Tesla Investor Day news, Gigafactory Mexico, Rivian earnings, and more
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And we are live for an episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintrom. I hope you're good, Seth, today because we have a huge podcast to do. I think we have like 20 stories lined up. You ready for it? Oh, yeah.

All right. But before we start, a quick thank you to our sponsor for this week's episode, SAE International. Join the global mobility community in Detroit from April 18th to the 20th for WCX, the largest technical mobility event in North America. You can register now. We have a link in the show notes if you want to jump on that right away. But we're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on on the show. All right. So obviously,

It's gonna be a Tesla heavy episode because of the investor day and actually a Vesta day But there's a lot of other stuff going on too at the same time So Tesla heavy stuff at first but a bunch of other interesting news at the end too that's not Tesla related So stay tuned for that. But let's jump in right away with a focus on Tesla investor day to start with so

Elon himself said it, like the biggest news, if you want to focus on what's actual news out of Investor Day, was the announcement of Gigafactory Mexico. Not super exciting, obviously, because we already knew it was pretty much a done deal a few days ahead of it. But yeah, now it's official. And a few more details about it. It is going to be just outside of Monterey. So it is going to be in Nuevo León.

where tesla already had a deal to have like the quicker border um going through the border faster and all that so it's going to be there it's going to be on a huge piece of land actually like we've been when tesla bought uh the land for gigafactory texas we were impressed by just how large it was and um uh now it's going to be twice that size for here from mexico so that doesn't mean that this is going to use all of it obviously

But and this is the render for the factory we're looking at right now. It's hard to tell from the render just how big it is. It looks pretty huge. It looks as big as Texas, the Gifford Texas, if not bigger. Other than that, not too many details. Let's just say that it's going to use the factory to manufacture the next gen vehicle. So we're going to get to do that a little bit based on the presentation of the investor day. The next gen vehicle platform wasn't discussed in like it wasn't.

As clear as the previous platform and Tesla release, it's more like a few additional incremental manufacturing and design improvements that put together makes sort of a new way to produce a car. And they're going to use that to produce new vehicles, including one that's going to be here for Texas. Obviously, a lot of people are talking Model 2 or $25,000 Tesla vehicle. It

It looks like this new model, this new cheaper model is going to be produced in Mexico for the American market and in Shanghai for the rest of the world. So that's where we're looking at. That's how we see it right now. And also part of that investor day event, Tom Zu, who is now basically the head of manufacturing and automotive at Tesla, made it clear that

They are sort of finalizing this Gigafactory group where Gigafactory is seen as a product in itself and they're just going to deploy that same product to new market. And of course, Zoo is known for the leader of Gigafactory Shanghai, which is by far the most successful Gigafactory that Tesla has deployed yet.

So he said that they're going to try to just replicate that everywhere now based on the same team, basically. And he wants to achieve the same goal as Shanghai or even beat it, which is from breaking ground to production in nine months. We'll see about that. But he did it in Shanghai. And I would have to assume that... Yeah, go ahead, Seth. They know how to do it. They have the expertise. And Mexico isn't known for like...

Red tapes. Red tape or anything. And I would have to assume that that was part of the deal too. That's what they were negotiating for so long. They were like, all right, you're going to let us just swim through that easily, right? I mean, they put a Tesla lane on the border. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Yes. Yeah. Very good sign. All right. So...

So actually, Elon himself said that was the biggest announcement on Investor Day, but he made that kind of like at the end, just before the Q&A session. The core of the way that he launched the Investor Day was like and the theme of Investor Day really based on what Elon said is that this event is about hope and optimism that is based on physics.

Hurt will move to a sustainable energy economy and it will do so in your lifetime. So that was kind of like the message you wanted to get across is like, we can do this. We can move the world to a sustainable energy economy. And then they actually did the math to prove that.

They haven't released them online. Well, maybe they just did. I just got an email actually that I need to look at, but they're supposed to. Yeah. So kind of white paper where we can actually see the details because now they focus more on like the result. But to be honest, like there's not much to doubt here. There's doubts about like just how feasible it is, but the math adds up. Like so that's the base math here. Basically, like 240 terawatt hour of storage.

30 terawatt of renewable power um that would require an energy investment of 10 trillion dollars it's so so these are the things that uh people are yeah really like because of course Tesla is extremely efficient in terms of capital expenditures maybe if they base themselves on that but Tesla is not going to be the one doing that 10 trillion dollars by themselves uh half the energy required then I thought that was a good point and

I knew about this, but it wasn't obvious to me. So I like that they pointed out the land area require less than 0.2% of the world. That's also like I don't think that many people think that's a problem. 10% of the 2022 world GDP. Also interesting and no actual submersible problem in terms of resources, which I also agree with on that.

So, yeah, the biggest point to start with that was really interesting is like you actually need less overall capacity if you're just more efficient with it. And electrification is more efficient with that capacity. So they compare like if you just use the current primary energy consumption from fossil fuels, you need about half of that if you go electric just because you don't have all that heat loss.

Right. Which I think is the main thing. Yeah, I don't think the public really understands that completely. And I don't think maybe they'll understand that after this presentation either. But it's an important thing to kind of know and get out there. It does put things in perspective in terms of feasibility. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like and especially since you can charge any time of day and you can kind of put energy back into the grid, it kind of seems like a better situation.

The other thing that I thought was pretty interesting from this part of the presentation was that, you know, mining the materials, you know, lithium, nickel, whatever, iron, is actually less mining than, you know, all the mining for coal and oil and all the other stuff. So, like,

Going to a sustainable economy, you're actually reducing the amount of mining out there. I hadn't heard that before. Yeah. I don't know exactly how that works, but that's an interesting vector to kind of contemplate. But like you said, it's coal and then you add mining for oil, just the petroleum, like the brewed petroleum. That's also extraction. It's resource extraction from...

from the earth so uh yeah i also that's one of the things also i was never heard phrase like that but it makes it on a sense when you think about it like add coal mining add petroleum extraction and yeah then it has to be more than extracting especially once you start to factor in the recycling of those battery metals right i mean yeah

The battery you're using, you know, you're extracting from the earth once and you're using hundreds of times, thousands of times maybe versus oil, which every single time you need to refill, you got to go back. Yeah. So it's completely different business model, basically.

And that's the thing though, it's less attractive. There's something very attractive from a business standpoint of like, let me sell something that people just burn and then are completely addicted to it and burn all the time. And I just have to just give them more because they burn it. While you talk about the battery and it's rechargeable and then it's recyclable and all that, like, eh, I mean, if I sell them one battery, they could just use it for the rest of their life. It's not as attractive from a business standpoint.

But we need to do it. So let's just do it. Also some encouraging stuff of like we're getting there, like in terms of solar and wind deployment, like it's just a three hex increase in deployment that we need. And then we just need to keep going like that a little bit.

