Tesla teases $25,000 car, new Roadster, Tesla Bot, and more
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We're going live, ladies and gentlemen. We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winshaw. Having a good week, Seth? Yeah, I'm good.

All right, let's finish it strong because we have a lot to discuss. All right, I'm launching this shared screen for the electric, but the StreamYard is having issues last few weeks. So we're going to just test it out real quick. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. But...

Obviously, the Shytessa annual shareholder meeting or cyber roundup, whatever you want to call it nowadays, was this week. It was a productive one in terms of news. There was a lot of interesting news that came out of it. So we're going to jump right into that. We're going to start by sort of the only interesting official part of the meeting. That's not fun. Doing that again.

So, yeah, the first part of me think is like the boring official one, the official items that people have to vote on this year. There was not that many controversial ones like the shareholders coming in. There was obviously the one about child labor that came out like a few times. We can get into that. That was because Yolande did comment on it and it was interesting. But I think it's an issue that has been like badly reported on for a while. But anyway.

The biggest one, according probably to most shareholders, was JB Strobel being introduced to the board for the first time. And without any surprise, he was voted with a majority of shareholders voting for him to join the board. So JB Strobel is officially back at Tesla in a non-executive role on the board of directors. We'll see if he's going to join any kind of committee on the board or something like that. But I would probably think not, if it's my guess, because...

Do you think this puts him into any kind of succession planning? All right. Sorry about that. Am I back on? Yeah, I rebooted myself. I don't know if it was you or me. No, but for me, I don't know what happened, but I just saw that I was on my Starlink instead of my cable. So maybe that was... Oh, you're on Starlink. Yeah, I was unknowingly. I thought I switched everything back to my cable because I had a problem earlier this week where they told me that my...

They told me that my internet is going to be down for three days because someone stole a cable, like optic cable somewhere in town. And like a big part of town didn't have any internet for like three days. They said, well, I called them and that's what they told me like right away. So I'm like, perfect. It's a perfect situation to use my Starlink.

So I started up and I, cause I have all the hardware already. I just don't pay for the monthly subscription. So I had to pay for one month just for three days, but I was worth it just to, you know, work on the internet all the time. So it's worth paying $200. Uh, and then it was back up within like a few hours. Yeah.

They told you three days, but it was only a few hours. Yeah, and then I had to switch everything back up on my Wi-Fi to like, you know, everything back to my cable fiber optic Wi-Fi. If everything should be good right now, I would assume. But yeah, JB, where we're saying about JB is that

We are all big fan of GB's here at ELECTRIC. We think he's obviously one of the most knowledgeable person when it comes to electric power trains, power electronics, batteries and all that. Like he's proven that times and times again. And he's a very good communicator of the importance of electric vehicles, or at least early on he was. Like now I think it's less so important for the majority of the market, like believe that it is a future.

But what is interesting, too, is like maybe this we know that Elon has talked about the potential successor at Tesla at one point. And GB is obviously probably the most competent one that you can have at this point. He's noticed very well. He's led himself another big company now in Redwood Materials is pretty massive in itself now.

And he's a bit younger than Elon. So in terms of longevity, that could help too. So yeah, everything is looking good on that front. I'm not saying that it is what is going to happen, but it's a possibility, I think. I was also thinking about that. But it's not a usual thing to make a board member the CEO in a succession. Yeah.

Maybe there's more to that. But I mean, it's new that he's a board member. He used to be an executive at the company for a long time and a co-founder. Right. All right. Then the other, well, let's talk about the other item too that was interesting from the official part is that this group of environmentalists pushing for Tesla to do an audit of its supply chain to ensure

sure that there's no child labor in it which is obviously it was it was actually shut it down which it always it always feels bad like all right we're gonna shut down this request to make sure that we don't have any child labor in that supply chain but obviously it's because it's the the implication that it has that they shut it down but they are already also the fact that they are already doing it uh no one no one wants child labor in the supply chain i think that much is obvious

The target obviously is cobalt and especially cobalt in the DRC and Diplomatic Republic in Congo. And it does happen. There is child labor going on right now in the cobalt supply chain in Congo.

And obviously no one wants to see that. No one wants that to happen. It's not a good thing. But the problem with it is like, what is the solution? And what is the solution that a company that use that material like Tesla and Apple and, and Elon was kind of a bit dismissing on that. It was like, yeah, we use a little bit of cobalt, like go after Apple and cell phone makers because yeah, it's true. The, the,

percentage of cobalt in a personal electronic batteries is much higher than an electric car, especially Tesla electric cars. That's just true. But at the same time, I think in terms of overall volume, I think that might be a bit different. But anyway, no one wants to see any kind of child labor.

The problem is like how much power does Tesla, Apple, and all these companies have in that? Because you don't want to just shut down. You can say, okay, just stop buying from companies that utilize that. It's not as simple as companies utilizing child labor. There's no Tesla, Apple directly making business with those. It's more artisanal minds saying,

that are using child labor and not just child labor that is bad, by the way, is they just they are terrible working condition. And it's not just the children that are suffering is the adults working there and all that. It's all terrible. And those artisanal minds.

And so you cannot. So the idea is like these mines that are not the big one operated by massive companies for the most part. As far as I can tell, they are these small artisanal mines and it's more of the value of the mineral in this case that is pushing those two sprung up in the DRC, which is rich in cobalt.

