Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis. First up, we got the Tesla China Wholesale numbers for July. Coming in at 74117, which means year to date, January through July, the Wholesale number sits at 500700 down 8% over the same time period in 2023. Wholesale combines domestic and exports, and for that metric, this was the second best month of this year. In July of 2023, the number was 64300. Goldman Sachs is predicting the average battery pack costs for 2024 will come in at $115 per kilowatt hour, 23% lower than last year, and they're expecting prices to fall another 20% next year. We have to remember though, from raw material pricing to battery packs to the actual EV costs, there usually is a 6-12 month lag because many of these deals work on contracts. And we know many legacy OEMs trying to sell their first wave of EVs are doing so on the higher end of the spectrum to help out with margins. For June, in the US, the average transaction price for a new EV was $56,400, and the gas-powered average was $48,600.
The analyst said there is a time lag that we need to account for here, and that's why 2024 is still a tough year from an EV demand perspective, but we do see catalysts opening up in 2025 from a demand perspective. Goldman is expecting the price parity for EVs and ICE vehicles to be achieved in the US between 2025 and 2026 as battery prices continue to come down. Keep in mind, this whole idea of price parity has some inherent flaws because who's deciding what parity actually is, but the point they're still relatively broad consensus that battery prices will continue to come down, and eventually, ED prices will follow. Here's the chart for spot lithium. You can see the peak was around November 2022 when the price was around 592,000 yuan per ton. The Chinese market, of course, heavily impacts pricing, and as you can see more recently, the price is all the way down to around 81,000 yuan per ton, which means over the last 20 months or so, lithium prices in the Chinese market are down about 83%. But the context that's often lost in this story, if you zoom out a bit more and go back to 2018, you can see the price levels we have now are much more in line with the historical average if you take out the distortion that happened in 2022 and 2023. The two main things that caused this distortion, one, you had all of the legacy OEMs putting in major battery orders, so the battery producers up to their supply, and then a lot of those legacy OEMs backed out of those contracts and reduced their orders, leaving those battery producers with extra supply.
One factor playing into Tesla's sales at the moment, Holmar said the main issue is money losing compliance EVs are being dumped on the market cheaper than Teslas. Elon also touched on this on the Q2 call and he now said other companies dumping EVs at massive negative gross margin is a problem, but not one that will last. It's not just legacy OEMs that are being forced to slash vehicle prices to actually move that metal, but we still have Hertz unloading tens of thousands of EVs onto the used market this year as well. Backing up, Elon's statement though was what the Ford executives have recently said is that for their next generation of EVs, these smaller vehicles, they are not going to sell them at a loss. At least that's their plan. They've basically been saying if they can't sell them for a profit, they're not going to sell them at all.
Tesla Chan shared a picture of the Tesla megapack factory in Shanghai showing the latest progress. They said the basic foundation skeleton construction is almost done. A sad day for Lynette Lopez as this is no longer just a muddy field and as far as we know, production for this factory is set for Q1 2025. Over the weekend, Elon did a walkthrough of the Tesla super compute cluster at Gigatexis which has a name and its Cortex. This will be around 100,000 H100 and H200s with massive storage for video training of FSD and Optimus. My guess here, based on everything we've heard so far is that this setup will continue for another few weeks and there's a chance that this system can actually begin training sometime in quarter four.
If you'd like to argue that technically it can start doing some level of training by the end of quarter three, be my guest but I think it'll be quarter four before this entire system is up and running and actually humming. As we've been saying for months, Tesla is in the midst of a major compute build out so likely by 2025 when it's up and running. Theoretically, the stage should be set to see some excellent improvements when it comes to the rate of training improvements and thus FSD releases and Optimus updates.
Tesla Tino shared that he was charging his Cybertruck in California at a V4 site which remember is V4 dispenser but they're all still V3 cabinets. At least momentarily he was getting up to 323 kilowatt speeds. Wes, a Cybertruck engineer confirmed Tesla is running a trial on a few different V3 plus stations which means the V3 cabinets and the V4 dispensers saying this is not a bug but it's also not rolled out to all hardware capable stations. Rafael said it stayed above 300 kilowatts for about one minute.
Given that this site is still using V3 cabinets and around 400 volts that means Tesla is testing some higher amperage for the supercharging rates. A hypothetical would be 800 amps times 400 volts is 320,000 watts divided by 1000 would be 320 kilowatts. As a refresher whenever we get V4 cabinets the word is that they'll have maximum power output of 600 kilowatts and a maximum current of 615 amps at 1000 volts. But with this testing that Tesla is doing it appears as though these version 3 or 3.5 cabinets actually have the ability to do a lot more amperage than we've been expecting in the past.
