EV world in 2024, Tesla self-driving, GMC Sierra EV Denali, and more
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We are live for our new and last episode of the year 2023 of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you're ready because we don't have that much news to discuss today. Obviously, it's...

holiday period of time. It's very slow news-wise. There's not that much companies are not sending out anything. There's just not that much happening in the EV world the last week of the year.

But we still have a few news items I want to touch real quick that I think could be interesting to our listeners. And then what we're going to do is just we're going to share our thoughts about the year 2024, what's going to be the big trends in the EV market, things to look out for in 2024, and how we see the EV world go forward. Maybe we can recap a little bit of what we thought was best in 2023.

And you guys can chime in for that. So if you're listening right now, we are live on all the apps. Most of them, you can chime into the comments section and we're going to see them live. So if there's something in particular that you want us to discuss for the last show of the year, you can put there in the comments section right now. And when they get to them in just a few minutes. I just want to mention that we don't have an official sponsor of this week's episode of The Electric Podcast, but we are...

Promoting our own merch store, you can go to merch.elektrek.co and you can cop some nice merch branded Elektrek, some just standard stuff, like good quality stuff with the Elektrek logo. Or we also have our history of... Oh, it's gone. It's right there. Elektrek cars of note, designed to where you see a bunch of silhouettes of cool looking Elektrek vehicles.

All right. Let's jump right in. There you go. So it's the end of the year. And like almost every year, Elon always says Tesla's full self-driving is coming by the end of the year. Tesla's robo taxi is coming by the end of the year, however you want to put it. Tesla's feature complete self-driving coming by the end of the year. He always moves the goalposts a little bit. But

As of late, he said that Tesla will achieve full self-driving safer than human. Now, he's used that term and says safer than human, which is very debatable, of course. By the end of the year, he sort of attached it more to the V12 FSD beta or apparently not beta because he did also say that the FSD V12 will not be beta, will take FSD out of beta. But also he didn't explain what that is either.

He said it would be coming by the end of the year. In the last few weeks, he kept indicating that it's going to be coming soon. We saw the update move from the small engineering fleet to the internal Tesla employee fleet, but that are not necessarily engineering. So it's just like any kind of Tesla employee that has a car that has FSD. And Tesla at the time has done like FSD deal where you could get FSD for cheaper. So a lot of Tesla employees have FSD.

who are Tesla owners, have FSD. And apparently about 15,000 of them are in that test fleet. So it's a decent number of people. So not all of them have the update, but customers still don't have them.

And this week, Elon was asked on Twitter what is going on with the V12 update. And Elon responded, it is already on a lot of cars, like I just mentioned. But given that it is completely new architecture, we are doing extra testing. It works very well in California, but needs more training for heavy precipitation areas. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not sure I get the excuse because I feel like that's the current also version of FSD that it's in our cars. It works very well in California, outside of California and where there's precipitation, not that much. But yeah, so he basically signaled that it's not coming this year to consumers. I still think it's going to be coming relatively soon if it's in this fleet of internal employees.

is like the last step towards bringing it to customers. Now Elon is not as enthusiastic as he's been for many years when you talk about FSD, so that might be a little bit of a concern. But I think it's obviously coming in the next, I don't know, the next few weeks to next few months max, but most likely, almost certainly in Q1 2024.

But what is so hard is to get excited fully about... For those people who don't know the V12, the big update, why Elon says it's a completely new architecture. Not exactly, right? It's completely new. But the main new thing is what you call end-to-end neural nets, where the privacy, the vehicle controls were coded by programmers. Now it's also being controlled by neural nets like the computer vision side of the FSD beta was.

They brought that to the vehicle controls, vehicle behavior. What the vehicle is doing is based now on the AI, really. So it is exciting. It has the potential to improve a lot faster with that. But what I really would like to see from Tesla and from Elon is clear steps towards actually delivering the promise of full self-driving.

I don't know about you, Seth, but I don't remember the last time where we had a clear roadmap where we were like, all right, we'll go for level four with the regulators. We'll submit the data with the regulators. There was talk about that early on in the program. Elon says, it's going to be hard. We're going to have to convince the regulator of it. We're going to have to give them a lot of data, show them that it's a lot safer than humans. We don't hear that anymore. We only hear like...

It's going to be mind-blowing. It's going to be full self-driving. That's all we hear. But even the term full self-driving now has kind of lost some meaning, for me at least. I don't know about you. Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting because Elon is still touting Tesla as an AI firm. What did he say on a tweet yesterday? AI robotic company.

Yeah. Tesla is not a car company. It's an AI robotics company. And of course we, we tongue in you tongue in cheek replied, well, the auto wipers say otherwise. Uh, so, uh, you know, like, you know, they make pretty good cars. They make a lot of pretty good electric vehicles. I kind of feel like that's where you should kind of put the wood behind the arrows. Like we're making a lot of good electric vehicles, uh,

And we hope to get to AI and we're working on it, but it doesn't seem like anybody's taking his, you know, his timeline seriously. I mean, he's not even putting out timelines, as you said, it's like, you know, we're just going to get to the next step. But the weird thing is like, you know, with one hand he's saying where Tesla is an AI company, but on the other hand, he has to create a separate X.AI probably taking some of his engineers from Tesla's, you know, AI company.

