Tesla NACS wins, Model 3 full $7,500 tax credit, Volvo EX30, more
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Hey, everyone. We're going live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchell. Doing good today, Seth? Yep. All right. A ton of news to discuss. And we're going to start with the obvious one, with the North American charging standard being as close as it gets to cigar. Like, a nice victory. Like, it's maybe not 100%, but the domino effect is in place.

And now it's just to see where it all falls, but it looks like it's going to fall in favor of Tesla's NAX standard. So what was the big thing that changed? Well, I mean, credit to Ford. We're going to focus on GM obviously today, but Ford got things started. But as we reported two weeks ago when Ford got on board,

We felt like Tesla needed just one more big automaker to get on board in order for things to really get going. Because you can, like CCS can still survive and even try with everything other than Tesla and Ford.

And to be fair, Tesla had a good argument before Ford even because they had more EVs out there than anybody else. Yeah, and over half the market. Over half the market. So the NAX was already the dominant standard as soon as it became an open standard and not just Tesla's actual plug. But now Ford got on board. So that's starting to look good. And just less than two weeks later, the big announcement is that GM... So exact same thing as with Ford. It was with the...

Sorry, I'm just going to start this way. The CEO jumped on Twitter Spaces and had a very awkward conversation with Elon. It wasn't awkward. No, it wasn't awkward. It was awkward just knowing the backstory and how Elon's made fun of her and

Yeah, I mean, the whole, like, you did it, Maribara, and Elon, like, fighting back against that, which, I mean, to be fair, I think that was Elon. I don't know if it's, like, it's not really CEO-like to fight back about these things, but person to person, I think it's fair. Like, if I was in Elon's shoes, I don't know if I would have let that one slide, to be honest. Yeah.

That's true. Although he could have probably been a little bit more diplomatic about it. You can say that about most of his comments. Right. But to his credit, he was very mature on the call. And it wasn't uncomfortable that he said anything or did anything. It was just uncomfortable that the past had been...

But I thought it was a good call because it was actually really a matter of fact. They didn't drag it too long. It was like, yo, GM is getting on board with the NACs. And the announcement was essentially the copy-pasted from the Ford announcement, which is new EVs from GM starting in 2025 will get the NACs plug as standard.

And then the next year in 2024, Tesla will make CCS 2 NACS adapter available for GM owners, just like they will do for Ford in order for the existing ones to take advantage of Tesla supercharger network. So that's the goal of Ford. GM basically said the same thing as Ford, is like Tesla's CCS.

design is more efficient it's charging network is more reliable uh so it's it's the better approach but what gets a little bit more interesting now with the gm announcement is that in the call both maribara and elon both said basically declared nax now as the unified charging standard for north america like they literally said that in in the call even though it's it

arguably a little bit premature, but at the same time, we felt like this was the thing that was just going to get the domino effect going. And sure enough, last night, just a few hours after the GM announcement, Flow, one of the biggest charging station manufacturers in North America, they announced that they will now support NACS too. So Flow is not like EVgo doesn't operate its own network or anything like that.

But they send the manufacturer stations for their network and they operate the network for other owners. So you need to buy the stations from them. So now they will offer to those customers if you want to deploy a charging network where you can deploy it with NACs, which if you are someone who buys stations from Flow, you should take them up on that offer because that's probably the better approach.

And then ABB also announced the same thing. This image is a pretty good one like this. If you don't see why we're really hyped up about this, this image should tell you.

So, yeah. That's real size, right? That's not. Yeah, yeah. Those are real size difference. So, ABB, Flow, FreeWire, all announced. EVgo was already on board. They were including both NACs and, well, actually, they were doing it before it was NACs. It was still not open. And Tesla's connector was through a partnership with Tesla. So, this is really good momentum. Yeah.

And now I would assume so. I would assume that we're going to see more automakers that sells electric vehicles for the North American market announcing soon similar deals. We're seeing more charging station operator right now because it's a bit more urgent for them since their business is providing charge for EVs.

in North America. And now if the three biggest EVO2 makers in North America are producing their vehicle or announcing that they will produce their vehicle with NACs, they kind of have to support that. Otherwise, they will cut themselves out of the majority of the market. Yeah, and it's not too far off. I mean, 2025 is a year and a half. And they're going to all, like everybody's going to have, or Ford and GM are all going to have adapters. So if you have a NACs plug, then you're going to,

be able to use it on other vehicles, even vehicles that are already on the roads. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, one thing that was interesting today, have you been following the stocks of the charging station operators? Uh, I have not. What's going on? Yeah. Double digit down today. I bet. Which if you go, it's weird one, because if you go already, it was planning like 600 station with max. Um,

which has yet to announce jumping on board next, which, but I don't, I don't even know why they're going down like that because like, I mean, it did, it does devalue their existing station and their existing production a little bit for sure. But for the most part, it's just, it's, it's a good thing that the market is going to be unified now because it was clear that Tesla was not going to give up its plug. Now, um, it was maybe going with the adapter, uh, strategy. Now, uh,

It looks like the standard as one, but I think that's a good thing overall. It's going to make the market a little bit messy for the next year or two, uh, until, until the, all these programs are put in place in the production. Um, but after that, it's going to be a lot cleaner, a lot more simple for the buyers for the industry in general. And, um,

And it's going to come in time for the huge volume of electric vehicle. Like we've been seeing an electric for years past 2025. We don't see a lot of people being willing to buy new cars that are not electric. So yeah,

This is good timing. As soon as like unified standard happened to like a lot more confidence for buyers, I think at the same time, this is just a big win, I think overall. Yeah. And I think possibly the reason that the stocks are going down of the, the other charging companies is that now they have to,

compete with Tesla head on, you know, head to head. Oh yeah, that's fair. I mean, you know, they're messy, like, well, Wallbox less so because Wallbox doesn't have its own network. Like I think the biggest one that if it had a public stock would be Electric Fire America. If Electric Fire America right now was on the public market, I would understand.

But Wallbox, I don't get it for that, though. Yeah, that makes sense. But, I mean, overall, like either EVgo, Electrify America, you know, Shell, that's another one. Shell should announce something. They're going to have to compete with Tesla head-to-head. Like they're going to, you know, the cost, the quality of their network, and, you know, frankly, that means they have to do either a lot of catching up or they're going to have to, like,

fine-tune their operations in a big way. So, you know, I kind of understand some skepticism in the market for those companies because it's going to be rough. Yeah, that's a good point. Also, probably like retrofitting costs are thinking to account too. That's going to be a big investment for those companies because there's a lot of stations like Electric Fire America stations, ChargePoint,

uh, if you go that are like right next to a Tesla supercharger right now. Right. So those are like, yeah, you're going to have to update those to next. Like otherwise it's just, you're going to go to next. It's just the CCS. Right. But,

Anyway, the only thing that happened so far that shows to us that it's not like a complete victory yet, but at the same time, we're talking about the government here, and the government is always a little bit behind everyone, is the White House just issued a comment that throws some cold water, just a little bit raining on Tesla's parade a little bit today, where a White House official, Robin Patterson, said,

Earlier this year, we developed a minimum standard to ensure publicly funded EV charging is accessible, reliable, and affordable for all drivers. We required interoperability to promote competition.

