Elon Musk's Twitter drama leaks to Tesla, wireless charging, the dealer problem, and more
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Welcome for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Windtral back in New York this week. How are you doing, Seth? Good. I look kind of very white for some reason. Yeah. The camera is not catching the light properly. You need one of these studio lights that I have.

This week's episode of the podcast is sponsored by our own merch store, the Electrek merch store at merch.electrek.co, where you can buy some high quality gears that are branded Electrek. And we even have our electric cars of note, electric car history, electric car t-shirt, and also a tote bag.

So you can check that out at merch.electrek.co. And I'm even modeling the hat today. Yeah, you have the hat this way. Yeah, I'm supposed to get some gear. I'll be able to have that soon on the podcast too. I think I have a sweatshirt coming. All right. So we're going to start out today with something that –

kind of like it wouldn't be big news if it's just the the actual action that happened but it's the context of the action that happened that is a bit worrying that's something that we've we've grown more and more worried about elon's outside of tesla action affecting the company and then we now we have like one of the clearest example even though it's it's a minute one the action by itself but

It is a little bit worrying. And it's probably what generated the most talk this week around Tesla. There's a lot of other news that we're going to discuss too that are interesting. But this one, you can see just from my article on it, 600 comments on this article. People had a lot of opinions about this. So what it is, is Tesla removed Disney Plus from some of its cars. Boohoo.

What are you talking about this, Fred? Why does it matter? I've never used Disney Plus on my car. I have a heater. And it's not that big of a deal by itself. It's the reason why they removed it or that we believe why they did it. So...

We had a source last week that reached out to us and said, warned us about this source from Disney on Disney side of things that they were like, hey, we Tesla reached out to us and told us that they're going to remove Disney Plus from the app. Of course, we're like, oh, OK, like this is a new source for us. So we're like, we weren't sure exactly what to do with it. Try to confirm the information. Couldn't.

Then a few days later, the source reached back to us and said, Tesla actually just reached back to us again at Disney. And they told us they won't remove the app completely from the Tesla Theater inside our cars, but they will remove it from anyone that hasn't used the app so far. So we're removed from Tesla. All right, we'll let people that use it, but otherwise we will remove it.

And then we were able to confirm that because that's exactly what started happening with an update earlier this week. So now, obviously, what's interesting here is the context because no one cares about native app inside the Tesla theater that much. But Elon, it looks like it's Twitter drama from Elon that is leaking into Tesla. Spilling over. Yeah, a lot of spilling over. And even worse than that, it looks like

Elon is using Tesla as a revenge mechanism against Disney for something that Disney did that has nothing to do with this. More specifically, removing ads from Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. So.

If you're not aware, since the anticipated comment that Elon gave his approval to last month, obviously a lot of companies reacted to that by removing their ads from the platform as a form of protest. It's a form of protest, let's be honest. They're trying to protect their brand. They know that people are going to attack them on that. They don't want their brand associated with that stuff, which is kind of fair.

And then Ilan obviously went on that famous now New York Times interview where he was asked about it and he actually apologized for giving approval to that anti-Semite comment. But then he backed away, right away, almost in the same breath, he attacked back the advertisers saying F you to them for trying to...

not taking hostage. What's the word that he used? He was like, uh, censor. No, it wasn't a censor. It was like a blackmail. It was, you want to blackmail me, blackmail me with advertising money, um, which is a weird way to look at it. Especially when you just admitted that your comment was like, uh, I was not a good one. Like, and, and then, and then anyone like reacted to it,

the proper way and you're like f you for reacting that way and blackmailing me is like who said blackmail now uh like and then also it was only disney and that he attacked like he didn't attack apple he didn't attack uh any of the other advertisers that pulled their advertising yeah so what happened with disney more specifically is like at that conference then elon said um

Right after he said F you to the advertiser, he was like, specifically, he said, hey, Bob, right after. And then looked at the audience because he thought that Bob Higer, the CEO of Disney, was in the audience. Now, since then, Elon went on a full-on attack on Disney, like just...

on Disney and Facebook saying, hey, Disney still advertise on Facebook. A lot of very boring stuff, to be honest. But then this thing happened, which is out of the blue, where he decided we cannot confirm it for a fact that it's his move, but the timing is just so strange that it has to be. For sure. So it looks like he instructed Tesla to

to remove the Disney Plus app from the store in revenge for that, for Disney pulling the ads and whatnot. And then I would assume that someone at Tesla had some pushback and they were like, hey, this is kind of a move that is bad for our owners. Like we are negatively affecting our owners for a beef that has nothing to do with Tesla. And then...

then I would assume there was some back and forth and the compromise on let's just remove it from the people that didn't use it. Now, what I'm more curious about is like new cars being delivered. So if anyone is taking a delivery of a new car, a new Tesla vehicle, if you can look at your Tesla theater and see if Disney Plus is in there now and a brand new car, because I...

