Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis. So first up today, Lex uploaded his interview with Walter Isaacson and we got some interesting takeaways. They talked a lot about the pain and the rough childhood that Elon had growing up. They shared anecdotes like when Elon was beat up pretty badly as a kid he was hospitalized for a week and then when Elon got home his dad, Errol, then berated him for more than an hour taking the side of the bully.
Later in life there were some anecdotes shared like around the Tesla verge of bankruptcy times in 2008 when Elon's former wife said that he was so stressed he would vomit at times. And Walter said it's some of Elon's childhood trauma that he's actually channeling and using as extra motivation and drive. Paired with the way Elon is wired which is he's addicted to risk and adventure and intensity which is again why he gets so much stuff done.
And one deep note they were talking about how Elon's empathy toward humanity is greater than empathy toward individuals. This gives Elon the ability to be a tough boss and to fire people understanding it's for the greater good of the mission. Walter said quote Elon is driven by mission more than any person I've ever seen and it's not only missions it's like cosmic missions. I see it all the time when I'm walking the factory lines with him or in product development where he'll look at say the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a starship booster. And he'll say why does it have to be this way couldn't we trim it this way or make it or even get rid of this part of it. And he can visualize the material science isn't small anecdotes in my book but at one point he's on the Tesla line and they're trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018. It's a life or death situation and he's looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis and he insists that Drew Bagley not Drew, that Lars Maravy one of his great lieutenants come and they have to summon him and he says why are there six bolts here and Lars and others explained well for the crash tests or anything else the pressure would be in this way so you have to and they were blah blah blah blah. And he said no if you visualize it you'll see if there's a crash it would the force would go this way and that way and it can be done with four bolts. Now that sounds risky and they go test in the engineer but turns out to be right. I know that seems minor but I could give you 500 of those where in any given day he's visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem that sounds pretty mundane but for me if you say what makes him special there's a mission driven thing I give you a lot of reasons but one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product but visualizing the manufacturing and of the product the machine that makes the machine.
I think you're also right on 50-100 years from now what Musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real world AI not just optimist the robot but optimist the robot and the self-driving car they're pretty much the same they're using GPU clusters or dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real world data. We all got and you did on your podcast quite excited about large language model you know generative predictive text AI. That's fine especially if you want to chat with your chat bot but the holy grail is artificial general intelligence and the tough part of that is real world AI and that's where optimist the robot or full self-drive or I think far ahead of anybody else.
Since a few years ago when you could see with Andrei Karpathy the software 2.0 evolution of autopilot it became obvious to me that this is not about the car this is about optimist the robot this is like if we look back 100 years from now the car will be remembered as a cool car nice transportation but the autopilot won't be the thing that controls the car it will be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world so broadly so that kind of approach and you kind of stumble into it will Tesla be a car company will be an AI company will be a robotics company will be a home robotics company will be an energy company and you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently like push forward with a vision which one will Tesla become well probably all of the above.
The full conversation will be below over the weekend thanks to the updated user manual for the new model 3 as we can see it looks like there are no airbags for the knee area in the new version. I do want to add this is not a guarantee for the north american version that still may be slightly different in different aspects either way I did just want to pass along this article from the IIHS some of their researchers have found a little benefit from these knee airbags they found not only do they have a negligible effect on injury risk but they may even increase it in some cases.
To everyone asking how the hazards will work when the trunk is open on the new model. 3 well here is your answer with the lights integrated to the trunk now they have the lights down here below.
We have a new questionable rumor from car news china according to a Tesla salesperson Tesla might increase the model y price in china next month they said the price hikes could be between 1100 and 1400 us dollars and that Tesla might even cancel the rear wheel drive variants altogether but here's why it's questionable if you go on to read the rest of the article they're also saying that the model y already has everything the new version of the model 3 added this is not true and if you need one example interior ambient lighting is not on the model y for that reason I wouldn't put too much stock into this report but it's certainly possible.
We got the Tesla production number for august and it was 80,832 essentially in line with july more importantly looking at the production breakdown between model 3 and why model 3 production still relatively on par with where it's been albeit slightly decreased coming in at 21.3 thousand for the month of august we'll see what september looks like but it looks like gigashang high is doing a pretty incredible job of maintaining the model 3 production all the way through this highland transition because we know that there are now parking lots filling up with new model threes for export from gigashang high.
