Tesla v12.4, Rivian next-gen R1s, VW ID.7 GTX, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wimtrom. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. We have plenty to talk about today. We're going to talk a bit about some Tesla news as usual. I can finally talk about my Rivian next generation drive from last week. New unveiling of the ID7 GTX.

and plenty more to talk about and we also want to talk to you guys so if you guys have any questions for us you can put them in the comment section right now and i get to it in just a few minutes after we're done talking about the news um before we jump in i want to say um quick thank you to our sponsor this week well kind of sponsoring our own thing this week with the electric american solar challenge 2024 coming second week of july in kentucky in bowling green kentucky so we're going to

Talk a little bit more about it later on the show. But if you guys want to check out this very cool student race with electric solar car that we're sponsoring, you're welcome to do so. All right. First, we want to talk about V12.4 because last week talked a little bit about where is it. It's been delayed a little bit. It hasn't reached the customer fleet just yet. So Elon talked about it this time.

Says that now, so that they kind of, not postponed, they kind of canceled the original 12.4 releasing to customers. And instead, they went to 12.4.1, which is now being tested by employees and should go to a limited number of external customers this weekend.

We'll see about that. Normally after that, then a week or so later, it actually gets the customer fleet. So we might have to wait a little bit. So definitely some delays there. However, Ivan is still hyping it and he gave us another little clue about what it is going to be able to do. So if you remember last time, he said no steering wheel nag now with 12.4, five to 10 times more miles between intervention, which, you know, giant improvement.

This time he says it could have been called V13 because it's such a big change, blah, blah, blah, but we're sticking to 12. Now he says that we're starting to get to the point where once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention. So that's a big new goal.

Even though I'm not a big fan of saying over a year because obviously it completely depends on how much you're driving over the period of a year. But at the same time, these are all things that are hard to compare to existing data.

mainly because Tesla is not releasing any. For example, the 5 to 10x miles between intervention, Tesla's never released miles between intervention data. We have some crowdsourced data that shows that Tesla is, you know, depending on

how you interpret it, it's like a few hundred miles between intervention, which in average, which I'm not getting that personally. So I'm pretty surprised by it. But even then, like five to 10x that, it's still like more a few weeks to a few months between intervention than a year for the average driver, I would say. But even then, it's a new, you know, it's just Elon. It's a new version of mind blowing really than anything else.

But I'm still excited about it. Like I said, I've been very impressed with v12. And like I said, if Tesla can deliver quick and consistent new update that shows meaningful improvements, then I can see a path to a level four system on the current hardware. But I'm being careful because again, v12.4 was supposed to come a few weeks ago. It hasn't been delayed.

There's room for doubt still, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. Yeah, I had yesterday or earlier this year to come back from Quebec City. And, you know, it drove very well for the most part, but I kept having this weird bug on the highway where I would pass a car, activate the turn signals to go back. It doesn't do that for me. Like I have it on in my setting. I don't know about you, but going back into the right lane after you pass a car, does it do that for you?

I don't have that specific problem. I have different issues. The speed through city streets is still a little slow for me. Sometimes I get nervous and just kind of...

Unfortunately, I don't have that much time on the highway to do testing. Yeah, you don't drive that much on the highway. Yeah, I mean, the speed issues on city street, I think, is mainly they're being careful with it. Yeah, so I do that sometimes as well. I'll test it out in certain situations to see how it does. But then after a while, yeah, I get tired. Especially here, I have some roads that are like 50 kilometers an hour that are like...

country campaign road that I want to drive at least like 60 70 on and it doesn't let me do that but on the highway it like every when I would tell it like it go back into the right lane after I pass someone as it do it it does it it will slow down in front of the person I just passed which is you know impolite borderline dangerous so that like I had to disengage a few times because of that like where I would well disengage what press the accelerator myself

Tesla released a new software update this week. The biggest change is significant improvement to the adaptive headlights. So that's only available, obviously, to vehicle with the Matrix LED headlights in the markets where this is available. So now the headlights adapt for curves and road ahead of you and also eliminates more when you're driving on the highway. So I haven't had too many issues with it.

this is automated with lights but i don't have the matrix ones though so that are a little bit better too i don't i kind of wish i did uh this is also bringing some improvement to the ec system when using the auto mode when set to auto the ec now cools down the cabin faster and your vehicle better regulates the hd battery temperature for enhanced supercharger performance that's really cool i use that feature all the time because

When it gets hot, it's nice to get into a nice, cool car. They also said that that will make the Cybertruck climate control a bit quieter. There's an update to Tesla Arcade. Now you have a leaderboard per supercharger station. So that's kind of cool. But, you know, I think groundbreaking, obviously. All right. This was a big story earlier in the week. Elon Musk.

asked Nvidia to prioritize a GPU shipment that was meant to Tesla and divert it to X and XAI. So this is a report that came from CNBC.

And it was based on emails that were circulating at NVIDIA that referenced, I could quote the email directly here, Elon prioritizing X H100 GPUs cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12,000 of shipped

H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla 2X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12,000 H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla. There was that email that leaked that clearly, that at least proved that NVIDIA

thought that Elon wanted to divert that, but Elon actually later confirmed it. And there was another email that also suggested that, yeah, that was after Musk talked about the planned spending on GPUs that the NVIDIA email would suggest they were concerned about this statement because they said it doesn't match the actual orders for Tesla.

