Hey everybody Rob Merr here and today we've got a couple updates on Tesla charging, some news items out of China and interesting job listing for Tesla and a few other items as well. Another tough day for Tesla stock today, finishing down 2.8% to close at $232.96, while the Nasdaq was down 1.1% on the day today. I have seen in various places a couple of mentions of Tesla being on some 18-day losing streak or something like that. Not sure where that's coming from, that's not accurate and only takes like a second to check, but we've had a number of positive days over that period of time, whether you're looking at it from a trading day perspective or a calendar day perspective. So if you happen to see that as well, you can ignore that or let them know that it is not correct.
Alright starting off I want to take a quick look at China insured vehicle numbers for the week of August 6th through the 13th. And for this week it sounds like the insured vehicle numbers came in right around 14,000. I've seen both 13,800 and 14,000 even. CNEV posts has 14,000, they usually do a pretty good job, so that's the number I'm going with here. And that's a really nice number. A couple of weeks in a row now with strong numbers, this would be the best week of the quarter so far. It moves quarter to date through the first six weeks, up to 58,300 vehicles insured, that compares with 57,200 through the first six weeks of Q2, which of course ended up being a record quarter, and it compares favorably with the slightly over 40,000, both in Q1 and Q4 through this point in the quarter. So the first couple of weeks started out slow, but Tesla now up 2% quarter to date over that record Q2 at this point. But after the next week or two, those comparables from Q2 will get more difficult, so to beat Q2, Tesla will need to average about 14,500 each week for the remaining seven weeks of the quarter, that would put them up towards 160,000 insured for the quarter, which is about what it'll take to be Q2. Definitely possible, however, if there is downtime for Project Highland or for any other reason, that would likely strain those numbers, and for that reason wouldn't be my expectation. There continues to be more rumors on Highland, but nothing that I've found that is really more concrete than anything that we've already discussed, so we'll continue to keep an eye on that, continue to keep an eye on these insured vehicle numbers, but we'll move on for now.
Alright, next we've got a handful of updates on charging. We'll start with National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Funding, or NEVI, NEVI, not sure how people are saying it. Either way, any V.I. funding, this was a $5 billion part of the infrastructure law signed in late 2021.
好的,接下来我们有一些关于充电的更新。我们先从国家电动车基础设施资金(National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Funding,简称NEVI)开始。不确定人们是怎么说这个缩写,不过无论如何,这是2021年底签署的一项基础设施法案中的一部分,金额为50亿美元。
So the funding is federal, but the proposals and the distribution is then handled by states, and we've got a couple of states that have published updates to this so far this month, Pennsylvania and Maine. If you know of any others, let me know. I think we had previously talked about how Tesla had not applied for any funding in Oregon, so I didn't anticipate this to be a huge thing for Tesla, but with these couple states, it looks like Tesla is participating in seeking this funding.
So let's start off with Pennsylvania, which has announced the first round of conditional awards based on the proposals they received from various different companies for charging station implementation. For this first round, they have approved 54 projects for a total funding amount of about $34 million. And again, this is just round one, so this is about 20% of what they expect to spend over the next five years. We should see similar updates for them each year, which I assume will be the case for other states as well.
So these 54 projects, they'll be all over the state of these 54 projects. 12 of them were awarded to Tesla, so about 22% of the total projects, Pennsylvania had stipulated that not more than 25% could go to one company. So it sounds like Tesla could have technically gotten some funding for one additional project, but pretty close to the max. But interestingly, while Tesla is about 22% of the total stations, they're only making up 8% of this allocated funding.
So Tesla is getting $2.7 million of the roughly $34 million in funding. That's $227,000 per station on average. While the other 42 projects, excluding Tesla are receiving an average of $740,000 per project. So at first glance, it kind of sounds like Tesla's getting a little bit of a raw deal, but these are proposals that are submitted by these companies, which more so speaks to the cost advantage that Tesla likely has for projects of this nature, as opposed to Tesla getting some unfair funding allocation. So if cost expectations are roughly aligned with fund allocation, that would suggest that Tesla's costs are about 30% of what the average costs of these other projects are. Obviously there are other things that could influence that Tesla could just for whatever reason request less funding, but I think it's probably at least directionally insightful.
