Tesla Semi event, Model 3/Y discount, M3 redesign, and more
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We are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub, publisher of Electric. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you're good because we have plenty of news to discuss this week. It's going to be a Tesla-heavy podcast, people. There was a lot of big Tesla news this week. Of course, the Tesla Semi event yesterday. So for those people that don't like when you talk too much about Tesla, you might want to skip that one. I'm just letting you know. Yeah.

But we have a few other things that we, non-Tesla related, that we're gonna talk about at the end of the show. And this is a completely ad-free show this week. We don't have any sponsor. So it's a completely ad-free experience for you guys. And we would appreciate if you could help us out by giving us a like, obviously only if you like the show.

a like, a subscribe if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify. And if you're watching on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, all of those things, if you can give us a five-star review, that'll help the show more than you can imagine. It's free to do. It takes a second and we read all of them. So we appreciate if you can do that. Also at the end, as usual, we're going to take your comments or suggestions, your subjects that you want us to discuss at the end of the show. So you can put that live in the comment section right now when I get to the

to it fairly soon. But yeah, let's start out with this Tesla Semi event yesterday. A lot to unpack, even though not that many surprises or anything like that. It was the kind of focus on the core product, like this is presenting it for what it is, which is like the first long haul Class 8 Semi truck.

And it's in production right now. It's ready for deliveries for delivery customers and starting with PepsiCo.

They're very focused on that. You know what it reminds me of a little bit? It reminds me of the early days of Tesla, like 2012, where Tesla had to explain to people the advantages of electric vehicles. Like, "Oh, yeah, the rigidity of braking on this, this is very useful." Obviously, I understand for a semi-truck, rigidity of braking has even better advantages. It's even a higher impact, I would say, but still.

were like that they were like oh electric motor you have like millisecond response time in terms of the traction like so we have extremely good attraction control on it like all the things that we were talking about like the early days of evs but now that it's become like common knowledge for people but since you know with the trucking industry as in it's it's very nice and the whole

electrification of that industry so they'd be still hammering on that stuff so I thought that was interesting but in term of the actual truck itself the production version because of course that was unveiled five years ago the prototype not that much new information that were released some somewhat changes to the the powertrain so originally it has four model tree motors

Tesla switched to the more recent Plaid powertrain, so tri-motor with the new carbon sleeve design. And they specified that the gear to one of the motor for peak efficiency had highway speed and the two other motors are used for acceleration. And you get insane acceleration out of that truck. You see three times more powerful than the next best diesel, well,

not the xbox it's not even the same category but the the best diesel uh semi class 8 semi truck um then they went into the like so the acceleration is just crazy like that video i watched it like 100 times like if you ever like pass the truck uh pass the truck on the highway on an incline that they go super slow like to see it like go just right past it at full speed it's it's really impressive

Term of the range, we got the confirmation because, of course, last weekend, Tesla announced on Twitter, hey, the Tesla Semi did its first 100-mile trip, and we did a report on that and everything, but there wasn't that much information. But even on the report, we assumed that they were talking about a single, like,

Like no stop, like no charging stop trip. And a lot of naysayers were like, oh, Elon didn't specify that it wasn't charging stop. But like that would be meaningless if there is. And now they release all the data to show exactly what it is. And it is truly impressive. So it's a 500-mile trip between Fremont and San Diego. And they went through the Grapevine. If you're not familiar with the Grapevine, it's just north of –

Los Angeles, the greater Los Angeles area where there's a lot of elevation. So you have to go up, but then you go down, obviously. And that's a big advantage with that vehicle. As you go down, you actually recuperate some of that energy, but still a lot of elevation, like from like, I think 2000 to 4000 feet of that.

And it started out in Fremont with a 97% state of charge, so there was still a little bit more in there, and ended in San Diego with a 4% state of charge. So you can see that basically you can give it even more than 500 miles out of that truck. So that's truly impressive. Still on the powertrain, with the drivetrain, we discussed the three motors, the same one that you can find in the Plaid Model S and Model X.

In terms of the entire powertrain, it's now geared for 1,000 volts. So it's 1,000-volt powertrain. So Tesla is going from 400 volts to 1,000 volts. You've seen a lot of automakers releasing 800-volt powertrains now, like most famously the Ioniq with...

the uh what's the egmp platform that's it right yeah and the gmp porsche as well porsche as well yeah porsche was the first we should give them credit for that they were the first with the tycoon and uh and then the egmp which is the ionic the j80 genesis and the uh jv80 60. 60 sorry and of course the ev6 from kia

So Tesla leapfrogged all of that with a 1000 volt system in the Tesla Semi, obviously a bigger vehicle too, but that was probably the only like one more thing moment of the show. They said that the 1000 volt powertrain is going to come to other Tesla vehicles without specifying which one. But then the big kicker was when we talk about the charging capacity of the truck. I should skip to that.

So, they talked about the megawatt charging. So, we already knew that the Tesla Semi was going to be combined with a megawatt charging capacity. You just need that for the kind of battery pack you have in a truck to have decent charging time. But this is all like all the pieces of a puzzle are coming together with what was announced in the last few weeks, like Tesla opening up their charge connector and revealing that they have a 1,000-volt capacity on the charging or retrofittable 1,000-volt capacity. So...

this also it's kind of strange because we've seen testers on my prototype before having a different connector but in this case they are showing like a new immersive a new immersion cooling technology that can be adapted in the same one and it's basically the v4 supercharger like they can make the v4 supercharger and be up to a thousand watt

Now, I don't think that all the supercharger stations are going to be like that because I would assume that the new immersion cooling technology is a lot more expensive. But it's real nice because you have it on a much smaller package here instead of some big, big cable. And yeah, and the big announcement was that Cybertruck is going to be compatible with that.