That's a company that he fully owns. He's not 20% ownership of. Very confusing communications from Elon. I don't think I would expect full self-driving, maybe ever, at least not in this hardware. You think that hardware 4, hardware 5, that would be needed to achieve what was originally promised for hardware? I think so. I mean,

i don't know i maybe maybe like a very root of entry kind of fsd on current hardware and then you know something that you could probably like you know like like comma ai kind of stuff and then eventually you know with hardware four or five whatever then that'll get to the robo taxi world

I think that's probably more likely than whatever the latest promise was. Yeah. And there's a concern also that, like you said, because there's a possibility that it's not even deliverable on the current hardware, or I shouldn't say the current hardware, but hardware 3, like the self-driving 3 computer and the sensor suit that is the most popular right now, the entire fleet, that Elon might be like just...

Elon and Tesla in general might be playing some kind of game where they keep us in this limbo where there's no clear timeline. There's no clear goal of level four, level three even. They're not talking about... There are automakers out there right now that are...

Going to regulators and applying for level three and level four systems out there and deliver commercial system, it's not a perfect world. We know what happened with Cruise. That was one of them. Waymo also has had their issues, but they are still going at it, still working. Then you have Mercedes with the level three system.

They managed to get things approved and all that. We don't see where Tesla is going with that. All the chips are in the FSD beta, and you just hope that they actually deliver on that. And where I'm talking about Tesla potentially just not being straightforward with people is like, the second that they do admit, if it's the case, I'm not saying it's the case, but if they have to admit at one point that, okay, it's not going to work on the level 3 hardware like we promised, then

Then this is sort of a monumental shit show at that point. Just a mess of lawsuits and reimbursement, refunds. So many problems that come with that, that maybe Tesla is just delaying it. Because if they delay that long enough...

to then arrive at the same time yeah but we actually did figure out full self-driving on hardware four or five or whatever it is at that point then it's not that bad like at least like they they can they get away with as financially speaking because figure out full self-driving is such a a big value creation tool that even if you screw all your other customers for it you can still like um survive financially but

It would be a mess. Like Tesla would lose a ton of credibility. And I know I already lost a lot around full self-driving already, but I don't know. We'll see what V12 brings us. Like I still have some hope about V12, but you know, I'm not, it's not a game changer for me either. Here's a question or maybe a prediction. Will we see a FSD refund or real FSD? You know, what's going to hit first? Is it going to hit in 2024? Yeah.

Is this a prediction for 2024 that FSD will either be a refund or actually happen or that's too far off? So what do you mean by like if it actually happens to like a robo taxi system, I guess? Yeah, I mean, I guess something along the lines of, you know, not having to have your hand on the wheel. Taking responsibility for FSD. Let's say that is really the game changer. Yeah.

Does that happen in 2024? It might happen in some jurisdiction in 2024. I wouldn't be shocked if this, because they kind of have to at this point. So Tesla might have to just, all right, let's try to get it approved somewhere by the end of the year. I could see that.

But here in Quebec, for example, I don't see it happening. Leland just mentioned it. We need to test it a lot more because of precipitation outside of California. Precipitation, especially snow. Right now, I cannot drive more than an hour, an hour and a half on my car

Before I have to stop somewhere and clean up my camera if I want FSD to work correctly because there's always just slush around all over the place. It's just, it's far from my... Is that FSD or just autopilot? I mean, both, but...

And obviously, like things that fall under the FSD package, like auto lane change, for example, are the ones that are more affected by the side cameras and everything. Because obviously, the front cameras are easy to clean with the wipers and whatnot. But the rest, it's not easy. Yeah, someone is saying about your volume, your mic volume on the YouTube set. All right. I'm yelling. I'm yelling. I'm yelling.

I can hear myself pretty well. I just... I can't hear you, but it's low. It feels low. I'm not sure what's happening. All right. All right. This is a question that we get every time we do the podcast every week. So when is the Model Y refresh coming? The project... Jupiter or Juniper? I keep forgetting what's... Juniper. So like the Highland project for the Model 3, Tesla is simultaneously running Juniper project for Model Y for refresh. Okay.

And there was already a little bit of a refresh in October that sort of brought in some of the update, at least the Malawai that's produced out of Shanghai, of the update of the island. But

This is expected to make a bigger update on the Model Y. And now a new report from Bloomberg sort of gave it like a little bit of a timeline on it, but it's pretty vague. At first, they mentioned that they have sources in Gigafactory Shanghai that says that the new Model Y is going to hit volume production mid-2024, but that's volume production. And then later on in the report, they talk about the New Year holiday,

where there's going to be a partial shutdown for upgrades at the factory to produce the first batch of the new Model Y. Now, they didn't say the New Year holiday, if it's like the calendar New Year or the Lunar New Year, because in China, they have the Chinese New Year in February that is a bigger holiday there than the regular holiday, like the regular New Year. So I don't know if it's this one they're talking about. They're not clear about that, too.

But yeah, they also mentioned that it's going to be a bigger update than the one in October without giving us any details of what's going to be updated. So obviously, it's going to be a bigger update than the ambient light that was added in October.

But we don't know if it's going to be like, are they going to bring a similar front end, like the front fascia update that was done to the island? Because the Model Y is so close in look to the Model 3 or was actually before the island, are they going to go that direction? Are they going to go something different? Are they going to keep the interior, the exterior design, because it's not that old of a design either. It feels a little bit older. The Model Y was launched in 2019, but because it looks so much like the Model 3, it feels a little bit older, to me at least.

