Non-Tesla EV Supercharger access, Cybertruck sales, Rivian $$$, and more
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Three, two, one, and we are live, everyone, for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and I have to apologize because we're a little bit late because of me. I had some technical issue with Chrome, but we're right back, and we are, as usual, with Seth Wintraub. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. Sorry for this little delay. I'm on a new computer. I'm on a little workation right now in Mexico.

great signal so it shouldn't be a problem worked in great all week so it's uh just my new computer that uh didn't like the chrome but uh yeah i mean we are in mid january right now it's always a little bit slow in the actual vehicle news but it was not one of those week we have plenty of news to discuss this week and we're gonna jump right in starting with some tesla supercharger access for non-tesla vehicles then we have a bunch of cyber truck news that uh

Part of what Elon tweeted out and whatnot. More stuff that Elon tweeted out regarding full self-driving and some great data that we were going to be able to dive into from the self-driving program. Then some RIVM stuff that was really interesting this week. We are starting to see the impact of Trump getting into office with his Department of Transportation nominee and a cool of other stuff to jump into. So first of all,

The full self-driving, the supercharger access through NAX for non-Tesla EVs has been updated this week.

Tesla has added a bunch of automakers to the program as coming soon. And the coming soon thing has not been the greatest indicator on the Enacs page so far. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it just doesn't work. But with the update this week, a bunch of automakers started discussing it. So

We go directly to those automakers. Normally, the timeline is a little bit better. This was all supposed to be done last year and early 2025. But obviously, with Tesla's complete refresh of the charging team, it kind of slowed things down a little bit. Now we have under Acura...

that have come out and confirmed that it's going to be confirmed through the announcement of the new RSX EVs that's going to launch later. It's just an announcement. We don't have the unveiling or anything just yet, but it's exciting stuff. You know, some people know it as the Integra, whether the people are into that vehicle, kind of a cult following, if you will.

Through that announcement, they confirmed that this spring, all Honda EVs in the US and Acura, I don't think they will be in Acura at that point though, will have access to Supercharger Network. So that basically means the prologue for now. Right. One car. Yeah.

And that's a GM car too, right? Fair. But a lot of that car, because we discussed last week, I think something like 40,000, 30,000 to 40,000 deliveries last year already. So that's not bad. Then we have Kia saying the same thing. So Kia, we were getting excited. A lot of Kia was supposed to get access this week. There was some miscommunication again. And now they also say, did they see this spring also? Yeah.

I mean, see, Kia and they already have the IONIQ 5 that's getting delivered with Mac. So it shouldn't be a problem. And some people are making it work. Also, Jamie reported with the A to Z third-party adapter is working. So you don't have the official adapter, but the third-party adapter is working. But now you should expect it also, yes, the Spring 2 to happen. So a lot of this has been pushed out to Spring, it looks like, for a lot of these automakers.

But that's the thing, they are not officially obligated, they're not officially approved by the automaker. The automakers are sometimes not ready with the third party, with the adapters themselves. But what we're seeing so far, and we're not saying you should try it and attend that, but it looks like if you have a Tesla app and you log into a Tesla account and you have a credit card linked to that account and you're using a third party adapter,

Depending on your vehicle, it might be working. And of course, Kia also has a lot more EVs out there than a lot of these other automakers. So we should see a lot more announcement coming out in the next few months, really, getting into the spring. All right, this was interesting. We complain a lot at Electric that Tesla is the most opaque automaker when it comes to

Releasing breaking down data per model per region. Basically don't do it. I did a little like visualization here for people that are more visual and you see the Q4 report from Ford on the left and then a Q4 report from Tesla. It's pretty blatant the difference.

Of course, you can argue that Ford has a lot more models than Tesla, but this is still as like six different models. And there's literally two lines to that report. So you can, you can make that up. Uh, so it, it forced us to, you know, dig a little deeper to try to track the health of each program. And the one that we're more curious about these days is the cyber truck because it's a new, relatively new program for Tesla. And, uh, and there's a lot of eyes on it for obvious reasons. But, um,

And we were concerned about it because it looks, based on the data that we have, that Tesla is either flat in Cybertruck deliveries from Q3 to Q4 or even down, according to a lot of estimates. But it looks like it might be the best-selling electric pickup truck in the U.S., and Tesla actually officially announced that through the Cybertruck Twitter account this week.

They had to poke a little bit at their naysayers, saying they won't make it, nobody will buy it. And now it has become the best-selling electric pickup truck in 2024. In the U.S. is missing there. I don't think you can say that specifically in the U.S., without saying in the U.S.,

And they might very well be right because we look at the Ford data, the F-150 Lightning was the best thing so far, and they disclosed 33,510

But again, the weird part here is they're announcing that and they're not even announcing how many Cybertruck they delivered in the US. Our own estimates put it around 40,000 units, so that would be more than what Ford delivered. But the 40,000 units is not just for the US. Our estimate is for entire Cybertruck deliveries, which includes some in Mexico and some in Canada.

But I would have to assume that this would be, it would need to be more than 6,500 to make Tesla wrong here. So I don't think Tesla is wrong based on that.

But it is pretty close. And again, in Q4, we can almost guarantee that Ford, with the Lightning, outsold the Cybertruck. And that's what's interesting here. Because obviously, you know, achievement, great achievement. Kudos on that. But at the same time, it's kind of weird to see them brag about that because, obviously, the Lightning has been out for a few years.