Now, they really didn't go into the details about that. So it's not exactly clear if the Cybertruck is going to be able to charge at a megawatt. If it does, I would be surprised. But it's not impossible if it's like from 0% to 1%, 2%, something like that. And then it taper off really fast, which is always the case anyway. But you can still assume something like...

extremely fast charging capacity for the Cybertruck. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it's going to be now pretty rare that people are going to spend more than 15 minutes at the supercharger with a Cybertruck. Is that, you think that's fair, Seth? I mean, it depends what, you know, this ends up being. You know, just because it charges on there doesn't necessarily mean it'll use the full charge.

charging like it could you know get 500 volts and and half a megawatt uh you know 500 kilowatt that's still fast that's still you know five or ten minutes at a charging stop but um just because it uses the charger doesn't mean it'll go that fast and you know there's going to be some variations and and

Maybe only the biggest battery pack gets the fastest speed or whatever. Yeah, that is extremely likely that there's going to be some discrepancy between the models here because it looks like Cybertruck might be anywhere between 250 and 500 miles of range. So the higher range model probably going to be able to take more capacity at first.

But nonetheless, very impressive charging technology that this Semi is going to have. And it's going to trickle down to other Tesla models, starting with the Cybertruck. So that was the more exciting part for the consumers, because obviously this Semi is more commercial trucks. Even though I heard from plenty of people that they're looking to buy one for consumer reasons, not for commercial trucking, which is kind of wild. But you can see how people would want to make a motorhome out of it or something like that. Yeah, for sure.

The other thing with the high voltage, so one kilovolt, means that they're going to have to space some of the wiring out a little bit further apart because the higher volts, you get the isolation issues. Oh, yeah. So it's going to, you know, they can fix it. I mean, or they can adjust for it, but it's just something to think about. Yeah.

um you know you get a arc the higher the voltage the easier it is to arc so uh just a design consideration uh in term of the batch pack we just learned not during the event that we learned after the event that you know confirmed that it's a 1.7

kilowatt hour per mile so that's that's one thing that tessa has always kept vague about the test of some i says less than two kilowatt hour per mile which is already good but like it's important to know exactly what we're talking about because the kilowatt hour per mile will tell you your your cost of fuel basically you just input your electricity rates into that with some efficiency loss and charging a few percent for percentage points it literally gives you your fuel cost so

he said that it's actually 1.7. So that also we can sort of extrapolate into the size of the battery pack with that, because 500 miles on 1.7, it's 150, sorry, 850 kilowatt hour.

However, like we just said, 500 miles might not be the exact range of the vehicle. It looks like you can get a little bit more out of it. And also, there's always a little bit of a battery buffer. So I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is closer to 900 kilowatt hour of total capacity. I think that would be fair. That sounds right.

What else? Yeah, the interior, they show not too much change since the prototype, but they showed a few features that give some quality of life features for the Tesla semi drivers, including the suspension dumps so that it's automatic, so it's super easy to latch a trailer to it. There's a one-touch button for light testing once you do latch a trailer so that you make sure that the lights work for inspections before you leave.

A bunch of things like that. One thing that they didn't discuss at all, and I kind of understand why, is autopilot of FSD. And I'm working on a report on that because I got some closer look at the production version of the truck and it's full of cameras. I think there's like 12 cameras around the truck. So obviously this is still talking about FSD or at least autopilot for it.

But you know that Tesla is also trying to convince truck drivers that you're going to want to drive that truck. So it's hard to make that argument when at the same time, they're like, we're also working for you to not have jobs in the near future. Obviously, I don't necessarily think that truck drivers won't have jobs in the near future. I think truck driver right now, if you're looking for a job, truck driver is probably a good job to have. There's a shortage of them. And even if you...

once we do get trucks driving mostly autonomously on the highway, at first it's going to be about safety, then at first it's going to be about convenience on the highway and all that. But in terms of like city driving, I think we're quite far from letting semi-truck go autonomously. And also there's other things to truck driving than just driving the truck. Like there's a bunch of logistics to indulge at the docks, where you get your load and when you unload it. So...

I think it's not a big concern for now, but it was clear that Tesla didn't want to get into it. There was no mention of it whatsoever during the whole event. Yeah, that's interesting. Also in that picture, you can see that both screens have the rear view mirror, the one above that. And Tesla's been flirting with getting rid of rear side mirrors.

uh for quite a while and um with these cameras it seems like you've got a pretty good view of the side of the truck the back of the truck but those cameras are on those mirrors yeah but they could just make a you know a small thing come out yeah um but for now they're still there and that would cut down wind resistance even more i wonder if that's part of uh elon's calculations you know getting it to 1.5

or uh yeah that's right I didn't mention that but he said 1.7 is what it is right now but he sees a clear path to 1.6 and put in she even 1.5 and that that's a big deal uh because every percentage point you can remove on that is going to be lower cost of operation but also and now that we we need to get in the cross of it is like so my overall impression of the of the presentation is like oh this this is delivering on the promises they made five years ago but

But I'm having issues very, I think they are on the verge of really having a truly like disruptive product for in the trucking industry that would change the whole paradigm of the industry. However, they need to confirm two things that they didn't talk about during the actual presentation. One thing is obvious is the price. We think that they're going to update the price because the price was unveiled five years ago and that was $100K.

