Tesla in Musk/Trump divorce, EV sales in EU, Hyundai's new electric minivan, and more
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One, we are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Leverett, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winshaw.

How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. It looks like you are reporting from the sun today. What's going on over there? I'm not sure exactly because from the room right now, it doesn't look too bad. I'm in a Tami right now next to Tokyo, going to Tokyo next week. And it's like one of those traditional ryokan where the light is warm, but it looks way clearer in real life. I don't know why my camera is picking it up like that, but we'll deal with it.

All right. Obviously, we have a lot to talk about. We're going to start with the little must Trump divorce and how it may or may not affect Tesla in the coming weeks or months.

And the EV market, the broader EV market in the U.S., obviously. We have a little update on the Cybertruck, probably the biggest discount yet on it. We have self-driving crash data that Tesla is openly trying to hide from the public. Sales data from Europe. BYB outselling Tesla in an important European market.

we have the new electric minivan for hyundai that i've seen the gas version of it quite a bit last week in korea and i was i really like those vans i'm happy that they're going electric i'm going to talk a little bit about them uh pole star 4 hitting the u.s market and nissan leaf having new picture of the nissan leaf then then we're gonna have plenty of time to talk to you guys uh about your comments whether it's about any of the topics we're discussing today or any of the topics

um that uh you want our take on from the ev world i'm sorry it's 5 a.m for me by the way so i was just i just woke up but uh i'll get in the groove in a second don't worry about it uh and nothing wakes me up rather than talking about the great relationship between elon musk and donald trump so if you've been living under a rock this week uh

The two went into kind of a public spat, a little bit of a breakup, a little bit of a nasty divorce between the two that, you know, just last week, Trump was giving him, I think it's like a fake key of the White House or something, like an honor, it's supposed to be an honor. And to thank Iman for his incredible work at Doge over the last few months.

where he managed to cut roughly $150 billion from the budget over the next few years. But most experts believe that that would have had to the deficit the way that he cut it and had to re-hire a bunch of people, had to give back a bunch of grants that were officially cut and whatnot. I clicked on the article. It's not showing up. I'm not sure why. Let me try that again.

My internet has been pretty good here, so I don't think it's the internet. Yeah, it sounds good. I'm not cutting off, so... Yeah, I'm not cutting off. Okay. Let's see. Let's see what I have on this. But, yeah. Yep.

And what happened this week is, so since getting out of the official administration last week, Ivan has become a little bit more vocal. We talked a little bit about it on the podcast last week. He started talking about the bill a little bit, the big, beautiful bill, which is the budget and tax bill that Congress passed a few weeks ago and now is being discussed in the Senate.

He's been talking negatively about it. He's admitted that he thinks he's going to have to the deficit and he's kind of upset about that because his mission was to reduce the deficit at Doge. And now the political class is adding to it and increasing the debt ceiling by four or five trillion dollars. So he ramped up quite a bit is this content with the bill this week and

At first, he didn't mention Trump whatsoever. So at first, he was focusing on the Congress people that voted for it and say that they are a disgrace and they should be ashamed of it. And he asked for them to be removed. So hinting at campaigning against them at the midterm next year. But everything changed yesterday or I don't know if it's even yesterday for you.

For me, it was yesterday. I woke up to it yesterday morning. So for you guys, it might be two days ago at this point. It was yesterday. But yeah. And this time he directly attacked Trump because...

You know, it's hard to get some distance between the bill and Trump because Trump is literally calling it Trump's big beautiful bill. So really the first thing it started, like it always started, it starts with a meme. And Elon posted a meme of the Doge effort being rammed as a truck by the big beautiful bill.

off by Trump's because this was the first time he mentioned him by name, but then it quickly devolved into him literally bragging about buying the election for Trump and Trump being ungrateful for not listening to him, which is, you know, it's kind of depressing when you see the world richest man literally bragging about buying an election in one of the greatest democracy of all time. It's pretty sad.

But then it went sour from there. It even went as far as linking Trump to Epstein, saying that the reason that the administration has not released the Epstein files was because Trump is in them. I mean, there's a lot of video footage of Trump and Epstein. It's not a tough line to draw. Of course he's in the Epstein thing.

Of course, of course. And of course, it's the reason they have been released. And everyone knows that. Anyone knew that for a while, because like you said, there's been plenty of footage.

Elon certainly knew it and knew it when he was campaigning for Trump. He knew it when he was saying that he loved Trump as much as any straight man can love Trump. An actual quote here, I'm not even exaggerating. He knew it when he said that Trump was right about everything. He knew it last week when he was sitting next to Trump and praising him during that little ceremony for the key of the White House. He knew all that, which is...

It's pretty wild because Elon thinks he's some kind of like folks hero right now, like fighting against the president and telling everyone that he's potentially a pedophile. But he's not being a hero. He's being an hypocrite because he knew it when he was campaigning for him. He knew him when he was leaving his son alone with him, when he was traveling with him.

uh, he, uh, he knew when he gave him $300 million to win the election. Uh, and you cannot deny that it's new information for him. Like, because Elon was posting about the Epstein file and releasing the Epstein file for, for months and for, for years before that he was, uh, you know, he, he liked to, to poke his rival, um, Bill Gates for being involved with Epstein. Uh, so he was, he thought like the Democrats was, was protecting him. Um, but then, um,

Every time he would post that on his platform, you would click on it and everything underneath would be about Trump and like him being an hypocrite for not mentioning Trump then. So he probably found out about it from his own platform. It just kept it quiet until now. But what we are seeing,

I mean, we knew that was coming. I think we said it several times on the podcast that personally, I thought it wouldn't last past 2025, this relationship. I thought it was pretty clear that it was going to go south. And I was pretty sure it was Elon, too, that would probably initiate the breakup, even though now Trump is saying that he initiated just a classic breakup. Like, no, I'm the one that... Especially with these two. Yes. Yes.

