More Tesla layoffs, charging team all gone, what is going on? Let's talk about it
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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 Wintraub. How are you doing this week, Seth? I'm good.

All right, and I want to thank Splitvolt for sponsoring this week's episode. The Splitvolt splitter switch automatically shares power from your existing 240-volt dryer socket with your Level 2 AV charger. You can learn more in the link in the description, but we're going to talk a little bit more about them and their great solution for charging in your garage. All right, a lot to talk about this week, and...

It's going to be at the different levels. So we're going to try to explain to you the weird moves that happened this week.

and try to give you some context to try to understand it because a lot of people just don't try to understand, don't understand it because they don't have the full context. And then we're going to talk about the possible impact of it, which is going to be speculative because we cannot know for sure. But I think it could be a big impact and a negative one, unfortunately. Then we have a few better Tesla news to discuss and some non-Tesla news like Rivian expanding in the normal Illinois.

Cadillac and solid state batteries are actually semi-solid state batteries, making it into actual EVs on the road. But yeah, the first move is Tesla firing the entire supercharger, not only the entire supercharger team, the entire charging team. Well, I should jump to this article actually because this one I actually put a little bit more information in it. And I have a nice image of Elon too. Okay.

Yeah, so let me give you some context here. This is all based on internal information that I'm very confident about, at least two sources for every point. If I'm saying anything that's not confirmed by sources, I'm going to say that it's an opinion or speculation or anything like that, just to be clear. All right. A few weeks ago, Elon took over the charging team at Rebecca Tenucci, the head of the team.

be directly a direct report to him and we've seen that throughout the month of april elon hiding more direct reports to him seemingly you know well there's two argument about it this is lower expectation some say that it's this was in crisis and he needs to take over which by the way if this isn't crisis it's kind of his fault anyway because he wasn't there for a year but anyway

Or the other argument is that with the critical shareholders vote coming, Elon is trying to consolidate power at Tesla, makes himself indispensable at Tesla, even though he has been dispensable for the last year. Having more direct reports direct to him makes him indispensable. So he decided to take to Nucci as a, as a, as a, I'm not sure you pronounce her last name. Rebecca, let's call her Rebecca. I'm sure she doesn't mind. And she was the head of charging at Tesla direct report to her.

When he did that, there was no clear change of plan about the charging network, supercharging or charging as a whole. But he wanted a direct report to it. Right after that, he started doing the layoffs, the broader layoffs, the Tesla telling all executives that he needed to lay off. And some were 10%. Some were asked to lay off up to 20% of their staff, depending on the teams.

Now, couldn't confirm exactly what was the percentage he was asking Tanuchi to fire in our team, but it was apparently a very high percentage. And two sources from RealMatters said that Tanuchi fought back against Elon on those layoffs. She said that percentage was too high, it would cripple her team too much, would slow down the plans for the rollout of the charging networks.

And then Elon decided to fire her and her entire 500 people team. Crazy. Okay. That's nuts. That's been confirmed by a ton of sources. That's been confirmed publicly by some employees that left Tesla, which is a bit touchy due to NDAs, but why not? So right after he fired her, he sent another email to executive in which he said,

Again, reiterated that they need to fire as many people as he says. Otherwise, this is going to happen. Like a clear threat that you're going to be next. Your team, your whole team is going to be next if you don't follow my instructions. So he made an example out of her and her team. Well, that would be the speculation, would be the assumption. That would be why he did it.

Because right after there was a big blowback to this reaction, like why would he do that? Elon took to Twitter and said that Tesla still plans to grow the supercharger network, but at a slower pace and focusing on existing, adding charging stall to existing station and focusing on 100% utilization rate station, which doesn't even exist. There's no such thing as 100% utilization rate station. There's no such thing as 100% utilization rate gas station. It's just not a thing.

Anyway, so this leads me like all the, this is my opinion based on everything I know. It looks like Elon never had plans to change anything about the supercharger network, wanted everything to go, maybe a little bit of a slowdown or anything like that. But then when Tonucci fought back against him, he decided to make an example out of her, fire the entire team as an example. And then he had to sort of readjust the supercharging plan a little bit because

obviously it's going to have an impact on it. Now, speaking of the impact, so that impact is going to be speculative, obviously, but we know a lot about it. So I recommend, by the way, Marco RP on Twitter.

He's probably the most knowledgeable people in terms of deployment of charging station. He has a feed that like release all new charging station. And he is as clearly contact with Intesta supercharging team. And he knows a lot about what it takes to deploy one of those station. And I think a lot of people underestimate what goes into it. Also, I might as well share this chart here because that's going to be very helpful into understanding. So if I share this tab, good.

So I just posted this on Twitter. It's from Bloomberg. It compares the deployment per quarter of Tesla and other charging stations in Europe versus North America. So if you see right here in Europe, Tesla has a great network in Europe, but it represents a small fraction of every quarter of new station deployment. In the U.S., it's the exact opposite. Tesla is the vast majority of new fast charging stations being deployed.

Vast majority. They started the record quarter last quarter, which you would think it would be good for the charging team. The charging team is probably celebrating. Yeah, we had the record quarter in deployment. Then you're like, oh, congrats. You're all out of here. It's crazy. It's incredible because the charging part of Tesla has been wildly successful compared to everybody else. By the way, take note of the scale on the right side. Even if they have...

like the 3K and the five, the US would be so small compared to Europe that you wouldn't be able to read anything almost. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're right. So look, the scale is important here. Not only Tesla represents a smaller fraction of all stations being deployed, the total number of stations being deployed is much smaller in the US.

The only argument that makes sense for Elon, if he wants to fire the entire team, and I see a lot of people, even in our chat here, which is very disappointing, saying that it wasn't subordination. It didn't do what the CEO asked her to do. So, of course, she's fired. Okay, she's fired. Why the entire team? Makes no sense. Stop with this argument. There's a lot of these arguments that people, I see Elon fans trying to bring up. It doesn't make sense.

