Tesla opening its charging standard, Twitter/Elon madness affecting TSLA, solar scale back, and more
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And we are live, everyone, for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchell. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you're ready because we have a ton of news to discuss today. And we're going to start with something that just broke news about an hour or so ago. And that's Tesla opening its charge connector in the hope of making it a new standard. So...

This is interesting because we discussed that just recently because of Aptera. If you guys don't know Aptera, it's this company that's making this three-wheeler that's like a hyper-efficient machine.

electric vehicle that can be powered by solar. You can put the solar on top and technically if you drive it for like less than like 10, 20 miles a day, it's basically just a solar car. You only charge it with solar, but it also has a bigger battery pack and you can still plug in to charge it. And they made the argument, which is a strong argument that the article doesn't show up. Sorry, let me see what happens here.

It's just because it opens up in a new tab. No, no, no. All right. This is going to work like that. Boom. Okay. Sorry about that little technical mistake on my phone. Yeah, we've got a new site this week, so we're learning everything. Yeah. When I was putting the podcast posts together, I had to adapt because if you just like the headlines, it doesn't necessarily put the link in anymore. But it's just take me one more second. It's not a big deal. Anyway, back to the news here.

they were making the argument that the Tesla connector, which you see here on the screen right now, and in the background of it, you see the CCS connector at scale, is just a much more efficient solution. It's just a much more elegant design, smaller, easier to handle. And it also happens, according to Tesla, it's twice as capable as CCS in terms of the total capacity. That's news to us. We're going to have to

dive a little deeper in that but you'll understand for a second because we have a lot more information about the tester connector now due to Tesla's effort to open it so what the what the app Terra did at the time because

technically they could that's what's the confusion about the news today about this the opening the connector because people are like and didn't test already open source their patent and everything yes they did uh but what this is doing is a little bit more than that like even though your pattern are open source and of course there's always the last Erix over how this open source the pattern because the these say the open sources but they mostly say that we won't sue you if you use our designs or or technology

As long as you don't sue us for using your technology, which is not really the sort of things that like Tesla is doing that so that they want to use other people's technology. It's more about they just want to make sure it's a fair game where people just don't start stealing their tech and then suing Tesla over some patents and technology disagreement. So...

But to do that, so Attero wanted to adapt the technology, but to do it, they need a little bit more than just the patent being opened. They need all the specs, all the design, and even like construction, engineering, schematic and everything. And that's what Tesla is opening right now because they want to make their connector the standard for North America. And they went a step further.

they changed the name, which doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a big deal. Now the connector is to be called, and starting this point forward, the North American charging standard, the NACS. NACS. NACS. Let's go for NACS. Let's call it NACS. So NACS, the big deal with changing the name is that one of the things that was preventing the Tesla connector to become the standard, because

It predates the CCS connector, if I'm not mistaken. It's 2012 that's introduced the Troj connector? Yeah, I mean, it debuted with the Model S in 2012. But yeah, I don't know if they had the schematics for the CCS thing beforehand. You know how slow those...

standards bodies are. I don't know. Like, I'm trying to think. I know CHAdeMO was around. Yeah. Because the Nissan Leaf. But that was and the Volt didn't have anything. I mean, as far as we know, the first implementation was 2012. Mm hmm.

Yeah. So Tesla was extremely early, obviously, in adopting electric vehicles and only making electric vehicles. And they had to develop their own standard. And now what's happening, even though the CCS has been adopted by basically every other automaker other than Tesla, they end up with, even if they want to use a Tesla connector, the auto industry is such a competitive industry, it would look bad to just

okay, we're going to all adopt Tesla standard as a connector. Like this is never going to happen in the industry. So just changing the name to now it's the NAX, North American charging standard. That will help a little bit though. Obviously Tesla's name is still strongly attached to it at this point. So it might take a little bit of time, but you might see maybe not some legacy automakers go for this,

but some new startup might decide to adapt this. And the big difference is since it's completely open, I would assume that Tesla is not charging any licensing fees for using it, which is a big difference compared to the G1772 CCS connectors. So that's already like a big difference there. And then Tesla claims a bunch of things, including the fact that... Here's the blog post that Tesla posted today.

They claim that it has no moving parts, half the size and twice as powerful as the CCS connectors. We're just learning today that you can take up to a thousand volts. A thousand volts is a lot. That starts to jump. You start to get sparks and stuff. Yeah, it starts to melt things really.

And Tesla makes the argument also that the CCS is not really the standard in North America right now. The Tesla connector or now the NAX is the standard because they have more charging station than CCS, than third-party connectors like EVgo and Digify America all put together.

So they have a strong argument here. And seriously, Aptera might have been the push that they made and the petition I didn't mention, they had a petition. And I just today looked at the numbers because we haven't looked at them since they posted it. It was earlier this summer. They had 40,000 signatures for it, which might not sound like that much, but for something as niche as like a standard for EV charging station, it's pretty significant. Because

Because no one is going to argue against it in terms of the actual logic behind it. It is a more elegant solution. The only downside is really like the problem is like all other Tesla vehicles have already adopted it. So that's definitely going to be like a big change for them to do it. But you can probably come up with an adapter. And when you zoom out and you look at the grand scheme of things,

There's definitely going to be a lot more electric vehicle produced from this day forward and from now back to whenever EV started, let's say 2012 when Tesla launched the Model S.

If we all adopt a unified standard right now, obviously it would have a positive impact long term and converting all charging stations to it. It's a big ask. So with Tesla just posting a blog post like that, they did say in the blog post that some charging station, charging network operators already have plans to adopt it.

But that's not enough details. I mean, we know EVgo already has put Tesla charge connectors on 600 stations. So that could just be it. But that's not those stations just being Tesla connectors or NACs now. It's NACs and CCS and even CHAdeMO at some station. Yeah, and they just use the CHAdeMO adapter. So they're only at 50 kilowatts.

Oh, no. I thought they were straight up putting the connector on this. No. I mean, they are basically buying a Tesla CHAdeMO adapter and putting it in the station. Oh.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, that's up until this point. That's what EVgo has been doing. Okay. Well, that move will change that at least. Like Tesla is going to actually sell them connectors, I would assume. And you can get the full capacity out of them. That would make sense.

Oh, we have a call in San Diego. I said the CCS was adopted in October, 2012 with the Sherry spark being the first to adopt. That's a nice little, uh, that's interesting tidbit of information. That's right around when the first model. Exactly. It was Q4, 2020, 2012. So right around the same time, but like, uh,

Chevy Spark was the first adopted, but Chevy Spark was not in 2012, if I remember correctly. I think it was 2002. Oh, maybe model year 2013. That could make sense. That's possible, yeah. I think it was a crazy little car. It had more torque than a Ferrari. Yeah.