So the most interesting thing here is going to be the response from Trump. And Trump has already responded a little bit through an interview and then a few posts on Truth Social. And the post on Truth Social, the most interesting one here, he said, the easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it.

Yeah, he just thought about it now, by the way. Just after Elon called it a pedo. Yeah. Elon was worrying 10 times

I asked him to leave. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted, that he knew for months I was going to do. And he just went crazy. So that has been a narrative of what really initiated this turn from Elon here. And some people said that he wasn't aware of what was in the bill. A lot of people linked it to the

the subsidies for energy vehicles going away and everything. But none of that makes no sense. So I broke it down in this post here that looks at the impact of Tesla, the potential impact on Tesla from this divorce and the incentive Trump ran on removing the incentives. Elon

knew that Elon approved of that actually because Elon said that he's okay with the EV incentive going away though he said that if fossil fuel incentives and subsidies would also go away and obviously Trump had no intention of doing that he was he was campaigning on build the drill baby drill baby drill so I don't think that none of that is new for Elon Elon supported Trump

Despite of that, I think that nothing changed there. The two only like possible option here is that Elon truly wanted to reduce the deficit. And when he saw that the bill didn't do that, he turned on him. But I think another possible explanation, too, would be.

Elon is starting to realize that he has not much influence on Trump, that Trump does what Trump wants to do. And he attempted because I should say he didn't just call him a pedo. He also straight up called for him to be impeached. And if Trump is impeached and then successfully impeached,

GD Vance would replace him. And GD Vance is Elon's guy, is Peter Thiel's guy, is Big Tech's guy. And then they would get a lot closer to their dream idea of some sort of dystopian technocracy. Technocracy, yeah. Technocracy situation.

So I think that is also a real possibility because he went quick to the impeachment. Like it was a pretty fast ramp up to that. And I think he quickly realized that he doesn't have the political weight to make it happen right now. So he backed off, uh, uh,

quite a bit from it for those that follow exactly like at the end of the day on Tuesday Thursday was like some people like hey we we prefer when Elon and Trump are a team and everything and he was like yeah me too he's like and he started backing off a little bit but that was also right after Trump called for removing all contracts and subsidies from for Elon's companies and then

As a very quick knee-jerk reaction, Elon said that he was going to decommission Dragon, which is the only way to send American astronauts to space right now.

Yeah, and like right away, right away. And I'm sure that he got a call from his SpaceX lawyers right away. They were like, hey, you know, we have like actual contracts about this. And also it's a space is a defense purpose now. So stroke of a pen, Trump can force SpaceX to do anything. And if you start fighting back to it, like you're going to...

Trump could nationalize SpaceX if he wanted to, like, for defense purposes. So Elon really overstepped his boundaries there and clearly backed off almost right away. It was like, oh, actually, we're not going to do that. Or is that, I mean, the third option, you know, first option, he's really, you know, insanely for removing the deficit. Secondly,

he thinks that trade events would be a lot easier to manage. Or the third option is he was on a crazy Kittiman binge and came down a bit at the end. He was like, oh, okay, maybe I went a little bit too far on that one. It's one of the threes probably. Hmm.

But yeah, so I don't think it's the incentive. If the bill passed, though, the incentives are going away. So that's going to have an impact on Tesla. There's no doubt in all the AV market. The $7,500 tax credit is going away. The ITC for solar batteries and wind is going away. The Biden IRA credits for manufacturing batteries is going away. The ZEV credits...

The bill does attack the ZEV credit, but like we discussed before, that's actually at the state level. And it's going to be a court battle, a court battle that Trump lost on his first term. So we don't know what's going to happen with it. But if you remove all those, though, the impact on Tesla is enormous.

So another possibility that I saw if it's in being the incentives that are triggered Elon on this is that Elon hasn't been at Tesla much over the last year, like at all, especially in the last few months. And there's been reports that since he's came back in the last few weeks,

He's asked the team, hey, can I get a briefing on the impact of the bill on us and removing all those subsidies and the tax credit and everything? And I think you might have realized that the impact on Tesla would be huge.

Pretty big. I mean, from my calculation, Tesla would start losing money big time next year from it. It would actually save Tesla's year. I think Tesla probably would be losing money in the second half of the year if it wasn't for the bill, because the bill is going to create a lot of demand for Tesla in the U.S. in the second half of the year, creating urgency for people to take advantage of the tax credit.

It's probably going to enable Tesla to not have as big of discounts like they do right now in the US, which is Tesla's only big market right now. But starting next year,

You would have to increase the discounts to compensate for the removal of the tax credit. You would remove billions of dollars that Tesla gets from the IRA battery manufacturing and a lot of demand for the batteries for the power walls and mega packets you get from the ITC 30% tax credit. And finally, you also would, if the tariff stays in place on China,

you would get a giant increase in cost for LFP cells, which Tesla uses in the mega packs and power walls. All these things are awful for Tesla. The other impact is branding. So the Tesla's branding issues, you know, we just talked about Trump removing, um,

looking into selling the Model S Plaid that he bought from Tesla a few months ago as part of a little infomercial that he had on the White House lawn. And that came after Tesla was having giant branding issues, the Tesla takedown movement was ramping up. The left, which was the bulk of Tesla's customer base in the U.S., basically disappeared.

