Rivian's new EVs, Tesla Model Y two-seater, Dodge Charger Daytona EV, and more
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And we are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winshaw. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. A little special episode of the podcast a little bit early because I'm traveling to Europe right now. And it's been a long week. So if we could do this at the normal time of the 11 p.m. Now it's 7 p.m. for me. But it's better that way for this show because we're going to have plenty to talk about, obviously.

If you joined us on the podcast, well, podcast slash watch party yesterday for the Rivian, already a lot that you know about. But we had more time to digest all the information from the launch. We talked a little bit more, said I had a great interview with RJ that you can watch on our channel on YouTube. And yeah,

A little bit more of information that came out too that we're going to discuss in a few minutes. But let's start with the meat of it. Let's start with the R2, which was the reason we're all there. It was called the launch of the R2. There was this one more thing and not even two more things type of thing.

surprise at the end. Not exactly what we were expecting, but it's still pretty cool when we get to that in a second. But the R2 itself, there was a surprise despite all the leaks because the leaks itself was not completely accurate. Well, I mean, the leak was coming directly from Rivian's website. So the information must have been accurate at least at one point, but they changed a few things. So the R2 in terms of design, I mean, it's pretty much what we saw in the leak.

It's also, if you're familiar with the R1S, it's exactly the same car on the exterior, at least, with a few design changes, but basically a smaller R1S. I can draw right back to the size, the dimensions differences here. So definitely a little bit shorter, quite similar wheelbase though. And you have obviously shorter as well.

And is it the, what's the, we don't have the width here. The width probably similar now. I think it's a little bit smaller. Yeah. On the outside set, there's not much to note, I guess, right? Yeah.

I mean, you know, obviously smaller all around. And when they had the two comparisons, it was definitely noticeable. But like on its own, like they could have probably driven this thing around L.A. And in fact, I guess they did. And nobody really noticed it besides some folks at the, you know, on the charging station because it looks like an R1S. Yeah. Natural camouflage. Yeah. But the kind of the big difference is.

Oh, yeah. The charge port is kind of the big deal, I think, on that one, right? Yeah, not as much a design feature than the feature itself. But, yeah, it is on the passenger rear side, is that it? Passenger rear side, quite low. I don't know if that's going to be... You can't even see it on that picture, actually. Yeah, it's like kind of where the top of the wheel well, really. Mm-hmm.

Which I don't, you know, like if you're a tall person, I wonder if that's going to be kind of a hassle to like get down that low. I don't know. Probably not that big a deal. I mean, it is a knee level. So unless like sometimes you don't, you don't see exactly where you're plugging it in. But if the, if the charge port itself is well designed, normally you can just like it funnels through as you plug it in. So you probably don't have to bend the knees too much to, to get in there.

But obviously the bigger issues that people are talking about is like, all right, this is going to be an axe connector. We saw it on the prototype itself. It is an axe connector. Biggest advantage of that is using the supercharger network.

most supercharger out there right now this is coming in 2026 so maybe this is going to be changing a little bit but it's uh um supercharger v3s which have shorter cables so that makes it harder to use this particular uh place though it is like this might not this is not the best picture but the fact that you don't see it on here does show you that it's very much at the very back of the vehicle right

So that could help a little bit, but not that much, obviously being. Yeah. And not, not for, not for towing either. Like if you're towing, that's going to be a real hassle to get into a supercharger, which, you know, that's like one of the things that, you know, theoretically, you know, you need superchargers for towing because your range goes down so much and you would have to like unleach, unleach your cargo and then plug in and then,

you know, get back in. I don't think that's a great idea. I mean, I know Tesla's building the pull through superchargers, but you're going to have to pull through in an opposite direction, which might be problematic. You know, Rivian said and RJ said that, you know, they want it on the passenger side for like, you know, street parking and

You don't want to have to bring the cable around to the other side. So like, that's why it's not on the passenger side, but like, I kind of wonder if it would have made more sense on the passenger front so that they could pull in front ways into a supercharger. Be good there. You also have the passenger side. So it's on the, you know, the street side when you're charging on the street and

And then, you know, you're also... I don't quite understand RJ's specific argument that the front... You know, being on the back right, you know, people who are already Rivian owners already have that set up in their garage like that. I don't think that's the case. And, you know, the Rivian Adventure Network is also kind of set up for the front left or the back right. I don't quite...

understand that but I think the bigger thing is um he he did mention that like the base model of the the Rivian uh our uh R2 is gonna have all the electronics in the back um because uh it doesn't have a front motor uh so they don't want to have to run a new you know new electronics to the front of the vehicle

So having it at the back of the vehicle where the controller is, is less expensive and they make a lot of cost decisions. So that's why it's at the back and it's on the passenger side for those other reasons. So I guess I kind of understand it, but I don't know. I don't know if that's the best decision. Well, two silver linings. There's two positive ways to look at this is like one,

Hopefully, in the next two years, Tesla ramps up the four superchargers, which is going to make it a little bit easier to use with the three more feet that you get on the cable. And secondly, Rivian is also deploying its own supercharger.

DC fast charging network, the adventure network. Obviously, there's no chance that it's going to come in close to catch up Tesla in the next two years, but it's still, they're still expanding. And then in the next two years, they're planning 600 stations, which is still significant and is going to be helpful. And obviously, Rivian is building those stations to work well with this particular charge port location.

Now, still on the back here, one of the more unique, less familiar design features that we haven't seen on many EVs is, one, the rear window slides down. So that was in the leak. Useful if you're carrying objects a little bit longer that you can have stick out. You just need to put that. Do you have that in the US, too? You have to put a red flag on top of an object that gets out of the car? I mean, you're supposed to. I don't know. I don't know if it's a law.

But I do know that you certainly should do that. Yeah, it's a law in Quebec. And then also you have these rear quarter windows that open up at an angle, which is good for aerodynamic performance, I guess, and can help the hair flow at the back.

Yeah, and it'll kind of make the thing more like, you know, one of those Toyota or, you know, Ford Bronco, like...

you know, open air thing. You got the glass on the top, you got all the windows open, you got the back open, you got the air flowing through. It'd be kind of a nice scene. And I don't, I think we talked about this with Jamie earlier. The reason that they don't have the windows in the backs of trucks anymore is because, you know, the exhaust comes back and, you know, boots the car. Obviously this is not a problem with EVs. So that's, you know, a nice plus that they can do there. But, you know, overall, that's pretty cool. Mm-hmm.

All right, moving on to the inside. That's where you get a little bit more difference from the current lineup of Rivian. It's still familiar, but there's definitely a bit of a downgrade, which is unsurprising. This is not the same level of luxury that you would find in the current R1 lineup, which is $70,000 plus.

But this feature is new. You have a double glove box situation, which got a giant pop at the unveiling. I'm not sure why. Personally, I'm not a giant user of my glove box. But I mean, this probably would use it a lot more with this because the one that is central here is more accessible to the driver. So that makes sense. Yeah, that would be true.

that that's one of the things that's in the volvo ex30 that uh you know they're very happy about current rivian r1 uh owners have glove boxes below the seats and they're they're quite small

And it's just kind of a hassle. Like, you know, you put your registration information in there for when the police pull you over and you're like, you know, it barely fits in there and I got to fold it and whatever. And just so, yeah, I think they heard their customers loud and clear. And it's clear, like, you know, a lot of the people inside the event were Rivian employees and owners.

By the way, most, you know, we'll get to this in a second, but most of the Rivian employees did not know about the R3. Yeah. Yeah, the ones that were there, the ones that, like, obviously, the vehicle is somewhat advanced in the design and whatnot. So there was probably a decent team working on it. But they were very good at compartmenting the situation so that not everyone knew about it.

