Tesla Robotaxi launch, new Nissan Leaf, Ford low cost EVs, and more
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And we are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good.

All right. We're doing the podcast a little bit early, but early for a set because I'm in China right now and plenty of things to do, very busy and all that. And I've been in Asia for a month now and I've been able to like try to do it on this Saturday morning and keep the time right for you guys because I know some of you like to join live at

at the regular time but unfortunately like this one like tomorrow was going to be crazy for me I'm starting a new drive program with our friend at xiaomi now it should be very interesting uh I cannot talk about too much about it until next week but uh maybe yeah I think maybe on next week's episode I'm gonna be able to talk about it so that's good but today I was with Neo which was insane I got to try the uh et9 which is a banger of a vehicle like it's

Top of the line Chinese luxury. Great vehicle, great suspension. A lot to love about this car. But also, Seth, I experienced the battery swap for the first time. Oh, interesting. And it is very interesting because, you know, we had battery swap.

in America for a very short period of time with Tesla, but it was purely, you know, a tax loophole to get the motor tax credit out of the vehicle because California, this weird rule for a while that, uh, if you could recharge the battery in five minutes, you get like twice or three times the credit or something like that. So Tesla did that, but it,

It kind of let bad taste in the mouth of the EV community and people didn't really see the purpose of it other than that. Then there was this Israeli startup, Bitter Place, that also tried it. It didn't work out. So I guess we stopped caring about battery swapping. We didn't take it seriously at all. And then NIO launched it in 2018.

And at first, we're like, all right, Nio is doing its thing. It's cool. But we didn't take it seriously enough, I think, because now they've done 77 million battery swap at this point.

And I knew that coming here today and checking the battery swap station. But even then, I was skeptical. I was like, all right, why are they doing it? Like fast charging is like 10, 15 minutes now at the top and 30, 45 minutes at the bottom. And even then, you know, that is starting to get the time you need to go grab a lunch or something.

Yeah. So I'm like, all right, why are they doing it? And it was very interesting because when I got to the battery station here in Beijing, the battery swap station, Neo with a lot of these battery swap stations has chargers too, like fast chargers next to it. Not that many, but like four or five, whatever, three to five, something like that. And when we arrived there, there was one guy charging at one of the four chargers and one person doing the battery swap.

Then we were in line to do the battery swap right after that. And then there were like four or five people in the queue to get it after us. Like they were coming, like there's a queue system that you don't need to be there, but you can reserve it and you have a time and you can do it. So people would choose to do the battery swap rather than using NIO's 1000 volt, like 600 kilowatt charging system.

And that kind of blew my mind. I'm like, wait, so it's not even like a convenience. They prefer it for some reason. It has nothing to do with availability or anything like that.

And then I had to ask some questions like, why do you think that is? Why we don't care at all in North America and Europe about battery swap? Well, I guess NIO is now deploying battery swap station in Europe, so maybe they'll get there. But in China, it's like a real thing. And first of all, obviously, it's the battery as a service system. So a lot of NIO's customers don't buy the battery pack. They just prefer to buy the car and then lease the battery pack on a monthly basis.

Which, you know, that in itself, not everyone is unborn in that. But then I started looking at the details of it. And first of all, you remove the battery out of the resale value calculation of it. Yeah, I mean, that has to be a big factor because if you're swapping batteries and you get a battery that's two years old from your new car, you're not going to feel great about that. But if you're paying for it as a service, it's a different story. Yeah.

It's a different story. And NIO is monitoring the battery health of all these batteries in there. So you always get a good battery. And they just...

They prefer that because I think also like the Chinese people, especially here in Beijing, it's kind of Silicon Valley back in the days, like early adopters, they want the latest technology and everything. So they are looking forward to a battery upgrade eventually, which they could get in their car easily. And maybe they'll just sprung for the smaller battery pack, which costs a lot less per month.

And then if they need to go on a road trip or something, they'll get the bigger battery pack, which costs like them like a few bucks a day more to rent for a few days. So things like that are very useful, very attractive to people. They like the flexibility of it. They like that it takes three minutes. It's so easy. Like you just it's like.

Just choosing a supercharger station on your navigation system on your Tesla is just that once you arrive there, you click start and then you just need to park in front of it and then it will back itself into the charger. And then you have the little Neo...

I don't know if you've seen that, an O'Neill AI robot in front of the dash that talks to you. And it's like, yeah, it's going to be fine. Just don't open the doors. And then you feel the battery pack being removed. And that's what I thought was an interesting part of it. Do you know how to open the doors while it's being removed? No. I mean, you could. Like, you can open the doors. It can exist because your 12-volt system still works. All the electronics still works and everything. Yeah.

but they ask you not to or the battery swapping process will stop if you do. But you feel now that the battery pack is such a part of the chassis of the vehicle. It's part of the rigidity. When they remove it, you feel it. You feel the vehicle just sort of like when you unbutton your pants after a big meal. And then when it comes back in, you feel the rigidity of the vehicle come back in. It's really interesting on that front.

uh well yeah then I drove the 89 which insane vehicle they have like the latest active dampening plus electro hydraulic suspension and they're a bit similar to when I tested the uh the Audi GT earlier this year like the the latest Audi GT and taiken have a very similar suspension system as this Neo uh though they claim a few advantages maybe not as good on handling but even better on the responsiveness of the um

of the dampening and I believe that it makes sense too because it's they're not trying to be a performance vehicle with the 89 they're more trying to be like a a Maybach type like super comfort luxury saloon type of deal and and they achieved that beautifully like literally no complaints about this car whatsoever the only thing that was a little bit rough on me was the fact that uh

So the ET9 is the latest vehicle from NIO. It's the flagship and they developed a whole new OS for it. And the OS is like incredible, but the latest version, they haven't translated it to English yet. So everything is in Chinese. So it's a bit tough for me. But I had the NIO team was there and I had the documentary crew that is following me for the EV movie that we're doing.

It was there and it was Chinese staff on it. So that helped. They helped a bit too on that. So that was helpful. But yeah.

