Tesla earnings were wild, new BMW iX, some EVs won't make it to the US, and more
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We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing this Friday, Seth? I'm good. All right. We have a big episode today because it was Tesla earnings week. There's always a lot of news that comes out of the Tesla earnings, and this one was a wild one. Elon was, I mean...

the most bullish you've ever seen him. And that is, there's an inverse correlation between how bullish Elon is on a call and how bad the earnings were. And that was like the worst earnings that Tesla had in a long time and the most bullish that Elon has been in a long time. So let's start by looking at the actual earnings.

And then we'll go into all the comments that Elon and Tesla said that were, let's say, newsworthy. And there's a lot of interesting stuff. We're going to get into hardware 3 stuff. I know that impacts a lot of people, including a lot of our listeners. We're going to get into the...

So there was some solar talk, some optimist talk at the end and everything. But if we look at the actual earnings, it was a big miss. There's nowhere around it. It was a huge miss. The expectation was $27.2 billion and $0.77 per share for earnings. And Tesla came in at $25.7 billion, so over a billion-dollar miss on the revenues, and $0.73 per share.

So a big miss on the most significant miss on earnings too. But that's not really like the, it doesn't really showcase exactly just how bad this is. So obviously this was for Q4, but we also have now the full year earnings that comes with that since we have all the 2024. So here are a few of the highlights here. The non-gap earnings per share in 2024 completely was down 22%.

So growth in earnings is gone. Then you have the actual income from operation down 20%, also quite significant. So Tesla is like by any metrics imaginable is not a growth stock anymore.

But that's what was very weird about it. It's like if you look at the stocks, I like when the earnings comes out, I like to watch the stock live after market at the same time. Like it's almost like a clear indication of how good or bad the earnings are before like you can dive into everything. Because normally I'll go directly at the earnings per share and I go the revenue just to put it in the article because that's what people are looking at first normally. But then you have to digest the whole earning.

And Tesla stock, you know, at the very first went down because he had big miss, but then quickly started like gaining backup, backup, backup, even before Elon started getting on the call and everything. And it's not clear exactly why, because we have the full shareholder deck and everything. And I guess the, the main thing like gross margins are down to cost are down, but gross margin are down also. So there's no, there's no improvement there. Um,

There is Tesla guiding again, coming back to growth for this year. But they did that at the last earnings too. Elon said a 20-30% growth in deliveries in 2025. Attached to, of course, self-driving and the new models that are coming out, the cheaper new models. Tesla reiterated the cheaper new models. But again, it's just reiteration. So there's not really anything new.

And then if you dive, you start diving a little bit more into the earnings here. And I'll skip an article and then go back because that's, I think, if we stick on the earnings, it's important. It's this here. So a quarter of Tesla's earnings was linked to recognizing a gain of $600 million on Bitcoin. Literally, that's what it was.

You know, Tesla, the rule changed on how you file your crypto on your accounting basis. And Tesla was like... Tesla bought them all the way back, I think, in 2020, 2021, and then sold a bunch of them in 2022. And then they only accounted on their balance sheets the costs that it caused them to have to buy the Bitcoin. I think it was 184 million, all the way back to...

That was in 2021, yeah. And that never changed on our content. But with the adoption of the new ACU 2023-808, you have now to account for their fair value. And so Tesla, Bitcoin increased a lot since 2021. They increased a lot, went back down and now went back up. So...

They had now to account for... They have close to a billion dollars in Bitcoin instead of 200 something million. And that was a 600 million mark-to-market gain that they had to realize on this. So you went from 2.3 billion in net income down to 1.7 billion in net income if you remove the Bitcoin. And then if you remove the incentives...

the regulatory credits, Tesla basically made a billion dollars in Q4, down year over year 86% versus the prior year, the same period, the prior year, 86%. At a billion dollar a quarter, Tesla is trading basically at 400 times its earnings right now. That's wild. It is huge.

So why did it went up? That's the big question because everything from a financial basis, from a fundamental basis, looked terrible for Tesla. Tesla is not growing anymore. The energy storage business is growing.

Did I put the post in there? I actually broke down the... So it is a silver lining, the energy storage. It is growing, but the revenue per gigawatt hour is going down, though, because Tesla has slashed the price from $1 million, from $1.5 million to $1 million for the megapack, and that has hidden their margins a little bit. So now Tesla is making, in Q4, even though they had a record deployment of energy storage, they're making the less they ever made per...

gigawatt hour deployed but it's still a growing business but there's they're not making as much money so it's not compensating at the earnings level as we can see now and then everything else is just bad for tesla right now on the earnings but the stock shut up why why

I think this was the biggest one. When I was looking at the aftermarket, when Elon came out and made that comment, the stock went up. And it said that Tesla will launch unsupervised full self-driving as a paid service in Austin in June. So that's an update on his comments from the previous call where he said that Tesla would...

release unsupervised self-driving in Texas and California in Q2. So this is an update from that. So we already, there was a lot of speculation around what that meant exactly, unsupervised self-driving in California, Texas in Q2.

I think we had like a consensus among us set that it would be a geofence service that's not going to own the customer fleet, you know, improve FSD all the way to become unsupervised level four in Q2 in California or Texas. So it was probably going to be a geofence service a la Waymo with teleoperations in an enclosed city to offer a ride ailing service with its own internal fleet.

And now these comments basically confirm that. So he says as a paid service, so it's not going to be a customer fleet. And later on, Lacal was asked the question and then elaborated on it. He did say that, yes, it's going to be an internal fleet.

So, yeah, it's going to be like a custom version of Tesla's FSD running on Tesla vehicles, not owned by anyone else. And then it's in Austin only. So in June is the last month of Q2. So really, the way I saw it, it was kind of a downgrade over the comments they made last quarter because now it's just one market instead of two markets. And it confirms that it's going to be a geofence service. They basically announced that we're going to have a service a la Wemo service.

years behind Waymo. That's what he said. But people got crazy excited over that. And even then, I think Tesla could do it. I think Tesla could launch in June in Austin, something. But I have serious doubts, mainly because Tesla has never tested on public roads on supervised self-driving, as far as we know. And legally, it would be

Completely new. I mean, I wonder if the first rollout is going to be like driving, you know, people from like a train station to Tesla headquarters, like employees, you know, like that kind of thing. Outside the train station, like if it's on public roads, that would be like completely new. Like it would be like the paid service would launch the first public road testing of FSD unsupervised. Yeah.

