Tesla starts selling Superchargers, EV concept galore in Japan, and more
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We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by... As usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? Good. I'm not just waking up like you are in Japan, so... Yes, we have a...

Weird schedule this week. Set was all over Europe and just came back just in time for the podcast in New York. But for me, I'm still in Tokyo right now. So I'm ahead of you. I'm a time traveler. It's already Saturday morning for me, 5 a.m. But I'm feeling pretty good. I think we're going to have a good show regardless of me being dead asleep 10 minutes ago.

And we have plenty to talk about, including why I'm here in Japan, partly why I'm here in Japan, because there's a lot of things I fortunately cannot talk about. But what I can talk about, I will. Don't worry about that. But let's start with a little bit of Tesla news, as we usually do.

Starting with a rare new color for Tesla, the Model S and X is getting a new stout gray. So it's very stouty. So you might not be able to recognize the vehicle in the picture right now on your screen if you're

on the YouTube version of the podcast. But this is a new style, Bruno. I'm kidding. This is actually pretty obvious and pretty similar to the midnight gray that we see on the Model 3 and Model Y. Actually, the new standard color on Model 3 and Model Y since earlier this year.

Now, Molest and X getting a new color is interesting because Tesla, as part of the big price cuts earlier this year, they made all colors standard or included, I should say, in the price. So there's no $2,500 markup for each color anymore. So you can choose anything. And now you have a new option on it, the Stal Gray, which looks pretty cool. Like I said, reminiscent of the Midnight Silver, but a little bit darker, in my opinion.

What do you think, Cedric? It looks like a little mattier or something, right? I mean, it's so difficult to tell just from the picture, but yeah, maybe. I have to wonder why they did that and not like a green or a brown or orange. Well, I mean, maybe it's the wraps, the new wraps coming that are going to take care of those more...

little out there colors like green and brown but uh you i mean you need a silver a gray or something like that in your regular lineup so uh this is nice i mean this picture is with the ariel wheels but uh this one with the arachnids looks pretty sharp to me yeah it looks pretty good green i think green is the way to go yeah i mean back in the day when they had this this green in the lineup they were like the darker like the forest green almost it was very good yeah

We have a slight increase in model wild pricing this week. So that's breaking the trend. Obviously, the trend has been

price decreases throughout the whole year. I mean, it had a lot of impact in the entire industry, a lot of impacts in companies, which just heard from Hertz that they just had the earnings this year and this week, and they are hurting primarily because of their Tesla fleet being devalued from these big price cuts. So they're going to be happy to hear that one. But

Not that it's a massive price increase. It's basically not even notable. We're just noting it for the fact that it is breaking the trend of the price decrease. So it's a $500 increase, and it's only on the dual motor all-wheel drive long range version, which went up from $48,500 to $49,000.

The price of the newly launched rear-wheel drive version is staying at $44,000 and Model Y performance also stays unchanged at $52,500. So a lot of speculation around that. Obviously, if Tesla is staying true to its strategy while it was decreasing prices, the argument was that they are keeping track of orders very closely, keeping track of production capacity, and they want both of them to match, obviously.

And when demand was not matching production, they would rely on price decreases to remedy that.

Now, shareholders lately have been pushing for finding new solutions to price decreases because Tesla went from incredible 20 plus percent gross margin to now in the high teens. And it's still a very good gross margin for the industry, but it's not what the investors have been accustomed to.

And there is an argument to be made that with a small budget per car, but would create a pretty big budget for Tesla overall, just because of the size of the fleet or the production rate, I should say, that they could have an impactful advertising budget that could compensate for the decrepency in demand versus production without having to decrease prices.

Now, Elon seems to be a little more skeptical about that, saying that they see some potential impact, but they haven't exactly figured out how to do that larger scale just yet. So that might be an early sign that things are working for them a little while on these front, because I know that the ads have been very targeted in specific areas and especially around incentives.

So wherever there are incentives, they're like, if you get that incentive, that car is actually pretty cheap. So that kind of advertising really, not the Super Bowl ad type of thing that most people think about when they think car advertising. I mean, why even do a $500 increase? I think it is a signal that they're sending. I think they're just, hey,

we're doing because the stock took a big hit over the last week like since the earnings it it took a big uh nosedive so i think um i don't know what the stock did today i think this morning when i went to sleep this morning it was still pre-market so uh it was up pre-market what did it do today i i can uh i don't hear you super well set right now i have to say maybe i'll turn it up yeah if you can turn it up it's it's up uh looks like

Two points. No, one and a half points. So not very much. Yeah, not very much. By the way, if you guys can let us know in the live comments if the audio is okay and everything on your side, that would be nice. Because since I'm on my travel setup, I don't know if I'm just the one that's not hearing set correctly. Yeah, you sound pretty good. Okay, perfect, perfect.

All right. This is a very interesting one this week that I think it was just yesterday. My days are very confusing. My days, these with the 13 hour time difference, but Tesla announced Tesla and BP announced a deal. That is a first of its kind where Tesla is selling a hundred million dollars worth of supercharger hardware to BP. BP is obviously the giant petroleum company, British Petroleum. Um,

So this is a deal where BP is buying the actual supercharger chargers, the stall and everything. But apparently the stalls are going to be a little bit modified. Like you can see here, it's the same shape as the new V4 superchargers, but with a BP logo on it, BP pulse. Exactly.

And they're going to deploy that at their location in North America. So BP, I don't think BP has like BP branded location like they do elsewhere. But in America, they are on their travel centers for America, Torrentons. No, there's BP stations. There's BP stations. Okay, cool. AMPM and Amoco. Yeah. Those are all like...

Those are all gas stations. Those are all standard oil things, yeah. Yeah. And they have these new charging gigahub sites that they are deploying in some big cities also. As well as Hertz location. Why would big be deployed? For charging Teslas. I don't know. Yeah. But I guess Hertz could do that if they wanted. I don't know. And the first installation are coming to Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. So...

