Electrek at Shanghai Auto Show, Tesla earnings, Slate cheap EV pickup unveiled, 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 Seth Winshaw, but this time coming to us live from Shanghai. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. A little tired. It's 4 a.m. Yes. Thank you for joining us on the regular time. We're making it work with your flight early this morning, so that's good. But we're going to do a little bit of a break.

And you're hyped up on coffee right now. You're going to be able to give us all the deeds on these Chinese EVs that were at the Shanghai Auto Show. So that Shanghai Auto Show, I guess it's the biggest auto show in China, I would assume. Oh, yeah, it's huge. It's the biggest auto show I've ever been to. And I imagine it's probably the biggest in the world. Maybe IAA was bigger. I don't know.

It changed a lot over the last few years too, IA. All right. So we're going to discuss that. We have a post that's up right now, but we're going to have a lot more to say about all the Chinese EVs in the next week or two as Seth and Scooter come back from China and do their...

writing reporting and we'll probably discuss a few of these posts on next week's podcast but we have some cool things for you uh in just a few minutes then we have the tesla earnings i already did a live stream about the tesla earnings on wednesday so if you want to really a deep dive on that it's on our youtube facebook and twitter so you can go check that out i went basically

And I did the whole transcript. I took the transcript from the call and basically live fact checked it. So if you're interested in that, you can check that out. But we're going to hit the highlights in mid-show about that. And then we have the Slate. Very cool new entry in the EV world in North America. So it's a Slate pickup in the SUV, which basically is the same thing. We're going to talk a little bit about that. It's very interesting.

But before we do, I want to say a quick thank you to today's episode is brought to you by Retrospect, maker of sleek, powerful e-bikes and outdoor gear built for everyday adventure. Electric Listener can get 10% off their next ride until May 8th with the exclusive code ELECTRIC10. That's ELECTRIC10.

only at retrospect.com we're gonna have a little bit more to say about them later on the show whenever they give us a they give us a card like uh electric 10 i always want to like try electric 20 to see if it works i'm not saying that it's gonna work guys you can try it out but i'm not saying it's gonna work all right let's start let's start with the uh the shanghai so

Scooter just posted today this article. It's kind of like an overlook of all the different EVs. So kind of...

Not a deep dive into any of them, but just to show you basically what's out there in China, which is probably a lot. So I'll go through them here and Seth can comment on what he remembers from them. I'm sure you kind of have an information overload right now from all these different vehicles. But let's start here. So we have what? We have the Nissan and Buick having some Chinese exclusive EVs.

Yeah, that's something we noted from a lot of Western manufacturers is that they have either joint venture EVs with a local Chinese company with their brand, or they were bringing specific EVs to China because China is so EV focused, so EV forward. So it was kind of interesting, like, oh, here's this N7 from Nissan. Looks like something that would be a hit in the US. Never heard of it.

You know, great, solid EV. Looks amazing. That's a Buick, right? I think Joe Boras has a post about this one on Electric. Yeah, and I think this might be still concept-y. I'm not sure if that's a full, like, whatever. But, you know, Buick's showing off their upcoming EVs as well. So...

That was pretty cool to see. I'm trying to think Cadillac had a bunch of EVs there that, you know, they had the Lyric, but it, you know, it's a Chinese Lyric. I don't know how much different it is. The Buick Electra there is also. Yeah, so Buick had a bunch of Electras. They have like a minivan, SUV, sedan. Is this the minivan? Yeah.

I don't know if that's Buick. That looks, oh yeah. It looks like the three Buick sign there, but that front hand is about as bad as the new Model Y's backhand. Like it's just shy and empty space. There's a lot of weird front ends over there. Yeah. So yeah.

Then Zeker, Zeker is the ones that brought you there. Yeah, Zeker had so much stuff. It's like it's even even being there for like three days, it's hard to get your head around all this stuff. And then, of course, they have the sister companies. They're all under the Geely brand. And Zeker is like just blowing up right now, like just producing so many cars, so many different varieties.

um it's hard to get your head around all of them uh the zero zero one so they do numbers like one two three four five the zero zero one is kind of their um their flagship sedan um they have uh yeah uh the zero zero seven i think is their best seller um that just and so we got to drive all of them and you know i'll be honest with you i can't get my head around you know all the different varieties and and um

makes you know makes a model or models of these things so but what they all have in common is that they're incredibly fast they're super silent they look great um you know you don't get to see the quality too much because these are brand new cars we're not they you know they feel solid but you know we don't know how they're gonna behave in five or ten years but from what i saw i was just like blown away by how great these vehicles are they would like any one of them would do

Really well in the U.S. market, I think. You know, I don't know about crash tests and if they meet all the standards, but man, it was just crazy to see so many great cars from Zeger. Mm-hmm.

This is Firefly. That's Nio's new entry-level brand. Yeah, they're kind of going, I guess, downmarket or more like millennial. I don't even know what you call it, but it's basically like a mini. Because mini is not making that. And it was super popular. There were so many people at the show just like, you know.

crowding this thing and it looks it looks pretty cool i like the um you know the firefly lights in the front and back are kind of neat and they had a lot of really cool design stuff that's the other thing there's a lot of really good designs coming out of china a lot of creativity a lot of stuff you don't see so that was great yeah that's what i was going to say too like i like that you know because there are so many of them not just chinese people but so many ev companies there

You kind of have to differentiate yourself, otherwise you're dead, which is kind of Tesla's problem right now in China too. And some of the bigger players, they kind of have a better understanding actually of the Chinese market and they do something like you've talked about with Zika, they just bust

bunch of different vehicles focused on your core technology, like the battery, the powertrain, the technology inside the vehicle. But then in terms of design and form factors, you kind of have to throw things at the wall and see what works in China because you'd be surprised what can work. So you have some EVTOL stuff too? CTL has an EVTOL.

Yeah, so they were just, I don't know if their cattle's building their own EVTOL, but they had one at their booth. I would say, yeah, I think we saw maybe 10 or 15 EVTOLs there. Like, seriously, it's just like every car maker or whatever has some sort of like drone or EVTOL thing going on. I mean, there was a lot of DJI drones coming out of the top, and I feel like I saw that like three or four times.

But that Xpeng is one that I think is made to fit inside. Yeah, it may fit inside that van here, which is pretty sick. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, that van looks like it should be on Mars. It's so cool. Right. I like it. What do we have here? iCar V23. Yeah, so this company, you've never heard of them before. Me neither. One...

vehicle in like 30 different configurations and colors it's like a little um jeepy thing you can if you're watching the show you can see it um they're really cool and i think they were like 18 000 or something they were like something really cheap and it would kind of go up against the bronco or well it actually sounds like slate and we're gonna talk a little bit more about them later but like the fact that it's small customizable and cheap it's like it sounds a lot like what like slate is doing right now in the u.s that's right yeah we will talk about them but uh

These are ready to go. They're making millions, millions, hundreds of thousands of them. And it's kind of cool to see this versus just cars. The Chinese middle class, they want differentiation. They want the ability to go off-road. They want towing and all the other stuff. So it's cool to see this kind of same mentality as the U.S.,

Xiaomi was there with the SU7. Was there a lot of... That's their one car. And they had it in every single color you can imagine. It's a great car. And the industry there is very... They're like, how the hell did they... I mean, they just decided a couple years ago to make cars. And they built this great car. Now Alt's selling them a little three in China, which is crazy. Yeah. Actually, last week was Alt selling Tesla completely in China just with this car. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful car and it's, you know, the price is great and it's, you know, a brand that they know. Like they have most, a lot of people have Mi phones or at least they've seen Xiaomi phones around. So it's not like something they haven't heard of or know. Skeptic asked, did Tesla have a boot at the show? If so, what was the buy? No, that's not the show. They were the only company there that wasn't. Hmm.