Under any V.I. funding, companies have to match at least 20% of those project funds. So there is at least a little bit of an incentive to keep those funding requests lower, otherwise you get to match a little bit more. So that's the update for Pennsylvania, and then earlier this month, Maine announced similar awards for about $6 million for seven charging projects, two of which are going to Tesla. So a similar percent of the total, and although I don't in this case have the full project by project funding breakdown, it looks like the per project costs probably work out pretty similarly as to what we just talked about for Pennsylvania. Tesla probably in that quarter million range with others probably somewhere around three times higher. So we'll continue to keep an eye on this for other states. I know it's only $3 million ish that we're talking about here, but this is also just the first phase of this funding plan, which could go for five years. And in this case, just two states that we're talking about.
Alright, next we've got another abbreviation update this time, NACS as opposed to any V.I. So North American charging standard Fisker has now announced that they will be adopting NACS natively to their vehicles, beginning in 2025 aligned with what we have heard from other manufacturers. Slight difference though, while others have said that they will begin allowing an adapter for the supercharging network that already exists in 2024, Fisker is saying that that adapter will be available to Fisker customers in the first quarter of 2025. So without getting into a whole conversation on Fisker here, obviously a smaller automaker, but now another one joining NACS.
While we're on the topic, Rivian CEO RJ Scarin did comment on the relationship a little bit more on the earnings call for Rivian last week. Specifically on payment processing or customer information, he said that quote, there's not any data transfer built into the relationship. It's a charging relationship whereby our customers will access the network and ultimately pay for the charging, and that will flow from us through to Tesla and quote.
So we knew very early on from Ford that Tesla supercharging would be integrated into Ford's apps. But these comments give us a little bit more insight into precisely how that sort of flow is going to work.
Lastly on charging Tesla has added a new product to the Tesla shop today. This is the universal wall connector. It's basically a Tesla wall connector with a J1772 adapter built in, and similar to the magic dock setup, you can either pull out the NACS charger on its own, or pull out the connector with the adapter attached as well. So if you've got multiple EVs or just want to be able to support multiple EV connector types, might be a bit more convenient, especially for something like a small business. This is $595 compared to the wall connector at 475.
All right, moving off of charging, we do have a few reports out of China that kind of match up with some rumors that we have been hearing recently relating to Tesla's FSD efforts in China. So from CNEV post, they say that Tesla is quote, planning to form a local operations team of around 20 people initially to bring FSD into the Chinese market. Local media outlet 36KR said in a report today and quote. That report also noted that Tesla has already sent engineers from its headquarters to conduct training. So we'll see on this. There do seem to be a lot of rumors around these efforts coming from different places, which does make it seem like this is something that Tesla is trying to prioritize.
Perhaps somewhat relatedly, there were also some reports yesterday that although they were relating to some access restrictions for vehicles that have Sentry Mode, those reports did lead to a comment from Tesla in which Tesla stated that they've got data centers set up in China. So all data does stay localized within the country, which although I don't think it's really new or surprising would obviously be important for FSD to progress.
Sticking with data centers, Electric has also noticed that Tesla has listed a job for a senior engineering program manager for data centers in Austin, Texas, which Tesla describes as saying this role will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of Tesla's first-of-its-kind data centers and will be a key member of the factory engineering team. So it looks like Tesla has pretty major plans to continue vertical integration in this area. I guess these would be primarily utilized for FSD related items, but probably other things that Tesla will use them for as well.
Alright, that is it for today then. As always, thank you for listening, make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications, and also find me on X at Tesla Podcast. And we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday, August 16th episode of Tesla Theory. Thank you.