Tesla Supercharger update, is battery swap going to be a thing?, Ford goes back on BEV, and more
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Welcome, everyone, to a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub, coming to us live from New York. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good.

All right. And I want to give a quick thank you to our sponsor for this week's episode, Splitvolt. The Splitvolt splitter switch automatically shares power from your existing 240 volt dryer socket while you're level two with your level two EV charger. You can learn more here in the link in the description of this podcast. But we're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on on the show too. So stay tuned for that. They have a very cool product that we are happy to promote.

All right, we have a lot to talk about this week. As per usual, we have a little update to Tesla's lineup last weekend that we didn't discuss in the podcast because it happened right after. A little bit more layoffs. We're going to discuss a little bit of an update on the supercharger situation. Then some FSD stuff. We have Trump is on the docket today, so I always make for some fun comments.

We'll try not to get too political around here, but he might be the next president of the United States. So it is, we need to talk about it. As long as he is not in jail.

No, he could be president from jail. Is that? There's nothing about the laws in the U.S., the constitution against that? No, I don't think that founding fathers thought that would be possible. I mean, you guys can have like criminals, zombies. What's going to be next for president? A vampire or something? Then Fisker and we have earnings from both Rivian and Lucid to discuss. Let's jump right back in.

So, two big news this last weekend. It was one Tesla launched a new version of the Model Y. So, you have a Model Y long-range rear-wheel drive,

So something that has been going back and forth with that. I don't know if you remember, Elon at one point was like, I don't want a standard range Model Y because it's going to have too short of a range. And then he actually launched one with 260 miles of range. But now this version of the vehicle is going away and it's being replaced by a silver wheel drive, but with the bigger battery pack.

for $45,000, which is just $2,000 more than the standard range version. And you get a lot more miles with that 220 miles. So significant difference. Love it. Great option. I would have kept the standard range option in it too, though. I don't understand why not. The $2,000 difference is...

Not too big, though, I have to admit. So it's like getting the lineup a little bit closer. But I just said I don't know why, but actually I know why because of the next piece of news, which is Elon revealing that the Standard Range Model Y was...

software lock vehicle. So Tesla has done that in times two times, first with the Model S, then it went with Model 3 ahead at one point. Tesla also has used that for some markets where MSRP laws for incentive make it so that Tesla was not able to launch a vehicle in there. So they would like software lock the features, including the range of the battery.

to lower the price of it and then people could after the fact unlock the capacity with more cash. However, most of the time Tesla told the buyers about that, like you're buying a software-locked vehicle. But in recent years, Tesla went completely away with telling people what's the battery capacity that they have in their car.

Tesla decided to also go away with telling them if that capacity is locked. And Elon just revealed it now as the Model Y standard range wheel drive is gone away from the order page. So now the existing owners are going to be offered, I don't know when, they're still figuring that out apparently, an upgrade for $1,500 or $2,000.

depending on the vehicle because Tesla is doing the standard range with two batteries. I think there's some with the 4680 out of Gifford, Texas, and some with the 2170. And there is 40 miles and 60 miles range. That's what's going to be unlocked for that price. So depending on which one you have, it's going to be $1,500 for 40 miles or $2,000 for 60 miles, depending on your battery situation.

So, I don't know, it's controversial, you know, because some people feel like, all right, if you already built the car like that, the battery is already done, like why don't you just give them the range?

Others is like, "All right, but you paid for what you were getting. You know you were getting a 260 mile vehicle and you paid for that, so that's fine." I guess the only real gripe you can have with that is the fact that, "Yeah, but you sold me a vehicle knowingly that it was less efficient than it could have been because I was carrying a bigger battery pack for no reason." I guess you can read that argument.

There's a flip side to that, though. That's a valid point, carrying around a battery that you're not using. That's kind of, you know, seems silly. But, you know, as you know, on a day-to-day basis, you're not supposed to fill your Tesla battery all the way up. But if you have this extra buffer zone, you can fill it up every day to the whole 260. So basically, you're getting on a day-to-day basis the same, you know, range that you would get otherwise or give or take a little bit.

But what if you don't know? If you're not told about it, you still charge it to 90% because you don't know. Well, if you do know about it. So I had the OG Tesla battery unlock. I bought a Tesla Model S 40 originally in 2012.

And Tesla never ended up making a 40 kilowatt hour battery. Rightly so, I think. And they just sold 60 kilowatt hour batteries with lock to 40 kilowatt hours. And I used that probably for a year or so. And then we had this long trip and, you know, I called him up and we made a deal and it was a pretty good deal. So.

Yeah, you got it for cheaper too, right? Yeah, it was significantly cheaper. Yeah. I mean, there were really just a few of you in that situation anyway. So I don't know. Did you ever get an idea of how many Model S40 they sold?

I don't think they ever said anything about it, but it was such a small number that like there was like one person that was in charge of like upgrading and downgrading those. And like, like I remember I was in New Jersey. We had to drive back and I needed some extra range and I called and they were like, oh, the guy who handles that is at lunch. That's just like, you know,

Tesla is totally different now. 140,000 employees are a lot less now. But back then, it was just like a guy in a desk somewhere was handling that. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I kind of have a 2000-something number in my head, so maybe I'm just confusing it with the signature. I don't know. Anyway, it's a nice addition. Tesla's lined up, and we'll see how people feel about that, if people are going to upgrade or not.