So there was some concern about that. So this CNBC article came out and we posted about it too. But I had some in my take. I did play devil's advocate a little bit because it is weird that a CEO of a company would divert products meant for a public companies in control of to a private companies in control of.

But I did suggest that based on my previous reporting, we knew that the giant 100 megabyte cluster at DigiFactory Texas was not ready. And, you know, now it's aimed for August. And I have some internal sources that think that it might be even later than that. So when Tesla was supposed to take delivery of those GPUs in December of last year, they were not ready for it. So Elon, you know, switched them to X, right?

Now, the bigger controversy around

Around that report, Elon then came out and basically confirmed what I just said. Tesla had no place to send the NVIDIA chips to turn them on, so they would have just sat in a warehouse. The self-expansion of Gigatex is almost complete. This will house 50,000 H100s for FSD training. So he basically confirmed the report from CNBC, but then added some context to it that Tesla was not ready as I expected. Yeah.

um so now they created that what the bigger controversy here is like the cover-up almost the the classic saying because after that elon went out and claimed that laura coloni the uh the uh the reporter behind this article was a liar he so he confirms a report and then calls her a liar yeah and he does that a lot he's done that with our reports too in the past where he's like he can find something that you know he

He's not even pointing at something that's wrong in the report. He's just had it some context. So you could argue – the only thing you could say is like, yeah, Laura's report lacked some context, which could have had from like reading a report, not to pat myself on the back. But that doesn't make you or her a liar. No.

And one thing that it highlights, and I know I've been hammering this for a long time, is like she also reached out to Tesla and Elon before posting her article and saying,

If Tesla had a PR department, they could have provided that context. And the article would still probably have been posted because I think that's the thing here. There's still some value in this article, especially in the context of Elon trittening to divert AI products from Tesla to his other companies. Now he literally diverted a shipment from Tesla of GPUs to train full self-driving from Tesla to X. To be fair,

It probably made sense for him to do that for Tesla in the sense that, I know, assuming that Tesla didn't pay for it, because that's, there is some theories right now that, uh, uh,

Back then, it's not clear how much money X and XAI had for those and who paid for it and how was that, you know, end all and was the Tesla board, did the Tesla board approve of that? Because obviously we'd have needed approval of a board to do that because, you know, even though if it makes sense for Tesla, you still have to tell the board that you're, you know, you're taking over their order, especially in the context that, you know, H100s and now H200s are like,

I don't know how many years back hoarders at this point, but every company out there that works on AI are jumping on those. So maybe it would have made sense to order them, even if you're not. I don't mean order them. I mean, like you're a hoarder and you hoarder them. Is that you can use the word like that, too? Yeah. Hoarding. Yeah. Or hoarding. Hoarding. So you're hoarding the GPUs. That might actually be like a good thing for Tesla. You don't. There's an argument to be made there.

But so it is newsworthy that Elon can even do that, I think, even if it was good for Tesla, I think. That is weird. Like, you know, the order comes in from Tesla, I would assume. It's not just like Elon calling Jensen and being like, hey, put me down for 20,000 GPUs. Or maybe it is. It sounds like it's exactly what it is. It sounds like Elon gave Jensen a call. For those who don't know, Jensen is the CEO of NVIDIA.

They are friends. And he was like, yeah, you know that shipment of like 12,000 GPUs that you're sending to Tesla? Can you just send it to X instead? I know it's already shipped. Apparently their email said it was shipped. But let's just divert it to X because like Tesla cannot take them right now. And yeah, I mean, the saddest thing about this whole thing is Elon calling her a liar, even though she's not. The worst you can say about her reporting there is like lack some context. That's the worst. You cannot say liar.

And two is like all the Tesla fans now, his Elon fans are attacking her for no good reason whatsoever because he just put a target on her back. And three...

I lost my train of thought here. I had a good three. I had a good other point about this. Oh, yeah. All these fans are quick to defend Elon for that, even though the real question is to ask yourself, how come the Tesla had this giant, like, multi-hundred-million-dollar hoarder of GPUs and had no place to put it? Like, they couldn't turn it on for... And now, like, these...

If Elon's logic is good there, they were supposed to get them in December. And now in his email, it says almost complete. So we're six months later and it's still not complete. Again, my sources tell that they are aiming now for August. So like eight months later, they had like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of GPUs that would have been useless for eight months and gone.

Are we not blaming Elon for this? Someone has to be blamed there. And now let's say that they received them in January instead, and now June is still months ahead without being able to turn it on, and maybe later too, based on what I'm hearing internally. So yeah, anyway you got it, it was not the greatest move from Elon, and also something that I think a PR department could have helped a lot. Just put some more context, explain it to the...

The reporter would have been including that in the context. I think our article, Laura clearly has an anti-Tesla bias, I think. She's reporting, and I'm not going to argue like I'm pro-Laura here, but her reporting seemed accurate there.

But she has a history of very biased reporting on Tesla. She reported at some point there was a big fire that stopped production at Tesla Fremont, and it was literally two skids catching on fire that was extinguished in two minutes. It's hard not to have a bias against or for Tesla these days. If you've been attacked by Elon, you're not going to be a big fan. Like Lynette Lopez, you know.

Yeah, especially if he calls you a liar like that. It's like, yeah. And I posted something on X2Defender real quick about it. And the rage I got from the Tesla fans was like, no, no, Elon is in the right here. She's in the wrong. And then I kept every single one of those people that would tell me that. I'm like, tell me where's the lie. Then tell me exactly where's the lie. No one could answer that. So that's, you know, what does that sound like? That sounds like a call. Right?

