Tesla incentives, Cybertruck update, Rivian options, and more
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We are live everyone for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by publisher extraordinaire, Seth Winchell. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right.

This week was kind of a slow news week, but we have a few very interesting stuff though that did happen that we're going to discuss. We have a new incentive from Tesla. We have a Cybertruck first update, the first significant software update. We have Rivian coming out with a bunch of options, which is going to be an interesting thing to discuss.

With the R2 coming also. And then we have the new Taycan that we're going to discuss. The new Taycan, the 2024 model of the Taycan that comes with some significant upgrades that are worth discussing. Let me share my screen with you guys so that we can get into it. This one right here.

All right. Let's start with Tesla bringing back the FSD transfer and free supercharging transfer incentive for existing buyers. So that first came out last year after Tesla.

after owners basically begged tesla to do the right thing and to enable people to transfer the fsd package which they paid up to 15 000 us dollars for it 19 000 canadian dollars for it over the last few years

For the simple logic that Tesla never actually delivered what was promised on it, which is a self-driving system, you could argue that Tesla has the feature-complete system now and everything, but it's still not what was promised, which is no driver attention required, self-driving level 4, even level 5 was mentioned at one point, but I think we can forget about that. Anyway, so it was logical that

If Tesla never actually delivered the feature that was promised, if you still believe that Tesla can deliver it, well, you can transfer your package to a new car if you're due for a new car. Some people like to upgrade their car every few years, every five years. I mean, at this point, you can have someone that updates their car every six years and could still get some use out of that transfer. So it's getting there, people. But Tesla always resisted that, which...

It kind of hurts me a lot because Elon always said that Tesla aimed to do the right thing and I think that would be the right thing here. Instead, what happened is that Tesla finally flinched and finally offered it last year. When was that last year? Q3 of last year.

But they didn't offer it as like, all right, let's now start doing this. It makes sense. We are still delayed in delivering on the feature. So in the meantime, anyone that wants to upgrade their car can transfer their package that way.

And to be clear, like, you're not losing any, Tesla's not losing anything with that because you remove the package from the other car. So when you sell that car used, they're going to have to purchase it back if they want to. So obviously, people are less likely to nowadays. But anyway, the only thing that it does really is that

It validates the owner who went down and purchased that feature. It validates their decision to purchase that at that price because now the price went up. Well, not exactly. It actually went down last year for a little bit. That's another story. So it validates that for the owner, which is the right thing to do. Instead, what Tesla did is that they used it as...

as a domain trigger. Elon said it was a one-time amnesty in Q3. And if you take delivery of a new car in Q3, you can transfer your existing FSD package to it. And he said it was a one-time amnesty and then it's not coming back. So if you want to do it, do it now, which created a domain lever for Tesla. A bunch of owners decided to go with it.

At the time, at Electric, a little bit more wary of Elon's comments these days. We did note that it might not be the last time that Tesla does that. And now they confirmed that they are using this as a demand lever. So it makes sense that they would bring back that demand lever because why wouldn't they? Just to make Elon not a liar, we're past that now. We're much past that. I like how he called it a one-

He called it a one-time. Tesla was very willing to make Elon a liar and bring back this incentive for this quarter. There's still a time limit on it, so there's no change on that. It's still very much a diamond lever that Tesla is pulling. Tesla owners will take delivery by the end of the quarter, by March 31st, get the opportunity to transfer the FSD package to the new car. Same thing for the supercharger incentive.

So if you have a car with free supercharging for life, you can transfer that to a new car and you can stack them up. So if you have a car that have both, there's a few cars that have both, but not that many. If you have two different cars like me, who has one that has a FSD package and the other one we has free supercharging for life, you can transfer them both to a new car and you don't even need to sell the car. Because Tesla gives me peanuts right now for my Model S, for example. So I would like to keep the Model S.

because it's still running super well because it has a new batch pack in it. And you can just keep the car and transfer that to the new car, which actually the new car is going to get a lot more out of a free supercharging because the Model S, the original Model S doesn't fast charge super fast. So I get more out of it. And also it's going to be my DD driver instead of my... I give my Model S to my parents right now who drive a little bit less than I do.

So I'd get more use out of it. And then I get my Model 3, which has full self-driving, turns right out to the Model Y, and I get a Model Y now, brand new car with hardware 4, which I think more likely than the hardware 3 could get eventually to Level 4. So these are interesting incentives for people. You're going to hate it.

But yeah, it's kind of a bittersweet thing. I'm glad that it's back. I'm glad that someone like me can take advantage of it. Some other buyers can take advantage of it. But at the same time, it kind of hurts me that Tesla is just, instead of doing the right thing with that, they are literally using their inability to deliver on a promised feature as a way to create more demand. It's both like business genius, but also ethically speaking, it's like,

Pretty F up. What do you think, Zach? Yeah, I mean, the obvious thing to do would be to say, hey, if you want a refund on FSD, you can have it and then move on and say, you know, do you want it on the next car or maybe you can wait and buy it as a subscription, which I think they still offer. That would be the right thing to do. But

Um, a second best thing I guess is like, they know that they have all these people who are sitting on FSD that don't want to upgrade their car because they don't want to lose FSD. And they certainly don't want to pay 14,000 or whatever they're charging now for it, uh, for new FSD, uh, which, you know, to me seems insane, especially when, uh, if you're selling a car on the open market with FSD and without FSD, it may make like a couple thousand dollars difference. It's not worth the 14,000 that,

uh people paid for it or you would pay for it new so yeah I agree uh this is certainly a demand driver for Tesla I'm actually considering it as well as you um just some you know you're not going to enjoy driving a Model Y around because the Model 3 is a much better car to drive I'm just telling you that now um I have a Model Y I don't enjoy driving it as nearly as much as the Model 3. I'm actually thinking

My wife is not on board with this, but I'm actually thinking of moving to a Model 3 because we have the Rivian. Yeah, you do have the Rivian. It's different. Yeah, we have the big hauler, but my wife...