All right. Earlier in the week, we heard of another round of layoffs at Tesla. This time, people reached out from several different departments. Software engineers were let go. Service employees were let go, which is a little bit worrying. And people in engineering was also let go, something that we reported about a few weeks ago. We thought that it could be next. Now we're hearing even design people might be let go.

being let go and also there were people being let go this week in today it's being reported in berlin and uh i just heard also from people in the gigafactory nevada also around the layoff there so people are being laid off all over the place at tesla and it's all the same narrative again inefficiencies and growth of a head count and resulting in supplication of jobs and you know restructuring and all that but the biggest

The thing that happened was obviously last week with the firing of the entire supercharging team. We've been reporting on exactly the impact on that. We reported last week that we could confirm that Tesla was backing out of some leases that they already had secured for future supercharger station. Jamie also got the email that Tesla was sending to

all the third parties with which they do business regarding supercharger networks, so contractors, property owners.

utilities and all that. They had this blanket email that basically was like, "Hey, things are screwed up around here because Elon just fired everyone. And if you're not getting paid, we're sorry. If the project is in construction, keep doing construction. You're going to get paid and everything like that. If it's not in construction, you can put it on hold and everything." So very confused situation there. I remember a lot of the chaos.

And people are asking, like, what is really happening? Elon said last week that this still plans to grow the supercharger network just at a slower pace and with a focus on existing stations, adding chargers to those. All right.

Now, Elon had a comment this week. He said, just to reiterate, Tesla will spend well over $500 million expanding our supercharger network to create thousands of new chargers this year. That's just on new sites and expansion, not counting operating costs, which are much higher, obviously. Tesla sells a lot of electricity and the maintenance of that too. Those are much higher than $500 million. But $500 million is what they're going to spend on new chargers.

supercharger station and new chargers at existing station. What does that mean? It's hard to say exactly what I mean because Tesla has never really revealed its capital expenditure on the supercharger network. You don't break that down. However, we have like kind of a pretty good idea based on some

applications for grants for charging station that Tesla's cost per charger, not station, is $45,000 to $50,000, which is much lower than a competition, thanks to an incredible supercharging team at Tesla, former supercharging team at Tesla. And so with that, we can estimate that at $500 million for the whole year or over that, he said,

Tesla's build rate for supercharger station in Q1, which was the last quarter that Tesla had a full team deploying those, would be pretty much the same. So between that and between what we previously reported in my wrecking ball article that, if you don't remember, I reported that Elon took over the supercharging team a few weeks ago, well, three weeks prior to the layoffs, I should say.

Not took over. He had Tenucci report directly to him. The other supercharging team reports directly to him. And what we heard is that, like several of the departments, he asked for 20% cuts in the department, which Tenucci fought back against because based on their plan, she believed she needed those employees to deliver. And Elon fired her and the entire team

we cannot confirm that he fired as a statement but it looks very much like that because right after the firing he sent out an email to other executives in which he said using her as an example like if you don't fire all um if you don't fire the number of people i've been requesting from your department uh you will uh i will ask for your resignation basically like i did with with them but obviously

i'm not i'm not trying to justify anything he said but he did by the way like i don't i don't agree with with that i don't agree with you know using an entire team as an example because uh you disagree with an executive anyway what i think this proves in this comment that elon said just prove is that there's no actual change of plan with the supercharger network this was just a rash impulsive decision to assert himself and his power at tesla by firing her and

and the entire team. We saw a lot about the Elon absolutist that Elon can do no wrong. These people start with the premises that Elon is right, so how can he be right?

And when there was this firing, a lot of people tried to, okay, how do we justify this? Like there's a change of plan with the supercharger. Okay. They were doing that, this and that. There was no change of plan whatsoever. Elon simply fired the entire team as a statement and the plan is still to deploy them. Obviously Elon is like signaling a little bit of a slowdown in the supercharger deployment because it's inevitable if you don't have a team to deploy them.

Which is weird. So you had Tesla fans, like Elon fans specifically, trying to justify the move of firing everyone. And then now that all the theories are wrong because there was no plan, it was just impulse, they are celebrating again because look, the plan of the supercharger is still good. It's still in place. Nothing changed. Things have changed. The entire team is gone. And the people are like, all right, but the superchargers are still coming online and everything. Everything is fine.

It's not as simple as that, everyone. There was plenty of charging station already in the pipeline, already in the construction phase, already pretty advanced. Those that are already in the hands of contractors outside of Tesla, they go through with it. So that's the station you're seeing coming online right now. I haven't seen Elon retweet a station coming online in Malaysia.

Okay, of course, there was like an electrical team that has nothing to do with Tesla that completed the installation and turn it online. It's not that complicated. But yeah, you're going to see a slowdown in the deployment pace. It's impossible. Like Tesla will not be able to re-hire at any kind of pace that's going to be able to maintain the rate of deployment in Q1.

Yeah, and I think that's an important point to bring up is like not only is this bad for morale at the company, but it's also, you know, when Tesla does decide to start hiring again, people are going to be like, oh, I might be part of a team that, you know, Elon Musk decides to make a example out of just because, you know, whatever. So that's not good on a lot of levels. You're thinking ahead here, Seth. That was...

