Tesla Robotaxi concept, Powerwall 3, Cybertruck coating, and more
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We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. Nice. And we are doing a little early show on a Thursday on early mornings in, well, where you guys are. It's late afternoon where I am because I'm still in a little workation here in Europe.

after IAA, but I'm going to be back next week, back home. So we're going to be back on our old setup. But this week, at least, it shouldn't be too much audio problem. We got our set as it's on setup, and I got a little bit better one this week. So we should be good for a good show, and we have plenty to talk about. So let's jump right in, starting with the Powerwall 3. So earlier in the week, we learned of the first Powerwall 3 installations, and

But Tesla had yet... Let me mute my notification, though. That would be useful. Okay. The Powerwall 3 installation started, but Tesla had yet to launch it on their website. We already had a lot of information about it because we had a few exclusive reports on Electric over the last few months about the upcoming launch of Powerwall 3. But no official information from Tesla, even though installation started. But yes, September 12th, two days ago,

Tesla updated its website to launch the Powerwall 3, which is going to be complementary to the Powerwall 2 and Powerwall Plus. So it's going to be a new lineup that address the markets in different ways. But now we have the specs. So as we exclusively reported, the bigger upgrade is the power output, which is now at 11.5 kilowatt continuous. They decided to keep the same energy capacity at 13.5 kilowatt hour.

Also, there's many rumors that it would be maybe an LFP cells. Tesla doesn't talk about chemistry in the specs, like they never talk about chemistry anywhere in their cars or anything like that, officially at least, on the consumer side facing stuff.

But I have to deduct that it's not LFP just because of the weight, because it's barely. So if it was the same energy capacity as the Powerwall 2, but LFP, it would be heavier. And it is heavier, but barely heavier. And what would account for that is the fact that there's an integrated solar inverter in it.

So it has to be a viewer for that rather than the energy capacity. Also, it's the exact same energy capacity. So you would have to assume that probably Tesla is using the same actual battery module in the Powerwall, just the different power electronics around it, including that solar inverter that I just mentioned. So it's solar to grid efficiency of 97.5% with six solar input with the maximum power point trackers.

Installations is all the same stuff. Probably easier to install, but I mean, where you can install it with what kind of temperature minus force Fahrenheit up to 122 Fahrenheit. Flood and dust resistant, flood resistance up to two feet. Still a nice 10-year warranty. It's a little smaller, though thicker, so not as high.

Not as wide, but one inch thicker than the Powerwall 2. Of course, the Powerwall Plus also have the inverter on top. That's sort of attached to it. So that is definitely taller. But yeah, those are the main changes. Elon commented on it briefly. Where did it say? Oh, that was on the other post. But he did say that the main difference is...

ease of installation and power output. And the power output, the difference being so big is making the PowerL3 useful as a single unit because...

I know like same energy capacity, obviously, but what most people don't know is that the power capacity was the main reason that people would install more than one power wall other place because the five kilowatt continuous output is just not that useful. Obviously, it's all depending on where you're installing it. If you have a tiny little shack of a house, you might be super energy efficient and five kilowatt might be enough.

but if you have a fridge and you want to run your dryer, you want to run things like that, it takes a lot of energy. So those are all things that it takes into account. And apparently it's also easier to install. Obviously, if you're installing it with a solar system at the same time, the solar inverter is integrated. So that's one less thing to install. So that's a big deal.

And yeah, so now that Tesla has also the Powerwall 2 in its lineup, the Powerwall 3 is going to be used for a brand new installation at the same time as a installer system.

that is going to be compatible with the solar inverter. And Powerwall 2 can be installed with an existing system. So it matches most major solar inverters out there or with a new system that is not compatible with the Tesla Powerwall 3 solar inverter. So you have an option for everyone. So does this also include the gateway? So for instance, when your power goes out,

There's another box in the old system where you can see that there. So no, apparently no, because the first installation we saw here, the gateway was there. Oh, they saw the gateway. Well, it is... The solar inverter is the one that's being eliminated. Right. And as the commenter said, that's good for string inverters if that's the kind of solar setup you want. But kind of the big players out there are Enphase, which do microinverters.

and SolarEdge, which do optimizers, which you'll still need an external inverter for that. But simple if you're using Tesla string inverters, which obviously Tesla would want you to use.

Yeah, and for those, Tesla is still selling the Powerwall 2. So that's why the two products are now being side-by-side. It's not Powerwall 3 replacing Powerwall 2. Right, so if you had an external solar inverter, you would get the Powerwall 2 because you wouldn't need the stuff on the 3. It is nice, though, that it's doing more jobs in one package. I mean, it's going to probably make Tesla a little bit more competitive for their own installation, the solar roof, for example, where...

Is it going to save on installation on that? So the station time and station cost? Yeah, I mean, if you have solar on your roof, you don't need quite as much battery because, you know, theoretically, the sun's coming out during the morning, you know, when you're using most of your energy and it's going to be there the whole day. And this, you know, it'll keep the battery replenished during an outage. So...

I like the product. Obviously, I already have a solar setup, so it's not going to benefit me at all. And you have the original Powerwall 2. Actually, the Powerwall 2. The original ones were like that weird shape. Oh, yeah, yeah, the rounded one. I mean, those lasted like a year, I think. They were quickly replaced by Powerwall 2. All right. We have a lot of news that came out this week related to the new Elon Musk biography by...

Walter is accent. So that was the big deal this week. Over the last week or two, there's been excerpts coming out of the media as part of the promotional push for the book. But the book actually came out on the 12th and we've been digging into it, try to find some bits and pieces of information that are worth newsworthy, because obviously, if you've been following Elon Musk closely over the last few years.

The book might still be worth reading and everything, but a lot of it you already know about. So it's like, it's one of those, like if you're a giant fan, you might want like the 10% you don't know about. You might want it. I might be a little bit harsher with 10%, but let's say like 10 to 30%. That is actual new information for you. But if you're a big fan, it might be worth it. But we've been digging into it to try to get... Oh, shit. No, tell it's calling me. If I don't pick up, they're going to...

All right. Let's talk about robo taxis. So we're looking at this design. Actually, in the book, they had the original design, and it was kind of like a cardboard mock-up. And I think a couple of big tweeters mentioned that, hey, they're showing the robo taxi design. And it would be kind of interesting if...

the, the robo taxi was only a two seater. And a lot of the other like robo taxi designs from Waymo and, um, cruise are four seaters. So, um, just talking about like how the, uh, the, uh, robo taxi is a two seater. And that's kind of interesting. Yeah. I mean, I want to preface this with some, like, like a grain of salt maybe, because the way this was introduced in the book, it's not like, Hey, this is the robo taxi. Uh, it was introduced in the book more like, um,

In between chapters, there was a few pictures somewhat related to that chapter. And this particular picture appear before the most recent chapter. When I say recent, I mean in time.

related to the robotaxi it's called a robotaxi concept so it might be one of many different concepts and then secondly there was also this picture that was much earlier in the book in the 2016 era of the book when they started talking about autopilot which back then Tesla was already talking about a robotaxi too but it's not clear when is this from exactly in time

And it says an early, in this one, it says an early robotaxi. And it looks to be the same, roughly the same thing or the same shape at least. So it might be an early vehicle that's not the robotaxi now. So let's preface this with that. Because also...

