Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Dylan Lumaise. So, Elon just said Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14th. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter. And maybe eventually we get a slightly discounted annual rate for those that don't want a monthly fee, but Elon did specify monthly. As a shareholder, this is exactly what you want. This will undoubtedly lead to better profitability for Tesla in the long run. But of course, as a consumer, there's some segments of Tesla owners now and in the future that would have been better served by an FSD outright, an option that will no longer exist in 30 days.
So, clearly, Tesla wants to own FSD in our unsupervised future and everyone else is going to be effectively renting it from Tesla. And I'll just say for me, I do care a lot more about Tesla stock and Tesla's profitability over the next 10 years of my life than paying whatever the monthly amount ends up at. I'm not saying everybody should feel this way, of course, it depends on how much Tesla stock you own. I'm just making my personal priorities clear. And from that perspective, this is far and away, the superior, much easier option for Tesla.
And I do understand why some people would argue FSD should come with every Tesla vehicle purchase and just be built into the purchase price. But there's absolutely no way Tesla's going to do that. With the tech, they've spent a decade getting right, they've spent tens of billions of dollars on, and with the tech that's hopefully going to unlock a multi-trillion dollar valuation for the company. And going that route would, of course, raise the price of Tesla vehicles and thus raise the bar for people to get into a Tesla in the first place, which, in my opinion, is not a good idea.
But the payback period for buying FSD outright is 6.7 years, that's 80 monthly payments of $100 a month. But some will mistakenly say if you own your car longer than 6.7 years, you would be wise to buy FSD. But the problem is that completely overlooks the time value of money, meaning if you were to invest $8,000 in the stock market and get an average 8% return every year for 6.7 years, you'd end up with $13,400. So the opportunity cost is actually materially higher when you make upfront payments like that. Meaning in that scenario, you could pay the $100 monthly fee for 6.7 years and still have $5,400 thanks to your investment, which would make the time you need to own your car even longer, maybe closer to 10 years for that payback period.
So I think you get the picture there, and let's not forget about Elon's new incentive award, 10 million active FSD subscriptions as a milestone. I'm pretty confident saying outright FSD purchases would not count toward that because of Tesla's wording on the website. It has always referred to subscriptions and purchases as distinct features not interchangeable. So I'm guessing that's a part of this whole scenario as well. And there will be a number of consumers that don't care as much about the math, they just hate the idea of software as a service, and this subscription model culture that we live in, and I understand that.
And this means Tesla no longer has to deal with FSD transfers that Elon very clearly did not like doing for whatever reason. But on that point, I'll say this, I really hope Tesla does something for the early adopters, especially those in Europe who have paid full price, and to date have gotten very little in return thanks to regulations. So even if the free FSD transfer goes away beyond this new February 14th deadline, I do think those folks should get one more free FSD transfer even after that. I think it would be the right thing for Tesla to do to say thank you for the early adopters supporting the mission.
Personally, I'm not reading too far into the date of February 14th, it could just be someone arbitrary as it's one month from today. Plus, it'll work out well for Tesla to recognize much of the revenue from trade-ins and upgrades and FSD purchases in Q1. We know Elon doesn't really care about quarterly performance, but this should be at least a slight boost to Tesla's Q1 profitability in what's expected to be a week quarter.
But yes, I would absolutely take this as a signal that Tesla feels it is one step closer to getting too true unsupervised. Not that us customers will be free of liability in our cars in the next few weeks, but in general, just a step that Tesla has to take before that ever happens because Tesla knows when unsupervised ships, everything is going to change and they will be inundated with demand when the word spreads. All I know for sure, this likely will not be the last pricing change we see.
There will almost certainly be a difference in pricing for consumers versus people operating on the commercial side, and if and when customers begin earning revenue with their cars, I think things will change. That is likely sometime away as Tesla would have to validate all of those customer-owned cars going on the network to ensure a minimum standard of cleanliness and reliability. And yes, I think it would be great if there was a usage-based fee for FSD because someone like myself that works from home and rarely drives doesn't get that much value from FSD compared to somebody that commutes an hour every day for work.
