Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Lumis, so I'm sure most of you saw Tesla's groundbreaking ceremony for the lithium refinery outside of Corpus Christi, Texas. But the main takeaways? Tesla will be one of, if not the first, to use an acid-free refining technique that creates sand and limestone byproducts rather than hazardous waste. They'll employ around 250 full-time employees and aim to produce enough lithium for 1 million vehicles per year.
But the start of the show was the Cybertruck and the custom rack over the vault. Perhaps this is a product from Tesla's in-house Cybertruck accessory scene that we heard about last month. And I think we were all expecting it, but the frameless window design seems to be confirmed. Tesla has been late before, but the current timeline construction is now, they're expecting to finish it next year, and then they said full volume production about one year later, sometime in 2025.
They also said this refinery will produce more battery-grade lithium than all North American refineries combined. Former Tesla employee Owen Diaz, who claimed racial discrimination at Tesla and was initially awarded 137 million, then it was dropped to 15 million, then he denied that, then the second trial ended at 3.2 million. Well, now apparently he's asking for a third trial. A hearing on his motion for a mistrial is scheduled to be held July 19th.
For the first week in May for Tesla China Weekly Insurance Numbers, it was 5,900. Plugging that data for the fifth week of quarter two into the table, if you wanted to compare it to the same week in quarter one, that number was 8,643. However, he have to remember, Tesla China was shut down from April 30th to about May 4th for the national holiday. We won't stay here so pause if you'd like, but here's that same data in bar chart form, and again, this slowdown right here was to be expected.
And we did get the breakdown for Tesla China in April when it comes to the wholesale number, 39.9000 were sold domestically, 35.8000 were exported. So here's that data plugged into the table, and if any of you happen to have the official production number for Tesla China for March, please let me know below, then I can update the inventory number. We already talked about how the wholesale figure was the best number for the first month of a quarter, but my only other real takeaway is the unwinding of the wave in action.
You can see the first month of the quarter domestic delivery numbers. Over time, the highest previous watermark was 26.8000, and for April they were at 39.9. Remember, April's an outlier due to the covid shutdowns, but the opposite is true on the export side, looking at the first month of each quarter, they were pretty consistently higher, 40,000, 54,000, 39,000, and it's coming down this time in April, 35.8000. So Tesla definitely smoothing out the delivery wave balance between exports and domestic sales in the first month of the quarter.
Berlinergy shared a Tesla stock note from Barclays. Tesla saw a 25% global BEV share in March and increased from the 18-21% range it's seen over recent months. And they added, we appreciate that the price cuts at least appear to be translating to stronger Tesla BEV market share, particularly in regions where competition is increasing, even though we know this BEV market share is not what Tesla is focused on.
And just because Tesla is not focusing on the EV market share does not mean that Wall Street is going to throw that metric out, they will very closely still be watching it so as a Tesla investor, it'll still be important for us to keep up with it. We have the Swedish Civil contingencies agency doing some research using data from 2022, saying gasoline and diesel-powered cars are 19 times more likely to catch on fire than EVs. The number of fires in electric cars has remained around 20 per year for the last three years, even though the number of electric cars has almost doubled to nearly 611,000 in Sweden.
I think most of us already understand the truth of this narrative, but I will include a link to this study below in case it's something you want to bookmark and share in the future. And yet another Tesla stock note from Morgan Stanley, they're saying again, in our view, the speed of the China EV export story may take investors by surprise. This note was done in conjunction with an analyst from EV volumes, but they came to the conclusion the China data is clear.
The domestic market is slowing and car makers need to start exporting to other regions. There's a government mandate out of Beijing to begin exporting vehicles and domestic players must have a plan for it. BYD just hired a chief designer from Audi and you likely see a new generation of European looking, European acceptable cars that will attract European buyers. We have Gigatexis finally reaching the volume production threshold of 5000 model wise per week on May 9th.
So now that both Gigabrelin and Gigatexis have hit the 5000 unit per week number, we can take a look and see how long it's taken each. Gigabrelin had roughly a two and a half week head start, but it was first to hit the 1000 per week and the 2000 per week. But then Gigatexis actually hit 3000 per week and 253 days when it took Gigabrelin 273.
But Gigabrelin quickly took back the lead when it comes to the 4000 per week number and Gigabrelin even accounting for the head start still hit the volume production number slightly ahead of Gigatexis. But all things considered with the 4680s taking a back seat in Gigabrelin and thus the structural pack because of the IRA and the 4680s being prioritized in Gigatexis, then Gigatexis having its own challenges with the structural pack and more of a focus on the 4680s as well as getting ready for cyber truck production, Gigatexis may be starting to show its bigger capacity relative to the much smaller Gigabrelin.
