Tesla sales are dropping, tariff situation, Nissan/Honda deal falls through, more
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All right, well, I don't have the music for some reason. My producer board is half off. That's weird because the microphone is connected to it. The microphone is working. The rest is off for some reason. All right, this is Fred Lambert for the Electric Podcast. New episode this week. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchell. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. A crazy week in the whole world this week, but...

Relatively slow on EV news. So we have a couple of news items to discuss with you guys for sure, but we're going to have plenty of time to get into the Q&A section. So at the end of the show, as usual, we'd like to get your guys' input. So you can put in the comment section right now. It can be about any of the topics that you see on the screen now, if you're watching the video, or any other topic in the EV world you want us to discuss, you can put it in the comment section and we'll get to it in about 30, 40 minutes.

But we're going to start out right away with Tesla sales numbers for the first month of the year coming out. And a lot of people are tracking that very closely right now because of the Model Y changeover. So the Model Y is by far the best selling electric vehicle in the world. And now it is transitioning to its new design. And that means transitioning the production line in 2021.

everywhere. It's the only test vehicle that's built everywhere in Shanghai, in Berlin, in Texas, and in

Fremont. So all these factories are changing over and that will affect sales. That will affect production, which in turn will affect sales. So we're trying to track that very closely. But then with Tesla right now, you also have this issue of like, all right, how much is the Model Y having an impact? And obviously any little change to the Model Y in terms of production is going to have a big impact because like I said, it's not only the world's best selling vehicle, but it's Tesla's best selling vehicle by a wide margin.

But there's also the Elon Musk effect at the same time. Elon Musk meddling in politics right now is just not helping Tesla's reputation, not helping the credibility, and it's affecting sales. In Europe specifically, so in Europe, we have monthly numbers.

In the U.S., we don't know what's happening right now. It's pretty opaque, the market. There's some data. There's a way to use inventory data to get an idea. So we should probably in the next two weeks have a little bit of an idea of what's happening with Tesla in the U.S., but not too much. In Europe, we have everything. So this week, we had basically all the main markets in Europe released their numbers, and Tesla is down on average about 50%, 50.4%.

to be exact, in January versus the same month last year. Some markets are very brutal. Germany down almost 60%, which was the biggest market. France, 63%. The UK is the one that's doing the best right now, only 18% down, which is to say a lot. Even though Ilan has actually been meddling a lot in UK politics and his reputation has dropped a lot in the UK based on the surveys.

But yeah, it's just not looking good for Tesla in Europe so far this year. And it probably will continue that way, especially with the changeover now happening with the Y starting like mid-January, basically. So the impact is going to be even greater probably in February on that side. And there's also always the Elon effect that's harder to quantify.

Yeah, the Elon effect is going to be pretty interesting to watch because he's going to be in the news 24-7. He is. I mean, you literally cannot shut up. You can't. Australia, also we have some number for Australia and it's also not looking great. Down 33% to only 739 vehicles. And that's one that's interesting because...

You cannot blame the Model Y changeover on this one because Model Y sales are actually up in the versus the interview of last year. It's the Model 3 sale that are just crashing 63% for whatever reason. So...

Maybe the Elon effect is at play there too. And Australia also has been down all year. It was down 17% last year. And in January 2023, they delivered like 2,000 vehicles in Australia. So going from 2002 years ago to 739. Tesla is having like real demand issues right now. You cannot...

cannot work around that. It's pretty clear this is having them an issue. But the silver lining for Tesla is China. And today we had the numbers for Tesla in China. And China is a bit different. China, I don't think there is an Elon effect in China. I think that Elon could call his next kid Adolf and they wouldn't care there. It would be perfectly fine. But

But the Model Y effect is a big one because obviously Shanghai is the first one that, GigaFerti Shanghai is the first one to do the changeover. And it's the biggest factory too. And it supplies obviously the local market. So the first, the number came out for January, Tesla built it. So Tesla China, so that includes the vehicle delivered in China and exported overseas from China, 63,238 vehicles.

And that's down just 11.5%. So it's not too bad versus the same month last year compared to 32.5% in December. So it's significantly down December to January, but that always happens because Tesla liquidates a lot of its inventory in December at the end of the quarter for financial reasons. It looks good. And then when the changeover happens, if you're wearing inventory, you need to just build that back up.

