Model Y refresh leak, Tesla FSD data, Audi A6 e-tron, and more
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We are live everyone for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchrom coming to us live from Paris, France. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. You laugh because you recognize my accent being there for a few days now. All right. Big thumbs up to Seth for showing up for the podcast because it's late out there. So we're going to try to make it short.

Short and sweet for him, everyone. As usual, we're going to start with a bunch of news items about the EV world. A few Tesla news, if you're not a Tesla person. You can skip to about 25-30 minutes into the show where we have a bunch of other EV news to discuss, including the unveiling of the Audi A6 e-tron, Lucid Gravity's production starting, and a few more things to discuss.

And then at the end of the show, as usual, it's interactive. You guys can ask questions and you can start right now if you want. We are live on YouTube, Facebook, X, LinkedIn and all that. You can ask us questions in the comment section there and we can get to them at the end of the show.

If you do enjoy The Electric Podcast, we would appreciate if you can give us a like, a thumbs up, a subscribe. All these things are free to do. Take a second and it helps the show a ton. We appreciate when you do it. If you're listening on your podcast app right now, whether it's Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever it is, if you can give us a five-star rating, it helps a ton. Ton, ton, ton. We appreciate when you do it. We read them all. Thank you very much. Let's jump right into it.

All right. There was some, well, it's been a week already, but it was right after the last podcast, so we should mention it. The 12.5 full self-driving update from Tesla Supervised Full Self-Driving. I started the wide release, as we discussed last week, limited to hardware 4 vehicle. And it's going to take another 10 days, apparently, before we move out of the hardware 4 and we go to hardware 3 vehicles.

You know, there's a whole controversy around that, but we went into it the last time around, so we won't discuss this now. But we will discuss more the progress because we both have hardware 3 vehicles. Well, Seth is nowhere near his car anyway right now, so it doesn't matter. But we don't have the 12.5, but it's actually 12.5.1 now.

It's getting wider release. Some mixed results. Some people see significant improvements. Some see still some major issues. But we don't have actual data on it. Well, at least not much. Because Tesla always refused to release its disengagement, its intervention data about the full-sum driving. Even though it claims to have 1.6 billion miles of data, we haven't seen none of that.

That's despite them making some wild claim, like Elon saying that the 12.4, which never made it to a wide release because it was too buggy, was going to see a 5 to 10x more miles between intervention.

So that doesn't mean much if we don't actually have a basis for it. But we kind of know, at least not an official one, but we have a crowd source one with crowd source data, which was a wild thing this week because we had some people like Alex Voigt here is classic Elon Musk cultist. And he used some of that crowd source data to show that there was a big improvement in the intervention with 12.5.

And the wildest thing I've seen in a while, Elon Musk actually commented on it. So he's commenting on very limited crowdsourced data about full self-driving.

And yet Refuse has the actual official data on 1.6 billion miles and doesn't release that, but still would comment on crowdsourced data, which is pretty interesting. And his comment points to a big lowering of the expectation for the FSD updates that are coming up that he's been hyping up.

So he said, now we have a clear path to doubling average miles between intervention in August. So in August is that, you know, he's going to be a few version of 12.5 that's going to happen, which are going to double average mile between intervention when 12.4, which never made it to market, was supposed to 5x to 10x the miles between intervention. So big reduction in expectation here.

And now let's dive a little bit deeper in that very, again, very appreciated but limited crowdsourced data set that we have, thanks to Tesla FSD Tracker. Just for context, they have about 160,000 miles of FSD data versus the 1.6 billion that Tesla claims to have.

So let's start with the base point with the 12.3.6 is the biggest recent update, the most recent update that was right released and the one before Elon's claim of several X improvement in miles between intervention. They have 24,000 miles on it. So not too bad, not too shabby, like pretty good data set. It shows 28 miles between intervention.

And 181 between what they call critical disengagement. That's just because you have to count all disengagement, obviously, because ultimately that's going to have something to do with driving. But some owners want to have the critical disengagement too because they

Sometimes some owners have different varying levels of comfort with FSD and sometimes people will disengage not out of safety, but out of frustration or just discomfort with what the system is doing right now. But again, it's a very objective thing. But yeah, 12.3.6, 28 miles per disengagement, 181 miles per critical disengagement. I don't know about you, Seth, but

That's pretty much my experience too. Like I fall into the average experience, I think, with that. Same. Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. Yeah. All right. Then the 12.4, again, was no wide release. So there was barely any miles in the tracker that was reported, 269. So not really worth talking about. Now, the 12.5 data, that's the one that they've been praising as, you know, big step improvement, right?

even though there was just, well, there was even fewer that it was just about a thousand miles when Alex made his tweet that was commented on by Elon. But now there's, not now, but when I posted this article two days ago, there was 1500 miles on both 12.5 and 12.5.1 combined. So a little bit more data, but way too early to claim that it's good or bad. And if you're going to claim one way or the other, I would stick with, I would, to be fair,

decent improvement compared to the 12.3.6, but not anything of significance. We're talking about 44 miles between this engagement up from 28, so not even a 2x compared to 5 to 10x that he was talking about, and 321 miles between critical disengagement versus 181. So again, not even a 2x.