It's hard to complain too much about this if you never use it, even though you could have maybe planned to use it at some point. It's Christmas. You're going on a trip. Yeah. What if you got the car this year and you didn't actually go on a road trip just yet? The reason to use Tesla Theater is somewhat limited to road tripping and whatnot, like staying at a charging station for a while, something like that. So, yeah, there's definitely...

The core of this story that is very frustrating is that Elon slash Tesla agreed to make the Tesla owner experience worse, even if I understand it's slightly, slightly, slightly, slightly, slightly worse. Like it's maybe like a fraction of a fraction of a percentage for something completely unrelated to Tesla, more specifically for a Twitter beef that Elon has with Disney.

So that is the worrying part for a bunch of different reasons. Worrying like for the fact itself, like, okay, like what's the next beef that Elon's going to use Tesla to get revenge on whoever he's beefing with. So there's that. I mean, imagine if it was Apple that he had a beef with. He could have taken, you know, Apple, you know, he could have started a war with Apple. He could, you know, Apple could have removed Tesla's app from the app store and

Apple Music could be removed from Tesla. There's a lot of stuff. Obviously, Disney's not a big deal for most people, but we're looking at a problem. It's also a problem of like...

I've been defending Elon to some degree from the people that are like, "All right, he cannot be CEO anymore." Name it, whatever drama there was over the last two years. It can be a multitude, you can choose a multitude of them. I was always like, "Yeah, but I mean, he's still contributing to Tesla in a meaningful way." This is one of those that are like, now it's a direct negative impact, even if it's the slightest one. And it shows

potentially some like state of mind that is very rough from work from the reality like the reality like it's not a we wound the right mind especially someone as smart as elon thinks that that's a smart move to use a publicly traded company that you happen to have control of uh to act revenge on another big company that uh

like vexed you on your social media private company by the way that you're the biggest shoulder of it's a bad look it's problematic it's worrying

If you guys have any comments on that, you can put it in the comment section. We have a bunch of other news we're going to get to in the next few minutes. But then we're going to have some time at the end of the show to talk to you guys and to respond to your questions. So if you're in the comment section right now on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, all that, we're live on all those platforms. You can put them in there and we'll get to them in a few minutes.

All right. A little bit more positive news, even though I kind of twist it too. So we reported last week when we got the release note for the holiday update, and we weren't necessarily impressed by the quality of the update this year, but there was some cool stuff in there. Tesla sneaked in a little nugget that has become now the biggest features to be added to Tesla.

I assume it wasn't in the original release note that leaked because it's not for all vehicles, unfortunately. Apparently, it's going to come to all vehicles in the future, but right now it's not for all vehicles. So it's finding that bird's eye view for parking assist.

They're not calling it the bird's eye view. They're calling it 3D reconstruction. So it's based on the existing 3D reconstruction that you get from what people call like the full self-driving visualization, basically. But it's a lot more high fidelity one. So Ashok Haswami, the head of software for Autopilot, released this video of it here. It's pretty cool.

So you see it predicts where the lines of the parking are going to be and gives you a way more detailed 3D visualization of it. So it's the equivalent of a bird's eye view on steroids, basically. So it doesn't render the full vehicles like it would on a bird's eye view, but it does what it needs to do to be able to use that as a park assist, basically.

As Jacques said about it, Tesla could simply add the camera to the... No, that's a comment. So the display... I told you, I keep getting cut by these things right there. This replaced the 2D obstacle bend the customer had with the high-resolution 3D reconstruction of Tesla's surroundings. This is an extension of our occupancy network. So the occupancy network is what the neural net that they've been using to replace the...

With the Tesla Vision only vehicles that don't have the ultrasonic sensors, they've been deploying that to use as a park assist instead and as a close recognition system instead of like the sensors that tell you, oh, you have like 30 inch before you hit something.

So this is an extension of that with much higher resolution to help with tight parking maneuvers. I'll just explain. The obstacles are modeled as a continuous distance field. This allows us to represent arbitrary shapes in a smooth and competitionally efficient way. The vehicles you see are not some fixed meshes, but the network's real-time production of the shape. So that's interesting.

But he also did say that this is only coming to Tesla Vision vehicles, so those without ultrasonic sensors. So Model 3 Model Ys since 2022, Model S and X since 2023. He did say that it's going to come eventually to the cars equipped with ultrasonic sensors, but he didn't confirm a timeline and I will not hold my breath for it. Yeah, I saw some, I think it was on Reddit or something, comments.

The visual stuff wasn't rendering fantastically. It was kind of just big blobs everywhere. People are getting the update right now? Yeah, I saw a couple of people on Reddit. It didn't look like the... I mean, they got the update, then Tesla pulled it. No, but they restarted it in the middle of the night. They restarted uploading the update again. Oh, did they? Yeah. After checking my car. Yeah, because I also got an update and then it disappeared.

