EV tax credit on chopping block, Tesla's China problem, Slate gets interest, and more
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We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintra. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. Yes, all right. Plenty to talk about this week. Going to start a little update that we've been doing in the last few weeks about the tax credit. We have a much better idea about the tax credit now in the U.S. thanks to the full tax bill being released, although...

Plenty of time to change. So it's a fluid situation. Let's keep that in mind. Then we have Tesla's delivery numbers in China that are starting to put some red flags out there. Quick update on the Robotaxi launch in Austin. Then we got to talk a little bit about Tesla employees pushing back against Elon Musk. That was interesting.

And Toyota has its new version of its BZ4X, which is now called just the BZ, and a few more to discuss. But as usual, we're going to have plenty of times to talk to you guys too. So if you guys have questions for us, you can put them in the comment section right now. I want to get to that later on in the show. It can be about any of the topics we're discussing today or any other topics in the EV world that you want our take on. We are live everywhere. You can put that in the comment section and we'll get to it at some point.

All right. So last week, we talked about the tax credit. There was a little bit more chatters around it as the house came back from its April pause.

And I started working on the giant budget, the giant tax bill coming up. And we discussed that, yeah, it looked more likely than not that they were going to kill it as part of the bill. The question now is more about timing, about phase-out period, about all of those. We were somewhat not too hopeful that it was going to be by the end of the year when we discussed it last week.

Now things have changed. So with the current version of the bill that we have now available, it looks like it's going to be until the end of the year. So for the entirety of 2025, as of now, there should be access to the federal tax credit for electric vehicle, the $7,500 tax credit, which is a point of sale credit too. So it's had a much bigger impact since it's been the case.

Another interesting tidbits of information about the phase-out period, which is not really going to be a phase-out period, it's going to be by the end of the year, is that for manufacturers who have not sold 200,000 EVs between when the tax credit was put in place originally, the first version of it in 2009, up until the end of 2025, you're still going to have access to it until you reach that 200,000 deliveries.

So that's actually very good news for companies like Rivian, like Lucid, all the startups that can reach production by then, can start deliveries. Then you would get access to that for the foreseeable future. We discussed how companies like Rivian and Lucid, it's not that big of a deal for them, the tax credit, because of their current bracket of a lineup of entry vehicles.

being a little bit more expensive and there's a cap on EVs, $80,000 is the limit. Is that, what's the, I'm confusing it with Canada sometimes, but I think 80,000 is for trucks and SUVs and it's 55,000 for sedans and stuff like that?

that sounds right i keep forgetting because it keeps changing yeah it's in the ballpark basically um so because of that you know rivian and lucid don't have it's not a big market for them but

They have specifically Rivian as they are too coming early next year or first half of next year. Lucid hasn't really unveiled their next-gen cheaper vehicles yet, but they are expected to come a little bit after Rivian's. So for those automakers, since they haven't delivered that many vehicles, so they see 200,000 vehicles total per year.

Probably should be 200,000 vehicles that are eligible for the tax credit, but I don't think that's in the language. I mean, either way, Rivian or Lucid are not quite there yet. Then you have new companies like Slate that could also benefit from that. So at least their 200,000 first deliveries would have a tax credit. So that's good. That should...

The impact is going to be big anyway. In 2026, if there's no tax credit, yes, EV sales are going to slow down, but at least the startups should be able to compensate a bit for it, access to tax credit. But then you also create this situation now, it's like the companies that don't have access to the tax credit anymore are less competitive than those that have access to it. That's an issue too. But that's the latest on the electric vehicle tax credit in the US.

My computer is so slow today. I don't know what's happening. I just restarted it too. I should close a few more windows. I don't know if that's going to help. All right. We're back here. All right. Tesla in China is having some issues. The Chinese market is kind of the most competitive in the market right now just because everywhere else, the Chinese companies don't have... I mean, we shouldn't say that because...

while other markets do

penalize Chinese EVs and they use protectionist initiative to counter them. The same thing is happening in China too for foreign EVs. It's not easy to penetrate the Chinese market. There's tariffs on foreign vehicles too. So it's not like the most fair market either, but it's definitely the most competitive one because Chinese automakers are the most competitive right now. And obviously on the Chinese market, that's where you'll find most of them.

And it's creating some issues for Tesla. So we have the latest numbers that came out this week from the Chinese Passenger Car Association that gives us both now a better look at the April numbers for the retail sell within China and the exports. So there's always some confusion. Jeez, man.

There's always some confusion between the two because sometimes people report one number as the other or just the total and don't take account the export. But here I put a chart together thanks to ChatGPT where you see the trend for the monthly

for the first four months of the year in 2023 in green. So the highest one is in green. That was 2023. Then 2024 in blue. That was way lower. And then now in red, you have 2025. So all monthly sales, you see down there, down in 2025, down in March and down in April. So every single month is down compared to 2024 and 2023.

But that's for the total import and export. So the import is there. Sorry, the retail local domestic sales are in the solid line here. And then in the what do you call those lines? Yeah.

Dash lines. The dash lines are the exports. So you see the exports went way down in March, but now in April, it's basically 50-50 Tesla is exporting vehicle and retail sales, but they are both down versus 2024 last year.

