New Tesla Model S/X, Robotaxi is sort of coming, Xiaomi breaks EV Nurburgring record, more
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All right, in today's episode of Electric Podcast, we're going to discuss the brand new launch of the new Model S and next, we're going to talk a little bit about Tesla's full self-driving effort, the relationship between Musk and Trump and how it could affect Tesla as it evolves, and it evolved quite a bit in the last two weeks.

We have Xiaomi's SU7 Ultra that snagged a new record at the Nürburgring. Really impressive. A different EV record for the Porsche Cayenne that's not even launched yet. That's already breaking records. And then we have a bunch of new 2026 prices.

for automakers including the rivian r1s the kia ev9 and a few more so let's jump right in with the launch of the new model s and next up and uh i mean i'm still in asia right now by the way so a little bit confused with the time i think i think i wrote this article yesterday but for you yeah it should be yesterday for both of us actually for this one because it happened in the middle of night um

Yeah, this is basically like a mid-cycle update for Tesla. I know that Tesla doesn't follow the more traditional...

approach to vehicle updates, forget the model years and everything like that. But for the most part, if you look at the timing of everything of the bigger updates, Tesla has done more major refresh and then does a mid cycle update. And I think that would if you account for the 2021 refresh, we're in 2025 now. So this is kind of a mid cycle refresh.

and it's not a very impressive one if uh we're gonna be fair here for for context small s and x cells have not been doing well they've been they've been crashing in fact uh Tesla has a capacity to produce a hundred thousand more s and x combined per year and it's currently selling them at a rate of around 36 000 units a year so it's operating at less than

half of its capacity and that's because of the demand the demand is just not there there's a lot more competition now in the ev space especially at the top end from rivian that we just talked about from lucid from the germans now with mercedes and bmw having you know very close mobile s competitors now there's a lot of options now and tesla is just not bleeding edge anymore and i think this is the

Best example, because while you have automakers like really pushing things, Tesla had a mid-cycle update that, no joke, basically amended to new wheels, including one that maybe boosts the range a little bit while another one actually reduces the range. And I'm just talking about the wheels here. And added an RGB light strip to the interior and added like a front-facing bumper camera.

to potentially had some capacity to the several ADS system that they have. That's literally it. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not much. Even in Tesla's list of update, the first one they put is a new color. So they have the frost blue paint color, which is this one here, Seth. I don't know what you think of that one. I like it. Yeah. It is new, at least. You don't see that often.

Yeah, I mean, Tesla could really just add 10 more colors. It would be really nice. Oh, yeah. I didn't look if they actually removed one to add that one. I don't think they did. So that's actually a good point, the added one. But in terms of the design, the wheels are the biggest thing here. So they have a bunch of new wheels designed, including this one. Yeah, this one is the new – it's called –

It's not Velor. I know I didn't put the name of the 19 inch ones. These are the 19 inch ones. These are the 21 inch. Okay. So these are the new 19 inch wheels from Tesla, and they are the one that reportedly improve aerodynamic performance, resulting in now a 410 mile range on the long range model S, which becomes the new longest range Tesla. And that's five more miles of range than the previous version.

But again, it doesn't sound like there's any powertrain changes. It's the same powertrain, same motors, same battery, the five more miles or because of the new design 19 inch wheels, which are covered area as you see.

And we see that because if you upgrade them to the 21-inch wheels, so there's the new Velarium wheels here, the range goes from 410 to 380, a big 30 miles difference. And I looked up what it was before on the previous version of 21-inch on the Model S, long range again, and it was 382. So you actually lose a little bit of range compared to the previous version of this one.

The wheels do make a big difference. And then the Mol-X also getting a little bit of new wheels, different design, the Peri-LX for the 20 inch and the Machina wheels for the 22 inches. Machina wheels looks pretty bad ass. They look bad ass, but I can't imagine those are very efficient at all. Yeah, the range hasn't changed much for the Mol-X actually. Bald Eagle actually got a little bit heavier too.

with the decent update. Usually they get lighter. What do you think that's due to? I think normally with a mid-cycle update, you're four years into a model, you're going to change also the

The battery cells maybe improve the chemistry a little bit, a little bit higher energy density. And that will help control the weight, even if you add features. Because normally in mid-cycle, you want to add features, which the Stella did here, but not a ton of them. So I think that adds to the weight a little bit and no counterbalance with any efficiency improvement. There was more space and cargo area in the Model X. I wonder if it's actually a bigger vehicle now.

Yeah, they didn't explain how they achieved that. They didn't release any volumetric metrics to compare them, but they did say a little bit more third row space, a little bit more cargo space. They also said improved cabin noises, but we also don't have any metrics on that. So this is probably like the biggest one. It's the front bumper camera added to the ABS system now.

And yeah, the other big change to the interior, RGB lights running around the vehicle.

And it literally feels like Tesla felt bad about that because this is a feature that was added to the Model 3 refresh a year ago, Model Y refresh a few months ago, which is the entry-level lineup for Tesla. So you're just adding that now to the flagship vehicles. So Tesla wanted to add one other thing to the added for the Model S and X. Now you have a

like an entry animation with those lights that looks a little bit like this. So you have the lights that welcome you and a little Tesla logo that appears and that sort of continues the line on the dash when it opens up. It's just when it opens up because you have to use the screen for that. And obviously you use the screen for other things when you're actually driving the car.