We got another excerpt from walter isakson's upcoming biography on elon musk and everybody saying it's ruining the book just remember the books about 700 pages and we're only getting a few pages of a preview in this one we got some more context on the bill gates elon musk situation in 2022 they were at a meeting together and bill gates said hey i'd love to come see you and talk about philanthropy and climate fast forward to march 9th of last year and bill gates landed to visit gigatexas then when elon started to give bill gates atora the factory gates argued batteries would never be able to power large semi-trucks and that solar energy would not be a major part of solving the climate problem bill gate said i showed him elon the numbers it's an area where i clearly knew something that he didn't despite this gates found himself impressed by the factory elon had built and his detailed knowledge of every machine and process most of us know about gates shorting tesla stock and by the time he arrived at the factory he had lost about 1.5 billion dollars when elon found out about the situation he was obviously upset bill gates said i did apologize to him to elon but once he heard i'd shorter the stock he was super mean to me but he's super mean to so many people so you can't take it too personally elon said how can someone say they're so passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most it's pure hypocrisy why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company after the visit bill gate sent a text to elon trying to talk about some of his philanthropic ideas for elon elon's response to that text do you still have a half a billion dollar short position against tesla to which gate said yes and then elon said sorry i can't take your philanthropy on climate seriously when you have a massive short position against tesla the company doing the most to solve climate change reportedly bill gates was puzzled about why elon was upset about him shorting tesla which is odd then right after this exchange elon texted walter saying at this point i'm convinced he bill gates is categorically insane i did actually want to like him side on x elon said gates also said the tesla semi was impossible even though it was literally being driven all over the country when i asked what battery watt hour per kilogram and truck watt hour per mile he was using to reach the conclusion that it's impossible gates had no idea but still stuck with his conclusion.
Here we have an unlikely source cbs sunday morning to potentially leak part of the design for the upcoming robo taxi so first we have this cardboard design as you can see it appears to have one row of seating potentially for two people with ample legroom easy ingress and egress the ability to get in and out and it looks like right behind the seats there would be some room for suitcases and storage.
I've also seen a lot of questions about why they would have a robo taxi with only two seats don't forget the rest of tesla's fleet the s3 xy will also be able to operate as robo taxis and will work just fine for families or people that want to travel in groups bigger than two so think about the millions of instances just one person or a couple will need a ride and then tesla will be able to make smaller more affordable vehicles use less batteries they'll be lighter and more efficient all of those benefits but you may notice something over here on the left and now you can't see these very well. but it looks like this could be an early prototype of the robo taxi cyber futuristic field design and i think it's this image that we're leading some people to believe it could be a three wheel vehicle i do think that's unlikely although yes it would lead to things like lower rolling resistance but i will say i'd be surprised if tesla were to go the aptara route then up top it looks like this could be a shot of the rear
I do want to say though if this really was a design for the robo taxi this could have been changed a hundred times by now. We know Tesla has a huge library of drawings, sketches, and designs like this that never ultimately stick. But again, hopefully sometime next year, we get an official unveiling event for the robo taxi and the twenty-five thousand dollar Tesla.
Replying to k-10 Elan did say he has a copy of the book but Walta recommended that he not read it over the weekend. Alex said a VW RND board member said that VW makes no money with BEVs and is slowing down the introduction of new BEV models. Saying "for us it's important not to overwhelm customers by moving too quickly into e-mobility. That's why our combustion engines make sense." Saying quote "with competitors, you see that the focus on low-cost electric cars means they don't make money. The transformation is a slow process." And he said, "Along the way, the internal combustion engine has a right to exist, which is why we are once again investing heavily in technology with the Tiggy One and the Pasote. This is necessary to bring the masses along on the road to electromobility."
Replying to Alex's post, Doctor Electron X said, "The goal of most auto manufacturers is to figure out how to wind down their businesses. I've been saying this about GM for a while, others are starting to follow GM's lead. The words they say to the media is to keep stockholders from fleeing all at once." To which Elan said, "If they don't switch to autonomous electric cars pronto, that is absolutely true. It may be a few years, but the electric and autonomous revolution will undoubtedly put some legacy car makers into the EV autonomous graveyard."