But yeah, so that's the holiday update that we're talking about. So apparently Tesla started pushing it last night and then put it on hold and even recalled the update and then they restarted early this morning or something like that. They started pushing the update again. So this is an interesting one, this update too, because you have these little goodies in there. You have the broader holiday update. But

It's also the update. You're getting the new autopilot nags that comes with the broader recall. It's a recall that we talked about last week. You get that too in there. So a lot of people were planning on not updating their car for that reason. They don't want the additional nag. But now if you want that audio update, it's in the same one. So you're kind of screwed. So we'll see.

I don't know if it's going to be enough to convince people or people are going to upgrade anyway. It'll be interesting to see what the new NAG feels like, like how intrusive it is. Yeah, we need to know because like we discussed last week, it's not that bad on the release notes. It doesn't look that bad. It doesn't look like it's nothing so super unreasonable except for one comment that is more vague and we need to actually see how it affects the frequency of the NAG and how easy it is to have it go away and whatnot.

Yeah, and a couple of publications, I think Consumer Reports also said something about how it wasn't enough, even with the additional nag. It just isn't enough. Well, they keep going back to the torque sensor on the steering wheel thing, which, I mean, it's something that we know for like seven years at this point. It's not something...

very new and there is the cabin facing camera now and then newer vehicles so um and this has been pretty good for me so far like the driver motoring for the cabin camera has been pretty efficient uh it catches me sometimes grabbing my phone and it's like hey pay attention it's like yeah you're right yeah i shouldn't do that you should definitely not do that uh um even just it catches you looking at the center display for too long too uh so that's good um yeah

So if it's more a use implementation, more of that, I'm fine. If it's the torque, again, I'm not a big fan of the torque detection because sometimes you even have to do a little bit too much and you can remove the auto steer, which is annoying. All right. This is interesting. The wireless home charger has been confirmed. So it was pretty much almost confirmed earlier this year. Tesla released this image here.

that seemed to show a wireless charger because of the pad here and this connector on the wall. But they showed that picture yesterday and they say, oh, there's going to be cool things coming. They showed that and then they don't say anything about it. Of course, they bought that company too, Wiferion, this summer and then sold it right back. It was more like an acqui-hour situation. They just wanted to get the engineers on board.

So there was that. But no comment at all until this Jay Leno video about the Cybertruck this week. So completely unrelated to the Cybertruck, but you had Franz von Holhausen, the chief designer of Tesla, that was in that drive. And he did mention that, I'm quoting here, we are working on the index of charging. You don't even need to plug anything in at that point. You just drive over the pad in your garage and start charging. So he said,

We confirmed that Tesla is working on that and it is specifically for a home charging situation, since you mentioned in your garage. So it would be a home wireless charger that Tesla is working on.

I don't know how excited I am about that, to be honest. I think it's going to be kind of a niche product, I think, for the most part, because it's going to be expensive. There's no way it's not going to be significantly more expensive. And not just expensive to buy it, but if you lose 10% or 20% in efficiency, it's going to cost way more to charge your vehicle every day. Yeah, but I cannot believe that Tesla would release...

that if they haven't figured out the efficiency issue. Because obviously, if it's less efficient, then there's no reason to buy that thing. It's more expensive to buy, more expensive to install, and then more expensive to charge. But also, it defies the whole purpose of having an electric vehicle and being more efficient if you're just losing more power. And there are other companies that...

claims to have figured out inductive charging and say that they are close to like 95% efficiency, which is basically the same as a cable. A cable also has some losses, which is around that 95% range. So until proven to the contrary, I would assume that that's figured out. Otherwise, it would be so stupid for Tesla to launch that. But even that, even if it's as efficient, so cost the same once everything is installed,

The charger itself is going to be a lot more expensive because there is more hardware in there. You have the charging pad. You have the actual chargers. You need to install that charge on the wall. Then you need to install the charging pad, most often in concrete and inside a garage. So this is a lot of work. Then you have the actual receiver on the car that you need to install. So that's more cost on the car. That's more weight on the car. Yeah.

All that to save yourself like a few seconds every time you have to just plug in your car, which really takes three seconds. I know that adds up. Like if you do that every day, twice a day for years, you can maybe save a few hours of your time. So if you're like a... What happened to the snake thing? Yeah. I mean, they even had a prototype. They had a prototype.

Yeah, maybe that's going to be the thing that's going to make it to the superchargers once self-driving is figured out. Right.

Because that might, that'd probably be a better, because it's not too bad in your garage to have that charging pad and stuff like that. But like in public roads, especially like. Yeah, you need fast. Yeah. And in places that, yeah, the faster you get, the more the loss is going to make a difference to you. But also places that have snow and things like that, you need to have like a snow machine, like get the snow off. Like it's not ideal. Like it would, you would break those things all the time.

So yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of this move, but we'll see what Tesla comes up with. All right, we get some better timing on the opening up of the supercharger network for non-Tesla owners and more specifically for GM and Ford. So turns out that

The timing of when the automakers announce their adoption of NACs as their new connector in North America matters for when their owners are going to get the adapters. So we get this information from a meeting at Forest City Planning Committee, Forest City, which is in Utah. So Jenny Pritari, I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name, but Jenny is the Tesla design manager of charging infrastructure. And she...

