Welcome to ElectroFide, it's your host Dylan Lumis, quickshadow to Ryan W and Marike Gike. Thank you for using my Tesla referral link and congratulations on your new Teslas. Pilot put out a new press release today about a new partnership with Tesla, which fun fact is the nation's largest operator of travel centers, and this partnership is to install Tesla semi-chargers. The stations will be built at select pilot locations along i5, i10, and several major corridors. The first sites are expected to open summer 2026, and construction of these Tesla semi-chargers will begin the first half of this year at select locations across California, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas. Each location will host four to eight charging stalls and will leverage Tesla's V4 cabinet charging tech, delivering up to that 1.2 megawatts of power at each stall.
The network will initially focus on providing charging infrastructure for Tesla semi-trucks, but in the future it may be expanded to be compatible with heavy duty EVs from other manufacturers. Tesla said the majority of a semi-trucks 500 mile range can be recovered in a 30 minute charging session, matching a normal mandated break period for professional drivers. So great news to hear that Tesla is going to have a very strong partner building out the semi-charging network across the country. And finally, with this partnership, the East Coast is set to get some locations as well. Field Truby said it's interesting that only Tesla semi's will be able to use them. Tesla uses the MCS plug standard, so in theory any other EV that can use MCS should be compatible. Dan Priestley from Tesla replied to that saying other EVs will be able to use these assuming they're equipped with MCS and ensure interoperability with charging equipment.
So the focus for now is of course on the Tesla semi because that's what's entering production and is expected to hit high volume before anybody else. But if and when other companies put their electric semi's on the road with MCS, they will be able to use these as well. I'm sure many of you somewhat understand the scale of Pilot, but they serve about 1.2 million guests every day across over 900 locations in 44 states and 5 Canadian provinces. And of course those routes mentioned, the i5 and i10 are not arbitrary, those are very critical routes for early adopters of the Tesla semi like PepsiCo. And frankly outside of producing the semi itself the biggest hurdle right now by far for electric semi adoption is very clearly the lack of public reliable ubiquitous semi charging.
And once again Tesla being the first mover here is going to get access to all of the prime real estate in the highest demand areas. And now with Pilot announcing this partnership publicly you would expect some other big name customers to also be looking to Tesla for something similar as well. And listen I know right now everyone is enthralled with the cybercab and optimists and unsupervised for the fleet but do not forget about unsupervised on the Tesla semi. It'll be another few years before this becomes a reality. But the fact is globally this really is another trillion dollar business line for Tesla that most people right now have forgotten about and are overlooking.
And last week Tesla charging shared a new supercharger location went up in Taylor'sville Utah. But it's a little extra exciting because Max from Tesla said this one goes to 500 kilowatts powered by the V4 cabinet. So finally we're getting some of these true V4 sites live out in the wild. Max from Tesla commented on the slow rollout saying Gigan Yorkline is spooling up and folks are working weekends slow at first then all at once the V4 cabinet is an awesome product. So as of now there are only two or three true V4 sites live in the wild but hopefully over the next few weeks that number rises quickly.
Now of course the primary benefits of these true V4 sites will be for cyber truck up to 500 kilowatts speeds and the semi at 1.2 megawatts. The sexy lineup fleet will still be stuck around 250 kilowatts. But really one of the bigger points here is that the V4 cabinets are said to be cheaper to deploy than the outgoing V3 or 3.5 sites. And remember a big part of that is because each V4 cabinet will support eight stalls which was up from only four stalls previously meaning you can have the number of cabinets for the same number of stalls. And they'll have roughly a three times higher power density which yes will be paired with faster deployments overall.
Today we had Obey, which is an app that aggregates real-time pricing and pick up times for many different ride hailing services, just published a new report. And now unlike the report from last year Tesla is in the mix. The data covers November 27th last year to January 1st this year. And during that time it covered 94,348 rides from Weimo, Tesla, Uber and Lyft. The transparent bars on the left are for March and April and the solid bars on the right are for November and December which means Lyft's pricing has gone up, Uber's pricing has gone up, Weimos has come down and Tesla is just getting started. But the takeaway Tesla's average price per ride is currently coming in right around $7.50. Whereas Weimo is right around $20, Uber is right around $17 and Lyft sitting at about $16. So based on this data Tesla is already over 50% cheaper than the competition.