Those standards give flexibility for adding both CCS and NAX as long as drivers can count on minimum of CCS. So you see like that, that just sounds like a dumb comment to me because like, okay, what about a minimum of NAX instead? Like what a CCS station needs to also include NAX? What about that? Because

So I understand if there was like a concern that you don't want to leave behind CCS EV owners, especially existing one that made an early investment into EV adoption. Like we love those, but they're not really being left behind because their experience will never be worse than it is right now.

especially with adapters. Like we know that Tesla is preparing an adapter for CCS to NACs. So those people are going to have access to that. So they're going to have access to the Tesla supercharger network. You have access to other networks that are now adapting NACs. So I just, I don't see why a station that only has NACs should be penalized. Really? Yeah.

It doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, and I wonder if there's an easy way to get around it, if they have like, you know, just have an adapter at the...

Yeah, on one connector. There's dual connectors now. Right. One station has a dual connector. But yeah, you're right about the government being slow. And I'm sure Charin has a bunch of lobbyists yelling at... Yeah, I was thinking that too. Yeah, because Charin hasn't responded just yet, but we kind of made fun of their response last week and did an article on it. Did pretty good too. Kind of made fun of that. But yeah, for the most part,

So the idea behind this comment is that this is their requirement to get access to the federal funding, to the $7.5 billion of federal funds that are part of the infrastructure bill, and that allocation is for...

EV charging infrastructure. But the previous requirement was simply that you can charge a car, you can charge an electric car from more than one automakers at a charging station. So Tesla's solution to that with the CCS adapter and the MagicDock, which would comply with that, I would assume. But now that other automakers are also adopting NACs, that also takes care of that without having to deploy the MagicDock.

Now, it looks like they might force Tesla to do a few stations with Magic Docks per new station. But I don't think that's changed a big deal because, anyway, the new money is for new charging stations. So there was going to be a solution for a new charging station either way. So this is how it's going to happen for now, unless the government just catches up to the reality that the NACS is just way better. It would be typical of a government to...

not back down and say, hey, we agree to CCS and everybody's got to have CCS even though nobody's going to be using it. Yeah. I mean, would the $7.5 billion make the difference? I think Tesla would just literally say, screw you, we make that in a quarter now. So let's just move on. There would be some complaining on Twitter, I'm sure. Yeah. Anyway, big round of applause.

Foreign acts, which we're going to declare it right now. They won. It's a new standard in North America. Congrats. And keep in mind, this is the hardware, right? So it's still using the CCS protocol to communicate with most vehicles. There's still got to figure it. We got to figure out how to do a bidirectional charging over Tesla's thing. Otherwise, CCS is still going to be around for Ford vehicles.

and there are you know other vehicles that uh want to go backwards uh the hyundai ioniq uh egmp cars have those uh bi-directional things so not all questions are answered yet but for sure nax is the future well you know what i think will happen i think max and like tryon will merge with nax will adopt

NACs as the connector and the CCS will be the protocol behind the connector. Because Trion, they are barking right now, but they have no bite. All their members are switching over and Trion is an association that represents their members. And now Tesla is a member too. Ford is a member. GM is a member. I guess the only problem with Trion is it's a global organization and

This is really going to be for North America. But at the same time, they could like split up with North America and Europe because interportability between North America and Europe is not...

major necessity for electric vehicles. Right, we've had different plugs for a long time. I mean, they don't even have the same plugs in England and France. Yeah. You know, we were talking about like, well, why, like this makes a lot of sense, but why did it happen now? Like, why didn't this happen like five, 10 years ago?

And one of the hypotheses we came up with is that Tesla behind the scenes has been a member of Charon for a long time. They've probably been pushing Charon like, hey, this is better in every way, hardware wise, than your standard. Why don't we do this? And, you know, Charon's got like committees and committees of committees. So, you know, they probably couldn't get it through. So maybe at some point Tesla was like, and, you know, maybe this is when they went direct to manufacturers and said, hey, look,

what do we need to do to get you guys to come over to NACS or, you know, come over to a standard? And, you know, maybe Ford said, hey, look, we'd love to be able to charge on your network. You have to give us an open standard. It's got to be something that, you know, nobody controls or, you know, it's controlled by many. So I think I think.

There's probably some stuff going on behind the scenes. I'm sure there'll be a movie about it at some point. Everything you just said made a ton of sense. I'm sure it's a close version of that that just happened. It also worked with the magic duck deployment, like starting and then stopping.

So it could make sense that Tesla was like not making enough progress with the automakers on that front and then started deploying MagicDock. And then the other automakers were like starting to like do their progress with Ford, progress with GM. Or I would assume that GM just been like they just been there right after Ford got on board, like it's domino effect. But then Tesla was like, all right, that's why they stopped. Like they deployed like seven or 10 automakers.

magic dock station and then stop out of nowhere so even though they deployed like literally hundreds of station stands so it makes sense that that's that's what happens and what happened one more thing uh we gotta give props to app terra because they were the first they were the ones who came out and said we got to do this uh tesla connector like uh we're willing to do it and i feel like at that point tesla was like all right we're gonna do ccs or whatever

And when AppTarot came out, I don't know what Tesla was thinking behind the scenes. Probably not that. But the poll, what do you call it when you gather signatures? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. We were blinking on the petition. The petition. Well, the petition was...

Somewhat significant, like 40,000 people, I think, signed that thing. 40,000 people signing a petition for a charging standard for electric vehicle. That's a lot. So, yeah, I think Altera deserves some credit in there. I don't think that them saying that they want to adopt Tesla standard...

as a big impact because personally they are not even in production and they're still far from production and even when they go to production they won't be a big part of the market but i think the petition and the the fact that they highlighted quite strongly the benefits of nax versus ccs i think that helped a lot so yeah it was definitely some credit to that terror all right this is something that happened right after last podcast actually we didn't have time to talk about it but

This came as a surprise that is still hard to fully explain, to be honest. But Tesla announced that not all Model 3 vehicles have access to the full federal tax credit of $7,500. Previously, it was only half of that, mainly for the base Model 3 and the long-range Model 3. And the reason for that is that we believe the batteries were coming from China.

explaining the limitation on the eligibility for full access to the tax credit. Now, the specs of either car did not change, which would point toward the battery still being the same, we would think, like a speculation at this point. But now Tesla announced they do have access to the full tax credit. And same goes for... Oh, where was I going with that? Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, sorry. Okay.

My other suspicion was like, okay, this might be a new Highland refresh Model 3 situation where Tesla is now – this new Model 3 has a battery that's made in North America, a battery cell made by –

with the resources for the batteries coming from places that have a free trade agreement with the US. So the eligibility would be to the full tax credit. So that makes sense. And now Tesla would be, as we've been reporting the last few weeks, Tesla has been liquidating its new inventory model three. So-

But if that's the case, then it's only the new orders on the Model 3 that would be full tax credit and the new inventory will not. But that's not the case. They're both full tax credit. So even that doesn't explain it. So no one has a full answer. And if you guys are listening right now, some theories would love to hear them because it's kind of a mystery at this point. How does that happen? But after Tesla announced it late last Friday, Tesla,

And earlier this week, the IRS website was updated or confirmed it. So it's not like a mistake on Tesla's part and then like that. It's official. Just not sure how. We won't complain about it. It's more people buying EVs because it makes the Model 3 right now super cheap. So if you're on the market for a car right now, you have an interesting decision to make with the Model 3 because it's one of the cheapest vehicles to buy. Pretty good vehicle. Very good vehicle.