So that number is not really important. It's the 11.5% from last year that's important. And there's a bit of also other things in play too, like obviously the Chinese New Year is always a big thing in the beginning of the year. It resulted in factory shutdown and Tesla has extended one, the previous reported from January 22nd to February 14th.

And there's going to be some partial shutdowns, though. It's not the entire line, but that will definitely affect sales. So I think the impact on Chinese Tesla sales are going to be bigger this month in February. So next month, we're going to have a better idea what's happening. Probably March is going to be difficult, too, because the production ramp is a little bit slow at the beginning for the new version of the Malawi. Also, you know, the...

Depends what's happening with the current inventory of the previous version of Model Y, just how difficult it is to sell compared to people that want the new version, even though the new version is a little bit more expensive. So I don't think there's going to have that many issues to sell the old ones. But yeah, China is keeping Tesla alive. I think over 40% of Tesla's revenue is coming from China, despite the lower average price per car. And so it's just a volume thing. It's a...

It's not just sales in China, but also the Chinese Gigafactory seems to be putting out quite a few cars that are making it around the world. Yeah. And so Europe. So that's the thing with Europe. Europe is still getting cars from China, from Tesla from China. And the demand is down there. So what Tesla will do with that, we'll see. Tesla has launched recently in some like...

other South Asian and East Asian markets. So maybe they will try to divert some of that production to those markets. We'll see. But I think this quarter is going to be way down for Tesla, I think. And do you think that'll rattle shareholders or do you think that it doesn't matter anymore? I think timing wise, it should. I mean, we already see that the stock was down like 10% this week. I don't know where it closed, but

It's like down 20% from its high of last month. And then, yeah, it's down about 10% this week. I think it will continue to go down as we see just how low the volume are going to be this quarter.

And then if you look at the trend with the margins, the margins has been going down all year last year. No indication that that's going to stop. Tesla is also in China right now, offered another $1,000 discounts on the Model 3, offers 0% or 1% interest rates, which are subsidized by the company. So that's also putting pressure on the company. So if you combine that,

With lower volumes, Tesla is going to barely break even probably this quarter. And that's going to put an impact on the company, obviously. And now that's the thing. A similar thing happened this quarter. We talked about it with the earnings last week. I don't think it was as bad. That's what it's going to be this quarter.

But it was pretty bad. It was below expectation of basically every metric from Wall Street. And yet the stock didn't do too bad last week after that. And a lot of that is attributed to Elon just saying again that full self-driving is around the corner, $3 billion business with the optimists and all that. And Tesla shareholders still believe that. So I think as long as Tesla shareholders still believe that, I don't think it's going to be a bloodbath on Tesla stocks. Although...

Well, I'm not an economist or anything, but I do fear a broader market crash happening. I think that's a possibility. And with Tesla trading at 180 times price per earnings, in a broader market crash, those stocks normally take a pretty big beating. So that's something that could happen too.

All right. Today also, we learned that Tesla increased the price on the Model X by $5,000 on both version, long range and all-wheel drive. But they also put some incentive on it. And it brought back an incentive that Elon said it was never coming back. But we heard that one before. And that's the free supercharging. Free supercharging for life, right? For life, yeah. So Elon has previously said that...

Free supercharging forever is not coming back to any vehicle. It's not a good incentive structure. And that was in 2020, he said that. 2018 or so, they started phasing that out on vehicles, not offering it as an incentive to buy, switching to paid models. At first, all Tesla were...

All Model S and at a certain point, Model X too were free supercharging. And then with the Model 3 happening, with the Model Y, the volumes just didn't make sense. So Tesla started to move away from that, but still use it sometimes as an incentive. And then in December, brought it back again as an end of the year incentive. So we're surprised by that because this is a big incentive that Tesla brought, but we knew that Tesla needed it at the end of the year for the reason that I said earlier about reducing inventory.

But now we are at the beginning of the year. And also, I didn't see any time constraint on this. And it's both. So Model X, big price increase, but it's both on Model S and X. And it applies in US, Canada, Puerto Rico, Europe, and the Middle East. So basically everywhere outside of Asia in markets where Tesla operates, obviously.

