Special episode, come discuss the latest EV news with me
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And we are live, everyone, for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And not as usual, this time I'm not joined by Seth Wintraub. Seth is on vacation, so it's going to be a special episode of just me talking to you guys. Sorry about that. I forgot to mute myself, so it's a good start. Good start. Yeah, you're going to have to bear with me for a minute because this is my first time using... Normally, Seth uses StreamYard and I manage the...

production part of the episode. So that's going to be me at the same time as

trying to move the show forward. So we're going to have a couple of news items that we're going to discuss as usual, but with not the back and forth between me and Seth, we're going to have plenty of times to take your questions or if you guys have any subjects you want us to discuss, you just put them in the comment section right now, should be able to see them and we can make it a little bit more of an interactive episode. I'll remind you of that as a little bit later on in the show as there's going to be more people to interact

tuning in because we're live everywhere, but it takes a bit for everyone to get on board. So let's just jump in with the news. I think we've been doing this show for at least four years, I want to say. And I can't remember the last time that Seth was not on the show. I don't think I ever missed an episode in four years. And I think Seth might have missed one or something like that. But the guys in the world deserve a vacation right now.

All right. Let's start with this. The MagicDock is still alive. So we reported earlier this year when Tesla started to deploy the MagicDock as some supercharger station. For those who don't know, the MagicDock is basically a NAX2 CCS adapter for people that have non-Tesla electric vehicles to use supercharger stations. And

The adapter itself, while it's called a magic dock, is because it replaces the receptacle for the connector at the charging station. So this right here on the screen. And when it's not in use, the supercharger is used normally for Tesla owners with the NACs, with the connectors directly. But through the app, non-Tesla owners can unlock it. And when they remove the chargers, it comes with the

part of the magic dock of the receiver of the connector and it becomes a CCS connector, basically. And the weird thing is that Tesla started deploying it earlier, very early in this year, a dozen stations in New York and a few stations in California. And they officially announced it in February.

But so about a dozen stations, like I said. So we expected that Tesla would continue to deploy it at more stations over time. But then nothing happened until now. So there was like a good six, seven months of no deployment. We assumed that it had something to do with some automakers adopting NACs as their official standards starting a few months ago. So no.

We thought maybe there's going to be a shift in the strategy because Tesla told these automakers that they would supply them with an adapter themselves for their existing EV owners to use a supercharger network. So that would remove the need for the Magic Dock.

But that isn't coming until 2024. Some people were saying like some automakers mentioned first half of 2024, some mentioned like Q2, something like that. So it leaves a decent amount of time to test. And also there's value to that. Even when that happened for those that don't buy the adapter, they can still use a network through that. So we weren't sure why Tesla stopped the deployment.

But they restarted this week with this first station in Fort Worth, Texas. Tesla was even spotted renting a Ford F-150 Lightning to test out the Magic Duck as a station. When we reported on this earlier this week, the station was not officially put on the Tesla map. You can check that.

supercharger station or supercharger station open to non-tesla evs and it didn't show up yet on this but i think it has now i received an email about that from someone so by the way i have my emails as easily available if you want anyone's tips to send out uh always welcome them so yeah magic dock is still alive uh we're gonna keep track of see if there's any more deployment um i would assume so maybe there was a supply chain issue it's not it's not clear

The next-gen Model 3, aka the Highland Model 3. It looks like it's about to happen. Finally, we have a few signs now that points to... We've been talking about Q3 for a while now. Now we are almost midway to Q3, so it's starting to make sense too. But beyond that, there's a few other indications. So obviously, the biggest one came at the earnings report when Elon said that there's going to be factory shutdowns throughout the quarter. He didn't say why, but...

You said it was for factory upgrades, but again, I didn't say why they needed to upgrade the factory. We assume that at least partly going to be related to the new Model 3 coming into production. Now, what we saw is that in Europe...

uh tesla pushed back the delivery timeline windows for new model 3 orders if you're there's still inventory available and everything but if you place a new order for the model 3 they pushed all back into q4 which is not normal for this time of quarter normally at this time of the quarter tesla allows like late september deliveries at the very least uh trying to deliver as many cars possible within the quarter for financial reasons

Now they pushed everything to at least October. And even for the Model 3 performance, they push it all the way up to January of 2024, so up to next year. So this is very abnormal for the quarter. Obviously, you would think potentially that they're doing that because of factory shutdown. They anticipate that the availability is going to be lower, and they're going to introduce a new version of the Model 3 and transfer those orders, those new orders placed now to the new version of the Model 3.

On top of that, there's rumors right now in China that Gigafactory Shanghai is doing the switch as soon as next week or in the next two weeks to the production of the new Model 3. And that makes also sense because obviously most of the European market is getting their Model 3 from Gigafactory Shanghai in China now. And we reported last week that in North America, which gets their Model 3s from the Fremont factory,

I guess we could call it Gigafactory Fremont. It's produced at least gigawatt hours worth of electric vehicle production. But in a way, we reported it was very shortly shut down. So we're going to see about that. But I checked the delivery windows for the Model 3 in North America or in the US, I should say. I didn't check in Canada, actually. And...

It's nothing like in Europe. So there might be a slight delay. We've noticed since GigaFreeShine guy has been online that Tesla tend to introduce changes sooner in price.

than it does in the US. But now that obviously everything is connected, like when we report on all those changes, so whenever the Model 3 comes out in China with the new island design and whatever updates going to be with that, obviously the hardware for potentially the new battery pack from the new battery cells from CATL, there's

it's gonna put some pressure obviously to relaunch it in the u.s because people are gonna be um but at the same time it's relatively small update so it might not affect sales that much in term of uh people wanting the new version versus the uh old one or the current one i should say for now um all right the acquisition of i don't know how you pronounce that uh

It's a Germany-based wireless charging startup that there was rumors, but not really rumors. Tesla showed their intention to buy the company earlier this year. It has now been made official according to several reports coming out of Germany based on official documents from the company that they have approved, shareholders have approved the sale to Tesla. So interesting step.