So far, Chinese EVs, the Chinese EV world that I've been exploring has blown me away. And then the big test next week is going to be the YU7 and I'm really excited about it. I just saw a ton of them because I'm already at the hotel where they are starting the test drive. And I think the Chinese influencers and media got early looked at it and I saw them coming with it and it's an insane looking car.

I keep seeing the SU7 on the road too. Sometimes I see an SU7 and I'm like, oh, it's a Porsche. And then I see a Porsche Taycan and I'm like, no, this is an SU7. And I get confused, especially with the colors they have here. Yeah, they're really good colors. Yeah, they're very close.

All right, but let's jump into the news this week. Let's start with the RoboTaxi launch because this is happening this weekend. It's just been confirmed overnight for you guys today for me. And it's worse than we thought. Let me replace that.

From an actual performance standpoint, it's worse than we thought. From a safety standpoint, I'm kind of reassured a little bit because I didn't know at what level of cowboyness

uh tesla was going to go with this and they went with the safety route which i uh i approve but in term of like them claiming a win with this it's gonna be hard for any anyone other than that of course the crazy fanboys which are by the way the ones that are being invited to the course so earlier this week before we even knew about all that i uh

I posted an article that was 400 comments now that explained basically that the launch is all about optics. It's clear what's happening. It's Tesla and specifically Elon taking L's after L's after L's on self-driving for years with missed deadline and broken promises. And now with the last few weeks, the last few months, Waymo has been getting a lot of momentum.

And Elon's narrative that he's been pushing for a while that Tesla is the leader in self-driving and there's no close second, his actual words, it's becoming a lot harder for people to believe that and the entire stock price is based on that and everything. So you see a little bit of a panic here. So for the last few months, his idea was like, we'll do a robo-taxi launch. We'll claim victory. We launch robo-taxi. It's done. We have it. But...

In doing that, they move the goalposts greatly. Instead of being unsupervised self-driving in consumer vehicles, it's a small fleet in a geofence area with teleoperation. And now we learned that it's way more than just teleoperation. There's an actual safety driver. It's literally FSD in your car, except of you being the supervisor in the driver's seat. Tesla moved the supervisor to the passenger seat and it's a Tesla employee instead of being customers.

That's all this is. Are they going to have access to the wheel? Like what is, what are they doing in the past? I mean,

I mean, Seth, if you're on the passenger seat, you can have access to the wheel technically. But now we've seen from the videos, from some videos of Tesla testing, we've seen that Tesla has a new UI on the center display with two buttons that you can push. I think one of them is stop the vehicle and the other one is pull over. So basically the safety monitor, or instead of safety driver, they call it now, they call it safety monitor. Tesla employees sitting in front, watching the road, making sure that

supervising making sure that fsd doesn't do something stupid and then ready to stop if it happens are we are ready to uh uh to pull over to press pull over look this is at least at the safety level it's it's better than nothing it's uh worse than someone in the driver's seat obviously but better than nothing like tesla could not have someone be in the driver's seat it would have looked

so terrible this looks pretty terrible but at least the optics like the with the influencers that they invited there and everything and all the videos are going to be created like all the influencers already on board with that they already like have their talking point of how they're going to sell that to people but you know said the main thing that i hear from waymo fans people that use waymo in la san francisco and austin and phoenix

is that what they love the most is that there's no one in the car. Like, it could be, like, just them or just, like, no one is listening to a conversation. Yeah, it's privacy. Yeah. People value that. And they value it so much, they're willing to pay more for Waymo than they do for Uber because of it, which is wild. Yeah. And now, you don't have that in a Tesla. Yeah. I mean, I guess...

Someone like us, we're Tesla nerds, would love it. We'll just poke the engineer that's in the seat. I don't know if it's an engineer, but a Tesla employee would just poke them with questions for 20 minutes as we sit in traffic. But I'm sure that's not the goal that Tesla is trying to achieve here. I mean, this is equivalent to where Waymo and Cruise and even Uber were, like, I don't know, five years ago. Remember, they all had people in the passenger seat.

Uh, that's, you know, when the, when the Uber killed that guy, uh, there was somebody in the passenger seat or I don't know, there was like a, an incident in Arizona, you know, Cruz had people in the car, but this is like, you know, so Tesla is marking that it is where Uber and Cruz and, and, uh, Waymo were, I don't know, four or five years ago. Like this is the demarcation. It's that,

From this, that's clear as it gets. Or at the very least, you can say they are at least behind them. It's hard to pinpoint where they are compared to them because this testing with safety monitors, safety drivers, whatever you call it, was going on for a long time for Waymo and from other competitions. But Waymo now has been without anyone in the car for a long time.

and uh so yeah we we reported on that and we reported like just and it's so much about the optics so you know he's just trying to get a win here and like trying to hold on to this image that he's been carefully crafting that tesla is the leader in self-driving like one of the worst thing that i reported on with this set is like look this is ashok ls ls wani wami the uh

The end of self-driving at Tesla. So this was the one siding of the testing. So there was very limited testing with that passenger safety monitor guy. It started just a few weeks ago. And so very limited. Again, Waymo tested six months with a safety driver, six months without a safety driver, and pretty sure they never had a safety passenger monitor. So he posted this picture of the...

testing with like a little emoji that gets so hot and it's so misleading so clearly for optics because the way it's cropped out the first car looks like self-driving because there's no one in the driver's seat but it crops out the passenger safety monitor and then the second car is actually a trailing car to make sure that the second the first car doesn't screw up and this one looks like there's no one in it too because you only see the passenger but there's actually someone on the driver's seat of that car that's crazy

I would note that during this picture that Ashok took, it doesn't show the left side of the vehicle. So I wonder if it was intentionally cropped to not show the safety driver. So yeah, everything was about the optics for this launch. And I reiterate again that the latest best data available shows that Tesla is at about 444 miles per critical disengagement.

