Tesla, Ford, GM earnings, Rivian R2, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electrek podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by the publisher of Electrek, Seth Wintra. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you are because it's earnings week, at least for Tesla, for GM. We have a few more coming up next week, but that always comes with a lot of news, especially when it comes to Tesla. So we're going to jump right into that episode.

Q2 2024, it was a miss on the earnings by a solid 10 cents or so. Yes, 61 cents per share was the expectation from Wall Street.

And Tesla came a little bit below that at 52 cent per share. That's a non-gap earnings. But they did beat revenue by a solid B, a solid billion at 25.5 versus 24.380 was the Wall Street expectation. All right. So a little bit of a miss on earnings, big beat on the revenue, kind of a wash there.

So then you have to go into the details a little bit. And, you know, Tesla is, let me mute that. I got a bit of alerts going on on my side. Do not disturb me. Sorry about that.

Yeah, so the stock went down as much as like 5% right after the release of the actual financials. But then it dropped 12% throughout the next few hours and the next day. And that was mainly because of

The questions that were asked, the response from Tesla and Elon, the last quarter was bad. The last quarter, their earnings were really bad, but Tesla like stock up the release of the earnings with a bunch of news that kind of helped a little bit. But this time they didn't do that, presumably because the earnings were not that bad. But if you start digging a little deeper and you look here at the actual shareholders letter,

i don't know if i can uh zoom in on that here yeah i can do it like that sorry my internet's a little slow today i don't know what's going on i just did a reset but it's taking forever to download a small pdf right now but the main thing i want to focus on is is the margins the the gross margins with tesla has always been leading in the industry uh not so much anymore i can't remove that side of things let me do it like that and then do boom okay

uh you have the gross margin it's a little gross but not this is here it goes from this one here there you go um gross profit here wait where's the profit but the gross margin percentage i keep losing it now what are we looking for here the gross margin quarters to quarter to quarter okay it's here uh has to be here right

Yeah, here. I got it here. So it went up quarter to quarter to 18% from 17.4%, but down year over year from 18.2%. Not that big of a deal. However, it was a big quarter for sales of credit. So the overall operating margin, which was just came in at $1.8 billion,

There was 900, almost 900 million out of that was from regulatory credits, which Elon wants to get rid of. Not a great look on that front because that would literally wipe out half of Tesla's profit last quarter.

And that's not account. That's just the regulatory credits that Tesla actually sells to other automakers. It's not the consumer side incentive, which, you know, Elon's and the people he supports right now also want to get rid of. If these are harder to account into Tesla's profitability, of course, because they are taken by the consumer side and insured.

So you don't see them in Tesla Financial, but they help Tesla sell its cars. And presumably, Tesla would have two lower prices in the U.S. to keep up with demand if those incentives were not there. And that would probably wipe out, you know, I don't know. It's hard to say exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if the white flag was close to the second half of Tesla's profits. Other than that, it's not that much news in the release itself. You know, Tesla grew its location 20% year over year,

7% for the model fleet. So, you know, this is good. It's allowing Tesla service capacity to catch up a little bit as sales go down because sales have been down year over year. And prior to sales going down,

The new location and superchargers were tracking below the growth rate of the delivery. So that's not the case anymore. So, you know, there's some positive out there. Inventory has crashed. Obviously, that's good, too. We expected that, obviously, because Tesla had a lot of vehicles in transit last quarter.

But still, some of them, again, we thought Tesla was emphasizing that the problem was vehicle and transit, but it's probably a little bit more than just that. And sure enough, because the inventory still went up from the quarter before that, three more days of supplies, which is nothing for a company of the size of Tesla. But the biggest thing, obviously, was the

energy storage deployment at 9.4 gigawatt beating the record was achieved just last quarter by twice as much at 4.1 and tesla disclosed that on the energy storage front that they were positive gross margin so

Overall, the energy business achieved record revenue and gross profit in Q2 without going into the details, but the non-automotive gross margin has achieved a record of twice the last record at over $800 million.

However, that's none of us are gross margins. So it's not just energy storage. It's also service and all that, which Tesla also note is going up. So we don't have a clear view into the gross margin of the energy business, which is a problem. Tesla is not the most transparent companies when it comes to that stuff.

I noted that they even stopped reporting solar deployment now. Here, normally, you have energy storage deployment and energy generation deployment, aka solar. Tesla is not even reporting that now for the last two quarters. So basically, they're giving up on that business, it looks like. Then we had a few news items to get out of the earnings. I guess I can go directly to here, yeah.