Bushings and updated suspension design. Again, no details on that, but Tesla says that it improved the suspension, so maybe that's also where the weight comes from. Updated adaptive driving beams, just like the Model 3 and Model Y also got recently. In terms of the actual design changes on the exterior, there's not much other than the plaid. The plaid does get a few updates.

hardly noticeable unless you're very familiar with MLS Plaid. But the biggest thing really is the front logo. As you can see, it now looks more like a hole in the middle because you don't see the logo as much because it's matte black now. It was chrome before. I don't hate that change. It's kind of a cool little change, but obviously very minimal. The Plaid here has a new rear diffuser.

Not a giant change, but a little bit. And like you said, yeah, more space for a third occupant in the Model X, but they didn't release any pictures of that, so I couldn't tell. Really, the biggest change out of this whole thing is the price. With all that, the price increased by $5,000 across the board for the long-range version of the Model S, NX, and the Plaid version of both.

So now a Model S starts at $85,000, $100,000 if you want to plan, and the Model X starts at $90,000, $105,000 if you want to plan. Yeah, I don't know what to say much about that, honestly said. I think this is an example of Tesla kind of losing its edge in terms of innovation compared to the rest of the industry, I think.

You know, when Lars Morovi, the head of VP of engineering vehicles at Tesla, announced that there's going to be a refresh and update to the Model S and X earlier this year, he said that this is going to show it some love.

And we assume that, you know, try to revive a little bit the vehicle programs as, like I said earlier, that the sales are not doing well at all. But this doesn't look like love, much like just a tiny little update and the price coming with a price increase too. So to me, it feels like they're just trying to grab a buck from, you know, there's a big core group of Tesla owners that always upgrade to the latest vehicles.

Yeah, especially for the top of the line vehicles like the Plaid and Model S and X. So I think they want to get like, they're going to get some money on that because I think the Model S and X, you know, this has been making them for a while. Obviously, economies of scale are not quite there anymore. Like they've reduced a little bit, but the production line have been optimized quite a bit over the, I mean, the Model S is more than 12 years old now. It's going to be 13 years old. So yeah.

it's um a 5 000 bucks increase there it's like pure margin for them so they're gonna i think they're just trying to make a buck here and yeah leave the program to die slowly yeah it feels like they um got a third party and said hey you know put a new diffuser on it you know change the interior a little bit this is like something that you could get you know like a like a

What's Ben's company called? Unplugged Performance. Yeah, Unplugged Performance could do something like this. Yeah, you can do it yourself at home just with third-party parts, basically. You're right. It's not the Tesla. Tesla used to do more to the Model S with a software update just a few years ago. They used to upgrade the performance. What's interesting is the Model S was so far ahead of its time that...

Even with all these, you know, very minimal updates, it's still a viable vehicle. Like it's still quite fast, obviously very fast. You know, it's still a viable vehicle. It's just basically the same vehicle that was around, you know, five, 10 years ago.

Yeah, it's still competitive, you're right. It's just like if you want more range, you have other options. You have the Lucid. If you want more luxury inside or seat option and everything, you have the BMWs that are also really nice, the Mercedes too. So at that price, it's a $90,000 car basically now. You have so many options, it's a lot harder to compete. Yeah.

All right, the launch of the Rebel Taxi program was supposed to be this week. There was a lot of reports about that. Bloomberg said Tesla was aiming for June 12th. Tesla at one point tweeted that it was going to be June 1st, too. So it's obviously getting delayed. But now Elon this week said they are aiming tentatively for the 22nd of June. But I wouldn't necessarily...

bet on that because it does tend to slip and there's also been some rumors that it's not quite what Elon first talked about like for the first time one of the vehicle was spotted

um completely driverless so elon said that since may the end of may that tesla has been repeatedly testing vehicle without any safety driver in austin and only like three weeks later we spot like these vehicles keep getting photographed all the time that that's the driving around uh austin for for testing and now we only spot one vehicle

testing without a driver three weeks later and since then since it's been potted and everyone's been looking for them they've been only spotted once again and it was the same car and it seems to be like another car at night so tesla is like testing two cars without driver one and during the day one at night i like i said waymo tested for six months

with a driver, safety driver, with a bunch of, with a fleet of cars and then six months without safety drivers, the whole fleet of car in Austin. And at that point, Waymo was already doing commercial self-driving ride ailing rides in other cities before that. So it's, I don't have a lot of hope that the server is going to actually launch this month. And if you look at the requirements for that too,

in for the city of Austin and for the state of Texas they just this week they were added to the testing pool and you need to go from testing to deployment and again with Wavo that took over six months and Tesla just was added today as an official testing phase so before that they were probably doing the same thing they've been doing in California which is like actually testing

with safety drivers and not saying that it's self-driving, just saying that it's level two and pushing the limits, which is Tesla's favorite thing. So, yeah, I don't have that much hope for that. But what I want to get to now is actually we've focused a lot on, we've been telling you for a while that Robotaxi launch in Austin is most, its main goal is to distract from the fact that Tesla is still not delivering on its promise of making

all its vehicles for self-driving since 2016, produced since 2016. And that's the big issue here. Because Elon is still saying that millions of cars next year are going to be self-driving on the road, and that would require the fleet, the customer fleet. So I want to look more at

like put my pink goggles on and look at it like what's the best case scenario that happens here because it is a distraction it is moving in the goalpost but the excuse from you know the fan base here is that

this program would actually result in improvement in the consumer version of FSD the one that's in the cars because it's true that it is the same hardware Tesla is using a model Y with hardware for just like you can buy right now it's just like it's not the same software it's using it's only operating in a geofence location that this has mapped out pretty aggressively