Because he did confirm on the call that, yeah, you remember a few weeks ago, like I kind of laughed at him for saying that there is a trial of unsupervised self-driving right now during his video game stream. And I was like, you have to elaborate on that because that's not that that doesn't make any sense. And he confirms during the call that, yeah, he only meant at Digo Factory Texas, like the cyber cab on the private property.

So he reiterated that again. It's like, we're already doing that. But that's not public roads. It's a big jump that there's normally you have to do some testing before it. And June is coming up fast.

All right. The other big thing that he said about self-driving, and that alone shouldn't negate any kind of positive about the FSD, especially when you're talking about comments that Elon makes, because this was basically Elon admitting that he's been wrong about self-driving for years and years and years and only admitting it now. So...

you know we've been hammering that hardware three vehicle will not reach unsupervised self-driving level if that has been clear since more than a year now and tesla insisted that's not the case even last quarter elon sort of opened the door for the first time saying not a hundred percent sure but you didn't want to say that that it was not true and then he was they were asked the question again on the talk and it was really telling because

No respect for Ashok El-Souani now anymore because he took the question first and then he said...

um we're not giving up on it and then he said like oh there's thing this and that that's coming to hardware three and then elon you know mr truth himself had to correct him and said the honest sensor is actually that we're gonna have to replace them to achieve self-driving so ashok was willing to string us along for the whole other quarter on this and like yeah it's gonna come but you know at least for this time he was like

We need to stop talking about that. Like, yeah, it's not going to happen. Which, again, we knew for a year. So it's not like... Either Elon already knew about this for a long time and was lying about this. Or he didn't know about this. And I don't know which one is worse. Yeah, that's the eternal question. What's worse? The malaise or the unknowing? Yeah, because then...

If you didn't know about it, it kind of invalidates all your prediction about self-driving. Like you didn't even know that. You thought that full self-driving wouldn't be able to run on hardware 2.5. It didn't. You thought it was going to be able to run on hardware 3. It didn't. Now you're saying it's going to run on hardware 4. Let me have some serious doubts. And then we have hardware 5 coming. Like, yeah, it's just how credible can you be?

So, yeah, this time he said it's not happening. And then he said that we're going to have to replace all other three computers and vehicle where FSD was purchased. And then he insisted on this. He even laughed saying that he said even with just FSD purchased, by the way, he said that it's going to be painful, but we'll get it done, he said, which I'm sure it's going to be painful, especially for Tesla service. It's going to be like a whole mess.

But then he said, I'm happy that not that many people bought FSD on hardware-free cars because that's going to limit the number of computers we have to change. And that's the big difference here. And that's where I'm going to make an argument that literally could cripple Tesla. But I think – I don't think it will cripple it, but it's going to be – if he says that just replacing them on FSD – on car that purchase FSD is going to be painful, it's going to be hell if they have to replace all the cars.

And I think there's an argument to be made here because if we remember Tesla's, you know, Tesla had a blog post about it before they deleted it. And I mean, and the internet doesn't forget it's everywhere. Tesla claim and use that claim to sell cars that all Tesla vehicle produced since 2016 are capable of full self-driving. And that was wrong with, at the time they were delivering car with hardware 2.5. They were wrong about it. And they were like, we'll go upgrade it to hardware 3.0.

like Elon just said now, the only upgraded cars that purchased FSD. But Tesla was proven wrong about this in court. When they launched, they didn't think about this. And that's actually one of the reasons why we're in the house with Elon for years now, because he blocked us over this article on this. But when Tesla launched full self-driving subscription service, a monthly subscription service, that was not available to people that had hardware 2.5 cars. So

Some of them use that. I'm like, all right, well, you're going to have to upgrade my computer because I want to try the full self-driving on a subscription basis rather than buying it. And then Tesla went to those people and were like, okay, but you're going to have to pay $1,100 to upgrade your computer to the hardware 3 computers. And people were like, nah, you said that my car would have the hardware, so you have to upgrade it. And an owner in Washington State brought Tesla to court over this, and the judge sided with the owner, and Tesla had to pay for the retrofit.

So now it's different. It's not hardware 2.5 to 3. It's hardware 3 to 4. But even though 2.5 is the same thing, like if you still have a 2.5 card, you should now be able to get an hardware 4 computer. And the difference is like now you don't even really need hardware.

to say that you want to buy a subscription to FSD to get the new computer because Tesla's CEO himself admitted that your car cannot achieve for self-driving while he said it would. And now it doesn't.

So that directly affects the resale value of your vehicle. Every vehicle. Every vehicle out there. Millions. We're talking millions right now. We're talking everything from 2016 to 2021, 22, 22, I think this is when it started. And then some all the way to 23. I still had the hardware three. We're talking about millions of vehicles and, uh,

it was false advertising. Tesla said all those vehicles would be capable of self-driving and Elon just admitted that it's not the case. So there's a real argument to be made that Tesla needs to replace those computers and all those vehicles unless

Those people don't want the new computer, don't want full self-driving, but then they should be compensated for the resale value impact of their vehicle. So there has to be something to be done there. I think that just makes sense. That's just as simple. We have Eric here that says he's a 2023 and three owners, one of the last one on the hardware three. Yeah, you're owed a new, even if you don't have FSD, you should have hardware four because you were sold that car

saying that you would get full self-driving capability and Elon just admitted that it's not achievable on the current hardware. It's as simple as that. A lot of Elon sympathizers like to...

you know try to mostly people are invested in tesla really are trying to play it down it's like no it makes no sense only when people with now they say only people that bought fsd but a few months ago they were saying like no one should get a hardware 3 upgrade because there was an excuse for that so there was there's always going to be an excuse but people need to hold the excuse was that they were gonna get full self-driving working on hardware 3 right that's so that's

And so we should get into the real world consequences here. We have a couple of readers who are mentioning that they're on hardware three. They want to know what's going to happen. Both you and I are on hardware three, right? I am of the opinion that it would be nice if Tesla would say something like, hey, you're on hardware three. You bought full self-driving. Here's $5,000 off.

a new Tesla with hardware for. That way we don't have to do a $5,000. With FSD transfer? Yeah, obviously. Yeah, that could be a solution, obviously, because not everyone would take that. Some people don't want a new car. So I think there needs to be more, but that could be something that would remove some of the liability that comes with having millions of vehicles that need to be upgraded.

