Tesla Cybertruck recalls, Rivian and VW partnership, Rimac goes driverless, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. This episode of the Electric Podcast is sponsored by the Electric American Solar Challenge 2024 coming in just a few weeks. So we're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show, but it's a cool student solar car race and competition that we are sponsoring.

So we're going to talk a little bit more about them later on. But first off, we're going to start with some Tesla news as we usually do, but it was kind of light in Tesla news this week. We have a bunch of Rivian stuff because Rivian had their investor day and they had this big partnership announcement that we're going to discuss in details. And then a bunch of other news.

After that, we're going to get into you guys' comment and questions. So if you guys have any questions for us, you can put them in the comment section right now. We'll get to them at the second half of the show. It can be about any of the subjects that we are about to get into or any other thing in the EV world, the renewable energy world that you want or take on. It will be our pleasure. Let's start with Tesla. Tesla.

changing their approach a little bit regarding the tax credit and the battery type of battery cells in their vehicle, giving you some choices now, which is interesting. So all these automakers now are kind of trying to adapt to the new rules of the federal tax credit for electric vehicles. They increased requirements in terms of battery component, battery material sourcing, battery cell production and all that.

So, you know, trying to adapt this just last week, we talked about the model three long range being added to it, which was a big deal. But there's two sides of this thing. There's the car that needs to be eligible through those requirements that we just discussed, but also the buyer needs to be eligible. And there's plenty of buyers that are not eligible because they often earn more than the $150,000 in yearly income for individual filers or $300,000 for dual filers.

So you might want this car and you just don't have access to it. So you might benefit for taking a vehicle that is not eligible and getting a better vehicle, even if it's almost the same thing. So Tesla now distinguished between battery suppliers for that reason. So...

On the inventory website, Tesla added a little toggle that says tax credit eligible vehicles. So, of course, you have some of them like with the LFP cells that are just not going to be eligible. So when you toggle that, you just don't have those. But the more interesting thing is that you have some of the same vehicles, technically some of the same trims. For example, the performance vehicles, Model 3 and Model Y I'm talking about here, that

you know, are officially eligible if you do on the orders page, but you have some of them that are now, you have the choice between them and the inventory now with this toggle. And basically what you get here is the difference between a vehicle that has the Panasonic cells or the LG cells with the former being eligible to the tax credit and the latter not. And that's because of their origin. I think LG or made in China or...

Korea or something.

are eligible to get to people that are also eligible to the tax credit and therefore they are opening up, they are optimizing for the tax credit basically. However, now it creates something, it creates a choice for those who are not eligible because now technically you're not eligible, you're like, okay, I'll get the LG cells because it doesn't change anything for me, I'm not eligible anyway, so I'm not going to get that $7,500 tax credit.

But it would be an easy choice if they were just on par with each other. Unfortunately, the LG cells, even though they are the same 2170 cells in thermo format, they have a slight change in chemistry between them, resulting in a little less energy capacity, even though Tesla doesn't actually change the temperature.

the mileage on the range rating. So it's possible that this actually adjusts itself for that in terms of software locking. But where there is an absolute clear difference is the charging. The LG cells do charge a little bit slower than the Panasonic cells. It's...

Not a massive difference. I've seen people trying to test it. Some of them claim as much as 10 minutes of difference from a 10% to 80%. It looks like on average it's closer to 5%. But still, 5 minutes to 10 minutes, it's not nothing. So it's something to keep in mind because now you basically have a choice. Do I leave one of those penicillin

car sales but one of those cars with pad and snake sells to someone that can that is eligible and will get 7500 and therefore you know help the adoption of ev a little bit more or do i just want the best possible car i can get for this exact same price uh you know it's up to you but i i do i always like the options so i do that like that that's yeah it's added the option

It's nice that they're actually putting it out there. Yeah, they're not putting everything out there. We know because we know about this and we're telling people, but Tesla is not the one telling people about this. They're not like, hey, actually, these LG cells will discharge a little bit slower. You won't find that on Tesla's website. Right.

