Tesla record quarter, Audi Q8 e-tron, Kia EV9 unveiling, and more
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one and we're live for a brand new episode of the electric podcast i am fred lambert your host and as usual i'm joined by seth wintraub how you doing today seth i'm good special thursday edition yes it is uh we have a little conflict a little scheduled conflict tomorrow it's set flying out to la and uh i'm right now why i look i look uh yellow orange right now it's because i'm in an hotel room in vancouver uh where i'm gonna be testing out um

the latest version of Tiger's electric snowmobile this weekend. So I just came to Vancouver a little bit ahead. But with all the traveling and everything, we won't be able to do the podcast tomorrow. So we're giving you a little Thursday episode right here. So it's going to be a little bit lighter on news because, again, we have

one fewer days of news to cover. But still, we have some very interesting stuff to discuss. So you guys should stick around for this one. And I'm sure we're going to have a little fewer people watching live because it's not our usual time.

and we didn't have that much notice to give you guys about that. We apologize. But for those who are watching live, please don't hesitate to send us your questions or your subjects that you want us to discuss. We should have a decent amount of time later during the show to either answer your question or discuss specific EV topics that you want us to get into. You can put that in your comment section on YouTube, Facebook, and wherever you're watching live right now.

We're going to start out with a little bit of a preview on Tesla's delivery numbers, which should come out this weekend. Sometimes Tesla does release them on weekends if a new quarter starts on the weekend. Sometimes they wait on the Monday, but you can always check out Electric. We're going to be the first one to post as per usual.

Or maybe not. Maybe not actually. If it's on. If you have a snowmobile. Yeah. Because I could be in the mountains in a snowmobile. We'll see. Maybe we're going to have someone else to post already. We'll check on that. So I might have contracted it myself right there. But anyway, we already have a pretty good idea what it's going to look like. And it looks like.

Surprise, surprise, another record quarter for Tesla deliveries. So last quarter was a record Q4, 405,000 deliveries. Generally between Q4 and Q1, there's either a little slowdown, like Q4 is a big quarter, last quarter of the year. Q1, it's either marginally bigger than Q1 or a little lower than, sorry, marginally bigger than Q4 or a little lower than Q4.

This time, we expected to be at the very least marginally higher than Q4 and maybe decently higher than Q4. And that's thanks obviously to Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas having significant ramp up in production this quarter. And obviously on the demand side of things, there was the huge price cut early in January that has definitely helped Tesla maintain strong demand into a higher production capacity.

And now we are getting some numbers from some of this is most critical markets that are should give us a good idea of where things are going in the US. We already reported that the price cut has resulted in unprecedented demand. Model Y, which is becoming Tesla's most popular model now, ran out of production build slots for

like halfway into the quarter, which is a great indication that demand is going great. There's still vehicles in inventory right now, including from Model Y. A lot of them are obviously Model Ys from Gigafactory Texas. So those are not available to order. There is no build slot. There's no production build slots for those. Just to put them in inventory or reach out to customers if they want to switch to that standard range version. So there's still some of that that's going to be delivered in the next few days. Well, actually today and tomorrow.

But yes, we expect a very strong quarter from Tesla in the US, which is still the most important market. But the second most important market is China, and it could become the most important market. And we have some registration data from the insurance companies in China that gives us an idea of how many vehicles are being delivered in Q1 from Tesla on the Chinese market. And with a week left in the quarter,

126,000 deliveries, which is a new record for Tesla in a single quarter in China. Obviously, also big price cuts came there early in the quarter that helped a lot. But at the rate that Tesla has been delivering vehicles in China in the last few days of the quarter, up until that last week that we still have data from, it looks like Tesla could deliver 140,000 cars in China in Q1, which is massive.

Then we also reported a little bit on Norway, which obviously is a much smaller market, but they still deliver like an insane amount of cars. They're going to have 10,000 vehicles, it looks like, this quarter in Norway. Incredibly impressive for a small country like that. So right now, the Wall Street consensus is 420,000 deliveries. Sorry, my TV and my hotel just started by itself for some reason. Let me shut that down real quick.

So 420,000, I'm sure that Elon loves that number for multiple reasons. So that's 15,000 units more than last quarter. And in my opinion, anything, it's 100,000 units year over year too. So we always focus, Tesla is so quick at ramping up that we focus like quarter to quarter. But honestly, normally on a financial analysis basis, you look year over year and year over year, it's massive 100,000 units difference.

I think anything around 420 and up is going to be very good for Tesla. It puts them at around 1.7 million units this year if they continue to maintain that rate. Obviously, we think that they're going to more than maintain that rate. But Elon already guided about 1.8 million units, though he also said that if everything goes well, it could be actually 2 million units. But we know that everything never goes well. Everything never goes well.

Any comment on this set or you think 420 is the number? I mean, anecdotally, like we haven't heard any, you know, there's no parking lots full of Model Ys anywhere, right? There's no like demand issues. Tesla hasn't really...

Spark demand that they had done the the Model X and Model S free supercharging. But like that's that's not a big number. Like none of the signs point to any sort of problem in demand. And at the same time, we haven't heard of any, you know, stoppages. Like, for instance, Ford just started up their F-150 line again because of a battery issue. But they were out for like almost a month.