She did a presentation at the planning meeting committee and they asked her about her question about the supercharger that they wanted to install there. And one of the city managers, city councilor, whatever, we didn't know who has the question. He wasn't even on camera, asked, is this going to be just for Tesla owners? And then Jenny responded that, yeah,

Our first car companies, Ford and GM, are starting in February of 2024. Once they have the charge port, she probably meant adapter, and software to interface with the charging station, they will actually be open to those vehicles.

So she confirmed timing that the first adapter should come in February and it's only going to be for Ford and GM. She had it after that, that the other automakers will come later. She said that we will be opening up to most of the other car companies in stages to make sure we don't get swamped all at once. So this is interesting. I wonder if they're going to do it in the order they accepted. I would assume so because Ford and GM were the first two. Right.

So it sounds like this is what really matters. Obviously, there's some very smaller ones that I don't think would have any impact at all. I don't think you put Lucid in there, it would have a giant impact on the Supercharger network. But still, this is interesting. So obviously, this is the adapter that is coming. And then in 2025, all new vehicles from these manufacturers will have the NACs integrated on board. So you won't need an adapter anymore, which is going to be nice. Today, we learned that...

Tesla is officially launching the Megafactory project in Shanghai, China. So we know about the Megafactory in Latrop, California. Obviously, it changed the game for Tesla, helped them ramp up production greatly for their energy storage division, more specifically the Megapack, hence the Megafactory name. Previously, the Megapack was manufactured in Gigafactory Nevada.

But Tesla moved the operation to this new factory and then ramped up the production capacity greatly, not quite to 40 gigawatt hour yet, but that's what they are aiming for. And it enables Tesla to break new records for energy storage deployment every quarter. In April of this year, they announced that they plan to replicate that mega factory in Shanghai, China. They had a deal with the Shanghai Lingheng.

which I think is, again, the region where it's like, it's the region where you can still, like you can own the whole factory. It's not like the partnership type of deal. What do you call that? I was going to say tax-free, but it's not that. Joint venture? A free trade region. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so originally this was supposed to happen quite fast. The construction was supposed to start in the third quarter and then production early in 2024. Now, today what happened was a signing ceremony for the land acquisition of the project. And so they started, they launched the actual project, the construction project there. And they say that now they are aiming for the end of 2024 to start production.

So a little bit of a delay, but it is coming. And this is going to be a big deal. Obviously, it's going to help Tesla cut logistical costs greatly because they're going to be able to send out megapacks for all the projects that are in Asia and Australia and New Zealand and all that from there, right, and then all the way back in the U.S. And then they can keep that production capacity in the U.S. for a project in North America. So it's going to be nice. All right, it was this report this week, right?

Reuters, a bunch of reports about Tesla, and they get to one this week. This one was the more damning one, where they said that the Cybertruck is having a bottleneck being the 4680 cell, which was not what we were hearing before. So they say that Tesla is still having an issue ramping up 4680 cells, and it's becoming one of the main bottlenecks in making the Cybertruck. So...

This situation here, it's kind of weird. So you know I'm not a big fan of Reuters, especially their Tesla coverage. It's generally seen as a very good news organization, but we caught them doing some weird things regarding the Tesla reporting in the past. And the weirdest one has obviously been, I don't know if we talked about it on the podcast before, but I assume we have. But for those who don't remember, the Tesla,

they have this uh this post that they said that tesla is gonna bring chinese-made vehicles sell them to the us um then elon responded to that post and saying that that's not true they said it's a false he said it's false and then they back edited that articles to say no in canada

uh the originally said us uh no excuse me back in the day they said they said north america and then in the article they said it's going to be in canada and in north america like as if like it's going to be somewhere else than the us or canada um so that's and then they didn't they didn't update the post to say hey we we changed that after elon said it was false and i thought they just they just changed it after that and then when they made a follow-up post a few months later or a year later

when Tesla actually started delivering Chinese-made vehicles in Canada, they referenced Elon saying that the original article that they posted was wrong. And they were like, look, we were right about that. And Elon said we were wrong. So there's something weird going on there. But I remember the actual original post and I have all the receipts for it. And it's clearly that the

it's deceiving so basically they're looking they showed there that they are more interested in looking like they were right than actually being right and they are willing to deceive their readers into thinking that Elon was actually false uh wrong on there when he was right originally so I don't like that at all and then okay you can say all right this is a one-time deal and everything it can be but

I reached out to the four people involved in that article and asked them, like, what is this about? This is not right. This is not how you do reporting and everything. And this is coming from a blogger here, by the way. And none of them responded to my inquiries, even though some of them even followed me on the X. And so they actually, like, you get notification when I reached out. And they didn't respond. So they are completely in another situation. They are okay with...

what they did. So since then, I'm like, all right, like this is obviously not up to par in terms of reporting. So I've been careful there. But in this case here, they claim to have nine people at Tesla, including like

Tesla managers and employees, we spoke to them on condition of anonymity, of course, because of the sensitivity of the matters. And they said that Tesla had yet to crack the dry coating and the industrial scale needed to make the 4680 batteries fast enough to hit its production targets. So that...