So things are starting to look down for Tesla in China, not horribly, but just year over year down. The thing that's most worrying right now is what happened last week with domestic sales. So with China, you have to give them credit. They gave us a lot of data pretty quickly. So we have the insurance registration data in China and they are released

Weekly, though apparently they are starting to talk right now about doing them just monthly now. So something to keep an eye on. But the weekly sales last week in China were just 3,070 units. That's down 69% year over year.

for the same week and why is it relevant to just look at a week well we're not just looking at a week we're looking at the the last few weeks really uh but the last few weeks as you can see are way down here and uh that's um that's worrying because the previous month so what we looked at the not just the previous month the previous quarter that we look in the last article just like everything else with tesla over the first quarter everything was blamed on the new model y

But you cannot do that for Tesla, especially in China in Q2, because they are delivering all the models are in production, full production now, all the trims of the new mobile Y. So it would, Reboot Drive was not the case in Europe and, and, and, uh, in the U S but it's coming up now, but in China, it was available for the whole quarter. And the quarter is still tracking, as you can see here in red now down versus last year. And, uh,

And the deliveries was estimated to be around 10,000 units last week. And now they're just 3,000 units. So people are kind of freaking out right now because we knew that Tesla is under a lot of pressure in China from the competition. There's a lot of top competition that's going straight directly after Tesla. But no one was expecting that big of a decline in sales so quickly.

so the question now is more is it was it an issue with tesla delaying some exports so there were more exports in the last few weeks reducing the availability of vehicles in china for domestic sales it's a possibility even though i try to look at the availability of vehicle there's vehicles and inventory in china and the delays for new orders haven't changed in the last month so

It's not clear what's happening. We're going to have to keep a close eye on Tesla's deliveries in the next few weeks in China if the Chinese market keeps delivering it every week. Like we said, they're talking about changing it to every month, which would muddy the data a little bit. But if this keeps going, it could point to an actual complete collapse of demand for Tesla in China, which would be obviously a big deal because China is the biggest EV market out there.

So something to keep an eye on for the next few weeks. Might be going into China too in the next few weeks if all goes well. Yeah, I was going to say maybe Tesla would invite you over to Shanghai. No, I really doubt it. All right, so a quick update on the Robotaxi fleet that Tesla is supposed to launch next month in Austin. So this thing is coming fast. People are really worried about it. What's going to happen? Is it going to be a big deal? Is it going to be a flop?

We've been talking about it a lot in the last few weeks because the last few months we've been focusing more on the fact that it's more of, we call it the moving of the goalpost for Tesla compared to what was promised with consumer vehicle becoming unsupervised self-driving. Now it's actually just an internal fleet in the geofence area offering ride-hailing services for a fee, just like Waymo is doing.

And it doesn't point to Tesla getting any closer of its previously stated goals and promises to Tesla owners about the full self-driving package. So that's been our focus there. But in the actual release of the fleet, there's other concerns too that, you know, we talked about a little bit about the John Krasik, sometimes I have issues pronouncing his name, but the co-founder of Waymo.

basically suggesting that he believes that Tesla is going to fake the Robotaxi fleet in Austin. And this is an increasing constraint that's going right now. And now we even get a Tesla cheerleader, longtime ultra bull of Tesla, Adam Jonas, who's kind of...

He's putting weight to that theory right now because he met with Tesla with some of his clients last week or this week, earlier this week. And he just came out today with a new note in which he said, Austin's is a go, but fleet size will be low, think 10 to 20 cars. Elon already said that in the last earnings, so it's not news.

Public roads, not news either. Invite only, that's news. Okay, not too surprising. So the program to get access to it is going to be invite only. So I assume Tesla is going to reach out to its local consumers in Austin to get access. But then the last thing is the most important one. Plenty of tele-ops to ensure safety level. In quotes, we can't screw up.

So teleops refers to teleoperation. We already reported last year that Tesla started hiring a team of teleoperation for its robot taxi launch in Austin. So they plan to use people that are remotely having some kind of level of operational control over these vehicles to operate them, to get them moving when they're stuck, something like that.

It's not entirely unique to Tesla. Waymo has disclosed that they use TIDOperation to some degrees at times. They've been kind of vague about what kind of level of TIDOperation they use. It's reportedly, from what we hear, it's more about if the vehicle gets stuck somewhere, then they get a message at their remote TIDOperation center, and then they can talk to the vehicle to help it getting unstuck, things like that.

Now, we don't know what Tesla is planning here. We know that they plan to have teleoperation, but the fact that Jonas says plenty of teleops to ensure safety levels, we can't screw up. It points more to the more bearish theory about the robot taxi fleet where the teleoperation are going to be pretty significant, where basically those teleops

Just like right now, FSD is supervised by someone in the driver's seat who is responsible for the vehicle. I think this is basically going to be the same thing. It's just instead of being on the driver's seat, they're going to be remotely supervising the vehicle. The question is more, is it going to be a...

a 10 vehicle to one supervisor remote control ratio or is it going to be a 5 to 1 or 2 to 1 or even a 1 to 1 scenario with a 10 to 20 fleet car I think it's

wouldn't be too surprising if it's a one-to-one, really. What do you think, Seth? Yeah, and to be fair, Waymo does have remote supervisors of cars. Not supervisors. I think, you know, if there's a problem, like the Waymo thing just hits an infinite loop or, you know, runs into some issues, a remote person can kind of take over the operation of the car. Obviously, Tesla in the past has done

some kind of shady things with the robots. You know, if they have a robot demo, there's usually somebody behind the thing, you know, kind of doing the hand motions and stuff. But so I agree. I think they're probably going to have a pretty, I mean, I would say at launch, there's probably going to be a one-to-one ratio. I wouldn't be surprised. And then maybe they'll like drop that down as they get a little bit more confidence in the whole operation. Yeah.

And honestly, that is probably the responsible thing to do. I mean, yeah, if it's based on the current FSD system, I would hope that it's one-to-one. I would even hope there'd be a safety driver in there because, look, the current FSD system based on crowdsourced data, which is the best data available because Tesla always refuses to share data, is...

500 miles between critical disengagement. I'm sure Tesla can get that a lot better

With this fleet, because it's trained, there's been no progress basically with FSD over the last four months. I would assume that it's because Tesla is focusing everything on the Austin launch and optimizing the system for Austin and also closing the gap on some features that are not available on the consumer level. But for the drop-offs and the pickup and all that, it needs to work too.