But you also have in mind that the new refreshed version of it is likely coming very soon, like maybe as soon as next month, I think. But just how big of an upgrade that's going to be, a lot of people believe that it might be also a downgrade to some degree, just making it, or maybe mostly under the hood things, it's stripping some features like this has been known to do at times. We don't know. But I would also keep in mind that

Most likely, there's going to be hardware for on it. There's going to be some things that are going to improve also. So it's a decision you have to make. Are you happy with this car at this new lowest price ever, especially with the federal tax credit? Because you can stack up that in California, the 2000 incentive to New York as incentives. I had like a dozen states that have incentives that you can stack up on top of it. And the car in some places can come down to...

$30,000 before gas savings with gas savings. This is a, like a $25,000 car in most places in the U S right now. Yeah. If it wasn't for the bolt and you know, the leaf, it would probably be one of the cheapest non-compliance EVs out there. Yeah. It's a great, it's a great car too. It's not like anywhere near a compliance vehicle. Absolutely not. And, um,

Do you think you were talking about like how Tesla did this? Do you think there's some sort of like final assembly going on in the US of Tesla China batteries? Because it doesn't make sense that because the chemist or the materials also have to come from

uh north america which i don't well countries that have free trade agreements so that's a little bit wider than north america but the battery cells must be made here or north america i mean uh so that might be a solution but i feel like we would have heard about that because it's so many cells so many batteries it's uh it's a lot so it's a bit of a mystery still

Maybe there's some agreements with the government that they achieved that let them do that just for... Because it will accelerate EV adoption. Model 3s are selling fire right now. It's a fire sale, basically, on the Model 3. Yeah, and to Tesla's credit, they kept the price down. They didn't hop it up when the

rebate happened no on the contrary right now the new inventory so there's still a discrepancy between new inventory and new orders so that i think has to do with the new refresh version coming obviously so there's a chance right now that if you place a new order you might like get actually uh a new uh refresh model 3 if you don't get delivery by the end of the month

But if you want the cheapest car possible right now, you have to go through new inventory. And those are pretty cheap. You have like up to $3,000 discount on top of the federal tax credit. So that's already like a $30,000 car. And then before local incentive, super cheap. All right. We had this little exclusive this week about the Cybertruck.

So we had some checks to the supply chains and some communication between Tesla and suppliers gave us a better idea of the volume planned by Tesla and a timeline for production. So this, I would argue, honestly, this being the best timeline there is out there right now, is this one that we published on Electric this week, because obviously the official one from Elon Musk has been released

end of Q3 for some kind of delivery event. And if we base the delivery event on Tesla's most recent launch, like the Model Y, it's going to be just a few deliveries to Tesla employees. So that's what makes sense. So it doesn't give us like a great look at the startup production and everything because it's just handing a few cars to customers.

But obviously the car gets approved by regulators, so that's a good thing. But other than that, it doesn't give us an idea of how production is going. Now, Project Everest, which is what Tesla calls Cybertruck internally and with suppliers. Oh yeah, also the official...

Timeline and plan production. Elon said about 250,000 units last month during the shareholder meeting. And then after that, he said 250, but maybe 250 to 500,000, he said. So we also got an idea on that. The told suppliers that it is aiming for a volume. It wants suppliers to prepare for a volume of 375,000 Cybertrucks per year.

But that is assuming that the suppliers production line are operating at 85% efficiency. So it's going to be a little bit lower than that. But also I would note that that number that Tesla has been giving suppliers has been going up and down throughout the last year. Like just earlier this year, it was 280,000 units, I think. So it went up by almost 100,000 units in just a few months. So Tesla wants suppliers to be ready for quite significant volume, like 100%.

higher than he done has said publicly. Well, he did say also 250 to 500,000, but at first he was more talking about 250,000. So it looks like he's playing things down a bit. In terms of the timeline to production, so again, he's talking about a delivery event around end of September. We learned that Tesla is planning to have release candidates for the Cybertruck at the end of August.

So release candidate is like, is built on the production line. And it's the last step that before the actual start of production and the, those release candidate are then last step to be vehicle tested for a start of production. And that start of production is planned for early October. So actually after Tesla supposedly plan delivery event, but that would make sense if the Tesla just delivers an end full of cars to customers and

to employees, I mean, or sometimes not even employees, but like people that are somewhat internal to Tesla, like board members and whatnot. I don't know if Tesla still does this thing where you remember Elon said that he has a policy that the first person to give him a check for the, for a new car at Tesla gets the first car.

Remember when Elon said that? He did say that, but I feel like board members have always gotten the first car. Yeah, because they're the first one to say it. Because Elon makes a presentation to the board. He's like, oh, we're planning to do the next truck is going to be called a Cybertruck. And then they all reach out for their checkbook. And like, this is like the first one to give a check. We get the first truck. I remember you said that about the Model S. And I think it was Steve Jurvetson that got it. Right. Yeah. Who was a board member at the time.

He's no longer a board member? Steve, no. You remember with the scandal about him loving sex parties? Well, actually, I don't know what I'm talking about. From what I'm hearing, it's a lot less than that. It was just like he ended up to a party that had a sex party after or something like that. Yeah, there was a book. Bloomberg, somebody had a book where allegations were made. Yeah.

Well, I don't think it was not like sexual harassment or anything like that. But still, like nowadays, you don't know what gets you canceled. All right. Moving on. Model 3 Refresh was spotted this week. Like prototypes with camouflage. Nothing huge out of this, but they kind of disappeared for a while. And now they're coming back. Two of them were spotted this week.

Is it an indication that the launch is closer potentially? So I thought it was worth noting for that. And this sighting comes from the kilowatts on Twitter, and it did show that they have the new hardware for cameras on it, which, I mean, we already assumed that the refreshed Model 3 would be the introduction of hardware 4.0 to the Model 3 since it is now on all of their Tesla vehicles. I think last week we reported the first Model Ys.

or being delivered with the R3. Nurburgring record for an EV production vehicle is back in Tesla's hands thanks to the Model S Plaid with the new track package, so the new wheels, tires, and brakes.

Apparently, you can say it's a production car if the manufacturers offer that package. But I mean, you can argue whatever you want. But anyway, Tesla just beat Porsche's record with the Taycan Turbo S that also had its own very limited track package on it. So I think it's fair game at this point if they are both using this track package, even though they're calling it an EV production record.

And to Tesla's credit, they beat the record by a significant margin. So they achieved the time on the famous Nürburgring racetrack of 7 minutes, 25 seconds. And I think the last Tesla's record was 7.35, but Porsche's record, I think, was 7.33. They beat it by eight seconds. So yes, congrats to the team. You can watch the whole video. Yeah, by more than eight seconds, they beat it.