That part, I think there's some bad instinct to it. We know that Tesla has been having issues with the dry coating technology, which is a big part of the 4680 cell technology. And now, specifically in that report, they say that the...

The problem is with the cathode, with dry coating the cathode test, that's figuring out the anode, but dry coating the cathode is a problem. But in the same report at the same time, I'm like, oh, this is kind of weird because they say that the 486 ED cell is a bottleneck and now they're only producing enough to make 24,000 Cybertrucks a year.

Then they say a tenth of what is required. That's a tenth of what is required at full volume capacity, which regardless of the 40680 cell won't happen until sometime next year. Not even that, sometime in 2025. So I don't understand the point of that. I would...

with or without 46 of these cells i would be shocked if tesla was producing the cyber truck now at a production rate of 24 000 a year so even if they were able to produce the 46 of these cells uh at a higher level why would they they would probably be trolling down the production capacity in order to match the rest of the production uh cyber truck production so i don't know about that report like i think i think there is validity to

just having issue with dry coating. I don't know about it affecting the Cybertruck in any meaningful way though. Yeah, I mean, the scaling they have to do anyway is going to be very difficult to get to that number. So it kind of feels like regardless of what problems may exist, they're going to have a hard time scaling to that number in the next year or so. Yeah, there's so many new technology in the Cybertruck too that I think are probably bigger issues than the 4680.

All right. This was a real bummer this week for Tesla employees. This is a report coming from Bloomberg that said that Tesla has decided to not give merit-based stock grants this year. So the compensation of employees following in the annual performance reviews said that even high performers didn't get the merit-based grants. Obviously, this is a big deal because Tesla

Elon specifically has claimed that one of Tesla's biggest advantage is that they give out stock grants, stock options to everyone. And that has made Tesla's compensation extremely competitive with the rest of the market. So obviously, if they are not giving that out this year, you can imagine that it won't be as competitive. They also have received...

like small like price increase but there's salary increases uh but we we've heard from tesla employees that this they're it's not like significant enough to compensate for the inflation cost which has been obviously crazy uh in the last uh two years

So this could be a real problem because at Tesla, I think one of Tesla's biggest advantages is that it's their level of talents. They have a lot of talent. And a lot of people want to come work for Tesla. So Tesla has a ton of application all the time. A lot of people want to come work there. But it's also like a big recruiting hub for other companies that want to make electric vehicles and everything. People, they recruit from Tesla all the time. So there's a lot of competition for Tesla.

to retain the employees at Tesla. And obviously, if you're not satisfied with your compensation and then someone else comes in with an offer that pays you 20, 30, 50% more, which is not unusual, you might be tempted to go for it.

Should we read our tip that we got from a Tesla employee? Yeah, yeah. We got a tip that you want to read from it? All right. I work for Tesla as an engineer in the Bay Area. In regard to the Bloomberg article, we have been told that we would not be getting any additional equity grants for this year's performance reuse. Our pay increases have also been significantly lower than in years past, only 5%, and only happened at the end of November, months later than normal.

This has had a severe impact with morale within the engineers at the company since the increase in compensation hasn't made up for the amount of inflation. Over the last year, there has been significant more discussions at the bar, in quotation marks, between engineers about compensation than seen in the past, especially with a lot of high performers leaving for significantly higher pay by going to competitors. This is an additional leaving, this is an addition leaving holes in certain groups that have been able to

that haven't been able to backfill. Newer employees also don't believe that their current starting equity will have the same explosion that those who have been with the company pre-2019 have seen. That's a good point. You know, your starting date is...

The stock price, I think there was a post on one of the Tesla Q folks about how in the last three years since Tesla joined... The S&P 500? Yeah, S&P 500, that it's only up like 11% over the last three years. And that's obviously a lot less than...

Some of the high fires, even the big companies like Apple and... Yeah, I think the S&P 500 is up like 26%. Right, close to 30%. Over the same time.

yeah over the last three years tesla has not been the growth stock it was previously finally it uh the guy guy or woman says it's no surprise within the industry at the end that the total compensation from tesla is considerably lower than what other companies are willing to pay but historically it has been offset by the increases in the equity part of the compensation between the amount of vehicles that are being sold by

by Tesla, the launch of the new and upcoming products and the large increase of pay in other areas of the organization. There's a feeling by the group that are making Tesla money now and in the future that their work has not been appreciated. So that's if that's if that's widespread feeling and we don't know, it's an anonymous tip, then that's problematic. Yeah. And, you know, the timing and everything, I think

I think it's a high credibility tip. Yeah, it is worrying. I think that Tesla's talent is its biggest asset and if they start losing it at a higher rate, there's a real concern. There's also like, even without compensation, a lot of people were feeling like, oh, we're saving the world and all that and we have a great leader and everything and then now a lot of people have doubts about the leader and it's not the same. So,

Hopefully, Tesla can get a hold of the situation because I can see that having one of the biggest impact on the company if they start slipping talent like crazy. But Tesla still have some great products. And this list is one of them. This is very cool. Tesla Electric is now celebrating its first year in Texas. The launch in Texas happened around this time last year. And some of the early customers are reporting their situation on the company.

electric utility platform, basically. And I mean, it's impressive. So we have this guy, RJ, from Texas here, posting basically. I don't know if I can show that directly here. Yeah, if I do this, probably. All right. So this is a statement. So you can see like he signed up in December 15, 2022.