Now, in North America, we need more charging stations, even if Tesla is slowing down its sales, which happened last quarter. There's a broader slowdown in EV sales, slowdown in the growth weight, not the total deployment. The total deployment is still increasing just at a slower rate. And we already have fewer stations in North America than we do in Europe. So we need more of them.

So there's no reason right now to slow down the deployment of fast charging station in North America. Let me be clear. And Tesla represent the majority of new charging station being deployed in North America. So Tesla firing its entire team

It's going to result in a great majority slowdown in the growth rate of fast charging stations in the U.S. and in North America. And that's bad for the mission to accelerate the advent of electric transport. It's the worst because now all the other brands are being brought on to connect to superchargers as well. Ford, Chevy, eventually Rivian, etc. Yeah, now it's not just Tesla vehicles that are dependent on those stations. It's all EVs.

Now, the only thing that would make sense, okay, and I'm not saying this is the case. I'm just giving, being the devil's advocate for a second. We know that Tesla has made some deals recently. Rebecca Tenucci announced it, that there was a new business model for Tesla to sell supercharger hardware to other companies and have them deploy them.

Now, if Tesla has some giant deals in the books to deploy, to build those charging hardware and sell them to them, and then they deploy them, and all these former Tesla charging employees go to other companies, these other companies, and help them deploy them, it could technically still result in a great deployment rate of fast charging stations.

However, that's huge speculation. We don't know that these deals exist and it would still result in at least a short-term slowdown in deployment because there would be some inefficiencies in these, you know, replacement of employees and other companies, deployment of new processes. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how complicated it is to deploy a charging station. You need to have

a contract with a lease with the property owner, you need to have the permit with the municipalities, you need to have the electric utility deploy the power because there's always needs for power upgrade at the site. This is super long, super complicated, requires deep relationship between the manager of the project, in this case Tesla, and the power utilities.

Then you need the contractors to deploy the project. So Tesla often works with outside contractors. So there's still some charging stations that were in the pipeline, that were in the contracting phase, that are going to get deployed no matter what. So I see people already saying, like, there was one station, I think, that came online today from Tesla. It's like, look, it's like business as usual. It's not going to be business as usual. We already reported on Tesla giving up on a bunch of leases in New York.

And if you remember, Seth, we just reported a few weeks ago, a few months ago, that Tesla was having a problem with the supercharger network in Europe, in New York City, because of a new incentive for ride share incentives.

Uber specifically to onboard people on their fleet with electric vehicles, big incentive for it. And like a bunch of those incentive went to Tesla vehicles, Uber drivers buying Tesla vehicles or Uber buying this. I'm not exactly sure we get the incentive, but anyway, it resulted in a lot of Uber driver now using Tesla vehicles.

in New York City. And we know that Uber drivers use primarily the supercharger network to reduce the charging time, especially if they don't have charging at home. So it resulted in the long waits at supercharger, especially in New York City, where Tesla is kind of limited in their supercharger location. They have superchargers that are located behind a paywall, behind access to a charging parking lot. And so obviously,

Ubers are not going to use that because they will eat their profit by doing that. So they go to specific supercharger station, the bigger ones outside of Manhattan. There's one in JFK and there's a bunch of them around. They use these ones because they're much cheaper. So Tesla was planning four big new stations. Three of them were over 20 stalls all around New York City. I think there was two in Queens, one in Bronx, and one in Brooklyn.

And those stations were to fix this idea. Tesla was even working with Uber to get the data from their drivers so that they know exactly where to put them. And Tesla identified those leases because of that Tesla's charging team, I should say. And Tesla has given up on those leases as they backed out of them since the announcement of the team being fired. So we know there's going to be a slowdown. It's inevitable. Now, again, this pie in the sky possible scenario that I just mentioned.

highlighted might be the only possible, like not too bad of an outcome, but it's still going to be bad in my opinion. Now, this brings me to this story here with Elon throwing his weight around. It's pretty clear to me that this is an example of it, but there was also other example. We reported on Anthony Thurston, the senior manager of the Cathode. We also Tim Woods or Tom Woods,

I don't know if I put them in the article because I got this same time. But basically half of the cathode production team has been fired. Now it's going to be Bonnie Eggleton that's going to take over the project because Thurston, Tom Wood and Drew Baglino were leading the project before that have all been let go or being forced to resign, however you want to look at it. And

And this is Elon basically just restructuring the entire team. And you have to speculate for the reason behind that, obviously. We don't know exactly. Elon is just – that's the thing that – it's okay to speculate, I should say, too, because a lot of people are like, why are you speculating? You don't know as much as Elon. I would sure hope that I don't know as much.

about Tesla as the CEO of the company. But Elon himself has given different reasons for those layoffs. At first, he gave the usual like inefficiency in hiring because of the increased quote rate of the headcount resulting in duplication of jobs and all of that. He gave this example, which we questioned in the first place because Tesla hasn't grown as fast as it used to.

But then at the earnings call, he said instead, he said Tesla needs a restructuring right now for the next phase of growth with AI and all that. Okay. You know, you give two different reasons for it. At some point, we can speculate on our own. And my speculation right now is that Elon is making sure that it's clear that

He's indispensable at Tesla. He's putting it right now as the shareholders are voting, like the vote started this week, actually, on his compact cage, which I understand some people have difficulties understanding.

using that vote for anything else in the actual comp package, using it as a confidence vote. But the truth is it's going to be inevitable. People are going to use it like that. And I think there's good reason for it because there's no way for shareholders to be hurt otherwise. It's not like we can go to the board and ask them anything. The board has made its position clear. It's backing Elon 100%. It's in Elon's pocket. They're all friends. They all have personal financial dealings. And the chairwoman was given a big, like,

shut your mouth package at the same time as Elon was giving his comp package. So there's no way to do it. Like shareholders have to use these votes to make themselves heard, unfortunately. And I think Elon sees this opportunities now in this restructuring and laying off Drew Baglino. Now I'm hearing Tom Zhu, I'm hearing from a valuable source, I haven't reported on it exactly yet because...