The Cybertruck just launched last year, well, very late in 2023, like 2024 was its first full year of production. And it had a giant backlog of reservation that it was accumulating since 2019. So obviously, we never thought that demand would be an issue for a Cybertruck in its first year of production. And that has been the case with basically every first year of Tesla vehicle program.

Right. Maybe not the molasses. Maybe the molasses was a little bit difficult at first. Was it? Yeah. I mean, it was really slow at first, but yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's harder to remember because Tesla had a little bit of a backlog too with Model S. It was a bit of a backlog with the Roadster. But, you know, I mean, we never saw that coming with the Cybertruck because there was over a million reservation for it. Right. But then now Tesla is bragging about this, but the real data here is like with a million reservation, Tesla delivered roughly 40,000 trucks in the first year and it's not having issues delivering them. And that is...

a fact because again it looks like sales went down from q3 to q4 despite lister launching a new version of the cyber truck uh cheaper and there is uh discounts have been added to it

Now this week, we announced that we confirmed that Tesla is discounting inventory Cybertruck with $1,600 off on the brand new inventory vehicle, $2,400 off if it's a demo vehicle and a little bit of difference depending on the mileage. So they basically all have very similar mileage in the 1 to 2,000. Google Chrome just sent me an alert and that's making me nervous. Okay, I'll allow it.

So, yeah, it's just not looking good for the Cybertruck. The sales are not looking great. And most likely, the salesman having issues this quarter also on it. And I'm just disappointed in Tesla being kind of evasive on that front. I mean, the worst of it was I don't know if you saw that this week, but, you know, obviously, California is having some disastrous fires right now and or I've been in the last few weeks.

And Elon has been commenting on it like a fire expert, of course. He also said that Tesla was going to use Cybertrucks to help in the effort.

And he said, no joke, he said that he's sorry for people waiting for cyber trucks in Los Angeles right now because they have to use the trucks instead of delivering them. They have to use them in the effort. And I think they gave like five cyber trucks to a bunch of people in the sheriff's department and the fire department and things like that.

While he said that, Tesla was listing Cybertruck ready for inventory in the Los Angeles area delivery on the first day, on the same day. So I don't think anyone didn't get the delivery because of Tesla's generosity there. Obviously, Tesla is having issues moving this truck. That's why there are discounts being added to it right now. That's why sales are down quarter to quarter. It is a bit disappointing.

I think obviously there's one silver lining, maybe even two silver lining for the Cybertruck this year. One is a cheaper version that's supposed to be coming, a $60,000 rear-wheel drive single motor version. That could help sell a little bit.

Because it's cheaper, obviously, the problem with when you look at the tallies of the reservation numbers, the tri-motor and the dual motor version were the one that was most requested. But that's back when they were supposed to be cheaper, too. So, you know, price is always a big factor. So I would assume that a lot of these people, you know, these people are not going to buy at all.

with the price change and the range reduction and all that. But some of them are like, "I still want a Cybertruck. I don't mind if it's just a single motor now and it has 200 plus miles of range." They will still get it. So there's always that. And the other one is

If Trump removes the incentive, the tax credit in the U.S., there's a chance that there's a phase-out period. There's a chance that they might not even be able to implement it until next year because of some IRS rules since this goes through the IRS, even though he actually wants to re-event completely the IRS and now make also a...

ERS, I guess, an external revenue service thing. Maybe community notes revenue service. And so that will create some urgencies to buy the vehicle. So I think Tesla could salvage the Cybertruck in 2025, which would sum up. But I mean, there are two things that are becoming very clear. 250,000 units per year, which was the deployed production capacity that Tesla was aiming for.

very unlikely to have the demand for that. And Elon saying that it could be, it could ramp that up to half a million units per year. That seems completely. And now the follow-up to that is that there was a report from Business Insider earlier this week that said that

They obtained documents from Gigafactory Texas that shows that Tesla is trolling down Cybertruck production. Makes sense with everything I just said. And shifting some worker from the Cybertruck production to the Model Y production. And now you might say that this is because of the...

change over to the new Model Y that is expected to happen in the coming days, weeks, months at Gigafactory Texas. But Tesla has done that in the past before and they don't shift worker from one line to the others for that. They generally hire more or they generally shut down the line to use those workers for the upgrades and for the new production lines or did they change the production lines? This is obviously also in reaction of the demand for the Cybertruck being lower.

We don't have an exact date on the start of the new Mandelweih production in the US. We learned this week that Tesla has started production. They actually confirmed it to the media in Europe. Tesla does still have a media team in Europe. They confirmed that they started production in Berlin, but they haven't opened up orders in Europe. So we don't have the European price or anything like that just yet. It's probably just pilot production for a few days to weeks and then open up orders and so on.

All right, this was very interesting. I've been using this crowdsourced data set to try to keep track of the progress on Tesla full self-driving for over a year now because Tesla refused to release its own data.