The next article after this one, we're skipping one, but we're going to go to this one right away because your segue was just too good. Yeah, this is a real concern. And this is highlighted by this article that Jamie wrote based on a LinkedIn post from Rich Otto, who was the head of product launches at Tesla.

I know Rich personally. He's a great guy. Yeah, yeah. We know Rich. We worked with Rich before at Electric, before we were blacklisted. And Rich was basically the last remaining of the PR at Tesla. All the press, all the public relation people were gone. Not gone, but they were put at other roles and then left, if not left right away.

Rich was one of the last ones that was actually doing some PR. He was in charge of the product launches, like the Cybertruck launch and all that, the actual events and everything. But he was also working with a handful of Elon-approved

media and jleno and kbhd maybe kbhd won't be approved anymore like he he's got into his uh his meme era right now after a few of these last review even there's a couple things uh uh but i know that i know that you guys too were not like super hype about the uh i'm like i see you guys i'm saying you guys are 95 mac said for those who don't know said also owns 95 mac but

Not the most hype event of the year this week, but he was also down on this one. It was pretty weak sauce, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So MKDHD is not as the Aptigo lucky guy as he used to be in Terminal Review, so maybe Tesla will be more careful next time. I don't know. I still love the guy. He's great. So yeah, Rich was still the one in Ling, all that stuff. And this week, he posted on LinkedIn that he's leaving the company, and he's apparently not part of the layoffs yet.

But he's leaving because of the layoff. So why leave? He says, it's a company I love and that has given me so much, but also taken its pound of flesh. Great companies are made up of equal parts, great people and great products. And the latter are only possible when it's people are thriving. The recent layoff that are rocking the company and its morale have thrown this harmony out of balance and it's hard to see the long game. It was time for a change. I think that was beautifully put.

And yes, it's the sentiment that Seth just shared. The talent exodus at Tesla goes beyond the people getting fired. The morale for the people that stays are down. And I think you're going to see a lot of people like Rich leaving because not only that, you're left. You're one of those that's still at Tesla and your friends left. The morale is low in the office.

You chat with your friends that left and your friends are talking to you about the cushy new jobs that they got here and there, where they're getting paid just as much, if not more than they were at Tesla, where they don't have a pigeon CEO that like,

comes shit in your head every now and again. You can still contribute if you're a mission-driven employee, which I think most people at Tesla are. You can still contribute to the mission to accelerate the advent of electric transport and renewable energy because there's plenty of other companies doing that now.

So you can have your cake and eat it too. So like now you talk to those people and you're tempted to go away. And on the other side of the fence, you also have now Tesla is going to have, there seems to be some kind of hiring freeze right now. But that thing is going to have to go away at some point. And this is going to have to, you know, you know what I said last time, like Tesla fires people supposedly leads you to hiring and efficiency. And then the

hire people due to their firing inefficiencies. And that's going to be inevitable. It's going to come. They're going to have to hire some charging people, some product planning people, etc. Now this is going to be much more difficult to do this hiring because of who's going to want to work at Tesla after this display from Elon. There's still going to be some people, obviously. I'm not saying that no one's going to do it. But a lot fewer people are going to want to do it, I think.

But the article that we skipped is still about the supercharging. It's about BP. And BP is not the only one. I saw EnviroSpark. I saw a few other companies that did that that are raising their hands a little bit. They're like, hey,

The property owners that got put in the dark, left in the dark by Tesla, call us. Call us. We'll take your charging site, your potential charging site. Same thing for the employees that were fired. They're like, eh, they go. BP is especially interesting because BP also bought $100 million worth of white label supercharger hardware from Tesla late last year in 2020.

At the time, Tesla said that it was going to be a new business for now. Though that was a business that was also handled by the supercharger team that is gone. So I don't know what's going to happen with that either. But still, I thought it was interesting. And it's the only silver lining in this whole thing is that the charging team at Tesla is going to find other jobs, most likely at other charging station company. And they're going to help accelerate the deployment of charging station there.

BP wants to spend a billion dollars in the next few years to deploy fast charging stations. So even more than Tesla's 500 million, about 500 million this year for Tesla. So maybe similar. I don't know. All right. Next on. All right. We have some FSD updates here. So there's V12.4 that is coming. So right now, Tesla is on V12.3.6, I think. And...

And yeah, V12.4 is apparently coming next week and a little bit more about that in a minute. But the big difference, so Elon used his usual hyperboles, like it's going to be mind-blowing and blah, blah, blah. But he gave actually one piece of actual new information that is not hyperboles. He specifically said that the steering wheel nag is going to be gone in V12.4. So this is a big deal for those who are not aware.

for years and years and years this was only driver monitoring system was keeping your hands on the steering wheel but this never had any sensor to detect hands on the steering wheel they can only detect torque being applied on the wheel so technically if there's torque applied to the wheel there's ends on it not entirely true but anyway so you when you're driving autopilot every minute or so depending on your speed you had to apply a little bit

of torque on the wheel, not too much either, because if you put too much, you're going to hang off of the autopilot of FSD Beta. But just a little bit to tell the system, hey, I'm still here. I still have my hands on the wheel. I'm still watching. You get this alert that you see here. Apply slight turning force to steering wheel. That's the official alert. Now Tesla has developed a new driver motoring system based on the cabin-facing camera that's underneath the rearview mirror.