More in terms of the vehicle and battery production, all that. That's 29X. That's a little bit less encouraging. 11X on actual vehicle production. Also not out of... It doesn't sound impossible right now. Just 11X. We were at 1% just a few years ago. Now we're at 8%. Not 8%. It's in the millions, I think. Yeah, it's in the millions. But it's basically that. We're basically at 10% of vehicle production.

Which that's also when you put it in perspective and go worldwide at 10%, everyone that's under the 10% mark right now, like you should be concerned, like you're falling behind. And I think the US is one of them. Yeah. So let's wake up.

so yeah that was like the beginning of the presentation basically like that's what you want to do and then how does this look gets there and obviously like all right new gigafactory is part of that a lot a lot more gigafactories are going to be following and i think there's going to be more announcements soon but then there was this here let's switch to this video over here um it's

It was the core, I guess, of the new vehicle platform. So a lot of people were disappointed in the event in the sense that they thought that Tesla didn't go into too many details, like they didn't feel like this is the new vehicle platform and these are going to be the new vehicle on it.

But it's still significant. It's still significant. So here, Tesla basically shows a cool way of like how they're assembling vehicles right now. And that's how they are assembling vehicles right now, not the industry. Like a lot of people would argue that that's already ahead of most of the industry right now, the way that they assemble the vehicle, even though the core components,

logic behind it is still very similar to the rest of the industry but yeah the problem like okay like you have to put the interior in like that you have to put the all the panels um on the vehicle painted remove some of the panels then you merge it with the power train that's what happened right now then you put in the seats and the center console all that finally you bring back the panels and the in the glass and then you have a vehicle so this whole flow

Tesla wants to do it differently. And let me just speed up to the next one here. So they showed also some improvement I already knew about. They installed now the seats directly on the battery pack, and that's enabled them to save a step. And when they merge the battery pack with the body like we see right now, it saves a lot of time. So that's already implemented in the structural battery pack Model Y that's produced in Giga Freight, Texas. Not all Tesla vehicles have this, but this is already an improvement.

But now they want to bring that to a new level, a whole new level. So that's going to be the next generation vehicle basically. So yeah, this is just a representation of how you can get more people to work on the car at the same time by working piece by piece and then bringing them together. But let me show you the other things. Okay, so this is the workflow difference here.

so the parallel and serial assembly that you basically bring the car together all at once into the assembly line from the stamping paint and casting you can see what it looks like right here like this if they call it the unbox process that's what they're calling so you can see the stamping on the top basically going to be the body of the vehicle and then

Some work is done on each of the pieces simultaneously and all the stations. So more people working at the car at the same time, instead of having to move the car around throughout the process, all of this is done simultaneously. And then boom, you have the vehicle assembly where you bring all these parts together at the same time. You see the front of the car and the back of the car is interesting here too. Like you've never seen that before. And then of course you don't have a full car, but then when you bring the battery pack in, since it's structural, you would just complete the body of the car just like that.

it is it is significant i know a lot not a lot of people were excited about this uh some people in the industry were like there was a lot of uh analysts that actually like uh they praised tesla for it uh i i understand it's not what a lot of people expected like we would have liked to see a car on this and obviously to say is showing it with the model why here a car already is in the lineup so that's not as exciting but you can see you can see where tesla is going with this i don't know what did you think so were you a little bit excited

Yeah, I mean, it certainly was interesting. I don't know, like, if you're trying to build a car as fast as possible, this seems like it would be beneficial. But, like, if you're just building cars, like, thousands at a time, you know, there's, like, you know, I went to school for systems engineering and we did all kinds of, like,

equations that I totally forget. But like there was, there was like, you know, this, we had studied the assembly line and, you know, Deming and Toyota's improvements. And like, it doesn't seem like this would actually help as long as everybody's busy and everybody's doing work and things are moving along. Like, I don't know that this would help, but I guess like if it's a shorter process and, and they can get cars together quickly,

you know, with fewer, with less amount of work, I guess it would make sense. And each car would take less time to make. I mean, that, that obviously would be better, but, um, I guess, you know, we'll see, we'll see when the, when the numbers come out and, you know, is this going to be part of the new model Y or is this going to be something we're going to see for the model two or, or whatever they're going to call that smaller car?

Well, I think you need to deploy a brand new production line for it. So it would be whatever next production line need do, which right now I would have to assume it would be the next generation core. But at the same time, like Gigafactory Texas with the Model Y and Berlin are reaching close to like 5000 units a week, which is pretty much what they wanted to be at. So then they're going to have to deploy new lines there too for

A lot of people tell them Model 3 would be next, but I don't know if it's going to be like a new vehicle or something. So any kind of new production line is going to come. But yeah, there's definitely an advantage if you're spending less time per car, huge advantage there. Also, if the car moves less within the factory, that's also an advantage. And also less volume per factory, less capital expenditure to deploy the vehicle production. There are a lot of advantages.

But yeah, is it really what's going to push Tesla to that 50% cost reduction again? I think it's part of it, but I don't think it's going to be it completely. I think we're going to see some

improvement in terms of supply chain material, the cost and all that. But that was also part of the presentation, to be fair. So I'm not saying that this is the only thing that Tesla was unveiling this week, but it was one of the main things. One thing that we find interesting, too, is Tesla discussed their new electric motors that they're going to produce that's going to not require any rare earth metals.

which is known as a problematic element, really. And Tesla used to do that, actually, before with their earliest version of the motors. So now they sort of reintroduced it. To be fair, there was a small amount of rare elements in Tesla motors. Now they're going to go to zero as far as I understand it. Yeah, and that's for the magnets, right? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the permanent magnet motors, they do require some amount. So that's going to mean that Tesla is less reliant on China because China kind of runs the rare earth minerals thing. Completely dominates it, yeah. Yeah, so that's going to be good for not having to bow to China's whims. Yeah, I mean, you saw like a bunch of stocks from rare earth metals companies like just plunge after that. Let's be honest like this.

It's still going to be plenty of years. Like it's basically, you know, electronics that you use out there and everything. It's not, it's an already Tesla wasn't like the biggest user of it. So I didn't, it's cool that this is doing that. And probably more companies should go the same direction, but I didn't see it like as that big of a, of a deal, to be honest. A lot of charging stuff. That was fun. Yeah.

One that was the most surprising of all probably is a wireless home charging station was teased and a lot of people missed it because it was the first time I've seen her, Rebecca Tunici.

She's the head of global charging infrastructure at Tesla. She did a very good presentation about supercharging and destination charger and all that. It was refreshing to see a woman in a Tesla presentation. Yeah, when there was a lineup at the end, they were all together. There was just two women on the lineup. That was...

Obviously, women are underrepresented in tech and they also underrepresented in automotive. And Tesla is a tech automotive company, so it's a bit understanding. But we like to see some female leaders out there. And she did a very good presentation. And at the end, she had kind of a one more thing moment. I mean, she literally said one more thing. And like a last team job.