So while Tesla's Robotaxies are significantly less, the other side of the coin is that the wait times are some of the longest in the industry. The average price of a Tesla ride hail they should say in San Francisco they can't use Robotaxie there was $8.17 and rarely exceeded $10 per trip. And they said that's way cheaper than the next cheapest option which was Lyft at $15.47 per ride. Tesla was averaging $1.99 per kilometer, the lowest figure of that category Obi had ever seen in its reporting. Compare that to Weimo at $5.72 per kilometer. They said Weimo is now in average of 12.7% more expensive than Uber and 27.3% more expensive than Lyft. They did call out these numbers are not true apples to apples comparisons I think most of us here understand that Tesla's fleet size is delimited only operating in a few cities. But all of this will pose another question that Wall Street is certainly asking how long can Tesla keep up this aggressive pricing.
And I'd say for a company with 40 billion on the balance sheet and continually generating positive free cash flow they can keep it up for quite a while. And then for the wait times Tesla's average was 15.3 minutes considerably higher than the competition. And Weimo's average was 5.7 minutes. Obi surveyed 2,000 people from California, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona. The enthusiasm and comfortability with robot taxis has been increasing a lot. The last survey only 35% were comfortable, that number has now jumped to 63%. And 45% of those respondents cited the high cost for the competition as a concern. But despite those encouraging numbers over 50% of respondents still cited safety as a persistent worry and 47% said they're concerned about possible safety failures. So those are just some numbers on trends that we've already known about anecdotally for months.
Antic notes that have been shared by people like George who said a 7 minute wait it was $1.95 for a robot taxi ride compared to $13. And for the robot taxi service in Austin over the weekend where the winter storm rolled through Tesla did shut down operations around 1pm and then opened it back up later that night around 8.30. But then David said the service has been offline since that last ride and to confirm Weimo has been offline longer. And that post was as of Sunday morning. And important data point David took 39 robot taxi rides in Austin the past few days and zero of them were unsupervised. So clearly most of the fleet is still indeed supervised.
But as of Sunday afternoon the service was back open despite the very icy ice rink like conditions. And David did say even though Tesla shut down the robot taxi service for a few hours over the weekend robot taxis were still out on the roads likely collecting data. And there's been a lot of controversy about if these robot taxi model wise are actually stock we know that technically they're not we've known about the GPS and extra communications hardware to connect to the remote operations in the back of the vehicle. But there have been some other changes now too as the side repeater cameras now have automatic washers. And yes I would guess that in time this feature will roll out to the general fleet as well.
截至周日下午,尽管道路上的冰层如同溜冰场般光滑,服务已经重新开放。David 表示,尽管特斯拉在周末暂停了几小时的机器人出租车服务,但这些车仍然在路上行驶,可能是在收集数据。关于这些机器人出租车(特别是 Model Y)的所有权是否归属于个人的争议很多。我们知道,从技术上讲它们不属于私人所有,因为它们内置了 GPS 和额外的通信设备,可以连接到车辆后部的远程操作系统。此外,现在也有了一些新变化,比如侧面摄像头具备了自动清洗功能。我猜想,这项功能最终也会推广到整个车队。
But already on the customer fleet we have some other hardware changes too. If you have a new model wide performance and you want to figure out how to talk you've hardware 4.5 there's a little pull tab right here just pull the down and if you look right in here you'll see the label I should say hardware 4.5. The past few days there's been a lot of speculation that this hardware 4.5 is bringing a third system on chip setup. People are talking about things like boosting compute power and improving redundancy. But for now as far as I can tell that is just speculation I know green the only has seen things in the firmware in the past that would hint that's a possibility.