And so the only other idea is like, all right, let's shut down those mines. But that would actually help the other companies that are not using that. And that would make sense. But would it help the people that are working at those mines? Not really. Like you would just take a bad situation for them and just make it a worse situation, like just not having any income at all. So it's more of an issue of like education and because,

those kids also not are working the mines they're not going at school and all that so it's a much bigger societal education problem that needs to happen in ddrc so if anything like it's not about like auditing your supply chain it would be if tesla and apple and all these big companies want to help it would be more like a direct investment in those regions to educate the people that there are better ways to do these things and all that i think that would be the solution but

So after the proposal was put forward, was shut down, someone else asked the question in the question and answer part of the presentation. And Elon announced like, yes, we're going to do an audit. And then he specifically said, we're going to put a webcam on the mine and anyone's going to be able to look online and make sure there's no child labor there. And you know what? No one's going to see any child labor because those mines where those webcam are going to be are going to be like full.

full-on high-level operational minds where it's not like it's using machinery and all that. It's not going to be hand-picked. Well, maybe some are hand-picked in some cases, but it's not the same thing. People have a very distorted view of what they think is happening with cobalt. And it's sad because there is, again, I'm not saying that there's no child labor. There is. But because of this distorted view, we're not really addressing the real problem. That's my point.

Yeah. All right. So, I mean, the problem is, is that it, it goes into the general, like there's just a, like a cobalt market materials and you can't keep artisanal minds from going in and middlemen and happening. So it's not, it's not possible to, to make it a hundred percent child labor free or, you know, bad practice free. But I guess this is a good sort of solution.

I mean, like I said, I think the only real solution would be like a massive investment into, um, education in, in, in those regions where it, it does happen. And, um,

support for the families that do send their children there so they don't have to do that. And that's about it. And then maybe introducing some more, some infrastructure around the mines that could be actually productive in those regions and then higher production

those parents instead and send the kids to school. But all that, that's also like a cultural issue, like a societal issue. There's different levels to this that needs to be fixed in order for that to happen, unfortunately. It's not as simple as putting a webcam on a mine, that's for sure. All right. Then just before the Q&A section, probably the biggest news that came out of the event is these few comments that Yvonne made about the next generation platform that's going to launch two cars, you said? Yeah.

At first, and you unveil the image of one of those, well, a silhouette, this picture right here of one of those cars, which we are assuming, again, assuming that it is most likely this like Tesla Model 2 or Tesla $25,000 car, whatever people are using these names, but there are unofficial names, obviously.

And it's cheaper, likely hatchback, designed in China, likely built in China too. That is going to come. So this is the first silhouette. Maybe it's the silhouette even of the little Mazda prototype that we saw a few months ago. Oh, yeah. Like the seemingly Tesla prototype built on a Mazda. Obviously not the same silhouette, but...

that was probably just a test mule type of vehicle. If it was truly a Tesla prototype. Yeah. And a lot of commenters saying that this looks like a model three. Well, yeah, it does. Yeah. Without any kind of reference point, like it's probably like shorter than the model three. It's probably like similar. Yes. Overall, like design shape and all that. Uh, but yeah,

You know, like it's weird. Like the cutoff here is strange. And like you said, like you ran it through some contrast thing and like it shows that it's clearly a render and not a picture that's been obscured. So it's not even a silhouette really. It's kind of a, it's just kind of like lights hitting something.

A car in a weird way because that caught off. I'm not even sure if it's... But we do know it's going to be a sedan. I mean, I guess that's kind of the big news, right? Yeah. It's not going to be like a hot hatchback, which, you know, frankly, I was kind of hoping for. Man, I mean, it could still be an hatch at least, like not like a Model 3 with a trunk, but an hatch. But it's not like the usual shape. It's hard to see the shape of a hatchback from this picture, if that's what you're saying. Yeah, I understand.

Elon made some interesting comment on it. First of all, he said it's not being designed, it's being built right now, which is an interesting comment to make. If you say it's being built, it would mean like normally it would mean like it's in production already, which I would seriously doubt. We kind of would have heard of it by this point. But unless he's like there's a prototype being built.

That might be what he meant, but for a guy that always says, like, oh, prototyping is so easy, it's production, it's hard, it would be weird for him to use that specific language. Then the other thing he said is, like, these two next vehicles coming on the next generation platform, which we assume is this car, the $25,000 Model 2, whatever, and the Robotaxi, those two built on the new generation, he said those are like 5 million units a year put together.

Which would make sense. I mean, the Roadster, not the Roadster. We'll get to the Roadster. The Model Y is already over a million units. And so a cheaper vehicle with an hatch would easily make a few million. And then the Robotaxi, obviously, if it is an all-electric vehicle and it's aimed at a ride-sharing service, it's...

5 million minimum like it could be a lot more than that but obviously that's if everything works and we know when it comes to Tesla and self-driving it's everything works is not a term often used.

All right. Roadster. There was a question about the Roadster from a member. And you could see, obviously, this is a Tesla shareholder that asked the question. And you could see the guy feeling bad about even asking the question. He's like, oh, I don't want... Everyone feels bad. We feel bad about it, Electric, asking anything about the Roadster, obviously, because we are supposed to have some free ones coming and everything. So it sounds self-serving. But...

Just from the mission standpoint, obviously, is the biggest issue. It's not a big mover, right?

uh for tesla in terms of volumes so in terms of the mission it's not a big contributor but at the same time they did unveil it and they did start taking reservation for it it did arguably save the company in 2019 where tesla was having issues selling the model 3 for a bit when it was ramp up ramping up and all that uh 2018 2019 and the program literally like using it to uh for the referrals

arguably save Tesla. So there's an argument for it to be made. And then Elon was nice about it. He said like, it is a completely fair question, like which I would agree with that. And then he said that the design and engineering would be completed this year. And hopefully, and he said, this is not a promise. Hopefully it goes in production next year in 2024. And obviously he said that before several times. I think it's like four or five years late at this point. So, uh,

I'm not taking this to the bank. Also, when Elon says, like, don't quote me on this, he will say pretty much anything. And when he says, don't quote me on it, that means there's zero plans. He means it. There's, like, no intention of building that next year. Like, zero. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean...

For the longest time, they just had the greatest excuse. We're basically on the verge of going under if we don't ramp up profitably and everything. But now they don't have that excuse at least. So it's more now spending their resources where it's most valued. And right now it's a Cybertruck.

But we get to that too. It's a Cybertruck. And he didn't say any more information out there. They reiterated that this SpaceX package, and if you remember this SpaceX package, it's those cold air thrusters, that this is still planned. And it's going to be sick. That's an exact quote. Even the inflection was good there.

