Post-Launch Thoughts on the Cybertruck w/Guest Dirty Tesla | Tesla Motors Club Podcast #56
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Hey there, welcome to another Tesla Motors Club podcast. My name is Lewis. I'm Doug. And I'm Mike. On today's episode, we're going to cover all the fun and exciting things that came out after the Tesla Cybertruck event. And we've got a very special guest to do that with us, Dirty Tesla. So with all that said, let's get into the show. Episode number 56 starts now. We're here. How are you, gentlemen? How are things? Doing well.

Pretty good. It's an unusual night for us, but Doug is all the way in Japan joining us. I don't know if you can tell it's daylight here. It's like 11 o'clock in the morning here. I'm super jealous. I need to renew my passport. That'll be probably my first trip again. Go back to Japan. Part of the reason I'm here is because I need to renew my passport. A lot of places need a couple months of validity, I guess is the word, of your passport. But Japan, as long as it's still valid while you're here...

they're fine so that's something it's like a quick trip before i actually renew my passport nice

Oh, man. Well, I mean, I'm excited. Cybertruck event happened. I was not part of the stream for that one. I had a conflict, but I did watch a good portion of it. It seemed like you guys had a lot of fun, but not as much fun as our guest tonight, Dirty Tesla. Chris at Dirty Tesla, man, you were there. I'm so jealous. That is exciting. In person. Tell us all about it. How was it? It was a lot of fun. Tesla does a good job putting on an event.

Some people said it's not the best event. I thought it was great. I've been to a few different Tesla events now. And in terms of the ones I've experienced, I thought it was a great time.

You got to go walk right in the front doors of Gigafactory Texas, which is decorated nicely. And they had different parts of the Cybertruck on display as you went through. So they had the body and then the motor and then the front and rear castings. They had a door on display. The one guy was kind of cleaning it, showing how he wipes it off and stuff. And then you go into...

the factory where they're actually building the cyber trucks. And this is what really blew me away because, you know, they're starting production. And of course the machines were on a demo mode. They weren't actually building the trucks at the time, but yeah, they started production. Yeah. They're technically delivering some today, but you're like, oh, they're just barely getting started. And you're walking down these, this line. And I mean, I, I didn't count. I should have, but I would have guessed there was like a hundred cyber trucks there. And I was like,

I did not imagine being surrounded by all these cyber trucks in different, you know, steps of production. So as you walk down the line, you start and there's like barely, you know, the body in white or the under part is called, you know, not an engineer or anything. And then as you get to the end, right before you get to where they're doing the presentation, it's like a pretty much completed cyber truck. And you got to see all those steps as you walk through there.

I barely realized this till I had got through. Cause it's just so that, you know, you're kind of like overwhelmed by all this cool stuff. They have like different pieces of the truck on display. So like one had the frunk and they had a sign like Tesla's first powered frunk. And they kind of talked about it. And then they had the motor sitting there and, you know, these different parts and by those different parts were employees who had actually worked on this stuff, standing there ready to talk to you about whatever you wanted. And at one, you know, Tesla's usually so secretive about this stuff. Um,

I was recording, of course, because you could be recording. And I walk up to the guy standing at the front and I start to ask him a question. I go, oh, I'm holding my phone. I'm recording. And he goes, yeah, that's fine. And it's just for Tesla, you know, that's kind of weird. But it was awesome. So, I mean, there's so much more. I don't know if you want me to just keep going. Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. They used to be much more open. The event you're talking about sounds pretty similar to the event they did when they had their beta vehicles of the Model S.

And you got to go into the factory. It was just called factory. It was before they did Gigafactory, but it was the Fremont factory. And they had all the machines and the demo mode just sort of showing what a stamping would look like kind of thing. And they had engineers around and you could chat with them. I don't feel like YouTube was as big of a thing then, or at least it wasn't a thing that you could really monetize as much back then. But I took a bunch of videos of people and they seemed pretty cool back then. But somehow in the middle, they got a lot more secretive. But that's good to see that they're

Clearly, they've been told that they can talk because when they're not sure, they can get pretty cagey and pretty scared for their jobs. If you're a Tesla employee, always err on the side of don't say anything to anybody unless you're given explicit permission because you do not want Elon to be mad at you. Man, that's so awesome, though. That sounds exciting. If you ever need a cameraman...

just let me know. I would have followed you around the whole night. That's right. Lewis is in Austin. I live in Austin. I would have come right over. I didn't know. Yeah, I was lucky enough to have my wife with me holding the camera. That's fair. She's a better cameraman than I would be, I'm sure. Well, that's because you'd be too busy gawking at everything. No, that's awesome. That sounds really exciting. You got to see all those cool internals and stuff. You got to meet various engineers and employees and ask them questions.

Any of those displays that stood out to you as being the most impressive? Was there anything that you were most interested in or you really enjoyed?

It was too overwhelming to really, for me, you know, it's a combination of just there was so much there and it was all new because it's all Cybertruck. And we knew we're like, yeah, I guess they're starting production and just like being kind of overwhelmed by that. And also just being totally honest, not having the best depth of knowledge of building a car. So, you know, I've learned things along the years just from following Tesla and how different things happen and et cetera. But I don't have like a depth of that knowledge. So sure.

Every single display to me was like, this is amazing. There's a motor there and the wheels. And like, I, you know, they had one, the robot putting the tires on the car. So it picks up the robot and it uses a camera to look at the lugs and it just get it. And then it can put it on. And like that to me, it was like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. So, uh, is it like the Kuka robots or like the big sort of red?

It was the red one. It was like the arm, basically. And it could, you know, do this. There was just everything. It was very overwhelming. It was very cool. Let me ask you, what was the sense in the room during the presentation, or at least the end of the presentation? Because from our perspective, while we're doing the show, I mean, they had some videos. That was pretty nice. Elon isn't the most polished speaker, but, you know, that is what it is. But the thing ended. I'm like, wait a minute.

They said nothing about price. They said nothing about range. It seemed kind of abrupt. And then, so we all had to look it up and I'm assuming in the room they had to do that. And my sense was they didn't mention those things because they probably didn't want on camera, everybody going, you know, because I think it was, I think overall it's very exciting stuff, but like the two main things that everyone had the question going in and the presentation itself did not answer what is the actual range? What is the actual cost? And both

felt like an under liver, or at least they didn't match the promise, even though other things maybe make up for it. Those are the main things people understand and had real questions about, and they weren't answered. So eventually, I guess everybody in the room is having to look this stuff up on their phone. So how was that? Yeah, it was very strange. So the presentation was really good in person. The videos were very impressive. The sound was good. Elon, you know, did fine and everything. And everybody, you know, was pretty positive and not

beat but yeah we're all like all right what's the range and the price and when it was over it was definitely the sense of like that was slightly superficial um you know like okay they mentioned the steer by wire that's amazing you know very cool they didn't go that in depth but they mentioned it um and they showed some of the demos of the towing and all that stuff and okay very cool um

And then, of course, people started getting pings on their phone from people not in the event, because, of course, no one at the event is looking at the Internet, really. We're all recording or paying attention or whatever. So then it starts spreading like, oh, the price is online and everyone starts talking about the price and everything. And yeah, overall, it was like this immediate sense of kind of like disappointment, honestly, due to the price being so high and the range being so low.

My initial take when I saw the prices, I was not surprised at all because I am not very trusting of corporations. So I don't care what they tell me. I'm not going to believe what they say until they actually deliver on whatever they say. So this whole time leading up to Cybertruck, in all conversations I was having online and with other people, I was like, just look at Model X. They can't have a $50,000 Cybertruck that goes 300 miles

And it's, you know, when they have an $80,000 Model X that barely goes farther than that. It doesn't make any sense. So I always had this $79,999. That's if you'll look up my talking on X or on the Internet, you'll see leading up to this. I was like, it's going to be $79,999. That's going to be a price because they can say they get the tax credit, but it's the most amount of money they can get.

I also, in my head, was, I mean, at some points, I was like, this thing's going to be 100 grand. It's just going to be too expensive. Once Tesla started dropping the prices of other cars, I started getting a little more hopeful for some more reasonable prices. But having super constrained production, along with immense demand, even if 90% of people are disappointed, immense demand, you're going to get a 79,000 price in there. I mean, why wouldn't they do that? So personally, I was not very shocked.

But I understand if people look at the 2019 specs and they think they're going to get that and then you don't even have a 350 mile cyber truck, let alone 500 miles. You're going to be like, what the heck? So I was disappointed with the range. The price is not as much. The one last thing I'll say to because I have to say this with the feel in the room.

When Franz threw the baseball, that was, they got their groan right there. Nobody was impressed by that. It was this like, it was very, from us watching the video, it was so terrible. One thing,

Elon introduces it. It's like, oh, we had a little bit of a mishap, but we're going to try it again. And we're like, oh, are they really going to do it again? Okay, that's cool. Like, okay, really show us this time. And it's like, wait, does he just have a baseball in his hand? The difference between a baseball and a steel ball bearing or whatever he had is so huge. And then he barely threw it. He just kind of, he just kind of, he just kind of, and he just kind of bounced. I was like,

Dude, about any car you threw something like that, the window's not going to break. Any normal car, the window's not going to break from a throw like that. He wasn't even trying. And Elon's like, oh, we could probably get a major league pitcher in here and it'll still be what? They shouldn't have even done it. They shouldn't have even done it. Shouldn't have mentioned it or anything.

I would have been happier if they literally brought out a door with glass, wasn't even a car, and threw a ball bearing and shattered it again. Like, that would have been a better reaction than...

like it's real baseball like well he didn't wind up or anything he just kind of yeah i felt like people were laughing in the room yeah no the reaction in the room i mean i i think i agree with you when you said they didn't announce the price and specs live because they didn't want the live stream to have everybody like oh like gasping or like you know people fainting like oh my god um but uh they got that reaction with the baseball thing i mean that just

Made no sense. It was very strange. Yeah, it's funny when you think about the window break because it didn't shatter, it just cracked or whatever. It didn't go through, right? It didn't go through. In the demo in 2019. Even though it was a little bit embarrassing, it was what they call good TV, you know? I mean, it created headlines everywhere.