More than a month, I think, a month and a half. Yeah. So, you know, there's nothing, certainly nothing like that. That's been part, you know, they retool every once in a while. But so, you know, they're going to keep getting bigger and bigger as long as demand doesn't fall off and they keep, you know, optimizing their supply chain. So wouldn't be surprised to hit 420. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. And you just hinted at the next piece of news I want to discuss. The only concern for demand is the Model S and X. Tesla offering up to 10,000 free supercharging miles, which is a decent amount of miles. Normally, like Tesla was offering like 2,000. That's five times that. So it's a significant, I mean, it's probably worth like 500, 600 bucks. It's not that big of an incentive, but still a decent one. And yeah,

Yeah, it is a bit surprising because like the Model S and X, they are the best deal they've been in a long time with the recent price cuts over the last few months. Like they were part of the big price cut in January, but they continued to cut the price over the last few months, making it the best deal ever. And now had years basically of free supercharging on top of that. If you're on the market for Model S and X, it might be the time to pull the trigger really.

All right. And part of the reason why 420 is very much achievable is that Tesla just announced this week that Gigafactory Berlin hit 5,000 units a week of production, which is the goal that they wanted to achieve to consider it like actual volume production. And it looks like there was like this little informal race between Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin. So congrats to the Gigafactory Berlin team. It looks like they won. We haven't received an update from Gigafactory Texas in a bit.

Obviously, Gigafactory exists as a different set of difficulties as Gigafactory Berlin, because at least part of the production and a big part of the production ramp is based on the 4680 cells. And Gigafactory Berlin doesn't have that problem. And there's also a good reason for that at the same time. And that reason are the incentives.

GigaFerry Berlin actually gets some of the batteries from China and that's not a problem for European incentive on electric vehicles while the new tax credit in the US is going to require as soon as next week to have sourcing of the battery cells not from China. So that's going to have a change and we reported last week that's going to affect the Model 3 for example, the standard range Model 3 and actually Tesla confirmed it just yesterday that that was going to be the case. We had the exclusive on that last week.

Another reason to follow electric. But yeah, Berlin, 5,000 units a week. Now it's exciting. It means that the next vehicle is probably going to be deployed soon. So people are thinking, is it going to be the new Model 3, Model 3 Highland version, Refresh Model 3, however you want to call it? Or is it going to be a brand new vehicle that this ST is based on the next generation platform? Who knows, but we're going to keep an eye on that because it's probably going to come out soon. Yeah. Do you think China is going to be the first to see the Highland Model 3 or...

I mean, historically speaking, in the last few years, Gigafactory Shanghai has always put out the first changes to any Tesla vehicles other than Model S and X because they're not produced there. So, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And we've seen some prototypes parted in China, but mostly in the U.S. So maybe Fremont and...

Yeah, it's going to be interesting. If it's coming out in Q3, so it's within the next three to six months, I would assume that it's either Shanghai or Fremont. And now, because I don't believe that Tesla could deploy the new Model 3 production line during that time in Berlin. But it's not impossible if they have kept everything quiet. But it's been hard to keep things quiet. Like a factory in Berlin, like there's always, there's so many people.

application, uh, for approval, environmental approval on that stuff that normally we, we, we see things coming before they, uh, they actually get into production. All right. Another exclusive that we had yesterday, uh, Tesla has poached a battery expert to come fix the dry electrode issue that comes with the 4680 cell. So that's been a big concern, um,

The ramp up of the 4680 cells, which Tesla, when Tesla sold us the 4680 cell, it was a huge deal. Here you see like the 5X increase in energy, 16% increase in range, 6X increase in power. Tesla was teasing like a 50% drop in cost, though that was not just the cell, that was also the structural battery pack, but the cell enables a structural battery pack, so it comes together.

And we haven't, it's not at the level that we thought it would be by then. The cell was unveiled, of course, at Battery Day in 2020. It was introduced first in the Model Y produced at Gig Flight Texas. But we know that Tesla has since switched to producing both Model Y with 4680 structural battery pack and 2170 with the whole structure, which shows that there's a reason for that. It's like the ramp up hasn't been as good for the 4680. So in order to

to make some money on their Gigafactory Texas investment, they had to still use the 2170. Otherwise, they wouldn't be producing enough car to justify a massive factory like Gigafactory Texas. And one of the reasons why we heard that the... Well, I mean, we heard Tesla has confirmed it, that the dry electrode coating technology, something that they actually acquired through Maxwell when they bought Maxwell Technologies,

seemed like to be the main reason that Tesla was buying the company even though the company was mostly known for its ultra capacitors they ended up selling Tesla ended up selling Maxwell ultra capacitor business to just retain basically now their

the dry electrode technology and Tesla admitted when they unveiled 4680 that the dry electrode coating was not quite there yet there was still work to be done in order to deliver on that technology or am I still on or I just lost set I'm not so sure I'm gonna keep going just to be sure but yeah so the dry electrode coating technology was not up to par and that dry electrode coating technology was actually

the main, one of the main advancement that the 4680 was bringing to the table. Tesla talked about a 10X reduction in footprint for the electrode and a 10X reduction in energy need for the electrode. All right, so thank you, Dan. It looks like I'm still on. We just lost set. Fully is going to be right back.

I was a bit concerned because he's the producer of the show within the software. So I hope that everything is still on even though he's not there. So there were some issues on the manufacturing side of that dry coating system, the powder into film system that Tesla calls it.

They just haven't been able to produce it in volume at a cost that makes sense to sell. And even the Model Y that are using the 4680, the teardowns of the sales have shown that Tesla has not included that technology in it just yet. So the sale is just a fraction of its potential right now.