This very cult mentality here is like so bad for Tesla. Yep. All right. A little good news for Tesla before we move on to Rivian.

well, from Tesla, mainly from unplugged performance here, but the Cybertruck's been upfitted for a police vehicle. So we know that the Tesla Model Y has become kind of the go-to police vehicle for a lot of departments looking to go electric. But, you know, in the US, they have a few departments that use like bigger vehicle, even like pickup trucks for petrol vehicle. And now you can have that going electric with this cool UK Cybertruck. It looks pretty badass here. Unplugged performance did a great job there.

And they are doing, I think what they're doing here though, is like, it's not really trying to sell that specific package here because I mean, no matter, I don't know how many, how much it costs for, for outfits to, to, to make that, but yeah.

The Cybertruck starts $100,000 right now. It is $100,000 plus on top of all the outfit stuff. It looks cool and it's probably a good marketing thing to show the police department like, hey, look at this cool vehicle. That's a patrol vehicle.

I know it's super expensive, but by the way, we can have a Model Y that is like half the cost of that and actually saves you tens of thousands of dollars a year in maintenance and fuel costs and does everything that a gasoline petrol vehicle can do and better. So I think that's more the goal here. And you could argue that this Cybertruck is also the goal of the Cybertruck for Tesla to make more of a marketing tool than an actual vehicle program. But it looks badass. I can't admit that.

all right let's talk rivian next generation so we teased about it the last few weeks there's been a bunch of leaks that i couldn't really get involved with because i was under embargo and uh and then um i did try this vehicle so we've been invited me to seattle last week to really like dive a little bit deeper into the r1

So Seth was supposed to come, but he had a little bit of conflict of scheduling there. I think you would have been a better person to talk about this because you have the R1S. So you have been able to, I think, frame the differences with the previous gen and the new gen a little better. But I'll do my best here. And anyway, the core of it is not as much about the driving experience. The update is for cost reduction primarily. So when you do that, your main concern is like, all right,

if you're going to cut costs or you're going to cut into the driver experience, the ownership experience. And I've been reassured by this a few days that I spent with Rivian in Seattle. They are not cutting on the driver experience. They are not cutting on the ownership experience at all. Most of the next-gen update has to do with manufacturability. So they have updated parts that are under the hood, like battery, harnesses, electric motors, etc.

Power electronics, all that stuff has been updated to make it cheaper to manufacture and to make it cheaper to assemble the vehicle at the end. So my first post, I posted two articles on this. The first one was focusing on that, on those updates. So yeah, here, for example, here's the...

Last gen battery module, the new gen battery module, again, made for manufacturability. Easier to, I think they cut a few stations where they ensemble the battery pack into the vehicle from that. You also, here in the back, you see a new module for the LFP cells. So now the standard battery pack is going to use LFP instead of NCA or NMC. I think NMC for some reason.

So now the max and large packs have the nickel base chemistry and you have the lithium phosphate chemistry for the standard pack. We still get over 200, EPA estimate 270 miles of range on the standard pack and 420 for the max pack. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.

New motors. So Rivian was previously, they did a lot of their own motor design and engineering in-house. But the manufacturing was the outsource that now they brought a lot of that in-house now, giving them a little bit more control on the implementation packaging of the motor, or motors, I should say. And now they have new tri and quad motors and new dual motor units.

that are more efficient and cost less. I don't know, they officially said cost less, but I assume that's the goal here. And that also the efficiency improvement result in cost reduction throughout the rest of the vehicle life.

And the tri-mode, you get with the quad motor R1T configuration, you get over 1,000 horsepower, 1,025 to be exact. And you get less, 0 to 16, less than 2.5 seconds. I didn't see less than. That's crazy. Yeah. So we went to the racetrack. They brought us to the drag strip there. And here you can see a run. I'm going to cut this sound. This is a pickup truck that accelerated from. That was my run. That was my run. It was a 2.7 seconds.

They have a cool launch mode where you have their little mascot that you shoot up for the launch mode. And then you put it in the usual one, like you have the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. You let go of the accelerator when your steering wheel is facing forward. And you're good to go. So, yeah, I saw some people do get 2.5 during that run. The media did. I think Zach from...

Jerry Rega everything got a 2.5 on his run. He was the first one to go. Makes sense. I was like third and then I got a 2.7 and they were warming up the tires. They were like prepping the track. So like obviously if you do that on the street, you might not be able to get that kind of run. But anyway, it's a pickup truck. 2.5 seconds. Crazy. Between 2.5 and 3 seconds is absolutely insane. The R1S is a little bit tiny bit slower, but not much.

All right, this is one of the places they made some big improvements to, the ECUs. So the electric control units, this is the first gen where they had 17 of them throughout the vehicle. Now they package them completely differently, and now they are able to do the same thing with seven of them.

So that alone is going to be a giant cost reduction without changing anything about the experience. And also that will reduce the harnesses need, the wiring need. And they talk about a reduction in wiring inside the vehicle of 1.6 miles, 2.6 kilometers less than the first gen. They gave an example like this was one of the harness that they were able to completely eliminate. So this, which is super heavy, I think it was like 40 pounds or so.

Heavy as hell, not in the car anymore, and all the station to put that inside the vehicle also gone from manufacturing. So, you know, big cost reduction there without affecting driver experience. Oh, yeah. One thing that they added to the vehicle, and I'm sure that's going to add cost, so then, you know, two step forward, one step back, is this new autonomy hardware suite that they're talking about.