So maybe that doesn't sound like much, eight seconds, but on a racetrack that is tested at this degree, it's significant. I don't know if it's in our show notes, but Porsche, within days of this getting beat, released their new EV, like crazy. It's supposed to be like their 959. It's supposed to be very limited edition, very...

low numbers but they want it to be like the all-time champion of Nurburgring and it's they don't just want to one-up Tesla they want to be the fastest car period period ever at Nurburgring gas or electric so that should be interesting yeah but right now it sounds like it's just going to be a one-off though you're not confirming production of it right but you know

I think they wanted to kind of say, hey, we're not out of this thing yet. Yeah, but it's not going to be an EV production record. They just want to stay in the new cycles. They can make a few of them. I mean, I don't know.

All right. We have a few more news items to discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comments section. I know there's a lot of discussions already in the comments because of NACS and understanding you guys are excited about it. If you guys have any specific questions, if you put question in all caps before your question, that will help us navigate through the comments after the show when we answer your questions.

And if you have any other subject you want us to discuss, you can put that in the comment section right now. We'll get to it too in just 15, 20 minutes from now. If you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, I would appreciate if you give us a like right now. It takes a second to do. Click the like button. You click the subscribe, the notification button. All those things will keep you updated with everything we post on Electric.

If you're listening to this podcast on the Apple Podcasts app, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast, if you can give us a five-star rating, only if you enjoy the show, obviously, that also is free to do. It takes a second, and it helps the show way more than you think. And we appreciate every single one of you that does it. And we read every single one of the reviews, too. So thank you for that. Let's get right back in. Panasonic announced a fifth...

production, battery cell production line to be deployed at Tesla Gigafactory Nevada. So this is, well, not a big deal, but it's a 10% increase in production capacity for the 2170 battery cells that Panasonic produced for Tesla there. Not huge, but I thought it was still interesting because it shows that Panasonic is still growing and quite on board with Tesla Gigafactory Nevada, despite sort of a weird situation of Tesla taking

taking over the factory. It's supposed to be a partnership between Tesla and Panasonic, but where Panasonic produces the cells there and Tesla produces the packs and other things, drivetrains and whatnot. But since the announcement earlier this year that Tesla is actually going to produce its own 4680 cells there and the Tesla Semi, it looks like it's going to be more of a Tesla factory rather than a Panasonic factory. But Panasonic is still growing there too. So

Good news for that. And Tesla has always been quite clear to its battery manufacturing partners that they're going to buy all the batteries they can get. I think they're staying through to that. All right, Seth, you're just coming back from a nice little trip to where was that? It was in Milan, Italy. In Italy, right. To check out the EX30 from Volvo. And this is an interesting vehicle, right? Oh, for sure.

So I thought it was kind of a drive event. I've been a big fan of the X90. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is going to be great. I'm going to Milan. We're going to go to the Dolomites. We're going to race around in this little micro EV. And it turns out I didn't look at any of the itinerary stuff. That doesn't sound like you at all. Well, you know, they had me at Milan. So...

Anyway, I got there and I kind of had a M. Night Shyamalan moment and I was like, wait, there's no drive here. It's just like the launch event. But it turned out to be a really interesting launch event because the specs, which we had a little bit ahead of time on a press release, kind of blew us away. You know, the

The price of this thing in the U S is going to be $35,000 starting, but that's with a, a solid size battery, a 69 kilowatt hours, 64 usable, which will net it with rear wheel drive about 275 miles. So this is kind of a bolt. It's somewhere between the bolt and the bolt bolt EV and the EUV size. And it's,

So the battery also bolt sized and gets bolt kind of range. No surprises there. But something we've always been talking about is like, well, what if GM started doing stuff to the bolt and actually working on it? What would happen? Well, what happens is if you add a 150 horsepower motor to the front, not a not a huge motor, not a fast motor.

you get a car in this size that goes zero to 60 in 3.4 seconds. So that becomes faster than a lot of Ferraris and Porsches out there. You know, not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them. And,

you know, it's funny. Uh, I haven't posted this yet, but we had, you know, interview times with some executives and, uh, the COO or chief sales officer or something, uh, was like, yeah, we at Volvo don't care about speed. We don't care about acceleration. This was, this was an accident. Like we didn't mean for this to happen. The fact that it goes as fast, we're not even sure we're okay with it. And, uh, you know, you talk to the engineers and they have a, you know, a little bit more optimistic, like, Oh, isn't this great? Like, uh,

uh that's that's one of them right there uh that's the project engineer uh we had a good conversation um so uh you know it also has specs otherwise that are really good um you know it goes uh 10 to 80 charge in 26.5 minutes uh tops out at 153 kilowatts for charging so unlike the bolt it charges uh as fast as you could probably expect

with a battery size that small. And possibly most importantly, it really looks good. I think if you're a Volvo fan, this is a very modern take on the Volvo. The interior is very Spartan. I would definitely say there's some Tesla nods. They have the one single screen in the middle, nothing in front, no heads-up display, which I think a lot of people

would probably appreciate. Um, but just a quick note, Tesla poach Volvo's head of interior and then Volvo poaching back from Tesla. After we went back to Volvo in the last few years. So that makes sense. If you see some last, a lot of cross pollinization there, uh,

But, you know, I think it's definitely its own thing. There's not like, you know, it's not like a Chinese copy that you would kind of be like, well, you know, they stole everything. This is their own take on minimalism. They also spent a lot of time talking about how, you know, the materials they use are all, you know, mostly recycled. And the carbon footprint of this car is the lowest they've ever had. And they can't speak for anyone.

other companies, but it might be the lowest ever. There's a lot of thoughtful stuff. We're looking on the video now of the center console where it's got a slide-out cup holder. It's got a slide-out phone thing. A lot of chargers, a lot of space, just really thoughtfully designed. They moved the speakers out of the doors and they have like a soundbar in the front.

So you get the same kind of really good sound, but with less complexity. And that, I mean, that's the, the, the overriding theme here is like they, they really spent a lot of time on making this a simple vehicle and

Um, but you know, in terms of like kind of bad news is this thing is a Chinese car. This is not, there's no part of this car that's made anywhere but China. Um, and so that, you know, for people in the U S that means it's going to be hard, uh, to get, uh, the, the, the federal tax credit back. You can get it through a lease, but

you know that's sometimes complicated and the lease takers will sometimes absorb some of that cost uh we're also looking at um they had a uh what's called a cross country version uh which kind of looks like a subaru a little bit uh the tires are a little bit bigger and rougher and it's got plastic in the front and back and a really cool roof rack with an extra tire um

I don't think it's going to be a super off road. Uh, this is a $35,000 car, but, um, you know, it looks cool. Uh, it'll probably do well on dirt and, uh,

you know, it'll be fine. Uh, but yeah, back to the China thing, uh, conversations with the, uh, chief sales officer. Uh, he mentioned something about how they make a lot of vehicles in South Carolina. Uh, you know, they haven't decided if they're going to try to bring this thing over to South Carolina. Um, my recommendation would be think about it a little bit, but, um,

They said for every vehicle they export, they can import one and not have to pay the 27% import tariff. So they're thinking that they can probably not have to pay the import on some of those. So it's an interesting situation. If they build one in the US, do they export? Yeah. So he was saying something about, and I have to obviously do some more research on this, but if they export one from...

