EV delivery numbers, EPA range change, BYD overtakes Tesla, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchard. How are you doing today, Seth?

I'm good. I hope you are because we had a huge news week. First week of the year, it comes with all the sales result, delivery result, production result of the EV world. We're going to focus mainly on the US market as we usually do, but we have a global story this week. We do have a global story on who's now the biggest volume producer in the battery electric vehicle market.

A bunch of other news, so let's jump right in. But before that, I just want to say a quick thank you to today's episode sponsors, Upway, a leading online e-bike provider carrying the broadest selection of brand new and certified pre-owned models. You can check them out at upway.co. That's upway.co. We're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show. Stay tuned for that.

But let's start with Tesla. In the U.S., obviously, still the leader by a wide margin in terms of...

Battery electric vehicle, but electric vehicles period. We got the numbers earlier this week. It came out Tesla beat their own guidance. Obviously, Tesla doesn't give quarterly guidance, only give yearly guidance of 1.8 million deliveries. They needed 476,000 deliveries to make that happen. They ended up at 484,000 deliveries. And the actual...

The expectation from Wall Street was 480,000. So there's a big expectation, achieve its full year guidance and beat them by a little bit, like a few thousand units for on a 1.8 million, doesn't change much, obviously, but still an incredible performance.

by Tesla, 35% year over year growth. So it's not the 50% that Tesla guides on average, but we know that Tesla says that that's just the average and there's going to be years, it's going to be over a year, it's going to be below. And this was expected to be a year below just because of kind of in the, but the way that this is, I already explained it, the thing is pretty good. It's like in between some growth period, just based on the lineup, like all the current vehicle programs at Tesla are kind of optimized pretty much. There's might be some

room to grow a little bit, but for the most part, it's optimized. So now the Cybertruck helping it a little bit, but not too much yet. We need the next generation of vehicle, obviously the so-called $25,000 Tesla and the Robotaxi to

enter another growth phase for Tesla but still in between growth phase you get a 35 increase on on deliveries of such a big product like a vehicle it's absolutely incredible performance by Tesla um that's globally obviously but in the US Tesla is the biggest automaker is uh EV EV producer by far

Now, the only thing that I kind of have a problem with this disclosure is like if you're watching right now live on YouTube or wherever, you basically see the entire report that Tesla released.

for their Q3 and annual 2023 production. And it's so limited. It's so, it lacks transparency in terms of all the models. Like Tesla bundles together Model 3 and Model Y, which I know they are similar vehicle, but they're still like quite different. And we kind of would want to know exactly like how big is Model Y compared to Model 3? Is Model 3 like,

how big of an impact the transition to island had in the second half of last year. And so is there room to grow back with the island now and the imminent launch in North America too? Like it would be good to know the health of the programs, especially such big programs like that. So this delivered 461,000 Model 3 and Model Y in Q4 for a total of 1.739 million people.

in 2023 and then it bundles all the other models together. It just says other models right here,

And that's starting to get real bad because now you only have Model S and X. You have Tesla Samay and Cybertruck in there. So zero visibility on that front. Tesla disclosed delivering 22,969 vehicles in Q3 in those other models category. So obviously, that's mostly going to be Model S and X. But we would like to know how it's been with the Cybertruck. Are we at a few hundreds? Are we at a few thousand? Where are we?

We cannot know. Terrible way for Tesla to operate, in my opinion, and shows their lack of transparency. And big discrepancy in terms of production. Why do you think they do that? What's the strategy there? Do you think there's a competitive advantage to not? I mean, the only thing that makes sense, and I disagree with this argument, but I think it's the why, the reason why.

And that's what Tesla fans are saying mostly because otherwise there's no reason not to do it. It's that...

tesla doesn't want to give ammunition to the naysayers and the media that attacks tesla all the time and like look uh cyber trucks not doing well they just delivered that amount or uh look more snx are going down but like there's other reasons for that and you're not going to explain it and i get that but at the end of the day you have a responsibility with your investors like this these these release are for your investors for the for wall street to just have a very good idea of like where

the health of the company and obviously the health of the vehicle programs are important. And Tesla is now openly hiding the health of all the vehicle programs really.

Because Model 3, Model Y, bundle them together also, I don't think it's a good idea. And they are basically the only automakers that does – the only major automakers that do that. When I posted that, everyone freaked out. Have you looked at Rivian? Rivian still delivers like 15,000 cars a quarter. It's not that big of a deal. They're obviously in a growth phase, and you want them to boost their overall production capacity altogether. I would prefer if Rivian would be transparent –

between the r1t and r1s and the the van and all that but i get it when it's 15 000 total a quarter it's not that big of a deal that's a much bigger deal and um all the other automakers they have a way more detailed programs i know people that gave the example of like all the bolt ev and both euv are bunched together all right like okay uh but like for look at a a ford

A report, for example, you have all the detail of every single model. You even have some trims at times, difference between trims. So when they are significant,

So this is a lack of transparency from Tesla that I think they should fix. I would assume that when the Cybertruck is in a higher production, they would add it here. But at the same time, I assume that the Model S and X will always be there and they're not anymore. And it went from worse. It went from Model S and X separately being shown to Model S and X being bundled together, even though they are widely different vehicles.

was more different. I would stick to the three and Y. And then you have now they are even included in the Cybertruck and Tesla Semi. It's ridiculous. Yeah. The Semi really seems like something that should be broken out. Like that's not even the same category of. Not the same buyers. Like nothing alike. Yeah. And it's been in production for a year at that point.

So it's a year with zero transparency into the production ramp, which I know like the production ramp was always limited to that little facility in Nevada until they move it to the Gigafactory Nevada. But still, I would like a little bit more transparency.

So before we move to... We're going to discuss all the Rivian numbers, the Ford numbers, the GM numbers, the Hyundai numbers, the BYD and all that. Let's just go quickly through a few Tesla news, other Tesla news. So the big news today, obviously, everyone is talking about is the range being adjusted across the Tesla lineup. So a lot of questions about that. I think we can answer your questions on here with this. So the...