Yeah. The door is also going to update compared to what they have right now where they don't have the speakers in them. So now they have a pretty large pocket for like a water bottle, large water bottle and other things. And still you have that torch, that flashlight embedded inside the door, which somehow has become kind of a

It's a Rivian thing. Yeah, it's a stable Rivian. Yeah, and in the passenger side, I saw Jamie's post, there's a hand warmer battery in there. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't mention that. Another feature that's not too common inside vehicles is the flat folding front seats. Both of them are flat folding, so you can have it fully flat. In the presentation, they mentioned mostly like a camping situation. So it can be useful for that. Obviously, the

Passenger front seat being able to go full flat down is also useful for cargo when you're traveling things around. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Yeah. This image by itself looks kind of strange. Like, why would you want that? The steering wheel has been updated with these giant scroll wheels. And as you commented right at the end, it sounds like you're right. You can control them from the back as well. And yeah, they're just massive.

Yeah, I wonder how the button push works on those. Like if it's sideways or... I think you can probably, even though if they go fully around, it's probably a mechanism to still push them straight, I would assume. I think it's probably doable.

yeah they're interesting for sure they called it and well i mean or they said integrated aptic control dial so if it's aptic like it's probably just you know you don't actually move them when you push you just you just push on them and it did it register the push and gives you an optic feedback so it gives you the feel that you can push them forward but you they don't they're not actually moving um this is the front console uh with the the front seats awesome

You have an extra storage in the front and you have some space in the front to put some like a purse or something. That's always nice. All right. Just one thing on that front console. RIVIAN, or sorry, RJ in a different interview mentioned that they have vastly improved the wireless charging on the PS4.

the the pad there and most people most rivian owners buy a third party thing because rivians is so bad oh yeah so yeah it's good that they've improved that a lot like the early teslas too there yeah that's the first to use their own they were pretty bad um now now they're good in the new mullow i'm a little three they're pretty good um all right speaking of the specs

a range they're talking about over 300 miles for that's 480 kilometers for all version of the r2 and there's going to be a rear-wheel drive version dual motor all-wheel drive version and all trimotor all-wheel drive version so the leak on the website originally said up to 330 miles of range so i assume that

One of those versions, most likely the rear-wheel drive with a bigger battery version, they didn't discuss the battery sizes just yet, will get 330 miles and the rest will get in between 300 and 330. That's the assumption. Yeah. And so the base model Rivian, the $45,000 one, will have a smaller battery that'll get 270 miles-ish of range.

um but you know obviously they they need to you know finish that and and get the epa rating but that's going to be like a you know 80-ish kilowatt hour battery pack that you know probably will be only on the uh the rear real version so pretty pretty interesting uh oh okay so i missed that at the presentation he said all version over 300 but the the base 145 won't be 300

Yeah, so they're going to have a smaller battery pack. It's going to be 270-ish miles. And that is going to be in the rear-wheel drive version. Well, that makes sense because that's pretty much what the base model Y2. Yeah. All right, the tri-motor version is going to be 0-60 mph in less than 3 seconds. Crazy. Yeah, like super car level for an SUV. Yeah.

Yeah, the dimensions are basically the same as the Model Y. I already even went into the difference with the R1S because it's basically a little broader. There was some talk about autonomous driving, but specifically, RJ mentioned hands-free driving and attention-free driving on highways, which we generally refer to as level three autonomous driving. They did share some details about the

hardware suite that was going to enable that 11 cameras all around the cars which is significant and five radars so unlike tesla they're not going with the vision only model they are relying on on radars i wonder if that's radar or radars and lidars because that like they might have dumbed it down for presentation by the way my bad for not asking rj about that i wanted to and i forgot

I feel like if there was LiDARs on there, they would be proud of that. Like, oh, we have LiDAR, especially for a vehicle of that price range. It would be impressive. Right.

All right. So that was one of the big announcement with this, like a Rivian is going with, well, obviously the R2 is a whole new vehicle platform and we can get to that in a second. It enables also other vehicles, but one of the main thing about the new platform, it's now using a different cell form factor of 4695. So similar to the 4680 that this introduced with the Model Y that was first built in the factory, Texas. It's similar size, just a little bit taller, 15 inches dollars, inches.

millimeters taller. And yeah, that's, they didn't go into details if it's going to be like a structural battery pack system. No, they definitely said it was a structural battery pack. Oh yeah, they did. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's basically the floor of the car is going to be the battery pack. And it's only, so there are two, sorry, the R1s have two layers of batteries, but because these batteries are much bigger, it's only going to be one layer of batteries.

But yeah, they said it. I don't know if they said it at the event, but they definitely said it's going to be a structural battery pack. Okay. So very, very Tesla-y in that respect. Absolutely. But I mean, they're not the only ones. Since Tesla announced that, several other companies have announced that they're moving to similar things. So it's definitely becoming a trend in the industry.

So the earlier leak, that was like the big thing. Like the main thing is like, all right, how affordable is that thing? That's what you want to know. And the leak said $47,000, but at the event, which the leak was just two days, three days prior to the event, two or three days prior to the event. And again, directly from Raven's website source code. Now the event, I'll actually surprise everyone with seeing that the starting price is going to be $45,000 for the vehicle. Now this is two years away and obviously,

we've seen in the EV industry over the last few years with the inflation and then the market changes a lot. So you never exactly know what happens. And there's been a few times where automakers announce a price. And if the vehicle is a few years away, it's on the same price. So let's keep that in mind, obviously. But $45,000 is a very aggressive pricing situation. And we did get the email that said around $45,000 after that, right?

Yeah, so it's kind of curious. And obviously, delivery is often $1,000 or $2,000 charge. So there's some ambiguity there. Mm-hmm.

And the availability is the first half. So we heard of the league coming in 2026. RJ specified the first half of 2026. And he also specified that how they are achieving that is because he did say that I wasn't aware that there was a further date than that before that. I thought that was always like around 2025, 2026. That's what they were planning the next generation. But he said that they are...

getting to market sooner, getting to production sooner by not building it at the Georgia factory that was planned. They're actually pausing that, pausing the production of the build out of the Georgia factory to build a production line in normal Illinois that's going to save them money and time to market. It's a strategy that's extremely similar to what Tesla just did in

A few months ago with the next generation vehicle that they planned, the cheaper model and the Robotaxi, which were first supposed to be built at a brand new plant in Mexico, Gigafactory Mexico. And then Tesla changed their idea, said they slowed down the build out of Gigafactory Mexico.

Still hasn't broken ground on it yet anyway. And they are planning to build it in Texas where they are already producing vehicles, where they already have their engineering team, manufacturing team there. So same thing for Rivian. It's going to make a lot more sense, a lot easier to build out the production line there for the next generation vehicle.

By the way, I asked RJ specifically, like, are you doing this to save time? And he kind of danced around it. Like, I kind of feel like it's a money saving thing more than a time saving thing. Obviously, you know, they're running, they're running out of money in a couple years. So they need to kind of

shore up their costs. And if it's saving them, what is it? $2 billion or something? Yeah, $2.5 billion. That's like another quarter of operations. So that may have been a bigger factor than the time savings.

Yeah, I mean, if they want to bring that thing in any kind of realistic, like, for the next three years, they would need to build out the factory in Georgia, like, really quick. Like, start spending money on it right now in terms of construction. And obviously, Rivian wants to get to a positive gross margin and profitability sooner than that. And so they need to focus on the production in normal to make that happen. Because that's the thing here.