And it's also being supported by teleoperation, which obviously cannot scale to a fleet because you cannot have teleoperator for millions of vehicles, consumer vehicles. It just doesn't make sense. But this week, Elon gave us some data point on this. He said that there's going to be a 5X. So this custom software that Tesla is developing for the robot taxi in Austin is going to merge with

at first he said soon and then he said uh it has a 4 4x improvement forex increase in parameters uh then right away he said 4.5 x after that which doesn't sound like much was actually a pretty big difference between 4.5 and 4x and um he said that that will happen more later this year probably the end of the year

So it's not like I don't know if that's his idea of soon, but he said several comments that different comments about merging the new software developed in Austin with the consumer fleet soon, probably later this year for X parameter or 4.5 X parameter increase.

people got pretty excited because nothing has really happened with full self-driving in consumer vehicles this year since V13 has been released. There's been a few point updates, but if you look at the actual performance of it, the point updates didn't do much. In fact, it kind of actually reduced capacity because if you look at up to V13.2.8,

There was only 5,000 miles of data, but again, this is the best available data and actually data that was approved by Elon Musk. So cannot complain too much here. Tesla was achieving 467 miles between this engagement. And now if you look at just the 13.2.9, which is basically the only, the most significant update that Tesla has done this year since launching V13 in December of last year. And the

uh i'm sorry you have 25 000 miles though on the previous one it's a new one uh 13.2.9 that you have uh just over 45 000 miles and it's at 371 miles between this engagement so it's actually a big regression but again less data though most people that use it uh regularly have also agreed that there was kind of a setback in and that has been the case with fsd for a while it's like two step forward one step back kind of a situation

So that's just to reinforce my point that the FSD in the consumer cars, and that's if you have hardware 4 too, because by the way, hardware 3 is even further behind. It's not improving this year. So what can we expect for a 4.5 or 4X improvement in parameters? It's not the first time we've heard that. 12.5 was supposed to bring a 5X improvement in parameters. That was last year.

And kind of a similar situation. People got really excited. You increase the parameters of what the car can do on FSD by 5x, now 4x. We're going to see a big jump. And to be fair, we saw a decent jump with...

V13 from V12.5, we saw almost a 2x improvement in miles between disengagement. Elon said there was going to be 5 or 6x. Didn't happen, but still pretty good. Can we expect something like that? Or can we expect a 5x improvement like initially expected?

discuss. I don't think so. If you look at the last time he said there's going to be a 5x parameters because that was 12.5 and compared to 12.3, it went up from 224 miles between this engagement to 273. That was a 5x improvement in parameters.

that was increased and again that was also very short-lived because other point released after 12.5 we have 35 000 miles of data on this is pretty good it actually regressed to 184 miles of range but there was a lot of updates in that a lot of point updates after 12.5 that were pretty bad and i do remember that on my on my own car because back then

hardware 3 was still you know around the same capacity of hardware 4. it was supposed to stay ahead of hardware 4 as tesla focused on that but they gave up on that last year and just admitted in january that hardware 3 is not going to support unsupervised self-driving so yeah that's where we are right now so we are waiting for tesla to merge the uh the new software that they developed for austin but

I mean, if you can tell from my tone right now, I'm not really optimistic about the entire situation because of historical data like I just presented. It hasn't really contributed to meaningful improvement. And I think specifically in this case,

The focus is on Austin. Why it's not improving is because they're training specifically for Austin. So I do think that with that software update, if you bring your car in Austin, it's going to perform probably pretty well.

probably the same level of the this is robot taxi they're going to be operating there though those are going to be probably safer because of the operation I just I just don't know like said so this week I I posted another article I didn't put it in there because because I was getting a little bit redundant when this one but um Tesla so Tesla was supposed to launch a service this week

and supported by teleoperation for safety, which Elon said was really important. And then Tesla had a presentation with an investor where they admitted that there's going to be plenty of teleoperation for safety. And a day before the service was supposed to launch on the 12th, and Elon pushed it to the 22nd, Tesla posted a new job listing for engineers to work on a teleoperation system that reduced latency. Because obviously, if you have remote controls of the car,

latency is a real problem because it's a safety issue problem. So like the day of they post a new job listing that that's still that points to this is still building the system to actually make the operational work. Yeah. I mean, well, it's interesting because I could see Elon saying, look, we got to get this thing out there. We're going to hire a data center full of people to like basically have their own car or two. And

It's almost like having like a mechanical Turk, you know, like you just have humans driving cars because, you know, Waymos have, you know, if something goes wrong with the Waymo, it calls up a human being and the human being does whatever. But can you imagine like a call center full of drivers like driving Teslas around Austin? I mean, that's what it's going to look like.

I mean, you remember a few months ago we were talking about, I always miss up his name, John Krasvick, I think the godfather of Google self-driving effort, the Waymo CEO until 2021. When commenting on Tesla's effort, he said, there's a lot of ways you can fake a self-driving car and talking about Tesla. So he expected Tesla to fake it.