So the good news is that we learned at Electric this week that Tesla hired Matt Tyler, a Milwaukee School of Engineering educated mechanical engineer, which spent the last decade working on battery cell technology, and most recently, a competitor to Tesla's cell technology.

manufacturing process, 24M. So 24M is also working on a similar concept for the electrode. They call it a semi-solid electrode that doesn't use any binder or mixing of electrolyte as an active material. So as most recently, he was the VP of...

advanced manufacturing at 24M and he's been at the company for six years working on that technology and Tesla just poached him last month and they made him the they made him the director of dry electrode development so it's basically going to be his job to deliver on Tesla's dry electrode promises so hopefully Tesla can do can can make some progress with uh

uh mr tyler idm right now you're back set yeah i don't know what i guess the thursday wi-fi is not as good as the friday wi-fi yeah you've never had an issue before uh yeah i was i was concerned for a second that i was not on that it was on my side and i was losing you because you're the producer of the show on the on the stream yard but uh it looks like i was still on so we're good yep all right i was just done with the dry electrode the news

Tesla solar roof news this week. So actually, that's another one that if you've been following Electrek, you have a good idea of it. But with McKinsey, they are one of the biggest firms that follow energy trends. And they claim to have a big exclusive this week to the first one to have inside information about the solar roof deployment. Of course, last year, we did reveal some of the first data that this has been getting close to their chest because Tesla hasn't been making down the solar power

panels versus solar roof deployment within their quarterly release. And we revealed that Tesla had deployed only 23 roofs per week during the second quarter of 2022, 2.5 megawatts of solar roof, which is just a drop in the bucket of the original goal of 1,000 roof per week.

So McKinsey followed up and they claimed to have some good data showing the whole year of 2022 and prior to that too. And they estimate that Tesla has deployed about 3,000 solar roofs since the deployment of the technology in 2016. And in 2022, it was an average of 21 roofs per week. Again,

fraction of what Tesla was supposed to do. But it's still growing. That's the good news. Growing in term of total deployment. So they're estimating 12 megawatts

throughout 2022 versus just short of that in 2021. But in market share, they see it going down. And the report looks like it was almost like financed by GAF Energy because it was really pushing the Timberlands solar roofing system, which we reported on before, which

which is a Tesla solar roof competitor, but it's a different product because it's a nailable solar roof. So actually it's like regular shingles, but you nail them to the roof. So they're going after different markets, more like similar to other nailable roof system plus solar rather than Tesla goes after the higher hand of the market with like more expensive like concrete roofs and tile roofs and things like that.

But Tesla is trying to ramp things up too with, we reported before, they're moving heavily into the third-party system in terms of they want to bet on third-party installer rather than their own installers. However, they're also investing on their own installers to be clear. They're still installing their product, but they now have 85 third-party partners to install their own system. Yeah.

this has been really moving to sell their own ecosystem it's not just a solar roof but also solar panel solar inverter and and the power wall obviously that's been the case for a long time catch us up on the situation with tesla solar like i know the panels are not necessarily made in the new york gigafactory but i think the inverters are or are the inverters made in china as well i don't

I actually don't know where the inverters are made. I know that Tesla makes its own inverters. So there are Tesla made. It wouldn't make sense that it would be made in Gigafactory in New York because that's where a lot of power electronics are made, including the superchargers. So it would make sense to make the power electronics there. But yeah, you're right. The solar panels are not, they are custom to Tesla's. They are the new like 420 panels. Another reference to 420. I'm sure Elon was like 420 panels. Yes. Yeah.

I don't need any other specs. Yeah. They were kind of early to have those panels because those are kind of powerful, big panels for the residential market. They've been around in the commercial market for a long time now, but not so much in residential. But that was like a few years ago now. So there's a very consistent incremental increase in power capacity in solar panels for a long time now. So in recent years, we have seen other...

420 solar panels. So it's not exactly unique to Tesla, but they claim to have their own. They also have their own designs and all that. So they look sleek. Of course, it's a Tesla product. It has to look sleek. But when Tesla is more trying to own the brain behind their solar system, their own energy system, so that they can implement

virtual power plant and more recently the whole electricity retailer system so that the brain is going to be obviously the inverter and also they can do it through the power wall which now include their own inverter and gateway which is kind of the brain of the power wall

Alright, moving on from Tesla news, we have a bunch of unveiling this week, including the Q8 e-tron from Audi that was just announced. Well, I mean, it was unveiled last year, to be fair, but as usual with these European manufacturers, they unveil the European version first, and then we have to wait a little bit for the US version because they do differ slightly. Generally not in the design or anything like that, but in the trims that you get. And in case of Audi,

The main thing has been the options on the battery side of things. They tend to only give the bigger battery option to the U.S. because they think that U.S. market does not have any tolerance for smaller battery pack. And that's exactly the case with the Q8 e-tron.

There was a smaller, like 90 kilowatt hour battery pack that was offered in the European market. And it's not available here. We just have the Q8 e-tron Quattro and the Q8 sports back S line e-tron Quattro. And they both have 114 kilowatt hour battery pack. So that's a big battery pack right there. And so the big news this week is more about the pricing. We get the U.S. pricing and it starts at $74,400.

which is a decent price. It's not for a full-size SUV here. If it was produced in the U.S., it would even get the tax credit here. I didn't see any word about U.S. production just yet, though. I'm sure that Audi is looking into that, and that would make sense.