This is almost completely new. I don't say it's completely new just because of... I remember back in the day, I don't know if you remember, this is like 2015, 2016, the early day of supercharger deployments. Tesla for a time was selling superchargers to private owners for a while. There was a few stations that were deployed. I remember one in Sweden, for example, and some of them in Jordan for a while where...

companies could buy them, deploy them themselves. It's just Tesla hardware, Tesla branded.

They would not necessarily appear in the Tesla network, just depending on what the owners wanted to do with them. If it was like for a private fleet or whatever. Yeah, I think they're mostly fleet. Yeah. Or if it was some of them, actually, I think I remember a few that were actually included in the network just because they allow people to use it. But that was, again, that was so early days and probably not the case anymore. Like you don't want to operate a free charger station these days. Not these days, no. That would be a money losing operation.

But, yeah, so this is not the first time that Tesla has sold supercharger hardware to a third party, but it's the first time at this scale and for the specific purpose of creating their own charging network. So this is Tesla competing with companies like ABB, Tritium, and all these other companies.

charging hardware manufacturer. So these are suppliers of like Electrify America, for example, they use that. So now Tesla is opening the door as we could be one of those. And Rebecca Tunushi, which she's basically the head of charging infrastructure at Tesla, commented on the announcement saying, at Tesla, we are driven to enable great charging experiences for all EV owners.

Selling or fast charging our oil is a new step for us and one we're looking to expand in support of our mission to accelerate the world transition to sustainable energy. We appreciate BEP's partnership in this area. It's the right step toward a more sustainable future. So she seemed to confirm that this might be a new business for Tesla because they plan to expand it. So it would be interesting to see where these things go because...

Yeah, I mean, we don't know like 100 million. They only said $100 million. I would have preferred if they said like the actual number of station or number of stalls even. $100 million, I would assume that it's a decent number because the thing is we know that Tesla is extremely competitive in terms of cost of deploying their own supercharger station. Now, I'm sure they're taking a little markup when they're selling to others, but...

We even saw, like, we have very little data, obviously, on that. All the data is pretty opaque. Tesla doesn't have to say how much it costs for them to deploy a charging station. But at one point, we did have one piece of data that was very interesting in the Texas program for incentive for deploying charging station period there, where they had to disclose their cost. And at least for that program, Tesla's cost was a fifth bigger

per stall of um the other big ones like the the shells the the the e i don't i don't remember if ea was in there but like the charge point and all that a fifth of the cost of deployment for the for the same capacity so so you you can understand maybe if bp had like uh uh sent out some some specs to um

to suppliers and they came back with some offers and Tesla was among them, you can figure out that probably the one with the cheapest one was Tesla. So if Tesla started doing that with more projects, they could take over a big part of the market. Yeah, I mean, this is going to be a big one for ChargePoint. You know, ChargePoint is the one that usually OEMs out. Obviously, ABB, there's a bunch of other companies that do DFBs.

What are they called? DC fast charging. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. I think this is, you know, because we know Tesla can make these at scale, as you said, at a fraction of the cost. Why would it, you know, why would somebody buy from anybody else? Like these work with all EVs. Obviously, Tesla's network is the best. One question besides, you know, the obvious is like, is this going to be on Tesla's app or is BP going to have a separate app?

Do they work? Do they play nice with other ones? So like if BP has some other ABB chargers already installed, are these going to compete with those or work nicely with them? So I would assume that what I think is going to happen personally, so this is an assumption, but as now other charging networks adapt the NACs,

What we're likely going to see, we're going to see another tab in the Tesla's navigation system. Like you have the supercharger tab, you have the destination charger tab, and you have probably the non-supercharger DC chargers with NACs. I'm sure they're going to find an abbreviation to that, but this would fall under that category where you guys can go through this. You can use them without an adapter. It's just it's not within our network because it's going to be a difference in terms of like pricing and things like that, obviously.

So BP is going to operate that. So they're going to set their price and it's going to be gas station pricing, everyone. Good times. Yeah. We get a little bit more information about the...

performance ludicrous plaid version whatever the new version of the performance model 3 is going to be with the island update might be sport version actually based on this information this information is coming from green a friend of the publication and a infamous tesla hacker who's uh

Every now and again, likes to dive deep into the code of new software updates from Tesla and find new features in there. And he found a bunch of interesting data this week and some renders that Tesla referred to as a sport version of the Model 3. And the sport version is going to feature

new seats and you see them here uh front seat well the back seat also new but we already knew that from the the island that was launching in europe but the front seat are it's it's hard to tell exactly here for people but they are well updated here like i'm going to zoom in a little bit like you can see a lot more side supports all the way up um near the headrest so normally you don't have that part here if you're watching the video version of the podcast i'm pointing to uh

the side support up the shoulders basically and also more side support at the bottom here so this is uh this is interesting because it's not usual for tesla to change the interior of its vehicles for a performance version or sports version or whatever um tesla obviously normally they basically don't change anything other than the suspension and brakes um

Which also are going to be changed here. That was not in the green update, but we got that last week, if you remember. There was other information coming out from the parts catalog that referenced upgraded suspension and brakes for Ludicrous or Plaid version of the Model 3. But in this case, it would be an interior update too. Also, the powertrain is not different in the Model S or Model 3 or Model Y.

from the long range version and the performance version but normally there's a software lock capability that is upgraded from that so that the car is generally the same so that's why it's interesting here it's like now that now the car at least the interior of the car will not be the same now uh we don't like this these are details coming out of green and they don't we don't know how this is going to be presented to customers on the configurator level so maybe this is actually like not maybe this is standard when you buy the a new version of the performance model 3.

Or maybe this is actually like an interior upgrade, like a sports package upgrade that you get. I don't know. We're going to have to wait and see. Still from Green also in the latest update, he found another thing that was interesting. It's a congestion fee. So it seems to be building up on the...

The state of charge limitation at some supercharger stations. So this is something that was introduced in 2019 that was itself pretty controversial. At first, at least, I think Tesla fixed it pretty quickly. But it's when you go to a busy supercharger and the state of charge is automatically limited to 80% in order to shorten the charging session, because obviously the last 20% is a lot longer to achieve.