I agree with that. And yeah, I think the solution in that vein that you just described or the path forward, because everything that I see, like Ilan said, it's going to be painful. It's like, don't know, Tesla doesn't seem to have a retrofit ready. Hardware 4 is not directly retrofitable to Hardware 3. It would need to be some kind of hybrid solution.

That thing green, right? That was a hardware... Yeah, but not even that was not retrofittable to hardware 3. It didn't have the same... It only had the hardware 4 connectors for the cameras because the cameras are different too. So you need to have something that match with the hardware 3 cameras because you cannot retrofit all the cameras too. And then that brings up another point. It's like, all right, are the cameras a limiting factor in hardware 3 vehicles too? And that's a legit problem because the hardware 4 cameras...

at much higher resolution. So you have to ask yourself that. And yeah, at the end, I think it's going to be upgrades, vehicle upgrades with a deal, big deal to discount them. That will make more sense than having to change all these vehicles because first of all, that retrofit doesn't even exist yet. Once it does, it's going to be extremely expensive in itself. Probably, you know,

when Tesla was charging people a thousand dollars to upgrade to hardware three from hardware 2.5, it's, let's say that's the same price, but that is nothing compared to the service impact it's going to have to, you know, it's, it's not, it's not a super complicated upgrade, but it's not an easy one either. So it's going to just cripple this, a service operation for months, if not years, it makes no sense. So there has to be another solution for that. And yeah, something in that vein that you mentioned of an upgrade with a big

big discounts and FSD transfer. It could be the case. But I don't trust Elon to be

willing to do that right now. I think it's going to have to go to the courts. I think people need to file class actions over this because Elon signaled right away, as he finally admitted, even though his head of FSD was willing to string people along, was willing to lie. If Elon thought that now, for sure his head of FSD knew that for a while, Tesla was willing to lie again on this and then Elon corrected him. A little thumbs up for Elon for a while. I'm

Once in a while. But then quickly, he took the narrative and it was like, only for people who bought FSD. That's not what Tesla said. And that's not the lie that you use to sell cars for years. So no. All right. It was a little bit of a talk of solar. So if you remember last, I don't know, it was earlier this week. So we didn't discuss that. But before the earnings, I put a post together when I went to say.com, saytechnologies.com, where Tesla shareholders vote on questions that are going to be asked

on the earnings call. And my article on it was like, it was all about broken promises because every single question was like, yeah, this thing that didn't happen, is it going to happen now? Like Roadster, Solar Roof, Tesla Semi, the ability to

for Tesla shareholders to invest in other Elon companies, all the things that he's been promising for years and it just doesn't happen. And solar roof has happened, but one of the questions was like, has Tesla given up on solar roof because there's no, Tesla doesn't even report solar deployment anymore. And we remember back in 2020, I think, yeah, that Tesla was saying that they wanted to reach by the end of the year a thousand solar roof installation per week, right?

And by 2022, we got a leak with a bunch of data that showed that Tesla was not installing more than 23 per week. So that was two years later and way off by northern magnitude. And they were asking, have you given up on it? And Elon said, no, they have not given up on it. But that's something that we reported last year. Tesla has kind of shifted away.

from installing the solar roof themselves and now relied on third-party installers. So they still produce them, they still sell them to installers that then sell them to the customers and install them for them. So it mostly goes through third parties, it doesn't go through Tesla. But there's no indication that the installation rate is any higher than what we previously reported. It's still a very, very small product for Tesla.

He said something, wow, he said, I think it looks really cool and your house generates electricity. And if you combine it with Tesla Powerwall, then you can be self-sufficient so that even if the grid turns off, even if the grid turns off for several days, your house will still work and your roof looks awesome. So it's like I recommend anyone who can afford it get Tesla Solar Roof and Powerwall. Your family's life might depend on it, which is pretty, you know, interesting.

on par for Elon just exaggerate that solar roof is going to save your life I think when he meant this like you're gonna have power even if the grid comes down if you have power walls and solar roof but that's also true of any solar and energy storage solution it's not just solar roof or just Tesla products still on the energy front Tesla announced Elon said that they are building a third mega factory to produce a mega pack and um

That's surprising because his exact sentence was, so we have our second factory, which is in Shanghai, that's starting operation, and we are building a third factory. So we're trying to ramp up stationary battery storage as quickly as possible. So yeah, Tesla has the Latrop factory in California capable of producing 40 gigawatt hour. It was just fully ramped up or so. Gigafree Shanghai was just completed recently, and now they're going to start production there.

And now they say that they are building a third factory. I don't know if you mean like in the future, like we're working on building one or if he means we're building like it's in construction right now. I felt, I feel like no, because if it wasn't construction, we'd probably know about it by now, but it's, it's interesting. Now we need to keep an eye out on this is apparently working on a new factory somewhere, but specifically for the mega pack. And yeah, I think I touched it. Okay. Here, here I put, I did the math here of like the profits per gigawatt hours of a

of Tesla energy storage deployment. And you see the deployment went way up in Q4, but the profit per gigawatt in billions is way down. It's the lower it's been all year, despite the record deployment. And that is partly because of the price cut that I mentioned. And also there's competition now. BYD and CATL, who sell cells to Tesla to build Megapack and other energy storage products,

They were like, hey, we sell the cells already, so might as well do the pack ourselves and sell that. And that's what they're doing now. And they are the giant, the biggest energy storage facility in the world now, which used to be Tesla's in Australia, then Tesla's in California. I say Tesla. Tesla builds the pack for them, but they are owned by other people and managed by other people. But they were used Tesla batteries. Now the biggest one in the world is in Saudi Arabia.

