TSLA results, cheaper Teslas, GMC Sierra EV, Ford F-150 EV towing, more
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and 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 winchob light from new york how are you doing seth i'm good all right i hope you're good because we have a big show this week obviously uh tesla earnings created a lot of new information that uh we're going to communicate with you today but also a bunch of other news seth got the f-150 lightning as we discussed last week and he

We took it on a little towing test that's going to be interesting to discuss later on in the show. There was a GMC Sierra EV that also was launched. We're going to take a look at that. We have also the Rolls-Royce, those first electric vehicles from Rolls-Royce. We're going to discuss that a little bit. But let's start with the earnings result with financial result themselves. It was a bit of a miss on revenue.

The street was expecting $22 billion in revenue. Tesla came in at around 21.5, so half a billion dollar miss. It's a significant one. I think there was already the delivery miss on the expectation. Tesla came in about 20,000 units under the expectation. So I think the Wall Street had little issues adjusting the revenue with the delivery miss, even though they had like, what, three weeks to do it. They're not perfect on that front.

So but on the profit side, on earnings per share, Tesla beat the expectation by five cents per share. It became a dollar or five versus a straight dollar, a flush dollar, which is significant. That's a 5%.

beat right there it's not it's it's no joke in terms of earnings like a dollar per share doesn't sound that much anymore but like you have to keep in mind that uh with the split that happened last quarter like a dollar per share it it's like three dollars for sure before that before the split so it's significant

Record operate, well, record everything basically because even though it was a miss on revenue, it's still a record variant for Tesla due to the record in deliveries. So operating free crash flows,

Before we knew about the delivery miss, I was saying that Tesla was going to probably come in with a $4 billion free cash flow this year. It's actually $3.3 billion because of the miss. But still, Tesla is generating cash like crazy right now. There's just no doubt about it. An important metric to keep track of is the gross margins.

Came in at 27.9, the same as last quarter. It's a little bit down from earlier this year where Tesla was hitting the 30% gross margin, but it's still an auto industry leading gross margin. There's no doubt about that.

So let's jump into all the pieces of news that were released throughout the day. But I've been staying on the financials. I think we're going to start with Elon when he said about the valuation of the company, because I think it was clear because it was the first thing that he said in the conference call. And of course, if you've been a Tesla investor in the last few months, it's been hard. The stock has gotten a beating, but the rest of the market also is getting a beating like this.

So it looks like we're entering a recession right now and the market has felt it. So it's not just Tesla, but like a lot of things, Tesla being volatile, it's often you see the impact even greater on Tesla.

That led him to, in my opinion, clearly some damage control at the early in the call, especially with the revenue miss that hit the aftermarket. Tesla was like down 5% after the release. So Elon looked like in complete damage control in terms of Tesla's valuation, which led to first...

well that to be fair that wasn't reactive because the the board had to talk about that beforehand so i'm sure it's been in the work for a little bit but the stock buyback he announced that tesla is actually going to launch a five to ten billion dollar share buyback program if you're not familiar with that that's a company is simply buying

back their shares from the public market, which reduce the outstanding shares available for the public to buy. It also increases demand for the stock by again, five to 10 billion. The plan is not concrete yet, but Elon communicated that the board has talked about it as everyone seems on board with it. So they're going to move forward after a formal proposal.

So yeah, that's normally some kind of indication that the company believes that their stocks is undervalued. So Tesla is trading about $200 a share right now. After doing the split, after the split, they were going to like 297, something like that. So Tesla has basically lost $100, like 25%, 30% of the value over the last, since the stock split. It's not good. So that...

shows a little bit of confidence. And then where the hype came in is Elon came in with his own prediction in terms of Tesla's market capitalization, saying that he sees, he reminiscent on, on his previous prediction that Tesla is going to surpass Apple in value, uh,

But here's the little caveat, though. So when he said that a few years ago, Apple was worth about $700 billion. And now he kind of says mission accomplished. And now Tesla, at least when he was talking about it, Tesla was worth about $700 billion. Now I think it's like $650 or something. But

He was saying like mission accomplished, even though Apple is not worth anything near $700 billion right now. But apparently he was talking about, oh, we can achieve the current valuation of Apple. And now, so now that apparently it's mission accomplished, he set a new expectation that he thinks that Tesla can be more valuable than Apple's current valuation, which is about $2.3 trillion with a T.

on top of it they said it can be valued more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined so some day America is one biggest oil producer in the world and it's also world about the same as Apple over over two trillion dollars with a T so he's saying that Tesla could be worth over four trillion dollars and he added that that's without Optimus like what Thomas is like a bonus to that so if the Optimus program is successful that's

Had up another $2 trillion to the thing. So that sounds a little bit like a stock pump to me. A little bit? I mean, yeah. So, I mean, it's absolutely true. Like, it could be. A lot of things would have to happen. Like, no other EVs, you know, companies would have to be good. I think they would have to really score with FSD. Yeah, they would have to solve full self-driving for that to happen. Right, and nobody else...

would also have to solve, like they would have to be the only ones to have full self-driving. I think that would maybe put them in that kind of classification. But, you know, as we know, other companies are doing pretty good. Well, I think to, not to interrupt you, but just to clarify, I, I,

We know Waymo already operates in Phoenix and San Francisco. We learned this week they're expanding to Los Angeles and everything. These services, I think, are going to work. It looks clearly like these are going to be successful transportation services. I think these can exist. But for Tesla to be crazy successful like that, I think they need to be the only one that have the full self-driving that you can buy the car. Right. Yeah.

because you cannot buy a Waymo. You're never going to be able to buy a Waymo. But you can buy a Tesla, and then if it does become full self-driving, and it's your own car, and then you put the Tesla network into that. I think if Tesla is the only one to have that at scale, then yeah, I mean, you can set the one self-driving, and it's not that there's not any other companies that figure out self-driving, but there are these fleet that need a lot of management like Waymo and Cruise. You don't think Waymo is going to

try to get their technology into consumer vehicles? Maybe they're going to get it, but Waymo is way more careful of a company than Tesla, to say the least. And if they do, they might do some kind of approach similar to what Tesla did at the beginning. Like, oh, it's about safety, so we're going to deploy some technology that is going to make their cars a lot safer. Maybe they're going to license that to some automakers that they're going to decide to go with it. But from what I can see right now from Waymo,

I think they're just going to keep doing what they're doing right now, which is expanding to a new market, like scan the hell out of a market of a specific region. Like right now they are doing it with downtown L.A. and Hollywood, West Hollywood and a few other areas in the greater L.A. And then deployed vehicle on there to offer a service like a Uber service in the city.