But personally I'm not yet ready to say that there's a third system on chip for these cars with hardware 4.5 that are now shipping to customers. And this photo was shared of the additional vehicle information for one of these vehicles with hardware 4.5. But in the car it's still saying FSD computer 4 which means so far there really isn't anything customer facing that might be different with this hardware 4.5. I did find this text thread with a Tesla representative the customer was asking about the manufacturing date for hardware 4.5 which is listed in the parts catalog for $2,300 and the Tesla rep said it looks like those chips were installed on vehicles at the beginning of this month. So it would be safe to say any new build will have the latest hardware 4. But as always with this in the past we have seen Tesla reps get things wrong and have conflicting information so you cannot treat this as gospel.
And just to confirm here's that screenshot car computer hardware 4.5 unit price $2,300. And there have also been images like this of new model wise with a new front camera housing on the windshield which has a different enclosure than the outgoing models which we're thinking will help with the off-gassing and it's been those vapors that are rising getting trapped in this housing leading to condensation and this hazy like film or residue that can sometimes include the cameras. So obviously with this new design that is shipping on customer vehicles now this new housing is very similar to what we've seen on the cyber cab and what we're seeing in many robotaxi builds.
And the idea is that it's going to block this cabin air exchange and ultimately prevent those vapors from getting into the enclosure. So the customer fleet right now is getting some of these robotaxi updates but not all. We still have not seen any side repeater camera washers on the customer fleet. And per the usual I could speculate about what hardware 4.5 is going to bring but right now we just don't know exactly what it's connected to. So let me be very clear here this whole hardware 4.5 could be nothing more than just some minor hardware changes that ultimately are just cost savings for Tesla and don't really change anything about the car for the customer.
And for whatever it's worth so far most of these hardware 4.5s have been in model-wide performance vehicles. So just know right now globally Tesla is in the midst of a decent amount of hardware changes for both the robotaxi and customer fleet. We now have all model-wide trims from Gigaburlin that do officially come with a bigger 16-inch QHD screen including the standard model-wide but so far in the US the standard model-wide is stuck with a 15.4 inch screen.
And yes I'd be comfortable saying whether it's days, weeks, or months eventually that will change in the US. Meaning in the US sometime soon I would expect the model-wide standard to get the bigger 16-inch screen too. And Tesla has also been updating the interior ambient light strips from a silver color now to a gray black color. And I know that for the average person these changes don't mean that much but for people like you and I who like being in the weeds and following all of this tech stuff this is why I would say be cautious buying a Tesla right now. Clearly Tesla is in the process of figuring out exactly what hardware is going to be needed to get to unsupervised.
And just like it always does it's not going to roll out everything at once because we have to remember the supply chains need time to spin up. So factory by factory model by model we'll start to see all of these changes. And I know it can be frustrating as a Tesla owner. I myself have an AI for a car but I have no front bumper camera, I have the gray interior headliner, I have the outdated front camera housing and so on. But with all that said my hope is that once Tesla knows exactly what is needed for unsupervised then a lot of these micro changes like this will have largely been figured out and not that Tesla will get stagnant.
就像往常一样,这些变化不会一次性全部推出,因为我们必须记住供应链需要时间来运转。所以会逐步在各个工厂、各种车型间实现这些变更。作为特斯拉车主,我明白这种等待是令人沮丧的。我自己有一辆配备 AI 的汽车,但没有前保险杠摄像头,车顶内衬是灰色的,前摄像头外壳也过时了等等。不过,尽管如此,我希望一旦特斯拉明确了实现无人监督驾驶所需的具体条件,这些微小的变更基本上都能得到解决,同时特斯拉不会因此而停滞不前。
But flurries of changes like this that we can't make full sense of I think will be less likely. So I'll certainly keep a close eye on what's going on with hardware 4.5 and all of these changes to separate what's just opinion and speculation and what's fact. At this point I really hope all of you know who Alex Honnold is. If not please check out his Netflix special type A101 and then do not miss the documentary free solo. It's some of the most fascinating and inspiring stuff you'll see.