I think so. It's in the Middle East. I think Saudi Arabia. And the batteries are made by BYD. Both the batteries and the pack, my understanding is that. So there's serious competition with this energy now. But it's still growing super fast, and there's something that's critical for that. But like you see here, like you see the revenue from Q2 with $9.4 billion was roughly the same as in Q4 with 11 gigawatt hours, so almost two more.

All right, the big kicker, the big difference maker in this earnings that like Elon kept hammering on in his speech. That's what he spends the most time on in his speech at the opening. And then there was a bunch of questions about it and he still hammered that. It's like optimists. Optimists, it's what's going to save Tesla. Have you seen June 2 set? Yes. The second June, June part 2?

You have? There's a scene in that where Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet...

He just, he drank the poison and now he has like full vision. Like he can see like the future and everything. And there's this very cool scene where his mother asked him like, so what did you see and everything? And he does this thing like very solemn. He's like, like I've seen like everything. And I see a path, a single path for us to survive. And like he does this thing with his hand. It's like, I've seen all that path and I seen just one like that and everything. And Elon basically did that scene perfectly.

When he was doing the earnings, he was like, I see a path, just one single path that we can achieve where Tesla would be more valuable than the five biggest next company combined. The guy really, he thinks he's like Lisa Nalga. But that is, Pat, is optimist.

And Elon said on the shorter term, he said that the internal goal now is to produce 10,000 Optimus robots this year. So that's a lot. And normally with the shorter term goals, Tesla is pretty good at.

But even him, he said that probably that's going to probably not happen. It's like it's an ambitious goal, but at least several thousand. So that that alone could be interesting. Like Tesla has several thousand humanoid robots going around its factories and working and everything. But then then that's when the wild stuff started happening. Like he said after that, he said that Tesla won't.

increased production like 50 a year with the robot it's going to be 500 a year he said that the current production line that they're they're working on right now they're designing so it's not being built anything it's a thousand units a month um the next line will be 10 000 units a month and then next year they are working on a version two of optimus which Elon claims will be produced at a rate of a hundred thousand units a month

And he said at that point, he said it will cost less than $20,000 to build. So they're going to start selling it to other people. And then everyone's going to have their Optimus. And then they're going to build like 500 millions of them a year. And he said all that. And people started believing him. And the stock went up 5%, even though Tesla had its worst earnings ever. I mean, building Optimus shouldn't be that hard. It's just hardware, right? It's hardware.

And they did it. They had a bunch. It's the software that's hard. Right. The software is the hard part. So who's not to say they can't build 10,000 of them? I mean, they know how to mass produce stuff. They've got assembly lines. They've got lots of parts. They've got lots of batteries. It doesn't seem like a big deal. What would be a big deal is actually one of those doing something useful.

autonomously without teleoperation, without human intervention and all that. Yeah, that's the difference maker. You're right. And that's what we need to see. And we have not seen that so far. But I do think that with the emergence of AI and just how fast it is improving, I think that in the near future, in the next few years, yes, there's going to be a point where if you have the humanoid robots,

that is useful enough, that has enough flexibility, enough dexterity, enough autonomous battery to last as long as possible, enough lifting capability and all that, then it makes sense to start working on that and start investing on that and start being able to produce it in a high volume so that when the AI matches it,

it happens. And I do think that, like you said, this has a lot of expertise in that and like making complex product and high volume. I think that's, that falls into that, uh, you know, batteries, a ton of expertise on that, uh, inference computing for self-driving cars, uh,

You can use that to power the brain of the robot. So all of that makes sense. I just, I don't know that Tesla is going to be ready on the software side. And I see also a lot of competition on that front. I think a lot of other companies are working on humanoid robots and they are also working for like waiting for the AI to match that. And I know that

super big AI companies that are, you know, open AI and all that are working to have their models work in those robots as well. So I think open AI is working some kind of like Android model where, you know, their brain can be put in any kind of robots and so on. So I think... Let me ask you about that really quickly. Do you think the compute for AI robots will be located inside the actual robots or are they going to be... A lot of the compute is going to happen...

you know in a data center somewhere and just like the the motorized stuff and the the modems basically will be in the road no i think there's going to be a lot of in-house uh in in robot stuff i mean there's a there has to be you know a certain level of intention that runs inside the robot that you own that you can operate uh if there's gonna be any kind of like upgrade available through like software as a service and all that from tesla

Or any other manufacturers, really? Yeah, I think that's very likely. In fact, I think that Tesla is going to achieve like...

And useful robots, and I don't mean like selling them necessarily. Like, I mean, like if they're planning to build 10,000 of them this year and use them in their factory, it's because they are planning for them to be useful. Because 10,000 robots that are just like, you know, sorting cells like that, like it's not even a real task it's doing. Like, it's just, it's not really useful. So I think that this is going to achieve a useful robot before they achieve a successful unsupervised self-driving level four.

I'm very confident of that because you don't need a robot, a humanoid robot to be as useful as a human worker to have value. Not as useful, not as skilled. It just needs to be able to replace certain tasks and it's already super valuable if you do that. But on the other hand, self-driving, you need your self-driving vehicle to be

as good if not better than not only the average human driver but the most skilled human driver and the failure of doing that as terrible dangerous outcome so it's it's completely different game so i think this is going to get a lot closer than that even if they launch an unsupervised driving service in uh in austin in june because that's like i said that's going to be a geofence teleoperated system so it's not going to be really what was promised

Real quick, that's kind of another question, like a high-level one. Do you think that... I think we talked about this before, but do you think that Tesla gets the

Well, so two parts. One is, is the Optimus the best robot form? Like it looks like a human. It has humanoid, you know, kind of like arms and legs. But is that like the final form of like a useful robot? Maybe it should look like, you know, R2-D2 or, you know, maybe there's other forms like for more specialized stuff rather than, you know,

Like us, like we're, we're like this because you know, monkeys and whatever, but maybe I think, I think in the, in the like far future, yes. I think like you can design robots for specific tasks that, you know, and then optimize it, optimize it, optimize it. That like, it's just perfect for a specific task. And you, you,

You need them in a certain volume enough that it makes sense to design a product just for that. But right now in the world that we live in, most tasks in the world are designed for a human to do. So having a generalized humanoid robot and you deploy that in that task, you actually reduce the deployment cost so much that it makes sense to develop a robot for that. But yeah, I think in way the future, you're going to see...