South Carolina that gives them license to bring one in from China. Uh, I don't think it allowed like export from Carolina to like Canada or does it? Yeah. Yeah. And I think they do plenty of that in Mexico and the Caribbean and probably Europe as well. So, uh, that might be a vector for that, for getting that price down to $35,000 because, uh, we did the math, uh,

while we were there. And at 27% tax is about $10,000. So they have to be able to produce one of these for $25,000, make a profit on it, and then pay another $10,000 of the $35,000 you purchase it with to the government. And

instead of getting a lot about the chinese manufacturing market well that's what i was saying i was like that's impressive if china can build a car for this car for 25 000 bucks uh you know with this kind of speed and this kind of you know quality of materials and looks like uh-oh we're you know the american manufacturers are in for a rude awakening yeah and you know this is geely uh geely's uh

I think it's based on a Zeekr car that already exists. So all of the R&D has already been done on the drivetrain. So all that stuff is tested. People are driving the drivetrain around already. So it's just interesting that they can sell a car for that much. And then obviously the all-wheel drive version with the extra motor in the front gives it that extra speed.

It's what the Bolt EV should have been too. Like we've been asking the Bolt EV and the UV to have an agile motor portion option for a long time. So it is nice that it's coming right when the Bolt EV is going away because I think it's going to fit that market pretty well. How about being more expensive now that the Bolt EV got a big price cut this year? Or was it that? When did it get the huge price cut? I think it was last year. Last year.

But at the same time, this is another thing now that's a great transition into this that you posted this morning about Mary Barra in a new interview inting at a new Chevy Bolt EV built on the old Sion platform, right? Yeah, so that's, I think, kind of a huge news. She was definitely being coy if you listen to the audio of the podcast. She was like, I think the key quote is...

You know, Bolt is something that has built up a lot of loyalty and equity. So I can't say more because I don't discuss future product programs. But, you know, there's probably a move from a second generation to third generation. But that's an important vehicle in our portfolio. And then was there ever a second generation Bolt? Well, so they called the Bolt battery pack the second generation. The first generation was like the Spark EV and those compliance cars.

So the bold is actually the second generation and then third generation is the, uh, Ultium. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

I thought you meant like specifically with the Bolt. Like I thought you meant like when they had like that 10% battery upgrade or something. That was the lowest effort upgrade I've ever seen in my life. Because basically LG, they had an LG battery guy at the event. And I was like, so, you know, did GM give you a spec? And they were like, no, we upgraded our batteries. And GM was like, okay, we have to upgrade our cars now. Like it was just like a model upgrade.

There was a design change too at one point, but even that, if you call that a new generation, it's quite a stretch. Yeah. It's like a very mild design change. Right. But I mentioned in that article, like, hey, what if you just put another motor in that bolt and sold it for more? Or you'd spend some time and upgraded the charging speed. Would have been nice. Yes, sir. Yeah.

Ford announced this week that with the increase in production in the F-150 Lightning XLT version, there's no need for a reservation process anymore. You can place an order today and you should get your car by September, which is...

fairly quick for a pickup truck. Pickup trucks are hard to get, although a little bit less so with inflation lately. But in the last year or two, a six-month waiting period was not uncommon at all. So this is a quick three, four months turnaround. And it could be quicker too. And it's good. It means...

What needed to happen is happening. So Ford is increasing production capacity. And it sounds like they have worked through the most of their backlog. So they had a decent backlog of reservation for this. And now they've worked through that. I would assume that the price increases resulted in them working a little bit faster through that backlog, just because I heard a lot of people just cancel the

After that, a lot of people just stopped buying new vehicles, period, with the inflation. But that affected all vehicles, including the Lightning. But the XLT now starts, I think, $65,000 before tax credit. Yeah, it's not cheap. Yeah, $65,000 for the XLT. But you can have a tax credit up to $80,000 for an electric pickup truck. So you come down into the $50,000 range.

before any option so in terms of a pickup truck it's not not necessarily a bad deal yeah uh you know i i know people who've got both uh a rivian and a ford and a lot of people say that the ford is better for like road trips and stuff it's a little smoother and so i think it's competitive um

It's also interesting that we mentioned Rivian. Rivian's having a... I think we're going to talk about that next, maybe. I don't know if this is about the fire. But Rivian's having an event where you can go to normal and just buy one like old style. Ford is now... We're talking June to September to get a vehicle of your order now. I think as these cars start to get lower and lower in...

delivery times, the actual number of people who want to buy these things is going to go up because I think a lot of people want to test drive and actually want to buy one old school style, like where they go to a lot and they drive it around and they like it. So I think there's a whole lot more demand drivers to open up for these electric pickup trucks. Yeah. And also just like we know a

If there were a group of drivers that were more reticent into getting into EVs, the truck drivers were definitely on top of that list. And there's nothing better for adoption than getting your hands on the product. So yeah, Tesla also helped a lot. Tesla's momentum came with higher production because more deliveries, more

More new cars in the neighborhood. Neighbors sees the car, start talking about it. Like this sounds obvious, but it works. It works like that. So I think you're going to see a lot of that with the pickup trucks. Like when the new dad on the street got the F-150 Lightning and like, oh, let me go talk to Johnny about the Lightning. Like that's the biggest marketing you can ever get. Yeah.

Now, on the bad marketing side, this happened this week with the Rivian R1T that caught on fire at an electric farmer's station. So we heard about that before, about not necessarily catching on fire, but we heard the Rivian R1T having some problem at an electric farmer's station in the past.

where they would overheat, the charging port would overheat and would cause problem with the car and the car would brick at the charging station. So we heard a few instances of that, but now a fire occurred and we reached out to Bolt Electric Fire America, which didn't even respond to me as far as I can remember. I don't think they ever did. They're probably just freaking out about the NACs too much to even think. They're busy with that. But Rivian did respond, but with nothing significant other than they are investigating the situation.

As you can see for the image, I'm not any kind of like fire forensic person, but you don't need to be to see that the fire clearly started at the charge port or the charge connector. And the good news is that it doesn't look like the battery pack was affected. So even though it was a significant fire by the look of it, and we saw some videos too of it when it was actually on fire. If you refresh the post, I updated it. You did put it in there? Yeah.

Thank you. You got it. No, you have to read. Oh, you just put it in there. Sorry. Good call. Yeah. As you can see here, it's a open flame. I mean, it's kind of crazy if you look at it. It's like, it looks like a top fuel dragster. Like, yeah.

I don't know what that is. Oh, maybe that was like the 12-volt battery. I think it was the 12-volt battery. Yeah, maybe. That's what the speculation was. Yeah, because the— And Rivian did, when they did reply to us, they did say something about it not hitting the big battery. High-voltage battery, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's obvious from the aftermath, because if it was, the car wouldn't look like that at all. Right.

So it looks like there's a good firewall between, like a literal firewall between battery and the rest of the car, but still obviously a concern. We keep saying, statistically speaking, electric vehicle are more likely to catch on fire than gasoline powered vehicle. Gasoline, the very flammable...

liquid that you put inside your tank in your car and it can burst in flame uh but it's still worth like looking into fires like that when they don't happen after a crash or things that's the things that you know should cause a fire sometime this being part charging not a good look but i'm sure rivian is on top of it yeah obviously all right that's it for all the news this week we can jump into the comment section and start you guys as questions and um

A lot of comments today, mostly on NACs. Doug Grunberg's charger company is talking, taking about public or consumer NACs charging, free wire, EVgo, flow. I think we covered all those. ABB also. Yeah, ABB. Blink, I think Scooter just said that he got a comment from Blink. Okay. Yeah, they said their new DCFC charger is going to have...

