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Welcome to a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seb Wintrom. How are you doing today, Seb?
i'm good all right let's jump right into the news this week we have i was kind of a slow news week uh but we still have a few items that i think are going to be really interesting to discuss and a lot of things that are probably going to launch some new discussions and things like that so if you guys want to jump into the comment section and uh talk about it about it with us you're welcome to let's just be put
put myself into focus so we don't get all these notification coming in. There we go. All right. So we're going to start out with, since it's going to be our last podcast before the Tesla delivery results coming in early next week, probably on Monday, I think. Yep. Monday. So we're not going to be able to talk about it until next podcast, but we're
There's been a lot of updates this week, a lot of analysts again downgrading their estimates. The consensus keeps going down and it's all over the place. People are just not on board. There's not a clear way where these deliveries are going to land. But now some of the more serious ones are really interesting where it might look like not only Tesla is not growing at a higher rate anymore, it might be
going down. Shrinkage. Shrinkage in time of growth. So we talked a little bit about that possibility, but like kind of vaguely earlier this month, now it's becoming more clear, like even like Troy Teslike, who's been one of the more consistent type putting out quarterly delivery estimates,
has downgraded now to 420,000 deliveries. Yeah, I'm sure some people are going to like that number. But if you remember correctly, so last quarter, Tesla was 424,000 deliveries. That was a new record.
Now, from Q4 to Q1, sometimes there's a pushback. Last year, it was actually up from Q1, Q1, 2023 was up from Q4, 2022. So, there could have technically still be that number. However...
Virtually all analysts agree that it's going to be below the Q4 numbers. But now some people think it's even going to be below the Q1 2023 numbers. So it would mean no growth at all year over year, which would be completely new for Tesla, like something that hasn't happened in...
i don't know when probably like what seven eight years something like that like yeah been been a while a long time like sometimes there's been not like testa has been i had at one point in two years in a row of like quarter to quarter growth which is absolutely insane especially in the auto industry which is seasonal so it's it's normal to have like year over year growth but
quarter over quarter is crazy especially maintaining that for two years now not only we don't have that anymore we went we might be going back to shrinkage like you said so wet bush um the exchanger estimate like a lot a lot of this is putting a light on the wall street analysts too like there's some some of them like they get a bad name in general for sure like it's like car salesmen in some in some ways like i'm sure they're not the most trusted people in the world in terms of proficient but
There are some that are good, there are some that are bad, there are some that are on their game and everything. But there are some people that just barely touched their estimate this quarter, even though a lot of people are saying it's going to be a bad one. So, Wedbush, for example, went from 475,000 estimated deliveries, which would have been very good, down 50,000 to 425,000. So, what happened in the last few weeks?
where Bush just wake up and like, all right, let's put that down. But I'm seeing estimate from 420 to 480, which is a huge range. And I'm talking from like big Wall Street firms here. But Troy's like, like I said, has been...
consistently reducing his estimate since the beginning of the quarter. And he's now down to 420, up for 435 just a few weeks ago. And to Troy Testlake's credit, he's one of the analysts who's using this like a more data-driven analyst, analysis, like where he's looking at actual VIN numbers and all that. So right now, what I saw that the overall consensus, if you get an average of Wall Street, it's 448.
458,000 deliveries. But I think the consensus is just skewed too much upward because of so many analysts on Wall Street not updating the numbers right now. If they were to update the numbers, it's probably be closer to 450. And so what I'm seeing right now, if anything less than 450 for Tesla this quarter would be bad.
And if Troy Tesla and some other analysts are right and it goes up to 420, 425, I think that's just awful for Tesla because that literally means like it's not only not growing at the high rate, it's not growing at all. It's shrinking.
Do we have any, like what was Tesla's guidance last quarter? Well, that's the problem. Tesla is not big on guidance. Unlike most other automakers or most other companies in general, they don't have precise guidance. Tesla's only guidance has been we're going to grow this year. So it's not even a quarterly guidance. It's a yearly guidance, an annual one. And we're going to grow at a significantly, we might grow at a significantly less high rate than we did in 2023, which was like,
30% or so, I think, in 2023. So 2024 should be significantly below 30%. But that can mean anything. That can mean like 0%. That can mean like 10%. What does that mean? We don't know. But we're going to keep an eye on this because this is obviously a big deal. Because Tesla, even with some demand issues because of microeconomic circumstances and tougher competition and all that, Tesla has been able to still grow by 20%.
slashing, slashing, slashing prices. It's still been knowing that, but not to the same effect it looks like. Yeah. And those slashing of prices has kind of affected the rest of the industry because things like the Mach-E become a lot less enticing when the Model Y is $10,000 less or even more. Exactly.
