Tesla Q1 results, Model 3 Ludicrous, Silverado EV RST electric pickup, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I'm Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchop, coming to us live from Colorado. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. So that's why we're doing this show a bit early. Seth is on a different time zone, and he has things to get done, but it's always nice, a little early Friday show, and by the time you guys get off of work, you get into your car, you can get access to the show and whatnot. It's fun, too.

So obviously, we're going to have a lot to talk about this week because it's the first week of a new quarter. That means we get a lot of our EV delivery numbers from the industry. But we have a few cool other things to talk about. We have the Model 3 Ludicrous, who is somehow not launched yet, but it has to be any day at this point. Oh, let me see here. Let me just put my notification down. I have it scheduled for 5. Okay.

There you go. All right. We won't hear that anymore. This Ludacris, we keep hearing about it and it keeps showing around and it's just not getting launched. And this week, the Slaven had an event about it. We're going to talk about it. They haven't launched it yet. So I don't know what's going on with that. We have this Silverado EV that we got. The RST version was launched this week. So we're going to discuss that and a bunch of other things. But anyway.

Can you show the screen? Can I do that? Yeah, I got it. All right. Let's do the black version. No, not working. Okay, never mind. All right, let's start with Tesla's delivery numbers, which were not great. And not only not great, but worse than basically everyone expected. Like a lot of people, we reported a lot on the last few weeks of the quarter that the analysts were downgrading their estimation.

for Tesla's quarter to a degree that was starting to get worrying. Like, is even Tesla not even going to grow year over year anymore? What's happening? And even the Tesla fans, like, were getting on top of the analysis, were like, hey, you guys are being way too pessimistic about this. Like, it's not going to be that low and everything. And it was lower than anyone ever predicted, even the most pessimistic people. Tesla... What's happening? Oh, my scroll is inverted. Okay. Um...

The tested reported 386,810 deliveries during Q1 2024 on production of 433,000 vehicles. So what does that mean?

So the production is down quarter over quarter and production quarter over quarter is better to look at than deliveries. Deliveries is a bit more seasonal, even though it has been tracking the production quite well because of Tesla's adjusting pricing to do so.

However, this quarter is a bit different. There were some external factors that came into play on the production side of things. So Tesla does give some good excuses for, oh yeah, I should say that the consensus was 431,000 deliveries. So Tesla came about 50,000 deliveries below the consensus.

But I do think the consensus was skewed a little bit too upward because some analysts were not quick enough to downgrade the estimation as it became clear that Tesla was having a difficult quarter. So I would think that some of the more serious consensus were closer to 420, I would say, which is still way off 386,000.

Tesla gave some good exclusives. Decline in volumes were partially due to the early phase of the production ramp of the updated Model 3 at our Fremont factory and factory shutdowns resulting from shipping diversion caused by the Red Sea conflict and an arson attack in the factory in Berlin.

All great excuses. So Tesla, we know Tesla did the switch to Model 3 Island, Model 3 Refresh, or whatever you want to call it. I know Tesla says that they don't know where the island name comes from, even though it's written on some of the new parts of the car. Anyway, that's another topic. That came to GigaFree Shanghai last year.

took a while for tesla to bring to fremont but they did they did the switch over in january so for sure that switchover does slow down production and lower bolt production and deliveries um so that that makes sense but tesla still produced 433 000 vehicles

The Red Sea conflict, also a problem. It resulted in a two-week factory shutdown in Berlin, and then the arson attack, a week and a half factory shutdown. But that, so like you could say, all right, factory was shut down for a month in Geffrey, Berlin, which it's actually probably a little bit more than that because it takes a while to ramp up after you reopen. But still, Geffrey, Berlin was producing like 5,000, 6,000 vehicles a week. It wasn't the most, the biggest producing factory in the world. So it's a,

It does not have that big an impact. And you see that because Tesla went from producing just roughly a little bit short of 500,000 cars the previous quarters to 433,000. So it's down about 60,000 cars or something. It's the discrepancy between the production and deliveries that is a real problem. So Tesla basically added 46,000 vehicles to inventory. Now, I know it's not exactly accurate.

They are not all just in invent. They are technically an inventory. Like that's the correct term, but they're not, they're not necessarily not sold. Some of these cars are in transit to consumers and these logistic issues with the factory shutdown and the availability of the vehicles does affect

uh result in logistical issues to deliver those vehicles to customers uh just because you don't have the availability of the right car the right time at the right place and since berlin is having issues and berlin supplies model wise to markets in europe now tesla has to send those cars from china the transit time is longer and that results also in more vehicle and transit at the end of the quarter

All these excuses are right, and I see that the Tesla superfans using them like crazy. But if we're being honest here, it's still a disappointing quarter. We didn't think that Tesla would be as down at $386,000 equal delivery. If they were going to have some logical issues on top of that, no one expected Tesla to be below $400,000. I think that's fair to say.

Were you as shocked as me when you saw that number came out? Yeah, I mean, everybody was like really low in the 400,000s and to be in the 300,000s is, you know, kind of a shocker, especially since this is the first time Tesla has been down year over year since what, 2000 maybe? Yeah.

Well, 2020, but that was like the quarter of COVID and all that. This is the first time that not global pandemic related. And probably like six years or something like that. And Tesla did come out with some excuses, but that's it. The whole press release, that was it, which I didn't like. All these excuses focused on production rather than deliveries.

And then Elon was quick to comment on every subject in the world right now. Didn't even comment on this when it came out. He only did a small comment after someone trashed Tesla's result. And he just said, he responded to, of course, Omar. Omar responded with,

a counter argument. And then Elon, instead of coming up with his own argument, just like piggybacked on Omar. And it was again, the argument that BYD was also way down. So that's the thing that people are going. So this little silver lining that you can get from Tesla's result is that Tesla did regain the global BV volume crown from BYD in Q1. So BYD took it in Q4, 2023, because of also a major slowdown in BV.