A little update on the 4060D sales. So last week we talked about that. We talked about Elon getting some kind of, not quite a deadline on it, but apparently putting some pressure on the 4060D team to deliver on the cost parity with suppliers or even below the cost of suppliers by the end of the year.

Or it was not clear if they were completely going to give up, but according to our article, by the information, they thought that maybe that was going to be the case, that they would give up on the program entirely. Now, there was a very encouraging update with the release of the earnings, where it says in Q2, we produced over 50% more 46-CD cells than in Q1. It ramped up going good. And you can see the cost improvement. In July, we entered validation of vehicle testing for first prototype Cybertruck produced with

in-house dry cathode for the 680 cell, a major cost reduction milestone once ramped. Cost reduction across our product lineup remains a top priority. So in that report that we discussed, the main highlight was the issues with the dry coating process for the cathode. So Tesla had nailed the dry coating process for the anode, but the impact is expected on the overall cost of the cell to be much greater if you could dry coat the cathode, which is

If it's not a majority of the cell, of the cost of the cell, it's close to that. So now they've produced a prototype Cybertruck with it, which is good news because it's not a prototype cell. It's a prototype of the Cybertruck with those cells. So if you're at this step, you're probably already somewhat advanced in the testing of the cells with the dry coating cathode. So I think it's a fairly encouraging milestone in that direction.

Volume is still like 50% quarter to quarter. It's good, but it's not massive because Tesla is producing just enough for the Cybertruck right now, which itself does not ramp up that much. Tesla did a little bit of an update on the...

Cheaper models that are coming. So in the Q1 report, it was the confirmation of the change of plans that we reported on earlier this year, specifically that Tesla killed the two vehicle programs on the on-box platform that were going to be the cheaper $25,000, $28,000 vehicle based on the new platform.

Now, only the Robotaxi is based on the platform. So Tesla reiterated all that with this release, but they accelerated the timeline a little bit because last release, they said the second half of 2025, these vehicles are... Sorry, I skipped a step here.

So they cancel those two vehicle programs, but they replace them with new, cheaper vehicle program, not as cheap as the $25,000 and $28,000 vehicle, but cheaper than the Tesla's current lineup, which is around $35,000 for a cheaper vehicle. So we expect something between $30,000 and $35,000. They approve these two models that are not based on the new platform completely, but they do incorporate some of the changes with the new platform, but they're still based on the current production line from all three Model Ys.

So, these two vehicles, last year, last earnings result, we were told they were coming the second half of 2025. Now, Tesla says plans for the new vehicle, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025. These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be able to produce on the same manufacturing line as the current vehicle lineup.

So that was already something that they said last quarter, but the first half of 2025 is, you know, this is good news. Seth, I guess if the production is coming the first half of 2025, we should probably see these vehicles quite soon, right? Theoretically. I mean, timelines are always weird with Tesla. Like, I always have expectations and they're always kind of dashed, but...

But normally Tesla brings the vehicle in production, they unveil it sometime like a year or like nine months before. So we're pretty much there now. That's true. Unless they're worried about cannibalizing their current sales, which that might be a concern here. Yeah, you're right. And I would assume that these two new vehicles that we learned about are getting much closer. They're going to be closer to Model 3 Model Y than Model 3 Model Y or 2 Model S and X.

So you're probably right about that. The catenization aspect is probably a bigger concern than they were for the multi-mile-a-while launch. So maybe Tesla is planning to unveil them right when they are ready to go into production. That would be interesting. All right, Elon confirmed that the Robotaxi unveiling is going to be October 10th. So Bloomberg earlier this Monday reported that there was going to be a delay in the August 8th event, and it's going to be in October.

So Elon confirmed that it's indeed October 10 that's going to happen. He reiterated what he said earlier, that some important design changes are behind the delay. And now he also hinted that there might be like a one more thing situation, said that the delay is going to enable Tesla to show a few other things. Roadster.

And the Roadster might be it. You're right. I mean, it was also briefly discussed during the earnings result or the conference call that followed the earnings result where he was asked about it. And he said that the engineering of the Roadster is almost complete. He said that they might have a few things. And that's going to be mind-blowing, of course. Of course. It's going to be mind-blowing.