Rivian is showing us the R2 which, I mean, on paper and now the vehicle, we've seen it, Jamie's seen it in person, was impressed. We've seen the unveiling. We were impressed. It hits the mark everywhere. It's just now they need to bring it to production and if they want to survive, they need to predict production and make money on it at some point and they're not even making money on the R1S and R1T right now. So the focus needs to be on that within the next two years to

build the financial stability to bring the R2 and to have the credibility to bring it with a profitability, which is just not quite there just yet. But

Gaining credibility every day. We just reported earlier this week that Rivian is terminating their third shift at the normal factory. And it's not because they want to reduce production. It's because they are increasing the efficiency of the plant and can produce them without a third shift. So that's good news. And that will show in that will improve their gross profit on the cars undeniably. All right.

So there was a famous Elon Musk, one more thing, woman. If the verge, I was going to say, I hope you didn't do the same mistake they did, but yeah. Yeah. That's a reference to the verge thought for some reason that the one more thing was a

It was a Nylund Must thing. It's famously a Steve Jobs thing. They must have a 13-year-old on their Twitter account or something. Yeah, I still remember when tech media was written by techies that are just nerds and super fans of things. Now, it's just... Anyway, I'm not going to spend too much time on this. There was one more thing, Roman. There wasn't even two, you could argue. But the...

RJ went with like, all right, this R2 is not just a vehicle. It's a new platform that we're building. And obviously a new platform enables different vehicles on the same platform. And this next vehicle is the R3.

And that's kind of confusing me in the naming scheme now because you'd have the R1S, R1T, so the first generation vehicle, the higher end vehicle. So you can forget the next generation thing because, I mean, there's going to be new generation of the R1S and R1T eventually. So it's like...

in terms of size and luxury level i would say you have the r1t and r1s then you have the r2 so we assume they might be like r1 r2s r2t or to whatever but now the r2 is the new generation vehicles and also the name of this specific suv midsize suv and now you have an r3 that is built on the same platform as the r2 but it's it's its own vehicle but you also have a r3x that we're gonna get to later um

All right, so the R3 is a little bit smaller than the R2. It did give you the dimension. I don't know if we had it when we wrote that post. I don't think we have the dimension on this. But yeah, it's a hatchback, basically. Did RJ call it the form factor differently or it's just a hatchback? Yeah, he called it a hatchback and he said it was smaller than the R2. Mm-hmm.

a lot of people have different opinions on it i know that your opinions evolve in the last 24 hours on this car uh a lot of people called it like a gremlin looking vehicle or ionic five kind of feel uh it's definitely uh more ionic fine and gremlin i think in terms of actual like it's very modern looking at the same time that um

But I think it's the shape that this very like triangular shape at the back is something that was popular in the like the 70s or 80s in the car business. Wow. And I say popular. It was they tried it in the 80s and 70s and it kind of died out. But Riven is trying to make a comeback with it. And it's looking pretty good to me, actually.

Yeah. I mean, and you know, initially when I saw it come out and I was like, Hey, this is a Gremlin, but you know, it, or a Lada. Yeah. I don't know if you remember the Lada. It's like a Russian vehicle. Uh, my uncle had one. Really? Oh man. Those things are cool. Anyway. Uh,

I like in the 24 hours since it launched, I've been just kind of ruminating on it. And now I'm like, oh, my God, I need to have that. You know, I'm a Chevy Bolt owner. I'm looking at the Volvo EX30 as my next car. And now this is going to be my next car or my next, you know, whenever it comes out, I'll get one probably.

So I'm super into this, you know, until the next amazing car comes along. But right now I'm really excited about this thing. And, you know, when I talked to RJ, he was like, a lot of people at Rivian want to build this one first and build the R2 after it. And I was like, hmm, that actually makes a lot of sense because you have already, you know, an SUV like you're making. You don't have like if you want to get into this market first, you might want to think about,

making this first, I don't know what that entails. I'm sure that's a lot of thinking and they're probably already quite a bit down the road on the R2, but it's an interesting idea.

the r2 what they show the prototype they showed looked a bit more advanced for sure i'm sure they were working on this before they were working on the r3 that makes sense uh strategically speaking you're right like the they already have an suv and the um so the r3 is further from the the r1 and

And there's no doubt that the R2 is going to cannibalize a little bit of the R1S cells, which is like the breadwinner right now for Rivian. And the fact itself that they released it is already going to affect cells most likely. Yeah, I agree. There's some Osborne effect happening. Yeah. So the further distance you can have with it, the better, I think. But at the same time, like you cannot, there's the...

Form factor, the price range, the actual segment in which the R2 is operating is the biggest one in the world right now. There's no doubt about it, specifically the biggest one in the US and North America where Rivian primarily operates right now. So you cannot argue against that. Like it makes sense to have a vehicle in that segment if it's the most popular one.

So, yeah, it's a tradeoff on both sides. But in terms of the R3, we don't know that much about it just yet. Like the unveil, some of the features, like I don't think we have a picture of it right now, but the rear window opens halfway, but still opens out. It's not like a rolled down window like in the R2.

Right. So you could like drop stuff in instead of having to open the whole hatchback. Yeah. Yeah. The specs are not released just yet. The price is not released, though. It's going to be a little bit cheaper than the $45,000 starting price of the R2. And I think Arjun, your interview said something like it's going to come after the R2 without saying when. Right. Pretty much that. I mean, that that's hard to like he said he wanted to stagger it. He wished he had staggered the R1S and the R2.

And they actually did stagger it, but yes, that definitely came after. But yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that's like going to be an extra year. So yeah,

First half of 2027 would be my best guess, which is a long time. Yeah, it's a decent idea. They haven't even opened up the orders on this. They have opened up, not orders, I should say reservation for the R1T and not for the R2. They opened it for the R2, not for the R3. And they did another one more thing moment after the R3, though I wouldn't consider that its own vehicle program, though they kind of introduced it as such, but it's the R3X R1T.

So the R3, did he say it's going to come in a single motor and dual motor, I think, right? That's what he said. And tri-motor. Oh, yeah. The tri-motor is the R3X. So that's what's confusing to me because for the R2, it did say single, dual, and tri-motor. But you didn't see like the tri-motor is not the R2X. It's not a different thing.

I know it is kind of a weird naming strategy. Yeah, so maybe this will all like plays itself out by the time it reaches production, maybe they adjust that. But to be fair, the R3X is more than just a tri-motor version of the R3. It has a higher suspension. It has a wider wheelbase, wider wheels. The body is a little bit wider around the wheel wells. It's a little bit different. Red mirrors?

Yeah, I don't know about that. But yeah, it's actually that was on the prototype at least. Interior looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit more adventurous than the R3's original look, the normal one. Other than that, again, not that much information on it in terms of specs and everything. But I know you did say on your podcast, on your interview,

much less than the three seconds 0 to 60 for the R3X, right? Right. I mean, it was below. So the R2 tri-motor is going to be below three seconds. So this one, which is a much smaller vehicle on the same motor and batteries, is going to theoretically be that much faster, which who knows if that's like two seconds or 2.8 seconds.

whatever it's gonna be but that's basically the hot hatch electric hatch that we've been asking for forever we've seen we've seen the renault um made prototypes of it with the zoe like they had this cool like and obviously there's always not as cool and aggressive as this vehicle also but i mean they had this drill motor version of it at one point that they did which was really cool i don't i don't think they ever sold it though uh we've been asking

GM, Chevy to do a dual motor version of the Bolt forever it just made a ton of sense they never went with it Rivian was like we're gonna do it and also I mean I know you're a big fan of the Bolt but this thing looks a lot better than the Bolt it does sadly

Yeah. So I think this is good. This is really cool. I think it's just but let's not get too excited because I don't I don't think we're going to see this market anytime soon. So we'll just keep an eye on it. But it's nice.