And a lot of people have criticized me for it. They're like, Fred, you're using a very limited, very flawed data set. And I agree. I agree. It's not the best data. It's somewhat limited. Only now it has like a few hundred thousand miles on it. It's not bad, but not great either. And a few tens of thousands of miles per version of full self-driving, again, limited data.

not great but it is by far the best we have and it is way better than anecdotal evidence of just you know watching some youtuber posting a drive on it you actually have data you actually have crowdsource that you can put them all together and you can track progress and uh i also defended myself with elon uh at one point last august i think it was in august yep

He referenced the data set, the specific data set that I'm talking about here, positively. So I'm like, if Elon is doing it positively, then I feel like it's pretty okay to do it. And Tesla itself refusing to release its own data, you don't have anything better. Now this week, Elon went further than that. He posted this image while he retweeted an image of someone else posted.

and said this is what exponential improvement looks like. So again, using this specific data set and referencing it positively. So now it's very hard to argue that you cannot use this data set because Elon himself is using it and he's referencing it positively, which if it's not close to the ballpark of what Tesla is seeing with their internal data, it would be extremely misleading. Obviously, I wouldn't put that past Elon Musk these days, but...

Right now, we have to acknowledge that. However, I have some massive issues with that. I'm going to have to deal with it. I'm no mathematician, but I went to school. I know my arithmetic. I know my exponential functions. And I know for a fact that you need more than two data points to call exponential improvement, exponential growth.

You need to have one data point, a second one that shows growth, and then you need a third one that shows growth that is higher than the growth between the two data points, which you obviously don't have here. So that's not Tesla going exponential at all, just on purely a mathematical point of view.

so that's that's first first off but secondly i think you need some context here because i i agree with you and this data is correct by the way and i'm gonna there's another point about that but

It looks good. We were talking here about highway miles to disengagement on FSD. It shows very little improvement between 11.3 to 12.5. 12.5 was at 85 miles per disengagement here. And then 13.2 shoots up to 724 miles. And then Elon calls this is exponential improvement, which is not. Let me explain why. The problem with this is that

Tesla just released, actually not with 13.2, it was with 12.6, what, that 5.6.1. They finally merged

The highway stack with the city driving stack, and if you've been following the program, you know that the highway stack has been neglected for years. Tesla has been focusing on the city driving stack and trying to sell the full self-driving package and all the features that come with that. And they put all the focus on that. And all the end-to-end neural net were using that. And the highway system has never benefited from that.

and has fallen way behind the city driving. So what we actually see here is not exponential growth, is Tesla using years and years of development of city driving, and finally, after dealing with it a bunch of time, applying it to highway driving.

Now, again, I'm not trying to take a big dump on Tesla here and saying this is bad. This is good, obviously, but it's not exponential growth. It's something completely different. We could technically, I'm not saying that's going to happen, but we could technically not see another increase for years with Tesla doing the same thing with that. I don't think that's going to happen. I think the improvement is going to be faster with the end-to-end neural net. We've seen that, but I don't think it means exponential at all.

But, okay, so that's one point.

And also this guy here, Philip Enberg, that Elon is retweeting, you have to be careful with this guy because he also posted a very similar chart but with city miles, and that was completely fabricated. He literally fabricated the data and then screenshot it and then posted it with the same post after this one went viral. I assume it might have been trying to disprove what I wrote in this article, but it was completely fabricated and confirmed by the owner of the data, actually.

So the most interesting thing I see here though is like now we can, okay, if Elon is approving of this data, we can dive into the rest of it and compare it and not just looking at highway because again, the highway mileage is misleading, I think in that front. So what we can look at from this is, okay, this is FSD 13 here.

If we took the average of all the FSD 13.2 version, which are the ones that went wide release, if you have an hardware 4 car, if you have an hardware 3 car, forget it. You've been left behind. We just have 8,000 miles, by the way. It's not awesome, but that's also true for the highway mileage. Highway mileage is even lower than that. So take that with a grain of salt. The average miles between disengagement now is at 90, okay?

Not as exciting as 700 to 23. But, you know, I also agree that miles between disengagement is not the greatest data because, you know, you can disengage for whatever reason. So that's why we also have miles to critical disengagement, which is what Tesla has been using as a point of reference. They sometimes call it necessary intervention too. And Tesla has been calling a 5 to 6x improvement between 12.5

to v13 with that and we are sitting now at 493 well i said that i said at the time of the article that was a few days ago it might have changed a little bit with more data but i think it went down i think i checked like a day later and it went down so keep an eye on that so that's actually a 2.7 improvement

in miles between critical disengagement versus 12.5. Again, great. Nowhere near five or six as Tesla claim, but pretty good. Now, what's obviously more worrying than anything else is that Tesla claim, or Elon more specifically claims that this is going to achieve unsupervised full self-driving by Q2 2025, which is just a few months away.

And Elon is pointing to this data that we have here being in the ballpark of what Tesla has. So, you know, fewer than 500 miles.

And by the way, it's not like a lot of people call me like an hater or full self-driving, but I actually predicted this, if you remember, a few months ago when Tesla announced the V13 and said what will be in it. I said that actually like a 500 to 800 miles between critical links engagement is quite likely if you add like reverse, park, and un-park, it made sense.

they came close but not even in what i was predicting so you could argue that i'm a bull when it comes to uh that's the fsd at this point but now if we say that they are in the ballpark at fewer than 500 miles between critical disengagement we have to reference the uh what ashok the head of wholesale driving said that the last earnings that he said that to achieve unsupervised wholesale driving testo will need to be at the equivalent of human miles between collisions

which according to NHTSA is 670,000 miles. 670? Yeah, thousands. That's three zeros after 670. So Tesla going from less than 500 now to 670,000 miles within five months or so. That's what Elon is saying is going to happen. It makes no sense. It's basically like 670,000 miles is from the Earth to the moon and back.