So, yeah, it probably can get closer. Maybe you can double it, maybe triple it even, which, you know, sounds incredible. But if you triple it, you're still only at 1,500 miles between critical disengagement. And that's like a crash per taxi per two weeks or something. So it doesn't work. It makes no sense unless you have...

a safety driver or a very high level of teleoperation, which is what Jonas is suggesting here, or like a one-on-one supervisor per taxi.

A few weeks ago, you remember Zach from JerryRigEverything, the YouTuber? He's a bit like me. He likes to fight the cult on Twitter. He likes to poke the bear on the X platform. Engagement. He's very much hated by the cult on Twitter, very much like me. We're brothers in arms in that fashion. He

He went as far as when one of these cultish people to bet, I think, bet $10,000 that Tesla will not launch a robot taxi service, a truly unsupervised robot taxi service in Austin in June. I think he needs to do it by the end of June. And I recommended him not to take that bet.

Because I think the only thing that the main criteria for the bet is that there's no driver in the car, no safety driver in the car. So because of the teleoperation stuff, because of the geofencing, because of all the limitation, I thought Tesla should probably be able to do it in June. So I thought it would be a bad bet for him to lose that. However, what we learned too from another article from the information this week is that

Tesla has yet to test the system without a safety driver in Austin, just weeks ahead of launch. Now, it might be that Tesla is not planning to do that. They're planning to just always have a safety driver until they actually launch a service, which would be weird. You should test without it, even though you can still have someone in the car. It doesn't make much sense to me. And for comparison, Waymo...

They launched in Austin earlier this year, and their testing included six months of testing with a safety driver in the car, and then six months of testing without a safety driver in the car.

So now with that said, I think that Waymo is way more, that was an unintended play on word, but is way more conservative with their safety approach than Tesla, I would say. So maybe they still do it, but I'm starting to be a little bit more confident for Zach from Jerry Rigginger's bet.

All right, the other thing on the RoboTaxi fleet is NHTSA is getting a little bit involved, a little bit late to the game, but still. NHTSA, I mean, I can understand why they would be late to the game because I hear that they have been quite gutted by Elon's Doge, you know, the agency that's supposed to oversee...

auto safety and Tesla is part of that is getting gutted by an agency run by the CEO of Tesla. Do with that what you will. Seems like a coincidence. Complete coincidence. And NHTSA is actively investigating Tesla, specifically Tesla's full self-driving program. So

This week, or about actually last week, but it came public this week, Tanya Topka, the director of NHTSA's Office of Defect Investigation, wrote an email to Tesla, a letter to Tesla, basically asking for a lot of information about what they plan to do with the robot taxi fleet in Austin. And it's related to the fact that they are currently investigating full self-driving for a safety defect related to

road conditions, visibility and all that. They are afraid that they find a bunch of crash related to FSD and they are investigating the whole thing as being potentially dangerous. So they're like, hey, you say that now you're going to use that. So, I mean, obviously Elon has talked about this for a while.

So I think what's happening here, why NHTSA is getting involved right now is that I think it has to do because they do quote in the letter, Elon saying at the earnings just a few weeks ago, that it's going to be the Model Y that they're going to use. And it's basically going to be full self-driving, but just in Austin without supervision.

So when they heard that, I think they assumed that before that it was going to be like a new system. I know a lot of people wrongly assumed that this was going to use the cyber cab, the fifth generation autopilot hardware for self driving hardware, all that thing. But then

i thought it was already clear but elon like clarified it uh that's running called no it's going to be mobile wise using fsd with a version of fsd that's you know optimized for austin so i think that put the red flag for nitsa is like wait you're going to use that thing that we're currently investigating for safety defect unsupervised in austin texas next month

And they sent us that, I put the full like questioning, but they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 questions with a lot of sub question within that. And basically a lot of it is like, what exactly are you going to use? So they want to confirm that you're indeed going to use FSD, even though, like I said, optimized. And then they want to know, like, how do you know that this is safer than humans?

So they want data. Again, Tesla has always refused to share any data. Another cute little red flag.

They want to know, okay, the data collection that they're going to use, if they still consider this a level two system. So that's the thing here. Like one of the main thing that Tesla has been able to avoid sharing any data is like they always claim, oh, FSD, even though it's called full self-driving, is just a level two driver assist system. So they kind of want Tesla to like actually put their money where their mouth is and like, hey,

Is this actual self-driving now? You keep saying unsupervised, you keep saying robot taxi and everything. They ask, based on SCA automation system, is this a level four system, which is what Tesla is describing to everyone, but always refuse to claim it for regulatory reasons more than anything.

So they want all of that and they want it by June 19. So I don't think that they can prevent Tesla from launching this. Like this is Texas, like Texas rules are pretty relaxed when it comes to self-driving stuff.

But they say that they want an answer, but June 19, if they don't get an answer, the test is facing up to $28,000 in penalty per violation per day. So, you know, a little bit of a show of force from Nitsa, but nothing too crazy here. And like I said, I don't think they can stop it. They just, we might actually get some more information for Tesla than we are used to because this is, like I said, very scarce, the release of information about FSD.

We just, like Elon said, you're just supposed to trust them. You're just supposed to look at videos on X of paid Tesla influencers, and that should give you enough confidence into Tesla for self-driving. All right, two more Tesla news articles before we move on. This was a big...

report this week that got earlier this week, they got a lot of people talking. So many things happened in a week. Like I already forgot about this article that came out like five days ago. And it was a big article. It was, uh, that was based on the wall street journal report, I think. Uh, no, that was, uh, no, that was the external letter. Okay. Yeah. That was the letter. So a group of Tesla employees wrote, um, open letter to, uh, to Tesla, uh,

to basically ask for Elon to be removed. So it showed that within Tesla, there is a desire to remove Elon. And

Let me quote the letter here. The damage done to Elon's personal brand is now irreversible. And as the public face of Tesla, that damage has become our burden. We are now at the crossroad. Continue with Elon as CEO and face further decline as customers abandon the brand or move forward without him and allow our product and mission to succeed or fail on their own. Pretty good point.