So Tesla would automatically add those specific busy supercharger station, limit the state of charge at 80%. So that created a whole hop war like, yeah, I mean, I get what you're doing here, Tesla, but sometimes you do need to get to 100% depending on where you're going for if you're doing a road trip or anything like that.

Tesla quickly adjusted back then. And what they said, what they did instead is like they didn't limit it to 80%. They automatically set the limit on your car at 80%. And then you could just go in there and increase it manually to 100%, which I think is pretty fair.

It's not that big of a deal. Most people were happy with that. But now, Green found that Tesla is working on something called a congestion fee that at those supercharger stations, when they're limited to 80%, you can still get them up over 80%, but they're going to charge an extra fee for it. So this is a little bit more controversial.

Reading at the comment section on that article when I wrote it, it looks like some people had some interesting thoughts on it that Tesla could potentially implement that would be nice. A lot of people were suggesting that Tesla should

I don't know exactly if Tesla knows that. They can know that, but I'm sure they can figure it out. If you're local to the supercharger, you should get a congestion fee for that. But if you're using it just for a regular charge, you don't need to get somewhere. It's just like you're charging for charging. But if you're not local to the supercharger, example, if you're on a road trip and then you might be...

you're in a different circumstances with your state of charge, you shouldn't be charged this congestion fee. Interesting thought, I thought. What do you think, sir? Yeah, I mean, I always get those 80% warnings. And, you know, it's obviously easy to move it along if you're, you know, taking a big drive or it's really cold or whatever. So I don't know. I don't,

I guess it depends on what the congestion fee is, if it's a lot. And then also, is the congestion fee more than just staying there fee? So one thing, one reason- The idle fee you're talking about? Yeah, the idle fee. So if you're eating at a diner and your car's about to hit 80% on a supercharger, you can dial it up to 90 so you don't start getting idle fees. Yeah, I do that. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I think most people do. Yeah, I think William Mernier is probably referring to that right now in the comment section. He says, we travel a lot and that's pretty nice. There are lots of places where people just park and leave for either shopping or a meal. So yeah, if you're – the charging experience now is getting so much faster that we used to say, hey, you're going to stop to have a meal anyway or whatnot to stretch your leg.

And by the time you're done with that, you come back, your car is fully charged. But now it's getting so fast that like you don't have time to grab lunch and you have to move your car if you're going to get your idle fees or otherwise. So, but if you charge to a hundred percent, like those last like 10% or so long to get, it generally just gives you enough time to, to grab your meal. But now if you, yeah, I, I, well, I, I get, I get it from Tesla's perspective obviously too, because, um,

From a kilowatt hour basis, you're just not delivering a lot of energy at the end of that, like on a good period of time. Yeah. It'd be nice if they could do like a sentry mode, like release the charger and like shoot out the charger and then not sentry mode, but the remote control one where it could just

Let go of the charger and drive away, drive into a nearby parking spot. Yeah, you just move the car, parking in front, and then someone else can take the place. I mean, not impossible, but yeah, you would need an update to the stalls themselves. Yeah. All right, moving on from Tesla news, Nissan. So Nissan is actually the automaker that brought me here to the show to check out the Japan Mobility Show that was happening all week here in Tokyo.

And they brought me to talk about a lot of concepts, honestly. It was a show full of concepts. So in the headline of the podcast, I call it the EV concept galore in Japan. That was pretty much it. They showed me a bunch of other things that honestly I'm a lot more excited about, but they say they're going to ruin my life if I talk about it. I have an NDA sign I cannot say anything about.

What they showed me, yes, it was a lot. So the only thing I can say is like, they have a lot more than concept, but for now they're only showing concepts. So let's talk about the leaf hyper sport. I cannot say anything. So don't, don't, don't try to, to get me sued here. Okay.

uh nissan unveiled the electric hypercar with n saying one megawatt hour of power so this is the one that the unveil and the actual show everything else that was at the show we actually already talked about because the uh they unveiled them ahead of the show so they have actually one you see one of them here in the background um this uh like uh juke looking uh actually juke looking uh size nissan but uh with

an extreme geometry concept on it. That's all electric too. But here, this is the Hyperforce, the Nissan Hyperforce. It's basically a showcase of a lot of future technology that's coming to Nissan. Obviously, they didn't say anything about this being a future production car.

But actually what I learned after the fact, it's not in the article because I learned it at a visit at the Nissan Advanced Technical Center after that. That's actually something that I can talk about is one of the features that is supposedly in this car. This is obviously a prototype, but they say that it would be powered by solid state.

And we did have an update on solid-state batteries at the Nissan Technical Center. They're talking about starting a production line in Tokyo next year in 2024 for solid-state batteries, but commercialization not until 2028. So don't hold your breath on that.

But we've seen a lot of progress in solid state lately. I suggest you guys, if you're interested in solid state, you should read the Scooters article this week on the QuantumScape update. It was very detailed. QuantumScape is very good at recorders giving a very detailed update on their progress or conversation. And these seem to be one of the more...

realistic ones in terms of timeline and all that. They're not pie in disguise type of thing. And they've been making a lot of progress too. So 2028 is not like an insanely aggressive timeline for Nissan here in terms of achieving a solid state, a commercialization of solid state. But they have a few other concepts. They're like a type of preparing for different...

user experience inside the vehicle based on driving mode. So you have a touring mode and a racing mode and the entire user interface inside the car changes between that. Nissan is working a lot on what's going to happen when cars are autonomous and use of VR inside the car, use of AR inside the cars and things like that. So you see that in this concept here. It's pretty crazy. Should we do our read real quick?

Oh, yeah. Do we have a read this week? I had to know. Sorry. Yep. No worries. Today's episode is sponsored by Is In Wheel, a smart e-scooter and mobility brand celebrating five years of innovation and sustainable travel. Is In Wheel showcases its passion for making riding fun through its daily efforts, not only striving to provide an efficient commute, but also a more enjoyable riding experience for all.

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Yeah, I'm looking at those prices for the Halloween sale. It actually looks pretty good prices there. You can get a scooter for $260. That's not bad at all. It's weird. Halloween is not necessarily known for like a discount time, but Israel is taking advantage of it. Yep, pre-black Friday. Mm-hmm.