Now, obviously, the version of the system that it's in the Roltec C is supposedly better. But we discussed that last week, like the 5X improvement in parameters. It's not something that we've – it's new. We've heard about it before, and it's not – it wasn't nearly as good as – the improvement was not nearly as good as what they previously claimed. I'm going to use a quote that sort of went viral this week, so –

Now we know for sure it's going to be geofence. Everything's going to be geofence. We don't know how big the size of the geofencing is going to be. The app is going to be released this weekend, and only people that get an invite can download the Robotexy app, and the geofencing area is going to be there. So I'm sure we're going to hear about it pretty soon. But it's going to be geofenced, confirmed an invitation and everything. Now the...

some people pull up a whole quote from Elon from 2019, so not that old ago. In 2019, Elon said that self-driving was already solved. And at the time, he said that...

um where is the actual i said if you need a geofence area you don't have real self-driving so take elon on his word tesla doesn't have a real cell driving right now they have till operation they have a trading card they have a safety driver that's on the passenger seat that's it um there's a few other limitations i just put the article on it with the safety monitor and all the other limitations so you also

The service is only going to be available within the geofence area, excluding the airports. So apparently the geofence probably includes the airports, but Tesla doesn't want to handle the airports just yet. Not that big of a deal. You can understand that. Only going to operate from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m., though. So there's a good six hours where it's not going to run. Again, this is what should be important. What was interesting about Robotaxi is like,

it's just run by itself all the time and then that's why the way more operation too is like super efficient and they're able to 6 p.m to 12 a.m 6 a.m to 12 a.m so it's just from 12 from midnight to 6 a.m it's not operating okay now the demand is not super high but at the same time if you get out after your night of drinking it's like 1 a.m to 2 a.m and yeah like yeah it's when it's really useful so

You cannot do that. Also, I think you cannot even be intoxicated. I think you cannot be drunk inside or you cannot drink or you cannot be drunk. One of the other. Participant must be courteous and respectful, unsafe and disrespectful by a vermilion determination. I mean, courteous and respectful to who? To the property or the safety driver, maybe? It's going to be limited or unavailable in inclement weather.

Just so you know, ride-a-link services, especially like Uber and Lyft, when they are the most popular, it's when the weather is bad and people don't want to walk to the transit system, don't want to walk to the subway. Take a bike or whatever. They don't want to take a bike, all that. That's when they are popular. That's when Tesla don't work. Again, just because everyone has driven a car with FSD and when there's like some rain and everything, it's like, oh, the system starts flashing. It's like, no, it's not good. Yeah.

So there's a lot of these that are not super, they don't inspire a lot of confidence into Tesla being the so-called leader in self-driving. The big one, obviously, being the safety driver. And just when this is happening, and again, I'm convinced that Waymo is behind all of this thing. Like Waymo,

The fact that they are taking off now with new cities. This week we learned that they are preparing to launch in New York, by the way. They filed for a permit in New York. And they expanded by 50% their service in California. So this is the...

San Francisco map is now going all the way to Burlingame. So you have Malbray now that's covered also, South San Francisco and all that. And then you have the Palo Alto, Los Altos area. I just spend it all the way to Menlo Park and the Los Altos Hills. So now these two are going to get close to be connected too soon. So once the, because I think you just have like a few more towns between Burlingame and Menlo Park.

So then these tours are connected, the whole South Bay is going to be connected and available for Waymo. No highway is still a thing though in this part of the Waymo service. LA expanded a lot, so you have Brentwood being hided, Beverly Sudets looks like the part of the Hollywood Hills I guess here. This is Silver Lake, Ankle Park.

Inglewood. So you got the SoFi and you got all the, you got like Torrance down there where Tesla's design headquarters is.

Yeah, is it a little bit further down though, I think? Yeah, it's probably a little further down than England. Yeah, but they're expanding fast. I mean, they weren't in LA that long ago. So all of that being added, it's big. And of course, the biggest area they have is Phoenix. Phoenix is covered quite well. And they have Austin too. So I assume they're going to expand Austin soon.

So I think this, I think New York, I think them buying 2000 Jaguar I-Pace and upgrading them to their hardware suite by the end of next year to add that to the fleet, to more than double the fleet. These things are like getting in on worried and it's like we need to do something right now.

still on the tester nude side we learned that this is pausing production for a full week during the week of the fourth of july so normally they just shut down for a day or two now they're going to shut down the production of both the model y and the gigafactory at the cyber truck sorry uh production lines and uh that's

That's not great for Tesla. It's clear why it's happening. It's the inventory of going up. Model Y, the new design is not selling as well as the plan to. And the Cybertruck obviously is still selling horrifically. The inventory is piling up. Over 3,000 listings on Tesla's website were still available when I wrote this article.

It's not a good look for Tesla. This is in the US too. Like US is the market that's doing not as bad as everything else. Like China is not doing too bad too. They're still down quarter over quarter and year over year, but not too much.

I'm not like the night grew up and everything, but I think that China is going to get a lot worse in the coming months because the competition is increasing. The price are coming down, especially what I'm going to test out this weekend. I mean, I'm going to tell you how good it is, but if it's half as good as they claim it is, Tesla is in trouble. So the U S was the only good market. And now I think, I think this is going to go well in the U S in the second half of the year because of the removal, the plan removal of the tax credit, which looks extremely likely. Yeah.

So more people are going to find some urgency to buy. But then 2026, what's going to happen in the U.S. with all the tax credit? It'll be interesting. I mean, the U.S. is like at 10% right now. Are they going to drop to 5%, you think, EV adoption? I don't know. It's going to be rough. It's going to be interesting to see what happens, actually. Like, you know, GM, I guess Ford's got...

