Tesla goes into wrap business, 4680 cell update, new Kia, BMW, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. Let's jump right in. But right before that, I want to say a quick thanks to AMP for sponsoring this episode of The Electric Podcast. AMP is the makers of energy management solution for e-mobility products. We're going to have a little bit more to say about their service later on the show, so stay tuned for that.

But let's jump right into the news today. We have a few Tesla news to discuss, and then we're going to jump into non-Tesla EV news. And then we're going to take you guys' questions, comments, subjects, and go right into it. So...

Tesla launched a new service this week, getting into a brand new business, the wrap business. And I'm not talking about hip hop. I'm talking about the wrapping of their vehicles. So that's something that has been a rumor. But I mean, that's a rumor for a while. This actually did this in China a few years ago, at least briefly. I don't know if they still do it in China. But now this is in the U.S.,

You can go straight on Tesla's website, the Tesla shop website, actually, where you can buy other accessories. Now you can buy a wrap for the Model 3, Model Y, or a clear wrap also. So you can get just the X-Pel style wrap.

wrap that protects your paint, or you can get brand new colors from your car. Again, just Model 3 and Model Y. There's seven colors for it. People have been complaining a bit about the color choices that Tesla has because they said it's not like... Normally, like...

When you have a wrap, what's fun about them is you have a lot of options or different, more fancy, more funky colors. Tesla didn't go with that as much, but there is the classic, like a matte black. So obviously this is going to be popular. The white looks just like the Tesla's white.

paint option. You have this grayish, pale gray color, which I think looks pretty good, actually. Yeah, it's color of my brilliant. I really like that color. Yeah, this one is also interesting. It's like a blue, a gray with like a tiny hint of blue in there.

rose gold rose gold i was i was sad i don't even know that this one is but like i can do with rose a little bit of a green so this used to have a very nice mole s green color yeah this one is very reminiscent of that one i like it a lot um uh the red is uh looks like basically the the mole uh the red that you can get them all while in berlin basically uh but in a wrap

So yeah, I mean, I think these colors are pretty cool. I don't know why people are complaining so much about them, but I assume the complaint might be more like we need more options, which obviously I can support that. The other thing that people are complaining about is the price. We're talking about $7,500 starting price, $8,500 for some of certain colors. So it is not a cheap option. Wraps are not cheap in general, right?

But, I mean, I've seen people quoted closer to $4,000, $5,000, $6,000 for a Model 3 or a Model Y wrap. So it completely depends on where you get it. The fact that Tesla is offering it, I think, is good. Obviously, they're going to create even more competition. Probably could eventually drive prices down, though.

doesn't look with this first offering with the price being higher up, but they could make a little bit more competition. And obviously the big speculation coming out of this announcement this week, this release of this new wrapping business for Tesla is the Cybertruck. A Cybertruck wrap is going to be even a bigger thing there just because Tesla won't offer a different paint color because of this thing that's still finished. So wrapping is going to be basically the only option to change the outside look of your vehicle.

And now the fact that Tesla just ahead of the launch of the cyber truck is launching this from all three. Why points to Tesla likely making this an option also from, for cyber truck, which wouldn't make a ton of sense. Is that, is that any tempting to you set? Uh, you know, we have some scratches and stuff on my car and I was like, Hmm, maybe we should just, instead of spending, you know, whatever on, you know, I would imagine it being probably a couple thousand at least on a repainting. Um,

maybe like 5 000 on on a paint job uh obviously this would be another option the colors are all right um there's a lot of third-party wraps that probably cost less and and more exotic colors um but i think for tesla it's going to make a lot of sense to to do this in-house and you know adding you know it's not like a paint shop where you have to add like all kinds of you know technology

To get a new color, you can just add a new color and have it built. Yeah, Tesla doesn't make the wraps. They probably order them. Yeah, so there could be a lot more options in the future. And theoretically, prices should come down. Yeah, because right now, I've seen them. I heard just for two service centers in California so far. So I would assume that this is going to take a while before it spreads to all the service centers in Tesla countries.

specifically for that job or trains their staff for, because this is almost an art like this thing. It's pretty hard to get very well. So yeah, I look at the comments on the article about it and yeah, a lot of test owners saying that they got theirs done for closer to 3%.

$3,000, $4,000. So I think that's definitely on the lower side because I had mine quoted at one point from a few years ago. I think it was quoted like 6,000 Canadians, so it's closer to like 4,500 Americans. So something to keep in mind.