Once a seven, another seven. Well, I don't know. Anyway, so I'm also thinking of upgrading my Tesla situation because the FSD is in play again. And before that, I was kind of stuck with the one that I had, which is.

i mean i have to say like it's been fine mostly the drivetrain's been pretty great but things you know there's been some problems like my son slammed the door too hard i guess the back door and it's like stuck closed now and um yeah it's a weird one um and there was something else that happened i don't know there's just like little things and it rattles and stuff like that um the the panel gaps were always pretty bad

So I don't know. I would like to get a new Model Y, like one that's put together well and maybe not the 4680s because of the charging stuff. But it seems like something that would be worthwhile. It just, I don't know. I'm kind of on the fence. Tesla also, I don't know if you've looked at their inventory stuff, but they're also marking down things like $4,000 or $5,000, $6,000. Yeah.

Yeah, I saw that you just posted that. I mean, Tesla inventory always has a discount of like 1 to 3,000, but I'll need to look if there's really like more to it now. I've looked mostly in Canada, to be honest, but with Canada, like I don't think they have like extra discount inventory right now just because of the recent price drop, which resulted in the new incentive, especially in Quebec.

So yeah, for me, it's more why I'm looking at the Model Y right now, because I could use a little bit of a bigger car. I could use a tow hitch, and I'm getting a whole bunch of new electric toys that require a trailer to move them around. So that can be useful. And the odd word for these things are what I'm looking at. And so obviously, I would be using a little bit more fun of driving. My Model 3 performance is super fun to drive. There's no doubt about it. But I would also, and I would also use obviously acceleration and things like that, but

I don't know, maybe it's a trade-up that would be worth. With my Model 3 right now, they gave me $30,900 for it. 2018 Model 3 Performance with 53,000 kilometers on it. So basically, with the new incentives, it would be like $30,000 out of pocket after trading to get the new car. It's not a bad deal. It's 30,000 Canadian pesos. It's like 22,000, 23,000 US, something like that.

Not a bad deal. Yeah. Our plan was to give the Model Y to my in-laws. And you can actually still remove the FSD from that one and move it to a new one. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. The only thing they say is that the car needs to be in your possession in your account when you transfer it.

So you need to buy the new Model Y before you give them to your in-laws or if you actually transfer the car to the right Tesla account. That's the only requirement. Here's a situation that might be interesting. What if somebody had a Tesla Model S with free supercharging and it was totaled? Could you buy that totaled car

get the free supercharging off of it, and then do whatever they were going to do and give it back to them, basically. You know, I don't know if Tesla can. I mean, I'm sure they can figure out that it's Tolo. But if it's in your account and it's listed as having free supercharging, I don't think it's going to be a problem. I think it'd be fair. Yeah, because, I mean...

Especially since you had the free supercharging and you're not able to use it now because your car is stolen and there's no equivalent to get on a new car. So it would be fair to transfer it to a new car. Yeah, so if you find a Model S with free supercharging on it on bring a trailer kind of site, maybe it makes sense to buy that thing temporarily, get the free supercharging off of it and then do whatever to give it back. Yeah, set it for parts or whatever.

Yep. All right. Moving on, we have the first significant software update for the Cybertruck. So the Cybertruck, for people who don't know, there's still limitations software-wise. Tesla often does that. They

bring the core to market and not fully adapted software, it's not fully adapted to it yet. So this has a lot of different software now to maintain. It's not just the Model S anymore. Like yeah, Model S, Model X at least are pretty close, but still they have software differences to them. And then Model 3, Model Y also very close, but still software difference to them, especially since they've been

different variation of each models. And now you add the Cybertruck into the mix, it's getting a lot more complicated for Tesla software team to maintain all these different softwares and bring all the features on par across the lineup. For example, the autopilot is the, at least the auto steer, which is like the main feature of autopilot, even though cruise control, active cruise control is also very important.

It's not on Cybertruck just yet. So Tesla hasn't adapted to it, probably still gathering data from the fleet in order to adapt the cameras and everything to the... Because the positioning of the cameras are different on the most Cybertruck than on other vehicles, obviously.

So there's a lot of things like that that are not there yet. Also some room for improvement. Like you get more data from the fleet. You get a bigger fleet now, obviously, with the customer delivery starting. So you get more feedback and you're able to improve the software. And Tesla has...

I mean, Ford CEO Jim Farley himself said it, Tesla has a big advantage over automakers because how deep their software goes, whereas they control all the subsystem inside the vehicles, they also have full software control over them.

So it gives the opportunity to upgrade a lot of different things. And we get the first example for the Cybertruck here, which apparently gets improved ride and handling through a software update. That's always cool. I'm reading from Tesla's release notes now. Get a more consistent response on different road surfaces and greater comfort on rough and winding pavement in sport mode or when custom ride and handling is set to focused.

Also expect reduced pitch and body roll in off-road mode. So this is pretty cool. Tesla has always set out for the Cybertruck to have a very versatile suspension system.

that's able to be comfortable with and without load, with and without towing, and on and off-road. So it looks like Tesla is making some adjustment there to achieve that goal, which is cool. There's also... Could you try again? Nope. Siri is trying to get involved in this podcast here, but... No, no, shut up. I think it's off. No, stop. Weird.

Siri, the AIs, AI. Now I have Siri, Google Assistant, Jim... No, no, no, no. Don't say those words. I have them all nowadays, so they all try to chime in. You also have more efficient charging with this update. Your vehicle now adjusts to the power level of each DC charging station, so battery preconditioning when you're navigating to a charger and then charging can be more efficient. So I'm not sure if that's like a non-supercharging station, like Tesla is not adapting to them, or if...