Yep. But everyone focused on this image here, which is the Tesla diner, which we know is coming. It's an undergoing project in Los Angeles where Tesla wants to do a supercharger station with a diner, with a ritual style diner that has a movie screen and shows like some famous movies. So you can just stop there, charge, grab a bite to eat and watch the movies.

very cool project we know it's underway which is why it makes the other image interesting even though a lot of people missed it uh the other image shows a tesla like a large tesla wall connector but it doesn't seem to be connected directly to the tesla vehicle but there's a pad underneath right there so i don't know what else it could be other than a wireless home charging station i don't think it's a big leap right

Yeah, and we've seen some third-party wireless solutions that look similar to this. So it would be, it seems like that's what they're aiming towards. You know, some people have said, well, this is the bi-directional, and maybe it is, but I think more likely this is a wireless option, which, you know, I'm kind of torn on because, you know, there's a lot of loss of energy, and it's not hard to plug in, frankly. Yeah.

um in in the the current wireless or the i don't know if they're called wireless or just inductive charging but you know you lose 30 of the power or something like that then it's really not apparently the latest the latest technology is not

That inefficient. I need to see some proof, but after writing that article, I got two or three companies that reached out to me. It's like, hey, we're just as efficient as cables. Doesn't make that much sense to me either, but I've heard of some induction technology reaching 92%, 93%, which is pretty close to what a cable gets. There's some loss in the cable too.

And I'm sure Tesla is up to speed with the most recent stuff. Because that's a bigger deal. Obviously, if it's not as efficient, then why are we doing it? Because like you said, you're not solving a big problem here. Plugging in your car is not that big of an issue. It takes you seconds. I know, of course, hundreds of EV owners. I think I've heard it once or twice. Like, oh, shit, I forgot to plug in my car. It doesn't happen that often.

It probably happens less than people are like, oh, I forgot to go get some gas and now I'm low on gas. Yeah. I mean, the big thing, though, is like autonomous vehicles. Like if, you know, Tesla ever gets this robo taxi thing going, they don't want to have to deal with that snake charger thing. That seems a little...

Yeah, well, that's the thing. So definitely because of self-driving, it is a bigger problem to solve. You have to solve for the issue of like, how do you charge if there's no human to plug it in? But that's the thing, like you said, Tesla seemed to be going against wireless charging on that front and go with a robot arm. But now that might be a change of plan. I haven't seen the robot arm in a while. We haven't seen it in a while. Elon said it was still in the plan two years ago.

But I'm not familiar on that front, but I know there's some inductive technology for DC. Is it the power output? I mean, I guess if you're not lose, if you can keep the same efficiency, the power output doesn't make a big difference, I guess. Yeah. And Sylvia also mentions that it would be beneficial when snow and freezing rain were part of the equation, which is

uh we here in northern us northeastern us and canada know uh pretty well uh i'm sorry i'm i'm kind of blanking right now why would it be when it would be better than plugging in well just just you don't have to like get a frozen charger frozen you know charge or be underneath the car yeah but there are also some disadvantages though because like you have like you

putting that pad in that concrete floor, like it doesn't have to be necessarily cheap. And then you have to have it on your car too.

And then compatibility too, like we just Tesla just make a big push of like, let's be compatible with everyone like the CCS Magic Dock or like or whatever makes our property charger the new North American standard. Now, OK, now if we go wireless, then OK, is everyone's going to have the wireless pad, the wireless charger inside the car that can match every pad and all that? Yep. It's all all up in the air at the moment.

yeah but it still was very interesting to see tesla tease that because i i would have to assume that it was coming since they showed that at the same time as you saw the diner and we know the diner is coming all right another big thing on charging that was not part of the charging presentation though so a little bit more vague it was a question and of course it's a question that often comes up when it comes to tesla especially lately as other automakers have gone all in on bi-directional charging tesla was asked

about it again and Drew Baglino, Tesla's VP of Power Engineering said that within the next two years they are integrating bi-directional charging in all Tesla vehicles. So within the next two years all Tesla vehicles will have the capacity for bi-directional charging. So now he said that and then at the same time Elon said I don't think very many people are going to want to use bi-directional charging unless you have a Powerwall because if you unplug your car your house goes dark and this is extremely inconvenient.

So right after Beglino is like, yeah, we'll do it. Within two years, we'll have it. Elon, sitting right next to him, was like, yeah, no one's going to want to use that. Yeah, I don't get that, to be honest with you. I've heard Elon say that, or PooPoo, bidirectional charging quite a bit. And part of me is like, well, he doesn't want to kill his Powerwall business. But I feel like both of those can exist together. You can have a Powerwall that kind of keeps things going while your car is not there.

And then, you know, you have basically like five or six or more power walls worth of a battery in your car that's just sitting there. Like, why not, you know, make that part of the backup solution? And it's just a couple pieces of electronics that and some software that you need. Like most of the expensive stuff is already there.

So I don't get why Elon is so down on charging. I remember last time they talked about it, it was he mentioned that, well, you know, the Roadster had the ability to do something like that and nobody took advantage of that. But the Roadster was a different animal, different, you know, world we lived in. So, yeah, I mean, I get what you just like.

I think that like some people were confused because like you know said that and he said that so like already just not in agreement is this happening or not happening I think it's it's happening it's just that um

Like you said, they are doing it in the car because you can do it fairly easy. It's not a big thing to add to the car. Then it's more about the integration to the house. That's a bigger deal. But if the car can do it, is compatible with any system, then you just increase the value of the car by doing that.

but elon did had something though where he said that bi-directional charging would be very useful combined with a power wall where you have a power wall for your d2d use of time of use schedule with your utility or using your solar at night and all that and then as a short-term

use for a power outage and then you can plug your car into that. And if you have an extended power outage, then you could run your whole house with the power wall plus then the car if you have to.

To be honest, I do think this is like probably the optimal use of bi-directional charging because you don't want to use your car too much either. You don't want to use your car as a time of use. That's never going to work. You can use it as backup power because that's relatively infrequent depending on where you live.

Hopefully, yeah. Yeah, I've been in Mexico for the last three weeks. It's a little bit more frequent here. So I wouldn't want my car to have to back up my house all the time if I want my car long term to have a good battery pack. But yeah, this is the optimal use. And then like you said, you don't want to cannibalize the Powerwall business. If you just can combine the two, that would be good business too.

Yeah, but I mean, I have to say, like, just having the ability to plug your car into your, you know, your house into your car, like that alone, you know, you're basically mimicking what a generator does. And people pay $10,000 for generators. And you're, you know, you have enough batteries in most EVs to power your house for days. So...