I don't know. I feel like there's still going to be, I think it's going to drop. I just don't know how much. Or maybe like the, the adapt to the pricing and everyone like starts dropping pricing like crazy. And because I don't, I don't think all the automakers are just going to give up on EVs from that. Like, even though, even if the U S market is down on this, there's like a giant downturn, obviously in, in, in the finance and economics of the U S that would have a big impact. But, but Tesla is a solution. Yeah.

to bring that more sales level away a six seater set six heater yeah not a seven seater so last week we talked about the seven seater because this list another email to uh um to some customers saying that the seven seater was coming so the seven seater has been gone since the new design earlier this year and uh and now it's gonna make a comeback hasn't yet been in the configurator but we expect it to be soon but now our friend green the infamous tesla hacker who

parsed through the firmware update from Tesla and finds new features. He confirmed that a six-seater has been talked about. And there's been rumors of a six-seater in China forever. There's been rumors of a longer wheelbase six-seater, which would make sense if you're going for the six-seater. And that for years has been talked about and it never really happened. So...

it's hard to get too excited by it but with dreams finding it now in it and not only that he said that he's that it's unlikely that to be just for china based on what he found so so it looks like this is really working on a six-seater model y so i don't know what that's going to look like exactly i have this beautiful ai image that gives you an idea like it's it should be probably something similar to model x where you have like a small third row

to captain's seat in the middle and then the regular seats in the front. There's some advantages to it for like the third row because, you know, the Model Y third row is... Yeah, you can put your feet in the middle. Yeah. So you, if you can have similar seat as the Model X, which, you know, some of the Model X, they designed like this nice, like Y-shaped seat posts that leaves a lot of room underneath them so you can fit your...

Your feet underneath them, you can fit your feet in the middle, like you said. So there's a little bit more space for the back. But the Model Y there is so small, it's going to help by how much, I don't know. And then what's going to happen exactly with the second row? Is it going to be a little bit more squish out of that? I don't know. I would say one of the best things about the Model Y is that you can put down the second row and you can do fantastic car camping.

And, you know, that's one of the things I like, probably one of my favorite things about the Model Y is like, you know, you're on a long road trip. You know, I have, I've done a couple reviews of like inflatable mattresses. Instead of stopping at a hotel, you know, you stop at a charger, you throw, you know, inflate the mattress, you got the perfect air conditioning, you got a great sound system, you got the glass roof, like everything.

I almost prefer that than to a hotel. I'm about to go to the Formula Sun stuff in Kentucky, and I'm actually looking forward to pulling over to the side of the road and sleeping in the back of the... You cannot do that with the Model X, though. The Model S, the six-seater doesn't go flat. Right.

So, I don't know. Are they going to be able to do that with a six-seater model? Why? That's the big question. Yep. Okay. Because what you said, I've heard it from many people that being totally flat is the main thing. That's cool. So, I don't know. We'll see. Maybe do a longer wheelbase. I don't see that happening that much, but it's a possibility. Okay.

All right, moving on from Tesla news today, we are going to talk about the LEAF, then 2026 Silverado EV, Ford's Mackie recall, a bunch of other things. And then we're going to jump into you guys' comment section. So if you guys have questions for us, you can put them in the comments right now. It can be any of the topics we discussed today. It can be about things you want me to check out in China with the EV world. It can be any of that, and we'll get to it in a few minutes after we get through these news episodes.

The new Leaf was finally fully unveiled. Last time I was in Asia, actually, that's what I came to see, but not necessarily, and I couldn't even talk about it. It was so weird. Nissan brought me to their headquarters, showed me everything they were working on in EVs for years to come, and they're like, by the way, you cannot talk about this at all. It's a weird move.

Yeah, it was like they paid for my whole trip. It was like, why did you bring me here? I thought you wanted some publicity. But yeah, that's what we saw. That was in 2023. That was two years ago.

And the leaf is really different. It's like kind of a small crossover, like a mini Aria. It's what it is right now. I mean, you look at the side view here. Yeah, no, I like it a lot too. I don't know if you can see crossover, but it's certainly not what we're used to with the leaf. Yeah. It's a big update. I like the two-tone. I mean, the leaf, that's a classic for the leaf, the two-tone. These headlights are sick too.

Yeah, and it has next. No more.

Yeah, they jumped straight from Chatham-O to Naxx. That's impressive. That's a big upgrade. All right. So what are the specs on that thing? So I have to admit I couldn't go to all the details this week. I've been so busy. But the Nissan Leaf Trim S, so that's the base one, 130-kilowatt motor. I mean, the Leaf has never been a beast on that front. And a 52-kilowatt hour battery pack for how much range? Yeah.

The S, S plus. TBD. Yeah, TBD for the S. So the small 52-kilowatt-hour battery pack, we don't know. But you get between 259 and 303 miles on the... With the 75-kilowatt-hour. Yeah, with the bigger battery pack, 75 and 160...

So all of them are 160. So yeah, all Algema bigger motor after that, 160, but then the S plus, uh, so S plus is the base, but with the bigger batch pack. So this one gets you the most range. And then the, uh, SV plus and that's non plus have a bunch of other features, probably different wheels too. And everything that affects the, um, the range quite a bit. We have another detail. Oh, we have the interior. I mean, look at the interior, but I didn't see that. Yeah. Big upgrade to on the interior. Yeah.

Zion display, very modernized compared to the previous model. Looks great. 14.3-inch display. What's it going to cost? Closer to dealerships, I guess, closer than when it comes to the dealership. Yeah. The key to minimizing from the Nissan is the pricing of the Leaf. It can't go that much higher than it was before. So, you know, I think it has to start at the low 30, right?

Around $30,000? I would say $30,000 in the $30,000 probably. Low $30,000? Yeah. Well, I guess I was thinking like with incentive. It needs to start with incentive. It needs to start below $30,000, I feel like. Yeah, especially for that lower range one. Is it supposed to be produced in Mississippi still? I think Tennessee. I don't know. Nissan has a factory, I think, in Tennessee. Yeah. They had one in Mississippi too, but I don't know if they're shutting that down.

Alright, what's new with this 2026 Arado EV? If I'm buying an electric pickup truck, this one is definitely on my list. So I want to see the upgrade with the 2026 version. Design-wise, I don't expect anything crazy because it's still early in the life cycle of that vehicle.