So that's where we are as of now. Let me go look real quick to see if the FSD tracker was the FSD tracker right here. Let me see if there's a little bit more reported recently. Oh, yeah, about 70 more miles. So it doesn't change the data much. It's about the same thing. All right.

i'm gonna remove this just to be sure as a guest said so we're at 44 miles between this engagement where where do you think waymo is right now between this engagement uh say that miles maybe thousands 95 thousands to be exact 95 000 between 40 44 or 331 if you want to stick to the critical one but both are completely unimpressive and now going back to

my point from last week about uh you know are the word three starting to look like unlikely to get unsupervised full self-driving now we see the data that right now tesla is having issues well is having difficulty a lot of work but according to elon has to be done to optimize the code of 12.5 to run on outward 3 and that gave us only 44 miles between this engagement or 331

between critical disengagement. Now let's say to achieve an unsupervised level four system, you need in the tens of thousands for sure, maybe not 95,000 that we're most getting, but in the 50,000, if not, I think 100,000 would be my preferred goal. But anyway, so you have to do what Testa did between 12.3.6 and 12.5.1 several times over. Like,

Several, several, several times over. And between the improvement we've seen that and between like how much optimization space there still is in Outward 3, I'm starting to believe that, you know, I put like a less than 10% chance that Tesla can deliver unsupervised self-driving on Outward 3. And in terms of delivering unsupervised self-driving period, I think we're still several years away.

on like what Elon is claiming right now, end of the year, or I'll be surprised if it doesn't happen next year. Because I mean, the data is pretty clear. We need a ton of improvement before going unsupervised. This here and this here, if you're watching, are the two numbers that we need to improve. And we're nowhere near. Not saying that, I don't want also to just trash the improvement. Like from a few months, it's very decent improvement.

Again, early data, we need more data to confirm it, but based on the early data, it's a decent improvement, but way less than Elon has claimed. So kudos on the team for the improvement, but Elon, adjust your prediction here because obviously, well, you did adjust at least the improvement in August that were promised in July, slash that by more than a half. All right, moving on from FSD, we have some Model Y refresh leak this week. These two images here were leaked on Reddit.

Looks like they're straight up from MonoWide Juniper, MonoWide Refresh that has been re-emerged for the last six months or so. Bloomberg at one point reported that it was coming in mid-2024. Then both Tesla and Elon squashed that, saying that there's going to be no refresh this year. There was always an emphasis on this year. So we know they're working on one for sure because we've seen camouflage prototypes around California. Sorry, and the camouflage was...

front bumper, back bumper, similar to the one that we've seen on the Model 3 last year and the year before that. Now, everything points to probably early next year, we're going to get a Model Y refresh. Now, this image here shows two things. There was this image, what looks like a Model Y prototype with the wrap just lifted up a little bit in the quick picture. So we see the back end of the vehicle here was now the new light fixtures that run around the back between the headlights, the taillights.

And you have the Tesla spelled out logo, which is something that Tesla did with the Model 3 Refresh. They went from the T logo to spelled out Tesla. But this new red bar here, which assumes a light bar, is brand new. Unique to the Model Y, I should say. And then in the interior, we do see the ambient lining stripe that goes into the door and

Looks like it's probably going to the dash too, like the Model 3 refresh has. So these are two things confirmed coming to the Model Y refresh. Not much, like obviously we're expecting a lot of other things to come. The most controversial one, obviously, being the new steering wheel that has made it to now all the Tesla vehicles except Model Y. It's going to be interesting to see if Tesla does the leap and implement this more controversial feature since the Model Y is its most popular vehicle by far. So

It's the one that has the bigger impact when you pull something that drastic as a steering wheel without stock. That said, I experienced it for a whole week with the Cybertruck. If you remember my Cybertruck review, I did say that the turn signal, the lack of stock for a turn signal, I have no problem with. I got used to it very quickly and actually preferred the one on the Cybertruck. The gear stock, I am missing it. I was missing it the week that I used the Cybertruck.