Both the option of CCS and NACS. That's obvious. Like every new charging station manufacturer is going to announce that in the coming days. All right. Question. Some older Tesla vehicles need minor retrofit to use the CCS adapter. Does this mean when non-Tesla branded NACS fast chargers roll out, they won't work on these older Teslas without said retrofit? That's a great question.

NACS uses a CCS protocol even if the plug is different. I think. Yeah, but you're talking about the other way around. I think obviously the CCS to NACS adapter is going to be way more popular than the NACS to CCS now that NACS has basically won. Right, but I think he's asking, can I take my old Model 3 to like a flow station with a...

But I don't think they will be able to charge using the flow station with the NACS adapter. Yeah, not the NACS to CCS adapter. Right. Yeah, well, that already exists. That's already available for sale on Tesla's website. But yet there's a need for a retrofit on the charge computer on board. But again, I think that's a much smaller use case than the other way around.

Yeah. I mean, especially now, like for myself, I was always thinking about it. Like, should I get this adapter or not? But I was always, I don't, I don't know how much use I'm going to get out of it. And now that sounds like everything is going max. I'm like, all right, like I'm not going to buy this adapter. If my Tesla is going to be able to charge at future, like if you go stations, bling station, flow stations, all that. So.

All right, Neil from the Gold Coast. Question, is there any news to confirm or deny whether there's likely to be a Model Y refresh anytime soon? Obviously, we see the Model 3 refresh coming. What do you think? I doubt it soon just because of volume. That's the lifeblood of Tesla right now, the Model Y in terms of volume. So any kind of refresh would affect production line significantly and

That would be bad for Tesla. So I wouldn't hold my breath for that. It's going to be certainly not this year. I would be shocked why it gets any significant upgrade this year. It might get some changes like this to always implement some changes, but not like a whole refresh. All right. Glenn Stanford, great quick look at the Volvo EX30. We need more of these cars. Agreed.

The nail is in the coffin for CCS. Change all CCS connectors to Tesla ones and provide the CCS to NAX adapter for the rest of the CCS ones.

uh and i think that's the idea yeah i know this is so it's going to be a bit messy for the next few years so i don't know if they're going to do that or if they're just going to uh provide the adapter instead uh i don't like they probably every uh charging network operator is probably gonna have to do the math and see like what makes most sense whether providing an adapter or a

It's worth the mess in the next year or two for the reward after two years of having a nice unified team.

North American charging scene for the EV community. And keep in mind, there's going to be adapters. Everybody who wants to charge on NAX chargers is going to be able to do that. And that's kind of this question here. Mark Webb says, regarding NAX, do you think it'll cause an Osborne effect? Which is, if a new thing is coming, then nobody buys the old thing. No, I would be reluctant to buy a CCS1 car knowing it's obsolete in one year.

Yeah, your adapter point kind of fixed that. Now, obviously, less optimal experience than no adapter, but also not a huge burden. So maybe, yes, it devalues CCS car performance,

for the next year, but not by much. You know what makes that as clear as ever? Ford and GM's announcement coming now, another year from now, makes it pretty clear that they are not too worried about that. Also, they're just not too worried because EV is so little volume for them at this point, rather than what it's going to be in the next two years. So I don't think they're too worried about it. But also, it doesn't...

it wouldn't prevent me from buying like this, this EX 30 right now. If I wasn't a market for a car that size, I would definitely go electric. I would probably go with this one. And the CCS plug would not stop me just a hundred, $200 data and it's fixed. Yeah. I mean, you know, I hate, we, we always talk about this, but fast charging is obviously very important, but most people charge at home. It's not going to be a big deal. And you know,

Tesla's come with adapters. You can get an adapter really cheaply for level two. So it's not a big deal. Yeah. All right. So this is kind of a follow-up. Neil from Gold Coast again. Question, I'm trying to decide on a 3 refresh or Model Y. Wow. So he's already buying a 3 refresh, even though it hasn't been announced. But I'm concerned there might be a Model Y refresh coming next. What are your thoughts on Y refresh coming based on what we know? So we kind of address that.

So here's the thing to think about the Model 3 Refresh. Like we've seen the exterior. So a little bit new headlights, new headlights, facial a little bit updated. Those are all things already slightly different on the Model Y. So I don't see that being a big deal. I think the bigger updates to the Model 3 with the Refresh is under the hood and it's structural updates.

it's the bigger casting and all that those things are already in the new model wise so yeah that's true so i don't i wouldn't expect something significant um

If anything, like, okay, maybe the new steering wheel with all the stock and with the four-star buttons are going to come for the Model Y, like they're coming for the Model 3 Refresh. Is that a plus? So there's a lot of things right now that I don't feel bad about recommending people buying a cheaper Model 3 right now pre-refresh because of that, because I know it's not the biggest updates ever. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. C Evermont says all those dual plug Chatham OCCS charge point stations just replace the Chatham O with NACs. Yeah. The 12 leaf owners that actually tried a road trip can deal. That sounds great unless you're a leaf owner, obviously. But the problem is that those are only 50 kilowatts. Yeah. It's not great. Yeah.

So I was here. What is going to be the big fight between charging network is going to be the price because currently Tesla is expensive. I didn't know that Tesla was any more or less than EA. Yeah. I mean, the problem is, but he's right, though, that there's going to be competition there.

And, um, I think a lot of it's going to come down to, cause there's just subscription services and then there's car companies getting involved with the charging station to have like preferential pricing for their EV owners at some kind of incentive. So there's a lot of that happening. Uh,

I can see, again, going to be messy in the next year or two. And then I see things just being a little bit more uniform, but more make sense. But then you can go to a gas station and then the next gas stations charge like 10 more cents a liter. And that's also a thing that happens. So you have to shop around sometimes. So this is one thing.

I haven't really thought much about, but it could be a concern. Question, if NAX is an open standard, does Tesla wield any power, financial or political, over NAX adapters, car charger companies? Yeah.

I think anyone, yeah, it's an open standard. I think anyone could produce them if they wanted to. I think they already do. There's already third-party NACs charging adapters being produced. So I don't think that's a problem. I think that, I think Tesla's made deal with Ford and GM specifically right now to produce adapters for their EV owners. Also like that was part of the agreement to convince them to switch to NACs is like, we're going to produce you like,

We're going to reserve some for your AV owners. Again, that's going to be a thing that's going to happen in the next two years and then it's done. Then it's going to be a unified North American standard. Most, if not all, cars produced for North America are going to come with the NAX standard.

All significant vehicle anyway. And think about how much better it is. It's going to be a lot less materials. It's just a little bit of material, but a lot less plastic, a lot of adapter, heavier, chunkier, all that stuff. So think about that. Now all the ego stuff is gone too. Now that Ford and GM got on board, even though Tesla has made some work to dissociate itself from NAX, but it's still pretty much a Tesla connector. Yeah.