But yeah, not only the battery pack is massive, 114 gross, 106 net. So that's the Audi has always been known to having a big energy buffer on the battery pack. They've been a bit concerned about that. And obviously, the bigger the buffer, the less efficient you are. But they actually have reduced the buffer now. It used to be 91% of the pack that was usable. Now it's 93%. So it doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a big difference, 2%.

And at the same time, another increase is in the charging capacity, DC fast charging capacity. The peak charge rate has gone up from 150 kilowatts to 170 kilowatts. Still not massive for a 2024 model year in the EV market. It's not top end for a premium vehicle. But at the same time, Audi has been known in terms of DC fast charging for having a

Even though the peak charge rate is not the highest, they maintain that peak charge rate for a longer period of time, which results in a charging session that is on par with competitor, really. In this case, they did release 10% to 80%, the usual charge session, in about 31 minutes, which is perfectly decent.

Yeah, it's decent. It's not quite a Hyundai E-GMP platform, but I think that's probably because the battery is so big. It's charging fast, and we know Audis usually have a pretty good charge curve, but it's just such a massive battery that even at a high charge rate, you're not going to be able to fill that thing very quickly. Exactly. That's part of the concern. Some pictures here, but we already...

saw most of that from the European unveiling. Actually, this is an European version that we're seeing right now. I'm actually going to be test driving this car in California in early May, I think, or mid-May. Oh, nice. So I'm going to be able to... 300 miles of range?

Yeah, we don't have the EP number just yet, but the WLTP are over 350 for the bigger battery pack version. So I would assume that EP range will come at over 300 miles. We won't have that until we get the vehicle in the US, which is going to be closer to the summer.

This kind of lines up with the Polestar 3 a little bit. Both huge battery pack. Polestar 3 is 111 kilowatt hours and same size. Although I think the Polestar might be a little bit like higher off the ground, but not quite as high SUV looking. It's more like a sedan. Polestar has that like elevated sedan kind of look and feel.

And now that makes it five Audi full electric vehicle in the US. If you do consider the sports back to be a different vehicle, obviously it's not a massive difference. And we've been talking it for weeks because they've been gradually releasing new information about it, little teasers and whatnot. But now the EV9 from Kia is fully unveiled.

We are going to have all the specs that we're going to be able to get into, but a lot better pictures now than what we've seen before too. It was a lot of teaser images. Now we have the full pictures. It really delivered on our high expectation for the design. Kia has been knocking into all of the park lately with the EV6, also beautiful design. EV9 just as beautiful and also...

for the US market is probably going to be a big deal thanks to North American market is just super hungry for full size SUVs. Yep.

Battery pack, we have two options, a 76.1 kWh pack for standard range rear-wheel drive and a long-range 99.8 kWh pack, which is going to be available both in the rear-wheel drive and dual-motor all-wheel drive configuration. So that's good. Kia and Hyundai, that's one of the things I like a lot about them. They're big on options. They give you...

Actually, this is actually coming down from the EV6 and Ioniq 5 where they give you also the dual motor all-wheel drive option for the smaller battery pack. But I understand not doing that in this case. That's actually what Tesla does too. If you're going to lose a little bit more efficiency, a little bit less range on the smaller battery pack, it makes sense not to have the all-wheel drive version, which is going to accentuate that.

So everybody wants to know the price. And we initially heard that they wanted to do a $50,000 version of this thing. But that was when it was still a prototype and a lot of things have changed since then. But that small battery rear wheel drive one will probably obviously get closest to that number.

You know, the 76 kilowatt hour battery, that's pretty much what a EV6 or a Hyundai Ioniq 5 has. So it's basically that car battery in a bigger vehicle. So I don't think the range is going to be too good there. It's probably going to be close to 200 miles, I would imagine, real world. So, you know, for $50,000, maybe a 200 mile EV9 makes sense. Yeah, I see scooter is a little bit...

estimated here at 300 miles for the bigger battery pack version. I think that might be a little bit optimistic, doable though, but optimistic. Like you said, the other smaller battery pack is going to be much closer to 200 miles than anything else. Likely going to hit 200 miles, but don't expect anything close to 250 or anything like that. But like you said, no pricing information just yet. So we're still just estimating right now. US pricing is going to come out later this year.

But yeah, I think very durable though for the starting price to be close to $50,000. I think that's with the specs we're seeing here, 150 kilowatt motor. So nothing crazy. In fact, I was going to say that is a low power motor for that vehicle. Of that size, yeah. I mean, that's the Chevy Bolt motor. It's 150 kilowatts, 200 horsepower. Wait a minute. Is that a typo or...?

Long range rear wheel drive gets 150 kilowatt motor. Standard range rear wheel drive gets 160. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Although it is faster with a smaller motor, with a smaller battery pack, which it would be because it's going to be lighter. Even though a better battery pack also enables higher power output, but...

