Welcome back everyone, I'm Jordan Geisigee, and this is The Limiting Factor. I've been fascinated with battery pack swapping for EVs for a number of years, but most of the videos I've seen on the topic didn't answer some of my basic questions about the technology. I thought it would be a fairly straightforward topic, so I decided to do a quick 10 minute video. However, when I dug into battery pack swapping, it quickly expanded from a 10 minute video to a 30 minute video, because the basic questions I had all led down rabbit holes with some surprising conclusions.
For example, the fact that battery pack swapping will likely leave companies who adopt it stuck in the mud from a pack technology perspective, and that a swapped battery pack provides less than 80% of its nameplate capacity. So today I'll discuss those points along with the cost structure of renting and swapping the battery pack versus owning and charging the battery pack and much more. Let's get into it.
Before we begin, a special thanks to my Patreon supporters, Twitter subscribers, and YouTube members. These are the people who sponsor my videos and make the channel possible. As always, the links for support are in the description. For this video, I'm going to be using Neo and their battery pack swapping system as an example. That's for two reasons. First, Neo's built their brand around battery pack swapping. Second, besides operating out of their home country, China, they've also started entering the European market and will likely eventually enter the US market. So there's a good chance my audience will encounter Neo at some point.
Let's start by looking at the customer facing costs of battery pack swapping. Bear in mind that because Neo isn't clear about costs on their website, I've had to collate their fee structure from multiple sources. That fee structure varies between China and Europe. I'll be using the fee structure that's been reported out of Europe and converting it to US dollars.
When you buy a Neo vehicle, you can either rent the battery pack or own the battery pack. Obviously, buying the battery pack has a high one-off upfront cost and the rental option has lower upfront costs but means paying a monthly fee for as long as the customer owns the vehicle. Beyond that, there are two battery pack sizes available. A standard range 75kWh battery pack and a 100kWh long range battery pack.
If a customer chooses the ownership option, the 75kWh battery pack costs $13,000 and the 100kWh battery pack costs $23,000. Is that fair? Let's look at that two ways. First, from the perspective of profit margin. Currently, the manufacturing cost of high nickel battery packs is around $150 per kilowatt hour which means the 75kWh pack costs Neo around $11,000 and the 100kWh battery pack costs them around $15,000.
So the 75kWh battery pack has a $2,000 profit margin and the 100kWh battery pack has an $8,000 profit margin. That is, the 75kWh pack is a fair deal and the 100kWh pack carries a luxury premium. Second, let's look at whether the high initial cost of owning the battery pack is fair by comparing it to the cost of renting the battery pack.
A 100kWh battery pack in a Tesla vehicle should last at least 330,000 miles. Given that Neo's vehicles are less efficient, which we'll talk more about later, let's say that their 75kWh battery packs respectively last 250k and 300kWh. The average person in the US drives 13,500 miles per year, which means Neo's battery packs should last 18 years for the short range and 22 years for the long range pack.
When we amortize the cost over 18 and 22 years, it comes to $58 per month for the 75kWh pack and $87 per month for the 100kWh battery pack. If the customer chooses to rent the battery pack instead, the cost is $180 US dollars per month for the 75kWh pack option and $315 US dollars per month for the 100kWh pack option.
That means it costs 3 times as much per month to rent the battery pack instead of owning the battery pack. And stretching that over the life of the battery pack on the low end, renting the 75kWh battery pack ends up costing $40,000 over the course of 18 years, which is $27,000 more than the cost of owning the battery pack. On the high end, renting the 100kWh battery pack ends up costing $84,000 over the course of 22 years, which is a whopping $61,000 more than the cost of owning the battery pack.
Setting the battery pack is clearly a much better decision if you are the average driver. The only way to tilt the scale here would be if you are driving more than around 50,000 miles per year, which would brick your battery pack within about 6 years.
On that note, if the 18 to 22 year time frame is too abstract, another way to look at the cost of owning versus renting is how long it would take to come out ahead if you buy the battery pack instead of renting the battery pack. As shown on screen, it takes about 6 years to break even for both battery packs.
So if you buy the battery pack then after 6 years, you can start pocketing $2,000 to $4,000 per year. 6 years in, the vehicle will only have about 81,000 miles on it, and the battery pack will be less than 1 third of the way through its life. That means the vehicle would still have 93 to 94% of its original range.