All right, we got two Cybertrucks recall this week. And we love Cybertrucks recall for the main reason that it actually helped us track the production rep of the Cybertruck. Tesla has been very opaque when it comes to that. They're not breaking down the deliveries and quarterlies. They are including the Cybertruck with more S and XLs now. It makes no sense.

But yeah, last time that there was a recall, we learned that there were about 4,000 Cybertrucks out there in April. Now in June, there are over 11,000 Cybertrucks. And we learned that through two different recalls. First of all, the trims around the bed of the vehicle have been known to fly off the car. We've seen a few reports on that on social media. And Tesla investigated it and they found that the applique, they called it, around the

the vehicle or sometimes not properly, the adhesive is not properly fixed and it can fly off and that's a safety hazard for obvious reasons. And therefore it is a safety recall.

Tesla will either replace or rework these parts. So this is actually a physical recall too. Tesla is obviously known for doing recalls that are just over-the-air software update. This is obviously not one of them. So next time you bring your car to the service center, they will check the applique around the trims of the bed to see if they need to be reworked or replaced.

And it's going to be at no charge to the customer. So that's for all the Cybertrucks built until May 26, 2024. And that was 11,383 Cybertrucks.

Now, at the same time, Tesla disclosed another recall, and it's something that we've anticipated for the last week. Because last week, we reported that there was a sales alt or a delivery alt on the Cybertruck regarding a problem with the motor of the windshield wiper. And now, Tesla has confirmed it that the front windshield wiper controller may stop functioning due to electrical overstress to the gate driver component.

So it's actually a problem with a supplier. The contact of the supplier found the issues and now they will replace on these trucks. Valeo and USI are the two suppliers involved. They will replace these motors on the Cybertrucks. All Cybertrucks built until June 6th and that was 11,688 dollars.

So you can see that this kind of greatly slowed down the production of the Cybertruck between around the end of May and early June, probably because of these issues. They kind of slowed things down because they were trying to fix those issues because, you know, that's just over 300 Cybertrucks built in the last, between May 26th and June 6th.

All right. But about 11,000 Cybertrucks out there, you know, a little bit... Respectable. Respectable. A little bit lower than I would have expected by now, to be honest, probably closer to like 15, 20, but still not bad. All right. Speaking of deliveries...

People are trying to estimate where Tesla's deliveries are going to end up for the quarter because this is a big deal. Tesla's slowdown in deliveries, year-over-year reduction in deliveries last quarter affected the entire industry. A lot of the headlines that you see these days

Just in Congress yesterday, there was this debate about it that EV sales are slowing down everything. It's mainly Tesla sales have slowed down and they are so important to the EV market that it's dragging down the entire market. And some other legacy automakers are using that to justify slowing down their EV efforts.

We want to see Tesla bounce back from this bad, from these 26,000 deliveries they had in Q1. The estimates for Q2 have been kind of all over the place because on top, Tesla's deliveries were way down. Production was down too a little bit, but there were a discrepancy between the two 46,000 vehicles that scored or so. Now-

Tesla's own argument is that a lot of these vehicles were in transit to customers anyway. So technically that's 46,000. I doubt that they were the full 46,000, but it was a good chunk of that is going to get delivered early in Q2 and boost Q2 numbers.

But I think there's more problem than that. I think Tesla has also a demand issue and a lot of these e-codes were not meant for customers. And also there's the fact that the production slowdown last quarter also resulted in a slowdown in deliveries because you have order matching issues that complicate logistics at the end of the quarter. So now people are trying to figure out what's going to be like in Q2. The consensus right now on Wall Street is 450,000 deliveries, which is, you know,

big jump from last quarter, 386, but it's still down from the same period last year of 466,000. So I think that would be bad by itself. It's still not growing year over year. And

with 46,000 vehicles added to the inventory last quarter. I think this wouldn't be great. But even then, the 450,000 is likely going to go down by the end of the month. Like we're at the 28 right now. So there's still a few days of deliveries. But at the same time, the analysts are, you know,

keep updating their estimates and the estimates are going down. I saw a bunch of them in the last few weeks that are closer to 400,000, 415, 420, 430,000. And

It looks like Europe is actually a big part of the problem. So let me pull that out, actually, because I might as well look at it up to date because that was a few days ago. So this website is pretty cool here. It tracks EV registration. So this is based on registration. It's not necessarily deliveries, but it's pretty good tracking normally. So you can see now as of June,

2024, we are at 103,000 Tesla registered in Europe. It's 15 countries in Europe that are being tracked versus 163,000 at the same time last year. And you can see that the discrepancy happened a lot this month and last month, more than the first three months of the quarter, which there was a discrepancy still of about 15,000 vehicles.

Yeah, they were actually up for the first two months. Yeah, and then it switched and switched a lot in May and in June. So this is a problem unless Tesla has like a record, like last few days of, I mean, this is always a few weeks behind, to be honest. So last few weeks of the month, other than that, you know, Europe is going to be,

Not great, but we've seen some numbers coming in from China and China looks not too bad. Tesla has implemented a lot of incentive in China in the last few months, including like zero percent interest loans and all that. So that helped a lot, apparently, because registration numbers in China for Tesla right now are looking pretty good at the end of the quarter. So that should help. But, you know, Europe is also an important market and there is the U.S. too that's always...

you know, a big question mark when we, it's a harder to track a little bit quarter to quarter. But the model three long range getting the tax credit a few weeks ago, that's, that should help the end of the quarter, obviously. So yeah, I, I really don't know. I think, like I said, I think even 450,000, I think would be not great, but anything less than like 430,000 or something like that, that's, I think that would be really bad. Yeah. I mean, Tesla was supposed to get like 2 million vehicles this year.

Yeah, they're really going to have to ramp up to catch up to that. Yeah, and how? I don't really see how. The Cybertruck can help a little bit, but we saw not much. If Tesla can deliver, I don't know, 30,000 Cybertruck in the second half of the year, that would be great. Do they have room to drop prices anymore?

I mean, the costs are going down. So technically, yes, but not that much. Right. I think there's, you know, there's a silver bullet. There's the full self-driving. Like if they do have like meaningful improvement in that, it does make things a little bit more interesting. Like it does encourage people to buy, but it hasn't so far. Right. Yeah.

Oh yeah, we spotted that earlier today. It's a Tesla Samaya that had a LiDAR sensor, a sensor array on top that looks like LiDARs. I think I have a closer picture here. Yeah, looks like LiDAR sensor that was spotted on the highway last week. The image we're sharing on Reddit today. And what's interesting about that is like Tesla has not really commented about autonomous or ADAS system.

in the Tesla Semi for years now. There were mentions of it at the original unveiling back in 2017, things about the convoy mode that was cool where the vehicle could track each other and reduce drag by they could brake at the same time and all that. That was really cool. And that was basically the extent of it other than Tesla saying that their autopilot system that's now on all vehicles produced is going to also be on the Tesla Semi. Other than that, there was in the...

Tesla's production on V-Link in 2022, there was no mention whatsoever of autopilot or self-driving. I would assume that this has something to do with the fact that with commercial trucking, when you talk about self-driving, you talk about replacing truckers and that starts to get controversial. And Tesla wants to sell those vehicles to trucking companies. It's like...

You see a trucking company ordering 500 Tesla semi-trucks that have self-driving capability. Your truckers might start looking somewhere else. Not that I think that self-driving is that close, especially for trucking, because truck drivers do a little bit more than driving, to be honest. But anyway, I would assume it has something to do with that. Now, these LiDAR sensors, I don't think that Tesla is using these LiDAR sensors for self-driving itself, but normally Tesla will use LiDARs for validation of their own

sensor suite, which are now our cameras, and ground truthing. So this is likely what Tesla is doing now, which could indicate that Tesla is working on implementing some of its ADAS, autopilot, supervised self-driving stuff to the Tesla Semi, which is interesting.

All right, moving on from, oh, do we want to talk a little bit about the American, the Electric American Solar Challenge? Yeah, we're just a few weeks away. I guess probably two weeks from now, a little bit more than two weeks from now. We're going to have, we're going to be in Kentucky for the scrutineering and then the electric Formula Sun Grand Prix. That's going to be at the Corvette Museum Racetrack near Bowling Green, Kentucky.

And that actual race is going to be July 16th through the 18th. And then after that, we're going to move on to Nashville and we're going to start that race on July 20th. And that's going to go across country all the way to Casper, Wyoming over the next week. So 20th to 27th, we're going through the U.S. We're going to go through St. Louis and Nashville.

a bunch of other places. So if you guys are in the Midwest and I guess Rockies at the end and want to come see a solar race, jump on the website, find out when we're going to be where and head over and come see us. We're really looking forward to it. This is a great project. There's tons of really smart college students putting these cars together. These are the, you know, the electric vehicle manufacturers of the future and

So, you know, it's funny to see we see them all in like tents. But these guys are all going to be like, you know, six, six, mid six figure income people in the next few years. So great to see them all. You know, their team's doing a great job. And these, by the way, these these solar cars that you've probably seen before go on regular roads and highways. They're not, you know, on some like offbeat and track. They they're on roads. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, these are going to be the future leaders of EV startups out there. It's going to be fun. Yeah, I mean, Tesla's original team came from the Stanford team. Exactly. All right, we have some interesting news coming from Rivian this week. The first one is the big one. It's this new partnership with the Volkswagen Group.

that is going to invest up to $5 billion into the company and set up a joint venture to produce next-generation electric vehicles. All right, so the details, not too many details on what's going to happen. It starts with a billion-dollar investment. Talk about producing next-gen vehicles together. If you read the announcement and all that, it does sound like Volkswagen is interested in Rivian Software.

which is not too surprising. Volkswagen has had a lot of issues on that front that has impeded their effort to produce electric vehicles. So they are now setting up this 50/50 joint ventures around next generation electrical electronics architecture. So apparently they're very interested in

what we even call its new zonal system of power electronics inside the vehicles and electronics. It's something that I talked about in my review of the next generation R1s. It's cut down their ECUs by, I think,

I think it was 17 to 7 inside the car. Great improvement in RNS system. And all of that also comes with software improvement and software updatability deep into the modules. I think a high percentage of their modules are fully updatable now. And so the partnership starts with a $1 billion convertible node to Rivian.

So this is good for Rivian too, because even though Rivian still has a lot of cash on end, it, you know, it,

And it's still plans. We're going to discuss that because there was the investor. The profitability is still far away. Like there's a gross margin positive that's supposedly going to happen at the end of the year, but that's not profitability. So Rivian is most likely going to lose money for the very least the next year, maybe several years to come. So they're going to need some more cash. So this is a new cash call for them.

however and then after that after the establishment of the joint venture vw says it will invest an additional four billion into rivian in one billion trenches in 2025 and 2026 contingent on revient meeting certain milestones without mentioning them the stock the ribbon stock jumped up over the announcement of that i don't know where it is today but yesterday like 30 oh now it's down seven percent today it's actually back to yeah almost where it was uh

Yeah, I was at $12 a share before the announcement, and now it's like $13. It's shoot up to $18. Wow. So I guess sell the news. Should have unloaded. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, and I get why they would sell too, because once they digest the news, like it's good. Like, you know, it's big investment, more cash for Rivian. But convertible notes, that means more dilution, obviously. Well, unless they pay back those loans. But again, I don't know.

I need to go see the terms of when they need to pay them back. I don't think that's... Rivian is not going to make any profit for a little bit, I think. And where you get a little bit cold on these joint venture is like, it's not the first time we've seen Rivian do that and not come up with a lot of things, especially the Ford one. The Ford was supposed to be vehicles coming out of that joint venture and nothing really happened.

The Amazon partnership, you know, has delivered a bunch of vans, but even that is cooling down too. And now, you know, they are nowhere near. There are 100,000 vans deliveries and they're already talking about like trying to sell to other people. So it's not perfect, but, you know, it's not bad either, right? Mercedes Sprinter vans were also talked about. Yeah. Was there an official announcement on that? I don't remember that. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And that still hasn't happened either? I think they unannounced it or whatever. Said it wasn't going to happen. Yeah. So these are not. But I think the more positive thing is that this is coming at a time where we know that Rivian is going to need some more money. So this is a way for them to get more money without having to beg anyone. Like they're actually doing some work for Volkswagen here that's going to use their technology. And this is good for Volkswagen too, because again, if they're talking about the electronics and the software, they're

It is one area where they were lacking and now they have a partner that's kind of their expertise. Rivian has invested heavily in software. They have the former head of Android at Intel now that's leading the effort. So they have a lot of talent there.

All right, then Riven also had their investor day this week. And they sort of gave a little bit of a preview of Q2, which we knew was going to be... I guess this is also part of where the stock dropped a bit too, because we got the preview of Q2, which we knew was not going to be great because there was the factory shutdown, the switch over to the next generation R1s. And all right, so what kind of details we got there? Kind of read it. Okay, so...

This is still Q1. All right, Q2. So these are expectations for Q2 because obviously the quarter is not even completely over, but they still have a good idea of what's going to be like with just a few days left. So they expect now production of 9,100 to 9,300 vehicles in Q2. The delivery should be between 13,000 and 13,300.

slightly down from the first quarter at 13,518, which is not bad considering the production shutdown, but Q1 was also down. So it's not ideal either.

But we have now a better idea. They're still talking about positive gross margin in Q4. And now they have a lot more clarity into that, starting to see the impact of the next generation cost cutting. So some of the cost cutting they showed here. So positive here, not actually any numbers on it, but positive.

Here you have the idea of what the production roadmap is going to look like. So post Q2 2024 shutdown, you know, 65,000.

plant capacity for the vans, 85,000 for the R1 S and T. Now what they are looking at post that is the, well, with the launch of the R2. So same thing, 85, 65, but they plan to make 155,000 R2s out of that normal factory.

So this is, you know, change of plan that they had. Supposed to first come to the Georgia factory, but not going to come here first. And then Georgia, once it has the two lines up, it's going to be 400,000 R2s and R3s. What else? Oh, yeah, they have this little roadmap here that shows some hidden vehicles. Yeah, one of those is kind of boxy. Others kind of look like cars. Interesting. All right, moving on from Rivian.

This is kind of something that we hinted a little bit about last week, but Volvo has confirmed it this week that it's going to be a delay in launching the EX30 in the US until 2025. So we talked about this last week that the EX30 was supposed to come from China and now with the new tariffs, it just doesn't make any sense. So Volvo shifted the idea to produce them out of Belgium.

And, but you know, the, the, the, the, he said that last week, but it's not like we expected them to be able to turn this around like super quickly. You know, you cannot just flip a switch and start producing a car at a different plant. So this is going to result in a delay in the launch of the U S but just until next year. So not too bad. I don't know if they said when in 2025, no, I don't think we have exact timing on 2025, but I wouldn't expect it early in 2025.

Yeah, it sucks though because people were expected to have them by now. They're all over Europe. Yeah, they're already doing like good numbers in Europe already. Yeah, and it's frustrating because when they did announce this, everybody was like, yeah, but they're never going to send many numbers to the US because we're like the last priority. And here we are. So the other problem is like they're saying, well, we're going to build this in Belgium.

Why don't they just build it in South Carolina? Why do they need to build them in Europe to send them over here? They have a plant in South Carolina. Maybe that's why it's taking so long. Maybe that's part of their plan is to do kind of what Volkswagen did with the Chattanooga. Built the first few in Europe and then... Yeah, an impossible...

All right, we have two more news items to discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comment section. So if we have plenty of times to discuss, you guys, whatever you want to discuss in the EV industry or things that we discussed today, you can put them in the comment section right now on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X. We are live everywhere. All right, Remac. We'll say Remac. But there was a new brand launched this week called Vern. I think that's how you pronounce it.

that was launched by Matt Remack, the founder of Remack and two other executives at Remack.

The involvement of the actual company is not exactly clear, but I would assume that it's involved because the unveiling of the brand and the vehicle was at the headquarter of Rimac. So I think it would have to do with it. But it does sound a little bit Elon Musk-y, like launching another car brand while being CEO of an existing car brand. But...

I think that even though the press release and all the company information I looked at, there's nothing that clearly links Rimac to this company. It does look like there's part of it. If you remember, Rimac is obviously better known for their HyperCard and Evara, but

It's now like kind of became this unlikely big automaker in Europe through the partnership with Porsche, taking over Bugatti. So now Matt Remag, the CEO, is the CEO of the Remag Group, which also englobed Bugatti. And not just the Navara, but they also, you know, they produce a lot of things now. They produce the powertrains for other automakers and all that.

And now they are launching Vern, which is an autonomous level four electric car brand aimed at ride sharing. And they are not building their own autonomous driving technology. It's using MobileEyes level four autonomous system that is pretty advanced now. And they expect it to be ready by 2026 to work in their car. So what they unveil is the Vern autonomous vehicle that you can see here. So a two-seater vehicle.

No completely driverless, no steering wheel. The experience is really built around the passenger. I mean, look at those seats there. It's like first class airplane seats. And the first thing, design. Yeah, these sliding doors that go forward, giving you a giant entry space.

You see the vehicle's number there. So instead of having to ask your Uber driver, like, hey, are you Fernando? Now you have actually, you see the number there. These look like LiDAR sensors on the sides. And look at the interior. Here you have a giant screen. And the experience can be customized for each passenger.

And yeah, a lot of the thing is around the brand since, again, the autonomous driving technology is not, you know, it's a completely different company. So the brand, the company itself is more about the vehicle. You know, it's an electric vehicle. They haven't focused much on the specs of the electric vehicle, but, you know, it's going to be

is presumably good enough to work as a ride-hailing system in cities. I think that's going to be the goal because it is a level four, so it's going to be limited on work and drive, but they haven't talked too much about that. The service is expected to launch in Zagreb in Croatia, where Rimac is based in 2026, and the company plans to expand to Europe and the Middle East. They already claim to have deals with 11 different cities around those regions, Europe and the Middle East. So an interesting new market for Rimac or Vern, I should say.

Yeah, the model is very weird. The founders being part of another company, why not just launch it within Remac? I guess they don't want to, you know, their brand is Hypercars. They don't want to, you know, dilute that, I guess. Yeah. But they don't even say like this is like a new brand under Remac. It's like a separate company started by Matt Remac and two other executives at Remac. It's kind of weird. All right, Polestar.

Launch a new version of the Polestar 3. Well, they started deliveries of the Polestar 3 this week. We should know that. So deliveries started of Polestar 3. And at the same time, they launched a version with... I think we have more than 11 kilowatt hour. The battery pack, a little typo here. But yeah, a new lower price Polestar 3 with a single motor.

So new long range single motor Polestar 3 starting at $85,500, about 80,000 euros. It's right now only available in Europe, but it's going to come to North America and Australia later this year. It has the same 111 kilowatt hour battery pack for up to 404 miles of range, but that's on the WLTP. So you can expect a little bit slower than that.

well i don't get the pricing because it says 85 but you do have the dual motor pilot pack at 73 so is it like a new one that you can get right now i guess yeah it's hard to tell oh no okay no that's just okay that's maybe the including the end over if that that might be the

American price, the US price change into the European price converted to US dollars with the tax, with the VAT, I would assume. Because now, yeah, the lowest price is now $73,400, which, you know, Polestar, especially with the Polestar 3, Polestar 4, the main thing that people have complained about has been the price. Like they are great cars, looked awesome, have great specs, but

They are priced at a pretty high premium, and it looks like people are just not willing to apply that premium to the Polestar brand. Polestar brand kind of took a break for a while and came back with this strange launch as a

All electric brand, but with the Polestar 1 being PHEVs. So they're trying to find their footing and the price is just a little bit high. But I think they have great cars. I think they look awesome. They have great spec. It's just the pricing is just hard to justify for some people right now.

Yeah, and maybe the worst or the best competitor for the Polestar is Volvo. It's basically the same vehicle, costs less versus the Polestar 3. The Volvo EX90 has three rows, same drivetrain. It's kind of a hard sell. Yeah, I agree. I do think it looks a little bit better. It does. I agree. I mean, it's a different look, a different aesthetic. All right, let's get into the comments section real quick.

All right. Carl in San Diego is back. Uh, room remack remote robo taxi news is out of left field. That's kind of true. Some people don't qualify for the tax credits because their income is too low. And these tax credits are non-refundable. Retirees are sometimes in a situation as our low wage folks. That's a good point. And then think about that. Yeah. Yeah.

California, though, in California, they have some great low-income people incentive now that I think go up to like $12,000 or whatnot. It's pretty wild in some regions. So if you're in California, at least you can look into that. Solar ITC tax credits were allowed to spread across multiple years, but not EVs. So, yeah.

All right. Dan Oberstay, I wonder if SCOTUS is overturning of Chevron deference. We talked about that in the Slack room a little bit with, of course, Jamie chiming in with his eclectic opinions. Chevron deference will have impact on the EPA's ability to decide which vehicles batteries qualify for the full tax credit.

It's a lot of stuff happening. Yeah, I think the decision is kind of wide-ranging. It could affect a lot of different industries and a lot of different aspects. We're still looking into it. I don't know if Jamie is working on a post right now because it's not exactly clear what kind of effect it will have. So I wouldn't be willing to comment on that. You might have something here, Dan, but I'm not equipped to comment on that right now.

All right. Important question here. Have you wished Elon a happy birthday yet? Is his birthday today? I don't even know. I don't know. Yeah, it's weird. True, the credits are non-refundable, but the IRS is prohibited from recouping any credits taken by buyers without enough tax liability. If you take the credit, you can keep it. Dealers and manufacturers will reduce the sale price unless you tell them your income is too high. They will let you know that you can steal the credit from the IRS. That's interesting.

Don't know if that's true. Tesla also has explained their LIDAR purchasing properly. There are laws against truck convoys in the USA. There is? Maybe. Or I guess platooning close together is illegal. I mean, sometimes if they're doing that, you can't get on and off because there's just truck after truck after truck.

So yeah, there could be some issues with that. Daniel DeYoung says, how seriously should we take Rivian or Remax autonomous driving or robo-taxi plans? Well, Rivian... Yeah, Rivian is not autonomous though. Well, I mean, level 3. They're talking about level 3 right now. Which is autonomous on the highways, basically. So...

you should take that seriously because I think that's very achievable. In fact, I would love to see Tesla talking about level three a little because I think it's an achievable technology that delivers a lot of value. But they are laser focused on, you know,

level five or nothing, or I think more realistically level four on that thing. As for Remax, if I'm just driving, it's mobile eyes. So it's more how serious you take mobile eye. And I think there should be taken seriously. I mean, you're now a pilot of Intel. They have, you know, coffers for days. So,

Yeah, they should be taken seriously. A lot of Tesla fans and Tesla drivers, they think that Tesla is alone in this game. And then people mention Waymo that already has a commercial service available. And they're like, yeah, but it's Jio fans, so it's worthless. There's value in all these kind of services. There are different levels of values. And no one disagrees that if you can solve self-driving, vision-based self-driving, like Tesla is trying to do, you...

you unlock incredible value. It's just that it's hard. It's super hard. And Tesla says it's about to do it for years now and it's just not doing it yet. So there's reason for skepticism there too. Yep. All right. Here's a good question. Whatever happened to the Roadster? Yeah, I mean, it's a weird one. Earlier this year, Iman kind of said that he approved of the latest change to the Roadster. Now it's going to be

unveil at the end of 2024 a new version of it updated from the 2017 version which is now very dated and that it's going to come to market next year now right after he said that we heard from sources from one source

So that's why we didn't report on it because it's just one source. But that source has since been confirmed to be correct on other things, though. So the project was again delayed. We don't know when exactly, but there was resources that was hanging at that project that has been diverted, like several other vehicle programs at Tesla around that same time. So I don't know. I think it's still... I would be surprised if it launches next year.

Yeah, same. Carl says, I suspect the Volvo EX30 loses its reason to exist if they can't make it in China cheaply. It wasn't designed priced to be sold at those low prices while paying Belgian US wages. Maybe, I don't know. I kind of feel like they could make, I mean, they make other cars like in the US and in Belgium and they sell pretty well at Volvo prices. Maybe they have to jack up the price a little bit. I don't know.

Small battery, small car. I mean, I get your point. Like it's, it's, it's,

It is cheaper to make vehicles in China, but is that now – are we just giving up on making cheaper vehicles in Europe and the US? Is that what's happening? I don't like this defeatist kind of attitude that we have. We made a mistake. We as a North American, we made a mistake. We gave up a lot of manufacturing expertise to cheap labor in China for a cheaper price, and now we are in this situation right now.

Can it not be reversed, especially with automation, with AI and everything, while creating some good jobs at the same time? I don't know. I kind of want to be more optimistic on that front. I think we can bring back that. I know you have Mexico also on the southern border, and a lot of companies looking to go there instead to make their cheaper vehicles. Yeah.

including Tesla and including BYD also looking to make a giant factory there. Ford making a Mackie there. But I don't know. I think it's doable. I would like to see it happen. I mean, technically, that's what Tesla was supposed to do with the Model 2 in Gigafactory Texas.

Now, I guess it's going to be these Model 3, Model Y-based vehicles that are going to be cheaper. Not $25,000, but still a little bit cheaper. So I think it's still doable. At least I want to see it happen. All right. Two last things. Remac Robotaxi is working with Mobileye. We did say that. Agree, we should try to build what we consume domestically, but the EVs are too expensive to build because of battery costs. Well, that too...

With that too, we can build here, I think, less expensively. It's just we have to build the supply chain for it. The reason why China is dominating in batteries right now is because they saw it coming and they built the entire supply chains for it from scratch. And we just don't have that in the US right now. But we are working on it. There's...

ton of projects here right next where I live right now we have this uh we call it the Valley of electric transition and we have a bunch of companies that are working on uh transforming battery materials so we obviously in Canada we are extremely rich in metal resources and including battery metal resources like nickel and lithium and even cobalt and um

We could extract it from here, we could transform it from here, and we could build a battery pack from here, and we could optimize the entire supply chains, increase it to a higher volume. And then we have the possibility to be competitive, I think, with China long term. It just doesn't happen fast. It's just too big of an industry. It's mining, it's transformation, and it's high-volume manufacturing. That's a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Battery manufacturing doesn't seem to be too human intensive. Like you could mechanize most of it. So, you know, if you're not paying human beings, we're pretty competitive otherwise.

There's a lot of labor to it, but just because it's so big, you're right that by volume, like I don't think that's, you know, by capital, if you mean like by batch you produce, I don't think you have a high number of human workers. It's just that to make it viable, you need to have a giant scale. So at scale, you still have thousands of employees at a single firm. Yeah. Yeah.

We are having to play catch up and the only way we compete with BYD is tariffs and Chinese companies are being subsidized by the CCP. Not a bad point. Yeah, I mean, that's true. I work for Proterra, manufacturing American-made transit buses. Unfortunately, funding and path to profitability was not great, even though the products were amazing, especially our battery manufacturing plant and tech. All right. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, it's a tough environment right now in China.

Yeah, the fundraising, there's a few EV companies failing like Proterra that fell, like Fisker that went bankrupt recently that those, you know, you inject those into the market now and it becomes harder to raise money and make these projects happen. So it is a problem. But I think these are, you know, these are hiccups in the broader, in the grand scheme of things. I think the industry is going to survive that. And, you know,

You have to give them to China too. They are doing some great stuff. We should be inspired by it. I know there's the idea of like, you know, the Communist Party and their involvement in the industries there. And we don't have that kind of system there for better or worse. And, you know,

But I think that with our capitalistic system, we should get inspired by that instead of just having fear all the time. Just get inspired by it and just try to build an industry here that is strong. I think it's completely doable.

Yep. All right. Let's leave on this inspiring note. I hope you enjoyed the show this week. It was a short one, but a fun one. If you did enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe, whatever it is on your app right now. When you do it, it helps the show more than you think. It takes a second to do and it's free. We appreciate when you do it. If you're listening on the audio version of the podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your podcast, if you can give us a five-star rating, also takes a second to do and it helps the show a

time so i appreciate this we single one of you we'll see you same time same place next week have a good one