Model S, surprisingly, the Model S long range saw its range increase from 375 on the 21-inch wheels to 382 on change for the 19-inch wheels. Everything else saw a range decrease. So the Plaid 19-inch lost significant, almost 30 miles of range.

28 miles of range for the under 21 inches wheels. Model X, similar situation. The 20 inch, the long range went from 48 to 35, 348 to 335 for the 20 inch wheel, 333 to 332. So I actually went up on, maybe it's a 322 here and I made a mistake. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. I was like transcribing from the website, from Tesla's website at the same time. So it might be a mistake here. I would assume it's a mistake.

Plaid 333 to 326 on 20 inch wheels. If you go with 22, it's 311 to 300.

Model Y, obviously, much more popular vehicle, much more important. Real-world drive stayed the same, so 360 to 42, depending on the wheel. But the long range, 20 miles dropped to 310 for the 19-inch wheels. 20-inch wheels, 318 to 292, a big drop there. And the performance went from 303 to 285.

Yeah, anytime you're going from over 300 to 200 number, that's psychologically kind of a big step. Yeah, you break that advertising benefit of showing 300 miles or over. So, Model 3 didn't get anything changed. So, what happened here? So, there was a rule change by the EPA.

And the rule change, like in short, it's kind of complicated. It's not even a rule change. It's kind of a classification of a rule because the EP gives some leeway to the automakers to adjust things, adjust multiplier and use like default driving mode instead of like different driving mode, different creep mode, different old. And now they wanted to incorporate all of that into the actual range calculations.

So now they have to use these different modes in part of the testing and then get an average of those, which makes a lot of sense. So it's not like because the range is not supposed to be perfect condition range, even though it's pretty close in terms of Tesla. Tesla with that leeway, Tesla has been known to use that leeway a little bit more than other automakers have. Like our old friend Mark Gurman.

reached out on Twitter when we posted that article and he was like, is the rule changed? Now Tesla has to be honest. And it's not a bad point, but the truth is like, it's not about being honest. It's about being conservative or more optimistic. And Tesla is,

tends to err on the sides of being super optimistic within its EPA range, while other automakers have been known to be a little bit more conservative. And the result is basically it's like, yeah, you can call it honest or dishonest, but it's more like, do you want to advertise a higher range and then disappoint your customers at the end? Or do you want to be a little bit more conservative and make your customers not be disappointed when they actually get lower range or they get closer to the EPA range in this case? So

So this is more the case. And now basically the EPA has tightened a little bit its guidances to leave a little bit less leeway at those automakers. And it results in range drops for Tesla, obviously. Now the Model 3 is not in there, which is interesting. So the EPA says that the new policy is applicable to new testing for 2024 model year and later vehicles. It may be applied to new testing for 2023 model years.

vehicle retailizing carry over data may continue to use that generated on their previous policy for as long as the tests are valid so i don't know how long the tests are valid exactly but manufacturers we add a new configuration to a test group for 2020 2024 and later must prevent present new test results using this policy but existing data can still be used if it is representative so it does sound like tesla just didn't submit anything for the model 3

We suspect, or maybe you can say we hope, that it has to do with the launch in North America of the Highland Model 3, which we think is coming on Earth this week. We saw that Tesla was kind of sneakily testing the Model 3 Highland in the U.S., but we've seen that for a while, but we didn't report on it too much because it was weird. They were all having Chinese badges on them, so we're like, all right, Tesla might be importing some

Chinese Model 3s in the U.S. just for testing ahead of the production in the U.S. of the Highland Model 3. But someone got close enough of one of those vehicles

Sorry, last weekend. And they saw that even though they have the Chinese badging, the VIN numbers does show that the vehicle was built in Fremont. So they're kind of sneakily trying to hide the fact that they're building Model 3 Island in Fremont with that. But if they are, it would point to an imminent launch, I think.

But yeah, and so that might also explain why the Model 3 is not in that list just yet. And it's going to be updated with that new role change and with the updated version of the Model 3 with Ireland at the same time, whenever that comes, hopefully in the next few weeks, months max, like two or three months max, I would say. Yeah, and it's good that Tesla is kind of, you know, walking back its range estimates a little bit. It was getting a little out of hand a little bit, just too optimistic there.

So, you know, these are going to be a little bit more realistic, although probably still on the optimistic side. Yeah, it's roughly a 6% decrease across the board. So you're probably right. It's probably still a little bit optimistic. It depends. Some people were hitting the AP range. It depends how you drive. It depends where you drive, when you drive, at the temperature you drive. Like, there's so many different factors. But yeah, in general, people were not hitting it and that will help.

Tesla also added the two colors from Berlin to the Model Y in the US. So the

Stout Gray and Ultra Red have now made it to the U.S. market. So it's been teased a bunch of times. These were the colors that were enabled by the newly designed paint shop in Berlin, in DFA Berlin. It was supposed to come also to the U.S. through an updated paint shop in Fremont in Texas. So now apparently it is ready because you can order these vehicles in Stout Gray. Stout Gray is the one that's included at no cost. So that's real nice.

And the ultra red, it's replaced the midnight silver, obviously, which was pretty close to it. The ultra red is a $2,000 option like the other colors. But they are real nice looking colors. I still wish they would do brown and green and yellow and some other interesting colors besides the very blue, red, black, white. Sounds like they're bidding more on the wrap side of things for variety. Yeah.

all right this is interesting uh tesla updated is a fairly new api so for those don't remember tesla for years was operating some kind of unofficial undocumented api uh to get access to everything that you can get access basically to the tesla app so there were third-party apps but they were unofficial because

Tesla hadn't documented an official API. They did that last October with an API very much focused on fleet management. So for all the companies that have Tesla fleets, it would make sense to build something for them. And also a lot of Tesla third-party apps that were unofficial were doing that already. So now they can make them officials.

But now Tesla has updated this week its API to integrate new products. So the Powerwall, its solar products, so solar panels, solar roofs, solar inverters, and all that, and its wall connector home charging station have now all been added to the API.