For those who don't remember when we first reported on this a few months ago, Wi-Fi is mostly known for producing charging, inductive charging, wireless charging for industrial robots, robots that travel around in factories. Those robots are, for the most part, autonomous. So if they're autonomous, you would want them to charging to be autonomous too, obviously. And you can make some parallels to that too.

Potentially Tesla's use of wireless charging is going to be related to that too, if they can ever get to full self-driving to work. So that is the main part of the business, but they also are developing systems for electric vehicles, charging consumer electric vehicles or commercial electric vehicles, not just industrial robots. And that wouldn't make more sense. You would have told me that like a year ago. I was like, hmm, weird for Tesla to buy that. But more recently...

We reported earlier this year on the investor day when Tesla unveiled this image that I'm showing right now. I guess I could show a bigger version of it like that. Where they tease what clearly appears to be a wireless charging station with a wireless charging pad underneath the Tesla right there. Looks to be a MOS. So that was a big surprise. It was kind of unusual for Tesla to tease a product like that. Normally...

That's not how Tesla teases a product, especially with it wasn't even Elon Musk teasing it. It was another Tesla executive. So because of that, I would assume that Tesla is working on that seriously and probably is going to be released or at least announced officially soon. And this acquisition of Wifarian is...

Most likely aims to accelerate that wireless charging program for Tesla because now they have a company that already has deployed 8,000 chargers. So it's already a company that is in the revenue phase, in the deployment phase, even though they've been around for only since 2016. And in terms of the cost of the acquisition, so Tesla is not known for big acquisition beyond, obviously, SolarCity was a big one.

They mostly do smaller acquisition. And this one is reportedly in the, I think it's in the mid, high double digit millions. So between $50 and $100 million is probably what we're looking at here in terms of this acquisition. So fairly cheap for a company that has $23 billion in the pocket, but probably good value if you want to accelerate a program like a wireless charging one.

Quick update on what we discussed a lot last week was the Tesla range being exposed in that Reuters report. Quick recap, Reuters showed that things that we knew about already about Tesla using a little bit more optimistic multiplier to get a longer EPA range, but also some new information about Tesla potentially having a program that showed you a more optimistic range when their battery was full.

And wait until your battery is at 50% state of charge and below to give you a more precise range in order to avoid you being stranded, which is not unlike... There's...

Other reason to explain that, and Tesla used to justify it by saying that the car would learn about your trip and optimize it and give you a more precise rating. But in the report, they claim to have sources and even saying that Elon especially requested this, the CEO Elon Musk, said,

To make it so that it's purely for advertising purposes, like to show you a high range and then they make you the shorter range. But that was the claim in the report. Anyway, the update this week is that the report has already resulted in a class action lawsuit with three customers in California filing for it. So as you know, when these things like that happen, normally the lawyers are quick to put a case together and get paid. But anyway,

So in this case, I'm not exactly sure what's going to turn out of this because like I said, even though I agree that there's things that Tesla does with its range and the range that I would prefer it wouldn't do, everything is legal technically. Tesla is allowed to use the most optimistic multiplier as possible. Should it do it? I mean, I don't know. Personally, I always said that the...

The best thing to reduce range anxiety is precise range prediction. Because if it tells you exactly how much range you're going to get, where you go,

then you're not really worried about losing range unless you don't know where you're going and you have to take detours or whatnot. That's a possibility. But other than that, that's better than long range, in my opinion, or excessively long range, like over 300 miles, in my opinion, for the most part, unless a very few occasion, there could be value to that. But the vast majority of people don't use vehicles like that, don't use cars, at least not on a non-commercial purpose.

So we'll see what they can do with that. If they can prove the thing about faking the range for the first 50% state of charge, maybe there's a case there. But for the EPA stuff, I mean, you kind of have to sue the EPA, really. All right, we have a few more news items I want to discuss. And then we're going to have plenty of time for everyone to get into the comments. Like I said, it's just me this week. So this is on vacation for the people that are just tuning in right now. I see more people are flowing in at the moment. So...

We're going to have plenty of time to make it a little bit more of an interactive episode. So if you guys have any questions for me regarding the news that we discussed this week or any kind of new other AV topics you want us to discuss, you can put it in the comment section right now and we can get to it in just a few minutes.

It can be any questions related to the EV world. I don't mind. And if you are someone that do enjoy the Electric Podcast, I mean, the Electric Podcast is on fire right now. Last week, we topped the top five of the most listened to.

automotive podcast in the us so we are in great company against like big brands and all that so it's really cool that you guys are are tuning in and listen to us so we appreciate it if you do want to help the show it's free to do takes a second you can just put a like right now on whatever apps you're doing put a comment that also help if you're listening right now on your podcast app you can

Give us a five-star rating with a comment. We read all of them. We appreciate them. And that helps the show a lot in the ratings of those Apple podcast charts and all that. All right. This just came out today, this video from what they call the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. So they've been running this run on less kind of study, I guess.

Very interesting study where they tracked a bunch of different electric trucks, battery electric trucks, and the Tesla capacity for their potential in commercial use. And it's a very interesting program. Long term, they have a new – they did the batch like two years ago that you can go see their data on their website. Interesting. But they have a new one ongoing right now. And the Tesla Semi is part of it, along with a bunch of other trucks from –

Lion Electric, BYD. I think Nikola might be in there. I'm not so sure. And it's not live just yet, but they are starting to gather the data on it. And they're going to have a very interesting report on that. But in the meantime, what they did is they released a very interesting video from PepsiCo about their Sacramento Depot, they call it.

And it's a facility, the distribution center, where they use a bunch of electric vehicles and especially 21 Tesla Semi. And the video focused pretty much solely on the Tesla Semi here. But they give you very interesting real world use cases for the Tesla Semi truck. So it's very interesting.

They say that a vast majority of the 21 trucks are used for somewhat local deliveries. They call it like within 100 miles. So these trucks, these 100 miles, they can go for like 12 hours because all the stops and charging and not charging the truck, but unloading and loading the materials.

So the vast majority of the trucks do that. And that's trucks that were running on diesel right now. And obviously in the electric truck, 100 miles, there's no problem at all. And even if it's over a period of 12 hours, it's not a problem for the Tesla Samurai, which has 250 to 500 miles range, depending on the model. So the vast majority of the Tesla Samurais do that.