Yeah, hopper bullies that Elon is known for. Yeah. And then he said that it's going to come next year. But he already said that earlier this year. And it's kind of, you know, we don't really believe it because it's been a forever coming next year type of product. Yeah. But as long as it comes out, of course. Yeah. All right. And speaking of always coming next year, the next thing that Elon mentions in our inning is he gave a little bit of a...

elaboration elaborated on the plan to bring unsupervised self-driving so now that's you know the tesla's self-driving effort has been so difficult to follow purely on a lingo basis like you know using the beta using you know you're not you're not using the agreed upon level three four or five in the industry even though elon as in the past mentioned like he doesn't care about that stuff it's just level five or nothing basically um

So now they're using supervised and unsupervised full self-driving. So that's the approach that they're doing. So people already have the supervised self-driving, which used to be called FSD beta. Now it's called supervised. So Elon was asked about his new timeline. And he said that it's possible that Tesla is going to be able to take over the responsibility from the system and make it unsupervised.

later this year or otherwise you will be surprised if it doesn't happen next year, which, you know, read between the lines. And yeah, it was asked about like the regulatory process and all that. And he said again that he doesn't think that it's going to be that big of a challenge, which is,

I think it's a little bit too optimistic, but it's on par for Elon when it comes to self-driving stuff. Because he was asked even directly during the call by an analyst about if the robot taxi, and that's something that we speculated, that the robot taxi approach is...

being separate, being a dedicated platform for self-driving and being separated from full self-driving, which Elon keeps saying you can turn on and it's going to result in a million or now like several million self-driving vehicles, that Tesla could use the robot taxi and deploy geofence services much like Waymo. And Elon kind of dismissed that, which leads me to believe that this is not in the plans at all.

And instead, reiterated his thing about, this is the vehicles that are already out there that we just turn on. It's bigger value creation ever. So it's kind of a bummer personally, because I think, especially now that Elon is like fully out, put Tesla fully all in on self-driving and autonomy and AI, it would be good to have at least something to show like ASAP, like as soon as possible. And I think a geofence service like Waymo is amazing.

much more achievable than this idea that, you know, hardware three, hardware four vehicles are going to be able to be full self-driving at just one. Like at this rate, we've seen like three decent size FSD update this year so far. So let's say we see three more in the second half of the year. So are you saying that we're within three software update from level four or five self-driving system unsupervised? I don't see that happening at all.

So hard to believe. As he says, or as it's been said, even if the Tesla cars can do it, does that mean the regulators are okay with it? And you have regulators in every state, country, et cetera. Elon's argument against that was, in my experience, regulators have been quite happy to approve systems once they are shown to be safer than humans.

And then no one come to our argument with that. I was like, gee, can you show the data that it's safer to human? Because you have always refused to release that data. We're kind of in a little conundrum here. Like Ilanis says something, but he doesn't back it up. Doesn't back it up. Kind of getting used to that.

And this is my little segue to that news that I posted today, though. Already 169 comments on this. Which Elon made some comments over the last few days on Twitter that kind of confirms one of my biggest fears when it comes to Tesla. And it's the liability of Elon promising level 5 self-driving on every vehicle built since 2016.

Tesla was already wrong about that. The hardware was not on par on the computer side with an R Word 2 computer and was replaced by R Word 3 computers. And now, we are five years, I think, since I retrofitted my R Word 2 computer for an R Word 3 computer on my car. And now it looks like R Word 3 is obsolete already or getting close to being obsolete.

So, Elon said on Twitter, when talking about why FSD 12.5 is only on hardware 4 vehicles right now, he said, "We are focusing on just Model Y with hardware 4 for the initial release. Make sure that works well, then broaden.

This has the 5x increase in parameters. Hardware 3 would run the same parameter count, so it would have the same performance increase, but it requires extra work to optimize the codes. So what that tells me is that Fessler is getting close to reaching the limit on Hardware 3. If now...

Because just a few months ago, less than a year ago, Elon was commenting on all the word for once the transition was made with all word for which they took a while. I don't even know how many are worth three cars. They are out there because Tesla build all the word for another three car side by side for a long time. So we don't really know. But I would assume it's in the millions.