Tesla now didn't know before if your supercharger you go to is a 150, 250 station. Not sure. I mean, it had to know that. I would assume so. That's why I'm thinking maybe it's other non-supercharger DC station, but I don't know.

There's also a bunch of other release in this update, but it's mostly all the stuff that was in the Tesla holiday update from a few months ago, from December. So it's stuff that just didn't make it to the Cybertruck yet, but other vehicles already have it. This is pretty cool.

All right. On the bad news front for Tesla, it looks like they're preparing for a round of layoffs. So this is a report from Bloomberg this week that says that Tesla reached out to all its U.S. managers to ask them a binary question, whether is someone on your staff critical or not critical? That's it.

So normally when a company does something like that, especially when Tesla does something like that, it's because they're preparing for a round of layoffs and they want the manager to give them the people that cannot be touched. And they have to give a few options if there's going to be layoffs. So this is a bummer really because...

It's something that we've been keeping an eye on, on that I tried, because I do believe that Tesla's biggest strength has always been its ability to attract talent and to retain talent. And I know there's a bunch of Tesla naysayers right now that are laughing at me as a, Oh yeah, really retaining talent. There's like been people leaving left and right. Sure. There's always some turnover. And I agree that there's been a bunch of like more high profile, uh, departures lately. Like, um,

Capperly and Zach and people very critical to Tesla. But for the most part, Tesla has been extremely good at retaining top talent. There's people that have been Tesla for decades at this point. And Tesla always tops the list of the most attractive companies to work for, for student engineering. And so the next generation, Tesla is always getting the top new interns and all that. And then some of them are getting offers after that. So

That's something to keep an eye on. And if the morale is down in the company, if it becomes less attractive to work there, if the job stability is not there with rounds of layoffs, it can be a problem. And now it's starting to stack up a little bit because you have...

We reported on the stock compensation being slashed last year. Then there was the annual pay bump following the performance review that was disappointing to a lot of people that reached out to us. And then it was confirmed by Tesla when they sent out an email saying that they were going to do a second review of the pay bump because they heard that the feedback was bad.

But then that was delayed. We reported a few weeks ago. So this is becoming more and more. Now you add to that a possible down array, which is, it's not great. Tesla always, to be fair, Tesla does practically do round of layoffs. And even as the company is profitable and grows and all that, so that that can be weird for people, but for the most part,

Sorry, Tesla has justified that by saying that it's to counteract hyper growth, inefficiencies in hyper growth. Because Tesla has grown its ad count super fast over the years, hiring tens of thousands of people every year. And when you do have a hiring effort that is so big, you will get some redundancies, some mis-hires that shouldn't have happened and all that. So it's just going to happen. And it makes sense to just live it out with a round of layoffs and whatnot. Okay.

However, it made more sense before than it does now because Tesla has started to slow down its headcount growth significantly. In 2022, Tesla grew its headcount by 29,000 people.

So a lot more hires and also just a bigger percentage of growth in 2023, even though Tesla had more people, they just grew by 12,000. So it's basically a third of the growth in term of actual new headcount and even less so in term of percentage increase of their total headcount. So.

Tesla is now less of an excuse of like, hey, we're growing so fast that we just we need to fix that at some point that it's more like cost cutting effort right now, really.

But yeah, if we have people at Tesla that want to give us just some insights, like maybe we're wrong. Maybe the morale is like top notch at Tesla or anything like that. Like we'd love to hear from you anonymously or not. It's you to just talk about this issue because I think it's one of the biggest ones. Tesla, if it loses its capacity to attract and retain talent, it's just not the same company anymore.

And I know you have some inside sources there. Have they mentioned anything pro or con about that? Yeah. And especially after this article too, I had a bunch of people reach out to me about it. And that's why I'm asking if there is any contrary opinions to this because both before that article and after that article, what I've heard from people is like mostly like,

I've heard two things. I've heard the morale is down because stock options are down. The stock is down. So the stock options are less valuable. The pay bump was not there.

Also, people are not as inspired by Elon Musk as they used to be. It's a lot more controversial. So having a leader that's more polarizing is not always great. And then I've heard also on the hiring side that it has become tougher for Tesla to hire. Tesla is now having to be a little bit more competitive in their offers because people... It's not what it used to be. Tesla used to be able to offer less money to people because people put more...

more potential in the stock options. That's not true anymore. So that's harder to sell to new hires. And also just on the pay level, Tesla has never been super competitive for the...

the Bay Area specifically in terms of software. So that has been an issue I've heard. And at the same time, people are just now not willing to take those pay cuts for the mission anymore because, I mean, the mission is still there, but it's just...

Tesla is not the underdog anymore. It's not like, oh, we'll show these ICE automakers what's done. That feels like it's been done a little bit, so it's a little bit less exciting. I feel that at Electric too. We used to yell at all those other media organizations, like, you should take EV seriously. Now it's like everyone is taking EV seriously, so it's not exactly the same. But there's a bunch of factors like that that I think is affecting the situation for Tesla.

All right. Tesla has expanded its advertising effort. It's something new for Tesla advertising. We remember last year, just a few months really after Elon happens to buy a company that's heavily reliant on advertising. A shareholder asked him if Tesla would start advertising and

And he said, yes. It wasn't the first time that shareholders had asked him that. And it was always no and not this time. It was yes. Did I put the quote in it? Because the quote I thought was very interesting. Because obviously Elon hates advertising, or at least he hated all the way up to October 2022. Yeah, yeah. When he asked that, I did find a quote and I put it here. He said, it's indeed ironic.