All right. This is another concept, but this one actually announced for production or at least a production version is going to come. It's actually going to be the first Infiniti vehicle. So the fact that we've been complaining a lot about the fact that Infiniti doesn't have an electric vehicle yet. It made no sense. Nissan, the corporate company for Infiniti, parent company, however you want to call it.

had ev since 2010 and now uh we're 2023 and infinity didn't go electric but this is going to be the first one the infinity qe and the um the concept itself is absolutely stunning it's uh

it's uh basically they approach it as like a sculpture like they wanted to make it like a piece of art that's not necessarily like inspired by cars but just it can stand alone as as art itself and it shows in the in the like look at the the back end of that car it's pretty pretty stunning um and um yeah it's a full-size sedan so that's uh that confirms that the first um the first infinity electric is going to be a full-size sedan so it's going to compete with the

the model s the lucid and all these cars in the in lineup and they briefly showed a little bit to an electric suv that's gonna that's gonna be uh they didn't show much pictures of it just this quick image of uh an electric suv that's gonna come after that and this uh this infinity electric to uh the qe it's called right now but i don't think that's going to be the the uh

name of the official production version is going to be built in the U.S. at the Canton, Mississippi factory that Nissan has there. So they're going to be able to take advantage of the incentives. So that's going to be a real boost in Nissan's presence in North America in the EV space. They haven't released any specs or anything like that. So we cannot dive into that. But it looks pretty sharp from the concept at the very least.

all right i'm gonna skip that one for now just to uh talk about another concept this one was uh i was excited about the show like again i told you i was i was walking through the the japan mobility show on on monday um tuesday i guess um and um a lot of evs a lot of evs but uh a lot of them it's harder to get excited about first of all as a north american reporter because a lot of them are not coming so to to the to the us to canada

More of them are coming to Europe. I know we have an audience in Europe too on the podcast. So you guys are going to be a little bit luckier. And also, yeah, a lot of concept vehicles. So vehicles that we're not even sure is going to make it to production. But this one, this one apparently will. And looking at it too, it's not a super concept-y car. It actually looks like it's something that's pretty close to production. Even as side mirrors, that's often a good tell if it has side mirrors or not. It has door handles. Door handles.

Torrent doors and side mirrors are pretty good to tell. And it's a comeback. It's a prelude. So for those that remember the prelude from the 80s and 90s and even 70s. Yeah, it was in the 70s. Yeah, it launched in 78. And it was a very popular car at one point, like just between the second generation in 83 and 87. So that was the peak of the prelude. That was 300,000 units were sold in the 70s.

I think it's over 500,000 units of the pre-Uber. So which is very good for a coupe, a two-door coupe is not, they're generally not a super high volume vehicle, but it was a fairly inexpensive vehicle for a sports car looking coupe, a lighter weight vehicle too. Now, obviously this is why we haven't not seen a lot of two-door coupe in EVs because of the weight issues that comes with it. It's kind of countered what's fun about these cars and

But now with a lot of advancement in energy density in batteries, I knew it has to come soon. I mean, we've been talking about the Miata forever now, an electric Miata. A lot of people are waiting for that. And Mazda also had a bunch of concepts at the event, but nothing that was electric, unfortunately. They had the one with the rotary engine in there.

But some people are saying that that version might become an electric Miata in the future, but Mazda doesn't want to confirm anything on that. So we're not announcing anything just yet. But the Prelude, also a weird announcement from the Prelude. It was kind of in the background of the Honda presentation there. The press release that they released on it didn't have any pictures or anything, but I grabbed a few from the floor here. It was obviously an unfinished presentation.

model, like it's not a working prototype or anything like that, like there's no interior, but it does look advanced. And the way that Toshiro Maibai, the president of Honda announced it, he didn't even announce it as an electric vehicle per se, but you have to kind of read it between the lines. So Honda, like a

Like a few legacy automakers, especially in Japan, it's a term that's more popular in Japan. They like to use the electrified term. So they say the vehicle is electrified, which is kind of a blanket term that includes hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery electric vehicles.

But the way he said it, he made it sound like it would be a fully electric vehicle. So this model will become the prelude for a future model which will inherit the joy of driving into the full-fledged electrified future.

and embody Honda's on all transports mindset. So full fledged electrified. So it kind of was like a wink, wink. It's going to be all electric, but we don't mention all electric because we're weird on the, and yeah, it's almost like they've been lying about electrification for so long. So they have to say full fledged electric and electrified instead of their, their typical kind of with Tesla and like full self-driving it's it's self-driving or not. It's not, uh,

But yeah, and at the show, I was trying to talk to people and like, can you guys just confirm that it's going to be battery electric, all electric and everything? It's like, everything is what Mr. Toshiro said. Like, I kind of assume that it is, but it's a bit frustrating. Another kind of hint to it would be the name actually. And I know it's a comeback of a previous car, but you have the prologue that is the...

crossover SUV that Honda is doing that's all electric. So maybe it's kind of a naming scheme for their electric vehicles. Prologue, Prelude. I don't know. Well, Prelude has been around for a while, but yeah, that's true. Yeah, but it's been out for a while too. It's been out since 2022. Yeah.

I remember those things in the 80s had that four-wheel steering. They were like the first normal car to have it. Oh, really? Yeah. There was like this ad where it made like a sharp left and then kept going straight. It was a really cool car back when I was into those kind of things. At one point, it was the car I wanted to get. So it's kind of interesting to see it come back now. Looking really good, I'd say. Maybe it would come back as a four-wheel steering car too. That would be interesting. Yep.

All right, now let's get into this here. There's been a few announcements this week from Honda, from GM, from Ford.

A lot of things that are being framed as slowdown from the electric vehicle front. So in terms of Honda here, they announced that they are abandoning the plan to build electric vehicles with GM. So they have this partnership with GM to build a few electric cars on the Altium platform. So Altium built GM powertrains with Honda built cars under the Honda brand.

and they uh they confirmed that this plan has been killed now and the the uh they say that the level of affordability affordability that they were trying to reach is uh is not there so they are giving it up and uh and this is one of several announcements this week on that front so the um

You also have GM that announced the pushbacks of the Equinox, Silverado, GMC Seria EV. And they gave a Lucian Bolt update. I didn't have time to read all the articles that came out this week. I was pretty busy here in Japan. So I'm going to discover this one at the same time as you guys.