11 cameras all around the vehicle, 360 coverage, eight times the number of megapixel than in the previous generation, five radars and ultrasonics on around, plus a new computing platform from NVIDIA inside the vehicle.

they think that all of this combined is uh gonna be enable them to go all the way to level three in the future but right now they're sticking to adas you know features driver ss features they already have traffic aware cruise control they have lane keeping now they are adding lane change and um

I tried it. I did a little lane change with it and it worked well. Very similar to the Tesla system. The lane keeping though is not on par with the Le Palette, I would say. It's pretty good. And again, I was driving with Quinn from Stanzy Lab who owns an R1S. He was able to give a little bit of difference. And I just talked to Seth about it a little bit about the fact that how did he think about his lane keeping in his R1S and

Quinn was able to try both and I only tried a new generation, said that it was a significant improvement. And obviously, I'm going to assume that they're going to keep releasing a lot of improvement here because their hardware suite is future proof to a certain degree. So software update on that new compute power is going to enable them. I think it's also like 10 times the compute powers from the previous generation. So big upgrade there too.

Not a lot of design changes with the new generation. One of the rare ones is the lighting system front and back. You already had some kind of charging thing. You had some communication with the charging in front of the first gen set? Yeah, it's weird because initially they had something that looked like this. And then eventually they just changed it to a green bar and it doesn't have the moving thing.

Okay. So it's weird because like the original thing had that, I guess maybe they decided, uh,

not to do it and then maybe they were like we should do it again I don't know yeah but I saw the first one that you referred to and I think this one is also better than the first one too like they upgraded for the best and start a little bit clearer it's not like it's you could say it's a gimmicky feature but I can see some value in it especially now like uh when I was just driving the cyber truck in Washington State I arrived at a supercharger that was completely full for example and I had to wait

And if I could like just check out the cars and see exactly like what's the state of charge of the batteries based on that, that gave me an idea of like this guy is almost done. So I'm probably going to be able to take his place in like two minutes or so. So I think there's some value in that. It's not a bad feature.

A lot of software feature has been added. Now you have car keys in Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch and some Google Pixel devices. So your car key is not only like, you know, driven as all the same, like...

phone uh car keys option that you you can have in most cars today but most premium vehicle i should say you also have your key card like similar to tesla but you can have that key card now in your apple wallet and use that instead so like it's another option on top of it uh they have a new connect plus subscription service that they're going to launch which is um

I guess the equivalent of the Tesla premium connectivity that now is going to support streaming video through Google Cast and provide access to more than 3,000 apps. This is pretty cool. I like Google Cast. It's a good idea. I think we often talk about this. Why do you want to use...

native app on your center display to like they're a sub part something that you will find on your android or apple device so why not just use your phone use your ipad and that now you can do that in any car obviously but now with the ribbon you can do that and if you want to have the bigger screen and use the bigger screen you can cast it to the screen so smart solution i think i've never seen that before too i think i think it's the first time inside of a

at least in North America. Probably in China, they already have it for 10 years and we don't know. Apple Music is also coming under the Connect Plus subscription service and that's going to be compatible with Dolby Atmos.

I'm not an audiophile. I'm not like a, like I can not tell the difference that much. I can tell like, you know, basic difference between the standard like Audiosystem system and the premium stuff. And I've been in like one of like some of the Mercedes S class with the crazy system. Like I can tell that that's amazing. But honestly, I was in the Rivian and I was like, this is as good as my...

uneducated here can can take really so that's a big improvement because the meridian sound system that um rivian had originally was solid and then they built their own and it wasn't great and they did some updates and it was a little bit better but quinn probably told you it's not yeah yeah quinn's told me something similar to what you just told me yeah

And Quinn is an audiophile too, and he liked this system. I don't think he was like crazy impressed, but he liked it. And he is a crazy audiophile because he has all these headphones and whatnot. All right. Oh, yeah, there was this new dynamic glass roof that's pretty cool too. I think I have better pictures of it on my other post about it. I'm going to get into my driving experience. But yeah, the second gen R1S will start at $6,000.

$75,900, $76,000 and $70,000 for the R1T. As for the base version, obviously then you had more motors, bigger battery packs, and it goes up pretty quickly. And it's already in the hands of customers.

But obviously, this is the price that starts. This is the price they're selling it. Really, the update is more about the price that it's costing them to build these vehicles. That's really what the update is about. And we don't know that yet. Obviously, they're not sharing that. They probably don't even know exactly yet because as they ramp up production, that's where they're going to get most of their cost reductions.

RG, we talked about last week, RG warned us that don't focus too much on the Q2 results because the Q2 results only have like a month of solar deliveries of the next generation. There was the factory shutdown and all that. So it's not going to really take into account the full cost reductions of it.

Let me show you. This morning, I also posted my driving impression. Again, my driving impressions are not that valuable because I couldn't really compare them to the first generation. One of the biggest differences with the new generation is that compared to the previous one, they use the exact same suspension hardware-wise for the R1S and R1T. It's the same vehicle platform, just different body, third row in the R1S, bed in the R1T,

Tunnel cover in the ONT, no tunnel cover in the R1S. But that body difference makes a big difference on your suspension and how... They did tune it differently for the R1S to be fair in the first generation, but it's just the same hardware. Now they are using different hardware for the suspension of the R1S versus the R1T. So everyone that has driven both was giving me feedback that it was a big improvement.