All right. So the Cybertruck, there was no real significant news coming out other than this, other than the production volume estimate coming out of the meeting. So...

He still said later this year, which the most recent information was production this summer, delivery event in hand of Q3, so around hand of September. And now he was asked about the production volume capacity that Tesla planned for it. And the audience said, yeah, it's going to be an S curve, so slow at first, ramping up and all that. And so he said, I guess we will see what the demand is, but we are likely to make $250 a year, maybe more.

And then he added maybe 250 to 500,000 a year. So 500,000 a year, I think that was like the minimum that a lot of people were thinking about because just pickup truck-wise, especially if you go global. And I think that was originally the plan, like production in Texas, but delivery is global.

Half a million sounded like about right. I mean, Ford sells a million F-150 a year just in the U.S. And I think same thing for one of the GM's programs and the Ram, too. I don't know if the Ram is at a million, but if it's not, it's pretty close. So...

There's plenty of room in the market, but $250 a year seems low. But of course, Tesla has always said we know the Cybertruck is polarizing in terms of design. So if it's not that popular, we might shift to a more traditional looking pickup truck. So maybe that's still in the plans. But if they nail the Cybertruck, I think people just get over the design in my opinion.

Yeah, I don't know. It's strange because sometimes I see it and I'm like, oh, that looks okay. And then sometimes I'm like, that's never going to... So this picture is from the event. What do you think now? So that actually doesn't look bad in my opinion. I mean, the wiper is crazy. And maybe it's those weird hubcap things. Yeah, the hubcap, they look like they stick out a lot of the tires. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. That looks better than most, but like just some angles make it just look really weird. You know, it's going to be like a culture war, this thing. Like it's going to like if the Internet memes win and like they make it like if you're driving this, you're a nerd. Like, well, nowadays, it's not a bad thing to be a nerd, but like whatever is the term that the kids use these days. Mid is the bad thing now, Seth? Yeah.

Yeah, mid-fat. Mid is bad. So if you're mid for driving a Cybertruck and this gets around, all right, this will fail. But if you're... Because Unan is pushing not for mid, it's pushing for badass. It's badass electric. And he's not wrong in terms of...

the stainless steel finish and everything you don't care about like scratching it and all that like there's a bad nest that you look like almost like a tank like there's some bad badassness to it whatever you want to call it but i a lot of people are saying it looks like

i didn't have my sensor thing on but uh so if if that if that's the side that wins then i think yeah people are gonna feel bad about driving it just like what what other car we could use for that where like people like it's known like the the cube for example of the cube is that a cube yeah like nissan cube or something yeah nissan cube is not like people see you in that you're like wow i didn't

Especially when it was a new car. So you knew. You went out and bought a new car. You got it on purpose. It's not like you don't have any cash. They were selling it for $2,000 on the used cell lot. It was like a new car and you decided to get that. There's a few cars like that, I guess. All right. This was a little bit of a surprise, though. Not really the same time. To me, it didn't surprise me. But the media jumped on that and were kind of crazy about it.

Elon said that Tesla would try, and this is the quote, "try a little advertising and see how it goes." That was the exact quote. So Tesla's shareholder asked it about the meeting, made the argument that Tesla should push some features through advertising, some features that are lesser known.

that are on the roadster looks good on this. It looks good. Some lesser-known features, some safety ratings that Tesla is getting and all that, things that are not as commonly known in the wider public. The price, too. Elon himself said that on stage, and that's a good argument. A lot of people still think that Tesla is super expensive and all that. But right now, I just posted an article with the Model 3, the new rates right now that are coming out on the new inventory.

Like at least it's 384 a month now starting price. You can get one after the federal tax credit for $35,000. That was the original goal of the Model 3 and everything. So it's not that expensive. So just like advertising that, like pushing that around to advertising companies

would be a big deal. And so the guy made the argument and Elon listened and he was like, yeah, we'll try a little advertising. And Elon has previously said that he hates advertising. He previously boasted about the fact that Tesla doesn't advertise and instead spend every penny on making the product better. And he basically laughed at other automakers for spending. I had to look for this article, but it was like, Hyundai was like at some point at $4,000 per car in advertising spending

GM at like over a thousand and like there was a lot of money spent to sell those cars I think automakers are other than pharma I think it's always like pharma and automakers is the biggest ad spenders in the US that's just in the US because most other countries don't have advertising for pharmaceuticals but

So, yeah, even though Elon has always said that, I remember him always being still open, like realistic to the fact that once Tesla hits much higher volume of production, they are likely going to have to spend a little bit on advertising. And I think he would have thought that it would have been later on, maybe. Yeah.

And this is coming a little bit sooner than he anticipated. Like maybe he thought like, oh, once we had like five or 10 million units a year, that would make sense, but not at 2 million units. But now, obviously this year, Tesla's prices have gone down nonstop in order to keep up, for the men to keep up with production. And, yeah,

Instead of cutting down on those prices, Tesla could have spent maybe half the price of those cuts on advertising and it would have created a demand. We just don't know. It's hard to tell exactly. So now it looks like Elon is willing to test that out. And it would make sense because there is some efficient way to advertise. You don't have to spend $4,000 per vehicle. The guy that said it on the...

annual meeting at the argument that Tesla would have the same marketing budget, advertising budget as Netflix. It would spend $500 per car. Um,

Now, to be honest, I don't see that many Netflix ads out there. Yeah, I was going to say, I've never seen a Netflix ad, I don't think. Yeah, but the guy said, I see Netflix ads all the time. Maybe the argument is like, do you have Netflix? Right. Because I have Netflix, so I don't get fed ads, I assume. I assume Google and whatnot knows. Well, we've just said it like three times, so we're going to just have tons of Netflix ads. Yeah, it's going to come. No, I would assume they know it, but anyway. Anyway.

