Tesla Model Y RWD, Cybertruck bait-and-switch, Rivian earnings, and more
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We are live for a new episode of the AirTrek 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. We have plenty to talk about this week. We have the new Model Y rear-wheel drive being launched in the U.S. We have the Cybertruck 8N switch on the auto steer, range extender being killed, a little quick, cheeky prototype. We have the new Model Y rear-wheel drive being launched in the U.S.

We have the tax credit to talk about, a little update on it, nothing too surprising. We have the Rivian earnings and we have a bunch of EVs from Jeep, from Toyota and some updates from Nissan and Waymo to talk about. So a big show today, but it's going to move quite fast.

And we're going to have time to talk to you guys. So I know you guys are still coming in right now, but if you're on the stream, we are live and we take questions and answer. We interact with the chat, specifically in the second half or, you know, tail end of the show. So if you have any questions for us, you can put them in the comment section right now and get to it. And if you do enjoy the podcast, please give us a like, a subscribe and all those things. They help the show a ton. And we appreciate when you do.

All right, the Model Y rear-wheel drive long range has been launched in the US. So this is not too surprising. We started seeing the Model Y, new Model Y long range all-wheel drive starting to get an inventory. So generally that means that Tesla doesn't have any backlog of orders anymore.

And they needed something else to get things going, to create some momentum. And we saw that Tesla was starting to discount the Model Y all-wheel drive through... Let me just put the notification on pause here. Do not disturb. I even have people on staff reaching out to me. They know I'm live on the podcast right now. Come on, guys.

No, it's my fault. I should just put that in case it's up. They started discounting directly for early Model Y owners, a $2,000 discount, then a more broader discount by subsidizing financing rate to 1.99% down from 4 point something is their regular interest rates right now. So all these things are discounts. But we know that also there's the

Tesla had the opportunity to launch a cheaper version of the vehicle, so the long-range rear-wheel drive and the standard range rear-wheel drive. They've done so now for the long-range rear-wheel drive, which already has been available in Europe for weeks, if not months now, and same thing in China for months. But in the US, Tesla... The US really, everything we see right now from Tesla, it looks like it's the least affected market from demand issues.

Not doing great either. Tesla has to pull a lot of demand triggers to get people to buy in the US, but it's not as bad as what's happening in Europe. Tesla is being completely squeezed out of the European market. It's basically a demand collapse.

And in China, it's basically a little bit ahead of the U.S. market right now. Like competition is crazy. And this has been this a lot quicker to do the discounts, especially for the new Model Y. So if things point to Tesla having significant diminishes in China, too, in the U.S., it's a little bit not as bad. And we see that from Tesla taking its time, taking full advantage of only having the Model long range all wheel drive, which is more expensive, more opportunities for profit.

And now launching the long range rear wheel drive for $45,000. So it's not a big discount on the all wheel drive version, which is $49,000. So it's a $4,000, you, uh,

You get more range. So it's about 30 miles, I think you get. Yeah, 30 more miles of range that you gain from losing a motor. And you're a little bit not as fast, obviously. So you go from 5.4 seconds 0 to 60. You go from 4.6 to a 5.4 seconds 0 to 60. This is the starting deliveries in three to five weeks. So we've seen something similar in the past.

In Europe, where the vehicle has been available for sale for a while, but deliveries are supposed to start end of May, early June. So this is similar here. And deliveries have already started in China, obviously, for a little bit. So if you lived in the South or in LA, would you get this one?

Yeah, anywhere that you don't need an all-wheel drive, this is a better solution, I think, because you get more range and 5.6 seconds is plenty fast. So if you don't need the traction, and I mean, even in the Northeast and everything, like where we live, I mean, all-wheel drive is super useful, I'm not going to lie, but it's not for everyone. I know plenty of people that just don't drive the...

They don't drive in the snow. They only drive in the city where even if there are snow, especially here in Quebec or in the Northeast in the US where they're used to snow, they do clean the roads pretty frequently. So rear-wheel drive is fine for that too. But I don't think it's going to help the Slotan just because of the price difference here is not giant. It's 4,000.

Yeah, $4,000. Every time you remove $1,000 from a car, you do increase the market quite a bit here. But I don't know how much of a bigger market they are for a $45,000 Model Y versus a $49,000 Model Y. Both have the federal tax credit, which we're going to talk about a little bit, though, so that does have an impact.

All right. There was a significant bait and switch that happened this week when it comes to Cybertruck. So bait and switch is basically Tesla's new modus operandi. It's how they operate these days. But this one is like a pretty like flagrant one. And I think it's a great way to highlight one of the main problems that I see with Tesla, the Tesla community right now. And it's the...

The camouflaging, the massaging, the excusing, the simping over the mistakes, like clear wrong things that the company does that normally in a healthy community would be criticized and there would be a hope for fixing it.

But in the Tesla community right now, because it's so polarizing, because it's so these factions in it with like Tesla stock fans, EV fans, just Tesla Elon fans and all that, you get... Tesla doesn't get the feedback of like, oh, this is a wrong move. We need to back away because...

a significant portion of the Tesla community right now will back wrong moves to the end and serve a problem. I think this is a great example here because I posted this article earlier this week and it's basically Tesla announced to the Cybertruck owners, the non-Foundation Series Cybertruck owners, I should say, because the Foundation Series came fully loaded with FSD and everything. But the Cybertruck, just like all other Tesla vehicles off the Foundation Series,

It was as autopilot as standard included in the price of the vehicle, just like the Model 3, Model Y, S and X. And then you can buy FSD with all the features that comes with it for $8,000 or $100 a month. So that means that standard, you have traffic-aware cruise control and auto steers on autopilot, which are super useful.

very useful features for highway driving. I recommend it. It's a great feature. And people paid for it through the price of the car. It was included in the price of the car. But now Cybertruck owners started getting an email from Tesla this week in which Tesla wrote, as we improve our autopilot technology, our feature sets will change accordingly. Autosteer will not be available for Cybertruck outside of full self-driving supervised.