There's another aspect where Tesla is trying to get some money out of its fleet. It's through the full self-driving package. So the full self-driving package is where Tesla can get a lot of profits because it's just a software update at this point. The hardware has already been included in the cars. So if they can get someone, not even a new delivery, but an existing vehicle to get it, it's going to just increase its revenue and profit greatly.
Now, Tesla is counting on its V12 that's been pushing out over the last week. We've talked about it last week. V12 seems to be now being pushed to Waterfleet. I still haven't got it. I said I've got it this week. And it's Tesla. Yeah, your background screws that up.
So Tesla is banking that people are going to try it and they're actually going to want to buy a full-sale joint package. Because mind you, like full-sale joint package, we don't know the take rate of this. But from the only few data points that we were able to get, it looks like it's below 20% in North America.
And globally, it's probably closer to 10%, if not lower than 10%, because the rest of the world doesn't even have FSD beta. It has also more limited versions of autopilot features. So it's due to regulation, I mean. And that limits the take rate, obviously. So if Tesla can boost that take rate, it's going to help. And Elon announced...
Two new initiatives this week. One, everyone's getting one month of free FSD beta trial. And the other one is Tesla's going to mandate that every new delivery of a car...
gets a demo by a Tesla employee. So you upload the default self-driving V12 on the car, which is not completed because even with that one month free trial that everybody's getting right now, if you buy with a referral code, you already got three months of free full self-driving. So pretty much I would assume that most people that are buying a new Tesla are buying it with a referral code. And
If you do that, you get it three months. So you upload that software. Now the employee is going to push it right away. So that's the difference here. And this is a little bit touchy where...
You have to request the FSD beta software from the car. It doesn't come standard in it, even if you bought it. Now, even if you have it for free for three months, in the case of someone that didn't buy it, but bought the car with the referral code. So now Tesla is going to show you, okay, I'm going to request it for you at the delivery so that you can experience it. So now you're going to have it in your car. So that means as soon as you press that stock down,
once or twice depending on your configuration you're gonna be on fsd beta so a lot of people are gonna be on it now uh because technically if you have like a navigation put in and you're on the highway and maybe you have autopilot you want to put it on well now that autopilot is fsd beta and and if you have the navigation and it's going to take an exit for you it's going to take an off ramp and it's going to keep going on a festival so something to keep in mind here
Now, what if you have an older, like a Model 3 from 2018 that has the 2.5 hardware? Are you going to get FSD beta or are you going to just stick with autopilot? No, you're going to have to have that self-driving computer at least.
So version three hardware and above. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You have to have it. So if you are 2.5, you can get the upgrade to three, but you have to have the computer upgrade for that. And Tesla only delivered those to those who bought the FSD package. Like myself, for example, I had a 2.5 computer and my Model 3 was upgraded to a three when I bought the FSD package. But yeah.
I bought it at lunch and then when it was ready, they sent me the self-driving computer. Are you talking about the launch where Elon said that every car made from now on will be able to drive itself?
Yeah, to be fair, it did add the caveat like the computing power may have to be upgraded at some point. So that was always like we didn't hammer tested too much on that other than when they made people pay for the subscription though. That was a little bit weird where you had to pay for the computer for the subscription.
That was a bad move from Tesla. I think that's when we got blocked too, when we reported on that. I think that's the initial block. Yeah, the first block that we got from Elon Musk was when we alighted that that wasn't cool. Anyway, now...
The other thing, and that plays into maybe the delivery results here, is that also that mandate to demote the full self-driving for every new delivery, that also increased the delivery load tremendously for Tesla. Because if you are not aware, nowadays it's different. Like if they have time, if it's a slow day or whatever, and you're taking delivery of your car,
Distilled employees are great and they will show you everything. They answer every question and all that. But if they are a short staff, hand of quarter, there's a rush and everything. The average experience, and I've seen it myself taking deliveries with people, it's like good luck even talking to someone other than for signing some papers. And even then sometimes it's signed beforehand. They send it to you through the app and you can sign it electronically now. It's like giving you a key.
pointing you to a car getting inside and that's it you're gone like they don't show you anything they point you to the center display here it will show you like tutorial videos and everything and it's great for the most part i think especially nowadays consumers a lot more uh informed they do their own research and everything so i don't think it's that big of a deal for most people but some people would like to have more question and it's possible at some times
Now, everyone, not only that won't be the case, a test employee will need to get in the car with you, show you FSD beta, drive with you FSD beta. That's like a multiple X multiplicator on the workload of a delivery.
And you know what? I think the timing of that, Elon releasing that, announcing that at the end of the quarter like that, with everything pointing to a bad quarter at Tesla, I think that's an excuse they're going to use for the delivery results.