It's not, it's unlike Tesla to release a new product that way, to unveil a new product that way. That's not really normally what they do. But to play the devil's advocate to my own point here, at the same time, it might be like, Xaction was like invented with Elon Musk for years and he got interviewed with everyone, including Franz. And we can talk about Franz a little bit about that too, because maybe we can come back to it later because it's not exactly related to that. But the book made me think that Franz is a,

a much bigger leader at Tesla than I knew about. I mean, I knew it was critical in the design sense of things, but I think it goes like much further than that in terms of entire product. He was running the production for the Model S for the first year. At one point, yeah. Yeah. You're like, what? The designer? And there was a lot of like, well, he's learning what his designs do. Like, hey, that little thing I did now causes these people to have to do this or whatever. Yeah.

So, I mean, from an experience standpoint, that had to be super valuable. Yeah. And that was when Tesla was much smaller too. Sure, yeah. But more recently in the book to the East, like he was leading meetings that are like critical to Tesla's long-term product roadmap that is beyond just design. But anyway, coming back to this, it's possible that Franz got so used to

Walter being around that you're like, all right, let him take pictures of this. And then this is the actual vehicle or vehicle model or whatnot. So it's possible to, I don't know. But yeah, so let's assume that this is actually the robot taxi, the concept. Yeah, I mean, a two-seater is wild, right? Like, does it make sense? I don't know. I mean, I guess you think about most of the times you take a cab, you're either by yourself or with one other person. So maybe. Yeah, yeah.

But at the same time, you're also often like, oh, let's split it between four of us. That also happens relatively frequently. Now the idea is it's going to be so cheap, just call a second one. You drop off at two different locations. That's even better. So there's some logic behind it. And are these three-wheelers? These Aptera things? Yes.

I can't tell if they're three-wheel or four-wheel. Yeah, you definitely can tell from this. From this, it looks more like a four-wheeler, but at the same time, it looks like the wheels in the back are not at the same level as the wheels in the front. They're a little bit more inside the frame. So it might be.

If not, it might be like what we were talking about the micro car in Germany last week, the Microlino that has this concept. It is a four-wheeler, but the back wheels are more inside. Right, right. So it might be that also, which we noted. It's nice. It's good for efficiency, but it's a problem for getting around polos. Yeah.

So, yeah, I would be very surprised if it's a two seater. At the same time, later on in the book, they talk about a few things that match this concept. One, futuristic, Cybertruck-like. Looks like, I mean, this is a black and white picture, but it looks like a metal, possibly stainless steel finish, sharp hedges. So it could fit the description of being Cybertruck-like.

uh they say smaller than the model 3 so it looks smaller for sure if it's a two-seater it has to be smaller so there's a lot of things that i had up here that this could be an actual um tesla robo taxi early con early concept i mean it definitely is an early concept but i mean it could be still what tesla has in mind for the robo taxi i don't know about the doors yeah i know another butterfly audio yeah you call it those uh

Butterfly doors? I keep thinking about the Silicon Valley. They go like this, not like this. Right, right. But it's interesting nonetheless. I mean, what was most interesting in the book about this RoboTaxi, and they keep linking the RoboTaxi and the cheap $25,000 vehicle together, is how not baked in the idea the vehicle program is yet.

after it's even announced because I mean Tesla has been talking about RoboTaxi for a while. And $25,000 car as well. Yeah, mainly related to its existing vehicles becoming RoboTaxis which obviously hasn't happened yet but the RoboTaxi dedicated vehicle was announced early last year and I don't remember exactly what event but in the book

They talk about a bunch of meetings that happened a month after it was announced where they're still discussing... Like Elon said, it's going to be a dedicated robot taxi all built around self-driving. And then months later, they're like, yeah, it should probably have a wheel still. It should probably have pedals and everything. And then Elon was pushing back against that. Then there was the idea of removable mirrors, removable wheel, removable pedals. And Elon pushed back against that. He said, blame me if it doesn't work and all that. But...

It shows like when Elon's announced something, like,

We really need to take it with a grain of salt because this has been a running gag for a while now that Tesla engineers, it's the first time they hear about it when he announced it on stage. But reading that book, it's like, all right, it's actually, that's the truth. That's the truth, yeah. At least based on these two vehicle programs, that $25,000 vehicle too. And the $25,000 vehicle, which I don't like the name because especially these days with inflation and whatnot, like what is even $25,000?

But Elon was apparently not excited about it, even though he's been talking about it for a while. And it was announced all the way back to the battery day when the 4680 was announced because Elon says this is going to enable Tesla to make a $25,000 car.

And then months later, I think even a year later, Elon was not excited about it. And it's only when friends showed him a concept of it next to the actual robot taxi where he started getting excited about it. And not only that, after it was announced, friends and a bunch of engineers showed him a study that showed that Tesla needed a $25,000 car to achieve the 20 million vehicle per year goal, which I would have assumed that he already knew that, but

They needed that to achieve it. And then he was like, all right, let's move forward with that. I thought they were already moving forward about it. But at the same time, I remember also Elon saying that calming everyone down early last year about the $25,000 Tesla. You remember when he said that we're not actually working on it right now because we're focusing on Model Y ramp up. So I know that there's been like ups and downs about the excitement around the vehicle program.

All right. Oh, yeah, that was interesting. Also from the book, it confirmed that Tesla will actually build that Robotaxi and the next-gen cheaper vehicle in Texas first rather than Mexico. So when Mexico was around earlier, it was announced earlier this year. It was announced as the place where the next-gen vehicles are going to be built, the new Unbox vehicle platform, a vehicle manufacturing system.

going to be built there. But that plans has changed recently in May. The book was almost in real time, really. At least the latter part of the book, the book goes all the way back to the beginning of Elon's career and whatnot. Though it kind of shifts through a little bit of... It's kind of complementary, I feel, a little bit to Ashley Venn's book that covered more of the early years. I mean, Ashley Venn's book has been out for a while now, too. So I think it picks up a lot after that.

I don't know if you remember on the Vance book, when it came out, Elon was super pissed about it. And then later on, he was like, okay. And then now he's friends with Vance, I think. They talk on Twitter sometimes. Okay. Yeah, I haven't noticed that. I remember him being mad about it and everything, but the makeup, I don't remember. I haven't noticed.