And I think they're going to keep expanding with that. And maybe one day they're going to reach a level that's like, oh, you can get a Waymo from LA to Austin, Texas or whatever. But for now, I think that's way further in the future. This approach is obviously you can criticize it of whether it's going to happen or not. But it's obviously a lot more ambitious than that. Yep, definitely more ambitious. But if you just take...

that's the thing though if you just take the the vehicle business the selling car business if you believe um tesla's ramp up to 20 million units and if tesla has any credibility at all it's on the product the ramp up of the electric vehicle production like the that's where they have the most credibility and not only as a company itself like compared to the other other vehicle programs and other fsd programs and all that that they have less credibility on now especially on the timeline front

They have more credibility than any other companies in doing that. They are incredible at ramping up production. Even companies like Ford, who has 100 years of experience in ramping up production of vehicles, they're having issues in electric vehicle ramp up. So this has a lot of credibility on that. If they get to 20 million units, I mean, with a million units right now, they are generating what is it?

it's over like 10 billion of free cash flows per year with a million unit, imagine 20 million unit

That's an insane cash flow that they're producing. And then there's like the supercharger aspect. I think supercharger is going to be a huge business, especially when they open to other EVs and all that. In like five, six years, that's going to be like a multi-billion dollar business to you a year. So there's a lot of growth opportunities. I'm still very much...

yeah yeah energy front is like barely tapped into the energy front too right now it's just the energy front I I I think a little bit more issues with um the wheel on is talking about oh it could be just as big as their vehicle business um but we we don't we see the energy scale test as an incredible uh we can discuss that too uh this has an incredible uh

quarter for energy storage deployment. I think they deployed 2.1, they said. Yeah, 2.1 gigawatt hour. It's not only a record, it's like a massive record. It's like half a gigawatt hour more than the previous record. So

On that front, on the solar, on the actual energy generation front, we don't see that much growth. And it's hard to see it like an exponential growth like the Tesla vehicles because you're going to have to have staff to install those. The solar deployment, it's all about the installation rate and the stuff we need to hire, like,

tens of thousands more people to have and kind of scale that would match their vehicle business yeah and whenever there's like a bottleneck in supplies the energy business always gets constrained they always lose out to the automotive business um you know there's not batteries power walls don't get any batteries for a while that kind of thing yeah and now that's that's what we're seeing right now with the 2.1 god hour we see a ramp up in

Tesla was not kidding when they said like, oh, batteries is not a problem this year because they are having enough for both the vehicle programs and the stationary energy storage. And we're hearing that the mega factory in California that produces the mega pack is doing like very good. Like they are ramping up extremely fast right now. They're not quite at the 40 kilowatt hour per year that they are talking, but they might get there very fast. And I would,

I would predict that Q4 is going to be even bigger than the giant record that this had in Q3 because obviously the ramp-up of mega factory is extremely recent and it takes a while for that to show up in the deployment because Tesla produces them, but then they have to deliver them. The project needs to be commissioned and everything. So it's a solo ordeal. So maybe I think we're going to see a ramp-up in Q4, but 2023 might be the year of stationary storage for Tesla.

just not solar yet i would like to see solar pick up a little bit all right probably the biggest news that came out of the whole uh i know it was just like one or two sentences that elon said is the next generation electric car platform for tesla so this this one has kind of been in the a little bit questionable like what's going to happen with that because

the plan sounded like it was always okay we we have the roadster very expensive model s a little bit cheaper model three a while a bit cheaper and then even cheaper car and then of course over the last few years elon has been talking about a 25 000 tesla vehicle that would have a giant impact on the ev adoption because it would increase the um access the market to the ev market by just having a much cheaper like basically like a

We have 25,000 vehicles right now. We have been talking a lot about the Bolt EV, of course, but the Bolt EV is extremely limited in terms of the output, though we are hearing good things about 2023 with going from like 40,000 units to 77,000 units that they make for next year. So there's going to be bigger availability. But of course, if Tesla launches a $25,000 car, it's going to be a car that they want to sell millions of units per year. It's as simple as that. Yeah.

It's completely game changer. Like, oh, we already have $25,000 car and it's not selling in the millions. Yeah, you're not producing in the millions either. So that's a big difference. But then, wait. Just real quick, you know, I just got a bolt from my mom and we're actually looking at other bolts. There's a four to six month wait for all the bolts in my area right now. Four to six months. Like that's the middle of 2023 for...

Not beginning, but into spring to get a bolt right now. And it seems kind of like we're not reporting it because we don't have any solid evidence of this, but it seems like every bolt that can possibly be bought is being bought right now at that $25,000 price. And a lot of them much higher than an SRP, too. Right. Yeah.

So coming back to the... Oh, the one last thing is that I think in December or January 1st, they're going to get some tax credit, but probably not the full tax credit, depending on GM's battery situation.

Yeah, we get a lot of questions about that. Like what car, what rebate, everything. It's a super muddy situation right now. A lot of automakers are still waiting for the final guidelines that will answer that question. I think they're expected soon. But Tesla did say during their earnings that they do expect to get the full credit. They didn't specify which variants, obviously, but on some variants, I would assume. I don't think they assume that all cars are going to be able to get it. But yeah, yeah.

This is the question that everyone wants to answer too. And I think a lot of automakers don't even have those answers. But coming back to the $25,000 Tesla, it looked like it was happening. I mean, there was a lot of momentum last year, earlier this year about it, where Tesla was like even doing like a design contest in China because the goal was to produce a car in China. And they had the open like an engineering center there, design studio there. And they were like going to...

make that $25,000 car happen. But then 2022 happened and Elon said, you know what? The R&D focus right now is all on Optimus and on ramping up Model Y production with the new, not the whole new platform, but the Model Y has introduced a lot of new casting, bigger casting technology and all that in there that's making a big difference. So there's a lot of R&D that went into that.

So he said Tesla, uh, engineering of this year, he said, this is not working on a $25,000 car anymore. Then Elon also had made some comments that make it sound like it won't even be in the works. Like this is not going to be aiming to make it cheaper vehicle because of full self-driving reducing the cost per mile so much that he believes that

That going towards self-driving is going to be a best option for people that are looking for cheap transportation option because you're just going to use a Tesla network, which is the Uber-like service that Tesla wants to deliver with self-driving vehicles. That's going to be cheaper than owning a car.

But now it looks like it's back in the plans. And we saw some inklings of that with Elon saying that he's embarrassed by Tesla's pricing right now, which obviously a lot of it is inflation and all that, but he wants a cheaper Tesla vehicle. And during the earnings, earnings car was asked about like what's...

what's happening right now with the cheaper Tesla. And he said, it's the primary focus of our new vehicle development team. Obviously at this point, we are done with the engineering for Cybertrucks and Semi. So it's obviously what we're working on, the next generation vehicle, which will be probably about half the cost of the Model 3 and a Y platform.

It will be smaller, to be clear. So a smaller platform that enables smaller cars but are much cheaper. So he's kind of walking away from a $25,000 price target, it sounds like. But he's saying about half the cost of Model 3 and Model Y. So technically, the Model 3 starts at $47,000. So...

$25,000 could still be in the plans, but I would put something between 25 and 35 just to be sure. That would be a safer bet. Obviously, we are going to take everything we learned from S, X, 3, Y, Cybertruck, and Semi into that platform. But when we are on a 2-for-1 target, we're trying to get 50% of the cost numbered again.