So wait, the big elephant in the room though, like what about Twitter? Yeah, yeah. That's what I wrote in the thing. So Twitter, Elon's going around begging advertisers to come back or to use – so how can he exist in two different worlds where like advertising is pointless and stupid and you're a loser if you have to advertise? But hey, Twitter has an advertising thing. And you know –

Basically, Elon had to sell a ton of Tesla stock to get Twitter and, you know, to buy Twitter. And now it's worth like, you know, a fraction of what it was. This could be a mechanism for transferring more money from Tesla to Twitter. Obviously, you know, like...

would be a shocking, shocking thing if Tesla chose Twitter as a place to advertise. Yeah, it wouldn't be shocking whatsoever because I don't know about you, but I remove, not only I remove, sometimes just to check, I remove my ad blocks on Twitter. But not only that, the ad blocks don't work for them because a lot of money they make through promoted tweets that gets around that. And

spacex spacex ads are all over the place on twitter all right all over the place and i have starling too so like why like i don't like don't stop feeding me starting ads i already have it so you're actually getting your internet through starling so they could even like they know your ip well that was just this week for like a few days but uh for the long it was like i had my thing for months now i bought it months ago and i'm

Anyway, so since Elon bought Twitter, that's what has been happening. Now the difference, I guess, Tesla is a public company, SpaceX is a private company. He has a lot more control over SpaceX than he does over Tesla.

And yes, obviously it would look very bad if Tesla has like, let's say just for numbers, like $100 million advertising budget and they decide to spend like $80 million on Twitter ads. That would look awful because even Elon on stage right there, he said like, because that was one of these arguments about when people ask him, when people, I should say, when Tesla shareholders ask him the very reasonable question,

Well, not at this annual meeting, actually, but that was prior to that. They asked him what positive impact, because he said that owning Twitter is going to have a positive impact on Tesla. They asked how, and he said,

Basically said that he didn't know how and then like he scrambled an answer saying like, well, I mean, we're getting a lot more popular on Twitter. Tesla is my own account is and that that is helping sell Tesla vehicles. But now this time at the annual meeting, he said, actually, when we do that on Twitter, we kind of preaching to the choir. And I think that he's actually correct.

completely right about that so then even like pushing ads on twitter about tesla i don't think that i think that's also preaching the choir and it wouldn't help anyway we're all saying that to be very self-serving here we want tesla to push ads on electric instead that would make just a ton more sense and actually like here's something tesla spent some sort of money i don't know if they paid up yet but they spent some sort of money on the electric uh formula sun grand prix

So they're already doing it. They're spending money on electric. Knowing what we spent to have the title sponsor, I don't know how much they spent to be honest. Fabulous.

But yeah, I mean, I can't wait to see Tesla ads show up and see what Tesla can do with that. I mean, obviously, I think they're going to go more traditional way, like a lot of TV ads and maybe like some Instagram stuff and things like that. That's very popular these days. I don't think they're going to be traditional. Yeah? Maybe in like the Apple traditional, but you know, like Super Bowl ad or something. Yeah, maybe. I don't know.

Apple, on things like Instagram and all that, I don't see Apple spending. That's interesting. They spend money on Instagram, I think. Maybe not in Canada. I don't know. All right, moving on. This was the...

Well, based on our views on all our posts that we did, I did probably like six articles on this shareholder meetings. And you would be surprised to know that this was the most popular one by far. So people were really excited by this update to the Tesla bot. So Tesla shared a video update of the program. And personally, I thought it was actually positive. Like, as you know, I've been skeptical of this whole idea. And Elon, Elon, Elon.

This is starting to annoy me so much from Elon because I always thought it was super smart guy. He is obviously super smart guys, but this is like a cognitive...

it doesn't register for him and he was doing it for the longest time on fsd or people don't understand the true value of fsd and all that but obviously everyone understand that what they don't believe is that tesla could deliver it and they have reasonable doubts about that which is completely fair and now he's doing the same thing about the tesla but like people don't understand how much value this is going to create once we have a fully functional tesla bot like we're going to sell like

billions of them. And it's going to be the, he literally said this, billions. And then it's going to be the biggest contributor to Tesla's value long-term. Who doesn't understand that? Who doesn't understand that if you have a viable, uh,

relatively inexpensive humanoid robot that can do a bunch of different tasks. Everyone understood the value in that. Like, obviously, with that tremendous value, what people don't believe is Tesla's ability to deliver on it. And again, fair concerns about that. Now, at least with this new update does with the footage and everything, it shows some progress. So why I say that it's not as much of a sideshow anymore is because

One that, well, it's the progress over a short period of time. So the last update was in September of last year. So about like eight months or so. In eight months, nine months,

It's decent progress. That was eight months ago. That thing. That thing that could barely walk, could wave, and that's about it. And then they add the second prototype at the same time too, but that one couldn't even walk, couldn't do much of anything. Had to be like propped up on stage like that. Like terrible. And now that's what we get here. I don't know if the video is going to work. It's jumping. Not too bad. So yeah, the walking is...

but it looks very stable to me. Like with the swinging of the arms and everything, it looks stable. This is a quick video of the motor torque control. Like somewhat impressive, but we've seen that before from other companies. It's not something that's crazy. This is interesting, the discovery of the alignment. So that's the software part of it that we're going to get into later because...

That's one of the biggest synergies that Tesson is doing. This is the impressive part. This is a render, obviously, but we're going to see... So they're not quite there, especially speed-wise. But the ends, we see great improvement for Tesson. The ends, like the gripping of this object here is actually very impressive. There are two different shapes of objects. And...

obviously with different tensions, let it go once you are already like this. This is quickly, but it might look not that much, but this is actually very impressive. The second part here, how he dropped the object like that, like at that speed, this is not nothing. And now Tesla has five of them, it looks like, five prototypes going on. So I see some significant improvements over a short period of time. So I'll have to give them that.