We're going to talk about Tehran later on. I hadn't seen one of those in a long time. But when one of the engineers came to my house to fix the prototype that they gave me, it had a little spark. It brought me back when I saw that car. Yeah. So going back to this thing, why after a decade of using the adapter, why didn't Tesla do this 10 years ago? Or why didn't they do that at some point sooner?

why are they doing this now yeah so if you want my opinion on it it's just my opinion like i don't know it for a fact it has to do with the uh ira the the new uh actually that's not the re that's the um

infrastructure bill that came before right that unlocked the uh that unlocked the billions of dollars in investment in charging station is like six or seven billion dollars uh that is currently being distributed right now i think the first batch happened just a few weeks ago a month ago and

one of the requirements to get some funding to deploy those new charging stations is that it's a weird requirement. They do not require you to have a CCS adapter or compatibility with CCS. And Tesla has indicated that they will enable compatibility with CCS. And I think, by the way, some people are thinking that this announcement today means that they're not going to do that. I don't think that that's the case. I think they're still going to do that because there's still value in that. There's

hundreds of thousands of vehicles now on the road that can use the supercharger with CCS. That would make a ton of sense. But

What they do require is that the charging station that gets the funding needs to be able to operate with electric vehicles from more than one automaker. So a weird way to phrase this, but more than one automaker, that basically was targeting just Tesla. Tesla and Rivian, even though Rivian uses CCS on their fast charging station that they're deploying, they are locked just to work with Rivian vehicles, for now at least.

So that will, I'm sure that Rivian is considering their options on that front because I'm sure they're also going to want to have some of that money. But yeah, so if Tesla can, instead of adopting CCS at those new stations that they want funding for, if they can have another automaker adopt their own standard, then all of their stations automatically become CCS.

um eligible for funding and i mean literally it could be that app terra if app terra brings their vehicle to market with ccs uh would not with the nax now

as their standard, then Tesla has access to the funding. So that would make sense right now. To be fair, that sounds like Tesla is just going after some government money and everything. I'm not saying that in any nefarious way whatsoever. It might literally be that Tesla will interrupt

would have wanted that for a long time obviously it would be an advantage for their own standard if their own connector becomes the standard it's just a giant advantage for them but what what happened is is that for a long time it didn't look like a possibility with everyone adopting ccs and everything but now with appterra pushing for that and tesla seeing some momentum for it maybe he said let's give it a shot and see see if we can get people on board

Do you have another take on this or do you agree? Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I think that now is that, you know, that's why they're making this decision now. I think, you know, they should have done this a long time ago. I think it would have been kind of better for the industry to have one standard.

And Tesla would have been at an advantage if it was, you know, the standard bearer, I guess. But then there's always the questions like, well, who controls it? Like if, you know, Volkswagen wants to do something different, do they have to go through Tesla? Do they, you know, if you're going over a megawatt or something somewhere down the line in the future for trucks, you know, who controls that? You know, you can't fork it. There's all kinds of stuff.

and I don't know if Tesla in this blog post has really answered like you know is it really truly a standard that you know all the automakers can get involved in the other thing is it's just the physical handle so the CCS thing is not just the the handle it's also the handshake and you know the whole

I think it's the whole thing for Tesla. I haven't had time. This literally came out two hours ago. Tesla has released all the documentation, so we haven't had time to go through the whole thing. So don't...

don't take it on us if uh if we don't have everything right right now but it looks like it's the whole thing like this stuff first of all it's definitely the on the vehicle side too like they released this image but it looks like it's the entire protocol and the handshake and everything everything is included looks like i've just been perusing a little bit the documentation that they released but some of it like you can go on the website right now like or go on the electric we have the link the download link is right there i'm showing it right now on the on it and um

Yeah, it goes into various details about how to even incorporate that in a vehicle and everything. There's even the pin, the DC, the AC, the DC pin, all the connectors, the inlet, everything is in there. But we know all Teslas that are built right now can do CCS with an adapter. So, you know, I think like the best case scenario would be that all vehicles can do both Tesla and DCS.

you know nax and ccs and then at you know at that point you know either make two two holes in the car or you know give everybody an adapter to carry around and then everybody can charge everywhere yeah but i mean we're we're also early like it's it sounds weird to say but like because it's been 10 years in the making but it's we're also still early enough that we could make the switch uh it's just you you think there's like no no chance whatsoever that

Everyone gets on board. That's what you said. I don't see Volkswagen and Ford and stuff. Yeah, just throwing their lot in with Tesla because if Tesla controls the standard, they're losing some. But at the same time... They don't have charging stations, though. That's the whole thing. That's true.

um maybe what should happen is uh charin the group that covers ccs should say okay let's figure this out we're gonna make our you know ccs3 adapter is really just a tesla adapter so like the road map is to go from both ccs and tesla to one unified adapter and and it sounds like this this tesla spec has some new stuff in it like

megawatt charging, which we hadn't heard that this thing could do before. So maybe there's some new stuff here. Maybe Charin can be convinced. We know Tesla's part of the Charin user group. So maybe there's a way to kind of like make this all go to one spot and keep compatibility with CCS and Tesla as well. So-

Hopefully that's in the works, but we know how these things don't always. Yeah, I definitely agree with you that it would be quite the task to get everyone on board. But this is the first step to see how is it even a possibility really. And when you look at this image here, and congrats to whoever at Tesla pulled that together, there's no excuse. When you look at this thing, you're like, all right, who did that? Yeah, I mean, it becomes like an accessibility concern as well because

Those are quite heavy and with the big cords, those things are very hard to plug in. And if you have any accessibility issues, maybe that becomes a problem. So you got to fix that stuff. And this is going to come to a head. This is going to come to one of these kind of situations where they're going to have to have an easier access.

solution i guess yeah well it's something that we're going to keep an eye on in the next few months to see if the story evolves but uh we're also going to have a few more stories later on today or tomorrow about once we can get through the entire documentation because i'm sure there's a few pieces of news here that's going to be important but let's move on about what has dominated the news all week in the tesla world which is kind of annoying for some people because it uh

It's not about Tesla, really. Well, it became about Tesla. You made it about Tesla where...

He's been selling Tesla stock to finance not just the finance the acquisition of Twitter, but now it sounds like it's to finance the survival of Twitter. That's how he made it sound. So this week, well, actually, this was disclosed this week, but we learned that in the UCC filing that on last Friday, on Monday and on Tuesday, Elon unloaded.

Millions of shares worth over almost $4 billion of Tesla shares. And it looks like it basically directly contributed to Tesla stock dropping about 30% during that time, just unloading those shares. That selling pressure was big on Tesla and wiped out over $100 billion worth of value at Tesla stock.