I think that was a project that Tesla made with Samsung because literally the next day, today, Samsung and Tesla announced a new partnership on energy connectivity where the Tesla system API is going to work through the SmartThings Energy app.

So it's basically all the Samsung connected appliances and smart products can be managed through the app and that can be connected now to the Tesla app. So you can get your Tesla solar,

home charger, Powerwall data through that app at one place. So it seems to be limited to that right now, but they say it's an ongoing partnership with Tesla Energy that there should be updates and new possibilities in the future. They said that Tesla Stormwatch, which is something that happened if you're a Powerwall owner,

the storm watch detects when there's a risk that there's going to be an outage due to a storm. And then it gives you more backup power. It focuses on backup power instead of optimizing for sending electricity to the grid. So now those storm watch notifications are going to be pushed to your smart TV, Samsung smart TV.

I don't think that's a huge feature. Most people have their phone on them or whatever. You get it. You don't need a big star watch alert on your TV blasting for no reason. Kind of an Amber Alert situation. But they seem like the press release, I'm kind of extrapolating a little bit, but they seem to tease the fact that you're going to be able also to...

they have this ai in the uh smart uh smart things energy app something from samsung that gonna be able to connect to the digital energy app and when you go on backup power with your power walls it's gonna be able to manage your electricity usage uh from your samsung appliances so they didn't explicitly say what that's going to be like but it sounds like for example

You go into backup power and your dryer is running. Well, your Samsung dryer is running, but it will shut down to get that power because obviously drying clothes might not be like a priority if you're losing power or something like that.

So it's interesting. It's an interesting development. We know that Tesla is going heavily on the software side with their energy division rather than hardware. They're still going strong in hardware with Powerwall and Megapacks and all that. But solar-wise, they're kind of scaling back a bit. So it seems like the solar products is the way to go for Tesla in the energy front.

All right, we're going to be ready to jump into all the other EV news, EV sales. But before that, we just want to say a quick word about our sponsor this week, which is Upway, a leading online e-bike provider. All right. Today's episode is sponsored by Upway, a leading online e-bike provider carrying the broadest selection of brand new and certified pre-owned models.

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That's all caps for additional $100 off. Learn more at upway.co slash pages slash electric, which is in the show notes. A huge thanks to Upway for sponsoring. I had an opportunity to visit Upway in their new warehouse. Well, it was new at the time in Brooklyn. They've got a really interesting situation going on there. There's just tons of brand new e-bikes. Some are overstocks from the...

you know, like specialized, some really, really nice bikes. If you're looking at the screen right now, there's some specialized at a pretty good price. Yeah, really good prices. And, you know, they, they like go through inspection. They, you know, there's like bike techs there and then they package it up in a box where you basically just have to tighten the, uh,

Oh, that's huge. I hate the e-bike mounting experience. That's the thing that holds me up the most. It's a good product, especially for someone like you that always has a fleet of e-bikes around. If you want to update one, I'll send one of them and give me a little discount for the next one or whatnot. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Thank you a lot to Upway for sponsoring this week's episode of the podcast. By the way, if you are listening to the podcast and you are a fan, you can give us like a like, a subscribe. You can hit the notification button. All these things take a second to do.

And it helps the show more than you can think. Free to do. Take a second. And it helps our visibility. It helps the show. And we appreciate when you do it. So hit that like button right now. Takes a second. And I thank you for it. All right. Rivian released their delivery numbers and was a bit of a slip for the company. The stock price got a hit from it too.

They produce 17,541 vehicles. Again, without splitting the numbers, which is always annoying, but more understandable at that kind of capacity.

The discrepancy between the production and the deliveries, which were at 13,972, pretty wide, which probably didn't help the stock because that means that it's going to be harder to improve on those gross margin, which has been the big story with Rivian all year, trying to improve those gross margin. If you're producing a vehicle and you're not delivering it, it hurts the financials. So it was a little bit short of the 14,000 deliveries, but obviously not that much.

So it ends up with an all-year production of 57,232 vehicles and delivered 5,122. So you have like 7,000 vehicle inventory growing.

which is obviously not great for a startup. But Rivian doesn't have the kind of delivery infrastructure that Tesla has just yet, or Tesla or any other automakers really. And they are sticking to that model of delivering direct to customers. And so they have to scale everything themselves. They're not relying on third-party dealership. It is difficult. So we do expect still some issues at Rivian in the next year

year, two years maybe, especially until they move to the higher volume vehicles, the next generation vehicles, which are going to be a lot of helpful to achieve higher volumes. Yeah, apparently they also had a bunch of Amazon vans that were kind of just hanging out because Amazon doesn't take any deliveries during the fourth quarter. That's obviously not a huge amount. You can see the YouTube there. Do we know why Amazon doesn't want to take deliveries? Yeah.

Well, they're delivering a lot of stuff, I guess, in Q4 because of the holidays, I guess. Also, they don't want to make any change to their fleet and whatnot. Yeah, they just...

They just have all the delivery vans on full blast. But at the same time, we also know that Amazon authorized Rivian to deliver vans to other people. So they could have taken the opportunity to not sit on them. But that was not that long ago too. So maybe Rivian's sales team on the van size is just not ready to sell off that volume to someone else.

Yeah, I mean, that fleet stuff takes forever. You're talking about a lot of monthly times. And then there's probably a lot of R1S and T things just sitting around because they just don't have the infrastructure, as you said, to deliver the stuff. They've obviously been able to produce and they've hit their numbers on production. It's just getting those into owners' hands. I think the R1T is actually...

kind of on parity. They're making as many as they can sell, but the R1S is still quite a bit behind. I think if you order one now, you're looking at around six months at least, depending on where you live and everything. How about you? When are you expecting your R1S? Well, it was last I heard, it was like summer of this year now, since we're in 2024. Yeah.