Total deliveries for BYD quarter to quarter. However, BYD was up year over year. So it's not like Tesla just crushed BYD here. BYD was down from its massive Q4.5. Tesla also had a...

Tesla also had a record Q4, but BYD had an even bigger record Q4. But Q1 to Q1, BYD is up. Q1 to Q1, Tesla is down 8%. Yeah, and if you're doing quarter over quarter, Chinese New Year kind of impacts sales in China. So BYD is going to take a bigger hit than, you know, a quarter over quarter hit than Tesla.

uh, year over year hit. So I think you're right. Year over year is the metric to look at. Yeah. It's a seasonal business, automotive business. So you have to look at that. And even like spread out the word BYD is down 42% quarter over quarter, which is a bit misleading when you, when you look at it. Uh, but yeah, BYD, obviously China's is on market. Tesla, Tesla, China is also Tesla's biggest auto market. Um, but, um,

it's a little less of a big percentage of its overall deliveries than BYD. Now, I do think that the performance of Q1 in China is also what affected Tesla negatively. Tesla quickly introduced zero interest rate loans for its vehicles in China this week. And this probably has to do with that. It's something that the Chinese financial regulators actually enabled, especially for electric vehicles. They did the...

new loan program for electric vehicles that enables the loaners to establish their own interest rates. So it can be zero. Hey, I just thought of a great tweet. Elon could blame born-born people for the downward trend of Tesla's because Elon, of course, is born-born. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that was a weird one this week, too. I don't know why he's hammering on that. Yeah, it is a weird scene right now. Yeah. But in the U.S., also, Tesla is having some issues, and it cannot be more clearly highlighted than with the deep discounts that Tesla is putting on its inventory in the U.S. right now. I was looking at that yesterday. I made a post about it.

So we are quite used to seeing discounts on inventory vehicles at Tesla now, but they get increasingly better for consumers throughout the quarter. And now the first week of the quarter, we're seeing some deep ones. I've seen a bunch of $7,500 discounts, the equivalent of the tax credit on these vehicles. I've seen some 7,000 ones. Most of them are in the range of $3,000 to $4,000, depending on the vehicle though and where they are.

It seems to be highly dependent on where they are in the market. But this is at the beginning of the quarter, not at the end of the quarter, which means that probably by the end of the quarter, there's going to be some crazy discounts. Mm-hmm.

Or other new incentives. So we just reported a few hours ago that Tesla reinstated the FSD transfer for existing owners. So we know that Tesla is rallying a lot on existing owners upgrading their car rather than concurring new consumers. It's just easier. What about you? Are you tempted yet? Are you waiting for the end of the quarter?

I'm going to wait a little bit for sure. I'm still in the market for one. I'm not opposed to an upgrade. It's a 2018 car. It's been six years. So I'm open. But I'm also open to other brands. If you have... You know...

There's other cars that like this. Let's be fair. Tesla is not the only one discounting to like a lot of what we're going to get into it in a few posts. But there's a lot of other brands that are bringing their price downs. Yeah. And this is great for EV drivers because a lot more people can afford an EV now. Yeah. For an EV, again, if you have the money on hand and everything, because...

loans are still an issue. It's like, let's not discount that. Yeah. High interest rates are no joke. And, and they do add to your monthly payments significantly. So unless you, this did bring their loan prices, their loan interest downs a little bit, like a 0.1% this week, but nothing major. Nothing like China. It would be, I wonder if it makes sense to have a variable interest rate loan, a,

because it seems like everybody's expecting the Fed to come down. So I think people are waiting. And I wonder if that would be a good idea because everybody expects it to come down. So if

If it comes down, theoretically, your loan amount would come down. I don't know. I'm not big on borrowing money, but I know this exists for mortgages, of course. Has this ever existed for cars as far as you know? Actually, it's not a big thing here. I know in Canada, variable rate mortgages are big, but in the U.S., it's not and definitely not for cars. Okay. It's like the strike price, whatever you get, you get it.

All right. Let's talk a little bit about Model 3 Ludicrous, which could be like a little bomb for Tesla in the next few months whenever it finally launches. So we were reporting that since Tesla refreshed the Model 3, they reintroduced the rear wheel drive, the all-wheel drive, but they didn't reintroduce the performance version. It has been unavailable unless you can find an inventory unit at Tesla, which do exist. At least they did until a few weeks ago, the last time I checked.

And we've been expecting a new version of it. And from what we've been seeing with the prototypes that have been spotted, it would be a bigger upgrade than the previous upgrade from the all-wheel drive to performance version. There are some body mods, new bumper, new rear diffuser, new seats. That's sort of brand new.

And we don't know exactly about the performance. That's the thing that's missing. But what happened this week is Tesla was spotted at its Malibu store having some kind of event with the Cybertruck, the new Model 3. And there was an uncovered Model 3

We're calling it the Ludicrous because it looks pretty clear that's going to be Ludicrous now with the badge in it. It's the same design on the badge that was in the Model S Ludicrous when you activated the Ludicrous mode and the screen would go space balls. That's pretty much it. And Tesla was spotted bringing some of the usual YouTubers that are approved by the company, like Marcus Brownlee, MKBHD, and Jason Camisa.

They were at the event. So normally if they were at the event, it looks like they probably were able to produce some content and Tesla is giving them some kind of embargo and they're going to the next few days. It could be hours. Yeah. I mean, every time someone asks me like, hey, do you know when they're going to unveil the Tesla Model 3 Ludacris performance, whatever? Yeah, it could be right now and we're missing it.

I always, the whole week, I spend the whole week thinking that I'm missing the Model 3 launch right now. Like I was with my girlfriend, I'm like, oh, let me see if they launch the Model 3 yet. It's so annoying. Like every other automaker, they'll tell you exactly when, exactly how. If you're a journalist, they give you an embargo too. I know that's too much to ask for Tesla, but still, it's annoying. You know, there's probably an embargo, but we don't know what it is. Yeah, there's probably one.