I've heard personally, driving the R1S and the R1T during that event, I much prefer driving the R1T. I thought it was a little bit more responsive, like a little bit more dynamic driving vehicle than the R1S. But I've never been a big fan of driving big SUVs or even riding in big SUVs.

like, you know, the Ford Expeditions and Escalade and all that. They gave me like carsick more, more like a boat-like feeling. But apparently you do get that a lot less in the R1S. And personally, I don't know if it was less because I didn't experience the previous one, but I didn't feel that in the new version of the R1S.

Yeah, these are all the configuration. This is probably an interesting part that I don't know if Riven is going to get into, but all the different configuration. Personally, I like it. I like more options the best. So you start with the dual motor standard 270 miles range. That's the new one with the LFP cells now, which gets used in 16, 4.5 seconds. Very nice. Still pretty good. Then you can... Yeah? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, for the slowest truck to go 4.5 seconds, 0 to 60, pretty good. Yeah, slowest, not slowest. That's a key word. Then you can have the bigger pack on this. So you still have the dual motor, but you get a little bit more power out of it with 675 horsepower and you slash a full seconds out of the 0 to 60. And that gives you 60 more miles of range at 330.

Then you have the max pack, which is like the optimized for range here, 420 miles of range, same 0 to 60 acceleration at 3.4. And then you start losing range if you had motor to the max pack. So you have the tri with max three, but you still get 380. And they do say that you can get over 405 if you put it in conserve mode. So the more energy efficient mode.

2.9 seconds, 0-60, which would be plenty for me. And then if you're like, nah, I need more than that TriMax. I don't know why you would. You get the quad at 2.5, but you lose a little bit more range on that too. But you go 0-60 in 2.5 seconds. You have 1,200 pounds foot of torque. It's just a kind of a crazy vehicle. Over 1,000 horsepower. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they took me off-roading. I'm not much of an off-roader, to be honest. I cannot tell you a ton of experience with this. But one thing that I liked, we did a rally mode here. And we did an off-road mode, too, in the off-road course. The...

Rally mode, what I like, I mean, it's a 6,000-plus pound vehicle, so it's not geared for rally, really. But you have the ton of power behind it, so you don't feel the weight as much, and you can still have some fun with it. So they do have the rally mode in there. And what I like about it compared to the Ford, for example, the week prior, is that you get a little bit more options in the term of you can actually still have regen and different level of regen in the R1S and R1T.

Speaking of regen, the regen, what do you keep yours at? High or standard? I think I'm at high, yeah. Pretty hardcore. Yeah, normally I always keep my EV at high. I love regen and I love getting to optimize the energy in my vehicle with the regen.

But I've never felt such a strong region as in the Rivian, especially the R1T. It's a little bit front-forward, so you feel it even more. But I think you're getting used to it. So I do like the fact that they have low standard and high on this because I think...

Probably some people will have to go to standard and low just to get used to it. And then if you really go for it, you go too high. Now, I'm not saying go too high in the rally mode, but you can, which is fun. And you can put it in low too. You can remove it completely. And then you have the traction control, which you can remove it completely.

Keep it at reduced or having standard traction for off-roading, which is, you know, I don't know exactly what you want with that. But for the rally, I mean, then you have the off-roading, which was really impressive. Really nice course at Dirt Fish. You can really, like, test the suspension and go deep in the water. And honestly, pretty easy course, I would assume, because they put me on it. I could do it by myself if I wanted to, so without any coaching. And that's what's great about these vehicles, too, is, like, they make things easy. Like, everything is easy with it.

I know some people, they like to make themselves tough on them when they drive a car. I'm not one of those people. Make it easy for me and I'll enjoy it. All right. Before we go too far, let's do the read of the... Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about...

All right. We got the Electric American Solar Challenge 2024. So if you're looking for something to do in July in Tennessee and Kentucky, we're putting on a big show or, you know, we're sponsoring the big show. It's basically a bunch of I think almost 40 colleges are racing their vehicles. And there's two two kind of things happening. One is the Electric American Solar Challenge.

Um, sorry. The first thing is the electric formula sun grand Prix. That's going to be in Bowling Green, Kentucky at the Corvette museum track, uh, national Corvette museum motor sports park. Um, and that's a 3.15 mile grand full course. And that's kind of going to, uh, determine the starting lineup for the second piece, which is the electric American solar challenge. Um, that's going to be Friday, July 29th. Um,

And then it's going to go all the way to Saturday, July 27th. And that's going to cross the U.S. We're going to be in the Midwest. And, you know, the whole map is on the on the site linked in the show notes. But let's see if you click on route. I think. Yeah, I think I just need to switch my window right there. So basically, we're starting in Nashville and we're going to end up in Casper, Wyoming.

Um, each night, uh, we're going to stop at a place. Uh, St. Louis is the second night, Columbia, Missouri, then Kansas city. Then, uh, I don't know, like some small towns in between there and then eventually Casper, Wyoming. So, uh, if you're along that route or if you're interested in solar vehicles, it's a fun thing to come out and check out. Um, obviously if you want to check out the vehicles, you're going to want to be at one of those stops.