Zeekr had a 1.3 megawatt charger on display. Jesus. Yeah. And we're going to have something, I mean, I guess I'll spoil the surprise. They have, you know, the idea of automatic charger, like with the robotic arm. Yeah. They had that? They have that working. They didn't have it at the show, but we, like, it's done. It's a done deal. Yeah. I mean, it always made sense to me, like, especially if you don't want to lose any kind of efficiency to wireless charging, you

like have a system that can plug it in and, you know, maybe not. Does it look like Tesla's thing, the robot snake, or is it more just like a pulley system that moves? No, it's not a snake, but it's more like just a factory robot looking thing. Yeah, that makes more sense to me. Yeah, and it just has like three axes and it just puts it in and, you know, it seems very matter-of-fact.

I got a good video of it and they're thinking ahead like, all right, when everybody's autonomous, the cars will just pull in and charge. And one day we're going to have a factory that just sends cars out on the streets. And if there's a customer in Hong Kong and we're building it in Shanghai, the car will just zoom down the street in the middle of the night and charge up at these stations. That makes sense.

so the u9 you didn't get to drive that thing yet i hope i will when i go to china because that thing looks sick yeah i mean we were there with zieker so it was you know byd wasn't really um we didn't spend too much time with them but you know obviously this car is just crazy you know it jumps it like it has all kinds of um you know it's i think 250 mile per hour top speed zero to 60 in two seconds it's just

You know what it is? You remember when the Roadster was going to be like the halo car of the whole EV industry? This is the halo car, yeah. BYD, bring me to China so I can try this, please. I'm supposed to go in May, end of May. I want to check that out. And then, so that's Xpengs, yeah, that's Xpengs robot. So Tesla is not the only one with humanoid robots. Yeah, and it was waving to you and follow you around with its head and do kind of silly stuff.

It was kind of funny because it was like chained to the ceiling. And we were like, well, you know, what's going to happen? Is it going to be like sentient and just start attacking people? They have to chain it down so it doesn't go crazy. But yeah, it's cool. Like it's, I don't know. I think it's similar to a robot from Boston Dynamics maybe 10 years ago or something. And then the weird. There's a lot of weird. A bunch of furry cars out there.

there was a lot of fur. There was more fur than I was expecting. More fur than you were expecting on the show, right? I mean, you still expect some fur on the show, just not that. Yeah. And they still have booth babes, but they also have, you can see in this picture, there's a booth babe, but there's also booth dudes, which I thought was very egalitarian. That's nice. If you're going to have the

misogynistic stuff, you might as well have the guys also being objectified. This kind of reminded us of the Shaggin' Wagon from Dumb and Dumber. Although this one was a hamster. Yeah, and then they had like Sequin's. I think that last one was like a Sequin's vehicle. You know, they're just trying to get there's just so many auto companies there. They have to get their, you know, get people excited.

Yeah, they also had Fireflies that were modded like crazy. Yeah, BYD did something similar. They had an ice cream. Oh, yeah, there's a Booth dude. That's your Booth dude right there. Yeah. Good looking man.

Yeah, we were like, okay, if you're going to do a booth date, you got to do a booth date, dude. Then now all of a sudden it makes sense again. So yeah, it was just, it's sensory overload to the extreme. I mean, I feel like Scooter said we walked like 10 miles that day. Like we just walked and walked and walked like right from the beginning of the show to right to the end of the show.

It's too much to even sum up in a sentence. There was car companies that I'd never heard of that had a full line of cars that each one of them would have done well in the US. All electric, all 0-60 in 3 seconds kind of stuff. My main question for you would be after going to the show seeing all those EVs, how screwed do you think

US automakers would be if we didn't ban, virtually banning Chinese EVs in North America right now, just all screwed with EVs.

we'd be really screwed. I don't know how you could compete with this many. And who knows how much the government helped build up this industry, but as it exists now, there's just so many EVs. And each one, you're like, okay, what is this SUV that goes zero to 60 in three seconds and it's third row? What does that cost? Oh, it's $22,000? Okay. There's just nothing that compares to it.

There was a Lincoln company, 900, you know, a super fast third row, kind of like Range Rover Rivian type of vehicle. And it was like $26,000. Nobody would buy a Range Rover or Rivian if this, you know, a very similar car. So we talk about this a lot, Fred, that Chinese vehicles are 90% as good and at half the price. And it was, that was so apparent there.

And they can make it 110% as good for 60, 70% of the price too. So that's the thing. So if they would be allowed to come into the North American market, they would adapt to it. It would be a little bit more expensive than it is in China. I mean, just the logistic cost alone are significant, but they would also have to adapt to the local regulations and everything, safety requirements and all that. And those are not...

not significant like they are they are significant and um but still like with the margin you're just talking about the in term of the comparison of what they are selling them there versus somewhat equivalent vehicle that we sell here it's like it's night and day there's so much room to improve yeah and and geely would would note that like we they've done the experiment that the polestar 2 is a chinese car like and they they sold it at a price that you know

included a lot of you know overhead like the same geely vehicle in china would sell for about half the price they can do it like everybody you know a lot of people like the pull star too um you know the pull star three is being made in um i think north carolina or south carolina but um they're making them here as well and you know selling them uh globally so

they've run the experiment the chinese cars can definitely go to the us they just you know with the 145 or whatever it is when this airs tariff um it changes about a second right

All right. Now we'll jump into the Tesla earnings. And then we have a few more news items about Tesla to discuss. Then we're going to talk about the slate. Seth just did his Chevy Blazer SS review. And we have a CETL battery that we're going to discuss too. But then at the end, we should have a little bit of time to take you guys' questions. I see you guys' questions are already coming in. So if you can put question or queue like Spike did, that's perfect. And then ask your questions so that we don't

mix it up with the conversation that sometimes happen within the chat, that would be great. All right.

Did you have time to look a little bit at the earnings set or you were too busy in Shanghai? You know, the best way for me to get the earnings is to look at you and Jamie talking about it. So both Scooter and I said this separately. We don't go to any news sites. We don't check the website. We just go into Slack and read what you and Jamie are talking about. So yeah, I've got the best info out there. As you would know then, the headline is that they were bad. They were...

Pretty bad. They were like expectations were like the expectation were very wrong to start the quarter. They went down consistently throughout the quarter as the analyst, the Wall Street analyst finally caught up a little bit to this problem, especially this quarter, both due to the model wide changeover, but also just broader demand issue. And even then, even with already terrible expectation, they

Tesla didn't meet this expectation and buy a wide margin too. So they were expected 21.3 billion in revenue and 41 cents per share of earnings. Tesla came in at 27 cents per share on the non-GAAP basis and 19.3 billion, so $2 billion off, which is kind of strange. It's like a 10% off investment.