He said that Ottawa 4 vehicle software update will lag at least six months behind Ottawa 3 because they want to focus, they feel like they need to focus on getting FSD on Ottawa 3 working super well and provided internationally. Both of these things have yet to happen. FSD not working super well, at least not being unsupervised and not being provided internationally either. And yet now FSD,

Less than a year later, Elon is saying the contrary to that. Instead of focusing on hardware three first and hardware four lagging six months behind, like he said last year, now we're seeing Tesla focusing on hardware four first,

And I don't think it is because, you know, Tesla has forgot about hardware three people that, you know, have been waiting longer than hardware four people for the most part. I don't think it's because of that. I think it's because it requires extra work to optimize the code, just like they said here. Elon said here. So it means that the limit of the computing power of hardware three, you know, again, it's

There's been some idiots out there today that have accused me of lying and saying that I'm saying that 12.5 is not coming to HW3. That's not what I said. I'm saying that if it requires more work to get it there, it's because they're close to the limit of the capacity of it. So maybe they're going to be able to do that. But then what happens after that? It's not 12.5 that's going to be unsupervised. It's going to be a future update. So there's a serious concern about whether they're going to be able to optimize future update

To be able to fit on all the word 3 and achieve self driving. I think it's this is starting to be a serious concern right now and a big liability for Tesla because this was promised to consumers for millions of vehicles. So what happened then if that doesn't happen? Do they. Did they retrofit to hardware for millions of vehicles?

Do they buy back vehicles? What happens? Can they even do a retrofit? There was never a talk, right, of the retrofit of Outward 4 from 3? He said something about it. Maybe it was 2.5 to 3, but he said something about it would be too expensive to do it or something. Elon did it at some point. Yeah.

Yeah, but that was when they thought for sure that hardware three was going to work for full self-driving. And I'm not saying it's not going to work, but I'm saying that if right now, while we're still several, like several update away from unsupervised self-driving system, Tesla is already having to optimize the code against hardware four. And Elon said that hardware four still have up to eight X increase in parameters capacity.

which is great for hardware 4, but what's going to happen with hardware 3? It's a valid question. Yeah, I think this is the biggest liability for Tesla. The customers, you don't even need to have bought full self-driving package. If you bought your car thinking that at one point I was going to be able to buy a self-driving package, then you have a case to be reimbursed by Tesla.

It's a solid case. It's false advertising and all the data is out there. All Elon's claims are out there, so it's pretty easy to do it. The 2.5 to 3.0 update was subsidized by the cost of the full self-driving. Theoretically, if Tesla is charging $10,000, $15,000, whatever, they could subsidize the cost of the hardware there.

Yeah, but now you have people like me who were upgraded from two to three. Oh, no, sorry. And that's where you're right. That cost was subsidized, but now I'm not buying anything again. And you have to do something. So, yeah, it's going to be a mess of a situation, I think. And I think there's a lot of people, Elon included, that are like, they just don't want to look at this problem right now. They just, they are...

And I mean, I guess I can see the only thing where I can see that makes sense is like the thing that if they achieve unsupervised self-driving on hardware four and they can't on hardware three, it's not that big of a deal because they achieve self-driving and then everything else is like peanuts at this point, which is probably not wrong.

It is just that Tesla has to be transparent about this. As soon as it's clear that you cannot do Outward 3, you just have to tell people. You just cannot tell people, let them in limbo like that. I don't think it's okay. But it's true that if they achieve unsupervised self-driving on Outward 4, whatever costs it is to buy back those vehicles or to retrofit them,

It's not, it's probably going to be a drop in the bucket. It's just, but that, but that's also a big hit. I'm not saying Tesla is going to even achieve on all four. It's not clear either. All right. Last Tesla news before we move into Ford's GM's earnings. And then a couple of other news that we want to discuss. We have one more Tesla news and the big, it's kind of a public service announcement. Yeah.

And after that, after all that, we're going to take you guys' questions. I already see we have a bunch of questions right now. So if you guys have a specific question, if you can put like Bike Angelis here, he does it perfectly, just a Q, double dot, and then you put your question. Otherwise, I would just assume it's going to be a comment discussion in the posted section. But you can put them in the comment section right now on X, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, wherever you're watching.

All right, so Tesla has warned against this wet towel trick to speed up supercharging that you might have seen on social media recently or even at the supercharger station. So it's a trend that's happening right now that people figured out that if they wrapped a wet towel around the connector, like you can see on the image I'm showing right now, if you're watching, you speed up the charging capacity of the supercharger and or the vehicle.

Out of spec tested it out and they were charging at 34% at 58 kilowatt hour kilowatt. And then they put the wet towel on it and the 58 jumped to 119 kilowatt, which is, you know, a lot. So definitely would speed up your charging. However,

It's not a good idea. It works, but is it safe? And probably no. So Tesla answered, "Placing a wet cloth on supercharger Kimball handles does not increase charging rates." That's false. It definitely does increase the charging. "It interferes with temperature monitors, creating risk of origin or damage." That's definitely true. "Please refrain from doing this. Our system can run correctly and true charging issues can be detected by our systems."