And then they have three test SMIs that they use for long haul. What they call long haul is, according to, I'm going to mess up his name, but very interesting what he was talking about, this guy Dijon Otonovic. Sorry about messing up your name. He said that it's about 250 to 450 miles of range.

They only have three trucks that do that. And they say they're very satisfied with the performance on that. Had some interesting data points on it. So Tesla to support that because obviously 500 miles a minute, if you do 450, also depending on your load, depending on the elevation, once you arrive at your destination, you're going to need to charge and go back. So Tesla has been deploying...

750 kilowatt mega chargers at pepsico facilities to support that and they say they can charge a truck to 80 capacity in less than 45 minutes so it's pretty good but they were particularly impressed by um this is a regenerative braking capacity on the semi truck which is obviously like if you if you drive an ev you probably use regenerative braking um and enjoy it i hope

I certainly do. And the heavier your electric vehicle is, the more useful the regenerative braking is going to be if it's implemented efficiently, which apparently it is with the semi-truck. Mr. Antonovic, the head of electrification at PepsiCo, specifically mentioned that at one point they went on their way down on the Donner Pass, which is between Sacramento and Nevada, because that depots in Sacramento.

And they said that on the way back from the Nordpass or the way down of it, they did the whole thing energy neutral, meaning that the truck didn't spend anything that it spent on thermal energy. It recuperated right back when it needed to break throughout the pass, which is a quite long pass. I don't remember how many miles, but it's pretty long. So it's pretty impressive they can do that with your diesel truck. I mean, wow.

every kind of little hot pill you're going to do, you're going to have to, uh, you have to burn a lot of diesel and then you're just going to have to smack on your brake and, uh, use it, use the, uh, your agile brakes like crazy.

Another interesting thing that he mentioned is that Tesla Semi is achieving now an efficiency of 1.7 kilowatt hour per mile. So originally when Tesla first announced that this is somebody we're talking about less than two kilowatt hour per mile, which was already impressive. When they unveiled the production version last year, they did say 1.7 kilowatt hour per mile. And the way that he phrased it there, he said that over the last few months, they've been achieving 1.7 kilowatt hour per mile. So it looks like

the efficiency has been improving. So maybe there's been some updates. I don't know for sure, but he specifically mentioned that it's over the last few months that they've been averaging that. Maybe they are learning how to more efficiently use the truck too, so that can be cool. And 1.7 kilowatt hour per mile, you

you have a potential for some deep savings here. I mean, I looked at even the most, like looking at the most efficient possible diesel truck when you can get the best like diesel prices. And even then, so you compare like the best case scenario for a diesel truck, you're going to get about

30 cents uh per per mile and at 14 cents per kilowatt hour which is the off-peak rate in sacramento and that's that's the great thing about the battery electric trucks is when they're not in use overnight you just you charge them and you get the cheaper rate uh you get basically a 23 reduction in fuel costs so that's just your fuel costs before like any likely maintenance savings

And you tell a fleet manager that manage like hundreds, if not thousands of trucks, and you can tell them that like, oh, you update your fleet and you're going to have a 23% fuel cost saving. Again, against the most efficient diesel trucks, like on an average, I would think 30 cents is in very low range. It can easily be 40 cents. That would be an even greater fuel cost reduction. But over hundreds of trucks, like that's millions of dollars per year.

of fuel cost saving again before any maintenance savings and also they add in the video i really suggest you watch the video but they had like a bunch of drivers too that um commented on their experience with the tesla samis and they were all very happy about it specifically mentioned the fact that you're so close to the front of the uh of the the tractor that you get such a such a great view it's a different experience different trucking experience which is pretty cool

So I really think that these battery-electric trucks are the future of trucking. And I just hope that they come in high volume soon. I know Nikola has delivered a few, but obviously there have been some problems with those lately. There's the Freightliner that has a few, but it's extremely low volume. Volvo is starting to deliver more volume. BYD too, but BYD is a shorter range. It's not long-haul trucking. So this, the Sassamani, I think, is my biggest hope for...

electrifying a large volume of the trucking industry, which represents a big part of emissions in North America. All right, moving on from Tesla news, we had an update on the pricing of the Chevy Blazer as GM is starting deliveries of its new Altium-based electric SUV. And as you would expect, the pricing has been updated up.

Since the original release, that has been something that we're used to over the last year in the EV industry. So a lot of vehicles that were announced last year or the year before that had a little bit more optimistic pricing goals. And with inflation, everything is being adjusted as the vehicle actually comes to market. So in terms of the Blazer, there's going to be cheaper versions in the future apparently, but for now...

GM updated the price on the version that are coming this year. They're available right now and until the end of the year. And for the 2LT all-wheel drive, it's now $56,715, which this is a 270 miles APA version. And that's up from 45. No, that's a 1LT from $47,500. So it's about $8,000 up.

The RS all-wheel drive is now $60,000. That's about a $4,000 increase in price. And then you have the RS rear-wheel drive, which gives you the longest range at 320 miles. And it's going to cost you more than the... So you pay more for the range than you pay for the all-wheel drive here because the rear-wheel drive version starts at about $62,000. Okay.

I've been seeing, so these are obviously US prices. I know we are also popular in Canada. And apparently the Canadian prices are not too crazy because normally you see a big jump with the Canadian dollars being significantly lower than the American one. And also sometimes there's other pricings that come into play. But apparently the price are not too crazy. I've read it's still high enough that you don't get all the incentives depending on which country.

province you're from. But it's worth looking into if you're in the market for an electric SUV. So like the Chevy Blazer, it's a good looking truck, SUV, whatever you want to call it. All right. The big thing that happened yesterday, last night was the Fisker,

Fisker's Vision product something. What did he call it? Fisker Product Vision Day 2023. It was basically a day of unveiling a bunch of different vehicle concepts there. It was kind of all over the place. Our own Jimmy Dow was at the event. And I wrote this article to help him out because there were so many vehicles being unveiled. We had to be multiple people to cover the event.