So when Tesla launched a Cybertruck in late 2023, it was far from feature complete on the software side. Tesla had to update it over the year. I mean, full self-driving, even though it was included in all Cybertruck between late 2023 when they started production and October of 2024 when they switched over to the non-fabrication series, they didn't release full self-driving until September. Yeah.

it was uh there was a lot of work to be done but then still they had the traffic aware cruise control on the basic autopilot but not auto steer and now tesla says it's not coming at all which is uh uh kind of weird because people technically paid for it on the moroni sticker and everything it says autopilot included and autopilot that tesla is traffic or work on traffic or workers control and auto steer so tesla to smooth things over they are offering one year of free supervised full self-driving trial uh

to those people. So technically, it's basically well worth $1,200 at the $100 a month for if you go by the subscription service.

So I guess there's some value in it. But a lot of people just don't want full self-driving and they were happy with Autopilot. And that's why they didn't buy full self-driving. But now they will get it for a year for free. But after that, what happens? They're going to have to buy it or they won't get the feature that they paid for, which is problematic. So I highlighted that in my article and I thought it was pretty fair, pretty good.

It's an $80,000 to $100,000 truck too. And like now on a $25,000 vehicle, you can have traffic overcoast control and auto steer, like an active lane keeping included. So it's kind of weird. But the feedback I got from the Tesla community on this article was very telling of what I was experiencing.

explaining earlier where people are like, what are you complaining about? It's not a bait and switch. It's the definition of a bait and switch, by the way, but it's good news. They are getting a year of a service that they didn't ask for instead of a feature that they paid for. Like, come on. I really wish that the Tesla community would understand

reframe their thinking around that like they are there is room for fair criticism of Tesla and this is a prime example of it they sold the feature they now they don't they didn't deliver it and yes they have uh something to compensate it but personally I don't think it's enough

I'm sure if people want to take that deal, they can take it. And I'm sure after taking it, they were not going to be allowed to sue or anything like that. But if you don't want FSD, which I completely understand why you wouldn't, you should get a refund, a partial refund for Tesla not delivering on the feature. I think that's fair. What do you think, Seth? Yeah, that makes sense. It's weird that they think that that would fly. What was the expectation that people would just...

That's fine. But you know what? You know what I think? What? I think like in the delusional mind of Elon and the Tesla FSD people, oh, I mean, they're going to take that deal for a year. They cannot complain because they get auto steer in FSD. And by the time this is done, FSD is going to be so great. It's going to be unsupervised and everything. And now everyone's going to want to get it and they won't complain about not having auto steer. I think that's literally what they're thinking.

Yeah, that sounds right. But they've been thinking something similar for every year for the past six years and it never happened. Right. Speaking of a bait and switch with the Cybertruck, there was kind of two bait and switch this week with the Cybertruck. The range extender is officially dead. So for those who don't remember, the range extender, when Tesla delivered the production version of the Cybertruck,

It has way shorter range than it was supposed to be for the price. So higher price, shorter range. And Tesla's way to fix the situation was like, hey, we're going to offer you a range extender, which is going to cost $16,000 on top of the already higher price of the Cybertruck. That's going to take a third of your bed, as you can see from the picture here. And then that's going to give you the extra range that brings you closer to what we originally promised.

Again, they started sending that when they launched a production version of the Cybertruck in late 2023. Started taking non-refundable $2,000 deposits for it. It was supposed to come in early 2025. Then we reported in October that Tesla updated its website to say mid-2025 instead. And then we reported last month that the option was completely removed from the configurator.

And this week, sure enough, Tesla started reaching out to the people that did place a deposit for the range extender. So some people actually wanted that thing. And they said, we are no longer planning to sell the range extender for Cybertruck. So I put the full email here, but they are basically going to start refunding people that placed the deposit on it because this thing is just never going to happen. Did you think that was going to happen, Seth? No.

It seemed like they put some thought into it. They were saying, well, you can't install it yourself. It seemed like they had thought it through a little bit. When we updated to early 2025 to mid 2025 in October, they also changed the range boost that it was getting.

so so they adjusted that so i felt like okay this thing actually exists somewhere and now they are testing it and they are realizing oh maybe it's not gonna have like the the basically was a 25 mile reduction or something like that so it was still like a pretty decent boost but nothing too crazy

So I'm sure, like, personally, I think it's the same. I think they really plan to do this thing. So I see a call in San Diego says range extender was never, ever going to happen. Elon Musk was in line when they released the truck and wise people knew it was a lie. And they were aware. I don't know. Like, I think...

I think it's more the fact that, you know, Tesla's, the Cybertruck program is a mess. Obviously, it's a commercial flop and it's not selling that Tesla was thinking was selling. So that's why the Cybertruck rear-wheel drive that we talked about a week or two when it launched,

has the same battery pack now as the all-wheel drive, which was not supposed to be the case. I'm pretty sure that Tesla was planning to make like an LFP battery pack for the Cybertruck. And then when they realized that demand is so low for the truck, it's not worth producing it with two different battery pack sizes. So let's just produce the rear-wheel drive for the same battery pack because it's not going to sell that much anyway. And that's for the same reason, all right? If the vehicle program is not significant enough to be worth producing two battery sizes for, it's not worth

making a range extender removable battery pack on top of it all. So I think that's probably what happened here. So yeah, two Cybertruck bait and switch in the same week. All right, this is a fun little post here that I'm trolling on X all the time to try to find some stories, ideas, and whatnot. And I see you have to be careful when you're on X because it's probably the mecca of misinformation these days.

So I always double check everything and even now and then we can still make a mistake. But this one, so I don't blame them for making the mistake, but I thought it was a pretty funny mistake 'cause this image here started circulating these images of a EV prototype, what looks like an EV prototype

And, you know, it was first posted by the Tesla Propagandif and FSD promoter-in-chief, Hallmark's catalog, aka Hallmark Quasi.