So I think that's correct for sure. So when you put this on, so there's a big thermal risk with fast charging. You put in 250 kilowatts into a relatively small cable, creates a lot of heat, and you want to manage that heat to a certain degree and you don't want it to overeat. Putting a wet towel is not going to counter that heat much. It's a wet towel versus several hundred kilowatts of energy or power.

What it does, though, it does messes with your sensor that are trying to detect if the thing is overeating or not. And that is the risk there. So it's not the... There's definitely light there. It definitely increases your charge rate. It definitely does. But it does it at a great risk that you should avoid. So don't do it, people. Because, you know...

It's great to charge faster, but it's also great to have a car that doesn't catch on fire. And we've seen those lately at superchargers. The wet towel, probably the evidence is get burns with that if you use one of those. All right. Moving on to Ford. Ford had a big miss on Q2 earnings.

And, you know, Ford, you have to give them credit for that. Out of the few legacy automakers that are invested into electric vehicles, they are at least disclosing how this business is going for them by having separated two years ago their gasoline business or fossil fuel powered business and their electric business with what they call Ford Model E.

We already discussed their sales, though, last time. I think it was two podcasts ago. But they sold just short of 24,000 units, EVs in Q2, which made them the second biggest automaker seller in the U.S. after Tesla. But this is the overall. So they had the revenue of $44 billion.

EPS of 47 cents per share versus 64 that was expected. But let's focus on the Model E here. So the Model E business lost 1.1 billion last quarter on, I think, 2.5 billion of revenue. So yeah, not great. But what do we have here? Okay, the revenue is going up.

So good news on that. But $2.5 billion is the last $2.4 billion for the first half of 2024 on that business. Yeah, it's big, but you kind of have to take Ford and Model E as an EV startup.

that has the backing of a legacy automaker basically that's how you have to take it and you know 1.1 billion is a big loss but we you know we've seen worst from other automakers and they're still ripping up production as they remember production they expect the economy of scales to uh to help uh on the call too on the um earnings call following the release uh ceo jim farley said that uh ford is focusing on more profitable uh evs so there's that

And they think that their main competition is Tesla and low-cost EV manufacturers in China. We know we previously reported that they built a new team to build a low-cost EV too that is going to come in the next few years. Then they had the GM, third biggest EV seller in the US. They had, well, that's a mistake here. It's certainly not millions. It should be billion, but $48 billion in Q2 EVs.

Versus expectation of $45 billion, so a nice $3 billion B. Net income increased to 14% to $2.9 billion. But again, the volume is not quite there with GM. They sold 22,000 EVs in the second quarter, up 34% too. But we're still not really at the bull TV era and all that.

Their lineup is there, though, for GM. Like, they have, you know, the Chevy Blazer, 6,000 units a quarter now. You know, not too shabby. Equinox just started, so we have to give it some time there. But the second half of the year could be a little bit more interesting. But GM did reduce their expectation on the EV front. The target of 300,000 is now down to...

Quite the wide margin of $200,000 to $250,000 of the year. So you have to give credit where credit is due. Like Tesla does that half a quarter. Right. But they are building out the lineup. They have the Blazer. Now they have the Equinox. They have the Silverado. They have the Lyricx and all the other Cadillacs.

They have, yeah, the Hummer EV is not super high volume, but it's an EV still. Now they're selling like a thousand a quarter or so, so it's not too bad. So the second half of the year, when you have some of these programs ramp up, especially the Equinox, it's cheaper. Going into next year, where you have the next generation Bolt, we can see things going in the right direction. But GM doesn't break down their profitability of their EV programs, so we don't know much about that compared to Ford.

Rivian did the revenue. I think the earnings are next week. So we don't have that just yet. I'm going to keep a look on that, even though as we previously reported, the Q2 earnings are not going to be super representative because of the next generation R1. Sorry, being lunch and doing the right in the middle of the quarter. So we don't expect we expect most of the impact in Q3.

but they did share that their Rivian R2 pre-orders are now well over a hundred thousand and they're still climbing, which is not too surprising because, uh, it was very, very well received when it was unveiled earlier this year. And, uh,

It's going to be much cheaper. And a lot of people that are interested in Rivian, and I think Rivian is saying, especially some people are like moving away from Tesla now. A lot of people are looking at Rivian, but they're like, yeah, a little bit expensive. So they're like, yeah, one Rivian, that's like a Model Y competitor. I'll get one and the R2 is it. But it did slow down quite a bit to 68,000 in the first day. And now there are 100,000, but that's normal. It does slow down.