It got buzzed and it was kind of funny and they leaned into it. And I thought that was fine. You know, if you looked at the accessories you could get for your Cybertruck, you can get a nice decal that shows the cracked window. And you would think that would be like a $2 item, but they're charging 50 bucks for it. So it's Tesla.

I don't know if it's worth 50 bucks, but there are people that will pay 50 bucks for that joke. So when they end up doing that baseball, I don't understand whose idea was that. I want them to fess up. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Elon's idea, but it was a terrible idea. Yeah, for sure.

So you were talking about the price for me with the original presentation. The thing that really stuck with me from the whole thing, even though you have this vehicle that looks like a low poly video game sort of thing, was the 40K price. I'm like, wow, that's really impressive. They can put all that technology, even if it's like the cheap one with only 200 miles of range, 40K, that's amazing. So I'm not surprised.

Well, I would say I was really surprised that they announced that. And then I guess I'm, I am disappointed that they couldn't follow through with that. Yeah. I think this all comes down to the 46 80s, not meeting their goals. I think that's all of it because, and I still, I've talked about this in other lives I've done with people and I still haven't done it, but I really want to go back to battery day and look at what they said. The, cause you know, they gave us like concrete numbers. They're like by this date or this year, at least the, uh,

Energy density is going to be this high, blah, blah, blah. And that's our goal. It's going to increase things by this much. So if you were to increase the energy density of these 4680 cells by a certain amount, then you could have the same pack size.

and you'd get your range, right? And I think if they could have done that, then they would have a $40,000 or $45,000 pickup truck that goes 250 miles because they could use way less cells, and they would have the 500-mile version, etc., etc., or they could make a cheaper version and keep it at 300 with the range extender because there are arguments for that, in my opinion. But 4680 just hasn't played out in the timeline that they had hoped. That's my kind of main guess for that. And on top of that,

That was another thing back in 2019. I remember when they put that 40K price up there, I was like, that's less than a Model 3, but that doesn't make any sense. How are you going to sell a pickup? With all the better tech. Yeah. How are you going to sell a pickup truck with a whole new everything you're doing here?

for less than a model three that goes like just barely less range. It just made no sense to me. So I got a question for you, Chris. And I want to go back to the batteries a little bit. When you start, you were talking about all the bits and pieces they had on display that you can walk around and take pictures and everything. Did they have the Rex, the range extender out there anywhere to be seen? So,

So that was a surprise. That was a surprise. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, you know, again, in the presentation live, as you're watching, they're like, Oh, 340 miles or 320 miles. And you're like, Oh, and then the, again, it was, it was this, you could just tell it was waves in the room of information being spread out. You can see it in real time. It was a weird, we're like, Oh, here's the price that's online. And then everyone's like, Oh my gosh, now we all know the price all of a sudden. And then wait a second. There's a picture that says range extender, 470 miles. And everyone's like, Oh my God, we're saved. Like, well,

Except you lose half the bed when you do it. Exactly. For me, I'm actually, I think, a customer that would like that. Price-wise, I don't know if I want to pay that much, but I want more range, and I don't have a bed now, and I'm getting away with it, so I think I could get away with a smaller bed, personally. I think

I get the sense that that range extender is a product that doesn't really exist yet. It doesn't seem to exist on paper. Yeah. Um, you know, when you're talking about the cells, yeah, it'd be worthwhile to go back and see what the promise was. The last time I paid attention to it, um,

And people were sort of talking about, oh, like the cells have more energy density. But I did the math. Just by volume, they have the exact same volumetric energy density, right? Just like the cell is bigger. So yeah, per cell there's more energy, but it's literally a bigger cell. It's a bigger cell, yeah. And it like by direct factor was just the volume, the increase in volume. Right. And they're supposed to be significantly better. And I

I'm not a battery chemist. I don't want to claim to know all these things that Tesla doesn't know. But they had higher aspirations. And maybe one day they'll get there. It just didn't happen in the timeline that they had kind of hoped for. That's the Tesla way, right? Right, yeah. Making the impossible late, right? Isn't that what people say? That's a big deal, right? Late is still happening.

latest still, it happens eventually. Yeah. I mean, I, I'm not really, I'm not talking negative about it at all. I think it's just that their goal was this and they didn't meet it. And no, no, I am very impressed with everything Tesla does because most of, I mean, all of these, you know, most companies, uh,

maybe not all of them, but for the most part, all these things, no, not all of them, but many of these things he does, people say, oh, it's impossible. You can't do that. And then he does it. So, and his teams, you know, he didn't build rockets by himself, but I think everyone understands what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think when we spoke about the batteries a couple of times in past episodes and my takeaway was always, now I'm going to have to go back and listen. I'll probably contradict myself because that's the way of the internet. But, um,

I mean, pretty much all of the improvements in the 4680 cells even now are basically manufacturing and cost, right? It's really just improvements to Tesla's bottom line from a performance or a energy technology, other types of things.

There's really no improvement from the end user's perspective, except for maybe the cost savings and things maybe carrying over. But even when you look at the Model S or X or doing the plaids, they can't use those cells because they can't deliver the energy that is

is required they have to use the older cells so yeah it's it's interesting to see i i think though that you're pretty spot on i think that's a really legit intuition of they were optimistic as tesla usually is that they would be in a better position and they just didn't get there what i'm curious of is the for the and obviously as doug said it's not really real the range extender i'm curious to see like how heavy would that be is it something you can easily remove for

add on right like okay today I need my bed I don't need the range let me take it out it's like it doesn't look like it probably gonna be heavy right like yeah and my sense would at least I've heard people talk about it's not something you can just put in yourself and to me then that kind of defeats the purpose

It's not like a thing you can just sort of put in as something that has to be done at the service center. If that's the case, it's basically a permanent fixture of your car. Yeah, my initial take was kind of what you're saying, like, oh, sweet, you get this extra battery for when you need it or you can move it. But it's looking like it's 50 kilowatt hours, which is, you know, the size of a Model 3 rear wheel drive battery. A couple thousand pounds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen estimates everywhere from 500 to 1,000 pounds. I don't know how it would only be 500. That seems too low to me. That seems kind of light.

Yeah, exactly. It's going to be significant. I mean, you're not going to pick it up by yourself. You would need heavy machinery to do that. And on top of that, an aspect I didn't think of, but I was talking to Kyle Connor, he's saying you have to hook up coolant lines to this thing, right? It needs coolant. And how are you going to get it to balance with the battery you already have in there? Because all the cells have to be balanced. And how do you get that much juice flowing back and forth between these two batteries when this is a...

a piece of the car that wasn't there before, because if you want to supercharge this thing at 250 kilowatts, you have to have lines that allow that much energy to flow into it. I mean, there's just so many technical aspects of it. There's one more, there's one more to think about. And especially for a truck, this is going to be the bed. This is good. This battery is going to be part of the new bed surface. So it has to be armored and built the wood stand people dropping heavy things in there. Right. Yeah. That's a great point.

And that weight is higher, too. It's now level with the passenger. Yeah, it's a bit higher. It's below the passenger. Yeah, I would definitely say it's an afterthought, partly because it's not well integrated. They have like a sub trunk kind of space, you know? If you had that kind of space, why didn't the batteries go there for your extra range? So it doesn't feel like something that is well integrated into the car. If they really wanted to do something like that, you'd think they would have done it in a way that could have been user-friendly.

installable. You could think like maybe instead of one big module, it could have been four modules or something. I suppose spread around the car. But to Chris's point, right, you're going to have electrical connections that have to be extremely robust. You're going to have coolant connections. You don't want somebody to do that incorrectly. They don't want to be liable. If he had some kind of quick connect or quick disconnect, whatever you call it, and if it self burped or whatever, so that, you know, not impossible to do, it would be a challenge.

Have you ever used the portable batteries from Jackery or any of these people? Oh, yeah. I've got two of them. Yeah. How much does that weigh and how many kilowatt hours do you got? You know what I'm saying? They weigh a lot and not much. Exactly. So I don't think user installable is like feasible for any amount of significant range you're going to get. I was just kind of playing in my head what you just said about charging. I mean, that would be a nightmare.

I really think what you're going to see is two charging circuits. You're going to see one plug for the pack, one for the car. You just put another port on the battery pack. You just do two plugs. You have that 120 port. You can just plug it in there. Yeah, there you go. There.

Yeah, so your 50 kilowatt hours of battery is only charging at 11 kilowatts. That is not – that would be awful. That would be a terrible solution. I mean even regen gets up to, what, 80, 90 kilowatts? Yeah, on a good day. Yeah, right, on a good day. You need a lot of – you need a lot of –

And you just slowly charge it up that way. And then you go plug in again, right? Right. I think that extra pack could be its own thing. So it would have the smarts to charge at the right rate. And then there would have to be some brains there feeding it whatever power it can take. They'll definitely be less than the rest of the pack.

So, I don't know. It feels like it's not even completely engineered yet. Not even that it doesn't quite exist yet. It's not completely engineered yet. And that is a kind of a Tesla thing too. What I'd call it just-in-time engineering.

I wouldn't be surprised if it disappeared. Yeah, same. Because they have ideas, like they plan to do battery swaps. When the Model S first launched. Yeah, that didn't last long. It never really made a whole lot of sense for your own personal vehicle. Fleet maybe, but not your home. Yeah, so it might go away. We'll see. We've also speculated that the low-cost vehicle, which isn't on offer yet,

might also go away. If they have enough demand for the higher-end vehicles, why even make the lower-end vehicle? Yeah, no reason to. We should say, though, it wasn't really part of the event, but a lot of cool things did really come out about this Cybertruck.

I'm a little bit indifferent about its styling. I'm not really a truck person, but I'm starting to think I would like to drive this thing just because of the technology. That's the beginning of the end. You realize, you know, in before Doug buys a cyber truck. And the next thing is I have to get a mullet. I mean, what are you saying? I think, I think we're past that, Doug. I think, I don't know that that could happen.