Any comments set on these leaked pictures? So I think the lighting obviously looks like a big change. You know, the Model 3 upgrade, Highland upgrade wasn't, I feel like that was a lot more subtle than what this looks like. This is going to be a kind of a big change, I think, or a bigger change. I guess it's not a huge change.

Well, it's going to change the back a lot. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be a bigger change to the back than the Model 3, for example. Right, exactly. So, I mean, this may be a bigger driver because I think one of the bigger criticisms of Tesla and the Model Y is that the design is pretty stale. And this would be an opportunity to kind of refresh that.

Yeah, it's still and it's kind of, this is kind of a victim of its own success there because they made so much of it. It became the best car in the world. So in a short period of time, we have millions of Model Y. You see them everywhere.

And yeah, I mean, if I'm not a Model Y owner, but if I was like a Model Y owner and parking in a huge parking lot, I'd be like, I need to pull up my app and look at where my car is. It's going to be 20 other cars just like mine within like a few hundred feet.

But yeah, I agree that the back is going to be a bigger change than Model 3. But the Model 3, the front was a bigger change for the Model 3. Maybe the Model Y front is going to be less of a change. The Model 3 front is a little bit more aggressive. Maybe that doesn't translate as well on the SUV format. Remains to be seen. So maybe Tesla decided to go with a bigger change to the back because of that. It's just speculation. I know nothing about what the Model Y front looks like in the refresh.

All right, this though, as confirmed last weekend through the chief engineer of the Cybertruck, that the upcoming range extender, which is a battery pack that sits in the bed of the Cybertruck and gives it its range that Tesla promised at the original of the Cybertruck, needs to be mounted by service. It needs to be structurally mounted, which makes sense. Tesla hasn't released that many details about the range extender yet or even its availability.

But it's expected to cost... At one point, there was a mention of $16,000 in the configurator. It might have been a placeholder. We don't know. But it's going to be expensive because Tesla is talking about going from 340 miles of range to 470 miles of range on the dual motor and 320 miles of range, depending on the wheels, to over 440 miles of range on the Cyber Beast.

So it's going to be a big pack. So it made sense. So like we were thinking, how is it going to be able to be mounted in there? Is it going to be able to be mounted by the owner in the garage or do you need to go to service? How does it work? Because obviously it's not ideal to have a pack that takes a third of your bed.

a cyber truck bed so not ideal more weight less space for more range which is generally the trade-off that you have to do but in this case the advantage of a removable range extender is that we thought that maybe when you don't need the range you don't need to go long distance you don't need to tow things then maybe you could remove it and you know get more efficiency and more space in the bed

but we were always questioning it's like this thing is going to be heavy as hell this thing needs to be secured uh securely mounted in the bed so that it doesn't move at all because that would be dangerous so we weren't we weren't sure that it's going to be possible at all unless this does came up with some kind of like lift system and like a very advanced mounting system that's very secured

we have the answer now and the answer is no uh wes morrell the lead engineer for the cyber truck said that any range extender offered by tisa will be structurally mounted so it's safe in a crash fair enough fair enough is just a little bit disappointed yeah i mean think about the weight of that thing i mean it's gonna if it carries that much uh battery to move that thing you know hundreds of miles

that's going to be thousands of pounds and you know you add a bunch of you know 60 mile per hour inertia to that and it's going to go flying basically if it's not mounted really well yeah i agree also it won't be really easy for home people at home to do it either unless they have like a forklift at their house yes lift system yeah

All right, this was interesting. It's not a big news, but I wanted to discuss it because especially I want to ask the audience right now if this is actually a concern that you had. Because I was sort of aware of the situation, but I was not aware that they went as far as making a product. So I know some EV owners are afraid of car jiking at a public charging station due to the fact that if you are there in your car, you're kind of a...

easy target to a carjacker because you're in the car and you would need to exit the car to leave because the charge, if the car is charging, you need to remove the charge connector to be able to leave. And some people are scared of that because they feel that it's a vulnerability. I didn't know it was that big of a problem. That's a company actually developing a product around that problem. The company is called EVJEC and the product is the EVJEC escape connector.

and it's what you see here in the little gif i put at the top a little device here that uh you know is basically a charge adapter and you can be next to max ccs to ccs ccs2 to cs2 whatever and if you're in a situation where you need to leave and you don't want to exit the car for safety reason you can just um unlatch the um the charge connector from inside the vehicle

And normally you wouldn't be able to drive from there. You wouldn't be able to pull the charge connector out. But with this system, you are able to drive and it will just disconnect from there here, as you see on this image here. The GIF is a little bit slower. And it just disconnected.