All right, moving on, we had a very interesting update on the 4680 cells. So we love to see updates on the 4680 cells from Tesla because obviously a lot of the future vehicle programs are going to rely on that, including the existing vehicle program for the Model Y. But the Cybertruck is going to require a lot of these cells in the ramp up. So this is very important. And also we expect the next generation vehicle to rely entirely on 4680. So that's

tesla being able to produce them in a high volume is very important and tesla has always refused to share the production rate of the cells now what they did is they shared a milestone and taking the last two milestones together we can kind of estimate some kind of production rate here and that's why i call it a production breakthrough because it looks like

significant production rent was achieved recently. So Tesla announced this week the 20 millionth battery cell produced at the factory in Texas.

We learned about the 10 million cell being produced in June. So I calculated 16 weeks for Tesla to produce the last 10 million cells. So if you divide that number by 16, you get an average of 625,000 cells per week over those last 16 weeks.

Obviously, I would tend to believe that more recently the number is up, like the average was lower starting in those 16 weeks and has been going up since. I'm going to put a very conservative estimate right now at about 800,000 cells per week. Now, we know that the Tesla 4680 cell, unless it has improved very recently, has an energy capacity of about 26 amp hour at 3.7 volts.

So that gives you roughly 100 watt hour of capacity per cell, which would bring Tesla about 800 megawatt hour of cell production per week at GeoFactory Texas, which is quite significant because that would be for Model Y, for example, would be good for about 1,200 Model Y per week. We know that Tesla is not doing that there. They are compensating with the 2170. Now, I'm trying to evaluate what that would be for the cyber truck. Obviously, we don't know.

the batch pack capacity of the Cybertruck. But if we put 130 kilowatt hour as an example, that's still about 600 Cybertrucks per week that they could produce with those cells from Gryffiric, Texas, which is probably a lot more than Tesla is going to be able to produce any time this year. I wouldn't expect Tesla to hit 600 to 1,000 vehicles a week with the Cybertruck until 2020.

probably end of Q1, maybe second quarter 2024, I would assume. And you don't think that they're going to make any Cybertrucks with the old cell or the 2170s?

It would be very weird if they do because the old design is built around the... Tesla could do that with the Model Y because it already had a non-structural battery pack design. They could just produce it with or without. With the Cybertruck, it would be strange if Tesla anticipated that and did a second whole redesign of the base of the truck for a non-structural battery pack like the

and not impossible but it would like they would have anticipated a very uh tough ramp of 4680 and we've heard uh tesla say in the past that they don't anticipate 4680 to be the bottleneck for cyber truck and i think this announcement this week basically confirms that like they they are ready for for cyber truck with the 4680 cells so great news there um

So last week, we talked about the slashing prices on the multi-monthly Y. No price changes this week, but big lease pricing changes from multi-monthly Y, like big ones, like a big adjustment of basically between $70 and $90 off on the monthly price.

The Model 3 now starts at $329 a month and the Model Y starts at $399, $400 a month. That's with a down payment though of $4,500 in terms of 36 months. But still very attractive. This is the cheapest way to get into a Tesla vehicle quickly. I don't think there was any other. One of my friends bought or leased a Model Y just now.

And he picked it up like a day before the news came out. So he didn't get that pricing? No, it's horrible. Yeah. And one of the things with the lease, obviously, is that you can take advantage of the tax credit, even if the tax advantage goes to the automaker or the dealership rather than the consumer. So you can take advantage of it if you don't have access to it for a

income bracket reason or whatever. However, this update was also sent with Tesla updating its warning that it expects to lose on some version of the Model 3 the full tax credit by December 31st.

So we know that the battery requirements become more stringent at the next year, starting next year. And we don't even know how Tesla is getting the full tax rate right now with the base Model 3 with the LFP cells. And the new Model Y2 is also using LFPs. So...

what we can infer from that at least is that how Tesla is getting it right now is probably like right on the verge of the requirement and next year's bump is going to push it over. I would assume that's, that's what's happening. Makes sense.

uh supercharger v4s are coming to the us so v4 has been quite a saga because we we've known about v4 for over a year now uh they've been in the plans of a bunch of supercharger station in europe they've already been deployed in dozens of locations there's a few locations also in asia that have been turned online over the last few weeks but in the us and north america there's been no official v4 deployment until now

Not online just yet, but in construction and in advanced construction, we have now three sites that have been confirmed. One in Wilsonville, Oregon. We have a small V4 supercharger station that is being deployed. Again, not turned on just yet. We have another one in Spark, Nevada. In Spark, Nevada, someone on Reddit was able to get close enough to see that it's actually a magic dock. So it's the first V4 that we can confirm it has a magic dock on it.

for both NACs and CCS. So that means that might be the very first V4 supercharger in America that's going to be used for non-Tesla EVs. There's also the payment screen that we've seen in Europe being added directly on the station. So that's interesting. And finally, we have one more station in Alabama, of all places, getting one of the first V4 supercharger in the U.S. in Prattville, Alabama.