So it's 50% improvement in cost.

And that's throughout Zachary Corcoran, Tesla CFO, kind of expand a little bit of that. That's the cost of capital expenditure to everything. They want half the space, half the factory space to the Model 3 and the Y. So Tesla is really betting heavy on the manufacturing aspect of it. They want a design of a vehicle platform that's just super easy to manufacture in order to keep the cost down and enable a cheaper electric car.

so i was really happy to hear that that it's back in the plans and everything is just he was asking about product announcement everything he says now this is not the place for a product announcement we understand that uh i'd be curious to see if there's any link between that supposed like robo taxi platform coming up and new cheaper platform because robo taxi wasn't mentioned at all in the earnings and we know that uh

At the annual shareholder meeting earlier this year, Elon kind of announced it, that this was going to do a robotaxi, like a dedicated robotaxi vehicle. It makes sense. You really don't want like a zero to 60 in three seconds robotaxi, right? Yeah. But do you want it smaller though? You don't want it smaller than Model 3, Model Y. Yeah, I mean, I guess the platform, I don't know.

Well, if it's optimized, if it's a smaller, but it's optimized for a taxi service, like if there's literally no driver's seat or whatever, like you can probably optimize it to make it like fit four or five person in there. But I don't know. Yeah, it's like that cruise thing that was built on the Bolt platform. It's like a big, you know, there's no, it's like a train car almost. Because a Model Y is great for like a taxi service. You remember, have you ever tried in New York the Revel? No.

No, I've seen those everywhere. But every time I'm in New York, I see at least one of them. I tried them last time I was there a few months ago. And I was expecting like the, you know, because they announced that they modified the Model Y to make it more like they removed the front passenger seat and everything. So like you have like basically lounge and if you're like alone in the back and everything.

But apparently they gave up on that. So it's just plain old regular of a Y, which is fine because when they used it, we were like four of us. So we needed that front seat. That's good. Yeah. So yeah, cheaper vehicle platform coming from Tesla at half the price with a multi-mode Y platform. That's the goal.

Very important too, we got an update on the progress on the 4680 battery cells. Tesla is always vague about that. So what they said this time is that the total number of 4680 cells produced, which put on paradise is cell center formation. So this is the last step. I think they sit around for a while. Increased three times sequential

in Q3. So three times more cells were produced in Q2 than in Q2, which would be super impressive if we knew how many cells Tesla produced in Q2. But as far as we know, when they produce one cell in Q2 and three in Q3, obviously I'm exaggerating, but like that's, you have to put this in perspective. Kirkhorn did elaborate a little bit that gave us a little bit more information is that, that Tesla is currently tracking to produce enough 4680 cells per

per week to produce a thousand car this quarter. So that's a little clearer, like at 60 kilowatt hour per car, that's 60 megawatt hour of 46 AD cells per week or an annual production rate of three gigawatt hour, which is starting to be significant here. It's not...

nowhere near the 100 gigawatt hour that uh tesla was aiming for but um well i don't i think they were aiming for for next year but you know next year so this it's not like they're behind the goal but they're still i mean they're still far from that goal that's my point uh but then the uh the kind of surprise that i'll say a little bit because the it doesn't look like this is going to be super reliant on the 4680 cells like it sounds like all that at least for sure these thousands per weeks are all for the model y production in gigafactory texas because

Sorry, a lot of our assumption was that Tesla Samai used the 4680 cell. During the call, Elon confirmed that that's not the case, that Tesla is not using the 4680 for the cells. They didn't elaborate which cells they're using. I assume it's the 2170, but they said it's not the 4680. Then it was specifically asked, too, is the 4680 cell production REM going to be a problem for the Cybertruck production next year?

And Elon says, no, he didn't say don't expect it to be a problem. He didn't say that the Cybertruck is not using the 468 cell, just that it's not going to be a problem. So that wasn't clear. I would assume it would be using the cells, but not clear.

uh tesla some minor not a lot of new information on the ssmi other than yeah it's in production in early production right now and first deliveries are coming in december and how's that but he did put a target on a total production of 50 000 test smi uh in 2024. so production just started right now elon says it takes about a year to ramp up

So they were going to be a big ramp up into 2023. And then in 2024, Tesla could have the capacity to produce 50,000 SSMIs per year. So that would be kind of massive. We wouldn't make this one of the largest Class A truck manufacturers. And that's going to be in Nevada, right? No, no, no. I think they're going to move the production to Texas at that point. I don't think they're going to ever have the capacity to produce 50,000 trucks in Nevada. I don't think that's the goal. Okay.

From what we heard last year when we first reported that Tesla was going to produce them there, they installed the capacity for five trucks per week. But I think they're going to learn a lot from that production and then move to a much higher volume production in Texas. I know that's something I like to track with every...

earnings result release is the infrastructure that Tesla is building around its business and how it compares to deliveries. And it was a very good quarter for the infrastructure. The stores and service centers increased 41 location in a single quarter. So that's much bigger throughout the last year or two. Tesla has been growing at about 18 to 25 new location per quarter. So 41 is a

big increase versus 16% increase year over year compared to 42% growth in deliveries so

It's still tracking much behind deliveries. But you cannot, like it's not equal anyway because each location is different. Some locations can have much higher capacity than others. And we know that Tesla, we reported a lot on that on the last few months, that Tesla is putting a lot of efforts into service and that they're putting a lot of energy into building bigger location with higher capacity. So each location is not equal to the other.

uh so that we we're just tracking the total number here so it's not perfect metric mobile service fleet also take care of a lot of uh service capacity for tesla and that drew a lot to last quarter with 79 new cars in the fleet for a total of 1532. uh yeah and then total stores and service location by the way it's 728 so this is a

A lot of location out there now. I don't know. I should check. How many Apple stores are there out there? Do we know that? More than that. Yeah, I would assume, but...

I don't know exactly. Yeah. On the supercharger front also, which is a very important infrastructure for Tesla, a lot of growth. Tesla deployed 2,718 new stations for Q3. So compared to 2,500 last quarter. So it's a new record by itself. Tesla now operates 38,883 supercharger at 4,283 locations.

It grew 33% year over year. So that's very impressive. Again, lagging a bit behind 42% for the global deliveries. And now you have to take in mind that you cannot only compare it to the growth in deliveries for Tesla because Tesla is starting to add non-Tesla EVs to the network. So that's a lot more potential traffic at the Supercharger station. So the de-deployment rate needs to increase a lot.

But we see Tesla putting a lot of effort in that. In the shareholders letter, Tesla mentioned paid supercharging grew more than three times compared to the prior year, and we're working to further accelerate our deployments. We continue to expand supercharger pricing from fixed to variable to better manage vehicle flow to our network. Yeah, the variable pricing is certainly a big asset for Tesla to try to manage traffic at those stations.