Twitter is highly dependent on advertising. Here I am, never really used to advertising before, and now I have a company that's highly dependent on advertising. This is kind of like, you know, I'm being a little bit quick. I'm not really used to advertising. It's more than that. You are on record saying that you hate advertising. And now I have a company that's highly dependent on advertising. I guess I should say that advertising is awesome and everyone should do it. Obviously, that was tongue-in-cheek, but it's ironic, but it's true at the same time. Yeah.

And then seconds later, he's like, you know what? I proud myself in taking feedback from my shareholders. So I'm going to say, yes, we're going to start advertising. It has nothing to do with what I just said about me having a company. So for the most part, we all thought, okay, how long is it going to take between the Tesla company

starts advertising and start advertising on X specifically. So we didn't take bets or anything, but we should have because it didn't take that long. Only last summer, really, like a few months after that, they started advertising a little bit with some targeted Google ads. And then I think it was in November, there was video ads that they started to put out in November last year on YouTube's.

It looks like it was like a small test or something like that. Now, this week, it looks like the big expansion. We got a bunch of reports from people on YouTube, on TikTok, and on X. So Tesla has decided to start advertising on X, which is controversial for a few reasons.

Well, it's only controversial if Elon is involved, really. And you have to think that he most likely is. Because also, I just mentioned YouTube, Google, TikTok, and X. What big advertising platforms are missing? Yeah.

Facebook and Instagram. So that sounds like Elon's hands is behind the poppet somewhere there because Elon obviously hates Zuckerberg and Facebook and Instagram. And Tesla is not transferring any money for Headspace there, but it is transferring money to X, which is kind of the problem because now

Elon has like a direct way to funnel money from Tesla to X. Obviously, I'm sure that there has to be reports on how efficient the ads are and all that. But it's still a bit controversial because...

X is a private company. You know he wants to send a lot of money there. You know he does. It's just very clear. I'm sure. Especially the stats, the data on this, you can play with those a little bit. It's easy to manipulate, easy to make it look better than it is. I'm sure that right now, Elon is thinking, let's boost those ads on the X side of things. Makes it look good. X is very good for Tesla. Yeah.

And to justify sending money there and boosting the budget for Tesla ads on X. Yeah, it's just too easy to not be by the book here. It's too easy to have conflicts of interest, even breach of fiduciary duty. It's just too easy. And you know what? I have zero confidence in the Tesla board having any oversight over this. It's sad to say, but...

in one of the biggest company in the world right now, one of the most valuable company in the world, one of the most impactful company in the world, doesn't have a board that shareholders can trust to have oversight over that because they didn't do anything when he started XAI, when he bought Twitter and transferred employee from Tesla to X, they didn't do anything when he asked for 25% or he would move AI product or he wouldn't build AI product at Tesla and build this XAI startup instead.

They let him evidently now, and as per a court decision, they let him basically craft his own performance package and present it at the board as if it was their brilliant idea. Just too much nonsense at this point. Just too much nonsense to let that one slip too.

All right, we're going to move on from the Tesla stuff and talk about Rivian, Porsche. And then we're going to end on a very interesting note too. We're going to come back to Elon. Not really Tesla related, but I still thought it was very interesting. And it's probably going to generate some discussion for you guys. So if you guys have any questions for us, you can put it in the comment section right now. We're live on X.

On Twitter, Twitter is excellent. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram too. I think we might be live on Instagram. We're live everywhere on LinkedIn. So you can put the comments right now and when they answer them, it can be about what we discussed today or anything else in the EV space that you want us to discuss when I get to them in just a few minutes. But now let's start about Rivian that has had it.

two two or three uh new options so well two new base option at least for um the r1s and r1t it's a standard and standard plus battery packs um so these options are obviously cheaper uh i think it brings the price down to 60 something thousand dollars

$69,000 is the starting price for the R1T with the standard pack. Yes. $69,000 before tax credit, obviously. It's not eligible to the tax credit too. Okay. $69,000 is right there. It's a new standard battery pack. It gets you 270 miles of range, which is not bad. You have the standard plus. That gives you $315,000. And then they changed the EPA on the max. Is that it?

because there's also a longer range option now well the max is that the new extra thing which is controversial because it doesn't give you that much extra range but um yeah 400 on the r1s 410 and the r1t i don't know so this is an interesting move obviously from rivian because it's uh on the eve of uh the r the r2 platform launching

which is going to be the cheaper vehicles built on our platform. Are we expecting more than one vehicle though, or one T being unveiled, right? - So nobody knows for sure. I think we know that there's going to be R2S because we've seen the patent and the thing under the sheets. But I think I would love to see a R2T, which would be like a Maverick or something like that. I think that would be a really cool product. - Yes, for sure.

Well, obviously, the strategy here is very smart. They're going to unveil that March 7th, right? Yep. In Laguna Beach. In just a few weeks. And it's not going to come right away. It's going to take a year or two before the vehicles actually come to market. So it makes sense. In the meantime, all the press, all the attention they're going to get on them for unveiling those vehicles. And people are like, we want them. We want them so bad. But they are going to be like, yeah, if you don't want to wait.

We just launched cheaper versions of our bigger vehicles, the R1T and R1S, just for a few thousand dollars more, probably like $10,000 more realistically, maybe even a little bit more. You can actually get one right now. So obviously this makes a ton of sense. Smart move from Rivian right here. Yeah, they give you kind of like every tier that you could possibly want, maybe even too many tiers. I feel like three tiers is maybe enough. Yeah, four is a lot, huh?

yeah um just the battery pack after that you have the uh motor configuration options right yeah you can get a quad motor although they've made the quad motor

they've they've neutered the quad motor so you can't do like tank turns and you know there's not a lot that you can do the quad motor what you can't do with the dual motor and the dual performance motor is so good and it's more efficient so it's like and they only charge us you know a small premium for the quad motors i feel like they're gonna pull the quad motor at some point because just nobody nobody would rather have you know that little bit of extra performance and you

not the range and save money. Unless you really want to off-road with it, which I don't know what kind of percentage of Rivian buyers really... I would guess that in, I don't know, in the middle of this year, I think the quad motor will be a very niche product if it's even offered at all. Makes sense.