To me, it's like there's a lot of value, like, you know, $10,000 worth of value in putting it bidirectional and, you know, a little bit of hardware and software. And, you know, you're getting $10,000 more out of your car, which is basically paying for the battery. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, you're getting it. You're right if you compare the value to a battery bank. But obviously, even if you buy the car with that intention, I don't think most people are going to use it like that that much. It's true that it has the capacity, but we'll see.

Why I would like to see Tesla being excited about this is I would like to see Tesla integration into the home electrical system because Tesla is famously very good at that, very good at power electronics, very good at frictionless integration. And we haven't seen much of that. I still have yet to see the Ford power thing, whatever. Yeah, and I think it's with Sunrun. Yeah, Sunrun, right. Yeah.

And yeah, that's really like people who have gotten those, you know, trying to get those installed have reported to us anecdotally that they're not working fantastically. So a lot of work to get that, you know, we'll get there. It's just not. It's still early in its infancy right now. But yeah, I would like to see what Tesla does with that.

All right, another thing about charging was very interesting. Tesla is going to announce that they're about to launch, well, about to this summer, starting in Texas, unlimited overnight charging for $30 a month. This is part of Tesla Electric. So if you've been following Tesla Electric, launch in December in Texas, where Tesla moved for just providing virtual power plant services to actually be a full-scale electric retailer.

So they have an electric plant base for them for Powerwall users. So they just sell and buy electricity and they do that through their own system if you have a Powerwall. Now, still in Texas, because they are regulated as an electricity retailer, they're going to launch a product that's not just for Powerwall user, but actually for any Tesla owner,

Maybe a test owner with a wall connector. That I'm not so sure. I don't think they really need a wall connector. Any kind of charging would work, I would assume. But they're going to offer, you pay $30 a month. And then when you plug in your car, they haven't said the hours just yet, but they said overnight. You won't have to pay for that electricity. That's a big deal. $30 a night. Especially if you're thinking about replacing your F-150 with a Cybertruck.

Yeah, I mean, any kind of car that demands a little bit more power or a car where you drive a little bit more often, like if you're just driving a few miles a day, you won't see a big difference because your electric bill probably you don't see that much of a difference from charging your car right now.

But if you're a power user and you drive a lot, $30 a month is pretty cheap. And they can do that, obviously, because demand control is the biggest thing. And that's the thing, too, that why Tesla is not super excited about their bi-directional charging is that they think that instead of sending back into the grid, just controlling the load itself is the first step. And they're right about that. If you can control the load, you already have so much more power.

Use usefulness in your electric grid and if you can incentivize like this for people to just charge at night You you it's control below you just move the load from one place to another and you move it to a place where it's a lot cheaper because people are not using electricity as much and in term of Texas they also have a lot of wind power and wind power also comes at night and sometimes more at night too, so

You end up having a bunch of electric capacity at night that people are not using. So if you can incentivize them to use them for super cheap, and that's something they're not going to do during the day. Because right now, all the people in Texas, they arrive at work at 5, 6, 7 p.m., plug in their car, and the car charges right away if they're not absented to overnight charging. And during that period of time, that's where there's a lot of demand on the grid. So if you can just shift a little bit that demand later, and it's starting to be more

There's a lot more Tesla vehicles out there now. So it's starting to be a significant load if you can just bang them up together like that and shift them all to overnight charging. You can never shift them all, obviously, but a significant amount. We're talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of electricity. Yeah. Eventually billions. And the savings is like a typical driver will spend $300 or more a month.

On gas, you know, especially if you have a, you know, F-150 type of situation and you're driving hundreds of miles a day, this is a tenth of that price. And you wake up every morning with a full tank. It's a pretty hard deal to pass up. And I'm sure a lot of people in Texas are really thinking about this.

Yeah. And obviously it's not all your charging is then in a home, but vast majority of it is. So, so it's, it's not a complete like $30 to whatever is your current consumption in fuel and gasoline, but it's, it's getting close. All right. I made all of that, all that charging news before the event itself, Tesla announced that they were opening the supercharger to non Tesla EV owners. So last week we showed you the magic doc because Tesla was installing the first station in New York state.

Now, they have officially launched so that non-Tesla owners can actually show up right now to, I think it's 10 stations in the US, most of them in New York, and then I think one or two in California, but it's going to grow pretty fast. And they show how it works, which is pretty simple. You just put your Tesla account, credit card, show up to the station, choose a stall, and then unplug and charge. And Seth, I think you did it, so you can...

Explain in a little bit more details. Yeah, it's pretty simple. If you've ever had to use like an Electrify America or EVgo, you get an app and you, you know, as you said, you just pick the stuff. The bigger problem is like, well, you know, Teslas are all alike and they have

rear uh driver's side plugs well you know chevrolet bolt as you see here has a front driver's side plug so you have to pull in front ways and then you are in the wrong spot for the charger because uh so you're taking up two two uh slots um so there's a lot of things that tesla is going to have to work out you know my my solution is like go around and install the magic dock on the end

where a non-Tesla vehicle won't be taking up extra parking slots, and then fill them in as they go along. And I think Tesla's got some new charger configurations where they're kind of on the side rather than at the back. The version 4 we've seen a little bit of has a longer cable, so that'll be better for Ford F-150s and Rivians and Porsches.

So all these little things are going to matter. But the experience is pretty simple. Like, you know, you yank the thing out, you know, you set it up. And once you hear a little click in the supercharger, which is the magic dock engaging, and then you kind of push it in and yank it out. And then you have a big CCS connector and you can throw that in your non-Tesla EV.

And it starts charging pretty much as quick. You know, it's funny. I've never fast charged this bolt until this point. I mean, no, past. So and I was only getting, I think, 25 kilowatts here. But, you know, basically you wrote the story. I was like, hey, I'm in New York. Where's the nearest one?

And I was like, I'll just bust out there. And I think I beat everybody, maybe not out of spec, but I think we were the first one to post. So I thought that was kind of fun. And I would never probably charge on a Tesla charger again with the Bolt, but...

I mean, different use cases, different use cases. Was there more than one charging stall there with the Magic Connector? Yeah, all of them had that. Okay, all of them. Is that a brand new supercharger station or did you just add it to them? Not super new. It's, I think, maybe like one or two years old. And it's a level three, or sorry, a version three one. Yeah, which leads us to a next...

It's just not a very popular place until this week anyway. Then all the people from New York City came up and YouTube it. Yeah, it's on Long Island, right? No, this one's in Brewster, which is in northern Westchester. It's kind of near Connecticut. Yeah, there was a few in Long Island too. I don't think there's... Maybe not Long Island. I think upstate New York. Just in upstate? Okay. All right, so that leads us to... Is it there? Yeah, Supercharger V4.