And it's not completely unprecedented because there was recently one of those like a big AI startup worth over a billion dollars, like a whole unicorn that was figured out to be using like it was a coding AI. So, you know, you put a prompt and they will code it for you. And they were using AI.

coders in India to supply the code and they raised like a ton of money on that. So it's basically with the safety. If you can get the latency down, you can get a whole data center full of folks in India driving Tesla cars around. Yeah. But if you have even like I don't think it's going to be as bad as like India, because obviously the latency problem would be significant. But even if you're as close as you get and you optimize everything for the latency,

Yeah, you're still going to get like it's still not going to be perfect. And I think that's why right now. So the first car that was spotted, the first robot taxi with actually no one in the driver's seat that was spotted this week, there was a training car right next behind. And I believe that the reason for that is because there is a remote control system, especially like a kill switch that you can just smash a button and it's going to stop the car.

and it's right behind it and like it was staying as close as it could to the car so i assume that that's what they're doing right now and if that's where they are right now god it's and they're launching this month it's it is scary stuff folks

I know Tesla is up today on the news that it's released some new information, some new guidelines to fast track the launch of self-driving vehicle and that boosted Tesla. But I literally just woke up and saw that, so I don't have time to look into it. But it sounds like it's mostly for like actual driverless vehicle without pedals and steering wheel, which...

had a new layer of approval for NHTSA because, you know, for the last 100 years or so, all vehicles had pedals and a steering wheel. So to approve them and being safe on the road, they need a new system to do that. And they fast track that. But that's like CyberCat, basically. And again, I don't think that regulatory approval is the limiting factor for CyberCat. I think FSD working is the limiting factor.

all right one more tesla articles and then we jump into xiaomi porsche rivian and much more if you guys have questions for us you can put them in the comment section below and we'll get to them in just a few minutes as we get to these news item uh and if you do enjoy the electric podcast please give us a like a thumbs up subscribe all these things are free to do and they do help the show more than you think

All right. So Elon completely backed off from his attacks on Trump this week. The little breakup is over, apparently. He said that he regrets some of the things that he posted about Trump last week. He didn't specify which one. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah. The one where he called him a pedo. I don't know if that was part of them. But yeah.

But yeah, Elon, Elon like started sending a little arts emoji to Trump. I think Elon got scared pretty fast. He realized that if Trump's wanted to, he could, he could crush Tesla, he could crush SpaceX. He could, could destroy his entire, his entire business if he wanted to. And, um, I mean, the CIA has taken out countries, so you really don't want to mess with the U S president.

No, not right now. But what was really interesting is like, so we talked about it last week when the breakup started that, you know, all of it was around the bill and people are not sure like what is the real reason behind it and everything because

Elon made it about the bill, made it about the increase in deficit, which is his main concern. And then Trump and the GOP went the other way around and they said, no, no, Elon is actually upset about what's the cuts for Tesla in the bill, which, you know, the removal of the tax credit for electric vehicles, the removal of the credits for producing batteries and so

the ITC for solar and batteries, a 30% tax credit that helps Tesla a ton with its energy division. So all these things are going to badly affect Tesla. And I think once they are all removed next year, I think this is going to start losing money later on.

So I think it would actually make sense that Elon would be mad about that. The only problem is that Elon actually knew this for a while and Trump campaigned on this. So it's not new information for him. So unless he...

He thought that he would change Trump's mind on all of this, but it didn't even look like he was trying to change his mind on this. In fact, Elon is on the record publicly saying that he's okay with removing all of those incentives. He did say he did have a little caveat that you should also remove all the incentive of fossil fuel industry. But I kind of and that's obviously not happening.

And I kind of don't think that Elon was dumb enough to think that that's what's going to happen. I don't know if he thought, like, I'll give him $300 million and then I will get the things that I want. We'll kick out all the immigrants and we'll try to get the deficit under control and we'll kill the woke mind virus and all that. And then Trump's going to do a 180 and stop being a shield for the fossil fuel industry. Like, yeah.

I don't see that happening at all. And I don't think that Elon saw it happening like that. So I don't know exactly. It might really just be about the deficit. It might be about something else. I don't know.

But now the biggest example to see that Elon just doesn't care about Tesla that way anymore. I shouldn't say he doesn't care about Tesla that way because he cares about autonomous vehicles. He cares about the stock price and the stock price is all about autonomous vehicles right now. And he admitted it. But he doesn't actually care about the original mission and our mission at Electrek here to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles because...

All these parts that I just listed are more about EVs than about autonomous vehicles, obviously. And as he was making up with Trump now and going back on the bandwagon and literally sending him little heart emojis. That's not a joke. That's literally what he was doing this week. Trump signed three new laws.

resolution passed by Congress this week that reversed California's emission rules. Well, it reversed the right to set their own emission rules. And this is going to be contested in court. California has already announced it before he actually signed it. He signed it yesterday, Thursday.

And now there's just a lot of confusion now. So like the automotive industry just doesn't know like, all right, do we have a system now for credit? Do we participate in it as the court process is ongoing? It's not clear. But I just want to make it clear, though, that for Tesla, this was a big deal. Like this Tesla would have died without this program.

completely over several times over the last decade it's it's been financing Tesla at a great tune at one point in like in 2023 Tesla could have like survived without it honestly it started starting so much money that it didn't it was this was making more money than what it was making from uh just the incentive programs now it's not the case in Q1 Tesla

the earnings were smaller than its revenue from selling zev credit and selling other uh emission credits and and these these are going to slash the emission credit quite a bit from my understanding and like this is pretty complicated stuff but these changes this revolution don't change anything to the programs until 2028 so it basically

Remove so there's several waivers that California and now all it's not just California anymore. Now, obviously, it's all the carb states that have adopted California's rules. So that removes the right not only to California to put its own rules, but to let other states adopt its more stricter emissions and.

