Hey everybody Rob Manward here, welcome back to Tesla Daily. Today we are talking about more big news on the North American charging standard. We also have an announcement of a big Tesla energy project, another one in Australia, updates on Tesla's possible factory plans, new FSD beta release notes, and more.
First off though, how about the stock, although the streak may have ended the run continues Tesla up 5.3% today to close at $274.45, while the Nasdaq was actually down to 10% of a percent on the day. So significant outperformance after hours keeps climbing, so always a little bit more fun to be reminded of the volatility that Tesla can experience when we are on the way up.
I'm sure the news that we got today didn't hurt and that is that the North American charging standard dominoes continue to fall with Rivian announcing today that they will be following the same path as GM as forward by getting access to the Supercharger network in 2024 via an adapter and then integrating NAS as standard in their vehicles starting in 2025.
And they did say that that would be included for their upcoming platform, the R2. Rivian did make sure to point out in their press release that the Rivian Adventure network will continue nationwide expansion, but that was really all they said about that. They didn't say if that would also be adopting the North American charging standard, but it would follow reason that if they're making their vehicles on that platform, how could they possibly not do the same thing with the charging network that they say that they're going to continue to build out?
So if that's the case, presumably Tesla vehicles should be able to easily connect with those chargers as well. With Rivian trying to position themselves as more of that adventure brand, that might mean, especially with now the inclusion of Tesla Supercharger network, that they can focus that infrastructure build out on more remote or less trafficked areas because it's more in alignment with their brand less focused on utilization and more about ensuring these adventurous locations can be accessed. That seems even more likely now that they won't have to focus on competing with the Supercharger network for areas that are already established. They can kind of just seed that to Tesla and then fill in the gaps with their charging network to support their brand rather than try to generate an ROI off of their network.
Then hopefully and presumably Tesla vehicles could be using those too, which could of course add some nice options for Tesla customers. Now they could also reevaluate this and just kind of drop the idea of the charging adventure network. That would also not surprise me, especially as they have to sit there and look at how do we bring costs down. Well, a charging network is going to be a driver of additional costs for a long time. Seems like pretty low hanging fruit to cut.
Anyway, if we look at where things stand then for the North American charging standard, things seem to be very much going in segments. US legacy automakers kind of kicking it off Ford and GM getting on board. Then we had these various different charging companies comment that they will be adopting an ACS. Now with Rivian, there's a US startup automaker that has adopted it. We'll see if Lucid follows if Tesla will allow them to.
And then really the only segment to go at this point would be foreign automakers for their North American production. This one I think is probably the most interesting because if there were to be sort of a line in the sand where this stopped, this segment would probably be the most likely candidate. Now I expect that this is kind of just going to keep on going. But getting that first foreign automaker on board, that would offer a lot of confirmation that this is going to continue and completely dominate in North America. So who might be that first one to fall?
Well, we've got some new comments today from Hyundai. Their CEO has said that they will consider making their vehicles more readily compatible with the North American charging standard. One of the considerations that Hyundai has to make is that they do have some of their vehicles on an 800 volt standard.
So far Tesla has been at 400. So that's kind of how the supercharger network is designed. But as Tesla has teased a little bit, it sounds like that's going to be increasing with their next generation vehicles, hopefully including the Cybertruck. So the best guess is that V4 superchargers should be well prepared for that higher voltage, which could alleviate some of those concerns for Hyundai.
So anyway, very curious to see how this segment falls. I know we've had a couple of comments now from a couple of automakers from the limited trend that we have seen so far, that seems to be how it goes. And then happens pretty quickly after that. So hopefully we'll be discussing some more news on an ACS relatively soon.
All right, next, I want to hop over to Tesla energy because we have news of a pretty big new Tesla energy project. Of course, in Australia, we get to see quite a few of these from Naioin. So a long time partner of Tesla for battery projects there in Australia, this time is a project in West Australia. And the projects keep getting bigger this time around. It's going to be a 219 megawatt 877 megawatt hour battery in the town of Kali in Western Australia. This project has been in the works since 2021, and it sounds like it will commence operation sometime. Wait 2024. And the best part about it is that this is actually just the first stage of this project. And it actually has approval up to four gigawatt hours. So that's a huge project.