Over the last two years, I've seen a lot of hardcore Tesla fans, Elon fans, excuse me, a lot of Elon fans start moving away from him a little bit for a bunch of different reasons, like his political alliance these days. Not alliance, but affiliation, I should say, maybe.

making himself a political person at this point. Like literally this week he told people you should vote Republican, which is kind of a very rare thing to say for not just a CEO, but someone as influential as Elon Musk. You don't get people like waning in that much like that.

which I'm not completely like if I wouldn't be completely against it because like these people, these super rich people, they, they actually put money in those elections. Like the, the input millions of dollars to influence them. And Elon did it in the past. Like, so what's the, really the big difference between actually putting your money to try to influence election and actually using influence to influence them. So I don't know about that. What I, I don't like as much is, uh,

what appears to be is logic behind... I mean, there's two things in it. I don't know if we want to get into that too much, but I find it very interesting because... So in the actual statement where he said vote Republican this week, he said it was because the Democrats have the White House, so it would balance things out. Okay, if that's really your logic, that's fine. But then...

in other comments that are not like directly political where where he's more commenting on the situation he he seems to say that the reason that he's pro-republican right now is because the democrats hates him and like he said you know that the whole biden situation that happened over the course of like a year and a half and and all that and just this week he was tweeting at omar

where Omar was literally like Omar is so weird sometimes he's like not self-aware very much of like he doesn't realize that when he points out something obvious it's he doesn't realize like that whether um Ali comes out really where he where he said uh

People are so frustrated that Elon is not recommending to vote Democrats for a party that hates him. And then Elon responded to that like, yes, that's exactly it. So is the reason, is it to balance the power or is it because you don't like the Democrats because the Democrats don't like you? I don't know. It seems pretty obvious that he's got a beef with the Democrats right now, both with Biden and then originally it was that woman that told him to F you.

Yeah, there was that, you're right. There was COVID. And then it was the Biden not inviting him to some kind of announcement. And obviously, the biggest one I get was the union thing that they were going to do against Tesla for the tax credit. That actually has an impact. That's my whole point. It's like, okay, people don't like you for whatever reason. I mean, I'm pretty sure Elon is aware that he's a pretty divisive person and not everyone's going to like him. I mean...

especially at the scale he's at. And I just don't understand, like, oh, because some people in that party don't like you, dislike you, and say things, you're going to vote for the other party despite of the actual politics behind them? Because my old point was always, I thought Elon was pro-environment and wanted to, you know, his old comment about we were doing this crazy scientific experiment of pumping carbon dioxide into the

atmosphere and we don't know what kind of results it's going to get. That's the Elon that got me. That Elon I was like, oh, I was on board with. But now in my view, there's one party that is doing something about that. There's another party that's not doing something about that. So that would be a hit for me personally because I think it's the biggest issue of our time right now. Not that there's no other important issue. They are. But I think that if we don't solve this one, the other ones don't matter that much. So

So, yeah, I don't like the way it's devolving these days into that. But the way that the old – and I don't know if you like my headline here that Elon is selling $3.9 billion worth of Tesla to throw in the Twitter dumpster fire. Oh, I like it. Which is pretty much exactly what's happening right now. So a little physical more –

psychological level like there's a lot of things happening but on the physical level he's literally like taking money away from tesla and putting it in in twitter and for what exactly because the twitter situation right now uh is uh is kind of wild i mean

This whole thing about, oh, we're going to charge you $20 for a verified checkmark. And then, oh, it's going to be $8. Yeah, right. It was going to be 20. Sure. That's a classic move to charge you something that you weren't paying for before.

But no, I mean, and it's firing back because the logic behind it. And I think they pulled it today. Right now, you cannot subscribe and get the verified checkmark today. Yeah, there's something weird where even people who bought the verified aren't even seeing the verified. Yeah, but I think because they pulled it today because too many people were doing weird things with it. That's the weird thing about this.

He saw it coming. He said that. I remember I assume everyone was telling him that because it was kind of obvious. But if the goal of buying the verified is to reduce spam bots and

Yes, you're going to reduce the number, but you're going to increase the impact of those bots because if not necessarily those bots, but those spammers, because if the person can, instead of having a million bots for free, they have like a few bots for $8 a month, but those bots are verified. They're going to have a much more efficiency rate in terms of whatever scam they're pulling because more people are actually going to think that it's for real.

And sure enough, it's happening. I mean, last week was people faking being Elon and saying some wild things and Elon banning them or suspending them. I don't know if there's a difference right now. I saw Ethan. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, he's currently off and he had to create a new account. So really, so he's probably banned then. What did he do? You know, imitated Elon. He imitated Elon. Okay. Yeah. I've seen a bunch of, I've seen people with huge account, like Ethan Klein as a, like millions of followers and he did it. And I know he said some wild things though, which I don't encourage necessarily, but, uh,

now some people and they did tesla this week that's the whole thing some guy did tesla real and it looked like if you don't know it looks as real as it gets but so when you know especially in the feed yes when you're straight up in the feed yeah if people are retweeting it and you see it and you don't know what's happening with twitter you would think that it's real and so the the whole logic behind it was that um

Last week when when Elon was the subject of the of those jokes He asked that okay if you're doing a parody account, it's fine But you have to put in the bio that's parody which which I think was already the case before to be honest So that's nothing new So Elon was like kind of stop stop making fun of me or at least make it clear that you're not actually me or whatever but then this week and

when the person did Tesla, so that was an example. So if you look at it here, the only thing that you're gonna know from just this view of the tweet that it's not Tesla, and it got me for a second, you got me too, is that it's Tesla real instead of just @Tesla.

So that's the only difference here, which is for most people, it's not a lot. And sure enough, like that thing at 5,000 likes, the video has got 40,000 hits. And that person was following the rule. If you clicked on the actual profile and you see the bio, the bio clearly said it was a parody. So the person was following the rule. They got banned though, because Elon changed the rules and said that the parody need to be in the actual name.

And I don't know if that's exactly fair because it looks like the account got what Elon was like, I changed the rule and then boom, the account was banned right away. But give them a chance to adapt to those new rules. Not that I agree with what the account was doing, to be honest. Obviously, they were being a little bit

malicious, but they weren't doing they were respecting the rule. They were just making fun of Tesla with making false statement about whatever the company is doing. So Elon was like, Twitter is all about fun now, but unless you're making fun of him or Tesla, really.