So it's like saying that you're capable of launching a rocket 500 miles in the air before it blows up in space. And then you say, oh, that's no problem. Within five months, it's going to be able to go to the moon and then back. It's pretty crazy. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's...

Feels like a pretty safe bet. Yeah. Yeah. If they want to open some prediction markets on that, I would love to place a bet on that. Actually, is there any? Do we know? I mean, I use Polymarket and Polymarket doesn't have one right now. I could reach out to them and try to open up a market. I wonder if we could sponsor one or something. We could actually. Yeah. Let's do that. I know a guy. Okay. Let's do that. I feel like that's a good way to make some money. Yeah.

All right. So that's it for our weekly update on full self-driving. There is a Tesla boycott that's gaining some momentum in Germany, and it's specifically because of Elon's meddling in politics.

So why I reference that here is because we know that Elon's antics on social media has had an impact on Tesla. It's just super hard to quantify. And the shareholder community that support Elon always points to that. It's like, how can you even say that it's happening?

And they're right. It's very hard to quantify. But now we have some direct impact, especially in Germany. They are not shy about like saying, yeah, we're not buying Tesla anymore because of E-money. We reported on that last year with Rossman, one of the biggest investors.

pharmacy chain in Europe, but it's a German company. And they said that they would sell all their Tesla vehicles. They were electrifying their fleet and using Tesla primarily. And now they are selling all their Tesla vehicles and not buying more because of Elon's support for Trump. They were specific about that. But that was before Elon also commenting directly on German politics. And he's been backing the AFD, which I'm no expert in German politics. I won't go into too many details, but

They have been labeled as a far-right group, and a lot of their members have been promoting neo-Nazis ideologies and, you know, been caught in Facebook groups saying some very nasty things that I won't repeat. You know, things like that. And Elon has been promoting them and saying that they are the only way to save Germany. And it's funny because we found a bunch of ads of them online

before they got Elon's support that was attacking Tesla when they were trying to set up a gigafactory Berlin. And they even had an ad of like a Tesla vehicle burning and saying like sponsored by AFD. Some crazy stuff like that. But now we have another example. After Rossmann, we have Litschblick. It's a large energy company in Germany that also had a mandate to electrify their fleet.

And they announced on LinkedIn this week that we are pulling the plug on Tesla in our fleet, that this decision was made by our management together with the Facilities and Real Estate Management. And then Kevin Lukcik, sorry if I'm missing your name, the head of Facilities and Real Estate said, Elon Musk's support of Donald Trump and his recommendation to vote for a far right, right-wing populist and right-wing extremist party, he's talking about AFD, that is no way compatible with Lichplik.

prompt us to take this step. We are committed to diversity, tolerance, and democracy. And of course, climate protection and electromobility are extremely important to us. But in the future, we will be relying on providers other than Tesla. All current contracts with Tesla vehicle will not be renewed after the contracts end. So,

So in Germany, actually, a lot of cars are bought through companies. It's a very popular way to buy vehicles. Tesla has been like a lot of automakers see like 30, 40% of their sales through those programs. Tesla was a little bit lower. I think closer to like 15, 20. And to be honest, like even LegitClick are clear. They said we are aware that this will not have a far-reaching economic consequence on Tesla. They just want to set an example. And this is part of like a larger boycott that's come up.

happening in Germany. There's a boycott specifically of X of like 60 German and Austrian organization. And now it's like leaking to Tesla because obviously Elon and Tesla are hard to dissociate.

I put this on the comment. I asked people, I asked local German electric fan, and I said I asked the same thing on Twitter to comment on that, seeing if they see some momentum around that. And I'm hearing that this might be a real thing that takes some real momentum because currently people are really not happy. Apparently, AFD is polling as less than 20% in Germany.

So it's not like Trump in the US that's at least somewhat popular. It's not even popular at all in Germany. So he's putting a lot of people against him and consequently against Tesla. All right, this was somewhat interesting here. I was able to use that very high-level Photoshop that I put on an image a long time ago. Again, Tesla says that it's working on a new way to clean cameras.

on its vehicle. It was talking specifically about the Cybertruck, but it sounded like it obviously could be something a little bit larger. But there was a big thread on X this week about, you know, some Cybertruck owners complaining about having to clean their rear view camera basically before every drive because, well,

If you're not aware, it is a very critical camera for test of heat for the Cybertruck because if you have your tunnel cover up, your rear view mirror is basically useless. So you have to absolutely rely on a rear view camera. And if it's dirty, you're screwed.

Like in my week-long review, I was in Washington this summer, so it was not that big of a problem. But there was a few times that I got into the vehicle, started backing and like, oh, damn, it's too dirty for me to back and I need it. Otherwise, I need to pull down the tunnel cover, which takes longer than going to clean the camera.

So owners were complaining about that. And, you know, Tesla at first tweeted to its Tesla AI account, responding to that thread. They like tried to be funny and like say, oh, we should make the, uh,

we should because people were saying i need to lick the camera basically and he said we should make it taste there's certain ways it would be fun to lick it i'm like oh boy first of all no one is actually licking the camera i do hope like at least lick your finger and then and then why why shit something like that if i catch someone leaking their second shot camera it's some wild thing anyway

So Tesla was making fun of that, but then they said on a more serious note, a more comprehensive cleaning solution is being worked on.