Yeah, so we'll have to wait and see. They just don't have a service center here in Quebec, so they're not focused on deliveries in Quebec. And now I'm more open to the Rivian because the Cybertruck, I'm not so sure anymore. But at the same time, we see the Rivian number, and I think Tesla's going to catch up to R1T production soon.

pretty fast i think pretty quick yeah because let's say that they are the rate right now of like they're producing more r1s right than r1t now oh for sure so let's say they add a high best case scenario like production of six seven thousand r1t per quarter tesla is probably close to that this quarter by the end of this quarter right

Yeah, I would imagine that Tesla is going to catch up pretty quickly. I wonder how fast they're going to catch up to Ford. Yeah, which is, I think, the next story. Good transition. Yes, it is. All right. So Ford was very proud. Mr. Jim Farley was putting that out there. It was like, we're the second biggest EV brand in the U.S.,

It's cool. It's a cool thing, but you're so far behind the first one that it's not like a usual second place. You can have a second place that's like, oh, maybe it's going to be first place next time. No, not anytime soon. No, it's not. We don't actually know exactly just yet how many Tesla vehicles were delivered in the U.S. last quarter because Tesla doesn't break it down per...

But it's not close.

They delivered a record number of 25,937 electric vehicles in the last quarter of 2023, which is up 24% quarter over quarter, which is nice. And overall, they delivered 72,608 EVs in 2023, up 18% year over year. So good performance, not quite what it needed to be, obviously. So the Ford Lightning and F-150 was way up. They delivered...

So that's what we're talking about here. 11,905 Lightning in Q4 and only 24,000 for the whole year. So like the ramp up was very much in Q4, but they just also increased the price on the Lightning too. So it's going to be harder and harder to sell those, but it seems to be going pretty well with 12,000 almost in a quarter. It's not too bad, but it's nowhere near the 150,000 where they were aiming to be. So they were supposed to be at 150,000 by the end of last year, right? Yeah.

150, yeah, that's what they were, which they're not going to get to unless they double. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And overall was just, well, I mean, that was the production rate they were aiming to exit the year at. Right. So it's not exactly, the 24,000 is not representative of that. But still, there are 25,000 electric pickup trucks sold in the, in Lightning, electric pickup trucks sold in the US in 2023, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

You think Rivian can catch Ford in 2024? I mean, we just talked about Rivian. They hit 50,000 this year and they've been doubling year over year. So theoretically, they'd get to 100. Yeah, I think Tesla is the best selling electric pickup truck in 2024, I think, in the US. I think it would make sense. Unless Ford just really ramps up, but I don't see it.

Mustang is still the biggest mover for Mustang Mach-E, obviously I'm talking about here. The biggest movers for EVs for Ford, second best-selling electric SUV in the US, but again, way far behind the Volvo Y at 40,771 units last year. So that's the whole year. So the two big vehicle programs for Ford are the Lightning and the Mach-E, and they were respectively at 24,000 and 40,000 units last year.

The E-Transit is the third vehicle in the lineup, and it has 7,672 units. Also a big 18% year-over-year change, but the van improved a lot the last year, so I would have assumed that. Pretty cool.

And they actually break out numbers pretty well there. Oh, well, that's the pricing on the branding. But they do. Yeah. If you want to go on my Twitter, I posted like a Tesla sales report versus a Ford sales report. And it's night and day. Even if you just pick the electric vehicles in the Ford report, which obviously in much lower lumber, but it's still better detailed than Tesla's.

All right, moving from Ford, GM's numbers. GM is kind of in a transitional period in EVs. It's not pretty. But still, they sold in Q4 19,469 EVs. So it's a decrease from quarter to quarter.

that's where no small decrease yeah small decrease from the last quarter that was just over 20 000 units uh but an increase over q4 from last year at 20 uh that was just 16 000 units um so what did the move here obviously the bolt is still the the leader uh where's the boat chevy bolt uh at 15

12 551 units in Q4 down from Q3 really down from Q3 why would it be down from Q3 they stopped making them I guess I don't know but no but they were still making them throughout the whole quarter almost though mostly Korea uh anyway the bolt is all the production now so this was this last big quarter at 12 000 units and now

They still have a few, obviously. They still have some in inventory, but it's going to go away pretty quickly, especially it still has access to the tax credit and all that. So it's pretty cheap. They're going to go away pretty quickly, in my opinion. So now they're going to rely entirely on the Altium EVs to go, and that's a lot harder. So...

The Hummer is doing fairly well for what it is. It's a super expensive, super big, super obnoxious vehicle. And it sold 2,028 units in Q4, up from 1,167 in Q3 and up from 72 in Q4 last year. So obviously a huge ramp up. Lyric also doing pretty well at 3,820 units. I mean, pretty well. The Lyric could do better than that.

Up about 700 units from the quarter before that. And obviously, 86 last year. It was nothing last year. But still, you're talking about your two biggest...

Alt-C on program right now with the bolt going away, it's them. And we're talking about 2,000 units a quarter program, almost 4,000 units a quarter program from Lyric. It needs to grow. It needs to grow bad fast because without the bolt, they're going to slow down to a crawl. Well, you can almost say it's a crawl already at 19,000 units a quarter overall for EVs.

The rest, you have the Blazer, which we know is not really ramped up just yet. So it's only 463 units. Silverado EV, only the work truck is available. So it's more commercial deliveries, only 443. So also that's going to be something this year. And the Equinox EV was delayed launching this year. So nothing on that front. GM, the Q1 of GM is going to be interesting without the Volt. Well, again, some Volt deliveries, but not much.

And if those programs don't ramp up and Altium, it's going to look like that. Mr. All-in GM, not going to do much all-in on EVs. Yeah, theoretically, the Equinox should help, but that's also delayed and slow and more expensive than it was supposed to be and everything that seems to be plaguing Altium. Yeah. I used to be like GM is going to definitely survive the transition, but now I'm like, I'm not so sure.