I already discussed the Tesla big in rack, the full self-driving transfer. And I do like that for like, I know people like to understand. Yeah, this should make it permanent. My only issue with that, like, I think it makes sense. I just, my only issue is that Tesla is using it as a demand trigger rather than what it should be, which should be all the time offer until they actually delivered a product. Cause you cannot use your own inability to deliver a promise product as a demand trigger is just, it's wrong.

The other thing, I think it's a good example too for – I'm going to start using now from people that always just take Elon on his words. You have a lot of people like we post an article that like Elon will like try to deny it in some way and everything. Like people just take it as word. Oh, Elon denied what you just said. So you're wrong. You're wrong. It's like, eh.

Am I wrong? Like he leaves room for the truth to be there. And also he's known to be misleading. And this is an example as clear as day. Elon came out last year with this offer saying word forward, it's going to be a one-time amnesty. So take advantage of it right now because it's not going to come back.

And then it came back. And now it came back twice. So Elon is undeniably capable of lying or at the very least misleading people in order to sell cars. People should know that at this point. It shouldn't be controversial to say because we have the proof right there. But yeah, the offer is there now. And we know that Tesla is

Looking a lot of it's on consumers to boost sales because it's easier and there's actually a big, you know, there's a big pool of existing distal owners that can upgrade. On the other hand, it's no longer the limited time thing because we know it's going to be around again and again and again. It should be permanent. Yeah, it should be permanent. And, you know, like we'd like to see kind of that

be enunciated by Tesla saying, hey, if you buy FSD, you'll own it throughout whatever cars you get from us. At the very least, until you deliver it, until you actually have a self-driving car. Because then at least you have the product, so it's on you to keep the product or to move on or whatever. But until you haven't even delivered it, especially for people who pay like $12,000 or even $15,000 for it. Yeah.

All right. This was an interesting one here. Kind of a controversial post this week that came out from the information, the information, the publication. They figured out that XAI, I keep getting confused scrolling because it's inverted. How does that even happen? The XAI, Ivan's own AI startup that he started last year, has poached another Tesla AI employee, Mr.

Mr. Ethan Knight. That's a cool name. He was one of the top engineers, staff engineer on Tesla's Vision.

computer vision system. And now he's been poached by XAI. So, you know, people have been using this as another example of Elon's conflict of interest between XAI and Tesla, which goes beyond just poaching employees, but also the fact that Elon threatened Tesla's shoulders that he won't be developing AI product at Tesla unless he has 25% of the company, which is a clear conflict of interest. But the idea of also coaching

So competing for the same talent, the two companies, is highlighted by talent moving from Tesla. It's now the fourth Tesla engineer to move from Tesla to XAI. Elon came around and said, tried to deny the report, saying that Ethan was going to open AI. He had an offer from an open AI. So XAI made an offer. Otherwise, he would have gone to open AI and Tesla would have lost him anyway. Okay.

why did Tesla couldn't offer exactly like whatever opening I was offering him? Like it's, uh, it's not a good excuse, obviously. Uh, even though we got community, community noted Twitter for like reposting, which is so stupid. Uh, but, um, yeah, I mean, you know, on Twitter. Uh, yeah. Nice. Yeah. Our credibility is now room forever. I love it on Twitter. I always get that on Twitter. Like someone, uh,

I post something and it's like, your argument is invalid because in 2019 you posted something that Elon disagreed with, so you're wrong. It's like, yeah, what Twitter or Elon disagree with doesn't make it false. Anyway.

So, yeah, it is a clear conflict of interest. I mean, I get there might be some kind of situation here where Ethan just didn't want to work at Tesla anymore and was getting a job at OpenAI and then XAI managed to like divert that and

Ethan was not staying at Tesla whatsoever. I could see that happening. It's a possible scenario. It still doesn't explain the three other Tesla employees that went to XAI. It still doesn't explain Elon's clear conflict of interest of going from the same talent pool. What if Elon finds the greatest next AI mind out there? Doesn't work at Tesla. Doesn't work anywhere else.

He's much more incentivized to try to hire that guy at XAI than he is at Tesla because he owns much more of XAI than he owns at Tesla. Everyone that's trying to make the argument that this is not a conflict of interest, you're blinded by something. I don't know what it is. It might be your love for Elon Musk. I don't know what it is, but you're blinded by something. You know what I love about this? This is the one thing that Tesla...

hardcore Tesla shareholder Elon fans don't love because it affects their bottom line. It affects their money flow because they don't own XAI. Elon owns XAI. So if you're an Elon fan and don't have a lot of Tesla shares,

you're still, you know, Elon can't do anything wrong, but if you're a Tesla shareholder and all, you see all the AI talent moving out of Tesla and into XAI and, and, you know, like you said, um, if there's any AI talent that Elon Musk seems to think that, you know, is the next big thing, he's going to point them to XAI. We know this, this is, so, uh,

This has kind of divided the Elon fans between like the Tesla shareholder Elon fans and the, you know, just the Elon fans. So I like to see this because this kind of like, you know. Makes it clear. His feedback loop is sort of getting some, you know, stuff from this because a lot of his feedback loop is that, you know, the mega Tesla shareholders. Yeah. Yeah. It's annoying. Obviously, I would like to see the board do something about it, but yeah.

I have zero hope for that. Zero, zero hope for that. All right. Moving on from Tesla stuff. Let's talk a bit about the new Silverado EV first edition SRT. We have the full specs of it. We have the pricing of it. And it is a sexy beast. Yeah.