So the first vehicle that they unveiled was this Ronin that they actually teased earlier this year with a few images. So it's not completely new, but this is an actual concept vehicle that we saw. It was...

Not a working one. The two other vehicles that they unveiled were actually, they drove them on stage. But Fisker was very protective of all the concepts that were unveiled there. At the end, they let people that were at the event come see them, but they told them to stay like 10 feet away from the vehicle so you couldn't get too close. But the first one they unveiled is this Ronin, which is a GT four-door vehicle.

So that's cool. Not a lot of convertible in the EV world right now, so we always welcome one. But this is a convertible, obviously, in the supercar segment. So it's not a cheap convertible or an accessible convertible, let's say. When I saw it, I remember right away the Fisker Emotion. So Fisker, for those who are not familiar with Fisker...

startup started by enric fisker we started another startup of the same name his name obviously um backed in uh 2012 i want to see the fisker fisker karma came out around this time maybe 2013 something like that and that went bankrupt was brought was bought by a chinese company was re-marketed as the karma automotive but that also didn't work out but fisker was not even involved with that anymore uh he

Got his name, his brand back, I guess, and relaunched a new EV startup. But if you remember the early days of the new startup in 2017, 2018, it was kind of a mess. It was kind of all over the place. They kept unveiling a bunch of different concept vehicles, just rendering and all that. And the first, I think it was the first one, was the eMotion. It was a butterfly door looking supercar.

like this Ronin here. And it was supposed to have a solid state battery that was going to break all the record. But then they ended up realizing that they were getting screwed by the company that was going to do the batteries. And they ended up suing the company. It was a whole mess. But they ended up putting the whole thing on the back burner anyway to focus on the ocean, which is now in production and deliveries have started.

But even though they just started deliveries, I think they delivered like 66 cars, like a quarter, I think they just announced. They are already looking into the future. That was what this whole deal was about. It's looking into the future. And the first one on the bill was the Ronin. They didn't say anything about the pricing, but obviously being a supercar, you would expect that it's going to be quite expensive. Thinking low to mid six figures, honestly.

Fisker called it the world's first four-door electric convertible. But again, the rear door or like very small rear door, like in a pretty double butterfly door. So we'll see about that. But he claims that it's a five-seater. So that's impressive. But again, they didn't release any pictures of the interior and the interior was completely backed out. So we didn't see them at the event either. So it's not clear what that five-seater looks like.

They didn't go into too much detail in terms of specs. They said 0 to 60 miles per hour in two seconds, about two seconds, they said, 1,000 horsepower. So we're talking like I compare it obviously to the Tesla Roadster. It looks to be in a very similar segment as the Roadster.

About the same specs and obviously 600 miles of range, which is also what the Roadster is supposed to have. So they claimed 600 miles of range. That's the main figure that Fisker focused on. And it was kind of funny because you would know throughout the whole event

Fisker, so confusing, Henrik, and we'll call it Henrik, tried very hard not to mention Tesla, but he kept referencing it without actually mentioning it, which was interesting. And this was the most interesting reference, I should say, because he specifically didn't mention it, where in order to...

He was talking about how Fisker plans to achieve the 600 miles range on the Ronin. And he said, there is already some integrated battery pack out there. And of course, we know about those, but we have actually looked at something different. So obviously, when you say integrated battery pack here, you think of the Tesla structural battery pack with the 4680 cells being part of the structure of the vehicle chassis here.

So we think, okay, he's talking about that, but apparently Fisker has a different twist on it. But no, he can see we're looking to integrate the cells into the structure of the body that will give us our goal of getting to 600 miles of charge. So he's basically talking about the same thing, the structural battery pack that Tesla is doing. Sounds like at least he didn't make the difference clear here if there is one.

But again, this looks like a non-working prototype that they unveiled. So it looks like they're quite early in their production and the development process. So I don't think this is very advanced. He probably doesn't know either how the structural batch pack is going to work. And I doubt that they have an active...

design on that working design uh and they have sometimes he talked about towards the end of 2025 though he said that on stage for the run-in towards the end of 2025 and then uh apparently according to jamie talked to the the press people there and they they kind of walked that back a little bit it's not clear and again didn't didn't talk about pricing design looking good as uh as usual with fisker that's definitely is strength or company strength or whatever

But it was not the only one to be unveiled there. Right after unveiling the Ronin, they unveiled the Pear, which has been the vehicle they've been talking about for a long time, supposed to be the higher volume vehicle than the Ocean.

It's like a, it's a small compact car. It's like a SUV shape, but very compact form. Like it's very small car, even though it fits five people. And the price is what, uh, is what is attractive, like under 35,000, $30,000. So 29,900 before tax credit. So it can easily go to a $20,000 after tax credit and local incentive, which was available in many different States in the U S so very, very cheap vehicle here.

And Fisker claims it's going to be able to bring it to market very quickly. Some cool designs here, like you can see the back gate here. Also a front trunk, which again, another reference to Tesla without actually mentioning Tesla. It looks like they don't want to use the term front, which was kind of...

we believe was invented by tesla at least like popularized by tesla and now most people that most automakers that do have a front trunk mentioned frunk but they are calling a fruit a front boot uh i don't think that's gonna stick but uh nice try swisco and what else did they release any spec on this thing i do like that like the design is it's like a little compact ocean it's pretty good

Yeah, the interior was very bare, though. And obviously felt a little bit cheap, but it's a cheap car. Jamie was there and he mentioned he gave off some Honda Element vibe. I don't think that's a compliment. No specs in there? No specs. In terms of timeline, it's coming in 2025. So they still have a little bit about two years to deliver this.

But obviously, I'm staying a bit skeptical on this. And I think it's healthy to stay skeptical about Fisker in general, just because it just started with the ocean, which they grabbed a lot of headlines with the ocean. And they did it by claiming it's going to be a $35,000 car. Later, they get it up to $37,000, whatever. But

That was like the big selling point. And right now they're only delivering the $70,000 version and they're not making any money on this app, like a five person gross margin. And that's putting aside a lot of other things and the other expenses on the operational front. So they're losing a lot of money right now selling a $70,000 version of it. So I really want to see that they would need to turn that around in the next two years and get down to the $37,000 version profitably before they can bring that pair to market.