That is monitoring the eyes of the driver to make sure that they're paying attention to the road at all time. Now, this has become the primary driver monitoring system at Tesla. And it's been pretty good for me, honestly. I mean, it's annoying because I think like it's three seconds or something like that. If you turn your head for like more than three seconds, if you're not looking straight at the road, if you're looking at the screen for three seconds, I think it's a little bit excessive because, you know, sometimes like I look...

you know i'm changing something on the screen or something and takes me like four seconds and then the alert and everything it can be annoying but i do think it is technically better than the hands-on steering however there's a big loophole to that uh i don't know if i want to publicize it too much but i think it's already quite well known at this point anyway it's sunglasses if you have sunglasses on obviously you can get away uh with with that rule uh don't do it

Keep your eyes on the world all the time. But Elon says that this is going away with V12.4. I don't know how big of a difference this is going to make, honestly. I think they're going to remove it, but they're not going to tell you not to put your hand on the steering wheel anyway. So I don't know how big of a difference this is going to make. But this might come as soon as next week because in this article is Elon giving some kind of outline of future full self-driving updates starting with V12.

12.4, which he says is almost completely retrained models. And the final touches are for comfort right now as it sometimes accelerates or breaks too fast for most people's taste. Yeah. So a lot of people say that. I don't have much of a problem with the current version, to be honest. Anyway. Okay.

Then he says, he continues that 12.5, it's when the system at various stage of testing right now, we're getting into, this is an interesting part, we're getting into rare complex situation. For example, going down a narrow one-way road and countering a road closure and having to reverse out to find a new route. That closure also needs to communicate to the rest of the fleet so that they don't get a whole bunch of Tesla stuck down the road. So this is much more narrow case.

Interesting that Tesla is doing it because obviously this is something you need for like a robo taxi kind of application. But obviously if you have someone behind the wheel, not as useful because obviously you just...

You encounter that road, you manually take over at that point. But for the goal of Robotexy, you need absolutely those things. So Tesla is working on them now. And I'm feeling a little bit awful. I like the idea that the V12.4 is completely retrained, apparently. So that...

would confirm Elon's statement that Tesla is not compute AI training, compute can train anymore. They can retrain entire models faster because that was quite fast. I mean, I say that, but I don't actually know exactly when they started to work on 12.4. Anyway, but

so the extra compute power is great because you need to to train a system on the best data possible and having that compute power available means that as soon as you have that clear data you can recreate the whole model a lot faster so obviously this is credible value for Tesla right now as they have those new

models that are neural net end-to-end. So every time you train a whole new model on cleaner and cleaner, cleaner, cleaner data, you have step changes rather than incremental improvement and sometimes worse, like step backwards, which has been the case for the FSD program at times. So yeah, I'm a little bit hopeful. I'm planning to do this this weekend. I'm planning to do a V12.3.6 review in Quebec City.

I'm going to try the whole Quebec City too. Cobblestones and all? Yeah, we'll try. We'll give it a shot. While we're here, let me do the read real quick. Yeah, on Splitvolt. Let's talk about Splitvolt. All right, guys. This week's episode is sponsored by Splitvolt, the company behind the cream of the crop and new electric vehicle home power accessory technology, the Splitvolt Splitter Switch.

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Level 2 EV chargers and other EV accessories. Thank you very much to Splitvolt. Yes, thank you, Splitvolt. All right, moving on from... No, no, we have one more Tesla article, I should say. The last article is an update on the DOG investigation. So Tesla last year confirmed that there's a Department of Justice investigation into Tesla. They said they received some subpoenas, some communication from the DOG.

And now it was confirmed from based on sources at routers that they are specifically looking into securities or wire fraud for misleading investors and consumers about electric vehicles self-driving capabilities. So this doesn't mean much, to be honest. It's just they are looking into it. Not the first time that the government has paid attention to Tesla, but it is specifically

Wire fraud or misleading investors, so securities fraud, which is a big deal. The SEC also has been looking at the situation apparently. And there's been plenty of time that the government has looked into what Tesla is saying about full self-driving rather than what they're delivering. And

As much as Elon has said some stupid things over the years and he's had bad prediction about self-driving, the guy is more, not all the time, but more careful with his word than people giving credit to. So it's hard for the government to nail him on something like that. He's great as to walk the line between like, all right, I'm not saying something that

that is entirely false. I think it will be delivered by the end of the year. I think it's coming in two weeks. It's not fraud technically, if you really think it is. However, the DOJ has subpoenaed Tesla, most likely talked to employees.

Got some documents. If the DOG can prove that Tesla internally knew that it couldn't deliver these things in the timeline that Elon has said, and Elon knew about that and said it anyway, that's where you get into a more like prosecutable kind of area. I'm no lawyer, though.

Keep that in mind. Be famous, disclaimer. You want it on the internet? Yeah, I'm a lawyer just on Twitter. Just an ex-lawyer. Just an ex. So yeah, I mean, something is definitely a storyline that's been going on for a while. The Tesla Q community has been like, when is the DOG finally going to press charges against Tesla, against Elon? Some believe it's getting closer because of that report. I don't know about that. All right. Moving on from Tesla. Trump. Trump.