So you get 440 miles of range. That's the 200 kilowatt hour battery pack at work here. The same concept with the Hummer EV, but with a little bit more efficient vehicle on top of it and a little bit more capable vehicle. Here you see the bed here. You have just short of six feet bed, but you get the extension with the, I forget what you call this, tailgate thing that you can pop up.

but it's very useful feature. You get 10 to 10.10 feet, which is just nice. But then also the back doors, you know, the back of the thing. And so you can put stuff in the back seats as well. So that's a really big bed into the cabin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Super useful. You get 10,000 pounds of towing capacity, 113 pounds of payload capacity and,

The MultiFlex mid-gate is what you just mentioned, I think. And the MultiFlex tailgate is the thing that I mentioned opening up of this. You get 350 kilowatt charging, which is awesome. Oh, you get a free power shift wall connector if you were a reservation holder. That's a nice little...

incentive to yeah keep in mind this is a 90 something thousand dollar vehicle yeah yeah it's it starts at 94 500 but then i mean this is the first edition the foundation series cyber truck is a hundred thousand dollars starting price so it's six thousand or cheaper gets a hell of a lot more range gets more range and if you had the power the range extender in the cyber truck which is not even

available just yet. I mean, that thing is a huge battery. It's a 200 over 200 kilowatt hour battery. I mean, we're talking about like, you know, it's got the same, you know, 240 volts out that can power your house. This is, you know, a 200 kilowatt hour battery can power a house for weeks. So, you know, you could almost say, well, Hey, I was thinking about putting, you know, five power walls at my house or even like a, a mega pack almost.

Well, you've got that in your car all the time. A mega pack is 3.9 megawatt hours. Maybe not. It's the equivalent of like a bunch of... It's a power pack. Yeah. How many was the power pack? Power pack was...

I'm blanking right now. Wasn't that 100 kilowatt? Yeah, I think it was closer to that. Power pack. And that's probably the price of that. With the inverter, it was the price of that Silverado EVS RT. You get the four-wheel steering, too, just like the Cybertruck. This is a well-equipped vehicle. Yep.

Do we have a test? Is someone getting a test drive of this electric? I have my request in. I did see it at the last Chevy event. It looks like a beast. Obviously, a little bit bigger than something I would prefer. But for those people who do prefer full-size pickups, this is going to be a pretty nice vehicle.

I saw a Hummer AV for the first time this weekend in Quebec. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's on the little Montreal street. This thing looks like a fucking beast. It's massive. Yeah. I'm planning a road trip this summer to go to Gaspésie, which is like the furthest eastern part of Quebec. I'd love to get one at Silverado or even the Hummer, really, to get 400 miles of range for a road trip. It's nice. We'll make some phone calls.

We don't have a lot of press cars in Quebec, though. That's a problem. All right, staying on the big vehicle,

segment this uh first pickup truck from byd has been leaked this week and uh apparently it's meant from global markets now i don't know what that means exactly global market i would assume that it means not just china for byd uh but obviously the biggest pickup market is in the u.s and byd is not operating in the u.s at least for its consumer vehicles it is for its commercial vehicles and this

Could be a commercial vehicle also. I don't know. But yeah, we got from a Chinese publication. We got a few spy... Well, they called it the spy shot. But when I saw the shot on my face, these are pretty well-framed, nice plays. The shot looks like the vehicle is posing. And it also has a heavy camouflage on.

Apparently, it's like a mid-size to full-size pickup. It's in between those. I don't know if I would call that camouflage. Whatever the opposite of camouflage is. I mean, it camouflages some of the lines of it, but it's a pickup truck at the end of the day. So you don't expect any fancy lines or anything like that. It's not a Cybertruck either, but it's not super wavy.

So obviously, I think what people are more looking forward to this for is the pricing. BYD has been extremely aggressive in pricing and they have good value for the price. Especially if we look at the seal, for example, the BYD seal in China, it's crazy. And it's not a bad car for 10K. It's basically a Chevy Bolt. Yeah. Yeah.

But we don't, do we have a time? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think this year. So this, so it looks like a little bit like a teaser, like the company probably leaked that on purpose because the shots are just, I cannot believe these are spade shots. But thanks for seeing EV posts for letting us share them. But red flag.

All right. Now going from BYD to a similar company, CTL, a thermal battery producer from China. They unveiled this week a 1 million mile battery with a 15 year warranty on it.

Right now it's just for buses. That's a little bit of a bummer. A tiny bit of a clickbait on this, but it's their partnership with Yutong, it's an electric bus manufacturer in China, and CTL have released this 933,000 mile, 1.5 million kilometers, 15-year warranty on this.

So obviously, again, this is for buses. Buses have a different little use cases. But this is for buses and commercial vehicles in general. So it could come to other vehicles, I would assume. But eventually, it could also come to consumer vehicles to a lesser degree. But ATL, you have to give them a ton of credit because...

like we give tesla enough credit for expanding uh electric vehicles and i think tesla do get a lot should get a lot of credit for like making electric vehicles like compelling like they made like great electric vehicles that you know they're better than gasport cars and they were the first to do so and they were the first to do so in volume too but we have to give catl credit for helping tesla make those vehicles high volume because tesla i would not have achieved

it's last two years of record volume without ctl i think that's a fact too that has been a big partner for tesla and a bunch of other automakers too so that's why i think we should credit ctl for a lot of the enabling the high volume evs that we have i think i think it was like 13 million last year globally 13 million electric vehicles and i don't know how many have ctl batteries in there but i would venture that it's like a high percentage maybe not majority but like

20%, 30% or something? At least. Yep. Which is wild.

All right, we got a few more news items to discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comments section. So I know we did this show a little bit early today, so I don't know how many of our usual readers, original watchers are here right now. But if you do have a question for us, whether it's about some of the subjects that we discussed today or any other easy subject that is on your mind right now and you want to have our take or you want some questions, you can put them in the comments section right now. We're live on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram.

LinkedIn, Instagram, everywhere, basically. So put them in the comment section and we'll get to them in about 10 minutes. The next news is some EV numbers coming from Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia. So Toyota's EV results in the US this week were released for the Q1. It's nothing too impressive. Less than 2,000 vehicles in Q1. Well, vehicles. The BZ4X is the only one.