And people argue that, oh, maybe with Trump and with this information and everything, the right could compensate and start buying Tesla vehicles. But we were skeptical of that from the start, but also produced a report on this, like looking into Tesla's infrastructure in red states and in rural areas, not really being there to support a more right-wing customer base. Tesla can address that, but it takes time and everything. And now you add to that

Elon going against Trump and MAGA obviously being a lot more for Trump than for Elon, you probably remove all of that together and you accelerate the branding issues. I think Jamie posted a little survey in his post from the...

It's weird because right now I'm on their page. It's just not showing up for you guys. It's like the stream yard is not following up the web. Maybe if I do this. Now it's working. Sorry for you. Go from yesterday. From Thursday says that

You see who you would side with between Trump and Musk. All people, regardless of their political affiliation, 28% Trump, 8% Musk, 52% neither, 11% not sure. The Dems, unsurprisingly, 4% Trump, 11% Trump.

Musk, 80% either, 6% sure. Now, the independent is probably the most interesting part here. And it's 18% Trump, 8% Musk, 59% either. And obviously, the Republican are widely for Trump, 71% versus 6% for Musk. Yeah, that poll is particularly indicative of...

uh the independence where you know elon musk is saying hey we should create a new independent party in between which you know there's obviously the forward party already exists but uh in that particular you know party according to this poll trump is like twice more than twice as popular as he is so yeah i don't know he does he just doesn't have the political weight he doesn't understand that he doesn't understand that yeah yeah too many yes men around him

So this could be even bigger issues for Tesla regarding demand and branding because now Elon is hated by the left and the right, and the left is not coming back. The left had its fun yesterday and cheered on Elon a little bit, like, yeah, yeah, do it. But they cheer more about the situation than Elon himself. I think he exposes hypocrisy more than anything, and I saw the response from a lot of people,

Tesla investors, obviously the stock crashed 14%. Uh, some of it was obviously due to the third point that we're going to get into, which is with the, uh, um, penalties, uh, regulatory and, uh, investigation and all that, that could come from, uh, the federal level. But I think a lot of that too, and I, I saw some edge funds post about it, that, uh, the, they had their Elon realization moment that Elon is an hypocrite and that, uh,

All of what he was saying about Trump yesterday, he knew way before that and he was just not saying it because it was not convenient for him at the time. And those issues are specifically to the US. And even though Tesla has had an impact on the branding in the US, it hasn't been felt in the deliveries because of a few reasons. Because of record discounts, the tax credit still being in place.

But also because the U.S. market is the least competitive when it comes to electric vehicle because a lot of foreign automakers don't bring their full EV lineups to the U.S. They are limited to whether by incentives or they just, you know, we often discuss that like, oh, the Kia EV3, for example, like, oh, this should be super popular in Europe. They should try to bring it to the U.S. They don't, things like that. And obviously the Chinese EVs are,

virtually banned here, while they're obviously not banned in China. And in Europe, they are decentralized, but not as much as in the US. So for all of that, the US market is the most important for Tesla. And branding issues continue there. Probably went through the incentive problem. Now, the third thing is the investigations. So a lot of people argue that maybe the real reason that Elon backed Trump

was to get a lot of federal agencies off his back. Musk and his companies have been under known investigation from the SEC, the DOG, NHTSA, the US Labor Board, and the FTC for a ton of different reasons. And as soon as Imam got into the government,

He had a say in who's going to lead those organizations going forward, those agencies. And he also gutted a few of them through his Doge effort. So obviously making it clear that if you keep going after me, this is what's going to happen to you. And now...

This could change. Obviously, Trump could just put some pressure on them and just go, hey, you go after Tesla now, you go after SpaceX, you go after Elon. And there are clear avenues to do that. We discussed last week the clear lies that Elon said on stage at an investor conference about Tesla's demand, provable material lies to investors. The SEC could jump on that easily now.

NHTSA has been doing a serious investigation about Tesla's self-driving package. Even prior to this divorce, they had questions about, well, they had the ongoing investigation still on FSD, but they had specific questions about the launch in Austin.

So maybe now they shut that down. That's a real possibility. So all of these risks have greatly ramped up in the last few days for Tesla. And on that front, I'm happy because I think Elon doesn't know about the governance of a public company. He doesn't respect

shareholders, even though a lot of shareholders just love him, but he doesn't respect shareholder rights whatsoever. Does he respect the SEC? Oh, you know what SEC stands for? Middle word Elon's. Yeah. Middle word Elon. First word includes suction. And the last word is of a phallic nature.

Yeah, it's not great. And the SEC is not perfect, obviously. But a lot of the SEC's issues stem from the lack of resources. They let a lot of scams go on because they just don't have the resources to do it. And they went after Elon once. They went after Elon for, honestly, not the biggest deal out there. And so it...

irks him, but technically they were right about it. I think Elon didn't secure the funds for it, for the private takeover of Tesla.