Then taken by the Tesla Newswire, a very popular Tesla news account on X. We framed it as if it was a camouflage Tesla prototype and possibly the more affordable model, a Model Q, even though we know for a fact that this model is not happening.

And then we have Mayur here who is a prominent Tesla pumper on Axe too and a member of the Rebellionaire group, which is basically a Tesla stock pumping group basically on Axe, who said, "Now this is what gets me ultra bullish. We need to focus back on selling cars." So seeing this so-called Tesla prototype was ultra bullish on Tesla.

And then Faraday Future, which this is kind of the punch of the whole thing. It still exists, by the way. Faraday Future came out on X. It's like, by the way, this is our prototype. It's not Tesla's. This is apparently a Faraday X prototype mule.

So Faraday is better known for their high-end vehicle, like at $300,000 or so, FF91, kind of trying to make the Rolls Royce of EVs. Faraday Future was kind of also the first EV startup to happen after Tesla started having some success, especially on the stock market. People saw the opportunities and were like, oh, okay, you can actually make an EV company work. So there was like...

faraday future then lucid and rivian and then like a bunch of them started popping up but

Faraday was kind of the OG of the post-Tesla success EV startups in the US, even though it's kind of like a Chinese-US company now. They had plenty of financing issues and trouble. But now they actually delivered a few vehicles. But again, it's like a $300,000 vehicle, so it's not super popular. But now they are apparently working on a new brand called Faraday X, where they're going to launch second-generation vehicles that they expect to be a little bit cheaper, a little bit more mass-market-like.

So this is apparently it, it was the first pictures of it, but the Tesla community promoted it thinking it was theirs and no, it's Faraday. I think it's a good example of like, there's still a lot of people in the Tesla community holding on to the idea that Tesla is working on new models, new cheaper models coming up that are brand new vehicles, because this is not like a Model 3 or Y. Well, obviously it's not even a Tesla, but...

The famous Model 2 or Model Q, like the newswire said. Internally, this vehicle existed. We reported on it. It was called the NV1. Sorry, NV9-1. And there was also the NV9-2. Two cheaper new vehicles built on a new vehicle platform. Hence the NV-1.

And there was the NV93 also, which this one still exists. It is the cyber cab. But Tesla has, and we know this since early 2024, canceled the NV91 and NV92, the cheaper $25,000, $30,000 models.

in favor of focusing on the cyber cab because obviously self-driving is about to be solved and Elon instead greenlit the stripped down version of the Model 3 and the Model Y to basically better utilize the Tesla production line which are being trottled down right now. They're working on their capacity because Tesla's having demand issues. So this is the reality

That, again, we knew since early 2024. We reported on it since early 2024. But because Elon, because Reuters came out with a report, a similar report that reported some of what I just said, and Elon denied that, falsely denied it,

A bunch of people still hold on to the idea that this is happening, even though since then, since Elon's denial, Tesla has confirmed it several times. They confirmed that only the cyber cab is going to build on the new vehicle platform. Then at the last running calls, they...

They all but said that the two new cheaper models coming out are basically going to be streamed down Model 3 and Y. They said that they admitted that when you build on the same vehicle platform, on the same assembly line, you are limited on how much difference the vehicle is going to be. So this is basically exactly what we've been reporting. But so far, there's still a part of the Tesla community that's like, don't want to accept that. They prefer believing that.

A lie that Elon said that's been proven untrue even by Tesla for a better part of a year now than to just accept reality. It's so weird. It's a very weird situation, especially, you know, they find out that they've been lied to by Omar. Several times, yeah. Yeah, several times and then just go back to believing the next thing. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, until that changes in the Tesla community, I think Tesla is going to be in a downward spiral for its core business, which is still selling electric vehicles, no matter how much they want to focus on self-driving robotics. Interesting news coming out of Mazda here. So the ball is rolling for the NAX becoming the standard connector in Japan. It's officially rolling now. So Mazda already announced...

well for the very little evs they have in north america they're going to use the nags going forward but now they had a second announcement today where they said that they're going to actually use them on the bev's that they launched in japan also starting in 2027 so they confirm it's going to have nax as native standard connector and if you want to use something else than next

You're going to have to use adapters, and that will give Mazda EV owners in Japan access to Tesla Supercharger Network. So this is actually the second company to do that. We reported last year that Sony Honda's mobility company brand, Colafila, also has a similar deal to bring their EVs in Japan using NACs.

And obviously we didn't care about it so much last year when they announced that because of Fila's and new companies and new brand and everything. Even though Sony and Honda are obviously very serious companies.

They've been talking about Athilla for a while and it's finally supposedly going to happen, but it's kind of a wait and see situation. But now that Mazda, which is obviously not a giant manufacturer, but it's significant in Japan, is doing the same thing. It's kind of when Ford announced adapting NACs in the US and then GM did it and then that got the ball rolling. It kind of feels like that right now a little bit.

And I should note too that Japan doesn't have actually an official charging standard. In Japan, Tesla has been using the NACs also for years. So it's not like Europe where they have their home connector and Tesla had to use that. That's not the case in Japan. So there's actually a chance that it would be similar to North America on that front. All right. We have news on the...

tax credit front, so the GOP leader, Mr. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House for the Republicans,

Gave us a quick little update. So the House just came back from their break. They have a break in April and now they come back and they are starting to work on the big budget bill again. That's going to give giant tax cut to the top 5% while increasing the deficit by, you know, the $5 trillion over the next five years, even though Trump ran on no deficit and, you know, fiscal responsibilities.