So they're still having a lot of issues ripping that up. It's, it's up 9% year over year, but like the deliveries just started last, well, just a little bit before the Q1 last year. So like we thought that was early to ramp up and by a year now production, we think you would have thought that they would be much more ramped up than it is right now, but it's not the case. It's a bit frustrating. Is it, is it your notification? That's it. Yeah. Sorry about that. I quit, uh,

but they keep coming. So probably put them to focus for 30 minutes. It'll be fine. Yep. All right. And, but we compare them to, to yeah. I thought the hunting Kia were in there.

We have the Lexus RZ EV numbers too, 1600. They're almost selling more Lexus EVs than Toyota. Yeah, I've actually had a lot of people ask about that. I think there's a lot of Lexus people who are willing to pay a little bit of extra on that. Yeah, surprising too.

Okay, so Hyundai sold 6,822 Ioniq 5 this quarter. That's nice. It's a new record for the first quarter. It's a new record. As for the EV9...

Just over 4,000 units. And just also the same for the EV6, so 8,000. Hyundai and Kia are completely 10 times outselling EVs from Toyota in the U.S. It's surprising, especially since Toyota delivers. It's such a big brand in the U.S. They deliver close to half a million cars a quarter, I think, in the U.S. Yeah, I think they're the biggest brand, right? Mm-hmm.

The IONIQ 6, 3,646 units. So the IONIQ 6 is not too far behind the 5. It's not too bad. Now, to be fair, all these cars are being heavily discounted too. Just like the Nomura Y, for example, they are getting big discount. I think we saw like $10,000 markdown on the EV9 this week. Yeah.

By the way, I'm driving an EV9 here in Colorado. It's a great vehicle. I don't know if I would trade in my Rivian for it. The one nice thing about it compared to the Rivian is it's got two captain's chairs in the middle row. So you can put all your ski stuff like right down the middle. Whereas a Rivian, you would, you know, there's a bench seat in the back, so you can't really do that. But the way...

The EV9 is not that much cheaper than the Rivian. No, not for spec. It starts lower, but the low-cost one is like rear-wheel drive, very slow. If you want the same specs, you're basically going up to the same price. Pretty close, yeah. Yeah. All right, speaking of Rivian, we have the Q1 numbers from them. They also had some excuses, just like Tesla. They did say they were preparing for the factory shutdown for upgrades, so they do...

They are flat. They're not down, they're flat. They did big expectation at the village, but they produce just short of 14,000 cars. So it is down from production of 17,000 vehicles, but that's Q2Q, it's not year over year.

And they delivered 13,588 vehicles in their quarter. So that's nice. Their deliveries is very close to their production. So that's going to be good on their financials in term of. We know that Rivian's biggest problem is they're losing a lot of money per car. But if their deliveries are tracking close to their production, that's going to be less so the place. So they're basically flat in terms of deliveries quarter over quarter. Let's go on.

Yeah. And, you know, theoretically, they're building a little bit of an inventory buffer for that shutdown period so that they can keep delivering vehicles. It sounds like that not only are they going to make a lower cost vehicle, you know, R1 vehicle after the shutdown is complete.

But theoretically, they're going to add some features to the R1S and R1T. So one thing I think people are expecting is the vehicle-to-grid stuff that is coming in the R2 line that we've already seen. So if it's in the R2 line, you've got to have it in the R1 line because that's so much more expensive and the bigger. Your flagship product. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's the number that we're going to be tracking for Q1 here. So there was an extremely nice progression over a year and a half from losing 139,000 vehicles per car to down 30,000 in Q3. But then there was this big bump up in Q4 to 43,000, which we weren't expecting as much. So we're going to need to see that going down if we want Rivian to still be going the right direction. Yeah, the stock took a big hit on that news. Yeah.

Hopefully it does the opposite when it comes down again, hopefully. All right. So one more numbers I want to discuss real quick is Ford's numbers. Ford released their Q1 result this week and they announced that they delivered 20,223 EVs in the first quarter, just over 7,000 units of the F-150s.

Then the Mustang Mach-E was 9,589 and the Transit was just short of 3,000 units, up 148% year over year. Not too surprising because last year, obviously, they unveiled a new generation of the Transit, which is like a massive upgrade over the previous one in terms of efficiency and range.

The Mach-E is up 77% year over year, but I think that was last year. That was a time that they had the battery production issue. They had to stop sales for the batteries. So it's not really surprising, but the Mach-E is doing not too bad at 10,000 units with the price drops lately. They had some big price drop that helped the vehicle a lot.

Right now, the Mackie with a NAX connector adapter is not a bad car. Yeah. No, it's compelling. Yeah. My main issue is the charge rate is lower than the Model Y, for example. So that's the biggest drawback. But at least you do have access to the supercharger network now. So, I mean, if you like the car more than the Model Y in terms of the actual car and the interior, there's a lot of like about the Mackie. It's different than the Model Y.

It's not a bad option. My only thing is like the charge rate. Like it's a, it's a big annoying. Yeah. It's, it's actually a little bit bigger. So, you know, when we were thinking about this Colorado trip, we were like, all right, what's the, what's the EV that we should be looking for? And obviously the EV nine was a good one because, uh, the size, but we're thinking, all right, what's the next big, biggest, you know, SUV. And obviously Mercedes, uh, uh, EQS would be nice. Those kinds of things. But, uh,

Mach-E was in the conversation. It's fairly large. And, you know, with the Tesla connector, the Naxx connector, it becomes charged. You know, you can charge it a lot more places. And they've also had some discounts on it lately. So as you mentioned, so.

Pretty good option.

But there's a drawback. You do lose some range with the all-wheel drive. So you make the decision from that. Do you want the highest range version? Or if you're also like $40,000, if range and all-wheel drive is not something you care about that much, you don't do any road trips, $40,000 car there, you have a very nice car, $40,000.

Yeah, I'm also kind of surprised more automakers don't just do what Rivian does with their all-wheel drive system. So they have a conserved mode that'll go even further than their range says they'll go. And they do this by only engaging the front motors, which if you're on the highway, that's fine. Like, you know, you don't need all-wheel drive highway necessarily. And, you know, if it's snowing or whatever, you can engage the all-wheel drive.