And first month didn't have to pay anything for his bill. I should say, what is this guy's system here? So this electric, this is electric is like basically like the VPP, the virtual power plant. But instead of just responding to specific events like the VPP does and offering grid services during those time from decentralized energy assets like power walls and solar system to

It's the whole, your entire electric utility is on that plan and the utility will sell electricity whenever it makes sense for your own system. And this guy here in Texas has a 12 kilowatt solar system with three power walls. So it's a lot of power walls, especially for a system of that size.

Because you have a bigger system than that, right? What's your system? You have two power walls, but you have... What's your solar power system? I think we have 14 kilowatts. Yeah, 14. So yeah, so the first one, $15, but it says negative here. So basically, you don't have to pay anything. Your electric bill is free and you actually make $15 in credit.

Then the only month where I had to pay the grid was in January, February. So January 12th to February 13th had to be 1244. Then from there, it was all just bigger and bigger. And then the system kept becoming more and more complex.

profitable for the owner and by the end of the year ended up with a credit over a thousand dollars almost a thousand a hundred almost seven hundred dollars so the test electric basically managed to help the owner optimize his solar system and power wall to make his entire electric bill disappear

And on top of it, gives them $1,000, which you're able to cash out at the end of the year. So it's not worth keeping those credits. If it keeps going at that pace, and in Texas, I think it's going to get probably worse before it gets better. It's not worth stacking up those credits, thinking that you're going to use them on your electric bill at some point. You probably won't. So I think this is awesome. People have been talking about...

the smart grid forever like like a smart grid is coming it's going to change everything like but it's always all right like we have these smart meters and whatnot like this is what i'm thinking about when i'm thinking about a smart grid i'm thinking about like decentralized energy asset like energy storage like power walls otherwise solar system and you put them together and you put smart software behind it that send the electricity where it's needed

when it's needed, and you compensate the people that invested into those energy capacity. So if it's an electric utility and a large scale solar farm, wind farm or hydroelectricity dam or large scale energy storage with power walls or mega packs or any other batteries,

then that's them that the electric utilities should be compensated by that. But if the homeowners decide to do their own investment, and obviously you have other advantage to that, like Paul Wallace can also save you from outages, then yeah, you should be compensated for that. It makes sense. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And in Texas now, of course, it's a deregulated market. So it's, it's got pretty crazy sometimes. So especially in the, in the summer months, the people running their ACs like crazy, you know,

put a lot of pressure, a lot of stress on the grid, and then they are willing to pay a lot more for power. So if you have some extras, and RJ here in Texas had plenty of extra, and was making between August 14 and September 13, made like $700 worth of credits. Pretty crazy.

You know, it would be interesting to see if, you know how like Bitcoin mining is, you know, you make a few pennies here and a few pennies there based on the equipment you buy. It would be interesting to see if you could kind of turn this into a gaming situation where, you know, you get a few bucks for some extra solar panels and battery, and then you add a little bit more, you get a few bucks more. You kind of, if Tesla can get that same gamification that happens with like

Bitcoin mining and other little money tricks. I wonder if that would be... And if you had your own miner... Well, yeah, you could... You could do that, but not only that, if you could connect it to the Tesla Electric system too, because the biggest cost of mining is the cost of electricity that it takes to make the computations. Tesla Electric could tell you, like, all right, right now...

your extra power that your system is producing makes more sense to send it to the grid because the grid is going to pay you a lot for it or if it doesn't make sense right now the grid doesn't have it pays you peanuts for it because it doesn't need the capacity send it to your miner instead and like the miner is going to use it and that's going to make you more money in crypto that would be kind of cool yeah i'm not a huge uh crypto guy so that that's a little foreign to me but

it would be nice to just send that to the grid and make money off of that. But I get it. You're not going to make a ton of money, you know, during when it's, when energy is cheap middle of the night type of stuff.

All right, we have two more news items, and they're basically the same news. It's just they work together. And then we're going to get into your guys' comment section. So if you have any questions for us or any other subject in the EV world that you want us to discuss today, put them in the comment section right now. We're getting some comments from X. This is new from last week. There's only since last week we're getting X comments too. But on YouTube and Facebook, we get them also. And LinkedIn too. All right, so...