$150,000 for the base version, $180,000 for the longer range version, and $200,000 for the Founders Series. So we think it's going to be higher than that now. However, I don't know if they are not releasing the price because they have to honor the original pricing for the customers that already place the podcast.

which I think would be fair since those customers have been waiting for a long time. And they put money down, right? They put a lot of money down between $5,000 and $20,000 at one point. That's the increase. So they could have put that in the bank and probably doubled it. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously I think they should honor that. But then once the higher production starts and they open up to other customers, I would assume there's a new price. I would like to know that because that would –

that's important figure to know in terms of like because it's all these these trucks it's all about the economics once once the fleet operator they talk about updating their fleet they look at the cost obviously and they look at the cost operation of the specific truck and how fast they can pay it back and all that so obviously the cost of acquiring it is an important part of that in terms of cost of operation it's quite clear that it's going to be much lower with that 1.7 kilowatt hour like literally

up to $70,000 in fuel cost saving per year, depending on how low you can get your electricity. And Tesla said during the event too that they are gonna be working closely with the customers in order to maintain their electricity costs lower with selling those charging station with mega packs and solar and all that. That makes a ton of sense. The other metric that we don't have, and that's a big deal, though we kind of have a good idea of it,

is the weight of the actual truck itself, the tractor, because they did discuss weight and load capacity, but they only discussed the gross vehicle weight, the entire capacity, which trucks in the US and in most markets, I think, have a max capacity of 80,000 pounds. So that's the truck, that's the trailer, that's the load. You cannot exceed that, and that's for like road safety issues.

And in the US, they did increase the capacity to 82,000 for electric trucks because they know that electric trucks are potentially heavier. So they are giving some leeway to electric trucks with 82,000 pounds. And then Tesla said all the metrics that they released... Sorry, let me shut that down. I think it's making sounds since earlier. I apologize. How do I remove that focus right there?

There you go. Sorry about that. It shouldn't make any sound anymore. It's okay. Okay. Dan Siri, listening all the time. So where was I? Okay, yeah, the weight of the truck. So they only talk about 82,000 pounds. So like when you saw the truck exerting like crazy, that was with 82,000 pounds. Very impressive. The 500 mile road trip, they said it was just under 82,000 pounds. Also super impressive. But then...

In order to know how much you can make out of that truck money-wise for an operator, you need to know how much cargo you can carry. And obviously the volume itself won't change. So everything that goes by volume, everything that's lighter, basically, Tesla is going to make a killing out of this. This truck is going to do well, probably regardless of the price, because even if the price goes up to $200,000, this is like a four-year payback time instead of three years or something like that. It's nothing crazy. But...

In terms of weight, we want to know how much the actual semi-truck weighs in order to know the capacity because a trailer, like a 53-foot, like, on-island trailer is about 10,000 pounds. So you're already down to 72,000 pounds. And then a truck, a diesel truck, they vary quite widely between around, like, 12,000 pounds to 25,000 pounds.

And it would be fair to compare Tesla with the higher hand of that range just because of how powerful it is. But even then, it's not like the sleeper configuration or anything like that. It's different too. So normally you would have to compare it with like a maybe max 20,000 pound vehicle. And we did get some information just based on the load testing, the video that they release, if you calculate the weight of the cinder block,

large concrete blocks that they have in there it would bring the weight down with 82 000 pound limits and 10 000 pound trailer to about 27 000 pounds so that's quite heavy um it's lighter than the nicola electric battery truck the tree that they release it's a little bit lighter than that because that that's the big problem with the tree right now i think it comes in at like 20 000 pounds which is a lot

uh like it's never seen before in in some of my truck that has this kind of capacity just to add a little context uh dan oberst in the comments says uh the videos they showed had 11 jersey barriers on it those are 4k pounds each 4 000 pounds each so 44 000 pounds was on the trailer

Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if I had the same data of 4,000 each. I don't have the calculation that I did earlier, but let's see if it's similar with Dan's numbers. So you do that, you do minus, I mean, it's probably less than 10, but, and then 44, 28. So we're very similar. My calculation was very similar to Dan. Dan's truck would come at around, yeah.

But the weight of the trailer, it's harder to say because it's an open trailer. I couldn't find exact data on how much those weight. But it's probably around that, 27,000 to 28,000 pounds. So it is heavier than most trucks these days. So you're going to lose some weight with that.

So it's not like the only Grail, but it's pretty good. And it's going to have a lot of very good use cases that are going to pay for themselves pretty fast. And did I hear during the presentation that electric trucks can be 2,000 pounds heavier?

Yeah, yeah, 82,000 pounds overall instead of EV. That's with load, with trailer and everything. So, yeah, it's a big deal. And the big deal also with battery electric trucks is this is the first one, well, the first long-range one. So, obviously, with battery technology improving, efficiency improving, that number is going to be able to go down. So, with that number going down, that's just money in the bank every time, like every year.