So it was fair. It was just not that big of a deal, I think, and didn't affect people's money that much. But lying to investors about Tesla's demand will affect people's money ultimately. So that's a real problem. But I'm more concerned about safety here. And I think there's a need to rein in Tesla with full self-driving. And we are often reminded of that with some crazy crashes. All right, moving on.

The Cybertruck inventory is nearing 4,000 units, even though Tesla has basically stalled production for a week last week and they trundled down production quite a bit. They're selling the Cybertruck roughly at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000 units now, lower than last year. And that's with a supposedly a million reservation for it. And now Tesla has launched its biggest discount yet.

0% APR, 0% interest financing if you buy FSD on it. And I think a lot of people buy FSD because

It's a more expensive vehicle, so it doesn't affect the total cost percentage as much. And also, Tesla doesn't have autopilot on the side. We discussed that a few weeks ago. They're not releasing auto steer on it, which is insane. So, of course, more people turn to FSD. 0% financing on this is no joke. Tesla has already had 0% financing on the Model 3, 1% or 2% financing on the Model Y, and

But on the Cybertruck, on an $80,000 truck here, I mean, there's the $70,000 version, but we've already discussed, I don't think anyone is buying that. It's such a bad deal. So an $88,000

truck with the FSD, zero percent financing is a big deal. It's basically a $10,000 discount. It's like $10,000 in revenue that this lady is losing by subsidizing the financing right here. It's a big deal. So I think it's going to work. I think a lot of people are going to take this offer, but a lot of people are

So in percentage, it's going to be a big increase in sales for the Cybertruck. I think from this is just overall, it's not going to be that big of a deal because I think this might be able to work through half or three quarter of its inventory right now through that deal, which it's going to help quite a bit. It's financial for the end of the year, but

I don't think they're going to be making any money on those trucks, obviously, because the $10,000 discount is quite significant. So this is getting a little bit desperate when it comes to a cyber truck. You're willing to either lose money or not make any money. And overall, they're proving. Yeah, and the volumes aren't really growing at all. Yeah, I think this is going to go from like $25,000 to maybe like $32,000 a year of annual sales rate from this. Nothing too crazy.

Regarding FSD, Tesla is kind of in a little battle here with the Washington Post that is suing Tesla and NHTSA to get the crash data.

So we already talked about that a little bit before where Tesla is guarding its crash data quite a bit where the NHTSA requires any automaker to report crashes related to advanced driver assist system. So at all the exact timing, I think it's five or 10 seconds. If an ADS system with an ADS system

was active within five or 10 seconds of a crash, the automaker has to report it to NHTSA. Unsurprisingly, because of the popularity of Autopilot and full self-driving, Tesla is the biggest reporting entity for this report. They have the majority of the crashes, but Tesla is using the confidentiality clause of the report to not actually report

to hide most of the data from the report. So I took a little screenshot video of it for you to see here, but you see Tesla is in the reporting entity side of it. You see Tesla a bunch, you see Rivian a little bit and everything, but mostly Tesla. And then you go through the report and like everything is redacted for Tesla. You can see that it's Tesla just from the fact that it's redacted. While you have info from other automakers here due to multi...

You have all the other details, but when it comes to Tesla, all the main info, especially Tesla is concerned about people knowing which version of its system is crashing. They don't want to release that information. They don't want to release the exact location of the crashes so that the media could

more easily link a crash to the report and confirm that it was on FSD and all that. So the Washington Post is suing to like, hey, I think this should be public. Everybody else is doing it. Tesla is kind of abusing of the confidentiality clause and Tesla is fighting it in court. And in a filing this week, Tesla straight up admitted that the reason it doesn't want to do that because it would suffer financial harm if this information became public.

But it's not for the reason that you think. So obviously, I think, yes, it's probably right that if we had better understanding of it, let's be clear. The only thing that happens if Tesla starts releasing the data is that we get the public, we the public get a better understanding of the crashes related to full self-driving and autopilot. That's it.

I think that's a good thing. But this is like, no, it's going to arm us. It's like, yeah, potentially, because you have a lot of crashes, we get a lot of data, we get a little bit of an ascending of how dangerous your system can be.

But it's not for that. It's because competition could gain a better understanding of its system by knowing which ones are getting better and which ones are not by looking at what... So one of the data that Tesla is redacting is, like I said, the version of the software, the version of the hardware, and...

competitor i guess could then use that to go out to try to copy the the better system from tesla rather than the worst system it's it's ridiculous it's a a bad reason to hide a system and then what would happen if that if competitor would gain a better understanding of which one is safer and which one is not safer ada system would get safer across the board

Is that not the goal of that report? Making the road safer? So Tesla is actively trying to make the road unsafe here. Pretty interesting. We're starting to get the full European data in May. And Tesla kind of claimed victory because they had a good month in Norway. Norway's sales were up compared to last year. So 2025 is in blue here. And in green, you have 2024.

But as you can see, everything else is down and it's down quite a bit, including in France. And I didn't have the data from Germany when I posted that article earlier this week, but we now have the data in Germany too. So France and Germany, obviously the two biggest market per volume. Not anymore. Now Norway is by far the biggest market because Tesla sales have crashed at 67% in France, about 50% in Germany. And in Germany,

The craziest thing about all of this is, again, it's Tesla lying because Tesla said that the poor performance in Q1 was solely because of Model Y. The reality is...