We've been talking a lot about the dealer problem with EV in the U.S. Like, this is an issue. Like, dealers have recently shown, and for a while now, themselves as being an obstacle to EV adoption rather than allies. Not everyone. There's some good ones out there. Don't send me the emails like you always do. But it's been a problem. And now you get some great examples. A few weeks ago, we talked about the letter that they sent to the White House saying that

to slow down the EV regulations because they're not selling well. Now you even have dealers that are opting not to get into the EV programs of some automakers. So you have Ford dealers. Ford this week confirmed that only 50% of their dealers have opted into their EV programs. So Ford and

Most of the automakers have programs where if you want to sell their EVs, if you're already an existing Ford dealer, but you want to sell their EVs, you need to make some investment into some charging infrastructures and some training for your employees and all that. Things that make a ton of sense if you're selling electric vehicles.

And a lot of them had pushed back against that. They don't want to invest in that, whether for financial reasons, they don't want to invest the money, which like that I can understand if they are strapped on cash or whatever. But a lot of them, they don't want it because they don't believe in electric vehicles. They don't believe that it's going to work and all that. So this week, they confirmed that only 50% of them are getting into or confirmed to sell EVs in 2024.

So that's kind of a bummer. I thought it would be much higher than that. I knew for sure there would be some old doubts, but 50% it's... Yeah, it's no good. But I'm reading here about the cost. So it's half a million dollars it costs to be certified. So it's no joke. It is a lot.

It is a lot, but that's kind of the future. Although I have to say, why does a public DC fast charger cost $500,000? They're expensive, but that seems excessive. Yeah, a million dollars for Elite tiers, which is another...

some demo units present on Ford's.com live. It sounds like Ford is also like trying to get something out of it too. Right. They're clearly trying to get something out of it. Maybe they should lighten that up a little bit.

But they are not the only one with this problem because Buick this week also had a similar issue. And GM is a little bit more aggressive with those. They are buying out basically half of Buick dealers over their EV plans. So those that don't want to invest that money, which is a lot cheaper for GM, is $300,000 to $400,000. They are getting buybacks. So 47% buyback.

are now being bought back. Almost half of the Buick dealers are being bought back by GM because they don't want to invest that money into electric vehicles. So a big cleanup for GM too. All right, should we jump into the comment section? Yep. All right. We'll start off with Fred Ora sending the bird to Elon. I know you can do that on YouTube. You can put the bird on YouTube. Richard Cool says, Elon needs a self-imposed gag order.

Carl in San Diego, Disney news is nothing compared to the bombshell from Reuters that Tesla gaslighted their owners, telling them that dangerous failing control arms and broken driveshafts were owner abuse. Elon made his text a lie to customers about the safety issue. Yeah, I mean, I read this whole report and like, I don't know, like, it's...

It looks like they're using service report as proof of that. And it doesn't exactly work like that. Tesla has all its service report public. And I looked at them and I don't see where they say that Tesla knew about an issue. It's more like when they get an issue from a customer, they send it out to that service system and they all know about it. So they can match issues and like, oh, this is the solution to this issue.

So you could claim that, yeah, they knew it was a problem on other cars, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a defect. Like we know like Nitsa actually investigated that suspension issue and didn't found any problem. Now I'm not saying Nitsa is perfect and might have missed something and whatnot. Like that's possible. But I don't know about that report personally. Like I'm not sure. Did it feel like last week, like everybody was coming after Tesla?

It felt weird, right? I don't want to get conspiracy theorist on anybody, but it just felt like a lot of negative news came out. There was multiple recalls. I mean, that's obviously National Highway Safety Board, but a lot of negative Reuters and Bloomberg reports. All right. Kind of weird. Moving on. Jonathan Root picked up the EV9 last week. Pretty impressed with the build.

Build quality and space. Software is Kia's limitation. Yeah, it's the limitation of a lot of automakers, unfortunately. Yeah, those Android autos and Google and Apple car and all that, they cannot come soon enough for those that are not willing to invest enough in software, unfortunately. But yeah, congrats on your EV9, though. That's a nice car. Yeah, love to hear if there's anything weird or exciting or whatever. We're waiting for our review as well.

Tesla users with the new safety updates have proven you can cover your driver-facing camera and it ignores the safety protocol. Have you tried that? That would be new because I think that previously you couldn't do that. You couldn't cover the camera. It would give you alert, but I'll look into that. That's interesting. All right. One of those stories we covered this week, the Netherlands has installed many solar bike paths.

It seems like a great idea, although the Netherlands doesn't get a ton of sun. It'll be interesting to see the data and how much energy it generates. They've had solar roads planned for a long time. It's just making the model work. All right. If you have multiple EVs, moving a single cable from one car to another is easier than moving each car over a wireless pad.

I guess that's assuming you only have one pad. I mean, eventually, I guess you could have two pads, but I don't know. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, if it's more of a niche case, eventually a lot of people are going to have multiple EVs, I would assume. But yeah, I don't think that's the main issue. I think the main issue is like how much you're saving time versus the money more than anything else.