Recently at the Fully Charged event, Sandy Munro saw a VW logo pointed at it and said that they could be in the EV graveyard. Next to that point, we have this: one of the top executives at VW was dispatched to China to review the competitive landscape and his assessment was grim. He told the VW CEO that Europe's largest car maker was losing the electric vehicle race in its most important market and had no prospect of catching up on its own. Echoing Elan's words, VW risks getting confined to the wane market for combustion engine cars and lacking the volumes to support its bloated structure.
For the last five years or so, we've heard how VW was going to catch Tesla in EV sales but looking at quarter two 2023, Tesla in the black, 466,1000 BEV sales, VW still sits at 145,000. So as of quarter two this year, Tesla is still more than tripling up VW in terms of full BEV sales globally. The boss of VW China said, "It's a marathon and not everyone in a marathon who comes out fastest will be seen first or at all at the finish line."
We're already seeing some of these last-ditch type efforts from VW, like paying 700 million dollars for about 5% of e.paying. And that e.paying deal was preceded by new cooperation agreements with a battery maker and autonomous driving specialist and an infotainment developer. Going back to that first quote, that VW's own executive does not think they can catch up at all on their own. What does that mean? Well, ultimately it adds a lot more complexity for VW and takes away a lot of those profit margins. So, will Sandy be right again with Tesla stock up over 10% today?
At least part of it could probably be attributed to this from Adam Jones and Morgan Stanley. They put out a new Tesla stock research note highlighting the benefits of Tesla Dojo, and they've upgraded their Tesla price target to 400. This would be about a 60% increase from their prior price target of 250 dollars per share. I believe this is now the highest Tesla stock price target on the street, and this would give Tesla a valuation of about 1.4 trillion.
Honestly though, guys, all this note really is is Wall Street waking up to what many of us have now been talking about for months and years. He said, "We believe Dojo can add up to 500 billion dollars to Tesla's enterprise value, expressed through a faster adoption rate in mobility, robo taxi, and network services software as a service."
The summary: With a highly experienced semiconductor team, Tesla has built a custom AIA sick chip that due to its core function of processing vision-based data for autonomous driving, it can operate more efficiently than the leading cutting-edge general-purpose chips on the market and at a fraction of the cost. Tesla pursues high vertical integration and key technology domains to enable high iteration and continual improvement while helping to diversify away from over-reliance on third-party suppliers that may not be able to provide an optimal solution for Tesla's specific needs.
The more we looked at Dojo, the more we realized the potential for under-appreciated value in the stock. We believe Tesla can reasonably test its all-time highs of 400 over the next 12 months.
If you're not new to the channel, everything I just said really should just be a reiteration of what we've all known. They talk about Dojo changing things at Tesla going from targeting just automotive to being multi industry training speed going from months to weeks capital expenditure going from high single digit billions down to low single digit billions again all things that we already know but morgan saintly did say that they raised their bull case valuation to five hundred and fifty dollars up from 450 before they said we believe dojo can represent the next step change in market perception of tesla longer term we see scope for dojo to provide avenues for tesla software and hardware capabilities to extend well beyond the auto industry if dojo can help make cars see and react what other markets could open up with their calculations when comparing what tesla would have to spend on equivalent compute from in vidio dojo has the potential to drive six and a half billion dollars in cost savings for tesla over the next few years then despite those calculations they said we have not given tesla credit for specific cost savings from dojo versus current super computing budget nor have we given tesla credit for any non-auto related revenue streams they also made no changes to their assumptions for tesla energy or tesla insurance and finally they said dojo is designed to process visual data which can lay the foundation for vision based ai models like robotics health care and security in our view once tesla makes headway on autonomy and software third party dojo services can offer investors the next leg of tesla's growth story replying to this note elon said almost all of tesla's value long term will be from ai and robots both vehicle and humanoid believe it or not
parts of wall street are clearly waking up to the real tesla story bit by bit in the past five years evs have gone from 2% of new car sales in california to 22% and i just wanted to show you this chart if california were a country it would be the fourth largest in terms of quarter to ev sales this year so here we have the top 10 global ev markets and we can see their ev share of new cars of course norway still leading the way but california should be leading the way and a sign of things to come for the rest of the united states especially once we cross that 10 threshold