Tesla is starting to deploy the first ones. One has been spotted in the Netherlands. I'm not going to try to pronounce where it is, but you see it right there. This gentleman right here was able to spot it and share the video.

where we cannot it's still covered and everything but you can see it's the supercharger v4 and you there was one picture where you can see the inside of it here but the main thing is you see really the size of it just how much bigger it is than the current stall and not that exciting in itself

though there might be a potential for like a little bit more power electronics uh in there instead of the back stall so like the supercharger have back hands and then you have the stall and current electronic and the stalls are not much but maybe there's a way to combine them now but the biggest thing with the height is uh the charging cable

so you see here a regular Tesla stall this one is like a whole foot taller and the way that the height of the cable starts at the maximum height of the stall and wraps all around the stall Rider than inside the little hole that you have in the current supercharger station and this one looks like it has the magic dock too on it um so obviously

longer cable would be part of the solution of the problem that you just mentioned, which is that it's hard to reach the charge port on certain models. Tesla had to know that. They knew that already. I think it's going to be pretty problematic to keep retrofitting a lot of these stations with those magic docks because

we're already seeing it like it's been days and you already see like a bunch of people just parking and blocking two stalls uh it's gonna create a lot of frustration i think yeah and i don't even know what's the advantage of that if they just like deploy the new v4 and these are the ones that you open up to other

I don't know. Maybe they were doing it. Like you said, it's not a very popular station that they did it at. Maybe they just saw that the usage rate was like you never reach more than like 40% usage. So it's worth doing it because if you have an untested vehicle showed up and they take two stalls, it's not going to affect anything. So maybe that's what they're doing. Because otherwise, I think it's going to be a whole mess. Yeah, there's going to be some issues, I think. But I don't know. We'll figure it out.

All right, that was all the Tesla news. So now we're going to jump to the non-Tesla news. But before we do that, I want to just share a quick word about our sponsor, SAE International. Seth, take it away. All right. This week's episode is sponsored by SAE International, host of the WCX World Congress Experience event. For 2023, WCX is set to return to Detroit from April 18th to 20th at Huntington Place.

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It's going to restart. They have a restart date for the F-150 Lightning, March 13. So it's coming in just a few weeks. Still a good two more weeks almost of being out of production. And when did that start, the production? Because it was a few weeks ago. Yeah, a few weeks ago. It's not a month ago. February 4th, so a month and a half.

Right. That's significant, especially for something that they can't make enough of. They can't make enough of. It was a very exciting vehicle program. This year was supposed to be a big ramp, and now you remove a month and a half of it. It's not going to be great. And obviously also the issue itself with the SK cells and all that, that's a bit of a loss in confidence. But they have figured out the issue, and I mean...

I'm very glad that the EV programs are surviving these things pretty easily now. It used to be like, "Oh, there's a few fires and it's the end of the world and all that." Bolt is the biggest example and the recall was mishandled terribly. We had to basically twist the GM's harm into recalling that car.

But now the bolt is back and they are ramping up production this year too. So it's not like vehicle programs are surviving that. So it looks like Ford handled this fairly well. It's just six weeks behind this year, which is significant. Yep.

Still on Ford, big win for them this week. The U.S. Postal Service announced that they're going to buy over 9,000 E-Transit vans from them. So this has been a big story over the last few years about the U.S. Postal Service contract to electrify their fleet.

They made this big announcement about 10% of their fleet going electric and people just got outraged by it. Rightfully so, I think, because these are primed to be electrified, just primed to. And instead, they were like, all right, now we can just do 10%, even though they were completely, not retrofitting, but they were updating the entire fleet, which was an aging fleet. Yeah.

The timing was perfect. This is the time to do it. And if you are a fleet operator, you want to go all electric. It's just, it makes so much sense. So after a bunch of basically being ridiculed for a year or so, like I don't remember what is the, I don't know if Jamie wrote that post. I'm not sure if he's going to put the name of the guy. He hates him so much. The head of the U.S. Postal Service. But that guy was like basically pressured for the last two years to, you

change the situation and they finally agree in December that they're going to electrify their entire fleet by 2026. DeJoy is his name. DeJoy, yeah. So one of the bigger contracts, one of the first early contracts is this one here. So you're going to be expecting to see some Ford E-Transit as your local postal service vehicle.

There's going to be a change in it. It's not, those vehicles are perfect. Like they get a hundred, 120 miles of range. Ford can make tons of them. Uh, they're already making tons of them. Uh, it's just like, duh, like why, you know, Oshkosh, you know, needs to spin up a new design that looks like a freak show. Like you, you've seen the, the USPS Oshkosh thing. It's like got that low hood and the, the weird back and everything. Um,

I don't get it. I don't know why they won the bidding for this. I don't know why Ford didn't just say, hey, we build these already and they're standardized and you can get them off the shelf or whatever.

So I guess this is good. I think Oshkosh probably was just like, yeah, we can't do what we said we were going to do. Just go to Ford. And I think Oshkosh gets some of their drivetrains from Ford anyway. So I don't even know what Oshkosh is involved for anymore. Yeah. They were so highly to the car, the trucks, whatever anyone called them. Yeah.

All right, the new VW ID.3 was unveiled this week, a little bit updated design. Hard to get excited about it here because it's not coming to the North American market, but for a few European friends that are listening to the podcast,

uh you're lucky you get access to this car it's a pretty it's a good looking car i agree yeah a hot hatch too there's not a lot of that in the segments here in the us like basically that's why you're driving the bull tv it's right yeah it's as close as it gets but yeah a little bit sleeker drag coefficient c

The interior has gotten new materials, a lot of recycled materials. So I know the Volkswagen is pushing hard on that throughout the entire ID lineup. And I think the ID3, the new generation of the ID3 is kind of spearheading that whole program. Yeah, I mean, it looks like a good update to me. It's just not a massive update, but it's not like that car is like three years old at this point, three or four years old.

Yeah, it's solid. I would have loved to see, oh, yeah, we're going to try it out in limited numbers in the U.S. and see if everybody loves it. You know, that kind of thing. That would have been... You know the answer to that. Like, it's going to work. I think so. Well, maybe not so much now if they're, yeah, because of the tax credit. They wouldn't get the tax credit. Yeah, but VW, they sell, like, GTIs. Like, can you imagine having a...

I don't know. I would feel like a GTI would be just demolished by this thing in terms of like experience. Especially if you do a dual motor version of it and you actually make it like a hot, hot hatch. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, Rivian had their earnings this week and it's kind of a mixed result. A lot of people were disappointed in the guidance for 2023. They are guiding for 50,000 deliveries. So there was a story that came out today where they told employees that they can actually do 60, 62, something like that. But the official guidance is 50,000. And look,

A lot of people saw some improvements and whatnot. I have to say personally, I'm still focusing on the main thing, which is they need to achieve a positive gross margin. And there has been a small improvement on that. They basically went for like 2.9 times the cost to revenue of building a car to 2.5 times.

2.5 is still a lot. Like if they sell a car for $100,000, it cost them $250,000 to make it. That's just that's not sustainable. Now, I know everyone is like, all right, now they still have a lot of money in the bank. They still have a lot of room to achieve that. And that's true. I think they have like, but that's true. But the cash on end is going down fast. I think they are now at $12 billion.