But yeah, three times more revenue from paid supercharging than last year. That's a big increase. And I think Tesla is going to keep that growth going because especially now that all new EVs that Tesla deploys don't have free supercharging. They don't even have the $1,000 free supercharging. Maybe that's going to change soon. We're going to have another story to discuss that.

uh later on about that but also obviously the non-tesla evs are are all paid customers and probably pay a little bit more to in the future all right that was announced last night the new tesla quicksilver and cherry red were unveiled so those are the new tesla white colors that are enabled by the

supposedly cutting edge paint shop that Tesla has at Gigafactory Berlin that Elon described as the best paint shop in the world that's enabling these multi-coat colors that give a lot of depth. So for the first time, we get to see them. And let me tell you, I'm extremely impressed. There's no way to cut the music on that.

Guess not. The Instagram integration is not the best. But you see them here. The video is so much better. You can see it. I'm pretty sure that video and the picture don't give it justice too because those multi-coat paint jobs, there's a lot of depth to it. So when you see the sun going through it, you can see all the different variations of the color in it. It's beautiful. So a big success for Tesla. I think on that, the Quicksilver, also the picture there is not...

nowhere near as good as I've seen in the videos. Why do you think they only did it in Berlin as opposed to like Fremont where you could be painting more expensive Model S's and X's? Yeah, multi-coats is apparently very difficult. I'm not a paint expert. There's a lot of people that

there's there's a lot more complexity than than people think it's not like even painting a wall is like there's there's like an amateur painting a wall and professionals it's like two different things and then you take that on a vehicle's body instead it's so much more complex and also needs to withstand a much harsher environment and walls in your house so hopefully unless you're pretty hardcore

So there's a lot to it. And apparently the new paint shop in Berlin allows for like a very complex multi-coating system to apply the paint that enables these new colors that have a lot of depth to them. But yeah, you're right. I mean, it would make a lot of, because they are not cheap. So Jamie wrote that post. I think he shared the pricing on them. Okay, so they are replacing the previous gray and red that was available. So the white is still the base one.

And now the previous gray was 1,600 euros. Now it's 3,000. And the previous red was 2,000 euros. Now it's 3,200 euros. So those are not cheap color options. They're expensive. So it would make more sense to offer them in...

on like the mo s and x i think they would be popular but for now it's going to be for just for the model y and gigafactory berlin elon did say something about like yeah uh we're gonna have more color in the us coming but he didn't say that it was these ones these multi-coat ones but you might we might need an upgrade uh at fremont for sure uh what colors do you think would

be the next ones to be added. I mean, these twos are, I think they knock it out of the park, to be honest. I'm a big fan. Like, bring that to the US, bring that to the Model X and the S, I think a lot of people are going to go for it. Even if they are... You'll just bring these same colors. I thought you meant like, you know, brown or green or something.

I mean, they look so good, Seth. I'm not joking. You could make a lot of different variations of that in brown and green and all that. I know that Tesla is not a big fan of options. These are not new options. They replaced previous options. There's still now only five color options for your Model Y in Berlin. Is it true that Elon hates yellow?

Oh, yeah. I remember. That was an old meme thing. Yeah, that was. He completely denied that, by the way. I mean, who likes a yellow car, though? It's a very narrow, you know, where yellow works. Yeah, I know the Mustang kind of popularized it a little bit. Like when Mustang started offering a yellow color, like a lot of people like went for it. Was that the saline one?

Yeah, I'm sure Selena offered a yellow collar. I'm going to get suits set. Come on.

But yeah, I think there's definitely room for more customization, especially with the volume Tesla is selling. Tesla is going to sell like 600,000, 700,000 Model Y this year. You see a lot of them. I'm in the middle of nowhere, but I'm deep in Quebec. I'm not near a big city or anything like that. And I see a Model Y every day. They are becoming extremely common vehicles to have. And they're all the same colors. Or they should do a wrap maybe. Maybe they do a wrap.

yeah i mean uh there's a lot of people do with them but they are expensive if they could offer like a factory wrap that would that would be less expensive that would be nice a lot more color options but these these multi-code though like they're they're different like you know like you can get some nice wrap but like this is this is awesome i think like i'm i'm a big fan if you cannot if you can't tell so i want to see a lot more of those uh

Maybe Tesla's going to get so good with manufacturing at one point that they're going to want to throw some challenge at themselves. And they're like, all right, let's offer a whole gamut of 10 super nice colors. Or you know what? What if Tesla just said, look, here's the wheel. You pick a spot on here and we'll computer match that color to your car. So they'll have like 64,000 colors. In fact, I think Tesla's going to do that. 2035. Yeah.

They already have that in the car. You can already choose any color you want in the car. Right, exactly. So I think they're going to have a thing on the web where you have a wheel and you pick somewhere on the wheel and they're like, okay, we'll color match that. But that's just like...

One color. There's more to that in those cars, like Quicksilver and Midnight, like those multicolored. It's more than just our color. It's like shiny stuff and clear coat and all the other stuff. Yeah, it's a lot of depthness. It's a bunch of different reds put on top of each other that create this depthness. It's pretty crazy. And the Quicksilver. I think I might like the Quicksilver more than the red.

I mean, my mobile S signature, like 2012 vehicle, the signature red still looks awesome on it. People always look at it and say, I've never seen a Tesla like that color. It's like real nice. Another new Tesla news this week, already 36 minutes to the show and we're barely, we're not even out of the Tesla news this week. But this one is another interesting one, to be honest. Tesla launched a new J1772 on charging station for EVs other than Tesla.

So they did that last year, if you remember, for like a brief period of time. But it looked either like a test or like...

a surplus of of connectors or what i don't know what happened but it was like the old tesla charging station that they had and he just put the j1772 connector to it this is the new station with a new connector itself the connect look at that the connector is nice that might be the nicest j1772 connector i've seen that's definitely cool yeah so far and 550 dollars

So if you're familiar with charging station prices, this is cheap for a station that will give you, is it 11, 9 kilowatts or 11 kilowatts? 40 amps is 9.6 kilowatts. So I think this goes to 48. So that'll be around 11.6 kilowatts. Yeah, 11 kilowatts. And that Wi-Fi connectivity, yeah,

You can split the power. There's a lot of features that come. It's basically the most advanced Wi-Fi connected station that Tesla has all those features available. So this is very cool for $550. Tesla is going to put a lot of competition in the market, I think, for that.

So do you think that this is the early sign that Tesla is going to go to CCS Combo on their cars in the U.S.? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know because last time they came out, it was such a short amount of time. It could have been for roadster owners or something that needed an adapter. I think there's a roadster adapter for this one, but there's not a roadster adapter for Tesla's typical charger. Or maybe there is. I don't know.

But now that they're really doing this thing and looks like they've spent some time designing it, it makes me think that they're going to think about it more. Or maybe they just want to be like the everything charging brand. Yeah. I mean, the page itself, the marketing around it, to me, looks more like your second option because they're making it clear this is not for a Tesla vehicle. I mean, you can still use it with a vehicle with the included G 1772 Tesla connector that comes with every car.