Some might argue that with the rented battery pack you'd still have access to 100% of the battery pack at 81,000 miles, but that's not actually true. More on that later in the video.
Before we move on, there are three things to keep in mind here with renting versus owning. First, none of these calculations include financing costs. Depending on the length of the loan and the interest rate, that would add about another year to the break even cost for owning versus renting the battery pack.
Second, if a customer has the cash on hand to buy the battery pack outright, they could rent the battery pack instead and invest that money and potentially come out ahead financially. Third, when Neo first entered Europe, for the rental option, they offered a signing bonus of 600kWh per month of free charging, which is worth a couple of hundred dollars per month. My understanding is that promotion ended in March, but if something like that is available, renting the pack is worth it if the customer doesn't charge from home and if they put a lot of miles on their vehicle.
However, in the long term, I'd be surprised if Neo regularly offers free charging or swapping promotions. That's because they're already losing tens of thousands of dollars for every vehicle sold and eventually they have to drive towards profitability to become a viable company.
While we're on the topic of charging costs, how much does it cost to swap the battery pack versus charging it? So far, we've only talked about the cost of the battery itself, not charging it. If you choose the ownership option with Neo, battery pack swapping is off limits and the customer must charge at home or charging stations instead.
With that option, you pay the typical vehicle charging rates that vary depending on which country you're in. If you rent the battery pack, you can either use the battery pack swapping stations or use charging stations. However, it's worth noting that at least for the time being, Neo's vehicles fast charge rather slowly.
That's because they only accept 140 kilowatts of power versus the 250 plus kilowatts of other brands. Neo is rolling out a high-power 500 kilowatt charger, but that's primarily geared towards the 80% of non-neo vehicles that use their charging network in China.
Moving along, there's two parts to Neo's fee structure for pack swapping. First, there's a $10 service fee for each battery swap, but customers who rent the battery pack get two free swaps a month. Second, there's a fee for the cost of the electricity that was used in the swapped battery.
For that electricity, Neo charges the same rate that a customer would pay at a charging station. Because of that, we can effectively ignore the electricity cost when comparing the cost difference between charging stations and swapping stations.
With that in mind, how much would the service fees for swapping add up to per year? Depending on pack size, each battery swap should provide 250 to 300 miles of real-world range. That means the two free swaps cover 5 to 600 miles of driving per month, which is half the 1100 or so miles that an average driver in the US needs per month.
To cover the additional mileage, two additional swaps would be needed, and those swaps will incur a service fee of $10 each for a total of $20 per month or $240 per year. That is, the swapping service itself is a fair price, and the extra costs of pack swapping are buried in the battery rental agreement.
If we did include the cost of electricity and assume that the customer charges at home, they'll save about $250 per year on electricity because both swapping and charging stations charge a premium for electricity. Then, if we add the service fees for battery swapping on top of the electricity premium, that makes home charging $500 to $600 less per year than pack swapping, which is over $3000 over the course of six years.
If a customer did charge at home, depending on the pack, that money could be used, for example, to cover financing costs and or a home charger. To wrap things up on cost, the key message here is that the reason why Neo offers battery pack swapping is the same reason any company offers a product or service to generate revenue.
It's not a free service, and over the long term, it can be quite expensive. Some people will find battery pack swapping useful and will be willing to pay for it. The question is, what proportion of those people are actually aware of the additional costs they're taking on?
I've personally spoken to many potential EV buyers who think a vehicle battery is like a cell phone battery, and it'll only last a few years rather than 10 to 20 years. That is, as the public becomes more educated on EV batteries and battery charge times improve, my view is that they'll gravitate towards charging rather than swapping.
On that note, let's move on from customer facing costs and compare the throughput speeds of swapping stations versus charging stations. Neo recently launched their version 3.0 battery pack swapping station that holds 21 battery packs. That means it can support a throughput of one vehicle every 3 minutes if the batteries are in a constant rotation with a 1 hour charge speed for each pack.
However, 3 minutes doesn't include pulling in and out, so in reality, the swapping time is 4 minutes and 11 seconds, which means up to 344 vehicles per day. Version 2.0, which launched in 2021, held 13 packs and could maintain a rate of roughly 1 pack swap every 5 minutes. Version 1.0, launched in 2018, held 5 packs and could therefore maintain a rate of 1 pack swap every 12 minutes. That is, they've improved the speed over time and that will likely continue.