In this case, the limitation is at the motor either way, so it's not going to be an issue. I feel like everybody buying this thing is going to go for the all-wheel drive. Like 98% of people buying. And even the all-wheel drive, you get not that big of a second motor here at 282 kilowatt-hours. But I mean, six seconds is plenty. Most other full-size SUVs and the gasoline size, they don't get nowhere near that. Right. And it's not anywhere close to a Rivian, but...

you're not you know expecting rivian from this vehicle and if you want actual performance they said that uh there's going to be a gt line version that's going to be a little bit more exciting but they haven't released that many details about that other than uh um some follow-up saying you won't see that okay until 2025 so we're still uh at least two years away from that oh to be honest like uh do they really need that they really need like a

A GT version. I think they don't, but... Look at the Model X Plaid. Not a big seller for Tesla. Right. The EV6 GT, that's a little bit more exciting. But this, you won't see that. I like the interior a lot. It looks like a great implementation of the cameras for side views.

Yeah. Are we going to see those in the US? Probably not, right? I mean, we're due to updating rules on that. It's time. I know that things move slowly in the regulation side of things, but it would have such a big impact. You just change a few things in the laws and you would have a massive efficiency gain for probably better safety too. I would assume better safety. Yeah.

All right. We sort of talked about it for a second earlier when we talked about Ford, but they officially confirmed today that they're reopening the F-150 Lightning orders and they're also updating the price. So the...

The little pause in production has created a little bit more of a backlog. Not more of a backlog officially since they actually stopped taking orders during that time too. But unofficially, there was still demand being created for that truck. And they weren't producing any, so that demand was backing up.

And now they decided to reopen it today, but with a nice little price increase. So the Lariat standard range went from $1,500 more. Now it sells for $76,000. It's not cheap, a lot more expensive. So all those price increase are also adding to a bunch of price increase that came over the last two years since that vehicle has received pricing.

Then you have the Platinum trim that's now selling for about $1,000 more at $98,000. And the Pro version, so the cheaper version, got the biggest price increase, unfortunately. It now starts at $60,000. Was it starting at $40,000 when it first launched? Yeah, so it's gone up from $40,000 to $60,000, basically. Which is crazy. It's 50%.

It's $20,000 more expensive. Yeah. And consumers can't even buy it. It's only for fleet customers right now. Yeah, right now at the moment. Hopefully, it's going to open up once they increase the production capacity, which they also said they're going to increase it. Well, I don't think they actually updated the number. It's just more like the timeline. So they say that 150,000 units outpost, it's coming this fall, by this fall. I hope that they could use that downtime to actually update their production lines and whatnot. Yeah.

But yeah, that price increase here, like going from $40,000 to $60,000 is no joke. That's a big difference. And I don't think it's like an opportunistic difference of like, oh, people are willing to pay that. I think it's more of like they have to do that to make money off of it. I think it's more like that. And also it should give you an idea of what like the Cybertruck, for example, like the $40,000 Cybertruck, you can also forget about it. Maybe Tesla can beat $60,000 though.

I wouldn't be surprised if it can beat 60 for the base one. I don't think so. You don't think so? You want to make it interesting? I'll bet you a Cybertruck. I mean, here's the thing. Tesla will be opportunistic. And if they can charge you 60, they will charge you 60 for sure. But I'm saying that they might not be... First of all, they won't be... That's the base version. Tesla won't sell a base version Cybertruck for until probably...

2025, 2026, I would think. So we're still far away from that. They will go with the high-end version first, like they always do. But yeah, by that time, the market is going to be way different by 2025, 2026. It might make sense to have a lower price version. Yeah, but there's going to be more inflation between now and then too. You think so? You don't think we're going to get down to control? Not crazy inflation like we had last year, but I think 5% or 10%. I don't know. Maybe they can get it down

And, you know, I think Ford at some point is going to start lowering their prices too. I mean, we know that they lost, what, $3 million or they expect to lose $3 million in the EV side of their business. So they're not making money. They don't have big margins. So it's not like they're being opportunistic here. Yeah, I don't think they're making much money off of that. All right, you had the chance to try out the latest version of Blue Cruise on the Mustang Mach-E. That's a good-looking car right there.

Yeah, and yeah, nice color. We took it up to Vermont. I drove it over to Albany. Then I charged it at Electrify America, and it was quite slow, and I was quite upset about it. But then I drove it down the interstate from Albany to near New York City, and that was like the only place around me that Blue Cruise was west. I mean, we don't have a lot of interstates in our area, and there's none on the way to Vermont for us, so...

had to had to do it this way um so blue cruise is basically like supercruise it's very similar uh gm supercruise is you know quite nice the thing that blue cruise has improved on is that it's you know fully hands-free now so when it's on you don't have to have your hands anywhere near the steering wheel your eyes have to be up they have to be kind of scanning around looking around in front of you

But that's pretty much it. And do they have a driver monitoring to make sure of that? Yeah, you can see the steering wheel right at the stock. There's those two little things looking at you. And then above the rearview mirror, there's a little camera. And I don't know if the camera is actually part of the suite, but it's basically very similar to...

Super Cruise. And I know, you know, there's Tesla folks who are like, you know, you can only go on certain roads. That's garbage. My Tesla can do autopilot on my driveway. I get it. That's for sure. Like Tesla's will do this at more places, but in places where Super Cruise and Blue Cruise work, it's a much better experience not to have to have your hand on the wheel. And it feels much more like being a passenger if you're just looking out.