Pretty much what we've been saying for a while. If you keep Elon as CEO, you can basically kiss goodbye to Tesla's brand. It's going to continue to erode because Elon is too controversial at this point. Most people don't like him. Toxic. Say that again? He's toxic to the brand. Exactly. It's toxic. I talked to a friend of mine who was also big on Tesla this week, and he said,

He said like, oh, this is... He's worried about it. He doesn't like what Elon is doing, but he thinks maybe within six months, everything goes back to normal. But if Elon stays, I don't see that happening because you don't change your mind on him like that a little bit. And I use...

I use Bud Light as an example. You remember the Bud Light last year, two years ago, when they put the transgender person on the can and all hell broke loose for a few months. That hurt Bud Light a ton.

20, 30% drop in sales. And it lasted about six months. But it lasted about six months because Bud Light got scared shitless. Like right away, they turned back on their marketing plan that they went full redneck. And you're like, yeah, yeah, screw us for being open-minded. Like they turned around. To be fair, it's probably the mood. Like you know your market. Like Bud Light is not the most woke people that are drinking the Bud Light's.

But Tesla is not doing that. That's the thing. Tesla had... Okay, the bad move happened and now it keeps happening and there's nothing that shows that it's going to stop happening. So I don't think... I think Tesla is an ongoing issue. And what's interesting here is that... All right, yeah, so...

The letter was kind of prompt following Elon saying that he's going to come back to work more at Tesla and less at Doge in the last few weeks. And the employees that signed the letter are kind of have a good point here that they say that this is tone deaf basically what Elon did. I'm quoting the letter again. Elon's recent claim that he's refocusing on Tesla is not only tone deaf, it's insulting. It implies that the hardship that the past six months stemmed from a lack of his attention, not from his action.

It shifts the blame onto the very people who have held the company together. Let's be clear. We're not the problem. Our product, another problem, our engineering service and delivery teams are not the problem. The problem is demand. The problem is Elon. I love that. Clear, consistent, like right to the problem. Then the confirmed that demand problem that we've been pointing out at Electric for months, that like, oh, it'll be everyone because...

One of the biggest problems with Tesla is like the shoulder base right now of their ends over their highs, over their here's. They don't want to see the real problem. They don't want to accept the demand problem. They keep finding excuses. And obviously the big one for the giant missed in Q1 was the Model Y, the new Model Y. But now this letter confirms from employees confirming that Tesla is sitting on new Model Y inventory already.

So now that those very cars are sitting on sold, growing week after week, production is running better than ever. Quality is high. Processes are strong. Domain is what's broken. This is not a product problem. It's a leadership problem. So they confirmed that the new Model Y are sitting on sold.

And they are basically asking Elon to resign. So one of the main people behind this letter, Mathieu Lebrot, we talked to him this week via email. He confirmed that he was let go.

Tesla after publishing this so that he published this on the website and Tesla linked it back to him and he was let go after working for Tesla for five years. More recently, he was leading the sell and delivery training program. So he was training the sales and delivery track at Tesla for the last three years. And yeah, he was let go. He confirmed it on a post on LinkedIn.

which he blames on saying that. When I wrote this article, I hate when the cult does this. This article was clearly to point out, one, there is at least some interest within Tesla, a movement within Tesla against Elon. They don't want Elon.

confirm of a demand problem within tesla so it's not just or or i mean i thought it was clear from the evidence that we've been sharing for the last few months but now we have directly for the nesta this is the main thing about the problem and yeah unfortunately the guy was let go uh it's not surprising that the guy was let go you talk against your boss you like like if i if i was saying that the main problem at the electric would be a set

ikea i wrote a letter about it i'm pretty sure i would be let go uh so that's not really the the issue i i like people are like yeah of course he's let go yeah but that's not the point of this whole thing yeah i'm sure he was aware that there was a good chance it was going to be let go here but the the the key of the story here is that he thought it was worth to say and to risk his job to let people know tesla is in trouble with elon that's the main point here

He also started an ex-account to publish the letter and the ex-account was suspended. That's Mr. Free Speech here. Free Speech Absolutist. I mean, you can fire him. I'm sure you have cause to fire him if you want to do that, even though I think it's dumb. But suspending his account is free speech. That's not cool. All right. The last test article before we move on is a quick one. It's just about Elon as a...

as a new uh new puppet on the board uh tesla has confirmed that they hired a newborn member it's mr um it's the president of chipotle i forget his name mr mr jack hearthong he's a 20-year veteran of chipotle yes that's the mexican grill at the mexican restaurant that we all love he was um he had a lot of roles at the company

Over the year, most recently, he was president and chief strategy officer. Before that, he was the CFO and administrative officers for years. He has zero experience in the automotive industry. Pretty sure he has zero experience in humanoid robots either, in AI. But he's a veteran officer of a large company, so I guess that's something. But...

Yeah, I don't think I think he's just another puppet there to to let Elon do whatever he wants, because that's the main thing you need to be to be on the Tesla board is just let Elon do his thing and cash the checks because the stock options are coming, Jack.

In terms, you know, one of the big things with the board is like it's not an independent board. Everyone has links to Elon. I mean, Elon's brother is on the board. A bunch of people that have financial dealings with Elon outside of Tesla is on the board. Elon's friend like Murdoch is on the board. Larry Ellison was on the board, a friend of Elon. So there's no independent board member. That was the main problem. That's why his CEO competition package was rescinded.

So now Tesla was looking for an independent board member. That's the main thing. So in an SEC filing, Tesla claimed that Arthong is an independent board member. His only link to Tesla, according to the filing, is a son-in-law that's been working at Tesla since 2016 as a service technician. He's making $124,000 a year.