And I'll just say it, I think what Alex did on L Capitan is the most impressive athletic performance maybe ever. It's at least in the conversation when you consider what it took mentally and physically. It's just nuts. And guess what? Alex has said that AG1 is a part of his healthy morning routine. He said quote, it helps me feel generally well, sick less often, fewer stomach issues, etc. And this man plays the game at the highest level. So if AG1 is his go to then I'm quite encouraged about the 75 plus quality vitamins minerals and nutrients being in my routine as well. So don't just take it for me but there are reasons why it's my multivitamin probiotic support, superfoods, stress adaptogens and immune and cognitive support in one daily scoop.
Now with different flavors, it's a quick easy way to get my nutritional baseline. So if you want to support the channel in this way, you may not have that opportunity much longer. No promises, but you can use my link below to get a free AG1 flavor sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors. Plus a free vitamin D3K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. It's drinkag1.com slash electrified or you can use the QR code on the screen.
Tesla has told workers during a town hall recently that it plans to begin collecting data to train optimists at the Austin Gigafactory. Tesla is looking to train optimists how to operate in the Texas facility, adding it was targeting a February start date. The optimist data collectors in Fremont are typically kept separate from the general factory workers to avoid interfering with output. And there in Fremont the data collectors have recorded themselves organizing vehicle parts and working on conveyor belts. The videos are then used to teach optimists how to mimic the same movements.
Full disclosure, this article is from business insider, but they said Tesla's optimist trainers are outfitted with large helmets with cameras that point in several directions. The helmet is attached to a heavy backpack which can be unwieldy at times. Tesla has experimented with a lighter fanny pack setup, but it's unclear if Tesla will use that in the factory data collection. The town hall also covered non-optimist developments. The company is working on updating several production lines and construction will continue to be ongoing at the factory.
Naturally, I would love to think that Tesla will be getting optimist ready to train on the new Unboxed CyberCab manufacturing lines. Obviously not so they're ready to start in April when CyberCab production starts, but for whenever the time comes and optimists is ready, whether it's later this year or into 2027, we've talked a lot in the past about how optimists should be well suited to work on this new Unboxed manufacturing method. And maybe, just maybe, that's exactly what Tesla will start training for in February. As we know, just two months out, Tesla is definitely gearing up for CyberCab production in Austin.
Now, just briefly on the autopilot and FSD situation people have been talking about it for a few days, everyone wants to know if you spend $8,000 on FSD outright right now, will that lock you in for unsupervised when it ships? A Tesla rep said in this conversation that was shared when the unsupervised version becomes available, you will not be charged any additional fee for that upgrade if you've paid the $8,000 for FSD already. But again, just because one Tesla rep said it does not make it a fact.
And further, would a chat like this be legally binding in the future? I'm not sure. Here's my main concern with all of this. I think most people are thinking, well, if I pay for FSD now, I'll have unsupervised for the life of that vehicle. And maybe that's the case, but my question becomes what about on the insurance side? Because don't forget, when unsupervised ships that actually means Tesla is taking the liability. And for a long time, I've thought Tesla would be the company to self-insure unsupervised.
So do we really think Tesla is going to take on all of that insurance liability for free with unsupervised? So all I'm saying is that going from supervised to unsupervised brings with it a major liability shift and I don't think that's going to be free. And who knows, maybe it's as simple as you do get access to unsupervised without paying more, but then you have to pay extra for the insurance aspect. And the only rational reason I can think of why Tesla has not just come out and given everybody more clarity on the situation is because Tesla itself doesn't yet have the clarity it needs.
They're not exactly sure how all of this is going to play out or on what timeline, which is why Elon said the $99 a month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD's capabilities improve. The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride, which is unsupervised FSD. And to be clear, Elon was talking about a massive value jump, not necessarily a massive cost jump to go to unsupervised. So frankly right now it's about as clear as mud how all of this will play out.