But now that the big ones, Ford and GM is on board, like Rivian has no excuse. Hyundai has no excuse. All these guys are going to come out with it. It just makes sense. Yeah, I think it's only a matter of time. And for what it's worth, we've reached out to Rivian and some others and asked them for comments on NAX. So if we hear anything, we'll post here. Moving on.

uh so gold coast guy again uh do you think there will be any tech upgrades for why refresh was coming soonish or do you think it would just be cosmetic we kind of talked about that a little bit yeah i don't think any kind of significant like from that point on i think any ev wise like ev technology wise i think everything is going to be mostly increment incremental improvements i don't

And with Tesla, it's something like if I don't know if it's Google's first time like buying a Tesla, but it's something you have to deal with. Like they change their cars all the time. It's not a model year approach. Timing is hard to guess.

So you kind of have to deal with it. Like, it's like, do I want this? Do I like this car right now? The way it is for that price. If you do go for it, if you don't know, because there's going to be price cuts after the fact that you're going to be, Oh, I wish they didn't do that and all that. Then you have to deal with it. Basically.

All right, Mark Webb says vehicle to ax is already in the NAX specification. Yeah, I think there's some language about that in there. Yeah, and we also know that Tesla in Europe was also building their cars to do bidirectional for a while. So it's all in there. Did that dog strike video about Tesla come out because Waymo just had the same thing happen? I didn't see that from Waymo.

No, I didn't either. That's, geez, that's sad. Yeah. Waymo is slower, though. It operates normally. Doesn't Waymo have a speed limit on it? Yeah, I don't think they go as fast as that one was going. 30 miles an hour or something like that. That sucks. Question prediction on Charin. Megacharge standard, Tesla on board or independent? I think Tesla's on board, aren't they? Yeah.

I don't think that's been 100% clear, to be honest. Okay. I know that Tron was considering that because Tesla had proposed its own mega charging standard and Tron was considering it and then they went their own way. So... Big battles. With what happened with Naxx, I wouldn't get it past Tesla to do it again. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, this is something to think about. Carl Aldinger, big problem is that being missed here in the celebration of NAX is that Ford and GM are undermining the establishment of a healthy competitive system for charging by choosing Tesla, not just NAX.

See, you're excited that Tesla won, but will you support nationalizing the Tesla charging system if it's a monopoly someday? And it's a major problem how Tesla runs it. I think Carl is not differentiating the connector, the standard for the connector and the charging protocol and the operation of a charging network. So you think Tesla, when no one else was doing it, decided to deploy its own charging network

And now it should be nationalized? Like, this...

It's not a good look. It's not how it works. What is being nationalized is not a good word. It's being open source is the charging connector and protocol and system that's involved in that. But the charging network is not... There's no monopoly involved at all. It's just that's going to be the technology used to connect the cars. But what you don't want to have a monopoly on is...

charging network. So that's where we need competition. But that's what... So Tesla actually did a favor to those other companies. Now they use the better charging connectors, NANAX, on their own chargers. And those

charging network now will have access to a much bigger market meaning tesla vehicles on top of now all the other vehicles that are accepting that are adopting nax which soon is going to be virtually every these produced in the north american market so no this is this is not the right way to look at this all right greg pullen says question do you think tesla will pull the magic dot deployment if they haven't already

Well, we just discussed that. It looked like that's what happened. Now with the new comment with the White House, it sounds like Tesla might have to keep it around a little bit, like maybe include one magic dock per new charging station just to comply with this requirement to get the federal funding. It would just be for sure at this point because, again, long term, it looks like NAC's going to be the solution. All right. Somebody else is up with my Twitter conspiracy theory. The Model 3...

as a 25k car for the win uh so mine was mine wasn't really super serious but um yeah it is right now uh new inventory model y and model 3 new inventory model 3 right now

In plenty of markets in the U.S., it's a $25,000 car. Right. And if they can make it cheaper, get rid of those stocks and, you know. Those super expensive stocks. Yeah. And make the frame one piece and all the other stuff. That's a $25,000 car. Watch out, Chevy Bolt.

All right. Rich Teer, I don't think it'd be very long before the White House succumbs to reality. And well, you don't know politics. The requirement for CCS to get EV charger funding. On the other hand, governments are the kings of sunk cost fallacy. The scenario you envision can't happen because NAX is a standard. The specs are out there and anybody can implement it. No monopoly required. Yeah.

With NAC's Domino, does this mean the 400-volt battery architecture has now won out in North America? No, it supports 1,000-volt. NAC supports up to 1,000-volt. It all depends on the charging station, like where the bottleneck is going to be.

But the standard is not going to be a limitation up to 1,000 volts or even a little bit more, 1,100 volts maybe. Yeah, it starts to arc, I think, at around 1,100. All right, Peter Ferrett, only 40% of the battery packs need to be made in America across all Model 3s. Oh, so is that how it works? But I think that the battery pack and the cells, too, the cells are separate to the battery pack. It's like another part of the requirements. I might be mistaken, but…

All right. Question. Isn't Tesla's short charge cord in some charge ports locations on the wrong side still a problem? Yeah, but that's the other good thing too that now they're working with Ford and GM. I would assume that in their future vehicle program that do include NAX, they're going to standardize where the charge port is going to be and that's badly needed too in the industry. But

That said, no excuse. Like Tesla could make their charge cord a little bit longer. But that's apparently what is the case with the V4 supercharger, which we haven't seen in North America just yet, unfortunately. Right. I kind of like where Rivian has their charge port, like on the front, by the front light. But also Tesla is obviously in a good spot as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Corners are good. Tesla says you can't use our protocol. You use CCS protocol. So no, NACS isn't a standard. It's a plug design. The problem rests with GM and Ford favoring Tesla's proprietary network. I don't know if Carl's got the facts right. I think GM and Ford are open to all networks. I mean, one of the reasons that Ford and GM are getting on board is for their EV owners to get access to the supercharger network because that is definitely a plus.

But the reason they're incorporating NACs in their future EVs is because the connector is a better design. All right. I'm just going through some questions here. Question. Do the recent announcements by Ford and GM mean that the Magic DACA, we talked about this, dead before it arrived? All right.

We're getting a lot of conversations here. All right, back to Volvo builds the safest cars and builds a compact car that is blisteringly fast. I just watched the BMW iX wreck his car on video because he decided to cut around the car at light speed. Well, dumb people will do dumb things all the time, too. So you cannot make some things completely dumb proof.

But in general, I think acceleration can be safety to a degree. Like if you need to get out of a situation really quickly, like it's super useful. I know on the highway, like sometimes you want to be able to pass someone for safety reason. Like you see sometimes I see a driver like falling asleep next to me, like, oh, you just get ahead or get back and honk your horn, things like that.

All right, Mr. Turkey next says no knee room in the EX30 backseat, teeny tiny all over. No, not really. There's plenty of room in the back. It's similar to a Chevy Bolt, which, you know, it's not super luxurious rooming back there, but it's easy for an adult to sit back there, even with like an adult sitting in the front. And if you have kids, obviously even better. So that's not a problem.