I could do a mullet. That's where your soul starts getting corrupted when you start driving the truck, you know. I'm sure there are plenty of uncorrupted souls driving trucks. But yeah, there's a lot of cool technology that came out that I'm frankly surprised about. We'll just start with one. It was the drive-by-wire. We had this... Dan O'Dowd was right. You know, this is funny, Chris, and you're kind of involved here because we had Dan O'Dowd on the show.

And he requested to talk to us. Interesting. Supposedly he sought us out because we tend to be... Pragmatic. We're pragmatic. We're not like total fanboys. I mean, we're definitely Tesla fans. Right. But, you know, our main service is to the Tesla customer and we care about reality, not necessarily hype. And so we had an honest discussion about it with him. And...

He was a little bit out there. And one of the things that surprised me was he had the sense that every Tesla vehicle was drive-by-wire. So part of his nightmare scenario of Teslas was that someone could hack them and they'd all lose control. I don't know if you saw this movie on Netflix. It was called Leave the World Behind.

And they have a pretty good scene where Julia Roberts is walking through the sea of crashed Teslas. - You wanna play it? We could play this. We could play the clip. - Yeah, yeah, let's go ahead. Let's do it since we brought it up. - Nice. - You stay with the kids. I'm gonna go take a look. - What would Teslas do? - Look at all the white Teslas. - Yeah. - Okay, so you see all these white Teslas and they have a rear license plate or temp plate that says Tesla. - Yep. - Pretty eerie.

And this is exactly the nightmare scenario Dan was talking about. Yes, it is. When Netflix posted this clip, and I reposted it, and I was like, this is what Dan O'Dowd thinks FSD does right now. Right. Well, they put it in your face, you know, in a second. You know what, you guys, sit down, okay? You see anyone? There's nobody here.

He looks at this Moroni sticker. Self-driving safety features. I've never actually seen a Tesla with the Moroni sticker on it. I think mine was like paper. They just handed it to me. They hand it to you. Yeah. But this is, this is partly on. Oh. Oh, no. Oh, no.

It wasn't just full-tip, it was full-tip driving capable. And here they go. Here they go. It's like Jaws. All the Teslas. She's doing the math. I mean, if you go to four... Unavoidable. Let's wave them down. Wait, there's nobody in there. Yeah. What are you doing? Should we flag them down? Maybe they know something. There's no one in that car! There's no one in the car.

I thought it was supposed to have emergency braking. Why is it... They're holding up pretty well, though. Now, if Dan was actually involved in this, there'd be a bunch of mannequins with their heads popping off. Children mannequins, specifically. Yeah, children where the heads pop off. Oh, man. Oh, that's great. Anyway. That's just great. That's the future.

So Dan was under the impression that all the Teslas were drive-by-wire and that someone could hack into the car and take it over and drive away. And I had to point out, no car pretty much that you can buy today

has drive-by-wire that power steering. There's an actuator that can adjust the steering, but you can overpower that actuator. Not true drive-by-wire. Yeah, and you still have a steering column that's a rack and pinion. So you have physical control of this thing. You may lose your power steering. You may have to strong arm it, but you still have actual control. And I was really surprised

that he didn't know that. And I made the joke, I guess, in a later episode that like Elon, he's living in the future and he thinks that's real now, but now it really is real. The future is now. Yeah. Yeah, it is. But yeah, it's real. We knew it was necessary for the rear steering. And when they talked about it, I'm like, okay, of course that's going to be by wire because they're not going to run some mechanical connection back there.

But I just assumed that still in the front, you'd have some kind of mechanical override. And even steer-by-wire systems that existed in the past just had a drive shaft that was decoupled by a clutch. And then if there was a safety issue, that clutch would close and you'd still have actual mechanical authority over the steering of the wheels. But here, I'm sure they can design a robust system that is unlikely to fail. But yeah, you're...

You're at the mercy of the system here. So, Doug, here's a question for you. Actually, for anybody here who wants to have some fun. Which came first, 48 volts or steer by wire? Which came first? By first, in what domain? Because the only way they have the steer by wire is because of the 48-volt system. I mean, is that how you're putting it? That's how I'm putting it.

Both? You mean for Tesla or for the whole? For the Tesla. Because they make a big deal about how much power the steering takes. And the only way they can supply it is because of the 48 volts. Sure, but they could have just had a separate step up for just the steering. They didn't have to do the full system 48 volts to do that. It certainly makes sense. 48 volts had made sense for years. True. Steered by wire has not necessarily made sense before.

Until rather recently. Well, the jury's still out on whether it makes sense. Okay. But it certainly wasn't practical at all until recently. Yeah. So anyway, what are your feelings on that, Chris, with the steer-by-wire? I think it's great. That's kind of what Tesla's known for is always pushing, bringing new tech into the cars and being kind of the first to do these things.

And, I mean, I think it's going to be great. I don't have any, you know, first-hand experience, of course, but the comparisons people keep making is that we've been throttle by wire for years and years and years. Those don't fail. There's a lot of break by wire systems that are still, I think, like you said, they have a mechanical fallback, but you don't hear about problems with those.

Most airplanes have been fly-by-wire, as you mentioned, Mike, since what, the 80s or something? I don't know, but that's what I've just been hearing. And those don't fail. So in a car, it's a new thing, but the tech itself and the idea isn't brand new.

So I don't foresee any problems. Tesla is usually pretty safe. I think it should be fine. It does make the nightmare that Dan talked about possible. It makes it in the realm of, but it was possible when it wasn't steered by why that still could have happened. Those were models that were crashing. They don't, they're not. That's right. Um, yeah.

So sometimes I'm driving my car and it reboots while I'm driving. The screen goes back. But that could be the infotainment system. Exactly. So the system's seeing pretty well isolated. Like I'll be on autopilot or FSD and all my displays go.

And I'm like, oh, but the car is still driving itself. Okay. Or my brake is still working. Navigation is gone. I'm not really sure how that maybe navigation still exists somewhere, even though I can't see it. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but it's definitely disheartening when, especially at night, because the newer cars have some sort of action lighting. And then it's dark. The inside of the car was completely black and you're like, whoa.

Well, I had a passenger witness as I actually rebooted the info system while driving on the freeway. I had to. I lost my display and the map glitched and completely froze. Yeah. So other than stopping somewhere. The actual car itself, though, the car systems are real time, right? They're generally interrupt based embedded systems or the real time operating systems. They...

are reliable. It's basically the type of software that Dan likes to tout that his company specializes in. That's what they do. They do real-time OS-based systems. The infotainment is like a big Android phone, right? Sure. That thing can crap out and reboot whenever. It's not the same level of reliability. So I would imagine whatever system they have for this. And to be honest, I'm not even sure the whole fear of, oh, somebody hacks into it.

It's like, do you really think this is on the canvas and you're able to send commands? Maybe it could be an isolated communication just for this. For another brand, they were able to hit the brakes.

We know from comma AI and how that works that, yeah, that stuff is on the can. That's true. Like the steering and the braking is right on the can. Or at least you can send commands to it. You can't necessarily interrupt with the own thing that it's doing. But yeah, I think if you can send commands, you definitely can interrupt it. Right. I mean, you could probably overwhelm it. Right. You could just wear a counter command. That points to a difference of what we're looking at right here with the Cybertruck. It's not CAN bus. It's gigaether.

And they make a point about that. And they make a point about it's not ECU scattered through the car anymore. It's ECU zones. Right. And I'm thinking perhaps, hopefully, fingers crossed, there might actually be some security involved. I see some comments in the chat, like Peter mentioned. It is possible, you're right, that it is all essentially on like a CAN bus or whatever their new Ethernet communication. I was thinking more along the lines of

The autopilot's working through the servos that are physically turning the wheel, no different than a human doing it. But the actual communication of the wheel itself's movement to the motors that are controlling the steering are all isolated. At least that's in my head how I initially think about how I would design the system is basically they're mimicking human input. So if you jerk it or override it, you don't have two competing signals going to the drive system. You basically have...

it's whatever the physical encoders are for the chat. But again, I'm not a Tesla engineer. I don't know how they actually built it. So it is very possible it's through communications. And then, yeah, the hacking scenario is potentially dangerous. At any rate, I'm confident that they've done a good system here for the steer by wire. The sensors are triple redundant. The

At least for the front actuator, there are two motors. Either one could handle the load, but they both share it, assuming both are operating. And what's exciting about it to me is that it opens up so many possibilities, right? It makes the steering a parametric system where it's not just...

the single variable of the steering wheel turning angle, but also what is your velocity. It could also have different modes of like, what tires are you? What kind of traction do you have right now? You'd love this for a Plaid. Plaid would love to be able to have that feature.

I'm sure the car has accelerometers in it. You could also change the feel or the ratio based on lateral acceleration right now. So there are tons of things you could do. And it's the kind of thing that could just get better, like with the software update. Hearing people describe how they drove it

They were a little put off initially at low speed because at low speed, the wheels are counter turning so that you get an effectively shorter turning radius. And that felt a little bit too much, right? A little bit more than people expected. But that's something you definitely dial in. You could change the ratio based on what your angle is. Like at low angles, it could filter out noise and small little rotations. And but then as you get further down,

turn out typically it's resisting more as you're turning more you could get more of a tire angle rotation based on your wheel position so anyway i think it's cool i'm really excited about that

I think it opens up a lot of possibilities. Yeah, I will say Jason Kamisa in one of his post interviews talked about how he got the Cybertruck two separate times. And the first time he got it, the steering, as you said, was too darty at low speeds. And it was just he would barely turn it and it was doing all this stuff. And he mentioned it to them when he gave it back. And they're like, oh, yeah, we can adjust that. And then the next time he used it, it was so much better. So they had already done a software update on top of that.

Kyle Connor had said that everyone is saying the rear wheels have 10 degrees of movement. And...

And everything he was seeing, just, you know, he hasn't had his hands on a Cybertruck yet, but just in videos and stuff, he was like, those wheels are not turning 10 degrees. What are these guys talking about? And he got to talk to, when he was going through the line in the factory, the people who were working on some of the steering stuff. And they said, oh yeah, we're not there yet. It's at maybe three or four degrees right now, but through an update later, we're going to enable the full 10 degrees of rear steer for the rear tires.