Because if I wasn't hosting this channel and wanting to get the content to test the latest software, $100 a month to drive maybe 100 miles a month to play pickleball is just not a great value. But a pricing setup like that brings with it a lot more complication for Tesla and unpredictable revenue, so I'm not going to speculate I'll leave that to everybody else, but I do think this is Tesla getting everything in place and ensuring the foundation is set before we have the floodgates of unsupervised opening up.
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I did watch the full two and a half hour hearing from yesterday on that federal framework for autonomous vehicles on repairability of vehicles on NHTSA and FMVSS exemptions and overall safety. I'll say this, I am encouraged that almost everyone at the hearing spoke with urgency about passing a federal framework for AVs and they understand why it's needed and there's a healthy fear of losing the self-driving race to China.
But there is certainly some concern in the industry and there's still a lot that needs to be worked out before these bills, specifically the self-drive act, can pass both chambers and be signed into law. So here are a few of the most important clips. Do you talk about the vehicle cap and the in the duration of the exemption the shock clock? Yeah, thank you for that specifically. The exemption process is a critical program for getting new safety technologies into the market.
The problem is the program isn't being used as much as it was used in the past because it's become opaque, unpredictable and to your point the caps on the number of vehicles and the length of those exemptions make it almost an unusable program for the industry right now and we think it's a critical one for new innovative safety technologies.
Well what concerns me is the big ugly law electric vehicle incentives and we also have a 25% cut to Knitza staff. So this is something as we're helping lift up AVs, EVs and hybrids are getting cast aside and that's that's concerning to me given the the popularity of them. Mr. Brooks, I want to talk a little bit about redundancy. You know in a lot of these autonomous vehicles, we have both cameras, radar and light arm.
We do a lot of light arm research in central Florida. How critical is it when you have bad weather, obstructions like small children or debris and expanding the range and improving the accuracy as if for to have that that threefold redundancy in these sensor systems? It's very critical and I think a lot of the issues we have seen with level two vehicles, particularly Tesla is their inability to distinguish during distinguished you know crash events and potential crash events when there is a low light conditions when you know we've seen them this flashing lights we've seen them unable to detect emergency responders and fire trucks and vehicles with you know that are pretty obvious to most of us.
Now are there manufacturers that are using all three of these redundancies because I know that we see that in in in beep and in Waymo and some of these others. Yes and you know Waymo is is is operating at a much higher level of autonomy than Tesla would be. You know Waymo's aren't requiring human drivers to take over at a moment's notice when a problem occurs. So when we're talking about minimum standards this redundancy of having multiple different types of sensors is critical.
This right here is a prime example in my opinion of regulatory overreach where these people take things too far. In what world should we be relying on Mr. Brooks to tell us what we need on these vehicles in terms of a sensor suite? For me I'd rather defer to Elon and a joke and Tesla's AI team. Not the head of a consumer advocacy non-profit that's focused on vehicle safety. And further I hate when they talk in generalities like what Mr. Brooks said about Tesla not recognizing emergency vehicles. Well is he not in the know about how well it's doing with emergency vehicles now because talking about Tesla's technology from two three four five years ago is not that relevant to where it is today.
在我看来,这是一个监管过度的典型例子,这些人做得太过分了。我们为什么要依赖布鲁克斯先生来告诉我们这些车辆需要什么样的感应系统?我更愿意相信埃隆(马斯克)和特斯拉的 AI 团队,而不是一个专注于车辆安全的消费者权益倡导非营利组织的负责人。此外,我讨厌他们用笼统的语言讲话,比如布鲁克斯先生关于特斯拉无法识别应急车辆的说法。他难道不了解特斯拉现在对应急车辆的处理情况吗?因为讨论特斯拉两三四五年前的技术,对其现在的水平其实没有那么大意义。
Currently I believe the insurance institute for highway safety has noted that eight-ass features don't really have any proven safety benefits at the moment. Which is something that could change for things like lane keeping assistance and other things in the future. But for now I think you know it's another area where I think we need a lot more data collection and research to be able to make a determination. I mean there you have it. This guy just said that eight-ass features don't have any proven safety benefits. So listen yes you can poke some holes in the safety data that Tesla shares itself but to go as far as saying that eight-ass features offer no proven safety benefits is the height of absurdity in my opinion.