And this is quite a big station that they are building there. Now, obviously, the big deal with the supercharger V4, especially in the U.S., because the U.S. is going to get the Cybertruck first before anybody else.

This is going to be very useful for a Cybertruck because we've seen a Cybertruck charge at V3 supercharger station. It's not a good look. You have to park the Cybertruck basically perfectly. There's no margin for error. You see the cable stretched to the limit to get in there just because it's on the rear wheel well.

And obviously the bed is a little bit bigger, so it's harder to get there. So this cable of the V4, for those that haven't seen it in person, we've seen it last month when we were in Munich, and it's surprisingly much bigger than the current one. Like when you get

stand next to it, you're like, oh, this is very big. And the cable itself is three feet longer than the existing one. So those three feet are worth a lot. Like it makes a ton of sense. So it helps with Cybertruck, but also obviously it helps with Tesla opening up the network to non-Tesla EVs.

Because those are not always, those would always have the charge port in the perfect location, the usual location, which should obviously be at the rear on the driver's side. Some of them like to get a little bit fancy with it for some reason. And now it's going to be easier for them to reach it with a supercharger network.

We're going to keep an eye on the deployment, but it sounds like we've heard of a week ago of the first one being deployed and already two more. So I think it's going to come fast. And those are being built in Buffalo or are those somewhere else? Those in Shanghai? I don't know for a fact, but I would assume that it is Buffalo. And that might be why there was a big discrepancy between them coming to Europe and Asia and the U.S. Maybe they haven't ramped up production in Buffalo just yet. Yeah.

while they did in Shanghai, where they have like a giant supercharger factory. One of the early Tesla Cybertruck went for $400,000 at an auction. So the truck is not even on the market yet, and someone bought it for basically five, six times the price that it is actually worth. We have no idea how many times. Yeah, that we also don't know, you're right. So it was through an auction for the Peterson Museum in Los Angeles, the famous car museum.

And that has a relationship with Tesla, though it's not clear if that auction had any relationship with Tesla because they did say that they are going to buy the truck themselves and then give it to the owner or to the person that won the auction. So.

So the auction, it was for the annual gala that was hosted by Jay Leno and they had people making bid online. So you didn't have to be there where you had to pay a $1,700 tickets to get into the gala. But it's someone that was at the gala that actually bought it because the online...

finished before the gala and the online auction, I think, didn't get more than $200,000 on that, which would have been a little bit more reasonable. But someone was willing to pay $400,000 for what they said was going to be a low VIN number Cybertruck. So that's why I put some doubt on the whole situation here because if they don't have a direct relationship with Tesla where they're like, hey, give us one of the very first ones on Cybertruck

I don't see how it happens. Maybe they think that because they have like an early reservation for it, that they can claim a little bit for that. But we know that Tesla's reservation process doesn't exactly respect the order that the reservation were placed in in the recent years. So I wouldn't bet on that that much. But Tesla has a relationship with the Peterson and they have currently a big Tesla exposition at the show. So that might be something to do with that. I don't know.

All right. We got the mystery. That was actually asked on the podcast last week about Yferian, the wireless charging startup that Tesla bought. People were concerned because on their website over the last few weeks, there was a mention that they were actually bought by Pulse rather than Tesla. So people were like, Tesla never bought this thing. What was this about?

So, now we got the clarification from the release this week and on October 10, they actually confirmed the situation. And Tesla did buy Wafarian, but they sold it just a few months after buying it and they did indeed sold it to Pulse. So, it sounds like based on the local information from local media, it sounds like Tesla basically did what people call an acqui-ire.

So it's an acquisition hire where they bought the company to get their engineering staff. And they didn't actually want their operations, their manufacturing operation, their client list and all that. They weren't really interested in that. They wanted their engineers, most likely because Tesla is apparently working on their own wireless charging solution. So they...

Acquired a company and then sold the operations to Paul's, kept the engineers. That's the story. That's an interesting flip, right? They got all the engineers, which are probably the most important part of the company, and then they

just shuttle the rest off to another yeah well pulse is already a power electronic manufacturer so maybe they just uh like it's a good deal for him like it's a cheap way to add manufacturing operation quickly because they did have their own manufacturing and where they produce um wireless charger not that much for electric cars mostly for robots too so for for industrial robots so maybe tesla was not really interested in that kind of business uh though i would i

I would have assumed that Tesla maybe would have wanted a way to manufacture those new wireless chargers, but probably maybe they weren't happy with the manufacturing operation at Warfarin. Or maybe they also don't need that much manufacturing capacity. I know that Warfarin was already producing 8,000 chargers. And I don't know how popular that Tesla home is.