We have Spike says that says that I got a Tesla hat at the start of the YouTube stream today. Tesla advertises with electric. All right. Well done. Literally, we just got a few cents from Tesla to Google to Google to us. It's very exciting. All right. Right now, I stopped trashing Tesla right away and I start being a full on bias. Yes, buy a Model Y. I'm buying a new car right now.

get a uh cybertruck get two so i got this wrong so this is the upgrade for the 2025 but it's announced now for the porsche tycoon is it yeah that'll be coming out the middle of this year though okay so it's like it's going to be an early model year yeah normally like 2025 would be the end of the year but this this summer yeah it's coming out this summer okay so what's new on this you have a it's quite a significant update so you have um

more performance here like it's a significantly more performance for the base version the uh rear wheel drive Taycan Turbo uh you get uh from 4.5 to uh no now 4.5 and it used to be 5.1 so 0.6 second shave on that 0 to 60 miles per hour time it's it's significant uh you have this new feature called

push to pass function in the sport chrono package i i never liked that there's a few porsche audios done that i've never been a fan of like you activate that and for 10 seconds you have a 70 kilowatt boost so you can go faster it's like yeah just just give it to me whenever i want it whenever i put wine like make make the button the bottom of the floor of the uh pedal you know like

Like I'll hit the button. When I hit the floor, that'll hit the button and then I'll go, you know. Brilliant engineering set. You just remove one part. Remove one input. Elon should hire you. Every input is an error.

You have faster charging, 320 kilowatt charging now, peak charging. The charging is impressive. Yeah, it was already great at 270. Now, 320, it's another 50 kilowatt higher peak. Obviously, peak is always, we try not to focus too much on that because normally you achieve the peak for just a few minutes max, and then it tempers off.

But this is still good. More is better on that. And the charging curve on this is pretty impressive too. It hits over 300 until 60% almost. So you're talking 0% to 60% you're charging at 300 kilowatt hours. 300 kilowatt, sorry. Yeah.

So, I mean, that's really impressive. They also improved the charging on the 400-volt network. So it should optimize the speed on that because obviously you're not going to always charge at 800 volts. You're going to try to, obviously. The battery pack now on the Performance Plus battery pack option is bigger at 105 kilowatt hour instead of 93. So that's nice. There's more power on the rear axle motor now and another 80 kilowatt more.

a next-gen heat pump so for uh cold weather climates it's uh it's going to be nice it's going to be a bit more efficiency out of this on top of having a bit while the beta retro package is an option for a bit of retro pack um more standard features like lane change assist ambient lighting porsche intelligent range manager the range manager was not standard a new cooling system and more so those are now standards feature

a little bit to change in the front styling here i'm not familiar enough with the taiken interior to point out the big differences yeah i mean it's got a new screen on the right side um the intelligent um we saw the intelligent range manager uh when we were at the mccann event and um that that's just really you know a smart way of like it you know figures out which stations you should charge at and you can even tell it like hey i want to eat dinner

like you can have like chargers with restaurants or or you know fast chargers and and if they're full and a lot of inputs into there so it's it's pretty smart nice new interior options black and black and slate gray

Pricing, the new pricing here. So now the Taycan starts at $99,400 and then it goes up fast if you want a 4S. Really fast. Already at $118,000. If you want a Turbo, you add $173,000. If you want a Turbo S, you add $200,000. And then basically do the same thing for the Cross Turismo version, but add $10,000, which is crazy.

I like how they're not even pretending like they want to try to get under the $80,000 price. Not that this is an SUV or anything, but it's just... Yeah, I don't know if the Cresta Rismo would qualify as one. I don't think so. No. Although it's certainly heavy enough. Yeah.

Yeah, $211,000 is the top. And that's the starting price. That's before you start doing the options and stuff. Yeah, and Porsche loves their options. Yeah, so you're talking about a quarter million dollar car. Oh, yeah. It's a rich person's car. I remember I was there when they launched that thing. I was sick as a mule.

in Niagara fall they did the crazy unveiling with the the falls behind it was awesome I'm like I was like oh I want that car so bad and I had my model s back then and I look to upgrade and it's like

Because these are US prices and Canadian prices. The one that I configured one and it was like $250,000. I'm like, geez. The cars are so nice though. They're just really well put together. They just feel great. They just go. Yeah. I think I would seriously consider one one day. If...

the Supreme Leader ever decides to deliver the Roadster and we do get our Roadster. I'm not putting any weight on that. I'm just talking about like a dream scenario here. And I would love to drive a Roadster. Obviously, I would give it a shot and everything. But I seriously doubt just how...

I would do with a car that's just that crazy and that expensive too. It would freak me out. I'm not used to driving something like $300,000. I would maybe sell that and buy the Boxster. It looks pretty cool. The new Boxster from Porsche coming, the Boxster Electric. That could be something very interesting, I think. I agree. Yeah.

And that, I mean, if it follows Porsche's existing lineup, it should be significantly cheaper, I would think. Right. Would be a nice weekend car going on like a little road trip. I want a convertible. Not that you mention it, like this is a pretty big price increase. Like that you could get an old Cross Turismo for...

you know like 80 000 this is like a 30 000 price bump the the old taikan starting price was in the 70s i thought for just yeah the original yeah yeah but they had so many changes to like the options the packages and all that they like they have the taikan taikan 4s taikan turbo turbo s it's pretty wild yeah i guess now i got it confused because you can have a turbo s with rear wheel drive really that's what they said here uh unless it was uh

our mistake here I think that Turbo S is all we'll drive real oh no it's just you can have a Turbo but I can Turbo that's we will try not the S yeah the S is the top performance one because I was surprised like even that gets 4.5 seconds it's pretty good yeah I mean everything on this looks amazing except the prices the prices I guess they I guess Porsche is like look we're so much better than everybody else we're just going to charge whatever

And of course you can get a Model S and all those things. I mean, they are well, they have a lot of experience selling very expensive cars, like the GTR 3 and all that. These cars are top notch and very expensive for a reason. And they are in high demand too. All right.