500 pounds or so that you shed, it's 500 pounds that you can put in that trailer and make money off of it. So trucking companies are going to be looking at that like crazy. So this is probably, again, with the asterisk, like we don't know the actual price of that thing.

tesla might have an ace in their pocket there that might be like a very disruptive vehicle it looks like it so kudos to tesla for so my concern on that is that uh elon's numbers aren't going to be accurate like uh you know if they're anything like you know what you get on your model 3 or model y or any of the cars tesla's numbers are always extremely optimistic especially compared to other vehicles so i'm

I'm concerned that these fleet companies are going to get these things with this expectation and they're going to be like, we can never get those optimum numbers. And we invested all this money and we're not making our money back as fast as we thought. So that's my concern with these things. Yeah, especially weather-wise, the 500 mile test is impressive, obviously.

by itself but it's in California obviously you do that in Quebec right now where it's freezing temperature you're not going to get the same results although and Tesla has been known in in winter to have not a much less accurate range prediction than other companies that's for sure so but still so I'm I'm optimistic about it about the Tesla semi program as a whole yeah for sure

all right we already discussed the cyber truck um getting the the megawatt charging technology or the same technology that enables the one megawatt for the for the tesla semi uh now the oh yeah this this was an interesting news here this week uh we had an exclusive where we had a very reliable source that uh told us that tesla is expecting

is planning for 75,000 Model Y vehicles to come out of Gigafactory in Q1 2023. So that is big news because Tesla is not producing anywhere near that capacity right now in a single quarter. So it would be a big jump between Q4 and Q1. But the way I see it is that Tesla might be...

I guess the word would be like throttling the capacity at GigaTexas right now. They're not letting go like full capacity necessarily at this point because of

the all the mullowai coming out of that factory for the us market right now and this is is having some issues in the u.s market we reported in that in that report earlier this week that there's some level of cancellations uh both like just regular cancellation in terms of uh this last long lead time so sometimes people say okay i can afford that car and they place an order and then by the time that they are supposed to take delivery and and give their money uh they

the bank doesn't want to lend them money or whatever happens, it's not going through and the situation has changed. So there's a lot of cancellation in that regard. Maybe their money's in FTX. If money is in FTX, money is in Tesla stocks that have gone down the last few months too. So things like that.

And obviously the other big reason for cancellation right now is the tax credit coming into effect next month in 2023. I think that's a big one. Yeah. So a lot of people want to wait for that. And unlike other automakers that have been a little bit more accommodating on that front where they let people, like if you think you're going to qualify and we're going to qualify, we can push delivery until then.

and then you can try to get the tax credit. Tesla is holding all the customers to their order contract that said you have to take delivery by that time. So if they refuse delivery by that time, Tesla cancels the order for you. So because of doing that, there's a higher cancellation rate right now in the US than there normally is.

And that sort of was confirmed later on, just the next day after we made that report with Tesla announcing. And Tesla is good with the timing, obviously, it's December 1st and that discount is for the month of December. But they released that sort of just when the Tesla-SMI event was going to happen and that kind of got buried by the Tesla-SMI news. But

Tesla is offering right now a discount of $3,750 for every Model 3 and Model Y delivered in the US right now. So whether you already have a car in order or you're placing an order right now and you can get delivery, especially with inventory vehicles by the end of the month, you get $3,750 off, which is a decent discount and goes away.

against Tesla's usual policy of not offering discounts because this is really very much they call it a price adjustment and a credit but it's very much a discount and because it's temporary it's just for the month of December and it's to counter those this level of cancellation that we just talked about it's an interesting number though right it's 3750 it's half the half the full rebate and

Tesla has mentioned, I think, in the call, their conference call, that they expect to get the full 7,500. But a lot of companies, a lot of automakers aren't sure that they're going to get the full and they can only expect to get the 3,750. So, yeah. Yeah. So that means two things. Either Tesla was wrong when they said that last quarter or

And they're actually going to get $3,750, so they are now offering that to the customers to counter the idea that they're going to wait until next month.

Or it simply is that Tesla feels like half of the full credit, which they might still expect to get next month, is enough to convince enough people to take delivery this month. Because obviously, this is a direct credit on the order versus a tax credit on your taxes.

and also it's uh you got your car right now instead of next month or even it's not even sure if you like if if the demand like our idea is like yeah maybe this is having some domain issues right now because of those situation well that's going to all change next month when that tax really comes into effect and everyone rush to get cars because because that's the other thing too

It's not just Tesla vehicles that people are going to go after. They're going to go after all the EVs on the market to get that tax credit. There's a lot of EVs that's going to be attractive, even if they get half of the credit because they are assembled in North America, but they don't fulfill the requirements for either the battery material or the battery cell assembly.

So that in itself will create more demand for every other vehicle at the same time because there's not going to be much more on the market. And those that can have the capacity to produce them are going to sell a lot more. Going back to my last report where Tesla is planning a massive ramp up to 75,000 units in Q1, that's an average of over 5,000 units per week, which is also like when Tesla determined that this has achieved volume production.

But very exciting, yes. All right, another Tesla news this week was this Project Highland thing. So this is routers that came out with this news. And I'm kind of being very careful with routers these days on the Tesla news because they had a lot of reports that were inaccurate over the last year or so. And so I take everything with a grain of salt when it comes to this, though the idea behind it makes sense.

Rado says that Tesla is working on the redesign of the Model 3, codename Highland, to reduce the number of components and complexity in the interior of the Model 3 while focusing on features that Tesla buyers value, including the display, according to the people who asked not to be named because the revamp has not been announced. Sure.

um not very little information about it says that the the design is focused on the interior making the interior more uh minimalist which is already very much minimalist and also inspired by the ball s without confirming exactly what that means obviously the big thing in the interior of the molester design last year was the yoke steering wheel but

But we don't know exactly if that's going to make it to the new Model 3. But yeah, they said that this is coming around the third quarter of 2023 and it's going to go in production in Fremont and Shanghai. And the timing makes sense. I mean, the Model 3 is sort of due for a redesign. And also, Tesla has made so much improvement with the Model Y, especially so they talk about reducing the number of components.