2026 Trail Bus Edition to up to 12. So that's not new. 1,200, 500 pounds. Zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds. Pretty good for a big truck. Yep. Here are the specs here. We don't have the difference, though, upgrades.

All right. The work truck, so that's the base one with the standard battery pack, $55,000, 286 miles of range. Okay, you won't... Solid. No.

So if you don't tow or anything like that, you're good with that. It's almost 300 miles of range for a $55,000 work truck that you can actually do some work with. It's pretty good. Extended battery pack gets you 424 miles of range. Now we're talking, but that price just jumped to $68,000. That's probably before destination fees. Yeah, before $2,000 in this industry. So it's a $70,000 range.

And then if you're on the max range, 493 miles of range. And that's going to be the longest range version because it doesn't have all the features of the LT and the Trailbus. But that's 66. So with the delivery fees and everything, $78,000 for a nearly 500-mile truck. It's not bad at all, especially if you compare it to the Cybertruck and everything else in the segment, really.

And then the LT, you can have it for $63,000, $65,000 with the delivery fee. So $65,000 and you get 283 miles of range. So you lose a little bit because of the added luxury features that come with the LT trim.

Extended range, you also lose 14 miles at 410 and 78 for the Max, and that's going to cost you $93,000. And the Trail Bus doesn't have the standard battery, so only extended range and Max, which have the same range as the LT, but come with extended range is $1,000 more expensive, but the Max is less expensive than the LT on the Trail Bus. That's weird. I wonder if there's something else with that.

Maybe the 91,000 might be the wrong... Maybe. But sometimes it's like the different features though. Yeah. Yeah, because it's repeated here. It's a great vehicle, especially if you're towing. I think the Silverado is kind of your only option if you're towing long distances right now. Yeah, that's fair. It's got that insane range of nearly 500 miles. Because the work truck is good. The LT is just a few...

want to get a little bit more comfortable but it's almost 500 miles for 70 000 70 000 not bad all right ford is telling that uh its new low-cost platform uh is gonna be able to compete with chinese evs and i'm here right now in china and like benefit of the doubt to ford i know i know they're investing big in this and i know that like the so they hired um

One of Tesla's former top engineers, Alan Clark, and they have also Doug Field, obviously, that's leading the entire division, the entire EV division at Ford. But this is a Schunk Works team that's been given a lot of money, like 500 people. It's led by Clark, and it's full of former Tesla people, former Rivian people, former Lucid people, even some Apple people.

And their goal is like, we rethink what an EV platform looks like. And now they're talking about being competitive in a Ken Dinner discussion last week.

Lisa Drake, the vice president of tech platforms, oversees that above Clark, released some details where they said that they are confident that they're going to be able to match the cost structures of leading Chinese players. That means not just the battery plastic, but full system costs from chassis and terminal system to inverters and electronics. So that's some confidence right there.

And we know that they've been benchmarking it. We know that the Xiaomi SU7 has been at Ford for a while. And even Jim Farley said that it's his favorite car right now. So they are looking in the right direction, at least. They know what's the goal. And now they feel confident they can achieve this goal. And on this platform that they're building, they are looking at eight different body styles. So they think they're going to be able to build trucks, crossover SUVs, and maybe even sedans on this thing.

expected to have like an electric ranger which you know that's exciting set you talked about often about like we need an electric maverick or something like that the ranger is pretty close to that yep so it's exciting i love it i want to see that what your uh sound sound went out for a little bit there well it went very tinny i don't know if you're well i'm good now yep okay

All right. So if they can make that happen, it would be really impressive because I said this week, I'm like,

I was driving around Beijing and I was in an EV that I didn't know about. I was like, this is an electric car. And I was getting taxied around by the documentary team that's with me here. And they rented the car and it was electric. And I was looking around the car. I was like, I've never heard of that. And then I drive around and it's like, there's all the taxi here are called Beijing taxi. I don't know if it's the Wuling or something like that. But they're all electric.

I stopped at the Neo Power Station, PowerSquad Station, and it was right next to a giant charging infrastructure, like dozens of 120 kilowatts chargers. And it was half of them were

taxis like they're just called Beijing that's the actual make model behind it it's crazy you just drive on the street and you see like a bunch of like decent looking EVs that you've never heard of on top of like the Xpeng and the Nio and the BYDs and yeah and you see some Teslas out there too right

Yeah, I've seen Tesla. I've even seen some American Teslas. Model S and X, yeah. When you see a Model S and a Model X, you're like, oh, you guys buy American cars sometimes. There's not that many of them, obviously. I saw a couple of Lyriks out there, too. Cadillacs. Yeah, I saw an OpTic even today. I was very surprised. That's quite new. We just had it for a couple of months in North America. Yeah, so there's some American cars out there.

Yeah, what was kind of a, you know, we were, Scooter and I were walking around the auto show and we were like, never heard of this brand, but they have 10 EVs. And, you know, like, okay. And they're like some subsidiary of Geely or, you know, whatever. Yeah. And well, now just even NIO today, like walking to their big, like they have a giant like dealership in NIO house, they call them. NIO has like nine models now.

And all serious models. Some of them, it's a bit like how these sometimes call it a model, but it's like a copy version of the same model. But they have seriously different ones, like the ES6 and the ET7 are very different models. They have a full lineup. And they have the Envo brand now. And they have the Firefly, which seriously, the Firefly is fire, pun intended.

It's a serious little like Mini Cooper smart car competitor. It looks really cool. All right. That was the good news for Ford. If they can actually deliver on that, the bad news, and I didn't get this article this week, but I want to check it out on the podcast. They are recalling 300,000 vehicles and it's forcing them to alt sales of the Mustang Mach-E.

So, $317,000 Mustang Mach-E model in the U.S. and globally are to resolve. So, what's the issue? A glitch that could give you luck and potentially wreck the vehicle. Okay, so regarding the 12-volt battery discharge, the front electronic latch may not function, which could leave you stuck outside or worse inside the vehicle. There's no manual release on the Mach-E? There has to be. Yeah, I'm sure there is.