Do we have that? Yeah, 12 billion. 12 billion on end, which is, it sounds like a lot, but it was like 18 billion just a few, just not that long ago because it goes down fast. Yeah, and generally you don't want to run out of money. Like you don't want to be at that point. They are making some progress though. And they did have 2024 as the time when they're going to break even and start theoretically making money on their vehicles.

Yeah, that's what they say though. But I'm trying to see a path to that and it is just hard right now to see that path. There was some encouraging front outside of the actual gross margin on the car where you look at research and development cost and selling in general administrative costs, like just the general operating expenses rather than the actual cost of building the products. Those have went down significantly. So they are losing a little bit less cash every quarter on that front.

But the product is really like the manufacturing is the hard thing when it comes to electric vehicles or any vehicles, really. But especially the vehicles, if you want to achieve it in volumes, there's just not that many companies out there that are producing electric vehicles in high volume. Rivian is one of them, relatively high volume, but they are losing so much money on it. And it's still the case. They brought in $663 million in revenue from selling, I think, 10,000 or so vehicles a quarter.

And it cost them 1.6 billion to build them. So 2.5 times what they're selling them for. Not good, a little bit better, but I just don't see how like within a year, can they really bring that to a positive gross margin? We would need to see like big jumps every quarter, like bigger than what we've seen from the last quarter. And the last quarter, there was a big jump in production we thought would help

And then in the next few quarters, the jump in production are not going to be super big if they aim to be producing 50,000 cars by the end of the year. That's 1,250, 500 a quarter. No, a little bit more than that. Yeah, a little bit more than that. But still, it's not a big jump from what they're already producing right now.

So, they're going to have to find improvements outside of economies of scale. So, it's not easy to do. Yeah, and they have two other problems to deal with. They have the Kia EV9 coming out soon. So, some of the people on their wait list might jump over to that. And then, of course, Volkswagen Scout brand is going to be coming in 2025. I'm sure they're going to start showing those off and getting people excited about that. So,

The time for Rivian to kind of get their, you know, their things in order is probably really soon. And, you know, this Max Pack is something that's kind of interesting as somebody who's waiting on a R1S that I'm kind of tempted to get the 390 mile thing, but you have to give up the four motor option to do so. And I wonder what the price, you know,

for the bigger range and the fewer motors is going to be. So there's some interesting things happening, but we really want to see that cost per vehicle to go way down. Yeah. They haven't announced the pricing on that new Max back? No. Yeah, I mean, especially if you're going to be towing things with it and whatnot, it can be useful. Yeah. Is it not backing on it?

Alright, speaking of the EV9, that's the last post for today. So after that, we're going to take your questions. If you guys have any questions, put them in the comment section right now. You can ask us about specific subjects that we discussed today or subjects about the EV world that you want us to get into. I think we already have a ton of questions today though, but maybe we have time to take a few more. So

you can put them in the conversation right now so yeah the ev6 there was this new teaser these uh that give us like a better look a little bit at the uh uh ev9 you're right sorry and you make that same mistake a bunch of times yeah silhouette so it's not you know a great look at the car but it looks like it's going to be a sharp looking vehicle like you're right that the rivian r1s has uh maybe something to worry about a little bit because it is uh

like kia has never been seen as the super like premium brand but um they're with their evs they're starting like the ev6 is i think it's a solid looking car and uh if they can replicate that in a large suv format i mean i think this looks like again not a great look but i think this looks better than i can escalate right now

I agree. And, you know, we kind of give Kia, when we saw the EV9 prototype, we're like, they're never going to make anything that looks like that. And it doesn't look exactly like the prototype, but there's definitely some like reality coming into here. But it still looks pretty impressive. It's not like, you know, how Nissan just kneecapped the design of the Aria. And now, you know, now it looks like a Leaf kind of.

They're not doing that. They're making it really quite stunning. Yeah, and if the EV6 is any indication, the actual production car was very solid too. All right, let's jump into the questions. Adam Wibley says, do you think Model 2, which is the lower priced Tesla, will not have autopilot? When do you think they will make a truly affordable vehicle with cloth seats, metal roof, not luxury, etc.? Cost estimate, you think?

I think all Tesla vehicles going forward is going to have a topolet or a version of self-driving, so I don't think that's likely. But yeah, everything else sounds about right. Model 2, likely, Claude C, maybe.

Yeah, metal roof. I don't know about metal roof just based on the manufacturing technique, though. That's like Tesla is starting to get a lot of advantages out of a glass roof just for the manufacturing aspect. So that I'm not sure. But yeah, just less luxury in general. I know that sounds like a lot of people when I say that and talk about Tesla interior and I see less luxury there. Like where are they going to take the luxury from? Because there's not that much.

Personally, I like it. I like the interior of this vehicle, but I understand the point. All right. James Careens says, comment, refreshed Model 3 might have 48-volt architecture, new drive system, replacement of wood dashboard strip, hardware for computer. And then maybe after release, they will add headlight camera. Yeah, we didn't talk too much about the 48-volt thing, but that's something pretty interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Tesla already indicated that was coming. We didn't know exactly when. And again, what's kind of like Model Y was supposed to have it for a while and then they sort of scaled that back because they didn't want to invest too much in a new platform. They kept it closer to Model 3. Now, whether the Model 3 is going to have it, the new version, I don't know. That's a possibility for sure. So that's what is not as exciting about the new vehicle platform because

They're probably going to introduce this when they can on a new production line. It's not going to be like, oh, this new model has this and be happy with it. That's the way Tesla is. They tried not to capitalize their sales too. If you would know tomorrow morning that the refreshed Model 3 is going to have 48 volts, you're probably just not going to buy a Model 3 for a while. Yeah.

All right. Spikes43, why the hate for Investor Day? They did launch a supercharger V4, new revenue stream of brand agnostic charging, new factory, et cetera. I don't think we specifically had a lot of hate for Investor Day, but we've been around for these kind of thing, long presentations. We know they're not as super exciting as car launches. What are your thoughts?

I mean, who's to blame? Like, is it like all the hype around it? Like maybe... I don't know. Elon made these original comments about it because he's like, oh, it's going to be mind-blowing. So I don't know if he'd said that this time. I don't remember him saying that, but he did hype it up, especially for the new vehicle platform. Like...

it's the thing is like a new vehicle platform is not something you can see it's not like super tangible like you remember when tesla unveiled like the dual motor i think you were there uh yeah and and there was the big robot that actually showed the vehicle platform with the dual motors like that that stuff gets people excited like now all the improvement on this thing where it's manufacturing logistics and all that so it's it's not as exciting um

Especially to the lay people, the people who aren't really thinking about production and cost. This was aimed at analysts and investors, not fans. But investors were not really necessarily happy because the stock did drop significantly after it. It came back up today, but the whole market is super up today. So I don't know how much you can put. It's not like it's just coming back or anything.