The original waiver is not being attacked here. It's the one that permitted California and Carb State to operate with those rules starting in 2028. But 2028, the requirements were even going up and that would mean more ZEV credit, more oil credits, and that's not happening anymore. So it is going to affect the entire ZEV credit market and emission credits in general.

And Tesla was making billions from that every year. And now it won't anymore. So like I said, with that, with the tax credit going away on the EVs, with the U.S. market slowing down and the U.S. market being Tesla's main profitable market right now, I think this is literally going to start losing money next year. Not good. Yeah.

hi xiaomi xiaomi and i'm excited everyone so i was supposed to go back to montreal today leave to montreal today but i'm staying in seoul for a few more days just chilling waiting to be able to enter china next week on wednesday i think because xiaomi just invited me

to go check out the upcoming yu7 we're going to talk about the su7 now but the yu7 is the same version but the uh smaller suv mid-size suv and it's supposed to be you know very impactful vehicle that's gonna be produced in extremely high volume and most likely also gonna launch xiaomi outside of

China. But probably that's why they are inviting some international journalists to not just Chinese journalists, because otherwise it makes no sense. But yeah,

yeah xiaomi is gearing up to to expand beyond China and you see it in their marketing now and the way that they are approaching their their vehicle programs because the su7 ultra which is you know this is an actual consumer vehicle that thing and we've talked about how we have a reservation about uh putting 1500 horsepower in the hands of people which is like

with seventy thousand dollars you can buy 1500 horsepower right now which is just kidding it is a little bit scary uh but uh they took that car to the nerve ring the famous the legendary track in uh

in Germany and they just beat the record for so the scooter called it mass-produced EV I don't like these records like they're they can get a little bit complicated sometimes like what's a production car what's not a production car but you know let's put it in simple term here it beat the Molle's plans record which was beaded by the Porsche Taycan record which was beaten by the Rimac Nivera million dollar electric car record

So it beat all of those with a $70,000 car. It is super impressive. It actually is the fastest time of seven minutes, four seconds, basically five seconds. They just went under the five seconds and the previous one was 5.298. So now they have 4.957. So, you know, they beat it by less than a second, but still beat them up, beat them. So surely, yeah,

really impressive and apparently this is like a stock car like this is exactly like the production version of the uh Xiaomi su7 Ultra which again is crazy like 15 uh 1500 horsepower really impressive stuff you mentioned the remak Navara like it's got to be hard to sell that car for a million dollars when there's a 70 000 car with better specs yeah it's I mean and not just better specs like uh

You know, with EVs, people always talk about the zero to 60 because you have so much torque in an EV. It's it's I don't want to say easy, like it's still like competitive to to to make it a fast zero to 60 and a fast, you know, quarter mile.

But we've been doing that for a while now. And, you know, the thing with performance vehicles and performance vehicle fans and fossil fuels, performance vehicle fans, the caveat was always, okay, but you need repeatability. You need handling also. You need to be able to have like fast track times.

And the Nurburgring is a huge track, like a seven minute lap here. It's not a small track. So for an edge vehicles to be competitive there, it's a little bit harder. So you need to have good handling and you need to have repeatability in your power to get all this different straight and so forth.

So EVs are capable of doing that now. And so it's not, it's not just about being fast in a straight line. It's also being just fast period and vehicles are achieving that. And the fact that Xiaomi is able to do it with $70,000 cars makes no sense to me. I'm really curious about next week, like, uh, um,

And I'm going to spend a few days in China before that too. So I'm going to be able to check Xpeng, I think, just in, again, it's 5.30 a.m. for me. So I just woke up and haven't time to look at all my emails yet. But I think Xpeng just invited me to check out some of their cars too. So I'll check some of the EVs. Are you ever coming back? I'm going to stay there. Too many EV goodies for me. I don't know. That's what I'm curious about. I'm actually going to, am I going to love these EVs or not? Like I'm going to,

we talked about like oh yeah with the pricing and everything like it's like oh 90 of the car for 70 of the price 50 percent of the price or something like that but like is that 10 20 difference is it does it make a big difference and so I'm really looking forward to to investigate all of that next week starting next week for the next two weeks

and obviously the xiaomi what they are bringing me for the ui7 which is basically a model y competitor and mobile y is the best selling car in the world it's the best selling form factor in the world so it's going to be interesting if they do nail that

Then they have killer products on their hand, take over the Chinese market. And Xiaomi, I think I'm going to talk to them in more details next week. But my understanding is that they want to expand starting in Europe 2027. So it's still a while. They're taking things slow, but not in China. In China, they're moving fast.

So Xiaomi bids the record in Nürburgring. And then Porsche comes in with the Cayenne before the launch because that thing hasn't launched yet. I think it's coming later this year, at the end of the year. Cayenne is the bigger SUV. So the Macan just launched as the EV version. Now you have the Macan coming. And it just took the record from a 12-cylinder Bentley Bantayaga. Bantayga? I don't know how you pronounce that. Bantayga?