But yeah, now we have some sort of idea of a timeline for the refresh model Y in Shanghai.

I know that a lot of people are like, all right, but the Model 3 Highland hasn't even come to North America yet. So yeah, that is obviously a concern that we don't know exactly when that's going to happen. I would assume it's going to be early in 2024. Like Tesla probably wants to deliver as many vehicles as it can by the end of the quarter. So they don't want to shut down production of Model 3 in Fremont. So that would make sense to me. What kind of updates do we think are going to happen on the Model Y?

I mean, there's not super big updates, but as a package, the Highland Model 3 is a nice aesthetic update. You thinking the same thing for the Model Y or anything? Yeah, I'm thinking similar. It would make sense to just bring the exterior design, especially the front fascia in line, the headlights and all that, similar to the new version to keep it...

consistent between the vehicle lineup since they always were. Same thing with the interior. I wouldn't expect anything too big of a difference. Obviously, probably some internal difference to test all ways. I try to optimize to make it more manufacturable. It's cheaper to manufacture, faster to manufacture and all that. So there might be some updates on that front too. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah.

moving on the cyber truck yesterday had its first real world crash there was a crash of the cyber truck and there's a lot of talk around that crash a lot of tesla fans saying that all it shows that the cyber truck is so safe and then the tesla nissayer like it shows that the cyber truck is so dangerous i mean i don't know how they can get that much information out of that crash like it's fairly limited information that we have now we do have we didn't know what happened and like at least what

based on the chp that the california highway patrols report it's not the car's fault so all the autopilot uh the people that trash the pot all the time can can move move on from this one um but uh yeah so apparently this it's a toyota corolla that was driven by a 17 year old that uh he lost control of the car went into the embarkment and then over corrected and went into the

lane on the left that was the oncoming traffic lane and the Cybertruck was right there and got hit pretty hard.

The one was injured, so that's good. None of the Corolla driver and none of the three people that were in the car. There was apparently a minor injury to the driver of the Cybertruck, but he refused to get transported to the hospital, so it cannot be that serious. And there were three people in the Cybertruck, so that's pretty good that no one was seriously hurt in the Cybertruck. We have this video dash cam here of the aftermath of the incident that gives us a quick...

look at the damage. It looks like the driver's side of the Cybertruck got the blunt of it. The Corolla is obviously destroyed, but you would expect that. It's a 7,000-pound vehicle versus a small Corolla. Here you can see the Corolla. I'm very surprised that the driver is fine. It's a

But it's normal. A car is supposed to, especially if it's a front-end collision, it's supposed to crumple like that. It makes sense. The Cybertruck, the front-end looks okay. It's really just the side here. I saw some other photos that shows too, like it's pretty beat up on the side, like the bumper, the fender, the door. Even the door frame looks like it's been curved a little bit. And it was big enough that it had an impact that the front airbag were activated too.

But again, yeah. So I don't quite understand. Was it a head-on collision or the Cybertruck was T-boned? Yeah, it sounds more like it was almost like a little bit of a front-end collision, but not so much. The rest was just like a side swipe. It just swiped the whole side of the Cybertruck. Because you cannot go all in with the damage of the... Like the Corolla looks like a full-on head-on collision. But if it just like...

like a fraction of the front end hit that but they also hit like the embarkment and then they spun around like there's a lot of things that might have happened to that car uh that's a good point so we cannot go all the way from that but anyway the good news for tesla is like i think i didn't see any

foundation series etching on that. So it's probably not a Tesla customer that got hit on this. It's like one of the few first. And also it's in Palo Alto, as I've said. That happened yesterday in Palo Alto, not too far from Tesla's former headquarters. So no foundation series on it, etching. Palo Alto, no.

likely be a Tesla employee. And if it is a Tesla employee, Tesla is probably going to be able to buy that car back from that employee pretty quickly and then use any kind of information it can get from the Cybertruck, like a real-world test crash vehicle, basically. So that's it. Right now, you're going to see a lot on social media, Tesla fans praising the Cybertruck for its safety and vice versa for Tesla haters. But I would wait for more information from that.

All right, this one was a weird one. We got a leak on the PowerShare mobile connector. So PowerShare is this new brand for the bidirectional charging technology that they're deploying first with the Cybertruck, but it's expected to come to other vehicles.

Where you can share power with other vehicles, you can share power with your home, you can share power with everything, really. And Tesla has been seen having some kind of advantage on that front, even though it's been somewhat of a popular feature to have unable on your electric vehicle for a few years. And remember, it became more mainstream with the Ioniq 5 and all that.

So a lot of people now have that capability in their cars, but it's not used that much because on the home side of things, the hardware that you need there, it's quite an investment, both on the hardware side and the installation side. So we don't know a lot of people that have that.

Tesla was believed to have an advantage on that front because they already have their Tesla energy division. They already have power walls. They already have solar inverters. They already have gateways. They're already connected to people's electric system at their home. So it would be easier for them to link that to their cars if their cars have bi-directional charging capability like a Cybertruck. So Tesla in the original release was like, all you need is a Tesla universal wall connector and a gateway, right?

And if you have a car or a Powerwall, you probably already have those anyway. But now they released this user manual this week for something called the PowerShare Mobile Connector. And it looks a lot like the existing mobile connector, but the design is different. The design is updated, so it's definitely a new product.