And there's a few caveats that are different than what it was before. So Tesla says that now it's attached to the Tesla account rather than the car itself. So previously, like my Model S 2012,

I have free supercharging for life on it. And if I sell the car to someone else, it still has that. So the value is attached to the car. But with this new version, it's attached to your account. And if you sell the car to someone else, they don't have it. So Tesla has learned its lesson on that. Tesla also says that it's not for commercial use. If you're Uber, taxi, ride-sharing delivery services, you cannot use that. But Tesla said that also in previous version of the supercharging for life and

i mean it's it's pretty hard to enforce especially with like uber apps and things like that it's not like uh you have a title for a taxi or plates of taxi and even even then i'm not sure if this could actually enforce that it's it's obviously very useful for these people if you're running a taxi service and you can use supercharger for free uh you you're uh you just increase your margin quite significantly i still love it on my mls

having supercharging for free not having to think about that how often do you use it i mean is it really it's mainly my parents that use their car now and now that they have their vin fast they're using it a little less but when they do long distances they do they do use it because it is useful to use the supercharger they work for free for that right so we we haven't heard much about the vin fast sorry to digress a little bit but how's that going

my parents are happy i need i need to do a full review of it like they've been they've been harassing me about this to try it into a full review i i should do it when i have some time i'll get it onto that but my dad is super happy with it and and one thing he's very happy about so he had had some issues but mostly like software related and uh and i think with his key fob also had an issue at one point but they had it fixed fairly quickly and that's one thing that he's really happy about like apparently they're

They take feedback for customers very well and they're very proactive into fixing any issues. That's what they feel like well taken care of. A little bit like the early days of Tesla, really. When you have a new automaker, that's one of the concerns that you have. Something happens and my local mechanics aren't able to fix this, so I need to make sure the company is on top of it. VinFast looks like they're on top of it.

Good news for Mercedes drivers that they just got access to the Supercharger Network this week in the US. So all the cars are now within an adapter, obviously, can use the Supercharger Network. I think they're not giving the adapter, though, if I read the article correctly. Yeah, you have to buy it for $185 at the Mercedes dealership. Seems reasonable.

Yeah, it's not only on the expensive side for sure. And the new Mercedes vehicle will come standard with the NAG system later this year, like most other vehicles launching in North America. All right, moving on from Tesla news, we have the tariff situation. So the tariff situation was...

Kind of evolved a lot this week. So we talked a lot about it on the last week's podcast as things were being announced on the US side of things. Trump announced tariffs, 25% on basically everything except energy in Canada. Energy was 10%. And same thing with Mexico. And then during the weekend,

Mexico and Canada responded. And in the case of Canada, it was a 25% tariffs on like $30 billion worth of goods, mainly like grocery stuff and materials and all that. But then that was going to be applied on February 4th, I think. Yeah.

And another wave 21 days later, because we still have a democracy process in Canada and we had to open that up to public comments and all that. So for a 21-day period, there were going to be public comments on a proposed $125 billion worth of goods, including passenger vehicle, trucks, including electric vehicles, steel, aluminum products, fruit and vegetables, etc. So electric vehicles were going to be included from that. However, a couple of days later...

Trump decided to back off for a month. Canada just basically gave him something. So for people that are not really following this tariffs issue, like Trump signed a free trade agreement with Canada on this last term just a few years ago. And now he's basically breaking it.

with those tariffs. The reason he is officially giving people for breaking in and for not even using Congress through that approval is as an emergency solution for the fentanyl crisis. And he claims that a lot of fentanyl is coming in from Canada into the US, even though there's very little evidence of that. I mean, I'm sure there's some drugs that come

from Canada to the US, but there's little evidence that this is any significant part of the reason for the fentanyl crisis in the US. But that's the reason that he's using. Obviously, I think if anyone is following this closely, it's pretty clear that Trump is using this as an economic pressure on Canada for his goal to make Canada a 51st state of the United States. I think he said that several times and he said that he was willing to use economic pressure on that.

But that's the real reason. And that was surprising because Canada in December announced a $1.2 or $3 billion incentive to reinforce the border. And now as part of the negotiation this week over the tariffs, Trudeau basically reiterated that that's happening. And then Trump said, all right, that's a win. Then we'll back off for a month.

And same thing happened with Mexico sending 10,000 troops to the border, something that they already agreed upon a few months ago. So now we are in the clear basically for the next month or so on tariffs. I'm still pushing in Canada for my idea of if they do decide to go forward with these tariffs because now we have another month. So it's going to be early March that we're going to know if this is going back on or not.