This was an interesting poem. I'm putting it in there because it was one of the most popular articles this week. And I thought it was interesting because it sort of gave me like a little bit of hope for a second. But Ivan obviously couldn't stay away from Twitter all week and killed that hope for me. Do you like that image? It's an AI-generated image. I made myself laugh. I wrote this post here, which the headline is,

not clickbaity at all. It's extremely factual. Elon Musk introduces his new right-wing fans to a carbon tax. Goes as well as you expect. And I was like, what do I use for a feature image on this? And I'm like, ah, especially my girlfriend introduced me to Mid Journey and I've been using it a lot more now.

I'm like, oh, let's try to see if MidJourney can produce me an image like that. And I don't know if all family are with this, but you have to play with the prompt that you give it to try to get something that makes sense. And it goes through Discord, right? Yeah, it goes through Discord. The Discord thing is not ideal for that, but the way that you write the prompt is the most important thing. So the AI needs to understand what you're trying to achieve.

So this one, I was like, I had no idea what to do. So I was like, I'm literally going to go with the headline. I was like, Elon Musk explaining a carbon tax to a crowd of right-wing fans. That's literally what I wrote. That's literally what I got. It's just pretty good because, I mean, obviously, like the people look like they are a fan of him. They're like, yeah, and everything. He looks like he's explaining something. And then the carbon thing, I guess they are showing it with the fire in the back. I thought it was so cool. I don't know why.

Anyway. It kind of reminds me of that, what is that? That end of the world movie with Z. World War Z? Yeah. That seemed like, you know, the one with, I think Brad Pitt was in it. That's World War Z. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That scene in Israel where the zombies try to get over the wall. That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what was the situation here? So,

You know, Elon obviously has made a lot more fans on the right side of the political spectrum in the U.S. in the last few years for a bunch of different reasons. Reinstating conservative voices on Twitter has helped him be an hero of free speech and the right at the same time. And he's aligned himself a lot more with the political right in the U.S., simply like objectively speaking here.

By just looking at what he posts on X, he laughs a ton at the Democrats, which reasons a lot of the time he says stupid things and he allies them. But he doesn't do it with Trump, who you can like him or hate him. He also says a lot of stupid things. And just that, if you become a political commentator, which is what basically Elon is becoming right now,

You have to look at what they highlight and what they don't highlight. And what they don't highlight can say as much as what they do highlight sometimes. So he has aligned himself with the right in that sense.

But this week or last weekend, really, he decided to post about a carbon tax into his exact words. So someone posted like a cut of what he said before about a carbon tax that he think it would be very impactful. And then he said the only action needed to solve climate change is a carbon tax.

Everyone does that on X. I do that all the time too. I double the things. It's the way that the editor is put. I always double words like that. He's not signaling ISIS or anything? No, ISIS is institutions, investor services and all that. That's ISIS for him.

All right. So I clicked on it. I was excited. I'm like, oh, nice. Elon talking about climate change for a change instead of the immigration crisis and the worldwide virus and all that. That felt like the whole Elon Musk.

So I'm wondering how these new right-wing fans are taking this push for a carbon tax. And I went into the comments. I cannot show most of the comments, but I went in the comments, okay?

I had to go down 50 comments to see a positive one. Obviously, right now, his profile is very overtaken by these conservative people. And they laughed at him. They said, any tax is theft. Next is a tax on air we breathe. It's literally just...

And these also, I only picked the top ones here, like the most upvoted ones. So to get... This is a bummer. Why is that? A carbon tax won't achieve anything because China won't participate. We're going to get into that because that's actually a decent point. But I think you need to go further than that. Obviously, some climate denier stuff too. Yeah.

i don't i don't like this uh the way it's the co2 narrative is a lie so there was all that i literally had to go down 50 comments to see it so there's a there's a few things on this i tweeted out after this like this could be interesting because this whole elon musk going to the right things could be worth it if he can actually use his newfound uh fame in the right wing spectrum

to push a carbon tax and if that works I think that might have been all worth it because I do agree with Elon that a meaningful carbon tax uh is the most impactful thing that you can do for um to to to curb climate change obviously and the and actually it's also something that should be easy to sell to conservative because most conservative or free more well I mean there's been like

it's convoluted at this point, but like free market conservative at least, or for a free market. And a free market only works if you account for external costs. So it needs to be fair. It needs to, all the externalities needs to be accounted for. Otherwise it's not a free market. And burning carbon, burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon into the atmosphere as a cost. And if it's not reflected in that product, in the cost of that product,

It becomes an inefficient market and your market fails. And that's what we have right now. So a carbon tax fix this inefficient market and allows for a true cost of the products to be accounted for. And then the products that are the best overall, so the best product, also the best for the environment,

end up on top. It's as simple as that. So it should make sense. Obviously, it only makes sense if you do believe that carbon, the releasing of carbon in the atmosphere has an impact on the environment. I think it should be quite clear. I know that people are like,

Every single scientist that ever lived don't agree on that, obviously, but the vast majority of them do. I like this chart always on this. You're like a flat earther and you believe that NASA are a bunch of liar and everything. This data is coming from NASA. It's pretty simple data. It's the temperature on Earth, average temperature.

how it's been rising a lot in the fossil fuel era, especially the interlocal combustion engine era, it's been rising consistently while the solar irradiance, because that's the thing that the conservative often use, they say, yeah, I mean, the earth has always been cooling, warming, cooling all the time and everything. Yes, but during that period where we see temperature rising like crazy,

The solar radiance, which is the amount of sun that we get on Earth, has not changed. It's the same. It actually went down, actually, but that's part of the natural cycle of the sun. So, yes, the cycle of the sun has affected Earth, but the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is also affecting Earth. And now that we're releasing a lot more of it, which there's no doubt about, it's not something controversial to say, it has increased the temperature on Earth. So at the very least, we can all agree, I think, on the fact that

Products that emit less carbon over the entire lifetime, so that accounts for like battery pack production versus burning gasoline inside your car. Products that do less of that are less risky in this weird experiment that we have of pumping a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere. So why not go faster?