So these tax cuts are going to... I think I... Okay, yeah. So the tax cut, according to most experts, it could be way worse than that, but the best scenario possible right now is that they would increase the deficit by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, the current tax cut. So you need to find $4.5 trillion. And obviously, as usual in the US, you cannot touch...

defense spending. You cannot touch social security, even though they are kind of floating it, the Republican now, especially Elon. Yeah, it's getting crazy. Yeah. And you cannot touch Medicaid too. That's also not, it's like kind of a political suicide. So you're kind of limited now. And of course, Elon said, oh, we can cut $2 trillion with Doge, but that was cut down to a billion dollars. And now the latest expectation is $150 billion in 2026. So

Last time I checked, $150 billion is a lot less than $4.5 trillion. So now what are they going to do? Well, let's cut down the crazy expenses of giving tax credit to electric vehicle buyers, which at the last estimate was $2 billion last year. So that gets you a little bit closer to $4.5 trillion.

And yeah, so the update, we kind of knew it was coming. We knew that the GOP was less likely than not to keep the... It wasn't likely to keep the tax credit in the new budget. So now they are working on that budget a little bit more. And Johnson...

It was quoted by Bloomberg as saying, I think there's a better chance we kill it than save it, but we'll see how it comes out. So they're still talking about it. And the leader of the GOP basically in the House says that most likely than not, they will kill it. So the idea is more about timing at this point. It's fairly sure that it's going to go away this year.

Is it going to be at the end of the year? Is it going to be within 30 days of the budget passing? So right now, the budget is expected to pass. It could be as quickly as the end of the month, though that's kind of unlikely. I think people put it like end of May at best and probably early July at worst, like something like that. And so we've seen GOP...

sponsored bills trying to kill the tax credit for evs in the past year or so so we have a bunch of different version on how they could do it and most of them unfortunately were kind of harsh of like within 30 days of the bill passing you're out no like phase out period like there was before anything like that so we'll see maybe maybe with through the negotiation over the next month or so

we get more clarity on that because obviously this is going to be bad for the EV industry in the US, which is already struggling, already lagging behind the rest of the world. But at least if there's some kind of reasonable phase out period, it could boost EV sales in the meantime. And it's active right now. So if you are on the market for an EV right now in the US, that might be the time for you. I'm not

saying you have to pull the trigger right now but i i'm just i think a lot of people are going to be thinking that like this might be a good thing for the short term yeah uh purchases and and maybe even car companies will say all right we need to clear out our inventory right now so maybe they'll even lower prices on that side too yeah yeah you can you could see like a little

Price war, driving prices down because of trying to take advantage of the short-term boost in demand that a phase-out would create. This is going to be good for Tesla. Tesla still has the highest capacity to take advantage of it because the company that produces the most vehicles is going to take most advantage of this, obviously. A company that's right now not too affected by

A tax credit is Rivian because most of the vehicles that they sell are pretty expensive and there is limitation both on the MSRP price of the vehicle and also on the income of the owners trying to take advantage of it. So I think a lot of Rivian buyers just don't have access to the tax credit anyway. But Rivian was kind of counting on it for the R2 platform that's coming next year.

So that's going to be a problem a little bit for Rivian. But they released their Q1 2025 financial report this week, and there was some good, there was some bad. So obviously deliveries are basically going to be flat to a little bit down in 2025. And they remain on track, they say, for what they guided last year. So 46 to 51,000 electric vehicles delivered in 2025.

But the good news was the gross profit here is, do we have the actual earnings report? Yeah. Is that the earnings report? Okay. The good news is the, no, you don't have it here. Okay. Is it ir.rivian.com?

I'll tell Peter to put it in the article like I do for Tesla. It's so much easier. But the gross profit went up quite a bit. So they have record gross profit in Q1, $206 million. They are profitable both on the, not profitable, but gross margin positive on the automotive side and on service side and software. So that's good news. There are improvements on that front.

leading up to the R2, which also shares some parts and some productivity improvement. Because of the gross margin improvement, they also unlock a billion-dollar investment from the Volkswagen Group, too. So that's good news. They're still losing money, but less so because of those gross profits. And now they are guiding for an adjusted EBITDA of $1.7 to $1.9 billion lost in 2025.

But they're still sitting on a lot of cash. And we didn't put that in our article here. But I think they have like over five years of cash burn right now. And, you know,

i would assume that within a year of r2 hitting production and ramping up production i think they're going to be much closer to to be uh positive to actually deliver a small profit uh similar to what happened once tesla ramp up model three model y so i think uh i think rivian is i'm getting increasingly optimistic about rivian

I think Rivian's main problem right now is it's very dependent on the US market. And the US market, I think, is kind of in trouble of it. I think the real world is going to be plunged in a little recession soon. But I think the US might get it a little bit worse than the rest because if you elect a clown, you need to expect the circus.

We have this one I didn't actually look into, so I'm going to look into it live with you guys. It's going to be the Jeep Compass EV, a new entry from Jeep that's now been fully unveiled. A new entry-level EV, basically, for Jeep and Stenland. This is it.

And I can remind you too that if you guys have questions for us, you can put them in the comment section below. We are live and within the next 10-15 minutes, we're going to start taking you guys' questions. It can be about any of the subjects we're discussing today in the EV world or it can be like anything else that you want to talk about with us when we take in about EVs, renewable energy and whatnot.

And if you do enjoy the iTrick podcast, please give us a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on your app. It helps the show more than you think. We appreciate when you do. It's free to do. You can also leave us a five-star rating only if you think we deserve it, of course, on your podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That's also free to do and helps a ton. We appreciate when you do it. All right. So we have fully unveiled the

compact compass compact suv i don't know how compact it is it's probably more like a mid mid-size a compass right yep uh so you have a 10-inch cluster you have the interior here you can see too crazy uh it comes with a choice of a powertrain which is uh you know a bit uh

It feels a bit 2018, but whatever. You have the option of an hybrid 145 HP 48-volt system, 195 HP plug-in hybrid system, and the all-electric variant with front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive at 213 HP or 375 horsepower with the all-wheel drive. The all-wheel drive... Big power, okay.

What are we talking about range here? Okay, range, WLTP. So the only on Vildes in Europe, I think right now. 404 miles, 650 kilometers. But again, that's WLTP. So you can expect probably something closer to 350 for the EPA. And 20 to 80% state of charge in 30 minutes up to 160 kilowatts of DC fast charging. Yeah, I mean...