Don't forget with this conversation you have to keep the battery packs in mind and what type of charging speeds they can actually handle and for how long. The takeaway at least for now is that faster charging speeds for the cyber truck may be coming in the weeks ahead to the V4 locations. As far as we know this does not involve a new V4 cabinet for this site it's just Tesla pushing its current V3 cabinets to higher capacities than we originally thought. At least for now it's too soon to say how this may impact all other Tesla vehicles. And remember for now this is still a trial only at a few locations.
On the charging front the Oak Ridge National Lab has just charged a Porsche Taycon at 270 kilowatts wirelessly. They said the receiver fits into the space that Porsche carved out for a potential 11 kilowatt wireless charger on future versions of the Taycon. The low ground clearance Taycon had a 12 centimeter air gap between the receiver and transmitter but they said in a joint project with the UPS the system does work across gaps up to 28 centimeters enough for delivery trucks or semis. Personally I think commercial applications are still a few years away and I think this market will begin for at home charging and lower speeds between 11 and 30 kilowatts. But wireless charging progress is being made with speeds that are more comparable to what we're used to with DC fast charging.
There's always a big debate when it comes to Tesla and brand damage that's been done by Elon and his political antics and Morgan Stanley just put out their annual survey of their 575 interns on auto brand desirability. Tesla's desirability this year dropped to 11% from 14% last year behind Mercedes and BMW. Preference for EVs dropped to 15% with interns preferring ICE vehicles versus EVs nearly 2 to 1. And note the trend Tesla's desirability was down year over year currently it's at 11% but in 2022 it was 19% and in 2021 it was 30%. Yes it's a small sample size but it's also a notable trend. Farzad had a video with Hans and Larry and Larry was providing the argument that Elon if he wants to make a difference in politics should do it more behind the scenes and not so in the public.
My guess is that Larry nor galley will be able to change Elon's behaviors. Elon said that guy Larry doesn't get it. I would prefer to have zero involvement in politics however there's no company success unless civilization itself continues to progress. This insane shift by the left away from a meritocracy in personal liberties like censorship of free speech under the guise of hate speech will be the end of civilization as we know it. We all have our own opinions on this but just so you know this is where Elon is coming from.
Mercedes received approval from Beijing to conduct level 4 autonomous driving tests on its roads and expressways the first international carmaker to get such a permit. Becoming the first international carmaker to obtain such a permit in Beijing. Mercedes said the test will cover maneuvers like parking, U-turns, roundabouts, toll booths as well as changing lanes when the vehicle in front slows down. The latest update on Tesla's approval for FSD making it into customers hands in China is it's likely to be approved by Chinese regulators and enter the Chinese market this year. On the Q2 call Elon said Tesla will soon ask for the regulatory approval for FSD in China supervised. So don't get that approval which we don't have yet confused with the approval we do have from the Ministry of Industry and IT. That group did say that Tesla's employees can begin internal tests of FSD on public roads before opening the system to users in China.
Tesla has now registered for an insurance brokerage in China investing about 6.9 million dollars to get this business set up. It seems like a great time for this move because many of the data collection security concerns that China has had about Tesla historically have been alleviated over the past few months. We saw Tesla's cars are now eligible for government purchases in China. The restrictions were removed after Tesla won an endorsement from the country's top auto industry association that set in April the data collection by Tesla fleets in China was compliant. We also heard Tesla has been developing plans for a data center in China to train the algorithm for FSD. But as of now it's still not clear if Tesla is going to get approval for data transfer out of China back to America or if they're going to be relegated just to a local data center in China. If Tesla is forced into the latter then there will be questions about Tesla's ability to get the chips it needs from companies like Nvidia because of those sanctions that limit the type of chips that Nvidia can send to China.
For now with this Tesla insurance company in China we don't know if it's going to be Tesla's insurance or if this will be more of a partnership model like Tesla would be forced to do with that data center in China it would be in partnership with another company. To confirm I'm not making this up right here it says setting up a data center in China for FSD would require Tesla to work with a Chinese partner. Whistle and Diesel did a torture test of the Cybertruck and yes the F-150 was in the video too but if you ask me they really did not go through the same testing. I've gotten copyright claims from that channel before so I'm not going to risk it but the video will be below if you're interested and luckily AI driver took some great screenshots from the video. As you can see the height of this Cybertruck jump is not the same as the Ford and for the bottom pictures the Cybertruck did actually make it all the way across these pipes and they sent it fully off the end whereas the Ford got stuck before even getting its rear wheels onto the pipes. There were other problems with the video like damage that happened to the Cybertruck bumper here that was never really pointed out then later in the video they tried to pull the F-150 and the bumper actually snapped off and they thought it was just a fault of the Cybertruck but it was clearly already compromised. But overall it's great exposure for the Cybertruck this video in just two days has done over 10 million views and his videos usually do between five and eight million views.