Because it looks clear from this picture that was teased at the investor earlier this year that Tesla is looking to release a home wireless charging station. And quite honestly, I don't know how popular that's going to be. It's going to be probably a very premium product. And it's just not that big of a task to just plug in your car. I think I've been driving electric for like...

six, seven years, whatever it is. And, uh, I think at once I forgot to plug in my car, like where I got out of the car, I forgot it. And like the next day, whatever I wanted to go. And I'm like, Oh shit, I didn't plug my car. And I still had enough charge anyway. So it wasn't even a big deal, but it's pretty rare. All right. We have, uh,

a few more news to discuss and then we're going to jump into the comments section. So if you guys have any questions for us, you can put it in the comments right now. If you can put a cue or questions before it, like Mr. Turkey Neck did, like that's good. That was going to be easier for us to get to those questions in just a few minutes. Or it can be like, we're going to have plenty of time in this show because like I said, it's a

pretty slow news week uh so if you guys have any other like subject in the ev space that you want us to you want to take on it we can get on to that uh also in a few minutes so put that in the comment section right away before we move on to the next uh news we have a bunch of new evs from kia that and one from bmw we're gonna jump into a quick word about our sponsor of the week amp

All right, today's episode is sponsored by AMP, the makers of energy management solutions for e-mobility products. Team AMP is known for its expertise in the industry when it comes to understanding the battery and its functionality. With more than 300 years of combined expert experience, the team has developed proven battery management systems suitable for a wide range of applications, starting from 12 volts to 1,000 volts.

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That includes an all-in-one DC-to-DC converter, onboard charger, power distribution, and charge controller for electric vehicles. This unit saves space and cost on your EVs while providing maximum power density. Brands building new electric vehicle products will want to consider the AMP EVCC, a state-of-the-art charge controller for electric vehicles with support for all major charging standards, including CCS, NAX, and CHAdeMO.

And the AMP Fast Charge Junction Box enables level 3 DC fast charging, all built on the AMP charging software stack. The world's number one charging software capable of complying with all major charging standards globally. You can learn more about AMP energy management systems at amp.tech in the show notes or on the website. Yes. Thank you, AMP, for sponsoring this week's episode of The Electric Podcast. All right. Kia. Kia.

We discussed a lot about the EV9 in the last few weeks because they've been trickling the information about pricing, but we only had one trim available. Now they release all the different pricing for all the different trims. So the one that starts at $55,000 is the light rear-wheel drive. Then if you want to boost the range a little bit,

Still keep a rear-wheel drive. You get up to $59,200. Then the next option after that, all these next options have the long-range capability, but then you had the all-wheel drive powertrain on top of it. So the next one is the wind at $64,000, land at $70,000, and it goes all the way up to $74,000 for the GT lineup. So...

Kia and Hyundai have been very good about that. They give you a lot of powertrain options across the lineup. You can mismatch normally the rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, long-range, short-range. In this case, you stick with the long-range once you go all-wheel drive. But other than that, you stay pretty close. You get that long-range, you get a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack, basically, basically.

versus, I'm not sure for the short range. Okay, here are the mileage here, basically. So base one, 223 miles, which is still pretty good, especially for the pricing at $55,000. Then the longest range version is going to obviously be the long range with rear-wheel drive.

which gets you to 300 miles. And then if you want the all-wheel drive, you lose some of the efficiency. But with the wind version, you still get 270. Now with the Lennon GT, it goes down to 250, which is pretty wild because that's barely more than you get for the

the standard range rear-wheel drive version. So all these added features that you get from the more premium versions, they really hit the range. We don't have a list of those features. Yeah, Kia's not great at keeping their range up when they add performance stuff like the GT line.

Sorry, the EV9 GT has like 200 miles of range, whereas the regular EV9 is over 300 miles of range. So Kia's strong suit isn't making efficient high power vehicles. They can do one or the other. Mm-hmm.

And then the other news was the range, but like we already just discussed it because we put it in there, but the official EPA range were released this week and they are as we just discussed. So the efficiency here basically varies between 89 MPG to 80 for that not that efficient one that we just discussed.

So 76.1 is the kilowatt hour of the base battery pack. You know, it's kind of interesting, though, that the light long-range rear-wheel drive gets more MPG ease than the smaller battery one. Because theoretically, the only difference is the bigger battery, which is heavy. So it should technically lose. Yeah, I mean, it's a heavier battery that it's lugging around. It's surprising that it gets a better...