If they are going forward, remove the tariffs on the Chinese vehicles and open the floodgate to the Chinese, get all these nice EVs in Canada. That will hurt more than the 25% tariffs, I think. And we know for sure that the Tesla price increase in Canada last week or two weeks ago was not because of tariffs, because they haven't changed the prices now that the tariffs are not happening for another month. So clearly that was not it. My dad is in the comments now saying that he loves his very fast VFAs.

All right, Nissan had a bad week. The Honda merger is off. So we don't have all the details on this, but there are a bunch of reports from Financial Times and from Japan also that kind of points to Ford on the kind of pulling the rug on their Nissan here. And they were like,

what was supposed to first be a joint ventures between the two to be able to better transition into the electric vehicle future, changing to Nissan, you guys are going to be a subsidiary of Honda and we're going to be the boss now. So now there's not going to be like a merger of leadership or anything like that. It's just going to be Honda,

absorbing Nissan, basically. And that didn't work out for Nissan. They were like, nope, we're not doing that. So now they are reopening discussions for other mergers, possible mergers with other companies. And I think Foxconn has been mentioned. So Foxconn already met with Renault, apparently, who's one of the biggest shareholders in Nissan.

And they are starting conversation about joining forces for the EV business because Foscon. I haven't heard much about Foscon for a while now. I mean, regarding the, obviously they're famous for,

their partnerships with Apple and manufacturing Apple products. But you remember a few years ago, they unveiled like a bunch of new electric vehicles and they were kind of presenting them as like, I don't know if the term white label would apply to this, but it's like, yeah, we make these vehicles, but they could be like your vehicles. Just you put your brand on it. But I haven't heard back in a long time. You know, I hate to say it, but ever since Carlos Gozen left Nissan, it's not been great.

and he didn't leave nissan he was kind of forced out yeah we still don't we don't still don't have that documentary that we need on that whole escape from uh yeah i mean if the guy can escape uh japanese authorities like that in the in basically a suitcase uh he he's a he's a scrappy guy it might be useful to run a company no i'm just joking but yeah i mean you're right i mean i just a few years ago nissan brought me to japan

uh showed me their entire lineup of it vehicles and i got super excited with it like hey this is incredible bunch of tv but then they told me i couldn't even talk about them and then they never even launched them so it was happening guys i want i want to give them the benefit of the doubt but i see a bunch of aria around here though they they're still around they're still going speaking of that's

I've never even driven the Ariadne. Yeah, it's a nice car. I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up more. I mean, it's a little bit, you know, the acceleration is not exciting, but the interior is lovely. And it's, you know, like I think if Nissan was doing better overall, I think the Ariadne would be doing a lot better as well. Yeah, it does look pretty premium, especially compared to the Leaf. Like it looks like a big upgrade.

All right, a few more news items, and then we jump into the comments section. So if you guys have any questions for us, any topics that you want to take in the EVO right now, you can put in the comments right now. Looks like we're going to have plenty of time to get on that. All right, the GM announced...

That they are cutting a shift. They are basically, I think, letting go of 800 or so people at their factory in Mexico where they are producing the Chevy Equinox EV and the Honda Prologue. And they are kind of blaming it on the Prologue a little bit. So they said that Nissan, this change is mainly due to our customer Honda strategy of reducing production volume of the Prologue model.

So they gave a few other explanations to say that the adjustment of a mix of production for GM vehicle at the site. So it's not just the Chevy Equinox and Prologue. There's also a few gas cars that are being made there.

And Undo didn't confirm the change, but it said it is quite normal for our business to make production adjustments during the year in order to meet customer needs and market conditions. We will continue to carefully manage production inventory in our entire product lineup and meet anticipated demand in 2025. So this happened February 3rd.

which the timing is right around when Trump backed off of the tariff, but the tariffs were discussed. And they didn't also fully backed off. They just gave another month before they come into effect, giving basically room for a month of negotiation, I assume. And Mexico was slapped with 25% tariffs. This is a little bit complex because the prologue is selling well. We discussed that before.

surprisingly well for us it's selling better than the equinox which is the same car with the gm rent on it and carplay and carplay yeah carplay that's the thing that people like yeah probably what's helping this sells a lot so i don't know if this is um on the getting scared of the um of the tariffs and they're like yeah well it's not because obviously the tariffs will will hurt these vehicle program a lot if they're 25 percent more expensive um

they'll be too expensive period so that that makes sense uh so i i guess that gm and under are proceeding with caution and they they do believe that the tariffs are gonna come in place next month i think that's probably the approach that makes sense here but it's already like trump is already hurting cells in the evs like a lot obviously because this is going to be fewer volume available in the us with the prologue and probably the equinox too

We got, well, we'll call it a first look, but we've seen that car quite a bit. But I think the latest version of Volkswagen's cheap $20,000 EV. So this thing has been in the work for a long time. It was called the ID.Life and then the ID.2. Now it's the production version of the ID.2 All. I hate the name. Yeah. ID.Life. I mean. Life was good. Yeah.