Uh, so this is kind of obvious, but this is also talking about doing the same thing you did with the model Y with the rear casting and the front casting now, um, to the model three, it's just the, those things just makes a ton of sense. But, uh, doing that to the production is, is you're going to have to slow down the production significantly while you do that. So, uh,

It doesn't necessarily make sense to do it now, but over time and without affecting too much production, it would make sense to do it around Q3, maybe just a few weeks off, and then you restart production. So the news makes sense, but again, with a grain of salt because some of the recent exclusive reporting from routers has just been not great.

well speaking of uh bad reporting on tesla this this was a weird one today and if anyone has information about this they can reach out to me it's really interesting because i mean the part of the the the bad reporting is one thing but also the the bigger story behind it i think is like this there's someone that's uh doing some shenanigans here uh that's that's very weird so

So there was a report earlier this week that came out of China that said that Tesla set up a semiconductor joint venture with Switzerland's Annex Semiconductor. So it was a joint venture with $150 million to build automotive chips out of China. And so we got the report too.

But I read the report from the Chinese publication and I was like, yeah, this is like my bullshit meter was going off. I was like, this is not, this doesn't look real. But then I saw this already, this Manion and even like a bunch of like China, a bigger Chinese publication, like the South Morning China. South China Morning Post. Yeah, South China Morning Post.

uh reporting on it so my i'm gonna i'm gonna have to dig into this for real then because i was like just i don't i don't even want to touch this but then it was making rounds because those publication published it and even what what really got me triggered was when tesla ratty called annex a formidable partner for tesla and among the global leaders in automotive system on chips

And I know people that work in System on Chips. So I'm like, let me just reach out to them and see if they've ever heard of Annex. And no one I've ever heard of Annex. And then I started looking online. I started looking at the company. And the company does not exist. There's a website, but it's completely made up. I call their phone numbers. It doesn't pick up. They have multiple phone numbers. And one of them was in Ottawa. So I thought that was weird because it's a Swiss company. And

and the phone number is in Ottawa and I call it and it was the weirdest thing. It picks up right away and then it's like when dial-up internet came up, things like that. I'm calling a fax machine or something. And then I look at the registrar in Switzerland and there's no company in Switzerland registered with annex semiconductor as a name.

So I'm like, all right, this is weird. This is someone that made up a company. And more than that, they made up two companies because Teslarati and Tasmanian, in their reports, they said that the company was just purchased earlier this summer by a company called

The Zurich found, and then I look up, so Annex is definitely not real based on what I found. Oh yeah, this was a good one here. I look at the, on the Annex website, they have these chips. They're supposedly the chip that they make themselves. And it's clearly, you can see that the Annex is clearly Photoshopped on it. And then I pulled up a Ryzen chip and it's exactly the same chip. So they just Photoshopped their name on the Ryzen chip.

And then that Zurich found that supposedly bought them in June for $5 billion, something that Tasmanian and Tessariti didn't bother to check at all, is also a completely made-up company. I checked their website. So that's another thing that was a red flag for the Annex company.

company. I couldn't find a single person claiming to be working for them like on LinkedIn, none of that. Like they have no employees for a $5 billion company. That's weird. Same thing for a company that can buy them for $5 billion. But on their website, which again looks completely fake, they had two employees listed, Mr. Lionel Schneider and Mrs. Brianna Miller. And as you can see, they use stock photos for each one of them.

And then I looked them up and obviously I cannot find anyone that have a profile that matches them. So again, completely made up companies.

But the weird thing is like the registry in China is real. It's just that it's not Tesla. They call it Tesla Motors Limited. And in all of their legit registry for Tesla, because Tesla has a few companies in China, like you have to register a bunch of them, but not just in China. They have

They have different companies all over the world that's under the Tesla umbrella, if you will. And it's just called Tesla in China. It's not called Tesla Motors Limited. And Tesla hasn't used the name Tesla Motors in a long time. And I don't think they've ever used Tesla Motors Limited. So it's not Tesla that it's partnered with. So to me, it sounds like some people maliciously set that up, that company up.

with those two fake companies and then created those two websites for some lazy journalist to catch it and to report on it without actually checking the veracity of it in order to do what? That's the big question. Like, why do you want Tesla to be attached to those two fake companies?

Usually it's stock price, right? Yeah, it's stock price. So I looked into like, is there any like company that like the same name or something like that that affects the stock price? I couldn't find anything. The only thing that has – that makes some sense to me but I mean it's pretty big that I'd be surprised if – though it is not –

Some people say it's an un-sophisticated scam. Some people say it's actually sophisticated because of doing two different websites, the registry with the fake Tesla and all that. It's actually kind of sophisticated. I don't know. I'm kind of in between. But the only theory that I heard, and that's why if anyone else has some theories about this, I mean, I'm not saying that Tesla Ready and Tasmanian are involved in that. They're just lazy about it. But the people that made it...

The TSMC, the big Taiwanese company that makes chip. Yeah, TSMC, I think. Yeah, I always get the initials wrong. No, TSMC. So once that news came out, the stock dropped 5%. So that might be the idea behind it.