So I referenced this thing that in 2019, Tesla filed a pattern for using lasers to remove debris and clean, you know, not just the cameras, but the vehicle itself. Though it did reference the cameras back then. Obviously, Tesla was already working on something. Now, I don't necessarily think that this is what's happening. It would be kind of wild. It's not impossible because, I mean, other than a windshield wiper set, can you come up with another idea than this?

How do you clean a camera? I mean, the Chevy Bolt's got a little spray thing. Yeah, but even then, the spray, so it needs to dry. Yeah, I mean, it just dries off. There it dries off, so you cannot use it right away, but by the time it dries, yeah. It's pretty quick. Yeah, because, I mean...

The windshield works great. The camera is on the windshield. It has cleaning because it's on the windshield, so you just use your wipers and that's gone. That obviously is gone, but what are not covers are all the cameras on the side and the camera on the back. I've seen that. I don't know if they're only talking about the rear-view camera here. There's plenty of GM vehicles and Ford vehicles that use the spray thing, but

But can we see, are we going to see that also on the side camera? I don't know. Yeah. Lasers. Just give me a laser. Right. All right. Moving on from Tesla. Well, not completely. So there was a bunch of Trump nominees for head of departments that went at their Senate earring this week where they get basically grilled by senators about their background and whatnot. And,

And it's not always fun to watch because Trump has some wild nominees out there that have a very controversial background. But I have to say, when it comes to the Department of Transportation, this guy, Sean Duffy, I did a little background check on him.

He's one of the least scary Trump nominees out there. He doesn't have some wild controversy, some wild scandals behind him. He's a reality TV star, so probably why Trump likes him. He has something in common with him. But he also does have a background. He was a congressman for a few years. He's a lawyer. He became a lobbyist. So he has experience. He has legit experience.

But obviously, if you are to be a Trump nominee, your number one requirement is to be a Trump loyalist. It's not like I trust the guy or anything, but still. He had his earring and it was a lot softer earring than the other ones this week. So they're actually worry about instead of just saying like, are you a white nationalist? Are you a racist? What do you think of women? It was actually about policies, which was interesting. And I was able to talk a little bit about that. Not too much, to be honest, but still a little bit.

And first off, he discussed for a brief second the possibility of adding fees to an electric vehicle to pay to cover for the use of the roads. So that has been a big controversy in the auto and the EV industry for years now. And his response was they should pay for use of our roads. How to do that, I think, is a little bit more challenging. So it sounds like he wants to have a fee to cover the use of road costs.

but it doesn't know how to do it. Now, obviously, on a state-by-state basis, there's plenty of states that had fees to electric vehicles to cover for that. Officially, the U.S. pays for road maintenance through the gas tax. So that's why...

People see a need to tax EVs differently so that they can contribute to that. But the truth is that the road maintenance budget has been funded by other revenues from the government for years because the gas tax, the federal gas tax hasn't been increased since I think I've been born, I think like 30 years. So it's not really true that that's how they fund road maintenance.

because the idea is like, oh, if you use gas, then you use more the roads, which makes sense. But then if you want to do that, states with electric vehicles have been using registration fees, which doesn't really make sense because

A person driving like a thousand miles a year and a person driving 20,000 miles a year is going to pay the same fee and not going to use the road at the same rate. So there needs to be another solution. I agree with that, even though I think that we should wait until the U.S. has actually caught up with the rest of the world when it comes to EV adoption. Other than that, it doesn't make sense to keep adding fees on top of it. But it doesn't look like we're going that way at all.

And then Duffy was also asked by Senator Ed Markey about how he's going to treat Tesla specifically because of Elon Musk getting closer to Trump and giving him over $240 million for his campaign. He said, regardless of outside political pressure, can you commit to allowing NHTSA to follow the evidence and operate objectively? And he said, I will let NHTSA do the investigation. So that was more specifically Trump.

about the ongoing investigation from NHTSA against Tesla's full self-driving system. So Tesla has a broad investigation of Tesla's full self-driving supervised suda features since October of last year because of a fatal crash that then launched the investigation. And then just earlier this Monday, they opened another investigation more specifically into the actually smart summon feature after they found over a dozen crash in just a few months related to that feature.

So he was asked, will they continue to do the investigation? And he said yes. So I guess that's good if they stick to his word. But a bit of a bummer for Elon. If you gave $240 million to Trump, you thought you would make people squash that thing. Yeah.

like no it's gonna keep going but i mean it's not like a lot of people try to see a lot of tesla fans i just say that it's like not good with tesla but to be honest like i don't there's been a few like forced recall that this disagreed with but it's very minimal compared to like that i mean tesla is operating a giant you know

full self-driving supervised program for years in the U.S. and the regulators are letting it do it for the most part. And that's not the case in Europe. That's not the case in China. That's not the case anywhere else. So Tesla cannot complain too much here. All right, this was interesting. This came out today, a big electric car,

winter range test. So the Scandinavian, they love to do that every year. They have a giant, a bunch of different electric cars that they put together to try to calculate what's the difference between the WLTP range and the range in cold weather. So this year's mortar and NAF put it together, the big test. And we have the results now, which are quite interesting. And to be fair,

Their testing was in the north of Norway this year, this month, but it was kind of mild temperature. They were talking about like five degrees Celsius, 36, 37 Fahrenheit, something like that. It's not as cold as a winter. I had in my lucid review last week, it was way worse than that.