Or, you know, better yet, maybe just go to Bowling Green in Kentucky. So the dates and the times are all on the site linked in the show notes. Really hope to see some of you guys out there. I'll be out there. Hopefully we'll have a bunch of Electrek people joining us. It's a ton of fun. And you're basically seeing like the engineers of tomorrow, you know, all of Tesla's team

Uh, original team came out of the Stanford solar challenge. Um, and Tesla, you know, to this day is still sponsoring it. And, you know, I talked to some of the, um, uh, sponsor folks there and they're, they're like, you know, we're basically here to recruit. It's like shooting fish in a bucket. Every single person here, uh, is super motivated, super smart. And, uh, so if you're a recruiter, maybe, uh, pay us a visit. Yeah.

Yeah, it should be a fun one. All right, finishing up real quick on the R1S, R1T. I think there was a few more points I wanted to discuss. Oh, yeah. The interior, I mean, the interior, I'm a giant fan of the Riven interior. It's like a good mix of like, you know, it's a compromise between Tesla's like minimalist software-based approach to the interior. Like everything is through a UI and then the rest is minimalist, which I'm actually a fan of.

I like that. And then you have, you know, the legacy luxury automakers. We have an ultra luxurious but very busy interior. I think Rivian has a nice compromise on that where they are a software-based company and the UI is very important and everything, but they have a few buttons too. And the interior design is like somewhat minimalist, but still, you know, very nice, decent accent. Look at this backseat here.

I mean, these look like almost like front seat, captain seat. It's pretty cool. They have a new package, a new plaid package where they have a bunch of plaid mats and some plaid accents throughout the vehicle that are like well hidden. It's pretty nice. What else do we have here? Oh, yeah. We talked about the autonomy seat already. Oh, yeah. This is the example of my, of the lane change here.

So yeah, if you activate the lane change, it's going to look for you, make sure it can do it. And if it can't, you have 10 seconds to actually be able to do it. And if it's easy, it doesn't enable, it makes you like reset it. So like in this case, now I'm doing it right now. I couldn't do it before because the car was passing me. But yeah, it's pretty smooth.

All right. This is the new dynamic roof. So this is an option for the more premium R1S and R1T. You have that in the Porsche and the new Porsche vehicles, for example. So it's the electronically controlled roof where you can change the color and the lightning situation, the opacity of the roof through just a touch of a button. It was pretty cool.

And I was told to, I don't know if you can comment on that, Seth, but that the current vehicle, the UV protection on the roof is not top-notch and it does get hot for a while if you...

if you don't use it but generally yeah sometimes it's kind of hot um i wonder if that's going to be a retrofit like did they say anything about that no i don't think so with the because yeah the roof is one thing but the wiring harnesses that you have to do to control that it's probably not right that makes sense also uh did they talk about the uh inverter like uh can you plug in a 240 volt into the uh the back now uh i don't think they have 240 in the back no okay

i'm not sure but uh i feel like they do have like they have a compressor an optional compressor in the back and the other side i think it's 220. um i don't know if i took a picture of that uh the the frunk you know same thing it's nice it's nothing new from the previous generation bigger than the one in the cyber truck a little bit more useful than the one in cyber truck in my opinion uh you have the gear tunnel too

which is another option on top of the bed so the bed is a little bit shorter in the rivian obviously shorter than the cyber truck shorter than i think every other electric pickup truck option it's great for us snowboards the yeah the gear tunnel is yeah yeah snowboards and skis i think fit in there maybe uh golf clubs and hockey sticks like everything long that you don't want to uh put in the front so yeah my impression basically is that

Rivian is getting better at making electric cars. And not that they weren't good before, is that being good at making electric vehicles also means making them profitably. And Rivian is not there yet, and you're losing $36,000 for every car they make. What does that mean at the current price range that they are is that they basically have to cut their average cost in half

to not only go positive gross margin, but also have big enough gross margin to support their growing infrastructure, service center, charging station, and all that. But this update combined with some, you know, a lot of the things that have changed lately, they put them in a pretty good position because personally, one of the main things that was preventing me from going with Rivian has been charging network.

Now they have access to the supercharger. By the way, this 2025 version model here doesn't have NACs, but it does come with an adapter. So it basically has maybe like five seconds to your charging experience. Other than that, you have access to a supercharger network. NACs is going to come apparently next year. It's the same for not just Riven, but all other automakers making vehicles in North America.

so yeah charging infrastructure was the main problem then it was autopilot coming from a tesla driver for years autopilot is very useful on the highway i love it and uh revion is a little bit behind on that front but with the new hardware suite right now and they have their own in-house team their own software stack gathering data train new new system i think they're gonna get

you know close to like something to autopilot fairly soon and uh and then obviously they want to go to level three they're not talking about like full self-driving like tesla but at the same time that's something that i i don't like about tesla that they don't want to even do a level three which you know i think they might be even able to at this point but elon has always been super focused on level four and even said level five which you know i think that's gonna bite tesla in the ass but

You know, level three is super useful if you can, you know, stop paying attention on the highway for, you know, sometimes you, if you're going to drive long distance, most of it normally is going to be on the highway unless you have like, you live like deep in the country or something. Even then, most of the time, you're going to try to optimize your driving by going to the highway because you can drive faster there.

So if you can make that level three and you're not responsible during that time, you can not pay attention. It is super valuable. So I think Riven is going to get there at some point. Cannot say exactly how, when, because...