- A short TSMC. - Because TSMC just... they just announced a deal with Tesla to make Tesla's chips. So the fact that like they would get a giant contract from Tesla but then Tesla might actually try to make their own chip that would affect them but other than that, fine. But it's kind of weird. But yeah, also be careful where you get your Tesla news because some journalists are quite lazy and won't check any information before posting it.

And Tasmanian, they took down their article without any correction. Test already actually doubled down on it and said like, oh, look at all these Chinese publication that also reported this. Well, they're also wrong, obviously. It doesn't make it right.

All right, going back to this. We have one more Tested News this week and then we get to non-Tested News for those who enjoy those. And then we're going to get into your comments. So if you guys have any questions, any comments for us, put them in the comment section right now and I'll get to them in about 10-15 minutes.

The Tesla charging stations are now available at Best Buy. So this is the first time that Tesla has done this, selling them outside of their own stores. And also, they do sell it sometimes through companies that install them. If they have a deal with a certain electrical company, they will sell them to them. But I'm pretty sure that they don't make any money on those. The installation companies, Tesla sells them for the same cost that they would sell them to companies.

I'm not 100% sure with Amazon, I'm like 80% sure. But in this case, I would doubt that Best Buy is just selling Tesla for fun and not making any money because they are selling them for the same price that Tesla is selling them on their own store. So I would assume that Tesla is actually doing a distribution deal with Best Buy here. So what is the motivation for that? I would assume that it has something to do with opening up their standard. They don't want to be the only company selling their charging station.

Because it's a bad look if it's not even the Tesla charging station. They call it the Tesla wall connector right now because it's made by Tesla. But it is the Tesla wall connector with a NAX, a North American charging standard connector on it. Though they also sell the J1772 connector on their website too. So they do have both.

But the same price, $550, the same price that they sell on the website. So they're actually discounting them for Best Buy. Yeah, it's interesting. It might be for that. Maybe they're just trying to get their footprint out there a little bit more. Obviously, they're going up against ChargePoint and JuiceBox and Electrify America's got one and Clipper Creek.

$400, pretty good price for a pretty streamlined piece of equipment. They're cheap. Maybe they're getting out there like they're getting the possibility of superchargers being open for everybody. Tesla's got scale. They've got good design. Maybe they're just trying to make some money on this product. Yeah, that's fair too. Also, we kind of weird Best Buy, right? Best Buy is not really the company you would think for charging station for electric vehicles.

Amazon will be the company. Amazon sells a lot of charging stations. ChargePoint, Flow, all these companies are all on Amazon. So I think that, but obviously, Elon, Tesla, Bezos, and all that. I feel like Home Depot and Lowe's would be a good

place too because that's where you do a lot of home stuff and there's yeah electricians there and stuff exactly electrician have like entrepreneurs account at companies like home depot so it would make sense to sell them through that yeah no i agree that's a good that's a good point all right

uh you uh you bought your mom a chevy bolt ev and we discussed it a little bit over the last few weeks but you just posted the whole report on it so do you have anything else to report about this this this uh generous move that you did uh well it wasn't that generous i could have got a more expensive car but uh it was perfect for her you know the a lot of evs are very futuristic and you don't really want to throw a super futuristic

interior at a 70 year old woman who doesn't really want to learn new technology too much. So the bold is a little bit one foot in each, you know, century in terms of interior. But it does have a bunch of nice stuff. You know, some nuance there. The story kind of talks about the dealer experience, which was horrible. But, but,

We got everything taken care of. It wasn't super hard to get everything taken care of. It was just the audacity of them after I had paid for the vehicle to come back and target my mom for a $2,000 free oil for life kind of BS maintenance thing.

And then had some issues with the Qmerit install, which, you know, that could have been a lot smoother. Hopefully Chevrolet takes my feedback there and kind of, you know, gets a project manager because, you know, as it stands, it's kind of like the dealership has to talk to Qmerit. And if neither one of them are motivated to talk to each other, then they just don't. And you got to kind of project manage the whole thing yourself.

And then, you know, a little nuance is the Bolt EV doesn't have a 240 charger that comes with it. I kind of figured it did because the EUV has one. So I had to do a little bit of a jerry rig, which is make an adapter for the 240 plug to go to the charger.

12 amp charger. So now it charges a little bit below three kilowatts, which isn't bad. Like you can fill up the bolt in like about 24 hours. Um, but you know, we're going to get a regular charger out there and actually the charger I'm probably going to send my mom is the one that's going to come with my bolt, which I bought and I'm going to pick up next week. Um, so that'll be an exciting story to talk about next week. All right.

let's uh reconvene next week it's convenient we have a podcast just for that all right uh more announcement like this you cannot go a single week without an automaker announcing new investment into either batteries or uh electric vehicle production in north america obviously the tax credit has something to do with it but this week uh what was interesting is uh canada is getting some love so

Obviously, people are focusing on the U.S. a lot. It's a much bigger market and everything. But Canada used to have a decent production of vehicles, and it kind of eroded over the years. Now it's basically Ontario and nothing. But there's more investment with the actually vehicles happening now. And Volkswagen wants to get involved. They confirmed that they were looking for a Gigafactory location in North America. And then they also confirmed this week that they have –

What do they call those? MOU? Like a momentum of our understanding? What is it? It's basically an agreement with the Canadian government, with Canada, to look for locations for a potential battery cell factory. So to produce battery cells in Canada through Volkswagen's PowerCo company.