So, yeah, I think it's always like that, though, you know, buy the announcement, sell the news. So it's by the rumor, sell the news, whatever it is. Yeah. All right. Shifting gears a little bit. Vince asks, what are your thoughts on getting a used bolt versus new? Since new ones are hard to find without crazy markups, aren't the used ones almost as good since they have new batteries after the recall?

Um, yeah, I guess that's, that's true. Um, but the new ones are so inexpensive, like, you know, started at 25,000 and you get, you know, uh, for the rest of the month, you get 7,500 back. It's crazy. Like, you know, you get an $18,000, uh, really solid EV. Um, but they're, because of that, they're really hard to find. So, uh, if you can't find a new one, you know, a used one with a replaced battery is going to be pretty good too.

Anything to add there? I mean, if you can get your hands on one, go for it. Yeah, exactly. All right. Robert Gresham question. Is it me or did you sense some tension between Elon and Drew Baglino during the Investor Day presentation? Almost like Drew is trying to upstage Elon. Oh, my God. I won't get into these kind of gossips. No, thank you. No, thank you. Love the show. Shop. Shop. Thank you. Close enough.

Mark Webb, didn't Drew say that Tesla would implement bidirectional charging within two years and then Elon undercut that by saying he didn't think vehicle to home makes sense and gave a nonsensical reason?

Yeah, we kind of went into that. I don't think Drew was like, yeah, we're going to do it. And then Elon shut him down. I think it was more like, we're going to do it, like we explained, because it just makes sense to have the capacity in the car. And then Elon just didn't say, we're not going to do it. He just said, he has doubt about how useful it's going to be. And you know what? I think he's right in the sense of the grand scale of things. Like, if...

Percentage wise, once like a whole test of vehicles have bidirectional charging capacity, I would be very surprised as more than 10% use it. Like no joke. Yeah, it's probably true.

It might be better if they could add that into their grid stuff or something. Maybe if Tesla could use their energy prowess to kind of harvest that. All right, Mark Webb, it would also be useful if all calls supported a common wireless standard to avoid Rivians blocking two Tesla supercharger stalls. Yeah, I mean, you could also standardize the placement of the charging thing. I feel like that's something we could probably think about.

But just with the heights, I think, yeah, you can be super efficient with inductive charging, but you need to be very close if it's not an inch or two. So just with the height of the car, the pad where it's located, that's going to be so hard to do. Yeah, maybe the pad pops up or something. The pad pops up. I know the buses, what they do, a lot of places that have inductive charging for electric buses, the charging connector goes down.

and like they are the top they're on the roof of the of the of the buses instead of being at the bottom and they are like charging a bus stop and then it comes up and then it comes down on it so you have something similar from the bottom that could yeah also a little safer i guess on the top for those huge uh power outputs to the buses yeah all right here's something we didn't think of uh wireless takes care of the getting out of your car to unplug the cable at the charging station in a dark garage with a creepy dude approaching you issue

So I know, you know, you know, charge in the middle of the night. I've never had that happen. Yeah, I've never had that happen, but I could see how it could be a problem. You remember, it just reminds me, you remember that crazy video? It's been a while ago. I think it's right around when Sentry Mode started and you had this guy that was actually attacked

at a supercharged station and the whole thing was captured on sentry mode like the guy tried to eject i uh carjack him but he was high on something oh right like yeah it was weird it went terribly wrong and chased him away

All right. Rick Skinta, I disagree. I totally use the battery backup and so would 10% of other people. Yeah. Some people, it makes sense for them. I agree. Pay 23K after incentives for two Powerwalls for emergency or use my huge car battery to help out in the rare occurrence. It's power sales concerns. Powerwalls. Yeah. So that's the thing. So for you, it makes a ton of sense because you did buy the Powerwalls for backup power. But most people...

They don't do it for that. Like it's not the biggest market. Some people do it for sure. If you want to do a generator, it makes more sense to go with a power wall. The cost can be a bit different, but still. But I think most people buy it like to combine it with a solar system. All right. Sly says Elon doesn't believe in it, needs it because he's not connected to real life usage. I don't know. I think he's still right to a degree.

Elon's argument against vehicle-to-home was that if you had an outage, you couldn't drive your car without losing power to your house. Very illogical explanation point. If your car has no vehicle-to-home capability, then lose power regardless. Again, we're still on that, but Elon is looking at it from like he looks at the power wall. So basically, if you have bidirectional charging on your car, it's like you have a home battery pack. Everyone agrees on that.

a mobile home batch pack with a lot more capacity sure but it's still that and then you look at the Powerwall which is the most popular home batch back out there and you look at the use cases of like why people buy them and Elon looks at it it's like most people buy them for time of use a benefit combined with the solar system that's the primary use of it most people and again

I'm not arguing that there's no case for it. I'm one of them. I have power walls at home and I don't have a solar system. I use them for backup power. So I'm one of them. Like it would make sense for me. But I know it's not most people. That's it. But if you are one of those persons like me, then yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. More people chiming in. If power goes out, that means an ice storm or hurricane and I'm not leaving the house during that.

And when you do leave the house, you can just unplug, I guess. There's arguments for and against, but I think the option would be nice. All right, let's move on to some other stuff here. Free overnight charging and buy... Oh, we're still on bidirectional. Our opens at business opportunity... People are fascinating about that stuff. It's crazy. Charge a night and then pump up another bottle. I'm really curious to see how it's going to pick up because the hype around it is so huge.

Yeah, I just like it as knowing I can power my house from it. Or, you know, just not even your house, just like the refrigerator and some lights and some internet. Yeah. Let's see. Mark's, I think people would be willing to pay a one-time fee to enable vehicle to home.

If we don't believe in the FSD fever dream, so we know where this guy stands already, doesn't the higher utilization of car batteries via backup peak shaving make perfect economic sense? Oh, wait a minute. I need to read that question one more time. I don't think one has to do with the other, but here's a little explanation. You have a high cycle life, million mile battery or LFP, then you actually want to use those cycles over a shorter life to accelerate the usage payback of the battery.

So he's saying that because, so forget about the fever dream. He's saying that with the new batteries that can go a million miles, you actually want to use the cycles and get money back from them. Okay. Yeah. No, no, it makes sense. I mean, it's a quicker return on investment. So you need to have a use case for it. Yeah.

But so, yeah, I mean, FSD would provide a faster use case. So I don't know where he was going with that. Like he says, he says basically the million miles battery is going to be useless because FSD is not going to happen. Is that? I guess. No, I get it. I understand where he's going with this. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, moving on. MJ42 Kramer. Those are not as ugly as the USPS EV mail trucks. We're talking about the Ford E-Transit. Were those not real? You know what? I wasn't sure they were real either, but at CES they had one there. And I got in it, and it's real. And actually, utility-wise, it makes sense. But it's ugly as heck.