Now, obviously, so on the hardware side of things, and that I believe since the beginning, I think Tesla has a great advantage of leveraging everything it has done for the cheap vehicles because when you think about it, a humanoid robot, there's no like

On the hardware side of things, there's no incredible engineering challenge to overcome in order to make it happen. We have a lot of the technology already exists. It just needs to be adapted and packaged into a humanoid format. And yes, a lot of this is power electronic advantage. A lot of this is motors, actuators advantage, battery advantage, all that. We can leverage that into a humanoid robot, I'm sure. Now,

The grand scheme of things that Tesla wants to do in London in particular is thinking about is like we are developing the full self-driving through a more general AI approach. And we can just take that and put it into a humanoid robot. And the robot is going to be able to navigate the world around it.

You cannot take the software in a cruise vehicle and put it into your metal-rode robot. It's not going to work because it's seeing its environment into a very narrow framework, which is a road. The Tesla, the way they are approaching FSD, it's more of an AI detecting its general environment at all. So that's true. But obviously, it's not working super, super well right now on the car itself. So it's hard to see Tesla just having a smooth transition into a robot.

So in my take on it, if you guys have read it or not, but my view is that I can see it work now. We see it as taking somewhat seriously. We've seen a lot of progress in a short period of time.

Obviously, I don't think it's going to be a useful product super soon because I don't think that the FSD is going to be a useful product super soon. But looking at the timeline of everything that happened in FSD, I could see Tesla having a useful humanoid robot within about three years.

I'm sure you have a counterpoint to that. Yeah, so I wasn't impressed by the demo. So this was not live. This was all video. I mean, this could all be rendered, but I don't think it was. Well, he said it wasn't, so that would be a big risk if he lied about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it was rendered, but I think you can stage robots to do a lot of stuff, and we know that Tesla stages...

demonstrations. It's not just...

The walking thing, there's wind-up toys that walk. It's not rocket science to get a robot to walk. Yeah, but this is probably like a 100-pound-plus robot. More likely more than 100 pounds. I couldn't do it myself, so who am I to say that's not impressive? You see the robots at the Boston Dynamics.

They're doing like ballet and flips and breakdancing. Yeah, but it's different. The whole goal is different. I'm sure that Boston Dynamics has a long-term goal of that and they want to build directly. But what you see the robots doing now, they're doing it because that's what they're trying to do with it. Tesla is not trying to do that necessarily.

Yeah. So, I mean, I would just say that, like, I wasn't as wowed by the technology demonstration that we saw. It would be cool if that was live or...

you know like the the picking up the thing that the hand thing for me seemed like it could have been just a you know a one-off the the engineers seemed as surprised as uh anybody at you know when it accomplished like the task they were like whoa you know so uh that's not necessarily bad no i mean it's good to be enthusiastic but it's also like that shouldn't

shouldn't be surprising or anything. Anyway, I'm just not, not nearly as impressed. I don't think three years is, I have no idea, but I don't think three years is realistic. Well, I think to be fair, I think three years, they're going to have a useful robot so that, so that the robot is going to be able to start taking over some simple tasks and,

I think the economics of it is going to be useful, meaning that the robot is going to probably cost like $100,000 or whatever, but the $100,000 with the cost of operation is going to make sense for a bunch of certain tasks. I don't think it's going to be a robot that anyone's going to buy and then it just does things around your house just yet. But for certain tasks, especially like industrial, commercial tasks, I think it's going to start making sense. And then long-term, you can bring the cost down and...

and include more and more tasks into it. Will they be able to carry Elon around? Why would they need to do that? I don't know. I think they have a limit of 50 pounds, so unless he loses a lot of weight. But anyway, I thought it was interesting.

All right. That's pretty much it for the meeting for now. But we have plenty of other news to discuss. It's already 40 minutes in. Oh, boy. Okay. We're going to have a long show this week maybe. But we're going to try to have some time for your questions. So if you guys have any questions, you can put them in the comment section. I see a bunch of discussions going on right now in the questions. So that always makes it a little bit more difficult for us at the end. So if you do have a question over specific subjects you want us to discuss, let us know.

Please put question or subjects before it. That's going to make it a lot easier for us at the end of the show. Thank you very much. And if you do enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, a share, a follow, a notification button, all these things. It takes a second to do and it helps the show a ton. Like if you can send it to your friends, you can put it on a big TV and sit down your grandma in front of it. She's going to love it.

Anything you can do to help the show out, we appreciate it a ton. If you're listening on the podcast app, you can give us a five-star review too at the end. That takes a second to do, helps the show a ton. It's free to do too. All right. Still on Tesla though before we move on.

Oh, yeah, we have this exclusive here. Well, some other companies, some other publication got after it too. But Elon sent an email to Tesla managers this week to tell them that he wants to oversee all new hires at Tesla. Well, oversee, he wants to.

Let me just quote it directly. No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval. So you specifically want to approve every new hire at Tesla, which is about 30,000 new hires a year, by the way, on average in the last few years. So obviously not very realistic. So what I think, well, his claim in the email is that he wants to gain a better understanding of Tesla's hiring process or Tesla's new hires, I guess.

Obviously, the effective thing here is that it's going to slow down greatly the new hires and attempt to control cost, I guess. So I think it's a way to do some kind of low-level hiring freeze without saying that you're doing an hiring freeze. That's what it felt like to me. Mm-hmm.

But Tesla is still hiring, still posting jobs and everything. It's just basically, Elon just made it a lot more difficult for the Tesla recruiters out there. So good luck, Tesla recruiters. I feel your pain right now. Recruiters and managers are trying to hire. Oh, yeah, we had two interesting news about Tesla potential new factories. So we've been taking a close look at Tesla factories, new factories, I mean, because

Tesla is still sticking to this goal of having a production capacity of 20 million cars by the end of the decade. And we know that they're going to need about, at this point, it's going to be six or seven new factories that needs to be announced, including the Gigafactory Mexico.