And he's worked at Tesla for the last almost a decade. So they said it's the only link at Tesla. I have an issue with that because I don't think it's the only link to Tesla or Elon Musk. First of all, in the article, I reported that Kimball Musk was a board member of Chipotle from 2016-2019. So he undoubtedly knows Artang, who was CFO of the company at that time. Board members have relationship with CFOs, as far as I know.

So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a link there. Like Kimball went to see his brother and was like, I got a guy for you. He's not going to be any issue on the board, if you know what I mean. But then since I wrote the article, I also had a source that told me that, and that I need to verify, but I'll let it at the podcast. Don't quote me on that. It's just...

Apparently, I don't know why Tesla only disclosed that his son-in-law is working at Tesla for a decade because apparently his own son is also working at Tesla for a long time. And his own son has a lot of influence on him apparently. So something to look into. All right, moving on from Tesla news. We have a few things to talk about. Damn, my computer is slow. All right, the BZ4X becomes the BZ4X.

Such a better name, like night and day. Yeah, it's incredible. And it's going to come with more range. It's going to come with NACS port connectors. So that's good. And other upgrades. I'm going to admit that I don't look too much into it. So it's the 2026 version here. What do we get? So we get a 25% improvement in range and you needed that because the BZ4X was not great on that front. So now it's going to start at 314 miles of range. So that's more than decent.

NACS connector, like I said, so access to the supercharger network in North America. 10% to 80% fast charging under ideal condition, but they don't say the time, so that's not super useful. A lot more power thanks to the new SIC semiconductor, so that's the 338 horsepower. Front-wheel drive is going to be 221 horsepower.

Pre-conditioning for the battery. Oh, that was not in thermal management system. They didn't have that on BZ4X. I'm just surprised sometimes. Two-batch pack option, 57.7 and 74.7 kilowatt hour. So the 74.7 is the one that gives you 314 miles of range. With the smaller ones, you could expect 236. It's still good, especially for the price because, I mean, if that thing starts around the same price as the BZ4X, it's pretty cheap.

You get access to the Toyota SafetySense 3.0 system. Reagents are breaking. I mean, you cannot mention that as a feature. It's like a standard these days. Do we have the pricing on this thing? Oh, some update. Nope. Not pricing yet because it's going to come in the second half of this year. So normally we get pricing a few months ahead of time. I think the idea is to keep it around the same price though, right? I would assume, yes.

And you probably want to lease it. The lease deal on this is actually a pretty good deal. All right, this I thought was interesting. We like to BYD, new vehicle, several new vehicles a week, basically. But this one I thought was pretty interesting. It's not the China-only vehicle, but I wanted to mention it because a lot of people...

you look at the EVs available in North America and even Europe, though. I think Europe are a little bit more advanced than us on that front. And you don't really have... You had the Bolt. I think the Bolt was a very interesting vehicle in terms of format and price range, especially towards the end of its life, even though it's going to have a second life soon enough. But there's not really like an on-the-civic of the EV world. You know, a very simple...

cheap four-door sedan that you can get a lot done, a lot for like a new family, smaller families, or just a good run-of-the-mill cheap car that does what it needs to do. This is basically it. In China, they have plenty of them, but the new BYD E7 is that. It's a little, small, mid-sized sedan that just has everything you need and not more and at the right price.

So you look at the design, it's not, you know, I know a lot of people love the Undesivik design. So this one is not crazy, but I think it's not that bad either. Like it's pretty much on par what I would expect. A bit more pictures. Yeah, it's kind of like a generic Model 3 almost. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit more rounder, a little bit more like, you know, generic lines than the Model 3. But yeah. Yeah.

But you get a 15.6 inch infotainment system, a driver's display, you get USB ports, plug-in socket. Okay. Yeah, you see a little better look here a little bit and it's... Yeah, it's like it's a decent looking car. It's nothing too crazy. Size-wise, it's basically the same size as the Model 3.

But look at this. So the size of the battery pack, you have a 48 kilowatt hour, a 57.6 kilowatt hour for a CLTC. Again, CLTC, not the most accurate, but pretty good. 280 miles, 450 kilometers for the smaller pack, 323 miles, 520 kilometers for the bigger pack. And with these

Pack sizes, I would expect probably close to 215 for the smaller pack and 260 to 280 for the bigger one. It's very doable to get close to those range. But then you look at the price.

And the price, you know, we should have the official pricing tomorrow. They're going to launch the vehicle officially tomorrow. But it's expected to be between 70,000 and 100,000 yen, which is between 10,000 and $14,000. So that's nothing. Like that's, you know, that's a Civic 20 years ago. Without 20 years of inflation, basically. And it's all electric. It costs you nothing to run after that.

So these cars already exist. They just exist in China, unfortunately. Well, not unfortunately. Good for them, just not for us. Right. And it also might be why Tesla might be having some problems selling the Model 3 in China. Yeah, because then you look at the Model 3, it would cost more than two times that, almost three times that. And do you get two times, three times as much? No, not really.

All right, GM had made some headlines this week. They announced kind of a battery breakthrough and you know at Electric we are always a bit skeptical about battery breakthroughs. I mean, we've been doing this for 10 years plus now, Seth and I, and we've seen a lot of battery breakthrough that never come to anything. But this one looks interesting. It's kind of like the solid state battery. It's always a little bit further out though.

I need to look into it because I saw all the solid-state stocks today were way up. So it feels like the level of confidence on that is going up quite a bit in the last few days. But we're not talking about solid-state here. We're talking about manganese-rich batteries, so LMR batteries.

And LMR have been touted for a while, manganese-rich batteries have been touted as potential replacement of LFP batteries. So they have a lot of the similar advantages as the LFP batteries. They're still used lithium, it's just that they're cathode as more manganese-rich chemistry.