However, I looked through the whole user manual thing. Doesn't seem to be anything different from the previous mobile connector based on the user manual. Other than it actually counts the electricity coming in and out. So I guess that's pointing towards bidirectional charging. But other than that, there's nothing on it. It doesn't look like the user manual is set up for people using it for power share, using it for bidirectional charging. It looks like

I would be surprised if this just becomes this new mobile connector. And now this one is like they call it the PowerShare because it's PowerShare enabled. It's bi-directional charging enabled, but they're not ready for that just yet. That's what makes the most sense to me. It's a clean looking product. Yeah, it's quite small. I wonder if there's going to be an upgrade path for current users. Yeah.

Yeah, there's no pricing or anything like that involved. The mobile connector with Tesla was like $400, something like that. Yeah, they were messing around with the price of that for a while. I mean, obviously, it came with the vehicle at one point. For a long time, yeah. Yeah, and then it now is a separate add-on. Yeah, I think last year they stopped providing it with new vehicle purchases. All right, moving on.

The GMC Sierra EV Denali was spotted in the wild for the first time. So I guess we're going to talk a little bit about GM at the end when we talk about the EV world and the trends. But GM is starting out 2024, like not on a great foot with its biggest EV going out of production and a lot of its other new EV programs being delayed. But there is some exciting vehicles coming in.

Especially on the pickup truck front. So we have this Denali, Sierra EV Denali here. That's one of the most exciting offering that they plan to offer. And they plan to add to their EV lineup. Can I click on it? I'm trying to click on it. This is a new format of gallery for us. I think there's... You see this little thing on the top? Yeah, it should open. I guess not. We didn't have that before. This is new. Yeah, we made a new default. A new default gallery? Yeah, I don't know if that's... It's bugging out right now. I cannot...

Can I click on it? But anyway, so these images were actually shared by a GM official, a GM executive of this new version. I wish we could click on this one because this one is actually good looking. Let me see if I can do something here. You could probably right click. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah, it's opening up here. Okay. I just need to share the other. There you go. This should work. Yep. The good looking pickup truck. I agree. Especially with that color.

Yeah, on that color. And obviously, it's a shorter bed with the Sierra EV, the Denali. It's more of like kind of a luxury vehicle, luxury SUV that has a bed behind and can pull too. That thing can pull. Do we have any specs on that yet? I believe it's going to be the same as the Silverado with that 200 plus kilowatt hour battery and insane range. And you can tow things forever and all the other stuff.

Yeah, it's going to be like the luxury version of the Silverado, basically. 4G, obviously. This is a Silverado, just Chevy. Last one I want to talk about before we jump into you guys' comment section.

So if you guys have any questions for us or any topic you want us to discuss about trends that you want to see in the EV world in 2024, RRR forward and that too, or things that you think marked the year 2023 for the electric vehicle industry, you can put it in the comment section right now. We might get to it in just a few minutes.

Aptera just closed their year with a good news. So we've been covering Aptera a lot. They have this solar electric car that is super efficient. It's basically an ultra high efficiency vehicle, three wheeler. And it's so efficient that it's worth adding solar panels on top of it because it actually had significant range to the vehicle, significant charging capacity for the vehicle because it's so efficient.

So over the last two years, they've been raising money. They raised, I think, close to like $80 million from crowdfunding, which is very impressive. But bringing a vehicle to production, it's extremely expensive. They've been trying to look for partners, for manufacturing partners, for larger investors to give them the amount of money that they need to produce.

bring it to volume production because that's the thing. You can bring a vehicle to low volume production, but then the vehicle is not profitable and it's harder to ramp up profitably if you start lower. And there seems to be a decent number of people interested in the Abterra. They had tens of thousands, I think, of reservation for it, which is very impressive because it's not exactly a cheap vehicle, but it's novel. It's ultra high efficiency solar car.

So the good news this week is they found a partner in CTNS. So it's a Korean battery manufacturing expert. So they make battery manufacturing equipment. And they signed a deal worth over $15 million with Aptera that includes a direct investment. So the company is going to invest in Aptera. And they're also going to invest in a battery-packed production line at the Aptera factory, I think. It sounded like it's...

going to be at their factory if i'm not mistaken yeah uh so this is uh very good news for the company it's one step closer to production of course production was supposed to start this year honestly not gonna happen uh maybe next year now with that uh 15 million dollar investment and and uh batch pack production line uh i would hope so because i'm really i'm really looking forward for like

This thing, it would be real nice if this thing happens. By the way, I'm invested in a company, so I'm definitely biased. But I invest in the company not to make money. I invest in the company because I want that thing to happen. I think it would be super cool to have a new segment in the EV space that's just about ultra efficiency. I think that'd be real cool.

I agree. I think the Aptera is one of the coolest vehicles out there. It kind of looks like it was spun off from our electric vehicle solar race. I hope they can come to our race this year, which is going to be in Tennessee and Kentucky at the Corvette Museum racetrack. So hopefully we'll get them out there in July. Also, Aptera, like, you know, they've been around for decades.