One new factory in Asia, at least one new factory in Europe. And now in Asia, it looks like India, it might be in the running. So if you've been following Tesla and India relationship over the last few years, India is the biggest auto market that Tesla is not in right now. But they have been in discussion to get in for years and years and years. It's just that Tesla wanted to do the same thing it did in China, which is

We start importing vehicle into the country. We start establishing service centers, cells, superchargers, and we test out the market. And eventually we build out a factory there. And it was a very successful approach with Tesla in China. So they want to replicate it. But India was like, no, no, no. India was like,

We have crazy import tariffs that's going to make your imports of vehicle not successful. So what we want you to do instead is build a local factory, invest in jobs, and then you can sell your cars in the country. And Tesla was like, we prefer doing the import first. And they had to try to do a few deals where they would cut those import tariffs for electric vehicles that would allow Tesla to do that. They never came to a deal. Now this week, Tesla sends a bunch of executives in India to meet with government officials there.

And according to government officials, Tesla proposed to build a factory in the country. So it looks like Tesla is flinching for the first time and is looking to actually go forward with a factory, which obviously makes sense. As long as India was staying strong on their position, Tesla was just not going to give up on the Indian market. It's just too big of a market for

I mean, recently, I think India became the most populous country in the world. So not the richest one, obviously, but growing fast. So it makes sense to want to get into the country. And they have more than decent manufacturing capability now in India that's starting to, they're attempting to rival China. So it would make sense to build a factory there and maybe do export too. Actually, the report did mention potential exports.

And then the other factory, potential factory, though a factory wasn't actually mentioned, a significant investment was mentioned, is in France. So this week, earlier this week, Elon went to Paris to meet with President Macron. And he had this meeting. And then when he came out of the meeting, Elon told local news that he was looking that it was hopeful that Tesla would make a significant investment in France in the future.

So France was actually in the running for Tesla's first European factory. There was a discussion about the Alsace, but that could have been on either way, on the French or on the German side of things. And then Tesla obviously ended up in Berlin instead. But France was in the running and a lot of people are like, yeah, so right here, the first top comment that we had on an article, I doubt Mr.

C. Tromley, I guess. I doubt France is a real contender. Musk is famously entire union. France is heavily unionized. And even where they're not, it's coming to have stringent employment contract that make it hard for employers to act on a whim as Musk loves to do, which sounds correct to me. But at the same time, is France really more

uh pro-union than germany like they're both extremely pro-union uh i think another comment said something that i don't know if you're gonna be able to find it but said something like france and germany are just as pro-union it's just that french like to complain more about it which sounds about right to me so um so i don't i don't think i don't see that as a real oracle i think if they put those tax cuts in front of him they're gonna do it

And where else in Europe do you think they could do something anyway? Like UK, it looks like no one wants to touch the UK because of the Brexit. Right. They had some operations in, what, Belgium or the Netherlands? The Netherlands. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I guess, like, you know, if you want to save some money, Eastern Europe, Poland.

would probably be less expensive. Labour is a little bit less expensive there. It's still in the EU. Places like Bulgaria. Bulgaria doesn't have a good younger population, but prices are also low there. Romania as well. Yeah, makes sense. We'll see. Moving on from Tesla. This morning, GM announced a big upgrade for the Silverado EV work truck. It's going to be the first version of the electric pickup truck to launch this spring.

The range got way up, 50 miles up. That's a small upgrade. So when it was first unveiled last year, they were talking about 400 miles of range for the Cerrado EVWT or work truck.

And now they are talking about an EPA estimated. So it looks like they had this tested with the EPA. Otherwise, they would say like GM estimated range. And they're talking about 450 miles on a full charge. So it's a lot more than a competition. The highest for Lightning is at 320. The highest Rivian R1T is at 328. So this is not even close. Not even close.

It's a big deal. Starting to think that they just stuck the GMC Hummer EV pack in there and that's about it. I think, I mean, that would make sense because that's a 200 plus kilowatt hour battery. And it's not the most efficient looking truck out there too. It kind of looks to me a bit like the Hummer. Like if the Hummer has little curves. Right.

I mean, what it's really good for or will be good for with that kind of range is towing. Like you can tow for 250 miles or something. That was my point in the take here. Because even if you have that range, like if you have a 300 miles range, like here, there's not that much. But because towing is most likely going to do that at the very least. So now you have 450, that's still 225 miles of range. That's still like...

like afternoon of driving basically uh so i don't know but um yeah this is this is good news this is coming this spring and uh and and uh the work truck which is the first version of the silverado ev also is gonna have a 350 miles range version of it so it's gonna be like a little bit less expensive one because brace yourself for the price like this is uh

The time of the $40,000 lightning and all that, that's all gone. Everything is going to be the same for Silverado, I think. Yeah, I think they plan to get them under the $80,000 tax. Yeah, that's the obvious one, yeah.

All right, this new unveiling from Ford. Ford is getting annoying right now. This is annoying me with these cool little fun vehicle they're unveiling for the European market. And that's it. They unveiled that for the European market. But no word about bringing that to Europe. And that's the taste here with this. All right. E-Tornillo Courier. I think that's Courier. Courier is the English. Yeah, yeah.

So it's this small multi-activity utility van vehicle type thing. So you can see it. So we have a few pictures here of the interior. Nothing too crazy, but a lot of utility. I really don't understand why nobody will make one of these for the U.S. It feels like it would be a super big, all of North America. Yeah.

it would be a huge hit. So Hyundai has the Kia Soul. They don't sell that in the US, the electric version. But the gas version sells like crazy and it's a very similar size as this. I don't understand why they don't make an electric version. I mean, electric version in the US and I don't know why Ford is not selling this thing in the US. I think it would do really well.

Yeah, it's an interesting looking vehicle for sure. And it looks like it's very based around utility. So there's definitely a market for that. But right now they're talking about Europe in 2024 next year. No word about the US, no word about pricing. But we expect that they're going to try to keep that low. Especially if you look at the motor, which is probably the only spec that they released. They didn't release any range or anything like that. But the motor is 100 kilowatts. Yeah, that's really well. It lets me know that they are looking at that.