So, Barra said that there's going to be adjustments that will make our vehicle less expensive to produce and more profitable in the future. Yeah, they're adding LFP batteries to the Bolt. What? LFP batteries to the Bolt. Ah, okay. That's nice. Which is good for price, not necessarily good for performance, but it's a Bolt. You know, not trying to build the Corvette. Yeah. Yeah.

So she said they are moderating the acceleration. That's such a weird word. Moderating the acceleration. So are you accelerating or are you not accelerating? Because you're moderating the acceleration. It's more like they're regenerating at this point. It sounds like you're decelerating. So she found a way to say that they're decelerating their EV production in North America by using the word acceleration. That's such a politician way of talking in North America to protect their pricing. So protect their pricing. So in similar terms,

line as what Honda said about their plan. Adjust to slower near-term growth in demand. So again, they're blaming it on demand. And implement engineering efficiency in other ways. So they said that it's going to impact the Equinox AV, Silverado AV, RST. So I think that's the first version of the Silverado that was planned, the RST, right? No, the RST is the more like the Silverado did a fleet version first, and then the RST was supposed to come at the end of the year. Okay, that was the consumer version. Okay.

Yeah. The GMC Sierra EV. So no specific mentions. She said it would be a few months. Okay. All right. So not too bad, I guess. Well, all these things have already been delayed, so it's not going well. Yeah.

Oh, sorry. And yeah, at the same time, we should have broken down those two news separately because the very different type of news, the slowdown of all these EVs and the Altium. So yeah, it's just the LFP set that is new. That's the only new piece. I mean, they said a lot of words, but none of them were like newsy type of things.

And do we have a timing on the Altium made bolt? No. No. Okay. So they said it was going to be, there could be a significant gap between the stop of production this year and the new version of the bolt. Yeah. It's going to be interesting at the beginning of 2024. What is GM going to be selling in turn? Like the Q1 2024, how many, yeah, their EV, there's not going to be a lot of EVs on their, their list, except maybe some used bolts.

Like at the showroom, there's not going to be a lot of electric options at Chevy dealers. Yeah. It's weird because even the fact that they announced that the Bolt is done, because this almost sounds like this is going to be a new generation of the Bolt. So the Bolt is not dead, but they announced it like, oh, we're done. We're stopping production of the Bolt. The program is there. And then a few months later, they're like, but we're going to do an Altium Bolt. Well, that's a new Bolt. Yeah.

Kind of a weird way to move the program. Yeah, they said they changed their mind. One other piece of information that she reiterated this time, but they said before, is that because they already have a Bolt, that this is going to save two years of development time. So I don't know how long a typical car development takes, but she said it's going to be two years less than a typical car development. I think on average it's like seven years for Legacy Automakers. Yeah.

Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see how much gap between the, uh, the old bolt and the new bolt. Um, although I have to say like the new bolts, not going to have car player, Android auto currently it's, it's going to have LFP batteries. Like I, so far the old bolt sounding pretty good. Yeah. Um,

All right. One of the Altsion not delayed is the Blazer EV. So this week, there was a release of all the details in terms of the trims that's going to be available with the pricing accompanied to it. So here we have them, starting with the 2LT all-wheel drive version. Oh, you only have all... Oh, no, you have one rear-wheel drive here, but it's the most expensive one. What the... What is that? I think it's got a bigger battery. Yeah, it does. But it...

But it has to have the same batteries as the all-wheel drive RRS, but it's more expensive? That's a weird strategy here. Okay. So if you're not, I'm going to explain to you if you're not seeing what I'm looking at right now. You have the 2LT all-wheel drive starting at $56,700. You get 279 miles of range EPE estimate. Or actually EPA. I think the EPA has already been released on that.

so yeah those are the first the first two and the rs rear-wheel drive has not been given an epa range or but you have an estimate from gm of 320 miles they haven't released the horsepower which is going to be over 288 because that's the one of the base all will uh under 288 because that's the all-wheel drive version but they are charging a higher price of 61 790 than the

RS all-wheel drive, which sounds like it would have the same battery pack as those two because it's getting 279 miles of range and the other 320 because of the efficiency gain from being rear-wheel drive. But they are charging $1,500 more for the rear-wheel drive version than the all-wheel drive.

That's weird. We might want to check our numbers there. Yeah. GM might want to check their numbers. Yeah. I assume that... Or car and driver, I guess. Yeah. I see. Car and driver? Yeah, that was not official from... Yeah. We'll check with Peter. Peter wrote this article. We'll check if... Make sure that we are on the same page because that would be very surprising to me. So, yeah, it was...

kind of uh the uh earnings galore for automakers this week in north america so ford also released their their numbers and uh ford is an interesting one because they split their ev business with their gasoline business to give a better insight of uh what's gonna happen in the future and uh it was a a bad one this week apparently the um so a lot of bigger ev losses throughout the lineup obviously the uaw strike didn't help though though the uaw strike was

Barely in Q3, right? I think it was like at the very end of Q3. Yeah, and it was only six weeks, I think. Yeah, I think it's going to be more impactful in Q4, actually. But yeah, so the operating losses for the EV business, the Model E, Ford Model E, $1.3 billion. So $200 million more than in Q3.

Operating margins lost 75% in the quarter. It grew from 58% in Q2. So you're losing a lot of money on this, which makes sense because they are building extremely large factories, especially for the electric vehicles, and they're not delivering a ton of EV right now. Mackie was up 44% in terms of volume, so that's still good. But overall, they are losing money.