Sorry, my camera is trying to get into whiteboard mode right now. I don't know why. I don't have any whiteboard. It's okay. Yeah. So I don't know how you missed $2 billion like that. The average sale price obviously was way down. Tesla also got a little bit less money for the pretty impressive amount of energy storage that they deployed during the quarter. But roughly right now, Tesla's business...

would be a losing money business without regulatory tariffs. So the tariffs made a big difference. Tesla recognized more tariffs this last quarter than they did in Q1 2024, despite delivering a lot fewer cars, which means that they banked a bunch of tariffs and deployed it in the quarter to save the quarter, basically. So this is especially a bad look amid Elon talking about slashing social security and whatnot when his own company

Now is, you know, at Electric, we've been fighting back a lot about like Tesla is not just this welfare queen that people say it is. Like, yes, they collect regulatory tariff and everything, but the business would survive without it. We cannot say that anymore because Tesla brought in $400 million in earnings this quarter and it sold $595 million of regulatory credits. So Tesla would literally be like losing $200 million if it wasn't for that.

So that's pretty bad. Not only that, Tesla made $400 million this quarter. If Tesla had no operation whatsoever, so no business, they were just sitting on their cash position and taking interest, they would basically have made the same amount of money last quarter. So the business is literally becoming a money-losing business right now. And it is concerning.

So you would think that after that, and the guidance also Tesla removed its confidence. Tesla last quarter had the confidence guidance of growth for 2025, said they're going to come back to vehicle delivery growth. And now they removed that from there and they said, oh, we're going to actually revisit our guidance next quarter. So everything in there looked terrible. And then Tesla stock went up 20% this week after the release.

Why is that? The whisper number must have been much lower, right? Or something. I guess not. Not even that. I don't think that is because I look at even the most pessimistic analysts out there, even like the likes of the, I like Troy Testlike. He's one of the ones that tracks the test of delivery is the best. And then he applies that to earnings expectation. Even him didn't see that coming, even though he was like,

20,000 units closer than the Wall Street and all this. So it's pretty bad. So I guess the reason why the stock went up is like a few things. First of all, Elon kind of highlighted that he would be spending a little bit more time at Tesla, which shareholders appear to like. I don't know. Personally, I don't think it's a very good idea. I think that shareholders are kind of in a little conundrum right now where I think Elon is killing its core business.

but Elon is good for the stock. If Elon goes away, the stock crashes because I see Tesla stock now more as an index to track shareholder confidence in Elon's claim because it's not tracking the business, that's for sure. So it's tracking what Elon's saying. And then we're going to get into a little bit of what Elon said during the call because he said some pretty wild stuff.

So I didn't mention the post. So if you guys want to get like a deep dive into the earnings report and more specifically, like the earnings call that came after I posted, I did a live stream on Wednesday. You can check it on the YouTube channel. So I have the whole transcript there and I just went like claim by claim and fact checked it basically. So you get a good idea of that. It was pretty popular. People liked it. Yeah.

But some of the main claims were obviously around self-driving. Elon said it. Tesla is worth nothing around self-driving, so it needs to get it right this time.

I don't necessarily understand why people give a lot of weight to what he says about self-driving, considering he's been consistently wrong about it for the last 10 years. But evidently, based on the stock price this week, people do assign value to what Elon says about it. So it's kind of important to track what are his latest timeline. So here they are. He reiterated the launch of the paid autonomous ride hailing platform.

service in Austin coming this June. So this is apparently coming this June. However, he did clarify a bunch of things about it that we've been talking about for a while, but a lot of people didn't believe us about. First off, it's not the cyber cab that's coming. A lot of the confusion around that was due to Elon interchangingly using the cyber cab and robo taxi term to refer to the robo taxi at Tesla, but the robo taxi term

Term is just used for like any Tesla vehicle that can achieve robo taxi level driving. So he did confirm that the service in Austin in June will launch with Model Y vehicle. He also said that he was going to launch with 10 to 20 vehicle, which is basically nothing.

He said that Tesla is currently training a fleet of vehicles, specifically in Austin. Ashok also confirmed that. We've been reporting that the FSD update for consumers have been very rare. And basically, there's been no improvement in FSD this year since launching V13 late last year. And it looks like that is because the entire team right now is solely focused on optimizing FSD for Austin to launch this service here.

So that's not good because it's unscalable. Then if you have to make it good enough to be geofence and teleoperated, you have to basically run a car for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of miles in a specific area and then fix problems just specific to that area. It doesn't scale well, which is our point for a while that what Tesla is launching right now is...

basically what Waymo has been doing for years in other markets, including Austin. So not that crazy impressive. The next claim he made is that muster that Tesla self-driving will start contributing positively to the company financially in the middle of next year. He said, again, there will be millions of Tesla operating autonomously in the second half of next year, second half of 2026.

Again, that doesn't mean anything for me because he's literally said a version of that claim every year for the last 10 years, million-euro taxi on the road. So now he says sometimes next year. He also claimed that Tesla will get a 90-something percentage market share in the autonomous market.

That makes no sense to me. Tesla currently has a 0% market share, while in the US for paid services, Waymo has a 100% market share, I guess. I don't know anyone that currently operates a commercial service. So Tesla would get from 0% to 90% and just kill Waymo and a bunch of other companies. Why...

because Tesla is going to have a generalized vision-based system, but then now they are focusing on a localized system with parameter set too. Elon did discuss that, that Tesla is going to have to put some parameter settings on the full self-driving for places that have blizzards and things like that. So...

Now, what's going to be a blizzard? Because I know on my FSD, my car, it starts raining a little bit and I'm going to get a warning that there's bad weather and the system will perform poorly. Bad weather is a relative term. Then Mustad is confident that the first Model Y will drive itself from the factory to a customer's home later this year.

I mean, to me, that sounds more like the claim of like Tesla's going to do coast-to-coast autonomous drive in 2017, 2018, 2019, and it never happened. So I put that in the same category. The CEO said that he's confident. So that's probably the biggest claim that he's made there because, you know, we...

For all we just discussed, I don't care as much about the June project. Even if it happens, if it doesn't happen, it doesn't really matter to me because I think it's far from what was promised. And what was promised is unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles built since 2016. And now Elon says that this is going to happen by the end of the year. No, it won't. I'm pretty sure it won't. At least maybe if it happens, it's going to be something like

Tesla's going to merge the software stacks in the internal fleet that is in Austin. And then if you drive to Austin in your own consumer car, then you're going to be able to have an unsupervised ride there. And then it's going to be like a level three with Mercedes. Like while you're in there, then yes, Tesla is responsible for the ride. But then as soon as you get out of that zero fence area, no. So it doesn't have that much value. Yeah.

So during the call to during the earnings call, a lot of the focus was around Tesla's demand issues are not due to any. There was no demand issues basically. There was one time that there was one question that was asked that was directly about did the so-called demand issues due to Elon and whatnot change?

affect the order flow of Tesla this quarter? Yes, it was a yes or no question. And I don't know who responded from Tesla's management, but they didn't respond yes or no. Instead, they deflected the question with things like, oh, we had our business day in Asia for new orders when we unveiled the Model Y. It was like, yeah, cool.