At an ill climb, a popular incline in the UK, not the Goodwill. I know it's the most famous one. I didn't actually know that one, but Jamie's a bit of a nerd with these. He knows them. I think Pikes Peak is the biggest one. That one's in the US. In the US, yeah. But I think in the UK, it's even more popular. It's the, oh boy, Shelseley Walsh. So it's just a thousand yards.

or is it the other that's the original one it's just a kilometer what's the elevation yeah oh yeah it might be just the elevation yeah kilometer up this doesn't sell how long but it took the new record with a prototype because because again the porsche kyan hasn't launched yet oh okay i got it here it's the uh no so no no you reference spice the pike piece which is 12 kilometers i don't know how long is it just launch

But the time here looks like 20, so that looks probably like the time, 20, 25, which is 20 seconds. So probably not a long one. But still impressive for Porsche. Yeah, it's Porsche. They love to do that, Porsche. Like, how many times, like, they stole the Norbering record with a Taycan from Tesla, and then Tesla stole it back, and then they stole it again. They love to compete with those. Competition is good. Yeah.

All right, a few more news items before we jump into the comment section. 2026 pricing for Rivian. So Rivian has some good deals on the 2025 model years now, but the 2026 model years are coming and you can expect just a tiny little price bumps.

Across the board, $1,000 price bump on the dual standard R1S. So the R1S is going to start at $77,000 now. And it goes up to $107,000 if you're on the TriMax, $90,000 if you're on the dual Max for the longest range. And that also got a $1,000 price bump. The dual motor large battery is the only one that's basically stayed the same. Actually got a $90 price bump, really.

Really? We're going to increase the price by 90 bucks. And then you have the R1T that basically the same pricing upgrade for the different powertrains. Now it's going to start at $71,000 and it goes up to 101. And these things are hitting the dealership soon. But you can still get 2025 model years and they are pretty significant discounts right now, both on the financing side and on the lease side too. Yeah.

Not the same thing for the Kia EV9, though, because they just launched the 2026 version and we have the pricing, too. But they actually sold out the vehicle. So people...

So the main numbers coming in where they sold only 37 in the U.S. and they're like, oh, what's happening with that? And it's because they sold out a little bit. So they stopped producing the 2025 version and they completely sold it out. And now the 2026 model year is coming with pricing changes.

um basically staying the same uh you have just a little bit of a price cut on the ev9 light long range uh going from 50 from basically 60 000 to 58 000 so a little bit cheaper on that front but it still starts at 55 for the standard range uh oh and the gt line also got a little bit of a discount for the 2026 model year 72 774. i'll take that

in terms of the specs i don't think we can expect much change like this thing recently yeah launched last year so uh yeah launched yeah 2024. so don't expect a lot of changes to the to the model here uh mercedes the the uh tease the new electric van a new ultra luxury electric van so

It's basically one of those like limousine in a van type of deal. Yeah, it's not a van life kind of thing.

No, no, no, no, no, don't expect that. They have the eSprinter that you can modify for that. This Vision V Concept is basically a private lounge on wheel with a 65-inch screen, Dolby Atmos system with 42 speakers, 360 immersive experience and audio and lighting. I mean, it looks pretty insane. I have to look at that picture here. It's pretty nuts.

But this is a concept obviously, but they say that it's a concept for something that they actually plan to launch next year. So that this is actually going to come, I mean, not exactly this, but something based on this very concept. So like you see the chairs here, for example, like I wouldn't expect these chairs to make it to the production version. Normally like these things are very concept-y. They do look pretty cool, but I don't think it's production version type of thing.

but you might see an actual like mercedes electric limousine man launching as a 2026 model price and full spec to be unveiled closer to launch we don't have the spec yet but i would assume that it's a same powertrain as the latest e-sprinter which actually got quite a bit of a bump of capacity so that's nice subaru is teasing that they are bringing back the subaru brat so that that actually was not in my lexicon of uh

of uh vehicles that i remember i don't know about you you remember that yeah yeah yeah so i guess it's kind of um sorry again it's 5 00 a.m for me i don't remember what was the uh the name it's like a cowboy kind of like western name for that el camino so i guess it's kind of uh the insert to the hell camino from

Subaru in the 70s and 80s, they produced this pickup truck. So it's a low to the ground pickup truck, small pickup truck that, you know, can use more like a car. But, you know, you have the pickup at the back. And this small version here is just for fun, I assume, because put it in the back of the actual one in the back.

But they announced that they are bringing back the Brat as an electric vehicle. And it's going to be based on Toyota's EPU, electric pickup platform, that was unveiled in Tokyo in 2023. I was actually at this unveiling in Tokyo two years ago. We weren't too excited because it's just a concept vehicle, concept pickup truck, and they didn't announce any production vehicle program on it. So I'm like, all right.

Cool concept, but not much there. But now, I mean, I think Toyota might not have one planned in China already, but Subaru might be the first one to be like a global one. Oh, Reagan had the 1978 Pratt, really. So it's going to be an all-wheel drive powertrain with several drive modes for various terrain. So yeah, Toyota is planning a pickup truck in 2026. So that's not necessarily going to be the Pratt.

This is the Toyota EPU concept. It's not the BRAT one. So there's not much details as of right now. It's just that they said that they are planning to do a BRAT, to bring back the BRAT, and it's going to be electric based on the Toyota EPU platform. I think it's a good product. I think that El Caminos were very, very much loved. The BRATs are obviously loved. Yeah, and it's not...

it's not a format that exists right now right like uh electric or not i feel like that's like a santa fe is that no yeah but even that it's like uh high up it's uh off the ground like you have pretty big ground clearance it's not it's not low like uh

like this because the advantage of that obviously it's like it's it's going to be much more efficient so yeah exactly that's what you need for an ev so that's smart yeah so so it's not going to be obviously like something you go off-roading with anything like that but uh you know it's going to be all-wheel drive so you just yeah yeah yeah all right click one before we jump into the comment section

BYD has announced that they're bringing their ultra-fast 1000V flash charging network in Europe. They just confirmed that this week and it's a big deal. It's going to boost the European charging infrastructure quite a bit. And it is one of the advantages of not having

crazy tariffs. They still have tariffs, by the way, so you can still put tariffs and Chinese can still keep competitive. But on Chinese electric vehicles...