And they are cheaper than the lithium-ion batteries, the nickel-rich batteries, but they offer a higher energy density than LFP. So they could be like at the GM specifically is talking about 33% higher increase for the prismatic battery format. So the same battery format prismatic has 33% higher energy density than the LFP with the same format.

So that's quite a bit. It's like 33% higher than the best LFP cells today. You're getting pretty close to nickel-rich lithium cells now. And yeah, so they said that they basically... So the problem was with them, a short battery life and voltage decay. Those are pretty much the same thing. And because of that,

They weren't viable at the commercial level, but they claim that the battery break too, basically, is they claim to have fixed that. And now that they plan to bring those vehicles to market, bring future electric vehicles to market, especially they're talking about the trucks and the large SUVs. So one of my understanding here is like for the lower hand GM trucks and SUVs,

Instead of having LFP batteries in the future, they might have LMR batteries offering a higher range for a lower price. So getting closer to those lithium-ion. Kirk Kelty, GM's VP of Battery Propulsion and Sustainability, a Tesla and Panasonic veteran. We are pioneering manganese-rich battery technology to unlock premium range and performance at an affordable cost, especially in electric trucks.

So basically what I just said. So it's going to enable 400 plus miles vehicle at a lower cost. So what's the timeline on this? I think they said before the end of the decade. Yeah, it's going to be in production and commercial production with GM and by the way, this is GM and LG. So they're together on this 2028. So this is getting exciting because the EV market has been doing great, you know.

for the last few years we're achieving decent volumes especially outside of the us to be fair the us is a little bit behind the rest of the world but doing great a lot of improvements a lot of incremental improvement um but there hasn't been a big like huge step forward like a breakthrough moment

And there's two of them that have been touted for a while, and that's solid-states battery. And then at the lower end, the solid-state is more the higher end of the replacing or displacing some of the market for the nickel-rich batteries. And at the lower end, it was the sodium batteries and now the LMR batteries.

the solid state, a lot of people see it happening by the end of the decade towards the end of this decade before 2030. And now it looks like at the lower end, we might have the LMR. And then in China, we talked about a few weeks ago with Cato and the sodium rich batteries. So maybe again,

a little bit of a grain of salt with the whole thing because a lot of these a lot of these announcements don't pan out but this one we thought was significant because uh they actually talk about commercial production within the next three years so that's somewhat interesting all right two more news articles before we jump into the comment section so if you guys have questions for us now would be the time because we might get to them in probably less than 10 minutes or so so if you have a specific question or subject you want us to discuss you can put questions and

than your question after that. So it's gonna be easier for us to find it. Also, if you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, we would appreciate if you can give us a like, a thumbs up on the stream right now. It's free to do. It takes a second and it helps the show more than you think. We appreciate when you do it. So we just have a few likes on the stream right now. If you can get that up a little bit, we'd appreciate it. All right. The Ram electric pickup truck. So Ram is the only brand right now that doesn't have an electric pickup truck. Only major American brand, I should say.

Because American companies, American auto companies, they kind of need pickup trucks to survive. And we want them to be electric, obviously. And Ram has been talking about, oh, they're supposed to have one last year. Then it was pushed to the first half of 2025. And then late last year, we reported that it was actually pushed to 2026. And now this week, we hear that their Ram electric truck is pushed to, I think, next year even, or 2027.

Where was it in the article? Yes, summer of 2027 now. So people were already concerned about this. And I think there's more reason to be concerned now because we're still another two years away from them having an electric pickup truck. They move so slow, it's crazy. Yeah, I know somebody who's actually waiting on this thing and they're just like, it's never coming. Yeah. I mean, go with the Silverado stuff. They look very interesting. Yeah, I mean, that would be my go-to pickup truck right now.

All right, a quick note on Slate before we move to the comments. So Slate is the Jeff Bezos backed small pickup truck/SUV, customizable, very cheap, very little on features, supposed to start around $20,000 after tax credit, which they might not get depending on what happened, we'll see.

We talked about them positively because we do like the idea. There's a lot to like about it. There's a lot of question marks, obviously. We don't know how much demand there is for a vehicle at that price range with very little features. Turns out there's decent demand. So Scooter reported this week that the company announced they secured over 100,000 reservations for this vehicle.

However, to be fair, just like the Cybertruck situation, they are asking, I think it's $100, $50. $50 deposit to get a reservation, refundable, I assume, too. So, yeah, it's not...

I mean, the Cybertruck also ended up costing twice as much and being half as good as what was promised, so that didn't help. But we saw that if you are taking reservation for a vehicle, we're talking about even if it's a cheaper vehicle here at $20,000, if you're asking less than $100 or even $100, it's not the best show of interest for people.

And it's the conversion rate to an actual order after that is quite low, even if they deliver on the feature. So I'm still, I'm not poo-pooing the project. I think there's a lot to like about this. I think there is an opportunity there. I just don't know if like, if I was Slate, I wouldn't plan to make a hundred thousand of these a year because you already have a hundred thousand orders. Like it's a...

Although if they do a good job, I think they could hit that and then some probably. Yeah, if they over-deliver on what was promised, then yes. But this thing doesn't have a radio. There's a lot of features that people would expect for $20,000. We talked about BYD that is fully equipped at $10,000. So there is some concerns. But yeah, I mean, I'm still hyped about the idea. I like the design too. I think they're slick for what they are.

I agree. All right, let's look into our comment section. All right. From the top, let's talk about Rivian. Rivian sales were down. Was that right? Was Rivian sales down? I mean, they were down for the whole year. Why we don't talk about the Rivian sales being down, though I can answer that, is because we knew it was coming because the company told us it was coming, the company. Yeah.