It's not awful, but I do get 2022 vibes out of this. Like for a vehicle coming out in 2025, it's a bit rough. What's the pricing? Oh yeah, we have pricing. Yeah, and 400 miles. I don't see how you get 400 miles from the math there. Maybe that's another option. But like charging at 160 kilowatts for 60%.

30 minutes. Yeah, you have also the first edition EV forward wheel drive that has 311 miles of range, 500 kilometers. So it's confusing. Does the all-wheel drive have the longest range then? That's normally not the case. I wonder if it's another battery pack. Yeah, maybe. That might be it. So we don't have the official pricing yet, but the Compass...

Jeep, the gas version in the US starts at 27,000. So I think it's pretty... I'm not that familiar with the Jeep lineup, to be honest, but I think that's their entry level. And then the Compass 4XC, which is the existing PHEV version prior to this new generation that has the three different powertrain option, is 43,000 euros, which equivalent to 48,500 US. So if it's coming around that price, it's going to be pricey a little bit.

A little bit pricey for what it is in my opinion, but I haven't tried it out yet. Looks good. Yeah, the design is nice. All right, the Toyota C-HR Plus has started to arrive in Europe, starting with Norway.

So if you're not familiar with the C-H-R, it's no worries. Not that many people are. It was available in North America for a while, I think, as a gas-powered vehicle or an hybrid. Probably nothing in hybrid. But it didn't last that long. I think it was more of a European, Asian market vehicle for Toyota for a while. It's a compact SUV, I guess. And it's a little bit smaller than the BZ4X, basically.

But now they are reviving it, basically, and making a new generation of it, I should say. And now it's Plus on it, and it's all electric. And it's starting to arrive in Europe right now. So it's going to be at the new entry level below the...

the bz4x like i said uh do we have yeah we have some specs here so much like the bz4x 47.7 and 77 kilowatt hour battery options for up to 273 miles of range 100 kilometers on the top version and the smaller battery only works with single motor front wheel drive and you can get both uh

Front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive for the bigger battery pack option. Interior looks a lot like the BZ4X to me. And deliveries are expected in Europe in August, starting in August, so just a few months away. I doubt this thing is going to come to North America. No way. Yeah. I mean, if you want to sell a car in Norway, it's got to be electric, right? At this point, yeah. I think you can count on like...

Maybe two sets of ends, you can count monthly non-EV sales a month. It's like literally, it's that much of a penetration rate for EVs. All right, Nissan is still in trouble. They had this merger with Honda, it was, right?

Yeah. That fell through and now they're still looking for partners and everything, but things are not looking great for them. And now they're having another setback. So they're giving up on their plan to build a big billion dollar LFP battery cell factory in Japan. So they announced that this week. It's just crazy.

Let's give up on that. It was supposed to support an expansion plan, but it's just not the right timing for Nissan, obviously. It's a bummer because we need the LFP battery cell production to ramp up quite a bit in the next few years to support EV adoption and also battery

LFP battery cell production outside of China, which is heavily concentrated there right now. There's plans to do it in the US a little bit, but there's some production in Canada too, very low volume, but we need a lot more of it. So it's sad to see Nissan give up on that investment. All right, one more news before we jump to you guys' questions. So you can put them in there right now. You still have a little bit of time. It's Waymo. Waymo announced a big expansion of their fleet.

So they are basically single-endedly keeping the Jaguar I-PACE alive because that vehicle program is no more. But they just took delivery or in the process of taking delivery of 2,000 new I-PACE to more than double their fleet. So right now they have...

just over 1500 vehicles between their fleets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin. And now they're gonna add over 2000 new fully autonomous IPAs to their fleet throughout the next year. So by the end of 2026, so it's starting now.

It's cool they have a partnership with Magna to do the work together to do the upgrade to their Waymo One sensor and hardware equipment. So Magna is also building the IPA so they're very familiar with it, obviously. So integrating the equipment is going to be a lot easier. So that's starting now in Phoenix at their facility in Phoenix.

But they also confirmed their plan. They also have the Z-Curve RT that's coming. And they mentioned also last year, they announced that they were going to use the IONIQ 5, but that was not in their latest plan. They didn't mention it at all. So I don't know what's happening on that front. But right now, it's the I-PACE, 2,000 more. So they're going to more than double their fleet within the next year. So you can expect, obviously, more vehicles in the current market. But I'm hearing some really good things out of Waymo right now, like the...

They are ramping things up and doing 250,000 paid rides a week with 1,500 vehicles. And I'm hearing some data from some market like in Austin, for example, where they're already doing like a significant percentage of the rides on the Uber platform because you can order Waymo through the Uber platform. Apparently, they are doing like double digit percentage of Uber rides within the Austin area.

already. That's great unless you're an Austin Uber driver. Yeah, that's fair. But it's impressive because we always talk, well, we always talk, maybe Tesla always was Elon's excuse for

to this counter argument to people that said that Waymo was the leader in autonomy and not Tesla, because he keeps saying that Tesla is the leader and he doesn't even see who's second place because they're so far in second place. Uh, we always thought that was, uh, you know, kind of Elon's, uh, uh, what was the word that his lawyers use a corporate puffery, uh, kind of, um, saying, but, um,

Now they're scaling because they've more than doubled their paid rides within the last year. Already a great way to scale. And what they are achieving right now with a relatively small fleet of 1,500 vehicles is impressive. So if they have a fleet of 3,500 vehicles by the end of next year, which I think is going to be even more than that, because that's just the high pace. If they start adding the Z-curve to it and everything, it's going to go up fast. And...

Yeah, now you're starting to take a significant percentage of the ride-hailing market in all of the markets that you are. Obviously, there's still issues with scaling in specific markets. But on top of the ones that we just mentioned, we know that Waymo is looking this year to expand in DC and also in Japan and Tokyo. So I think things are moving faster than Tesla gave them credit for.