I don't know the reason behind it, but Tom Zhu is going back to China. I mean, he was there this week actually with Elon, but I don't know if he's staying there or he's going back to the US and then coming back to China. But for those who don't know, Tom Zhu has been like the number two at Tesla for the last year and a half or so. Very successful. Yeah. Yeah.

And the number two at Tesla, when the number one is like barely checking in, is pretty much the number one at Tesla. Yeah. I've been told by a lot of people at Tesla, the managers in Texas, that people saw Tom Zhu as like the de facto CEO for the last year as Elon has been very busy with Twitter. But

He was made in charge of North American cells. That was taken away from him last month. He was made in charge of all gigafactories. Now I'm being told that he's going back to China, to Shanghai. So I don't know exactly if it means like he's not going to get those gigafactory responsibilities or he's just going to work out of Shanghai or he needs to with things in shape in Shanghai, but he's not in Texas anymore and he's not...

He's not in the close circle, it sounds like. I still need a little bit more work to know exactly if he's demoted or anything like that. But actually, I cannot say that right away. I mean, Elon may be hiding him away because people are voting on whether or not he should get a compensation package.

Yeah. So at least in the meantime, it's very useful. I mean, I can bring this up here. If you go to corporate governance, I'm going to share this tab. If you go, this is on the corporate governance page at Tesla. You have the leadership here. In the leadership, you literally have Elon Musk.

Tom Zhu, who now is question mark next to him. You had Drew Baglino here last week. He's not there anymore. And you have Tanija Bigbab, who's the CFO, who was just promoted last year after Zach left. So Elon is purposefully keeping that leadership very, very small. Very small.

And it is problematic, I think. I think Tesla needs strong leadership, needs people to keep Elon in check, which should be the board. But if you go to the board here, friend of Elon, friend of Elon, friend of Elon, brother of Elon.

Robin Denholm was given a multi $100 million package at the same time as Elon got his. Caitlyn, we don't hear much about her. Joe Gibia, I think is friend of Elon too. That's the Airbnb guy. Then you have JV Straubel, long time CTO of Tesla, co-founder of Tesla. As far as we know, has a good relationship with Elon. I don't know how close he is. He did leave in 2019 and came back last year as a board member.

I don't know. I mean, I would love to see him take over. I cannot... I have to admit it. Yeah. He seems like just so much more level-headed, so much more easier to deal with. And to be honest, he seems like more mission-driven than Elon at this point. Because what Elon did this week, I think it's anti-mission. This firing of the supercharging team, I cannot reconcile it with the mission.

The only way I could do it is, again, like I said, if he knows that Tesla has a multi-billion dollar supercharger hardware deal closed and all these people, the supercharging team, are going to deploy them at other companies. I just don't think that's the case. Otherwise, the firing would not have happened in this way. I just don't see it. But anyway, so it is absolutely surprising, surprising.

in the worst way possible, this firing is going to result undeniably in at least significant slowdown in fast charging deployment in North America, probably major slowdown if worst case scenario.

And that's going to result in fewer EV sales globally because as Elon himself said, the biggest driver of Tesla sales, EV sales is supercharger deployment, service center deployment. Those are the biggest drivers. If people have a service center near them, store near them, and they have a supercharging station in between where they need to go and where they live, that's what makes their buying decision easier. And now we're going to have less of that.

And we're going to have more supercharger wait time, more issues. It's just, it seems like an unhinged move and in a long series of indication that led that way. Yeah. I mean, if, if somebody's insubordinate to you, like you shouldn't fire a bunch of people that had no decision, like they had no ability to, I mean, you know, if, if everything we hear is true, like,

Everybody under her who was probably doing a lot of the supercharger work was just, you know, it wasn't like a mass, you know, protest or something. It was her. And it was fast. It was fast. Also, we see in Serbian Nation, I mean, you use that word because the commentator used it. But all we heard from sources is that she fought back against the idea of firing a certain percentage of her team.

that's not necessarily insubordination. That's what you should do. I'm sure that Rebecca knew more about the charging team than Elon. She knew more about the needs of the charging team than Elon. And if Elon was asking for a certain goal from the charging team and she said, "If you want to achieve those goals, I need these people to work for me." And Elon was like, "No, you don't. Bye-bye."

uh it's uh it's not good and like if you follow the ilan at all and if you read the biographies on him you know that he's been known to have extremely harsh reaction to people not doing what he says and that's not good and in a company with a solid board and good governance this probably would have been avoided it's not in this case which you know leads me again to my issue and

I'm going to say it again. I think the sycophants are partly responsible for that because even in this, you know, among reasonable EV and Tesla fans, I think it's almost unanimous that we see this move as negative for the mission. I think pretty close to it at the very least. Amongst the sycophants, it actually did, you know,

put some questions in the mind of some singleton but some of the more hardcore one you know uh don't need to name them but they all defend in the move even without knowing all the details they all try to defend it and that's part of the case here if elon does this move and everyone unanimously

With a level head comes back and like, what are you doing, Elon? Like, are you, this is going to cripple supercharger deployment, especially in North America where Tesla is the only one deploying them in a high volume. What are you doing? Instead of that, all the sycophants did what they do every time when Elon does something weird is they defend him blindly. And that enables him to do these things.

I cannot be more clear about that. I wouldn't say that if it was like some, because the sycophants are not just, you know, homeless people in the street, like shouting, like weird thing that you try not to pay attention as you walk by them. Elon is addicted to X. He follows some of these sycophants. He's on the platform all the time. He sees these things. So he doesn't see me, for example, arguing against it because he muted me.