Oh, wow. So the capabilities there, they're just not using it yet. Yep. And they'll be adding things and tweaking on as time goes on as they do. That's another Tesla signature item. Definitely. Yes. I'm waiting for the sweet ass car that pulls up parallel to a spot and then turns sideways. And then just straight. Yeah, just straight. I want that so bad. Like, come on, give it to me. You couldn't quite do that. Not with 10 degrees. You'd need more.

Yeah. You could do it with 10 degrees if you had the counter 10 degrees with the front, but it would be a lot of squeaking. Right? That would be a pretty cool... With some torque vectoring, you could probably crab lock it. You could do that with software. That would be pretty cool. Crab lock in. That would be awesome. You'll probably leave, I don't know, a couple millimeters of tire on the road. Well, so as Mike mentioned, another big deal is the 48 volt for the low voltage system.

So I guess for technical reasons, or I guess it's just labeling, anything below 50 volts is considered a low voltage system.

In automotive. In automotive, yeah. I think of 5 volts or lower as low voltage. I was a utility lineman in the military, and for us, it was anything under 1,000 volts was low voltage. Well, you guys are weird. It's all relative. You're up on poles hanging out in space. I was going to say, for me, I was working on linear accelerators, and anything that doesn't break down the air is low voltage. Right, right.

Right, exactly. But yeah, so why does that matter for our non-engineers? So power, power is the energy per unit time, right? So for electrical power,

It's basically the voltage times the current, right? The voltage is the electrical potential. It's related to the force pushing the charge carriers along. And the current is the charge per unit time. Just moving by. So power is voltage times current. So if you multiply the voltage by four, going from 12 to 48, you are able to reduce the current by a factor of four, right? Because they're linearly related. And why does that matter?

It matters because what's called joule heating, the energy that's lost to friction, to heat, right? That's not a useful work, but just heat. That's the current squared time to resistance. Oh no, Matt. I'm just teasing. Well, for our non-technical viewers, it means skinny wires. What it means is if you reduce the current by a factor of four, you've reduced the heating by a factor of 16, right?

Right? Because it's a square. That's a huge deal. So what that means is that we can effectively change the wires. If you want to have the same amount of loss, the resistance in the wire is the length divided by the cross-sectional area. That means we can divide the diameter of the wires by a factor of four. You're able to lose a lot of mass in the wires, right? Like I said, it's skinny wires.

Yeah, skinny wire. Which are lighter, cheaper, potentially depending on insulation, but yes. And insulation, like the insulation you need for 12 volts versus 48 volts. It's basically the same thing. It's the same thing. It's more about abrasion resistance than dielectric strength.

Yeah. So that's pretty cool. It's way cool. Especially if efficiency is important and not even just for an electric vehicle. All cars, they've effectively been becoming more and more electric vehicles.

Over time like we used to have you have the the motor and you had a bunch of belts Going off the motor to do everything you had a belt run the brake booster You had a belt to run to our story for the air conditioning a belt for the power steering, right? And all those have moved towards like okay. We just have a little motor that does that So there's a larger power drain on the electrical system of your normal gas car So being able to bump that up to 48 volts makes such a big deal. It was relatively recent that the CEO of Ford

in an interview admitted to the fact that they had found extra 1.6 kilometers of wiring in their car, which equated to like 70 pounds, which equated to $300 worth of battery.

These things matter. They matter a lot now. I'm excited to see where this 48-volt goes. I can see some pitfalls. Accessories and trying to troubleshoot and deal with a 12-volt world and you're on a 48-volt car or truck. Aftermarket speakers. I was thinking more of my cooler that has to plug into the cigarette lighter. Yeah.

I mean, hopefully the world would go to 48 volts internally. It's pretty easy to have some kind of... Well, Tesla gave away the document on how to do it. Right.

But, I mean, there must be still 12 volts around for your accessories or whatever. They say there is. I don't have a Cybertruck. I haven't seen one. Chris, did you see any of the old cigarette lighters? I did not. No, I didn't see that in there. That's something that should go away. The cigarette lighter thing should go away. Well, it's just 12-volt accessories now. It's not a cigarette lighter. I still call it that. Okay.

But we're all old, so we call it a situation. You just need a voltage divider and you can get your 12 volts back. Okay, but they won't use a voltage divider, do they? Speaking of olds, my God. It's not like I said use a tube. Yeah, but the voltage divider is glossy with resistors and stuff, but they just use like a pulse modulated thing, right? I know, they use a DAC. Yeah. Only the electrical engineers would appreciate the joke there. Yeah.

Let's do a real stat. No big deal. Yeah, whatever. Are we trying to go from 48 volts to 12 volts? Let's just burn away. Yeah, easily burn the disc. Get a big resistor call today. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, man. That's exciting. So I agree. I think 48 Volt will be interesting to see. I like Cybertruck, but I'm more excited about all this new tech that they're doing. Drive-by-wire, 48 Volt. When are they going to pull that into other cars? All the improvements and things they're learning when manufacturing.

I think it's going to be sweet. So I'm excited in next year, see what they do the year after. Like, when are they going to pull some of these things in? I mean, the front camera. Hello. I would love that on, you know, on other cars. Although, why is it not wider angle? I'm still disappointed at the angle. Come on. Yeah, I feel like they missed the bus a little bit on the front camera. It feels to me that all they're doing is replacing the fact that they're missing the ultrasonic sensors.

And so that front camera, at least what I've seen on the Cybertruck, is just showing the front.

But what I've been wanting is the car to have super human vision in terms of seeing around corners. Like I thought there should have been cameras in the corners and you don't necessarily have to have cameras in the corners if you have a nice wide angle camera in the very front. A year ago, I guess more than a year ago, I went to Vietnam and I went to visit Vin AI and VinFast had a car that they had decked out with a bunch of stuff. And one of the things they had was this fisheye lens in the front that had 170 degree view.

And so it could see right in front of the car, right into the left. And I feel like that's what's missing. Where's our 360 camera view, man? Give us our 360 camera view. I want the bird's eye. I mean, come on, Tesla. They don't like, yeah, I love it. You're doing a lot of cool shit with cyber truck. Now I'm already ready for the next big reveal, but anyway, we'll get there. We'll get there. They're making progress. Jones. I will not be ordering a cyber truck tonight. My wife would not be pleased with me. Um, I, I,

you know it was bad enough i got the model s plaid just like on a whim i didn't buy it so i'll get a foundation were you chris you getting a foundation let's do it yeah i don't know i mean you know what if i get that email that's like hey order i don't know how i'm gonna resist that but at the same time i definitely do not make the kind of money where i can be buying stuff like that i just don't like the california people they make tons of money and it's a different world over there and

I made a joke online the other day about Bitcoin. Bitcoin's been skyrocketing. And I was like, oh, I knew I should have bought one Bitcoin for $16,000 a year ago or whatever. And someone's like, oh, yeah, I did that. I'm like, dog, I do not have $16,000 to drop Bitcoin. Okay. Yeah.

This is not stock advice. This is not investing advice. But I would just like to point out out there, Bitcoin is up 150% in the last year. I'm not a Bitcoin person. Nvidia stock is up 233%. So you would have made more money buying Nvidia

because of all the AI and the GPUs. So Tesla alone, XAI, or actually Elon with XAI, right? They're spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs. So Nvidia stock has done more than Bitcoin in the last year. So that would have been your less risky bet if you had the 16 grand.

But anyway. Yeah. So, Chris. Yeah. What do you even think about this foundation series? Is this just a money grab or what is it? I mean, is there any real benefit? I wouldn't call it a money grab because it's supply and demand. Tesla, as of now, for the foreseeable future, meaning like the next six months or so, Tesla basically has unlimited demand. Why would they not charge as much as possible? And they put the prices up and a lot of people are like, oh, 80 grand, 100 grand. Like, what the heck? This isn't 50 grand. What are you talking about?

But I have been saying this for a while that Tesla is very dynamic in their pricing. They're not going to let this opportunity go to waste. And I actually think what they did from a business perspective is very smart in that they know they have a ton of people that are super eager for this. And they're like, hey, it's 80 grand. And then they're like, oh, surprise. You want to order right now? It's actually a foundation special series.

For $20,000 and you get FSD and you get the light bar and you get this and you get this. Do you actually get FSD? That's part of the $20,000, yeah. Oh, that's only $8,000. It's not even that bad. My understanding was that FSD wasn't even mentioned. It is that bad because if you are one of these early reservation holders, FSD was $7,000 when you reserved.

And Tesla said that they're going to honor the original seven grand. So this is another way for them to get. Don't people are like, oh, you know, I could get to the front of the line right now. Right. I could just wave money at them and I get to the front of the line. I don't think so. No, it really seems to be that the early if you're watching the reservation numbers, those early numbers are getting called. So my reservation number, I'm around 40,000 in line right around there.

I've seen people slightly past me getting called to make a reservation and then way in front of me and slightly in front of me. But as of today, Tesla's only offering this to Texas and California because if there are any issues, they want to be able to help those people and fix the truck because the rest of the country isn't equipped to service them. So they're paying more to be beta testers, right?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, they're excited about it. And Tesla knows that they'll pay. I believe the word you want to use is fleece. You know, I really don't see it that way. I understand why you're saying that. But Tesla is offering it to them. And they're saying, hey, if you want it right now, here's the price. Go ahead. I understand the business side of it really well. I get it. But from a customer point of view...

I'm not going to be negative about it. I mean, if you have the money and you're willing to spend the money, it's not really a negative for the customer. It's a negative for people that aren't willing to spend the money. Right. So it's not fair. I want to interject this last little bit. I just read yesterday that Tesla reinserted verbiage into the contract. You can't flip your truck again. Yes, they did for one year.

Yeah, yeah. They took it out. By flipping means sell. Sell, yeah. We'll see how that goes. You can't sell your truck. Doug, are you implying that you can flip a Cybertruck easily? No, sorry. I'm not. I'm not. I think you'd have a really hard time flipping that. Okay, so Jones1 in chat says he's reservation number 113.