You know, maybe Volkswagen sees this and says, hey, there is a market in the U.S. for, you know, a ID3 or a GTI type of... I mean, and we know that Volkswagen's messing around with an electric GTI that may never get here. But, like, theoretically, Volkswagen could say, hey, look,

We don't need to make a Scout version or something. We can just bring one of our current vehicles with a second motor and decent horsepower over, and there's going to be a market for that. That's what I kind of wish they would have opened up a reservation for this because...

I think if they could have shown like a $50,000, $100,000 reservation for that thing, that would have been a lot helpful toward that, towards like creating a market for those kinds of cars in the US and North America and pushing other automakers to follow through. They didn't do that. They did open it for the R2. And RJ today confirmed within less than 24 hours of the unveiling of the R2, they received over 68,000 reservations.

Now the reservation, yeah, it's solid number, but it is a hundred dollars per reservation and refundable. So it's like the same thing that they're having with this Cybertruck. Um, so obviously you have to be careful with that. It's not a giant show of interest. It is a show of interest. And, um,

Obviously, a lot of people are criticizing Rivian of like, oh, they are taking reservation on feeling this way ahead of production. It's too early and all that. But it does make sense because obviously, Rivian is building a brand right now. It's building a fleet. It's building an owner's fleet. And these owners, they are at one point looking for their cars.

they are getting fans are like, okay, I'm be very interested in a Rivian, but I cannot afford it. That happened a lot. That was a big deal with the Model 3 and the Model Y with Tesla. They had just had a bunch of fans that couldn't afford a Model S or a Model X. And so you kind of like to tell them like this, this thing is coming and you

you're going to be able to afford it. And if you know that, if you know when it's coming and maybe you're going to change your buying perspective for another vehicle and focus on that. So it makes sense. But $68,000 is a lot of cash. It's kind of a little infusion of $6.8 million, like you said. That's not going to break the bank or not going to change much for Rivian, but still helpful.

And the stock, I don't know, did the stock react to that announcement today? It's definitely up. I should also note that I got an email last night, get priority R2 delivery. Thanks for being part of the Rivian community. As an R1S owner, we're excited to offer you priority delivery when you reserve your R2 so you can be among the first to experience our next adventure. So current Rivian owners are going to get priority. Yeah.

so yeah the stock is up two percent right now it didn't look like it reacted much to the news of the number of reservation but it was also up like 12 yesterday because they said it was the the unveiling was during the day and um and that that that was impressive because obviously the riven stock got a beating in the last few weeks two months so it's not it's just gaining back but

I mean, I don't remember the last time I was watching an EV presentation that didn't result in sell the news for the stock. Normally it's like buy the rumors, sell the news. But this time the news actually contributed to the performance of the stock. And there was technically some bad news in there with the Georgia plant. So that's built in or baked into the. I mean, as stock news, I don't know if it's bad news. Like if you cut costs, like most of the time investors love that. Right.

all right one thing that riven is pretty good at is the accessories uh they uh they are investing heavily in developing their own custom accessories for their cars and the r2 accessories are hitting the mark there they uh they went above and beyond really um they have uh so they just do a list okay so they have this uh this tent that is uh

cool looking, weird looking, depending on where you stand. It's definitely unique looking. Like it's kind of a cage, kind of a, yeah, it looks like it would be a cave on the side of a mountain or something. No, I know what it looks like. It looks like one of those tents that climbers use. Oh yeah, they're hanging off the mountain. Yeah, when they hang on the mountain, that's what it looks like.

Yeah, it's actually wider than the vehicle. Like it goes out to the sides more. So that's why she looks so large and like it and the ladder is like actually out so you can open the back door while the ladder is out. And it's like, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say, it looks weird because you think it's a square. And why would somebody be in a square tent that's four feet by four feet? You wouldn't fit in that. But because it's longer, it looks kind of weird. Do we have another picture of it or just this one? No, I just did some thinking about that. Then you have the bike mount, which is interesting. Apparently, the

You can see it better on this picture here. But how does that work? How did the bike stay on that thing?

The information that was on the website in the leak was more about how easy it is to mount it and demount it. That was like the main thing. There's not that much details about it. I think there's something on the sides that you can squeeze them into. I think that's what they mentioned. I can look at it. Actually, let me look back at the leak. The leak had more information on this. I think it was interesting.

i also when i run that i read the leak i was like i wasn't sure exactly either like how does this work but uh i have it here our bike mount system simply snaps into the rear accessory port so that's the two ports that you saw in the back so you can take the bikes to go no tools needed ready in minutes fits in front of the trunk when you're not using it so it fits in the front you're right there's no information on how this uh

things actually fit but this these ports these accessory ports on the on the back they fit a bunch of different accessories including this thing is there a name for this thing i don't think so no it's basically a cargo bed like kind of a mini pickup truck bed that you attach to the r2's ports accessory in the back so if you have like like in this case here uh plants and and dirt and all that that you want to transport you don't want to put that in your

nice $50,000 SUV. You put it in there and there. What's kind of cool about this thing, if you scroll up a little bit, there's actually wheels hidden at the bottom that you can kind of see right there. I don't know if the views that good, but this is something that you can like take inside like a Home Depot,

Oh, it's like a cart. It becomes a cart. Yeah. So you can pull it off and it's a cart that you can wheel in like a dolly and take this- Oh, okay. Here, no, you can see the here is on this side. Yeah. Take it shopping.

Um, so it actually has like a lot of functionality. Um, you know, you could take it shopping, then just put it on the back of your car. Um, and it almost, it gives you kind of like a, kind of like a small pickup, you know, pickup beds are getting smaller and smaller. Like this is like, uh, you know, you're not going to put a couple of motorcycles in there, but, uh, you know, it, it, it's good for some, from fertilizer and, and rocks and whatever. Um,

you can put back there and it's nice that you can you know pull it off and take it directly to where you want it so right it's a great idea and maybe even better is that all of these accessories are going to be available for the r1 stuff and they're coming out before the r2s are launched so i'm excited it looks like the the original because the r1s and r1t also like they were

marketed with a bunch of different accessories that look very cool but not all of them pan out and everything so it looks like this there's a second wave of that coming that with some cool stuff then you have this roof um box here that's just massive absolutely massive um but that's but it's a roof box like we're familiar with that uh and then there's the newly designed uh camp is it a compact kitchen you know

So is it called the chem kitchen also? They said it's called the compact kitchen now. Okay. Okay. So they even already has the chem kitchen. But it never went on sale. Yeah. And now they have like, again, this is one of the things that didn't pan out. Now they have the compact kitchen that looks a little bit more refined.

And kind of similar size as the box thing that we saw earlier, but enclosed, obviously. And you have equipment like this. This looks like a water dispenser or something like that. You have a cooktop. I think you have a sink too. I mean, a sink. And Riven is designing all these compartments to fit custom cookware that I think comes with it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, this is, you know, early stages. They kind of just showed this, but they didn't really like go into it. I don't know that this is like ready to roll yet. It seems like it's still in the tightening it up phase. Mm hmm. What's some cool stuff for sure? Yeah. And the best thing is for our one people to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be available for all. Is there any one of them that you want to buy for your R1S? I'm actually, I would take any of those four things. Yeah.

I don't know if I would buy a cam kitchen, but I would definitely test one out if Rivian wanted to send me one. Yeah, the cam kitchen is probably going to be pretty pricey. The bike mount, to me, if it's really like you said, takes a minute to put it on, put it away, that's nice. If you ever handle some bike mounts, they're generally not super fun to handle. All right, you also had your interview with RJ. Yeah, we got a lot of information in 15 minutes from him.