They don't want to put a timeline on it, which I think they've learned some from competitors not to. So smart on their part. But I do believe they're going to get there, especially with that future-proof hardware suite. My only concern with that, though, is I couldn't see any driver-facing camera. And I got some mixed feedback from the company. Some people in the company said, yeah, there is one. They removed it.

they had one in early ones and then they removed it and they didn't put it back in this one yeah in the next gen which technically i don't know level three even for level three i think you would need one yeah if you don't have anything in the steering wheel like cruise and ford or they do have uh they do have steering wheel sensors though so they can detect if you're on the wheels but you don't technically level three it's hands-free

It's also attention-free, so technically you don't have to put attention. No, but I mean like the Cruze and GM stuff has eye detectors in the actual steering wheel. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm not talking about that. No, I didn't see any of that either. I'm saying they have like sensors to detect your hands on the steering wheel. Unlike Tesla, that has to detect pressure, torque on the wheel. So that might be one of my concerns for actually level three though.

All right, Volkswagen unveiled a new ID.7 GTX. Solid vehicle here, I think to the ID.3, 4, 5, 6 buzz lineup. Right now, we only have European spec, European pricing on this. So you have two trims, the Pro and Pro S, like the ID.4.

It starts at 57,000 euros, the equivalent of 62,000 US. That's for the base pro with a 77 kilowatt hour battery pack, 285 miles of range, 221 kilometers, so don't double your TP, but still over 300 miles. Then you have the pro version with a larger battery pack that was arranged on this. Well, I had it on Bob, I think. Yeah, 440 miles, 709 again.

wltp uh you're equipped with the 240 kilowatt motor zero to sixty to five point four seconds volkswagen has never been known for their you know speedy evs uh that's sixty eight thousand seven hundred for the prop is that the pro-esque the all-wheel drive uh dual motor one okay yeah sixty two thousand

The equivalent of $60,000 for the Pro at $385,000. If you want the max range, it's just $2,000 or more at $64,000 for 440 miles. You have the Tour version that you lose a little bit of range out of it, $65,000. Then you have the GTX, GTX Tours, 370 miles, $68,000 equivalent. 363 miles for the GTX Tour at $69,500. A lot of options. 200 kilowatt charging.

10 to 80 in 26 minutes respectable yes so yeah this is coming to europe right now basically but uh the launch in the us has been pushed back there's no specific yet we're hoping it still makes to the us but we uh we're not sure when volkswagen's being a little bit quiet on that front yep we got a little sighting of the porsche cayenne ev

Porsche likes their camouflage and it's pretty heavy here. So not a ton to see, but this is one of our first look at the Cayenne EV. Obviously, we have the Macan EV coming and apparently this is going to be on the same platform. So even though we don't have the specs on this, we expect the specs to be basically the Macan, maybe a little bit shorter range, a little bit slower because it is bigger.

The Cayenne is bigger, I think. Yeah, the Cayenne. And also, we're supposed to get the Boxster between now and the Cayenne. Yeah, if that timeline makes sense. We've seen the Boxster a little bit more, too. The Porsche has been a little bit slow to adding more vehicles to the lineup. It feels like it, yeah. The Macan has seen a lot of delays. All right, and finally, the Kia EV4, which also Hideli...

heavily camouflaged been spotted you have the ev3 and the ev4 is going to sit in between and we have an expected you know 30 to 50 000 price range we add obviously the concept of it that was released but the concept was you know very concepty we were like all right this is probably not something that we're going to see uh in the production version so this is what's the concept here

this here though even though kia i have to admit is they're they're pretty forward with the design so it might look not too far from it but looking at this vehicle that was spotted here in korea um you can fast forward through that yeah here is the actual vehicle here again heavily camouflaged but at least shape wise it does look a lot like the concept it's really again really hard to see because heavily camouflaged but if you look at the back the back looks very similar

Two-tone top. He gave us some nice close-up. Nice close-up with some heavy camouflage. Do we know when the AV-4 is supposed to be officially revealed? No, I don't think we have an official date just yet. Usually they convert in Korea, then...

everywhere else korea europe finally north america last all right let's jump into the comment section real quick if you guys have any questions for us either about any topic that we discussed today or things that uh in the ev space that you want us uh our opinion on you can put them in the comment section right now on whatever app you're listening to and we'll get to it all right a l or ai says can you please talk about the honda prologue and how it compares to the maki and model y

I had a quick look at the Prologue just to catch up. It's a little pricey, especially compared to the Model Y with all the discounts and stuff. It does seem similar to the Mach-E in size and shape. It's a CUV kind of thing. All things being equal, I'd probably go with a Ford or Tesla over this just because those two companies are more all-in on EVs. When you go to the

dealer or Tesla showroom, they're going to know EVs. They're going to know how to fix them. Honda's a little bit behind in that stuff. But it looks like a fine car. If you're a Honda guy and you want an EV, why not? Yeah, I'm sure you're up in the air on that. All right. Carl in San Diego. Biggest news this year. Farley confesses lightning NMC batteries cost Ford between $30,000 and $40,000. Remember, Panasonic was not able to profit in Nevada Gigafactory battery production for years.

I mean, I guess that would be one reason why they are moving to LFP batteries, especially in their lower-priced vehicles. That seems like a crazy price, though, $30,000 to $40,000. How big is the battery in the Lightning? The Lightning is $140,000, I think, kilowatt-hours. It's still kind of pricey. All right. $98,000, $131,000. $131,000.