So in a recent meeting, as soon as, as recently as May, Elon and the team decided that they are actually going to build the first vehicles, an action vehicles in Texas on a new production line. That's going to be the new on-box line design there simply because they want the engineers to be, to live on the line basically as has been a team at Tesla. And Elon's going to be there too. And all summer, apparently I've been already working on it.

Designing this new. Unbox system. I have a gif here. If you don't remember exactly what it looks like. Is this idea now. That instead of having the body. Of the vehicle move along. The entire production line. They're going to split.

the sections of the vehicle and they're going to build they're going to work on every section simultaneously and then bring it all together at the very end only in order to be able to work there's going to be more work done at the same time on the vehicle instead of moving an entire vehicle and then working on it bit by bit which has been done since since the Molotia really a hundred years ago so this would be a very revolutionary product but

At the same time, there's another thing, a report that came out today that threw a wrench into this. So that's where they were with the Unbox earlier this year on Vestor Day when they announced it. But is that the next article or did I... I'm skipping to it. Well, we'll jump to it anyway. So this is a report from Reuters about Tesla achieving a breakthrough for a single-piece core casting, which would add to the Unbox system,

somehow that wasn't clear how it's going to be achieved in there because it's not exactly what you see in the unbox system but the single piece casting idea of course you remember you know that tesla has been investing in gecko casting in the last few years the model y now is produced at well not everywhere but in texas at least uh with one big front casting part one big rear casting part the um

battery pack structural battery pack serves as the underbody join the two of them together and you almost have an entire car you just have a few side panels and whatnot more like what you saw from the the unbox just now unbox system the single casting piece has been something that does that elon particularly have been talking about for a while says he was inspired by the the toy cars the hot wheels which are done as a single casting of course they are no bigger than a few inches but

He was thinking, why can we not do the same thing with a car? And this is nothing exactly completely new. You can see here an actual patent application that Tesla had back in 2019 about some kind of giant gigapress that would do the entire body of the car in one piece.

But there's been a lot of innovation needed to achieve that. So when you do a patent, like a patent is an idea. It doesn't mean that you have the technology ready just yet. You have an idea for it. And then if everything comes together, it can result in an actual useful technology. But this new report from Reuters here states that Tesla has achieved a bunch of these new innovation that could now lead to this breakthrough, making this single piece hot wheel light casting a reality.

a few of the details that i i find interesting here and maybe i want to preface this because we often like jab on routers too about doing misleading reports on tesla negative misleading report on tesla and the tesla fans always on them on that and there was good reason for that we all hited some very bad reporting on the report on tesla

So when we say that about their negative reporting on Tesla, this is obviously a positive reporting. Like you have to take them both with a grain of salt. It works that way. But in this case, though, there's a lot of logic to the report that makes sense. And it's based on probably five people familiar with the move without naming them, obviously. But yeah, the idea is that Tesla is now using a 3D printing and industrial sand technology to create the mold for the casting. And the idea behind that is that

The problem with the giant single-piece casting is that the casting molds cost a lot of money, obviously. The bigger they are, the more they cost money. And why automakers tend not to go that way is because they keep having to change the molds. They keep having to iterate them as part of the production process. So the more you have, the bigger you have them, the more money it costs. It gets out of control pretty quickly. And it also takes a lot of time.

to remake them when you make changes as you move along towards your production. So Tesla using instead 3D printing and then she'll send to create the molds as apparently reduced drastically those iteration time and costs, making now the technology possible.

However, using that technology itself created other problems, including a material science problem where they have to find new alloys that both work with that molding process and also work as a good alloy for a car, which needs a bunch of requirements in terms of crash safety and all that, longevity, repairability, and so forth.

But if you've been following Tesla for a while now, you know that Tesla has a very strong material science team, one that they actually share with SpaceX, led by a former Apple executive. And yes, they apparently made some progress. We don't go into the details about that, but apparently made some progress and they're coming closer to that. The last piece of the puzzle, too, is technology.

Obviously, you're going to need a giant gigapress for that. Tesla already is pushing the limits on that. They keep having the biggest gigapresses in the world. Most recently, the 9,000-10,000 one for...

for a Cybertruck. And now they would arguably need a bigger one. They're talking about up to 16,000 tons, which would be like a crazy machine, obviously. But at the same time, if it's going to be used for the next generation vehicle, which is a much smaller car, well, it makes sense to start with that. You start with a car that's much smaller, so you need a smaller press. Well, relatively to the car, obviously, because it's going to be still huge. They haven't decided on that just yet, according to the report. The report actually states that

They plan to decide this month if they're going to use that technology for the next-gen vehicle programs coming soon. So that could change, obviously, the whole unbox manufacturing system. But the unbox system could still work, obviously, because you basically, since the underbody of the car is still the battery pack system, so you can work on that. You can have the battery pack move along the line.

And install things on the batch pack because now the seat, for example, bolts into it, the dash bolts into it, and then you can lower the entire body on top of it and then put the car together at the end. So the same concept could apply with features change a little bit.

All right. We have some very interesting data about the Tesla Samad has been coming out this week and throughout the next week, we've been reporting, we're going to be reporting on that. I've been, I've been posting some information on my, on my ex account. Like I'm not doing an article every day on it because it's going to, there's not that much information, but you can follow me on X for like the tiny little details. I'm going to have a bigger report at the end of this, of this study that's going on as we speak, which is the, the,

North American Council for Freight Efficiency, the Run On Less program, it's running on 18 days. They have a bunch of different zero emission trucks that they are testing. And we get some data from them every day. At the end, we're going to have a full study on it. So I'm going to post only the highlights of it. But I posted the first day to announce the program here. So they have three different Tesla Samar running. So it's the first independent testing of the Tesla Samar that we've seen running.

And you get the total mileage that they do in a day, the number of deliveries that they do with these throughout these miles. And then you can even like granular data like this battery charge versus the speed that they're driving. So you can see that these trucks are mainly driving on the highway at 60 miles per hour. Then you have the battery state of charge charted up with the distance.

So you can see the first truck did 416 miles the first day. You have the truck's activity. So you can see when it's inactive, when it's driving, when it's charging, when it's idling.

Same thing with the speed charging, which is regeneration. Like this didn't work for the first day or the second day, but it's not working for the third day. So maybe don't take into account for this. Not all the data is working. And you have that for all three test SMIs going on right now. So the first one I said over 400 miles, 276 for this one, 545 for this one. The...

There was one yesterday that I posted this morning that did 789 miles in a single day with five deliveries, I think. So that's pretty impressive. That's an actual real-world use case for a zero-emission battery electric truck.