They're pretty transparent about it. It's like they expect sales to be slightly down in 2025 and the production to be slightly down as they move to focus on the R2. And a lot of people are waiting for the R2. This is a situation that even right now is like Tesla was when they add the Model S and X and they were moving into Model 3, Model Y.

know not there are a lot of people that are very hype on the brand and love the vehicle but you know 80 000 the dollar vehicle is not in most people's price range so they are waiting for the r2 basically and the r2 and they're going to be in production hell for a little while yeah that's fair all right fred if anybody from tesla offers you a fortune cookie in china don't eat it

Seems like good advice. How quickly will Tesla deploy the lower cost models? Do you think they will help sales stay even from last year or will they still fall? Sales will still fall this year. I'm pretty confident about that. They will help a bit, but for like

For every two new extra vehicle they had from the lower price one, the stripped-down Model Y and Model 3, they will remove a cell from the Model Y and Model 3. So it's not like they're not going to add to the volume that much. You lower the average sell price, you're going to increase the demand. There's no doubt about it. But, you know, I mean, especially we talked about the brand damage around Tesla already this year.

I think it's going to last for a while. It's going to have an impact on sales. And then you also have the broader auto market to look at. It looks like the US is about to enter into a pretty decent recession right now. And that's not good for large purchases like home purchase, like car purchases and everything. So the bad situation is compounding for Tesla.

All right, moving on. Question, who are the biggest players in building LFP batteries in the USA that will avoid tariff issues and qualify for existing tax credits? I don't know LFP offhand. I know cattle wants to build in the US, but... But it's not happening just yet. They do have some issues with that. I mean, Ford wants to do one with their partner. Is it SK? Yeah.

Yeah, that was cattle too, right? So the issue right now, like there's a bunch of plans to do it, but a lot of it is with

uh cattle technology and the US is kind of being a little bit skittish on that front even Tesla as Tesla tried to get around it by buying old equipment from cattle to try to make it FP cells in the US and even that plan kind of is stalling right now so I think there's like a weird situation right now in the US when it comes to making like

It's kind of seen as Chinese battery cell because it's LFP and it's like kind of their expertise, even though it's LFP is like an American slash Canadian technology. It's like good enough. And actually in Quebec too was big in the development of cell. Hydro-Québec had a big role in the development of LFP cells. So it's like a Canadian slash US technology, but that the Chinese took and mastered and now they produce them in volume.

yeah i'm surprised tesla hasn't uh jumped onto that train well like i said they tried they bought some equipment from catl but uh and and the last quarter they did say that they plan to use it that it's still it's still plans to use it but it's going to be super low volume so i don't think there's like a big if you're looking right now the question is like is there a big like lfp play in the us i don't there's nothing concrete i would say at this point

All right. Luke says, Spike, many believe the Tesla 2 Series to be the most important car maybe in a decade. I guess that depends on if people are buying Teslas at that point. Regulation on self-driving cars will change if there are a lot of crashes. That sounds right.

uh i agree and i mainly just want more evs on the road i do think that a lower cost tesla will take sales from current trims though yeah lower cost tesla are that are coming this year or stripped down model s uh model y and model three the model two that you the previous commenter talked about or uh some people call it the mole e or q q whatever

That one has been canceled. It's not coming. Stop wishing it. It's been canceled since February of last year. Yeah. All right. So then we're getting into a conversation. Why do you want more EVs on the road? Elon is Tesla. Energy dependence and less gas being burned next to people mostly. And then Elon is to Tesla as Steve Jobs is to Apple. Really? Steve Jobs has been dead for a decade. Yeah.

Spike, you need to do more research. EVs are no Pangea to energy independence. All right. We're going to just kind of fast forward through all this. Question. Slate EV battery sizes are similar to the Model 3 standard and long range, but the slate ranges are much shorter. So is slate sandbagging or really that inefficient? I mean, it's a pickup truck. Yeah. Also, I didn't even know they released the battery sizes in those. To be honest, I was not familiar with that.

I know they talk about the range, but I didn't see the battery size. All right. Regarding Elon being bad for Tesla's brand, Ronald Garrison says, no, this isn't just going to blow over. Lots of wishful thinking looking at you are as best in Tesla. Not going to just blow over gone too far. I think that's kind of what we were saying. Yeah.

And you need a change, of course, at one point to be able to get past it. And just we haven't seen even an inkling of the change, of course. I know some people talked about like the Wall Street Journal article about the board talking about the replacement and everything. But I think, like I said at the time, I think that Drew was just the board floating the idea to gain a little bit of leverage over Elon so that he come back to Tesla, which is kind of the opposite of what the solution to the situation is.

All right, we're going to cut through some Luke stuff. And then Dean McManus, LFMP has been out for a while, but cattle second gen sodium and LMR are getting pressed lately. That's true. They have some sodium batteries that are kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The other big one's been last week on that. They're even safer than LFMP.

I think that LMR may be hyped up a bit because it's not primarily Chinese manufacturing based and therefore better image in the shadow of increased Chinese tariffs. Okay. Cedric Weinstein says, does electric still have confidence in Aptera? I don't know that we've recently had confidence in Aptera. So...

I mean, it's kind of wishful thinking. I just got my diecast. I thought it was here, but I left it in the other room. Oh, you got an Aptera diecast? Yeah, it's pretty cool, actually. Yeah, it's probably going to be the only Aptera I'm going to own, but to answer Cedric's question, because I'm not super confident, but I mean, I wish them the best because like we said before, it's a cool idea. The price is a little bit expensive for what it is,

But I just, I love the idea of pushing to the max efficiency. And then there's a lot you can do from there. Like maybe they learn, like maybe the next generation vehicle after that is a lot more useful, but still has like 90% of the efficiency of that, but like 20% more usefulness. And then you start getting into a range that's really cool. All right. Andrew McConnell, this is actually worded

Okay, not great. Fred, I've been watching your podcast for over five years now. I know you have lots of knowledge and opinion about Tesla and Elon. Much of it I share, but please try to be less negative. Man, I would love to. I would love to be less negative about Tesla, but then I would need something positive to report on. People kind of confuse my reporting on Tesla. Oh, you must hate Tesla. No, I just see what's happening right now, and I...