But I do like the car, though. The car is great. Especially, like, look at the timeline. Spacious, like a Golf. Affordable, like a Polo. And it's pretty accurate. So, it was just a quick preview for employees, I think. So, it's not like a full launch. And it looks pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah, $20,000 seems like a low price. I wonder how they're going to get it down that low. I think it's €20,000. But I think while the euro and the USD is like it's equal now. It wasn't the case just not that long ago. They're talking about a range of up to 279 miles and we can run the 450 kilometers. And it's going to launch 2027. I thought it was 2026.

Maybe it's a 2027 model. I don't know. Production model in 2027. And finally, Trump has officially canceled the NEVI charging program, the federal funding for electrical charging. We knew he was coming. He put an executive order in on his first day about it. But now a memo has been transferred to all the states because this is actually, this is federal money, but it's being distributed through the states.

And now the memo reads, therefore, effective immediately, no new obligation may occur under an EV formula program until the updated final EV formula program guidance is issued and new statements are submitted and approved. So basically, the money that has been officially attributed now is good to go, but you cannot commit any new amount of money to any of the submitted charging station under the EV program.

it's not exactly clear how much this is gonna i think it was five billion total the program uh it's not clear how much of that money has been completely committed i'm sure they're gonna try to claw back as much as they can so we it's like depending on where it is in the process it's not clear well yeah that's pretty much it for the news this week yeah we can jump into the comment section

All right, Paul Lackey, some news that I don't know has been noticed much is that the battery company Zerotech Battery Systems just announced that they are going out of business. Well, I didn't even know it existed. Yeah. I'm not sure how significant it is. Zerotech, it's a Colorado company. Colorado has a surprising battery tech industry. There's a few companies. Tesla bought a company from there too.

That's where the unique mobility electric from the 70s is from as well. They are going way back there, but yeah. They had the... I think Colorado State had a really good battery program. Yeah, I think a few of those startups are going to spin off from that. It's not clear they were producing actually any significant volume for anyone.

All right. Timber452 says, make Tesla great again. Hashtag fire Elon. Yeah, I didn't discuss that too much in this episode, even though my biggest post of the week was actually you sent me this Reddit thread from the Tesla Investor Club where people were basically like stoking the idea of

you've removing elon from from tesla from that's those like this a shoulder saying that so it was like one of the rare time when you see actually some momentum behind that and my article on it got very popular and like i got 500 comments on so people were really excited

But I try not to talk too much about Tesla on the podcast and Elon Musk because I know a lot of people don't like it and everything, even though I think it is a big story. Tesla is the biggest automaker, EV automaker, and its CEO has lost its mind and the company is suffering from it, barely. I think it's 3.4 today.

What did you say? Stock price is down 3.4% today. Yeah. Yeah, it's down about 10% this week. I think it needs to come down a lot more than that. That was my main point in the article. Even though I see some momentum within Tesla to remove Elon, within Tesla's shoulder, I think most of them are just too afraid of what's going to happen to the stock if you remove Elon, which I agree, the stock will probably go down if you remove Elon. Yeah.

So I think that the stock needs to go down before that to get people, all right, the stock is down anyway, so might as well just remove Elon. And I think that might happen this quarter. I think the stock probably will continue to go down this quarter, especially after the earnings, which the timing is pretty good because you have the earnings in April and then you have the shareholder meeting in June.

And then you have the launch of the unsupervised thing happening around the same time too, which I think is going to be a pretty big mess. And it's going to be like...

It's going to get a lot of people disappointed. A lot of people think that they're going to get unsupervised self-driving in their car by the end of the year, and those people are pretty delusional. But this is not what's happening. It's a geofence launch of a teleoperated fleet, basically, or supervised at the release by teleoperation in a small area. That's all it's going to be. It's basically going to be a baby Waymo, Tesla launching Waymo just like five years behind Waymo.