Yeah, I'm surprised about the Jaguar thing. I mean, they're basically getting, they're going, they're eliminating Jaguar from the whole equation. Like, will they even have Jaguar logos on them?

it sounds like it's just an eyepace like it's a google waymo eyepace or something yeah i mean it's not like it was great for jaguar other than like actually waymo buying the vehicle like i don't think someone gets into a waymo and they're like oh it's such a great car i should buy one like it's you're like you're focused on the experience that don't there's no one in the driver's seat and you're getting to your destination safely rather than uh

Oh, maybe I should consider an I-Pace now. And I guess Waymo would take care of the service instead of Jaguar taking care of the service on these cars. I mean, it's like their first car brand almost or their first outsourcing. I mean, they're outsourcing it to Magna just like...

Jaguar did. Yeah, most of the manufacturing, most of the integration. Kind of like the first Waymo car, although the Zeekr is also going to seem like a... I mean, there was the Pacifica too. They were using the Pacifica for a while. And then, yeah, they had their own little weird vehicle for a while. But yeah, the I-Pace is really the vehicle that they used for their first real commercial application. And now there's going to be a Zeekr too.

All right, let's go to the questions. Gonzalo Zamora asks, "Is Faraday Features FX5 and FS6 legit? Where are they getting their funding?"

like faraday future is always just like oh yeah they're still in some reincarnation situation i mean i have to give them credit on on like their their like staying alive capabilities because i thought it would be dead like a long time ago they're kind of i i watched the movie sisu yesterday i don't know if you heard of that movie it's like

a World War II movie, a Finnish movie where the guy, Sisu, is a term used, it cannot be translated, but it's a term used in Finland to

kind of talk about like determination and uh um like never giving up and and all that like faraday is kind of see-through they just never get up but if i look right now on their stock uh they are worth about 100 million dollars so it's it's really hard to see a hundred million dollar company um

trying to bring high volume vehicle program to production, which is what they're trying to do with the FX5 and FS6. So I wish them luck, but let's see. Oh, they just reported their financial results. Let's see how much cash they have on end. Are they going to? That's all I want to know at this point. They don't have it easily available. But yeah, I would give them little chances of surviving the next two years, let's say.

All right. Speculaura asks, what are the best Tesla alternatives available in the USA? Obviously depends on what Tesla you're referring to as alternative. I would say Lucid is a pretty good alternative to Model Y. Sorry, Model S, X, Model Y, you know, probably Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq.

Mustang Mach-E, maybe a Volkswagen ID.4. I'm trying to think what else. Chevy Equinox or Blazer. Those are kind of my favorites. Yeah, no, I agree with all of that. And you have, if you can wait a year, I mean, the R2 is one of the most anticipated vehicles of next year, I would say. Yeah.

No, there's plenty of nice alternatives, really. Yeah, and the BMW i4 is kind of nice if you're a Model 3 replacement. Yeah, the Cadillac Lyric is also getting more popular, and it's an all-around great car. All right, Carl in San Diego, we answered that one live, but...

He didn't believe the range extender was going to happen. If the range extender was going to be a reality, you would have seen it on launch day and said he got a rendering, a sign of Tesla's panic about the intensely bad press they knew they'd get. That's fair. But also, but Tesla often launched a vehicle without things being ready. I mean, the light bar on the Cybertruck is still not widely available. There's still a lot of problems. Yeah.

All right. This is kind of interesting idea. Marco Dubronic says, what is the probability Tesla is going to cancel the cyber truck? And when, what's the probability Tesla is going to produce a normal truck? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, for those who don't know, Elon always said that there was like a backup plan. If the cyber truck didn't work, I think a more traditional pickup, electric pickup truck, but that was before he lost his mind. So I don't know if that would still be the plan at this point. Um,

Will a Cybertruck be canceled? It's so hard because the first year Tesla shareholders are still holding on to the idea that it was the best-selling electric pickup truck in the US last year. It's like, yeah, but

there was five years of built up demand for it and they basically lost 99% of that demand within the first year because of the production version was so far off what was promised. So like now, like 2025 is going to be a must-show for a year to make that happen for the Cybertruck. So it's not like a completely dead vehicle program really.

so I, I think without Elon, you, you might have an actual chance of making it work. Maybe like you,

you remove Elon from the equation and already remove some demand issues. Then you make some changes, maybe like give up on the 4680 cell, bring in another cell, bringing in the LFP version for cheaper and then a higher end version that can fit a better battery with the 200 kilowatt hour battery pack to go after the higher end of the

silverado and uh that that has actual like useful range for work truck i think there's things to do but i think i think it would require elon not to be there because you know that these are not thing that i don't think he not even cares about the cyber truck selling or not at this point i think he's like fully focused on like we need self-driving to work and that's going to save tesla um

So, and I don't think Elon also would give up. He doesn't want to like cancel the Cybertruck and admit defeat. I don't think that's Elon's way of operating. That doesn't work. So I don't see a high probability of the Cybertruck being canceled. I think Tesla would give them away before they do that, really. And that might be what they're going to need to do because they have like

thousands of them in inventory right now and they're just not moving at all so something's gonna happen i was just i just i posted yesterday set the uh a quick roadster post or like is the roadster ever going to happen and you know what i'm afraid that they're gonna do that because they they both owe us like a couple of roadsters i think they're like you know like do you guys want cyber trucks instead because we have plenty of those like can you two cyber trucks instead of one uh of run roadster

I don't know. Would you take a Foundation Series Cybertruck? I mean, first of all, you would need to give me two to be worth a single Roadster. Okay. So right there. And so then I sell one and I keep one. And then I drive around with a Cyber Beast Foundation Series. You put a lot of stickers on it. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, at this point, I would probably like Tesla. If you want to negotiate something around the Roadster that you owe...