Probably the low end of the market there. I compare everything to the Chevy Bolt motor and the Bolt motor is 150 kilowatts. So it's two-thirds the power of a Chevy Bolt. And that's probably a vehicle that's like 30% bigger too. Right, at least.

Remac was in the news this week with the Navara with a bunch of records that they broke with their performance car here. Let me just list a few for fun because there's a bunch of them. How many? It's like a ridiculous number. Yeah, it's a whole page. It sets 23 records in a single day on bringing the car to the racetrack, including the fastest 0 to 249 miles per hour.

Uh, so I think the top speed to 249, I think that's, uh, that's a new, uh, that's a new top speed. So that's one for electric cars. I think the Bugatti, I cannot read this. Chiron goes like 300. Can I read this? It's not, no, it doesn't work. So that's zero to 249 miles per hour, which is 400 kilometers an hour. That was in 21.3 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but it is, it is fast. Um,

The stopping distance, we don't list that. 0 to 60 acceleration in 1.85 seconds. That was the old one. Now it's clocking at 1.74. That's crazy. And interestingly, someone asked Musk on Twitter if the new Roadster is going to beat 1.74. And Elon's response was LOL. LOL.

uh so we assume that the roadster is going to beat that but obviously the roadster with this spacex package like it's basically cheating like you for sure it would be faster than that but you would be faster but you could only probably do that in a close course like you're not gonna be at a red light and pull out like rear-facing colder thruster and just blast it in the person behind you that's just a lawsuit in the making right there

But yeah, also the Navara is not really a competitor to the Roadster. We're talking about a car that literally costs 10 times the Roadster, most likely. And of course, the Roadster doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see, we'll see. Well, the Navara doesn't exist for 99.9999% of the valuation. That's a good point. It's just an unattainable vehicle. Even people that can afford it are like...

Do you really want a $2.3 million vehicle? It's just for a racetrack, basically. It's a street legal vehicle, which is impressive, but are you going to park downtown on the street a $2.3 million car? Maybe not. I feel like there's an opportunity for Rimac to make more of those. Make it not insane, just like $0 to $200 and I don't know. Like

2.5 seconds like you still have a cool car it just doesn't like break your neck they're gonna go down market but they're not it's not gonna be like a ferrari or anything like that like i mean they're just merged with bugatti so right you you you you get a feeling of what they're gonna do with the remax brand they're gonna do like a bugatti kind of thing where it's gonna be a lot of seven figures vehicles i think yeah all right to the questions um

I start them to make it easier. Hey, what's up, gentlemen? Quick question about Cybertruck. Will it start at $39,000? And if not, will that hurt demand? I'm going to say no. Yeah, no and yes, because yes, it's going to hurt demand. Some people are just not going to be able to afford it. I posted an article actually today about my guesses for the Cybertruck pricing, and I think...

The single motor one, which was the one starting at $40,000, it might be completely removed. Or if it's not removed, it's going to be much later. So like 2026, 2027, maybe something like that. So don't hold your breath for it. So I think it's likely going to start at $50,000, $55,000. And then there's going to be the tri-motor. That's probably going to be $75,000 at least. And then the question is like that quad motor one, the top one is probably going to be the first one.

like you would think over eighty thousand dollars but at the same time you think that they're still going to want to try to keep that uh tax credit opportunity so i don't know yeah i don't think i think eighty thousand is probably going to be the starting point yeah um this year or the starting point this year and next year and then they start coming down after that they'll probably be all wheel drive this year um they you're right they want to keep the tax credit um

So, yeah, I think if you don't have $80,000 in your bank account, you're not going to get this thing. I agree with all those people who pre-ordered it in 2019, thought they were going to get an amazing truck for less than a Model 3. A lot of things have changed since 2019. And I don't think Tesla or Elon was ever... They've never said the $39,000 one was going to be available at launch. They always said...

Do you think it will hurt demand? Yeah, we talked about that. What percentage of cobalt is used in petroleum refining? Petroleum? I didn't even know that was the case. That's not our expertise. Yeah, yeah. If it burns stuff, like, we don't know much about it on that track. All right. Shifting gears a little bit in regard to the end of the bolt, do you think the lack of a small electric car options will hurt the transition to electrification?

um it's not gonna help uh and uh i don't think the equinox is like the same class of car uh and i don't know that gm's gonna be selling a thirty thousand dollar one anytime soon i think it's more like like small cars are like important but like also low cost was kind of the big deal um we'll see maybe the the leaf and i can't recommend the leaf because of the chattamo and uh

yeah there's just really nothing else out there i i hope the equinox comes in low price but and we know you know gm's not opposed to losing money on each car so we'll see um kwame ama despite poor lightnings and hummer evs larger batteries and range they're expensive and require a lot of electricity yeah but we don't have as big of a problem with that because we know that the grid is also getting cleaner at the same time so i

Obviously, I'm a big Abterra fan. I use Abterra fan because it's an electric vehicle, but it's a super efficient electric vehicle that doesn't require a lot of electricity to run it. But I'm not some kind of solutist. I'm like, all right, everything's got to be super efficient. If you have a Hummer EV at home, I'm not going to judge you. If your home has solar on the rooftop, then I'm like, yeah, all right, you're good. The only thing that's bad about it is, all right, you're carrying a big battery a lot of times.

that you're not actually going to use because it has 400 miles, this thing. So yeah, so that's a bit dumb. But at the same time, like if you do, like every month you do a 400 mile trip, then yeah, it's kind of can be useful too. So as long as you power it with renewable energy, no issue with that.

All right, Stu, who is the market for Tesla's Cybertruck? Crypto bros and long-term investors? So that's what I'm talking about. There's going to be this cultural war upending with the Cybertruck of like, is the Cybertruck cool or not cool? And Stu is in the not cool side, obviously. Yeah, and I...