Oh, wait a second. No, the APA estimated range is actually not the same that we just discussed. I just saw the difference here. No, so it's 223. It's actually 230 that the APA get. 304 instead of 300 for the light range rear-wheel drive. And then the big difference here, huge difference, 30 and 20 miles difference for the all-wheel drive versions of the car. So they are pretty efficient or relatively efficient. Yeah.

or at least based on the way that the EPA is calculating them, which we know is always a bit controversial because the automaker has a choice of multiplier that can apply on the number that the EPA comes to under test. And

Generally, Kia has been a little bit more conservative. So we are hoping that this is still the case, even though surprisingly there is significant, especially for the land all-wheel drive, you get a 30 miles difference on this. Maybe you're going to have to double check this just to make sure we didn't do any typo and things like that. But so far, I assume that's correct. Pretty wild. Yeah.

All right, we have the unveiling also of the Kia EV5, which, you know, a little smaller cousins to the EV9. Very similar design that we unveiled this week, but a little bit less exciting because not coming to North America. Crazy. I assume that because it's smaller, Americans won't like it, like everything bigger. Yeah.

But this is a sweet little compromise here between the EV6 and the EV9. You have...

A little bit smaller battery pack, you lose basically 10 kilowatt hour for the short range or long range version. But you still get, well, that's a CLTC range, though it's not as accurate. But you should get still over like 200 and probably 250 miles of range out of that 64 kilowatt hour pack and closer to 300 miles for that bigger 88 kilowatt hour battery pack, I would assume.

You also have an all-wheel drive version. It still works on the 800-volt system that Kia and Hyundai have been using, the E-GMP, whatever the name of that platform was. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the pictures, obviously, it's going to be very reminiscent of the EV9. Yeah, I think all these companies leaving out their smaller vehicles out of the U.S. is...

is like incredibly stupid but um it's great for volvo with their ex30 coming soon um i'm actually so you're going to japan next week um i'm going to uh barcelona to do the uh ex30 and then um the porsche macan which a bunch of other publications got to look at

I don't know. It's just the prototypes, Seth. We don't need to see the prototype. We're going to see the real thing next week. We like prototypes. We actually like prototypes. And how much of a prototype can it be if they are weak from showing the real one? Yeah, and they're driving it around Marina del Rey. And why are you shipping prototypes to the U.S.? I mean, I don't know.

We cannot complain too much because we are seeing it next week, but we were kind of bummed out that we were left out of that opportunity to see it this week. Yeah. So anyway, we're both going to – like next week's podcast is going to be really interesting because Fred will be in Japan and I'll be in – Well, next week – I don't think I'm in Japan for the podcast next week. Okay. Next week is the 20th. Yeah, no, I'm leaving on the 23rd. So yeah. Okay. 20th, I'm still here. All right. All right.

Well, that'll be cool. And I think back to this, I think the Volvo EX630 is just going to kill it in the US. Yeah. I mean, it's a nice form factor. Yeah. It's still an SUV, like the EV or whatever, 5. And there's another electric crossover that was unveiled this week that we're not going to see in America this time from BMW and the iX2 xDrive30. So the latest...

IAX vehicle in the lineup. Looks like a very solid entry. WLTP range, you're talking about 259 to 279 miles of range between 417 to 449 kilometers. A nice little 65 kilowatt hour battery pack that's usable capacity. 130 max charge rate. So that's a little bit on the low side. We would like something a little bit higher for a vehicle that's coming in 2024.

5.60 to 60, that's perfectly okay. 111 miles per hour, 180 kilometers an hour. Yeah, that's something. That's actually a car that I've heard a lot of people asking for from BMW. It makes no sense that BMW has some nice entries right now in the EV market in North America, but it's on the bigger and much more expensive side of things with the i5.

i7 and all that stuff it's not cheap and this would actually be their like Model Y competitor maybe it's a little bit smaller than a Model Y did they relieve the dimensions kind of reminds me of the Polestar 2 a little bit yeah but it's more it's more CUV than the Polestar 2 I think

like when i look at it it looks more crossover than like the pole stars too like if you squint at it maybe it looks like a cuv but uh to me when i when i see on the street i'm like this is a sedan like this is a regular four-door uh but yeah this this thing is coming to um europe uh starting in uh 2024 and it's gonna be the new like entry-level uh bmw basically electric bmw sorry