Then if something happens, like for instance, a few spaces on this drive down, it said, hey, grab the wheel, start beeping, grab the wheel. You know, there's an exit or on ramp or something that's confusing to me. So then it turns into kind of like the Tesla autopilot where you have to touch the wheel and have weight on the wheel. But you can do that in a lot of places, too. So it's a little bit of a crossover there.

uh technology um the three things that uh ford upgraded here uh actually could you scroll up a little bit so i can i can remember these things um lane change assist um so this is something that tesla's done for a while uh gm does it in some of their vehicles not on the bolt ev

If you want to change lanes, it'll even suggest you change lanes. You just hit the stock, hit the turn signal. It changes lanes. It was super smooth. Tesla's is also super smooth now, but the original first Tesla was kind of jerky. So that works great. My one gripe about it is that it doesn't turn off the turn signal. So you have to turn off the turn signal again, which is silly, but work on that.

um predictive speed assist so this was a pretty straight roadway um but um when you are on sharper turns it does slow down a little bit um you won't even notice it or you're kind of it's kind of like what you would do anyway so it kind of feels natural um it's really helpful and I think the biggest thing um and it's something that I wish Tesla would do as well uh in lane repositioning so if you're passing a huge truck

And, you know, the trucks like kind of close on the line, you, you like naturally want to be like away from the big truck or the vehicle in the other lane. And, uh, blue cruise will kind of just inch you over a little bit toward that line. As long as there's not something on the other side. V11 does that with the full self-driving. Oh, does it? Yeah. Um,

That's great. That I really appreciate because there's times when I'm doing just a traffic-aware, cruise-controlled type of thing up the road, and I'm pulling up close to a bigger truck, and I'm like, why are we in the middle? We should be on the left side of the road. So that's nice. Yeah, speaking of, good timing to discuss it because we were asked about it last week, too.

I did get the V11 update, the V11.3, 3.3, something like that, in my car, my Model 3. I used it when I drove down from Shawinian to Montreal to fly out. So I just used it for like 120, 140 kilometers or so. I was pleasantly surprised by it. It's the first... Oh, good. It's the first...

update from full cell driving that I'm like, all right, this is starting to get something that I can get behind. But again, I used it mainly on the highway. And so I guess the biggest takeaway here is it quenched my concerns about

The merging of the stack of the autopilot stack and the full self-driving for using the full self-driving stack on highway, basically. It was it performed very well on the highway. One thing I should disclose first, I didn't I didn't like play with the setting just yet. So so some of my issues might be linked to the to the settings. For example, the auto lane change.

was super smooth for passing, like I passed the vehicles super well. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that they include that. I didn't know it was called that in lane repositioning, but yes, there's that. If you pass a big truck, it will hug the left lane and give you a lot of space to pass vehicles.

So that's nice. My only concern, it wouldn't go back into the right lane after that. It would just do the asshole move of stealing in the passing lane for a while. And at first I thought maybe I was the one that's like normally I go back in a little bit sooner. But then a few times I tried to give it as much time as possible and it would just not go back into the right lane. Now, maybe that's a setting situation. I haven't dove deep into the setting just yet.

But yeah, other than that, the performance was very good. I didn't have any issues. The only thing that I didn't like, but that might just be a Quebec issue, is that I kept getting alerts that one or more cameras is having issues and that would negatively affect full cell driving.

Uh, it's just, this is the worst time of the year in Quebec right now. It's lush everywhere. And, uh, you, it's so easy to get your camera super dirty. Uh, I tried to clean them up the best I could, but, uh, apparently, uh, apparently this is still an issue. This is interesting about not going back into the right lane because, uh,

That's new. Like it has done that in the past. Yeah. When it passes. So maybe that's something merging the stacks issue or something. Yeah. But I'm sure there's settings involved too because I know that there's like a setting for –

how aggressive you can pass a vehicle to. Because, you know, when you go back into the right lane after passing a vehicle, like sometimes the vehicle is in red and like it doesn't let you go back in the lane. So and sometimes I feel like it's a little bit too passive on that front because I feel like I'm way past that vehicle. I should be able to go into the right lane right now safely. And it's telling me like, no, you cannot do it automatically because the vehicle is too close to you. And like, yeah, I don't know about that.

Especially if I'm still not accelerating, but I'm driving faster in that vehicle. Like if I'm past it, I'm past it at this point. All right. We have one more piece of news and then we're going to jump into the comment section. So if you guys have any questions for us about any of the subjects that we discussed today or any different subjects related to the electric vehicle world or renewable energy, you can put them in the comment section right now. We're going to get to them in about...

Honestly, maybe 30 seconds because that last piece of news is not a big one. But I mean, it's big. It's not big. It's the Friday Future announced that they finally started the production on the FF91. I don't know how they pronounce it. But it's kind of interesting because obviously Friday Future had a tumultuous history.

But we thought they were at the verge of dying a bunch of times. And it's one of the very first non-Tesla EV startup too. I've been reporting on Faraday Futures since I started out at Electric basically, which is eight years ago at this point. So they were one of the earliest non-Tesla EV startup.

And for the longest time, we're like, oh, it's just going to go away. It's just going to die. They came so close to dying so often. Honestly, I thought they had died. A lot of controversies around the CEO to YT. Was it YT? Yeah, YT. Yeah. Gia.

So like a lot of controversy about the financing, like the taking over from Chinese investors and like them claiming, oh, we're a U.S. company or a Chinese company or and then

the buying of the factory, like a textile factory too in California. And finally last year they managed to secure some funding and they are bringing that car to production. But also that car, the 91, like what is it? Like people are a little bit confused about what they're trying to do with that car really.