I don't know, over a decade. And then, you know, at one point they, they kind of gave up throwing the towel and then the EV, you know, Tesla started blowing up and there was a lot more money to invest in. But I still like, I'm a little bit worried that they're not about the right things. Like they're not, they're not about getting the manufacturing started. It seems like they're, they keep on,

asking for more money, more money. And yes, they need more money, but we got to start seeing some results. It doesn't seem like they're making any progress in the manufacturing space yet. So hopefully that happens in 2024. Yeah, I feel what you're saying. It makes sense to see it like that. The response to that, I guess, is that they are trying to set up production in a way that they're going to be able to achieve volume production,

profitably rather than just like all right we could right now with the kind of money we have we could make like all right 500 of them or whatever but we're gonna make them a loss and then it's gonna be harder after that to ramp up to volume production um so i guess um so you can say that like that but also at the same time like okay if you can actually prove that you can make 500 of them and like 500 people bought them and are happy with them like that could also

help generate another round of investment. I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be their approach. All right. So that's it for all the news this week. Like I said, there was not that many news items to discuss. It was a slow news week, but we can get into your questions and then discuss a little bit of the trend that we think we're going to see in 2024 in the EV world. All right. First of all, Cisco says, Happy New Year. Yes. Happy New Year to everybody. Yes. Carl in San Diego. Elon is a liar. Stop repeating his lies. Well,

We kind of have to keep repeating his lies, unfortunately. Yeah, it's not like we're repeating his lies. We are quoting him, what he said, and on top of it, we're putting some context of why probably you should take everything he says with a grain of salt, especially that comment I assume came when we were talking about FSD for self-driving and all that. Obviously, you have to be careful when you talk about FSD and Elon's timelines.

All right. Rinaldo Balmes from LinkedIn says 2025 will be the biggest year as everyone adapts to NACS. I can't wait. Well, what about 2024? Should we just put ourselves in the limelight? Yeah, I mean, 2024 is going to be also the year of the NACS. They're going to start having the adapters for it. So I think that alone is going to be... Once that happens, there's not going to be that many discussions about...

connectors in North America. I think it's going to be settled at that point. The NAC is going to be the official standard and the few automakers that haven't got on board there right now will get on board. They will have to. And throughout the year, more companies are going to have the adapter. We reported last week that GM and Ford are going to get it as soon as February, apparently. And then after that, other automakers will get on boarded. But yeah, I agree that 2025 is...

kind of we've been talking about it for a long time and that's going to be like the big boom for evs just because of the availability that's going to have it's like the the program that you have right now with the model y with the model 3 where you have high volume evs

In North America, we looked at things more in North America, obviously, because I know there's other Vigo programs that are available in high volume in China and some of them in Europe too. But in North America, it's Model 3, Model Y, that's really high volume. In 2025, there's going to be probably half a dozen, maybe 10 programs like that available, I think. And...

And that's going to be a game changer. That's going to change everything. And yes, NACS is going to be a big part of that too, because one of the things that have been slowing electric vehicle adoption so much has been the charging infrastructures and how it can be frustrating with CCS.

charging station that are not reliable that keeps uh um there's not maintenance done to them and you arrive there there's nothing more frustrating than arriving at the charging station and not being able to plug in and charge like it's just we we reported actually on the rivian being charged by a cyber truck earlier this week and it sounds like that that was exactly that situation where they couldn't find a working they arrive at a charging station they

And if you're so low on charge, you might be screwed where there's nothing else. If there's not a charging station within the remaining range that you have in your battery pack, you're screwed. But then the Cybertruck was there and Cybertruck has basically level two charging out of the back. So they did that. And obviously level two charging a lot slower than the fast charger, but it can give you just enough to get to another fast charger station, which can be a big deal.

So yeah, I think that once every vehicle has access to the supercharger network and everyone experienced that, just the ease of using the network, if Tesla can keep up. So that's going to be one of the big story, I think, in 2024 into 2025. Can the Tesla supercharger network, especially in North America, because again, the situation is different in Europe and in Asia, right?

Can Tesla Supercharger in North America sustain its high standard as like the gold standard for EV charging as it onboards all these other new electric vehicles from non-Tesla automakers? That's going to be a big trend to watch, I think, in 2024. Because if Tesla can do that, that might be like one of the biggest contribution to EV adoption. It's going to be like they're going to solve it for North America. And if they can't, it's going to be a problem. Yeah.

All right. David Johnson says Mercedes has the guts to back their limited self-driving with regulatory approval and legal liability. Is Elon ever going to accept that? Yeah. Like I said, limited self-driving, you're referring to level three, which is for short periods of time. So in geofence area where you can activate it and then Mercedes indeed does take responsibility for the system if something happened.

The thing with level threes in Tesla is that Elon has trashed level threes every occasion that he talked about it. For him, it's like AI or nothing. It's like full self-driving. Even he talked about level five or nothing, which...

Makes no sense because level five is everywhere, any condition. It can do it like some of the best human drivers out there. You have to say a lot of human drivers are not even level five. Like my aunt, she doesn't drive when it's dark outside. She's not level five. There's people that don't drive in all conditions.

If it's snowing outside, there's a lot of people that are like, I'm not taking my car outside because I'm not used to. And I know that that doesn't make sense for a lot of people. Like if you live in California and like it's always perfect weather out there, maybe you don't know. If you live in Quebec or in a place where there's a ton of snow, where it's just so normal to drive in the snow, you don't think about that. But there's a lot of places where – and the people that just –

don't drive in all conditions. So even Elon saying that, oh, we're just going straight to level five, that never made any sense to me. I think level four makes a lot more sense, which is like almost most conditions that the system works in. But yeah, level three has always been like, no, we're not going to do that, which doesn't make sense to me because I see a lot of value in level three. Like if you're going to be on the highway example for two hours,

and you can clear the whole highway for level three, and you can offset the, you can just do whatever you want during those two hours, then that's a ton of value right there. I don't get it. That's huge, yeah. I mean, you can play on your phone, you can read a book.