All right. Some more information on Zerotech that we didn't know about. They were a big up and coming name and had a lot of high profile customers such as Bobcat. All right. Yeah. You need, you need some battery manufacturer. And also they were making more battery pack, I think, than battery cells. I don't think they were making battery cells. All right. Glenn Sullivan from X says Elon is failing in his mission. If he continues to try and fix us politics, he has a loyalty to shareholders and,

Advancing the transition. That's, I think, what I hear a lot from it. Like you said before, it's really surprising. I've never seen the shareholder Reddit accounts so negative before. Yeah, it's a Tesla shareholder. So I don't know if you saw last week what happened with the Tesla subreddits to the shareholder.

So there's a new guy, a new mod of the Tesla subreddit that took over. And he consolidated all the Tesla subreddits, like a bunch of them. All the positive ones. Except this one, except the Tesla investor ones. That's the only one that he didn't take over. And he basically banned saying anything negative on Elon.

Like you cannot talk negative on all these, this is subreddit. So I think that's also like putting, so it's, it results in a lot of these people that are not super pro Elon going to that subreddit instead. So I think that has an effect too.

All right. Dan Oberstay, if the charging plan is attached to the account, does it apply to both of my cars or is it just really attached to the car? Talking about the Model X unlimited charger. Yeah. No, it's definitely attached to the car, but through your account. And if you sell the car without, you're like, maybe you can sell the car. Well, it would have to be like a back deal type of thing. Wouldn't work with the registration and all that. Yeah.

All right. Say hi to your pops. Hey, Pat. All right, DGM. My theory, Elon is self-sabotaging. He wants to be canceled so hard that he can blame the collapsing Tesla company on it. That his company was canceled due to his political views. I don't know. He wants out. I don't know if he wants out.

I don't know if he wants to be canceled or anything like that. But I do think that for sure he's going to blame the boycotts attack. This quarter, he's going to say, obviously, Model Y changeover resulting in these bad performance with Tesla. But he's also going to say...

that are like all these attacks on everything. He's going to try to use it as a, to stoke up some like Tesla, like patriotism, basically where he was like, Hey, we're being under attack by these liberals and everything. So like we need to bend together and fight back, which is, which probably is going to work because like I said, like for a big portion of Tesla shareholders, he can do no wrong. There's nothing wrong he can do. Um,

I just posted one shareholder that says, are you supporting Elon Musk? I always will. Always? That's the shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. Yeah, exactly. There's no one I can say I will always support. What if they do something like that? No, I don't support that. And that's really a cult, right? It is cult behavior, yeah.

Anunciator says, I remember when he was praised for saving the earth. Yeah. It seems like, you know, I was just thinking like, you know, he had all these friends like Leonardo DiCaprio and like, are they still talking? Like,

Like, did he just shut out that whole piece of his life? I think he lost a lot of friends. I don't think he has a lot of like real friends that can like, hey, don't, this is stupid. I mean, all these Doge people are like 19 to 25 years old and they are racist and whatnot. I mean, one of them is actually a self-declared racist. So it's like a bunch of like incels, nerds, that's crazy.

We associate with them. All right. If Volkswagen wants to sell the ID2 all in the South, they should call it the I declare y'all. All right. Okay. Good one, Dan. Good one. It's a Dan joke, a dad joke. All right. I can't post in those Tesla Reddit rooms. I was targeted. Yeah. They banned a ton of people. If you say anything bad about Elon, they ban you.

All right. Tommy Key says, any news on the next-gen Chevy Bolt on Altium platform? We had a post. We had an article on that this week. I didn't include it because, honestly, it was kind of a stretch to make an article about that because it was like a quick video of one car undercover for like half a second. And you cannot tell anything about it. So it's not really worth talking, honestly. We know it's coming. We know they're working on it. Hopefully, it's not built in Mexico because it's going to get some tariffs.

Unfortunately, also, I think they've said that they're going to base it on the EUV and not the EV. So it's the hatchback. And again, super hard to tell from that quick video and everything. But if I had to tell you, like, maybe it looks closer to the EV than the EUV, I would say the EUV. All right. Let's see. Thanks for your show. I'll only say that Elon is a Nazi and I spent time this week boosting the need to get Elon's Doge jokover program eliminated. All right.