Now Tesla is suing this company because it claims that the system is unsafe. Tesla says that the lack of over temperature protection creates a safety risk testing of high current simulated charging to the connector. Oh, it was simulated dollar testing. It lies in conjunction with a supercharger cable and Tesla EV charge port demonstrated the surface temperature of the connector.

may reach as high as 100 C's after 30 minutes of charging and 420 ADC. So yeah, basically it works as intended, but it creates a risk of thermal runway of just temperature problem at the connector. So Tesla argue that it's more dangerous than it is useful.

So it is seeking to prevent the company from advertising the connector as safe and from importing it into the US. It's also seeking a minimum of $7,500, that's $5,000 in damages. Now, first thing I thought that Tesla was testing it. So I was like, ah, this is pretty cool. Tesla is actually testing like third-party stuff and find that this is dangerous. So it goes against the company. But now that I think of it, like they just simulated it. So they didn't actually test it. And why is Tesla...

going straight to suing. I mean, I don't know, maybe they went to the, what would it be like the FCC first or something like that, the Consumer Protection Agency in the US, because you could probably just give them that and they would do the testing and make sure if this is a good product or not. And you could go through that instead of going through a lawsuit. I don't know. But yeah. Yeah. You don't have to call the company and say, hey, we don't want you making this product. Yeah.

or at least you know we think it can be too over temperature there's no proper thermal protection and based on the simulation it can be dangerous but i would test it out they probably tested that out

But yeah, but I'm interested more in this idea of like a fear of carjacking because I mean, I knew about it, but I didn't know it was that big of a problem that, you know, company would develop a product around it. So if anyone in the comments right now can give me your thought about this, if it's overblown or if it's actually a fear that you have, I'd appreciate that just for my own knowledge.

All right, moving on from Tesla news, we have the unveiling of the Audi A6 e-tron this week. So if you've been following Audi's rollout of electric vehicles, they're doing something, they're like changing up their naming scheme, basically their naming convention, where now the pair numbers are the EVs and the odd numbers are the internal combustion engine. So, you know, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6, Q7, Q8.

The SUV lineup with the Q6 that was recently unveiled and going to come at the end of the year completes the SUV lineup. But now they are going after their sedan lineup, which they haven't really electrified that much. There's the Audi e-tron GT, but, you know, that's very higher end stuff. It's based on the Taycan from Porsche. This is the first, you know, more affordable, even though it's not going to be cheap, it's a luxury vehicle, but still affordable.

electric sedan. And like the Q6, it's also based on the PPE platform. So you have all the same improvement you have from there. And we did some deep dive on that. You can go on my deep dive on the Q6 for all the technology behind it. But huge improvement in efficiency. They get a lot more range. Audi always been good in charging, but some charging improvement too with the PPE platform. And yeah, this is like Audi maturing as an EV manufacturer now.

So the A6 has the same powertrain as the Q6. So you have the 100 kilowatt hour battery pack, 94 kilowatt hour usable, but you get more range out of it because it's a little bit more efficient. So Audi is talking about 756 kilometers, 470 miles on the WLTP standard. WLTP standard doesn't include climate control. So take that in mind. And now there's two versions. There's the sports back version here.

And then you have the Avant version, which is all these nomenclature for wagon design. So you have a sedan, but the sedan can be a wagon or can be a sports back, more regular looking sedan. So you have those, you have the Avant and sports back, and you can have those in normal version A6 or a S6 sports version, which can do zero to a hundred kilometer an hour in just 3.9 seconds, which is nice.

So some images here. You have the sports back version. I like it. Yeah, I like it a lot, actually. Yeah, Audi's always making good-looking cars. I don't think that's their problem. I mean, I wasn't the biggest fan of the e-tron in Q4, but Q6, I really liked it a lot. Look-wise, I mean. I mean, I'm not a wagon guy at all, but this actually looks pretty good. Yeah.

Then this is the Sportsback S version. So the S does also get some like different, more aggressive accents. Looks really good. Yeah, I like it. And then the S event version, which it's pretty good. I wouldn't go like to a bunch of a sports version of a wagon, but it works.

Maybe they should give it a shot and bring the event version to the US. Maybe we should try to give it a shot again to make wagon popular in the US. What do they call it? The shooting break? Yeah, shooting break is another way, yeah.

Then the interior, like I just did my review of the Q6 last month. If you guys have seen that, this reminds me a lot of the interior of the Q6, obviously. They updated their old user interface. They integrated the JAT GPT stuff in there. It's pretty cool. The rear seats are here. This is the back of the sports back version. Glass roof. Pretty good looking car.