I know they say that the cost is being brought down with the pair, with the new platform and everything like that. But I mean, obviously Fisker's force is design. It's not necessarily like the engineering part of it. Even though they have great people that work there and everything, I'm not saying that. But I really want them to deliver on that $35,000, $37,000 ocean before I'm going to take seriously the pair. Also, terrible name, the pair. What the hell? Okay.

I don't want to be mean about it, but I don't know who taught about that. I mean, I know it's an acronym for systems like an affordable electric vehicle, whatever, but it's... I think they could do better. And then they got on the electric pickup truck trend. You kind of have to have an electric pickup truck if you want to be a serious electric vehicle company these days. And the Alaska is the Fisker electric pickup truck, starting at a base price of $45,000. So...

I'm going to talk a little bit more about that later, about the whole pricing thing. There's a few cool things about it. The bed here, you can see here, can extend to over seven feet. So that's impressive. But it's obviously with this gate open, but the gate is apparently solid enough that you can secure it and have plenty of space. Otherwise, it's a 4.5 foot bed. So it's obviously on the smaller side in terms of pickup truck space.

The range would be 230 and 340, depending on the battery size that you choose. What else? What else? What else?

It wasn't that much spec being on the, like, again, this one was a rolling prototype. Like it actually worked, but they seem to have some issues at first when it first came on stage. So again, I think those are really early prototypes and the specs and pricing could definitely change by the time they reach to production. On stage, in terms of timing for the Alaska, he said, he said, oh, my team said 2025, but I told them I want a truck in production in 2024. So we'll see if his team deliver on that.

The design didn't fit well for me. Like in the front hand here, like I think there's, it looks like they're really like sticking to the design cues that the Ocean has and try to make it in the pickup truck, which sometimes work. But on the front hand here, I don't know about that. I don't think it worked. On the side, it didn't look bad. But the front end could need some refining, which probably going to happen by that time.

But yeah, I'm going to, we're going to jump into the comment section right now. So if you guys have any questions, any subjects you want us to discuss, I'm going to have a good 20, 30 minutes to go into them. So I'm going to jump in it. I don't know exactly how the comments things work, but I'm going to, because normally that leads that, but I'm going to give it a shot. But first off, I wanted to discuss a little bit about this, about the Fisker pricing and the old heaven, because I watched the whole thing. And

At the end, especially, he kind of showed his cards in Rick Fisker. And you guys can comment on this if you want. I'd like to have your opinion on it. But he said at the end, you can watch the event that's on our YouTube channel.

He kept saying that we are unveiling these concepts right now because we want to be early. We want to capture the market share early, even though they don't have anything. It's just a concept and some specs on paper that are guesses for the most part, I would assume.

And they say, we want to capture the market shares early with reservation, with the reservation process so that we can show that there's demand for it. And we can, even though there is other options on the market right now, especially on the pickup sides and all that, we can try to, by showing that we can capture the market early and do that. I don't know that's really the approach that you want to have as a company, but

Especially when you already have a product on the market that you need to make it work. And I think that's the main issues that I had with this whole thing where it sort of took a victory lap for the ocean. It's like, look, we have the ocean. It's already a success. So trust us from these three concepts. Give us your money for reservation. And then we're going to bring those to market. And it's going to be as big of a success as the ocean. And

The only metric that he showed for the Ocean as a success is the number of reservation that there is on it, which the same thing is doing for the other new vehicles they're doing. And Fisker is doing a lot of marketing on it. And we thank them because they're doing a lot of marketing on the X-Trac on it, too. They spend a lot of money on ads. I see them on our AdSense all the time. But anyway.

That's not the measure for success for the ocean. The ocean to be a sustainable vehicle program, they need to produce it. Obviously, it's produced by Magna, so that's a big help for them there. But they need to sell it, service it, and do it in a financially sustainable way, which is not happening right now.

They're talking about in Q4 is going to happen, but I have my doubts right now. If I look at the numbers, financial numbers, they will need to drastically increase the gross margin on it and pray that they don't have any issues, any recall, which is almost impossible. There's always recall. So if they are hit with like a big recall,

It could be a very hard time for Fisker. So I wish him the best. But right now, I think that this event didn't help with their credibility because they're just jungling right now with too many vehicle programs.

without securing the first one here, which looks like they could have a good vehicle program on their hand with the Ocean. It could be a successful one, but it's not there yet. So bringing all these other hot potatoes that you have to juggle at the same time now, I don't know if it's a good idea just to get some market share, the $250 reimbursable, refundable deposit. It doesn't mean much. Anyway, all right, let's jump into the comments here.

Okay, I love bacon. Nico, I love bacon too. I had some bacon at the breakfast. I don't know if that's relevant to the show, but I do share your love for bacon. Dave, Billy Vo here. Model Y is made in the US or shipping with hardware 4. Is it fair that only the Americans get the chance to transfer FSD to the new hardware? I mean, there's...

I know there's been a switchover. So I would assume Dave is probably Canadian there because I know that's been an issue now that Tesla is shipping Shanghai-made Mulwhys to Canada. So I would assume that that's what he's referring to here. But that changeover was like recent and I think there's still some version of the Mulwhys that are made in the US available in Canada. So there is that. But...

I thought the new Model Y in China has also recently been updated to the hardware for FSD hardware. So it's something to look forward, but we'll definitely confirm that. Oliver Guerrino, it's awesome how long this podcast has been running. Always a bit sad when a good podcast comes to an end, although nothing lasts forever. Big thanks for the years of nuance. I don't think you misunderstood me. The podcast is not coming to an end.

Unless you refer maybe to our friends at Inside EVs, like they had to shut down their podcast. But I'm hearing that it's going to come out another way. So I wish them good luck. But our podcast is not ending. Just Seth is not going to be there this week. I don't know if he's going to be there next week. He's going to be in Japan. So I don't know if it's going to work in terms of timing. Maybe it's going to be another week of just me. I hope I did a good job for you so far. I'll try to do my best again next week if Seth is not there.