Bear in mind that the charging network is still mostly version 1 and version 2 chargers, so most of the network can't sustain V3 swapping speeds and can probably only maintain an average rate of 8 packs per hour or a swap speed of about 7 to 8 minutes including parking.
As for charging stations, including Ingress and Egress, it's possible to fit at least 6 charging stalls in the same area as a Neo charging station. The length of the average supercharging stop is seasonal but should get below 25 minutes per charge this summer. That comes to about 346 vehicles per day for 6 stalls, which is nearly identical to Neo's battery swapping throughput of 344 vehicles per day for the version 3.0 swapping station, which is just starting to be deployed.
Overall, Tesla's supercharging speed has been dropping by 1.5 minutes per year and that will continue as they make improvements to routing software, improve battery chemistry and start to roll out their new V4 supercharger. That means within 5 years the average supercharger stop will be below 20 minutes and within 10 years it'll be 10 minutes. Our Invest is forecasting 4 minutes for 200 miles of range by 2027 and that is possible but it won't be at a network level.
And the first adoption of fast charging at those speeds will likely come from an edgier Chinese car or battery company looking for a gimmick to attract media attention. The question is, if a customer is given the choice between a gimmicky vehicle that can fast charge in 4 minutes or a gimmicky vehicle that can battery swap in 4 minutes, which will they choose? In my view, charging because it'll be cheaper and chargeable at any charge station rather than proprietary swapping stations.
Regardless, even if we assume a slower improvement rate of 1.5 minutes per year for fast charging, it's clear where things are headed. Eventually, the speed of fast charging will be well below 10 minutes and that's for the average vehicle. It'll happen much sooner for the newest and fastest charging vehicles on the newest and fastest chargers. So expect outliers well before then.
For example, when Tesla releases a 500 mile range version of the Cybertruck and if the V4 Supercharger can hit 350 kilowatts of power output, the Cybertruck should be able to charge 90 kilowatt hours in 15 minutes, which would be 250 miles of range.
That is, in terms of throughput for a given footprint, battery pack swapping and charging are neck and neck, but charging stations have more room for improvement and will eventually dominate. I'm sure there'll be some people who prefer pack swapping, but I don't know if there'll be enough of them to support an entire swapping network when we get into the 2030s. And that's before taking into account the other drawbacks of swapping stations.
There are three. Let's take a look at each. First, they have hundreds of moving parts and if any of those parts fail, the whole swapping station shuts down and no one can charge. It's a single point of failure. Not only that, with more parts and more things to go wrong, diagnosis and repair can become more challenging and time consuming. That's as compared to a charging station, whether usually at least eight stalls to charge at and each of those stalls have very few potential points of failure. That allows Tesla to have an uptime of well over 99.9% for their charging stations.
Yes, battery pack swapping stations generally offer charging in addition to pack swapping, but if the swapping station is out of order, then the charging station now has to take double the traffic, which could increase wait times. The second drawback of swapping stations is the faster the throughput of the swapping station, the more batteries it needs to hold. NIO's swapping stations have increased from holding five batteries to 13 and now to 21 batteries in the newest version.
That's because each one of those batteries takes about an hour to charge and with more charging visits per hour, more batteries are needed. On that note, many people are under the impression that battery packs swapping will make batteries last longer because the batteries would be slow charged, which causes less degradation. That may not be the case.
NIO's only keeping enough packs on hand to satisfy a one hour rotation speed, which means the batteries will have to be fast charged on nearly every cycle to keep pace. I'll talk more about how NIO deals with degradation later in the video, but the key point here is that NIO's batteries are going to be put through a demanding commercial service life.
Interestingly, the fact that NIO has to increase pack inventory at pack swapping stations when they increase the speed of the swapping stations, hence to a potential albatross around NIO's neck. When NIO increases swapping speed, or if they want to change the design of their pack, they have to keep more and different types of battery packs in stock at each station.
For example, if NIO came out with a compact vehicle that used a smaller 50kWh battery pack and a NIO swapping station holds 21 battery packs, some of those would have to be the new 50kWh pack, some 75kWh and some 100kWh pack. To keep things simple, let's say 7 of each battery pack. If the station runs at anywhere near its peak rate of 21 packs per hour, what's going to happen?
