Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis. First up today, we have new details about Gigabrelin's expansion set for next year, but as you may imagine, it's been met with some pushback. Over the past two days, there have been some protests and so far in this process, more than 1,000 citizens and institutions have raised objections. These discussions taking place right now this week could last several days. The authorities will evaluate these debates and then only then can Tesla actually be approved for its application for expansion.
Who's protesting? You guessed it, some environmentalists from the Green League, Naboo, and the Association for Nature and Landscape, but unless we're losing something in translation, it looks like the Green League has cancelled its participation in the discussion. This time around, the complaint is that Tesla blacked out some of the application documents and made some changes after it was published. However, the state of Brandenburg rejected the environmentalists' allegations. This is a completely normal procedural process.
Fast forward to today, and we learn a little bit more about what exactly Tesla is looking to do. They want to begin expanding Berlin in the first half of 2024. They're planning several steps in this expansion. The first half of next year, the existing factory hall, the production area will be modernized. Tesla also wants to build a water recycling plant. Then sometime in the future, they have plans for a second production hall and a battery recycling plant.
This modernized could mean many things, of course. Maybe they make the new Model 3 there eventually. Maybe it's for a slight Model Y refresh. Or maybe it's just some new equipment overall. I bet Elon would throw out one of his favorite quotes, fate loves irony, because we have these environmentalists who have been on and on complaining about Tesla's water use. That's been well below their allotted amount. So effectively now, that same group is protesting Tesla building a water recycling plant that would only help the water situation.
Then the second production facility, again it could be more Model 3 and Y, next-gen platform, Cybertruck, we really don't know for sure. Yes, I know some of those options are more likely than others, but ultimately we just don't know. Zooming out the main takeaway, Tesla looking to expand in Berlin despite everything they just said on the Q3 call. I just have to say this, hope you like my remote decor, by the way. There's a decent chance that Tesla is sandbagging with some of their public announcements.
Again, if Tesla and Elon like playing this 4D chess, which I definitely think they do, there's a world where they put out all of these negative sentiment talking points to get the rest of the industry to say, hey, maybe we should slow down, and then Tesla in the background keeps spending more than their capital expenditure guidance, and actually doubles down, and turns out to actually have their foot on the accelerator a bit more than they were letting on. Do not take that to the bank, I'm not even sure I think that's what's happening, but these are thoughts that I have wanted to throw it out there.
The state environment agency said most of those objections they received about Tesla's expansion plans were over the plant's water consumption. But there's more, the current issue is how the noise generated in the factory affects the surrounding area. Tesla and the state authorities are definitely on the same side, they both want the same thing, so they will overcome these objections, it just may be a little while, but expansion for Gigabrelin in 2024, you'll love to see it. So yeah, Tesla may not be rushing for Gigamexico, but clearly Tesla is maybe trying to reduce its reliance on China like we've talked about and they are pushing ahead in Berlin.
If you've been somebody disappointed with Tesla's perceived lack of aggression right now, this should be very encouraging news. Gigabrelin news on X shared an article saying that clearing the forest has begun for a new train station at Tesla North that should be up and running sometime toward the end of 2026. From Reuters, we got a peek behind the curtain at this autopilot fatality trial that is taking place right now. This is the first trial in the United States involving autopilot in a fatality, so naturally it's going to set some level of precedence for the future.
This was an accident from 2019 and the lawyer that's representing the victims that were involved in the crash said Tesla should never sell consumers experimental vehicles blaming autopilot. They're arguing autopilot caused this model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway at 65 miles per hour, saying that the car on its own made a sharp 43 degree turn on a freeway. Tesla of course said autopilot puts guardrails on the angle of the steering wheel at high speeds and Tesla blamed the driver for being intoxicated. Tesla also claims it was not clear whether autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash.
They're expecting this trial to last for a few weeks and earlier this year in April, Tesla won an autopilot case where the jury actually told Reuters after the verdict, they believed Tesla warned drivers about its system and that the driver distraction was to blame. As Tesla's core argument was that it tells drivers its technology requires human monitoring. We'll see what happens but I do have to say this whole experimental vehicles argument is so overplayed in such a mischaracterization of what's actually going on. Maybe I have a glass half full mentality but correct me if I'm wrong in the comments.
There's a new 12 stall V4 supercharging station now live in France. Supercharge.info on X said that crowdsource data so keep that in mind has the United States currently with about 2000 open and active supercharger locations in the USA alone. Just so you guys know we won't cover every single country but right now and in the weeks ahead, the new Model 3 is rolling out globally to many different locations. As Esther just pointed out on X, the Model 3 Plus as I'm now calling it is live at all locations in the UAE. And we have first deliveries officially taking place in France.