I'm still pretty excited for the R2, but even more excited for the R3. Porsche is backing down a little bit from his 80% EV goal by 2030. So they've seen the Taycan sales go down, but this is their own doing. They launched the Taycan in 2019, I think. I want to say 2019 if I remember correctly.

it's a while ago yep and they haven't launched i mean they launched the cross uh how do you call it cross uh turismo they launched across turismo but it's still the same car like just a little bit bigger hatch they they needed an suv they needed an electric suv they intend to my account and now uh the macan is probably like uh weeks away from launching now i guess i mean depending where i think they're actually launched in europe but in europe they're already there right yeah

That's a great car, but it's late. That was supposed to be like 2022 or something. Yeah, so if they had launched that in 2022, they probably wouldn't see a slowdown in their EV sales right now and wouldn't back down from their 80% goal for by 2030. I get it now. So yeah, in the first half of 2024, they saw a 51% slowdown in EV sales. You only have one car. Yeah.

It's a good one and it's improved significantly over the last few years. So I give them that, but you need that Macan coming. And then we are, we already seeing some prototype for the Cayenne. So I don't know why they're backing down now. Like they must know that they just need other models. And then when they do, it's going to ramp up because the Taycan was doing very well for them for a while. Became the second best selling car for a while. So.

Yeah, and they also have the Panamera plug-in hybrid, which has like 50 or 60 miles of range, and they have some other stuff. The 718, which is the Boxster, that was supposed to be out before the Cayenne. So stuff is coming. It's just they are not moving fast. And when I visited Porsche in Germany last year, they seemed really upset about –

the software that the parent company volkswagen or whatever however the relationship was working uh they were just really upset about like the software being laid and not performing well and and you know that hardware wise they feel like they're there they just don't have um the good software people or the good software group going yet yeah i mean it's you know not a bad excuse if you are forced to use them as an automaker because they're a parent company but right

So we can work around that. Finally, real quick, we want to discuss that Waymo is getting another 5 billion from its parent company, Alphabet, aka Google. So now they are working with 600 robo taxi in operation in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. So not a million robo taxi, but 600.

And that $5 billion is going to help them expand to Austin is already in motion, but they are expecting a number of new markets in the next few years. So good luck to them. They actually have a commercial rural taxi service in production right now. Not just a pipe dream that boosts the stock. So give them credit on that.

what's up what's going on how we get without to the sorry i was going to say what's going on with cruise i thought i saw something where they were actually going to get back into driverless stuff yeah i think they are working on a relaunch now they just they're just slashing everything this week they confirmed that they killed the vehicle that they had with the honda the uh origin yeah so they killed both ways yeah that was a bummer yeah

So they killed that. But I think they're going to make a comeback. They invested too much money in that. And if you're going to make a career, you kind of have to have a self-driving vehicle program, at least in the work at this point. So I'm sure they're going to try to bring that back. All right, let's jump into the comments section. All righty. Mike Angeles was here before we even started. So let's hit him first. Question, I see tons of salvaged Model 3s and Ys on Craigslist at deep discount. Is the title status justified?

Insurance declare a loss due to high repair costs. These cars seem to have a lot of life, but can't supercharge. Well, now, I mean, the last time we heard they were Tesla's put a process in place to prove them for supercharging.

So that exists unless they killed that program more recently. I have to admit, since they announced it, I didn't look back into it. And that was maybe like two years ago, if I remember. But last I've heard, there is a program with your service, Tesla service, that you can have the vehicle re-approved for supercharging once it is classified as salvage.

Now, is the status justified? I mean, it's a good question, especially in the U.S. Personally, I don't have too much problem insuring my Tesla vehicles in Quebec. But I've heard just this week we had a team member at 9to5 that complained about that, that they were getting a big increase in their monthly premiums. I think they were with Progressive, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure. So there are a lot of people that are a lot of insurers that are saying,

just spiking their premiums on electric vehicles and Tesla in particular for high repair costs, like you just mentioned. So it would, you know, the good thing about that is it would result in more salvage vehicles that are cheaper yet worth more because, you know, they're not that bad. So if you have...