Yeah. I mean, he's good. Like I read all the comments on this too. Like people really liked your interview, like your, the, the, your questions and the, I really like RJ's responses, like the way he responded, like the, uh,

I think a lot of our readers were surprised to find a rational CEO that was open and fun to talk to. Yeah. I don't know why. Yeah, that's weird. But anything you want to add that I know we use a lot of your interview in the first part of the podcast already, but anything you think is worth? Yeah, I just thought it was kind of interesting.

He called the R3X mind-bendingly fast. It was interesting to see him use those kind of superlatives. It's clear that that thing's going to be a rocket ship.

um you know as far as the r2 pack size he was definitely uh pr like it felt like there were pr people behind the camera with guns pointed at his face on some of these questions i was like you know i i saw on a previous interview you said it's 250 or 270 miles you know can we talk about the 270 and he was like 300 it's you know around 300 miles

And then, let's see. We already were not on the good side of the PR at Rivian because during our live broadcast, Jamie opened the charge port that he wasn't supposed to.

Yeah, he almost got his hand kicked off or whatever. Yeah. The R13X, it makes sense that it's going to be super fast because if it's built on the same platform as the R2 and it's much smaller, much lighter, and the R2 already is going to do less than three seconds. So it's going to be two point something seconds, zero to 60 for this significantly large SUV. Yeah.

The R3X is going to be, I'm going to be surprised to see like a 2.5 type range. Right. Which is going to be fun on a hatch. Yeah. So we talked about the NAX part. We went into that before. Let's see if you scroll down a little bit. There were some other things we covered. We talked about the cam kitchen, the bidirectional charging. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to talk.

That was a big, big thing, not only because the R2 is going to have the option of having, you know, basically a plug that would go into 240, which means you could plug it into your, you know, generator port or whatever. But also that the R1S and the R1T have a bidirectional capability in their CCS combo port.

Which, you know, I've heard off the record before, but I think Rivian didn't want to say it on the record because they wanted to kind of have the ability to never enable it.

- And they don't want the full ratings right now from all the R1s and R1-2 owners. It's like, "Hey, am I hearing that we have a bi-directional charging capacity or why? I don't know about that. Like I just bought two Powerwalls already. Are you gonna refund those?" - Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is a really useful thing to have. It's kind of frankly a little surprising Rivian hasn't done anything there because like, "Hey, here's a $5,000 product that costs us like a couple hundred bucks.

and you can charge your house with it. I feel like that's something that Rivian should be focusing on if they want to be profitable. And I know there's all kinds of electric standards that they have to follow, and it's not super easy, but like,

my god like this is every car you make has another you know five thousand dollars worth of cash coming in from it like i feel like they're really not uh you know focused on like making money from this thing so um every r1 vehicle that's ever been made can uh send power back into your house or it can you know

send 240 or it can only send DC power. But if you have an inverter, then you can, you know, power your house or power worksite or do all the things that the Tesla Cybertruck and the Ford F-150 Lightning can do.

But Rivian just has it secretly kept there. And the better news is the R2 is going to have the native, as an option, native 240-volt port like the F-150 and the Cybertruck. So that will be good. I mean, the bi-generational charging has been a big selling factor for some people, for the Lightning, obviously. And this is one of the biggest competitors of the R1T.

So it wouldn't make sense to try to market that a little bit, but yeah, it seems like they're a bit... And then I talked a little bit about how RJ was really likable. And besides the R3, I think the thing that people talked about the most was like, hey, this guy's like, they didn't start late and he's... Yeah. How did the original PR guy at Rivian, I mean, we're talking about back to 2018 or something.

He described RJ to me as like a smart, I think a smart, like Clark Kent. Stable genius is what I heard. Yeah. Genius Clark Kent or something. A genius Clark Kent character. Yeah. He does look a bit like Clark Kent. I'm going to admit it. Yeah. And somebody else said he looked like Steve-O, the jackass guy. With a full head of hair, maybe. Yeah.

no not the main jackass guy the other jackass guy who uh i think he had a draw oh no okay that's steve okay you mean um uh damn it not not johnny knoxville but oh steve i thought you meant johnny knoxville okay yeah yeah no i don't see steve that much all right uh we're gonna move on from rivian talk a little bit about tesla talk a little bit about uh the judge charger detona and then you uh updated ionic five so

Before we do, if you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, we'd appreciate it if you can give us a like and a subscribe and hit that notification button. All these things are free to do and takes a second and they help the show a ton. If you're listening to our podcast right now on your audio app, we are on everything from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to wherever you can get your podcasts. If you can give us a five-star rating, that helps a ton. Also free to do.

and it helps the show more than you think. We read all the reviews too. We appreciate everyone of you EV nerds out there. Thank you very much for helping the show grow. All right, moving on to some Tesla news. There was a new Model Y on Ville this week, and we didn't hear much about it because it was on Ville in France, and it's only for France, at least for now. So these French bastards are getting the new Tesla without us. That's crazy.

That's a shame. It is not a fully new car, to be fair. It is a two-seater modified Model Y. So you can see the picture. I have a bigger picture right here. Okay.

They removed the backseat, the second row seat, and didn't put a third row, obviously. Otherwise, I'd be able to enter the road too. And this vehicle is basically... Why is it only offered in France right now? It might still always only be offered in France, though I think there's some value for other markets too. It's because there's a...

specific requirements for commercial vehicles in France that have two or three front seats. So obviously when I mean three, it's like a little bench seat in the middle that are used for commercial use. So mainly vans, obviously vans will fall into that category, commercial vans, obviously they do get a tax exemption for the TVA tax. So that makes them much cheaper.

And it's very popular in France. There's a ton of them. I think we had the number. It's 6.3 million commercial vehicles like that in France. So it's a popular form factor for them. Now,

the Tesla has just been smart here. Like, wait a minute. If you remove the back seat on the Model Y and make it flat from the trunk all the way to the front seat, you basically have like a van with some decent side cargo space in there. Decent size is 2,158 liters of capacity. So,

We have that and now you have a natural vehicle and all these 6.3, not all, but most of these 6.3 million vehicles are diesel powered. So we have an opportunity here to get access to that tax credit, not a tax credit, but tax saving, tax exemption. And

at our price point with that tax exemption, it's going to be interesting for people. So if you have a business that you don't need a full-size van, this will work. Obviously, you don't have a commercial back here. It's still like a consumer vehicle back though. I don't know if that's... That lining might be different, to be honest. The picture is not perfect, but I wouldn't be surprised if that lining is different and a little bit more rugged. It would make sense. Now,

And it looks like a backstop, you know, against the back wheels. Yeah. Or back there. That's a big, yeah, a big change, obviously. So whatever commercial thing you have to object that you're traveling with, it won't damage your front seat. You're right. That's it. Right. If you break, it's not going to go right through the front and kill you. Yeah.

And now you get more range out of it too. Obviously, you remove seats, you remove weight. They are planning 565 kilometers on the WLTP standard. That's 251 miles. It's about 30 more kilometers than the highest range version of the Model Y gets in Europe.