All right, it's coming. The orders are opening up in Europe in September. No word yet on the North American market. The price for the upper to mid-range versions of the vehicle will start at 75,600 euros. And the sports bag version is about 1,000 euros more. And then if you want to go with the S6 version of these vehicles, it's going to start at 100,000 euros. So not cheap.

But the cheaper versions are going to come with a smaller battery pack in the future, though not in the U.S. if we follow Audi's modus operandi in the last few years, like the Q6 is not getting the smaller battery pack in the U.S., for example. Moving on, Lucid, at its first pre-production, its first release, candidate version of the Gravity electric SUV, the vehicle they badly need to save the company.

uh rolled up the production line in uh Arizona where they have their their factory is this it I thought it was a black one maybe this is just uh a disability model yeah I don't think we have the actual uh oh it's just this image right here I'm gonna share it just so we can see it why is it so slow I'm good videos slow yeah it's slow as hell right now like Lincoln doesn't want to open up

oh well never mind this is getting taking way too long for what's just a video of uh a car rolling out the production line but yeah the uh the gravity is very near and it's going to be very interesting for a few reasons because it's going to have all the same power train efficiency that lucid is known for with the air going to come to the gravity which is going to be obviously a little bit less efficient because it's it's bigger but

It's going to have industry-leading range for the segment, 440 miles that Lucid is talking about right now. More importantly, it's there to save Lucid, basically, because Lucid had an issue launching in the US with a sedan first, just like Tesla did with the Model S. That worked for Tesla, but 10 years, more than 15 years ago, this one. Now, the...

The market has changed a lot and they're very angry for SUVs. Sedans are not selling well at all. So it makes sense to add an SUV to the lineup. It just took a little bit for them to get there. But now the deliveries are expected at the end of the year, I assume. I don't see the delivery timeline, but if the production can date them. I thought it was something like typical, we'll make a few by the end of the year and then really start ramping up in 2025. Yeah, that makes sense.

All right, Rivian CEO RJ Skuringe went on the individual podcast or fierce competitor here at the Electric Podcast. And I'm just joking. And he talked a little bit about the plan for the next gen R2 and R3. And he talked a little bit about...

uh the the uh how they're going to position themselves in the market because obviously the r2 is seen as a as a model y competitor but rj insists that tesla is going to not tesla rivian is going to stick to its adventure branding and then like push the adventure stuff so that uh the uh that's going to be the differential matter so for example scurrin says that uh

you're going to be able to off-road the R2 just like you are the R1. Maybe not to the same capacity, like the R1 is a little bit more fancier vehicle, but still it's going to be a very capable off-road vehicle, which to be fair to Model Y is not. So that's one of the ways they want to difference themselves from Tesla.

But in terms of not differentiating themselves, they were also asked about their plans for competing with the full self-driving package Tesla is doing. And, you know, because the R1 platform, the new one, they have a brand new hardware suite for self-driving on it or for ADAS, I should say, for Advanced Driver Assistance System.

But they're only aiming level three with that, even though the system is more and more extensive in terms of hardware that Tesla has in their car. They don't plan to go full self-driving with that. The R2, though, RJ said that they're going to be able to do self-driving with it. Well, they're going to be able to have the same capacity that Tesla has in self-driving. That was more what he said. So Tesla is not technically self-driving right now either.

What else did he say that was interesting? He said the R3X has like hyper cars capacity. Says people are very excited about it. A lot of headroom in the R2. Yeah, same capabilities as the Tesla full self-driving FSD. It's pretty much it. Not too many details on that.

All right, we have a couple of BYD news before we get into the comment section. So if you guys have any comments for us, any questions, you can put them in the comment section right now. I want to get to it in just a few minutes. So BYD has confirmed plans to launch its electric vehicles in Canada. That's a big move for BYD to attack the North American market, which it's already in the North American market, but only in its commercial section. But...

Right now, Canada is discussing potential tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, just like the U.S. did, just like Europe did. And throughout these developments, there's lobbying efforts from both sides, obviously. The American automakers are saying yes, and the Chinese automakers are saying no. So BYD has entered the ring. And obviously, we know which side of the argument they are on as a Chinese automaker. But they're...