I'm going to block the comments for a second and talk about Trump. So this is based on a Washington Post report. So, you know, personally paid for by Jeff Bezos.

I really don't think Jeff Bezos gets involved that much into the Washington Post stuff, but it is a fun conspiracy theory to have. The report claims to have sources within a meeting that happened at Mar-a-Lago Trump's Club in Florida last month with a bunch of oil executives.

And apparently, the New York executive brought up what's going to be your plan regarding all these environmental regulations, specifically electric vehicle regulation and incentive, not just the incentive like the IRA stuff, but also like the emissions from the EPA, the emission regulations and all that. And especially wind energy was also concerned because Biden has been big on wind energy and expanding it.

What are you going to be your plan for those? And quoting the report here, Trump's response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean. You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental rules policy and stop New Run from being enacted, according to the people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Now, if that's true, it's wild and it's not wild. It's not wild in the sense that Trump's position on electric vehicle and environment policies have been becoming... It's been confusing for a while because the guy is all over the place all the time, but there's been a significant trend that he's been against it, whether it's...

personally or whether he's just, you know, trying to win vote with his crowd, left-winging crowd that are not fans of any kind of incentive for environmental projects. I think you said left. You meant right-wing? Right-wing, yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah.

So either that, the real thing that makes it wild is that he's basically putting a price on, you know, donate that to my campaign and I'll do that. So that's, you know, that's kind of been fun. Like it's definitely happening all the time in the US because you guys have extremely insane political funding laws like this.

Like that's the real root of you guys political issues is like you can, we have some problems in Canada. It came from citizens United, which is a Supreme court decision during like the Obama era era. You're right. Like I, there's no defense of it. What was the phrase from that decision? It's like, it's like money is free speech, money speech or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Companies have free speech just like humans do or just like citizens do. Yeah. And, and,

Putting your money on something is free speech. So putting your money on politics is free speech, which is not an entirely bad idea per se, but in practice with politics, it's just ridiculous. Because first of all, if you're going to give a billion dollars to someone...

You're going to expect something in return. So I'm not even that mad at Trump on this because he's just being a little bit more like of a straight shooter, obviously. He's like, all right, you give me a billion dollars, I'll do this for you, which is happening all the time in politics. It's just not being said that obviously, I think. Yeah.

But if you are like, I like that the Washington Post report specifically says like it's done people in the room. So even those those nasty, like just completely corrupted oil executive people, they were even them. They were shocked by Trump being so obvious about it. Just give me the money and I'll take care of it for you. It's wild times here.

Some wild times. Yeah. In Canada, we also had some issues with political funding and everything, but it's so limited. I think we have a limit of like $1,000 per person or per company or something like that. You know, $1,000, it's a little bit harder to say like, I'm going to give you $1,000 and you're going to do something for me. Like it's, you know, not impossible, but a lot more difficult. All right. NIO, you know, NIO has done something. I've never tested their vehicle, never been to China. Yeah.

And they're in Europe now too, and I haven't had the chance to test them. I would love to have a chance to test them. Honestly, if someone at NIO is listening to the podcast, I would love to get a try. There's one thing that I can say for sure that NIO has done, and it's both good and has surprised me, is that they make battery swap work. We talked about it a little bit last week with this new semi-solid state battery that they are testing through their swapping station where someone can rent it.

to them. So that brought the idea of short period of renting batteries because I know a lot of countries have

I don't know if they still do that, the Zoe, Renault in France. They have this, you can own the car but not the battery, you rent the battery. Right. Yeah, it makes it cheaper and the battery is owned by that. Yeah. Yeah. So you have that. So that's been common. But NIO is doing something else. Because they have battery swap, you can temporarily rent out a bigger battery. Kind of like what Seth did with his Model S40. When he needed the battery, he was like, hey, unlock the range. Yeah.

in it, you can do that temporarily by just going to a battery swap station and getting a bigger battery. So they've done that and we've been surprised because we had a lot of doubt about battery swapping for a long time. There was this Israeli company in the early days of the Nissan Leaf and whatnot that they had an initiative for that. What was that called? A Better Place or something? Say that again? What was that called? A Better Place? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. Better something for sure. A Better Place probably. Yeah.

Then Tesla did one too, where they actually did the engineering on it and everything, but that was specifically to get more emission credit in California. So they gave up on it after the rules were changed.

But NIO is making it real. And now one of the reason why I'm getting a little bit more interested in that is that they are working to make it a standard too. So the problem with battery swapping is obviously, it only works with your car. So you have one company doing it. NIO is just like, it's not huge. They just delivered their 500,000 vehicle, which is good, but they've been around for a while. So Tesla used to deliver that in a quarter. But

Now they are trying to make it a standard by getting other companies on board and they just announced JAC, I don't know, GAC, or do you spell it out? Or is it GAC Group? I think it's just JAC. Okay, JAC.