And it's guys like this making statements like that that our lawmakers are relying on for guidance with these bills. And at a minimum it will force our committee to deal with a real problem. Autonomous vehicles particularly Waymos are showing early safety benefit but lack of coherent federal framework to operate within. At best the self-drive act could create a single set of federal rules for safety for safely deploying AVs across the country while leaving room for local innovation. Like any draft bill it needs improvements that's expected but we shouldn't use that as an excuse to do nothing.
All of us should ask those hard questions we'll look at the facts and make changes to improve the bill where needed. So I want to focus on areas where the self-drive act could could be a little bit better. The bill's main tool is something called a safety case. Basically a report arguing an autonomous vehicle is safe. Mr. Brooks are the safety case requirements in the self-drive act strong enough and if not what other information should be required. The safety case requirements in the self-drive act are a little problematic for us mainly because they trigger the preemptive effect of the act but also the safety cases are essentially an autonomous vehicle manufacturer doing their homework in secret.
You know there's no requirement in the self-drive act for the safety cases to be submitted routinely in any form or reported to the secretary of the DOT or to NITSA. There's no real oversight of that process and even you know when the safety case structure is put together and rule a rule is made by the department around it you know there's some optional features that don't have to be included in the safety case that are difficult for us to understand why they're optional. For instance one of them is around software upgrades and hardware updates. You would think that that would be a critical component of any safety case because hardware upgrades and particularly software updates are taking place all the time in autonomous vehicles and to have that sitting out there as an optional portion of a safety case it makes no sense to us.
I'll have a link to the full video below but my biggest concern coming away from this is NITSA. Its staff has been cut by 25% and it sounds like it's already understaffed and I know it's under trained on AI and software defined vehicles and further many of these conversations at the hearing were people saying that NITSA needs to do this and test this and set standards for this and much of it will be tough like ensuring regulations for aftermarket modifications and repairs to cars to make sure that they don't impact these driver assistance features think in terms of overall vehicle weight and vision and calibration.
In the self-drive act there's a provision that requires NITSA to publish a final rule by September 30th 2027. That to establish new FMDSS and would mandate AV makers detail safety cases for every version of their cars which is basically demonstrating the systems are capable and safe. Another slight concern I have is that the witnesses at the hearing stressed how this federal framework preempting of state law would be limited but sadly they did not go into detail so we'll have to wait and see exactly how limited it will be and what authority the states will still have even if a federal framework is passed.
So my guess is we'll get a revised version of the self-drive act that could be passed toward the end of 2026. At that time some mandates like preempting conflicting state laws and upping the exemption cap to 90,000 from 2500 could go into effect immediately but NITSA will need anywhere from a few months to a year that September deadline to adjust the FMDSS the federal motor vehicle safety standards for automated driving. The hope is when that's done purpose-built autonomous vehicles can comply with the new standards through self-certification which would then eliminate the need for those exemptions in most cases.
So the 90,000 exemption cap in the self-drive act can be thought of like a bridge until we get to the new FMDSS but overall we finally have movement we have some bipartisan agreement we have Trump and Elon as very pro innovation so while there will be a lot of work behind the scenes still to happen it's shaping up like regulations will not be a serious limiting factor for Tesla.
Tesla will start CyberCab production in April and likely ramp pretty slowly at first. It'll take most of 2026 for Tesla to get production of the CyberCab to around a thousand a month if I had to guess and who knows what Tesla's robot taxi fleet size will look like at that point but there are enough states where Tesla can scale with the Model Y and CyberCab as it sees fit up to that 2500 exemption limit before any new bill gets passed and then we get that exemption hopefully toward the end of this year freeing Tesla up for 2027 and then it's off to the races for 2028 and beyond.