$36,000 for every EV they're selling right now. And that's, I mean, the average price of their EV they sell is probably around like, what, $50,000, $60,000? Yeah. It hurts. Obviously, they know because they're making big advancements, but they announced this week with their earnings that they are scaling back their EV investment right now because of how they see the market. So you've seen a lot of that this week, a lot of that from investors

especially the Japanese automakers, but the American automakers, they are looking at demand for electric vehicles and they're like, the demand is not there right now. So we're scaling back, which I think is a big mistake because it's not the EV sector that is scaling back. It's the entire industry that is scaling back. And yes, it's affecting the EV a little bit more because the average sticker price is a little bit more, but yeah,

That's just the higher your interest rates are on the bigger the sticker price, the bigger difference you get on your monthly payments and your monthly payments are everything when you buy a car. So obviously the higher sticker price market segments, including EVs, are going to be hit harder. But if you're scaling back your investment now because of that, once those interest rates come back and the demand for EVs come back even harder because

I don't think that the interest in EVs is slowing down in any way. I'm not sensing that at all from the market. It's just the ability to buy them is being reduced, but the interest to buy them is not. So what you're going to end up here is that as soon as it comes back with the interest that we're getting, I mean, I'm assuming the interest rates are going down at some point here. I'm not, I don't have a crystal ball into the market here and the federal bank, but

I would just like what we're seeing. We're seeing like the higher interest rate seems to have been working right now. We've seen inflation relaxing a little bit. So if there are more hikes in rates, I think it would be relatively small and then it would start coming back. But it's just my assumption. So it's no financial advice. But yeah.

Assuming that that's going to happen, if you slow down your investment into the production capacity on your EVs and the supply chains and all that, you're going to be screwed because then it's going to be the late 2010s again where Tesla started eating everybody's lunch and owning 80% of the market in North America because they are the only one that have the volume production capacity in battery electric vehicles.

Yep. I agree a hundred percent. I think this is a horrible mistake by these companies that are, you know, thinking short term. They're thinking about this next quarter, the quarter after that. They're not thinking like, Hey, every car is going to be EV in a few years. We need to make EVs profitable. We get to profitability by scaling up and not scaling up, you know, shutting down these, uh,

You know, delaying these big factories is not going to make it easier. They get they're going to have to they're going to have to have a couple of bad quarters no matter what. But they just got to get to the to the volume production. And honestly, like, you know, this could be the death knell for a couple of companies if if if they don't get to scale.

Yeah, it's like you said, it's short-term thinking, basically. They're just looking at the demand right now and they're not looking... But not only that, I think... You know, what's the term for that? I'm too tired to remember that. But the term of confirmation bias, like you're looking for things that confirm your pre-existing idea on the situation. Is it confirmation bias? Is that it? Yeah, okay. So I think it's more confirmation bias for... I don't think that applies to Ford necessarily. I think Ford...

is having some issues right now, especially with the UAW strike and everything. But for some of the other automakers that are maybe not super all in on battery electric vehicles, especially here in Japan, for example, and they are, it's more like we told you guys that battery electric vehicles wouldn't work. And we're seeing now the demand is going down. Like they're taking that as a sign to confirm what they already thought. So that's the bigger issue, I think, here.

But sticking on Ford, they do have a tentative agreement with UAW. I don't think unless things have changed since I went to sleep last night. They haven't signed the agreement just yet. The UAW workers haven't signed it, but they have come to an agreement with Ford, not with GM or Stellantis just yet.

But the workers are coming back at Ford. So they are ending the strike pre-insimilatly under condition that they go forward with this agreement, which is, I think, I mean, there's a bunch of things, obviously, but the big one is a 25% pay raise. But it's going to be a little bit more impactful than just a 25% pay raise because it's also reduced the time drastically from the time that you start.

and the time you reach your top wage. I think it was eight years before now. I think it's four years. So that's a big difference. Within four years, you can be highest paid position as a worker at Ford. So that's interesting.

I think Ford just released a little bit more details about it. If I remember correctly, I don't think it's in this article, unfortunately, but it looks like it's going to be a $700 to $900 increase in labor costs per car.

So significant. And I think that adds up to about a little bit less than a percentage point reduction in gross margin from Ford. So it's significant for everyone to understand because Ford doesn't have those 20% gross margin that Tesla has. So it does hurt.

But I'm happy for the workers and it looks like they are happy with the increase and it's not an easy job so you should be fairly compensated with it. I just don't want to see Ford go away as a company because of it either. Because it's not a given. It's been around for 100 years but

When an industry goes into a massive shift like this electrification, and if you have to take into account here that we have the auto industry is going to basically two massive shifts around the same time, like the electrification shift and the autonomy shift are happening almost simultaneously. And if you somehow screw either one of them a little bit,

you might be out of business. It's as simple. There's so big of a shift in the industry that it's that simple. And Ford seems to be cognizant of this, at least. They are one of the legacy automakers that are very aware, but doesn't mean that the execution is going to be there, no. Yep.

All right. We still have a few minutes. So I think we have a bunch of comments. If you guys have, I know I didn't say it this time, but if you guys have any questions for us, you can jump in the comment section and put them right now. We're going to answer them live on the podcast. All right. Mike Boyle from YouTube says, question. I was able to get a 2023 Range Rover plug-in hybrid. Apparently very rare.

I think it's a very good precursor to the all electric Range Rover. Any idea when that will actually release? I was actually at the Range Rover plugin event. I did a review of it. It's a nice car. The, you know, the electric range is around, I think 50 miles. So it's not, you know, it there's a big battery in there. And of course they've done a lot of work on the aerodynamics of those things and,

They said that I think 2025 model year is when the electric one's going to come to the U.S. I think they might even have one in Europe before that, but I'm not sure. They did actually show a prototype of that at the event. So I think it's going to be sooner rather than later. And that's going to be a big competitor to probably Rivian. I don't know, maybe Cadillac. Range Rovers are typically very high end, but they're also quite good at going off road.

I think it's more of a luxury thing than an adventure thing like Rivian, but you know, that's, that'll be good to see those. Any thoughts on that? No, I'm not that familiar with it. I remember when you reviewed it. Yeah, it was a fun review. Madrid out in the,

Spanish Highlands, whatever. All right, Neil from Gold Coast, Australia. Question, comment. Maybe the slight price increase in the Model Y relates to the introduction of some new equipment into the car. You know, slight changes, improvements are always being made to Teslas. Yeah, but the pricing changes. Normally, it's more about demand than like if Tesla makes some improvements to the car that reduce costs. Normally, that goes into the gross margin if demand allows it.