But he will see some of the sycophants that he follows or sees on the platform in his For You page defend him. And he was like, yeah, it was a good move. I did good. Good job, Elon. And this is problematic. So if you're one of those that blindly defended a move, even without understanding it completely, again, I am attacking. I'm criticizing that move because we have clear information that led to what happened, how it happened. And it doesn't look good.

So I think you should really take a step back if you're one of those people and reevaluate your impact on Tesla. Because those people who do that and they think my impact is positive on Tesla because I'm helping Elon, it's not necessarily the case.

It's not necessarily the case. I've even seen a message from someone this week that says like, everything you said, Fred, I agree with. My only reason why I'm not on board with this is that if we go against Elon, he will leave. And if he leaves, he will crumple the stock. I've seen that. I've seen people say that. So like they disagree with Elon, but they don't want to do it publicly because they

They don't want him to leave and they don't want the stock to be crippled, which is an assumption. By the way, I'm not convinced that the stock would crash. I mean, if it was organized and they put JB in and they had some plans, I think it could probably even go up a little bit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. If it's done well and GB takes over for sure. I just, yeah. I think because you spend any time on X and you think that the Tesla shareholder community is one way, but...

A lot of people who own Tesla stocks are not on X talking about it all the time. It's just there's a lot of smart money that's just like, you know, see how things plays out and wait. So you never know. You never know.

Now, the only thing that I started thinking about is when someone tells me that, I always ask them, are you going to sell if Elon leaves? Because that's how a stock crashes, is if everyone sells. And like, okay, Elon says he leaves Tesla. Are you selling? Now, Elon could sell, obviously.

He's never indicated that even in the litigation with the comp package. During the litigation, he said that when they talked about the package, he always said that it was independent on him leaving or not, staying or not. And after the fact, he said the same thing. So you want to believe Elon all the time, but not when he says, goes against your own argument to help him. It makes no sense.

Yeah, and he's still got a ton of stock. So him helping the company still makes him a lot richer. Yeah, yeah. What he's going to buy? He's going to sell all his stock and buy Lucid? All right, let's talk a little bit about our sponsor for this week's episode. It is Splitvolt and their Splitvolt Splitter Switch.

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All right, moving on. So Tesla has some bad news this week, but that's good news. Very good news for the company. Are we still on? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Okay, I got an alert. I was disconnected somehow. So Elon went to China and had a very fruitful visit there. He talked with the premier and came out with sort of a conditional approval

for supercharger for supercharger for full i've been talking too much about supercharger uh conditional approval for full self-driving package in china so this is a report here from bloomberg the u.s car maker was granted approval under certain condition according to a person with knowledge of the matter

we asked not to be in this identified because of detail or the criteria aren't clear this did manage to clear two of the most important order reaching a map and navigation deal with chinese tech giant beidou and meeting requirements for how how it handles data security and privacy issues so

The first one we don't know much about. I don't think they do announce anything. Tesla was already using Baidu maps in China, but now they would be like different maps specifically for self-driving, I guess.

The meeting requirements, all those data security and privacy issue, this is something that Tesla has been working on for the last two years. We reported before on that where they had a lot of issues with Chinese authorities based on the cameras, all the vehicle recording at all times and where the data is going, how it's being used. Some Chinese authority even banned Tesla vehicles in some regions and first temporary period of times when like official were visiting, for example, because it was a security risk for them.

Tesla did some investments in data centers in China to keep the, the, um,

to keep the data there and now the authorities have told them that they've cleared those issues and if they keep operating that way they won't have any issues with them so that combined with the maps it would result in tesla being conditionally approved for deploying the full self-driving package in in the the market so obviously good news for tesla china a huge market for them uh

There's already like $3 billion in unrecognized revenue for selling the full self-driving package and not delivering it either because they haven't actually achieved it, but also because some of the existing features in the package that Tesla has delivered are not authorized by regulators in many markets, especially in Europe and in Asia, including China. So Tesla is going to be able to deploy those features rather quickly with that approval.

And most likely also much increase in its take rate. And I think that the stock went up like 16% or something because of that most likely because Tesla is already a huge fleet in China and the take rate for FSD, I have to assume, is extremely low there. And now it's likely going to pick up if they know that it's coming. There's no point in buying it if you have no idea what's going on.

when or even if the regulator is going to approve it. But Elon is pretty close with the Communist Party in China and he's able to get things done rather quickly. You know, I think that's one of the things that his new fans on the right side of the political spectrum in the US don't talk about too much how close he is to China. The guy is pretty close to the Chinese Communist Party. He gets things done, quick visit and poof, ping-paf, conditional approval.

I'm sure there was some work laid before he got there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure. Tesla had the big Cybertruck software update this week.

It's the second one. There was one a few months ago, the first big one. And, you know, Cybertruck, new vehicle program for Tesla since November of last year. Like many new vehicle programs for Tesla, they put it to market, but then they don't necessarily have all their features enabled just yet, all the software enabled. So they release that over time. This time is very much focused on off-road. So Tesla is releasing two new off-road mode, overland mode, more consistent handling and

and better overall traction while driving on rock, gravel, deep snow or sand. And Baja mode, vehicle balance has improved and the vehicle handles more freely when stability assist is set to minimal. So you have a view of the new off-roading mode here and all the different, well, you have the general off-roading mode and Overland and Baja are now a specific one with different calibration of the handling systems. Then you have the surface stopping mode. You have a bunch of new features there.

Tesla is also bringing the locking differential to off-roading. So that's being a very much-has feature that's going to help the rough roaders a lot. So on uneven or slippery terrain, if your wheel has limited or no traction, Cybertruck can direct that torque to the opposite wheel. In off-road mode, it shows for locking differential option on the vehicle status area and off-road app. So for the Cybertruck tri-motor version, you also have front locking differential, so front and back locking. Okay.