And as we have talked about before, as Tesla ramps up their battery production, things like this are going to just become commonplace. And it kind of feels like they actually already are. I mean, if we take this announcement back five years, we would have been talking about this for probably weeks. And not that it's a footnote today. But I mean, we're not going to spend two weeks talking about this and the amount of press that it's getting is certainly not all that much more than, you know, most other Tesla stories might get. Sometimes it's important to step back and realize how fast that transformation has occurred. And then apply that to how we think about where things are going to be five years from now. Anyway, very exciting announcement and glad to see Tesla continuing to work with Naomi.
All right, next, we've got some more reporting on Elon Musk's meetings with world leaders continuing this time with India. It sounds like the prime minister of India is going to be meeting with Elon on his visit to the United States today. This is according to a Rogers report. They are reporting on a source with direct knowledge of the situation. Apparently, this is the first meeting to discuss high level expansion plans in India. So we've had plenty of rumors about Tesla and their intentions in India. Obviously, there are conversations that have been happening there prior to this meeting with this, I think carrying a lot of potential to significantly move things forward.
So I'm sure we'll probably see some more reporting on how that meeting wins. And then Elon has also, as I mentioned on Thursday, appeared in a new interview in France. This was actually transcribed on Twitter. So I'll link to that transcription. But one of the more interesting things that Elon said was quote, it is probable, even very probable that Tesla will do something very important in France in the years to come. And quote, so France, Italy, India, Spain, Indonesia, a lot of things that seem to be on the table for Tesla right now. And if we think about Tesla trying to continue that 50% annual growth rate, that gets harder and harder to do every year from a pure volume perspective.
I think the current factories are going to support a lot of that. But Tesla's gonna need more and they're going to need a lot of help from suppliers too. And I would imagine that these conversations are probably about fitting all of those pieces of the puzzle together over time. It is and will continue to be very interesting to see Elon navigating through all this. And I for one, am very glad that he is the one doing it.
All right, moving on, we've got a short clip here of the cyber truck apparently landing in New Zealand. This is from Murray Alexander of the Tesla New Zealand group, probably a production beta or something close to a release candidate version of the cyber truck here being delivered to New Zealand for winter testing.
I haven't double checked this timeline, but I did see a couple of comments that said that for the Model 3, this happened maybe six or seven weeks before the release, which although isn't the timeline that we're expecting for the cyber truck, hopefully at least reflects positively on something still happening, maybe Q3, hopefully Q3, maybe Q4, but either way, relatively soon since we've seen this kind of testing take place at a relatively late stage in the process for previous vehicles.
Speaking of other vehicles, we've got a possible update on the Tesla Semi, Zengler on Twitter, who is in the area and has followed this closely, is saying that after a period of very slow production on Tesla Semi, it looks like things are picking up again, spotted seven semis at the prototype line today, the most I've seen at one time, all with manufacturing plates and looked new. So we've had a period here where there's been a couple of recalls, maybe Tesla has been waiting to see how the initial testing is going with Pepsi, and maybe now doing another run on that small pilot line. Hard to know for sure, but good to hear of some activity going on there.
Next we've got another version of Tesla's FSD beta that is starting to roll out, this is 11.4.4, and this does have new release notes sometimes with these versions, we see the same release notes, but this is a new iteration. I think most of the release notes are pretty intuitive, so we probably don't need to go bullet by bullet.
I think one of the big things here is that there is improved handling of oncoming cars on narrow unmarked roads. I think a lot of people have had troubles with that, I certainly have with 11.4.3, so I'm glad to see that addressed pretty quickly. Then as we typically see some various improvements with lane management, vulnerable road users, and recall and precision.
I haven't had a chance to go out and drive it yet, but once I do, if I have any other thoughts, I'll pass those along. One of the things kind of interesting on FSD beta, Green the Only was able to, through his skills, access what is called, I guess, Elon mode within FSD, which Green says is a special autopilot mode where there are no nags, the braking is less intense, and probably some other changes under the hood that he did not fully explore. Now that eye tracking with FSD beta seems to be quite good, oh man, I wish those nags could be turned off, I would access Elon mode, I'd pay extra for Elon mode at this point. If that were an option, it sounds quite lovely, I know Elon has tweeted about reducing the number of nags, maybe finding a way where after a certain number of miles those can turn off, so I really hope Tesla is still working on those. If Elon was getting the nags, and there was no special Elon mode, I feel like maybe that would come a little bit more quickly.