Probably is the time to do it because I'd be looking to – I don't know about this visibility in four years from now to actually give me anything for the technically half a million dollars worth of road study. So yeah, there's room for negotiations. Let's just say that. When a company – I cannot think this goes bankrupt, but I think they're going to have a lot of issues in the next few years. So when a company goes bankrupt –

You can renegotiate your debt. That's what restructuring is. Maybe Tesla wants to restructure its Roadster debt to its membership base. They're not even thinking about it, to be honest. The Roadster is the last thing they need right now. They need to fix their brand image, probably, number one. If they said, all right, let's make a deal, I think I would be like, I want a Model S.

mullos would be more useful to me too like a nice uh anyway honestly i would if it wasn't for the brand issues i would be driving a new model 3 performance right now probably but uh i'm not i'm just holding on to my other one so maybe that

With everything going on with the radical decline of Tesla and Elon, why is the industry continuing down the path of NACs? You cannot count on Tesla's network going forward. We already discussed that quite a bit, but NACs is being officially standardized now. So when you see things like Mazda today, they announced that they had to deal with Tesla to bring the NACs in Japan. The deal with Tesla is not about NACs anymore.

They can, anyone can adapt NACs right now. I can develop, like I'm working with a company right now building an electric ATV, for example. We can put NACs on it.

and just hire like buying them from Electron, buy a NACS connector and that's it. We don't have to have a deal with Tesla. The deal with Tesla are about supercharger access. So now that you have NACS, oh, do you want access to a supercharger network? So that's more about it. So yeah, I mean, I don't think there's a problem with the industry considering their transition to NACS. I think it's a great connector. It makes sense. So the bigger concern is the supercharger network.

But obviously, if there was a radical decline in Tesla all the way through bankruptcy or anything like that, I don't think the supercharger network goes away. I think it's a great asset that someone would want to own. Yeah, for sure. All right. I was surrounded by about five Waymos not long ago on a busy boulevard, and they were more predictable than the human drivers. Generally speaking, I think that's the MO of Waymo. They're very safe and they're very deliberate drivers.

And they are conservative in their approach. All right. Business Insider has just announced that Tesla is giving Cybertruck and Model Y personnel a week off. Oh, that sounds like a Friday afternoon. That's one of the perils of having a Friday afternoon podcast. Yeah, you get all the news that they try to bury. Yeah.

I mean, the Model Y is a little bit more, I mean, I don't know, Dan, did they say specifically, so I assume if they've said Cybertruck and Model Y, that's being Gigafactory Texas. So this is the Model Y line in Texas.

Yeah, I mean, the Model Y demand has not been quite there. Cybertruck could take way more than a week off. And yeah, there's been some issues too. I see some DMV data in Fremont for the Model Y also being kind of sparse, as if maybe the production is not quite there or something happened. So Tesla might be throttling things down even more due to demand issues.

All right. And Robin Denholm sold another $30 million in stock. I think we knew about that. No, he said yesterday. So maybe that just happened too. Maybe they just... She sold earlier this week or late last week to another $30 million. She probably is down to her last access denied. Access denied to Tesla's investment relation. Really? Yeah.

That's good. I'm looking at the BI story. It says Tesla told workers on some Model Y and Cybertruck lines to take the week of Memorial Day off and also squash overtime hours. I'll look into it in more details after. I have read with great excitement Waymo and Toyota are going to make a personal FSD car. Any inside information or predictions when it will be available?

I think we talked about it on the last podcast on that one. Yeah, they're kind of going after Tesla because all the other things about Waymo is like just building their own cars for their own fleet to offer autonomous ride-hailing services. But the Toyota deal is more about integrating Waymo's technology into Toyota vehicles that they can then sell to consumer to be self-driving or maybe level three. I don't know.

All right. Carl says Tesla will cancel the Cybertruck on the same week that they fire Elon. Can they fire Elon? Time will tell. Lots of damage control needed to save that company Elon nuked with his insane actions. Yeah, I don't think Elon's getting fired anytime soon. Especially now that the stock is doing great. It was up like 4% today or something. Yeah, 4.72%. It's almost back to $300. Elon's not going to get fired if the stock is up. Yeah.

Elon's going to deadfire once people realize that he's completely bullshitting people with the self-driving timeline. And the stock price is kind of an index on how much people, how much Tesla shoulder believe that right now. So if it's up, it's like people believe it. So Tesla shoulders are not going to kick out the guy that's... And I also posted an article on this last week or two weeks ago, kind of the dilemma that Tesla shoulders have of like if you...

If you don't believe Elon, you kind of incentivize to still back him because if you remove Elon from the equation and his lies, and then people come back to a base reality of like full self-driving is still years away. Tesla has a giant liability of not being able to deliver it on millions of cars on hardware three, and most likely they're not hardware four also. Then you basically erase like half of the value of the company or something. So if you do that as a shareholder, like why would you do that?

you would probably just sell your stock instead at a higher price if you believe that. And then who's going to buy that stock at $300 a share? It's someone that believes Elon. So if you're a Tesla shareholder right now, you have to believe Elon Musk. And if you are, by the way, and you don't,

Maybe I have some soul searching to do here. It's like, why would you own the stock at $300 if you don't believe that they're going to deliver on it? You might get a chance to sell it a little bit higher in the future if the pumping continues and is successful, but you cannot pump a stock indefinitely. It just doesn't work. Yeah.

All right. Sort of switching gears. Can we call 4680 a failure or too soon? I feel like 4680s are just a standard. I've seen other companies, Chinese companies have 4680s. Rivian's doing a 4693 or something. I don't think the form factor we can call a failure. Maybe Tesla's

Yeah, I think that's Mike's question probably. It means like Tesla's 4680 cells. So I agree with what you said. The 4680 form factor is not a failure and plenty of other vehicles are going to use it, I think. It's more a question of like Tesla's battery cell in the 4680 form factor. Is it a failure? And right now, it's only used in the Cybertruck and the Cybertruck didn't deliver on its promised performance.

partly, I would think, because of the battery, like the biggest factor. So in that sense, it is a failure. This claims it's the lowest-priced battery per kilowatt hour that they can buy. I do have some doubts about that because I'm skeptical of everything that comes out of Elon Musk's mouth these days. But even if it's true, it's like, okay...