May, the month of May with mobile Y availability was worse than February, than the second month of the first quarter. That has never happened before. Like never, ever, ever. And now it's happening now, even though mobile Y availability was not as widely available in the first quarter as Tesla said. So,

And now sales are worse despite of the ability. It's pretty clear that Tesla is facing pretty much a demand collapse in Europe right now. So why is Norway so... Why is Tesla's market increasing in Norway?

of all places there's a few reasons for that first of all is this uh so in comparison so that's not saying that 200 increase uh that's not either a terrible may last year and no way for some reason i'm not i'm not sure why but you can see this is the the second months of the quarter for the for 2023-2024 you can see that it went up every time in uh uh

in the second month of the quarter. But this time it went way down. So I think there was like a supply issue back then. So that accentuated the increase because there's a delivering 2,000 car in May in Norway is not that big of a deal. Actually, you see it did that

in 2023. So it's a fluke, really. And I think the Model Y and the new Model Y has helped. So I think what happens a lot is like a lot of Tesla owners like to have the latest Tesla vehicle possible. And that's true.

I think Tesla has had brand issues in Norway also, but they are such a big customer base in Norway that there was enough people, despite the brand issues, that wanted to upgrade. And with the higher availability in Q2, they got it in May. So I think it would be more interesting to see if Tesla can sustain that throughout the rest of the year in Norway. I sincerely doubt it because of this data here.

It's more interesting to look at France and Germany, which by volume are bigger markets, and Tesla is not doing well there. In the UK, Tesla has also had a bad month, and it enabled BYD to surpass Tesla in UK in May. They delivered?

3,025 vehicles compared to Tesla's 2,000. So they didn't only beat them, they beat them by 50% quite a bit. But again, it's because both sales have increased, increased quite a bit, 400%, but they were just starting up last year around this time. And it's also because Tesla is declining, obviously.

But the Chinese automakers are coming for Europe. And I think the UK doesn't have tariffs or not as high as the mainland Europe. So that helps because 2,000 units for this market in a single month is actually quite good. Do they break down which model are they buying? Let's see. I would imagine there's a lot of Seagulls going. Yeah, and probably some plug-in hybrids too. Not that much information on that.

On the breakdowns of the models. Okay. All right. This minivan. I've been seeing. Like. Right now. I'm in Japan. Last week. It was in Korea. All week. And. I've seen. This is still slow. To update. But you're going to see it in a second. But these. These new.

minivan here they are everywhere from Hyundai and Kia but this one specifically from Hyundai and uh it doesn't look too good in the two tone right now but in all black they look really good they look they look super futuristic inside they're super spacious uh you have a seven seater a nine seater configuration but you also have like a limousine with like two seats that's super comfortable and you can even have it as a camper van

They're all gas vehicles right now, but Hyundai is working on an electric version. They're called the Starvia. No, Staria. Staria is the name of it. I don't know if we don't know if the name is going to be the same in electric, but...

Hyundai was spotted testing an electric version of it in Korea this week. It's expected to have either a 76 or 84 kilowatt hour battery pack for 217 to 250 miles of range, 350 to 400 kilometers of range. And yeah, here you see it. So that's the, that is Tariya launch here.

In person, I saw it in pictures before and I was like, not so sure. But in person, it looks great. Very futuristic looking. And again, great space inside. And so this thing should be coming electric soon. Overseas market. So in Europe and Korea later this year, overseas market in 2026. I hope it's going to make it to North America. Why are we always the last to get everything?

We relate to everything. We don't get everything. But on the minivan market, electric versions, there's not much. No.

It's more like vans, like the e-sprinter that's available now in transit. They're more like cargo stuff that can be configured for like seats, seaters. Yeah, I mean, the Chrysler, what is that? Pacifica. Pacifica has been around for a while, and that's kind of the only game in town for minivans, not minivans. And it's a plug-in hybrid, but it has a decent electric range.

All right, we have two more news articles to discuss and then we can jump into you guys' comments. So if you have questions for us, put in the comment section right now when I get to it in a few minutes. The Polestar 4, so I admit I didn't read this one this week, but it hit the market in the U.S., or at least the price has been released.

Let's see here. All right. Let's look at the chart. All right. So standard, it starts for the long range single motor with standard pilot pack, which is a hundred kilowatt hour pack. The standard pack is a hundred. So you only have a hundred kilowatt hour. Okay. That's the longest range version you're going to have then. 200 miles with a max charge, which is of 200 kilowatts, power 270, starting price of $56,400. Not bad.

A little bit higher than what was originally announced. But I think so is the tariffs. So Polestar is no, it's assembled in Korea. So it should be fine on that front for now, at least. Korea? Yeah. Do we have still tariffs in Korea? Just the 10%, right? Yeah, I think it's just normal. But I didn't know they were Korean. I thought they were made in North Carolina or something.

Yeah, I think they're both made in China and Korea, but obviously the US market is going to get Korea. Then what else? So then you have long range, single motor, power pad plus. And what does that do exactly? Okay, so that's more for the features instead of it goes off of the powertrain. That's $62,000.

And if you want to get a dual motor, so the cheapest dual motor version that gets you 544 horsepower, and it's very fun to drive. I actually drove this thing on a frozen lake in Sweden earlier this year, and it was awesome. 3.7 seconds. So the performance back actually is the same, 3.7 seconds, 0-60. Interesting.

That's $63,000 for $63,000 for the cheapest Zul motor. And then it can go up to $73,000 for the performance pack version, which gives you, I think, the bigger brake and a few performance features. Bigger wheels, bigger brake, different badges. And it's built in Pusan. I was there just last week. Took the train to Pusan. I like the Polestar. It's good-looking cars. Great-looking cars.