I believe that, but then you have to introduce 0% financing within weeks of launching it. So how big was that single day order? Like it didn't have an impact enough to get the backlog. So.

Things like that were a concern. And then in the US, we've been reporting in the last few weeks that the new Model Y already doesn't have a backlog of orders. And now Tesla is stuck with inventory vehicle of the new Model Y already. And sure enough, today Tesla released two new incentives for the vehicle. First off, bringing back the one-time FSD transfer for the fifth time. And again, this is one of the things that hurts me the most about Tesla, honestly. Yeah.

is that, okay, that's the other one, but like this is how they announced that the FSD transfer is coming back. Vox Populi, Vox Dei, I don't know if you pronounce, my Latin is pretty far off, but basically it translates to the voice of the people, the voice of God, which means like, okay, this is by popular demand that is coming back. We are folding to popular demand. And this is not,

popular demand because if it was by popular demand fsd transfer will be always available for customers until tesla actually delivers on its promise of unsupervised self-driving that's just the that's just the normal thing to do instead tesla uses its own inability to deliver on a product that people paid for and tesla promise to sell new vehicles which is nonsense so it shouldn't be vox populi vox di it should be uh

the voice of necessity and the voice of money because Tesla needs that money. That's what is happening right now. It needs people to upgrade. On top of this, Tesla also introduced a $2,000 discount for early Model Y owners to upgrade to the new Model Y. So that's a straight $2,000 discount. It's a big deal. So Tesla is clearly having some issues selling the car if otherwise they wouldn't be doing that. And I think what's really interesting with this is that

Those two incentives are kind of loyalty incentives because they are for early Model Y owners and they are for FSD buyers. So Tesla is really going after the loyalty issue right now because we know that a lot of Tesla owners have been selling their cars. They want nothing to do with Tesla until Elon is out. So Tesla is trying to counter that with this, which I'm very curious to see how it's going to work, if it's going to work. Well, I'm sure it's going to work to a certain degree, but like enough to save Tesla in the US? I don't know.

you know anecdotally um i did get a text message at during the brief period when model y was not uh able to get free fsd transfer um and you know i was like all right so you know how much what kind of discount are you going to give me and what you know can i get fsd and free supercharging and the guy

texted me back saying, oh, there's no FSD transfer right now. Like literally for one day, there's no FSD transfer. So I thought that was amusing. But it's also amusing that they're texting me now as an early Model Y owner. Yeah, I'm sure there's... I've heard in China specifically, the staff is under crazy pressure to put that pressure on the customers too. So I'm sure that's coming in the US also.

Yeah, I posted a very interesting article today, if I can say so myself. I kind of highlighted Tesla's problem right now with Elon's, I call it the Tesla dilemma. The company is cooked with Elon, but the stock crashes without him.

Because like I said, what we've seen this week is like, this has clearly become a meme stock right now because terrible earnings. Stock went up because Elon said a bunch of things about self-driving being solved in the next few days, few weeks, whatever. And then humanoid robots coming in, being the next grift and making Tesla a multi-trillion dollar company. So even like the Tesla shareholders right now that are kind of skeptical about this stuff,

But in the back of their head, they're like, oh, Elon is so smart. He's a super genius. There's a chance that he's right about it. So they don't want to... They are willing to sacrifice Tesla's core business of selling electric vehicles, which we love at Electric. We think Tesla had a giant impact on the industry and is...

contributed to accelerating the advance of electric transport. Probably a lot of the Chinese EVs that you saw in China this week probably would not have existed without Tesla. Tesla also accelerated the market in China and around the world.

but now it's not doing that anymore like tesla is being lapped over by other companies and i think tesla could still be a force to accelerate even further electrification but it's not doing that clearly under elon um for you know a bunch of reasons i think elon has lost it quite a bit in the last few years put all the eggs in the autonomy basket that is not working

And that affected the rest of Tesla's lineup that is becoming stale. Tesla launched a single vehicle in the last five years, a Cybertruck, and it's a total commercial flop. So all these things, normally if you're wrong about autonomy for 10 years, Tesla's sales are declining rapidly. Margins are going down. Tesla would be losing money right now if it wasn't from some regulatory credits and the interest they're making on the money that they accumulated over the years.

Most CEO would be fired, but Elon is a different type of CEO. He's not being fired. And the only people that can fire him are the Tesla shareholders. But the Tesla shareholders are kind of stuck in a place where if they fire him, the stock would probably crash right now. Because like I said, like we saw this week, being up 20% since the bad earnings, it's up on hype. Tesla stock trades on vibes. And Elon is manufacturing those vibes right now.

So if he goes, those vibe goes, the meme stock level, Tesla drops out of the meme stock category and the stock drops. So they're stuck right now. The shareholders are stuck. I mean, I would argue they're not stuck. Like I put in the last thing in my article, like I shared like some of the clear trends right now, Tesla's earnings, like it doesn't look like a growth company at all right now. And the PE ratio just shot up at 160%.

last time I checked. So that's pretty nuts.

But what I share in the electric stake of this article is that for me, it's not really a dilemma. It's not really a conundrum. Obviously, I'm not a shareholder, but I would save the business instead of saving the stock because the stock will drop eventually. Like kudos to Elon. He's managed to keep a momentum going like with the hype extremely well. But at one point, this is going to catch up. Like Elon has been able like to kind of make the call to

in your Waymo and competitor in the autonomous space. But you won't be able to do that indefinitely. Like Waymo just announced this week, they're doing 250,000 rides, paid rides a week set 250,000 now in the US in just four markets for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin for. So as soon as this reach, let's say Waymo starts having like a million regular customers.

in those market. Like that's a million people that tells another million people about it. And like now it becomes something else. And I think that Waymo is going to get there way before Tesla.

And then the whole idea that this is going to dominate. By the way, if this is going to dominate a market and autonomous driving, it's only going to be the US, maybe Canada too, but only in the North American market. Good luck in Europe. Good luck in China, especially in China where there's already a ton of competitor there. So yeah, it's like Beidou, WeRide, Pony AI already doing what Tesla is doing and way more in China right now. So I'm sorry if you hear my cat. My cat is like going crazy right now.

But, yeah, so this is the situation they are in right now that as soon as this mystique of Tesla having a good chance at dominating autonomous rides in North America goes away, then the stock goes away too. Because then what do you have? I mean, you have the robots maybe, but like the robots are still very far out. And also, as you saw in China and also in the US, there's just competitors too, like Boston Dynamics, Figure One and all those.

the people's going to wake up at some point. It's just, it's not sustainable forever, but kudos has been doing it for a while. So my view is that you're better off, you know,

putting the rotten apple out of the basket right now and saving the automotive business at Tesla, even though it's not going to be easy. But I'm sure that the new leadership and just distancing Tesla from Elon period is going to help with demand, I think. But also, I'm sure that the new leadership could look at all the things that Elon did in green light at Tesla that were already really advanced, like the Model 2 and other things.