But, you know, like, why are these automakers taking these huge hits by putting all wheel drive in when you can just, you know, disengage the, you know, a motor is not going to cause 40 miles of range. Yeah. And I remember I thought this was going to be how things going to work.

Forever, because the first automaker to introduce an electric vehicle with dual motors was Tesla back in 2016, 15, 16? Yeah, 14, 14, back in 2014. And the second motor, they did that with the motor. They had these modes that made the range actually longer with all-wheel drive than the rear-wheel drive.

So I thought everyone was going to be doing that going forward, like tuning their motors in different ratio for different optimization at different speeds and then use them when that makes sense. People move away from that. Surprising. Yeah, it's great. All right. Not all good news for Ford, though. Ford announced a...

It was a little bit softer than, let's say, Mercedes and all that in terms of delaying. And then GM in terms of the announcement of delaying their EV plans. But it does sound a lot like that. So they did push their upcoming three-row SUV that's supposed to be built in Canada, in Ontario. They pushed that to 327. It was supposed to come next year. And they didn't.

I talked about the new pickup truck coming in 2026, but we've been hearing about that before too. So it's not like that they were surprised. So it's more of a delay there. And the delay, they say they're going to focus on hybrids while they delay that three-row SUV. They did still commit to building an EV in...

uh in in canada and ontario that the ontario planned but uh it's not going to come until another two years and in the meantime they're going to focus on hybrids which that sounds a lot like what gm announced a few uh weeks or months ago a bit of a bummer but uh

It seemed like a little bit softer than the GM announcement to me, but effectively sounds like the same because we don't know any other EVs that were planned from Ford in the coming two years. Right.

Ford kind of came out with a bang, Mustang, F-150, E-Transit. And since then, at least in the US, it's been crickets. They've launched a bunch of other stuff in Europe, but nothing new. Yeah, Explorer and whatnot. Yeah, I think the F-150, they were too focused on being the first to market. And

It's just it's not as good. And I think Ford would admit that themselves, like a lot of features, a lot of capability. Sorry, a lot of efficiency and all that. They all say, oh, yeah, we know about all that. But that's for the next generation. It's going to be more built from the ground up than the first one. So, all right.

So that's harder to compete then with the Rivian, with now the Silverado is a very nice entry. And you have the Cybertruck too, which is not for everyone, obviously, but still a competitor. So I think, yeah, it's harder for them than they thought. All right, let's jump into the comments real quick. All right. Yes, this is another early show. Elon has tweeted the Reuters report on the cancellation of the Model 2 is another lie. Yeah, I was working on that just before the podcast.

Yeah, I mean, we've been talking like this, like, you don't believe Elon every time too, but this one, I have to admit that Reuters, they had some pretty horrible reporting on Tesla over the last few years where clear, like, the main one is like they've been open to lying or misleading their readers, like,

They care more about the appearance of being right than being right, rotors. So I'm going to side with Elon on that one. I think it's probably Eli. So if you don't know what they reported is that Tesla is shifting their focus on the robot taxi in their next generation vehicle rather than the, they call it $25,000 Model 2, whatever it's going to be called. Yeah.

Currently not. Elon says it's a lie. That makes sense. I think Tesla needs a $25,000 car more than you need a robo-taxi, especially if they have no clear path to actually making self-driving work right now. I did get 12.3 on my car yesterday. It's just at the same time as we got a foot and a half of snow and now it's turning into slush and I literally cannot get out of my house. I can't get my car out of my garage. But

I'm going to be testing that soon enough and give a report back. So Elon replied to the zero hedge tweet of the woke. And he just says Reuters is lying again and doesn't say on which piece. And then further up in this, this stream, sorry, I was just kind of looking at this, um,

He says Reuters is dying, but not necessarily lying there. So that was interesting. And then he put the eyes emoji on another thing that Sawyer Merritt posted saying that the $25,000 car and the robo taxi were always going to be based on the same platform. They were going to be very similar, but the $25,000 version was going to have a steering wheel attached

Maybe Elon and a team. I can't read it because I'm blocked. Never mind. Anyway, so that's funny. So what did he say? He says like you put the highs like where you don't want to say, but he's saying it. Is that? Yeah. I mean, he just said he put eyes on the one tweet, which kind of gave, you know, like how this could be kind of true, but not totally true.

So... Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man. It blocked me too after I pointed out that he posted the article that was nonsense. Yeah, I think... The team was so impressed with the good Aspera phone. Well, but that would still make... True, right? That would still make the routers report through then. You never know. I mean...

Something probably happened that made it seem less likely. But again, I'm not saying that Rotors is right because last year or a year and a half ago, whatever, I caught them literally back editing their article to make a new article sounds right, which wasn't if they didn't back edit the other one without saying it. So,

Like that, that's a, if you're in the media industry, you know, that's as shady as it gets. So yeah, not a fan of that. All right, moving on. Tesla sales of the Model Y will be down because of the Juniper model refresh. People see the advances coming up.

in the Highland, but Elon had said that the Juniper release is not coming this year. So I don't know. Actually, that was a Tesla message to their employees. I wasn't even Elon. That was Tesla telling their employees as a talking point that there's not going to be any refresh of the Model Y in 2024. And Juniper, if I'm not mistaken, was a report from Rotterdam. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So I don't know. I don't know. I read Highland was also a Rotterds report, and that was correct, to be fair. So I don't know. All right. So this is something that we've talked about a lot. Best guess on the new model. What will the name be? Elon has said it won't be called the Model 2. What other names do you think Tesla could use for the next gen model if Model 2 isn't the name? I think Model 2 was kind of popularized by Ron Barron at one point.