Good luck with that. I don't think that the president doesn't want that eliminated at all. All right. Carl continues, Elon never had friends. Peter Thiel was his last one. Good track record. I mean, Peter Thiel is still his friend, I would assume. Yeah, I think they're working together on this Doge thing. All right. Our colleague Joe says, Fred has Elon's number. Elon is 100% going to frame this as an attack.

How is that going to play to the GOP base, though? In Illinois, PDs can get a nearly free electric pursuit vehicle more than one fleet manager has said to me. We don't want any of that woke electric in our department. Speaking of Tesla, you said that Tesla is a woke electric? Yeah, I guess. So that's an interesting point because I've seen...

So one of the biggest Tesla propagandists right now are the Tesla boomer papa and Tesla boomer mama. They are the ones that led the effort to get Elon's $55 billion package. Literally, they spent almost full time working during that time to get the richest man in the world $55 billion that he appropriately appropriated himself through negotiating with a board that he basically owned.

um and but these people have now switched their effort to try to convince conservatives to buy Tesla vehicles because obviously it's harder to get liberals to buy one these days or anyone really that doesn't really associate with liberalism or conservative but just you know don't appreciate Nazi salutes um it's very it's an acquired taste in Nazi salute and um

They launched that effort. They were like, all right, let's talk to your conservatives friends about getting a Tesla vehicle. And we're like, let's boost order and everything. I'm sure it's going to work to a certain degree. But how much? Because like Joe says, the electric vehicle has a long history from conservatives to not liking them and associating them with wokeism, with tree hugging and all that.

I think Tesla and a few other automakers did a good effort to walk away from that a bit. Not being just about the environment, but just... And that's been my point for a long time too. It's like, if you want to build the best vehicle possible today, it has to be electric. There's just nowhere around it. So I think there's already an effort being done on that front. But just...

Maybe the Cybertruck. The Cybertruck helped too, but it's not working well either on that front. Oh, by the way, I didn't post that too because I don't know if it was last week or the end of this week, but Tesla is now, well, there's a few things that happened with Cybertruck. Now it has access to the federal tax rate. I don't know how much that will help because if you're buying an $80,000 Cybertruck,

And you can use that tax credit. It's very limited. You should probably not buy an $80,000 Cybertruck if you make less than $150,000 per year. I'm no financial advisor. Anyway, you have the lease. I've been launched to the US, so that will help a lot more because leases do help people that cannot afford a car to buy a car that they cannot afford or not buy it, but lease it.

And then Tesla is offering a free wrap for the Foundation Series because they still have, a year later, they still have Foundation Series Cybertruck in inventory that they need to get rid of. So you get a free wrap with it, which is worth like $6,000. So it's not a bad deal. All right, Joe is expanding. We have Paul first. We didn't talk about Paul. The right-wingers in the U.S. still hate EVs, even if they love Elon himself.

That's true because Elon doesn't talk about Tesla that much these days too. It's not like he's trying to push Tesla on his new conservative fans. Maybe if Elon started to do that, that could actually have an impact, but he's not doing it. I don't think he's even posted about the new Model Y since its launch, maybe once. And he tweeted, by the way, 2,000 times over the last week. 2,000 times.

And he tweeted about non-Tesla stuff during the earnings last week. In the middle of the earnings call, he tweeted about non-Tesla stuff. Don't tell me he doesn't have a social media addiction. Right. Do you think that's actually him or does he have people? No, no, no. He confirmed it after that. He laughed about it that he tweeted. All right.

Joe continues, I reply, but I'm not invited to talk on the show. We're going to have to invite Joe to the show. Even a Tesla to a lot of these guys, electric eagles woke bad. They don't make the connection that he's pro-Trump or don't care.

I mean, obviously we can invite you, Joe, by the way, but a little shout out at the same time. Joe has his own show, Electric Daily on YouTube and Quick Charge on most platforms or maybe both. Alternatively, the show is called Quick Charge, but the YouTube channel is called Electric Daily and he posts almost daily on this. All right. What will it take to reverse car sales trends? I mean, EV sales are still growing most places.

So it's Tesla sales that are going down, but they're not going down at a rate high enough because that is impacting the rest of the sales. Like in California, for example, we got the numbers for Q4. Tesla was down in California significantly, but the EV market was up 20%. So that's good. Yeah.