You also have a trail assist on the off-road mode. It's like cruise control, but for off-roading, trail assist helps maintain a set of cruising speeds so you can focus on steering. Trail assist works as both a hill hazard and descent control thing to keep the vehicle from slipping. That's pretty cool.

so it's like heel assist but for for trail for off-roading um then there's some off-road on-road feature the first one is called slippery surface better traction control on snowy high sea wet or slick road to distribute traction evenly across all tires you can find that under dynamics in your cyber trucks settings

You also have adaptive suspension is now estimate payload more accurately and automatically adjust damping and deliver a more comfortable ride. So I actually remember that from Elon back in the days. I want to say like...

I want to say like 2015, 2014, when he first brought the idea of Tesla building a pickup truck, he said that he recently drove a F-150 on the highway and he was like feeling the rattle of it because the suspension wasn't tuned to the payload or the lack of payload, I think in this case.

So you wanted Tesla to have an adaptive suspension that adjusts the payload so you have a comfortable drive whether you're loading or not or however much you're loading. So this is cool that it delivers on that a decade later. Cyber tent mode is coming. So Tesla has been delivering the cyber tent for a few weeks now, but the cyber tent mode was not available. Now it is. Basically, all it does is allow you to...

automatically level the vehicle so they have a very flat surface to sleep on but also some things like the sentry mode you can access directly the sentry mode and the outlets you can turn them on and have access to the light I think there's lights in the bed that goes through the tent basically so it lights up the tent at night so you can adjust that when you need to if you want to go to sleep or something pretty cool stuff

Coming to the Cybertruck this week, especially if you are someone that's off-road with this $100,000, $120,000 vehicle. Have we seen any videos showing how much better it is?

I mean, Tesla did give one to the BBC Top Gear and they did a video on it. But there wasn't much more new info from it. I felt like I did already do a post on the CyberTent. They basically just put the CyberTent together. Which, I mean, it looks like the consensus on the CyberTent is like it's a great product, but probably not worth $3,000. Like it's...

You buy it if you really want to have a custom-made tent for your truck, but $3,000 is very expensive for that.

We also got confirmation this week that Tesla has another customer using the Tesla Semi. So Cisco, who's a giant food distributor in the U.S., was spotted using the Cybertruck with the U.S. Food Service. So this is pretty cool. We now know that three people outside of Tesla has used the Cybertruck since the production version started. So that's...

PepsiCo, of course, Martin Brauer, and now Cisco also. I think Cisco bought 50, well, reserved 50, I should say. Yeah, they reserved 50 trucks from Tesla back in 2017 when they first unveiled it. So it sounds like it's one of the customers that's stuck with Tesla despite all the delays in the Tesla semi-program.

all right moving on from tesla news we have a few more news item to discuss and then we're gonna jump into the comment section so if you guys have questions for us regarding anything that we discussed today or any other topic in the ev world that you want us to jump into which you guys you can put the comment comment section below and i'm going to get to it in just a few minutes

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All right, Rivian announced this week that they got a nice little incentive package of $827 million from Illinois, from the state, to expand the normal Illinois plant for the R2. So this is something that we learned when Rivian unveiled the R2. So originally, the plan was for the next generation vehicle from Rivian to be built at the new Georgia plant.

which has been kind of going, not moving super smoothly. And then when Avion actually revealed the R2, they said that they will first build it in normal instead to accelerate the market launch and to reduce the cost, the capex of deploying the new lines.

I think this probably was in the work at the same time that they made the decision of talking to the local authorities and they gave them a nice $87 million package that is mostly like tax cut over a long period of time. So it's not like

super costly to the state and it's going to result in a lot more jobs because obviously the R2 is going to be a way higher volume vehicle than the R1S and R1T, much cheaper. And then you have the R3 coming too that looks pretty sweet. Cadillac announced this week that they will bulk out of the plan to be an all-electric brand by 2030, just six years away.

That was previously announced as part of GM all-in on electric vehicle plans, but we were expecting it since GM has itself backed out of that in recent months. And they have indicated that they're probably going to sell more plug-in hybrids, more hybrids than going all electric. Though Cadillac was the first brand under the GM banner to do that, to go all electric.

And now they said that they might still offer a gas car for a number of years. That was the quote after the 20 to 30 milestone, as per Cadillac's global vice president, John Roth. Bummer. Lyric is pretty good. I mean, I haven't driven it yet, but everything I've seen, everything I've heard. Yeah, it's pretty solid. They rushed some of the stuff for the first round, but after doing some updates, it's a very solid car. Yeah, it looks good too.

You know, put some necks on it, have access to the supercharger and that, or it can be a great car. All right, this is pretty cool. Like China, you always have to keep an eye on these Chinese manufacturers because at one point they're going to just go right past us.

NIO announced this week that they started trial of 150 kilowatt hours, semi-solid state batteries, doing that in China. They were talking about a 360 watt hour per kilogram of energy density, which is, I think, at least 20% above Tesla's right now, something like that. Also, they're really pushing those battery swap station plans.