Too bad. Another myth. It's hard to get excited about it because I would be excited about that car. It's just, yeah, bring it here. It's so weird. All right, let's jump into the comments section. All right, Mr. Turkey Neck is first out of the gate. Question, will Cybertruck use a 48-volt low-voltage system? The latest information we have is that it will, which is actually kind of revolutionary. Do you want to talk about it?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a big deal. Like it could be different. Like the only downside, obviously, is that there is some accessories that maybe could work with the Cybertruck, like just standard off-the-shelf accessories that might not work. But obviously, I think Tesla is going to take advantage of that by itself by offering their own thing that's going to work on the 48-volt system. But also now with those electric pickup truck that are –

that take advantage of using power from the battery pack you also have the outlets directly on the truck for to do basically whatever you want with it so it's not as useful as it would be on a gasoline powered truck obviously so it gives tesla this opportunity to innovate uh with a 48 volt system uh and yeah it could it would drastically reduce the

cables weight across the vehicle, which doesn't sound like much for people. You're thinking how big of a difference it is. Google some pictures of cable link inside vehicles, especially pickup trucks, most likely. I would say it's even a bigger difference. And we're talking about miles and miles and miles of cables that are inside of a truck just

all over, uh, those, the body and the, between those panels that you just don't see, uh, only if you're lucky enough, but, uh,

So, yeah, this could be a big different maker in efficiency. We'll see how Tesla do it, but I'm actually pretty hyped up about this possibility. It sounds like it's happening, actually. Yeah, and theoretically, if you need a 12-volt something or other, like I imagine they'll still have a 12-volt lighter adapter. Yeah, you can always do that. You can always do a DC-to-DC converter down from 48 volts to 12 volts.

But I agree. It's a big deal. It's definitely the future. 48 volt is also a common voltage in solar panels. It's common voltage in e-bikes. So it's not like they just picked a random number in the middle of nowhere. It's actually a pretty, you know, pretty used voltage. So I'm glad to see it. And hopefully, you know, more vehicles, Teslas and otherwise kind of jump to that. Mm hmm.

All right. He's back. Turkey next back with do either of you have your vehicles wrapped? I do not. Do you? Yeah. Like I said, I was looking to do it on my Model 3. I did wrap the Chrome. I did a Chrome delete wrap basically. So I did wrap that. Okay.

I didn't do it myself. I have a friend of mine that is more, that is better with that stuff. Like I said, it is like, there's an art to it that did it for me. So it was, it was pretty cheap obviously because my friend helped me and I bought a kit online that you can buy some of those kits online that are pretty cheap. You just, you have to apply them yourself and the art and the, like now my model three basically looks like the new model three, even though it's a 2018. Yeah.

Not the new Highland, obviously, but the ones like the last two years, they've been doing Chrome deletes on all three mobile Wires. So it looks better, I think. So I like it like that. But yeah, I was looking to do...

There's a lot of value. It is not cheap. It is expensive. But obviously, you protect your paint. It's not just an aesthetic thing. You protect your paint. So for resale value, it's really nice. Especially, they last normally about four years, something like that. So if you're someone that...

is looking to sell their car, like change cars every four years, this is a very nice solution where like as soon as you get it, you put a wrap on it of the, like you buy the base color from Tesla, like the white one obviously now. Nowadays, though, they do change at time. You put a nice wrap on it of whatever color you want the most. And then in four years when you want to change your car, you sell it, you remove the wrap, and then you have like a perfectly nice, perfect paying job to sell it, which increase your resale value.

Yeah. And, you know, in my case, I'm like, I've got a couple of scratches in my car and I was thinking about repainting it. And then I'm like, well, by the time I repaint it, I'm almost, you know, most of the way to a wrap. But that said, when I do want to sell the car and if I do pull off the wrap, those scratches will still exist. You need the buyer to like your wrap. Right. But then you can't get exotic. You can't do the orange with the, you know, fluorescent stripes. So.

Got to figure out a solution. Oh, yeah. And he had a follow up. Can it wrap be robotically applied? Not that we know of yet, but I imagine Tesla would be thinking about something like that, especially with something like the Cybertruck, which.

you know, has flat surfaces, which theoretically... Yeah, yeah. I could see that happening more with the Cybertruck, but anything, like anything else, like it sounds like it would be quite the endeavor to build a robot for that. Like it would be... Maybe the Tesla bot can do that. Like the level of dexterity was quite impressive with the last one, but it's still one of those jobs that you need... By the end of the year, I bet. They'll be doing that. Two weeks. Two weeks. All right. Uh...

Martin Hughes asks, which Kia model is the Kia Niro EV killer? Well, that EV5 probably would be the one that would replace the Niro because I do think they're going to replace the Niro when those new EV3, EV4, EV5 are coming because these are the new generation that are built on the eGMP platform rather than the Niro and what is the Hyundai one? Kona. Kona, yeah.

So, yeah, I think those are the ones. But if they're not coming to the U.S., maybe the Nero is going to survive there a little bit longer. I don't know. That would be interesting to see. They have been updating it. Yeah. Got a few updates. All right. Patricio Benedon asks, any idea when Giga Berlin will offer a seven-seat confirmation for the Model Y? Thanks. Yeah.