But then it sucks at charging. The charge curve of the Cybertruck is not great. So you can have the cheapest battery out there, but if it's not the best battery, if it's not good, there's a reason why it's the cheapest. It's just not good. You can pay me to take a Cybertruck, says Carl. And if I could get a free Cybertruck, I'd use it for exclusively chores around the cabin without getting it on public roads.

I don't know. I feel like I could put a sign on it saying, you know, F Elon. I've seen a lot of those and say, I got this for free. So, you know, whatever. I feel like I would be okay with that. I mean, you said yourself, it wasn't a bad vehicle. It's fun to drive. It's the drive by wire is crazy fun. I just, I mean, right now, if you,

If I have to pay for it, I'll go with a Silverado EV work truck before I do the... Because if I'm buying a pickup truck right now, I'm using it, I'm going to tow things, I'm going to do work truck things with it. Otherwise, I'll just use my Model 3. Right. KV says, Tesla should just put a lot of the inventory Cybertrucks into mobile service and loaner fleets. My 3 is going into service soon and I want to ask for a Cybertruck loaner. You're going to probably get one...

My friend, Bastien, just got a service on his Model Y and that's exactly what happened. It was like, "Do you want a Cybertruck? We have plenty of that." He's like, "Yeah, I'll take a Cybertruck for the day." You got the Cybertruck as a loaner, so you can do that.

there is uh the the but yeah you're right about the mobile service uh fleet too uh last time i had a mobile service on my car i asked them that because he came in with the model x if i remember correctly and it wasn't even one of those service model x that was all fitted nice with like box of tools it was like just a regular x uh so i was like i asked them like why don't you use the the cyber truck and he

You basically didn't have an answer. It was like, no, I mean, that would make sense. We have a ton of them at the shop right now. And the technician was also, I would love to drive that instead because it is a fun truck to drive, like I said. So yeah, it would make sense.

All right. Carlton Diego's back. Yeah. Anyone can use the next standard, but the only reason for GM bought into it was to get access to the Tesla network without it. It's better to stick with CCS one. I kind of disagree with that. I like the smaller handle. It's cheaper to make. I mean, it certainly didn't hurt that the network was available, but I think it's, but I mean, I think it's better to have a smaller handle. I mean, it's cheaper, it's easier to hold, you know, whatever.

What do you think? Yeah. I mean, like I said, I think Carl really has issues with Tesla in particular, which I sympathize with him. But unless you can actually point real issues with like, because the Tesla supercharged network exists. So it's there. So yeah.

You have to point out advantages of the CCS adapter over NACs to justify that because otherwise, I don't care. It's the NACs now. It's not even like Test Dust Connector anymore. It's the NACs. We just can use the NACs. I think that's fine.

Tell us more about the electric ATV you're developing. Will you be able to plow snow with it? Yeah, that's the goal. That's the goal long term. Right now, all the prototypes that we have are rear-wheel drive only, a single motor. But we are working on the all-wheel drive version that's going to be able to have a plow, even a snowblower connected at the front of it.

that's going to be powered by the battery. So you get like an electric snowblower that's powered by your electric ATV, which is fun. So that's the goal long term. So probably sometime next year, we should have something with that, with the all-wheel drive and the snowblower.

But yeah, it's basically the first full-scale electric ATV out there. There's plenty of things that are closer to toys, let's say, like to children's vehicle. But this is a full-size ATV that's about the same weight as an electric gas ATV, a little bit lighter even, but has a 10 or 20 kilowatt-hour battery pack, so up to 180 kilometers of range, which is more than plenty for kids.

an off-road vehicle and uh yeah all the all the benefits of an ev on top of that so it's called tehran ev if you want to check it out all right uh bob tanaja just sold 4 000 shares as the cfo of tesla yeah we always get those friday afternoon uh news items uh did you see the dealership in manitoba that's charging three dollar 360 dollars an hour for a charge on their dcfc

Since it's the only one around and Redline, Chrysler, Dodge. That's interesting. No, I'm going to have to check that out. That's an interesting story. Talk about a monopoly in a market. It's like someone putting all the hotels in the spot. 360, wow. I'm not sure mobile service techs in my area would want a Cybertruck because you can't use autopilot to do all the highway driving that's necessary here.

I mean, why doesn't Tesla give FSD to its mobile fleet of Cybertruck? That would be weird if they don't do that. And KV says there's a non-zero chance NACS outlives Tesla. Haha. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I mean, probably not wrong. Probably not wrong. Yeah. Because I mean, it's a great connector. I don't see actual issues with it. So it's a great connector. Yep.

Tesla is not all bad people. They still do great cars and just fewer than they did

a few years ago that's the truth there's just like one big problem at tesla right now i mean there's a a source of the of many problem that is there's a single source that if you eliminate that source and i and by eliminate them i mean letting him go i'm not saying anything violent or anything like that i know people are touching these days and you would then have an opportunity to you would

remove a big part of the demand problem if you just remove Elon. And then you would have opportunities to fix a ton of other problems at Tesla that I think are now beyond Elon, was most likely to not created by Elon. But now they are still there, even if it's not there. Like, for example, the hardware 3, hardware 4 situation, the cyber truck situation, like a lot of things need to be fixed. But yeah, it's not impossible.

All right. Well, that's it for this week's episode of Electric Podcast. If you did enjoy the show, please give us a like, a thumbs up and subscribe and hit the notification button to know when we go live, though. It's mostly at 4 p.m. Eastern time on Fridays, though we're going to be traveling quite a bit in the next few weeks. It's kind of a car testing season, so we might have to change things around a little bit. So that's why it's useful to hit that notification button so that you know when we go live. But also we have the post every week that explains to you when we go live.

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