Like there was clearly nobody designing that thing. Yeah, that front end is just monstrous. It looks like the thing that like Homer Simpson built. All right. Let's see. Is Tesla able to shift demand from Model 3 to Model Y? How good is looking at delivery times as a way to evaluate demand for different models? Yeah, so they raised the price of Model 3 quicker than they've done Model Y. So I don't know if that...

I don't know what that means. No, Model Y prices, since the big drop in January, Model Y prices kept going up and Model 3 prices kept going down. Oh, okay. So, our good is looking at delivery times. It is pretty good. Um,

as long as you take it outside of the delivery cycles that goes out throughout the quarter in each market. If you just look at an acceleration of a deceleration of that, that's where it's useful.

are easily able to shift them in from all three model why i think that's happening i think i i think demand is not higher for mobile wide ml3 in most places and globally obviously in the us it's a little bit different because we still don't have good access to a cheaper model why there's a standard range like the structural battery pack out of out of texas that you can buy on inventory

But once Tesla actually pulls the trigger on a standard range Model Y, be able to order in the U.S., I think it's going to be the best seller by far. All right. Sly, another small car that is not coming over here to North America is the Honda e. A little bit less excited about that one. Yeah, and I guess you can kind of get the Mini. Yeah, exactly. The Mini is a good compromise. Yeah.

Here's a good question. Do you have new hair glasses? I wonder if he's talking to you or me though. I have. It's not new glasses, but I lost, during my trip, I lost my usual ones. Oh, okay. So I'm using different glasses right now. New hair, yeah. I mean, I've been in Mexico for three weeks and I haven't shaved, I haven't cut my hair, I haven't shaved anything. I'm just trying to become Tarzan around here in the jungle. Nice.

All right. Getting toward the end here. When do you think the first production car will roll off the assembly line in Giga Mexico? What do you think the planned annual output would be? I think we saw something today where they were going to try to beat the Shanghai record of what, nine months or six months or whatever. Yeah. Nine months from breaking ground. I don't know when they're going to break ground. I would assume relatively soon. So yeah, I mean, there's a real possibility that would be like by the end of the year, early next year.

And then the plan output, as you said, a million vehicle, which makes sense because of the new production process is dense. You don't need as much volume, space floor, and all that kind of thing like that.

here's an interesting uh point of view from our own mikey g uh it's who's got a great podcast you guys should listen to it uh it seems to me that uh one purpose of the investor day was to downplay elon musk importance at tesla it looked overt that tesla inc wanted to reign in musk and showcase the rest of the talented team you know i didn't get that initially but like now that i think about it it was pretty like it was

It was like, hey, there's quite a few people here running the show. It's not just Elon. I mean, they have done that another day, like whatever they want to call them, like the AI day, battery day. They had showcased other executive. But yeah, I would agree that this one was like a little bit more extensive. Like Elon basically didn't do much other than a little bit at the beginning and a little bit at the end. So yeah, I can see that.

John will says, did you see this data charge YouTube channel charging the lightning on the supercharger? The cable. So yeah, it's literally too short to charge the F one 50 without breaking the cable or the stall. I see that we're, we're fans of Tom. What are you going to do? You can still park. You have to just park into like, basically you take three stall. Right. Or park on the end. And theoretically most of the chargers have one of those like side chargers. You could use one of those. I don't know.

Maybe they'll make a CCS extender cable or something. I wouldn't actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Ford did something like that. All right. We're getting toward the end. Oh, actually we're not. There's a lot more. There's a lot of questions. All right. Two more, two more.

Tesla will leave the original model's S and X out of some of the tech improvements mentioned, such as 48-volt battery, 4680 battery, structural battery pack. Yeah, I mean, Elon basically confirmed that during the presentation. He was very adamant that bringing those significant changes, improvements, you need to shut down the production lines. They just don't want to do that.

Here's an interesting question. Today, Fisker had a ship of some oceans arrive. Heard EPA may be 360 miles. Any change of thoughts? Good for them, Magna? I'm not a big fan of Fisker. Not a lot of hope.

for them surviving this landscape right now, but we'll see. But Magna's building them, and we know Magna can build them, so... Yeah, can they build them profitably? We'll see. Yeah, who's going to fix them and all that. James Corrine's question, when are they going to introduce new paint colors at Giga Texas? Well, we did see that they had new colors there, so...

not too far yeah i had a few sources on that like they were like super excited at tesla like we have a quicksilver and um and uh cherry red is the other one uh at the event and everything like everyone was asking them like hey is does that mean that you're bringing them to north america it's like no this is this is for investor day this is for investor they keep saying that so like where's you for some new colors all right paul long ranger uh

Question, are Tesla chargers going to be limited to cars that can fast charge or are going to be waiting an hour and a half for the bolts to charge? Well, clearly, we showed that the bolt was working. So they're not limiting it. No. Well, again, I have the suspicion that they're only releasing these magic docks at...

that are not that popular. If someone can challenge me on that, do it. I'm not as familiar with the two stations in California where they also open. Maybe those are more popular. I don't know. Yeah, the one in Brewster is like ghost town. Dead, yeah. Yeah. Let's see. We're pretty close to the end here. Rick Sinta, I agree with Mikey G for sure. It felt like Elon asked Drew to speak more. Stu question, when are your thoughts on the rate of lithium mining growth compared to the rate of EV growth?

Yeah, well, mining is one thing and the processing of the ore is another. So it's good business. It's a good business to get into because we do need a lot more of it right now. The rate, though, seems to be catching up to EV growth. That doesn't mean that it's going to stay the same going forward, but I'm optimistic about it.

And just like Elon said during the call too, nickel is a bigger concern right now for myself and most people, I think. Yeah. All right. Kind of a long-winded here. The main obstacle to VehicleDax is actual charger availability. Excited for Enphase's solution, which is a solar inverter company, which will hopefully be affordable and integrate easily well with their solar offerings.

Can't wait till vehicle to X combines with inducted charging and a virtual power plant. What a dream. Just pull into your normal spot and auto auto bidding starts wirelessly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, Enphase and SolarEdge and all these power electronics manufacturer related solar that makes the most sense for them to get involved in that process. Yeah.

All right, Rick Sintes, just off the call with Fisker, and they are guiding for profit for year one. So we'll see. We'll see. I wish them the best of luck, honestly. All right, question. Any thoughts? This is the last one on Rivian's quarter results. Vikas, go back into the podcast a little bit. We talked about it quite extensively.

Yeah. Thank you everyone for listening to the show this week. A lot of questions. We appreciate your question. We went a little bit long, but it was worth it, guys. Thanks a lot for listening. If you are listening right now, still to the show, we appreciate you. If you can give us a thumbs up on whatever app you're listening to right now and subscribe, that would be...

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