Bro, when you go and pick it up in Austin, you need to call me up and I'll come out and we'll go hang out and drive around in your Cybertruck. Race the Cybertruck with the Porsche. I wonder if Jones... Well, RN113 would be a little later in the list because the reservation numbers are in the, I think, hundreds of millions. And so you can look at the first few numbers. And so 112 will be the earliest. So I have two reservations. My first reservation is a 112.

A little later than that is one, one, three, you know, et cetera. So I wonder if he's been invited. Yeah. So he waited three days and he's like a couple hundred thousand behind me probably, which is just so crazy. Gotcha. Yeah. He's saying he just waited three days. Yeah. Slacker. And then the last thing I do want to say about the foundation series, which I think is kind of cool is the branding of the foundation series. Now,

Will this matter? It really depends on how many. If they're going to make 100,000 Foundation Series, then okay, it's not really that important. But if you are some millionaire car collector, which I am not, you could order one of these and in 10 years or 15 years, you have a special truck. Yeah.

And it's so funny because I was saying- It was an appreciating asset. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. I see how that worked out as of today. But it was so funny because I was saying to my wife, I was like, you know what's kind of messed up about this whole foundation series thing is that if we were like multimillionaires and could buy like 10 cars, we could easily buy one of these and

and then just hang on to it, not drive it very much, and then have, you know, maybe make money on it in the future like people do with collector's cars. But because I'm like more of an average person and I would have to use it as my daily driver, I don't have the money to have like a secondary car to put all my miles on. I'm going to devalue this thing and like I'm kind of double screwed. Yeah.

Are you saying you're not a Dan O'Dowd who just buys two Tassels and one for parts and one to drive? Well, he's a multi-billionaire from my understanding. Yeah, he's got money. He's a billionaire. I don't know if he's a multi-billionaire, but yeah. Okay, I thought multi-billionaire. Who's quibbling? What's a billion between friends, right? They put this Foundation series...

Not Isaac Asimov, by the way, but to put this foundation series in a more historical context, Tesla has done this from the very beginning. They had what they called the Signature Series. So there's a Signature 100 for the Tesla Roadster that came out and it had special badging. And because this was a revolutionary car, the first EV sports car that people could buy, what they did was...

There was a lot of value to the VIN numbers. People could get like one of the first 100 and you could see it right on the VIN number.

But they did all this sort of engineering with the VINs. Like typically it's supposed to represent order of production, right? Sure. Like VIN 5 should be made three later than VIN 2. But that wasn't the case at all. Tesla was just sort of making them when they could make them. And then at some point they decided, oh, but the executives want a car and they also want a low VIN. So they came up with what they call the Founders Series. And so there was a Founders Series of like Elon got one and I think Martin Eberhard got

He got VIN number two, but it was actually like the fifth one made because he got screwed over for some reason. So when they went to the European market, they had a signature 250 that they actually had trouble selling. Then they did this again with the Model S and they had the Founders Series. So I feel like the Foundation Series, it's like, well, it's like the Founders Series, but okay, these aren't executives or board members. So, you know, let's call it the Foundation Series or something slightly different. But it is a goal of many businesses to

oh can we basically sell the same thing to different people but have them pay what they're willing to pay yeah right i mean this happens with airlines it happens with any anywhere the way they can try to why coupons exist it's why software has personal versus business versus student right exactly exactly so that's what i sense that this foundation series is that there's a ton of demand

people want the cars now and there are people willing to pay more to get it now then they'll do it so that's what it is so i'm kind of ignorant of this the old you know roadsters are there collectors ones that are worth a lot still like i mean you know i don't really i don't really get that sense i think you can buy one now for around

70, I think, is what they're going for these days. And it really is what is the condition of the car. I don't know many people that care about the VIN.

What they might care about is who owned it, right? More than that. And then the state of the battery, because that car, if you just left it, it will brick itself. The battery will get into such a low state of a charge that the battery is done. It's a brick. Yeah, exactly. And there's some sad stories of people that bought the cars and then put them in storage units or even, oh, my car got in an accident and it had to go to the body shop and the body shop didn't have the sense to plug the car in. And I got it back from the body shop and it's bricked.

And most of the value is the battery. So that's a sad thing. I mean, I'll feel bad for that guy. I'm not sure I'll feel bad for, oh, I bought some cars and put them in storage containers and never plugged them in. I mean, like, okay, buddy, you can buy another one. I mean, me as a fan of the car, I feel bad about it. It's sad that the car went to waste. That's true. And what's even sadder is that there are a couple of companies that will do like a restoration. The battery swaps, but also some rejuvenate the batteries. Yeah.

I don't want to name names right now, but there's one company that was doing that and it's a delicate thing and it's something you shouldn't leave unattended and The whole warehouse went up and took out several cars as well as a t0 which was a AC propulsion precursor to the Tesla Roadster and That's terrible and it happened twice. You think the first time you learn second time and burned up a bunch of cars and

Did he have insurance the second time? Because my God, the first time that bill must have been big. Yeah. You know, friend of the show, Carl, I'm skipping on his name. I remember Carl. Yeah. His insurance went up because of that guy. Interesting. Medlock. Yeah. Or Medlock. Yeah. Anyway, that's a nice little aside. He was a great guy. If you haven't seen that episode, go watch that episode with Carl. That was awesome. Yeah, we need to get him back.

yeah oh man so chris do you have any rough idea timeline of when you think you might get the call are you expecting it this year possibly you're thinking q1 or you think you'll be lucky in 2025 um no you know yeah at this point it's been all over the place in my head with the information i have now i do think q1 is possible especially with the invites that have going out have been going out and seeing reservation numbers past mine now you know as you

I'll probably remember from the Model 3 days, your reservation number, your spot in line isn't the end-all be-all of when you're going to get the car. They take other factors into account, but it does help to have an earlier reservation number. And I think once they start opening up

to more places outside of California and Texas, which from my understanding is supposed to be as soon as next month is when they'll start doing that. I can hopefully get it pretty early due to the price, the cancellations, certain people not wanting it. And you know, like, yeah, I'm number 40,000 in line ish, but how many people, like even I ordered two, I'm not buying two. I ordered two because I didn't know which I'd be able to afford when it eventually was made. So I pre-ordered a tri-motor and a dual motor.

And that was just so I could pick which one I wanted at whatever it came up. Now it turns out that doesn't matter. You basically get to configure it when they send it. You can either pick a foundation series tri motor or a foundation series dual motor. I'm only picking one. I'm sure a lot of people did that. So yeah, there's no way to know for sure, but next year, a hundred percent. I mean, and I really think quarter one is a possibility.

Nice. So you think you'll get a Q1? Because we were trying to make predictions about how many by the end of Q1 will have been made. And we were all in less than 10,000. Sub 10,000. Yeah, it's all just a guess. I could see 10,000 in the first quarter. And it depends on how the ramp goes and a million different things. If they are like, oh, crap, we need to retool this stuff and they shut it down for three weeks, then OK, maybe not. But if things are going smoothly and they can accelerate at a decent pace, then I think

it's definitely impossible that I could get it. Also, they know who you are. So as soon as they open up outside of Texas, they might go, here's a guy that does videos. We like him. I mean, they invited you to the event or he does good videos for us. Well, you know, it's hard to say because yeah, there's no denying Tesla knows who I am at this point, but it's not like I've ever had direct communication with a company that's like, Oh, if you're ready to take your vehicle, like,

we'll hook you up. You know what I mean? So as much as I would love that, that's never happened. And with my Model X we got, so when the Model X refresh happened, we got so lucky because we ordered one like, I don't know if you guys remember this timeline, but they refreshed S and X. It took a while, but the refresh X, the plaid came out, but it was kind of slow. The X took forever. I mean, it was what a year or something in between the shutdown of production and bringing it back. And we were waiting so long to get this Model X.

And I kind of had the same thought. I was like, all right, at this point, Tesla has invited me to events. They at least know who I am. Maybe I'll get my ex soon, you know, and I ended up like getting it super late compared to a lot of other people. So it's which I'm not complaining about. It's I'm not special. They shouldn't put me ahead of anybody. But yeah, you never know.

So they know who you are, but they don't know who you are. I get it. And to be fair, not playing favorites is kind of a cool thing for the company to not necessarily do that. Right. So I think that's solid. I agree. They know who I am, but maybe they just don't care. It's probably the truth. That's probably more accurate. Exactly. Yes. That would not surprise me in the slightest.

So you mentioned you had reservations for both the dual motor and the tri-motor. The difference between them I find interesting and I don't quite know the rationale behind that. So the dual motor has a permanent magnet motor in the rear and an induction motor in the front. And the tri-motor has dual induction motors in the back and a permanent magnet motor in the front.

I'm not quite sure why they did it that way. The one thing I do think is interesting about the tri-motor, they did something similar with the Model S. They used to be all induction motors. And so the first of all-wheel drive Model S had induction motor both in the front and back.

And what they would do, I think they called it torque sleep. That's what they called it, torque sleep, where basically the induction motor would disengage. And then if you have no power going to the motor, it's just freewheels. So that's essentially what they're doing with the tri-motor Cybertruck on the highway. If you're not really using those rear motors, it's supposed to become freewheeling. I forget what they're calling it. They're not using the torque sleep term anymore. They're just disengaging it or disconnecting it. As opposed to what they're doing with the semi, which uses permanent magnet mode,

But when they're not in use, there's a clutch that actually has to disengage. So it's not just a load on a motor that's not being energized. So anyway, I don't know quite the rationale to have the opposite tack for the dual motor versus the tri-motor. My understanding, at least from the Plaid side, because the Plaid has permanent magnet motors in it,

is for performance right so the permanent magnet gives you more performance but like you said the negative is efficiency of disengaging or it's more complicated you know having having a clutch mechanic or something like that but yeah so i don't yeah i don't know that's an interesting point i didn't realize that the tri versus the dual motor and the cyber truck was different a permanent magnet in theory and probably in practice would be faster off the line you're not waiting for a field to be built on the stator to get going it's actually instant torque

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which, Sandy Monroe did an interview with a bunch of executives at Tesla. And it was a great interview, by the way. And one thing I heard someone say, well, that's how we get 2.6, 0 to 60, rollout removed. I heard him add rollout removed. So it's not really 2.6. It's like you get that chance for it to start up a little bit and then it's 2.6.