All you have to do is be able to be back at the wheel within 10 seconds. If it starts flipping out or whatever, you have to be back at the driving. So you can't go to sleep in the back. Sleeping is out of the question. For level three, yeah. Yeah.

But still, like you said, like reading a book, doing some work with your laptop or whatever, like it makes a ton of sense. And Tesla doesn't want to do that. I don't get it because I think Tesla is a lot closer to that than they are to a level four and certainly to a level five. Yeah.

Right. Jonathan Root says EV9 auto wipers are better than those from the AI robotics company. I would say I've never had auto wipers worse than my Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. And that's because all other cars use a rain sensor rather than a computer vision camera based system to do it.

Yep. But even then you would think like, all right, it's not that big of a, like you can figure that out with a vision system, especially if you believe that your vision system is now a baby AI, a baby general AI like Elon's at, but apparently not. Nope. All right. Maybe we should take Elon for his word and value Tesla at zero because it cannot drive autonomously despite charging customers thousands of dollars for something that doesn't work.

and then continues if you think it works read fred's words at a tesla fsd try to kill me what more do you need to understand how dangerous fsd is on the streets well it is it is potentially very dangerous there's no doubt about it but that's the thing though elon is not right about this being valued at zero like yeah it would be a lot less valued for sure without the self-driving effort but tesla is without fsd selling profitably millions of vehicles so like

Like, obviously, that's value. So I don't know why you said that, to be honest. I kind of feel like that's like a motivating factor for his, you know, the FSD team. He's like, yeah, look, if you can't get this to work, we're done. We're, you know, the company's over. We need you to do this. Yeah, like it's one of those kind of things.

All right. David Johnson, any sense of sales volume for Cybertruck? I mean, it's all internal and it's... Well, there was the Tesla investor relations and that's not their estimate. They pull all estimates for every analyst together. And so the Wall Street estimate is $1,200, I think, in the quarter, which seems high to me. Yeah.

Yeah, $1,200 is a bit high. Maybe $800, something like that, that would be closer to making sense to me. Yeah.

All right. To be clear, Kia Hyundai Genesis does not support vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid. They are only built to power an accessory vehicle to load. Anyone plugging into their home is violating the terms of their warranty. Yeah, I mean, it's basically in the U.S. it's just a 110-volt or 120-volt outlet. You can, of course, plug that into your home and run things from your home on it.

But that's really not what the use case is for those things. That's fair. And then goes on to say only Ford does vehicle to home and it's been a fail for many who bought it. Has it been a fail? I haven't heard too much from people who actually deployed that. Was it Pro? I was talking to Tom Malagny from State of Charge and he came by in Vermont this week.

And I don't know if we talked about it this time or a previous time, but he had Ford come out and install it there. I mean, you know, he's got so many battery things going on in his house that it's kind of moot point anyway. But he said he got it working. So I know of at least one person who had it working. For how much? So that's the question. Like how much did it cost you? Yeah, it was probably quite a bit.

Antonio Hollyville, what's going on with Tesla roof? I haven't heard that in a while. I asked because they canceled my order twice and they say they are not working with customers who are doing additions and the roof is not ready for install yet. I should mention that I'm also doing an addition to our house and I haven't even considered putting a Tesla roof on there. I'm just going to

solar panels on there after it's up. I mean, there's really no point because I have solar panels, external panels already on there. It would be weird to have part of it with, you know, a Tesla roof and part of it without. But what have you been hearing about Tesla roof? Well, I think it's part of Tesla's energy's broader strategy to move away from their own installation stuff. And they want instead to own the

behind your home energy system. So the gateway, the power wall, the solar inverters and all that. So they are certainly putting less effort into that. Now they're still doing solar roof installation. I know they're focusing a little bit more like on new homes and things like that. So they're,

it has taken the back seat if you're doing a remodeling and additions and sort uh now the console you order twice there might be like a bunch of different reasons for that like if it was like the price thing you can definitely you you there's been like a

wins in court over that. So you can force Tesla to get the price back. But if they're just not installing in your area, that's a real possibility because there's plenty of areas where Tesla just doesn't have the capacity to install. So that might sound like it's more like that case for Antonio, I would think. All right. Carl is back. ChargePoint operators, EVgo, EA, et cetera, are all, I guess, ChargePoint, not the company, but the...

Field are all bleeding money and have no proven model for profitability. The more they need to support the new stations, the worse the problem becomes. Has Tesla ever broken out their cost revenue for the supercharging network? Stands to reason Tesla is bleeding money on it too. I don't see Tesla's in-house manufacturing offsetting idle infrastructure costs. I mean, I think we did hear about the Tesla price on that one Texas deal.

But that's the cost of deployment, or the two references. So they're talking about the entire thing, an entire network as a profit center. So I think we heard recently that Tesla confirmed that the supercharger is now contributing positively to Tesla's profit.

like as of like last quarter or something like that. So I think there's definitely a way to make money off of that. Like it makes sense. Obviously it's a super capital extensive thing. You deploy them, super expensive to deploy and then the payback time is over a long period of time. So the business model is not like, it's not rocket science. Like it makes, it makes a ton of sense and it makes sense that it's not profitable right now too. So I'm not too worried about that.