Yeah, it's kind of a mess. It feels like none of these ideas have been like really just tested or gamed out. It's kind of like, hey, I got an idea. Let's just put it into production. And then, oh, crap, I forgot about like this one thing. So, you know, like I want to take a step back and like this is not good for Tesla. And the reason it's not good for Tesla is because Elon has so tightly engaged

control you know put his name like he he basically eliminated the pr department and said basically all public statements from tesla have to go out through my twitter account you know i'm the one who does all this stuff it's me me me so he's inextricably tied himself to tesla and then he's going out and kind of making a fool of himself a little bit i would say uh with the twitter thing um you know like

he may be able to pull Twitter out. He's obviously an extremely smart guy. I always thought Twitter was a very undervalued entity, especially with the attention economy and how many important people use it. As long as people don't leave Twitter, and there hasn't been that many people leaving, and it's frankly been a soap opera since it started. Probably, they're getting more

more interaction now than they've ever gotten. So, you know, I don't think it's like Twitter's dead. I think Elon's probably going to, you know, make it a pretty weird place for a while. But the problem is, is like, because it's credibility, like it's credibility. Exactly. So, you know, because he's so tied to Tesla, you know,

all the weird, crazy stuff he does there. You're kind of like, well, if he's not putting any thought into this thing, is he putting any thought into robots? Is he putting thought into full self-driving? Is he kind of bullshitting his way through all this other stuff? So I think it's a bad thing for Tesla, for Elon to be doing all this stuff on Twitter. But

You know, he's been kind of going down this road for a while, and I don't think Tesla sales have been hurt at all. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say at this point just –

how the impact, how it's going to impact Tesla other than literally impacting the stock at this point with Elon selling like crazy just to finance this Twitter project. But at the credibility level, it's important. But even before that, before Elon even talked about acquiring Twitter, we were already worried about his use of Twitter in the first place and how this echo chamber that he created

in Twitter is hurting his feedback loop and it's affecting it.

It's affecting his decision-making, it's affecting maybe even his psyche. I may be reaching by saying that. I'm no psychologist or anything like that but in my opinion, like there was an article that came out this week. It was in the Washington Post which obviously this is targeting Elon because like Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos can only think about how can he destroy Elon. I don't know.

I'm on the opinion of Joe Rogan on that one. Jeff Bezos did it right where he's out now. Is he completely out of Amazon? He's still obviously a huge shareholder, and I think he's the chairman. He's still chairman, so he still has something to do with that.

He's not like Bill Gates where he's totally out. He bailed out. He got all jacked up on steroids. He's moving up in his yacht with his young bride. I don't think she's young. I think she might have... She's hot. She's got a lot of plastic surgery. I haven't seen her in a while. He's living the life now.

I don't think he's thinking too much about destroying you. I wouldn't say that that article in particular was against, was probably not ordered by him or anything like that. It was accurate. The article was going into some of the super fans' interaction with

Elon and they pulled out the stats of Tesla Silicon Valley owners club, I think. They pulled out an average of 19 replies to Elon Musk per day on average since this summer.

It's not normal.

And you look at those replies and they're all just praising him all the time. And that's what has cultivated his Twitter account around. Obviously, we are blocked and we don't do that. And a lot of other critics have been blocked. And so when you create this whole environment where you're just getting praised all the time and obviously, he's only get praised, obviously, he gets also critics out there, but he...

When you just focus on all that praise and you just encourage that, like these guys that are just sending that 19... Because even if you are a giant fan of Elon Musk, even if you agree with everything he did, would you be sending him 19 praise a day? No, it makes no sense. It's completely unhealthy behavior. It cannot be positive on whoever that... I forget that guy's name that runs that account. And Elon himself...

And I still think Elon is one of the most important human beings that we have to achieve this goal that we have to accelerate the advent of electric transport. So, yeah, I think we should protect his psyche if we can, if we can have any impact on it. And our use of Twitter around him is one of them.

Well, let's move on because I actually, I think I forgot to mention it today. And I apologize to our sponsor, EcoFlow. We're going to fix that right now. I'm just having some issue navigating my old show notes right now because of this new system here, but I have it right now. So I just want to say thanks to EcoFlow.

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Thank you, EcoFlow, for sponsoring this episode of the Electric Podcast. All right. Let's move on from Twitter because we have a bunch of other Tesla news to discuss this week. I guess we had an exclusive. Tesla canceled a bunch of solar projects and it is scaling back its solar division to a degree. So we got a bunch of reports this week from people that had a Tesla solar project, either panels, solar panels or solar roof panels.

And in different stages, some of them were already permitted, the design done, permitted, like ready for like just give me an install date and things are happening. But then they got an email this week where Tesla, I'm going to quote the email here, you know,

I got at this point, by the time I did the report, I had like half a dozen, but now I have received dozens since my article came out. Thank you for your interest in Tesla Solar. Upon further review of your project, our team has determined that your home is in an area we no longer service. As we cannot complete your order, we have process recalcitration. You will receive a refund and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So when I saw that, I was like, all right, no service. In that area, we no longer service. So I started asking everyone that got this email, like, where are they? Because I thought, OK, maybe it's just pulling out of a certain state or just is this certain area. But I couldn't find anything consistent. Like literally, like it's Southern California, which is a massive market for solar. I saw Northern California. I saw I saw California.

I saw Oregon, I saw Florida, all very important like solar markets and not like extremely rural region. I mean, literally the greater Los Angeles area, someone in Glendale, someone in Irvine, like this just made no sense to me. And from what I'm hearing, there's hundreds and hundreds of projects that have been canceled. And Tesla is apparently literally pulling from those areas. They're not going to service them.

And what they're telling those customers is that instead they can go through a third party certified installers.

And Tesla has been using that for the solar roof for a while. It's nothing exactly new. They've been certifying people and we reported earlier this year that Tesla has moved the program also to the solar panels where Tesla used to for solar panel installers, which is like most of like the big ones like Sunnation and what are the big ones I'm blanking right now? Sunrun and Vivint and all those. The...

Normally, if they work with Tesla, it's like they're going to install a power wall maybe with it, though Tesla has very limited availability of those. But now Tesla is even to installers, is providing its own solar panels and power walls. And so that even solar inverters, not because they produce their own solar inverters, to create the two systems.

I have third-party installers deploy the entire Tesla solar ecosystem. So you have access like the Tesla app and have all those features that comes with it, but Tesla is not involved in the installation whatsoever. Now, the problem is the few...

customers that I talked to that did go with that option after Tesla released that they did contact those third-party installers they were all given higher prices than Tesla gave them because again those pro those projects with Tesla were really advanced and like this the other price they were waiting for installation date in some cases so yeah this is this is a somewhat of a major change in um

in this, in Tesla's solar strategy, because we saw Tesla having some momentum. Like, for a long time, the solar deployment was going down since the acquisition of SolarCity. Over the last year, things were going up. So we thought, oh, things are changing and everything. But no, apparently not. This is a little scale back. Though it's a scale back of installation, maybe the total deployment, if they still count deployment, if they just sell solar,

panels and power walls, we need to kind of count that. But off-grid electricity is still going to count power walls, but I don't know what's going to happen with solar exactly.