Really? Yeah. I think like, I wouldn't be surprised like if the, in the press release, like they have a very short press release with the result. And if it's like way down, they're going to use, okay, we have the arson attack in Berlin, which is a fair, fair excuse to be honest with you. Like that's a good one. Uh,
But they're going to maybe also say, also, we had higher inventory at the end of quarter due to a higher delivery workload because of the mandate to use FSD better, which we think is a safety benefit for Hans Zimmer. I wouldn't be surprised if there's something like that that happens because I'm sure that it would have, because it wouldn't be false. It would have an effect on the deliveries. Now, will they have a woke mind virus slowing deliveries as well?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think they would use that in the press release. Maybe a tweet will come out with that. But I think this is a major change here. Yeah, it's big. It's something to keep in mind. Now, in turn, other things are happening with FSD, but at the same time. So this happened last weekend right after the podcast. Elon announced that Tesla is no longer compute-constrained.
So some Tesla fan didn't like my headlines here again, like the headline was Tesla no longer compute constrained, running out of excuses for self-driving. But I think it's fair because if you remember, if you've been following the language and everything around full self-driving at Tesla for eight years now at this point,
There's a lot of things that evolve and we thought was already baked in. For example, the V12 end-to-end neural net, the training of the vehicle and all that.
The way it was first announced, we thought that this was always the case because you remember I said that at first Elon was like, hey, using autopilot is like training your dog. Like you're training the car. You're telling it how to work and everything. It's going to learn from you and all that. Turns out that was not true. That was always hard-coded by Elon.
programmers what the car would do. So yes, Tesla was using training data from the fleet with the vision system, but you weren't actually training your car how to react. That is V12 now. Now you're using the car data and information, feeding that into the vision system, feeding that into the neural nets training system and improving the car's behaviors that way.
So now, why I say running out of excuses is like, this was supposed to be always the case. Now it is. Now it is in V12 that's being ramped up right now. So that's one fewer excuse. And the other excuse is like, well, to train that neural net that controls the vehicle's behavior,
You need compute power to do that at scale because it's video training and video is super heavy. So you need a lot of compute power. And Tesla was constrained to compute. But Elon Musk this weekend announced Tesla is no longer compute constrained. There's a Dojo supercomputer that's come online a few months ago. But I think a lot of people believe that it's more NVIDIA-based.
training compute power that's been deployed by Tesla. Tesla has been apparently spending billions and billions of dollars on NVIDIA compute power. So they've been putting new clusters online and now training is not a constraint anymore. So what does that mean?
That means that now that V12 is there, training compute is there, we should see an extremely high rate of improvement. And if we don't, there's a real problem. Now I think there's no more excuse. Now Tesla would have to admit that their pathway is not the right one. I'm not saying that's the case. I'm saying that if things continue that way, which the way I'm talking about is not massive improvements. I've had...
FSD beta for two years now, and I've seen some improvement, but over a two-year path for something like AI. I mean, ChatGPD over two years is not the same product anymore. Why would Tesla's AI, if it's all AI-based, all neural net-based, why would it not be improving at a high rate?
Now you don't have any excuse. The whole thing is AI-based. The training compute is there. We need to see improvements. So I'm still keeping an open mind, saying that it can be improvement, but we need to see it now. And if we don't, and we need to see test or release actual data, not tell people, hey, go look at this guy's video on X. It's so great. It's like, what's that?
It is great, but it's anecdotal evidence. And most of the time, anecdotal evidence happens to be in California and Texas and very nice roads that are, there's no snow. There's no like, a lot of easy situation.
Okay, one last thing about full self-driving that I want to say before we move on is we've seen Tesla now change, update its language around full self-driving. Tesla and Elon Musk, obviously. So remember, we all remember the 1 million robo-taxi by the end of the year. That language has been wiped out of the...
Lexicon at Tesla and Elon, they're not using that. If they're using RoboTaxi now, they're using the word RoboTaxi differently. If you remember RoboTaxi, a million by the end of the year was Tesla's actual existing fleet being turned into RoboTaxi through software update. Now RoboTaxi- Now it's a different product. It's a whole different vehicle. It's an actual vehicle program designed from the ground up to be self-driving, something completely different.
Obviously, with leverage, similar technology and all that, I'm not saying that it's not the case. You don't hear Elon now saying, hey, soon enough, by the end of the year, whenever, we're going to turn your car into a robot taxi that's going to make you $30,000 a year and make your vehicle an appreciating asset. All these things have been wiped out of Elon's language, by the way, even though he used them to sell millions of vehicles.