And I would assume it's cheaper to a little bit cheaper because it's most definitely cheaper to make, I would assume. There's no price yet because Tesla only sells it to its fleet business unit. So if you go on the Electric article, though, I do have a link to it if you want to.

contact this fleet unit they're going to be able to give you a pricing so I don't know if they're only selling it fleet wise are they saying it one by one I mean you could sell it to consumer really like there's some people that could could use that really um I think I think it's a smart move I hope that it moves to other market because the Model Y is a very good vehicle and you don't have that many options in terms of electric vans that get that kind of range obviously you need a business that you don't you're not transporting anything that it's

doesn't fit in the vehicle um but i mean you can also it's not just for like transport things you you can if you have a business that you that you have like some mobile application to it and you need the space to deploy like i don't know like just like tesla's uh own mobile service uh vehicles uh you can build a custom setup with tools in the back i it's just smart

I hopefully as things gets beyond France soon. Yeah. I mean, why not just send it to the mobile fleet people? Like, I mean, I know they're using cyber trucks. Have you seen them a mobile Y a mobile Y being used by mobile service? You know, I actually had a model S or a model. Yeah. I mean, I think they just take old cars and put them back in the service there.

Yeah, I only use a mobile service once in Montreal came installed my full self driving computer. And once in in Louisiana, when I lost my when I lost my card for my car, the my key, they went and gave me a key. But yeah.

All right, bad news on the Gigafactory Berlin. We've been talking a lot about Gigafactory Berlin in the last few weeks because, I mean, it's Tesla's only factory in Europe. It's producing Model Ys for the European market. Model Y is now the most popular vehicle in the world, and it just happens to be electric, which is awesome.

But not everyone likes Gigafactory Berlin. Tesla has been facing a lot of opposition there from, believe it or not, environmentalists. It's not that they don't like electric vehicles. They don't like vehicles, period. They think everyone should be going around on bikes and walking and using public transportation, which...

We are pro all those things at Electrek, but we're also very aware that changing human behavior is a lot harder than convincing people that an electric vehicle is better for them than a gas car. So we think that electric vehicles are definitely part of the solution to reduce emissions from the transportation sector.

So we need to produce them to be able to convert gas mileage to electric mileage. There's just nowhere around it. But these environmentalists that are now more than just like activists, they are basically terrorists at this point because they lit an electric pylon on fire in between Berlin and Giga factory Berlin.

And that shut down the power at the factory and required evacuation of the factory. And apparently, Tesla has no way to reset the power for at least next week. So this happened March 5th, so like three days ago.

And Tesla is not expected to be able to go back to production for another week. So it's going to be a while. We're talking about billions of dollars worth of damage here. Like if you include like a production. I'm also kind of surprised Tesla doesn't have its own, you know, power station for that thing. You know, obviously solar in Germany is everywhere. I'm surprised that it was easy enough for a, let's call them saboteurs, you know,

for those guys to take out Tesla for a week or so. It's crazy. Yeah, that's what I said. It's actually like, I mean, I hate those people. They are terrible people. You should not do that. But to give them some credit, they were very efficient in their attack. They lit one pylon on fire, which, again, super dangerous. You shouldn't do it. It's also not right. But they ended up affecting 2,000 people too. Obviously, it's not just Tesla that was affected.

They ended up shutting down the power at 2,000 other homes. But obviously, the bigger target was Tesla. And that's the impact is more felt there than the other homes, obviously. So it's a very efficient attack. I'm going to give them that. But it's a terrible one.

And they're not helping their cause, too. I get the three-huggers that we talked about last week that set up camp in the forest where Tesla's planning the expansion of the factory. I get them. I don't approve of them either. I don't think it's that smart because, I mean, Tesla has made some great decisions.

Yeah, it's not. Yeah. First of all, it's not effective. And also Tesla is doing the right things on that front. Tesla has a lot of pressure for Gigafactory on water usage and they corrected. They completely changed their water usage plans and they reduced it greatly, which was one of the factors. The other one was deforestation. Now, I do understand that deforestation is not ideal and

Tesla did reforest as well and they planted more trees than they are taking out. So that's good. I know that it's not like one for one necessarily. Habitats are different. And if you change an habitat, it is impactful. But overall, I think Tesla is trying to do more good than bad here. It has to be a net positive or a net negative at some point. And I think that's a net positive. And you're just trying to negatively affect that. It's done.

Yeah. And you have to wonder like if Elon Musk's personal persona is kind of fanning the flames of resentment. Absolutely. It doesn't help at all because –

Previously, Sue, in a lot of the protests around Tesla in the IAA time last year, there was when that letter came out from the activist group that attacked Tesla again. They did mention Elon Musk and the richest man in the world, big ego and all that like they did.

you don't like either not that it's an excuse like you cannot like elon and not like electric pylons on fire right uh well speaking of elon we had uh an interesting development in the ai aspect of thing in the open ai situation uh we learned that elon tried to merge tesla and open ai back in 2018 when he left the open ai so if you remember

elon left openai after co-founding it and and committing uh 100 million at first though in those emails we learned that he was actually like saying like i'll cover the difference between what you raise and a billion dollars anyway and he left say uh noting conflict of interest with tesla because tesla was putting more efforts into ai and obviously

He did do that. Tesla did put more reference into AI. He even said that Tesla could play a role in AGI, general artificial intelligence. But at the same time,

He bought Twitter for way more than he expected that it was worth. Ended up having to sell tens of billions of Tesla stock to cover the cost of that acquisition, reducing his control over Tesla through reducing his stakes.

And then he asked the board, well, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but he created a separate startup, XAI, to develop AGI and then threatened Tesla shareholders that if they don't give him back up 25% shares of the company, control over the company, like he had roughly had before he sold the shares to buy Twitter, he wouldn't build AI product at Tesla anymore.

implying that he would build them at xai and during that whole time in the last few months he's been trashing open ai publicly for two things one their move as a non-profit which was funded as under elon and uh um as part of the mission of the company and the fact that they are so they went from a non-profit to a for-profit uh with the help of microsoft

And as a fact that they are not completely open anymore, they have closed down a lot of their research and code to the public, which they weren't doing at first. So Elon has been just bashing them on it. And now and more recently, last week, he sued them for those moves, for those for profit moves and away from their mission. This week, what happened is OpenAI released a blog post

countering the lawsuit. They say that they are moving to dismiss all claims in the lawsuit and they went as far as releasing emails as part of that to show that Elon Musk

was actually for the for-profit move of OpenAI. At first, he was trying to set up a different entity for OpenAI that's going to be for-profit and he wanted control of the equity, so a majority equity in that company. He wanted to be CEO and wanted initial control of the board.

That didn't go well with the rest of the people at OpenAI. They didn't think Elon, they didn't think anyone should have full control of the company. Then Elon switched the strategy and went to merging Tesla with OpenAI for Tesla to be OpenAI's cash cow. That's how it was phrased. Now, there's some controversy around this.

because their email that they release, people say like, that's not Elon actually saying that. And that's true. But Elon is sponsoring that. He's agreeing to it very clearly. So I don't know why there's much controversy on this. So someone who's redacted, the name of that person is redacted, did suggest that. They did say that OpenAI will not survive as a nonprofit. It needs to be a for-profit company to raise capital, enough capital to buy all the

compute power in order to support their artificial intelligence goals. So the person, I don't know why they don't want to name it, explain all that. And then Elon forwards that email to Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, two of the co-founders of OpenAI. And he says,

naming that person that is redacted is exactly right. It says Tesla is the only pad that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn't zero. It isn't zero. A lot of people also

Thought that that is not the move, but it isn't zero. So Elon often talks about that when he talks about like grand goals. It's like the chance of making it happen or very little, but it's a big enough goal that we need to try it, even if it's a near zero chance. So that's what he's saying here.

Now, that didn't work also with OpenAI. They didn't want to go with Tesla. And Elon left the company after that of his own willingness. Apparently, he wasn't pushed out of the company. He just left.