I actually prefer driving the two, to be honest. I think it's the more refined ones, the more performance-driving ones, a little bit more fun to drive. But the 4 is not too far behind. It's a little bit more high-tech. You have a great heads-up display. You have the center screen is gigantic, and it's all powered by Google stuff. It's pretty great. I was really enjoying myself driving it. Yeah, the...

i don't know if it's my browser or my internet it's just not backing from it right now but they're having some financial issues though uh poster i know that their stock is not going great i know they are not selling those vehicles profitably quite yet there it goes yeah and our last article is about the nissan league the next generation that is coming quite soon it's about to do its global debut later this year and um

We were getting more pictures. You get a clear look that it's basically becoming more of an SUV, a small size SUV crossover. It's kind of a mini Aria, really. It's not quite mini, but like a smaller Aria. So the vice president of product strategy here gave a presentation and he had those Nissan Leaf in the back here. And you have a little bit more pictures here.

Again, the browser, the galleries when scooter posts, it's not working for me. Let me have a better look here. Really similar to the Aria, just a little bit more rounded. Okay, that's from the aerodynamic look of it here. So that's the old one. So they discussed the aerodynamic performance and it went from, we had it here, I don't remember it by heart, but 0.26

In the US, 0.25 in Europe. And that's going down from 0.28 from the current leaf. So a decent improvement. Going to be a little bit more efficient. So I think that most of the images here are of the old one. But here they go. They're quick. They go a little different. It's not there quite yet. So they're still just teasing it.

That's pretty much it. We had some comments on your coloration. It looks like you're inside Trump's skin. Not a cantaloupe.

And Carl says, John Mars. All right. AI says, if grid is not powered by clean source, Trump is making coal plans to stay open. Is there still a benefit of getting an EV? Yes. Even if your EV is powered entirely by coal, it's still more efficient than gasoline. But we know...

Yeah, there's been plenty of studies on that. It's a big difference. It's true. It's a big difference. Obviously, if you have like hydroelectricity, solar power, but it's still slightly more efficient. And obviously, Trump is not going to be super successful in bringing back coal. Maybe he's going to save a few coal plants, but for the most part, solar. Most that's cheaper now anyway. Plus storage. There's a...

Yeah, to his question specifically, there's a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists about the greenhouse gases produced by EVs versus gas. That's the best map I've seen. All right. Skeptic says that red Model S for sale, if you don't mind the smell of corruption. We're joking about Trump's going to be like, holy depreciation when he tries to sell that thing. Yeah.

Nah, for sure he's going to sell it to like a million people for a profit. He's got, yeah, he's got the Trump premium on it. That's right. New Jersey Turnpike forcing Tesla to rip out all of its disruptive, never officially contracted chargers. Are there other places where Tesla's charging network is in question? I was actually, yeah. Yeah, we did a report on that.

Earlier this week, honestly, it's sad. Ripping up working chargers is done. 64 chargers is going to be removed. It makes no sense. But honestly, it's an oversight from Tesla. I don't understand how they let that happen because people are attacking the turnpike here. What reason, again? But

They didn't do anything illegal. It was in the contract. Tesla apparently had the contract just for five years. I don't know how you deploy millions of dollars worth of charging equipment and just have five years built into it. That makes no sense. So what happened is that another company, Apple Green, I think it's called. I've heard of them, yeah. I don't know if you know them. Yeah.

They operate a lot of the convenience and gas stops around the turnpike. They have a location at each of the 21 stops, and they thought it would be easier for them to manage the charging, so they are the ones that define the charging station now.

Ultimately, it's not that big of a deal because Tesla saw it coming because probably they realized, hey, we probably screwed up with that contract. It doesn't make more sense. They have the right to push us out if they want to. And obviously they did. So Tesla built other stations just outside of the third pipe, which is probably a little less convenient, but they built more of them. Yeah, it is what it is.

At the end of the day, there's going to be more stations. I think that some things that I didn't like about it is like the Etern Pike authorities and Apple Green kind of bragged about. I have

Our thing is going to be better because we're going to have a universal charger. And then you look into it and it's like, it's CCS. Building for the past. Okay. Some people, yeah, some people are not going to have to use the adapter for now, but someday everyone will, or you're going to have to change your thing. So I don't think that's that big of a deal either, because there's plenty of other stations that are going to have to adapt to the change to, to NACs. And, and there's always going to have to be a need for some adapter one way or the other, because that's,

CCS vehicles are not going off the road either. Like for a while, hopefully they're going to last quite a bit. So yeah, it's not an ideal situation, but I think Tesla learned from it and they're going to have to build better contracts in the future for the charging station. Yeah, it's weird that they didn't just build new ones next to it. Like why rip out perfectly good charging stations? Yeah.

And, and Tesla offered that to the turnpike authorities. They're like, we are fine with them building right next to us. So, so they, they probably gave them some kind of deal that. Yeah. And New Jersey, you know, so it's funny that the New Jersey turnpike closest to me is the James Gandolfini charging station thing from the Sopranos guy. Yeah.

Also, like, I wonder if the politicization of Tesla, you know, New Jersey is overwhelmingly Democrat. I wonder if that was part of it.