Some of these operators should be worried for sure. There's a thousand ways you can screw it up and just a few ways you can get it right. I'm not saying that they're all going to be okay, but there's definitely a way to make money off of that.

It's going to be big business. Like fast charging is going to be big business. There's no way. Yeah. And I mean, Tesla has such a big lead there that it almost seems insurmountable. It does seem insurmountable at this point, especially with the other charger operators having to adapt Tesla standard, build new, you know, build hardwood, new hardware. They're already like way behind. And, you know, Tesla's got such a big lead there and then they have money and they're profitable already. So don't know how you catch up to that.

Feels like Aptera adoption will be niche for years. Their best play is to prove to everyone that the car is the only one that addresses zero carbon sustainability. Well, I agree with the niche thing. I think that especially at the price point, at $30,000,

it, you know, when you can buy a, you know, a new Chevy Bolt or, you know, whatever of like a full on car for that price, it is going to be niche. I think where they become really cool is if they can get it down to 20,000 or 15,000. And if you look at the actual product itself, it doesn't seem like it's not, it doesn't seem impossible to get down to that price. If you can get to like

huge scale you need to scale i think that's that's the difference because right you've seen how they build that uh like the teardrop chassis like it's the same manufacturer that built like the supercars so yeah it's it's not cheap and so yeah i think scale is that it wants to figure out how to build that at scale that i think that's the the idea but like what is niche so what do you think what kind of volume would be niche

I mean, is that like what Porsche does or Ferrari does or is that what Subaru does? Yeah, because what Porsche does, Porsche does like decent volumes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. I think it's going to be like a Prius situation, I think. Like, you know, like a Prius wasn't like the best value car out there when it first came out, but it became super popular because it was like the...

the, oh, I'm environmentally friendly car. I think that's going to be similar with the Abterra. Like, all right, if you think you're environmentally friendly with your Tesla that gets 400 watt hour per mile, I'm getting 100 watt hour per mile.

Yeah, but they have to go to like, you know, just extreme measures to get that price down. Yeah, the functions of the cars are not as useful for sure. Yeah. All right, Chris Hellerman, Highland Performance News. We talked a little bit about how the Highland's not being built in the U.S. yet. Yeah, I think that performance version is probably going to come when they launch it in the U.S. too.

Who do we predict will go belly up in 2024? Are there any interesting... Who's in trouble right now? Are we going to see Ford or GM in big trouble? The big automakers, I don't think that's 2024. I think that's later on if some of the big ones fall. Definitely some of the big ones will fall. But I don't think it's going to be as soon as 2024. I think that's going to be more like the second half of the decade.

But some of the AV startups, though, those might fall next year. I mean, things like Fisker, maybe. I think they just jumped this week, Fisker. But I don't know. Some of the smaller AV startups. Lucid's probably good through the year, I would think. Rivian's going to be fine. Yeah, Rivian's fine.

Maybe some of the charger adapt, you know, like the home charger companies. Yeah. I feel like there's way too many of those. Yeah. Some of the more niche ones might have some problems or, you know, get acquired or merge or something like that. Not super obvious, though. I mean, like Subaru is not going to go out of business, I don't think. I'm trying to think Mazda. They won't go out of business. I don't know.

Moving on, looking for a wall charger, lots of 7J1772 wall units, but not UL certified. I can see more wall charger available as NAX is the standard concern, non-UL certified recommendation. I mean, if you're buying today, I would recommend something like an Emporium or a Tesla with a J1772, but...

you know, things are changing pretty quickly. So if you can hold off, I would recommend holding off. Yeah. At this point, other than the, like the universal wall connector from Tesla, it's hard to recommend anything else. Yeah. Uh, will there be a price war among the third party chargers to lure people from the Tesla network? Okay. You mean like price per kilowatt hour at the fast charging station? Oh, I was thinking, uh, from the, you know, the,

level two chargers but yeah but this is the network that's where I'm oh that's true yeah yeah um yeah it's a good question I don't know like there there's a like there's a limit on what you can charge uh for fast charging for sure like sometimes it gets close to the price of gas and people don't like that even though it's not that big of a deal because most people don't charge that often a fast charge station and you will get cheaper price if you charge overnight at home

But I know that's not available to everyone. So yeah, I think there's going to be like memberships things too that might become popular with some people. I think automakers are going to keep making deals too with third party charging network companies like they've done in the past with EA and with EVgo and all that. So look out for that. Maybe there's a deal that makes sense for you sometimes. All right.

So just we'll put this in there. This is more details on next year's electric Formula Sun Grand Prix at the National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park. We're going to talk more about that as more sponsors come online and we get more details. We're also going to start the other race in Nashville and go through some parks. So it's going to be a lot of fun. And that's all in July of 2024. Yeah, it should be a fun. Stay tuned for more. All right. My German's a little sloppy. So we'll just keep going.

Lucid Sapphire. Any updates there? I haven't been following that that closely, to be honest. Yeah, we'll update when we do find something. Crimson Decade. FSD is useless in the Florida rain. It will never be level 5 unless it gets a LIDAR.