this one was actually from gm authority just showing us the luxury ev cuv sold in the quarter two this year in the united states 108.7 000 vehicles total 105.5 000 of which were the tesla model y the Cadillac lyric in second place at a distant 1.3 000 from car sales in australia the model y has been crowned the winner of best electric car for 2023 they narrowed down the field to six new or upgraded finalists price under 89.3 000 dollars the judges then analyze these vehicles based on 100 criteria across five areas safety tech comfort convenience driving performance and ownership cost the model y came up trumps after solid scores in all assessment areas the model y is also the most searched electric car on car sales.com.au followed by the model three hydrag zane gave us an interesting scoop on an update for the tesla semi-production and the giga navada expansion we do know most of the megapack production has now been moved out of giga factory navada into lay throat
i have a high degree of certainty that with this information i'm about to share first week of august or so in the midnight hour the cover of darkness 17 semis arrived at the tesla giga factory navada and they brought in production equipment into these doors we're about to see 17 full trucks full truck loads trailer loads of semis and the where you see the three the two trailers backed up to the three loading doors and we'll get back to it here in a second and the wide door a lot of semi a lot of production equipment went in there and the rumor is is that it's for a semi-production sort of another prototype production line but maybe more automated semi-production has been moved up to the compound i don't believe they're starting it i believe they're waiting for the new version and then they will so we're getting closer to actual semi-production from giga navada because to date the pilot tesla semi-line is not actually in this building but i believe it's within a few miles of this building and sometime soon we should actually begin to see construction at this site where they expand this facility to allow for that semi-production
here we have another excerpt from the Walter Isaacson book this devol shroff is a member of tesla's autopilot team and by the early 2023 the neural network planner project the end to nv12 had to analyze 10 million clips of video collected from the cars of tesla customers and yes tesla is still using human labelers many of them based in buffalo new york and they assess the videos and give them grades more on this in a second shroff had been showing elon instances in where a neural network planner nt nv12 would work better than a rules based approach they had a demo littered with trash cans fallen traffic cones etc and he said here's what happens when we move from rules based to a network path based the car will never get into a collision if you turn this thing on even in unstructured environments elon got pumped about the idea and then said I want the latest data on miles per intervention to be the starting slide at each of our meetings and he told the team to make it like a video game where they could see their score every day so it would be motivating to watch each day as the miles per intervention increases so members of the team installed a massive 85 inch television monitor in their workspace that displayed in real time how many miles the fsd cars were driving on average without interventions they put a gong near their desks and whatever they successfully solved the problem causing an intervention they got to bang the gong
in a conversation about this end to end model the team found that the neural network did not work well until it had been trained on at least a million video clips luckily on that point james downma just talked to herbert full video will be linked below and james said that as the system gets better the number of clips that tesla needs to train on will be fewer and fewer it just becomes a game of finding the highest quality and curating what data tesla is actually using to train the neural nets and what's cool with the end-to-end system according to james is let's say tesla is trying to solve for one specific stoplight situation well in those videos the neural network is still going to learn from everything else in the scene that's going on not just that one little instance james did clarify that v12 is being built on top of a lot of the framework from v11 and prior version so no tesla has not thrown away everything that it did before v12 is built on a legacy of the system that tesla had but they've impressively found a way to take out most of the remaining code and glue all of the networks together so now the neural nets can begin to solve problems that engineers couldn't solve on their own and james did say the competition can't start out end-to-end you can only get there incrementally like tesla has done
And we know Tesla is planning to release shadow mode if they haven't already. That'll be pushed most likely to all cars to gather data even when those cars are driving manually. Pair that with Tesla hiring FSD drivers globally to then collect specific data for v12, and the data collection will be different with v12 focusing on gathering different types of video data. Because before, Tesla didn't care as much about what the driver was doing, they were just capturing the video because the manual code would ultimately control the output. So now Tesla needs to collect a new video database because now they need to train for the part that goes all the way to the end user controls what the human is doing in these situations. And now the human labelers that Tesla is still using, they're actually curating the dataset rather than labeling or approving the auto labeling of objects like before because again it's all about quality video data.