There's some people that would say that that venture into the fraud category. I'm no lawyer, but I think might be an argument there at this point. I think there will be an argument in some courts and we'll see. It's interesting. Like it seems like Tesla is trying to like outrun like legal battles, like, you know, how it kind of out innovates like copycats. It just seems to like, we're going to,
just go on to the next thing before the last thing can be even settled. Yeah, it moves fast. You have to admit that. Yep. Then after the RoboTaxi had the feature complete language that was used,
And that's probably where we are right now. Like what is Elon's vision of a feature complete is probably this version of FSD better where all the pieces of the puzzles are there. You have the auto park, you have the highway driving, and now you combine that with the city driving and you combine all these things together. And now you have all the features of self-driving. You just all need to improve to a level of safety where you don't need to be.
supervise and that's the new language now these days tesla is calling it supervised full cell driving uh supervises in parentheses though in the language i've been using uh so we first saw it appear earlier this week in that email that elon sent out to employees mandating
on the demo at HU Delivery, Ilan said that supervised full self-driving actually works, which is good. Probably, I don't know if a lawyer was involved in that, but that's good because, yeah, he's right. Supervised full self-driving actually works. It's just now you have to ask yourself, what makes it work? Is it the full self-driving part or is it the supervising part? And
There's no doubt in my mind that if the full self-driving was not supervised right now, there would be thousands, if not tens of thousands of crashes involved with full self-driving data going up because the drivers stop the car from doing stupid things all the time. So now it appeared in there. And now in the email that they sent out for the free trial of FSD Beta V12,
they are calling it also supervised full self-driving. So they are really banking on that word now to make sure that people understand that it's supervised, which probably should have been something that they should have done since the very beginning. I think that would have helped. But now keep yourself, keep in mind, Tesla didn't sell people supervised full self-driving. They sold the idea of full self-driving period to
supervise in the meantime. Now, the way they're including that is like, that's what you're getting now. The promise of what it should be in the future is not being communicated as much from Tesla nowadays. Keep that in mind.
Yeah, so we have two, we'll do some live comments. Fleming Law asks, what's your experience with FSD-12? To me, and then also Elon said everyone would get a one month trial of FSD-12. Any update on this? It's the end of the week. We actually have been getting some tips that people are starting to get the one month trial of FSD.
And they're actually one of them said that it wasn't called beta, but we're we're following up on that as as for me,
My experience has been very, like I got it two days ago or a day and a half ago. It is different. There's, it's like stops and starts a little bit differently. It's a little bit smoother in some areas, but rougher in other areas. So I don't know if this is one of those things where you have to take a step back to, you know, take a couple of steps forward. But it feels like this is not,
this isn't going to be RoboTaxi anytime soon. This is kind of like another small iteration. And I would almost even say it's not even a step forward. It's kind of a step to the side. Like things have changed.
But I'm very early. I've probably put about 15 miles of full self-driving on. Have you noticed the speed? A lot of people are complaining about the speed where it's like super cautious on this one and they're like not even achieving the set speed sometimes. Yeah. And, you know, the interventions that I did were almost always like the guy behind me is going to rear end me if I don't like get going here. So it's overly cautious and slow for sure. Yeah.
other people say like even like you set a speed as let's say like 55 miles per hour in the 50 zone and it won't do it which is weird before that it would do it there is this like i don't know it's a controversial idea to have like an autonomous system
uh go a higher speed than the speed limit but we all know like the driving in some places like it's completely normal to drive over the speed limit like it's yeah and i talked to mercedes about this they have the effort or sorry the level three uh self-driving where they are actually responsible and their point is like well if the cop pulls you over for going 56 and a 55 we have to pay that so we're not going to make it go over the speed limit
So as it gets to level three and level four, it really can't really break laws. The rolling stop is another good example. Everybody rolls to a stop. But if you can get in trouble for that and the company is responsible for it, they have to stop. Yeah, that's a good point.
All right, moving on from Folsom. Let's thank Alan's question there. Alan Longberg said, any word on V12 coming to Canada? People are reporting getting V12 in Canada right now, so it is happening. Not for me, though. I got V12 just yet. But it is happening. People are getting it. All right.
So the Cybertruck ramp looks to be happening quite a bit. A new drone flyover of GFR Texas yesterday showed like hundreds and hundreds of Cybertruck here. You see a bunch of them there. Like a better look here, you see like a few hundred just here alone. But that's just one parking lot. There's a few parking lot on the drone flyover from Vlad Sloan here.
where you see even some trucks getting loaded on for delivery. So there's a nice little cycle of Cybertruck coming up. We cannot say how many they're producing based on that because we don't know like how many, we don't have the actual rate of it coming out of the factory. But I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is now close to a thousand a week like that. That wouldn't be surprising to me at this point because it looks like a hundred or so a day or more is a real possibility.