我还没有机会出去开它,但一旦我这样做了,如果我有任何其他想法,我会传递它们。 FSD beta 中有一件有趣的事情,Green the Only 通过他的技能,能够访问所谓的 Elon 模式,Green 说这是一种特殊的自动驾驶模式,在这种模式下没有 nag,制动力较小,还可能有一些其他更改,他没有完全探索。现在随着 FSD beta 的视觉跟踪似乎非常好,哦,天啊,如果那些 nag 能被关闭,我希望可以激活 Elon 模式,我愿意额外支付。如果有这个选项,听起来很棒,我知道 Elon 已经在推特上发推文,称要减少 nag 的数量,或找到一种方法,在行驶一定里程后这些 nag 可以关闭,所以我真的希望 Tesla 仍在继续努力。如果 Elon 遇到了 nag 问题,而没有特殊的 Elon 模式,我感觉这个问题可能会更快地得到解决。
Next up, we do have another week of China-ensured vehicle numbers, this is for the week of June 12th through the 18th, and for that week there were 14,500 Teslas insured in China, so this is down a little bit from last week about 2000 vehicles, still a pretty strong week compared to the average over the last couple of quarters, and as we have been talking about, through the first 11 weeks of data here for the second quarter, that puts quarter to date at about 125,500 vehicles compared to roughly 107,000 at this point in the quarter for both Q4 and Q1. So despite a little bit of a week over week decline, they're still shaping up to be a really, really strong quarter for Tesla, they're only about 12,000 vehicles now away from setting a new quarterly record, which could happen as early as the number next week, and they obviously only need to average about 6,000 over the next two weeks to get to that record level, so even with Project Highland, probably some downtime for Model 3 impacting these numbers, a record quarter for domestic sales in China looking pretty likely at this point.
Last couple of things here, it looks like Tesla has at least in some cases increased the discount on the Model S and X that are available in inventory, I've seen some things that said that this was 5,000 up to 7,500, from what I'm seeing, the discounts seem a little bit more variable, as you can see here, there's a $10,000 discount on this Model S plaid, some other vehicles are only 5,000, some of them are demo vehicles, so you've got to kind of factor that in as well, but definitely a lot of inventory that is being shown as available and Tesla doing some pretty heavy discounting on the S and X.
最近,特斯拉在一些情况下似乎已经提高了Model S和X车型的折扣,这些车型可以从库存中获得。我看到一些消息说折扣是从5000美元到7500美元不等。但根据我所看到的,这些折扣似乎更加变化多样。例如,这款Model S plaid车型享受了10000美元的折扣,而其他一些车型只有5000美元的折扣,其中一些还是展示车型,因此需要考虑到这一点。但肯定的是,有很多库存车型处于可用状态,而特斯拉对S和X车型正在进行一些相当大的折扣。
So I don't expect a particularly strong quarter there, whether it's from a sales perspective or revenue margin perspective, we've talked about this before with Tesla, seemingly indefinitely delaying the right hand drive or even cancelling the right hand drive versions, that doesn't seem to be because there is so much demand elsewhere, it seems much more likely that Tesla is just scaling back production of these vehicles, which then might make it more difficult to justify doing a right hand drive run. So we're coming up here pretty quickly on Q2 deliveries, it'll be interesting to see that S and X breakout.
All right, last couple of things Tesla has filed for a new patent, I think first spotted by Electric for a steer by wire system, something that Elon has talked about working on in the past, something a lot of people would have liked to see with the yoke integration, so not too surprising to see a patent pop up for that, and obviously a lot of focus on redundancy and some separation or isolation of redundant items just to make things as safe as possible for a system like this.
好的,最后要说的是,特斯拉已经申请了一项新的专利,我认为首先被 Electric 发现的是一种电控转向系统,这是埃隆过去曾经讨论过的工作内容,也是很多人希望在方向盘集成中看到的东西,所以看到专利出现并不意外,显然,对于这样一个系统,重点在于冗余性和一些冗余项的分离或隔离,以尽可能地确保安全。
And then finally for today, switching gears, of course we've got more on Toyota, they are apparently working on emulating a manual transmission with an EV powertrain, so not actually having a multi-speed transmission, which could be done obviously in an EV as well, but just trying to make it seem like you're shifting in an ice vehicle, which I don't know, I mean to me it just seems like you're giving like a fake steering wheel to a baby sitting in the back or something like that, I don't know, it's just I'm sure there would be people out there, but it's so hard to imagine any adult actually finding value in a feature like that, but hey I guess if it's not distracting them from their technical breakthroughs that they keep making with solid state batteries then I guess no harm done.
Alright that'll wrap it up for today as always, thank you for listening, make sure you subscribe to and sign up for notifications, you can also find me on twitter at tesselpodcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday June 21st episode of Tesla Daily, thank you.