I hadn't heard that anywhere else except this one. I had a rollout removed. Yeah, that's how they all are. Actually, even the plaids 1.99 is rollout removed. They always have an asterisk on it. Now, I don't know that that's true with treated surfaces and stuff. Maybe you can do that without rollout.

Before the Plaid, Tesla had never used that terminology, even though that was kind of normal in the ICE world. When you quote your zero to 60s or when your manufacturers are advertising it, it was a regular thing to have a little star with a rollout removed. And Tesla had never done that before.

And then when the Plaid came out, that was the first time they put the Star and 1.99 with the rollout removed. And everyone's like, well, you know, I see why they're doing it. They want the less than two. Everyone else does it. But yeah, so you need that for the tri-motor. They don't do that for the dual motor. That's pretty funny.

Yeah. I was thinking, you know, you have that little bit of time for a field to get built up. I don't know how long that is, but with the rollout removed, we don't know because they've just deleted it as opposed to like a plaid with PM motors in the back, you know, they wouldn't have that issue. So, right. Well, I mean, I don't know that Chris is going to be racing the cyber truck when he gets it. Do you have a feeling yet for if you're going to go dual or trial? Oh, dual. Dual all day. The only reason I reserved the tri motor was because the 500 miles of range, uh,

I'm an efficiency and utility person. Those are the two things I want out of most things in my life. And Cybertruck really brings all that home for me. Now, in the world of EVs, it's obviously not the most efficient thing. But in the world of pickup trucks, it's the most efficient thing. And you get...

all that utility of a pickup along with the steel, the stainless steel with no paint. So you don't get scratches. I mean, it'll scratch, but you're not going to scratch your paint, which will then rust and you're not going to get dense. You know, whereas the roads I drive on, all the dirt roads, all of my cars have had at least some of their paint tore up a little bit because of the rocks. And I drive a long brush that brushes up against it. And it's like, well, whatever. I just, that's what I have to do. So I'm really excited for

this no paint stuff but 100% dual motor there for me there's no reason to get the try I want the most range I can get I don't want to spend an extra 20 grand for half a second faster 0 to 60 I mean just to me I know people want it to me it makes no sense so yeah yeah definitely dual hmm

Makes sense. Looks like Jones agrees. He's also doing... I mean, Jones, you already got a Plaid. You don't need a Tri-Motor Cybertruck. Yeah. It's like all the people that have a Plaid S and a Plaid X. It's like, do you really need the X to be a Plaid 2? You don't need it, but they're just doing it because they're flexing. And you're walking around the factory. I mean, I know you're not like a manufacturing type person, but one question I still have that I haven't quite had answered is,

I don't know how the body panels are affixed to the rest of the car, right? Because the rest of the car, like the castings are aluminum, right? And this is steel. Obviously, you don't, I mean, I guess you could, but you wouldn't necessarily want to weld aluminum to steel because you have some galvanic reactions there. Is it just glued? Yeah.

I was going to say, what is this glue? Like structural glue. I think Sandy's talked about this, unless you know, Mike. But no, I can't answer that. I'm not sure. You know, I watched the Sandy video, and I don't know that I got that question answered there. At this point... He didn't talk about how the panels were attached. Yeah. Yes. He did talk on the castings, how they had multiple pieces of the castings, and they would weld the castings together. But he didn't bring up how the panels were attached. Yeah.

Yeah, because the panels are part of the structural rigidity of the vehicle. Oh, the ectoskeleton, yeah. I mean, are they still saying that? Because I know that was the plan. Are they still standing by? Okay. They are in the sense that...

Like the torsional stiffness is very high. And part of that is because you have these panels that are holding the thing together. I mean, obviously you have a core. It's clearly not a total like exoskeleton where like the inside is all loose on the outside. But the outside really is adding something.

stiffness to the vehicle. So I'm still not sure how it's... Got to have an adhesive that's really strong then. Going back to the Lotus days when Lotus produced the Roadster bodies, there was a lot of structural adhesive holding that vehicle together. And there's structural adhesive in the S and the X and the 3. So I suppose they could do that.

If you look at the teardowns that Monroe did on the Y in particular, the gigacastings are primarily glued in place. I mean, they're slip-fitted together with a structural adhesive. He was in there with a rather large torch heating these things up to take it apart.

So, yeah. So I'll be interested to see how this works. When I went to see the Cybertruck at the mall in Maryland, as I showed you guys last time, there were some scratches. And it's something that looked like a pretty big dent on the thing. It was shallow, but it might have just been...

That that's what the, that panel was like. It's the baseball. It's the baseball. Whoops. You were supposed to hit the glass, not the stainless steel. Cause we've seen video of them hitting the thing with a sledgehammer and just people just kicking it and stuff. So, um, it was just how the thing got made. Well, they were, they do have some pre-production units in the stores as well. So, I mean, not trying to make excuses, but it could be, it could be the story on that one.

You're just trying to get yourself bumped up in that reservation line. Yes, everything Tesla does is perfect. I love Sabertruck. I'll pay you all the money. I mean, what about insurance, man? Like I'm thinking about repairs and stuff. Insurance has got to be killer for this thing right now, right? I've seen reports. People are reporting in that Tesla's own insurance company is over 5K a year.

just for the truck oh man i've seen normal quotes too i've seen some people um ask for quotes and their insurance so maybe this won't stick but their insurance company basically put in i think model x insurance for it because they didn't have another oh yeah they didn't know yeah and so then they were like yeah this is what you'd pay so i mean who knows if that'll hold up but yeah i should get a quote i should ask because that michigan is has the highest insurance rates in the country so i might be in trouble

Oh, really? I thought California did. No, Michigan's the worst. I'll tell you what, my insurance doubled or tripled when I switched from California Tesla insurance to Texas Tesla insurance. Really? Wow. Yeah. Tesla is not an ideal insurer in Texas, in my opinion. I looked at it and it was not a deal for me. So I do not have Tesla insurance. That's funny because out here in California, the Tesla insurance was 700 cheaper than Auto Club, which is who I had before.

But it's interesting when you think about like what kind of stuff the Cybertruck might get into. It looks like, at least the way they've been talking about it, that it's impervious to all the parking lot, grocery cart kind of stuff. It's going to be a throwaway truck. But then when you get to the point of, oh, I had something broke. Well, I ran into a pylon or something where the shock features actually had to deform. Like

Like, what do you even do at that point? Because you have a whole casting. The casting deforms. I think the car is done, right? The casting is a throwaway. I mean, those castings, they've already said straight up. If you read the actual Tesla body shop repair manual, if there's any damage on the casting, it's a write-off. There is no provisions for repair on the casting. Really? When was that from? Last year when I looked at the manual. Oh, okay. Okay.

because I okay I mean I don't know that much about this stuff but I had to remember that that was a big deal I remember that happening and then some information came out about there was some type I shouldn't even say it because I don't know exactly but there was some type of walkthrough on repairs you can do to it that would put the rigidity back to basically the same as it was before with some type of

Welding or I can't remember what it was, but, um, well, you could take the casting out and recast. Yeah. Yeah. Get your torch out and have at it. Yeah. Yeah. So Peter's saying it takes a lot of skilled welding. So I'm not sure if that's what it was, but I'd be interested to imagine. I mean, you guys seem to know a lot more about that kind of stuff than me. It'd be interesting for you to look that up and see what the latest is on that because welding on anything that's cast is, um,

Tough and not always well received in the welding community because you don't know what you're welding into, you know, what's inside the casting when you start working on it. What do you mean by that? You know, there may be voids or it may be material contamination. It's really hard to say.

I agree with Danny who posted. What's up? It's supposed to be a post-apocalyptic truck. Right. It's supposed to be messed up. It's supposed to look messed up. Right? Like, if you're worried about dents and scratches and dirt, like, come on, man. This is what it's for. Yeah. This is what I've been saying to people because people are like, oh my gosh, it's going to scratch. Dog, if you are worried. It's a truck. Exactly. If you're worried about scratching. Don't buy that car. Buy something else. That's not what this is for. If I get a dent in my Cybertruck, I'll be like, oh, that's cool. Like, who cares? Yeah.

It doesn't matter. Actually, you should be impressed because of how tough it is. So if you did something to dent it, that's an impressive amount of force. If I did something to dent it, it would have cut my other car in half. Okay. So I'll be like, oh, good job, Cyber Chuck. Let's keep driving. Or your kid threw a baseball at it. This is going to be more child mannequins. Now I can actually run them over in my, you know, Model Y. I had to stop the car. The chick stinks, Garge. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. No, that's who cares. Hey, Chris, you talk about a little bit, but we have a question and he says, please break down the reservation numbering because it's a mystery to me too. I haven't actually paid attention to it, but you started to talk about it. Yeah, that's fine. Like what do we know from it? So I don't know the exact number, but there are calculators that you can use online that start with, again, I think it's a hundred million number. So it's like 112 million, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's,

there's a base number that people somehow have figured out. I don't know exactly how they did it. And you can take your reservation number and subtract that base number from yours. And that will tell you what place in line you are approximately. Of course, it's not perfect, but there are calculators online you can use. And if you just Google except for truck reservation calculator, you just plug in your reservation number. It'll do it for you. And it'll tell you approximately where in line you are. Now, when you get past a certain point

This breaks down because a year or two years after reservations opened, Tesla moved all reservation numbers for all vehicles in together. So for a time, Cybertruck had its own unique kind of thing. And then the news articles were coming out were like, oh, according to this tracker, Tesla has 1.8 million reservations. And as Tesla does, I think they didn't like people tracking it. So they kind of jumbled it up.

But, you know, it's just as simple as that. If you have a 112 reservation number, you are very early. You're like day one. And then, you know, it goes from there. So, but when you say 112, you mean like a prefix, like 112, right here. Hold on. Let me just get mine for you really quick. He says like 112 million or whatever. But it's interesting that they like, why do you need to opt to skip? Why is it just your actual order? Why is the reservation number your actual reservation number? It is your reservation number.