Speaking of Cybertruck exposure Tucker Carlson just put out a nearly one hour video testing the Cybertruck in Maine. I don't think there's anything too ground breaking in here but it'll be below if you're interested. There were some rumors getting picked up that the Model Y project Juniper the refresh would have a battery capacity of 95 kilowatt hours. I just wanted to say for now I would classify this one as false it does not sound like a size Tesla would be looking at for the next gen Model Y. I'm not saying it's totally out of the question I'm just saying I'm going to need a lot more than this. Sawyer got an email saying join us at the Tesla P body for an invite only opportunity to be one of the first to take Cybertruck on a demo drive. Tesla may have production ramped to a level where they feel comfortable doing a little bit of marketing.
说到赛博卡车的曝光,塔克·卡尔森刚刚发布了一段近一小时的视频,在缅因州测试赛博卡车。我认为里面没有什么太突破性的内容,不过如果你感兴趣,可以看下面的链接。有一些传闻说Model Y项目“Juniper”换代版本的电池容量会有95千瓦时。我只是想说,目前我会将这一传闻归类为假的,因为这听起来不像是特斯拉为下一代Model Y考虑的电池容量。我不是说完全不可能,只是需要更多证据来支持这一说法。索耶收到一封邮件,邀请他前往 Tesla P body 参加一个仅限受邀者的活动,这是作为最早试驾赛博卡车的人之一的机会。特斯拉可能已经将产量提升到一个可以放心做一些市场推广的水平。
On Friday Judge McCormick asked Tesla's lawyers why they asked shareholders to vote on Elon's pay package. She said there was no legal precedent for Tesla's decision saying this has never been done before asking Tesla's lawyers there's no Delaware law on this correct Tesla's lawyer acknowledged there was no exact precedent for having shareholders overturn a judge's decision in similar cases. In court Judge McCormick seemed less concerned by what shareholders knew than by the prospect of investor votes that overturned trial judgments. The real question is whether stockholders can ratify in a judicated breach of the duty of loyalty. She asked lawyers for Tesla and its directors if shareholder votes aimed at overturning a ruling could occur at any time in the legal process when does it end in your world.
Basically arguing if a future ruling goes against Tesla will Tesla then be able to just hold a shareholder vote to overturn it. Which on the surface seems fair I guess but in this case the entire case originally rested on the fact that this vote was not fully informed at least that was the argument. But there were some concerns that if this goes in Tesla's favor then that would give Tesla the ability to exploit the legal system in the future. For now it's not clear if Judge McCormick will change her ruling and when she'll respond to the arguments made on Friday. She did however say her ruling would not bar Tesla's board from awarding Elon a new pay deal after the move to Texas. But as we heard Tesla executive say if they have to go that route it's going to be more expensive for Tesla.
Lucid reported its Q2 financials and their loss from operations came in at $787.4 million which was down from quarter to last year which was $837.7 million. More importantly though Lucid's revenue was actually up year over year to $200.6 million from $150.9 million. But on that higher revenue Lucid was able to drop its cost of revenue or cost of goods sold from $555.8 million to $470.4 million. Plenty of work still to do but some progress is being made. However Lucid's net loss was about $26 million higher than it was in quarter to of last year. Doing the math Lucid lost about $330,800 per vehicle roughly $20,000 better than quarter one. On the call Peter Rawlinson said we're planning an OTA software update that'll significantly enhance our 8-ass including the introduction of hands free highway assist, lane change assist, curb rash assist and more. We're making a big push on many aspects of our user interface software. Lucid also announced a new $1.5 billion investment from the Saudi public investment fund.
Tesla energy put out a video saying Powerwall 3 can be built every 25 seconds or roughly 700,000 per year to which Elon said this is a really great product. Took three major iterations as usual to get something great. You may have gotten an email from Tesla saying starting October of this year sales tax for EVs in New Jersey is going up from 0% to 3.31%. Elon has decided to revive his lawsuit against chat, GPT and OpenAI. He's saying their firm put profits in commercial interests ahead of the public good. The lawsuit seeks a judicial determination that OpenAI's license to Microsoft to use its AI models is null and void. Elon also contends the language models are outside the scope of OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft. And even more exposure for the Cybertruck, a very popular streamer, Aiden Ross did an interview with Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago and out front, he pulled up in a Cybertruck with a pretty interesting rap. During part of the stream, they did go outside and actually ended up getting in the Cybertruck listening to some music and Trump had some positive words about Elon.
Nothing new just that he's a good guy and very creative. Tesla's stock closed the day at $198.88 down 4.23% while the Nasdaq was down 3.43%. Surprisingly, it was a lower volume day for Tesla trading about 20 million shares below the average volume the past 30 days. If you'd like an update on what happened last week, just check the pinned comment. I hope you guys have a wonderful day, please like the video if you did, you can find me on X-linked below and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.