So it's going to be something to keep an eye on, but definitely they could change the pace for Tesla, the solar division. A little scale back. This is one of those things where I would like to ask Tesla, like, okay, what are you doing here? What's happening? Because this is a weird move. And it's not the first time we've seen Tesla being weird about canceling some solar contracts, especially with the solar roof and, like, changing prices and all that. So it would have been nice for Tesla to comment on it, but obviously we cannot reach out to press anymore. And...

Sometimes Tesla reaches, like people at Tesla reach out to you. I know you took a call today from somebody or took a DM today from somebody on the charging standard thing. But we've also gotten some solar stuff in the past from some of the Tesla employees. And I don't know if they're supposed to, if they get Elon's permission to communicate with us. But I feel like this is one of those situations where they should have said something.

Yeah. Speaking of, I did reach out to a few people and it's not clear what's happening, but Tesla has also let go of a bunch of people in the scheduling department and planning department of solar. So those are the people that sent out the crews and everything. So yeah, there's a lot of things that point to a significant scale back in solar installations. Yeah.

It's weird because, yes, you know, Elon believes and I think a lot of other financial people believe that we're either in a recession or we're going to go into a recession or it's going to get worse or something. But like Tesla doesn't have any like they have money coming in. There's obviously they're making profits. They don't have to pay dividends to anybody.

Why not invest in people and more solar and more batteries? And it just seems weird that they're cutting back at this point because they haven't reached demand. I don't think they've made enough solar. I don't think they're building more than the demand is out there.

Yeah, me too. I don't understand it because like, especially if you have the whole process in place already, all the, all the processes are there is just scaling with hiring more people and training them and all that.

But all the processes are there to make that happen. It's all about just capital. And that's what the solar industry had some problem with in terms of like financing those projects with as little money down as possible. But I feel like Tesla, like you said, is in the best situation to do that with their cash situation. So yeah, it's...

I don't understand. It is a headache for sure. It's like to have on top of all the other business that Tesla has. But I thought they were just tight. Like why they were not growing. I thought it's because they were tightening everything up to be very solid and then scale from a solid point instead of like taking like the struggling solar city and trying to make it work. But apparently not.

All right, good news for the people that have salvaged Tesla vehicles, Tesla vehicles with salvaged titles.

since 2020, Tesla removed access to supercharging and third-party DC fast charging. You could just not fast charge at all with a Tesla vehicle that had a salvage title. And just so people understand here, obviously Tesla gave a safety reason for it without giving too many details. They say it's dangerous, whatever. Obviously with the image I'm showing right now of a salvage vehicle, I'm going to one extreme end of a

of a scenario, but you have to understand that some vehicles are declared total and they go to salvage even though they're not that hurt, like that destroyed. These days, like insurance company would declare something total pretty quickly, especially expensive vehicles that all body works are very expensive.

That happens a lot. So a lot of people were very frustrated because they felt like they were just killing the value of salvaged vehicles. And people that put back salvaged vehicles together in good conditions, they're recycling. That's what they're doing. They're just keeping electric vehicles on the road. That's a good thing for electrification, a good thing for the environment. And Tesla just hit them pretty hard with that. But...

What we learned this week, at Xtrek, we obtained some internal communication that Tesla gave to employees for a new process, a new two-step process, where they combined the already existing high-voltage battery inspection that Tesla can offer with a new salvage tidal vehicle fast-charging safety inspection. So once you get both of those,

Tesla can re-enable DC fast charging, so give you access back to the supercharger network or third-party DC fast charging station, as long as you pass the inspection and the DC fast charging test with it. We don't have any details on how much that's going to cost and everything, but I don't expect it to be too expensive.

And the good thing too is that Tesla is going to do the test, do the inspection, and if they are like, okay, you passed it, they do a DC fast charging test. They re-enable your DC fast charging, do a DC fast charging test. Regardless of the result of that test, if you have been deemed okay by the inspection, you're going to be re-enabled. So if something doesn't work with your supercharger, you might be able to do third party or something like that.

If Tesla does an inspection and finds that something is not okay, they will offer to replace those parts to do repairs. Of course, at your cost, obviously, but still at least there's a clear path to re-enabling DC fast charging and including supercharging. So great news for Tesla tinkerers with salvage title vehicles.

Yeah, our friend of the site, Jason Hughes, seemed to be pretty excited about this opportunity for him. I guess salvage people all over are going to be in good shape now. Yeah, rich rebuilds too and people like that. All right, it was earnings week this week for a lot of automakers, including Rivian.

They posted their earnings with expansion of 67% of the production. They are reiterating their 25,000 units production goal for 2022. And so I think now they are at 15,000 units. So they're going to need 10,000 units produced in the last three months of the year. But let's look into revenue, a half a billion dollars in revenue in the third quarter. So pretty good.

But where things hurt is operating costs grew to $850 million. So that's up almost $150 million from the same quarter last year. The net loss was $1.7 billion. So that also hurt. But they still have $13.8 billion cash. So they're going to survive for a while. What I want though is the gross margin on their car.

Did we not post that? I think it's negative. Yeah, I know it's negative. I just want to see how it tracks. So let me see here. I can pull up the shareholder letter. I feel like I read that it was still quite large. Because that's what we really need to be tracking. I should have told Peter when...

when he wrote the article. So the gross profit, yeah, that's not what we want. We want the profit margin on the vehicles. Where's the income statement? Income statement. They make that so hard to find these days. Okay, there you go. So 2022, they got $500 million of revenue for selling those vehicles and it cost them $1.5 billion to do it. Yeah, that's just awful.

So that's the thing that I see people commenting on. Like, oh, whenever the production ramps up, like this quarter, for example, they claim that they're going to produce 10,000 units. So that's way up from last quarter. And then that's when they're going to start making money. Not necessarily. If they still have gross margin on it, like niggas of gross margin, they're going to lose money still. There's a point where the economy of scale does impact it, but...

Not that kind of impact, not an impact from going from negative 50% to positive 5%, like this too big of a step from just regular economy of scale. There has to be something else that breaks. So yeah, this is still a problem that needs to be fixed at Rivian. Again, they still have almost $14 billion cash on end, so they have time to fix this, but not that much time because I would assume that if

The trends continue right now on the gross margin. They're going to lose over $2.5 billion this quarter. And that's going to be a big hit on their $14 billion cash on in. Yeah. And the question is, why can't they make a car at breakeven? Or why can't they get closer to breakeven?

And I just don't understand how they're not able to get closer to breakeven these months later. I know they're ramping up. I know this is new to them.

all the other stuff but it doesn't seem like they're reeling in the cost well one of the big problem is that they came into production with a big backlog of orders at a price that was too low right uh that they promised and and to give them benefit of like to give them some credit here a lot of companies will have been screwed at uh let's just let's just go with um

Let's just change people's prices even though they have a reservation. And instead, they will honor the – they had some – the media, including ourselves, had to apply some pressure, but they did reverse back to do that. But now they add so many reservations that people that decided to go through with the order –

With the old price, they are still working to that backlog. And the backlog has increased. I'm impressed by it, like 113,000 reservation right now for Rivian. That's massive for a company that's going to produce 25,000 trucks this year. They basically have four years of production, four years of backlog right now. It's insane. Well, theoretically, they're going to be at 10,000 next quarter. Yeah.