So you can use it, but if I'm a Tesla owner, I wouldn't gravitate towards that. First of all, it's more expensive than Tesla's own wall connector without the adapter, $150. So $150 that you save on that. And it is easier than having to plug the adapter. To be fair, you had like five seconds. Also the button. You know how there's a button on Tesla chargers? Yeah.

does this doesn't have the button or does it if it does it does have a button i don't know if it's going to operate the same as that i think it might be the uh the latch there though yeah it might just be the latch so it's this could be an option for tesla owners that do have a tesla vehicle in another vehicle that is not a tesla like if you have a bolt ev and a tesla that that could be a good option because then you can charge more car with it you just have to put an adapter on your tesla when you when you use it for your tesla

So I don't know. But the way the marketing around it looks, it looks to be more for like commercial properties. Like this says, like if you're a developer or manager or owner of a commercial real estate interested in purchasing more than 12 J72 wall connectors, visit commercial charging. They talk a lot about, you know, now you can charge people with the Tesla destination charger network so you can install some of those charges on your property.

add them to the Tesla Decision Charger network, and Tesla has a system to charge people for using it so that it can be a source of revenue for people, greatly accelerate deployment of level 2 charging. So there's a lot of that at play.

And I would assume that a lot of people, when Tesla discuss deploying a decision charging station with them, they're like, oh yeah, but it's just for Tesla vehicles. And in the past, Tesla even paid for Cooper-Cleek's charging station, level 2J1772, combined with their own decision chargers and location just because of that. So now Tesla can just use their own charging station for that. So that could be just that, honestly.

A lot of people says, why is it more expensive? Because it's exactly the same with the Cess Connector versus J1772. I would assume that there's a licensing fee just for using the connector. I think the J1772 has a licensing fee. And it might be as big as the difference, like $150 difference. That might be just the licensing fee. It's that crazy. That would be really sad, but it would explain why.

charging stations are so expensive to begin with. Yeah, they're hard to make cheap. You see some of them out there that are similar to that price, but they're a lot more rugged looking. They're not as fancy. And a lot of them don't have Wi-Fi connectivity like Tesla's and all that. All right. There was an app update this week that gave us two important information that we discussed. The first one is the consumer-facing one. So that's in the release, in the update. Tesla discussed the fact that now they have

a lock screen widget that display vehicle battery range. That's cool. That's with the new Apple update, I would assume, like that enables a lot of lock screen widget now. But the biggest one is that a quick control to unlatch Model 3 and Model Y driver's door, and Tesla itself wrote in the release note, helpful if the door handle is frozen, only works with the vehicle software 2022.36 and higher.

So what this does here is you can unlock your doors already with the app.

but if you unlock the door with the app you still once you get to your model three or model y you still have to press on the on the door handle and open it now if your door handle is frozen which i've seen uh happen on my car before you can see it here i show up to my car and i try to press it and it just literally doesn't like put my full body weight on my time here to try to uh to press it and it wouldn't open because the actual door handle is frozen

What this update enables now is that even though the door is unlocked, it actually unlatches the door. So the door becomes unlatched. You can just pull it if it's possible. So yeah, it's nice, but

The other problem that comes with that is that they use frameless door windows. And you can see in that same video here a little bit later on, I finally able to open one here, boom, like that. And you see the door handle is frozen. I pull it, but the window doesn't come down here.

so the window is also frozen so that that's the bigger issue here so even though the door on latch if the window is frozen you're gonna have to pull it past the trim uh which i mean you can do it i've done it before but it's not ideal obviously because you can you can damage your trim you can damage the window also closing it back down is a problem because then depending on how

how strong you're willing to pull the door uh sometimes the glass stays beyond the trim so now you're driving around with basically open air coming it's not it's not good uh but uh fortunately i haven't had that much issues in the winter since the some of the last update with the preconditioning of the the pre-eating inside even though in that example i've been pre-eating for like 10 minutes so it's oh wow it's not it's no joke but uh test made some updates that did help with that so

I have a new problem. When I open the door, the handle doesn't close all the way. So when I close the door, the door just like, you know, it doesn't latch because the outside door handle is stuck open.

so do you have to push the endo in is that it or it eventually closes but um i think i got a wd-40 inside of it or something yeah no idea yeah it's not the best design of a door handle like this has some cool door handle designs from the early model s to to this but they are not have been the most uh reliable it's not a good sign when you have to label above it like how to open the door like they do in the tesla taxis yeah

Then the other thing that comes, but that's on the back end of the mobile app update. So thanks to our friends at Teslascope that found it in the back end. So it's not in public feature just yet, but it's an indicator that it's going to come up a big feature is a comeback of Tesla's referral program for vehicle. Because of course the vehicle, the referral program has never completely gone away. It's just, Tesla stopped using it for its vehicle and only use it for solar. Yeah.

If you're not familiar with the referral program, it was as simple as sharing a link. And if someone was to order a Tesla vehicle through that link, the person would get an incentive to do so. Normally, it was 1,000 miles of free supercharging. And then the person that did refer you would also get incentive, whether also, sorry, 1,000 miles of free supercharging for their car. Or before that,

It was bigger prizes that include like you can win a car. There was – you can get a $1,000 discount on a Roadster up to two free Roadster. And that's probably what killed the program right there because Tesla – For sure. Tesla – well, a lot of people – A new car. Yeah. A lot of people –

don't remember that period well. They're like, oh, Tesla screwed up. They didn't think this through or whatever. Or they say, oh, the program was abused by some of the more influential Tesla influencers. Who are you talking about, Fred? I mean, Electra got six Roadsters. Oh, we abused it.

You have to remember that time when it was like Tesla was having issues during that time. Like it was like the old demand is not an issue. Like Tesla says a lot in the last few years. Like, yeah, it wasn't an issue. But back then it was like Tesla was trying to sell those Model S and X. And then, of course, the Model 3 and Y came to play. Model Y, not so much like the Model 3.

program was basically dead by the time the Model Y came. Model Y is probably what saved Tesla. Without the Model Y, Tesla would have been in issues because there was a lot of problem ramping up through production. So during that time, Tesla needed that program to work. Then yes, they definitely kind of screw up with saying, oh, you can even get two

and they probably didn't think that so many people would get free roadsters. So from our own calculation, Tesla owes about 80 new roadsters for free. But that's just one part of the thing. They also hold significant discounts to a lot of people, and I would assume that a lot of them will want to buy them with a discount because even if you don't want to drive the car, you can just resell it and make some money. So...

There's probably like tens and tens of millions of dollars owed in. Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot for a company the size of Tesla nowadays. No, it's not for a company the size of days. And you have to account for the value of the referrals. Like the referral program did work a lot. Like it did work.

So yeah, the people did, people like Ling or herself did some marketing work for Tesla. There's no doubt about it. It's as plain as that. And Tesla now owe money for that in the form of cars. And I think Tesla Twitter is going to be excited to know that Fred and I will now be super Tesla fans again. The referral program is open. Yeah.