And here's a quick visual of that same data from Roland on Twitter. And remember, run rates are not going to be the same thing as ultimate production, but with Shanghai around a million, Giga Austin and Gigabrelin now around 500,000 combined and freemont between 6 and 700,000 per year, Tesla is now at a run rate between 2.1 to 2.2 million cars per year, sneaking up very quickly on BMW.
And the first model wide deliveries in Torrequille have begun. Electric shared a Tesla recruiter on LinkedIn was talking about a new job Tesla was hiring for in the title, Passive Safety Crash Test Lab. Then in tandem we learned that Tesla is building a new crash test lab in Austin. We don't really have any other information on this project, but here's the job listing description if you're interested.
Over the weekend, Elon said arguably, FSD beta version 11.4 should be version 12.0 as there are so many major improvements. V12 is reserved for when FSD is end to end AI from images into steering, breaks and acceleration out. And replying to Tesla Synopsis, Elon said once FSD is super smooth, not just safe, we will roll out a freemont trial for all cars in North America, then extend to the rest of the world after we ensure it works well on local roads and regulators approve it in that country. The only problem here is this super smooth requirement is very subjective, so that could mean many different timelines.
There was a report going around that Tesla was going to start production of the new refreshed Model 3 project, Highland, but Tesla China denied the authenticity of that news report as of yesterday. Honestly though, even if Tesla was going to start production of this new vehicle soon, I think they would deny it until they were doing it just to avoid the Osborne effect.
I can't confirm this data personally, but we have electric Felix on Twitter reporting that super charging prices are going down in multiple European countries, so just wanted to put it out there.
In what should be a surprise to no one, VW is going to dismiss all but one of the executive board members at the Software Division Carried, it has exceeded its budget and failed to meet goals.
Volvo put out a quick teaser on its upcoming smaller SUV dubbed the EX-30 that's going to make its debut on June 7th, reservations will be opening to American customers on the same day. For now though, this is pretty much all we get.
Ford has yet again adjusted the pricing for the F-150 Lightning, some models are up, other models are down, and the most affordable variant the Pro is actually sold out for the 2023 model year. So just in case anyone is in the market for this vehicle, you may want to go have a look.
Porsche is now teaming up with Mobileye for advanced driver assistance systems. Porsche is planning to integrate mobileized supervision into its future models. This is pretty big news because Porsche of all companies would want its customers actually driving its vehicles, but they did say there are certain aspects of partially automated driving they're interested in, such as not having to keep hands on the wheel the entire time in a traffic jam.
From Reuters Panasonic is expecting its net profit to grow 32% from one year earlier, thanks to the IRA tax credits, boosting its bottom line by $100 billion or about $750 million. More importantly, Panasonic's CFO said over the past two years we were greatly affected by a surge in raw material prices and a lack of parts and semiconductors, but those negative effects will largely go away this year.
More data to back up that thesis, Toyota just said it expects its operating profit to go up 10% this fiscal year, amid an easing in the global supply chain disruption from a shortage of chips. Speaking of Toyota, they're planning to unveil its next generation EV at the Tokyo Auto Show that is scheduled for later this year, October 26th. This upcoming EV from Toyota is supposed to make its debut in 2026.
Rivian stock is up about 10% over the last five days, mainly driven by its earnings, losing less money than expected, and bringing in more revenue than expected. Rivian's cash balance declined $300 million during the quarter, currently sits at $11.8 billion. Most importantly, Rivian said it remains on track to hit the full year production guidance of 50,000, which would be double what it made in 2022.
Lucid, on the other hand, said it remains on track to produce over 10,000 vehicles this year, but previously the guidance was 10 to 14,000, and that was already adjusted from a few months prior. The main storyline for Lucid has been when it will be forced to raise more capital. They ended the first quarter with $3.4 billion in cash, and said that should be sufficient to fund the company at least until the second quarter of 2024.
GM is planning to re-enter the European market, targeting Nordic countries first, with sales of an all-electric portfolio. At least part of this reentry for GM will start with the lyric, but we didn't really get any other detail on what other models to expect.
Tesla put out a very cool, very cinematic video going over how it does some extreme weather testing, specifically for the heat in the UAE. Definitely worth a watch, I'll have it linked below.
To those of you interested in an update on my health journey with this parasite situation, I plan to record a video and make it unlisted, but I'll let you know when I do that. You can find me on Twitter at Dylan Loomis22, I hope you guys have a wonderful day. Please like the video if you did and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.