In Europe, there's a few markets where all EV sales are down. That's true mostly because of incentives going away. That's going to happen in Canada also. I do like the idea of opening it up to the Chinese. I do like it. I think if we're going to give up on EVs in North America, might as well open it up to the Chinese.

Yeah. Or what if we said you can only import vehicles under $20,000 because we don't compete there? Yeah. I would be okay with that. Maybe not $20,000, but like $25,000 or $30,000 or something like that. Maybe $30,000. Because we don't build them. No. All right. We got a few more. Mike the Car Geek, what's your opinion on EREVs and PHEVs? Do you consider them a lesser vehicle? Sounds like a large SUV and pickups will get

this from ram ford and chevy and also scout um i i personally think they're a good carryover but like not gonna work out in the long run yeah i think the future is clearly bev's like perfectly like all electric i'm curious with the scout one just because of the specs and uh we'll see if it actually makes a difference if people go for this model like that where it's actually a large uh evbv range and then

the gasoline generator is really kind of more like a backup almost. Basically, the contrary of a plug-in hybrid. A plug-in hybrid, if their range is over 50 miles or around 50 miles, and most importantly, where you can actually use the core normally, purely on the all-electric one, where if you go too fast or if it's too cold or whatever, the gas engine doesn't kick in,

And you use it properly, meaning you charge it every night. I think it's a great solution. I just, I don't think it's the future of the industry, but I think it makes an impact. It makes actually a great impact. All right. Joe says, if Joe had 11 shows, it wouldn't be enough. He loves attention. All right. And it's Joe saying that too, for people that are just listening, not watching the comments.

And Carl says, keep up the good work, Joe. Kenny says, can someone post at the end of each day the number of posts Elon addressed Tesla, number of posts Elon, all other topics? It's usually zero out of ten. Yeah. It's not complicated. He doesn't talk about it. He talks about DEI, talks about USA. That's one of the things, like it's a little tangent here, but...

You know, I'm not against Doge as a principle. I think there's a lot of fat to trim on the government, on the US government. And if you have an agency that's going to do that, it makes sense to me. So I'm not against the principle of it. The execution of it, I have a lot of issues with it. And starting with USAID,

Like, USA, which I'm sure USA has some issues. I'm sure that there's some waste in it. I don't have no proof, but if you tell me that it's been co-opted by intelligence agencies to further the American agenda in some region, I would not be shocked by it. If you say that there's been some corruption and a certain percentage of their fund have been misused, I wouldn't be shocked by it. But I also know for a fact that it has helped

Thousands, if not millions of people, people that are dying from hunger and they've been saved by USAID. That's all out there.

And then if I'm like a government efficiency guy, I'm like, all right, where do I go first? Do I go against the US military budget that hasn't been balanced in the decades? Do I go against the billions of dollars of fraud that's been made through the Trump's COVID program loans? Do like, where do I start? No, I'm going to start with the agencies that feed hungry people around the world. That's what I'm going to start with. Like that's...

That's where you lost me there. Same. All right. Mark Ferris says, slow EV growth is okay. It doesn't have to grow at the same in every market. Tell that to Norway. Yeah. As a PHEV owner, I can say they are awesome. Yeah, it's certainly, I think it's kind of like training wheels. Like if you're not ready to take an EV, get one with like, you know, 40 miles of range, realize you don't need it.

you don't need the gas part and then your next car will be a full ev dr brian what happens yeah a lecture brian says what part of dei diversity equity inclusion does elon not like um i think it's all three of those i think it's all yeah i think he he doesn't like that uh that his name is not that he cannot do an acronym with his name with that those words he loves his acronyms

Dan says, don't know Elon in confidence. Oh, you did it. There you go. That's just us saying it. We made the same joke almost at the same time.

All right. Well, that's it for us this week, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the show. I know it was a shorter one this week. February, January is just not that much EV news out there. It starts to pick back up around March. So the next few weeks might be like that. But we still have some fun. I think we still enjoy it. And later this month, I'm going to Sweden.

to drive all the Polestar lineup on ice. So that should be interesting. I'm going to report that on that. I'm going to try not to get sick because it's like a crazy, like quick trip with a bunch of flights and everything, but I'll get there. I'll do my best. And we're going to have a lot of things to talk about, I'm sure. So stay tuned for that. And I'll see you same times next week. Bye-bye.