People are like, yeah, I mean, this robot is great and everything, but this task is so necessary, whatever it is, that it makes sense to design a robot just for that. And that's what we see in manufacturing application and all that. That makes sense. But it's basically the AI that advanced that because the AI, if you can generalize it and it's able to just look at a human doing a task and then replicate it, then

And that is the value, but to replicate it, you have to have the same tool as a human up to a certain degree, obviously. So I think that's the biggest value here. But yeah, going back to Tesla for a second.

Like, you know, we've been called a lot of like Tesla haters lately and all that. I don't reject that description. But really, my problem with Tesla right now is like it's not Tesla anymore. I think Elon put it in a completely different direction. So if I look at the earnings and I see like Tesla is so huge in the EV industry that Tesla

Tesla having a bad quarter like that, having a bad year, deliveries going down, earnings going down and everything, it is bad for the industry, for the entire EV industry. And we're going to get into some of those articles. Remember, we see people pulling away from EVs now, and it's not great. And I think that's...

You want to give Tesla credits for the EV revolution in the last 15 years, and obviously it should get credit. It should also get credit for Elon now kind of screwing it up a little bit with Tesla with these deliveries going down, with margins going down. With Cybertruck, you...

Delete Elon from 2019 to 2025 and you replace him with old Elon and you probably don't have a Cybertruck. You probably have a cheaper electric vehicle. You probably have several more models than the only thing we have new since 2019 is Cybertruck. That pushed the entire industry more, even more to go further while Tesla didn't.

instead of being stuck at 1.8 million units, now probably by 2025, it's like 2.5, 3 million units, whatever, what it was supposed to be, and so on. So I think that's my main issue. Like, I think as much as I want to give credit for Tesla for the EV revolution, I think what we're seeing now is the result of Tesla slowing it down through Elon Musk's lack of leadership. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I see that, but I wonder, like, you know, the people who are going to buy a Tesla and decided not to buy a Tesla, they're probably buying an EV from another manufacturer, right?

right or are they going back yeah but those are people i think that were like already on board with the electrification probably maybe thanks for tesla maybe not but uh the the actual like there's a lot of people that just don't even follow politics don't even care about you know everything but if tesla instead of launching the cyber truck would have launched a 25 000 model like it was talking about for years and then never did it

If it had released a van, if it had released a smaller commercial vehicle, all of that, I think those things would have contributed a lot more to the effort than what happened with Tesla in the last few years. That's more my point. But yeah, you're right. I see a lot of people like the new term that I see people using is swastikar.

One of the references to Tesla, the swastika, is like, I'm getting rid of my swastika, but I don't see a lot of people saying, I'm getting rid of my swastika and buying a Hemi, a Colorado, like they're buying another electric vehicle.

All right, we have six new items to discuss. We're already 38 minutes in, but we're going to have a little bit of time to talk to you guys. So if you guys have questions for us, any comments, any questions about any of the topics that we discussed today or any other topics in the EV world, you can put them in the comments section right now. We're going to get to them in about 15 minutes. And if you do enjoy the show, you can leave us a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on the app, a subscribe or hit the notification button if you're on YouTube. That also tells you when we go live, though it's mostly on Fridays on 4 p.m.,

And, yeah, if you are listening on your podcast app, whether Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, you can give us a five-star rating. Only if you enjoy the show, obviously. That helps a ton and it's free to do. So we appreciate when you do it. All right. Tesla announced this week that all V4 superchargers can charge up to 325 kilowatt in North America.

So this is a little bit confusing for some people because the V4 supercharger, like it's the Tesla also called it the V3 plus. But for easy recognition, it's like if you see a V4 stall like this, like on the screen right now, which is the taller one with the longer cable and it's full. There's not the hole in the middle where the connectors goes in.

Now, in North America, it can go up to 325 instead of 250. So we reported on that before. Atesta was working on that, and it's due to the

V4 stall has been installed for years now, but they were not powered by the V4 cabinets, the V4 technology was just the stall itself. So a lot of V4 looking stations or V3 plus, V4 stall with V3 cabinets, if that makes sense. And Tesla said that they could unlock more power out of that.

So now they do. All the stalls can do 325. Obviously, only the Cybertrucks can take... Well, for Tesla vehicles, only the Cybertrucks can take that. The other vehicles are still stock at 250. But I assume other non-Tesla vehicles that can charge at higher will be able to take that. So that's good news for them. As for the V4...

Full V4 station with the cabinet and the charging stall, those are going to be capable of 500 kilowatt, and they are now starting to be installed. So 500 kilowatt, and then there's also the mega charger that's based on the same technology that's going to be able to do up to a megawatt almost. And that's for Tesla Semi, obviously. Another fun tidbit that came out today, our friend at Lucid, Peter Wallison, said,

had an interview with PCMag and he went on to give us some tidbits of EV history there where he explained why Tesla vehicles have the charge port at the back driver's side. It's interesting because he was the... Rolison, if you don't remember, is now the CEO of Lucid, but he was the chief designer of the Model S, even though Elon dispute that, but there's plenty of proof that he was. And when they were designing the car,

rollinson was insisting on having it on the front left because he says most especially in america most american drivers like to pull in like they did actually studies on like when you park your car do you pull in and you pull back you reverse and people prefer to pull in and then reverse and reversing and pulling and after that uh pulling out um

so he was like yeah it makes sense if you do that it makes sense to put in the front left like that you're not going to have to trip over a longer cable over your door anything like that but it was elon that said no according to rawson here and his logic was particularly interesting so i'm quoting rollinson here

Well, that wasn't acceptable to Elon. He said it wouldn't suit the layout of his garage in Bel Air. So I said, well, where do you want it then? What suits the layout of your garage in Bel Air? He said it's going to be the rear because he could trip over the cable, if not, I assume. He was renting the property at the time. He didn't even own the place. But we put the charge port on the left-hand rear because the layout of his rented garage in Bel Air. Wow.

That's kind of an interesting bit of information, right? And I believe it because a lot of people... Say that again? Think about how much that one garage has affected everything. Because now Tesla superchargers are kind of the default chargers for electric vehicles, which are going to be the only vehicles. So basically that decision affected every single vehicle that'll be on the road in 10 years or whatever.