And that could help the company a ton too. So I'm sure there's things that can be done. All right. Should we talk a little bit about our friend at Retrospect? Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Retrospect, makers of sleek, powerful e-bikes and outdoor gear built for everyday adventure.

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Yes. Thank you. Retrospect. All right. Moving on from, oh no, I had one more Tesla article. Yeah. I just wanted to share that one real quick. It was an interesting post from Edsman's. We've been trying to understand like how rugged and how repairable the Cybertruck is going to be with its, you know, innovations and

Like there's a lot of innovations in there. There's the partially 48 volt architecture. There's the drive by wire. There's the rear steering. There's the stainless steel exterior that was supposed to be exoskeleton. It's not so much an exoskeleton and everything, but how does it do in terms of repairability and cost of repairs? Not great.

So Edmunds bought one last year for one-year testing, but they just disclosed this week that in December there was an accident. So this is the truck here. What they described, they didn't say the make or model, but they said a compact sedan crashed into the Cybertruck while it was parked. So the Cybertruck was parked right here, and then the car crashed into the rear wheel on the driver's side and a little bit of the bumper.

so not not as like i'm sure that the crash was significant because it moved the car the truck and everything it's an av truck but it's a fairly small vehicle versus a 6 000 pound vehicle and not a major crash based on the visual damage now of course anytime you hit a wheel on the side like that

with any kind of force, you're going to have problem with your suspension. So I would have expected like, yeah, I mean, your inspection is going to be, was crude and maybe like a $10,000 repair on this rear suspension. And then the, the aesthetic aspects of replacing this panel here, bumper panel and whatnot. So maybe a 10, $15,000 job.

Hell no, this was not that. So first of all, they had issues even like trying to repair the truck because they are in Los Angeles and you need to go to a test and collision center that is capable of doing a Cybertruck. There's a bunch of test and collision centers in Los Angeles, but only two that can do the Cybertruck. The first one, they told them it's going to take a month.

before you can bring in the Cybertruck and we can evaluate the estimated damages. And then it's going to be six months after that before we can start the repairs. So they were like, yeah, okay, no, that's not happening. Let's forget about that. They go to the other one in Ontario, California.

And this one said, it's also a month to wait just to get the estimates. But after that, we can start the repair right away. So all right, let's wait a month and see what the repairs are going to be. And the estimate came back at $57,000.

So like I expected, the rear suspension was a big part of it. So about $10,000 for the rear suspension, a new cross member and all that, because, you know, hit right on the wheel. It's an impact directly on the suspension. So not great right there. But then...

Then the other things that makes no sense and really points to the Cybertruck just not being a very repairable vehicle, the bed was basically $9,000 just in parts to repair the bed. The cab components, so the cab, you need to replace a high-strength steel frame for $3,000.

The tailgate, $2,500. The rear bumper, also $2,500. All things that I wouldn't expect you would have. Well, I mean, the rear bumper, yes, maybe, but $2,500 for a rear bumper is pretty expensive. And that's all before the $16,000 of labor cost. So $57,000 total. As you can imagine, the vehicle was just declared salvaged and it fetched a good $8,000 on the salvage car auction website. So...

there's still some value in it i'm sure the battery like you didn't have to repair the battery so you get you get a nice cyber truck 123 kilowatt hour battery for eight thousand dollars that's not bad it's actually really good and then theoretically there's a lot of parts there you could sell to uh future cyber truck owners yeah the rear motor was apparently screwed too didn't need to be replaced but i'm sure the front motor was okay

All right, let's talk a little bit about Slate because they came out of stout mode this week. We talked a little bit about them in the last few weeks. There were rumors of them coming out of stout mode soon. It's a new company financed by Jeff Bezos and others.

It's based in Troy, Michigan, has already a team of 200 to 500 people. That's quite the range. But yeah, they have a few people working on there and they have apparently decent funding. And they came out this week with an unveiling of their lineup. But the lineup is kind of, it's not complicated, but it's

It's either a two-seater pickup, but built on exactly the same body and frame. You can also have it as a five-seater SUV. So you see the two vehicles right there if you're watching on the show. So this is the pickup truck. And again, it goes with a very simple pickup truck, kind of inspired of these low-cost Chinese, Asian pickup vehicles that are more utilitarian than anything, but it still looks very sleek.

Very refined design. I'm really liking the design here. So you see it's small. It's not big at all, but it's surprising what it can do. Another angle right here. The interior, again, super simple. You have an instrument cluster and that's about it. You have some analog inputs, so no big screen. The only screen you have there is the instrument cluster. That's it. Very simple design.

And then that's the SUV version of it, which is really the exact same vehicle. I think they said an hour or two to make the difference between making the pickup version versus the SUV version. So that's sleek. But the headline here is the price. So this thing is going to start, they said...

Below $20,000 after incentive. I don't like that because I like, all right, especially if you're talking about the US, is there going to be an incentive by the time this comes out? Because this is apparently coming out. They didn't say exactly, but they're looking for Q4 2026, so a year and a half from now. So I'm not even sure there's going to be an incentive by now. But yeah, they said MSRP below $20,000 after federal tax credit, tax incentive.

You can reserve it right now for $50, by the way. But yeah, the specs are pretty impressive too. So only a 3,600 pound curb weight, max payload, 1,400 pounds, max towing capacity, 1,000 pounds. So like not the most utilitarian thing, but for $20,000, it's pretty good. You have, okay, only going to come as a single motor wheel drive. That's a bit of a, I would like get the option of an all-wheel drive.

Then the only option you get is on the battery pack. So the standard one for 52.7 kilowatt hour is the one that's going to be under $20,000. But you can get an option of 84.3 kilowatt hour. And that's going to be good for a range of about 150 miles for the base one and 240 miles for the bigger one. Again, not bad at all for the price that we're talking about here.

It's going to be capable of level 3 DC fast charging but limited 120 kilowatts, which is still going to give you 20% to 80% in 30 minutes. So it's not exactly a road trip vehicle either anyway. So it's not that big of a deal. Most of the charging I would assume is going to happen on level 2 and at home and all that or whatever because this can be also kind of a work truck. The bed's width is 42.9 inches.

uh max 50 54 okay so that's this between the wheel is 43 inches okay and then the max is 50 or 54.9 i don't know why it would be a difference on the max or the minimum and max after that so it's not equal after that okay i get you and then the length is 60 inches and that with the tailgate down you get 81.6 which is pretty good

But let me show you a video here. Let me see if I can. Because they've been releasing a lot of videos because one of the very cool thing about this vehicle is that it is fully customizable. I don't think that the audio is going to play, but the rest is going to work. So because like it's as simple as possible.