I'm not so sure. Yeah, they just can't execute. It's just weird. I mean, they're selling tons of cars, but they're all gas cars and just not... Yeah. They just can't make a good electric vehicle. And the only thing that gives me a little bit of hope is Mary Barra seemed to be completely delusional about it for the most part. And then at the end of last year, she kind of admitted it. She's like, yeah, we didn't execute too well on the EV side of things. So at least she...

she knows it seems like i would like if that if that's what she says publicly you can you can imagine that privately and with the team she's a little bit harsher with it i would assume so i would hope so uh because this is just not a great look for like hey we are all in on evs and you're delivering like tesla delivers that in three days in the u.s like it makes no like they deliver what they do in a quarter in like three days makes no sense all right yeah uh hyundai we have uh

The Hyundai result, which is, you know, Hyundai is one of the bigger players in the foreign automakers in the U.S., in the EV space. In the U.S., they delivered a record number of, what's the quarterly number? Oh, yeah. Those are the quarterly numbers. That's just the IONIQ 5. What's the total? They...

I guess they broke it out. You have to add those too. Yeah. Sorry. You get the Ionic 5 and the Ionic 6. They're not doing the regular Ionic anymore. And what about the Kona? Yeah, they don't even have the Kona in there. Anyway, let's do it specifically the Ionic 5. Its sales rose 92% in Q4 to 8,612 units. I don't know about you in the U.S., but in Quebec, I see a lot of Ionic 5.

Yep, same. I mean, they're an obvious car to see. It's a very standout kind of car. But I do see a lot of those as well. Yeah. That's almost just short of 34,000 Yannick 5s in 2023. That's a decent amount. 48% growth over 2022. So yeah, I think the Yannick 5 has room to grow in the US. It could be like a 50,000 units a year program, which is not too bad for a single market.

So IONIQ 6, a little bit behind, 4,601 units in Q4 for a total of just short of 13,000 units in 2023. So not too bad. So that makes it for a total of 47,000 EVs delivered in the U.S. in 2023.

So they are the second biggest other than Tesla. It's Tesla, Ford, and Hyundai, I think. Yeah, and I wonder if you can... I mean, Ford obviously has a couple of sub-brands under it. I wonder if you can kind of combine Hyundai and Kia because they're kind of the same company. Yeah. I don't think we share the platform or something. I saw an EV9 at the bottom of that post. I don't know if that was...

Maybe I missed it. There were so many sales posts this week to include in the podcast. 1,000, over 1,000 units just in December for the EV9 and the EV6. So 18,879 EV6 in 2023. So the EV6 is way behind the IONIQ 5, which would be the most competitive vehicle, I would guess.

Yeah. But in EV9, you cannot go really full year. It doesn't mean much because the EV9 came later in the year. But still, 1,000 units just in December is not bad at all for a late launch, too. I don't know.

All right, a few more posts to discuss, and then we're going to jump into you guys' comment section. So I see there's a lot of you watching lives right now, and I appreciate it a lot. If you have a question for us, you can put it in the comment section right now. When I get to it in just a few minutes, it can be a question about a story that we discussed today about the EV sales in 2023, about 2024, or any topic in the EV space we want to discuss. And if you do enjoy the show, if you can give us a like, or if you have any questions,

and to subscribe and to share right now. Anything, it's free to do. It takes a second, only if you enjoy it, of course, and we appreciate it when you do. All right, so we have a new, officially a new global leader in battery electric vehicle now worldwide, and it is BYD.

So don't laugh anymore, Elon Musk. We joke because I think he's been taking BYD serious now for a few years. But he used to laugh about it. We have the interview here. Isn't Tesla even using BYD Blade technology?

batteries. That's true. It's now more of a partner than anything else. But you might actually have seen like a variation of that headline before because in terms of ease, it depends what you consider an EV. So obviously at Electric, we focus almost entirely on the EV. We do go into plug-in hybrids sometimes when we

We think they're worth it when they have enough range and all that. But for the most part, we focus on BEVs. And BYD also still does a lot of plugins. So there's a lot of plugins in the lineup. But they've been focusing a lot on battery electric, on fully pure electric vehicles. And for the first time last quarter in Q4 2023,

DYD sold more purely electric vehicles than Tesla. If you had their plug-in hybrids, they are way above Tesla. Now, I think they sold 3 million EVs last year. Tesla sold 1.8.

But overall in the whole year, they sold 1.6 million BEVs versus, again, 1.8 for Tesla. Tesla only sells BEVs. But in Q4, BYD sold 526,000 all-electric vehicles compared to Tesla's 484,000. So for the first time, BYD is the biggest global seller of all-electric vehicles. Now,

This is just a quarter, but I don't think this is a trend that's going to change. I think BYD is just going to take over on that front. And it's kind of to be expected because BYD has a much deeper lineup. And they kind of went different ways, really.

Tesla went upmarket first and then started going downmarket, but it's still like now limited to Model 3 Model Y downmarket. The next generation vehicle is going to be the one that's going to bring Tesla to much higher volume, obviously, because they're going to go even cheaper. DYD started really cheap.

mainly focusing on commercial vehicles and then went to consumer vehicles and still kept in the cheaper, in the lower part of the market. And now more recently has been going up market with more expensive vehicles. And they are even now entering the European market with those vehicles. But still their biggest seller is cheaper vehicle, cheaper EVs in their home market of China. And

It makes sense, obviously, because China has like 1.3 billion people and the U.S., Tesla's home market has like 300 something million. So like Jamie said, you cannot underestimate the Chinese market because there could be literally a billion. I don't hope that, obviously, but there could be a billion people that die in China overnight and there will still be more people in China than in the U.S., which is wild. Yeah, it is wild.

But big congrats to BYD. I've been meaning to go to China and look them up directly there and see that. That would be interesting. So maybe this year. So they're still partially owned by Berkshire Hathaway, right? Yeah, they reduced their stake in it, but I think certainly they are amongst the biggest...

the biggest owner I mean I would assume that the Chinese government is still a big right they do like to own their business there the national is a real thing there um so that that makes us still like what Tesla interesting because Tesla in China they are popular obviously nowhere nearby BYD but they do own it completely they do own the Chinese business completely which is kind of interesting most of the makers don't have access to that

All right, we got the big price on Dave. Moving on from all the sales result, we got a price update that I just briefly mentioned about the 2024 F-150 Lightning. Do we have a nice chart in there? We do have a nice chart here. So the pro pricing is...

is now $5,000 more expensive. So it starts at $55,000 instead of $50,000 for the base version. That's the Pro with 240 miles of EPA estimated range. And then you can go to the XLT for that. And instead of being, well, it's still, instead of, no,

So it's $10,000 more than the Pro version. Interesting. Even for the same range. And we don't have a price. I think they don't sell the extended range pack on the XLT version anymore. I think that's why it's not here. It doesn't look like it. Yeah. I think the sweet spot is that new flash setup. Yeah. The flash...