So the trial period is going through the whole of May and they're going to be able to... Oh, the public is going to be actually able to test it. So you're going to be able to take it from those battery swap stations. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, another advantage of battery swap stations we hadn't really thought of. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. And this is going to be able to, so that means that battery is going to be an actual, by June 1st, going to be an actual customer vehicle. So existing vehicle on the road today is going to have semi-substance state batteries within a month. It's pretty wild. 150 kilowatt hour in this form factor too is, are they saying anything about the range on that thing? Probably not.

i mean 150 kilowatts probably going to be over 400 i mean on wltp probably 500. even the epa is going to be close to uh probably close to elusive what's the what's the lucid battery pack on the that gets over 500 is incredibly uh efficient yeah that's what i'm saying it's more efficient than big energy density so 118 is lucid yeah that's a lot more you have 30 plus kilowatt hour more so yeah i'm thinking

Maybe not as efficient, but pretty close. It looks like a very efficient looking car. Yep. Looks kind of like a Tesla. Yep. All right. Let's jump into the comment section. All right. James Whittingham, I jumped on before the show, said, what if in RoboTaxi world that Tesla was dominating? I wouldn't go that far or even anywhere near that. I think he's a what if, like it's a hypothetical. Musk has a tantrum and shuts down the network for a day. I don't trust him.

I mean, I would be very surprised to see him go that far. But if we're talking, is there is reason to questions, is state of mind and, you know, is action at Tesla? Then yes, I think that's would be a more reasonable way to look at it.

All right. Alexander Kabash, as a customer or consumer who lives in the suburbs, I can't foresee how robo taxis will capture a large chunk of the market. Americans travel long distances and to many random locations.

He continues, "This would require an entire generational shift, so my guess is at least 15 to 20 years away." Do you understand his point? I don't understand the point that long distance travel would be a problem for- Yeah. I mean, robo taxis can go long distances even easier than short distances because it's mostly on the highway and that's the easiest. Yeah. I guess he's probably talking about the existing system, like Waymo, that are geofence in city area.

But I mean, at that time of the podcast, we're talking more about Tesla, though. And Tesla's idea is the long distance travel, obviously. All right. Steve Brand, looking forward to your take on the utter stupidity of must firing of the supercharger team. I liken it to if John D. Rockefeller had fired his gas station build out team just as a Model T had shipped. We did talk quite a bit about that stupidity. So, yeah.

It's not crazy. It's called insubordination. Okay, we have an Elon fan. Maybe it's even Elon. He made it clear what was necessary and she refused. That's exactly how you get fired. How about your team get fired? Yeah, the fact that he fired the team completely destroyed his argument. But also, you know, she...

Unless she did it very rudely, which I doubt. I don't know her personally, but I don't think she would talk to Elon in any rude fashion. She just probably tried to make an argument that if she fired the percentage he was asking for, which I would assume was over 20%,

she won't be able to achieve the goal that he set for the charging team. And I just want to be clear too, it's not just the supercharger network, it's the entire charging team. So the destination charging team too, it's everyone that was involved in deploying those in the work also to working with the suppliers, the vendors and all that to get the components for the charging station. So it's a very wide ranging team here.

All right, Carl in San Diego has got some stuff here. And Sported Nation does not explain or excuse firing the whole division. To prove your point, that's a good point we're talking about. Mentioned it before here, but we have zero proof Tesla isn't losing money badly on supercharging. People have looked and Tesla intentionally hides the numbers in a roll-up summary. I mean...

still like they clearly have plans for superchargers um if i have full self-driving and it's really better than a human i feel you should get a discount on insurance especially if you have tesla insurance what do you think well i think that's what elon's been talking about with uh the plan for it but uh so far obviously hasn't happened

All right, Wilbur needs some IT work there. In Spain, the sun-powered part of the EU, it's hard to find Tesla chargers. It found mostly slow chargers. Well, yeah, Tesla came a little bit late in Spain. You know, it wasn't one of the first countries to get a Tesla vehicle. And yeah, the deployment has been slower in Spain too. But I assume you're talking specifically about Tesla chargers. I'm sure there's plenty of charging stations from other, like IONIQ, for example, in Spain. I'm sure they have...

Plenty of station. Is it Ionic? Yeah, Ionic, I think. A good percentage of Tesla buyers bought them due to the availability of the charger network. This will be bad for future sales. Yeah, if there's like long lines and, you know, pileups and people complaining and fighting, that's not going to be good.

All right. Mark Webb says Elon no longer supports Tesla's mission. Accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy, destroying the supercharger division and the industry adoption of NACs clearly decelerates transition. I think that's going to be inevitable. Yes. All right. Concord is the ride share market worth going after. Uber only had its first profitable quarter and it's for 10 plus year existence. No one else does it without losing money.

I mean, Uber was heavily investing in its growth. And also the biggest cost for Uber is the drivers. Yeah. And Tesla at some point talked about launching a ride share service before self-driving to kind of get a sense of the market situation.

beforehand, like to get a leg start basically. But that hasn't been discussed in a while. And now it looks like Tesla is trying to time the release of that with the self-driving system, which again, I'm not, I've been a lot more optimistic about since V12. All right. Toyota execs are asking how many hybrids can we build next year? I think that might be related to the excuse Tesla gave for the lowering of numbers.

Yeah, I mean, I think it might be related to the announcement this week. I don't think I put the post in there because it wasn't that big of an announcement, but I wrote an article about it. So the U.S. Department of Treasury and the IRS did release the final rules for the tax credit in the U.S. now, and there wasn't much change. Basically, they did relax some of the timeline for the critical material issue.

requirements, specifically for graphite, for additive, for electrolyte salts and some of those things. Some of those things are more problematic than are primarily coming from China. So they basically gave some relief for those that are not ready for that transition until 2027. So now the final rules. So I think some people were expecting maybe a change of rule for hybrids because

some people do attribute the slowdown in BEVs that some automakers have agreed to, like GM that we just talked about, to that reason. So GM says they're going to produce more plug-in hybrids instead of going full BEVs. And the fact that the tax rate does enable you to do that, obviously, if you have requirements for battery materials,

And you have very limited production of those battery materials in North America and in countries allowed under the agreement. It makes sense to make smaller batteries and you still get the full tax credit. So, you know, plug-in hybrids are attractive if your only goal is to move to get access to the tax credit. And I think some automakers are seeing a way to be competitive with BEVs is just to get access to that credit. So they are taking that approach.