All right, Spikes43, question, any word on what to expect from Rivian quarter two refresh? I'm hoping for better vehicle to load and heat pump. Both of those things sound really good. I expect some efficiency stuff. I think they're going to kind of double down on their dual motor thing. When they got rid of the tank turn, there was not much reason to have four motors available.

So I think they're going to try to get more efficiency out of that. I don't know. What else would you like to see from Rivian, Fred? I mean, you know more about it. You're an owner. I didn't read too much about the refresh. I read more about this week, their plans for the lower tier vehicles, the new plans, cheaper. So is it more... So it's going to be a hardware refresh, right? It's not going to be like...

I mean, it sounds like nothing's been announced yet, but yeah, I mean, it's not going to be a totally new looking vehicle. It's probably going to be some improvements inside. Yeah. You know, as far as the vehicle to load thing, I think putting a, right now there's like a 20 amp 110 volt inside there. I think they, they, you know, make like the Cybertruck and the Ford F-150 Lightning and they put a 1450 in there. Yeah.

All right, Glenn Sullivan, I have a – from Twitter, or I mean from X. I have a 17-kilowatt system in New Brunswick, Canada. There are no Powerwall installers here. Yeah, that's unfortunate. What will I need with Cybertruck to have a backup? So can you actually use the Cybertruck to kind of not – like if you don't have a Powerwall to backup your solar? It sounds like you can. You need a gateway and or a Powerwall.

So it sounds, but my worry is like if you really have your eyes set on the cyber truck in New Brunswick and there's no Tesla power wall installer right now, like it's likely not going to be any gateway installer either. So...

That's more of my concern. There's none in Quebec too. At least there wasn't when I installed my Powerwalls here. Had to come, maybe come all the way from Ottawa in Ontario. So obviously this is an option. But New Brunswick is even like a longer distance from Ottawa. There's none in like Halifax or anything? I mean, I feel like isn't part of Tesla's big battery research stuff in Quebec?

Yeah, but it's battery cell. I don't think it has much to do with the installers. But yeah, I mean, I would ask Tesla about this and ask them to have installers there. It would make sense. All right, Electric Brian says, comment, people should be able to install any app you can from the Play Store or App Store. What I really want is Sirius app. I would actually pay for premium data if it had that. Well, you'd probably have to pay for it. But yeah, Tesla's talked about having an App Store for a while now.

Elon has at least. Carl in San Diego. Yes, Seth, you can game the electric sales market, but importantly, the federal tax credits for residential solar and battery are for personal use and not for overproduction and profit. Arbitrage is greed. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to waste any energy either. So there's a lot of energy waste. If you're using it for crypto, you're going to waste it otherwise. Yeah.

And if you are, you can just buy it without federal tax credit and not have to think about that. All right. Uh, pal, Jamie, uh, electric vehicles are not ready. Electric vehicles still catching on fire. And of course he's from Facebook.

Yeah, that sounds like something your great uncle is going to write on Facebook because he sees something. Yeah, Paul, Jamie, I think you should inform yourself a little bit and find out that driving around with a highly combustible gas in your tank is also problematic if fires are a concern for you. And those vehicles that work on gasoline actually catch on fire at a much higher rate than electric vehicles.

All right. Carl in San Diego talking about the Reuters headline, Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts that it long knew were defective. Memo sent to technicians globally instructing them to tell customers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty. It's not as simple as that. Like, again, you're talking about a service notice there and it gets sent out. Like, whenever there's a new issue with a car that's found out, they send that out to everyone. So it sounds like that's what Reuters got. So that's why I'm confused about, like,

The validity of that report. All right. Then he goes on to say Rivian is the worst efficiency period. They need to fix that. Only thing worse is Hummer. Well, then I guess it's not the worst efficiency. But also Rivian is not that inefficient. I get more miles than they say that I'm going to get, which is weird for an EV. Yeah, they don't game the EP system as much as others. Right. Looking at you, Tesla. So, yeah.

Power, Cybertruck power sharing is not finished development yet. Vaporware. All right. Well, I think Tesla is going to be able to figure that one out. Like of all the things that Tesla can figure out, using their cars as batteries is not going to be a hard one.

All right. Also, thank you for covering the Tesla electric stuff. That is super interesting. Not as flashy as the cars, but I completely agree. This could grow value over and above cars. Yeah. Elon had said one time that the electric portion of the site or the company may be as big as the cars.

And then we have a response to Uncle Powell, Jamie, that on Facebook, at least they only catch fire one one hundredth as often as gas cars, which we have no idea if that's true. But I know it's less than gas cars. It is definitely less. There's so much fewer of them, too, obviously, but on a rate, the catching rate, I should say.

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for listening to the show this week. We appreciate you. If you did enjoy this show, if you can give us a like, a thumbs up, whatever it is on your app right now, it is super helpful. It's free to do. And it helps the show tremendously. And we appreciate the single one of you who does it. We have one more show before the end of the year. Yeah, we do. So we're going to be coming next week with the last show of the year. We're going to try to make it a fun one for you guys. We appreciate every single one of you. Have a safe weekend. Bye-bye.

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