Why not incentivize the less risky products? It's as simple as that. But obviously, every tax is theft and all that. The real problem, Seth, is the name, right? It's like a carbon tax. But it's a good name, though. It's what it is. It's a tax. Here's what they should do. They need to tax it or whatever you want to call it at the well. If they tax it at the well, then they're not...

You're not seeing like, you know, the gas pump. You're not saying, hey, there's a $4 tax on this. And you tax out the well at a rate that is. So what I would say is like, all right, let's figure out the best carbon capture in the world, right? Whatever the best carbon capture in the world, take that whatever it costs to capture carbon.

that's how much the tax is. So if you can capture carbon at $4 per ton or whatever, that's what the tax is. And if you do that, then it's solved. Do it at the well, charge it everywhere on earth, and that's it. That's it. I mean, I agree with Elon in this case. It's very simple.

Yeah, it is simple. Again, there's layers to this. There's what I just discussed. We need to agree that there's an impact. That's the difficult part. And maybe Elon should work on that before introducing to his right-wing fan the carbon tax. Maybe he should work on convincing them that humans releasing an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere has an impact on the environment. I mean, for people that don't believe me, just start your car in your garage for a little bit and tell me there's no impact. No, actually,

- Do it for like two hours. - Yeah, do it for like two minutes. - No, don't do it. Don't do it at all. We do not condone starting cars in your garage. - Killing yourself in your garage with car. But I mean, at least if you know that that's a thing, you should like, one thing that we should agree on at least is like air pollution is a real thing.

you've seen it in every major city if you go to india if you go to china and that's the other point so that's the other one all right what is it worth that we do it in the us and canada in the western world if china if india is not going to do it it's true you create yourself and you put yourself in a less competitive situation if you don't do it in the short term so i think there's a few aspects to this you can do is like do you want to be

part of the problem because not everyone is part of the solution or you, you want to be part of the solution. You should ask yourself that in the first place. So when you say everybody else is not doing it, so we shouldn't do it. You are agreeing to be part of the problem because you don't want to be a leader in, in finding the solution. So that's, that's just a loser mentality. In my opinion, start with is America as a loser mentality. I don't think so. Uh,

I would also say like you could tax China at the border. So like if China decides, hey, we're not going to – we're going to send all this carbon in the air, be like, all right, that's fine. You get charged 50% tax because you're sending all this carbon. So we're charging that – that carbon gets taxed anyway. So I think if we did that, then China would probably get on board or at least make an effort. Which they are doing anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, which they might be doing it better than we are. And that brings me to my second point on that front is that if you don't do it, then you're going to be a lagger in the new clean technology, like electric vehicles, like solar, like all that. And China doesn't want to be a lagger in that. And they are not. They are leading the way. So if you're not early in it, then you're not going to own the manufacturing power for that stuff and everything. And you're going to fall behind economically anyway. So you're going to be a loser anyway.

Yeah, and we know that's the future. Like, there's just no future for fossil fuels. No, it's literally a finite resource. So at one point, it's going to end. So why not end it sooner so that we have a less risk of a major impact on the environment?

I always like to point out risk instead of actual doomsday scenario and everything, because at least you have to admit that there's a risk because you don't know what this experiment of pumping carbon in the atmosphere is going to exactly do. No one does. We have a pretty good idea that's probably not going to be good. Yeah, it's not looking good. So why not reduce risk? We reduce risk in everything we do in life. Why we don't do it with that? Why we're conservative people? You're conservative. Let's be conservative with the environment. Yeah.

Anyway, I thought it was very interesting. But then, so I thought, oh, maybe this is like Elon coming back to his normal self and everything. But no, after that, he went on the whole Twitter rant about Disney replacing Johnny Depp with a black actor. And I was like, who gives a damn? Oh, God. I miss the old Elon. I miss the carbon tax stuff. It was kind of...

kind of threw me threw me back into the old days all right into the questions comments all right how long would it take GM to pivot to a new battery chemistry like LFP or could they even do that I think they've already said that the Bolt is going to be LFP the new yeah so we'll see like a couple years probably yeah not easy exactly because yeah they they do own partly on the uh the cell manufacturing so they're not completely selling Gnostic

Yeah, I mean, they have the things with LG and other companies. All right, this is for you, Fred. Did you really declare level five dead? Is Robotaxi in the coffin too? I don't see any chance of Tesla delivering level five autonomy on any other current vehicles. It just doesn't make sense to me because level five is anywhere, anytime, any condition. If you've used...

autopilot or fsd in um cold climate uh in in the snow and in um the slush and all that like i do every day in quebec you know for a fact that's just not happening like in a drive here between showing you into montreal right now i'll get half a dozen alerts of like hey this camera is like as a little smidge of something on it and everything can i do it these are hardware problems

Tesla is only focusing on improving software. Well, that's not true. They're also improving hardware, but they are promising.