Odds are that it's going to run out of one pack type. Yes, they could give a free upgrade from a 50kWh to a 75kWh pack, but that wouldn't work in reverse. Customers would be disappointed with a smaller pack than they've paid for with their rental fees. They could of course adjust the mix of packs in the swapping station to align with the local mix of vehicles, but that only decreases the odds that it runs out of packs and doesn't solve the underlying problem of matching packs to vehicles.
That means if NIO wanted to make a compact vehicle with a smaller battery pack, they have two options. First, they could increase the number of swapping stations, but it would be pretty frustrating for a customer to drive farther or take a detour to find a swapping station that has their pack in stock. Second, NIO could increase the stock of batteries at each swapping station, which would require expanding the battery capacity of new stations like they did from version 1.0 to 3.0.
However, even if they only need to increase the number of packs at each swapping station by 7 packs, at an average pack cost of $11,000, that would mean $77,000 of additional capital outlay for each charging station. That works as long as NIO can increase the speed of charging stations proportionally with the number of packs held, but that reaches a limit pretty quickly given that their pack's swapping speed is already down to 3 minutes.
With all that said, I don't think the additional cost and complication of holding more battery packs for each new pack design at each station is the biggest drawback of the pack inventory problem. It's the impact on innovation. There's three reasons for that.
First, any new pack design has to be stocked at thousands of charging stations. If the new pack design turns out to be a bad idea, NIO will have to live with the consequences for a decade or more, because that's how long those vehicles will be on the road. Second, the vehicle has to be designed around the pack rather than the other way around, which means the pack, to a certain extent, will dictate vehicle design.
Third, it may hamper NIO's ability to move to more advanced pack designs that can cut vehicle weight, like structural battery packs. Meanwhile, a company like Tesla that relies on charging stations instead of pack swapping is free to innovate on pack design however they like. The plug design is always the same for Tesla vehicles using Tesla chargers, regardless of what's going on with the pack.
Beyond that, with an adapter, a Tesla vehicle can use thousands of other charging stations as well. While it's true that NIO vehicles with rented battery packs can use both swapping stations and chargers, it would be pretty frustrating to pay thousands of dollars per year for the ability to do pack swapping only to have to use a charger that takes 40 minutes.
On that note, some people have pointed out that NIO has said 60% of their customers prefer pack swapping over charging. Here's my thoughts on that. Many of the people buying NIO vehicles are buying them because they want access to the battery swapping feature. That is, there's a selection bias here. If a customer selects a product for a feature and pays for that feature, it's natural to expect they'd make use of that feature. From that perspective, in my view, 60% is a poor showing because 40% of the people are paying for a feature they prefer not to use. That is, unless the 40% of customers not using the feature own their battery pack, in which case they shouldn't have been included in the survey.
Let's look at the third drawback of battery swapping stations. The last version of NIO's swapping station, version 2.0, cost about $435,000 to build. Some people have claimed that NIO's new version 3.0 station, which is fully automated, will cost less to build. But I don't buy that. That's nothing to do with the full automation, but rather because it needs to hold eight more batteries than the previous version. Each of those eight batteries will cost on average $13,000 each. That adds up to $104,000 in extra battery pack inventory. $104,000 plus a station cost of $435,000 is about $539,000. I'm sure NIO is getting better at building these stations, but not enough to overcome the higher inventory cost for batteries and also not enough to overcome the fact that the swapping stations will have higher maintenance and repair costs than charging stations. Another way will say a build cost of $500,000 per swapping station.
In the US, each Tesla supercharger stall costs on average about $40,000 to build, which means $240,000 for a six-stall charging station. That is, as far as I can tell, a Tesla charging station will cost less than half what a NIO swapping station will cost for roughly the same throughput for a given footprint. Furthermore, Tesla's costs will likely decrease over time for two reasons. Superchargers can be built in factories and dropped in place on site. Mass manufacturing drives down cost. Second, the battery is actually most of the bottleneck for charging speed, not the charging station. Even with no changes to the charging station, as battery chemistry improves, charging times will improve. That's as opposed to swapping stations, which for the same footprint and throughput will likely decrease in cost relatively slowly. That's because half the cost of a swapping station is batteries. So the cost of the swapping station will decrease it roughly the same rate as the cost of battery cells. Battery cells will continue to get cheaper, but that's been slowing due to price materials increases.