And it's a very high-end vehicle. Like I don't remember the exact pricing, but I think it's like $300,000 or something like that. Like it's not cheap.

And Jamie doesn't have the pricing here. Yeah, they went super high-end at some point. I mean, we just talked about the Q8 having a giant 114-kilowatt-hour battery pack. This has a 130-kilowatt-hour battery pack, claiming a range of 381 miles, which is a big range. But you would think that it's not that big with that kind of battery pack. But it's also just because of the...

that a vehicle has, 100, sorry, 1,050 horsepower, 0 to 60 in 2.2 seconds, which is not as fast as a Tesla, but it's a bigger car. It's a big vehicle. It's full size, almost like SUV, even though it's kind of a,

crossover form factor. 200 kilowatt charging capacity, that's good. Nothing great, but good. And self-driving capability like that, I don't know what they're talking about. Like if Tesla can deliver self-driving, I'm not going to bet on Faraday Future delivering self-driving, but you never know.

And so production has officially started. They plan to open a store in Beverly Hills later this year and Los Angeles as a, as an office in San Francisco, New York, Shanghai, Beijing. They, they're going to start selling that thing. So, I mean, I'm, I'm willing to go try it out. Yeah. Like just for, for like this, if I can actually drive and buy this thing after eight years of almost dying, this is actually happening. It's a,

Were you at the CES event where they drove us around in the back of one of those things? I wasn't there for that one. Yeah, so they turned that into like a big super luxury thing. Like the seats in the back felt like first class. I don't know if that's still the case though. We don't have the pictures of the back seat, but I don't think it's not. That was probably like six years ago or something. I know, it was a while. It's not the same car. Do we have any pictures of the interior here? I don't think so.

Well, it's cool that they got to market. I see JT and YF. Is that the initials now? It's good to see that they got it across the finish line, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be extremely low volume. And it's not going to be contributing like crazy to the EV market. But they claim to have 14,000 unpaid reservation and 401 paid reservation.

I mean, I wouldn't give any kind of value to those unpaid reservations. Yeah, I mean, you probably ordered one eight years ago. You probably have a reservation. Yeah. People have bought like three different EVs since they actually reserved that car. All right, let's jump into the comments section. All right. We explained why we're on Thursday. We have other things going on. I thought it was Friday. Sorry about that.

So Donald Boyd, we talked about this. The most recent FSD update did improve the products significantly for Fred. I still haven't gotten it on mine yet. I still haven't got V11. I don't know about significant. The main thing is I'm not so concerned anymore about the merging of the stacks. I think the FSD is going to do great on Highway. I'm not going to lose...

I'm not going to lose anything from what I loved about autopilot, which I did love autopilot on my way. It was a big thing for me. I love that about Tesla. So I'm not losing any of that. Now, am I going to use FSD on city streets more with V11 than I did before V11? I don't know just yet. I would need to use it more. And especially I would need to do that in the spring, like once the snow gets away.

All right. Do you know if the EV9 coming to the U.S. will have LFP or qualify for any of the tax credit when it comes out early next year? Definitely won't have U.S.-made batteries as far as I know. And I know that they were thinking about, I think, South Carolina or Alabama. I can't remember if they're producing those there. Yeah, I think they're going to be producing it in the U.S., though. That's clear. I don't know about the batteries. I don't know about LFP, too. I don't think Keo is making an LFP just yet.

Yep. LFP is still very much a Chinese thing right now. Speaking of LFP, Bloomberg came out with a report that Tesla and cattle are thinking about doing a battery factory in the US, reportedly copying Ford ownership licensing structure.

I did take a quick look at that. It's light on details. It's saying maybe in Texas, but there's no details. Yeah, we pretty much talked about that last week. We know it's coming. We know that Tesla is going to have a left-piece cell production in the U.S. It's more about when. We still don't know from that report when, but apparently they disclosed to the White House that they're also working on that.

All right, Nick Cedar question. Insurance companies are saying any crash damage to a battery is a total. Does the structural battery now seem like not such a great idea? Well, I mean... I mean, you just contradict it yourself. Like if it's a total anyway, like it doesn't change anything. So I would... I get where the concern comes from. It's more... The biggest concern is more like...

But apparently, Tesla, the side rails are still not considered a badger pack. They are replaceable. So it shouldn't be that big of a concern. But yeah, if you do have badger damage, like I said, it's total. And that would happen either way if you have a massive crash, in my opinion. So I wouldn't think it's a big deal.

All right, question. Who is using pouch cells and who is using cylindrical? And which form do you think will prevail? I mean, it's still the case that basically everyone other than Tesla is using pouch cells. And the new startups do also using cylindrical like Lucid and whatnot. But yeah, most are still using pouch cell. And Tesla is also using pouch cell for the LFPs. So which form is going to prevail? I think we're going to see...

a mix. It's going to be a mix going forward, a mix of chemistry, a mix of format. Unless the 4680 just kills everything and becomes so much better. And there's a chance that that's going to happen because we've seen other automakers being very excited about 4680 since Tesla announced it. So maybe 4680 prevails and cylindrical cells are the thing. But my gut instinct right now tells me that it's going to be a mix. All right. All right.

I hope Tesla goes forward with a dual motor Cybertruck, even if they don't get the dry electrode working in time. I don't think the dry electrode or the 4680 is going to be a concern for the motor configuration on the Cybertruck. All right. Stefan Frokar noticed that Tesla Solar Roof never say that they're a U.S. only product, but it is. It has been for sale outside the U.S., but never delivered outside. That's true.