All right. Uh, Carl in San Diego, uh, will IBP superchargers. So, uh,

that means BP superchargers will be completely off Tesla network and who will maintain them. If it's BP, this is similar to other charge point operators who will struggle to profit from installations. Uh, yeah. I mean, we talked a little bit about that. Like, uh, obviously I think it's going to be, uh, often the network is going to be BP's off its own network. Uh, and talk about maintenance though, there could be an opportunity that, uh, the deal include maintenance because, um, we know like when Tesla sells like mega, uh,

for example, to companies, they do oversee the maintenance of those packs. And it's not cheap. There's a service charge, obviously. But yeah, so it would be smart to Tesla to offer that because obviously they have the experience maintaining their own superchargers. And historically, they have been a lot better at that than other operators. And they have a global network of repair people as well. Yeah, so it makes sense. I think...

I think it's a good move from BP. They're probably going to have a good network in North America out of that. All right. Andrew Higgins from LinkedIn says, "No other EVSE OEM can manufacture DCFC." That's a lot of acronyms. "At cost, quality, speed of install." There's about 75% cost advantage. "Soup to nuts." We did talk about how SLS are quite a bit better. Yeah, that seems accurate.

When do you think the refreshed Model 3 will be announced and delivered in the U.S.? Do you think we'll hear about it on November 30th? Nah, I think November 30th was going to be very much a Cybertruck. Are you hearing that? I think my, did not disturb, just change. The, yeah,

the event's going to be probably more Cybertruck focused. But yeah, I mean, Elon was asked about that at the earnings last week and he seemed very annoyed at the question, but he seemed very annoyed at a lot of questions there. So he doesn't, Tesla wants to keep that information very close to their chest because obviously they're still selling the current version of the Model 3 in North America and

And when you know that the island is coming, it's going to be, especially since the island didn't come with like a price increase that much or anything like that. And it's a significant update too. Right. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I don't have that information. All right. How much better would Cybertruck Proso X be if Elon admitted he was wrong about stainless steel and they just pivoted to mild steel instead?

Is he wrong? I don't know that he's wrong. What is the question? Carl, you're going to have to elaborate on why he is wrong because we don't know that he is. I'm not familiar with that. We took William's questions already. All right.

Joseph Burdick, would you steer a used car buyer away from a 2013-2015 Leaf as a commuter car as long as I take stock of range and battery cell health? They look like a good deal to me. $5,000 to $10,000 and US 30% tax credit. I would say if you live in a winter climate, keep in mind that even that 50 miles will go down to 40 or 30. So you're starting to... Joseph does mention that

He's aware of the battery health situation and range. So yeah, I mean, if you're aware of that, it is a good deal. And again, we're talking about a commuter car. So as long as you're sure that you can cover your commute with this,

and you're not thinking road trips or anything like that, and you're probably thinking of a second car, I assume. Yeah, I mean, 5 or 10K sounds like a pretty good deal. Yeah, 5 or 10K is really inexpensive. I don't know what he means about a 30% tax. Is the used car credit, I think it's $4,500, but it's capped at 30% of the price? Something like that, yeah. That's what I was thinking as well. Yeah.

All right. Far follow me. Says question legacy automaker stocks are tanking GM's market cap is around 37 billion, particularly bad with the cruise mess. Do you think that Tesla would ever consider purchasing one of them to accelerate EV adoption and raid their assets, for example? I mean, Tesla doesn't have tons of cash.

Yeah, well, it has $26 billion, so it's not too far from $37 billion. It could be a stock also merger, but it's more of a real thing. I don't think this wants to...

to do that. Tesla already bought a GM factory when you think about it. Fremont was a GM Toyota factory and they weren't happy about that. Now Fremont is doing well, but it was very hard to switch Fremont to EV production on large scales and do it efficiently. Since then, Tesla has not done that. There's been plenty of factories available for sale, but Tesla has decided to build them from the ground up instead. They think it's just easier. So

I think Tesla would not want to get into that and just try to take over Automaker unless the deal is extremely good. I just don't see it happening right now. Yeah, especially if GM isn't in dire need of cash. If they were on the ropes, maybe it would make more sense. All right, that's what we talked about. What was the mood like in Tokyo? Yeah.

I mean, it's my first time in Japan, my first time in Tokyo, my first time at the Japan Mobility Show. It is a culture shock for sure. I mean, I knew that the Japan people were more insular culture. They're not super open to the West, but it's very different.

And so it's very interesting to me because it gave me like a better idea into the Japanese automakers from that. And I have like a better understanding of the longtime reticence to go electric, especially a Toyota, for example.

But, so yeah, what's the mood? The mood is concepts. It's, they are flashing the idea of going electric, but I don't know if I see very strong, like actions are better than word. And like, I'm trying, I'm having a hard time seeing the actual actions toward mass volume electric vehicles right now, battery electric vehicles, right?

Like Nissan has a lot of e-power stuff, which I'm not a fan of. I saw a ton of those over the last week, trying to push those e-power hybrids. E-power is the ones that have electric motors, but gas generators. Yeah, exactly. It's basically that. And they show us the latest generation of those e-power engines. And I mean, I look at them, they're like 10% smaller than the last one. I'm like, all right, they're still like, they look...

Very complex versus a small electric motor and a battery pack. I just don't think this is the way to go. I think this is a distraction against like electric, battery electric. So I want to see legacy automakers status quo. And they're like, I know you cannot stop selling your gas-powered cars, which the e-power is very much a gas-powered car.

But I think you need to stop the development of this, of next generation of these things and just focus on your electric vehicles for everything else that you launch. And I don't see that from Japanese automakers right now. Yeah. All right. Moving forward. So one person says, Vince says that it's confirmed that it seems that it is confirmed that Prelude is a hybrid, not pure EV. That must be some other report. I've not seen that.