You have some other trucks in there too, but the Tesla Semi is, like I'm not trying to be biased here, is the most exciting. Because if you look at the Nikola truck, for example, it's by Watt EV, did 61 miles in a day. But did 17 deliveries because they're just using it. I think Watt EV is at the LA port, if I'm not mistaken. So it's just driving very short distances, just moving cargo around. So it's not...

I mean, it's a great use case for an SUV because all these things should be electric for sure by now, but it's just not as good data, as fun data, as what we want to see, which is we want to see diesel-powered mileage on long-haul trucking being replaced by zero-emission battery mileage that is powered by clean energy. That's what we want to see. And I mean, we've been following the Tesla Semi program for so long, like it's 2017 it was.

It was on Ville. We were there at the event. Was it 2017? I think so, yeah. And now, like six years later, we're finally seeing these trucks on the road doing some work. As I said, we talked a little bit last week about the IAA, the protests that were going around that were quite mild, really. Relatively. Yeah.

But apparently there's something else that happened that was not mild that is related to IA, even though it didn't happen in Munich. So for those, I don't know if we talked about it on air last week, but IA used to be in Frankfurt until four years ago, two editions ago. They do it every two years and they move it to Munich. And the idea why they move it to Munich, it was that they were getting a lot of protests in Frankfurt, which I don't know, like maybe our German listener could chime in here. Like what's the...

what's the cultural aspect of it but i don't know if like it's just there's more it's more liberal in frankfurt and i don't know how that works but uh well it was called the frankfurt auto show yeah like auto um whereas ias you know so it was the show itself attracting more protests rather than the location being more at risk of products maybe

I don't know. As somebody who took a train from Frankfurt to Munich the morning before the show, it's really not that far. Protesters could easily stop on a train. Not if they don't have cars.

Train. On the train, yeah. But, I mean, is the train too polluting to you? Like, you have to... I think they're supposed to take bikes and walk. Not electric bikes, just regular bikes. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about pretty hardcore people here. Yeah, I mean, we discussed, though, that the Greenpeace put some cars in the pond area

in front of the IA Messe in Munich. And I found this picture because we missed it when we were there. We didn't see it happen. We were in the Messe, I guess, like doing our jobs. But Greenpeace posted that picture and I look at that picture and that has to be Photoshopped, right? You would think.

That pond was like no more than a feet or two of water. Yeah, you could see the bottom. I mean, there were like lights down there and stuff. It's not a pond. It's more like just a water. It's an artificial feature, pond feature, water feature. But there's no way like there's a car that looks like fully emerged. Like that doesn't look real. I think I'm pretty sure this is Photoshop. Anyway, that was the height of the protest in Munich last week. But on Tuesday in Frankfurt...

15 Tesla vehicles were lit on fire. They were torched down, causing half a million euros of damage, affecting other cars at the same time. And a day later, yesterday, we learned that

A radical group has taken credit for the criminal attack, for the arson attack. And they posted on a German version of the Indymedia website. They posted basically a letter explaining that. They linked it to the IAEA protest. So they said like, yeah, this was related to the IAEA. So this is an attack against vehicles and everything. But especially Tesla said,

So yeah, they said that we flambé, like I translated from German, so we burned down some new Tesla in Frankfurt tonight as a greeting to the protests in Munich as one attack among many of the destructive auto industry. So they say it's a retribution against the auto industry. So I won't get into all the details of their maniac letter here, but in general, there's two main, they hate Elon Musk, they don't like Elon Musk,

They say he has patriarchal fantasies. They take particular issues with Neuralink and his Mars colonization effort, which they think is about creating a vacation spot for the rich, which is as madness as that. If you need an idea of how disconnected from reality those people are, they think that rich people want to go vacation on Mars.

That's how connected to science they are. They think that rich people want to spend at best six months in a tiny little

thing in space to get there possibly lose their life then get in you don't you don't arrive in uh in the Fijis when you get there you arrive in the in the desolate planet with not much to see and a very harsh condition like it's not if anyone wants to colonize Mars has nothing to do with being a vacation spot for the rich but anyway when it comes to Tesla I'm losing my voice right now when it comes to Tesla their point was a little bit more rational though

Not that rational. It's about lithium and cobalt mining. More specifically about how it represents oppression to indigenous communities. Now, I can sympathize with that to a degree. I think no one wants to marginalize indigenous communities.

However, the main point I want to bring out here, so I understand wanting to bring attention to that. I don't think that's the right way to do it. Obviously, a criminal act is not that. When you make an action so grand, so maniac like that, you have to have great proof here. You have to at least like, all right, show me some example of

and cobalt mining that negatively affected an ingenious community and is benefiting Tesla too, because you're automatically blaming Tesla. And they didn't do that. So that doesn't look good there. Now, I follow a lot of mining projects related to lithium and cobalt and other battery-related resources. And I

deals with indigenous communities, especially in Canada and the US are a must. Like every time there's a deal with them, they don't always agree. And sometimes it involves a bunch of different tribes. But most of the times it does include a very lucrative deal with indigenous community that they are the first one to approve. Like when you invest in a new mining project, that's one of the first thing that you look

that they lock in, do they have a deal? If it is related to a land indigenous people, which it not always is, obviously, then they have that. It's a big plus. So,

you have to give us an example of here of like, all right, this, this is something, especially cobalt. So cobalt is a more difficult one because cobalt is especially mine in, uh, the DRC, the democratic Republic of Congo. And I assume that's like their biggest, like that's where they have the strongest point there. But at the same time, it's not, that's not even really the problem with, with Congo. The problem with Congo is more than the disorganization of like the use of, uh, uh, disorganized and, and sometimes even child labor, uh,

But that problem is not even a deal with the indigenous communities there. It's more about how do we get a more organized way to mine it? Because the people there, they want to mine this because they don't have jobs. Otherwise, that's how they get money. So they want this to happen. It's just they want this to happen in a safe way. And right now, it's not happening. Not everywhere. There's two ways. There's the industrial mines and then there's the

artisanal minds that are the problems but that's i feel like that's a completely different problem also you want to burn down tesla doing that tesla's use of cobalt is extremely minimal in their batteries like their batteries use very minimal cobalt and they are moving away from cobalt too for a lot of their vehicles so it's not really the best examples also at the same time

This is just going to get insurance money and then build those cars again. So what? Yeah. And it's going to take more, more resources. Yeah. They're just going to mine more. So clearly these aren't the sharpest, uh,

tools in the shed over there. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not big on using more runs in the headlines, but I felt like, yeah, that was justified. Yeah. That was justified for this time. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to burn down some cars, like, Hey, why not some, you know, gas pickups, I guess, like, you know, like pick, pick the cars that are causing the most problems. And, and I feel like these guys are not doing themselves any favors, you know, like, you know, hitting electric vehicles, like,

It doesn't seem like they're getting the most bang for their buck in terms of, you know, like trying to get goodwill from from outside folks. This kind of just seems like, hey, we're going to be dicks about everything and and we're not trying to get people on our side.