And so they announced a partnership with them to help standardize battery pack swapping. And they are one of several that have joined over the last few months. So you have also Geely is joining, huge Chinese manufacturer. Cherry also used, Jack also used, and Lotus. So all the big, and Chang Automobile, I don't know what this one is. So all these companies like own other brands. So they're not like, you don't, you might not know the brand because they're all mostly Chinese brand, but they are expanding globally.

Geely is obviously global, Lotus also, but they are Chinese owned. So now if you make them together, it might mean that battery swapping will actually have a future, which is interesting. I don't think a lot of people would have predicted that five years ago. Tesla abandoned it. Yeah. All right. Now, bad news on the Ford.

side of things so ford signal uh kind of a backtracking of its bv battery electric vehicle commitment in europe the company said that uh uh the uh they said that a lot a lot of other companies have been saying lately uh they said that they are not seeing some strong demand in bvs and they are looking at plugging the hybrids uh they say we just have to manage our way towards 100 electric drivetrain so

Again, electric drivetrain rather than BEV. So you're seeing that plug-in hybrids, hybrids are still at play. So they are not abandoning just yet their 2030 BEV goals in Europe, but they are making a signal that they are willing to roll back and look at plug-in hybrids. And I don't know if they said hybrids specifically. At least I don't think they said hybrids. I think they just said plug-in hybrids at least, but...

you know it's something that gm also has signal um well actually confirmed lately so i'm not too surprised to see ford do that and uh seems short-sighted i think we went through that a few times

All right, we have a few more news items to discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comments section. So I see you guys already put a bunch of comments in it. So if you have questions about any of the topics that we discussed today, you can put them in the comments section right now. We can get to them in a few minutes. Or it can be also about other topics in the EV world you want our take on. And if you do enjoy the show, please give us a like. You can hit the like button right now.

On any platform, we're live on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and everywhere. And if you do enjoy the podcast, you can also give us a five-star review. That helps the show a ton. It's free to do and helps us be pushed through the algorithm. All right, Fisker, Fisker, Fisker, Fisker. File for bankruptcy.

In Australia, which sounds like not too big of a deal. It's just a subsidiary in Australia, but Austria is where they actually produce the fiscal ocean through Magna.

So this is not the end of Fisker. They tried to make that clear, but the Australian entity of Fisker announced that it has voluntarily filed to open a restructuring proceeding via self-administration under the Australian Insolvency Code. So this is kind of the equivalent of a bankruptcy in the U.S., bankruptcy court.

The proceeding will enable Fisker Australia to ensure its operation are able to continue under the court protection, including paying employees and selling vehicles. Fisker Australia intends to continue delivering its vehicles to customers and to extend possible providing services, updating its over-the-air software as it moved through their restructuring proceedings. So yeah, this is the beginning of the bankruptcy at Fisker. Bankruptcy doesn't mean the end necessarily. It just means that the creditors are taking over.

And then depending on how the creditor wants to hack and everything, we are the creditor. The company could continue operating. And this is the kind of protection they seek throughout these proceedings so that if the company end up still operating at the end of it, you won't be too much of a shamble because you still have the capacity to operate during the proceedings. So that's it. But yeah, obviously this is... How's the stock? I haven't checked the stock in a minute. I'm assuming it's...

in the toilet yeah three and a half cent per share down 11 today down penny stock yeah down it's 99.15 in six months what's the it has a market cap of 18 million dollars so yeah it's basically done on this one where it's still still trading i guess people are still can still sell it but who's buying maybe there's some ip out there that's worth something yeah but it's gonna go to the creditors

These creditors are going to pay before the shareholders. All right. Speaking of shareholders, we have the Rivian and Lucid earnings report. What is it looking like? I looked at this quickly when it first released. The BD analyst with $1.2 billion in revenue versus $1.175 billion. That was the expectation.

They had a wider loss than expected though at -148 per share versus loss of 115 per share. That was the expectation. Revenue improved 82% year over year though. Ended the quarter with $7.8 billion in cash. So it's a lot, but it's down from 9.3 in Q4.

Yeah, they're running out of quarters here, it feels like. Yeah, I mean, it looks likely. Yeah, they're retooling now. So theoretically, this new version of the R1 that's coming soon will be able to be profitable or break even maybe? Yeah, so that's the thing now. So there was no major improvement in gross margin in Q1. But like you said, there was a shutdown for the new version of the R1 S&T coming up.

They started production in April 5th. So they also lost like a while in Q2 too. So Q2 won't be great either because of that, but hopefully you start seeing still an improvement in gross margin there. And they reiterated positive gross margin in Q4. So yeah, they still plan that this new version of the R01 would ramp up to positive gross margin.

If they can truly do that, that's my big thing with Rivian. Because that's wild. If you look at the... Did we put the... No, we didn't put the shoulder letter in there. I want to look at the gross margin progression. But last year, there was a big gross margin drop. And they haven't been able to replicate that since. And I think this new version is aimed to replicate that. But going from, I think right now, they are at minus 44% gross margin, negative 44% gross margin,

Now, to go through a slight positive one in just three quarters, it's massive. So if they can do that, I'm going to be very optimistic for the future. But it's a big feat to achieve. All right, Lucid. Lucid came in with delivery record of 1,902 deliveries, up 13% from Q4.

They produce 1,727 Lucid Air down from Q4 2,291, but they are trying to match their production with their order for the first time in a while. So that resulted in a revenue of 172 million, which is up year over year.