So, yeah, 40,000. So let's say two years of production rate at this quarter if they do achieve their stated goal. But they are still working through those people that had the whole pricing. So I'm sure. But looking at this, how negative the gross margin, like it's costing them three times as much money to build a truck as they are selling it for.

So we're nowhere near the 15% to 20% price increase that they have on the new units. It's nowhere near. So there has to be something that changes for them to survive here. Again, they still have time, but they have less time than people think. All right, I need to...

go back here do this starting to get the hang of this new uh system here i'm getting it i'm getting it stick with me the other uh earnings result that were released were lucid uh they delivered 100 uh 1400 lucid air their sedan and uh that brought in almost 200 million dollars worth of revenue

Let me see here where they are at in terms of cost of revenue. So, because they have the exact same issue as Rivian, basically. But not as bad, because on $200 million of revenue, it cost them about $500 million. So still twice as much. So not three times the amount of money that it cost, but twice. Though the production is ramping up, so that's going to help too here, but to a degree.

They have 34,000 air on reservation. That's also very good. It doesn't sound as much because we just talked about Rivian having 100,000 of them, but the air is a more expensive car. Well, I mean, it's a more expensive car. Right now, they do have options that are cheaper. They're just not available just yet. What's their cash on end? Because I'm a little bit more worried about them on that, though, even though they're losing less money.

I kind of actually wish they'd run out of money so that somebody would buy them, like Apple or... But I don't know. We didn't share the cash on end. I feel like Apple is perfect for Lucid because, you know, Apple wants to build premium stuff. Lucid's premium. They've got really good motors, got really good vehicles. Apple wants to start high end, I'm sure. They're based in Northern California. Yeah, it's all packaged up nicely. Yeah.

like i'm not against it definitely not against it all right we also had a few unveilings this week audi came out with the q8 e-tron god i hate hate their naming skill yeah naming scheme scheme i can't i they should like as soon as they go all electric like there's no there's no gas power they should just drop the e-tron and just go back to q8 q4 q6 and and that's it yeah um

I mean, the Audi, the Audi V-Links are not as exciting anymore because the designer styling is extremely close of their existing SUVs. Like the Q8 here, if you're used to Audi SUV. It's sharp, though, very sharp SUV. Yeah, they're quite popular, too. Yeah, yeah, for good reasons. They're solid, solid vehicles. Talking about 600 kilometers of range here. Let's see.

273 miles on range, that adds up. Let's see all the different... I have so many. The Q8 50 e-tron, Q8 sports 50 e-tron, Q8 55 e-tron. There's three more. So yeah, it's 106 kilowatt hour battery pack for the 55 version, the bigger. And you have dual motor. It starts with dual motors and you have a tri-motor version for the performance SQ8 and SQ8 sports back.

And those three motors equals to 370 kilowatts of power output. So even though the other ones are dual motors, you have two capacity because you have 250 for the base ones and 300. So it goes 250, 300, both for dual motors and then 370 for a tri-motor version.

And in terms of range, the basic one, Q850, has an 89 to auto battery pack, just like the sports bag version. And the sports bag is a little bit more efficient with 214 miles of range. 305 for the non-sports bag version. Those are all WLTP range, by the way. It's not APA because this unveiling was just for the European market. It's going to take a little bit before it reaches the U.S. market.

But yeah, if you go with the bigger battery pack version but still dual motors, you can get up to 373 miles of range. And again, the tri-motor performance version, you still have the bigger battery pack, but with the higher performance, you get a little bit less efficiency, up to 319 miles of range. The unveiled base price is going to start at 74,000 euros in Germany.

So the Euro and the USD is basically at parity right now, but that includes taxes in Germany, I would assume. So I would think something closer to $65,000 for the base price. But you're going to probably be able to get that up to $100,000 if you go with the tri-motor version with the bigger battery pack. We should probably get some time with that car, I guess, early next year or something like that. Yeah, I would imagine. It seems like a...

one of the top ones out there and the tri-motor that's that new uh what is it called ppe no it's that new platform that ppe platform with porsche but uh i wasn't aware that uh as far as i knew only the gt was uh was that i know that i thought the tri-motor was uh on the ppe but maybe not maybe uh i don't see it at first glance from uh from our report

But it was not the only big electric SUV to be unveiled this week. Volvo also came out with the EX90 electric SUV, which is dubbed the safest vehicle that it has ever produced. And if you know Volvo, they're known for their safe vehicles. So that's a big deal here. Seth, I'm going to let you talk about that one because I think it caught your eyes this week, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. So, you know, I'm in the market for a Rivian R1S.

And when I originally put down for it, Rivian said, hey, it'll be around late 2022. Well, it's late 2022 right now. It's not coming anytime soon. The latest that they put me on is late 2023. So I'm a little bit worried that's even going to slip further. And this thing comes out in late 2023. So maybe I'll have a look at this one. It's got some really good specs. It looks, I think, looks really nice.

It's not insanely priced. It's what, $80,000, I think, is the starting price. Oh, I don't know. It's got a bunch of LiDAR stuff. It's going to do a bunch of self-driving. It does a lot of cool stuff with like, you know, if your eyes start to wander, like Scooter mentioned that on the preview that it even knows if you're intoxicated, which, you know, I don't want to comment on my... You would never get into a car. I would never, exactly. So...

I just think that's a, you know, some really cool stuff, really cool technology went into this and it's a great size. So, you know, we're looking for the third row thing. Big frunk, big storage at the back. And it's funny. It kind of looks like, I don't know if you saw this inside, but it looks really Model S-y inside, like with that old vertical screen and stuff.

And it's all super minimalist a la Tesla. Is Volvo going with the Android Auto like Polestar? Yeah, so Volvo's full into Android Auto. So you get that really good maps thing and then you get all the apps that are in the App Store, which isn't an amazing selection right now, but at least there's a way for people to build apps. And as more companies jump into Android for Auto,

Like, uh, Ford, I think is all in, uh, so that's going to be a lot of cars. I think Dodge is actually all in as well. Um, or, uh, you know, the Chrysler group and, um, uh,

There's a bunch more coming. Theoretically, there'll be a huge market for these apps. More apps will be built and there'll be some cool stuff out there. Here are the specs right here. The same specs as each one that we just discussed, the Q8, up to 600 kilometers of range, 273 miles. That's again WLTP.