No idea. That's been one of the very most asked questions that we get, like the seven-seater availability. But yeah, we have no insight into that whatsoever. Sorry. Also keep in mind that the third row in a Model Y is microscopic. So you're not going to fit any adults back there. But the Model X is pretty expensive in Europe. Yeah, also true. Mr. Turkey next back, is the EX30 big enough to compete with the Model Y?

I don't think it's going to necessarily compete directly with the Model Y, but I imagine there's some people who are not super precious with how big their car can be. And I think the X30 is going to be, I mean, it's more like a competitor to the Bolt, Chevy Bolt in size.

So which is going away. So I don't think it's going to compete in the same way. But the Model Y is so inexpensive for what it is. I imagine that there is going to be some some overlap with buyers there. Yeah, I mean, every every new car, electric car, because we're still populating the entire auto market with it will be.

I sometimes punch above its weight a little bit or under its weight just because the options are somewhat limited. So I think my parents, for example, my parents, they want an EV so bad right now that they put a reservation on the Ioniq 5 and the Silverado Electric. Like, oh, whichever comes first will take it. Yeah.

Really? Those two cars? Yeah. So like they don't have anything to do with it. They're quite different. Yeah. Yeah. Totally different. So, but they both would work to what they want to do. But obviously this is, we're talking about a second car for them. So it's not like, like,

as important for the variety of it but still i think a lot of people uh are in this similar situation but also in a situation where like oh the model i would work great but uh i can do something a little bit a little bit smaller too and if it's gonna work with my price point i'm gonna go with the ex30 so there's gonna be a lot of uh competitiveness on that front i'm curious why they're not considering i mean if they're considering an ionic five why aren't they considering a tesla

It comes down to the incentive, too, in Quebec. They want a double advantage on the incentive. The Model Y will only get the federal one. It doesn't get the Quebec one. So they are bummed out about that. So basically, it comes down to the Model Y is going to be like $10,000 more expensive. Oh, wow. That's kind of the opposite of the U.S. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Because you can't get the tax credit on Korean-built batteries. All right, Tyler Hilliard. When do you think Tesla will release their vehicle safety report? It's now three quarters behind. No 2023 data yet. I'm sure it's just an oversight. There's no various stuff going on behind the scenes. The answer is probably never or never.

Like you said, so one of the obviously conspiracy theory behind that is that it's because the data has gotten worse and this doesn't want to release that, which is not impossible. It could be true because the data has been going like up and down at certain times, though overall the trend has been an improvement.

With, again, a very limited data set that was in those vehicle safety report. The only thing that it's good for is to compare it against itself. So we need data over time. So it is a bummer that Tesla stopped producing it. It might just, I don't think it's an oversight necessarily, but it might just be like, all right, they find out no one is reading that or whatever, which is not completely untrue because every time they released it, I did an article on it and those articles were

not very popular at all. Like people just didn't care about it. Probably because in my articles, I was pretty honest about the fact that it's not great data. So,

I don't know. Maybe they gave up on it or maybe it looks bad and they don't want to release it. I don't know. Maybe the only people actually reading it are the people who want to disparage Tesla. Yeah. Maybe it's just a weapon that they're giving to their enemies. I don't know. It's one of those things that I know people hate that when I keep bringing that up. It's one of those things that normally we would ask this to PR and like, hey, what's happening? You guys used to give us this data every quarter and now you're not. What's happening with that? Cannot do that these days.

Yeah, and they wouldn't necessarily give us something we could print, but they would kind of lead us in the right direction. Like, oh, stay tuned or maybe over here is some good data. And it's unfortunate that doesn't exist anymore. And while they were not always completely truthful, straight up lying is not...

good for them either so like if if i would ask them are you guys i could literally do that i could are you guys not releasing it because the data looks bad they could insert that and be like no no no and at least we know it's not that and i know like some tesla naysayers right now like oh fred you're so dumb like you say it's not because it's bad then you could just gonna believe them uh

Yes and no. Like I said, I'm very well aware that they're not always completely truthful. But lying about something like that is extremely risky for them because sometimes a journalist is going to ask that and they already have the data. And they have the data. Yeah. So that's something that it's a tactic that I'm not saying to say that I might have used in the past. And it's...

it would put them in real trouble obviously so right things like that can still like you can get information without actually getting the information if you know what i mean all right uh moving on mike the car geek asks does tesla semi use v4 chargers with the megawatt plug or is it a different charger what does tesla call it megawatt question they call it the mega charger um and yeah it is a different plug than the um the nax connector it's a different connector

Now is the charger itself because the charger is not the stall. And the V4 stall looks just like the mega charger stall. So that could be the same. But like the charger is not the stall. The charger is in the back. We call it the cabinet basically. And that's where they stack up all those chargers on top of each other to get that high power version. And yeah, so I don't...