The fact that they entered the ring confirmed that they want to enter the Canadian market with passenger electric vehicles. So that would be a change because previously they have only commercial trucks. So this is a big deal. And I, for one, I'm kind of welcoming it because they have some great products. Right now, they are the products and they're improving fast and they are a lot cheaper. And if other people cannot compete, well, free market,

Yeah, and they're also competing in areas that other companies aren't building EVs. There's no very inexpensive EVs except maybe the Leaf or maybe, which is obviously extremely dated, or Chevy Bolt is supposed to come back out, but who knows what GM's going to do with that. So on the low end of the market, the UID could really do well, and there's not really any competition.

most legacy automakers aren't even interested i mean the seal is also like it's not expensive but it's a nice car too like it's not cheap either they have a pretty wide ranging portfolio of vehicles like it's still on byd uh they announced a deal with uber this week uh they're gonna deploy a hundred thousand electric vehicles globally with uber deals similar to like hertz with tesla that we heard uh 2021 uh uber

was part of that deal too. They did get some Tesla vehicle from Hertz. That's what I meant. But now they're going to go Zirec with BYD instead. And they're also cooperating with the announcement with the partnership on autonomous vehicles. So that's an interesting development too.

but yeah 100 000 evs coming from byd to uber globally obviously i think they're gonna go in markets where they're incentive for it uh but uh probably not in the us and maybe in canada we'll see all right let's uh jump into the comment section all right here we go uh carl san diego was on before we started

Time for a reset on the future of electric mobility. Car companies have all lost their way. We need to invest in micro mobility and electric rail. Capitalism is failing to decarbonize. So I sometimes feel that way, but I think the reality is that to get more people to stop burning fossil fuels, you also need to have vehicles, cars.

What do you think? Yeah, yeah, that's my thinking too. My thinking has always been that it's harder to change human behavior than to find technical, technological solutions that are, that emit, that decarbonize

versus trying to just change the behavior. I do love micro mobility. I love electric rails. I love public transportation. I think we should focus a lot on investing in that. But at the same time, I do think like you said, we need electric cars that are as expensive or cheaper, as convenient or more convenient to get people to change to less carbon-reducing solutions.

all right it continues volvo's change in ev commitment was a harbinger of real retreat for automakers um you know volvo uh was gonna build all their evs in china uh or a lot of them the uh ex30 was that one and they pulled back on that so kind of a bummer but uh at least volvo's still trying on stuff although uh we've heard that there's

All right, moving on. How would you change Tesla's mission statement to reflect Elon Tesla's current strategy, especially when he clearly says Tesla is GAI, General AI Software Company, which will eat a lot of energy and not a car company? That's a good question.

Master plan for whatever. Yeah, that's apparently coming, right? I mean, but specifically the mission statement, I say keep the mission statement and remove Elon. That would be my answer, I think. Look, the AI can still contribute to the mission. Self-driving can contribute to the mission, I think.

it's just that the mission should still be at the center of things and with elon now i don't i don't think it is anymore so it's it's problematic i wouldn't change just the mission statement i would i would change elon or remove elon that's a great great answer all right carl and san diego you know what would be much more cost effective way to breathe life into the model why make it an orange yellow green purple gold turquoise not sure i would pick all those colors but um

that would be a nice thing to add a few more colors and i wonder how much like elon's like you know i've heard stories where he hates yellow and and all this other stuff i wonder how much of that is just being blocked at the top because i feel like a lot more colors would be cool and obviously the wraps are taking care of some of that yeah i like i would i would like more colors too i agree with that

It would have an impact, not a big one, I think. I think more of a bigger impact would be some good advertising from Tesla. Tesla doesn't advertise much, if at all, and when they do, it's bad. Or at least it's not. They assume too much. I retweeted this morning a tweet from my friend Scott about that. They assume that people know too much about it. They assume that they know about the product when they advertise. You should target people that know nothing about electric cars.

Just let them know like how cheap they are right now and how much gas you can save with them and how cool they are. That's all you need to do. Sorry about that. I'm deleting some of the spam we're getting in here. Okay. Sorry about that. Stop spamming us, people. Where were we? All right.

all right no the question was from mike angeles will tesla end up replacing hardware on the vehicle sold with the promise of being fsd capable i'm about to buy a low mileage 2018 model 3 with hardware 2 or 2.5 but concerned it'll never get fsd um so yeah i used to have a 2018 model 3. fred i think you still have a 2018 model 3 right yeah

they uh tesla upgraded to um hardware three if you had full self driving or bought full self driving and you can get fst with that but you have to pay for it so you have to pay for um yep well you're not paying for the upgrade but yeah you have to buy that so it's a significant cost but i think this question is more like even if it does upgrade through hardware uh well first of all would you upgrade to hardware through or would they upgrade hardware for

three or four. I mean, I don't know that four is upgradable. Yeah, that's the thing though. Yeah, I wouldn't bet on the small three 2018 Model 3 ever getting full self-driving to be honest. Yeah, I mean, you'll get what it has now, which is full self-driving that doesn't, you know, assist monitor. All right, a new question. What changes do you think Model Y Refresh will need to compete with the Rivian R2?