A lot of people discuss that and everything. It's a possibility, but I don't know. I think it's a money thing more than anything else, probably. All right. Daniel DeYoung says, Elon said robo-taxis won't work in New York City, but that most U.S. cities are like Austin. What's special about New York City? It's weird as New York City to LA FSD was a 2017 Elon idea. I understand Waymo has mapped Boston. The only thing I can think of is it's very compact and...

You know, it's difficult to drive in New York City for sure, but it's not something that FSD can't accomplish if it's working properly elsewhere. Human drivers can do it. And Elon's point has always been that FSD is going to be better than human drivers. So it makes no sense. If it works, it works. I think Elon is realizing that FSD is not

that good right now, that great? And he's trying to back up some of his... All right. OG Codex says, how far do you predict the Tesla discounts will go? Well, Nick, in the U.S., I assume you're talking about the U.S. here. If you're talking about the U.S., I think towards...

I think this next year is going to be the big, the big time. It's going to be the, the big, the discounts. So if you're not eligible for the tax credit, definitely wait after a tax credit. Cause I think that demand is going to crash and this is going to have to do big things to, to move, move the vehicles unless they just troll production down like quite a bit, which I think will also be the case to be honest. But, um,

This year, I don't know. There are significant discounts right now happening. But I think if the bill does go through and...

So it's officially no Tesla buyer is going to get access to a tax credit in 2026. It's going to create some urgency. Maybe you get still a pretty good deal if you have access to your self-adaptation, if you're eligible to it, depending on your income. But I think towards the end of the year, Tesla is going to be able to relax some of the discounts because of that.

urgency that the tax credit is going to create. So I don't think this is going to go too deep there. Next year, though, it could go pretty bad. Tesla could sell the car at a loss, really. Yeah. I was kind of fantasizing that somehow Elon would still get out of the bad graces and I could actually upgrade my Model Y because I'm going on a trip to the solar race that Electric sponsors, by the way. That's

that's next month july 4th around then so check it out if you guys are into it but um yeah he's just not gonna there's no way he's coming back this you know he there was one report that said that he's like willing to back some democrats right now but at the same time it's like i don't even know if that's gonna move that much yeah i mean the hiles and the far right stuff

Yeah. He destroyed. And he doesn't even realize. Destroyed. Because he's surrounded by yes people. All right. Mark Webb says, I remember Elon calling the cave diver who saved the kids in Thailand a pedo. Yes, he's an expert on pedos. That's why he knows Trump is a pedo. When Elon calls someone a pedo, it's usually correlated with Elon taking a major turn in his mental state.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the first time that I was like, Ooh, let me, let me look into that. And, and it gets worse because you hired like a fake private detective to figure out that he's a pedo after, after he called him a pedo without knowing he's a pedo. And then in court, he said, when he called him a pedo, he didn't mean a pedophile. He said, pedo meant like a creepy old man for him. So yeah,

Yeah, not a great one. And he won that lawsuit, by the way, but more on the technicality of like, all right, Ken is a big Elon fan. Elon's our greatest asset. Mark Webb says, I wonder what Elon is going to do with Trump's golden key now that they've broken up. Yeah. I mean, that to me kind of was like the kiss of death. I was like, oh, here's a little trinket.

Probably not even gold-plated. That to me was like, oh, that's painful. Because you can actually give people, not just the president, you can give them medals that actually mean something. Yeah, Medal of Honor, Presidential Medal of Honor. Nope. Gold key. Not even gold. Skeptic says, gosh, who's going to buy a Cybertruck now that the Trump bros are out of the club? Do you see that the Trumpers, the MAGAs, not being on Elon Musk's

good terms is going to affect Cybertruck sales specifically? Yeah, the timing is certainly not good. I think a lot of Trumbros were targeted market for the Cybertruck at this point.

Though I think there's also a lot of people that... Cybertruck is way more expensive than what it's supposed to be. And that's, I think, the main thing that is not selling well. It's that. Now, if you give people access to zero interest rates, even though it's not cheaper, it's more accessible as a payment option. Yeah, some people are going to buy it. I think...

I think it's still going to work. Like the, the zero PR, um,

for all Tesla vehicle has been very successful. It works. It's just more expensive than people think. People are like, yeah, the Tesla investors are happy when it happens. But since Tesla does that, look at the gross margins they've been trashing. It's expensive to do that. Someone is subsidizing this. All right, question. Any news on the pricing for the 2026 Toyota BZ? We talked about that last week, I believe. And it's the same prices this year, but with added...

range and charging. Yeah. A bit more efficient. Is it actually possible legally that the government in the USA takes ownership of private company like Tesla or SpaceX with reason of national priority or something? We talked about that previously. You know, like the government took over car companies during World War II to

build tanks and airplanes and stuff. So there is precedent. It is, it is possible. I don't see that happening necessarily, but. It's not with Trump. Cause it's like, that's pretty much as on Tyke. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Nationalizing a company. All right. Next steps at Tesla still autonomy and robots, something the company is not a market leader in, or is there any hope they get back in the serious car business or is hope lost? I think the former is probably right.

Yeah, I mean, that's what we've been pushing for, like, we got into this because of Tesla, like, both of our first electric vehicles were Tesla vehicles. We got interested in EVs. I mean, we were interested in EVs prior to Tesla, but we saw...