If you are, you know, yourself handy with that stuff and you can do some repairs, you know, Tesla now has some, they made diagnostic tools available. They made repair manuals available. They make, you can order parts, etc.

So it is doable. Or if you have like a shop around that does end-all test of the e-calls like we have here in 12J, we have a third-party shop that does that for you too. So you can, you know, maybe explore that if that's something that you can do because, you know, now if you can get it approved for supercharger, it might be a good option. Yeah, even if not, like, you know, having around town car for like 20, I don't know what these are selling for, like 20,000. That wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Or give it to your kid. If it's $20,000, it better be in good shape. Or less, yeah. Better be drivable. So Steve Greenfield, Automotive Ventures credits Toyota for betting American car buyers are more interested in hybrids than VVs. He also sees dealership model remaining viable. I think those are both short-lived things. I don't know about the dealer model being viable. What are your thoughts?

I mean, there are some good dealers, there are some bad dealers. For the most part, you know, I don't see many EV startup or any automotive startup launching a new vehicle and going with the dealer models. I've seen one and they went bankrupt and that's Fisker. Um,

or at least they had like a jewel you know thing going like with dealership and then with their own things and whatever but they were the one that went most with the dealership models uh while those that are going you know their own way with their manufacturer on distribution system are doing better so far at least uh and tesla leading the way obviously so i i don't i don't know that this like toyota is in the us at least it's stuck with that model so they kind of have to do it right

Now, giving them credit for betting on hybrids, I mean, yeah, sure, they did that early, giving them that, but I think that skewed their views of BEVs, unfortunately, and now they're stuck in that views while BEVs are taking over. So I think that was probably long-term. Short-term, it's good for Toyota. Long-term, it's going to be a net negative because they're going to be behind once, you know,

I agree. Already are taking over. And, you know, I don't want to poo-poo plug-in hybrids too much because I think that those are great for two reasons. One is that it's kind of just like training wheels for an EV. Like you want to do electric, but you want to make sure you have gas just to see, just to make sure that you can do the electric thing.

and i feel like that is a perfect use for hybrids and also the batteries and plug-in hybrids are much smaller so you're not taking batteries away from other cars so theoretically you can make you know five or ten hybrid plug-in hybrids uh versus you know one big you know like a rivian or something so you can make 10 cars for the same amount of batteries as you're making one rivian but

Every single one of those cars is using every single little bit of that battery every day. So I don't know. That's my take on plug-ins. I think it's just a short-lived thing. It's a short-term thinking. So I think Tesla and others are thinking longer term about the fully plug-in. Plus, you have two powertrains in the same car, more to go wrong, more to carry around with you, all that stuff.

All right. Last question from Bike Angelus. Do you think Canada and Mexico will become gray market source for low-cost Chinese cars for Americans? I mean, it's hard to get a Canadian car to the U.S.

I think he's saying that they're going to sell cars into Mexico and Canada with the intention that people are going to take them over the border and use them in the U.S. But I think he's discounting the amount of work you need to do to make a Canadian car or a Mexican car legal in the U.S.

Yeah, it's not going to be – it might be a great market, but it's not going to be big. I've looked into importing a car from the U.S. to Canada, and it's not a fun process. I wouldn't do it. I know some people did do it, especially with EVs and all that. It's just I don't think it's going to be at scale. Yeah, and I think that would also become a problem. If they started doing it at scale, the government would get involved.

uh carl asked how was tesla able to recognize so much more regulatory credit money i.e credits sold to ice manufacturers that was suspect because tips uh no uh yeah i don't know how this is suspect like all right let's move on from that uh and if you take the car out there are other businesses it would have been even lower yeah we discussed that solar is really struggling across the whole industry

uh solar stocks solar stocks got crushed i'm completely hosed sorry spikes at this point i would be happy if fsd reached level three don't see that happening either yeah i mean we uh we've discussed this before but uh it is a bummer that this is kind of like not even trying to get to level three like they just level four or five or nothing basically uh so i i agree all right

I hear you lagging a little bit. I don't know if it's just me or if it's everyone. I don't know if people can put in the chat if you're hearing Seth lag, but sometimes I cannot hear you for some reason. It might be me, though. Skeptic says, bet you $20 Tesla won't have true unsupervised self-driving in the next four years, and they'll never achieve it without a major hardware modification. All right. I won't take that bet, which you're going to have to find someone else.