All right. Meaning they were supplying Model 3 packs below cost. Low and declining battery pack prices were a myth and pickups were all underwater. Industry wildly overestimated battery cost decline from increased volume with the impacts defy rights law. A lot of stuff there. I mean, there's been a hop and a down. It depends when you negotiated your contract. I mean, if you remember, the lithium prices went like absolutely insane for a while. Same thing for nickel and cobalt at some point, though not as much.

So there's a lot of costs that went all over the place and things have settled down though. I think right now the battery costs have declined significantly and it went up, I think a little, it went consistently down all the time and instead of 2022, 2023, I think it went up a little bit, but now it's going back down. So I'm not too concerned on that front. And, you know, we're talking about battery pack costs too here, like I would assume so at $30,000, $40,000. Yeah.

That's not just, you know, penicillin, not just the cell manufacturer that have an impact here. There's a lot of things you can do to reduce your battery pack costs at the module level, at the pack level, power electronics. So, you know, it's on Ford too. All right. Moving on. All that was before the show even started. Fred is the man from BGM. He's quite verbose here. So we'll get Arlon.

Can't stop lying. That one-year quote will be in a lawsuit. You'll have to be more specific which one. No, I think even the lawyer one. But yeah, I mean, at this point, I think you have to weigh in, you know, the benefits of having Elon in your company with the legal liability issues of having him in there. Like the lawsuits are going to come from what he said in the last few months are going to be an AV burden for any company.

All right, Elon clarified training with those 50,000 NVIDIA chips will demand one kilowatt per and thus drain 50 megawatts around the clock. No, Elon, you're not doing more for the environment. Well, it depends what those chips are doing. Theoretically, they could be doing something positive. Yeah, that's coming from like renewable energy. And it's not it's not too bad. And Tesla has been good on that. Their whole roof is going to there's already a ton of solar on the Texas factory roof. And it's going to be apparently full of solar at some point.

All right. Friend picked up and bought a homeless Cybertruck today. Beyond happy emojis. Yeah, I've heard some good things. We had a friend of the show or friend of the site won a Cybertruck and Zach did a great post on that today. So check that out. My Jeep Wrangler P have also has lights to indicate the state of charge. It's great. Yeah, why not? I think it's good.

Here's the important question, Fred. Why 2.7? I've gained a few pounds, so that probably added to it. To be honest, I think it's just the grip at first. They were doing a lot. They were putting warmers on the wheels, on the tires.

So they were doing that and they were spraying the track. And sometimes it looked like it was even too sticky. Like some people were having like a weird start. Mine was not too bad, honestly. It was also like the state of charge was going down after a while. I don't know why I'm justifying it. 2.7 seconds is like more than... It's pretty fast for a truck, for a pickup. I'm out here justifying myself. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. The TriMax has the disconnect like the dual, so it could get better on the highway and different driving modes. Yeah, that's really cool. The TriMotor is super efficient for being that powerful of a truck because of that disconnect. It's really cool. Regarding the Cybertruck police car, it is also bulletproof, which would be good for police cars, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's bulletproof to a certain degree. Unless they hit the windows, which then you're dead. Oh, well. Yeah.

Uh, solar gym has gone, uh, ID seven, not coming to the U S according to VW putzes. I mean, it could come eventually. It just not, not announced yet. Yeah. Uh, nine 11 hybrid has no emissions, fuel mileage benefits. Clearly they aren't in any hurry to retire ice instead of banking on stupid clean gas concept.

Yeah, I mean, on the 911, they've been pretty clear that I think more recently they've been a little bit more open to going electric with it. But for the most part, it's like they basically make it clear that if we go electric with it, it's going to be the last one in our lineup to go electric. Yeah, their CEO said that at some point, I think at the LA Auto Show a few years ago.

um lightning was supposed to cost 40k so it was a cyber truck yeah well yeah that's been disappointing for sure uh full self-driving is pretty good i coach it to go with the accelerator pedal to engage encourage it to turn left or keep speed in the left turn rate lane that actually i think was a problem with some of the tesla fans showing uh um full self-driving i think i think they were accused of

hitting the gas pedal and make it look more smooth. Which is an intervention, technically. It's the driver intervening. So, yeah, there's also this issue of like, does Elon mean...

just any driver intervention, like no in a year or whatever, five to 10 X improvement in miles between, or does he mean like critical intervention where if I don't intervene, there is danger happening? Because yeah, to be honest, I intervene more often without having any danger than with it. I do intervene for danger sometimes though.

But for the most part, it is just because I'm annoyed. Like, let's go. Like, what are you doing? Why are you driving like that? It's more for that I'm intervening most of the time. And those should count too because, you know, this product needs to be better than human drivers. Right. It's just not the case right now.

unless you're extremely biased. All right. Well, that's it for us this week, everyone. I do appreciate every single one of you that's been listening to the show this week. If you do enjoy the show, I would appreciate if you give us a thumbs up, a like, or whatever it is on your app that you're watching right now. And you can hit the subscribe button and notification button too. That helps the show a ton. I'm going to have my Tesla Cybertruck review and a video if you're watching on YouTube right now. If you're watching this on Saturday, it's probably going to be up already. But if not,

If not, keep an eye out on it. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and you're going to know exactly when it comes out. It's a fun one. There's a few memes in it. Mostly positive review, I think, on the Cybertruck, though I do point out a few things and I'm like this.

Could have been made differently or I don't know why Tesla did that. But for the most part, I think it's a fun review. It's going to be obviously on the electric website too in more details. But yeah, if you do enjoy the show, please give us a like, a thumbs up. And we'll see you same time next week. Have a good one.