However, it's not all good. It's not all good. We've got reports from Tesla Cybertruck, early Cybertruck owners that get some significant failure rate on the units here. We talked to two people that got a Cybertruck. One got it two weeks ago, another one just last week.
And they had rear motor failure on their car. And it looks like it might be a somewhat widespread. I cannot say how widespread, but they were told by service that it's going to take a little bit for them to be able to repair the cars and the trucks because of a backlog on that rear motor that they need to replace. So one of them, I think, was told until like mid-April and the other one like two or three weeks before.
from the time it was reported. So it's like for the first month of ownership of the Cybertruck, it's going to spend more time at the service center than in their garage. And if there's a backlog on that rear motor, it might be like a more widespread problem than we thought. And also we heard like from MKBHD, for example, his truck that he got got a serious panel gap. Elon even commented on it.
I don't think that's a panel gap. That's a broken door. He said that 15 Cybertrucks in service at this issue with the door striker loosened in the field due to inefficient torque after the door fit. He said it's a five-minute fix. We've heard other people from other early Cybertrucks owners having similar issues. I don't know exactly about this door issue specifically, but panel gaps issues. And it's not that easy of a fix, or at least not.
Maybe it is that easy of a fix, but the service centers are pretty backlogged right now and they cannot process them that fast.
So I think Tesla might have had like they might this might be also an issue about both the quality issue at the factory for sure. That's there's no doubt about that. But also an issue where the factory is ramping up faster than Tesla's service infrastructure for the Cybertruck is obviously people need to be trained on the Cybertruck and all that. So Tesla trains its employees, bring them to the factory, trains them, send them back out and then they train each other and all that. But that takes it.
sometimes and Tesla is expanding Cybertruck delivery maybe faster than that is happening. I don't know, but there's a backlog somewhere and still some issues with the quality of the Cybertruck. Now, I want to be fair, every new vehicle program has some issues at the beginning. However, I think it's fair to highlight Tesla's in this case because Tesla seems to be having more issues
than other automakers in the green production. Simply by nature, Tesla, we talked about, he moves super fast. He moves quick and that has its pros and it has its cons. And that's definitely one of the cons of that. All right, moving on from Tesla news, we have a bunch of news
new vehicle or at least launched in the u.s with the pole store 4 we have the ford explorer details in europe and we're gonna have an update on fisker so if you guys uh if you guys enjoyed the show you can give us a like a subscribe and all that that helps us show a ton takes a second to do and if you want to participate into the discussion you can put in the comment section right now and we're going to get to them just in a few minutes at the end of the show when we're done talking about these uh these things
All right. GM is in talks with CATL to license its LFP technology and possibly a joint venture on a plant in North America. So this report came out earlier this week and it's coming from Core News China.
So this is a new model. Of course, CATL already had this deal with Ford in the U.S., and that brought a lot of political attention to it with concern of a Chinese company's controlling battery production in the U.S. The U.S. has had a clear agenda in terms of protection when it comes to its auto industry and the trans-engine electric vehicles and the tax credit being for North American production and all that. So this kind of...
It's been seen as a potential loophole that's happening that they want to close. But some companies have been finding a little workaround. We've heard about Tesla also being in discussion with CATL about licensing the technology so that Tesla would own the factory but use CATL production technology, battery technology to produce the LFP cells in North America. So there's not that much information on that technology.
potential GM deal, but it does sound similar to me. So it does sound like people or American automakers are looking to make this kind of deal with, say, ETL, which should technically bypass this issue. It might still raise some issues, but I think at this point, it's pretty fair. I know there's the main issues with the Chinese companies,
Having a hold in other market is the fact that technically a Chinese company needs to do everything that the Chinese government says. That's just the way they're set up there with the Communist Party. So...
It is – it's kind of like letting the Chinese government here in. It's kind of competing with the government rather than a private company, even though it's a private company. So I get those issues. Those are real issues that are probably above my paycheck. But at the same time, you have to give CATL some credit. Like they have –
They have expanded battery production more than anyone. They have enabled electrification probably more than anyone other than Tesla and probably catching up to Tesla at this point, which is the scale they are doing, them and BYD. And they have great technology. Everyone agrees. All of the automakers are using CATL now because they have great technology, especially when it comes to LFP. So...
Is it that big of a deal to use their technology, license their technology, and build them in the U.S.? Still under the control of a U.S. company, in this case GM. Tesla is also rumored to have a similar deal. And use their technology, pay them for it, obviously. I think it's just normal. What do you think, Seth? Yeah, I mean...