Sly Joe, 808, Ontario, Canada, waving. Hey, what's up, 808? Yeah, fear, eon. I'm not sure what Carl is saying there. Okay, G Lawless, I'm purchasing a Model Y by year hand for my needs. I like the LFP batteries because it's much better longevity, that's true, over other battery chemistries. Do all Model Y come with LFPs? Can I specify batteries, chemistry when I order?

All the standard range ones does. The longer range doesn't, as far as I know. So if you're buying the standard range one, which is the cheapest one, you should get LFP batteries, no problemo. Carl in San Diego, not only can you specify that you want LFP, Tesla never officially disclosed the chemistry, only tells you it's charged 100%. Yes, Tesla does not disclose any of those, you have to guess. But the biggest hint

Is that in your instruction, if it does say that you can charge to 100% daily, it is an LFP for sure, 99% sure. Because normally Tesla recommends a lower state of charge daily to prolong the longevity of the normal battery. So the NCA, I think that's not used for the most part.

Joe, Joe Boras here. Hey, what's up, Joe? That was an issue with GM's ICE vehicle for a while, wasn't it? Gas gouges would show full for an artificially long time when it showed low with 67 miles still in the tank. So I didn't know that. That's interesting. All standard range. Yeah. Nicholas already answered that.

Is it legal to not deliver on a stated range? Yeah, that's the part. So the thing with the range, everyone is like, you know, the famous saying, your mileage may vary. Like that's very true. And it's very true for electric vehicles too. So it depends how you use it. It depends on weather conditions, on the temperature. It depends on the road that you're using. It depends on your tires. It depends on your wheels. It depends on so many things. So,

The EPA range is the range that people use for advertising. And so the main issues that was exposed is...

which was not new that that we did reports on that for years that's why you you have some wiggle room that the ep gives you uh to for the actual stated range so they have the tests that they do they give you efficiency from a test and then you have a multiplier so you can use and so you can use a more optimistic multiplier or you can use a safer more conservative multiplier and like companies like ford for example they are known to use the safest more conservative multiplier

And it shows when you use a Ford vehicle, you're very confident in the range, even though it has a lower advertised range. Now, on the Tesla side, and to be fair, Tesla also has like a better efficiency than everybody else for the most part. So they do beat everybody else, but then they go a little bit higher up with the more optimistic multiplier. And that's where people have an issue because Tesla,

If you're in perfect condition in California and you're driving 70 miles per hour on the road, that's fine. But then if you go 72 miles per hour, you're going to go down fast. 75 miles per hour is going to go down fast. And so just these things like that, people, like they drive 80 miles per hour on the road. It's like my range is going down so fast. Yeah, it works like that. Same thing with a gas car. You're going to burn gas a lot faster.

Sal Joe said, "I saw a video on solar panels built on the roads with LEDs and it can warn you of animal accident on the road ahead. I'm sure it can charge the vehicle's battery too." Okay, I've never heard of that. Nico says, "You can fix range anxiety by running out of battery 100 miles away from home. This will be your life lessons." Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if it happens once, it never happens again. I'll say it 100 times.

Precise range prediction kills range anxiety as long as you use navigation. Like if you say, I'm going there, I can go there. It gives you exactly the mileage it takes to get there, how many miles I've got, I can get there. Most people, they drive like that. Most people don't go around on this. Maybe just a little Sunday drive will drive around. But even that, are you going to do that for more than 200, 300 miles, which most electric vehicles are going to be able to handle?

Yeah, okay, we already discussed that. Here we have the Jose. Any thoughts on the claimed superconductor LK99? How do you think this will affect the EV space, if true? So I don't remember the LK99 specifically, but I'm going to assume that this is all the room temperature superconductor stuff.

I think that's the safest assumption. I'm not super well versed on it. It looks exciting, but obviously if successful, it would be a big deal. But there's been a few false alarms on that a few times before, so I'm kind of staying on the more cautious part for now. But we're keeping an eye on this, and obviously it would have a giant impact on the EV space, on any space that uses superconductors.

Carl asked, is it better practice for Tesla to preview the new replacement Model 3 with automotive covers so that consumers know what they're buying? Oh boy, Carl, I think you've been around Tesla long enough to know that they don't favor cars.

press coverage anymore. They used to. They used to do that. I mean, for the original Model 3, we were invited to the release and everything. That was interesting and we had a good view and we were able to inform our readers. But now it's not the case. They don't trust the press. They don't encourage press coverage anymore. They don't talk to the press. That's the main thing. We want the

the main thing that I miss is be able to talk to Tesla, express and ask them like correction on things. And, and if some things comes out and like on their side of the stories and things like that, now we don't have that anymore. And yeah, we don't have invites to any test drives or vehicle unveilings either. So yeah, I mean, our coverage is going to be based on whatever we can get out of when the actual, the vehicle actually comes out. And with Tesla,

Unless it's a big step change, Tesla generally just brings it to production and is like, yeah, we have this thing now. And they don't even have a press release about it. They just update their website and we have to scrub the website for new information. That's how we get it. And then obviously someone gets their hands on it at one point and we can talk to them and whatnot. What else we have here? Yeah, NMC. I keep confusing NMC and NCA. Slide Joe says, I'm testing all kinds of battery types and so forth.

So far, LivePo, and now my favorite is LTO. Why long sales and same drop hour? Why long? I don't know them. Okay, a lot of FPP talk and 100 charge limit.

Mike Boyle, my blog, dropped in and says, under the FSD amnesty, I traded my 2016 Model S to a P100D for a 2023 Model S Plaid, got AutoWear 4, which doesn't support FSD yet. So now I have no FSD at all. Really, even in the new Model S doesn't support, well, it doesn't support FSD better, you mean, but you do have all the other features that come with FSD, I think.

You can correct me if I'm wrong there, but I mean, that's still a good move probably. I think I wonder how good of a deal you got on your 2016 P100D though. But if you traded in with Tesla, if you sold it on the private market, I wonder what kind of price you got. I'm sure you had to give a hot of pocket quite deeply for the Plaid though. That's not cheap, even though it got a lot cheaper in recent months.