I don't know if they're going to have issues with PowerCo in Canada because there's Power Corporation in Canada. I don't know if they're going to end up having to have a little trademark issue. Though I don't think Power Corporation has anything to do with battery cells. So I think we're good. But they have invested in Lion, I think. What did you call that? There's like a battery valley or something in Quebec? Yeah, Quebec's battery valley. The deal is with the Canadian government, the federal government. So it could be in Quebec, could be in any other province too.

But, yeah, I mean, Quebec Battery Valley wouldn't make sense for that, though, because right now it has everything except battery cell production. Like, you have cattle production, animal production. You have separator production. You have everything, basically, except batteries.

for actual battery cells. But at the same time, I don't know if a Volkswagen would make sense getting there because GM has been buying up all the capacity for everything that's there. And GM also has, through its partnership with LG and Ultium, they have battery cell production in other places that are going to ramp up over the next few years in the U.S. and Ohio and the

a few other places so maybe they're just going to want to uh transport that from battery valley to those production facility but he wouldn't make a ton of sense close the loop there and produce battery cells there too um all right and the last piece of news before we go to your comments is lordstown the endurance ev the first 500 units have shipped from the factories to uh

to be soon delivered to the first customer. So Lordstown is actually going to deliver pickup trucks, all electric pickup trucks to customers. So this is kind of exciting. I look at Lordstown basically as kind of a testbed for how it's going to go with those hub motors in electric vehicles because there's no one that's really done that yet. Like especially not for a pickup truck, like putting the

drivetrain, the drive unit, one of the most important components of the vehicle. Inside, one of the weakest parts of a vehicle, which is the wheels. They have four motors, one in each wheel, which is great for traction, great for power and everything, but

It's also super risky for longevity and all that. So I like that Lordstown did it. We're going to see it. Now they are finally going to have 500 trucks on the road. I think it's mostly like customer, like fleet customers that they're going after first. So that's also like the consumers won't really get involved for a little bit. So this is going to be fleet customer testing that. So that's going to be interesting.

uh but yeah i mean lordstown has been on the verge of bankruptcy for a while they got saved by foxconn like two or three times at this point uh but the foxconn really backed them and they got they got that thing on the market which is which is impressive by itself so kudos to everyone involved not saying that's going to be a success just yet like getting the truck to market is one thing then making it profitable and everything is a completely other thing and sustainable uh so we'll see but uh

Still, it's a milestone that needs to be celebrated, in my opinion. Yeah, Foxconn kind of seems to be creeping into the auto industry. They have a bunch of different places they're coming in. Obviously, they build iPhones, so they've got a lot of manufacturing experience. Truck is a bit different. Truck is a lot different, but they also have some stuff they're doing in China. There's another thing that they're doing.

Well, they didn't talk with a lot of people. I mean, the news this week is Scout, VW's new brand, Scout, they're looking into. And then they have sort of their own vehicle that they design and build themselves, but they don't want to sell themselves. So other brands are slapping their name on them. So they're doing that in other markets right now. Yeah.

that's something but not not in the us just yet because to be fair this is not the same with the lordstown endurance nornstown is was designed by a lot of our town it's just foxconn sort of took over the manufacturing of it much like uh fisker and magna with the ocean yep all right let's jump into the comments all right let's see jonathan root uh was first

Elon said Kanye. All right, so we're getting off topic right away. But Elon said Kanye was the smartest person he knew. Change of heart. Did he really say that? I know at one point they were closer, like two or three years ago, and they were friendly. And he did reinstate him on Twitter before suspending him again this week. I just...

Kanye is sick. Yeah. Don't give him a platform right now. Don't interview him. And I guess that's what Elon's doing is he's taking his platform. So that's a good thing. Yeah, well, he gave him back to him at a time where he probably shouldn't have given back to him. It was clear at the time that he was also in a very bad... I mean, I don't want to diagnose him with anything, but in my opinion,

non-psychologist's opinion. He looks like he's in a clear psychosis episode, a very deep one. That doesn't excuse what he's saying. I know that there's people that are bipolar and have psychosis that don't go full racist and anti-Semite. So I'm not saying that it's just that. But, I mean, the guy is... He's not the smartest person in the world, I don't think, but he's obviously a musical genius. So...

like you would think that he could, if he was seeing clearly right now, he would realize that these comments are extremely hurtful for a lot of people. I would think. Yeah. I don't agree with the musical genius part, but okay.

everything else i agree yeah i'm not actually i was i've never been a big fan of his music like there's a few things that i like but i watched a documentary on on on netflix on him and uh that goes especially in his early career when he was like producing for jay-z and all that and uh you have to give it to him like when you when you see that you're like oh like that that guy can produce music like crazy like he's very very impressive at it like he

that that's what i'm referring to uh obviously there's a few songs that i like from them too but i think that that's the part i'm referring to yeah i don't know if you can like his songs anymore i think he's like uh yeah canceled yeah uh all right uh we talked about the uh one kilovolt um

No FSD or steering assist info on the semi. Yeah, that was a weird one. I get where they're coming from. They don't want to anger any truck drivers, but I feel like the technology is obviously there. Yeah, so a couple of comments on the 1 kilovolt. We saw Carl Johan Larsen say a lot of isolation problem. We talked about it a little bit. Jake Cooley says, will 1 kilovolt help?

with the charge throttling at a higher percentage and battery temps limiting charge rate uh you know I don't know like I think that you know the battery level I don't think it's going to do too much there I mean what it does do is eliminate resistance or lower resistance um throughout and you know theoretically also you know lower magnetic fields and stuff so I don't know about all that uh moving on uh Nanda holds

Can they fold the mirrors flat on the highway with a tap on the screen? I'm sure they evaluated the drag difference during the Trix testing phase. They didn't show anything about that. Didn't say anything about that. I think the goal is more what Seth said earlier, where the goal would be to, once you get approval for it, you remove the mirror part of the mirrors and just keep the part where all the cameras are. I think there's three cameras per mirror. Oh, wow. Yeah.