But then, so what's the main take of this here is that what really like shook me is that Elon has achieved a whole new level of hypocrisy here, in my opinion, because if you've been following what he's been saying in the last few months, he's been just hammering OpenAI over the move to for-profit. He's just been laughing at them. He's even been attacking Microsoft lately because they, so basically OpenAI said, all right,

agreed with Elon, we need to be a for-profit company to survive. And they didn't want to give it to Elon. They didn't want to give it to Tesla slash Elon.

And instead they went with Microsoft. That's it. And why they went with Microsoft, it sounds like it's because they were able to set it up in a way that didn't give control to Microsoft. Microsoft is now the cash cow for OpenAI. And they can use that going forward while being autonomous from Microsoft. I'm sure Microsoft has an influence, but not as much as Elon would have if it would have been Tesla and or himself.

But it's extremely hypocritical to keep attacking them for the for-profit move when it was your idea in the first place. Yeah, that's pretty bad. It's awful, really. And yeah, it's making me just rethink the whole thing. So the

Elon's logic is not for profit, it's bad. It's for profit of OpenAI with Microsoft is bad. For profit with OpenAI and him is good. So him, he is the differentiating factor. He's the difference maker. He's going to make AI good. And he wanted to own and run that piece. Yeah. And basically, that's why he's starting XAI to do that exact same thing.

Yeah, and that's where I really lose it. Like, I'm like, all right, you cannot trust Elon Musk anymore because the chronology of things is like, all right, Elon wanted to get control of OpenAI. Elon could not get control of OpenAI because Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya and all that, they just didn't let it happen.

So he left OpenAI. Then there was a hard... So that was in 2018, everyone. Then there was a hard shift at Tesla to be an AI company. And you've heard Elon Musk say that many times over the last few years. Tesla is an AI company. Tesla...

through the self-driving effort first, but later on on a bigger scale, on the AGI scale and all that. So he's pushing Tesla hard to become an AI company after losing control of OpenAI or not achieving control of OpenAI, however you want to say it. Then he impulsively decided to buy Twitter for way more than it's actually worth. Using Tesla money.

Then he realized that, oh, what did I do? I shouldn't do that. It's ridiculous to spend $44 billion on Twitter. So he tries to back out. But then the judge, that deal was so botched by him, it's insane. So a judge actually forced him to go through with his contract and buy Twitter for that price. So then he has to sell tens of billions of dollars of Tesla stock, which again, the control of artificial intelligence is at stake here, losing some of his control over Tesla.

by selling those shares. Then what he does, he doesn't give up on having control of an artificial intelligence. That's not what he's going to do. He set up a separate company, a new company, after telling Tesla shareholders that Tesla is going to be an artificial intelligence massive player. Instead, he starts his own startup, XAI, which he has complete control over. And then he has the balls to

to ask Tesla shareholders to support a plan to increase his stake back at Tesla at 25%. Otherwise, he won't build AI product at Tesla just as he started his own AI product company. Basically, like blackmailing Tesla shareholders into giving him back control of Tesla. Otherwise, he won't get it. This is...

like a whole new level of like shady greed businessman and i know you can make the argument it's not greed is he really thinks that

without him, AI will go amok and will ruin the world. You might really think that. I don't actually know for a fact. You might really think that. But in practice, it's still what I just said. It's still the chronology of event that I just said. It's still that. And that is just crazy to me, to be honest, that someone would think like that. I mean, a few months ago last year, Salman Altman said,

Elon desperately wants to save the world, but only if he's the one saving it. And I think at that time I was like, ah, that's a cool theory from him. Like that might be the case. I was like, Sam is maybe onto something. But now I know Sam was absolutely right because Sam knew that. Sam knew what we didn't know until today, until this week.

So Sam was 100% right based on that. Like, I have to agree with him. In fact, that's actually an optimistic case because Sam could also be of the opinion like Elon just wants to own the world, basically. So is it just convenient that if it happens like that, if you're the one saving it, if you're the one like controlling AI, you happen to not let AI run amok?

You also have the greatest asset in the known universe that gets a ton of cash. It might be just a coincidence and the real goal is just saving the world, but it just happens. I think it makes you super rich, too.

That's what I mean. It's like Sam was actually being nice in that comment, I think. It might be. It might be that he already has so much money that like, all right, like having like $600 billion instead of $200 billion, like how much of that like difference really made. But still, it's just, it's convenient, let's say the least. All right. That was my weekly Elon Musk rant. Let's move on.

we got the full unveiling of the Dodge Charger Daytona EV this week. So a nice Dodge electric vehicle for a change. A nice Stellantis. Did I pronounce that right? I always read it. I never hear it out loud. Stellantis brand. So yeah, this vehicle, interesting. Obviously, we don't have a lot of American electric muscle car cars.

the mustang mackey like if it was the mustang is like the iconic muscle car but ford decided to do an suv with it so it's not really a muscle car anymore um it's just using the brand of it though though i do like the nike look and then i think it has some design accent of a muscle car it's just it's not it's not this here it's not a charger uh this is pretty cool it has a dual motor power train with front and rear edm edm what's that oh uh

I guess it's electric drive motor, electric drive module, maybe? I believe so. Yeah, it's the motor. I don't know why they put it like that. Yeah. So those deliver both EDM generate 355 HP. So both is that no, that's each, right? Yeah. Each. So 250 kilowatt each 500 total. Yeah.

The battery system on this thing, so it's a 400-volt system, and you have a capacity for, I saw it earlier. Sorry, it's been a day or two since I read that post. 317 miles of range on this thing.

20, I don't like to use 20 to 80%, I prefer 10 to 80% charging in 27, just over 27 minutes. That thing is going to come to like the original charger, your non-electric charger. I like that term, I'm going to use that more like now. Non-electric, it's just non-electric.

They're going to have a coupe two-door version and a four-door version on this thing. The two doors come first in mid 2024, so pretty soon. And the four-door is for the first quarter of next year, so you won't have to wait too much. And these cars, ladies and gentlemen, are produced in Canada, in Ontario, Windsor in Ontario. So

This is one of the first vehicles coming out of Canada that's fully electric, a full new vehicle program built from the ground up.

I mean, to be fair, Windsor is pretty close to Detroit. Like it's across the river, right? You can throw a rock from Detroit to Windsor. Right. Yeah. You see the interior here. I'm not, I'm not mad at it. It looks pretty good. Obviously this is the two door version. So you have like the, you have to pull the seat back to, to go in the rear. Obviously it's not, it's not the most spacious vehicle. It's a muscle car. Very interesting entry for, for, for Dodge here and for, for Stellan Fisk. It's, it's,

it's obviously a harder sell for the market that you're going after. Like if you're going after a muscle, what are you going to, are you going after, you might be going after EV fans that are like the muscle car aesthetics and want to do that. I don't know how big that market is. I'm in that market, to be honest. I do love the muscle car aesthetic. I, I'm not like a multiple vehicle kind of guy. And obviously this is, this is,

limited in terms of utility. So maybe like a second car type of deal. You might be going after the market of like middle-aged men and midlife crisis type of thing that want a muscle car, but they already have like a Model Y. They are super electric fans and they're like, I'll have that on my second car instead. Maybe that. But if you're going after muscle cars enthusiasts and trying to sell them an electric Dodge Charger,

Good luck. I mean, I'm happy that they're trying it. I hope that they're going to try it. I hope that they're going to try to go after their own clientele there. I just, I don't know how it's going to play out. This looks pretty good to me. What do you think, Seth?