All right, what else we have here? Question from Stu. Putting legal issue aside, I'll shoot this a deal with fake range estimate. So I did a little rant on Twitter about that this week when the class lawsuit came out. By the way, shame this bug follow me on Twitter or X now. Sorry, follow me on X at X.

twitter.com slash Frederick Lambert. But, sorry, is it x.com now? I still think it's Twitter. Anyway, so this is going to sound a little bit weird. And it's just like, it's hard to tell that it's not a good thing because it did help vehicle adoption. Like advertising a longer range certainly helped Tesla sell vehicles. It helped

Advanced EV adoption, Great League, obviously North America, Tesla is like majority responsible for SUV adoption. So worldwide, like also giant part of EV adoption is thanks to Tesla directly in North America a lot and indirectly also around the world.

And stating that longer range help, it didn't do it illegally. I see you putting the legal issues aside, but it didn't do it illegally. So it did it within the rule set. It's just not the most, it's just for the consumer standpoint, it's not the best action for sure. But if the mission is to accelerate DV adoption, is it illegal?

a mission move? Is it overall good for humanity? So, yeah, I think there's an argument to be made. But obviously, the mission, the regulators and the legislators and law side of things, they don't care about that. So it doesn't change anything.

So, yes, Stu changed the question later on and he said, why do you think it's okay for Tesla to break the law for the mission? So, again, I don't think they broke the law. So that's a difference. I think the burden is more on the consumer. Like the wrong is done to the consumer more than anything. So, yeah.

And I was one of those customers, but personally, I think the mission is more important. But I completely understand anyone that would be frustrated about that. And I encourage them to join the lawsuit and the class action and get yourself paid if you think you should. I won't.

I won't shame anyone for doing that. But personally, I thought a way bold side of things. I was like, hmm, might have been a net positive overall. And I think Tesla is doing a lot of that too. I think Tesla, like with the FSD today, they're doing a lot of like ask for forgiveness instead of a permission, though I don't see them asking for forgiveness a lot these days. Like there was the whole FSD transfer thing that they called it amnesty. So it kind of is. But at the same time, I thought it was just a demand lever that they pulled and not a true thing.

uh, it's your apology. Let's say, let's put it like that. Uh, so Carl says about the Ronin design looks nice. No need for the massive range. Fisker wants to build most sustainable EVs. So that requires tempering insane range inspiration. Yeah. There was a lot of, uh, sustainable buzzword that Fisker use. And I, I, I liked the, the overall sentiment behind it, but a lot of it sounded like virtue signaling to me. Like you just like,

make some good cars that have low impact on the environment and we'll be happy you don't need to to use all the buzzwords that are people using those presentation it was kind of getting tedious a little bit but but yeah i agree that the longer range like they they talk we want to make the most sustainable evs ever but then they make a super car with 600 miles of range which is like overuse of batteries for sure a pickup trucks that most people are going to use as a

just a passenger vehicle. So it's not, and then this giant like off-road things with super inefficient tires. So kind of going the other way that like do, do as I say, not what as I do. What else do we got here? We have a lot of comments coming in. So bear with me here. Pierre, Peter, Peter, our person said, you're right. Fred pairs, the trail of land is not the guaranteed success. The Alaska looks way better than cyber truck.

Not the front end. I know Cybertruck is like, anyway, it's not quite the taste. It's not for everyone. But I wasn't impressed by the front end of the Alaska. The Ocean, I think, is a solid design, though. And the pair overall, especially for that price range, is also good looking.

uh nicholas uh here asks how do you think tesla will handle a release of model upgrade battery happened before should be done better than molas next last time took ages to get up and running i think they learned a lot from the molas and hex update hopefully they did uh it seems like they did like they acknowledged that it was mishandled so um yeah i'm hoping for model 3 it's going to be way smoother it looks like model 3 was also planned ahead a lot like we've been

E-ring about this plan, seeing the prototypes around, gathering tidbits of information over time since late last year. So this update was a long time coming.

Obviously, I think the main thing was Tesla wanted to be up and running with the Model Y in Berlin and Texas to compensate for the lower volume of Model 3 that is going to come with this update. They're going to be able to push the Model Y more, which is already the best-selling Model for Tesla. That has passed the Model 3 for a little bit. So again, I got a lot of NCA versus NLFP.

As he says, his first IONIQ 6 today. You and a bunch of people, Electric has been spotting them lately. And they're one of the cars that makes the biggest impression in person, it seems like to me, from what I'm hearing from people I haven't seen in person yet. Has the car taken off at all in the US? No tax credit? Yeah, that's the problem. Seems like so much work for a car that I think will sell in small numbers. I mean, I think in Europe it's going to be very popular.

In the US, I mean, if Hyundai start producing it in the US or in Canada or Mexico, whatever, they're going to

they're going to be able to access incentives. And I hate to say that. When I say that, people always think, okay, the only way to sell EVs with incentive now. No, but when they are incentive, it is a lot easier because people feel like they're leaving money on the table. That's what people don't want to be like. They want like, all right, I have this EV there. It's available. I have this EV there. It's available. It's probably the same price, but this one gets incentive. This one doesn't. So I'm not going to leave that money on the table. So yeah, they do that.

Nettie here asks, will Project Highland finally give Tesla Model 3 a hitch option and or a vehicle to grid? Hitch option, I don't know if it's still the case, but for a long time, Model 3 will get a hitch option in Europe, but not in North America, which is a real bummer because there is a small towing capacity that can be super useful there.

Or even if it's not towing, but you can actually put a bike rack or something. There's a ton of value in it. They should do it. I don't know why they do not. Or I don't know if it was to sell them or why. I'm not so sure. There's no indication that Ireland will change that in North America. It would be nice, but there's no word on that. As for vehicle-to-grid, that's a possibility just because the way that Tesla framed their integration of vehicle-to-grid is like Cybertruck forward.