Yeah. And we know that Ivan designed a lot of the Model S around him. Like he wanted the jump seat in the back because that fitted his family at the time. Now he would need like three of those vehicles to make it work. That's why the Tesla Semi exists. Yeah. So yeah. But, you know, Rolison is not...

about the move. He thought it was not the right move, but he did admit that if you can beat them, you have to join them because the lucid air has the...

followed his principle and it wasn't in the front. But now Lucid, like everybody else, wants access to the Tesla Supercharger network and the Supercharger network is by far the best network. There's no doubt about it. So it makes sense to adapt to the network rather than the other way around. So the Gravity was announced with the charge in the back on the left and it's going to be next also. So the Gravity is going to be like work smooth less with the Supercharger network. So that's good news.

But yeah, not everyone has to reverse into a charging supercharger at Tesla because it didn't match Elon's garage that he was renting back then. Sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have a new BMW iX. The 2026 version was unveiled with a little bit of design details update. Cheaper starting price.

And a little bit of upgrades. The range went up from 309 miles to 340. So more than decent bump. 340 miles, you don't need much more than that. The base price was reduced by $12,000 to now $75,150. Also good. Speaking of the gravity, this is probably like a gravity competitor a little bit. Like it's in that kind of range. Yeah.

You have the base version, the EX-Drive 45, going to get 402 horsepower output in 312 miles of range. You're going to need the X-Drive 60 to get the bigger pack for 340 miles of range. And you also get more power at 536 horsepower. And you have the M version that gives you another 100 horsepower more. And that's also 40 more, 650. That's 40 more than the previous M iX. Okay.

0 to 60 in that M model is going to be 3.6 seconds, 135 top speed. So yeah, apparently I'm not that, I know what, if I see on the road, I recognize an iX, but I'm not that familiar enough to the design to see really the big difference here in the 2026. Apparently the kidney grill that they call, here in the little front tooth are updated and lights in them, they are illuminated lights.

I don't know if they were supposed to see that there. Oh, like the outside is a little bit? Yeah. Is that animated or is that just like a trim? I don't know. Probably. Some updates to the interior, a new curve display. Those seats look sick though. I like those seats. Yeah. It's different, but it works.

So yeah, here you have your models. If you want the 240 miles model, you're going to have to pay up $88,000. And if you want the M model, it's $115,000, so not cheap. And they're coming relatively soon because I think production is starting next month or in March, but that's in Germany. So it's going to take a while before it hits the U.S. market. But later this year, it's going to be in the U.S. too.

All right, this is not something that's going to be available for us to purchase, but I thought it was pretty cool, so I included the post here. Ford just unveiled a tri-motor Mackie NASCAR-inspired vehicle.

So there's not too many details on the spec. They say they're going to bring it to Pikes Peak. So when Pikes Peak happens later this year, we're probably going to have more details on it. But it might be similar to the super truck that they unveiled last year, which I think had 1,400 horsepower. Ford did confirm a 78-kilometer battery pack, so it's similar to what's already in the Mach-E, but there's no tri-motor version of the Mach-E.

I think it looks sick. I like that they are, you know, venturing in other things here, like with, you know, there was the Mackie Rally last year. But that's actually something you can purchase, not this NASCAR. Oh, yeah. Now we're going to talk a little bit about EVs not coming to the U.S. First, the Kia EV5 is going to not come to the U.S., has been confirmed, but it's actually going to come to Canada. So I thought that was interesting. Like, that's...

That's a new move because even though the US is expected to lose its tax credit and everything, and the tariffs issued and all that too, but Canada has also lost a lot of its incentive as well. So it's not...

Normally, if you're not going to enter the U.S. market, you're probably not going to enter the North American market. But Kia has actually confirmed that EV5 is coming. So do you think it's like a size thing? Do you think Americans won't like it? Yeah, so it actually isn't entirely new. The Kia Soul EV...

Only came to Canada. Didn't come to the U.S. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Kia Soul EV original was in the U.S., and then they stopped selling it in the U.S. When it was actually compelling, when it had over 200 miles of range. Yeah, yeah, then the upgrade at some point, and then the upgrade didn't make it to the U.S. Yeah, which is obviously frustrating. And actually, it's not too much different than this thing size-wise.

So, um, it looks better though. Like this looks better than the kiosk. Yeah. I mean, it looks great. Like, I, I don't know why, like, it doesn't make any sense to me. And of course we, we ask our PR contacts, like, what are you guys, what's the, you know, what are your thoughts here? And they're just like, you know, like somebody in Korea is like, no go. Like that's, we don't know we're here, but we're just here to,

sell what we sell so uh i guess if you really like this thing you can go to the north and drive one down and try to import it yeah do something like that but yeah so it's gonna have nax so it's gonna be one of the first about the first kia with nax i don't know well hyundai has already but i don't know

They're jumping on the Naxx wagon pretty quickly here. Yeah, the Koreans are quickly on that. 60 and 81.4 kilowatt hour options, front-wheel drive and all-wheel drive also available. Price expected to be around $40,000 and $50,000. I don't know about that. I don't know if that's the price that was expected in the U.S.,

I don't know. I would doubt this is Canadian dollars right now. Is it too low? Yeah, it would be too low, I think. Maybe starting at 50, 60, maybe it makes more sense. But if they sell, I mean, range of up to 300 miles, that's not going to be the 60-kilowatt-hour version, obviously. But let's say 200 and something on 60. What's an Equinox go for in Canada? That's a good question. Yeah, that would be the equivalent of the Equinox, right?

something equinox ev canada price what are we looking at starts at 45. huh but it starts at 45 right i mean it's possible maybe maybe it starts at 45 too yeah i don't know if those are upgraded with the recent drop in canadian dollars too but

And then the VW ID.7, as it's not delayed anymore in the U.S., it won't come at all. So this thing has been supposed to come last year and then was pushed to this year. It's been available in Europe for a while. I mean, every time I go to Europe, I see them around and I'm like, I always shocked, like, oh, I forget this. We're supposed to have this thing. It's not coming. No, it's not coming at all, apparently. So they have confirmed it. Canada, U.S. is not getting the sedan version of their electric vehicles.