I don't know exactly what that's going to look like. Obviously, Seth is kidding. We're not going to change our opinion on this stuff just because we're putting out the free-for-all program again. And now I say that and I'm going to sound like I say that because it's not going to be as exciting of a program again, but it's the truth. It's just not going to be as exciting a program. They're not giving away roadsters anymore. Yeah, they're not going to win roadster or anything like that. It sounds like based on the back end of the code, it looks like the free supercharging miles are coming back. And that's cool. I do like this. That's not...

1,000 free supercharging miles for Tesla, it doesn't cost that much. Though we did have some information, and when Tesla shut down the program, that quarter alone, it was costing them like $23 million in free supercharging miles. That's crazy. So it's still not cheap, but not a lot in the grand scheme of things when you're trying to sell cars at a 27.9% gross margin. It's not that big of a deal. Right. Because that's not even a few hundred bucks per car.

But of course, it's both sides. That's what you have to keep in mind too. It's like it's a thousand free supercharging miles on a new car, but like the person that referred a car, I don't know if it's going to be a thousand or whatever, but it looks like your free supercharging miles coming back. And then it also looks like this is going to be credit for accessories in the Tesla store. So that could be interesting. This has some cool things in there that some people would want.

But what I'm more interested in is like what we heard last year, Tesla was working on, was preparing this new referral program. And we were hearing that Tesla was going to rely more on the app itself. So that makes sense now that we're seeing that some back end of the code is referencing a new referral program. So we were right about that, it sounds like. But what I was hearing is like Tesla wanted to reduce the reliance on like people just spamming their referral links.

on social media, on our websites and all that. And it's going to be more like person to person. So, um,

Like maybe like you send the app to someone like, oh, you should download the Tesla app and whatever. And then you get a referral from that. I don't know. I don't know exactly how it's going to work. No one's though. But it looks like it's getting closer to being released because it's now in the back end of the Tesla mobile app. And do you think the fact that the referral program is opening back up that Tesla is now thinking that it's going to be able to meet its supply to meet demand and it's going to have some extra supply?

Is that a sign, early sign of that? So we should. That's a good question, because we should mention that

There has been a lot of doubts about Tesla's demand lately and enough that Elon had to address it at the earnings this week. And he stuck to his speech that demand is not an issue for Tesla. We don't see demand being an issue in the foreseeable future and blah, blah, blah. Which I think is probably right about that and everything. But I also think that Tesla sees their production capacity increasing at an extremely fast pace, a lot of competition coming in.

and they know how successful the referral program was in the past, and they just want to replicate it, I think. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, a lot more supply coming, so they want to get this out the door.

All right, Seth, talk to us about this winter towing test that you did with the F-150 Lightning. You went to a friend's house and played around with her tiny house, trying to power it and do some god work. Yeah, so it's not quite winter yet, but it was about 40 degrees. And that's like, what, 6 degrees Celsius? Yeah.

So I have a buddy, actually, if we have some time, I'll tell a little about what he's doing. He's trying to build a little village of tiny homes. And I'm not sure if you're familiar, but in New York State, weed is legal to consume. It's legal to grow, but it's not legal to sell.

He's going to have a little... He's on a farm and he's going to have a little crop growing for weed. I know where this is going. You buy the Airbnb experience or whatever and then that includes access to the weed so you're not selling weed. You're seeing an Airbnb experience that includes weed. That's smart as hell. This is his prototype.

And, you know, it's pretty, pretty, you know, simple. Like, obviously, there's, you know, plumbing stuff is a little bit more complicated. But what's kind of nice is, you know, I was able to just plug into the Ford Pro Power and heat the home from the Ford at, you know, one kilowatt, which isn't too much. And, you know, that that would keep the home for days. So that was pretty cool. So that's a side.

But what we did is we loaded up his trailer. You can see the big Tex trailer there. It's about six feet high, seven feet wide. And we took that up a mountain to where his little village is starting. And, you know, we... There's a lot... Like, when you put a trailer on to an F-150, there's a lot of, like, settings to do. You have to, you know, what's the weight of the trailer? What's the...

you know, the height and the width of the front and, and, you know, you, you balance it. So there's not too much weight on the back wheels and not too much weight on the front wheels.

of the F-150. So we did all that. We went up the hill about six miles in. Our range went from about 130 miles of range to 68 miles of range. Like that. And I hadn't done my homework. What's the weight of that trailer? Because it looks huge. Yeah, it's like 5,000 pounds. Yeah, I get it. It was like 5,000 pounds loaded. So I didn't do my homework at that point. I didn't know that it...

it reconfigured and I was like, holy crap, are we going to even make it back? We just dropped 60 miles of range. And we kept going up and we were going down a lot slower. So at the beginning we were going like 160, 155, 150. So we were taking big jumps down in range. And then once we went in half, the range was kind of more like what we were expecting.

So by the time we got up there, I think it only had like 60 miles of range, which is fine because it's only a few miles away and we were going uphill. So coming back would be downhill. And, you know, it did fine. We extrapolated out, you know, if I had the full battery, it would probably been about 130 miles of range on flat ground.

So then I drove it cross country, stopped in Ohio, visited my folks, compared it to a Bolt EV size wise, kind of silly, and then continued on to Detroit where we did another towing test. This time it was Ford kind of taking me through everything and they had their own trailer and it was a lot more measured. So in that case, we got to, you know, it was an eight by eight front trailer and

It was 8,000 pounds, so quite a bit heavier. And we towed it to kind of the airport area. So Dearborn to the airport is about 15 miles-ish. And then we towed it back and we did a little bit of street driving in between. And overall, we were getting about a mile per kilowatt hour.

um driving at 55 to 60 miles per hour and when we went up to uh 65 to 70 miles per hour we saw a huge drop in the uh the efficiency so down to 0.8 so my you know I have lots of observations and takeaways but the big one was that you can get good range um towing you just have to be

reasonable about it. You have to do all the measurements that Ford wants you to do, but the reality is you can't drive 70 miles per hour. That's kind of the big one. If you drive 55 miles per hour, you're going to get over a kilowatt, sorry, over a mile per kilowatt. The Ford F-150 has 130 kilowatt hour battery, so

you're looking at at least 130 uh miles and then you know this one was the the decked out um one so if you had a um less you know that there's a model of the f-150 that has 320 miles range i think you're over 150 miles if you tow with that one um a big load so that was kind of my takeaway and it wasn't winter like it was 40 degrees and raining in detroit so

When it gets down colder, there are other things, other mitigations like precondition, which works really good with all EVs. And the thinking there is like when you're pulling something, the batteries are working a little bit harder, the motor is working a little bit harder. So that kind of heats the cabin and the batteries so you don't have to spend a lot of extra electricity doing that stuff. So, yeah, just...