So that, and Ron Barron seems to have some inside information on, he's a Tesla investor and friend of Elon. I think he might have some inside information, but perhaps not. What do you think? Model 2 would make sense, especially like we expect it's going to be like a smaller Model 3 type deal. So it's not like, because in Tesla now with the Model 3, like the Model 3 was supposed to be Model E and Tesla was supposed to stick to letters and

But with the Ford owning Model E, they had to switch to Model 3. So now Tesla is opening the door to numbers. But at the same time, maybe they want to just do the Model 3 as a number because we know that the Model 3 is just an E on the other way around and it's supposed to be like a little choke to keep it like the sexy lineup, whatever. So maybe we go with that. Can you spell another word than sexy if you had a letter? Yeah.

Sexy-er. With Cybertruck, maybe Tesla's moving away from the letters and numbers. Yeah, you're right. That's true. Maybe Tesla has a unique name like they do with the Cybertruck. Walter is accent, the biographer in Landmass, the biographer that saw some of the early concept and he did say that it was like Cybertruck-like. I don't know, maybe...

Cyber car. All right. Probably we'll reveal it now to keep news of the Model 2 canceling from being too large. He's talking about the Model 3 performance or ludicrous or whatever. Well, it looks like it was happening this week. I wouldn't be surprised if it's today, later today or tonight. Yeah, it could literally be any minute. Yeah.

I don't know if you guys went over this, but how do you think GM's new EV truck compares to the Cybertruck? We did talk about it a little bit, but just, you know, one big thing is the battery size. Like we're talking about 204 kilowatt hours versus what is this? 123. 123. So, you know, not double, but like, you know, pretty close 70, 70% bigger battery. And that, that obviously translates to way more range, real range, not necessarily, you know,

you know, what, whatever published ranges. Um, and, and, um, I did see a couple of YouTubers, uh, taking the cyber truck around and they, they actually ran it to it. The battery died. And I think they got like 460 miles or something. Um, so the, the, the Silverado, you mean? Yeah. The Silverado, sorry. And they were the same people who drove the cyber truck and got, you know, fewer than, uh, Tesla's rated range. So, um, yeah,

You know, there's a lot of other stuff. Obviously the design aesthetic is, you know, night and day different. If you're into traditional pickup looking vehicles, the Silverado is going to appeal to you more. If you want people to gawk at you on the street, the Cybertruck is going to appeal to you more. As far as, you know, features, both of them tow pretty well. Or, you know, for EVs, both of them have power out.

So you can charge your house or a campsite or whatever. I don't know. What do you think, Fred? Yeah, I think you described it well. I think the specs of the Silverado EV is what Tesla first announced the Cybertruck would be. So I think that the win on that front, design-wise...

a personal thing like you said if you're more traditional you can pick up truck obviously there's a clear winner there but some people love the Cybertruck too it's interesting looking vehicle that's for sure

Now, Cybertruck is nice in terms of new tech. It has a lot of cool new tech. It has a 48-volt battery system. It has an end-to-end steering wheel, a steer-by-wire. It has the potential of being potentially full self-driving at one point, depending on what you think of that for a Tesla. So there are advantages there, two potential advantages. But also, it seems...

That you might be getting like the Tesla early adopter treatment too with the Cybertruck right now. Because I've seen a lot of issues with them. I reported last week on a bunch of rear motor breakdowns that happened early in the ownership. So a lot of people have the Cybertrucks in the shop for weeks.

We know that Tesla likes to move fast. They do a lot of testing, of course. I'm not saying that Tesla doesn't do any testing, but it does appear that they do less testing per program than other automakers do and to bring the vehicle quicker to market. I think that's a fair thing to say. So it does cause some issues early. I'm not saying that other automakers don't have any issues early in their vehicle program. They do, but...

In average, it looks like fewer. But at the time, we haven't seen that many solar idle EVs on the road just yet. So I don't know about that. Yeah, GM's kind of slow rolling all those things out. The way they do that is by making $100,000 vehicles that not too many people want to buy. Exactly. Just like Tesla with Cybertruck. Yep. All right. Wider question here. Sean Goggin asks, what do you make of the possible overall EV market slowdown? Maybe early adopters have all bought

So I think we have a big problem with the terminology of an EV market slowdown. It's the acceleration has slowed down. So the EV market is still growing. Super. Yeah, and it's growing quite a bit. So I think the problem that I see is that media is kind of buying more

you know, the fossil fuel industry and the traditional legacy car market people who are saying, well, it's not exploding like we all thought it was going to explode. Well, it's still growing quite a bit. It's just not as fast as it was growing, you know, last year when we went from, you know, 1% to 10%. It's not going to, you know, 10X, you know, next year or, you know, we're talking about large number problems here. So, yeah, that's kind of my take. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. You're right. And also, it's different market per market. Like you have some market that it goes a lot faster than others. And in the U.S., obviously, U.S. is U.S. centric. And the U.S. is deploying, adopting EVs slower than the rest of the world. Last year, 18% of new cars were electric.

In the US, that was 9%. So half of the global rate of EV adoption in the US. So that's something to think about. But yeah, when we see it slowing down, it went from 6.5 million EVs sold in the world in 2021 to 10.4 in 2022. So that was a huge leap. EVs were going crazy there. But it's...

In 2023, it wasn't that big of a jump, but still $13.7 million. That's like $3 million more than last year. $3 million of a complex product like a car switching to a whole new powertrain system is a lot. It's still a lot. And this year, yeah, it's still going to be not a giant jump, but they're expecting over $16 million. So we're on pace right now with Q1 for $16 million. So it's not a...

It's not nothing. It's still great growth. Now, some markets are going to get more of it than others. I think the U.S. is still going to grow, but not as fast. But you have to look at Norway. Look at Norway at 96% electric right now in the new market. And we see the last few percent are tough to get. There's still some people that just don't want nothing to do with it, which makes no sense. But no, it does make sense. There's some people that are like that.

But you have to look at Norway, just how quickly they went from that 18%, which is like the global average in the world right now, to 60%, 70%. It was a few years it took. Like once the switch happened, it happens fast. It's very much market-driven. There's incentive-driven. There's infrastructure-driven that drives the whole thing. So you have to look at the whole thing. So yeah, I'm not worried about it.