But still, so keep that in mind when I give the results, because they're kind of crazy. The difference is kind of crazy. So the worst one was the Peugeot E3008, which has just 510 WLTP range. And the distance it achieved during the test that day, 347 kilometers. That's almost 32% deviation from the WLTP standard. That was the worst. Which one was the better, the best?

Polestar 3, and it was the best by a wide margin of just 5% difference, 5.18% difference. It has a WTP range of 516 kilometers, and it achieved the longest distance of all the other cars despite having the sixth official longest range. It was able to do 531 kilometers of range on a single charge. That's impressive.

A lot of people want to know about the Tesla because they test the Tesla every year. And the Tesla has been doing good in that test for the most part. But now we have the new Model 3 this year, and they use the Model 3 with the longest range. And this car, this Model 3 had the longest of all ranges, official WLTP1 at 702 kilometers. But it actually was able to travel...

uh 530.8 kilometers so it traveled a little bit less than the polestar 3 despite having an official range of you know over 160 more kilometers of range so it came in at a 24 uh deviation which is you know in in the wars uh of those you know you i i i didn't like the comments that a lot of people posted here there's uh they were a bit like confused like they were saying like yeah but the

Model 3 has a 75 kilowatt hour battery pack, and he was able to do the same distance as the Polestar 3 is 100 kilowatt hour battery pack. But that doesn't make sense. The Model 3 is a small sedan. The Polestar 3 is a bigger SUV. The difference here, the important thing here is the deviation, not the total kilometers that you achieve on the charge. It doesn't make sense.

One thing that I thought was interesting to note, if you look at the top five here, you will notice that BYD is there twice with their Tang having less than 10% deviation, pretty good. The Sea Lion getting 13%, which, you know, 13% to 20%, 10% to 20% is good. Like it's normally where most of the EVs fall here, you can see. But in the top five, you have two BYD vehicles and one

Four out of five of these vehicles are built in China. That's pretty nuts. I'm starting to get why the industry is just scared of the Chinese because if you're not aware, the Lotus and Maya, you know, Lotus is a British brand, but it is built in China. Same with the Polestar. Polestar 3 is also built in the US, but I'm pretty sure that the European version is built in China. Mini Countryman is built in where? Europe? I would assume so.

It's BMW. I would assume so. Um,

Moving on. Oh, yeah, that was interesting. Alaspec did a charging test of the IONIQ 5 against the Model 3, but on the Tesla supercharger. So that kind of made it fair because obviously IONIQ 5 has some of the best charging out there on 800 volts and the Model 3 doesn't charge on 800 volts. But if you put them on the same Tesla supercharger, then you have a more like a fairer comparison.

And the results were surprising where the Model 3 was able to add 55.7 kWh of capacity in 31.53 minutes. By the way, I assume that they started the same state of charger. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fair. All the specs are trying to be fair on that stuff. So I assume this is the case. So yeah, basically 32 minutes.

55.7 kilowatt hour. And then Yannick5 added 59.6, so a full four extra kilowatt hour in 30 minutes and 37 seconds. So, you know, a full minute 20 less than Tesla and four kilowatt hour more than Tesla. So quite impressive here. And obviously, if you were having that on a 800-volt charger, it wouldn't even be close.

So I think it's something worth noting because Tesla completely, for years and years and years, charging was the moat, not just with the supercharger network, but with the actual charging capacity of the vehicle. Seth, you're a giant fan of the Bolt EV, but 50, 55 kilowatt hour fast charging, that was the biggest bummer. And Tesla is still ahead of a lot of them. A lot of automakers are still stuck with the 150 or so kilowatt.

But even though with 150 kilowatts, a lot of automakers like Audi, for example, even though it's over 150 these days, still had a pretty good charging curve compared to Tesla, thanks mostly to a big battery buffer. But now you have those automakers, especially Kia, Hyundai, completely lowering Tesla out of the water when it comes to charging. We do expect Tesla to do some improvement on that. The

it kind of leaves some room to uh you know be safe and then if they get more comfortable with it they kind of unlock it later but something keep an eye on all right we have a few more news item to discuss regarding rivian and then polestar and then we're going to jump into the comment section so if you guys have questions for us you can jump in the comment section and it can be about any of the topics we discussed today or any other topics in the ev world that you want to take on and i won't get to it so rivian

Got a little gift from Biden just before he leaves office in a few days. Uh, the, uh, the, the try to rush the, uh, the loan. They have a big funding loan that they are, uh, trying to get for the Georgia plant where they plan to ramp up production of the R2 vehicles. So the R2 vehicles are R2 and R3s are going to first be produced in Illinois at the existing plant. But, uh,

Once they nailed that, they want to replicate it in larger volume at the Georgia plant that has been announced for a while now, but it was kind of delayed a little bit. And they were expecting a lot of funding for that, $3.4 billion in loans. And since then,

Biden lost, Trump won, Trump wants to kill all funding, all incentive, all these vehicles. They were worried that maybe Rivian won't be able to get that funding, but it was announced earlier this week that they were rushing it with the Department of Energy, and it was confirmed yesterday, I think, that they got the funding approved. So it should be locked in. If it's locked in, I don't think

they can remove it i don't know no expert in that but i think i might want to get that check out the door yeah you want to cash it as soon as possible yeah go to the bank get the cash and riven has another another good news that come out today where volkswagen uh announced that they are they would be interested in expanding their newly formed ev partnership with tesla where uh

Yeah. The partnership was announced last year. We discussed it already. It was mainly focused around software. You mean Rubio? Sorry? You said Tesla, right?