And on Tesla's choice to remove autopilot in the US and Canada and just leave traffic aware cruise control as the base ADAS. The term autopilot has been abused and misunderstood and conflated with FSD for a long time. There were legal actions pending against Tesla in California if they didn't stop using the autopilot name. And there were many Tesla customers that thought they were using FSD when in reality they were using autopilot. Ultimately I think it's far too early to jump to conclusions about what Tesla is going to have as standard ADAS features.
It's a fluid situation, Tesla's figuring things out, it's going to continually test the market for elasticity. And so it's hard to do but we have to give Tesla some time to sort through what it's going to do. And just a reminder for now, the last day to buy FSD outright is February 14th. And the only other thing I'll say because I get a lot of questions about this, my biggest concern with buying FSD is that it's still tied to the VIN. Meaning if God forbid you were to get in an accident beyond just minor repairs, basically that $8,000 goes up in smoke.
Whereas if it was tied to your personal account to give you one license to use on one car, that would give me and a lot of other people a lot more peace of mind. And I will say I think Tesla is failing miserably in the communication department on all of this. So many people are just not going to make a decision because they don't have enough data or surety about what they're actually buying and how this will work. And like I said, Tesla might not have all of the answers itself but don't go changing all of these things until you do.
And don't give people timelines and shot clocks without giving them the data they need to make a good decision. There's been a lot of talk about this new kill switch that's coming in all of these cars. But the truth is back in 2021, Congress passed a bill, those called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And one part of that, section 24-2-20, said that car makers had to put in special tech and new cars to stop people from driving if they were drunk or impaired or drowsy.
So if the cameras or sensors thought you weren't capable, then maybe it wouldn't let the cars start or would force it to slow down, and so on. Well, last week the House of Representatives voted to basically stop that part of the bill. But the vote failed, so ultimately nothing has changed. Plenty of people were on social media saying the government's now putting these kill switches in cars, meaning it can stop your car if you go somewhere it doesn't want you to.
And I'm not even sharing my opinion here, I'm just saying that ultimately nothing has changed. That rule from 2021 is simply staying in place as it was. So ultimately it's still going to fall in Nitz's hands. They're the ones that have to figure out exactly how they're going to implement this new technology. And guess what, they were supposed to be done with that by the end of 2024, but fancy that, they're running late.
The thought is maybe they figure out the rules toward the end of this year and then it starts being implemented into new car models around 2027. So the truth is we have no idea how Nitz will actually implement this, but for now I just wanted to make it clear this isn't really some overarching kill switch where the government will just sit there watching driving around and push a button and then your car stops and you're out of luck.
And who knows, given the political landscape, anything is possible in the future, but I'm just saying we are not there yet. And the big elephant in the room autonomy is certainly going to change how and why these things need to be implemented if at all. Hyundai Motor recently did some testing of different autonomous systems, one of which was the Atria AI, its own autonomous project.
And Hyundai's advanced vehicle platform, AVP division, gave a score of 25 out of 100 to its own Atria AI in terms of technological sophistication. Tesla's autonomous tech scored 90 out of 100, Huawei was 70, mobile I 50 and Momenta was at 50. And there are voices within the company that want Hyundai Motor to retain the Atria AI brand while using Alpamaio as its foundation model.
AKA let's tell the world we've developed our own thing, but behind the scenes we're really using the solution from Nvidia. Meanwhile, they're saying because of this evaluation, Hyundai could give up the project altogether and instead use Nvidia's Alpamaio. So just one more anecdote that legacy auto is still completely clueless on what it needs to do with FSD. Eric, the lead engineer for CyberCab said there are dozens of CyberCab testing around the country today ubiquitous everywhere as we scale. That sharing a post from the Robotexi account, where the CyberCab was testing in Alaska. Eric said the ingress and egress will be better on this product than regular vehicles even in tight spaces. The width of the car relative to standard parking spaces, the hinge axis pulling the lower door out as it opens for more foot and leg space and the power function.