In case any of you would like this lovely presenter to tell you all the new details about the new Tesla Powerwall 3 compared to the older version, I'll have a link to this video below from Good Faith Energy. Nothing really new but it was a good video. It'll be there if you're interested.
The Tesla China weekly insurance data came out for week three of this quarter. 8100 was the number. If you wanted to compare it to the same week of Q3, that number was 7700. However, if we look cumulatively at the first three weeks of quarter three, we were at 20.9000. Over the same three weeks in this quarter, we're at 16.6000 still below the pace again though to be expected. The word on the street is Model 3 Plus deliveries will actually begin in China toward the end of this month. Why are they waiting so long after we got the M.I.I.T. approval? The only thing I can think of Tesla just allocated a number of vehicles for export knowing they were waiting for the approval. So they arranged X number of ships filled those up and now they'll shift back to local deliveries.
Tasha Kinney touched on Tesla in her weekly newsletter from ARK Invest saying that the Model X was notoriously over engineered as many people are saying now the Cybertruck is following suit and many of us remember the challenges with the Model 3 production ramp. She also said costs for the Cybertruck are likely to surprise on the high side of expectations in the short term. Right on cue because I think a lot of investors were lulled into thinking that the Cybertruck is going to be super cheap to manufacture and in the long term I do still think that's a possibility but for the next two years that's most likely not going to be the case because of how much new technology Tesla still has to figure out how to build this new thing. However Tasha said we continue to believe Tesla is years ahead of the competition in producing cost effective performance EVs. Pair that with their seemingly insurmountable advantage in real world driving data Tesla will continue to lead the world in autonomous electric transportation.
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Today California has suspended GM's cruise unit from operating driverless vehicles in the state saying they're not safe for public roads and that company officials misrepresented the details of an accident with a pedestrian. This is a polite way of saying they lied. The california dmd decision was effective immediately today and the agency said there's no set length for the suspension right now cruise is also operating in phoenix and austin and laying the groundwork to expand in multiple US cities and Japan.
I can almost guarantee right now that the authorities in phoenix and austin and the rest of these cities are watching this unfold and now having conversations. We've already talked about most of the high profile accidents over the past few weeks and one of the more recent ones it turns out the details of that accident were even more gory than we originally thought. I won't get into the details I know some of you watch with family but crews said ultimately we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles in an effort to save lives.
What we have here is the DMV saying that crews did not release all of the video footage of this one accident and they had to learn it through nitsa. Naturally crews disputed that and said it was a mischaracterization either way though. Cruise has burned through 1.4 billion dollars this year and on the earnings call that was just today mary bara said the company believes in av technology and plans to deploy it with honda in tokyo in 2026 saying we know from the data that crews avs are involved in far fewer collisions than human drivers.
Talk about one of the most broad statements ever no idea what data she's actually referring to and what nuance is involved in this statement. Just to prepare everybody if you don't already know this story will be used to absolutely try to push back autonomous vehicles in general which yes tesla will be looped into my hope and expectation honestly is that the regulators know tesla's strategy is much different than crews wamo and the others but this is certainly a major setback for crews now we have to wait and see what happens with crews in its other jurisdictions and for now i would classify this as a speed bump for autonomy in the longer term now it's time for the real house is on fire at gm story on its earnings call gm withdrew its 2023 profit outlook and said that they will slow its ev strategy to put profits ahead of sales targets translation gm is adopting the poll star approach focusing on profits basically giving up on sales targets gm giving up its fight to try to chase tesla in being the dominant ev producer simultaneously today we have the uaw just after gm's earnings saying that they're expanding their strike against gm where they make full size profitable suvs in texas specifically arlington the strike includes about 5 000 workers and this factory is where they make the escalate the ucon the chevy tahoe and suburban suvs in its quarterly financials gm said the uaw strike already costed 800 million dollars in lost production before this arlington strike including 200 million dollars during third quarter so part of that hit will also show up in q4 we'll get back to the strike in a second but we have gm pulling back from its efforts to challenge tesla's lead in the us ev segment mary barra continued saying gm is slowing the launch of several ev models to cut their costs and pulling back on ev product spending they're looking to save billions of dollars through their redesign and relaunch of the chevy bolt using lower cost lithium batteries from china and they're scrapping the plans they had to spend five billion dollars for several new entry level evs gm is now abandoning the goal of building 400 000 evs from 2022 to mid 2024