Yeah, because the real environmentalists, they look at that and like that's just you just created more emissions and any kind of your activism could save. Like this just doesn't work or save or eliminate, I should say. It makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, I mean, I get the whole like, you know, fewer cars on the road like that actually strikes a nerve with me. Like I get it, but...

Like, come on, let's, let's come up with some solutions here. Let's, you know, train infrastructure, bike infrastructure. Those are all things we need, but I don't know. It just seems like, you know, it's like the, the, the PETA things that when they, you know, throw paint on, you know, people's mink coats or whatever.

Yeah. Just not the right, not the right approach is failing. The execution is not, it's not, it's failing. Like I get the sentiment, but the execution, I mean, you should have seen the emails I've gotten from after writing this article said like, like it's discouraging for the future of humanity. Sometimes like I got someone that's like, I don't know why you criticize those people taking those violent action because they're

Any kind of peaceful protest is racist. And I think I stopped reading. All right. Peaceful protesting is racist. So that to Martin Luther King and whatnot. All right. This just came out today, actually. The Cybertruck might get some optional scratch-proof coatings.

That's going to make it scratch proof to almost everything except things that are diamond level hard. So that's, uh, that's surprising because I mean, already the cyber truck is, uh, we thought that stainless steel finish was already enough in term of rug, ruggedness, ruggedness. Is that a word? Yeah. Ruggedness. Ruggedness. Uh, but, um,

I guess, I mean, if you don't remember, because there's been fewer events of that, thankfully, but at one point, there was a lot of Tesla being keyed. Sort of similarly to what we just discussed, like Tesla vandals, like to obviously different degrees here with arson. But for a while, it was fairly common, especially in California, especially in Silicon Valley, where there's some rivalry between the

more like hippie community and the techies where they didn't like people driving Teslas and they would key them. And that's kind of where a sentry motor generated to prevent that or to at least like shame people when it happened or catch them sending the video to police.

But, and that's worked for some, I would have heard a lot less of that lately, but in the last week or two, there's been a few instances that came out on social media and someone commented on X saying that with the Cybertruck, it's going to, people keying the Cybertruck are going to ruin the keys on the Cybertruck. And then Elon added to that, we might be able to offer an optional Togstan carbide coating, which is basically scratch proof to everything below diamond hardness. Yeah.

So it sounds like it could be one of the few options available for the Cybertruck, this Tox10 carbide coating. But at the same time, Ilan has mentioned a few other possible Cybertruck features, optional features like the solar roof, for example, that we haven't heard for a while. And with the Tesla Cybertruck deliveries or delivery event starting soon.

I don't know what we should expect in terms of options and accessories for Cybertruck. I mean, technically, even the Cyber Quad is an accessory to the Cybertruck. Yeah, I mean, I have to say the Cybertruck has a different look to it when it's been used a little bit. And I don't know if that's a... If that's the look you're going for, which kind of seems like Mad Max, been driving around the desert kind of look, then that's good. But

I don't know. I think it's that people are going to be proud of if their Cybertruck is beat up a little bit. People are going to be like, yeah, I'm using it. We'll see. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like it's going to be a mass market to me. That's one other part in the book that we saw. We kind of already knew about that, but they went into a little bit more details in terms of...

A lot of people at Tesla not being a fan of the Cybertruck and designer working on an alternative and everything, but Elon kind of shutting it down, even though they can still bring it back if it doesn't work. Didn't Elon say before the launch of the Cybertruck that if this one doesn't work out, they've got a backup plan kind of thing?

But you know what? Like, I think it's almost impossible for it not to work out at this point. I mean, to a certain degree, like, especially now with what we heard from our supplier sources that they're planning about 200, 400,000 vehicles a year. I, I,

Cybertruck might be hated by like 90% of people, but it's still that 10% of like Elon and Tesla super fans that they're going to want it anyway. That's going to be enough. Are there enough of those people that are? There's a lot of them. A lot. Okay. Sorry. And then that combined also with the people that like, cause Tesla, like you have to give Tesla credit where credit is due in terms of like specs and performance. Like they normally, they hit the mark there. So there's a lot of people too, that don't care about what the,

the vehicle look like if it hits everything else? They're like, Oh, that's, I don't know. I mean, normally I don't care too much what the vehicle looks like, but that is like, that's too much. I mean, the cyber truck is singular and like, there's nothing that even comes close to it and what it looks like for better or worse. Some people love it. Some, you know, I, I kind of flip flop on it. Like when it has like a nice skin on it,

I don't think it looks too bad, but like the pictures I've been seeing recently of it being used, like, I don't know if I could. And then the other thing is like, so, you know, when Elon goes out to like the Chappelle comedy thing and he goes in front of the public, the general public, and you could say like a Chappelle audience isn't the general public, almost universally booed. And the Chappelle public too is one that's like,

anti-woke and all that like that i would think so like yeah not anti-trans but like anti-trans woke anyway kind of surprised me that and then you know he was just like they showed him at a gaming thing and a league league of legend tournament too yeah and and like also like universally booed and yeah people were like saying like bring back twitter or the i don't know if they were talking about the name or like actual like

Yeah. So, I mean, so either, you know, you, you just like Elon and this is the ultimate representation of Elon is the cyber truck or, you know, you love Elon and it's the ultimate, but then also you're driving around something that is very representative of Elon. So like, you know, people will be trying the windows and see if, see if they're really bulletproof, like those kinds of things.

I mean, I'm looking at it. I guess I'm biased with my perspective here because, I mean, I'm the first one to criticize Elon when he needs to be, I think. But if all the specs hit what I want, I'm going to be the first in line to get it over most vehicles out there. I mean, the other ones I'm considering right now is...

At this point, it's going to be the Silverado, maybe. Interesting. The F-150 Lightning, I kind of want to wait for the next generation. I think the next generation is going to be such a big difference and it's coming relatively soon. Obviously, timing is way different for me in Canada, too. It changed everything. So the Rivian's off your list.

They sent me last month, they sent me a month before that an update. And like you say now, like first quarter 2024. And I mean, I've kind of lost hope a little bit for the Rivian in Quebec. I don't know what they're doing, but... I kind of feel like you could, you know, rattle some chains, like change your address to Ontario or something. Maybe I should give it a shot, but... Vancouver. I don't even know if they're going to be able to build my configuration to the way I actually get the...

like the the price that are originally uh supposed to get so pricing also like i don't want like a hundred thousand dollar canadian truck either like i want like something a little bit more reasonable right we'll see

All right, we have a few more news items to discuss. And then we'll jump into the comment section. If you guys have any questions for us, if you can put like I've seen a lot of conversation right now in the chat. So it's going to be hard for us to get into some questions. So if you guys have some questions, just put question in front of it. And then we're going to get to it and answer it a little bit later on on the show in a few minutes.