I kind of feel like I've fallen into the not cool side. I had a Cybertruck reservation and I gave it up, but this was like, I don't know, three years ago, four years ago. But I don't know if I'm ever going to see a Rivian. So maybe that was a dumb move. Hey, Fred, last week you mentioned that Rivian might have a demand problem because their delivery estimates are getting shorter. Can it be that they're ramping up and executing on production? Yeah.

Yeah, but they claim a 70,000 vehicle reservation backlog at the same time. So if you have... I think they are having some problems having people to change their reservation into orders in some markets, obviously, because...

some of those rational or in markets like mine where they're not selling it. So yeah, in markets where they're already selling, they already have service center. I think they might be having some demand problems because you can get one delivered in two weeks. Yeah. I also think they're throwing some people who are online under the bus and not making their vehicles as quick and getting the higher value from the new people, but whatever.

All right. A little bit of Twitter stuff here. Elon, the free speech crusader, except when Turkey's president Erdogan asked him to censor. I did find that a little bit off-putting, especially his response.

but if you're going to be a free speech absolutist you got to be a free speech absolutist right yeah but at the same time uh i i read the official twitter response that made a little bit more sense where the twitter response went into all the court orders that they were receiving and everything and uh they are fighting the battles that they think they have a chance of winning but they had there was one court order that um

There was no way they were going to shut down Twitter in Turkey if they didn't agree. And that was this the tweets that we're talking about here.

And also, I think this is a little bit like I know like they are using the Elon like free speech. Absolutely. This is an excuse here. But I think Twitter tried their best on that one and just couldn't do it because they were the last one to do it. Everybody else did it before that. Everybody like Facebook and all the other network did it. It's just Twitter tried to resist. And then at the end, they were like, all right, it's either resisting or Twitter is shutting down in Turkey.

Yep. Joel Sapp, I don't think Elon hates ads that are honest, but I think that they can make an engineering company lazy. Do you make a compelling product or keep a so-so product and advertise more? That's a good argument. Yeah. I never really saw it like that, but yeah. I can see that happening. I don't think with the Tesla culture around engineering and manufacturing and all that, I don't see really like a little bit advertising doing much, but yeah.

I mean, that's the whole like Elon saying ads are propaganda. You know, we're looking for propaganda people. Well, that was PR. Right. PR, whatever. All right. Question. Considering that it has been established that Tesla faked the first FSD video,

wouldn't it be prudent to be more skeptical of the bots video? Well, that was your point, I think. Now, fake is a bit of an exoneration, I think. The video was an unedited video all the way through. It's just that they ran that scenario a few times in order to wake. So I would assume that that's the same allegation that could happen with the bots, which could be true. To be honest, that could be true. But...

this might sound like naive on my part, but the way that Elon made it sound like, and I sort of believing on that. And I'm not, you guys know another, not super quick to believe Elon most of the time. Uh, but he said that, uh,

like i that he told the team like last minute like i want a video of where we're at with but the tesla bot like last night and he put that video together last night of whether that's a and you and the video like it's not that impressive like sunset too is you have to like look at comparison of where they were at eight months ago and now i think that's the most impressive part uh but um

So, yeah, I think that's really much like a video that he chewed together last minute on this. I believe him on that. All right. Question. Autopilot still seems far away to me due to the corner cases, but maybe AI and Optimus becomes useful practical sooner than autopilot because it can be put to use in a controlled environment. Thoughts?

Well, obviously, I think Tesla is going to be using it first. There's a major labor crisis right now. Try to hire people for labor jobs in factories and everything. It's super, super hard right now to find competent people to do that. So

Iman, that's what he's thinking about here, obviously. He's not advertising it too much because it sounds bad for coming from the CEO of a company. He's like, I'm looking to replace you people. It's not something that sounds good. But obviously...

It's going to do that. Now, people shouldn't be scared by that, obviously, because any kind of automation can happen. Yes, it does affect some jobs, but it creates other jobs, creates other opportunities and all that all the time. I don't see Tesla, well, there's going to be these usual wave of firing because of the efficiency in the hiring every time. Tesla is going to keep growing their headcount even with robots. That's how it works, really.

All right. Steve Sutton says Boston Dynamics has been in business for 10 years. Tesla has been doing this for about 10 months. And look at the progress they're making. But they're not doing the same thing. That's the thing. Like Boston Dynamics, it's in the name. Dynamics, they're doing the robotics around robots.

Tesla, as they are thinking about the AI and what we can put that in that's going to be the most useful. They're like, yeah, a humanoid robot. So let's build a humanoid robot around our generalized AI to see what it can do. I think that's a completely different approach. All right. Mr. Turkey Neck is in agreement with Seth. Robots and Twitter are unfortunate distractions in the fortunes of Musk and Tesla. It's not proof of his pure genius, is it?

Yeah, I don't think that was your point or whatever. Yeah, that's not really what I'm saying. I mean, Twitter, I don't know. I feel like I don't know what's happening with me, but I'm kind of turning around on some of the Elon things. Like I've been really down on Twitter for a long time now. I kind of see a glimmer of hope with Twitter recently. And I just did now too with the robots. So I don't know. You know they're not paying their rent or anything like that, right?

I wouldn't pay that rent in San Francisco, to be honest. Why? Last time I went to San Francisco was not impressive at all. Okay. Obviously pay your rent, people. And I'm skipping over a lot because there's a lot of conversation and I didn't check the recent stuff. But

Mr. Turkey next back, Ford will stick with the e-transit configs, which cover a broad span of transport requirements and possibilities. Why introduce a comparable model from the euro market to cannibalize your own brand? The e-transit is not something that consumers really think about. Obviously, the van life scene is ripe for the pickings, but this thing looks more like a fun, consumer-y

yeah vehicle like a mini range rover or something and i think it would be really popular yeah it's not it's not the same thing as the e-transit at all i think yeah all right so so that's all the uh comments all right well thanks a lot everyone this week for uh this week's episode to join us in this little adventure that we do every week to recap all the best all the most interesting electric vehicle news of the week i think it was a fun one i hope you liked it and we're gonna see you same time same place next week