the features on the current hardware. So I don't think the current hardware can support level five, maybe level four. Yeah. Level four. You can have a robo taxi service on level four. I would think it's just that service going to shut down. Yeah. Waymo would be considered level four, wouldn't it? Yeah. Waymo cannot operate anytime, anywhere. Yeah. They can do it in nice warm cities that don't rain a lot.

all right uh jersey john from twitter i mean x says elon robbing tesla to pay twitter is a nice graft i believe he means grift but maybe it's a graph too sort of drafting money from one to the other fyi i got a tesla ad at the start of the youtube stream today that is great they are good ads

Yeah, I'm sure Tesla could be very good at advertising. You know, ultimately, like I'm not against this advertising. I think it's very good because I don't think the price war right now and the price drop are sustainable. Like we've seen, I just reported today on like SAP not buying Teslas anymore in their fleet because the price go down too much. And, you know,

EVs are super attractive to fleet managers. And fleet managers buy a ton of cars. They helped Tesla a lot in the last few years. The Hertz, Autos, Autonomy, Tesla, they bought tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles over the last few years. But for them, what's attractive with EVs is like the customer ownership over a lifetime is so much cheaper because of fuel savings. But fuel savings is one thing. Resell value is also super important for them because they do resell them.

And if Tesla is crashing that by keep reducing the cost, they're screwed with that. So there has to be a way for Tesla to have. I'm still good with price going down. Obviously, I think that's good, but it needs to be a lot more stable than Tesla just. Right. I think that's actually what kind of killed the deal with Hertz as well. Like they were really frustrated about the values of their cars. Yeah. Yeah.

Every time he lowered the price, the whole fleet went down quite a bit. Yeah, they were looking at their charts and like, shit, shit, shit. It's just terrible. But yeah, and advertising is like a potential solution to that. So instead of spending on reducing the price of the e-codes, losing money on there, you use that money to try to sell it to people that can buy it at the current price, but they're just not convinced for whatever reason. Yeah.

Obviously, it's easier to just reduce the price, but there is an opportunity here to get Tesla's name. A lot of people don't know about Tesla's great features and don't know about the price of the car right now. They think that

You think you drive a Tesla? You're a millionaire that just bought a $100,000 car. Yeah, and the gas savings and everything. There's a lot to get the word out. Moving on. Question, how can Rivian keep charging an astronomical price for the MaxPak? It should be a $3,000 increment. I agree. I think Rivian maybe have overpriced that tier. Yeah.

I think it's like five or even more thousand dollar extra and you only get an extra 23 miles or something like that. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it's for those people that, you know, they're towing or they're in Alaska or something where they really need every single watt hour of power. I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah, I'm not as familiar with the MaxPak pricing option, but yeah, I would agree that sometimes the automakers, it just don't make sense that they just try to, especially for Rivian because it's a luxury vehicle to a degree and in terms of the R1T, it can be like a work vehicle too and you want that longer range to make people pay for it. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe they don't have a lot of batteries right now, so they don't want to sell more than they can make. Yeah, you can sell more cars with smaller batteries. All right, question. Will they end Model S after Performance Model 3 is out? I think that's a no. No, definitely not.

Twitter is all that saves us from Western collapse. Yeah. So this is interesting. So Elon tweeted that today, yesterday or the day before. Chuck Cook, I think the guy that does like the left turn, that always does the left turn with FSD, the FSD beta tester, big fan of Elon. He was a fan of Elon. He tweeted yesterday that he muted Elon because he's tired of his political commenting and all that.

Then someone else responded to that comment explaining that

saying that first of all was mean this comment when you look at it because he basically claimed that Chuck Cook or anyone that Criticized Elon right now do it because of money they do it because they are in Tesla just for the money because they are shareholders or whatever like and that Elon is looking beyond that money and then if you are in that month in for the money you should still be pro Elon because and I'm quoting here every Elon is doing everything right and

And he's doing it to save the US. He's doing this to save the US because if you don't save the US, there's not going to be an FSD anymore. There's not going to be Tesla shares anymore and all that. And then Elon responded to that with a single word. And that word was exactly. So that's Elon's state of mind right now. He thinks that he's doing everything right. He's showing that he's saving the US by shaming Disney for being too woke.

Because Disney is ruining the entire world because they are going too far in the DEI. You know, I'm the first to admit like, yes, there's people that are pushing the DEI too much or people that are going too much with extreme wokeism and all that.

I don't see it as a major threat to the US or to civilization, Western civilization. It's always balanced itself out for a while. There's always some extremes and then it goes back and everything. The crazier thing of all that is thinking that you can fix that. I don't think you can fix that with some tweets or suing Disney.

All right. Eric Han says, why would China need our carbon tax? They already had way ahead of us in moving into the electric feature. They are doing a lot of coal burning though. Yeah, still are. They are moving fast in the solar too. They are building giant solar plants. But yeah, they're still burning a ton of carbon. Yeah. And this is a good point. You can't expect other countries to reduce carbon emissions if you won't do it yourself. You want to be a positive leader. Yeah.

Good example. And now Elon advertises on Electrek. Let's go. I'm a full Elon fan now. As soon as he put a dollar in my pockets, I switch. Yep. It would be nice if Elon was more right-wing, but he's neither left or right-wing. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So the fanboys are raving about version 12. Is there any difference you have version 12? No, nobody who's not a fanboy has gotten version 12. Yeah, that's the point. Yeah. Yeah.

They're still super limited right now. They were promising a wider release for a while, but they still have not done the wider release. Troy from X posted the importance of the price cuts and people flipped out.

Okay. I'm not sure. And Bob Olvis says that Ilan is not against immigration. He's just against illegal immigration, which is everyone's stance. There's no one that's pro-illegal immigration. Everyone agrees that people should go to a port of entry. That's not what's at stake with the immigration crisis. The only thing that's at stake is how do you handle the illegal immigration. That's completely different. Anyway, we're not going to solve this on Electrek.

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