I said Tesla, sorry. So between Rivian and Volkswagen, it mainly focused around software. So Volkswagen wants this software-defined vehicle platform. So Rivian is going to help them with that because they see that Rivian has some kind of lead in software, which I would agree, especially against Volkswagen that had a lot of issues with software. But now they're talking about, you know, expanding it a little bit more where...

What was the actual quote here? We're thinking about sharing modules and building purchasing volumes together. So that's very interesting here. So that implies a lot of things because that implies if you're sharing volumes, that means sharing parts also because normally you would not want to buy parts together. So that means more compatibility between Rivian and Volkswagen.

And obviously, by building purchasing volume, you will reduce costs, which would help Rivian a lot because Rivian is working hard to reduce costs. So that's great news for both, really.

And, you know, we've been always a little bit skeptical when it comes to Vivian and its partnership because there was the Ford partnership that didn't add up too much and there was the Mercedes partnership that didn't add up too much. So now we're seeing this one with Volkswagen and obviously like big numbers, 5.8 billion and all that. It's like, oh yeah, it's very exciting and everything. But I mean, with the background that they have with those partnerships, we're like, it's hard to get to. I mean, I should give some credit to this Amazon partnership that's been going pretty well. Not perfectly either, but

pretty well. So we're like, all right, this is going to be an Amazon or this is going to be a Ford or a Mercedes Benz or a Daimler or whatever. Sounds like it's going to be closer to Amazon now. That's good news.

And then Polestar, Polestar announced some restructuring again. Polestar is having some financial issues. They're trying issues reaching profits, which was supposed to come this last year. Now they are aiming for 2025 to reach a profit. And they confirmed that the Polestar 7,

which is going to replace the 2. So the 2 is going to go away. The 2 has been around for a while now. It's kind of getting a little bit older. It sounds like it's not going to have a refresh. And instead, it's going to be replaced by the 7, which is going to be a smaller, compact SUV, cheaper also. So the Model Y is the best-selling car in the world, and people want to have a competitor to it. It makes sense. So it sounds like that's what Polestar is aiming for.

I understand that. I'm supposed to maybe go to Sweden to test out some Polestar next month. It's not written in stone just yet, but I'm excited for it because I haven't tested much Polestar so far. All right, let's jump into the comments section. All right, we got a little bit of a guy in there that keeps... Yeah, so I'm just going to work on that. But

Antonio Hollywood from Connecticut says regarding the winter range test point to difference between Polestar and Tesla is no difference at all. Since with all the variables number must be well within Delta era, it would be more useful for me to see the difference.

Between summer numbers and winter numbers, by now we all know Tesla inflates their claimed numbers. I mean, there's been reports about that with the EPA numbers, but I'm not as familiar with the WLTP and how...

uh how they can play with that because with ap there's a multiplicator that's up to the automaker and yes tesla is known to use the biggest multiplier possible while some of the makers are a little bit more conservative i don't know if there's a case with the wltp which are generally higher numbers but that's partly because they don't use climate control too so i thought that was the main difference with the epa but i might be wrong i'm not

No expert on that. All right. Paul T says, this simply illustrates the inefficiency of Ford versus Tesla. As soon as Tesla offers cheaper Cybertruck numbers, we'll pick up. Most who have ordered Cybertruck want the cheaper models. I think we can agree with that. You always look for the negative story with Tesla. How is having the best-selling electric truck bad news? Try looking for a positive story for once. So tiresome. I mean, I explained exactly why that story is negative. Like it's, yeah, the million...

a giant pent-up backlog of demand. And within three quarters, your sales go down despite launching a cheaper vehicle. There's no way to look at this positively other than, yeah, they beat Ford, which as kind of a sub-poor product when they have lightning. And I'm not, if you love your lightning, like I'm not trying to dump on it. I'm just saying that just like if you love a Cybertruck, I'm not trying to dump on it. I'm just saying that, you know, it's closer to their,

uh also fuel powered platform they they said it's in the beginning that they have on a more like from the ground up completely different platform that is the is the platform t right that's coming in this later this year that's going to be the real uh competitor really so yeah it's not it

I'm saying comparing it to the F1 Lightning when you had, you know, five years to build up the demand for it. You had the million reservation. I'm saying it's just doesn't look good. And then sales go down within three quarters. Yeah, you could say four quarters. It's just not a good look. Yeah. I wonder also, you know, there's the GMC Sierra, the Silverado, the GMC Hummer. Like if you added all those up, I wonder, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there's a number, but. Yeah, it's, I don't, I think it's,

Like even short a little bit of the lightning. Right. And then what is Rivian selling R1Ts these days? Rivian, you know, I'm going to be honest with you. They all like Tesla on that front. They don't split their, they don't break down their sales like Tesla. They do the same R1S and R1T on the same. So it's hard to get an actual clear number on that. Yeah.

So we're talking about the exponential thing. What Elon did was draw a line across the five blocks, which make it look exponential. But even that's not true because you would need another jump that is higher than the previous one. And you don't see that. So there's no way. Elon either doesn't understand math or didn't bother to really look at the data. And he just thought it looked good and posted it. Obviously, I think Elon understands math. I think that's it.