All right. Andrew McDonald question. Do you think the future Semi will be higher or lower in price? Well, I mean, it depends how you look at it. Like, it's going to be a higher end price than when Tesla originally announced, which was $150,000 to $200,000, depending on the model. Yeah.

But well, I think long term, it might be able to go down from that. And you know what? I think it's kind of weird that Tesla went with the 500 mile model first too, like with that, because I think you could have a much bigger impact with the 300 miles model now for a lot of...

of driving or a lot of situation, I think. But at the same time, the 500 miles makes sense to at least to show like you can have an electric truck that does 500 miles, a battery electric truck. Because there's other electric trucks on the market, other classic electric truck with 80,000 pound capacity, but they don't do 500 miles. This one does. So this one is like a full eight hours of driving. And after eight hours of driving, you need to take a 30 minute breaks minimum anyway.

within that eight hours of driving so during that time you charge the vehicle and you can you can do probably easy probably you can do easily over 700 miles of driving a day with that tesla semi truck with that current configuration that's that's awesome yeah game changing really the quick charging and all that stuff yeah we talked about the weight of the jersey barriers um

Jay Cooley agreed, I think, that 1.7 watt hours per mile was on that 500-mile trip, where they're going under 55 miles per hour the majority of the trip. I think semis aren't supposed to go above 55 in California. Or 65? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, they're limited in speed. That's true. So that affects it. I don't know that we... Do we know for a fact? We do have the video of it, so we can...

I don't know if you can see the speedometer on the video. This video is so fast, you'd have to slow it down quite a bit. Yeah, it also looked like he was in a lot of traffic. I mean, they went to LA. Right. Yeah. I don't know about that. All right, Dan Oberst again. Has there been any rumors about the shareholder proposal's next meeting to remove Elon as CEO? Given the bad Twitter PR, there seems to be a better argument now than the last time that vote came up.

Well, now that you say that, I realize that's extremely likely to happen. Not that he's going to be removed as CEO, but that there's going to be a shareholder proposal asking for that. I think that's very likely at this point.

I don't think it's going to work though. I don't think it's going to work. Unless Elon himself supports it, which might be the case. He might decide like, all right, you don't want me to CEO? I don't care. Give me something else. I've got other things to do. So, and that's a point right now that I think he can easily survive without Elon. That's obvious. Though I still think he's a positive for the company as a whole in terms of his...

uh engineering drive and the way he's pushing the products i i like that but yeah as ceo i think it would make sense to have like uh i see a yan smith uh referencing herbert diaz at the end here i think i think that would make sense to have herbert take over a ceo all right brad sloan what would be the advantage of having a thousand volt system in the cyber truck is the key to this the 4680 battery maybe that's what makes it special

I think it's more like the wiring and the charging and stuff like that. Yeah, you save a lot on wiring, that's for sure. Charging capacity higher and potential for a higher output, though you don't really need one kilovolt to get very competitive output. Right.

And then following up, is Tesla still going to open up their supercharger stations to non-Tesla vehicles before the end of the year? Good question. 30 days. Yeah. I don't think so by the end of the year, but sometime. Yeah. Or they changed the plan. Maybe the thing that they announced last month, maybe that really changed the plan. And now they're like, we're not really opening it with CCS and adapters and all that. We are just banking on Aptera or whatever else jumps on board.

And then we're going to use that to stick to the standard and still get the benefits of the subsidies for a new charging station that needs to be available to ARG vehicles from more than one automaker.

Yeah, that news, the NACS news, that's not good if you're voting for Tesla to make CCS. Yeah, if you are a CCS vehicle owner that hoped to be on the Tesla Super Truck. I'm not saying that's not going to happen. I'm just saying that it introduced a new possibility where Tesla goes another way. That's what I'm saying.

All right, Bradson. FYI, I did drone video of the Gigafactory and discovered not long ago that Tesla ships out there model-wise at a rail yard 25 miles from the Gigafactory. The rail yard is expanding, too, to keep pace with Tesla. So I assume you're talking about Gigafactory Texas? Yes.

Brad, and yeah, I mean, right now they are changing the whole logistics around Gigafactory Texas to try to handle the new capacity that's coming in the next few months in Q1. It's just a different logistics when you're shipping like a few thousand cars per week to 5,000 cars per week. It's just a lot of products to ship out, a lot of big products. It's too bad they're not closer. I thought they were building the Gigafactory like on a train line.

Texas? No. Berlin, they are extending the rail line to reach the factory. I have to say, it seems like Gigafactory is not going to be

slowing down anytime soon maybe a train line there would make sense yeah yeah i mean texas has been very accommodating to tesla or maybe a um a boring company loop line a loop that goes to the factory to the the rail line i don't know

Well, yeah, that's it for us this week, everyone. I appreciate it. One of you that's still listening right now, if you're still listening and you enjoy this ad-free episode of the Electric Podcast, please hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. And if you're listening in audio only, go to your podcast app and give us a five-star credit. Right now, we are in the top 10 of the automotive podcasts in the U.S., and that's because of you, and we appreciate you doing that for us.

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