Now, the price increase is not as big with $3,500 more now starting at $73,500. And you do get the extended battery pack with 320 miles of range. So yeah, I think you're right. That's a sweet deal.

But then you have price decrease. If you want to go all in and get the fully equipped platinum or even the platinum black version of the Lightning with the extended battery pack, but with the bigger wheels and all that, the range is not 320, but 300 miles. They got a $5,000 decrease at $85,000 and $93,000 for the black version.

If you want the Lariat, which is like a nice compromise between the two, still they're not going back to saying the small batch pack on it. So you have to have the big one with 320 miles of range and that's $2,000 more expensive at $80,000. So yeah, I think you're right. Like if you want to go...

Long range, which is useful for that. If you specifically are using it as a work truck and everything, if you plan to tow anything with it, you would want the bigger badge you pack. And now the Flash is this $73,500 option. And if you want the more luxurious option, you go $80,000.

I've also seen that a lot of Ford dealers, and this is probably coming from the company, are offering big-time sales incentives, like up to $10,000 sometimes, on top of these price changes. So I think one of the ideas that Ford had was like, hey, let's take the pricing ability away from the dealers. We'll raise the prices or keep prices a little bit higher. Yeah.

And then the dealers can't jack up prices and Ford can actually lower the prices. So that might be what's happening here. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. On the bad news trend, there's a report. It's not confirmed yet, but it's a report coming from Germany from Automotorhundsmarts.com.

that the highly anticipated the VW, now they call it the ID2 All, so it's the least expensive, like a $25,000 Volkswagen that's supposed to come in 2025, might have been delayed in 2026. And the report states that that's due to the Euro 6 emission limit for cars being more relaxed than originally intended.

originally planned so it looks like volkswagen is going to take advantage of that and push the id2 all a little bit that's that's according to auto motor and sports at least so that would be very disappointing obviously even if the if if the new regulation allows them to doesn't mean that they have to do it doesn't mean that they should do it i think we need that car as soon as possible and probably volkswagen needs that car as soon as possible too because i don't know if you've seen their stock price but i haven't been doing great lately yeah

Not at all. And it's funny that they would just slow down the rollout of that. Like, that would be a good reason to do so. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense to me. Like, they need to get some – they need to hit some home runs. And they're just kind of making bad decisions left and right. Yeah, I agree. All right. Last piece of news before we jump into you guys' comment section. So hit the comment section. We're going to get to it in a second. Hit the like button too while you're at it.

So Fisker announced that they are pivoting to a hybrid strategy. So they are moving away with their direct sales model. There is still apparently going to be a hybrid system of direct sales and they are looking for dealer partners.

So there have been issues ramping up a little bit like we talked about with Rivian, a little bit in smaller volumes, obviously, but still a similar problem. So they announced this week, Mr. Henrik Fisker said, as we saw throughout 2020, the EV market has changed drastically. As a high growth startup, Fisker is transforming

transforming a strategy effort by putting in place the brand accessibility and sales channels required to satisfy increasing demand for the Fisker Ocean and to prepare for launch of additional future models. As a result, we are evolving our business model and intend to add as many as 50 dealer partners in the US and Canada, a similar number of dealer locations in Europe this year. In keeping with our asset light strategy, I expect the dealer partnership model should enable Fisker to expand its sales and delivery network

at a faster pace. Obviously it will, uh, expand the network if you're just signing contracts with existing dealers. Uh, is it for the better though? Uh, we don't know. I mean, I, to me, it's not that big of a deal with Fisker because Fisker was already like partnering with other companies for service and all that. So it's not, it's not like they were like fully, uh, brick and mortar, like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid or anything, but, um,

So it might I like it because I like that. Give it a shot, Fisker. Let's see if it can work. If it works, it might be an option. It might be an option, especially amid a weird transition now where we have two. It used to be you only had the dealer franchise dealership models. Now you have the dealership models and you have the direct sales model that is becoming more popular with Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.

So now with the hybrid model, let's see if it works. Maybe it's a compromise that they can work. I saw a question in the comments section already about the Fisker. So Colin San Diego says Fisker announced that they will actually work with dealers. News was confusing. Are they adding...

Are the additions to say as a traditional dealership like Toyota Fisker or Chevrolet Fisker? Yeah. So possibly, Carl, it could be a solution. So it could pretty depend on what kind of contract obviously the dealers have. So who is Fisker is going to go after exactly. But, you know, like a dealership is not,

Married to a brand. A lot of the times when you go to those section of towns where you have a bunch of different dealers there and look at the buildings, sometimes the buildings are similar, even though you have a Nissan building and you have a Ford building, well, it can be the same owner sometimes. They just build those buildings like that and they get a deal with Nissan, get a deal with Ford, whatever, but it's the same owners behind. So if they can, okay, let's build a little shop in between those two properties and make a deal with Fisker or something like that. So-

Things that are going to happen if the dealers see value in adding the Fisker brand to their assets. So we'll see how it goes. I'm curious to see when they do make those deals, maybe we can reach out to some of those new dealers and see how these hybrid models work for them. That'd be an interesting story, I think. All right, let's jump into you guys' comments.

All right. I haven't heard of this, but Jean-Michel Belanger says, any news about Dubac Motors? Did you hear about any chance of revival of that company? I haven't. That thing, I think, is dead. It was maybe a chance way back when they first announced it, but...