I love it. I'm glad that they're doing it. They're even including that fake muscle car sound, which I think has changed a little bit from the launch. You know, the front face, we've talked about this before, but the front face of it, see how it's like kind of square at the front? It's actually not square. That's a front spoiler. So it's actually pretty aerodynamic at the front, as most EVs have to be.

So that front like squared top thing is actually just a spoiler and there's air flows through that rather than, you know, then over the car rather than, you know, bouncing off of it like it does in the gas version or, you know, being used as a cooling factor for a big ICE engine.

Yeah, and the front bump on the hood here, it almost looks like it's bumping the air over the cabin. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Strong back, too, with the backlight.

Yeah, I mean, this isn't what I would focus on if I was Stellantis or Dodge. But certainly, I mean, it's going to be fast. It's going to be, you know, it's going to be a vehicle that they know they have customers for. Yeah, if they can convince them to go electric, obviously. Right, and they're doing the things like making the fake noise and all the other stuff and the weird front as well.

Well, I'm going to be curious to see how much it sells. It's going to be interesting to look.

All right, we have one more news item to discuss, everyone. We're already an hour 15 to the show. We appreciate everyone that's still listening. But then we're going to take your questions. So we're going to have a little bit of time to take your questions. So if you have things you want to ask us about things that we discussed today on the show or other topics in the EV industry, you can put them in the comment section right now. We're going to get to it in a few seconds. So we got a little refresh for the IONIQ 5 from Hyundai this week. So it's getting OTA updates.

uh software updates a bigger battery and a rear wiper that's luxury for you wow i mean the r2 does the i think the r2 doesn't have a rear wiper right no but it's got the window that rolls down so you can just roll it down you can just roll down the water right in instead yeah uh all right so i mean i'm perfectly curious on the um

Yeah, there's some exterior changes too. You have the new inline too that has a little bit more sportier design accents and all that. You have all the pictures on there. Check them out. A new digital key that works on your phone and Apple Watch to unlock and lock the car.

What else? Here it is, the back wiper. I mean, also the back of the R2 is like flat, like dead flat. So it's not as useful. I think it's more of an edge, just like the R3, more like the R3.

But the real changes are inside the car, with the biggest change being the addition of about 7 kWh of battery capacity. So not too shabby. Bringing the car up to 84 kWh from 77.4. The rated range will go from 458 kilometers to 185 miles. Oh wow, Jamie used the kilometers before the miles now. Really trying to push the metric system on Americans.

uh the battery increase bombed the rating to 485 kilometers 201 miles that's the that's the korean though uh does no korea doesn't have wltp i'm not so sure it's going to be the apa range going to be less than that yeah um charging performance uh they're still talking about 18 minutes oh that's good with a bigger bigger battery oh yeah that's a good point

Improve vibration and vibration dampening and sound isolation in the cabin. That's good too. USB-C port. I mean, this IONIQ 5 was already a great car, everyone. So like this is... Did they do wireless carplay in that one? Wireless carplay. Yeah. That was a big one. Car navigation cockpit. Yeah. It's nice. It's nice if it works well. Every time I try wireless carplay on cars, like I feel like there's a little bit of lag in the navigation compared to if you just plug it in. Yeah.

It's not that big of a lag, but if you're in the city and you have to go left, right, left, right, it's pretty useful. All right, let's jump into the comment section real quick. All right, I have a pretty hard stop at 1:30, so we'll try to go quick. Do we have a date for Rivian opening the Adventure Network to other EVs? I don't think we do.

Not that I've heard. Not that big of a deal. You did say that they will. Not that big of a deal. It's not that many station right now. Right. So the charge port on the R2 is so low to save a few dollars of high voltage cabling from the battery pack. Seems like an odd justification for like six more inches of height. It wasn't for the height. It was actually for instead of putting it on the front left or front right. Yeah. Because of the rear wheel drive version, that's low cost.

I wish it had a sunroof too. I'm sick of fixed glass roofs. Not only do they not open, but they almost never have a real shade. So yeah, we're talking about the glass roof on the Rivian R2. I think most of the makers that actually like Tesla, they found out that when they did have a sunroof, like the Model S or something, they found out that people never use it because Tesla has all the data on your car. So they didn't know exactly what you use or not. They were like, ah, no one is using this thing actually.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of like the idea of a sunroof. The original Model S had a nice sunroof that you could kind of fold out. I wish that was still an option on some vehicles.

All right, Jesse Seastrand, I'd be much more interested in buying an R3 than an R2. I actually wonder if there's more people that are going to buy, want to buy an R3 than an R2. I guess that's the number. I would have bet they would have been. Just because I know that the R2 is in a bigger segment, but there are already so many options in that segment. When the R3, there's not that many things like...

There's nothing like it, but there's some, you know, like bolts and, you know, EX90s, 30s. The R2 is already far in the future. R3 would make so much sense. I agree. I kind of want one as well. R2 has no rear window wiper. We talked about that just now. R1T that I got third party and I didn't get that priority mail. Oh, so maybe hit up Rivian if you're going to try to get a priority mail.

uh does that mean i won't get a free nax adapter uh i think rivian will probably give that to you and we did not hear about the free nax adapter yesterday which i was kind of hoping to hear about uh well we we did say that is coming this month that the adapter is coming this month but he did we did say that last month too so like it wasn't it wasn't news but they didn't say anything about free just yet yeah and i wonder if you can like i wonder if the nax adapters are generic like could i take my chevy bolt

and use that Naxx adapter for a Chevy Voltron? I think we tried that. I think someone tried that, and I think no. Okay. All right. The bike rack also seems to fit either on the back of the car or the top, according to the R3X picture. Oh, that's interesting. All right. Well, we're going to look more into that because I want one myself. So personal interest will get more information. Any news when Rivian will come to Quebec, Canada? Fred?

Well, it's already in Canada, in a bunch of places, in Ontario, in Alberta, and in BC. It's coming to Quebec, I think in the next few weeks. I think they were setting up the Montreal shop right now. Yeah. Grizzly and B says April, May. Spring, April, May. Yeah. So next few weeks, next few months, Matt. All right.

Let's see, Dan Oberstay. I wonder if they're more nationalists than environmentalists. So they don't like that Tesla is an American company. I don't know if that's a big thing. Yeah. More concerned with keeping German cars viable. I don't think so. Hi, France. Cars are not diesel powered like electric Berlingo, electric Peugeot.

i don't know which i'm not sure yeah there are there are a few options uh for these types of vehicles that are electric for sure they're just they're just not as good as the mly like the mly is much more investment that was put into bringing that vehicle to production than these vehicles so it still makes sense for tesla to offer something in that in that segment

yeah this is something else i was going to allude to uh dan everest says that the protesters wanted to save the forest they should have acted when the forest was first converted into a paper farm yeah it was weird to see that the uh the protesters were like in a man-made planted managed forest like come on guys like uh it's you know it's not even really a forest anymore as dan says i mentioned in my post but i forgot to mention it on the podcast

Yeah, Elon sounds like a politician, a specific politician. Only I can fix it. Kind of like Trump. All right. The hood of the Dodge Charger is unnecessarily bulbous to make it look like it has a V8. Yeah. And then Josh X says, thank you. All right.

All right, we went through all these comments pretty fast. So we're going to get set back on the schedule right away. And for me, it's already almost 8.30. So I'm going to call it a night here. We're going to be the same, not the same time, same place, back to our usual schedule next week. I'm going to be back in Quebec.

We have a ton of cool things coming up, guys. So please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe to wherever you're watching this right now because we have a lot of content that's coming up. If you're an EV fan, if you like electrification, if you like renewable energy, Electric is the place for you. So thanks a lot for listening. Thanks a lot for watching. And we're going to see you next week. Have a good one. Bye-bye.