10 to 80% charging in under 30 minutes. Dual motor version will be powered by 11 kilowatt-hour battery pack. Basically the same specs as the Q80 e-tron. It's very powerful. 180 kilowatt hours, basically the exact same pack of the top end of the e-tron. Bidirectional charging, including plug-in charge. You said it's coming 2023? Are you sure that's U.S.?

Well, that's what my reservation says. Well, those are always correct. I've never seen a reservation that was not accurate on the timing of deliveries. Speaking of under legal, we don't know exactly when it's going to come, but it's going to be awesome. It's the Terran Reaver, an all-electric ATV. I had the chance to play around with the prototype last weekend.

We got the exclusive here at Electric, and it's not because we are the coolest and best EV publication out there, which we are. It's because they are basically my neighbors. The company is based here in Shao Wen Yen, and they developed this really cool electric

ATV. And there are a bunch of electric ATVs out there already, but there's none of them have been really built from the ground up to be electric. A lot of them are just converted. A lot of them have lead acid batteries, which does no business in an electric vehicle in 2022. And

And yeah, so they're not, some of them are like more like, you know, here in this image, you see the Cyber Quad for kids. It's basically that, just a little bit more blown up and maybe a little bit more powerful, but certainly not as powerful as the Reaver, which has a 52 kilowatt motor in it. And what's impressive too is that they managed to keep that vehicle lighter than an average, an equivalent in size vehicle.

And ATV, gas-powered ATV, which normally is the contrary for electric vehicles, but they really, by designing everything from the ground up, they were able to save a lot of weight. And, you know, I'm not saying that ATVs companies are lazy and things like that, but there's not as much innovation as maybe they should be in the ATV market. So when a startup, very nimble, is entering that space and they're smart about it, there's a way to innovate here. And I think they did that at Tehran and they did something pretty cool.

because what are the other thing that is unable going electric with any tv is that people use the tvs for different reasons like you just want to have fun with it you just you just uh ride around at full speed and whatever like that's that's one use and you can definitely do that with the reaver but it's also you can be a workhorse like here the reason why i want it is like i have a nice little piece of land here and i i have work that i need to do uh that's literally at the other side of it which is probably like basically kilometers away and uh

If I want to bring tools there and everything, and I have to walk all the way there, I cannot bring my car. I have my show run, but it's not very great for carrying stuff around. So this thing, you have a towing capacity of 1,500 pounds, so you can put a trailer on it. And because it's electric, they're doing some very cool things where you're going to be able to put like the F-150 of...

F-150 Lightning of ATVs. You're going to be able to power tools on it in the back, charge a power station. It's going to be like a mobile workstation, basically. And how much power did they say would be available? They haven't confirmed it just yet, but it's going to be enough to power some power tools. That's cool. They haven't finalized exactly what that's going to look like, but the whole system is built around enabling that with the software update soon.

And yeah, so you can do both. You can have fun and have it as a workstation at the same time. And then with having the battery pack there, you can also, they designed it so that they're going to be able to plug custom-made accessories for the Reaver. We're talking about like...

it's not a slow plow a snowblower you're going to be able to attach a snowblower in the front and it's going to be an electric snowblower attached powered by the propulsion battery pack of the of the vehicle so a full electric like uh mini snow not actually mini it's still a big one but not like uh like the front loaders one and they are also talking about uh

self-powered trailer where it has a small electric motor in it and you attach it to the um the river and you basically turn your uh your river into a four by four or six by six because you can also have it as a dual motor

and you basically have like just a super strong of a pulling machine and they are even talking about putting solar on that trailer so you can self charge for people that are actually going on trip on ATVs because that's not a big part of the market but some people like to do it so that will enable that instead of like it's the equivalent of you see people carrying like jerry can of gasoline on their ATVs the trailer with solar is going to be the equivalent of that which I think is pretty cool um

But yeah, they've done some cool things. They inspired from Tesla where the first prototype had a Tesla battery pack in it, like battery modules. They used battery modules from a salvaged Tesla. And so they got inspired by the modules for their own modules that they've designed. And they managed to fit a 20-kilowatt-hour battery pack in there. So that's pretty significant. In terms of range, I mean, it's hard to talk about range with an ATV because the range

completely depends on how you use it you can go like crazy with it or you can just like slowly go around your land to work with it uh they're talking about 190 kilometers of range about 110 miles of range but again that doesn't mean much but 20 kilowatt hour battery pack it's it's massive for this like you can be able to use this for a whole week without charging it and if you charge it you have level two charging j1772 you can recharge it about three hours

uh top speed 100 kilometers an hour 62 miles per hour which is faster than you want to go crazy yeah yeah depending on where you because you that's the thing you don't want to really want to use these on the road and that you're going to win this off-road because on the road there with the giant tires and everything they don't feel great on the road uh so yeah that kind of speed off-road in the forest it's insane uh in terms of pricing and availability uh it starts at 14 000 usd

for the 10 kilowatt hour version. So you have the 10 or the 20 kilowatt hour version. If you want to upgrade to the 20 kilowatt hour version, that's 17,500. And then you have an option for your second motor, which is a little bit expensive. If you want to go with the second motor, it's $4,000 to add on either one of those versions. So I'm super excited about it and I want to encourage the company too because they're local and I think they're a really cool company.

And so I did place an order for it. If you have to place a refundable deposit, $450 to get a reservation. And they already have some in customers' hands right now, but they're moving. They have a financing round right now that they're trying to close to move to volume production. So they only plan to make about 100 next year. That's not a ton, but those are going to be actual production version.

And then they're going to move to a higher production in 2024. So if you want to have your name on the list, you need to place a reservation right now. But yes, some deliveries next year for sure. All right. That's pretty much it for all the news this week. You can check out the video about it. I posted a video with a lot more details on our YouTube channel right now if you want to go check it out.

All right. Questions. Let's move in quick because we're already 108. Love the new electric web design. Yeah. Thanks to everybody who helped with that. We're still tightening things up a little bit here and there, but I think it's better overall, much faster on mobile as well. Patricia Bass. So EVgo, et cetera, will have the adapter for Tesla owners, but not vice versa. Tesla chargers will not adapt to other manufacturers.

I don't know that we know that yet. It doesn't seem like with this, we kind of assumed that they were going to do something, but not this. So with this, it seems like the chances of adapters for US market have gone down. But Tesla said they're going to charge cars in the US. They literally said that they're going to have CCS compatibility at their charging station in the US. So I did not take this...

as a change of plan on that. I think this is like a one more thing on top of it. But I might just be assuming that too and Tesla is actually...

If we're right about the funding, like the incentive things, that might be what is happening, but I'm still hopeful that the plan remains to also have CCS adapters and CCS compatibility at the superchargers. - Yeah, and just to answer her second question, what about the Tesla's made in other countries? Don't they use a different charger? Yes, they use CCS.