There's been things in Canada going on. I remember like last year, there's been things about like looking for roofers and solar installers that mentioned solar roof, but nothing has actually been delivered as far as I know. And based on Stephen's name, I assume he's not from Canada. He's from a European. It's got an even market. And yes, so that's, I wouldn't hold my breath about the solar roof making its way there.

All right. It's amazing how much more range Lucid gets out of the same battery size as the A8. Everyone should be working toward efficiency, not larger batteries. That's a great point. It's a great point, but Lucid is also a sedan versus the A8. What's the A8? Is he talking about the Q8? Q8, yeah. And that's also true for the one I saw that...

Blank on the name. The Volvo and the Polestar 3. Same size battery, but 100 less miles range. Nikola Motor just announced $100 million public offering. I'll jump right on that. Then Kia gets their longer range by underpowering the motor.

It does seem like that's one of the components of getting better range is having a low power motor. That EV9 that's going to have a Chevy Bolt motor in it is going to be a good example of that. Brian Woods from LinkedIn, how would you measure the social impact of the repair it yourself or does it offend to marketing communities that ask that? I don't remember what we were talking about at that point.

I don't understand the question either. He's got more questions, but I don't know if they're where the metrics coming from. If I own an F-150, what is the market worth for somebody purchasing one and budgeting an entire year? I'll buy a Nissan. Okay. Well, we'll move on. Yeah. Andrew McDonald, what is your opinion of the value of Sandy Monroe's opinion of Tesla lead in design and engineering?

Grain of salt. Take it with a grain of salt. Well, you should thank pretty much every commentator of Tesla, including herself, with a grain of salt. Everyone is biased and everything. I mean, Sandy does good things with the teardowns and whatnot. We do get some insight, but...

A lot of things that he's done, I also don't put too much value in it. For example, the biggest one that I was disappointed about, when he got the Elon Musk interview, I thought that was a complete waste of time. He was basically just patting Elon on the back for an hour. If you get access to Elon, I know that Elon is probably not an easy interview to do. And if you don't do that, maybe that's the only Elon interview you're ever going to do. But I don't know. I wouldn't be able to do that.

personally. I will also say by omission, I feel like Sandy has kind of pumped up Tesla's positive points, but not the negative points. Anecdotally, I will say that some journalists were talking about

how bad FSD was. Sandy was right in there with them saying FSD is like a two-year-old driving. I don't think he would ever say something like that publicly, at least not in the current

climate. I think Sandy is a great example of capture. The Tesla fans have captured him. If you remember, early on with the Model 3, Sandy was extremely anti-Tesla. He trashed the Model 3 and everything. He got trashed by Tesla fans. Then, boom, he switched. He was like, all right, big Tesla fan and everything. The Tesla fan embraced that. We got him. He's on board right now.

He's one of us. And things like that. And I'm not saying that initially. I think that it makes more sense that he would be pro-Tesla than anti-Tesla, especially as an automotive engineer. I think there's a lot to love about Tesla from an engineering standpoint. But at the same time, you have to ask yourself what does that entail in terms of bias. Yeah.

And it's, I'm not, also, I'm not trying to trash him like that. Like, it's a hard thing for everyone to do, including for ourselves, to try to maintain as unbiased opinion as we can get, which is being completely unbiased is impossible in my opinion. Yeah, and he's a smart guy, you know, kind of from a different era, comes from the internal combustion era, but I think he's made the transition over pretty well. Not all of his contemporaries have, so. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Do you think anything new or exciting will be unveiled at the upcoming NY Auto Show? I think the new Kona EV will be there. Yeah, I think that's going to be there. We got invited for a couple things. Like I said, I'm going to LA, so I'm not going to be there, at least not for the media days. There was something else that was there. I don't remember. Remember I told you you could come down to New York and go to it? Yeah, well, that was the EV9 debut. Oh, that's right. That was EV9.

Maybe they'll have a price. I don't know. We'll see. FSD version 11 has minimal lane change button in the settings. Maybe that's the... Maybe I have that activated. Maybe that's what that means. That's possible. Yeah. Okay. Well, if it's default, if it's... You're saying that that's what is on by default. If it's not on by default, then I definitely didn't activate that because I didn't touch a setting at all. Okay. Yeah.

And then back to the Cybertruck comment, I don't think the 500-mile range version, tri or quad, will happen without the 4680 dry electrode. Okay, if that's what was the meaning of the other question, yeah, yeah, that's probably true. I just think that the motor configuration is not going to be affected by the 4680 having dry electrode or not. But yes, that, I mean...

500 miles on the Cybertruck is probably dependent on optimizing 4680 cells to the max or near the max. And we're not quite there yet. No, apparently not. Yeah. All right. That's all the questions. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening to the show this week. We appreciate you taking the time on the

on the last minute change to a Thursday show. And if you do enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on the app that you're listening right now. If you are listening to the audio only version on podcast, which is most of you, we appreciate you guys too, even though if you cannot tune in live. And if you can give us a five-star review on your podcast app, that helps the show a lot. It takes a minute to do and we read all the reviews. We got a few ones last week. We appreciate you guys that did that.

It helps boost us in the chart and it helps reach more people about the electric revolution. So thanks a lot, everyone. And we're going to see you next week on Friday. It should be on Friday next week. Bye-bye.