The vehicle, that's why they get the price down so much. I'm sure they're going to do like same colors and all that. But you're going to be able to customize it, I think yourself even, like I think are very minimal work to be done. So there's a lot of body panels, a lot of trims that can be easily replaced that gives the car like a very different look. You're going to see it in a second here.

automatic cup holder that's crazy so they were pretty much just laughing at like all the features that other people put in there

But like, look, look at all the customization. You can do like a full bumper, a hat on, like the different front plates, different lights or light, or I guess trims around the lights, I should say. A bunch of different accessories that can be added like that. So it's like here to see you reference like the Mr. Potato basically, because that's almost as easy. And now you can see all the different look that the truck can get. I think that's pretty cool.

i agree i think the modular idea has kind of been a long time coming i wonder how strong you know if you build a suv out of a pickup like how great the panels will be i mean you know jeeps are kind of like that you can put a hard top on a jeep they're a little bit noisy and windy so it'll i guess it'll depend on how it goes i know some of the commenters are like you know this is going to be vaporware i would say this is got a better shot than most if nothing else because

It's got Bezos money behind it. Exactly. It is a good idea. It's an inspiring idea. I think even if it doesn't come to market, it'll get Ford and Chevy and maybe Jeep to kind of think about their vehicles and maybe making them more modular. So certainly newsworthy. Yep, I agree.

And if they are planning production or deliveries, I should say, in the second half towards the end of 2026, I would assume they're going to be moving quite fast here. So we're going to get a good idea, I think, within the next 12 months or so, how serious this project is. But I would assume it's pretty serious. All right, two more articles to discuss, and then we jump into the comments section. So if you guys have questions, put them in the comments right now. We're going to be there in 5-10 minutes.

So for a while you had the Chevy blazer SS to drive around and said, how was it? Yeah. Uh, they took us down to North Carolina. Um, it was a very quick drive. Uh, probably had, I would say five minutes on the track, which I'm like, you know, you reserve this track for the day. Like give us some more time. We had a, you know, uh,

an engineer sitting in the passenger seat. So we can, you know, kind of do our own thing for a while, you know, on Porsche drives are just kind of like, Hey, have fun, sit on the track, you know, here's some stuff. So, you know, that was a little bit disappointing, but I certainly got to push this thing as far as I could. I'm actually a big fan of it. Like it is like, this is a fast car, like 3.4 zero to 60 and,

Um, so it jumps off the line. Um, you know, it's a Chevy, so it's not like all show luxury, but it's a very sporty inside. Um, you know, it has those like, um, jet venting. So it, it looks really cool, but I think that's a little polarizing. It's very masculine. I don't know if the SS version is going to be popular, um, with a lot, with a broad swath of the population, but like the muscle car guys are going to like it.

The SS name is not the best idea. Well, you know, if you can forget about the Nazi part, and I know that the Nazi stuff is big in cars these days, they did have the Supersport, you know, the Impala and the Camaro. It's kind of along that same line. Yeah.

But yeah, you know, I think about people who are coming off of, and there's a matrix on there that they showed us, people coming off of Model Y performance or you were thinking about a Mustang performance. This car is right up there. I mean, it certainly is fast or a little bit faster than those vehicles. But somehow they got over 300 miles still, you know, for instance.

um the uh kia ev6 uh gt super fast car but like the miles drop from over 300 to like 220 or 240 or something um how did chevy do this they just put inside the biggest battery pack they possibly could the same as the lyric it's over 100 kilowatt hours so it'll go 300 miles um

The event was great. It was fun. There were barbecues, North Carolina stuff happening. But we didn't really get to do reverse charging. I would have liked to have seen that. We didn't do any kind of charging, which at 190 kilowatts is respectable speed for a blazer, but maybe a little bit faster would have been nicer.

um but overall like a very solid vehicle I I was pleasantly surprised um and Jamie had looked at like the original Blazer and uh there was a lot of software glitches I think then and right right after that um I did notice there was some like slowness in in some of the uh Google software but overall it was uh

you know, certainly passable. And obviously Google is going to be updating their stuff quite a bit. So I'm not too worried about the software component. Good to know. And that applies to most of GM, pretty much all of GM's equal to. Yep.

All right, one last post, then we jump into the comment section with you guys. CATL had their big event, their big tech day this week, and they unveiled some impressive stuff. They kind of caught trying to catch up to what BYD unveiled a few weeks ago with 1,000 kilowatt plus charging capacity. So they had that. That is their...

So there were two main big announcements. So this one is the Shenzhen. So there's a next generation of the Shenzhen LFP cell. So it's like the most advanced LFP cells they add. And they were talking about...

They showed a bunch of examples of the charging being maintained on that cell at over 500 kilowatts at over 50% state of charge. I've seen even closer to 70% state of charge still hovering around 500 kilowatts.

So if you've been following a charging curve on your electric car these days, you know how insane that is. I mean, they're talking about adding, depending on the model, of course, about 300 miles of range, 482 kilometers in five minutes. So you're pumping gas level there. So that was the first big announcement. And the other one is the next generation of their sodium cell. So this one is called Naxtra.

And the next generation of the cell achieves a density of 175 watt hour per kilogram, about 385 watt hour per pound. So that's...

on par with the latest higher hand LFP cells and the average nickel-rich cells. So basically, this was the big coming out for CATL of announcing that their latest sodium ion cells, which have a potential to be cheaper than LFP or nickel-rich cells, have a potential for higher performance.

that they are kind of ready for the mainstream now. And they are planning to start volume production of this thing in December. They also had a great demonstration of like the safety level of the sodium cell. They saw it in half, they pierced it and everything. And LFP cells are already pretty good on that. It's hard to get them to have a thermal event, but apparently the sodium cells are even more difficult to burn.

I think this unveiling and the timing of it has something to do with the new Chinese regulation that were announced on the day one to have, they say that all electric vehicles need to be like zero thermal event by 2026. So this is basically like guaranteeing that almost. So the timing is pretty good for CATL, which already is by far the market leader for batteries. All right. So I just wanted to update you guys about that. Let's jump into the comment section now.

All right. Skeptic says, did Tesla have a booth at the show? If so, what was the vibe? There was no booth at the show. You know, I will say there are tons of Teslas, especially here in Shanghai, which is near the factory. Like by far the most common American car like I've seen. I don't know if I saw a Ford in the wild, although they did have a booth at the show. There have been Cadillacs and Buicks I've seen around. Even a Corvette I think I saw. But yeah, it's

by far the most common car, American car or American car brand here. It continues. How screwed is Tesla clearly falling behind in China and the CEO meddling in U.S., Canadian and European politics? You know, it's weird because like Tesla is having problems in China for entirely different reasons than, you know, the U.S. and Europe and in the U.S. and Europe. I think the cars are still very competitive, if not, you know, the best

bang for buck uh but in China it's not the case like there's a lot of competition here um you know the charging network isn't um an advantage because there's so many uh so much charging infrastructure um and there's so much variety of of other cars and you know Tesla's uh Model Y is a little bit I mean the new Model Y is out now and I've seen a few of those but

You know, they just have the Model Y and the Model 3 for the most part. In China, they sell 90% to the rear-wheel drive version of those two cars. Yeah. And, you know, you see, like, we went to a mall yesterday. Every car company has, or not everyone, but, like, there's, like, I would say 10 or 15 different, like, in the mall car companies. Zeker's there. Volvo's there. Yeah.

Xpeng is there. They're all just in the mall. So Tesla is just one of 10 or 20 car companies. And the other ones are coming down in price and getting much, much better in features. So different things to fall behind in China. And it's funny because one of my auto colleagues said he saw a Tesla with like

Nazi stuff on it, but not in a bad way. They were fans of the Nazi stuff. So that's kind of weird, I guess, in China. Nazi stuff didn't hit home quite as hard. Yeah, the Nazi stuff didn't hit home, but now with the latest ramp-up, since...