Especially with those weird front doors. You know how they have that little lever that you hold? It pops out. This is a great example of trying to be fancy, adding complexity, adding more points of failure, and now they're paying for it. No offense. It was kind of neat. I like trying new things, but just a regular door would have been just fine.

Yeah. But the fixes are software updates, so it's not that big of a deal. I don't know why they have to stop sales for that. It's pretty hardcore. I would expect the sales to restart soon because of that. All right. Another one that's putting some pressure on Tesla is the Volkswagen just released the... Well, it's under their Moia brand. Moia? I don't know how to pronounce that. M-O-I-A? Moia. Yeah, Moia. It's their autonomous driving brand that they've been working on for a while.

And they combine it with the IDBus, so that's cool. And they released the IDBus AD, which is going to be their new production autonomous vehicle. And it's being deployed right now, I think, in Hamburg, right? Sorry, it's going to be an autonomous shuttle service coming across Hamburg. And now with the large-scale deployment coming across Europe and the U.S. in 2026, so they plan to move fast.

And I don't see anyone in the passenger seat of that one. I see actually some luggage, uh, compartment. That's nice. And yeah. And I'm, I mean, I've, I've read the release on that earlier this week when they, when they announced it and, uh,

They even mentioned why they started with Amberg. It's like they found a bunch of intersections and everything that is challenging and is going to be interesting to test out. While Elon was on record last week saying that the Robotaxi launch is going to purposely avoid difficult intersections and navigate around them. You see, Tesla loves to test with customers inside. And

Now, getting a little squeezy on that. Yeah, you know, that particular vehicle, I wonder if they were thinking about doing seats facing each other because you have that big door opening and you could probably put six people in there if you had seats. I don't know. It just seemed weird that they had that configuration.

Yeah, but a lot of people don't like that, don't like to drive backwards. Yeah, ride backwards, yeah. Especially in an autonomous car, probably. Yeah, I thought that was interesting. So one last quick article before we jump into the comment section. So if you have a question, be ready to put them right now. So someone, a reader, an actual reader actually sent me the report here, and it was a great report from Republic. So it's a Swiss online investigative journalism magazine.

And they did a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests in Switzerland that revealed something pretty funny. It's more sad than funny, really.

The Federal Office of Energy in Switzerland ordered a study from a reputable scientific-based research group. And the question that they want to ask is like, from a scientific perspective, using a scientific method, try to answer the question, when does it make sense from a climate perspective to replace a gasoline car with an electric one?

And I personally, I like that question because even though the question that is an EV better than a gasoline vehicle. So if you're buying a new car, obviously buying an electric one makes more sense for the environment. There's been plenty of studies on that. We've discussed it last week. You set the reference, the Union of Concerned Scientists studies on that. That's really good.

It's been answered. But there's a fair argument that the cost of manufacturing an electric vehicle is still harmful to the environment. It requires a lot of logistics, a lot of moving around, a lot of fuel, too. So it doesn't make sense if you have an old beater to just beat it to death and keep driving it for the longest time instead of buying a new car, even if that new car is electric.

So that's a good question to ask. And they did the study. So they ordered the study in 2022. It cost them the equivalent of $120,000, the Federal Office of Energy. And then Infra, the company behind it, returned the study to them. And the report was clear that

replacing over 90% of existing petrol diesel car with an equal size EV could save CO2 immediately, except for the vehicle that hardly ever leave the driveway. So if you don't drive that much, yes, you're probably better off keeping your old car if you don't drive that much. But if you drive regularly, then every time you drive, that compensation with the zero emission vehicle, especially if it's combined with renewable energy,

you're going to have a great impact on the environment. So they answered the question and the study was great. And the goal of the study was to inform buyers that if they make that choice, it's powerful for the environment. But the study never came out. That was released and that was completed in early 2024. And no one knew about it until last week.

That's because the Republic heard about it through the grapevines, I assume. And then they did the Request Information Act and got the study and released it.

So what was interesting after that is like they asked the Federal Office of Energy, why did you not release that study? And then they claim, oh, we're not so sure anymore about the result of it. We thought maybe it could be misleading. So we decided to kill it. So then the Republic, being good journalists, they were like, really? That sounds like a bad excuse. So they did another Freedom of Information Act request to get the emails around the

the discussions of releasing the study back when they received it. And the discussion was way different than they never actually questioned the result of the study whatsoever. They were just doing that now, now that they've been caught with it. But instead, they said that the information is potentially sensitive. He said that it could be misinterpreted. So like, oh, people are so dumb that they're going to misinterpret that statement.

study that's pretty clear straightforward uh he's and he said that's coming at the time that the federal administration tends to be perceived rather negatively as if that's going to make them more negative and the studies simply so someone sort of fought back against it it was like this study is simply academic so i can just show it should be like pretty it's pretty straightforward you should release it uh but then the uh they said that uh

In reality, no one will consider whether to replace their five-year-old combustion engine with an electric car from a climate perspective. First of all, no, not no one. I do agree that most people don't do that. Most people don't buy an electric vehicle with the climate in mind. I think you just better cars. You just wake up every day with a full charge. You don't have to buy gas. All these things, I think, have a bigger impact than thinking about the environment, unfortunately.

But that was the goal of the study. The goal was to figure out, are you letting the buyers know, are you going to have a positive impact on the environment? So if it's something that concerns you, you have that information. And now they're like, oh, we shouldn't be giving people that information.

So it's really weird that they decided not to release that. And through their great work, Republic did some great work, but they couldn't actually pinpoint exactly why. Because it is suspicious, like it is propaganda deciding not to release that, but it's not clear why.

like the the guy in charge now in switzerland for the federal office of energy was a former oil lobbyist and he came in in between the study being ordered and the study being received but at the same time apparently the guy is actually pretty pro evs now and it's he wasn't there's no proof that he was involved in the decision whatsoever so i'm like because they did mention it at the republic but like i don't i don't think that's that relevant if the

Did you have all the information, all the emails and all that? So maybe it's just incompetence, but we clearly have still a lot of work to do when it comes to fighting against EV propaganda, anti-EV propaganda, and getting people educated on that because things like that still happen. And 2025, Seth, 2025. Yeah.