See a question. Do you guys think the $35,000 Volvo will get that zero to 60 and curious if Tesla can export cars and then get credit to import a made in China car for similar? Um, I mean, they don't need any credit really for, I mean, they're, they're building enough cars in the U S that they don't really need to import cars. Um,

And I don't think the $35,000 Volvo will get the zero to 60. That's the all wheel drive. I imagine that's going to be a little bit more. If you want to find out, you can kind of look around it. They're selling it in Europe now. So you can see what the prices are. I think there's like a 42,000 Euro version that has all wheel drive. So that's, that's adding like $7,000, still a pretty good car for 40, $42,000.

Section 4.5 of the NAX spec says it supports the ISO 1518 protocol, 118 protocol for charging, which is the same standard used by CCS, which I think is the plug-in charge as well. Do you think one of the new Tesla models might be a midsize pickup? I don't think so, no. No. Two new models are the cheaper car and the Robotaxi, so none of that sounds like a midsize pickup. But they might both be Model 3s.

Alright, question. Are you going to do an article on the bad FSD video you referenced? Would you do a video of your FSD driving with commentary? I would do the latter. I'm working on that latter. Actually, I'm waiting for a new device that I'm trying to put so I can record with my iPhone instead but safely plugged into the plug-in too but...

attached to the glass roof. I had two of those before, but they both fell every time they fall. As for the bad video that I referenced last episode, I did go back and I did reach out to the owner. The owner is a bit reluctant to share it. He said there was no damage on the car. Watching the video, I'm a little bit confused because he did hit the side pretty badly.

So he's kind of very pro-Tesla and not really wanting to get into the details. He says he doesn't want to make Tesla looks bad, which is not really what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to, on the contrary, I'm saying that you're likely not responsible for this accident, but you know how it is sometimes. Won't get into too many details either way.

I think speculation that the charge port of the Rivian is what burned first. So if the charge port is what burned, Electrify America might have some explaining to do. Do you think that refreshes will help demand for Model 3? Did SX refreshes increase demand? Well, the SX refreshes were just so badly handled that it's hard to understand what happened with them because SX

Tesla stopped selling them for so long. It took a while to bring them back to production because Tesla was focusing too much, not necessarily too much, but they were focusing on Model Y at the time. So there was a big backlog and then it sort of fade away and now they're having some issues selling them. So as for the Model 3, well, it depends on the price, really. $25,000. Yeah. If it does affect the price, maybe. Yeah.

Saudi keeps on cutting production, but only price is not going up. Do you think EVs are starting to make a dent in oil demand? Yeah, they are. It's starting to be significant volume. It's not huge just yet, but yeah, it's starting to make an impact.

If FSD only gets really good with hardware 4, is it possible Tesla would have to offer the upgrade to older models that were promised FSD or did the fine print protect Tesla? Well, there's no fine print that's going to protect Tesla. There was too much material, too much content that showed what Tesla promised buyers versus what they deliver. So I wouldn't be too worried about that.

So if what you're saying turns out to happen, so they cannot deliver it on their promises with all World 3, they need all World 4, I just don't think that retrofit might not necessarily be the solution there. Because the retrofit is significant. All the cameras in the cars are being updated. A new radar now, at least not on Model Y. Apparently the Model Y is not getting a new radar just yet, Model S and X are. So I think the...

The retrofit would be too big of a thing. So I think it's more going to be like this Tesla investor, like this should be your biggest concern. Like what happens if Tesla cannot deliver on its promise with AutoWare 3? It's going to be one of the biggest lawsuit, biggest class action lawsuit ever.

But can't they just keep pushing it out and saying, we're still working on it, we're still working on it, we're still working on it? Yeah, so here's what I'm thinking. They could technically do that up to the point that what if it starts working with hardware 4? Right. Then it starts looking bad. It's like, wait, wait, what? This guy that bought his car last year now has what you promised me six, seven years ago. Right.

This is not a good look. There's already a class action going on regarding that. These things take years to evolve. But I would assume that once that happened, then everybody that has already paid for FSD is going to jump on that.

With good reason. The last couple of questions we have is about, so I guess the guy who is worried about Tesla becoming or having to nationalize the charging network. I guess the idea is that like, you know, Tesla's at such a, uh,

big lead and they have so much lower cost of building networks and they have obviously a bigger uh market of people to use their networks that it's you know they they run electrify america and evgo and shell and everybody else out of business and they end up being the only network and then they control the prices and then that could become problematic

I mean, technically, yes. But like what Carl said here, he put in capital letters, HIF. So it's a big HIF. Mm-hmm.

But you're right. Tesla does have a giant lead with the supercharger network. But I think what Mark is saying too is this is due to incompetence from the other side of the thing. And I wouldn't necessarily say incompetence either. I would say more like out of necessity. Tesla built a supercharger the way it did out of necessity. It didn't exist before that. And

they had to do it and they had to do it in a way that serves their user base while all the other charging network, well, at Eletrify America, you can make the argument not because the way it started is also like, it's very unique with the diesel gate scandal, but,

The other network, their business is to sell charging to EV owners, while the supercharged network was built around providing a service to Tesla's owners. The two different approaches gave Tesla a giant advantage in building a very good network.

And then they just start putting a price on it. Now, yes, it could turn into giant business for Tesla. I could see Tesla selling billions and billions of dollars worth of charging a year in the very near future. They already have 12,000 superchargers in the U.S.,

Yeah. It's going to be probably like 20,000. And they're going to be able to make them cheap now because they're going to get subsidized by... They're going to get subsidized and they are building more of them. And they have... They have virtual network as well so they can get cheap electricity. Yes, they can put mega chargers there. They can put their solar there. They can combine them with controllable load benefits, come down on peak charges. They have...

and you'd have a decade of data on it to optimize it. So you're right. They are in the best situation to own that space. But

The concern of the other gentleman earlier was that the standard is due to that. The standard helps in terms of like the connector is more efficient, is better. But I don't think that making that the standard is the killer feature for the supercharger network. That's not it. So yeah, the standard shouldn't

prevent like that from happening it's just this let's put charger network is better than everything else right now period and if it keeps growing uh and the others don't catch up that's what's gonna happen but i think i think the the others will will have to to to catch up now and the the all they receive billions in investment too and they will receive billions in funding too from the federal government uh to deploy stations so

They just have to use it a little bit more efficiently like Tesla to be able to compete. But I don't see a world where Tesla is the only charging network, DC fast charging network in North America. I think it will be the biggest. It will stay the biggest, maybe even the majority of the market, but never a monopoly. Does that make sense? As long as there's some competition, it should keep everybody honest. And then the flip side of that is...

By allowing competitors to have access to a better charging net connector, as Mark Webb says, Tesla is actually giving their competitors an advantage that they didn't have before. GM cars will now be able to charge just about anywhere. I know when you were driving around in the US South, Fred, you were driving in a Mustang and there was very few chargers, but there were plenty of

If you were driving a Tesla, you wouldn't have had any issues. Yeah, I did a road trip between North Carolina and Mississippi in a Mustang Mach-E. If I had a CCS to NAX adapter at that time or a NAX connector on my Mustang Mach-E, the experience of that road trip would have been significantly better than having to rely on Nature for America. And I mean, when I went to Birmingham, I had to drive like 30 minutes outside of town to get a CCS charge.

That's not great. Well, there were like two, three superchargers around Birmingham. There's like one in a Bucky. That was the first time I went to a Bucky. It was actually outside of Birmingham with my Tesla. Bucky's, yeah. Interesting.

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