Since the Trump administration kind of shifted away from like, all right, broad tariffs on everyone, even though there's still, by the way, a 10% tariffs on everyone and 145% on China and 20% or so on steel and 25% on cars and all that. People tend to forget about it. Now they think it's only China. But the Trump administration has kind of shifted towards that and saying that,

The goal of the tariffs now is more about decoupling the Chinese and U.S. economy and trying to turn all the other markets to make deals with the U.S. rather than making deals with China. Whether that will work or not, we'll see. I have very little confidence in the Trump administration achieving any good outcome for the U.S. people on that front. But still...

That has been falling on deaf ears in China, especially when JD Vance called them peasants and all that. You look at the Chinese social media presence and they took it at heart. And this is not good for Tesla because now...

Similar things that's happening in Canada, for example, where Canadians are kind of boycotting as much as they can American products. You're going to see the same thing happening in China. And that is not good for anyone in the US, especially Tesla when it comes to electric vehicles. And Tesla was already having issues. I mean, I see Tesla right now being squeezed out of the Chinese market. The market is not realizing it. I mean, the stock market, the Tesla investors are not realizing it yet.

But I see it with the way Tesla is putting incentives to sell the vehicles out there. I see how others are growing where Tesla is stagnant. I think we're seeing slowly but surely kind of a demand collapse for Tesla in China, in Europe. And the U.S. is kind of like the last market where Tesla still has a shot. That sounds right to me. These brands like Zeker just are coming on so strong here that the vehicles just aren't compelling anymore. Right.

And Tesla is only spending like 1.4 billion in CapEx last quarter. It's not like way more. It's like $5 billion from Google to spend in the next two years. Then all the Chinese, it's several times too. So good luck. All right. Spikes43 says, question with FSD transfer coming back. Are you considering upgrading your Teslas? I'm tempted by that and free charging on the Model X.

It's a hard, like, I kind of want something to happen before I'm going to spend more money with Tesla. I kind of feel like. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, for me, it would be too hard right now. Like my plan right now, I'm going to keep my Model 3 and I'm going to just like use my Tesla credits to fix it when I need it to be fixed at this point because it's getting a little bit older in 2018 and starting to need some fixing. So I'm doing that right now because I cannot give more money to Tesla. You know, I'm not like a bleeding heart liberal or anything like that. I'm just starting...

more and more to see the problem with the government right now in the U.S. becoming truly authoritarian and, you

You know, the stuff talking about the third term and sending people without any kind of due diligence, sending them to other countries, then openly joking or not joking necessarily about sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons. Like these things, we saw them happen before and it was all in a very specific context in Europe that, you know,

We should not forget. And even though I don't think it's the same thing, I'm not out here calling Elon a Nazi and I'm not calling Trump a Nazi. I'm calling them authoritarian and with serious fascist tendencies. And Elon made that happen. Without Elon, without his Tesla money, without all that, that would not have happened in the US. And it's a scary thing that's happening. And I don't think anyone should encourage that. It's well put. I'm in the same boat.

all right uh Tom McKee says question is there any news on the 2026 Chevy Bolt I think he probably means the Chevy Bolt and I did get some off the record commentary from Chevy at the Blazer event nothing juicy or anything I would have you know made some sort of comments but it's still on track they did say to me that it wasn't necessarily going to look like the EUV which kind of Mary Barra had said

They're going to kind of focus on the EUV, but why would you do that when you have the Equinox already? So they said it's going to look different than either of the past Bolts. I think it's going to be similar. Maybe size-wise, it's going to be somewhere in between. But they said they're going to have an announcement later this year. That's what we've been expecting, yeah. And then it'll be theoretically produced at the beginning of next year. Yeah.

It's supposed to come out as a 2026 model year. Yep. All right. Skeptic says, did you see that Walmart is going to build its own charging network for thousands of new DC fast charging stations in the next five years? Yeah, I think we kind of knew that when they ended their Electrify America kind of deal there. But it's great that they're doing it. Hopefully other retailers follow Target, whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if Walmart is always like the best location for fast charging, to be honest. Like I've used them when I went to Alabama, for example, and I didn't like the location at all. But I mean, more is always better than less. But I think people need to kind of think a little bit about where they put their chargers because there's definitely places more useful than others.

I mean, the best place for a fast charger is like those rest stops on the freeways. Those like, you know, they have like a McDonald's or Tim Hortons or whatever and Starbucks and a gas station and, you know, put a couple of three fifties at those things and they're always full. Uh, Carlton San Diego says you're saying tariff, but you mean credits and those are state rules generating those regulatory credit sales. Um, I think he's talking about Tesla being profitable.

I said tariffs? Okay. I thought I said regulatory credits. That's what I meant. We're talking about the difference between Tesla making money or not. Yeah. Tesla stock is popping because Musk is scaling back his doge time, but the joke's on shareholders because he will only damage the company more.

I think so. I think that's fair. I think he's made more damage than positive in the last year. And also, he did still say that if Trump's allowing me, I'm still going to spend a day or two a week at Doge, which to me, when he said, I'm going to scale back at Doge starting next month, I'm like, all right, the shareholders are going to be happy about that. Sure, that's probably going to help the stock.

But then he said it's still a day or two. The guy still runs SpaceX. There's seven days in a week. So if he doesn't take a day off, he spent a day or two at Doge, you know, a day or two at SpaceX. You're already spending less time at Tesla than a full-time CEO would. And then add to that the fact that he has Neuralink, the boring company, X, XAI, which are not the same thing. It makes no sense to me. Tesla deserves a full-time CEO. Yeah.

uh question can you contact slate and get more information from them the slate truck has become the most interesting upcoming ev by far the people's ev truck specular is clearly a fan we have we have scooter that's on he's on the he's on slate's case and you can look at his article on it he did that direct contact with with them i think or at least with uh sources so he has all the details

Uh, Konefsky says, hopefully there'll be a lot of apples to apples comparison of Tesla versus Waymo in Austin. Assuming Tesla manages to launch there. Yes. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of, uh, Twitter slash X users that will be comparing the two and I'm sure they'll be unbiased, uh,

Yeah, the only thing that we really want to compare is the actual data. But Tesla will never release that. And Waymo has released a ton of data about their system. And they are not fully transparent. I would like them to be more transparent. But they are certainly a lot less opaque than Tesla is. Tesla has never released any data whatsoever about full self-driving other than the total miles achieved. But that's all supervised miles. So...

We need the actual data in Austin. How is Tesla's 10 and 20 vehicles operating in terms of interventions and remote intervention and all that compared to Waymo? That would be interesting. The anecdotal evidence is not that good. Can't wait to the Austin Robotaxi launch. Assuming it happens, it's going to be hilarious. We'll see. If you wanted evidence that the Cybertruck just isn't going to be a big seller, just look at the Q1 results.

I mean, they don't even disclose how many Cybertruck in the Q1 result. It looks about 5,000 or 6,000 this quarter. That's about it. Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that it's like the number one, you know, like Model Y, Model 3, like people bought those before Elon had his Doge thing. You can kind of hide around those things. But like if you have a Cybertruck, you bought it during Elon's crazy time. So, yeah. Yeah.