So some maybe hope that the tax credit wouldn't be in there. And Toyota is definitely one of them that are betting on hybrids rather than BEVs. So they're going to be able to still be successful on the U.S. market.

All right. Moving forward, Sylvain, having known about that stuff, I wouldn't have bought my Highland. Yeah, that's right. Sylvain just got a Model 3 Highland. Yeah. I mean, it's still a good car and you still have charging station in Quebec. Sylvain is based in Quebec.

yeah it is it is a bit demoralizing for if you i think a lot of people are also coming to the realization like this like they've been you know supporting tesla for a long time supporting elon for a long time like this is one of the move they're like oh uh all right maybe some of the people that have been criticizing elon or you know have a point everybody has their line like you know and he keeps crossing everybody's line yeah and uh

Yeah, when it cross yours, that's when I've seen it, especially for Marco, for example, that I just gave a shout out to. He was someone that was extremely pro-Tesla, pro-Elon, and he was extremely knowledgeable about the supercharger network. So he knows that this move doesn't make sense because he has this knowledge. So that flips him. So I'm more like a generalist on Tesla. I know a lot about everything about Tesla. So I had this indication for a long time starting to pop up.

Yep. As BYD took over, Elon may think his engineering failed and must go. I don't know. That really doesn't make sense. Question. Why do you think Tesla was still deploying V3 superchargers when it seemed they may have been technologically obsolete? I don't think the V3s are obsolete by any stretch.

They are the majority of fast charging, of successful fast charging station in North America. So V3 is great. Like, I don't know why people are so stuck to like the V4. Like, obviously, I would love to see more V4, but they can be like a bunch of different reasons for it. And V3 is great. All right, Colin Court, what happens when customers and employees realize that Elon doesn't care about the Tesla mission anymore? I guess we'll find out.

Yeah, I think this is one of the moves that so far I don't see how you can reconsolidate that with the Tesla mission. All right. Why didn't anyone push back when that bogus analyst predicted how much money the Tesla supercharger network would easily make with NAC's adoption? Charging is not profitable. Actually, they said the contrary. They said that now it's turning profitable for Tesla, at least not for other people. So, yeah, which makes it even weirder to do that move.

All right. And how will Tesla attract high quality employees in the future when the expectation is one of terrible work-life balance, low growth and high likelihood of being fired? Great point. Exactly. Mark has a great point there. So one of the worst thing about these firings right now, you know, a lot of people, when I said like, this is not being handled well, this is not going smoothly. They say, what are you talking about? Like plenty of big corporation does firings like that. I don't,

I don't see it like that. I'm sorry that happens once or twice, but the way that Elon did the charging team,

that's a unique case. That's very special, I think. And obviously, if you're someone now, Tesla is going to go back. Like right now, if you go to the career page, there's no jobs whatsoever there. But Tesla is going to start hiring again soon. And when they do, it's going to be a lot more difficult because a lot of people just don't want to work in an environment where, you know, I have a disagreement with the boss and not only I'm fired, the entire team that's been looking up to me is fired. Like, I don't know how she feels right now, Rebecca Tenucci. All right.

about that but I'm sure she doesn't feel great about how that went. She's going to be fine though. She's going to find another job. Actually, I bet there's a bunch of people giving her a call right now. Did you see the tweet that I posted? It was pretty funny. Which one? I can share it. It's a video actually so I'm going to share it on the screen. It's too funny not to share for the people. I posted it on Twitter too. Where is it? It's loading up.

I see a Homar's catalog DM right there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not responding. Look, so this is the Motor Trend Power List on the Yonto industry last year. And if you look at it, you see Elon Musk where he is in there. What do you think? He's number 50 on the 50th list. And then if you go down...

You have to go down, down, down, really down on it. Who do you find at number two? Rebecca Tenushi. So she had to go. She had to go. Maybe that's why. Yeah, she had to go. There's no way. Yeah, you can't have that.

All right. If Elon fires Tom Zhu, since he probably has an H1B1 visa holder, he needs to find a new job within 90 days. But if he is in China, then it doesn't matter, obviously. So he probably doesn't want to lose him. I don't know about logic, exactly. But I haven't said anything about him getting fired. Look how they treated interns. I don't remember any intern stories. I think they just slashed the intern program, but they're slashing everything right now.

uh china doesn't appear to have much of a consumer protection or product liability system they do have precedence of death penalty for corporate crime interesting all right uh bill simpson the chinese will take any opportunity they can to steal cutting-edge technology and foreigners can't do a thing about it it sounds a little jingoistic at best i can't heat the tent according to uh carl in san diego

No. I mean, you have the outlets right there, so you can put maybe small electric heaters and have it there. Brian Gardner, when are they going to ramp up the semis? Good question. I mean, they're building that facility right now, right? The high-volume production line is aimed for late 2025. So probably after that.

All right. Did Tesla switch to using their own semi for their transportation? I know anecdotally, but it seems like they aren't actually comprehensively convert their own truck system to delivering chargers, mega packs or cars. You have to charge high rates for long distance taxi ride to cover your empty ride home. Even without a driver, it breaks the economics. Yeah, but it's still a fraction. Right. If you have a car driving back by itself to a city like 100 miles away.

It's, and it's probably gonna, if you have an entire network of vehicles too, you can probably route in that even like, even if it has a certain, like maybe, maybe just get 50 miles of without a passenger instead of a hundred, like it's still super valuable. There's no doubt about it.

All right. I have a Cybertruck pre-order and watching the charging issues is scary. Yeah, a lot of people are going to think that stuff. Maybe they cancel, get a Rivian or something. Will Tesla be unable to meet their Nevi awarded DCFC installations with firing their supercharger team? That's a good question.