Ladders. Yeah. All right. Electric Brian, 500 miles to 670,000 miles. We're talking about full self-driving over five months would be exponential growth of 4.22. So, yeah, obviously that would be good. I'm just saying that's not happening. All right. Any insights on the ChargePoint EV charger cable theft prevention initiative?

Oh, I missed that. Yeah, I'm not familiar with that either. It is a big problem. Some people are wild with that stuff. Well, I mean, there's a lot of copper in those things, and copper is really easy to pawn for. I mean, you're not getting a ton of money, but you get like 20 bucks, which for some people is what they're after. Is Tesla and Polestar using the same type of battery cells? Does that have an effect on efficiency? So we're talking about the cold battery.

I'm not familiar with which cells Polestar use exactly. And yes, obviously, it would have an effect on efficiency. Not the only one, though. There's a bunch of other things that come into play. But Seth's probably right on that. Probably the biggest difference is how conservative they are with the WLTP. And the more conservative you are with the WLTP range, the one that you're actually advertising...

then the closer that your real-world range is going to be. And even so, with a big difference with the winter test. Yeah. All right, Carl in San Diego. Ilana's a world-class video game player, sort of, I guess. No, he's not. Shouldn't that mean his EV designs are superior? I think, little tongue-in-cheek. I think he's referencing the controversy that happened this week where he was exposed for lying about his video game prowess, which...

Which was a big indication that I think he's, you know, he's completely losing it right now. Right. Isn't that a weird thing to try to do? Like, why would you try to pretend like you're the best video game player in the world?

Does he think he's mentally ill right now? Yeah, it seems like he's mentally ill. But did you see what he said too? So a bunch of different guys exposed him on that that know the video game. But one guy in particular was this big streamer who claimed to fame was like, well, that's not true. He's not claiming fame. He's actually a good gamer. But he went viral for having a hoarder and he had a cockroach climb on him while

while he was streaming and then you don't pick a fight with that guy because you know yeah he doesn't have enough time on his end uh he has so much time on his end he doesn't pick up like five that guy and that guy was one of them that pointed out all the problems with his stream of that of exile and he's a big streamer so elon had contacts with him before because he tried to get him to stream on x and after the guy exposed him elon decided to leak his dm between them and in the dm

The guy was just like, Elon was trying to get him to stream. The guy was like, yeah, I'll talk to my editors on YouTube. They are the one that runs my YouTube channel because he streams on Twitch. These guys cut his stream, put them on YouTube, like an editor will do. And then Elon was like, who are these mysterious editors? And then he tweeted out that with the DMs that,

The guy, his name is Asman, is like, Asman is not his own man. He needs to verify everything with his editors before posting anything. So don't believe him. So literally, Elon Musk, the smartest man in the world, confused like newspaper editors that oversees journalists with YouTube editors that cut videos for an online personality like Asman and then try to use that.

to defend himself against him accusing elon of using people to boost his accounts

on all these video game characters. It is one of the wildest things I've ever heard. He is losing his mind. It's crazy. It's very weird. It's distressing. I feel like I should talk to a psychologist about that. WLTP versus EPA, I think it means. VS versus any other. Is apples to oranges best to stick to one and use that one for a comparison?

Yeah, no, that's fair. Yeah. Should be one standard. Regarding the boycott, Tesla called me this week to test drive the new Model 3 to replace my 2018. I let them know I was divesting of Tesla due to Elon now shopping Volvo, VW, et cetera, for replacements. How bad would it have to get for the board, which is Tesla, which is Elon's buddies and gets paid?

How bad would it have to get for them to pull him? I think you would need to go a step behind that. It would need to be a shareholder revolt that pushed the board out and then Iman out from there. I don't think the board... We cannot count on them to do anything at this point. The shareholder base, I call them zombie shareholders right now. They're just following Iman like zombies. There's no...

I don't think that's going to happen either, unfortunately. I think the biggest thing that could happen is like, you know,

Elon's starting to sell shares and that trashes the stock. And then shareholders get mad and then they start seeing his mistake for what they are. Tesla is losing sales right now for real. They start seeing that. That could maybe start something. But I think most of the realist shareholders have already left Tesla at this point. So it's hard to create a movement on that front.

All right. A few more questions here. Best way to stop charge cable theft is to reprimand copper scrap buyers. I don't think they care. They can clearly see a liquid coal cable is stolen. Can they not bring that down before bringing it to the scrap guys? I guess. I don't know. I mean, I guess it depends on the cable. They could just rip it off. But I imagine. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know that world too well. Yeah, me neither.

All right. Last one so far is, to me, I like the 80 mile per hour byway test Out of Spec does. Yeah. Out of Spec and State of Charge both do some good range real world tests. But I think the one with motor is very similar. Every car does the same route and everything. So it's not, I don't think it's a bad test. It's a pretty good test. I think they do the same speed, the same route and everything. Yeah.

I think it's a pretty good test too. Yeah. And what's 80 miles per hour in kilometers? It's a lot. It's probably like 130. Yeah, it's over the speed limit.

What are you talking about? Oh, boy. I'm just kidding. All right. Well, that's it for us this week. Thanks a lot for joining the Elcheck podcast. If you do like the podcast, please give us a like, a thumbs up, or subscribe, whatever it is on the app that you're watching right now because we're live everywhere. If you're listening to our podcast app, if you can give us a five-star rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, that also helps the show a ton. We appreciate when you do it. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a fun one. Bye-bye.