If you have a new subject in the EV world you want to discuss that we didn't touch today, you can put that in too. We're going to get into it in a few minutes. So we were just talking about Tesla moving the GigaPress stuff, and now Hyundai has confirmed that they also have a plan for that. Not the single casting that we just discussed, but a more larger casting, a little bit closer to what Tesla is doing with the Model Y right now. And they are...

adding themselves to a list of automakers that have signaled that including Toyota Volkswagen Volvo that have signaled that they are moving towards that and so it's based on a new trademark for hypercasting so they're moving you know want to use the term used by Tesla with gigacasting and it looks like it's planned for 2026 but as we just discussed as they were getting to the gigacasting stuff this is already moving to the single piece casting stuff so

I mean, did we discuss like, you know, like when there's an accident, like is it more likely to be totaled if it's a car? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's been discussions about that. But honestly, like these days, like any kind of significant accident affects the body of the vehicle. Like the instruments are totaling in anyway. So I'm not as concerned about that as most people are just because of what I'm seeing. Yeah.

I might be wrong, though, but from what I'm seeing, if you have something that affects the body already with the multicasting technology, insurers tend to be like, we're not fixing that. I don't know. The European Union announced that they are sending a probe into...

uh incentive given in europe to electric vehicles or electric vehicle buyers and companies that are coming from china so they're seeing a big surge of it and obviously this is the protectionist alarm bell has been wrong now in europe and they're like ding ding this is this is going to be a problem i'm sure that they got a little call from bmw mercedes vix wagon and all that and they're like all right we're going to look into it and uh

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced a probe this week and they're going to look into it and obviously I would expect something to happen about that because obviously China does it, the US does it so I wouldn't be surprised if the EU started realizing why are we the only one giving subsidies to vehicles that are not built here and they should probably do something about it. I'm not saying they should, I'm just

I'm for as much subsidies as possible on electric vehicles as long as they're not counterparts on the gasoline part side but I also understand from the EU perspective like they are letting them their auto industry erode with those Chinese I mean here in the report we mentioned BYD, NIO and Xpeng but

which are Chinese companies coming to Europe right now. But I would put Tesla in that. I would assume that Tesla is also going to be affected by that because they sent a lot of Chinese vehicles to Europe. And I would assume that even though it's not a Chinese company, they would also be hit by those potential new import fees. Obviously, Tesla is in a little better position, though, because they have Gigafactory Berlin. So if there is some time between now and when the

new potential import fees come in place, they could ramp up production in Berlin and counter the effect of that. Hey, did we talk about the 2024 Kona Electric? Oh, I skipped that. You're right. Yeah, so we have a bigger, bolder, and better than ever Kona Electric 2024. So kind of forget sometime about the Kona because it's like one of those three powertrain vehicles with the gasoline, the hybrid, and then the all-electric one, but it's still a popular vehicle in some markets.

and now let's go with the new specs here do we have uh i like to have like a nice chart for that especially with the uh bolt disappearing you know this is kind of like that will disappear for a short period of time probably this should come back yeah right as a next generation all right so a new and improved drag coefficient of 0.27 which for a crossover is pretty good

New pixelated system, horizon lamp running across the front. So that's kind of reminiscent of the Ionic. Exactly, yeah. A little bit Ionic. I mean, they still have that charge part in the front, which is ridiculous. That's the first thing I would have killed. Yeah.

larger tech infused living space horizontal seat pad integrated dual 12.3 parodynamic display in the front i mean that back seat looks exactly like the bolt yeah a little tight the front seats are 30 slimmer that sounds like a big change but there's more leg room this thing oh i guess it's like uh slimmer in that like the thickness of this here yeah yeah so you get more room in the back i guess yeah hard to tell from this

Though that curve looks kind of pronounced. Yeah. All right. Do we have some updated powertrain spec or two battery option? 48.6 kilowatt hour with 133 horsepower motor and then 64.8 kilowatt hour. That sounds the same, right? I think that is the same, but it does have vehicle to load now, which I think is an improvement. Okay. At least over the initial ones. They might have, that might be from last year.

Yeah, we don't have pricing yet. So obviously the pricing is going to be an important factor here because it is in the cheaper lineup of electric vehicles. So if the price point can be attractive, it could still be a successful vehicle.

I like this color. This color, like this tennis ball color, it's different. Keep coming back to the Bolt, but there's a shock. It's called shock on the Bolt. One year they did that. I'll also say the problem with the Kona, I think now, is that since the Infrastructure Reduction Act came into play, you don't get much, if any, money back unless you lease this thing. Compared to the US-made Bolt,

or other, you know, I don't want to say it's the same thing, but like, you know, Mustang Model Y, those type of vehicles, you're saving a lot of money. So this is going to be priced similar to the Model Y. And clearly, it's not nearly as robust of a vehicle in a lot of ways. So it's going to be a hard sell on that point. Yeah, it's always hard to fight subsidies. Like if you have a vehicle that has it, you know, that doesn't...

It doesn't make much sense. All right, we have this interesting report this week about the energy secretary. She set out this summer on a road trip to highlight the goal. So it was featured in the NPR article. So Jennifer Grenholm, U.S. Energy Secretary, set out with all her staff and her crew and an NPR journalist to cover the thing in a road trip, an EV road trip from Charlotte, North Carolina to Memphis, Tennessee.

And the goal is drawing attention to the billions of dollars the White House is pouring into green energy and clean cars.

Okay. So they had a few stops on the way, obviously. And there's plenty of things between those two locations that involves electric vehicles. North Carolina, of course, has a bunch of EV plans there. Tennessee has a VW. So they set out in a Cadillac Lyric, a Ford F-150 Lightning in a Chevy Bolt. They didn't say if it was the EV or EUV. And

actually granholm is an ev driver herself used to have a bolt uh now drives a mustang mackey so she was very well aware that this is not going to be a super easy trip and i mean i i've done like if you remember last year i've i've i've did my review of a an electric road trip in the south and then i did in the mackey and i noted that it is a real problem in term of uh

non-tesla vehicle charging infrastructure in the south of the u.s is just not not there yet for long distance driving it's still doable like i did it did it successfully but it was stressful like i hadn't felt that kind of range anxiety in a little bit while if i would have done it with my tesla i would have had no problem and the the npr article by the way like is

It's pretty good at it. Like I would save it. I linked it in an article and send it to your friends in the South maybe that are not...

like they think that EVs are never going to happen because of the charging problem. It's pretty good at explaining the fact that, yeah, this is a problem for sure. But for non-Tesla vehicles, Tesla vehicles are fine right now in the South. And obviously this $7.5 billion coming aims to fix that. But what was very hilarious about the trip is that, yeah,

Look, if you're going to show how an electric vehicle road trip works these days, you have to show the problems too. And they try to cheat. When they arrive in Georgia, in Grovetown, which is just outside of Augusta, Georgia,

They arrived at an Electrify America station. Actually, so there was these three electric vehicles that they had, but they also had Secret Service people following them around in SUVs and whatnot and staffers. And they sent a staffer ahead. We realized that one of the charging stations was broken. Not a big surprise in the Electrify America station. But also there was another one that was in use so that they couldn't charge all three vehicles at the same time.