No, but it's some obfuscated thing. It's not actually your place in line. You have to do some kind of conversion. I have no idea. So my reservation number is 112...

seven, eight, nine, and then I'll say zero, zero, zero. I don't want to give away my exact one. It probably doesn't matter. I've seen plenty of people post them publicly, but so it's my, my, no docs and Chris. Yeah. Don't, don't call Tesla and be like, Hey, I want to cancel this reservation number for seven. Yeah. Just so I can move up. Exactly. Yeah. That's, that's what I'm scared people do. But so 112 million, 789,000. And so one, one, two is the lowest of the first three numbers. And then the next three people will have like one, one, two, five,

That's, I think, the lowest I've seen. 1128, stuff like that. I mean, if they wanted to, they could have just had a random number generator and then just had a lookup table on their end. Of course, and that's eventually basically what they did by mixing it in with all the other models. So there's no tracking it anymore. But, you know, if you're within the first, like,

like week you should care if you're past the first week the numbers get so high it's like don't even you know don't even think much about it because so many people reserve i mean mine mine is okay i said around 40 000 i reserved the night of the unveil i mean it wasn't immediately when it opened up but it was you know within probably an hour or something and 40 000 so right and and given the way production ramps work if you're near the end let's

It's not going to make you talking probably the difference of weeks. It probably doesn't matter at all. Yeah. Yeah. True. So any other thoughts at the event?

Got to see all the cool shit. Yeah, they had all the like the famous cyber trucks on display, which is very cool. They had the one that was shot. You could I went right up and touched them, touched the bullet holes. And then they had the crash tested ones there. I have I put all that I made a video. It's bullet dense, bullet dense. Yes, exactly. Well, yeah. So make sure, folks, then if you're interested in seeing that, check out Dirty Tesla's channel on YouTube. He's got a video on there so you can see his recorded reactions when he was at the live event. Yeah.

It's no longer live. It happened in the past. That's how time works. That's how time works. All right. That's a good question. Scott Harper asked, are the tires foam insulated like the Continental RX? Yes. Yeah. That was in one of the reviews. I think the Hagerty review. They mentioned that. Yeah. So that's why they were floating on the snow in the video. I was going to say. Yep. All right.

Oh, man. I guess we should point to that. There was a video recently, which I think is ridiculous for anyone to have any issues with Tesla. Clearly, it's an issue of traction. It's traction. It's traction. It's just the wrong tires. It's the tires, right? The car has got torque for days. That's not the reason it needs somebody to pull it out, right? And it's super heavy. So it's not that it needs to be loaded up with sandbags. It just needs tires. Right.

Or some chains on those tires. Or chains on the tires, yes. Well, chains were listed as an accessory for an obscene amount of money. I'm surprised the car doesn't have... Like auto chains?

Well, a kid, a Knight Rider, had this traction control, and you'd see these little spikes would come out of the tires. I remember that. So, Elon, why haven't you done that yet? What's up? Come on. Where's our James Bond re-inflating tires? That's next year's upgrade. There's so many things we should have that we don't have. Where's the stealth mode from Die Another Day? What's going on?

Now, we do have the... Well, floats. Floats, right? I was going to say, they gave us one of them. It kind of floats, sort of. Are you planning on water testing your Cybertruckers? Did you get it? I was until they did Wade mode. Wade mode, yeah, until they didn't talk about it. But I think maybe what I'll do, don't record this part, but I will back a boat...

into, you know, I'm at the boat launch and oh, I went too far. And then, you know, if something bad happens and insurance will help me out, if it floats, then, you know, I got a banger video right there. I don't think insurance will help you out when you tell them that you plan to do it. No, I didn't. We stopped recording. We're not recording right now. Nobody's saying this. Nobody's saying this.

Yeah, it goes one of two ways. Either you got a cool video and it works out great, or you got a video like that Model X that went into the water a couple weeks ago. It went in the water and it caught on fire underwater and the fire department decided we're just going to let this do its thing. Let it burn. Yeah, that was pretty dope. That was crazy.

Well, let's be clear now. So the wade mode that has been mentioned, they say that they pressurize the... Pressurize the battery. So that you don't get, I guess, the saltwater ingress in it. Right. You don't get a short in the battery. But that's very different from what was talked about before. So wading is still not floating, right? No.

Tesla talked about, or Elon, talked about the thing floating. It was supposed to float. And it was supposed to get an outboard motor so you could drive it like a boat, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like that Knight Rider boat they had on the Simpsons once, right? Right. That's like the jets are supposed to be on the roadster. Okay, first they said $40,000. Then they said 500 miles. Then they said it could float. Now you're killing me, guys. Come on. Right, so we have no floating, no range. They thought you want me to buy this thing.

That's a good question, though. We talked about would it float? I think it probably could. The issue is water displacement, right? Displacement, yeah. But would you have control authority if it floated? Unlikely at best. If you put really big fins on the tires...

There have already been examples of a Model S floating, and you could kind of steer with all-wheel drive because the wheels are turning and you're kicking up some water. So you could kind of steer, but if there's any bit of like a current or flash flooding or whatever, you're done, right? I'm only laughing, Doug, because some Model 3s look like sieves as it is. I mean...

I'm not sure it would ever float long enough to care. Oh, well, the other issue with the Model 3 was that the rear bumper was like a... It was a scoop. It was a bucket. Just cup the water. Yeah. If you're driving at, I don't know, 40 miles an hour, like one might do, and you drive through a puddle, just like shear off your rear bumper. Right. Because the water just goes right in there. An air brake. That's awesome. A water brake. Yeah, a water brake. Yeah.

Oh, man. I think we have another question for Chris. Tim asked, do you think Cybertruck will be delivered with FSD 12? That's a wishful thinking. Yeah. You know what? I think that their goal, I've said this plenty of times, is to get it out for the holiday update. I think that that's an internal goal. Are we going to see that or not? What I will say is look at the holiday update, the picture that the Tesla account posted where they show the advanced parking park assist, where they like kind of form the world around the car.

I think that they are showing us V12 stuff in that. I think that you're going to have the car and Elon has talked about this in the past where,

much more of the world around you, almost like we've seen in their demo videos over the years where they show like how the car kind of recreates the world as it's driving. I think that's kind of our first hint at that. So I do think we're really close. I can't wait. Oh, I'm very excited. Give it to me. But Cybertruck comes with hardware 4, which Elon said will be behind hardware 3 for a while. It comes with the front bumper cam, which new evidence shows that's not actually going to be part of FSD, which makes no sense to me. Like, come on. Yeah, like...

Because you can definitely see those little kids over the, uh, well, that was my question. Essentially what you're saying right now is like, well,

Will the Cybertruck even be delivered with FSD? Because all the test drives we've seen, Autopilot wasn't engaged. Autopilot wasn't available. I assume FSD as well. So do they even have it trained up and ready to turn on for normal people as they get it? It doesn't seem like it right now. So, yeah. And that's how even hardware for cars. Hardware for. Yeah, it was lacking when it was first delivered and all. I think Autopilot wasn't even on.

But that was like, that was what, like a week or something. So, but still, yeah, that's definitely possible. I was super envious of all the hardware for people until I saw like, oh, but you can't actually use it. And I was like, oh, okay, I'll wait. Well, that was that again, the Tesla way. That's what happened with hardware too, right? The hardware one or whatever you want to call it, that was done with Mobileye and then

Mobileye was like, "Huh, we're not really happy with you guys just training your AI off of what our system does." And so that ended and Tesla pulls Mobileye from their newer cars, but they weren't at feature parity yet. So yeah, people at hardware too were behind for months, right?

if anyone remembers yeah chris you've been testing the latest fsd stuff do you still feel like the slope is positive i got the update overnight and i had to go pick up someone from the airport

And it did some shocking and surprising things to me in that short trip that I hadn't seen before. I'm on the road and the road's going to the right. And for some reason, it just jumped onto the shoulder. It just drove essentially off what you're supposed to be driving on. I'm like, I had to grab it and take it back. And I never did that to me before. And I was wondering if that was the update or what. I later figured out that navigation had missed a turn. And I don't know if it was trying to

correct or thought it could get away with a U-turn on a highway, but I mean, on the interstate. So I don't know what was going on, but what's your latest experience with that? Yeah, pretty flat for a while. We got a decent upgrade, in my opinion, with version 11 in certain aspects, like especially highway just became so much better when they finally enabled FSD on the highway. At least that's been my experience. I enjoy it far more than I did navigate on autopilot.

But the other on-street features, there's improvements. And if I compare what I have today versus a year ago or a year and a half ago, it is significantly better. Even though in the moment, you're like, what the heck? Why are you doing all this stupid stuff? It has improved big time. But...

In the past, like maybe six months or nine months, in my opinion, it's been pretty flat in terms of the changes. And actually, I've had more negative things come up in my software that I constantly am posting about on X. So when I first got version 11 with the Highway FSD, I had a thing where I have a weird part of my highway where there's

an exit on both sides at the same time. Yeah, that sounds real smart, right? And there's only two lanes. So everyone's slowing down to, it's the stupidest thing. Well, for whatever reason, FSD, when it was going past the left side exit, you don't normally have an exit on the left side, would just drop

drift into that exit on the highway. I was going 70 and it's just like, oh, here we go with no turn signal or anything. So I posted about it on X and Elon Musk responded to it almost right away and he's like, are you on this latest version? And when he responded, they had pushed an update that day. So my video was from the day before and I said, well, no, but I will go test it on this new one and I'll get back to you. So I went on the newest version that he was quoting and

It did the same thing. I posted it on X and I was like, here you go. Here's your update. I don't know if he's going to see it or anything. And almost right away he responded and he said noted. The next update, it was fixed. It never started happening again. Okay. So,

He sees my stuff on there sometimes. I don't know how all this algorithm stuff works, but sometimes he'll see my stuff. So now I have these, I don't want to get too into it, but I have a lot of complaints. If you go look at my X profile and my YouTube, I complain about them all the time. These mistakes that beta makes constantly always does the same mistakes.