And other competition that might come in 2025, 2026. I mean, the, I don't think is really a competitor. The will go off road. It's more boxy. It's just more of an adventure vehicle versus a kind of a street. Vehicle so I don't think that's a good comparison, but there are a lot of other. Vehicles in the space, like the, the portion, which is a little bit more expensive, obviously, but.

um you know much sportier car typically um so i don't know what do you think

Yeah, I don't know. It's not like the Model 3 refresh looks nice. First of all, that's the main thing. It needs to look nice. So the Model 3 refresh had that coming. But in terms of actual features and specs and all that, it wasn't a giant improvement. There was some under-the-hood improvement efficiency-wise, performance-wise that are pretty good, but it's not a giant step. I think if Tesla can do that to the Model Y and make it look good, just different but good,

I think they're going to do pretty well. But yeah, it's going to be a more competitive market with the Rivian R2, with, you know, Mercedes coming with a vehicle in the segment too. There's going to be a lot of pressure, especially from the top down. Then from the bottom, you know, we'll see what the Equinox can do. We'll see what Blazer can do and all that. But it's a different market than when Tesla was alone with the Malawi, that's for sure.

But if you want to know that the real thing has nothing to do with the refresh too, but what Tesla is really betting on, which has been betting on for a while, it's self-driving. Elon truly believes that, I'm sure he's putting in his steam or putting some efforts into the refresh and all that. But at the end of the day, he's thinking like, can I get self-driving anytime now? And once we do, who cares about the refresh? People are going to buy it because they want to have a self-driving car, which we'll see. Yeah.

Remains to be seen. All right, question. I read the first Cybershop pulled off the assembly line in July 2023. So it's been a year. What's your thoughts on hitting one year of production?

i don't know that that's true about july i know they were pre-production ones rolling off in the summertime yeah they announced it though he's right dave that they announced like in july like we produced the first cyber truck first production version of cyber truck but yeah it looks based on the timing on everything and when the actual event for the first deliveries happened in november or early december i don't remember anymore um

It probably was a release candidate, just like what happened this week with the gravity from Lucid, for example. So, yeah, it's more it's been closer to like seven, eight months than a year, I would argue. But the Cybertruck program is about where I would think it would be, maybe a little bit behind, but not too much.

And it's doing about as well as I thought. Like, it's a great vehicle with a lot of cool technology in it. It's packaged in such a way that Tesla, you know, didn't want to have a best-selling pickup truck. Like, they don't... They are not...

going to make a giant dent in the pickup market. They're doing well against other low-volume electric vehicles, electric pickup trucks, but the goal is to take over the pickup market, which is huge in North America and produce a ton of carbon emissions. And I just don't see the Cybertruck having a huge impact on it. Mostly a bunch of people that don't need trucks or never heard, never wanted a truck before the Cybertruck are going to get one and drive it around like any other vehicle. Yeah.

All right. WinnerNanny7, most people with hardware 3 have been offered an option with less than hardware 3 have been offered. Yeah, we talked about that earlier. The keyword from that range extender article was that they used the phrase any, not the or our. It means that they never even built one yet. Pure vaporware. I don't know if that's true. I think people are scared of carjacking because they are totally scared. Teslas are not a viable car to steal and thieves know that.

Yeah, the tracking stuff on the Tesla makes it a low value car because that's a good point. Question. Can you approximate the cost of solar panels to battery storage and grid scale, i.e. for every X amount you spend on panels generation, you need to spend X amount on batteries?

i mean i think that varies widely by the application and location yeah it would be super hard to do but you can you can google some of the like the bigger system because you're talking about grid scale here some of the bigger system and you can you can check out like what's the power capacity versus the energy capacity and if they are linked to solar farms but for the most part like it's i think like a

a quarter of the energy capacity is the power capacity of a energy storage system and uh normally has you know half to a third of solar attached to it general rule yep all right moving on question i agree so we get this sorry um that was the second time that he asked that but

Let's go back to the A6 is comparable to the BMW i4. The Sportback A6 has some cargo space as the wagon. You just lose some vertical room. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. The A6 looks a little bit more luxurious to me, but it's fair. Probably, yeah. Regarding FSD transfer, wouldn't it be a good compromise to indefinitely allow all H-Hardware 3 and prior vehicles to transfer FSD to...

A14, that way they could phase out FSD on hardware three and lower. You know, not only that would make sense, but it would be a giant liability reduction from Tesla by, you know, removing these cars from the market, allowing people to just transfer to people who bought FSD and are now, you know, there are people with FSD and an hardware three vehicle right now are a liability for Tesla because they're going to have to do something for them at one point.