Operational loss though is quite wide at $729 million, a little better than a year ago at 772, but still massive losses. They had a billion investment from Saudi Arabia recently, so that helped them a lot, but they still have $5 billion in liquidity.

And at losing $700 million a quarter, they have basically a year of runway still. Obviously, the big difference is the gravity. They are betting on this since the US is their biggest market. The US loves SUVs, not so much sedans. So they are hoping that they're going to be able to increase their sales greatly with that. But I don't know. Personally, I'm not a fan of the exterior design of the gravity. I don't think it looks great in an SUV. Yeah.

It's nice inside, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Inside the design of the Lucid is very luxurious. Very nice. All right. Let's jump into the comment section. All right. What's up, everybody? Sean Goggin question. Elon is aggressively cutting. But why? Just fear China competition, Trump election and IRA going away. Why cut to the bone? I think we talked a little bit about that, but, you know, just on a high level. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I do not believe the narrative that Elon is pushing that this is just restructuring due to supplication of jobs and all that. There's two main theories, I think. I think one is, yeah, what you just said, Elon.

There's a lot of things outside of Tesla that is putting a lot of pressure on the broader market, on the auto industry, but the broader market as well. So Elon might be anticipating a bigger recession. It might be a competition from China. And he wants Tesla to be a little bit more bearable to be able to go through that. That's one theory. I think both could be true too, I think. The other one is...

Elon doesn't want Tesla to be an auto manufacturer anymore. He's cutting a lot into Tesla's auto business. We got that one tip. I forget what we did with that. There was that one tip that we had that was like, they knew a lot of the code names. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the tips are around, it's clear that Elon is pushing for RoboTaxi rather than any other vehicle program at Tesla. He killed other vehicle program at Tesla because of it.

So I think there's part of that, but some people are seeing, you know, I'm literally going away from the machine that makes a machine and all that, like just not as much a manufacturing company, but like an AI company focused on, you know, just miles driven. Like we're going to put, you know, Tesla had this thing where all their leases, they're going to own it at the end. So far they've been selling them. They've been selling them as used car, but there is technically this idea that Tesla could,

As soon as they turn on the robotaxi, if they really can, which I'm not saying they will, but if it does happen, then I would assume they would stop selling vehicles coming off of their lease because Tesla, I think, is the only automaker. I might be mistaken, but I think it's the only automaker that don't let you buy your car after the lease. They will stop selling them as used cars as they do now and keep them to provide those services, which would be extremely profitable for them.

Because they're getting cars for free, basically, and putting them to work in a highly profitable way.

margin because they're going to go against companies that use human drivers, which are expensive and inefficient. So yeah, this is one of the idea, but obviously if that is the idea, there's the high, high risk of being too early to it and cutting to the very profitable auto business that Tesla has right now in hope that there's this future business actually works, which is still unclear. So yeah, it's

Pretty wild approach. All right. It would be nice if they'd at least use the extra battery capacity to nullify any degradation over the life of the car. That's in reference to the software locking the battery. We can talk about that a little bit. Yeah, that could be good.

Protect themselves from the impulses of the CEO. State of Charge, a friend of the show, Tom Malogny, says, I agree, Fred. It really looks like he just blew a gasket and fired everyone without thinking about the consequences. State of Charge is Tom? Yeah. I didn't know. Yeah, he's got his offshoots down there. It's a good name for him. Yeah.

The guy is the king of the charging station. He's the charge guru. All right. Stock price is definitely paying the price of his, meaning Elon's lack of self-control. Yeah, it's down again today. Tesla employees should unionize as fast as possible. Yeah, that's another good point. Elon's making a great case for unionization. Exactly. For someone who hates union so much, he's making it easier on his employees to actually want to unionize. Yeah.

Mike the Car Geek says, do you believe supercharging is currently profitable for Tesla or is it a marginal business unit that helps sell cars and has a future growth profit? Well, both can be true. Both can be true. And yeah, that's one of the things that I saw a lot of Elon fanatic going, trying to justify the move by saying, you know, supercharger is not really profitable. It will never be. That's why Elon is cutting. No, it has nothing to do with the move. The move was an impulse move.

rash decision to prove a point and to make an impact on the other executive. It was nothing to do with any change of plan for the supercharger. I've reiterated several times, supercharger is still central to Tesla's plan. So yeah, it has nothing to do with that. And yeah, right now the charging business is not easy, but it's obvious that it can be very profitable business because if you have all the data on the

where the charging stations are being used. You know that the EV market is still going up all the time and it will go up until all vehicles are electric. So you can, with a good data analysis, you can match your charging network exactly to the growth of that market.

maximize the utilization of your network. And it's easy business. Like, you know, electricity coming in, you pay for it, you charge for it coming out. It's pretty simple business. So yeah, it can be highly profitable if managed well, which a supercharged team was apparently managing very well. Yeah, which is like even like, it just boggles the mind why that happened. In States, we are...

And makes it 10 times harder on political manner. I don't know what that means. My 2020 Model X doesn't have a cabin camera. Will they remove the nag for these cars? That's a good question. Yeah, that's what we were thinking. I doubt it. We'll see next week. Or maybe not. Maybe some SNX won't actually get V12.4 right away. But I sincerely doubt they will remove it if you don't have any other driver motoring system. I just realized this guy is called Skeptic. Skeptic.