So now Cybertruck is in production. I don't know. I don't assume that Tesla plans to do any significant update to the Mold 3 following the island. So maybe they're going to introduce that right away. But at the same time, those are very small changes to the inverter that they have to do and the protocol. So it's not, maybe it can be retrofitted too. I don't know. Glenn Sanford says, as a self-confessed and a fine boy in early Al-Azhar, how did I end up the criminal FSD amnesty? What?

i'm not sure what your point is there glenn uh yeah not sure danielle de young says the fourth lining barely fits at the v3 supercharger yeah that's an issue or the adapter can they add a couple extra feet of cable on it to make it work or would they uh have to have the cab the cable to the charger itself

Yeah, I mean, that's something that the Supercharger V4 fixes with the longer cable. So that's not a problem at that level. But yeah, it's going to be a problem with the V3 Supercharger. So the MagicDock doesn't add much length, maybe like a few inches max. So yeah, I assume you're talking to the chargers that Tesla plans to sell to Ford buyers, EV owners next year.

Yeah, we don't know about those, but I would be surprised if it's a cable one. So do those exist? A bit like the chat demo one that Tesla used to sell or still does? I don't know. Used to? So that added some length. But seeing the magic duck, it looks like Tesla might stick to just that format, which is very compact. All right. I'm going to take a few more questions before we go.

Nate asks, "Can you guys talk about pros and cons of Tesla 5 recurrent others? Any article on that topic comparing the service?" I'm not a user of any Tesla companion app personally. I used to for a while and then after a while I realized I wasn't getting that much personally off of it.

It completely depends on the user. We do have a few articles on it. If you search electric for, I don't know if Tesla 5 we have recovered, but Recurrent we covered a bunch. You can take a look. I wasn't the one that personally wrote those. I wasn't the one that tried to review them. But yeah, there's definitely value. Some of them work very well too, but personally, I just wasn't using them enough.

Stu said that Tom Maloney, I always mess up your name, Tom, I'm sorry, is taking the Rotary's report seriously instead of just saying that Tesla didn't do anything wrong. The report was more than just APA. It was more like we mentioned, but the biggest thing was the actual potential fraud of messing with the first and second half of the state of charge and giving different purposely optimistic statements.

range prediction versus more realistic ones. If that's true, that would be a real problem. But the runner's report itself was kind of weird about this part. It was the most damning one, I think, in terms of

They said that that only happened when Tesla was selling the Roadster and the Model S, which that by itself doesn't make sense because Tesla stopped selling the Roadster in 2012, started selling the Model S. So they never really overlapped that much. So I assume that they meant when the lineup only consisted of Roadster and Model S, which would mean between 2012 and 2015, which was the Model S only before the Model X came. So...

I think that's what they meant. And they said we couldn't confirm after that if it was still in play. And we did talk about this last week. But as early Model S owners like myself and Seth, we did realize that that was happening or something weird that was happening. Less so these days with our Model 3s and Model Ys. So it's not sure if it's still happening. So I don't know if there's very that much value there in terms of like the seriousness of the report. But all the other things like the service centers, like DLs,

trying to cancel service appointment over range that's that's kind of what you need to do because there's nothing to do about the range like the range it is what it is so there's no nothing that service can do so of course the service is going to try to cancel your appointment uh so that that's not a weird thing to me i mean i know it's going to be frustrating and i accept that but it's not they're not service that's a service not going to be able to do anything about it stefan says um

To buy FSD before it's a waste of money, no one knows. Sorry, there's a lot of issues with this comment here. Tesla lie about FSD all the time. All the work for it is supposed to run full FSD according to the announcement from MolX. Yeah, I mean, we discussed that a bunch of times.

Oliver had, is Tesla being accused for advertising the AP range? You're in Europe, you won't get that WLTP range on the motorway. Yeah, WLTP is another thing too. But these standards I estimate are a good method for comparing different models. Yeah, so that's the difference with the AP that people have a problem with. It's not if they allow a different multiplier for different brands.

It's not as good of a comparison between the two. If everybody needs to use the same thing and we know exactly what's the protocol, then yeah, it's a good comparison Apple to Apple. But now there's some wriggle room and Tesla takes full advantage of that. All right. The last question and then I'm going to go. Nicholas asks,

Question, how common it is among your friends and neighbors to have EV, solar, home, battery, plus hourly electricity prices, the full package? Do you have in Sweden moving fast? I've got it all. Well, I'm glad for Uniclass, and I'm glad that Sweden is moving fast on it. I mean, here in Quebec, it's not in terms of solar, just because there's not a ton of value for people here in solar, financially speaking, just because all of our electricity comes from

from hydroelectricity, which is a renewable source and a very cheap source of electricity. So solar is a lot less competitive here than it is in other places where electricity is more expensive. There's still some people that do it.

But if you walk around in a rich neighborhood, you won't see that many solar on the roof or at all really. They're very far and few in between. In the US though, it's very different. And again, it's state by state, region by region. The higher the electricity rates are, the more financially viable solar is going to be. So a lot of places, it makes a ton of sense. And batteries, of course. I do have batteries here though.

I have EVs and batteries, but the solar make no sense. I think I'm going to add some capacity at some point. Um,

I need to redo my roof anyway, but I won't do a solar roof tiles though. I'm not, I don't have Jeff Bezos money. That's what you need for a Tesla solar roof. But I'm going to do just regular panels at some point just to get a full backup system, like with my battery and solar. Like if something happens, at least I still have some power for a long period of times. Now it's just my batteries are good for when power, I lose power for,

a short period of time or up to a day really i would be fine but um if it's uh something happens it's like for weeks at a time then uh you screwed but if you can trickle charge with uh solar then you're fine so yeah it's uh

I'm definitely jealous of your setup if you have an EV, solar, and batteries. It's very cool. All right. That's it for us this week for the Electric Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this show. I hope I did a good job even though I was alone this week. Probably the same thing next week. I'm not exactly sure. Maybe Seth is going to be back. He's going to be surprised. So if you do enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe. It takes a second to do.

It's free and it helps the show more than you think. If you're listening on your podcast app, if you can just go to the Apple charts and give us a five-star rating, that helps a ton too. And it takes a second to do. And I appreciate it every single time. Thanks a lot, everyone. I hope you have a good weekend. Stay safe out there. Bye-bye.