AVs are still a little bit more expensive than gasoline cars on average. So high interest rates, the more expensive the vehicle is, the higher the interest rates has an impact on the purchasing decision. So if those can come down, that will help a lot too. But yeah, not to worry.

Yeah. I would say also the, as you mentioned, the infrastructure is woefully behind, especially here in the U S again, I'm driving a Kia EV9 and I'm having to deal with like Electrify America and ChargePoint chargers, which are just annoying and expensive and just silly in a lot of ways. Do you have a charger where you're staying at? No. So I had to go to Electrify America at a Walmart nearby, which is fine. Um,

you know, it, I got, I think a hundred kilowatts, but you know, we were, we had to go pick up some, you know, crap at Walmart. So by the time we got out, it was over 80% and, you know, charging much slower at that point. So you're like, whatever. And then we were, we stopped in Breckenridge and they had a charge point one year and it was great. It's like $29 for 15 minutes.

and i was like what like i don't even know if any you know charge point's not going to charge at anywhere near no fast so i was like eh i don't know so we're just going to regen going down the mountain and find some place in denver to charge up yeah when i'm traveling nowadays like

if you can find an Airbnb or a hotel that has like a charge, like you don't even like a charge one, I get like an actual level two chargers, but even just a plug, it's a, it's a game changer. Like you can work around it. Like you said, like you can find a restaurant or Walmart, whatever, where you need to do something. So it's not that, that big of a problem to actually go charge. But if you can just do it while you sleep, it's, it's,

game changer. I'll pay more at Airbnb or a hotel to get a charger. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be fancy. It can be level one. Level one, you can put on 40 miles a night, 50 miles a night, which is a typical driving. So yeah, just a plug. Doesn't need to be much. And Airbnb now lets you search with

places that have chargers but if they even if they don't sometimes they list it as level one too so that's nice and that's you i like to know that but if not you can ask do you like can i get just like blogging in your driver or whatever most people are fine with it all right have we rode in a cyber truck yet um i did at the launch event uh when when electric wasn't quite on uh tesla's bad boy list but um

They haven't reached out yet with an offer to ride one. I haven't seen one in the wild yet. Have you up there in Quebec? Yeah, I saw one when they were like the engineering unit, but not since they've officially been in production. I haven't ridden in one just yet, so we're not quite there yet. There's one at my Tesla dealership in Mount Kisco. My wife took pictures of it, but that's all we've seen so far.

All right. Moving on. Are any of you getting a Cybertruck this year? Wrap it with your logo, like your background wallpaper. We're not going to wrap it like that, I don't think. Do you still have your reservation, Fred? I still have my reservation. I still have my Rivian reservation.

I'm still not 100% decided on either one. I do need a pickup truck for sure. That's a fact. And I would like one this year. So it might be either one because I do have a nice little piece of land now and I need to move things around it quite a bit in the summer and all that. So it would be useful to have a pickup truck to do that.

Though I might have also an electric ATV coming that might be able to get around that. But then if you have an electric ATV, you want to move the ATV around and then you need a pickup truck to move the ATV around. Is it a cyber bike or what was that thing called? Cyber quad? No, it's not a cyber quad. It would be, if all goes well, because it's not in production just yet, but it would be a Tehran EV. You can look it up. It's a pretty cool.

Full disclosure, I'm on the board of directors. I'm not an investor in the company, though. I'm just volunteering on the board. But yeah, so a lot of fun EV toys coming that pickup truck could be useful. And I'm not completely opposed to Cybertruck. Like Peter says, wait until they fix the kinks and bugs. Yeah, there's that. There's no autopilot on the highway. I've been driving like an electric Tesla for years.

I don't know how long now, and it's been on autopilot on the highway every time. I don't know how to drive on the highway now on autopilot these days. It's crazy. Ford and Chevy both have Blue Cruze. Yes. Every time I test drive a car, it's like I was just driving the Audi Q6 the other day, and I was arguing with the test driver about, yeah, well, I don't like the one because in the Q6, I congratulate them to...

offer a full one-pedal driving on it. But they also have like six other modes of driving, different region and everything. And I'm like, he keeps explaining all of them to me. He's like, I know all of them. I'll stay on one-pedal driving. I'm fine with one-pedal driving. Same with Kia and EV9, yeah.

Yeah, but he was like, how do you do it on the highway? I don't get the highway. Like, since when do you drive on the highway? Like, I just, you have the traffic-aware cruise control on this thing. And it's pretty good on the Audi, too. So...

I just do that. So I don't touch the brakes on the highway or the accelerator anyway, unless I have to, obviously. But so, and any other occasion, one-throw driving, if you get good at it, it's way better than anything. For sure. I mean, even when I was doing, what do you call it?

with a bolt, GM, I don't know if you weren't at that event, but... Paddle thing? Yeah, they had the paddle, yeah, but they have this... When you put cones on a big parking lot... Auto crossing, yeah. We did auto crossing with the bolt...

And everyone that was a pro autocrosser, they hated the well-tailed driving. They hated using the reach and everything. I thought it was way more fun like that. Obviously, if you do autocross, you do need to use the friction brakes at one point. But I tried to do some runs just with the reach, and it was fun. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's all the question this week. I appreciate every single one of you that has a question today was very interesting. Uh, thank you for listening. If you do enjoy the show, you can give us a quick thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on the application you're watching. It helps the show helps, uh, power the algorithm to, to show it to more people. And if you're listening on your podcast app, you can give us a five-star review. Only if you enjoy the show, obviously that helps a ton. It would be helpful too, because we are getting some people that don't even listen to the show that give us like one star review sometimes. And it's, uh,

It's not cool, so if you guys can balance it out, we'd appreciate it. All right. Thanks a lot, everyone. I'm going to see you same place, same time next week. Have a good one.