He says, I have FSD and there's a 0.0 chance this system will become autonomous. Yeah, I mean, that's quite the statement. 0.0. That would have been me about a month ago, but like this last update was pretty good. And now I'm questioning everything.

And also, you have to go a little bit to more details on what is autonomous. Iman has used the term level five before and said that some of, he said that this is existing vehicle will become level five. This I still think is untrue. I still think it's impossible for Tesla just due to the hardware. And, you know, five is in all driving conditions. Use it in the snow for a little bit. It doesn't work.

As soon as there's a little thing that goes on the cameras, it goes bad. Anyway, but level four, I think, yeah, I think level four is very likely possible in an existing vehicle. Maybe within a year, maybe two years max, I think it's happening. All right. DCFC is so fast already that I don't see a use case for battery swapping, except maybe for big trucks. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree that the need for it is not...

huge as that was that was Tesla's rationale for yeah it makes sense but um there's there's space for both though like it could still work

Yeah. My understanding is Fisker doesn't own much IP. They might own the basic design, but Magna owns the rest. That would be interesting. What if Magna was just like, all right, we're just going to keep making these. Or maybe they're like, we don't want to make these. We wanted to make them when you were paying us to make them, but we don't want to make these ourselves. They could sell them on their own or sell them to someone. Yeah, it's not the best cars out there anyway. Yeah.

All right. The EV pullback has me very depressed from an environmental standpoint. I wish there was more pricing in of externalities that would make them on par with developing EVs. I think, yeah, we're talking about carbon tax would be the easiest. Oh, dude, dude, dude, yeah.

The pricing in of externalities is carbon. So I agree. Yeah, I agree too. I think we've been saying for years that the incentives to buy electric vehicles are not as efficient as de-incentivizing buying gas, polluting vehicles, polluting everything, anything.

And we have the perfect example for it, Norway. And that's exactly what Norway did. And they were the most successful in adopting electric vehicles. And they're doing great. Obviously, Norway is an oil-rich country too. And they are big on like, don't get high on your home supply. Norway has really, has it made. They're rich of oil, but they know not to use it themselves.

Not that other people using it doesn't seem to have an impact. It does have an impact actually on everyone that lives on the planet. But what are you going to do? We cannot stop using oil from day to day. It would stop the entire world economy and probably have a worse impact than a good one. But still, I don't see a carbon tax happening. I don't see, especially not in the US, the Democrats don't.

don't seem to have the guts to actually pull this off or the gusto to pull it through the very polarized political system in the US. And there's no chance that the Republicans are going to do it. Every taxation is theft in their eyes. And the free market is perfect, even though carbon taxes is made to fix taxes.

the issues of on price externalities in the free market so it makes no sense but yeah i don't see a clear path that happening like i said politics i'm very i'm a very apolitical guy i don't have a lot of the hopes in politics i don't see politics making some of the biggest change in the world sometimes they do sometimes you have some like great politicians that come out and you don't want to do the right thing but for the most part uh people that want that kind of power uh

are not the best people like i think that that times have proven that and technology has been has been great for us to solve problems um not we have to be careful to also see the technology as this kind of like solve all type of thing like you have to do some personal choices too but i don't see humans making any kind of pro-environment choices if it

If it in any way takes any level of comfort or financials away from them, which isn't our nature, apparently. Yeah. All right. One last one. Did you see the news that the free, I think you're talking about FSD trial, only led to a small conversion rate?

I am not surprised. Like Elon has been going like V12 is like, is incredible. Getting too excited. It's incredible. And it is, but is it useful? Is the real question. And I know Tesla has been, has been like trying out some new narrative lately. Like, like FSD is great for you because it takes away some task of driving, which removes fat fatigue, which I think is true.

Especially on the highway, I don't think, I think it has task in city driving. Like I'm more alert than if I wasn't using FSD on city driving. I may be less, I don't want to say less alert on the highway, but I'm less nervous.

And I have more focus on the road. So I think that is truly safer and that's great. But the actual usefulness level is still much higher on the highway than in city driving. And then why would I upgrade from, let's say, enhanced autopilot or just regular autopilot if that is working great, rather than for just having the city driving stuff, the intersection stuff?

The usefulness is not there and it's still $8,000 or $100 a month. So yeah, the proposition value is still not where... Probably Elon was a little bit too quick to do that move, that free trial. It's going to come back anyway. What am I talking about? It's not a one-time thing. It's going to come back. So yeah, I wouldn't be too worried about that. Maybe with, you see, like, so the...

I mean, I would doubt it would launch a new one with V12.4 and maybe with .5 or .6, you're going to see another trial coming out, another free month. And maybe the conversion rate is going to be a little bit higher this time and a little bit higher the next time. And I do believe that at one point, everyone that has a Tesla capable of level four self-driving will have level four self-driving in it because it is extremely valuable when it works. Right now, the value proposition is just not there just yet.

However, that's it for us everyone this week. Thank you everyone for listening. If you do enjoy the show, please give us a like, a subscribe and all this stuff. And we're going to see you same time next week. Have a safe weekend.