And I've been posting about them for months. He doesn't respond to it. It doesn't get fixed. And, you know, one of these mistakes is kind of dangerous. And I'm like, what's going on over there? Like, I know you guys are seeing this feedback. Why don't you, we've gotten updates in the months I've been complaining about this. Why isn't it being fixed? So I'm a bit frustrated on those things that didn't used to be problems. And now they are. Because if those couple of issues I have honestly weren't there, I would be having good drives like almost every drive.

So maybe they feel like we're pushing on the next version. Like if we're working on 12, it doesn't make sense to step back to 11 to fix that. Well, for sure. And I hear that and I've heard that from a lot of people. And I agree with you to an extent. I don't necessarily believe that, but it's just an idea. Yeah.

Okay. Devil's advocate. No, it is an idea. And well, the problem with that is we got an update that brought these bugs and we've gotten like three or four more updates ever since those bugs were introduced over the six month period. And they're still there. So they're doing something with version 11 still.

even though version 12 is coming. And if they weren't updating version 11, I'd be a hundred percent. Yeah. They probably just don't care. You know, even though this is a dangerous thing that's on thousands of cars on the road, they shouldn't be fixing their folks and version 12. So the thing that's difficult and it's why experts will even say like, there's no guarantee that self-driving cars are going to be available tomorrow or in five years or whatever. Like we don't really know because

Because the type of learning that neural nets do and the type these systems do is effectively as you feed in more data, it may improve in some areas and make it worse in other areas. It's not like it's just all net positive gain. So part of the problem is as they tweak things and they try to get it, oh, do better in this scenario, it's going to potentially get worse in other scenarios, right? Like it's non-deterministic in how it's learning.

And so that definitely, it makes it hard. So they really have to try a lot of things, throw a lot of data at it, tweak a bunch of stuff. And it's like a game of, you know, that's the running joke, right? It's two step forward, one step back or one step forward, two steps back with it. And that's really how it's going to behave. And we see that with everything, right? Even things like chat GPT, people complain like, oh, the latest update came out and now it's giving me worse responses than it gave me before. And people are accusing them of lobotomizing the models and doing just like,

That's just the nature of machine learning and how these things work. So it's not just easy, make it better. I'm not convinced it's all machine learning though. It's fair. It might not be. So I'm listening to all you guys talk about the FSD thing. And I'm thinking back over the last several weeks, I upgraded my side marker cameras to the very latest, maybe a year ago and got better quality camera out of it to get rid of that light leak issue they had.

And I tend to have the view on where you can see what the side marker sees when you got the blinker going. Up to the very last update where they actually enhanced how the cameras worked, they were pretty reliable. Ever since that update, there's been a much more pronounced tendency for flare, especially with low sun or bright lights at night to the point you can't see anything out of the side marker camera. Sure.

I've also noticed at the same time that some of the routes I've taken FSD on no longer work quite as well as they used to. Cause and effect? Don't know. I don't have any empirical evidence. This is all just me observing.

But I kind of wonder if maybe an improvement of one thing had some unintended consequences on something else. Let's be honest, right? Like wipers still suck, right? Everyone unanimously agrees. Auto wipers. Auto wipers are terrible. Oh, yeah. Well. I still have a thing in my car. So my car is a little over here now. It's a 2022 Model S Plaid. And when I go to back out of my driveway sometimes, sometimes I just have to wait because the rear view camera feed just doesn't show up on the screen.

I go to go in reverse and everything's black. And it's just like, I just sit there and wait and go, all right, well, I want to be able to see out the back of my car before I back into a child's like crossing. Does it self-correct or do you have to shift out? I don't have to do anything. It'll fix itself, but it just, I just got to sit here and wait five seconds, 10 seconds.

like weird stuff like that it's like this shouldn't be a thing for a car that cost me 150 000 at the time right yeah but it is what it is and you know i'm still super happy i love the car i love the power i love fsd even though it sucks and i hate it i love it because it's still better than anything you know what i mean like it's a love-hate relationship and i think that's just part of being a tesla fan i got a question probably for you lewis

The difference between 11 and 12, the main difference is 12, the decision making is based on a neural net as opposed to just the interpretation of the environment. In the current version that we're using, when the car does something, it gives us a little explanation for what it's doing, right? Moving out of the far right lane or getting out of the passing lane or whatever.

Right. Is it going to still be able to do that for us if that's no longer programmed? I guess that that would have to be a train thing also. Like, oh, if you do this, tell it to say this. It is. Yeah. How are we going to know that that's what it's actually meant to say? Right.

Right. There are techniques. It's a hard problem. One of my companies I worked at a few years ago, that was one of the main problems we focused on is explainability in neural net based models. Right. Because you have these neural nets, you give some inputs, it pops out an inference, it gives you some data out of it. And you're like, why did you decide that? How did you decide that? Right. And it's explainability in neural nets is an ongoing field of active research. It's not perfect.

But it is much better. And I'm pretty confident that they'll have appropriate layers. They'll have appropriate training and things in there where we'll give us some rationale for why it's doing what it's doing. It shouldn't be like they had to teach it what to say. Like, it shouldn't be like that. It should more be that they're going to map certain signals to canned answers, probably. So it

I don't think they're going to be generating the cars. You won't get unique messages each time. They'll probably just go, hey, based on these signals, we've decided to change lanes because this is coming up or whatever. But I honestly feel like a lot of those messages today aren't even with the regular driving. A lot of that is more with the route planning.

And I'm not sure that that stuff's really different. They talk about, oh, we're consolidating all these models or getting all this code to be better, yada, yada. It's like, yeah, are you like to which part? Because there's, like you said, there's the part where it's like understanding the world around you, basically doing observations, figuring out like object identification, right? What are things doing prediction of where things are moving? All of those things, they've been slowly adding more and more. So I think they're going to have decisions like,

okay, I need to slow down. I need to speed up those types of things. But are we going to get messages for all of that? Probably not. And most of the messages are the route planning. I don't know that they're going to be changing the route planning just yet, but we'll see. But yeah, I'm hopeful that they will still be giving explanations. If they don't, I think that's a huge negative. They should focus on that, but they definitely have the talent and the people.

Yeah. Sorry, I'm just laughing. I see people in the chat talking about the wipers. I didn't mean to open that can. Honestly, that's the most embarrassing bit because I'll be driving the car and just out of nowhere, the wipers will just come on and someone else, what's that? You just shrug. It's a Tesla. It just does that. And also, I can tell this must be part of the training. Sometimes it gets overcast.

But it's not raining. It's just overcast, okay? And I think the camera's, oh, if I see a gray sky, that must mean... And I'll get a message...

FSD might be degraded due to weather conditions. It's just cloudy. It's not raining at all. The road is bone dry. And I get the, you know, you get that. You don't just get a message. You get a little noise and someone what's that? What was that? It's just doing his thing. And then wipers will start going, dude, you're not going to wipe the sky away. The gray isn't going to go away.

That is the hard thing with neural nets is you don't always know what the model's learning. It's picking up a signal, but you don't know what it is. It might be the gray sky. I think that's what it is. It feels like the AI that was supposed to distinguish breeds of dogs. And it would say all these Huskies because the background would be snowy, right? That's what it is. Correct. Yeah, yeah. It's like the sky is gray. Must be raining. It's like, come on, dudes.

Yeah, we'll see. It definitely could happen where they'll improve it. And they'll I think it's just they don't have any resources on it. Like Elon, I know you're not going to listen to this. You'll never see this. Can you please just put an intern on wipers? Like, seriously, just put one intern focusing on wipers. That would make so many people happy and it would be so much less embarrassing. I literally turn my auto wipers off.

Thankfully, I have a Model S. When I found out that the 3 and the Ys, you can't even do FSD without auto wipers, it blew my mind. I was like, what? I didn't know that you had the option to-- Model S, you do not need auto wipers when you're doing FSD. Model S and X, it's not required. I literally have auto wipers off most of the time when I'm driving. I don't know if this is an S problem, but it's definitely a 3 problem.

If you have the windows open as you're driving, if you use the washers, that's coming into the car. That's going to come in and drip on you if your windows are open and you turn on the washers. And sometimes the washers come on automatically, right? So it's like...

what the heck can we not design a system where the washer doesn't like come into the car so i haven't tried it but i'll let you know that now i'm gonna actively see if that happens in my car that's funny but i'm wondering if the ass had enough foresight in the design of the windshield or whatever such that when you use the washer and the windows open it doesn't just decide to come in and then drip on your arm or whatever that's funny yeah off the sea but anyway

Oh, man. So this has been a blast, man. I'm super jealous about you getting to go in person and seeing all those cool things. The Cybertruck event. I think Lewis is willing to dress up as your wife next time. Yeah, I mean, I'll wear a wig, like whatever you need. I couldn't bring you. I would have if I could have. Yeah. Yeah. No, I feel you. I feel you. Only a plus one. You know, I would have done the same thing, although my wife probably wouldn't have wanted to go. And she is an engineer. She just doesn't care about this. Well, that's funny.

But anyway, it's great having you. Thanks for all of your insights. Remember, folks, he has some cool videos that he posted on his channel. So go check out Dirty Tesla on YouTube. Thank you. Follow him on X and all that kind of stuff.

And as always, thanks for your support, follows, likes, subscribes, all that kind of stuff. Thanks for the questions. Keep it coming. We'll have more interesting guests, not more interesting. We will have additional interesting guests like during Tesla. Man, it's late. It's like 10 o'clock on a workday. I'm so sorry. We won't bore you with people like Chris next time. Anyway, we won't bore you with people like Chris. No, Chris is very interesting. That was funny.

And anyway, one of these days, I want to just pick your brain on your actual field of research and your day job, because that I probably find more interesting. I'm up for it. But anyway, so we'll we'll wrap this up. Thanks to all the producers and all the folks behind the scenes that make this happen. And again, all your love and support and your hate keeps comments coming. Post supporting members, Tesla Motors Club dot com. I'm going to stop talking now before I say something else dumb. And anyway, this was episode 56. We'll see you guys next time. Peace.