Good experience checking that stuff out. There's been some silly YouTubes and TikToks or whatever that, oh, I can't believe the range on this with towing is so bad, that kind of stuff. So it was good to see firsthand it wasn't that bad.

i mean you have to expect when you're you're towing more than the weight of the car at one point it's gonna it's gonna affect the efficiency regardless of your motion and like really bad aerodynamics on those things as well yeah yeah yeah all right speaking of electric pickup trucks uh gmc unveiled the 2024 gmc sierra ev denali edition one so the

First one they're going to produce it's they're taking this very similar approach as the armor ev So there's the edition one first, it's going to be more expensive But it's going to be fully decked out with 400 miles of range crab walk just died like the armor ev and it looks slick, so I mean Might be worth getting the edition one just for the look here. Look at that. It's a nice looking truck

You're right. It has a lot of Hummer things on it, like the Crab Walk. I think it's got 200 kilowatt-hour battery as well, same battery, to get to 400 miles of range. Look at that front right there. It's big. The body's easy. I mean, grocery. That's still the front there? Take a look real quick at the go-back there. If you look at the buttons there,

um on the yeah that it says oh it's not there but um on another screenshot it had that with like a crazy amount of it was like 120 kilowatt hours or something kilowatts anyway

all right so uh the sierra like the uh gas part version you have another configuration which is nice so you you have a lot of box length uh change that you can have the standard box at 5 11 so almost 6 feet multi-pro mid-gate engage it's 9.1 multi-pro engaged with the load stop engage you have 10.10 feet of box length so this is significant they demonstrated that with this uh that's the

What do you call that again? It's the tailgate load stop engage. So this is this thing right there. You can put a full-size paddleboard. Yeah, and that's similar to the GM, sorry, the Chevy Silverado has similar features like that. All right, let me know the other spec, performance spec. So standard, the highest performance mode, up to 9,500 pounds of towing capacity.

that's nice yep do you have the battery no they don't they're not disclosing the battery capacity but they say 24 modules if we know how many modules there was in the hummer av we could tell you if it's the same total color pack but i would assume so right yeah i think so especially with 400 miles of range that do we have the weight of that thing i mean i'm sure if it's not as heavy as the hummer it could make a big difference but uh

Max power output of 754 horsepower, 0 to 16 under 4.5 seconds. So not quite Hummer acceleration, but still pretty nice for a big truck. 250 kilowatt charging capacity. It is on the 800 volt system. They also have a dual charging for 19.2 kilowatt on level two. That's also good.

The bi-directional charging, so the Power Station Pro on board offers up to 10.2 kilowatts of board power. Oh, interesting. That's more than the Silverado had, I think. And it's on par with Ford's. You know, is that really the interior? Yeah.

I think so. It looks just like the Ford, the Lightning, Mackie. Yeah, and you know, it's kind of, I don't know what the word is, but it has that exact same volume screw wheel glued on there. Yeah, that's like no qualms whatsoever. Just straight up copy it. Yeah, Ford probably should have patented that section. Hey, look, it's exactly the same. Yeah, it works. It works.

and there looks good though looks clean yep well not not too busy like all the buttons are like these little switches underneath there i like those those are like rugged looking and uh makes the rest a lot clearer kind of like tesla inspired like just one long um fan slid all across the dashboard also cool but the paddle block that that's with the power board inside too like the

Yeah, they have that same, I forget what they call that, but that doorway that goes out to the back. And, you know, obviously you can kind of turn it into a convertible a little bit, leave it open while you're driving. Do we have, okay, so that's a 2024 Denali Edition 1. $107,000. Yeah. Delivery start in early 2024 starting at $107,000.

And then there's going to be the 2025 model year that's going to come, I assume, at the end of 2024. And then you're going to have the cheaper version that's going to start all the way down to 50,000 units. We'll see. We don't have a clear indication of the rollout. I wouldn't be surprised if it's going to be similar to the Hummer EV where...

It starts at $107,000 and it starts technically at $80,000 but it takes them years to get there because they go from the top version to the mid-range version and so forth. Between $50,000 and $107,000 there's a lot of room for different versions there. We'll see when that $50,000 MRSP is available but I wouldn't be surprised if it's not in the 2025 model year but we'll see. I can't be personally surprised.

because you have to keep in mind a lot like the main thing that came out of this like people see the 107 000 price target of course it's just for the additional one so that's confusing but then you compare it to a sierra pickup truck gas powered pickup truck and that starts at 40 000 so a lot of people like hey boy but this is the first ev version of it and then

a lot cheaper version is going to roll out in the future speaking of cheaper ev rose wars rolls royce i have so much issues mentioning that rolls royce

The Spectre, that's their first electric vehicles. They've been teasing it with, they had this prototype that they've been showing around for the last few years. And now they have, those are renders, I would assume. They're all renders that they unveiled this week. So it's not a full unveiling. They just unveiled some specs and the design through those renders. It looks sharp though. If you're a fan of,

The Rolls Royce always look kind of the same. They have a few versions, of course, but this one is built on the Phantom platform. I don't know if they have the same feature where you can grab that thing. Have you seen that before? It like ducks down or something? Yeah, it ducks down when you try to grab it. It's pretty badass. Well, yeah. Hyper luxury. That sounds like a challenge. Those whack-a-mole type of things. Yeah.

Yeah, it's built on the same platform as the Phantom Coupe that they have already, gas-powered version. So this is like the EV version of that. So some of the specs that were released, 577 horsepower, 664 foot-pound of torque,

Talking about 4.4 seconds, 0-60, but of course, Rolls-Royce are not known for their acceleration. They're more known for the luxury itself. They haven't released too much information about the batteries, but they did say that they are aiming for an EPA range of up to 260 miles, which is not bad. Nothing on the charging capacity. Pricing.

they didn't specify it, but he said it would be priced between the cooling on SUV, which started at $350,000 and the Phantom, which starts at $46,000, $460,000. Uh, and it's,

deliveries are expected to begin in late 2023. So we're going to have to learn a lot more about it until then. It's not quite there yet, but this is design and some basic info. I wonder who's going to go on that test drive. I know some people at Rolls-Royce. I can reach out. I don't think they're quite there yet. I think we're still about a year away from any kind of media drives. Yeah, I think I'm going to have to show up in a suit for that one, like for the video. Like you cannot just...

A bottle of champagne. I mean, the test drive would be in the back, right? Yes, that's what I was going to say. We're going to hire a driver for a test drive and just be in the back and tell the driver, that would be a fun video, actually. This is Fred with Electric for the test drive of the Rolls-Royce Spectre. For this test drive, we actually hired Jonathan here who's going to be a driver. I'm going to be sitting in the back for the whole test drive.

All right. If you guys have any questions for us, put them in right now. We're not going to have that much time to get to it because we're already way over an hour into the show. But we had a lot of discussion in the comment section right now. So we're going to try to find some of the questions or anything we can discuss and get to it.

All right. Dan Oberst, longtime listener. He says, if you spurn Elon, like Apple and the Saudis, he's going to grow larger than you out of spite. So perhaps that's why Elon used the Saudis and Apple for the size comparison. Yeah.