To balance things out, let's move on to the drawbacks of owning a battery pack and supercharging. First, as I've said already, and what's immediately apparent is that charging a vehicle on a fast charger like Tesla's superchargers will take on average about 25 minutes. That's considerably slower than a four-minute battery swap. However, the 25-minute charging speed is only a drawback if a customer lives in a highly urban environment. Most supercharging occurs while the driver is making a rest stop during long trips, and most charging in general occurs at home.
The second drawback of owning a battery pack is the risk that the battery will develop a defect after the warranty ends, and the customer then has to pay for a new battery pack out of pocket. From what I can tell, Neo has a 10-year unlimited buy-all warranty on the entire vehicle. Tesla battery packs have an 8-year warranty that ranges from 100 to 150,000 miles. In either case, if the battery pack fails 8 to 10 years from now after the warranty ends, the replacement costs for those batteries will probably run about 5 to 10,000 in today's dollars. As said, the odds of the battery pack failing are fairly low. According to data by Recurrent, 1.5% of their 14,000 EV customers needed a battery replacement, and that includes recalls by companies like Hyundai and Chevy. On average, Tesla battery packs tend to have the lowest replacement rate, with their newer vehicles tending to fare better. I can't say how much of that is due to the age of the pack and how much of it is due to improvements in pack manufacturing, but both factors are probably contributing to the higher reliability for newer packs.
Either way, ultimately, the customer is left with a choice, except what's probably less than a 5% chance of the battery pack failing and paying $5 to $10,000 for a battery replacement or a 100% chance of paying an extra $30 to $60,000 in rental fees.
The third drawback of owning a battery pack is that you're stuck with the same range for the life of the vehicle. With Neo, you can change your plan on a monthly basis and upgrade to a larger battery pack size or downgrade to a smaller battery pack size.
Currently, those pack sizes are 75kWh and 100kWh. There is 150kWh pack planned for this year, but it'll have a high price to limit availability. The fourth drawback of owning the battery pack is that it'll degrade over time. After 20 years and a few hundred thousand miles of driving, the pack would be at about 80% of its original range. The pack is good down to about 70%, so a customer can probably squeeze another 5 to 10 years out of it, but 80% is typically considered end of life.
However, although owning the battery pack means a customer has to deal with degradation, I'm not sure if Neo's solution is much better. Bjorn Nyland did an exhaustive job of putting Neo vehicles through their paces and summarizing his experience on YouTube. Then, at AonDee on Twitter, did a great job of summarizing Bjorn's videos into one megatweet with links to Bjorn's videos.
I'll link the tweet in the description if you're interested in reading further. What Bjorn found was that the 100kWh battery packs that Neo advertises only allow you to access about 85 to 88kWh for 100 to 0% discharge. Tesla and every other manufacturer do this as well to extend battery life, but the number is more typically around 94% for a Tesla rather than 85 to 88%.
But then Neo takes it a step further and limits the maximum charge state to 90% at the battery swapping stations. That means the actual usable capacity from 100kWh battery pack swap is 77 to 79kWh. So although I've seen some Neo fan videos pointing out that battery pack swapping is better than charging because you get a full battery pack with each swap, it's simply not true. Even worse, Neo's efficiency is about 15 to 35% worse than their best performing competitors.
That matters because although battery pack swapping is much quicker than charging, Neo's vehicles are electron guzzlers. That means less range per battery swap and swapping more often. Which of those trips to the swapping station doesn't just involve the 4 to 5 minute swapping time but also the time it takes to travel to the swapping station.
But getting back on track, in my view, the reason that Neo places so many limits on the battery pack is to make their battery packs last longer. That could be for two reasons. First, to increase the profit they make on each battery pack throughout its life. Second, as I said earlier, they only keep just enough packs at each station to meet the maximum throughput of the station. That means they'll be charging the battery packs on an aggressive 1 hour charge cycle on every charge cycle.
So placing limits on the battery pack may be the only way to make those battery packs last as long as a battery would that's mostly home charged. Regardless, the effect on the customer is that they don't get full access to the advertised capacity of the battery. In my view, that's actually a worse outcome than owning the battery pack and dealing with degradation.