All right. This is a long one. What happens to waste products of so-called sustainable energy? I think we can just probably pass on that one. My current Model 3 long range is 2018. That's the guy that says, though, three reasons for the Mongo Y performance, why you ordered a Mongo Y performance. Yeah, I don't want to gamble not being able to transfer my current FSD by the time a refreshed Model Y is available. That's a good point, I guess. Mm-hmm.

Look, the multi-performance, one of the best value car in Tesla's lineup, I think. Yeah, I was actually considering trading out my Model Y for a Model 3 performance. I thought that would be one thing to do. Reviews are great. You have the review when you want to carry the kids around and that's the car for dad to have fun. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Imagine sitting in the backseat of a Tesla robo-taxi and it starts to rain. Guess you'd have to jump in the front seat and take over, assuming it even has a steering wheel. Skeptic. All right. No, you don't have to take over. You just have to take over a button to control the wipers for the robo-taxi. Robo-taxi can handle all the driving, but the passenger has to control the wipers. Maybe they could put an optimist in there for that.

All right. Are there any other Tesla hackers out there that could comment about hardware three? Green said that the original promise of two redundant processors was already scrapped to use both for processing. Forgot about that. Yeah, I don't remember hearing about that. All right. Tesla profits fell 45% in the second quarter on WikiV because of the sale of

Elon Musk's company is selling fewer electric cars and if big bets on driverless taxis or artificial intelligence may take years to pay off, Tesla's profits have been under pressure due to declining sales of the company's electric cars. Tesla on Tuesday reported a 45% drop in... Okay. That sounds like it's written by an AI, to be honest. Yeah, that might be AI.

All right, I should read ahead, I guess. Oh, I've also ordered the Tesla roof. That will be the biggest pain. Cybertruck has only one approved installer. Can you say Monopoly? I already am seeing poor customer service from the installer part. All right. I think you read CDS, Cybertruck. I think it's Connecticut. Oh, okay. Okay. All right, here's a question, an actual question. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen with Tesla solar installations and all that. It looks like it might just be going away completely. It's crazy.

all right question is there any way to know how similar or not model 3 production is between fremont and shanghai i mean there's a way buy a fremont car and then buy a shanghai car and then make a difference comparison but it's just outside of our budget i track it yeah the budget versus uh actual like uh we gotta ship one from you know value for our readers because

I mean, in Canada, I guess there's some value because we do get both. So I guess there's some value there for Canadian buyers. But other than that, it would be a big difficult thing to look into. All right. Skeptic says Ford should have announced a small electric truck one or two years ago. I really I kind of agree with that. I feel like the Maverick electric would be a perfect vehicle. And I don't know why they haven't built that yet. They have a hybrid.

Question, how is Tesla's market share of all cars versus EV sales? So Tesla dipped below 50% on EV sales. I think they're like in single digits of all car sales. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the shareholder letter, there is a thing about that. So in U.S. Canada, Tesla's market share overall of the automotive market is just short of 4%.

In Europe, it's 2.5%. And in China, it is 2.3%, maybe. All right. Another question. Question, how long will Tesla offer Tesla roof if they can't sell more of them? The whole solar thing, I think, is up in the big question mark right now around it. I wouldn't bet on it being around for that long, to be honest with you.

Like many, I purchased Tesla at the top of my budget. Buying FSD is irrelevant to a large percent of owners, surely. Don't call me Shirley. That's not a bad point. Yeah. Did Fisker go with dealerships and go bankrupt or were they going bankrupt so they went with dealerships? I think the latter. What do you think? Yeah, I think he's right on that one. All right. And the final question I have here is, do you see Waymo ever being profitable? The hardware is expensive and the remote monitoring is...

cuts into the savings you get from not having a driver. I don't see how this gets profitable. What do you think? Well, I mean, I think with time, they probably get better at all of that. Like the remote motoring can be reduced, probably maybe even eliminated on one point, I would assume. And the hardware, I mean, we've seen LIDAR costs drop like crazy also.

And what else is super expensive in that? I mean, I guess the computing power, but that's true of, I think right now probably Waymo is like overdoing it with the computing power.

because they're still working on the technology. They don't know exactly what they're going to need. And once they know what they're going to need, they can probably optimize it and turn that down. So I'm sure there's plenty of cut savings that they can do over time. And they're Google, so they're not in a hurry either. They have the coffers to go for a long time.

Yeah. All right. Well, that's it for us this week, everyone. Thanks a lot for listening to The Electric Podcast. If you did enjoy the show, please give us a like, subscribe, all those things that helps the algorithm. And we're going to see you same time next week. Have a good one.