I haven't heard from them in a long time. And I think now like any kind of technology and design they had is just way, way past the, like the industry is like, it's past that by a lot. All right. We got a hello from Diego in Argentina. Appreciate it. A question as a new, our real world drive model Y owner trying to take best care of the battery. How do you recommend to charge the battery without knowing if it is LFP or not? I mean, just,

apparently it's not that's what we were taking care of that stuff yeah apparently it's not so that's what we were told uh so yeah they follow tesla's indication of charging up to 80 but at the same time like it's not written in stone like i like don't don't make your life more difficult because of it like if you need it to be 90 because it makes your commute easier or something like do that if you need it to be 100 do that too like it's

But if you can not keep it charged 100% for too long, and if you can limit the charge to 80%, it doesn't affect your day-to-day driving, do it. It will help the battery a little bit. Not that much. Yeah. Moving on. Happy kid. Yes, just like gas cars, the tank is built for 300 miles, but usually gets more. I don't know if that's just like gas cars, but...

For years, we've heard the EV community say nobody gets what the EPA says you'll get, but that was largely based on the experience with Tesla range inflation instead of recognizing the worst offenders. So yeah, when Tesla gets dialed back a little bit. Yeah, he's right. If 80% of the market is an offender and being super optimistic with the range, it does tend to spread to the entire EV industry. But you're right. The Bolt EV always got great range in the Bolt. Yeah.

Yeah, I would always get something similar to what they stated. All right, Curtis Biggs from Twitter says, if this was a change in methodology by the EPA, should all manufacturers have similar D rates? Well, not necessarily because some might have already taken into account of that and with their mold supplier being lower, they might not have to change it.

Maybe they will, though. Maybe some will. We'll keep an eye on that. But yeah, Tesla was obviously like Tesla was pushing it so much that like a little change like that, they had to change it. Although automakers might not need to. We'll see. And also, like I said about the testing, it depends with the new model year and all that. So that can affect. Yeah, we might we might see some stuff coming down later.

Carl in San Diego back, color choice seems like a no-brainer to breathe new life into the Model 3 sales, missing an opportunity. I think the Highland would also breathe new life into the Model 3 sales. Yeah, I don't think the new colors on the Model 3, I think it's just the Model Y. Probably will come though with the Highland. I don't know what the issue is.

And I do think more colors would be a really... Like, it can't cost that much. And it can't make that... It can't be that complex to add a few more colors. And I know wrapping is kind of an easy way to fix that, but I still think a few more colors. Like, a nice green would be really good. It could bring back the brown...

All right. Has anyone shown Tesla power sharing with Cybertruck or is it a feature that they didn't deliver with launch? I haven't seen it. Have you? Yeah. No, I don't think they have the installation on the home side just yet. But I've seen people receiving like a survey email from Tesla. So with the founder series, it is included. The hardware is included. So they just haven't delivered that yet. So they started sending surveys for people to explain like what's going on with their homes and

So Tesla can probably find some early adopters that fit the best use case for PowerShare. So I would assume that it's coming relatively soon. Kyle O said, I think he means out of spec, Kyle. I don't know. Said Cybertrucks don't have functioning autopilot and assume FSD, even though Foundation Edition makes you pay for FSD and advanced autopilot. Any news on that?

Yeah, Elon said this week that Cybertruck is the lowest priority for FSD. So yeah, they haven't adapted the entire software stack to the different requirement of Cybertruck because of the different positioning of the cameras and all that. So yeah, it is an issue. If you're a fan of Autopilot and FSD, driving the Cybertruck might be a little bit frustrating for you.

Yeah, for sure. So here's the question on everybody's mind. Any idea how many Cybertrucks have been delivered so far? Yeah, I wish this stuff would be more transparent on that. They're not, so we have no clue. If you had to guess. I guess I would be like a thousand maybe. And that's mostly to employees, you would say? Mostly to employees and then a few to non-employees, obviously, too, like a few hundred maybe. There's quite a few out there. There's some out there on Turo already. You can get one on Turo if you want to.

Maybe we should do that. Yeah. I don't know if they are. Are there any in Vermont? California and Texas. But yeah. Right. That makes sense. All right. Moving on. Question. Fisker announced they will actually work with dealers. Oh, we talked about this. Yeah. I already answered that one. We can...

Question, do you think the first Tesla Roadster will be delivered to a customer before or after January 1st, 2026? Oh my God. That's about two years from now. They put the date pretty far. I would assume so that far. January 26th is two years from now. Elon said 2024 last time he said anything. So that's this year. Obviously, I'm not holding my breath for that because he said that before. So I'm hoping 2025, but...

So yes, my answer would be yes to that, but I don't know. I have no clue. Yeah. All right. Rivian will suck at selling to the masses without dealerships or service. I don't know.

I mean, they have their own dealer. They're not dealerships. They're just service centers. Yeah. And it's weird that Rivian can't scale that. It seems like not a hard thing to scale versus building more vehicles, but it just isn't happening. Yeah. I mean, hiring people is hard these days or at least good people. Yeah. So just that alone. And then a lot of things need to come together. You need to find a suitable place.

And then they're competing against Tesla, against Lucid, against all the other people that are trying to open those places. So they're finding the right one. I'm sure it's not that easy. And then you have to outfit it with all the equipment and all that. I mean, new location is the number one thing. And then adding the employees to deliver and service their cars too. It's not easy. All right. We kind of talked about this last time. Eric Williams says, question, how about some 2024 predictions for the EV market? Yeah.

I don't know if you should we rehash or we should just move on? Yeah. I mean, we talked to if you want to go, Eric, see the last podcast, we discussed mostly that last time. But I mean, a lot more growth, maybe a few players going away because the market is very difficult and hopefully inflation, the interest rates stabilize down a little bit, makes the market a little bit easier.

And there's always like, there's the FSD wildcard. Like if Tesla was to somehow pull out FSD, that would be wild. That would change the market a lot. That would be a wildcard. Speaking of Elon, did you listen to the space you had with Peter Diamantis? No. That was like Wednesday night, I think. I listened to the whole thing and...