In an upcoming Tesla software update, there's a new feature. Charging can now be stopped and the charge cable released by pulling and holding the rear left door handle for three seconds, provided the vehicle is unlocked or a recognized key is nearby. So Europe has had this one for a while, but it'll be new to North America. I'm not sure what to make of this one. Definitely a rumor for now, but Ming said Tesla China is expected to debut a new Model YL Plus in Q2 or Q3 of this year. And they're saying it'll have an 88 kilowatt hour battery pack, which would be compared to the 82 kilowatt hour pack on the current Model YL. Further than that, we really don't know what else would be different with this trim.
And this is one of those accounts that sometimes gets things right and other times not so much, so we'll just have to wait and see. Tesla is now sending out FSD14.2.2.4 to the initial waves of customers. Figure shared some new videos today about its Helix 2 saying it's the most powerful model to date. It's using the whole body to do dishes and to end and it's fully autonomous. They touted long horizon local manipulation, meaning it performs continuous, multi-minute tasks that demand the full integration of locomotion, dexterity, and sensing. Helix O2's tactile sensing and palm cameras unlock manipulation tasks beyond pure vision-based policies.
They said we demonstrate four tasks at the frontier of multi-fingered dexterity, to which I would say, until Tesla releases its demo of Optimus V3. Brett Adcock said this has been a year-long effort to realign our AI stack to work on long-time horizons and complex manipulation and locomotion tasks. The real breakthrough that figure is touting here is how to date a lot of humanoids will be told to do a simple short task. Grab one thing, walk here, put this apple in the basket, put this dish in the dishwasher, and so on. But here, Helix O2 is showing it can do a full four-minute chore completely by itself, meaning you tell it what to do and then on its own, according to figure, it goes to the dishwasher, opens it, takes out dishes one by one, carries them across the kitchen, puts them away, loads up the dishwasher, and then starts the machine, all without any human intervention.
And if you see in the video, there is one point where it actually uses its hip to close a drawer or its foot to lift the dishwasher door when the hands are full. And the videos of the dexterity, where it's unscrewing a bottle cap and picking out a pill out of a medicine box, pushing 5ml out of a syringe and grabbing small pieces out of a messy pile. So in short, the blog post that figure also put out is really talking about how now figure can see and feel, walk, grab, balance, and correct its own errors all in one smooth continuous operation for a few minutes at a time.
And yes, I know the robot's doing things slowly, but again, it's a robot, it's very early and that's to be expected. And I have to say, just watching the videos and taking what figure is saying at face value and I'm pretty impressed. But as always, we have to balance what we're seeing here with what Elon said that Optimus is going to be 100 times harder than FSD. And the fact that Ark Invest said humanoids will be 200,000 times harder than autonomous driving. So I'll let you balance all of that on your own.
I do really think it's awesome progress, but ultimately you need to zoom out and understand that right now the breakthrough is a humanoid doing things on its own for a few minutes. And of course I'm biased, but I will say this makes me even more excited for what Tesla is going to debut hopefully in a few months. And GM just said that it will end production of the Chevy Bolt EV at its plant in Kansas, replacing the EV with gas powered models. The company confirmed production of the 2027 Chevy Bolt EV will conclude in about 18 months shortly after the model arrives at dealerships. So that Kansas factory is now shifting to making combustion vehicles.
As GM continues to make a significant pivot to reassess demand for EVs tomorrow. Wednesday is Tesla's earnings day. Hope you all enjoy it ahead of that. Elon just said space space industries will vastly exceed the value of all of Earth given that you could harness roughly 100,000 times more energy than Earth and still be using less than a millionth of the Sun's energy.
He then said also due to autonomy, Tesla is worth more than the rest of the auto industry. That's before Optimus reaches scale production and increases Earth GDP by an order of magnitude. So really the question now is can you be patient for long enough?
Tesla's stock closed the day at $430.90 down 0.99% while the NDX was up 0.88%. It was an incredibly low volume day trading 46% below the average. No surprise though as everybody waits to see what happens tomorrow.
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