Yeah, Florida rains is kind of hard to drive in. Yeah, but that's the thing. It's hard to drive for a human too. If you're talking about the torrential rain that happens, like you're in a jungle basically, a lot of people, a lot of the humans, they have these stops on the side of the road when that happens. Normally, it's for a short period of time too, so it's not too bad, but yeah. All right, Carl doesn't agree with me that you can read a book and safely respond to a problem in time. That is a myth. I mean, I drove in Mercedes level three, two,

thing they told me I could read a book so I don't know you said what you said 10 seconds that you need to react yeah they said they said that you would have to react I mean if you're reading a book and like it starts beeping plenty of times put the bug down and look ahead and look what's happening like yeah yep

Antonio Hollyville level five will not work until 80 to 90% of cars are driving with the software. I'm not confident anything than level three might be feasible in the near future.

That's a good point, although I don't know how true it is, but I feel like when everybody's doing the software thing, it's going to be easier. Yeah, but that's the argument. The cars need all to talk together. Everyone understands that. If all the cars can talk together, it can make the whole thing, let's say, a little easier. But that's the whole idea that Tesla is doing. Tesla is doing the idea of they want to replace a human driver. You can put them in any situation and they can figure it out. Yeah.

I guess that's where Tesla doesn't understand this argument, which makes sense. If that's your idea, Tesla's idea is basically that they could take their Tesla bot, put the FSD software in the Tesla bot, put the Tesla bot behind the wheel of any car, and they'll figure it out. That's the kind of idea behind it, so you don't need to talk to other cars. Because if you need that, then you're screwed. The transition is not going to happen overnight like that.

All right. Is it a bad idea to buy a non-Nax EV currently? I would say no, it's not a big deal. I have, you know, a Rivian and a Bolt. If I want to use my Tesla Charger, there's an adapter for that. If I want to use my, you know, if I want to go the other way, there's an adapter for that. It's pretty simple and easy. What do you think? I mean, it's a bad idea if it's a concern for you to have to use an adapter because there's

adapters are always going to be available it's just no big deal it's a little bit more expensive for sure like the for level two it's not expensive but for level three the charging is definitely expensive uh so but we're talking about a few hundred dollars here so if you if you count that into the cost of the vehicle going forward and you and you don't mind having to use the adapter it has like a few seconds every time you want to charge and whatnot then it's not a big deal yeah and um

Yeah, I think most people are going to charge at home for the most part. So it's not a big deal. Yeah, that's a few $10,000 for that out there. All right. Tesla needs to update their network for NACS support too. Their pre-2021 cars won't work on NACS. Their supercharger cables are too short. They don't currently support CCS protocol, but NACS needs it.

My understanding is that all Tesla vehicles will work on all Tesla chargers currently and into the future. So my understanding is that Tesla has not guaranteed that it's going to move all of its old charger to NACs. It's just that other vehicles, other non-Teslas won't be able to charge at those particular superchargers.

which might be kind of a big deal because those were the original superchargers. They were put in very strategic points. And if the Chevy and the Fords can't use those, then it might be... I mean...

I don't know how good a due diligence Chevy and Ford and everybody else did, but I really hope that they realize that there's a lot of superchargers that are not going to be NAX compatible. Yeah, but at the same time, Tesla has been known to update their stations with new stalls or add new stalls that are the latest generation to existing supercharger station. So yeah, it is something to keep in mind for sure, but I don't think it's going to be that big of an issue.

John Kachagias asks if Mazda is going to be around. I think that was during that conversation. I think they're fine and I think they're partially owned by Toyota. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of fusing companies together. Consolidation. Consolidation, yeah.

All right. EA is at 64 cents per kilowatt hour in some states. You know, I think depending on the place and the time, it almost gets up to a dollar per kilowatt hour. Yeah, that's crazy. That's nuts. So just be careful when you're charging and planning charging. Why is there a disconnect with many saying Toyota is so behind in EVs, but Monroe and Camisa says the opposite? Monroe says that Toyota is not behind on EVs?

and i've never heard that i mean uh um i would be surprised about that i've never heard anyone or that is not working for toyota saying anything else than toyota is behind on bv's we should say like because they have a lot of hybrids for a long time and people some people do consider that electric vehicles but uh it's battery electric vehicles that they are way behind

And yeah, there's no doubt about that. If you're seeing a disconnect, I think some money exchange hands might

Yeah, I mean, Toyota would agree about that. Yeah, for BEVs, they would agree. But at the same time, it depends what you mean by behind. If you mean behind on technology, Toyota would argue that, ah, we know the technology, we just don't think people want it. So we could build it if we wanted to. I think they're both behind on the technology and behind on just the deployment in general. But who knows?

So Monroe says that Toyota has the capability. I mean, yes, they could do more if they wanted to. There's no doubt they don't want to.

That's more the case. They've been investing too much in hydrogen fuel cells and they don't see a market in BEVs globally. They admitted that in China there's demand for it and they have invested more in BEVs in China. They just have...

The Japanese, they move slowly. The big companies in Japan, they move slowly. We did that thing last year. It was going to work next year. And they don't see the trend right now of BEVs taking over the whole world by the end of the decade. So they're going to be surprised by what's going to happen, I think, in the second half of the decade. I agree.

All right. Well, that's it for us. That's it for the Electric Podcast in 2023. I appreciate every single one of you that tuned in for this show and for all the shows all year. Thanks to all our sponsors this year, too. And we're going to hit the ground running next year. You're going to see us next Friday. Same time, same place. I hope you guys have a great new year. Stay safe out there. Have a good one.