I'm sure that any NEVI station that were approved is going to get built. Maybe not on time, but it's going to get built. Yeah, I mean, those are basically free stations for Tesla. You don't leave that money on the table. All right. What charging companies are in the best position that could replace Tesla charging deployment? That's the thing. There really isn't any. Like Electrify America or EVgo, Shell, I don't know.

Rivian. Yeah. The plug-in hybrid shift by old-timer gasoline-burning car companies is only for them to import their Chinese-made products, Lincoln, Nautilus, Buick, and Vision so far? Well, no. Plug-in or not plug-in. Plug-in or BEVs needs to be assembled in North America. Unless you mean the product designs and whatnot, but that's not that big of a deal. All right, Fred, you said you recently...

You said recently that you went from a 10% chance to a 30% chance that self-driving will accelerate and become fully functional. Are you still at 30%? Did I say that? I didn't give a percentage on it. I don't remember doing that. Maybe like we were saying stuff last week. Yeah. I'm 100% sure that self-driving is going to be achieved at some point. Achieve on the current hardware is the bigger question.

Right now, I would say I'm about like probably 50-50 achievable on hardware 3. Maybe 60-40 achievable on hardware 4. Probably 100% hardware 5 for Tesla. Yep. All right. After supercharging incident, should there be any concerns about the Tesla Semi program since they want to do mass production in the near future?

I don't see it as being a problem. Most of the charging infrastructure that's going to be deployed for the Tesla Summit is going to be deployed at customers' distribution centers. Then the network for longer distance travel is not going

It can be deployed later. Like you can just deploy charging station at distribution center for customers of Tesla Semi and already you're going to slash a big part of the emissions of the truck industry. Then for the long distance travel, you do need to deploy a charging network. But that can, you know, if...

Tesla cannot build enough electric trucks for just those distribution centers for years and years and years before they move to long distance. And I think they're going to do that. I think they're going to focus on the smaller battery pack and all that just because it makes sense in terms of volumes. All right. So it says we know people in the charging networks and the Tesla network, and it is very profitable. I mean, it makes sense. Once you build it, it's just like an ATM. Yeah.

All right. What's going on here? A lot of Twitter stuff. 4GM and Ram have a huge head start. Let's see. Rumi is very upset at you for picking on Elon all day. Well, first of all, I see a lot of people comment that, especially on Twitter. And it's like, you understand that my beat is Tesla. Like my job all day, every day is to report on Tesla. We do have other writers at Electric that covers other writers. And I do cover other companies time to time. But by...

Far, my beat is Tesla. So, of course, I focus on it. And Elon happens to be CEO of Tesla. And he happens... I don't know about shit on Elon. I don't shit on him. I criticize him. And he's a big boy. You can take it from him. You don't need to defend him. Yeah, he has very thick skin. Maybe the Ionity Manufacturer Charging Network could take over the superchargers.

I mean, I think it sounds like Tesla is realizing they screwed up in a big way and they're trying to scramble, especially from the email. Yeah. Should we read that email? I haven't read it. So we just received an email that Tesla sent out to whom? Tesla.

To suppliers. To all concerns, you may be aware that there has been a recent adjustment with the supercharged organization, which is presently undergoing a sudden and thorough restructuring. Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. Sure. Very politically correct way to say it. If you have already received this email, please disregard us.

Okay. As if we're attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. So that right there, that right there means chaos. It means there's chaos. Like, oh, you might have already received this email from somebody else in the organization right now because we don't know what we're doing. Okay. As part of this process, we're in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects, and streamlining our payment procedures. Okay.

Due to transitional natures of this phase, we are asking for your patience and with our response time, chaos, chaos, chaos. I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid. However, I want to express my sincere appreciation for understanding and support

as we navigate through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction project and planned pre-production walks. Oh my God. If you didn't think that you're going to have a slowdown, right there you have it. If currently working on an active supercharging construction site, please continue. Contact email redacted for further questions, comments, and concern. Additionally, hold on working on any new material orders. Contact for further questions. Elon Musk.

Should be the one getting those. I hope that the email redacted there is Elon's personal email. And that is the one having to deal with all this logistic nightmare that is going on right now because it is extremely difficult. All right. NHTSA, the auto shop rules say new cars have to see cars stooped in road in day or night. Isn't Tesla's lack of radar a problem for them?

i don't think that you need it i agree with elon on uh on vision only the the road system are built for vision and neural nets like humans have highs and brain so i agree on that you can do everything on that i don't i don't know that the current hardware inside the vehicle the computer computing power is powerful enough to run uh like right now this has an issue like they have to have a software like efficient enough to run on it that can also drive

We don't know that yet. We don't know if that can be achievable. Tesla doesn't know that. All right. Last couple here. No, Tesla overbuilt their installations. No one should say charging is very profitable without them showing financial proof. I'm sure that some charging is profitable. I wouldn't be surprised that Tesla's charging as a whole is profitable. And Tesla's service and other recently does point that way.

All right. Last one, Elon said he needs 10 billion for FSD. So I think many of the recent actions are to save money needed to come up with the 10 billion. Tesla has $27 billion in its pockets right now. And they already spent a lot of that. They already have a lot of that money spent, the 10 billion. They invested over 3 billion, I think, in the last two quarters on hardware. So they're already getting close to that. They don't need... And

Fire 90% of the charging team. Even if the cost cutting is like the priority, why fire the whole team? It makes no sense. You wouldn't have to send out that email if you have fired 50% of the team. Even 60% of the team probably could have still indulged like the existing projects and everything like that. It makes no sense. It makes no sense.

All right. We're going to hand in on that because we've been over an hour long. If you're still with us, I appreciate you. You're a real one. I hope you have a great weekend. If you do enjoy the show, please give us a like and subscribe. You can also give us a review on your podcast app. That's also super helpful. And have a safe weekend. We're going to see you same place, same time next week. Bye-bye.