So what they did is that when one of the – the one in use left, they put one of the gasoline cars in that parking spot to block it so that when the – Which is messed up, by the way. Yeah. That's like almost like a war crime in my book. Yeah. And so that they – when the energy secretary would arrive, she could charge.

But someone arrived before. So that was the goal, obviously. So if that happens, they couldn't charge. And that person was pissed. They had a baby in the car. It was super hot. They needed to charge to get home. And they started to argue with the staffer involved. The article was never explaining whose idea it was. But whoever idea it was, it was a poor idea because it makes sense.

it makes everyone involved looks bad and they end up calling the cops on the energy secretary to add to this end though because they said i'm here first this is a gasoline car has no business in this but completely in there i agree i would have done the same thing yeah

Unfortunately for them, though, in Georgia, there's no laws preventing gasoline vehicles to park in a charging spot for EVs, which is a crime by itself. The legislature in Georgia needs to get on that ASAP. It makes no sense to do that. It's not a parking spot. It's a charging spot. But I mean, I guess they still understood that they were in the wrong so that they tried to negotiate with them and they ended up

finding a level two charging station or I don't know if they said level two, but they said slower charging stations and to charge the vehicles so that the person could charge. But still, it's an extremely bad look that highlight our issues with, again, non-Tesla charging because that would have been a lot easier because there's a bunch, especially around that area, there's actually a bunch of Tesla charging station superchargers, which Tesla could open to non-Tesla vehicles to help, but that's coming.

Yeah, so I'm actually taking a trip this afternoon to Cape Cod and there's no charging stations on Cape Cod. There's like one right at the beginning. So I was like, what? Like Cape Cod doesn't have any TVs. Yeah, I mean, there's a Tesla supercharger like halfway up, but like I'm taking the Rivian, so.

I got to charge at the beginning of Cape Cod and then do all my stuff up there and maybe get a slow charger. And then when I come back, charge on the way out. Wherever you're staying, there's no level two or whatever? There's like one down the street at like a CVS, but I know that's going to be, you know, really kind of a hassle to walk there. I mean, hotels. Yeah, hotels. I mean, I don't know if it's a hotel that you're staying or Airbnb or whatever. It's a hotel. Yeah.

Yeah, hotels, it's a no-brainer. They need to install those. I mean, we didn't talk – I don't think we talked about that because this week is podcast a little bit because last week was on a Wednesday. So it's like we're covering like a week and a half basically. But that's like this big deal with the Hilton Hotels, like 20,000 universal chargers coming to Hilton Hotels at 2,000 Hilton Hotels location in North America. I didn't even know that Hilton Hotels had 2,000 locations in North America. Well, there's a lot of brands. They have like –

The smaller ones, I guess, like the Holiday Inns, they're everywhere. I don't know if that's Elton or whatever. So yeah, that's a no-brainer. And they said something like six minimum per hotel. So that's smart too. You need a bunch of them. Because I did arrive at some hotels sometimes where there was only two and they were already in use. Though generally, you can ask the desk and the informative person because normally they're already charged and everything. Yeah.

Yeah, I wonder what the optimum final boss situation looks like at a hotel. What is it going to look like in 2024 or 2040? Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, you mean like

are all the charging all the parking lot have a charging spot is that what you're saying like maybe i mean what what do you do i i kind of feel like you just put like outlets everywhere yeah i mean that's level one easy yeah level one is not bad too yeah just make sure there's an outlet you get 40 50 miles extra and then of course you can get to that level three at some point you know right and then you know the people who are uh

you know in dire need can use a level two charger that's that you charge money for too like yeah right now a lot of hotels they don't even charge you for for charging overnight too yeah i mean most of the hotels yeah most of the hotels i go to and i'm like hey that charger out there you know i need to get it started they're like we have no idea what that is i don't know how to work it like what somebody put it there we don't know it's it's really like and you know like

it should be part of a hotel experience. Like, Hey, you know, like there's somebody pooped in the pool. Like they could go fix that. Like, like what, why can't you, uh, that that's a particularly gross one, but you know, it just seems like guys, it's really not that much that hard. Although I will say like, uh, you know, we had some, uh, some of Rachel's, uh, and, you know, relatives in town and they're very smart people. They're very like green people and whatever they have Prius, uh,

The whole car charging thing for them was like really like, you know, they were driving, you know, up to Cape Cod with our Tesla. And, you know, they decided to get off the freeway. And, you know, we had mapped out the charges for them. They got off the freeway. They went like, you know, 20 miles or 10 miles to whatever. And we're like, well, now you got to change your charging stations. And they were kind of like, you know, that it was it was just kind of weird that like,

you know, they're not thinking that way when they could have just, you know, obviously pulled into a supercharger or whatever. Anyway, uh, point is it's, it's kind of a new world for, for everybody. Yeah. All right. Should we jump into the comments here? Yeah. Uh, Jonathan route, which is, it was actually a Friday afternoon. Same here. Um,

AC will save your life in Phoenix and Dallas when there's a power outage and a heat event. That's a pretty good point. Sad, sad, maybe commentary on the situation, like with the heat indexes. But like you, if you lose power in some of these places in the middle of a heat thing, like you're going to die. I mean, obviously you can go to, you know, get in your car and go somewhere or whatever, but pretty, pretty important stuff to use backup power things, especially in these areas.

SolarEdge are using rebranded K-Star cattle LFP batteries on their three-phase inverters. Not sure if you know the chemistry of this new Powerwall. We kind of speculated that it was the same chemistry because of the weight. I think it's NCA they use on the Powerwalls. It's NMC on the cars, NCA on the Powerwalls, if I remember correctly. Ismail Yousef, that RoboTaxi design looks too much like a concept and not really worth commenting on.

Wait, at least until it's actually moving on its own. Well, we had two different examples of it. So it was kind of weird. Yeah. I mean, it's still worth reporting on it. I think that was, that was their thinking at least one point in the process, uh, Carl and San Diego, uh, at the least they'd want to bench seat. So it could handle three in a row, squeeze in a child bucket seats. Don't fly for a taxi. Yeah. I'm, I'm also skeptical on the two seats or a situation. Yeah.