That's because 100kWh Tesla battery pack can experience about 15 years of degradation before it reaches 77 to 79kWh of remaining capacity, which is what Neo provides on a brand new battery pack from a swapping station. Now that we've covered the key points of battery rental and swapping vs ownership and charging, let's look at one final point before moving on to the summary.
Many people have pointed out that battery swapping takes batteries off the market that could instead be used in vehicles. At first, that point seems persuasive, but the more I looked into it, the more I came to view Neo's additional battery pack requirement as neutral.
Much like gas stations, swapping stations will have a throughput well below their peak rate for most of the week and then get hit hard at specific times like Thursday through Friday in the evenings. Each swapping station can swap up to 344 packs a day, but the reality will probably be closer to 150, which is about 1000 packs per week.
If the average swapping station holds 20 packs and each vehicle swaps once per week, that's one extra pack for every 50 vehicles. That's a large number of battery packs at scale, but it's not a huge number proportional to Neo's vehicle fleet. If that were the whole story, I'd say Neo's battery pack inventory was diverting batteries that could be used elsewhere, but there is more to the story.
Neo's connecting their swapping stations to the grid and using them similar to the way that Tesla uses megapacks. The battery pack inventory can be used to buffer the grid when electricity prices are high and draw from the grid when electricity prices are low. That can occur during most of the week when the swapping station is underutilized. That is, Neo's battery pack inventory doesn't appear to be wasted.
In summary, let's review the key points of battery pack swapping versus charging. Although battery pack swapping has lower upfront costs, on a long-term basis, it can increase the cost of owning the vehicle by 50 to 100%.
With regards to throughput, Neo's swapping stations are on par with charging stations. However, they cost more than twice as much per unit of throughput, but they come with other drawbacks as well. They represent a single point of failure, and because they have so many moving parts, they're more likely to fail and more expensive to fix. Plus, any expansion in throughput requires a corresponding increase in battery pack capacity.
That's as opposed to Tesla charging stations, which can support higher vehicle throughputs with no change to the infrastructure, and over the past five years have achieved an average uptime of 99.9%. Beyond all that, the most serious drawback of battery pack swapping for me is that Neo has locked themselves into a pack design that could seriously stifle innovation both at the pack level and, in terms of their ability to move into new vehicle classes.
That's because any new pack will require expanded inventory at their existing swapping stations, which appear to have limited capacity for that inventory. The sole advantage of pack swapping for most people in most use cases appears to be that it's faster than charging, but that advantage will decrease over time.
Charging of course isn't perfect either. Besides slower charging speeds, there's a potential for large repair bills after the warranty runs out, but that risk is low and can be accommodated for with financial planning. Battery degradation is also often listed as a drawback for owning the vehicle and the battery pack instead of renting the battery pack, but that appears to fall apart with some analysis.
Neo software locks a good chunk of their battery packs to reduce degradation because their battery packs have a brutal commercial service life. So renting a Neo battery pack is like using a battery pack that's already seen a decade or two of degradation. That's compounded by the fact that Neo vehicles are much less efficient than their peers.
So who is Neo targeting with their battery swapping technology? To me, it appears to be five groups. First, people who live in highly urban environments that have no access to parking and charging at any point during the week, like parking garages, malls, and grocery stores. Second, people that are willing to pay for it as a luxury that differentiates their experience from other EV buyers. Third, first time EV buyers that don't realize how long battery packs last and how reliable they are are worried about the time it takes to charge an EV compared to a gas station and haven't done the math on what battery pack swapping as a feature will cost them.
These customers may feel like they're getting a great deal because they're reducing their upfront costs, but haven't considered what it means in the long term. Fourth, people who drive more than about 50,000 miles per year and can take advantage of the potential loophole in Neo's rental agreement, which as far as I can tell doesn't place a limit on the number of pack swaps a vehicle can do. Fifth, people who are good at investing and can afford to buy the battery pack outright. These customers can rent the battery pack and invest the upfront costs instead of buying the battery pack and potentially come out ahead financially.
Overall, I don't have anything against pack swapping. There are use cases where pack swapping could be an excellent idea and I've listed those on screen. But in my view for passenger vehicles, it's really a niche use case, not the ideal use case. If you enjoyed this video, please consider supporting the channel by using the links in the description. A special thanks to my YouTube members, Twitter subscribers, and all the patrons listed in the credits. I appreciate all your support and thanks for tuning in.