We don't know the actual difference with that. But if your question is basically, can a Tesla semi charge at a V4 supercharger? Right now, the answer would be no, because they would need a different connector. Does Tesla semis have like both kind of chargers in case they need to do like an emergency charge at a regular supercharger?

I don't know if the production version does, but we do know that in the testing phase, Tesla had a solution to charge at regular superchargers with some kind of like octopus adapter that

plugged into the mega charger connector on the truck like so the regular connector on the truck and like split off in several nax connector that tester could plug at a supercharger so they have that solution which i assume that uh if if it's still in the production version they have one of those octopus and all these uh and all these trucks would make sense but right now uh those trucks are mainly used between existing like uh location that like they don't they don't go it's it's

It's not like the Tesla Semi is not yet for like a trucker that just takes job, like he gets called and like take this load from there to there. It's not for that yet. It's for a trucker that works for like Pepsi and goes from one distribution center to a store or whatever, or for Tesla between its own operations. So we're not quite there yet. All right. Moving on, Brian Wilson. Jay Leno drove the Tesla Semi on his show and a Tesla engineer said Cybertruck is 800 volt battery pack.

I haven't seen reporting on this confirmation. Well, it was already announced last year at the Tesla Semi event when they announced the production version of the Tesla, when they unveiled the production version of the Tesla Semi, they did mention that the Cybertruck would be on the same 8-under-volt system as the Tesla Semi for charging and all that. So,

It was not new information. I liked the Giardino Drive. It was a great informational video, but that was not brand new information. All right, Ralph Spratt. My Model S is wrapped in tangerine dream. No one wants to hit it. Send us a picture, Ralph. I don't know what tangerine dream means. In general, I think people don't want to hit another car. So I don't know why the color would have a bigger impact on that.

and then that's why that's my dad look who it is hey mr lambert uh he has six reservations

Yeah, he has a lot of that. And every time, every week when I go to have dinner at my parents, I'll always complain. It's like, I don't get a lot of news about my reservation. Like I check with the dealership and they don't get back to me and everything. Yeah, there's just not a lot of allocations in our region here for electric vehicle, unfortunately. If you're in Montreal, things like that, it's a little bit better. But yeah, what did you say? What are the other vehicles?

Oh, and if he's still on right now, he's going to list them for you. But yeah, I know the Ionic 5 is one, the ID4. And that ID4, actually, that's the only one that they did reach out to him about like, hey, we have one, but it was not the configuration that he wanted. They tried to upsell him, obviously. Always, always, they always try to do that.

So he refused that one. He was like, no, I'll wait for my configuration. So the ID4 was one of them. Ioniq 5, Silverado Electric. So that's Sri. And I'm not sure if he had one of the Volvos. What about a Mustang Monkees?

I know that he did check for the Mustang Mach-E, but maybe he needs to do it again because I think the price might have gone down since last time he checked. I think he checked the price and it didn't match what he wanted. But nonetheless, I don't think that was that long ago. Maybe the Mach-E is in there. It's just not the configuration that he wanted.

There is some nice options nowadays. If you have six reservations, you couldn't have six reservations just a few years ago. You couldn't have six reservations on electric vehicles. So on that front, we're making progress. Now, obviously, if you're not an electric vehicle automaker and you're not named Tesla, you just don't make enough of them. It's as simple.

I mean, Rivian is getting pretty good in terms of the volume and everything. So we have to give them that. But they're obviously still nowhere near Tesla. But there's progress, everyone.

All right. Well, he had – so the three that's missing. Oh, yeah, that's right. The Equinox and the Blazer EV. And he's even thinking about a VinFast. You know how desperate you are when you start thinking about a VinFast. He's aware of the problem with it, but he's like – he's so desperate about getting one. He's like, all right, I'll put my reservation for a VinFast, too.

But obviously, the Equinox and Blazer EV are also in the top choices. But I mean, they just started delivering the Blazer EV in the U.S. So obviously, the Canadian market is an afterthought. And the Equinox is by the end of this year in the U.S., right? Yep. All right. So maybe early next year in Canada. That's a possibility.

All right. It's going to get exciting. The next few months, the next few years, the EV market always gets more exciting. That's why we love our job at Electric, and that's why we love you guys for listening to us, for reading our content. We appreciate you. If you do like our show, please give us a like, a thumbs up, all those things. They help the show a ton, and it's free to do. It takes a second. If you're listening right now on your podcast app and you like the Electric podcast, a top 10.

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