So I was going to say we have to rush through this, but because I have another podcast. Well, Micah just informed me that there's missiles coming in, so he's going to go hide in the bunker for a little bit. So no rush. Skrank Finkel is from Finland, and I think this is the first time he's been able to join us.

He asked, did we see that ChemPower started delivering their Moore system, 1.2 megawatts and eight plugs, 12 plugs in core for this year, once again, leading the charge? Perhaps a ChemPower insider, maybe?

Yeah, well, Ken Power has been doing some great work. I have one near my place. Sylvain has one in Trois-Rivières and he loves it. I think he's deploying them at his new station too in Quebec. So we're starting to have a few of them. And they are impressing hardware. Good to see some new people. Paul Brown. Donald Parrish says, I use FSD on road trips. I trust it on street not to hit anything parking. That's not as good, but that'll come.

I think that's kind of what most of us think. Like FSD and autopilot are pretty good on the freeway, but around town, still a little scary. Save me Turkey and tire and road on trip. Last trips.

i guess most critics of tesla fsd haven't used it personally very much they love to say that the fsd found but like we we've had fsd for years in our cars that and i a lot of fsd critics have had fsd i've tried it on the hardware for it is impressive like my take has always been

if FSD was developed in a vacuum without the promises that Elon made, without selling it as a full self-driving system, if it was just an ADS system that

keeps improving and maybe someday it gets to level three, maybe someday it gets to level four, we don't know. I think it would be a super celebrated product, but unfortunately it's not that. It's been sold as a self-driving system for years and it's just not that and it's never going to be on Outward 3, probably never going to be on Outward 4, most likely never going to be on Outward 4 and that's it. All right, Paul T's also in the Tesla fan club. Whatever Tesla do for RoboTaxi, you will say that's reckless. This will soon change if all goes well. That's a big if.

Waymo have accelerated their program because Tesla is breathing down their necks. Oh my God. So the reverse, I guess, like he's throwing down the, you know, reverse card. Yeah, that's, that's pretty nuts. I mean, if Tesla,

comes out and can prove that their system is super safe, I'll be the first to be happy with it. I know. I can't wait for this to work. If Tesla full self-driving works, I own that. We paid for it. I'm going to be sleeping in the back of my car on road trips. If this actually works, I'm going to be the happiest person out there.

But what Paul needs to reconciliate is the fact that Tesla has never released any data whatsoever beyond cumulative miles on FSD, has fought at every level.

Every attempt for people to release that data. The only one that's been able to force Tesla to release some data has been NHTSA. And even then Tesla abused the redaction system so that the data is not revealed to the public. They are currently in a fight with the Washington Post on the releasing the data. They went to court against the California DLM. He did not to release any specific data. They own record with the court saying that if their FSD data is revealed, it's going to be, he's going to have financial damage to the company.

And then Waymo, which you think is scared of Tesla, has a whole dashboard on its website that lists everything, all the data, all its accidents, explaining the accident that happened, how it happened. And that to me, that's real like being safety focused. And that's just not what Tesla is doing.

Right. So, and he continues as soon as there's a problem, which there will be for Tesla, you and others will jump all over it best to be cautious, then accelerate plus expand numbers and areas covered again, like that that's to be expected. Like, but our problem is with the promises, like the,

It's not helpful. Yeah. But he's kind of contradicting himself here because he says like, oh, you guys think that Tesla is reckless. But then when something bad happens, you say like, oh, well, you're going to jump on that. And it's better to be cautious. Well, then be cautious. You seem to be on our side for a second there. Yeah.

Here's an interesting question. Skeptic asks, will true FSD be possible if cameras can't read signs? I just finished a loop of the Eastern US and words on signs do a lot of heavy lifting to direct traffic, especially in construction zones. I think, I mean... Why would a camera not be able to read the words? Yeah, I mean, they can read speed limit signs and stuff like that. I just think he's thinking of like, you know, those big signs that say like, you know, detour or whatever. I don't know.

I mean, those things are not...

I want Tesla to nail just... Tesla should really go back to the basics and try to release a level 3 system on the highway. I think that would be the smart thing to do. That would be amazing. Because Tesla is doing very well on the highway, but they have not nailed it yet. There's still some phantom braking issues. There's still some concern with a static obstacle on the highway. There's a serious Nets investigation on that. If...

if they could just focus on that and nail that, and then it's not too bad. If they see a construction zone coming, a detour coming, anything like that, it's level three. We expect that. So just alert the driver, hey, we see a construction zone coming, we see a detour coming, take over. We need your help on that. There's so much value in that. But Tesla, because Elon promised level five self-driving years ago, they're just so focused on that, unfortunately. Yeah.

All right, Marco switches up a little bit. Question after new Nissan Leaf. Is there any news on the Nissan van, maybe updated NV200, which was popular? Maybe now is the time, Fred, to leak some of the stuff you saw two years ago in Tokyo. Well, honestly, I don't remember seeing a van. I don't remember seeing commercial. The NV200 is more of a commercial vehicle than anything else. I don't actually remember anything commercial vehicle back at that release. It was all like...

good consumer uh consumer vehicles like you know any signs a bit funky with their with their vehicles sometimes like with the juke and things like that so it was all like the different version of that with electric so right maybe not maybe i don't know if there was an electric juke specifically but all right skeptic says the new leaf is a huge improvement but it's not special enough to sell on specs alone the price has got to be low i agree especially because small battery packs and

smaller size, so it definitely has to have a good price component. That's right. $52, I don't know, maybe $30,000. It's possible. It's pretty small for these days, the $52,000. Total Tesla deliveries in 2025, 2024 minus how many?

It's 1.5 million, I think. Right now, everything's pointing towards 1.5 million. All right. Regarding the Nissan LEAF, it has NAX, but also a J1772 port, which is goofy. I didn't see that. Oh, is it a dual port? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you would think they would just have an adapter. They could sell you an adapter from... There's a bunch actually out there. Unless it's two sides. Yeah.