Our old friend Joe Boros, it doesn't look that different from the original Rivian concept coupe. I think the early EVs all had some kind of small efficiency play. Wheels in the back are a narrow track like the original Honda Insight and the VW XL1. Those are both super aerodynamic vehicles. Maybe that was what they were thinking back in 2016. Yeah, I can see that. Da-da-da.

Most exciting thing about Tesla Semi is nobody seems to care about the amount of load it carries for any given mileage numbers. I don't know if that's the most exciting thing, but certainly that'll be part of the equation. I hope to see electric do a day-long test drive of the Tesla Semi. It could be very interesting. Hey, I just now remember we're supposed to have a test drive of the Tesla Semi. We won through the referral program, right? We never got that.

Oh, my God. I totally forgot about that. That's like from six years ago or something. We're supposed to have that. Never got it. Let me call Elon Musk. Yeah. DM him. We'll get right on that. By the way, you need a special license to drive those things, right? Yeah. But I think it was on the test track. Like do a launch on a test track or something like that. Which I would still be down to do. But not as cool as a full day-long test.

Regarding German trains, are they electric? They are, but it depends on where they get their power from. But the German grid is awfully green and there are a lot of solar panels on the sides of the road. So Carl in San Diego, since you framed it this way, no EV protesters don't have to skip the electric train that uses pantographs and doesn't use batteries and e-bike are sustainable where full-size EVs won't scale. Full-size TVs, I guess.

Under a zero-carbon future. No, I don't support arson. I hope not. They definitely already burned gas cars. The cobalt thing is baffling. It's been used to refine diesel and gasoline for a century, but here we are. Morons is 100% justified. I think it's obviously the use of it as...

increase a lot in batteries but even like before evs like batteries with consumer electronics like consumer electronics use a lot more cobalt as a percentage and batteries percentage yeah yeah then then evs just because of the need of density of energy density all right a little bit of a sidetrack on indigenous exploitation problems when they dunk all the way through is complicated these people even the kids are desperate for basic living supplies uh so they starve without the money it's

That's not a great commentary on the situation. All right. Will the scratch proof coating be to regular gold color of tungsten coating of drill bits and saw blades? Is it, so is that, you could change the color, but then surely that could be like a second, like a, like a other beneficial effect of a,

Like, all right, you get like the, oh, it's $2,000 coating. You get to see it scratch proof. And also you get a different color than everybody else because there's going to be a lot of stainless steel finished Cybertrucks out there. All right. We have some very anecdotal stuff here. My wedding ring is tungsten carbide, which is interesting. And it isn't as shiny as when I got it. It has millions of micro scratches. Hmm. And, uh,

It's not as ugly as off-putting as a Cybertruck. Cybertruck will continue to create class wars with EV versus ICE cars. I don't know. We're kind of going into some weird places here. Yeah, there was a lot of conversation in the chat too. Let's see if we can find some questions. Yeah.

I have a deposit for the Cybertruck and Silverado. So you mentioned the Silverado. Why are you a Silverado guy instead of a Ford F-150? I mean, because I'm like that big battery. It's attractive to have a big battery. It's a very big battery. Yeah, and I mean...

I don't know, man. There's some of these trailers, these new trailers that have been coming up lately. Not the living vehicle. That thing is insanely expensive. The other one, I forget the name, but it's from Tesla Engineers. It's the one that is super aerodynamic and it pops up and it's all glass and it looks super cool. You can have a 60-kilo-hour battery pack and a drivetrain in it. That and the Silverado, you can drive basically all day

like do like 600 miles in a day with a little charging stop be like completely different places i just i feel like we have to have an intervention with you and jamie like jamie's gonna have to talk to you about this a little bit why you know jamie's like always hey we never too many too many miles oh yeah yeah i mean i and i agree with him except for that except for a truck

Because if you actually use it for pulling a trailer, pulling some load, then it does make sense. Otherwise, I agree with him. I wouldn't want to lose city hair with 500 miles of range, like a sedan, like a luxury sedan with 500 miles of range. That doesn't attract me. But a truck that has 500 miles of range and 250 miles of range with a full load trailer, that's interesting to me.

I won't comment on that because I am in the... You have a giant Rivian. It's a mid-size. It's true. Honestly, I don't know if I need it. There's more battery capacity at your house than a Megapack. I know. That's what's frustrating. I wish I could just have the batteries modular and like, hey, I'm going somewhere to take the batteries that I need

Anyway, I have a little lift. Yeah. Lift that you can put in. I need a little one of those, you know, the Tesla robot things. Yeah. Lift things. Arms. All right. This is interesting. I didn't know about this. Carl in San Diego says you can do a one day lease. So this would be to kind of circumvent the, you know, for cars that don't qualify for the. Yeah. So you do a one day lease and you get the seventy five hundred dollar tax credit.

You buy the lease out immediately. We did that with the BMW i4. Only problem with using the lease loophole with an instant buyout is with some states like Texas who tax you twice. Interesting. I'm going to have to look into that. We're going to have our leasing guy look into that. Yeah, we have a leasing expert. Might as well do an article on that because that's an interesting loophole.

All right. No more range anxiety. When you buy out the lease immediately, they cannot charge you the lease rent interest. Buyer beware because some manufacturers make it hard to do the buyout, forcing you to do the dealerships. Yeah. Tesla's one of them. So Granholm learned about icing and then there should be a federal guidance so Georgia doesn't need to pass its own rule independently. That would be nice. Federal guidance. Cape Cod is a destination. Destination charging is appropriate.

You're right. Yeah. That's why I'm surprised that the hotel don't have it. If I'm in a hotel at a big destination like that, I would do it. There are some. And so we're going all the way up to Provincetown. There are some destination chargers that we will probably use. It's just like we would love to have a faster charging option, obviously. You will significantly shorten the battery pack lifetime using supercharger on this chemistry. Which chemistry? I don't know.

Because we just posted a study. He talked about LTO before. So, I don't know. Let's see. Let's move on. Destination charging output should be matched with the distance they are from fast charging nearby. Some places really need level 2. I guess that's a good point. The light ship designers haven't explained how the drivetrain will coordinate with tow vehicle. That's going to be difficult to control. That's a good point. That's the one I was talking about, light ship. All right. Last thing.

Steve Rose, is there a date yet for Cybertruck event? No, not yet, but I would assume it's coming soon. At least the announcement for the event is coming soon. I thought it was going to be this week, so still one more day. Or maybe it's going to be this weekend. But yeah, I would expect it's going to be soon. And it could be also soon after the announcement. Tesla has been known nowadays to be like, all right, it's going to happen in two weeks from now rather than a month.

Wouldn't be too surprising. And what we've been seeing for the Cybertruck lately with the crash test vehicle being spotted and all that, it's a real possibility. Things could move quite fast. So we'll keep you updated on that. We'll post that so that we know. And thank you, everyone, for listening. If you do enjoy the show, if you can give us a like,

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