The devil's always in the details here. You know, the Ford thing actually, you know, it seemed fair at the beginning. And then, you know, there was a lot of drama and politics about it.
So, you know, just to back out a little bit, the LFP technology that cattle is like the best in the world at by far was actually invented in the US. I think that's good enough. I think was part of that, that the guy who recently died at like age 100 died.
You know, like there was this all was kind of invented here and then the Chinese picked it up and ran with it. And now they have the best technology, the technology in the world. And then, you know, we're licensing it back here. I kind of feel like I don't know, it feels like we should definitely be using this. This is like important for the future of electric vehicles.
Again, the devil's in the details. So how do we license the technology in a fair way that's not going to make us vulnerable to China's whims? So I guess we're working through that. Well, I think licensing the technology would be that. But yeah, I agree that I'm not an expert in that.
And to be fair, also China on their side have a lot of protectionist laws too. So it's not like one way. It's like all of the automakers other than Tesla have to have to partner with the Chinese companies to produce vehicles in China. So it's a two-way street. All right. Polestar released their US pricings inspect for the Polestar 4, which is their CUV, midsize SUV type vehicle. Okay. Those are the... Okay. Right here. Okay.
so you have the single range one which gets the single range single motor one like it's 300 miles of range ep estimated uh it's gonna start at fifty six thousand three hundred dollars
Then you have, if you want to upgrade to a dual motor one, all-wheel drive, it's quite the upgrade, $64,300. It's a $8,000 difference. Yep, big motor. Yeah, for just a different motor because you get less range, 270 miles of range, just the all-wheel drive. And then you get the performance version with the plus and performance packs.
at 74 300 that also get 270 miles of range the plus packs we discussed this last time it gets like yeah it gets uh um the pilot pro kit and uh more luxury features adas system and all that
So yeah, I think this is going to be more of a competitor. Like when we said a Model Y competitor, but obviously in pricing, it's not a competitor, but it's a more luxurious vehicle than the Model Y, I believe. So it's going to be more a competitor to two vehicles that we discussed, the Porsche Macan EV and the Audi Q6 e-tron. I think those are going to be closer competitors, like the midsize SUV luxury segment. I do like the design of it. I'm
love the Polestar design. Polestar 2 is also great looking. Polestar 3. They had the full lineup at the New York Auto Show, which I was at the last two days. They are probably some of the best looking vehicles on the show floor. They did a really good job there. Obviously, the company is a little bit thin right now, but hopefully the demand for these things is pretty high.
Open order in April, so next month. And it's coming to the market by the end of the year. All right. Then we have the Ford Explorer launching in Europe. We also have the specs here. Don't I have my charts? I love my charts, guys. All right.
Single motor extended range Explorer starts at 45,000 euros. That's $58,000 US. So that's pretty much equivalent of the Polestar. Although this includes tax, right? I think. That looks like a pounds, but yeah, similar. Oh, yeah. That's a pound sign, not EU sign. Okay. 77 kilowatt hour battery pack. If you want to get the dual motor version, yeah.
Just two more kilowatt-hours in there. Okay, that's the big pack. And then you have the 52-kilowatt-hour pack also for a cheaper price. So starting at 39,000 pounds, the equivalent of $50,000. They don't have the range listed. They just have the top range listed at 374 miles, 600 kilometers. But that's WLTP. Okay.
So WTP doesn't account for climate control. So take that into account. So that's the Ford Explorer EV for the EU market. Now, Ford in the US.
It doesn't have the Explorer, but we do have the F-150 Lightning. And we've reported last few months they had some demand issues on that vehicle, and that keeps going. As Ford announced that they are cutting more jobs, one-third of the 2,000 workers that work on the F-150 Lightning at Ford's Rouge EV plant in Michigan.
So 700 workers are being transferred to its Michigan assembly plant for the Bronco and the Rangers. So that's bad news here. If 150 Lightning is having some issues competing with the new entries in the market, obviously the Cybertruck, that's taking a lot of attention, but also the Silverado EVs.
that is attractive in many ways with the much bigger battery pack. And obviously the Rivian is also still an option for everyone, even though it's been around for a while now. Yeah. So it's, man, the prices are still good for the Lightning though. You can get the Flash at $73,000, 220 miles on range. The Flash is still a good deal. Yeah. That's the one to get, I think. Yeah.
I feel like there's a lot more innovation Ford could be doing with the F-150 Lightning. I mean, you're looking at the Cybertruck as a big competitor there. They've really not done, again, at the LA or sorry, the New York Auto Show, they had a, let's call it a switch, switchback, switch something, Lightning, which looked amazing for off road. Switch gear, I think. Yeah, something like a switch gear.