AVs working because of Tesla and we think I had a China impact and they reach volume before everyone else and they had higher volumes than everyone else and the shift to autonomy and robots that Elon initiated has changed that obviously that's it's clear from the data now can it goes back to that I think I think you need to remove Elon from the equation to go back to that thing there's no there's no other way and

Right now, I just don't see a clear path towards removing Elon. I mean, if he decided, hey, I'm going to be politics only guy and I'm going to help Peter Thiel and whatever, maybe he would drop out and need some selling some Tesla shares as well. I don't know. Marco also asked any news on Canoo, Aptera, Proterra and other promising EV companies now basically non-existent. Yeah, most of those, Canoo and Proterra, out of

business and Aptera is very small. But Proterra I think is operating out of bankruptcy though I think. I think it's still an operation out of bankruptcy. Aptera, I think the

they had some success with their latest crowdfunding effort to like, you get an earlier delivery of, uh, of the solar car. If you get it, I think they're like three quarter or so sold out on that. Uh, I just, I just don't know if that's going to be enough to get them to production, but we'll see. I'm, uh,

I'm still like cautiously, I'm skeptical about the company, but I think there's still a path to production. Specular says question, which EV makers benefit most from Tesla's fall? I saw an interview with RJ Scringe from CEO Rivian. He certainly danced around the question, but I think he was acknowledging that there's opportunity there.

They're the only other pure EV play besides Lucid, which also stands to benefit. But both Rivian and Lucid don't really have low-cost Model Y, Model 3 competitors yet. That's their big problem. If the R2 was here, if the next Gen's Lucid were here, it would be a very different scenario.

So right now it's not really Rivian and Lucid that's benefiting the most. It's the people changing their Model Y and Model 3 for like Amig-5, Mustang Mach-E and other vehicles on the side. And you see a bigger impact in Europe where you have even more choices and everything. But in China, even though in China it's not really because of Elon that they were changing, it's just because technology is improving much faster than other companies.

But you're right. Probably Rivian, right now, if you stand in front of a Rivian store for a few days and you look at the trade-ins that people are bringing in. A lot of Teslas. A lot of Teslas. A lot of Model Ys and Model Ss, too. Yeah, people are upgrading from the Model Ys to the R1s. Not sure about SpaceX, but definitely not Tesla because it's a public company. I don't think they're talking about government taking over. No. I don't think so.

I think you could still could with, with, with, with the exceptional reason, but I think the, you need like a defense reason, a national security reason. And obviously SpaceX is, is more related to that. All right. Marco's got 16 more questions. So maybe this will be the last one for Marco. What about promising sodium ion batteries? I had, I heard on Monroe or somewhere from an expert that he expects those batteries will be dominant in like five to six years because of abundance and cheapness.

and i think also you could add safety um sodium ion batteries are definitely coming on strong they're not as energy dense as lithium obviously but um what we need is cheap abundant uh stuff and you know mediocre performance and that's what sodium's about yeah and they are improving those performance uh we saw with the catl one it's like now reaching yeah lfp performance so

so we'll see CTL I think is the one leading the um the dance here for for the sonium battery so we'll see how what kind of mix they get with their lfps and and all right it's not really not really uh car related but will all the doge folks leave government since Elon is out turning into CNN to find out I'm sure

I think Doge is probably going to slowly wind down and be forgotten. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of tied to Elon, and I'm sure nobody wants that, especially in the Trump world right now. All right. KV says, I assume Elon nuked his relationship because he finally got back to Tesla and someone got through to him on how destructive his actions have been to Tesla. Yeah. I don't see somebody telling him that. I don't know if that's the case.

Yeah, I don't see something exactly that. I think those around him at Tesla right now are loyalists and they're just yes men and all that, which is a big part of the problem. Maybe not everyone, but those that aren't are like walking on eggshells probably. And I think you...

what he did wasn't really successful. People thought that was a strategy. Maybe it was like going with the ripping the band-aid kind of mode. But if that's the case, I don't think it was really successful. I think he said it like, oh, kill the... He didn't make it clear. If it is the case, which I doubt, he didn't make it clear that the problem was attacking EVs, attacking solar, all that. He said remove all that and then remove the fossil fuel subsidies.

But I think it's you made it more about the deficit than anything else, which, you know, the deficit is a problem. I agree and everything. But related to Tesla, not that much. All right. I agree that I am tempted to sell my Tesla shares now, maybe wait till they get back up high again and then pull the trigger. Now, now you are ready. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Greg, that's not a good look like that. There's already been a couple of signs.

All right, Mike, the car geek says Chrysler turns 100 years old. Do you think we'll ever see an airflow concept EV go into production or an all-electric minivan? I would hope so. By the way, I met Mike, the car geek, last year at the electric solar race, so hopefully he's back there this year. Nice. Yeah, we need more electric minivan for sure. Electric Brian says, I would buy a new Model 3 if it was $15,000 less expensive and still had the tax credit. All right. That would be a cheap car. That's...

That's a $15,000 car. Yeah, pretty cheap. All right. With the tax credit. All right. That's it for the electric podcast this week. I hope you enjoyed it. Next week, I'm trying not to be... Oh, it looks like the temperature is like... What is happening? I'm not on the moon anymore. I'm on Mars. And I'm going to... Yeah, no, that's completely... Is it because I got closer? Is it my camera? It's probably my camera. All right.

Well, we're going to see you same time, same place next week. If you did enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe, all these things. I'll just show more than you think, and they are free to do, and we appreciate when you do it. Have a good one. Bye-bye.