You know, we'll see how they do with this stuff but I don't think they're anywhere near where Tesla is right now and I don't think the infrastructure they put in place or the compute they have in the vehicles is capable of doing it like they're going to have to come up with a different way to do it and they're going to have to prove it. It's a research project, it's not a term the crank thing. So if so, someone's asking a question, well you know how soon after Tesla does what they're doing well somebody else just do what they did okay how long will it take a competitor to put four million instrumented vehicles on the road and then run them for two years to gather all data and then train the neural network. Even if even if you knew everything Tesla is doing even if they published the source code and shared what they were doing, a competitor's got to build a fleet of vehicles, they got to get them out there, they got to run them for years because they got to turn the data engine crank to get the thing going. And then at the end of that, you know then they get results that the Tesla's doing now. It might be a little faster, you know three years from now, five years from now, maybe the computers are faster than that kind of stuff but you know how long does it take to build four million cars or a million cars and put all the instrumentation on them out there, that's not something that happens in a year right? That's not, that's probably not something that happens in three or four years given you know the build rates at a lot of the competitors. So you know it, the idea that someone is going to see what Tesla did and then they're going to go do it a year later, like that's not going to happen. Something else could happen, it's certainly possible, I don't think it's going to happen because I don't see any other players that are capable of putting a system in an OEM vehicle, a privately owned vehicle, and putting it out there. I don't see any of them building the infrastructure necessary to close the gap in less than, I don't know, three years, five years, something like that. I mean, I would say that that would kind of be the minimum and I'd be surprised that somebody did it five years after Tesla but it'll depend on how the technology moves. The tech moves really fast every year and surprising things happen. Tesla adapts to these surprises, everybody else adapts to the surprises, and some of the surprises they may, you know, they may open the gap with Tesla and some of them might close the gap. It's hard to say.
You not only do you need a, you know, a million cars out there, a really large population of cars driving this stuff, and, and just to be clear it's not the 400 000 FSD cars that are important one that all of the, you know, there's four million Teslas out there driving around. They have the hardware that they can gather data with this stuff because for this kind of stuff and for a lot of the regular FSD stuff as well the FSD 11, FSD 10 perception whatnot, any car that's instrumented, you can gather data from it. It doesn't have to be driving on FSD. um you as we're mentioning before the quality of the data really matters so you can't just hoover up you know it i mean for instance say that you had a million cars out there and they were just driving around recording stuff but they didn't have the capacity that they didn't have the capacity to run fsd you just had cameras on cars and you just have all the state well first of all you can't ingest all that data you can't store all that data video is really big it takes insane amounts of storage i think as you know i had commented today just storing the stuff that they want to store the stuff that's actually useful takes you know mind-boggling amounts of of storage and if you're just going to store everything that a lot of cars come from like it's not doable you can't do that there's just there's not enough storage they're not enough bandwidth that's not a practical approach to trying to solve this problem tessell's approach was to get filters out there the cars are smart you can tell.
the cars what you want and they go find just that stuff and they send it to you so you don't get if a car drives for an hour you don't get an hour video from all eight cameras you get 10 seconds of video of the one thing that you really wanted to see that you needed to add to your data so that that's a really critical component of this that the fleet is a search engine it's not a tape recorder right it's not just recording stuff and one last big takeaway from me from this conversation was james was talking about even if a competitor hypothetically were to solve fsd shortly after tesla does it's not like they're really going to be eating into tessell's market share the market is so huge the tam is massive so it's going to be a long time before we start to see any competition eating away at each other's market share in a robo taxi market so there will undoubtedly be a major first mover advantage for presumably tesla but even if somebody else were to figure it out a year or two later which is very unlikely it's not really going to matter that much for tessell's market share because the market is so big even the mighty tesla can't produce enough robo taxis fast enough to saturate this market for many many years to come just like the model s and x the new model three when this feature is enabled has the ability to allow it to use inputs from sensors to select drive or reverse automatically but yes this feature can be left off entirely and it can be overridden by pressing the break and then using the actual manual buttons to select your gear hope you guys have a wonderful day you can find me on x linked below please like the video if you did and a huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters.