Tesla earnings, Model 3 Performance, Mercedes-Benz electric G-Class, and more
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Welcome everyone for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wincham. How are you doing today, Seth?

I'm good. All right. And this episode of the podcast is sponsored by SplitVolt. The SplitVolt splitter switch automatically shares power from your existing 240V dryer socket with your level 2 EV charger. You can learn more in the link in the description. And we're going to have a little bit more to say about SplitVolt, the splitter switch for EV charging later on in the show. So stay tuned for that.

But a big show today, a huge one, obviously, was the earning calls for Tesla and a lot of news came through that. So we're going to get through all that stuff. Then we also had Jamie test out the Mercedes G-Class. I don't know if he tested it, but he was there for the unveiling at least and a little bit more.

All right. But before we jump into the earnings call and how I came with it, we can finally officially talk about the Model 3 performance after months and months of teasing, of prototype sighting, of leaks, leaks directly from Tesla and whatnot.

We have all the details right now. So we're going to get over it pretty fast because we pretty much knew everything about this car. The two main new details that are confirmed are the acceleration of it. So that also sort of leaked, but we weren't sure if it was correct. It was correct. It's 2.9 seconds, 0 to 60. That's for the American version. That's for the version built in Fremont.

For the markets that are getting the one built in Shanghai, though, you're getting a little bit slower vehicle. I think you get 460 horsepower, the equivalent of 460 horsepower, rather than 510 for the version that's built out of Fremont. So, I mean, that's one of...

the the the only bummer about this car because because if i was to upgrade right now probably that would be my upgrade car from my mobile 3 2018 performance to this because uh i do like what i'm seeing right now um but in canada we do get the shanghai version so that's that's a bit of a bummer that's interesting uh would you consider buying a us i guess it would be kind of a pain in the

Unless they do the switch up. And sometimes it does happen, like for whatever logistical reason, we do get a batch from Fremont. And that maybe I would jump on that. But now if you're talking about getting it in the US and then getting it to Canada, that's so complicated. It's not worth it.

But yeah, everything else was confirmed before. And I've seen also the unplugged performance. I don't know if you've seen the images of it. Unplugged performance already released like an aerial kit for this. And oh my God, if you don't like that car already, just with the aerial kit from unplugged performance, it looks sick. Yeah, I would like that. But yeah,

I think I would need to wait to see if I can get a Fremont one. So, yeah, the 2.9, the 500 horsepower, the new track mode, we already knew about that. The suspension with active damping is there too, bigger brakes, all of that. We get a better look at the new seats here, which look virtually the same as the one in the Model S instead of having the plaid seats.

badge in the middle you have the ludicrous one but the uh the car itself is not called ludicrous as far as i can tell it's called multi performance like you used to and even if you look at the sport modes at the modes inside the vehicle you have like the sports one you have uh the performance one is not called ludicrous it's called insane like it used to be in the original dual motor um s

So the pricing is the other big information we get. It's $53,000 before incentive. And in the U.S., it makes it interesting because if you do qualify for the federal tax credit, you're better off buying a Model 3 performance than you are buying a Model 3 long range. Well, I see you're better off. You're better off if you do want the trade-off of the performance versus performance.

The range, because you do get a slightly less range, about 50 miles less, 296, which is still up from the previous version of the Model 3.

Performance, multi-performance is just obviously the bigger. It's especially the wheels. The wheels makes a big difference. And they look pretty cool, these new. We reported on that actually last week, the new 20-inch Forge wheel. They look insane. But if you are ordering a brand new multi-performance, they come with these wheels. You don't have any other option.

In the past, Tesla has changed that with the multi-performance. There's been time where you were able to order it without or you get some inventory vehicles that have the 19-inch wheels instead. They do make a big difference. So maybe we see a multi-performance with over 300 miles of range if that happens. But I'm sure that for now, Tesla is banking on a lot of orders for this. I'm sure this thing will sell.

Oh, and I should elaborate. Why you do get the federal tax credit on this and not the long range Model 3 is because of the battery. So you probably do have a nickel-based battery in there rather than an LFP, and that's why you get the Chinese batteries. So tell me how they decide whether the cars are coming from Fremont or Shanghai. Is it just where there's extra inventory or...?

I mean, I'm sure that they have a better, well, for the Model 3 at least, they have a better gross margin right now on the one in Shanghai than they do in Fremont just because they've been producing it for longer. The Highland version I'm talking about here. Performance, I'm not sure how, like it's too new, obviously.

So that helps. And in Canada, we don't have the protectionist laws for the Chinese-made cars like you do in the US. So it makes it advantageous for that. That's why we have a few models that you guys don't have because of that. So Tesla, yeah, it's probably just because if they can send you one, then they're going to make more money off the wheel. And it's not crazy because they don't have a bad build quality in Shanghai or anything like that. So people are not mad at it.

All right, moving on from the multi-performance, let's jump into the Tesla earnings result. First off, the results themselves are bad on the two main things that normally Wall Street bases these things on, which is revenue and earnings per share. The expectation on revenue from Wall Street was $22,220,000. $22,220,000.

tesla came in at 21 billion and 300 000 million at 300 million so the way it's written it's so uh hard to think of that was the number is so yeah they were they were short by quite a lot like almost a full billion short on revenue earnings per share the expectation was 49 cents per share tesla came in at 45 so they missed on both

But the stock went up and it went way up. It was up like 19% the first two days after the earnings. And I think it was pretty much flat today. I haven't checked in the hours. It's down a little bit at the end of the day. Yeah, down a little bit. Okay. But yeah, it's still way up from the price it was before the earnings, which is extremely rare when you have a big miss like that. Well, a significant miss. But there was a few things that were encouraging.

First off, the gross margin. Tesla not only still had positive gross margin, it basically had the same gross margin quarter to quarter. It was like they actually improved the gross margin if you remove CyberChuck and if you remove Model 3 Ram. So basically Model Y, Model Y is the bestseller for Tesla. The vast majority of the revenue and everything comes from the Model Y. So Model Y is...

Despite lower pricing, got better gross margin. So that's good news. There was that. But it's a lot of like little pieces of news together that made it so that Tesla was able to fly through this earnings mist like it was nothing. So let's get into a lot of these pieces of news. The big one here, it's a change of plan regarding the more affordable, cheaper electric cars.

I see a lot of confusion for that. I see even a lot of confusion from so-called like Tesla experts. People have been following Tesla closely. They're not sure it's a change of plan. Tesla flat out says it's a change of plan. It is a change of plan, everyone. So Tesla went as close as it possibly can to confirm without making Elon a liar that the $25,000 Tesla is canceled or postponed indefinitely, whatever you want to call it.

So if you remember, Reuters first report on that, Elon called them a liar for it. Of course, the Reuters report was not... There was a few things you could possibly say was not right exactly. I think it was more correct than not correct. But anyway, I think Elon can get away with calling them a liar on that without being sued or anything. But we didn't later confirm that indeed...

There's no resources being spent at all on this. The expansion that Gigaferry Texas for what we now know is called the NV9, New Vehicle 9 program, was canceled or at least postponed indefinitely. So the NV9 was a $25,000 Tesla, sometime called the Model 2. It was the $25,000 electric car enabled by the 4680 cells and the unboxed

manufacturing process put together. That's what enabled that car. And we said Tesla is not spending any money on that anymore. Cancel the expansion at Gigafactory Texas to build it. Instead, focus the resources on the robotaxi and the data center that's also being built right now at Gigafactory Texas. So all the construction resources has been spent on that instead.

In that report, Tesla basically confirmed that. They started that we have updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of the previously communicated start of production in the second half of 2025. So they have accelerated some timeline. I think the timeline that they have really accelerated here is the robot taxi timeline, even though they don't go into too much details.

The next line is these new vehicles, including more affordable models, will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platform and will be able to be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle lineup.

So this is a completely different, or these are completely different vehicles than the NV9 because they are, NV9 was, they were building Tesla new line for it based on the unbox. So this is not the same vehicle they're talking about. It's also not the $25,000 vehicle. So that's a big thing here to focus on because Tesla, you don't see Tesla mention that anymore at all when it was first announced with the 4680 cell. They're not mentioning that anymore. And, uh,

In the conference call following the release of the result, Tesla was asked directly about the $25,000 Tesla and they responded around that question and focused instead on these new plans that they were talking about. So Tesla explained the idea behind this change. This update may result in achieving less cost reduction than previously expected.

$25,000 Tesla gone, but enables us to prudently grow our vehicle volume in a more capex efficient manner during uncertain times. So the car is going to cost a little bit more, but it's going to cost us a lot less to bring it to production. That's what they're saying. This will help us fully utilize our current expected maximum capacity of close to 3 million vehicles, enabling more than 50% growth over 2023 production before investing in new manufacturing lines.

So this is the big thing. Tesla has been talking about 3 million vehicle production capacity deployed, but they're not even close to that. They are closer to 2 million. So this is how they get to 3 million by utilizing their existing production lines to produce these new cars, unannounced cars until now, instead of the previously announced NV9, which was a $25,000 unboxed Tesla. This one is gone.

Finally, they said, our purpose-built Robotaxi product will continue to pursue a versionally unboxed manufacturing strategy. So the Robotaxi is still being built on unboxed.

I hope this helps understanding this change of plan here because I know a lot of people are confused about it. A lot of people still think the $25,000 car, I had some people calling me a liar from my report on NV9. I think this pretty much confirms my report instead that the NV9 is not happening. At least for now, they might. I'm sure that if the RoboTaxi unbox manufacturing process is successful, they're going to build more cars with that process if it's as revolutionary as they thought before.

it makes no sense not to get on board with that. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if you remember, but before, like last time they start, they were talking about the, the robo taxi and the affordable $25,000 car. There was a question like, is that car going to have a steering wheel or not? Because they had kind of mixed messages about that. And I feel like that, that,

They're still going to have that mixed message because RoboTaxi is not going to have a steering wheel theoretically, but they're not going to have a steering wheel version of the RoboTaxi. It sounds like. A lot of people saw the $25,000 car as that, as a steering wheel version of the vehicle. Now, so the way we got the information internally is when Tesla canceled that in the NV9. And when it canceled it, we didn't hear those plans.

We heard the reason behind the cancellation was Elon is going all in on RoboTaxi because he thinks Tesla is so close to achieving self-driving, which if he's right, it does make sense. It would make sense. A self-driving vehicle is going to be much more impactful than a cheaper, like a $10,000 cheaper Tesla, which would be also crazy impactful. But there's levels to this. Yeah.

I think that Elon is basically edging his bet here because I think these plans were put together rather quickly. And I know like people are like, yeah, they're talking about accelerating the delivery of those vehicles. Of course, everything is going to be faster than building entirely new production. And if you're using existing production line, you're going to get there a lot faster. And we know that there was other vehicle in the $25,000 also that was

in the plans, you know, the weird Chinese hatchback that we've seen a couple of times that looked like it was being tested by Tesla, but also looked like a Mazda. This car might be like one that could fit that description of being put on that, on those existing line. So maybe Tesla is just bringing that back after like a year being off the table because of the unbox plan. So the way I think is a real possibility, I'm not saying that's true, but a real possibility is that

Reuters reported their thing and Elon was like, no, that's nonsense because it's not canceled, it's postponed, whatever. And then we reported on it with giving a little bit more credibility on top of it. And then there was a big blowback from the investor community because obviously the investor community right now is...

basing their models on Tesla more on volumes from cheaper vehicles than on self-driving because there's still not too... The credibility level of this self-driving effort is not quite there yet, though I will agree that it increased a lot with V12.

So the investor community was like, we're going to have to downgrade you like crazy right now if you don't have a new cheaper models in the plan. And to edge the bet while still going all in on the Robotaxi, obviously, I think that's where they came up with that plan, which might still be a very successful plan. I don't know. It felt like it was put together rather quickly after that. Yeah.

But that helped because at least for the short term, midterm, it does show Tesla has a plan to get to 3 billion vehicles at least. So that was an interesting one. On the self-driving front, Tesla also released this little sneak peek at what they previously called Tesla Network, the self-driving ride-hailing app to compete with Uber.

We have actual screenshots of it or renders of what it would look like. So you can summon the car and then you have a very like Uber-like screen that shows you how far away is the car, how much time is going to get there. Then in the meantime, since it's self-driving and there's technically no one in it or

There's going to be in between the time that drop off the last customers and you can set up the temperature in the car and everything, which is cool. And then you get a view of where you're going and you get to see what the car sees. Not necessarily credibility builder or confidence builder in the vehicle system.

Of course, that's all worth nothing if you don't have a self-driving car. But a lot of the call was... You could see the call was to building confidence that Tesla can deliver a self-driving vehicle. And if it cannot...

Elon was clear, don't invest in Tesla. He was pretty honest about that. He said you should not be owning the Tesla stock if you don't believe that we're going to solve self-driving, which is also useful to say when the shareholders are about to vote on your compensation package because if you're a shareholder that believe that Tesla is going to solve self-driving, you're most likely more supportive of Elon. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Yeah, that works together.

The 4680 cells was an interesting little update from Lars this this running call. A lot of questions around it. We heard rumors that even like Drew was was fired over the 4680 cell program not going as well as Ilana Oh. But Lars said this week reiterated that it's ahead of Cybertruck production and Cybertruck right now is the only vehicle

Using the 4680 cells from Tesla, that's all they need to be ahead of. But the more interesting piece of data that Lars revealed this week is that he believes that Tesla is going to be ahead of cost of suppliers by the end of the year, which if through would be absolutely massive because...

Tesla five years ago was not even thinking about producing its own cells. And within five years, they would be producing them in a high volume or high enough volume, like gigawatt hour volume. And at a lower cost than competitors or suppliers that have been producing lithium cells for like three decades. If that does happen, it would be absolutely impressive.

Next piece of information. Oh, yeah, we got a small Cybertruck update. This will confirm that in one week of April so far, they built 1,000 Cybertruck in a week.

So that's where they are right now. Production rate of about 50,000 annualized. If they can maintain that, that doesn't mean... If they said we achieve 1,000 in a week, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are at consistently under 1,000 a week. But that's about where we expected Tesla to be right now. Maybe we expected closer to end of Q1, but early Q2 is not bad either. Looks like the production ramp is going as planned, even though...

I would say that there's still some questions about the quality of the production, but that's always the case with Tesla's early production. You're taking a big risk when buying an early Tesla new program. Quick update on Tesla Semi. I think, is it Lars that said that too? Yeah, I think. They're not always clear on who's talking, so unless you don't recognize their voice perfectly, like I know Elon's voice pretty well, but the others, I'm like, who's talking? I wish it was a video. Yeah, that would be nice too.

He did give an update about the, well, there was a groundbreaking. There was this new, looks like there's going to be a completely separate building for Tesla Samaya Gear Freight Nevada. That's a change of plan. That might be what happened with the expansion because at first they were supposed to continue the expansion on the main building like they did, like they were supposed to do originally, which they never did.

But we heard that that's what's going to happen for Tesla Semi too. And then the expansion of the building was delayed by over a year because it's just happening now. And it was announced in January 2023. So now it looks like it's going to be a different building next to the factory that's going to produce the Tesla Semi. And Tesla released this picture of it. And he said that they're planning to start production in late 2025 for the production version of the Tesla Semi, which was already...

announced in 2022. And the first delivery to external customers is going to start in 2026. So the Sasa Maya has been one of the weirdest vehicle programs I've ever seen because first on Ville 2017, supposed to come to market in 2020, then delayed two years, enter official production and a production version of the vehicle is on Ville 2022. But obviously we knew at the time it was like low-level production. And then now you're going to have a new production version of it

three years later with the volume productions. It's a strange legal program, but it needs to happen. I hope it happens.

All right. So with the buildup and confidence in self-driving, Elon also revealed that they are in talks with one major automaker right now to license full self-driving. So they've been talking about that over the last few calls. It was always, oh, yeah, there's some people that are thinking about it. But the last time Elon was like more concerned where he was like, it feels like automakers are not believing us just yet.

yet. Obviously, V12s have still launched, so credibility builder. And Elon says now that they are in talk with one major automaker. And he says that he's confident that maybe one deal is done this year, maybe more than one deal is done with automakers this year. He said it would be supplying the self-driving computer inside the cars and the camera system and then licensing the software for it. So that's the deal that they're looking for. Any guesses?

it was ford ford i think is the one that makes more sense yeah i mean blue cruise is pretty good i have to say like uh i mean it's being investigated right now by this uh it is pretty good but it's limiting there's no there's no clear path from blue cruise to level three level four level five that's true yeah and i know of all the automakers uh board and uh

Jim Farley are closest to Tesla. Yeah, that's a big part of my guess. It's like Jim Farley has been very complimentary of Tesla and Elon specifically. They were the first to jump on board with NACS.

So they seem to be a willingness to work with Tesla. So that makes sense. And then Ford didn't have good luck with their own self-driving effort. They invested in Argo AI, which went under. So now they are a little bit more limited in their self-driving effort. They have Blue Cruise again, which like you said, is pretty good, but it's not...

the the path i'm not saying it's clear for tesla to stop driving but it's a lot clearer from their current auto palette which is the blue cruise competitor to something uh bigger so yeah i can see it happening uh they did know though that if a deal happens this year which again they said that they believe it could it's going to be about three years before it gets into a car uh so

I saw a lot of people when Elon said that, a lot of people was, all right, it's just Elon talking out of his ass again because they don't even have achieved self-driving and now they're trying to sell it to other automakers. I mean...

It's going to take three years before the time is activated in any car that Tessa Tomica is producing. So all you need them to believe is that Tessa will solve it within three years. If they believe that, then it's not as big as a risk. And honestly, I think that's...

Very doable. I think that's going to basically Tesla would be selling like hardware five computer and camera system and then licensing a software that is going to come in three years. I think that within three years, Tesla can solve self-driving. I can say that pretty confidently. A little update on Optimus. Elon said that Optimus is right now doing factory tasks in the lab.

they believe that they will take that from the lab and into the factories uh like they're this year and then he said even crazier than that i said did he plan to sell the optimist to customer next year probably um now that that i'm a little bit more skeptical about but again a high is moving so fast and um there's i think this last one big advantage on on uh

than the competition. You mean like Boston Dynamics? Sorry? Like Boston Dynamics? Yeah, over Boston Dynamics, over Figure 1. Maybe Figure 1 looks pretty cool, but Boston Dynamics, pricing-wise, they're not great. And I think that's where Tesla has a big advantage because even if you compare them to Waymo and stuff, Waymo built...

vehicles dedicated to self-driving and they didn't need to sell them to consumers. They didn't care about the price of these cars. I'm sure they care to a certain degree, but not to a degree that someone that's actually trying to sell that car to a consumer will have to think about cost and pricing.

And you have to think about also the appeal of the vehicle. So you have to have it optimize the self-driving system inside the car so it doesn't take the whole trunk, for example, like it does in other self-driving efforts. So because of these limitations, Tesla did build AI hardware, so the self-driving computer and the camera system and everything in the car, to be super efficient, power efficient, cost efficient, and efficient.

And also compact. So all these things make Tesla probably one of the world leaders in AI products efficiency in both power and format.

These things are huge for, I think, a humanoid robot because you're limited, again, in space and in the format. And also you want the efficiency to be extremely high, both at the cost level and power level to make that viable. So I think this is where Tesla has a lot of advantage. I'm not as convinced about the AI part of it, but at the same time, AI is moving so fast right now that even if Tesla is not the one

having a great AI product put inside the Optimus, they will have the Optimus at least optimized for this whatever AI product comes out that is like very advanced. I don't know if that makes sense. So I'm getting a little bit more hyped up about the Optimus product.

You know what, why don't we do a quick read or after this one, we'll do a quick read. Yeah, I just want to do this one because I think so with everything I just said, I think one of the main reason why Tesla was up despite the big miss on the earnings and revenue is Elon was successful with the earnings to make it seem like Tesla has a chance to ride this AI wave.

One of the most impressive thing that they reveal is the current compute, training compute power that Tesla has increased a ton in Q1, 130% up. So we see like this is probably like Dojo that came online last summer. So Dojo was a big step up in training compute capacity, but then it shut up again last quarter.

Tesla has been taking deliveries of a lot of NVIDIA GPUs. It's like servers, server racks, like the HR100.

So a lot of compute there. We know that another 100 megawatt is coming at Gigafactory aiming for the summer. We're hearing that it might be a little bit later than that. So a lot of compute power is coming. So that's helpful. And then you combine that obviously with V12 and these things together could start meeting a lot of improvements fast. At the same time, I thought it was interesting because they

A lot of very nice questions for Tesla and the management during the call. But there was one analyst that dared to ask Elon about the threat that he made about not building AI product at Tesla, which I thought made sense to ask, especially in the context of Elon positioning Tesla as an AI company.

And Elon did answer quite vague. You could see that he was kind of concerned about how, you know, maybe the legalities behind this answer. And he said, and so instead of actually answering, like what happened if you don't get 25% control over Tesla, he decided to put it that way. He said that if I disappear tomorrow, if I get like kidnapped by the aliens, I think Tesla is going to still solve self-driving. I'm just not sure about Optimus.

So it's interesting because also right before that, he said that he thinks Optimus is going to be...

what's make Tesla worth like an infinite amount of money, basically. And then he says, yeah, but you're going to need me to solve it. And if you don't give me 25% control, you might not be able to. So that's so weird. You have that happening in a real earnings call for a $500 billion company. A CEO sort of vaguely training to like leave and...

The real threat that is that if you leave, he's going to leave with talent, obviously. Not just his own talent, but other people's talent. So very weird situation to be in for Tesla shareholders right now. But yeah, let's do a quick read on the SplitVault. Let me show you some. All right. This week's episode is sponsored by SplitVault, the company behind the cream of the crop and new electric vehicle home power accessory technology.

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the cheapest way to get a level two charging station at home if you already have a 240 volt system in your car because most of the time you're probably not running your dryer at the same time you're charging and and if you have to it's going to take it care for you it's going to split between the two but uh yeah yeah if you're using your dryer it stops charging your car and then when you're done with your dryer car starts charging again automatically great product

All right. Moving on from the Tesla earnings news, something that came out earlier today, actually. NHTSA is kind of going back on its recall from last year. So late December, in December of last year, if you don't remember, there was a 2 million car recall from Tesla. Basically, all cars that have autopilot capabilities.

The recall was an over-the-air update to increase the warnings that comes when you activate autopilot. So more warnings about keeping attention, hands on the wheels or pressure on the wheel and all that stuff. And it was the conclusion of a three-year investigation from NHTSA that started basically mainly from the emergency vehicle, like the fact that Tesla kept crashing into emergency vehicles stopped on the highway. But it was more of a broader investigation.

broader investigation of Tesla's driver monitoring system and the fact that what is Tesla doing to make sure that drivers are paying attention when using autopilot.

Which has been a long time question. So this was the fix. But when Tesla did the fix, it looked like a clear compromise on both sides because on Tesla's side, they said in the defect notice that they didn't agree with NHTSA's finding. They didn't think they were not doing enough to curb abuse of the autopilot. And NHTSA, obviously on their side, what they were getting is very minimal changes to the system here.

minimal but at the same time personally if i use uh self-driving if i or fsd or autopilot in my car i find that the driver monitoring system is pretty good like i i have to pay attention if i look for more than three seconds at anywhere that's not right in front of me the car is telling me about it so this is pretty good obviously there is one well-known i think

thing to bypass that. I'm not going to say what it is because I don't want to propagate it more than it already is, but it's a significant way to get around as driver monitoring. So that might be what they're going after in this. It's not clear. But in general, what they said is that they've learned of new crashes since this fix, and they learned that...

A portion of the remedy, the remedy is that update that we talked about, both requires the owner to opt in and allows a driver to readily reverse it. So I don't know what we mean by that exactly. It might be what I just mentioned, or it might be maybe some test owners never opt in to program to allow the cabin. We're getting a lot of your notification right now. Yeah, sorry. Turn this off. Sorry about that. It might be a lot of the...

owners that have not accepted that the camera, the cabin facing camera could record you. So maybe if you have never opted into that program, you can still

use autopilot so maybe that's it and tesla was like asking people to opt in and some decide not to but in my own opinion it's been a while since i've opt into that program it's been years i thought that you had absolutely had to to use any of autopilot features so maybe you can still use like some of them but not all it's not clear but nitsa is now reviewing all that and they are relaunching an investigation into the autopilot system

Cybertruck, we got a power share story. So that's not just for Cybertruck, but any vehicle capable of bidirectional charging. We have had a concern that the cost of the hardware and the installation on the house side is sometimes quite high, making the system a little bit less valuable. And the idea behind bidirectional charging, obviously, is that

the cost is lower than the home battery pack so that's the only reason it makes sense because otherwise you're better off with a home battery pack because it's always there not just when your car is there when your car is plugged in but with bi-directional charging on a car you already bought the car's battery so technically you could have it cheaper

Now we've learned from some installation for like the Ford Pro Power system that sometimes that's always true. Tesla seemed to add an advantage there because they already produce all the hardware necessary on the house side. So on the hardware costs, it looked like they were in business because they needed the universal wall connector, which is 600 bucks, the gateway, 1800 bucks. So, so far you're way off the cost of a home battery pack. But you also have the installation.

For the current Cybertruck Foundation series owner, Tesla was providing all of that for free. And the Cyber Beast, they were even providing a $4,000 toward installation, hinting that that would be around the cost. And some people have been quoted that or at least close to that. I don't think I've seen under $4,000, but I've seen closer to like $5,000. So it's pretty close to that. But some people are also being quoted like some crazy things.

Joe Techmeyer, we reported on him before because he often does those drone flyover of the Gag Factory Texas, posted a quote for $64,000 for his power share. That's great.

To be fair, that included two power walls on top of it. So you add two power walls on top of the PowerShare installation, but you can also remove that if you don't have the two power walls. It's a $33,000 installation by a company called Three House, which is one of the Tesla's few approved PowerShare installers. So $33,000 to have access to your PowerShare on the Tesla Ecos.

Now, $24,000 of that had to do with the 320 amp upgrade on this electrical system, which was not clear why it's necessary. Like, why do you need to increase the input, power input of your house to back up the power of your house? Why can't you just back up the existing power? Like, even if your car has like more capacity, then you don't need to match that. Like, you can just, if you surpass it, you can just...

Troll it down. It's pretty easy to do. So it wasn't clear why they did that. And also that Joe had his house electrical system upgraded recently because he had put a mass like 30 something kilowatt solar system on his house. So it made no sense. And he wasn't the only one to get a similar quote from Three House. I've heard from two other people that got similar. Well, not the $64,000 because that's with the Powerwall, but the like 20 to 30 range range.

Which is insane. Now, since we reported on this yesterday, apparently a few people got answers back from Three House. And Three House was like, oh, well, you know, this is just something that we could have done to upgrade your system. There's ways to do it that's way cheaper than that. It's like, well, I think we're going to go with that one.

So that's a problem that we've seen with the early Powerwalls and still to this day in some regions, it completely depends on who's the installer because obviously people are limited. It's not like you say, okay, I'm not getting that quote and I go to someone else. You have to go to a Tesla-approved installers and there's not that many of them right now for PowerShare, a lot more for Powerwall. But when they were a lot fewer for Powerwalls, it was a real problem when people were giving like just crazy quotes for installing one or two Powerwalls.

So I think we're seeing the same right now in power share and Tesla needs to get on top of that, not to allow that craziness. Hopefully we see that fixed soon. All right. The last Tesla news I want to discuss that happened right after the last podcast. We didn't talk about it in the last podcast, but the Tesla appreciating asset story still takes a kick to the nuts here because the full self-driving went down from $12,000 to $8,000.

Appreciating in the wrong way. Yes, by a lot, by $4,000. 50%. Yeah. We kind of saw this happening with the subscription going down from $200 a month to $100 a month. And still then, even with this $8,000 price cut, you're still probably better off with $100 a month subscription for now, unless you're extremely confident about this, that it's going to turn around, which...

I might be open to considering. I know, I know. It's getting better. It's taken so long to get good. And now it actually, there is noticeable improvement in the latest version. And now I'm rethinking my whole FSDs BS is never going to happen. And I'm like, oh, this is actually kind of good. I've made multiple journeys without interventions now. And I'm like, oh crap. Now I have to rejigger my expectations.

Well, yeah, I mean, we should rejigger our expectation. I posted something about this on Twitter yesterday, and I got the Tesla fans like trashing me for changing my opinion, even though if it's a positive way to change it. Everyone can change their opinions. First of all, this doesn't make Elon. Like, Elon changes opinion. Did Jamie put the original tweet in there?

I don't see it, but I remember it by words. Basically, Elon said that Tesla is going to become an appreciating asset because Tesla is going to keep increasing the price of FSD as the system gets better.

We are the first to admit here that it got a lot better with FSD v12 and the price actually went down. So someone changed their mind here. Obviously something changed. I think it has nothing to do with FSD. I think it has to do with Tesla's trying to sell, well, it has to do with FSD trying to sell FSD, trying to bring in some revenue right now to FSD.

make things look better on the financial side of the thing because Elon needs this quarter and the next one to look well, no, this quarter to be very good ahead of the vote in June. Things need to look great right now. Anyway, I'm going to call this right now

I wouldn't be shocked. You know, sometimes companies have to release. Well, they don't have to, but they have to. I don't know exactly the threshold that they have to do it, but sometimes the company will release warnings about their earnings ahead of time if they're going to be too good or too bad compared to expectation. I think we might see Tesla doing that this quarter, especially if they don't release earnings before the vote in June, because I think the vote in June comes before the actual release of the earnings later that month.

You understand what I mean? Yeah. So to build confidence in it. And Tesla could have technically a great quarter, especially if we see great improvement in FSD. We could see Tesla, Elon hinted today, working on the article right now, hinted about a launch in Europe of FSD. I know that they presented it to a few regulators there.

So at least like maybe a muted version of it because they do have issues regulators there. In China also, any left-hand drive market basically said that the right-hand drive market is still a problem, but left-hand drive market are still going. So just Tesla releasing FSD there, that's a big revenue boost for Tesla. Then they also were sitting obviously on 40,000 cars from inventory last quarter. They sell that this quarter, having them built them last quarter. That's a huge boost for a quarter, obviously. So that

might also make Tesla a big expectation this quarter. So all these things put together might help Elon. So I think that has more to do with that than actual keeping to the promise of increasing the price when it first got better, because it did get a lot better.

Yeah. I mean, the thing about FSD is that there's millions of cars out there that can buy it and it costs Tesla. I mean, obviously they have to build FSD, but like every additional car that gets it is the cost is nothing to them. And that's a hundred percent pure margin. So like getting people to buy it at any price is going to help their, their bottom line.

I mean, people who bought it at $15,000 are probably super pissed and whatever, but they're going to make a lot of money on FSD this quarter. Yeah. I mean, I don't know who bought it at $15,000, to be honest. And if someone did, I think there's an argument to be read more because they never delivered what you actually bought. Yeah.

By the same time, Elon was asked – oh, sorry, you missed that one. But Elon was asked on the earnings call to make the FSD transfer permanent until Tesla delivers on self-driving. And Elon had a one-word answer to that. I'm sure you can guess what it was. I'm going to guess it started with an N and ended with an O. You're right on it. That's a bad move, I think, for Tesla. It would be a great –

It would be worth buying right away. He's trying to protect the long term. Especially at $8,000, I think a lot of people would buy it. That's a thing you would...

Maybe you get the one month free trial or you try it yourself with the summer or during a road trip because it's just $100 a month and then you love it and then you get very confident that this is going to achieve self-driving with it. And then you're like, I'm going to lock in it right now at $8,000.

and then I can transfer it if I change my car or whatever. So it would make sense. And it would be, I think, a big thanks to all the dumbasses that we are that bought the system years and years ago, even though it was not working for years. And now that it's finally getting closer, it would be nice. But I don't know. Maybe I'm asking for too much.

All right, we have two more news items to discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comments section. So I see a lot of people are commenting already. So if you have a question for us, it can be about something we talked today or any subject in the EV space. You want our opinion on it. You want our expert opinion.

expert knowledge on it or whatever, you can put in the comment section right now. We're live on YouTube, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, everywhere. Put it in the comments and we're going to try to get to it in a few minutes. Also, if you do enjoy the show, you can give us a like, a thumbs up and all that. That helps the show a lot. Free to do takes a second.

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All right, the G-Class. So that thing was unveiled a few years ago, the concept of it, and a lot of hype around it. I don't understand the G-Class. It's a cool-looking car and everything, but it's kind of a status car, I think, for some people. I know I talked to a guy at one point that worked at Mercedes, like one of the big Mercedes-Benz dealerships in L.A.,

And he was selling all the, what's the, not the Lakers, but there's another, what's the other NBA team? The Clippers. He said they're all buying G-Class. I've sold three G-Class this month to just Clippers athlete. So it looks like it's a status car for a lot of people. Yeah. And I think it was in Beverly Hills, actually. So I think Jamie went to Beverly Hills for the unveiling of that car.

so there was a lot of hype when the eq g was unveiled um in 2021 so yeah it was a few years ago and now this is the production version of it uh so a few things that was confirmed so a combined output of 579 horsepower a two to one gear reduction for off-roading four independent motors which is which is real nice also for off-roading um you have a um

the all-wheel turn, so you have the rear wheels are turning also, so you can get the tank turned. Yeah, that's the video that they released a few weeks ago. That's not real. That's not CGI. Yeah, and it's annoying because Rivians used to be able to do that, and now they don't want to tear up the pavement, I guess.

Yeah, they are doing it on a wet pavement, to be fair. You can see it. It's in Las Vegas where it doesn't rain too much. I don't know what's happening there. But yeah, it's a cool feature to have. You have some specs here on the off-roadings. You climb up to 100% 40-degree grade, all stable on the lateral slope up to 35 degrees for 33 inches of water. Not sure what does that mean.

Oh, it can just go through. Yeah, because board means go through water. Ah, okay. I didn't know that. You learn something every day. Yeah. So yeah, it's one of those capable of off-roading vehicle, but it is $180,000. I don't know if they did release the price, but the G-Wagon is not cheap. I mean, the non-electric version. So I'm sure the electric version is going to be pretty expensive. I don't think they released pricing just yet.

uh do they release availability oh they have a fake they have a fake rear like spare tire uh older and it's actually where you put your charger that's not bad yeah though that's that's what i was going to say it's like one of those cars that are capable of off-roading but you'll actually bring it there because it's just a crazy expensive vehicle and that would be an example of that because a spare tire would actually be useful for

um you're really off-roading yeah maybe maybe uh if you are a real off-roader they have a package with like real spare tires or something i wouldn't be surprised because mercedes-benz loves packages yeah optional packages 160 kilowatt hour usable batchy pack oh that's a big one i don't know they didn't release the actual capacity because mercedes sometimes has a decent buffer of this

Five regenerative braking settings. That I'm not a big fan of. You need two max. Five is a lot. It's a 6,800-pound vehicle. Oh, my God. 200-kilowatt peak charging. And that 116-kilowatt-hour battery is going to be good for 293 miles of range on the WLTP standard, 473 kilometers. EP has not been released just yet. This vehicle is going to come...

Probably towards the end of the year, I expect it to be $150,000 and up. Ain't cheap to have a G-Wagon. Nope. If anybody's at Mercedes listening, I'm putting my hand up for a review.

Oh, yeah. And that, I mean, maybe Jamie already got that long down, but that press drive is going to be fun. I'm sure they're going to do some off-roading with it. Yeah, yeah. That's probably like the main time that people off-road the G-Wagon is like if you live in the UAE and if you do a press drive because the owners actually keep them in their garages. I'm just kidding.

All right, CATL also unveiled a new LFP battery that has 4C ultra-fast charging capacity. So that's real nice. The way that they are framing it is that you could get 370 miles, 600 kilometers in 10 minutes of charging, which is crazy.

So CATL, world leader in battery, big Tesla supplier, big everyone supplier. They supply everyone now. And they make it big with the LFP cells, which at first they were selling for like buses in China. Now it's making their way into all the electric cars out there. Majority of electric cars are LFP now.

One of the main problems with the LFP arm, and there's a few, it's all pros and cons. You cannot have everything in a battery, but one of them for the LFP was the charging capacity. So now this one is real nice. You have CATL, so the new EV battery is the world first at 4C ultra fast charging. I believe that. And 600 plus miles CLTLC, it's the Chinese standard long range capabilities. The new battery can gain one kilometers of range in as little as one minute.

that's not impressive yeah that's not impressive that's like a bike yeah because 10 minutes you can get three three something and that was uh miles against 600 so yeah it makes no sense okay probably in there or there uh and and it works well at extreme temperature minus 20 c minus 4 f uh you can still get super fast charging capacity also lfps in colder weather has been an issue so all good news there

I can't wait to see in which cars that makes it. It couldn't be anyone because basically everyone is buying from CATL now. All right, let's jump into the comments section. All righty. So we haven't talked about Aptera in a while, but what do we all think of Aptera? What's the latest? Yeah, I saw we did post something this week. Scooter posted something about them doing a deal in UAE. So that's cool for them, obviously, UAE. A lot of sun there, so it's great for a solar car. Also a lot of oil.

Yeah, also all of the oil, which they want to divest from at some point. I think they're seeing the writing on the wall and they want to invest in other things. So they made a deal there. I think they're still trying to close the last round of money to get to production. I think they need a few more tens of millions to get to production. They've done great at raising money with crowdfunding and all that, but it's a vehicle. It takes a lot of money to get to production. So I think they're not quite there yet.

And the follow-up, do you think they can compete with Tesla being cheaper with a plethora amount of options? I don't know if that's where they're trying to compete. Yeah, exactly. That's not what I tried to do. I like Aptera because it's a...

hyper efficient vehicles so efficient that it can be called a solar car because it can put some solar on it and it's actually going to be you more useful than just running some fans on on your AC system so it's what's great about them is like this hyper efficiency focus it's a three-wheeler let's be honest so Tesla doesn't have a three-wheeler so it's not competing on that sorry my nose is like going crazy right now but yeah so

You could argue that they're competing with any car manufacturer, any electric car manufacturer, because they're making something that is going to be used as a car.

And, yeah, you can make the argument that why would you pay $25,000, $30,000 for an Aptera when you can pay like $5,000, $10,000 more and get a Tesla? Some people are going to make that argument for sure. But I'm more of the sense that I want to see that product exist because I think there's a market for hyper-efficient vehicle. So I want them to get there, make their first generation, and then maybe the next generation is actually something that could compete with Teslas and other vehicles out there.

I don't quite understand this one. Yeah, there's a large gap from the previous day that will likely need to be filled in the chart. This was at the beginning of the show when we were talking about Tesla. I'm a bit confused too. Alright, we'll move on. Do you think Rivian will have to raise more money before R2? I think they will sell 5,000 R1T per quarter against Cybertruck and cheaper F-150. That seems kind of low. Yeah, I think it could probably get a little bit higher than that. I don't know. I think they said last quarter that they don't

expect to need to but they're still keeping the uh opportunity to do it so yeah i don't know all right uh moving on bike angela says uh can you share any advice for buying a used tesla i'm shopping for a used model y long range seems like there's some good deals what should i look out for should i avoid high mileage uh i mean it depends on like you need to look at the warranty for sure like where the warranty stands so sometimes that's the do it like so they have a used car warranty

So even depending on the mileage, you should look at the car, obviously, because the mileage is more... There's different mileage. There's good mileage and there's bad mileage. There's people that abuse the car and there's those that don't. So you can get some high mileage car that's still very good. And if Tesla has a used car warranty on top of it, that...

you still have some general warranty time and some battery and power train warranty, then you're good. But yeah, I would focus on that more than anything. I haven't looked myself at the Model Y use. I look at some Model 3s lately because I was looking at deals like in the US, like how low can you bring it with the $4,000 tax credit for the $25,000 and lower cars. I don't think the Model Y falls into that though. I don't think you can get close to $25,000.

maybe maybe some high mileage one but maybe work so maybe look into that yeah also uh the model y suspension um just because it's a heavier car and it has a very uh kind of i don't want to say low grade but kind of like a light suspension um that goes a little quicker so um just give you know give it a quick drive make sure the suspension sounds good uh

But, and also what was that company that, uh, you rate the batteries, you like log into your Tesla account with them. I think they were a sponsor for us for a while. Can't remember. Yeah. There's a few of them. Uh, I don't remember this one, but that's not a bad idea. Uh, do you think the Equinox, the Chevy Equinox will reach high enough production numbers to make an impact on GM's market share? What is going on with Ultium battery output?

I mean, it's hard to ramp a battery system. Even Tesla is having problems with their 4680s, but I don't think anybody's having a worse time than GM's Altium. They are quite behind on their production numbers. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I think that if they produce them, there's this chicken and the egg idea of the demand and the production and everything when it comes to EVs. But we know that people are buying cars. There's the gasoline. So if you go after gasoline and you have the product to go after them, you're in good hands.

And the Equinox with its price point, with its spec, I think they're at the right spot for it, especially if you can get on the incentive on top of it. In the US and Canada, we also have some great incentive. I mean, the Equinox in Washington, they have a new $9,000 incentive in Washington. Wow.

It gets cheap. Yeah, it makes it free. You lease it with the fuel savings. It's a free car, basically. So I think there's no excuse if you cannot sell it. If you make a good EV, there's no excuse to not sell it. You just need to get behind it and obviously produce it in volume and produce it in a cost-effective way. So I do think that if it reaches... The question is if it reaches high enough production, I think the market is there. I think it's going to be a good car for GM. I just don't...

you know, we've been let down for the production capacity of GMEVs for a while now. The Bolt, we thought the Bolt could be over 100,000 units a year if they wanted to. They never got there. All right. Quantum Cheddar says, please compare 4680 battery day predictions to current absolute disaster of reality. I mean, yeah. Well, we don't have all the specs on the 4680 today that they're producing and it keeps changing, but I do understand what you're saying, Quantum Cheddar. That's a funny name. But yeah,

Disaster? I wouldn't go as far. If it's true that they achieve same performance at a lower cost by the end of the year, I think that's a win because this is a big part of Tesla's cost. If they do beat the cost of their suppliers already and what it's going to do, what do you think it's going to do on top of it? It's going to lower the cost of the suppliers too. So I think it's too early to call it a loss.

Recurrent, call it recurrent. That's right. I think that's it, right? Recurrent, yes, that's correct. By the way, thank you, Recurrent, for sponsoring us way back when. Sorry, I forgot your name. Come back whenever you want. Yeah, I don't see anybody successfully tamping battery right now except for maybe BYD and cattle. But obviously, we don't have as much insight into what exactly they're doing and how they're doing it. Ramping, you meant. Yeah, ramping. Yeah, well, I mean...

There's, I'm sure LG and Samsung and Panasonic can also ramp things up, um,

But a lot of automakers are slowing things down right now with their EV efforts. So there's no market to rent things out. That's kind of one of the points that Elon brought up in the earnings call too. It's like, yeah, 4680 might not be going as well as it should be, but it's not as big of a deal because we started 4680 because we were afraid that we're going to be squeezed out of the sales market because too many automakers were ordering.

shooting the prices up. So we had that as an alternative, but now since a lot of automakers actually slowed down their EV efforts, it free up a lot of the battery market, which is good for Tesla. Good for Tesla's credits, emission credits cells too. All right. Dan Overstay, question, do you all know when GMs will be installing NAX plugs in their vehicles? Are they able to use Tesla superchargers yet?

They are able to use the Magic Dock ones currently. I did that at a local supercharger. Jamie's actually talking to GM right now about it because there's a rumor that they are... Okay, yeah. Social media... Oh, they shut down actually. No, they shut down this. So no, there's no...

There's no... Disregard. Go to the MagicDock stations if you need to charge at a Tesla station, but they can't. And we don't know when GM will be installing NACS plugs. They said two years originally, but... They said... So some automakers are saying like early 2025. So first half of 2025. But we've heard rumors from Tesla that some of them might be coming in Q4 2024. So if someone is coming in Q4 2024, I would think it's either Ford or GM or...

Rivian, Zopetta. Battery day 4680 projected 100 gigawatts by 2022 versus reality 2024 is around 7 gigawatts. Not quite there yet. They don't even need 100 gigawatt hour now because there's only the Cybertruck that's using the 4680 cell right now. Cybertruck is nowhere near that production level. Also, demand is outdoing supply at the moment. Sorry, supply is outdoing demand.

It feels like Elon thinks it's not worth for Tesla to pursue electrifying the world, let the Chinese do it, and there's just a little profit there. I don't know if that's... I don't know what you think about that. Well, I think there's definitely a lot of profits to be made there. Yeah, I don't think that's as simple. I think that Elon is very stuck on this idea that, you know...

Why would you buy a Tesla over a Chinese vehicle if they can make it cheaper and it's just as good? I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm saying that it could get there because the Chinese are good. They're very good. So it's like what can be our different factor is self-driving. So if we do actual self-driving, I think it's a mute point. And he's right about that. There's no doubt about it. If you have a true self-driving car, you can even be...

not as good as everybody else on every other aspect of a vehicle and you're still going to sell more than anybody else because there's so much more value to have a self-driving. However,

They're not there yet. Elon thinks that they are on the verge of it. He sees it happening very soon. So he's investing everything like that. So it's not like one or the other. He's obviously seeing both, but he's like, the easiest way to get both is if we get self-driving right, then the electrification thing is going to happen by itself because we're only making electric car anyway. And people are going to want to buy our electric cars because we have self-driving. That's it. That's the general logic behind it. Makes sense. Yeah.

All right. Hello. Carl in San Diego. Corporations recognize that product liability will potentially kill their company if their product is ever found to be harmful or dangerous. Why isn't Tesla evaluated as the most dangerous manufacturer? Because is there really actual data showing that it is? Yeah.

You know, a lot of people stick on like, oh, there's been like 13 autopilot crashes, fatal crashes and all that. And like, yeah, there's also like 2 million Tesla vehicles with autopilot in North America. So is it actually a lot? Like, obviously, every debt is terrible. I'm not saying that. But like, if you want to go statistically speaking, I don't know what it is. Now,

I think there are some issues with the way Tesla is presenting those products. Like, for example, this week they tweeted like FSD, supervised FSD is five times less dangerous than the average car crash rate in the U.S.,

which is true. The supervised part makes it true because the unsupervised FSD beta would have a 10-time, I'm guessing here, obviously, but most likely 10-time higher crash rate than the average in the US. Yeah, and actually even supervising may be making it safer because you're so...

freaking scared of getting killed like with it driving that you're like hyper focused i know i'm much more focused on the road when fsd is running than i am when it's not i don't

I don't chill out. I don't look at the phone. I don't do any of that stuff. I'm like... Yeah. You're like, what is this car doing right now? That's all you're concerned about. And it's cool to a degree. I understand that. But obviously, the fact that makes it safe is the fact that it's supervised. So I'm finding it weird to brag about that. That's just weird. Like...

You go with horsepower, like my car is like super, it's like 500 horsepower when there's 500 horses that pulls my car. It's like, all right, is this your achievement or the 500 horses achievement? Yeah.

Makes a little sense. All right. When FSD required constant interventions, everyone is forced to pay attention. If FSD requires less than one intervention per trip, some users will completely let their guard down. That's a concern. Good point. Yeah. That is a concern. All right. Eric Freed from Twitter. I think the $8,000 price point for FSD has to do with the fact that it's not transferable, possibly. Follow-up. Average 6.5-year ownership of new car masks out to $8,000K.

or to a k at a hundred dollars per month so is that the average ownership time of a car in the u.s i didn't know that that would be more to be honest well yeah i mean if like four years for example you're already like in in the cash might be a hundred dollar a month it makes sense

uh fsd has improved so much it's crazy make me think about even doing the subscription i have to say one thing like i've been hearing tesla fans say every single update is amazing and i'm always like no it's not it's the same or worse or you know barely noticeable so now i don't trust anybody who says it except for my own driving and of course you but uh

you know, like I, I think, uh, having all the super fans do, you know, years and years of, Oh, this update blows my mind. And you know, like, yeah, that did this one a disservice. So people aren't really hearing like how much better this one is. Although with the $99 free or the free, um, month of FSD, a lot of people are getting to see it.

Yeah, but though when someone like me was been like saying it's bad for a long time says now it's good. Like I posted that yesterday, people freaked out, especially on X because on X, like it's definitely skew one way. But it makes it interesting. All right. Why would people pay 8K for self-driving is unvetted on a large scale and maybe deemed dangerous once implemented?

Because they think that it's going to become unsupervised self-driving relatively soon. That's the logic behind the move. All right. Carl in San Diego says maybe NBA players only fit in the G class. Those guys have car fitting issues. Oh, that's true. I didn't think of that. Yeah. Yeah, it is a tall vehicle. That makes sense. Who can predict a Tesla 3 Series resale value after eight years when the battery warranty runs out? Throwaway vehicle? Well, plenty of Tesla Model 3s.

I've been off of RRNT because eight years is the timeline, but it's not 160,000 kilometers or something like that. And plenty of cars are over that. So the battery is not a big concern to me. Like I had a Model X that had 370,000 miles on one battery. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Eric Fried says, regarding the used Tesla, get into the service menu and run a battery diagnostic. That's a good idea. We were talking about buying a used Model Y. Recurrent was the name. FSD doesn't have to be safer than a driver. It has to be perfect. That is indisputable product liability fact. That's a good point. But it doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be

As close as perfect as possible. It has to be significantly safer than human to be worth anything. And it has to be extremely significantly safer than human to be approved by regulators. Thing is, is that that's kind of achievable because humans are not great at driving. Yeah, we are pretty good for like as a species. There's no other species I can win. Though I've seen dogs. I've seen dogs drive actually. They're not too bad.

Especially if you compare them to BMW drivers. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But so we kill like 30,000 people every year in the US on the roads. And most of it has to do with things that automatically a self-driving system take care of, like fatigue, fatigue.

being impaired. So these things will never happen to us. Now, of course, you introduce new ones like bugs and all that, but there is a way to make it. I see a path, obviously, to a self-driving system. I think it's very possible, especially with the rate of improvement of AI that we've seen in recent years.

A year ago, I didn't use any AI whatsoever in my work, in my day-to-day, other than like I know that some, like you can argue that AI with some algorithms were feeding me things on social media and all that. But like actual useful things that I do, now I use it every day with a bunch of different things for my work, for my personal life. And it seems to be improving at a pace that's incredible. So even if you're not like looking at just Tesla, if you're just looking at AI, you

You see a path there. And I think that right now, Tesla is kind of being vindicated for their vision and neural nets only. I think it's becoming clear that that is a path now that AI is reaching a very high level. You get it that the sensor load makes sense. It's a visual base because visually, AIs are getting good super fast. So the LiDAR and all that, I think it makes sense that you won't need it.

All right. Well, that's pretty much it for us this week. Thank you, everyone, for listening to us ramble about electric cars and self-driving cars. We appreciate to have everyone of you listening to the show. If you do enjoy the show, if you give it a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe. If you're on YouTube, we're getting close to 200,000. So check that out. If you can give us a subscribe, hit the notification button too, because that way you're going to know when we're going to go live, which mostly is 4 p.m. Eastern time on Fridays.

So I hope you guys have a fun and safe weekend. If you're using FSD beta, pay attention at all times. All right. Bye-bye.