As Marco reported Tesla has a massive new supercharger expansion coming to FireBock, California. Tesla was granted a conditional use permit for the addition of 232 stalls north of the existing site and this expansion will also feature 16 new semi-chargers. Thus when it's all said and done this site will have 304 charging stalls 288 for cars and 16 for Tesla semis. Previously the biggest Tesla charging location in the world had 164 stalls also in California.
Here's the pin for FireBock California on a map in Fresno County. Max from Tesla said projects like FireBock are years in the making and happen in coordination with the utility and jurisdiction. It takes long term forecasting planning and flexibility decelerating and accelerating based on demand but Tesla charging will keep up with EV adoption.
People were wondering why this location they thought it seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere but looking up the address of the site and plugging that in you'll see it is directly off of Interstate 5 or i5 and obviously Tesla knows better than anyone else where it needs more charging availability. And of course it'll be a very popular route for Tesla semis and other EV trucks going up and down the west coast.
Tesla started rolling out fsd14.2.2.3 to the early access group, no updated release notes. The early feedback is that the navigation is still goofy. I have watched and read almost all of the reviews about it that are out there so far and it's pretty tough to find any real noticeable changes. Dirty Tesla did note an improvement in parking lot behavior not going down a one way that .2.2.2 did but with a small dot release like this it's likely going to be hard to tell real concrete differences especially with limited testing out there right now.
The 7-seat interior option is finally available for an extra $2,500. At least for now the 7-seat option is only available for the premium all-wheel drive variant. You can also now choose a 20-inch dark gray helix wheel option for $2,000 and for all premium trims and above the headliner has finally changed to black the gray is gone. And just like we saw in China for the premium trims and above the screen is now bigger at 16 inches up from 15.4 inches in the prior variants. So I think most people would still prefer testlages bring the Model Y L to the United States as the only people getting in the regular Model Y third row are likely to be children. So it's nice to have the option I suppose but we want the Model Y L and really I think most people want a proper three row SUV but it doesn't look like we're going to get that anytime soon.
7座内饰选项终于开放,需额外支付2,500美元。不过,目前7座配置仅适用于高级全轮驱动车型。现在可以选择20英寸深灰色螺旋轮毂,价格为2,000美元。此外,所有高级配置及更高版本的车顶内衬已更换为黑色,灰色款已不再提供。正如我们在中国市场看到的那样,高级配置及更高版本的屏幕尺寸从之前的15.4英寸增大到了16英寸。因此,我认为大多数人仍然希望特斯拉能将Model Y L引入美国,因为只有孩子可能会乘坐常规Model Y的第三排座位。虽然有这个选择是好的,但大家真正希望的是一款合适的三排SUV,只是看起来短期内可能还无法实现。
Waymo expanded its Geofence in Austin and now it sits at 133 square miles whereas Tesla is still at 243 square miles. There is a new study out there floating around from the Pro EV group EVs for all America but I just want to say this is based on about 600 respondents so an incredibly small sample size. But a few of the main points for what it's worth in 2023 a majority of Republican voters 59% agreed EVs are for people who see the world differently than they do. But fast forward two years by November last year only 49% of Republicans agreed with that sentiment. Hence the headline Republicans are finally warming up to electric cars. But we still have 48% of Republicans saying they will probably never buy an EV. One takeaway EVs are perceived by GOP consumers not as vehicles but as statements particularly on climate policy which is just part of why I really do hate politics and the politicization of Tesla is one of the most unfortunate outcomes that we've had.
Of people seriously interested in buying an EV in the next year or so only 54% have a favorable view of Tesla. So again a very small sample size not all Republicans and Democrats are the same across the aisle so I'm not sure we can extrapolate this too much to the broader population. Today the Euro NCAP just put out a new press release talking about the best in class cars tested in 2025. The highest scoring car was the Mercedes Ben's CLA which topped the small family car category and earned the title of best performer of 2025. The other top performers the Mini Cooper E the Tesla Model 3 the Model Y the smart number five and the Pulse Star 3. The updated Model 3 remains a leader in safety the electric family car achieved high scores across the board and particularly impressed in child occupant protection.