All right. Bike Angelus says, question, are any automakers planning to release a small pickup truck? The Wolf by Alpha Motor is so appealing, but I have my doubts whether it will come to market. Ford needs to make a Lightning Ranger. I think we saw a Toyota, uh,

Yeah, I saw a Toyota at the show. I don't think it's as small of a pickup truck as Bike Angel is referring to here with the Alfa motor. That thing was extremely small. But that thing, if you'd be super careful, we reported on that, there doesn't seem to be any kind of significant effort behind the company. It's just a bunch of renders. But yeah, a little bit more than renders. They have some very early models, but

So no, I've not seen anything in that specific size because that, I don't know the dimensions, but looking at it, it looks very small.

All right. Electron, a company that makes Tesla charging accessories and chargers and chargers for non-Tesla EVs, announced a supercharger to CCS adapter named Vortex. Ships in January. I think it's only for cars that are NAX compatible but still have CCS. Probably 2024 models. The problem is that Tesla doesn't allow any...

Currently, it doesn't allow any EVs to charge at their regular superchargers, only at the ones with the Magic Dock, right? So you get this adapter and where are you going to take it? Yeah, I don't think this adapter does the handshake. So I think Electron is more like preparing for something. They might allow it. It's probably going to be something over there. Tesla is not going to be the only one manufacturing because it's open. So it's going to happen, but

Right now, like Seth said, I think Tesla still needs to approve you using the supercharger. Yeah, it's kind of a weird product. And so Electron makes a bunch of stuff. They make adapters going the other way from CCS to Tesla.

And, you know, we got one. I tried it. It worked. It wasn't quite as fast as a normal Tesla adapter. But I called EVgo and Electrify America and I was like, hey, you know, Tesla obviously has this adapter. You're going to support that. Are you going to support this third party electron? And both charging networks were like, we can't guarantee anything like it might work. It might not.

but we're not going to guarantee it. Don't know why you would buy that in that case because, you know, the Tesla one's available. It's a little bit more expensive maybe, but, you know, it works at the moment, but it might not work later. And that's not something you want to kind of mess around with. The price is good though, 200 bucks. So, all right, moving forward, you think you'll see in the HD market, a diesel hybrid before an electric only state for HD trucks to be reached?

I don't know what that means exactly. Heavy duty trucks? Oh, yeah. Heavy duty market, a diesel hybrid before all electric only state for HD trucks to be reached. I don't know. I don't know much about diesel hybrid. I don't know where they're at in terms of development or anything. I've never looked into that, so I don't know. But...

What's the definition of an EV duty truck exactly? Because I wouldn't be surprised if there's already... Is it a weight? Yeah. Is it like a 350, like a Ford F350 or something like that? Is that what's an EV duty truck? Yeah, probably.

All right, moving forward, Joseph Burdick loved the article this week. Rivian R1T makes history as the first EV to win the off-road Rebel Rally. Oh, I missed that one. That's good. I believe that's a rally with women only. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know about Rebel Rally. It's a pretty difficult rally. Yeah.

But to be honest, I thought that the toughest part about that rally is actually the navigating. It's not necessarily how tough it is on the vehicle. So I don't know how much of a win it is for Rivian versus the women that were driving the vehicle. But I mean, the fact that he's able to do it is still good. I'm not that familiar with the rally, by the way. But I've talked to some of the women behind it before. And apparently, the navigation is the very tough part of it.

Yeah, and if I remember correctly, it's Rivian employees that are racing. Oh, really? I thought it was journalists, but maybe not. I think Rivian actually had two teams this year. No. Last year it was employees. All right, Daniel Lewis, where are the North American EV engineering hubs outside of California? Everywhere outside of California just seems like manufacturing.

So what's engineering hubs? Well, I just talked to Nissan this week and Nissan has an engineering hub in Nashville, I think. Yeah. One in Nashville. They're pretty big in Tennessee. Yeah. What else though? Good question. I mean, I mean, Texas. Yeah, I guess. Tesla has a pretty big EV engineering hub in Texas. But their engineering engineering place is still in California, I believe. Yeah. Well, I think they have both now. It's like there's a lot of them in both places. Yeah.

I'm sure there's others. I can't think of any. Yeah, same. Illinois, Rivian, they have some engineering. It's manufacturing. She's right. But they also have some engineering in Illinois. Yeah. All right. Carl Ensenio, Elon said Cybertruck was going to be very hard ramp up to profitability. Then they dug their own grave. I assume it's the stainless steel feature. That's the problem, unless it's the 4680 issue. Okay, Carl is responding to...

We asked him to elaborate on this. Elon admitted this thing still is their problem. You might be right. I don't think it's the 4680, though. I think that's pretty clear from the latest update that Tesla is going to be fine with 4680 for now. But yeah, I don't know. That doesn't mean that it still is.

obviously it is the new, the novel part of the Cybertruck. So you might be right. Yeah. But I don't, I don't think they're going to, he's going to, he's going to admit or like, he's going to give up on this and change to something else. I would, I would be very surprised at this point. All right. Jake's online. Electron's email says it will work at 20,000 superchargers. That's possible, but not guaranteed. And when will it work? We don't know.

And I think all the manufacturers that are going to allow that to happen are going to also provide their own adapters as well. So I still don't know what this thing is for. Stefan Schnellblogger, Jake's online question, probably not useful for a supercharger, but third-party charge point, et cetera, with a NAX port. Oh, I guess that's a good point. If there's a NAX port and you want to go to CCS,

but still like that's coming i guess right yep all right and one last thing uh go back to bed fred i mean it's gonna it's gonna be hard now like i just had a coffee and uh and uh i'm in i'm in tokyo and this is my first day off i'm where i'm not actually working in tokyo so i can actually explore so i think i think it's gonna be hard for me to go to bed right now but uh it would be smart so that i i can actually like go out tonight or something but

Yeah, I'll see about that if I follow you. But thanks, everyone, for listening to this week's episode of the Electric Podcast. If you did enjoy the show, if you can give us a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on your podcast app, it would be appreciated. If you're listening on your audio podcast on Apple charts and that, if you can give us a five-star review, that helps a ton. It's free to do. It takes a second. I appreciate every single one of you that does it. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one, everyone. Bye-bye.