Looks amazing. Like great, great aesthetic. It looks like it could just barrel off road. But, you know, they don't make that. They don't make that version. And it's, you know, a little bit frustrating because I feel like they could probably sell a ton of those. That would be kind of the Raptor version of the Lightning. Right.
All right. We're going to finish up on an update on Fisker, and then we're going to jump into the comment section. So if you guys have any questions for us about things that we discussed today or any other topics in the EV world that you want us to get into, we're going to have plenty of time to get into that if you put it in the comment section right now. So Fisker is basically done. We have been discussing their route to bankruptcy for the last few months, well, the last few years really. Thank you.
I remember actually with Scooter way back then, Scooter tried out the-- he was the first on our team to try out the Ocean. He was like-- with the early version, he was pretty impressed. I was like, yeah, there's a chance. I was always telling Scooter, be careful with Fisker. Don't get your hopes up.
I've been around for a while and I remember how Fisker came about. Obviously, the original Fisker went bankrupt too, but the relaunch of the company was, if you were around with the early days of 2016, 2017, 2018, it was a mess of a company. I was surprised that they managed to get that Magna deal, bring the ocean to production.
A lot of people saw that and was like, "Alright, this might actually work." I was impressed that he did that, but thinking that it works, it was never in the cards for me.
So what's the update this week is that they screwed all the early customers big time by just slashing the price of the Ocean in the last ditch effort to survive. The Ocean Sport, which I don't even know they delivered that one, but was starting at $39,000. They slashed that to $25,000, which they weren't already making money off of that. Now it's $14,000 or less.
The Ocean Ultra went from $53,000 to $35,000. And the Ocean Extreme, so that's the model they started with, they've been delivering a lot, that's $61,500 down to $37,500. That's a $24,000 price difference. So you can imagine that all the people that took delivery of the Ocean Extreme in the last few months are like, what the hell? My car is not worth anything anymore.
Because you just slashed the price in half almost. So now everyone is just trying to get rid of their Ocean, obviously. So you can get one for even cheaper than that right now. Use one because everyone is trying to get in off their hands because they know what's happening next, obviously, is Fisker going under and no service on those cars anymore. You're going to have to go third party. You're going to have to go super expensive. There's not going to be any parts for it. You're basically screwed.
which is the risk of dealing with these smaller startups. It's a problem sometimes.
allowing some other on days too i guess we should we should talk about because um that happened just right after the last podcast but the the nissan deal that was rumored is off the table confirmed that they're not discussing with other automakers anymore so that deal fell through not surprising we told you after the nissan on the matchup last week we're like i doubt that they're gonna announce it on the matchup and then the fisker one right after it's unlikely so that's done um
They got some money over the last week or two, but it's not nearly enough to survive. And now these price slash... I don't know what they're trying to do with that exactly because, I mean, probably they have inventory right now and they want to... Because they did stop production last week too. So they're sitting on some inventory and they want to get rid of it to get some money in, even though it's at a loss to restructure the company maybe. But they are...
they have hundreds of millions in debt over 100 million in payables and they had that billion dollar convertible note like it's just it's however they can do to like restructure the company it's not gonna be the same company anymore and uh and fisker is gonna lose control and rick fisker i mean
going to lose control like any day now again again they missed a few payments and it's it's done the uh that that uh the investor is gonna that the creditors gonna take over and unfortunately i don't i don't know what they're gonna do with it like this yeah i mean they
they could chop up the company and you know sell it out maybe you know maybe honda or whatever will lowball some crazy low price for the technology and maybe they'll keep the current
fleet running. I don't know. It's hard to imagine. Yeah. I mean, there's the... I'm pretty sure that the other vehicle programs, like all the things that were announced at Fisker Day, whatever, I'm pretty sure that's worth less at this point. It's just too early in the program. The Ocean is worth something. If you think you can fix the issues with it, maybe you can bring something back that is worth something. I don't think the brand is worth that much.
At this point, it went bankrupt twice. Fisker brand has always more been associated with design. I don't think it carries enough credibility to be worth anything on the market right now. So I don't know how a company comes in and salvage this, to be honest. But I'm sure there are some ruptures circling in right now, trying to see if there's a deal to be made for peanuts because the...
the creditors are going to want to get something out of it. And probably there's some a few hundred millions to be made maybe, but no major deal in my opinion. All right, let's jump into the comments to Hindish. Early show this week due to your travels requirements. Yeah, so let's get in there. We talked about the FSD experience. We talked about Canada.
Paul Thurgood from X or Twitter says, you obviously have not driven it enough. 12.3, almost all have said step change improvement. I will say that the first round of 12.3 beta testers who are, you know, I would kind of say the usual suspects gave it all, you know, glowing reviews as more and more people got into testing.