we're just not going to be talking about the interim production goals according to their cfo mary barra said gm has work to do to hit its low to mid single digit earnings before interest in taxes margin e-bit by 2025 gm's decision to delay retooling of a factory in oryan to build ev pickup trucks will save them 1.5 billion in capex next year we won't dive too far into the numbers because the way i see it they just don't matter that much what they said now looking backwards what really matters is what happens over the next two years and take a look around it's not going to be good gm said profits for the quarter were pulled down by 1.5 billion dollars because of higher costs and the impact of selling more evs which is definitely not a good incentive to continue advancing that product line the problem of course is if they don't and our future is truly all evs then where does that leave gm the cfo said gm execs are concerned about rising interest rates as well as the conflict in the middle east and whether that could affect consumer behavior gm also said losses at its cruise robo tax unit widened to 732 million in the quarter as i said over on x guys it's like tesla takes its foot off the accelerator a little bit people go crazy here we have gm basically slamming on the brakes of its ev plans at scale not just a model here or a factory there but it's overall ev plans now drastically coming back if you've been around the channel for some time you'll know that i do not like hyperbole i try to avoid it but in this scenario it really does feel like a major inflection point where things are drastically changing for gm's future
One question I have right now is what does this mean for the Chevy Blazer but saying they're not going to spend that five billion dollars for several new entry-level EVs. Clearly, this isn't like, "Oh, we're just not going to retool a factory or maybe a delay here." It's like we're scrapping most of our plans. Back to the strike, more than 45,000 UAW members, or about 31% of them covered by these expiring contracts, are now on strike. Another 7,000, or about 5%, have been laid off due to the ripple effects. The UAW strike now covers eight assembly plans and 38 parts distribution centers in 22 states.
Bara said discussions to include battery plant workers under the scope of the national agreement remained open but said the current focus is for the workers at the Ultium joint venture to negotiate their own deal with the union. She added, "We need to make sure we have a contract that's going to allow us to compete and win in what is a challenging market for EVs and also allows us to support the business we have with strong margins in our ICE business."
Shifting gears to Stellantis, they said they were outraged by the escalation of the strike at their factory. But the latest is that UAW talks with Stellantis and Ford are ongoing today. The status of those talks with GM is not clear. If you do want to see GM's financials, here it is on the screen, go ahead and pause. But again, I'm not going to dive in because this is looking backward. And going forward, this means very little.
The cherry on top, year to date, for Cruise, they've made $100,000 in revenue and burned through $1.4 billion in cash. They've lost $1.9 billion. And if you read the footnotes, this year to date number for 2022 excludes $1.1 billion in a compensation expense from the modification of stock incentive awards. So, this number would have been even worse. Ironically, on their slide deck, they said "increased Cruise expenses due to rapid operational scaling in line with expectations". But today, that seemingly is crashing to a halt.
Naturally, in the slide deck, they make everything seem so rosy and everything looks so good. But then on the earnings call is where they told people what's really going on. In my opinion, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But what they said on the earnings call pretty much renders all of this null and void. As Soir pointed it out today, Sean Feins said, "We're done. We've tried to do things the right way. We've taken our time. We've been patient with these companies. It's time to amp up the pressure."
Today, Stellantis said it's temporarily laying off another 525 workers in Michigan. GM said it's furloughing 139 in Ohio due to the UAW strike. As VW celebrates 75 years in Norway, this will be the last year for ICE sales in the country. Starting next year, they will only sell EVs. If you don't have the context, people may say, "Oh, wow, this is great from VW." But the reality is over 90% of the vehicles that are bought in Norway are electric vehicles. There's just no room for ICE sales in the market.
Here we have the 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS EV. That will quickly top $200,000. Looks kind of like a hybrid between a van and an SUV. Of course, it looks great. But as that Mercedes dealer just said, "Will this be an aspirational vehicle that people aspire to own? And will there be any sales or lease incentives to help move some of these vehicles that haven't been selling well at dealers?" Not this one in particular, but the other Mercedes EVs. The starting price is $181,000, and all versions come with the same powertrain, a dual-motor all-wheel-drive setup, doing 0 to 60 in 4.1 seconds. Order books for this vehicle are already open, and production will be in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We don't have official EPA estimates yet, but the word on the street is it should come in around 300 miles. The max charging rate is 200 kilowatts.
We've been talking about it now for a while. We should be expecting more automakers to pull back their EV plans. But this was definitely more than a pullback. This was a slam on the brakes for GM. Toss in the UAW strikes being ratcheted up, and talk about an unenviable situation for Barra and the Big Three. Maybe it's just me, but they're really making Tesla's situation seem not so bad. Don't forget, check out AG1 linked below. Thanks in advance if you do. 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.