Is it a dual port or is it two sides? I'm not sure, but why wouldn't they just sell you the same adapter that Tesla sells for $40? Why create an extra port, I guess, is the saying. With that, I agree. Unless you put it on, oh, it's a dual adapter, it looks like. It's a dual port, I mean. That's a bummer. We don't know exactly how much larger the third gen Leaf is from the first or second gen. I would say it may be even smaller. I don't know. It kind of looks longer but shorter.

Yeah, it's a different form factor, but I don't think it's that different in size. Yeah. How do you know that Tesla is shutting down to too much inventory? That's what you want us all to believe. It could be due to new models. No. All right. You want to know how I know that, Paul?

I know that from simple deduction. There is too much inventory right now in the US from the Cybertruck and from the Model Y. So what you do in that case is that you reduce the inventory. Also, the new models are coming in new section of the factory with, like people mentioned, the Cybertruck and things like that. So they don't need to shut down the production line from the Model Y and Cybertruck for that. There's maybe the...

stripped down version of the model y but i doubt they would shut down the the factory for that and if that was the case they would also do it in freemont at the same time which they haven't announced so just come to realization paul that tesla sales are going down significantly despite record discounts despite record incentive and this should be worrying and you should

seek out to avoid that from happening rather than ignore it and just act like it's not happening. We're not Tesla haters for pointing out that Tesla is having problems. I actually argue that the Tesla fans that ignore those problems are the real problem for Tesla because they make people ignore the problem and act like it's not happening. If you don't recognize the problem, you're never going to solve it.

All right. Another fan says a lot of graphs and reports. Those are very good sources coming through are saying Model Y and 3 are now the best selling EVs in Europe and China. Is this true? Can you guys elaborate on this?

Model Y is often going to show up as still the top-selling vehicle in most markets. In China, I don't think it's the top-selling vehicle. I think it's the top-selling premium vehicle. We have to go with the premium segment to claim that. In Europe, I'm sure there's some market. It's the top-selling EVs for sure, maybe top-selling car. But sales are going down. That's the most worrying thing, sales of the best-selling EVs.

EV is going down when EV sales are going up. Up 25%. All right. Moving on from LinkedIn, Pedro Camacho says, the Nissan Leaf is the latest example of car bloat. Thumbs down. I wouldn't say that. It doesn't seem bloaty at all to me. Well, yeah. What do you think he means by bloat? I have no idea. I disagree. Yeah.

Skeptics says, I guess most critics of Starship haven't even written it very much. That's a response to the fans of FSD having driven it. Yeah, the Starship exploded yesterday. I saw that. It was crazy.

EV versus ICE meta-studies are incorrect production emissions figures based on a mountain of early papers about leaf or using flawed greet production emissions estimates from Argonne Labs. Okay. A lot of pollution from EV production is at the ground level, like water runoff from mining. That's terrible, but our real existential threat is from CO2 in the atmosphere, which EVs are better for.

That's a good point. But there's also like when you're manufacturing a big product, there's a lot of transport going into it. So most trucks are oil-based. The trains, sometimes the big cargo shifts, all of that takes into account. You need to take into account too. With regard to reading signs, not saying cameras can't read them, but currently they don't with the possible exception of speed limit signs. Yeah, we mentioned that.

Naxx is on two sides for the Nissan Leaf. That's pretty cool. Okay, if that's the case, because I googled it really quick and I saw the dual port. But if it's on one of each side, that makes sense because then you can have left side Naxx at the back and that's good for supercharging, easy supercharging. Right side, you have the level 2 J1772. That's great for speed parking. Yeah.

Street parking is a big deal. Yeah. Maybe that's the best configuration going forward. Although I wonder if you can even charge level two with NACs. Like if you're at a Tesla destination charger, I wonder if we'll have to look into that more. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good question. But that's interesting because that increased the value of the vehicle quite a bit because that exists. Other vehicles have that, but like the Audi, for example, the Audi A6 and all that, but that's a much more expensive vehicle. Yeah. Like at the lower end, there's not, I don't know, many vehicles that have dual port on each side. Yeah, it's interesting because that is...

Like that's a good configuration. If you can have both sides and use two different types of connectors, that's a pretty good situation. I wonder if Leaf does that because it's a global car and they, you know, they manufacture for Japan and Europe and there's different stuff everywhere. Well, like Carl says, they're clearly unconvinced an accident is guaranteed. I don't know if that's the case because still like the,

the the G1772 is not a CCS port it's just it's just level two port so so so you really much need the the next there for fast charging so I don't I think I think it's more like the value added of having the dual port uh system yeah that makes sense

All right, last one. Kyle Connor talked to Nissan about the charge port situation, and they said it was because the NAX adoption came too late in their development cycle to incorporate it completely. This was a compromise. Well, that's a good compromise. But how is that a compromise? Well, so it sounds like they just added it on instead of subtracting. Yeah, but they did add it completely, though. Maybe it was easier just to add it than to...

to take off the other one. Oh, you remove the other one. Yeah. But, but still it's, it's, it's, it's hiding completely. Like it's a full DC fast charging port. It's like when you get a kidney transplant, they don't remove the old kidney. They just put the other one on top of it. Really? Yeah. That's for real. Wow. I didn't know that. That's nuts. All right. Well, that's it for us this week. We're going to let set, uh, hopefully Micah is okay. And he's, uh, back at his desk soon. Uh,

And I can do the Weedie podcast so you guys can stay on if you want to talk about micromobility with Seth and Micah. Hopefully soon we'll monitor the situation. But that's it for us this week for the Electra podcast. We're going to see you next week. We'll see when because I think next week I'm still in China. It's going to be the last day or two there. We'll see. But I'll keep you updated, everyone. Thanks a lot for joining us. And if you do enjoy the show, please give us a like, a thumbs up, whatever it is on the app. It helps a ton. And we're going to see you next week. Have a good one.

Bye-bye.