对未来一年左右打算购买电动车的人中,只有54%对特斯拉持积极看法。不过,这只是一个很小的样本,不是所有的共和党人和民主党人都有相同的看法,因此我不确定我们能否将这结果过多地推测到更广泛的人群中。今天,欧洲新车评估计划(Euro NCAP)发布了一份关于2025年最佳车型的新闻稿。其中得分最高的是梅赛德斯-奔驰CLA,它在小型家庭车类别中名列榜首,并获得了2025年最佳表现者的称号。其他表现优异的车型有Mini Cooper E、特斯拉Model 3、Model Y、智己5号和Polestar 3。更新后的Model 3在安全性方面仍处于领先地位,尤其是在儿童乘员保护方面取得了高分,表现十分出色。
Its safety assists score shows Tesla's continued improvement of driver assistance safety features. And on the Model Y reinforcing Tesla's dual category victory this year the company's best-selling Model Y proved the gold standard for small SUVs specifically excelling in child occupant protection and safety assist tests. If you're wondering how the CLA beat out Tesla well the CLA scored 94% for adult occupant 89 for child occupant 93% for VR use vulnerable road users and 85% for safety assist and the Model Y was 91% for adult 93% for child 86% for VR use and 92% for safety assist so for VR use it was the CLA's new pop-up hood that gave it the edge. There are sensors in the front bumper that detect when the car hits a pedestrian and in milliseconds you have these actuators that lift the rear edge of the hood up by about 2 to 4 inches and the idea is to create extra crumple space between the pedestrian's head or body and the hard parts of the engine under the hood.
So the Mercedes might be better if you hit somebody but the Tesla might be better at avoiding hitting somebody. Samsung is now going to start supplying 5G modem chips to Tesla. The development of this cellular connectivity chip reportedly started in 2024 and ended last year. Tesla has been using Qualcomm's 5G modem chips but will now switch to Samsung's. The word is Tesla does not want to depend on components made in China and Taiwan so it's switching to suppliers who can make components in South Korea or the USA. And as we've said, Tesla has been deepening its ties with Samsung in more ways than one. Samsung recently signed that 16.5 billion dollar deal with Tesla to make AI 6. Those chips are set to be made at the factory in Taylor, Texas. And Samsung is making some of Tesla's AI 5 chips using the 4nm process node in the US.
And the expectation is Samsung's AI 6 chip will be on the 2nm process. Tesla released a nice new video of the lithium refinery in action. As far as we know, the word is that Tesla is still using an acid-free refining process which is one of the first in the industry to do so. So it avoids certain chemicals, it ultimately reduces costs, and it just produces more environmentally friendly by-products. It was December 2024 where Tesla officially started operations and testing by feeding raw materials through the kiln for the first time. And now the facility is designed to produce enough battery-grade lithium hydroxide for enough batteries for about 1 million EVs per year. And it's the first Spodjamene 2 lithium hydroxide refinery in North America.
Road 1, a logistics provider has added its first Tesla Semi-2 its fleet. But it's just the first of a planned edition of 10 of Tesla's Class 8 Semi's to serve the Oakland, California market. The first Tesla Semi has already been in commercial operations for Road 1 for a few months, hauling heavy aluminum loads between its facility and Oakland and Tesla's Fremont factory. Road 1 said the truck is meeting and beating expectations for performance and efficiency. They also said the Semi has been operating at 1.9 kilowatt hours per mile with payloads averaging 38,000 pounds.
Road 1 manages inventories of aluminum and steel coils and runs continuous operations to keep Tesla's stamping operations supplied without interruption. And as you've seen on the screen, the Metgod and the Wilderness YouTube channel spotted the new Tesla Semi testing on the Fremont track. With the updated light bar going all the way across the front, which I am a big fan of, and we should start to see production ramping of the Semi in the month ahead. And hopefully we get at least a quick update on this on the Q4 call.
Tesla's stock closed the day at $439.20 down 1.79% while the NDX was down 1.07%. The volume was 20% below the average. Don't forget to check out the link below if you want to fight back against those data brokers selling your information. Hope you all have a wonderful day and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.