Elon seems like the most – the best it's been in a long time I've heard him talk. He made a ton of sense. He was stuttering a lot, but that's old school Elon really. But other than that, he made a ton of sense. He didn't go wild with his answers. Other than always he's preaching. I mean it's not wild he's preaching to me.

people to make babies and all that. It's not that wild of an idea, I guess, because there are some concerns with the birth rates in countries, in specific countries. But other than that idea that he keeps pushing all the time, like telling people that they should make babies, he was like the most normal. He's been for a while, talked a lot about what Peter, the amethyst, talked a lot about carbon capture, obviously, because he financed the...

Was it the moonshot thing that Yazdam and Tis, they gave $100 million to try to bolster a project that do carbon capture. Talked a lot about just the energy storage space and the EV space. And he was very optimistic. Well, the talk was supposed to be optimistic because it was about the age of abundance and all that. And he was a little bit more nuanced and not too pessimistic about AI stuff.

He says there was an 80% chance that AI would be good and just a 20% chance that it would be not good. But obviously, if it's not good, it's a lot not good. It's very bad. Yeah, if you had a 20% chance to destroy the Earth, that's not a good... Yeah, but at the same time, there's no stopping it. You won't stop the AI development. It's just impossible at this point. Right.

All right, we're going to move fast since we're over time a little bit. Any guess when Tesla will have auto park and summon to vision-only cars? I mean, they just released the bird's eye view thing for the vision-only cars, which is a plus that you don't even have in the ultrasonic cars. So I think we might be close. I think that would make sense if it's close. Yeah, I agree.

It could happen any given software. Because now they basically built the vision system that you need for parking with the vision only. So now they just need to probably deploy that V12 FSD neural nets end-to-end system to the parking system and then you have it basically. So we're probably pretty close to it. I think all the pieces of the puzzles are coming together now.

All right. Converting EV buses to be EV, I don't know any offhand. Do you? No, but it does exist. I don't know offhand either, but I've heard about it. It does exist. You can do that. There's companies that offer it. Here's a good question. Would you rather own a Kia EV9 or a Rivian R1S and why? Well, you're a R1S owner, so you should take that one.

Yeah, so I think I'm happy with my R1S. I just think it's going to be better off-road. I think Kia's

made for road driving. You know, you can go off-road every once in a while. A little bit better acceleration or a lot better acceleration in the R1S. The one thing I, you know, it's kind of bugging me is the stereo in the R1S is not amazing. And, you know, the ones that we drove, you know, when they were testing them were Meridian, you know,

the top end and they went with their own thing and it really when Rivian had their own stereos come out first they were like you know this is beta we're going to update the hardware or the software and it's going to get better and they really haven't done that and you know like when I'm playing music that I love I just don't like it in the Rivian so it's great for podcasts I guess so you know for music if you're a music person maybe the EV9 is better I don't know

Any predictions about the expansion of the charging network in 2024, especially for non-Tesla superchargers? Oh, so that's going to be tough. So I'm hearing things about charging companies right now, especially those that are big in the North American market. So I don't know if your question is about North American market, but we're more focused on North American market here. And it's not good. The next transition, Tesla's overwhelming dominance on the market,

has made it very hard for them. So...

It might be difficult for non-Tesla supercharger. Obviously in 2024 and 2025, there's going to be a transition where non-Tesla EVs are going to be able to charge on the supercharger market. So this is a plus for everyone, especially for non-Tesla EVs because it's going to give you access to a lot more chargers. Now, if you're talking, the question seems to be more about the deployment of non-Tesla supercharger, non-Tesla chargers really,

That might go... That's probably still going to go up, but I think there's going to be a few players that are going to fall off and that might slow down a little bit. But I think overall it's still up, I would assume. But I think Tesla is going to deploy more superchargers than any other companies put together probably.

Did we talk about the Cybertruck range? We talked about the 254 miles. Yeah, I wouldn't go into too much details. I mean, all the spec is supposed to release a video in more details about that. They just released a live stream, which made it sound like it got 254 miles of range, which is obviously not great because the car is supposed to get 320. But they only drove in the highway, only drove at 70 miles per hour, which is not excessive of a speed too. So yeah, it can be a little bit disappointing.

colder climate a little bit, I think it was like 40 something, I remember it was eight Celsius. So eight Celsius is not too bad, honestly. It's like minus eight right now. So I would be concerned about the capacity of the Cybertruck in freezing temperature right now. That's the only take out from it. But if you're only driving at highway speed,

uh a 20 range loss over the epa estimated range is not too bad either like it's it's about what i would expect it's just the temperature thing i would like to have like another is the same test but like at freezing temperature to see the difference because now that would be a little bit more of a concern because i think it could go down to like

There's a big difference when you drive at eight Celsius and minus eight Celsius. Like it can be literally just that can be a 20% difference. So now if you get below like 210 miles of range, that's less fun. Yeah. Had towing to that. All right. This would be like almost a post in itself. Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota have all passed EV net zero laws recently. In your opinion, which one of these states has passed the best EV policies?

Yeah, maybe we'll write a post about that because there's a lot of nuance to that. Maybe that's a Jamie post. Jamie always follows all that stuff. I'm not close enough to the specific policies to know. Yeah. All right, last question. Sandy Monroe predicted in a recent video that Lucid will go bust by the end of 2024. Do you guys agree? It depends what you mean by going bust, maybe. I think the Saudis could still keep backing the company and don't go bankrupt. Right.

Maybe Lucid goes private in 2024. Maybe something like that. Because I don't think the public market right now is geared for EV startup. I think a lot of EV startup went public at a time that was just not ideal. Lucid is one of them. Fisker is one of them. Tyga is one of them. There's a lot of companies like that.

uh what's the other one mullen automotive has seen this stock destroyed they're like we have 200 million dollars in order right now and we're in production and our stock is crashing and what's happening like they also partner with a con artist that went to prison and like a bad battery technology that was completely made up but so they you win something you lose something

All right. That's it for us this week, everyone. I appreciate one of you that listened to the show this week. Thank you for being a supporter of The Electric Podcast. If you give us a like, a subscribe, it helps the show a ton. If you're on the podcast app right now and you give us a five-star review, that boosts the show a ton. It's free to do. It takes a second. And we appreciate every single one of you that does it. We're going to see you same place, same time next week. Have a safe one. Bye-bye.