If you don't do it or you do it more reasonably like Europe is doing compared to North America, you end up adding investments from Chinese company in things that are important like the charging network. And BYD also, this is the thousand-dollar architecture, one that can charge your car in five minutes.

But obviously, it's going to have other automakers that are not using 1000-volt system can still be able to take advantage of it because Europe has the type 2 standard anyway, so everyone has the same plug and everything like that. There's not much details on actual deployment scale, but as you know, BYD is quite an ambitious company, and they're just starting out in Europe, really. So, yeah.

But by 2030, they want to be like a top player by 2030. So they kind of... They know that right now they're just starting up. And by 2030, they're going to be like a serious player. And that's going to be within the network of Charging Station now. Because right now they only have...

$16 in Belgium alone, that's kind of big. Like Belgium is not a giant country. $40 in Spain, $50 in France. And in Germany, they only have $27. In Germany, they want to grow to $120. BYDs, no joke. When they come, they come fast. All right, let's jump into the comment section.

Yeah, there's a big march for Oman today. Today.

Yeah, you guys are still Friday, so the 13th, yeah, the 14th, so Saturday there's a bunch of March planned for, again, like no King March, they don't want Trump to be king, so they don't.

Yeah. All right. Donald Parrish says FSD in parking lots needs lots more work. I think that's, you don't have to, you could have just stopped before you said. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need to say parking lots, but the parking lots thing is because you can do the summon. So you can do it from outside the car. Right. And there's been a lot of instances of people that you need to be ready to, that's, that's kind of a, I kill switch with latency too. So you,

you have the kill switch on the app. And yeah, there's been plenty of instances of people just, at least it's tiny little fender benders because that's super low speed. But again, it's fender benders at low speed and then FSD can get higher speed outside of parking lots. It gets scary. - On the plus side, Donald Parrish says FSD getting over to the left lane on the highway for cars pulled off on the right. First time I'd see it, I'd do it consistently.

so that's i've never had that behavior before uh question any thoughts on how the new war on iran may affect the ev industry i think the anti-ev provisions and the build back better bill might need to be reconsidered i guess the thinking there is iran is a big oil producer and you want to kind of squeeze that that out um i don't know that how much did oil rise today eight percent yeah i mean

It's significant, but it went down quite a bit this year too before. So yeah, it is significant. When oil goes up, gas prices go up. EV sales generally do go up. But it's so hard to convince buyers around the cost of ownership. The sticker price is just such a big deal. Yeah, nobody does the math. Yeah, no, it's hard.

And the sticker price is going to go up for everyone that makes less than $150,000 a year next year. So I think that's a little bit bigger than what's happening. But to answer your question, Speak Your Lawyer, it is significant. And it's going to have an impact globally too, obviously. It's not just in the U.S.

ron san diego says protesters attacked waymo cars and before that there have been abusive crews tesla taxis will not be well received yeah i mean they're going to be in austin so that's not it's a little bit liberal there but yeah yeah i mean austin itself is is quite liberal but uh yeah it's not la either

realistically, RoboTaxi will take longer than Elon's aggressive deadlines. I think nobody on Earth is arguing that. I don't think it will hurt Tesla's reputation or bottom line. No, but it goes beyond that. It's not just not meeting the aggressive timelines. It's also lying about the vehicle's capacity to achieve it in the first place. Yeah, the stock price is based on that.

Yeah, and it's not just the timelines that were wrong. Elon was also wrong that Tesla could achieve self-driving with hardware 2, could achieve self-driving with hardware 3, and now it looks like it might be wrong about hardware 4 also. So these are promises on millions of vehicles to achieve full-sense capabilities that won't happen. That's a giant liability for Tesla. It's not just not achieving it. And then the thing about the stock price is that

Elon has always said that Tesla is alone in this. There's no competitor coming close to them. So even if they are late, they're going to be first anyway, and they're going to dominate the market. That, I think, for reasonable people, that is becoming clearly false. We can see what Waymo is doing, and Waymo is performing extremely well right now. So as Tesla keeps getting delayed and keeps having to figure out its hardware situation,

Waymo has had a completely different approach where they went crazy with the hardware. They made it work with that. And now they're trying to reduce costs and like, all right, can we make it work without this? Can we make it work without that? Is it still safe? That's what they're doing right now, optimizing everything while Tesla is still trying to make it work. And the idea that Waymo cannot scale, and there's no doubt that it's harder to scale than if

you make vision work but you need you need to make vision work it's not working yeah carl san diego adds that cruise was doing a lot of remote driving intervention i think that was one of the reasons the uh company was shut down but you know i i kind of feel like cruise cut it cut gm cut cruise out a little short like i feel like um they had a big a big uh product there and they gave up a little early on that

And Super Cruise, the consumer product, was actually pretty good, and it still is pretty good. It still is. And actually, the upcoming Bolt, I really hope, has Super Cruise because that's the one thing I really wish my Bolt had. All right. RQ says, I have Tesla Y hardware version 3. Do not have full FSD. Is autopilot safe on highway? I think so, right? I like autopilot. If you're paying attention, yeah. If you're paying attention, yeah, you cannot become complacent with it.