I think that if nothing changes with Tesla,

Tesla is going to become like a Mazda, basically. It's just going to become like a somewhat smaller automaker, probably making less than a million vehicles a year. Because, you know, yes, Tesla made 1.8 million in 2023, but then they made a little bit less in 2024. And now they're going to be making a little bit less in 2025, probably a lot less actually in 2025. And then it's going to keep going down because of all the issues that we were discussing. And yeah, maybe they figure out full self-driving at some point.

But not on the timeline that Elon described, which should be no surprise because it hasn't happened in the last eight timelines that he suggested. And Tesla has a giant liability over all of Elon's lies around self-driving. These are real massive problems that need to be solved if you want Tesla to succeed. Start solving these problems, starting with Elon Musk.

And, yeah, I mean, then there's going to be some positive things to talk about with Tesla. But for the meantime, right now, Tesla is led by a guy that just openly, like, change is supposedly truth-seeking AI to talk about the white genocide every time someone asks him a question. Like, that's a fact that happened this week. And people already, like, are moved on past it, but...

Did you see that Seth? I honestly, I can't keep up. You can't keep up? Like Grok was, every time you ask a question to Grok, they will, you will answer the question and it could completely are unrelated to the situation in South Africa right now. And then they would, they would tell you, by the way, did you know that there's a white genocide right now in South Africa? And

And people are like, what the hell? Why is Grok saying that to unrelated? And you know, Elon has been hammering for the last few weeks about the problem in South Africa. And he calls it the white genocide and all that, even though there's a lot of evidence that's not true. And then today...

Today, XAI had to come out and say, hey, we don't know what happened with that. Someone, an unauthorized person changed the code in Grok to have him say that and everything. And then you're supposed to believe that, that an unauthorized person changed that at XAI when the actual owner of XAI is saying the exact same thing that Grok is randomly saying to people. It's like...

People need to realize that Elon is in like deep, he's in a big kale right now, whatever is going on. Like, I don't know if it's the drugs or if it's just the social media addiction that have him spin out of control and do stupid things like that. But that guy is CEO of Tesla right now and it is problematic. So that's my main issue.

Yeah. All right. Let's move on to thoughts on Polestar and Lucid. How long will the Saudis hang in there with Lucid? I don't know. Lucid, with the gravity, has got a pretty good vehicle. If they can get the manufacturing down in price and sell enough of them, I think there's a path to success.

profitability and if I think the Saudis see that there's a path to profitability, they'll continue to fund it. Yeah, I mean, the gravity has been extremely well received since the launch, like extremely well received. So like you said, if they can ramp up production and do it profitably,

I don't even know if they need more money because I know they have a pretty decent runway right now. They just raised some more money. So I think they're good for a while. So the gravity needs to work and then the next gen vehicle needs to work. But yeah, Polestar, I'm not as familiar with the money, but I mean, they're backed by Geely. So I think it's dependent on Geely, just how long they want to keep that going. They have some great cars.

I love the Polestar vehicles, especially the Polestar 2. It drives amazingly well. I really like how it drives. So it's just that, yeah, they are having issues selling them profitably too. So it's a similar situation, but they need to have continuous backing from Geely, I guess. All right, Spikes43 says, I think the vehicle to load it after Tesla made for the low trim Cybertruck was cool. I am hoping it will come to other vehicles. The article covering it was maybe more negative than needed to be fair.

I mean, I wasn't being negative on the product itself. The product is fine. I was more being negative of like the reason why they needed that product was because they removed everything that was cool about the Cybertruck of the rear wheel drive version and still charged $10,000 more than it was supposed to be. And then they released this $85 attachment to kind of give you like a fraction of what

one of those features that was removed that I just mentioned, the power outlets in the back. So that's more what I was mad about. The actual product is fine. And yeah, it would be useful for other... Probably be more useful on other Tesla vehicles than the Cybertruck because I don't think anyone is buying that rear-wheel drive Cybertruck anyway. So yeah, that's fair. And I would be curious to see if it actually would work on other vehicles than the Cybertruck.

Because we've been speculating about for a while that they have the same inverter as the Powerwall 3 that is bi-directional. So yeah. Has anyone tried that yet? Has anyone bought that and just tried to plug it into like a Model Y and see if you can actually draw power from it? I haven't seen one on YouTube or anything. Yeah. I mean, I should try it. I mean, I would order one. But then if it doesn't work on my 2018 Model 3, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work on like a 2025 Model Y or something.

All right. Last question. John Marsh Banks, Aurora Innovations has started using driverless semis on a Texas quarter. What's their next steps? Didn't Aurora just lose their CEO? I don't think Sterling Anderson was the CEO. He was a co-founder. He was the first or second, one of the early autopilot leader at Tesla, head of autopilot, predecessor to the full self-driving, started Aurora.

with Chris Henson and a few others. I don't know if he was CEO, but yeah, you're right. They now have a little corridor between us. Houston? Houston? Houston?

Houston Houston Houston we have a problem yeah that's Houston and uh in another city in Texas but yeah the next step is uh now they want to run it like non-stop like they uh they uh want to run it overnight too because now it doesn't drive at night uh so they are moving to to have it work at night and then increase the fleet so

Yeah, I mean, driverless trucks are coming and they need to be safe because you already have this problem with Tesla FSD crashing into people. Can you imagine if it's a semi-truck crashing into you? It's not a fun situation.

All right. Well, that's it for this week's episode of Electric Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. If you did enjoy it, you can put a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on your app. If you're listening on your podcast app, we do appreciate when you leave us five-star reviews, only if you think we deserve it, of course. That helps the show being pushed to more people and to learn about electric vehicle through electric. So thank you. We're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one. Bye-bye.