Yeah, in different CCS than in North America, though, the CCS Combo 2, which is a bit different. But yeah. All right, question from Bike Angelus. It seems the Twitter deal represents the greatest risk to Tesla since they ramped, since Model 3 went big. What do you think about that?

I mean, I think the Twitter deal and I think Elon Musk at this point is the greatest threat to Tesla. And I think Twitter is part of what is having Elon Musk losing it a little bit. So, yeah, I guess. But...

I think there's more than just Twitter. But I think... I literally think that Twitter, not just the deal, but his use of Twitter... Right. ...is a major influence of him. Like, I keep going back of, like, the capture thing. You remember when he told me that I was captured by the Tesla shorts and they influenced me into becoming anti-Tesla? I think he basically, like...

He was projecting about himself. Because I think he got captured by the right because the Democrats were being mean to him. And to be fair, the Democrats did some dumb things too. It's not like they did things that he shouldn't have done.

for sure. And they did think purely political, including the union thing that they were trying to give $4,500 to EVs made by unions. That was definitely anti-Tesla, but not specifically for Tesla. I think it was just like for unions. But yeah, so I think those things build up together, started having an influence on him. And then obviously the whole echo chamber that he built around him on Twitter with

with the Omars and Sawyer and all those people. I think, again, I don't want to sound mean. I don't think these people mean bad. Even Omar Wu, I think, is a complete idiot. I don't think he means bad. I think he doesn't understand what the impact he's having

on on the situation i think he's just like i'm super pro tesla and i want tesla to succeed which i agree with him i want tesla to succeed too but he's doing it in a way that uh he doesn't see how it's effect eroding on on elon's uh psyche and affecting the whole situation yeah all right let's move on

Um, follow up question. How do you assess the rollout of other charging networks in the USA with supercharger networks seeming to be fully deployed for seamless SV driving? Competing automakers are at a deficit. I think that's what do you think about that?

I mean, we've said it for years that legacy automakers should have invested in their own networks, not relied on third party and third party had a very bad track record in terms of usability and uptime. But it is getting better. And, um,

And so it's striking for the best, but Tesla definitely still have a giant advantage from investing on it early and they keep investing on it and they keep, it's hard to catch up. But at the same time, if now, if everything becomes open, like Tesla, I just, as given everybody, like the,

No one can complain about Tesla having a moat with the Supercharger network now because they just said, you guys can have it. You can have our standard and get on board. Obviously, people like that would also help them with making the Supercharger a bigger revenue stream. But still, no one can say that Tesla is trying to build a moat with the Supercharger network anymore. All right, Carl in San Diego, disagree that Elon is helping with sustainable transportation. We're getting pretty...

He has been so focused on building what he wants and not what is sustainable. I guess it's bigger, faster cars and not smaller bolts and stuff.

Yeah, but do you agree with that? No, I think the faster cars, the performance and everything, I think that's all people want. Not only is what people want to help dispel a lot of the stereotypes about electric cars being golf cars and things like that, like that, that was still the case. People don't remember. Like, I, that was still the case until the Model S. Like,

Yeah. And even from the Model S, it took a while. It took the dual motor event. It took maybe up to Plaid. Now, I think it's just you're living under a rock if you don't know. If you want the fastest car in the world, the most performance car in the world, you have to go electric. But it wasn't too long ago that it wasn't the case.

All right, Carl in San Diego, this is some rare good news from Tesla that they reversed the decision for salvage vehicles. Yeah, what do you think the, I mean, we talked about it before, but what do you think the motivation was?

i don't well uh yeah i mean someone someone who actually reached out and gave me the tip from tesla had a theory about it and i mean they were at tesla but i don't think they were previewed to like the actual thinking behind the decision or anything like that uh and they had a theory where with opening up the supercharger network whether through ccs or now or now this this new open standard they are onboarding

non-Tesla EVs on the network, on their CCS, and they have no way of knowing if that car was salvaged or not, salvaged title or not, like they do for their own cars because they have all your data, believe it or not. So it looks bad for them to like, oh, they say, oh, no Tesla vehicle salvaged on DC fast charging, but they're going to accept like a bolt that has been salvaged on their supercharger network. Like that would make no sense. So

I guess that's a theory, but I don't know if that's the one that made it. It is for sure that they have no excuse that it took two years to make that happen. Yeah. All right. This is just a comment. Elon has a long history of being pro free speech, except the speech he disagrees with. I think we're all kind of seeing that.

What does a bankrupt Rivian look like? Does Amazon swoop in or does it just go away? I don't think it would go away. I don't know if Amazon would swoop in or maybe one of the other investors. I guess Amazon would be the... Yeah, I mean, I guess when I say the clock is ticking with the $13 billion in the bank and you're losing $2 billion a quarter, that's just like with the reserve money that they have, they could still raise more money and Amazon could come in and help. So yeah, I'm not...

I'm saying it's a problem, but obviously I'm not like predicting that Rivian is going to go bankrupt soon. I'm just saying that it's something to keep an eye on because we live in a capitalistic world. And if you want the vehicle program to succeed, it has to be a profitable vehicle program. There's just no way around it. All right. Two more questions. Joel Sapp says, Seth, what do you think of the EV9? This is in regard to the Volvo that I put an order on in case the Rivian doesn't. Did you not reserve that one?

so the ev9 is not available for reservation yet so um that the final form hasn't even been announced there's uh at the la auto show last year um kia showed off a prototype and it's you know it's way too funky to be you know close to final but i don't know when that they said that they're gonna have they're gonna be on the streets in 2023 and they haven't released it yet so

I don't know when that's going to drop, but knowing Kia, it's probably going to be in the $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 range. So that'll be something to watch as well. That's definitely on my radar. And then the last question, just got a call from a local service center asking me if I wanted a Model Y. I am concerned that Tesla has a demand problem again.

I don't know where you're located, Francois. It's more of a location thing.

It literally could be someone that canceled their order last minute and now they have a vehicle available and they're looking for someone that's willing to take that specific configuration right now. So I wouldn't be worried so much about it like that. But yeah, I mean, Tesla right now, I mean, I assume you're in the US. If you're in the US, Tesla is kind of in a weird situation where a lot of people are waiting for next year when some of those vehicles, including the Model Y, are going to be

eligible for a nice little $7,500 check. So, yeah. All right. That's, that's pretty much it. Yeah. I have an accent. If you have an accent too, brother, Dave says, everyone has an accent. I'm trying to do my best. It is my second language. Um,

But yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for listening to the show this week. We went a little bit long. We had a lot to discuss, but I hope you appreciate it. And I thank you for EcoFlow for sponsoring the show this week. You can use their code. I had it right here. You can look at the description of the show, though, because it is a weird one. EFBF8OFF for an extra 8% off. And that's on top of their Black Friday sale of 50% off.

you can see their center yeah so i get go get if you need a power station go get it right now and we're gonna see you same time same place next week have a good one