So reporters can go and take the same ride in a Tesla and Waymo. There are all aspects of the experience. That's true. And I'm sure many will. Skeptic asks, what is it like to get around in China as an English speaker? Fortunately or unfortunately, my time was mostly kind of taken up. I mean, now is the freest I've been and I'm just at the airport hotel now.

it's not hard. I mean, there's a lot of, uh, it trains everywhere. It's very easy in Shanghai. Um, but once you get out of like the main cities, even in, um, where, where Zeker is, um, it's, you know, a city you've never heard of that's 13 million people. And a lot of those there, a lot of those, uh, not everybody speaks English. Um, there's a little bit of English at the high end, um, malls and at, you know, at the Marriott, they speak a little English, but, um,

you know you're going to want to know some mandarin if you're coming here and going off the beaten path uh if you want to clear if you want clear evidence that cyber truck isn't selling well look at q1 results there's another one had the ct been a big seller that must told us it would be it would easily pull tesla revenues up i don't know about easily but yeah i don't think they mentioned the cyber truck at all in the the um one thing that i should have mentioned though when we were discussing the earnings i guess i didn't i should mention now is that

Tesla also all but confirmed that the new affordable electric vehicles that they plan to launch later this year

are going to be stripped down Model Ys, Model 3s. They didn't outright confirm it, but when they were asked about it, they were like, yeah, I mean, you know, we have limitation when you bring a vehicle on the same production line as an existing vehicle. So our goal is going to be focused on reducing costs through removing some features. And so like basically what we've been saying for a year. So when Elon comes,

called out the Reuters article last year and he said that there was a lie that he killed the affordable vehicle and instead focused on the robotaxi. We already knew that that was false and we reported it several times and Tesla sort of confirmed it when they said that only the robotaxi is going to be built on the Unbox platform. But now we also reported that Tesla is going to instead greenlit these two vehicles.

And now they basically confirmed it during the call. So don't expect new or other affordable vehicles from Tesla other than like stripped down Model Ys and Model 3s. They might not be called that. They might be called something else, but that's what they're going to be. All right. KV says, my favorite part of the call was, how are you going to handle the sun glare cams? And Elon, there is no glare. That's kind of like the Steve Jobs, you're holding it wrong comment. Yeah. Yeah.

He added a little bit more explanation to it, but there's still some glare issues with SunGlare issue in Tessavico. Mudder snow on the camera would have been a better question. Well, he kind of answered that too when he said there's going to be parameter now that's going to limit the use cases in regions where that happens.

People are pointing out that without government carbon credits, Tesla would have lost $600 million. Essentially, it's in the red now. And we talked about that a little bit. It would be more $200 million, but yeah. Also, rain, it doesn't handle heavy rain well, despite what some people in California say. Yeah, they don't know heavy rain in California. Yeah.

how can slate have no screen at all since the backup camera is required are they using a digital rear view mirror um that's a good question they do have a little screen for the speedometer and stuff so maybe yeah back up on there or maybe i saw there was a phone in there maybe and i think i think they can also put a screen into like it can be an add-on i think they have everything as an add-on so they can have a center screen so i don't know you know i i never understood why

car companies just don't put an iPad dock in there. Like why build your own screen and operating system when you can buy a, you know, $500 iPad, that's going to have a better screen, better touch, better OS, uh,

maybe this is an opportunity for a company to do that. - Yeah, and you already have all your Apple CarPlay stuff all loaded up. - Yeah, set up. Easy. From the Wired article, it will have standard automatic emergency braking, for example, the mandatory backup camera, the view of which is displayed on the driver's digital instrument cluster. - Exactly. - All right, there's some cross talk going on. There's an instrument cluster screen in the interior picks. All right.

Let's have another look. Is Fred worried about the first fleet of Optimus showing up to his house?

In 50 years. No, I get that question a lot these days. Not exactly that question, but that version of it. Like, aren't you afraid of like Elon Musk, like sending goons after you and whatnot? Like all these psychos and everything. I'm not afraid of one bit because they don't take me seriously. Like they all live on the X, like Elon and his cult live on the X. And if you go on the X right now and you...

type Fred Lambert and you ask people like, what do you think about Fred Lambert? You would get like that. I'm a loony tune, crazy person that just hates Tesla and wants to see Tesla destroy and all that. Like I have no credibility. All my articles are bullshit and all that. So because of that, like even though my articles gets millions of hits per month and I'm widely read amongst the industry and everything, on X, you live in a different reality where I'm

I'm completely not credible. So why would they go after someone that's not credible? I like it like that. I'm good being a moron on X that no one believes as long as in the real world I still have my credibility. All right, we're getting kind of late. It's 5.17 already. So let's focus on the one that says questions maybe. All right. There's a few. Cybertruck's wrapped in crypto.

There's some people who don't know if they'll make the slight question from Dan Overstay. Have you heard anything about when Lucid will be cleared for Tesla supercharging at full power? Q2 2025 was the last word, but no updated from Lucid since 2023. I don't think we've heard anything. Yeah, no update on that too. 2025 is a big transition year for NACs, so you can expect some delays on that front. It's inevitable.

Question, do you guys think the FSD transfer is only for Model 3 or for Model Y? I thought it was only for the Model 3. I think it's for everything, right? This time around, it's for everything. I think every time they launched it, it was for everything. Maybe not for the Cybertruck last year, but I think most of the time, every time it is. But they said sexy, the whole sexy lineup. Question, have you guys seen any evidence of Elon's pivot to the right gaining any sales at all from the right? You know, I haven't.

I'm sure it has a little bit because otherwise you would see Tesla sales collapsing in the US, which you're not seeing just yet. You're seeing like a little downturn that might be accelerating in the next few weeks. But right now, the US is the only market that's saving Tesla right now.

My brother issue with that, and I had a few reports on this, is like, I don't think Tesla is set up to sell to the bulk of the right-leaning people, like in rural areas, in red cities, in red states. Tesla has way fewer service centers, way fewer stores. A bunch of them, no stores at all and no service centers. So, yeah.

The number one thing that drives Tesla sales and electric vehicle sales in general is access to service, access to charging. So if you don't have those in a red state, Tesla is not going to sell well in a red state, no matter how many infomercials Donald Trump does on the White House lawn. All right. The decline in used Tesla price sales could also be affecting their new sales as many of the Tesla owners have traded in over the years. Now with loss in value, it's less compelling to get a new Model Y or Model 3.

That's true. Yeah, the downgrade in sales, like I had an article on this last week or this week, where the used car sales in general are finally going back up after a year and a half of decline. They went way up during COVID and the supply chain issues and all that. Then they've been declining for nonstop basically for two years. And now they just picked back up over the last month.

thanks to Trump's tariffs and fear on inflation and all that, except for Tesla, which Tesla completely broke the trend of the market, which is pretty bad. So that's a very bad sign for Tesla. All right. That's all the questions. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening to the Electric Podcast this week. It was a long show. We're going to let Seth go to his plane and spend a good 20 hours on the airplane. And we'll see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one. Bye-bye.