Yeah, because technically Elon is the richest man in the world, but you know you have some Saudis out there that probably have some money that we don't know about. Of course. Like whatever the valuation is of Saudi or MCO, that's a guess basically. Right. In terms of size, what ICE vehicles might be comparable to Tesla's future smaller vehicle? I think like a golf-sized car, a Bull TV-sized vehicle. I think that makes a lot of sense.

i definitely like the idea of a hatchback yeah a smaller hatchback like a bull tv would make a ton of sense to me all right spike 43 says question do you think the improvement in energy is showing less ability to put those batteries into cars i expect a big q4 but a pullback in q1 for cars

So do you think the improvement in energy is showing less? I think the priority is always putting the batteries in the cars and then the leftovers end up in stationary storage. So I don't think that's going to be a problem. However, there has been instances of Tesla delivering more in Q4 than it does in Q1 and that keep with their quarter to quarter growth. I don't think this is going to be the case because

To me, it sounds like Tesla, like they bit the bullet this time and they're like, we're not doing the big end of the quarter. We're not as big of a hand of quarter push. So if they do that in Q4, like they did in Q3, that would put them in good space for Q1 to be bigger in Q1 and Q4. All right. Interesting question here from Dan. Has electric heard anything about using mega packs?

for electric cargo ships. Seems the perfect form factor for shipping. Unload spent batteries, load full ones, add number of needed based on distance,

um it does seem like a good situation but um we i certainly haven't heard anything about that yeah i don't think the like i know what you're saying about like if it's container size you can just like lift it like any other container and then like put new ones instead of the charging or whatever uh or to charge them but uh i don't i don't think that's the right way to look at it really i don't think the mega packs are optimized to charge a boat and um

The boats actually, they stay a decent amount of time at the docks. When we're talking about large cargo boats, it takes a while to unload them and load them back. So there's plenty of times to charge them while they're there. You don't need to remove the batch packs or anything like that. And the first, it's not exactly the same, obviously, but we don't have any large scale electric cargo boats. There are some in the work, though, but

that are coming up but i think they're gonna get inspired from like the ferry industry that they have like extremely high powered chargers at the docks and i think we're gonna see the same thing for cargo ships all right green gold says tesla needs to make a cheaper model or gm will get all of that market share in the robo taxi is vaporware deluxe

Yeah, but that comment does make sense if you believe that FSD is vaporware. Indeed, GM does seem to be positioning itself extremely strongly at the lower end of the market. Actually, everywhere in the market. In the Alley Edition 1, they are also at the higher end of the market. Well, obviously, I think Green Goal here is referring to the Equinox. Right. Yeah, that's...

Yeah, that's going to be, if they ramp that up quickly, I think the Equinox is going to be a big seller. There's no doubt about it. But there's still plenty of room for Tesla and other people too. All right. Someone from Norway, I believe, says, how many semis in the U.S. market before they start shipping globally? What's your guess on that? It's so hard to guess when Tesla expands beyond North America. That's the question basically here. Yeah.

And it's more complicated with semi trucks too because the differences in term of regulations are much wider than they are with the passenger vehicles. So you might have to hold your breath for a while, unfortunately.

Green Gold's back saying if EVs are going to make it in the market, then they're going to have to get cheaper or they will never be marketable for the general public. No, that's like, yes, technically, yes, for sure. Like the cheaper you go, but you need to stop thinking about the days of like people buying Hyundai Accent at like $9,000 and use like the average new car sale price in the U.S.,

is like $43,000 for a new car right now, not an electric. The EV adoption is all about new vehicle purchase. It's not about used vehicle purchase. I'm very glad that the U.S. is adopting the...

tax credit for the used car EVs. That's going to help a lot of people. That's going to help a lot of people go electric in the lower end of the market. But in terms of EV adoption, it's all about the new car market. In the new car market, cars are expensive and EVs are not that much expensive than those cars right now. And when you

take into account the cost of operation, they are cheaper. So it's not the right way to go at it. Either you're also right that if you can make one cheaper, like a $25,000 electric car, then of course you expand the market. But it's not that critical at the same time. It's just going to accelerate things a little bit. All right. Sandy Monroe said that Tesla is hamstrung in Fremont with their paint shop using the old Saturn one. It's poor quality. Well, I would be surprised if they get the Saturn paint shop.

Yeah, what's Armstrong means? Just like it's stuck. Like they can't do anything. Okay, the bottleneck in Fremont is paint? I guess so. Is that what Sandy Monroe is saying? I'm not aware of that at all. I don't know if...

I know they have two paint shops now. They don't just have a Saturn parent shop. They have two paint shops now. They built a new one since the old days. I feel like they're not using the old one. All right. Nobody says that new Tesla red looks as good as Mazda's deep red, which is better than any Ferrari color. Nobody says that. That confused me for a second. The guy's name is nobody for people that are just listening. Yeah.

I haven't seen a Mazda that looks that good in a long time. They do have a nice... Maybe I haven't seen a new red from Mazda, but they do have a nice red for sure. Mazda is kind of popular here in Quebec. I see a lot of Mazdas. Really? Yeah. I see fewer and fewer. But this new deep cherry, whatever it's called...

i've never seen a car look red looks that good it reminds me a bit of the roadster prototype the roadster prototype had a nice paint too that's true red paint all right uh we're getting toward the end here uh last call for questions dan says i heard that from tfl trucks they estimated the denali battery size is 212 kilowatt hours well i mean we know that the

the hummer ev has a 200 what seven or something kilowatt hour battery it's probably the same battery yeah like there may be some changes to it but i doubt it all right uh nanda holes how likely would gen three sorry third next gen third gen tesla be full die cast frame like the early giga press patent filing pics showed the ultimate hot wheels for adults

Yeah, Tesla has talked about that before. That's the ultimate goal, just printing a car, die casting a car. You do the Hot Wheels, and they are getting closer to that. However, I think it would be a big bet to design that right now.

I think if Tesla had the Cybertruck already in production and they learned from that, I think they would have the confidence to do, okay, let's... Because this is going to be a giant investment of a platform here because I think you said it's going to... If they do that, they aim to sell more of vehicle on that platform than they do all of the other platform combined, which would make sense. If they can achieve a $25,000 to $30,000 price tag, they would sell a lot of those. But...

that's a big bet to make for such a giant change. I think the like big rear casting, bigger front casting on Model Y, going to Cybertruck with the old exhaust skeleton casting, like that would make sense. And then you go to the full body die cast after that for the new platform. But it looks like he's gaining confidence on that. So that might be the case. Nanda might be right.

All right. Well, that's it for us for this episode. That was a long one. Often happens with the Tesla earnings. I hope you appreciated it. If you did, and only if you did, of course, please give us a thumbs up, a like, or whatever it is on your platform that you're listening right now. Because we are everywhere at Electric. We don't discriminate on the platform. And yeah, you can also, if you're listening on your podcast app right now,

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