We'll start with the ID4. All right, let's jump into the comment section. All right. Carl in San Diego. Trump administration is officially moving forward with tariffs. Trudeau called out Musk specifically. What do you think? Is that true? I thought I heard today that it was pushed to March 1st. I don't know. Yeah, just looking. I don't know if this guy's handle is PG. Maybe not. Maybe it was...

Yeah, apparently not. Okay, he's right. Apparently that's it. They're moving forward. All right. But it's not going to be wide tariffs on everything, though, is it? Is it going to be just specific things, right? I saw, so I'm in Vermont and we only care about Vermont things. People are very happy about the maple syrup production is going to be more valuable now that we don't have to

contend with the Canadians maple you have to be careful with that there's real cartels of maple I know I've heard stories it sounds pretty amusing yeah there was a big price that one point in Quebec millions of dollars oh man

So we don't need to read the name of this guy. And I think mere ketamine poisoning would open up an opportunity to make billions shorting this fraudulent stock. Ukrainians have an easy way to fund their defense for cheap. I tweeted today, like I retweeted a short that announced that he's closing his short position. And I'm saying you should be careful shorting this stock because...

It doesn't trade on fundamentals. It doesn't trade on it. It trades on Elon's lies. And as long as you have enough people believing those lies, the stock is going to go up. So you have to ask you the real question you have to ask if you are willing to short test the stock is what is going to change that's going to make people stop believing in Elon Musk. And if the salute and all that didn't do it, what is going to do it? It's a real question.

He kind of goes on, we are made to believe that Tesla bubble can continue only for some unicorn scenario of selling humanoid robots when Tesla is already distanced by actual robots companies. Also, who would want a Nazi robot spying on you in your house and sending video footage from your kids to Elon in his clique of Pakistani minions on H1B?

All right. Well, we went off course a little bit there, but Pablo Cubare says, hey, what should I do at this time if my Model 3 has hardware 3? What are you, Fred, going to do since I know you have hardware 3 on your Model 3? Thanks, guys. That's...

That's a good question. Yeah. What are we doing here? Well, I think Seth, you were in the right path with this. I think that's going to be the solution. Like I said, I just do not think that Tesla is going to be the one willing to come out with a solution, unfortunately. So I do think that there's going to be lawsuits around this. I do think that someone's going to start a class action and is going to have to go through that and is going to take years.

And the biggest winners, as usual, are going to be the lawyers. But I think that's the biggest solution because, honestly, right now, I think what's going to happen is Elon is going to finally tell his engineers, like, all right, you guys need to work on a ritual fit for the AutoWare 3 vehicles. And if it makes sense, it would be AutoWare 5 ritual fit to the newest computer because the AutoWare 5 computer is coming out later this year, apparently. So...

They're going to have to start working on that. And then they're going to start doing the math and everything and realize, oh, geez, I don't think it makes that much sense. And then Elon's going to try to find a way to get around that. And then it's going to be hard. It's not going to work. Maybe they're going to offer something, but it's not going to be great. And then at the same time, there's going to be a lawsuit going on. And then I think it's going to be a whole mess, basically. So what can you do?

I mean, if you don't want to sell your car because you're going to lose a lot of value on it and you want to keep it, you keep it and you hope for the best with the lawsuit. So I just had a thought kind of related. What if the retrofit of FSD to other automakers is just a Optimus robot that is your chauffeur? Right. Then it takes up a seat in your car. Yeah.

I mean, it could probably just be on the side or something. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that the...

the optimist robot's gonna get a better computer than the hardware 3 and then but then i'm not even sure that the hardware 3 computer is the only bottleneck in the hardware 3 cars too i think the cameras might be like a bonus of optimist like say all right say you know they tesla focuses on optimist and part of its brain is big enough to like do full self-driving like car so every everyone that's an hardware 3 car gets an optimist for free is that what you're saying

I wasn't going to say that, but that would be nice. But what would be nice is like, say, you know, you don't want to drive a Tesla, but you like full self driving in your like Cadillac Escalade or something. You could one of the pitches for the robot would be like, all right, this robot's going to clean your house and give you a back rub. But it also will be a limo driver for you and it's going to drive you around.

By the way, I don't know if you missed that, but Elon did, again, reiterate that Tesla was in talks with other OEMs about integrating full self-driving. Who do you think is on that list? We talked about this before. I don't know, but I don't even believe that that's true. He also said that if you don't have full self-driving, you're going to be dead. The company is going to die. Does that include Tesla? Yeah. I guess so.

And a similar question. I thought I read an article indicating that if you have hardware 3 and FSD, they will upgrade your hardware. Maybe someone can confirm. That's what he said, but there's no plan to do it right now. All right. Seth and Fred, you are a great example of successful Canada-U.S. collaboration and partnership with Zero Tariffs. Wow.

Could you please advise your respective governments on how it's done? Sorry about the tariffs. I mean, there's a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Canada, and Trump is using some very strange tactics to walk back all of that. So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely hard to be in his head, and I want to be in Trump's head and try to –

find ways around that because it makes no sense and obviously also threatening to almost invade canada or make canada the 51st state it's why don't you guys take vermont that would be that would be fun yeah i don't know maybe uh it's gonna start like the first maple syrup war the maple syrup wars i love that 2025 yeah

Eric Penchman says 2023 Model 3 owner here with Hardware 3. So a lot of us. I just looked at the Tesla app and FSD is still available to buy from my Model 2023 Model Y. They should remove that. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, if it's not going to exist and they're going to have to upgrade it anyway, maybe they should pull that. I don't know. They still would like to take the cash, I'm sure. I agree. If you...

If you see that in your app right now, if you can send me a screenshot of what it says exactly and if there's any fine prints around it and everything, I'd be curious to look at because I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is now selling the full self-driving package with a little bit of a fine print or something that says that doesn't necessarily promise an unsupervised self-driving even though it has been promised verbally. But I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is trying to reduce its liability there.