We started to hear about, hey, this thing's driving really slow, you know, two, five, ten miles per hour. Hitting curbs. We heard a few people hitting curbs. Yeah. There was a lot of little stuff.
uh it is like so i will admit or i will say that it is a different set of software because different things that annoy me uh happened and things that used to annoy me were fixed so you know i think everybody's going to have kind of a different experience based on where you're driving how the roads are what your expectations are etc um
let's move on to jose uh wow early pod yeah we did uh uh i'm flying out to colorado uh tonight so um fsd 12.3.2 is awesome here in socal happy friday so um i don't have 0.3.2 i just have 0.3 it would be nice to get on the latest um and try that out but i'm not going to get to do that for at least another week here um fsd 12
drives about two miles below the speed limit for me, and that's with zero traffic. A lot of people say that that makes it kind of useless. And I guess it's so frustrating. To be useful, it has to feel kind of normal driving. And if you're just like, damn, people are piling up behind you, it's not ideal. Yeah, that was my experience as well. I just couldn't deal with how slow it was going.
A comment just took my Model Y Long Range for a test drive on FSD 12.3. The first impression is mind-blowing. My eight-year-old said it felt like I was driving.
- Well, I don't know about your eight year old's opinion of it. And also I don't know about mind blowing that seems like to be a copy pasted from an Elon Musk tweet. But I do understand that I'm not gonna deny your experience and I know some people are like really impressed with it. I don't know where you're based too 'cause obviously the experience in California and where there's a lot of driving data coming in has been better. We have the Jose here also saying that in SoCal, it's great.
I would assume that it's better there for sure. All right. Guy Rogers says, Gonzalo Zamora, same. I thought something was wrong because mine kept sticking at anywhere from 2 to 10 miles per hour below the set speed. Wow, that's exactly mine. With no car ahead, very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. I'm having some issues with the speed also even on V11 where...
I turn on a road and it assumes that the road is 40 kilometers an hour. I don't know any road in Quebec that's 40 kilometers an hour. Normally, the base one is 50. Then you have 30 in some places that are super high residential or school places, school areas and all that. But normally, it's like 50 is normal.
So 40, they pick that up and then they won't update it until they actually seize a 50 limit. And then it's 40. So I put it up to 60 where I would be driving normally myself 60. And then it sees the 50 and then it passed the 50 and it goes up.
The limit goes up to 50, but my driving speed goes down to 50, even though it was at 60. Makes no sense. Like we just bumped up. You'd think we bumped up 10 kilometers an hour, which we didn't because it was always 50 kilometers.
And you go down to 50, even though I set it to 60. And I'll always set the limit over the speed limit because otherwise it's so frustrating. So there's a lot of issues like that that makes no sense. Also, I'm still getting some slowdown in the highways, but they're not necessarily phantom braking anymore. So it's not like actually braking on the highway. It's just it's driving. I'm driving. I'm set at 118 kilometers an hour, which is completely normal. And get back driving at that speed on the highway. And then it will...
slow down to 110 for no reason even though i'm still set at 118 it will just like feel like slowing down uh when passing sometimes that's the most frustrating i'm passing someone and then as i'm going back in the right lane it starts slowing down in front of them as dangerous stuff i'm like things like that are so frustrating you have to keep a close eye on so yeah and
in the next few weeks everyone in north america is going to get fsd beta trials and all that and it's yon is going to tell you that it's to prove that it works and it's a safety thing and all that but
Let's be clear, it's an attempt at getting you to buy the FS Debit Up package and to improve Tesla's profit in a tough quarter. That's all it is. And you're more than welcome to try it. Of course, I'm not going to tell you not to try it. But if you do, please be careful. Please.
Remember, it's supervised full self-driving and the supervision part is the true safety part. The safety addition is the fact that you should be super high alert, even more alert than usual when driving. And that makes it more safe, not the car.
Maybe the car can save you, but you're going to save the car a lot more than the car saves you. That's a pure fact. In an average driving day, you're going to save the car a lot more than the car is going to save you. So keep that in mind. Now, it's still a cool feature. It's impressive how it works, but...
be careful and i haven't tried it myself yet i'm supposed to get it but uh i've got two updates this week on my mobile 3 and still no v12 on it so i'll be trying it out soon because i'm doing plenty of driving this weekend so hopefully i get it soon and i i can yeah maybe they'll even bump you up over to uh 12.3.2 yeah you just you just got 12.3 you don't have anything after the three that's interesting i didn't get i didn't get that update all right not a big deal
All right. So thanks, everyone, for listening. Please be safe out there. Drive safe. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Bye-bye.