Having them get rid of that car, remove FSD off of it, having them upgrade to an Ottawa 4 car, and then getting back that Ottawa 3 car and probably removing FSD off of it, would be smart, is a giant reduction in the liability that Tesla has with this issue. So I agree with you on that, Tyler. I would do the same thing. All right. Regarding... No, we just did this one. Yeah.

I have a feeling a lot of BYD vehicles will be smuggled into the United States for benchmarking and wealthy folks. I don't really think wealthy folks have their BYD vehicle, generally speaking. They have the super car, like the S9, S7, somehow that they make, which looks pretty cool. But other than that, yeah, I agree that it's maybe some importation, but not that much. There's also a pain in the butt to get a car homologated. Yeah, we talked about that last week. Yeah.

all right what about the charging for byd canada does not have great infrastructure for charging except tesla chargers i thought canada had pretty good charging infrastructure uh i mean there's some there's some weak spots for sure especially in ontario in quebec we're doing pretty good there's some places that it's not super easy but you know it depends there's some place that's good someplace that's it's bad um yeah and yes tesla supercharge network is a lot more extensive but

You know, BYD has a great relationship with Tesla. Tesla is opening up its network. It would make sense that if BYD is making cars for Canada, they will make it with Max. You know, BYD is a supplier for Tesla. So, yeah, I definitely can... I don't see a problem with that. I don't think it's going to be a problem. All right. I think the Chinese competition in the U.S. is healthy. Just hit them with a 50% tariff, which I think is reasonable. That's still a pretty big tariff. But...

100% so a lot bigger I guess. You have a 2025 Taycan 4S tomorrow. They gave me a few grand off just for asking. Demand softening question mark. Yeah, I mean the Taycan cells have crashed. Yeah. So it makes sense. It's not possible to make enough batteries for all the vehicles, not to mention homes and businesses. That looks like a first part of a question.

But it's not. So we'll move on. Yeah, to be honest, I don't even know where you are right now. I kind of lost track. Okay, now I'm back. Okay, Mike Angeles, is there any hard data showing how many Teslas have experienced battery failure? Are earlier models more vulnerable to battery failure than newer models? Any data comparing to other car makers?

i don't have any data comparing other makes but we did track that early on in the tesla rollout how many battery would fail and it was a decent amount at the beginning with like the early model s's and everything on that

It quickly went down with each new model and niche refresh and all that to a point that within like 2018, 2019, it wasn't really that big of a problem. It was very small. And if you follow like degradation of the energy retention of the battery that Tesla specifically has, it's not a giant issue at all. Most people are fine.

I had a Model X that had 300,000 miles before the battery was replaced. A Model 3 has 60,000 miles and still has great battery retention. 100,000 plus miles on my Model S. And it did have a battery replaced at 70,000 miles, but it was a 2012. So it works with my point. All right. People are saying China will take over the world TVs, but it seems fundamentally with their strategy that they need to innovate Western firms' ideas to copy Fox's.

Well, that's been the case in a bunch of different industries when it comes to China. And they're not going to be alone. They're going to crush a few. Some big companies are going to fail, I think. But there's still going to be a bunch of them that's going around. It's not going to be only Chinese automakers, I think. I know people who would not get gas at night or in certain areas. So people do not like being exposed and unable to immediately flee a dangerous situation regardless of the circumstances. We're talking about the...

And some of those people will buy a $300 charge connector for that. Yeah. All right. We're going to skip ahead a little bit. When model three was announced, many other manufacturers said that they would have Tesla killers. Would you say that there are any today or any in this foreseeable future?

I mean, all of them together are hurting Tesla sales for sure. Like Tesla sales, Tesla had to crash the prices in order to keep up the sales. And that's been because of this competition. So even though this, I don't think there's any one single Tesla killer out there. I think all the competition together is putting some pressure, at least on Tesla. I think that's fair to say. If there is a specific Tesla killer, I mean,

the yd seal you know is still ramping up and everything and it's not available globally because it's chinese made but might be might be one of them and mold three cells are not doing great either so yeah all right that's pretty much it uh guy has uh 80 plus miles and batteries okay and china has two generations of engineering oh yeah

All right. Well, that was a full show. We're going to let Seth go to sleep in Paris right now because it's getting late up there. And we appreciate every single one of you for listening to the show this week. If you do enjoy the show, please give us a like, a thumbs up. All these things are free to do to help the show. If you're listening to your podcast app right now, quick five-star review, it will make my day. And I appreciate you for doing it. We'll see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one. Bye-bye.