Yeah, it's funny because it'll say supervised FSD with supervision, also supervised. And improvement in capacity with future software update, but not necessarily actual self-driving capabilities. It's weird. Yeah, a lot of that. Are we anti-Tesla in our podcast like the news site? I would say we are similar, but we're not anti. We're just giving you facts. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why I see like every time now when someone calls me like, oh, you're just a hater and everything, like points to something inaccurate in what we're saying that we use in an indicative way or shut up about it because we're just stating facts. It's just the facts happen to be bad. Like, oh, you guys turned bad, especially over the last year on Tesla. Tesla has been doing bad last year. The earnings just came out. They're down 53%. It's bad. Yeah.

all right eric williams says the auto market seems to be changing so fast gas electric self-driving tesla hardware with 345 is it safer to lease when considering a new purchase versus buy what do you guys think yeah it does make sense like if you can get good terms on the lease like i would definitely consider that before anything else in canada though you have to be careful among three model why there's no buyback so you know once the lease is done tesla gets the car so for better or worse so you

take that into account in the u.s i think it's a little bit more flexible all right um we talked about r2d2 is the poster poster robot for useless can't get over a door threshold yeah okay so that was not a good uh robot form factor but we'll think uh r2d2 can easily get over a door's threshold like don't underestimate r2d2 you're crazy

All right. That is something defending us. Justin, being entirely reliant on the Model Y as the biggest issue, a smaller, more compact version of the 3 or the Y that Tesla may be doing with newer models may take sales from the 3 and Y as well. Yeah, it's inevitable. I think Troy Teslike is kind of an analyst at Tesla on Patreon and Facebook.

Twitter and blue sky now. And I, yeah, the analysts of that. And he said like, so Tesla reiterated again that they're launching a new, more affordable vehicles this year, first half of this year, they won't be able to produce that many of them this year. It's not going to be like a big impact and they're going to capitalize the rate. And he estimates it about 50%. So like if, if they produce a 50,000 new vehicle this year of the new models, the, the,

You know, it's not 50,000 more vehicles that Tesla's going to sell this year. It's 25,000 because 50% of those are going to come from people that were going to buy them all through a while. So you have to take that into account for sure. So it's not going to contribute that much to Tesla's growth, if any growth this year.

All right. Electric Brian says, Trump says 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico coming Saturday. So does Equinox EV, HOMexico, go up in price 25%? But that's what I want to see. I don't know the exact. Also, the Mustang Mach-E is also HOMexico. Yeah.

and a bunch of other vehicles. Yeah. And a bunch of parts, a ton of parts for U.S. made vehicles come from Mexico. So I want to see exactly if it was made official. Because if it wasn't official, it was made in the last hour or so since we've been on. So we need to go check it out.

Any updates on the Ford 120-volt charging bug? My truck won't charge at greater than 12 amps on a 120-volt EVSE. That does sound like a problem, especially because the trucks use a lot of electricity and 12 amps, especially in the winter. It's probably not going to give you much, but I don't know much about it. Yeah, I'm not aware of that spare to carry issue either. We can ask our Ford people.

Carl says, that's prices. The story about NAX port placement, big ego fail. What do you think? The more affordable model is coming in first half of 2025, an actual new model or a decontented Model 3 hatchback?

Yeah, I think it's going to be very close to Model 3 Model Y in design and shape. Probably a little bit smaller, not too small, but a little bit smaller. And yeah, with fewer features and probably closer to a $30,000, $35,000 price point. And yeah, that's going to be attracting to a lot of people. But yeah, it's also going to take some sales from Model 3 Model Y.

The only sensible position for charging port on the EVs is the passenger side front. That way it can nose into superchargers as well as charge curbside without being affected by passing traffic on the road. It's kind of a good point. I was thinking about that. I read this comment earlier and yeah, I mean, if you don't have to park on a street or charge on a street that often, then I guess, you know, it doesn't matter that it's driver's side, but

If you're designing a car and you want the most options, I guess that pulling in front to a supercharger and also having the ability to charge it on the side of the street seems like a good option. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's an argument to be made. I like that automakers are doing also the level 3 supercharger on one side, connectors, and then level 2 on the other side because mostly the CD charging, that can use the passenger side, is going to be level 2 too. Greg Poland says it might cost less to add LiDAR to hardware 3. Yeah, but then you don't have the compute power to manage. I think my... I was going to say mine has...

The radar. Yeah, Elon was proud about that one too. It was like, because he was asked about the LiDAR again on Wednesday. And they were like, do you still believe that LiDAR is useless? And even if it was free, you wouldn't add it to the car. He was like, yes, of course.

And then he went, you know, we had a radar in the car and we turn it off. We have cars right now out there that have a radar that is useless. It's like, you're proud of that? You have the useless hardware in your car and you're proud of it? Yeah, probably saved some lives or something. Yeah, and himself agrees that a high-definition radar is useful for a system, for a driver-assisted system. It's just that the one that he uses is not good enough, he thinks.

All right. Matt says, hi from Amsterdam. Love the podcast. Are you considering boycotting Tesla news given the Elon situation? The news? I mean, letting...

Things go through the door. I think you need to bring things to light. Boycotting the company is one thing. Boycotting reporting on the company is very different. I don't think that makes much sense. Especially like, okay, if we don't report on it, all right, now you're going to only get your Tesla news from Tesla ready? Will you trust being very unbiased about Tesla? Come on. I think it's good that we report on Tesla. Yeah.

All right. CBS News is reporting the terrace will begin tomorrow. Yeah, I want to know on what though. Is it on everything? It is safer to back into a parking charging spot than to back out. Some people believe that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think now with cameras and all that, it's pretty safe to either way. The port location of the Leaf seems ideal. That's front middle. I'm not sure that's right. The Leaf used to be, yeah, front middle, yeah.

Yeah, that was actually mentioned in the... in the...

the Rawlinson interview because the leaf was already unveiled in 2010. Yeah, 2010 was unveiled, I think, the leaf. And you could see that. So they did consider that, but then they said it was too fragile, but too risky there because you have a lot of front impact, like just a little bit of a fender bender in the front could affect your charger and it would be more costly to repair and all that. So I think that makes sense. So they decided not to go with that.

All right. That's comments. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening to the Electric Podcast this week. I hope you enjoyed it and we did. And if you did, please give us a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe, all those things out the show time. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Bye-bye.