And that's my other fear with it, too, because, you know, with that 4x increase in parameters and if Tesla goes from like close to 500 miles between this engagement to a thousand miles between this engagement, which, you know, I think that's a likely scenario. You could see that by the end of the year, early next year, Tesla release a big update, big improvement. You reach a thousand miles.

it's getting very good if you do that it's just nowhere near where you need it to be unsupervised self-driving so you still need to be supervised

It's just so good that people start becoming complacent. So there's like a balancing act between like being super good, but like never achieving unsupervised and then people being complacent because it's super good. And then like, okay, it's super good. It prevents some accident, but it's so good that people become complacent. And then you start creating some accident. Like it's a weird balancing act that scares me quite a bit. But if you're paying attention, it is good.

electric ryan says they refresh model s and x ought to have hardware five if they do we don't know about it uh yet i mean deliveries are gonna start any day now and i assume that we're gonna be able to get that those details but i feel like uh no yeah it's not impossible that it's in there because uh i don't think tesla would announce it if it's not in model 3 and y yet

Speaking of that, Elon has been pitching the new Model Y as a robo taxi. You too can buy a robo taxi, same as the one being used in Austin. Is this BS? Will the robo taxi service be using off the shelf Model Ys? Yes and no. I mean, it is using off the shelf, but no, it's not a robo taxi. That's what you mean. Yeah.

All right. Would Tesla be able to do Airbnb for robo taxis where it offers to tell operators as a backup to Tesla owners over time? If it improves, they need fewer teller operators per vehicle. Are you nuts? There's hundreds of thousands of people that have FSD right now. If it was actually unsupervised, there'd be millions.

So now you have to figure out what the ratio that makes sense of cars to the operator. I don't know what that is, but if you have millions of cars and you cannot have one guy in like a hundred car and that's the thing with the level of the operation. So the current service and that is about to launch in Austin is gonna have a high level. And again, we literally have only seen one car being tested and there was a training with another car with a kill switch.

it's crazy all right how do you scale that to millions of vehicles makes no sense yeah latency might not be a problem if they use starlink uh actually starlink is way more latent than cell networks because it has to go all the way up and down so well it's not it's not that way up so they are so lower to orbit that it's not that way up actually the latency of starting is pretty good it's the bandwidth that's not uh yeah it's not always great in uh

in dense area so if there's a lot of them it's the bandwidth that's bad the latency is actually pretty good i don't think it's good enough for this though again they have a training car right behind sleep might as well use bluetooth right uh 12.9 miles around the nerve burning in 7.04 we're talking about xiaomi right now no word from elon yeah it's i wouldn't expect them to comment on that yeah i don't think they care much about the uh model s at the moment it doesn't seem like

Yeah, we saw the Model S. They did bring it to Nürburgring recently, the performance version. We haven't heard anything, though, about how it performed, if they even tried to beat the records or something, because sometimes they just bring it to test it. So it's not clear, but you might hear something soon.

all right we have a special actually the ceo the ceo of xiaomi did say that he expect the record to be broken soon i don't know if he expected to be broken by themselves or if uh if they saw something there too like like the molest plan i don't know it's not clear so if you're still talking to your hyundai friends or sorry kia friends fred can you please beg for the pv5 to come to north america thanks it's a good vehicle nice

Every time we are on a press trip, all the, I mean, most of the American and North American journalists, all we do is beg automakers to bring the version that's not an America to America. Literally, it's half of the conversation we have with these automakers. It's not just me. It's all the publication. Most of them are like, hey, we want this. With Audi, it was with, hey, bring the event wagon version with

With Kia, it's like, oh, bring the hatchback of the EV4, bring the PV5. It's always that. That's all we do. And they very rarely listen to us.

This is a good question. Specular says, do you think that inexpensive EVs exported from China start to take over ICE cars in the developing world? I do think so because in China they can get the price down where they're competitive with gas. And gas isn't super reliable in the developing world where electricity isn't reliable either. But if you have a solar array, for instance,

you're gonna have enough to put in your car and then there's all kinds of advantages like you could run uh you know whatever off your off your car uh as a backup for the you know even in Puerto Rico the the and I'm not saying that's um developing world but um it is nice to have backup batteries they have all the grid they have great issues that are similar to the one more right

Yeah, no, you're right. And you see it would be why did they do that? Like they are not scared to go in developing countries and smaller countries and just like, you know, we'll set up a dealer and we'll just make it work. So they have access to service. And, you know, maybe even if the infrastructure is not quite developed for EVs yet, you can have a situation like this, right, with solar power, whatever. And

people gradually people start to see evs as a real option and obviously it helps when you have like a bunch of automakers that that do at the same time and then the infrastructure get built and everything but we'll get there some soon all right last question or comment hyundai santa cruz is bradish yeah i said santa fe i meant hyundai santa cruz

yeah but yeah I I I get what you're saying with the center cruise I would I would say I was thinking Santa Cruz when you said Santa Fe and uh I think it's a little bit higher too yeah it's a little taller but it's not it's it's about the closest thing there is right now apparently yeah I'm excited for that I'm excited for what's exciting about EVs too is like people they the the are willing to test different form factors with

like the slate, for example, even though I'm not sure the project will ever happen. It's still cool that these things exist and they're trying to make them. So it's exciting. All right. Well, that's it for us for this week's episode of Electric Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week, though I'm going to be in China. So see you there. Bye-bye.