Real quick, no video from me tomorrow on Friday. While I'm here, I plan to spend some time with family, but I also have something I'm working on finishing that you guys will see here soon enough.
Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis.
欢迎来到电气化,我是主持人迪伦·卢米斯。
So first up today, we have an insider, allegedly, from Cruise, really spilling the tea, and it's quite hot. I have to preface this with, we don't know how true this really is, but let's see what they said. I'm gonna relay insider info. Cruise level for autonomy is a complete lie. There's intervention and supervision all the time when the cars are out on the road. The executives higher-ups wanted more cars on the road, even though we brought up issues the cars were having, they did not care, they just wanted to get more vehicles on the road to have more funding and to make shareholders happy.
Cruise AVs cannot see small children or animals on the road, even when they were out on autonomous mode. Even with extremely concerning issues like I just stated above, they did not care. They still sent max numbers of AVs on the road. We literally had two auto park failure collisions in the parking lot doing testing a few days ago. Clearly not good.
Again, we don't know how true this random text is, but let's assume there is at the very least some truth to it. For years now, Tesla has been attacked in the media and by the general public for being reckless with safety when it comes to autopilot and FSD. People have wrongly accused Tesla of rushing out tech that was not ready, making the public unwillingly part of this big experiment. Other more nefarious actors will say have said things like FSD attempts to kill other people. The list goes on and on. All the while insinuating that Elon cares more about profits than he does about people.
Now, us and the Tesla community understand how absurd that really is, but what does actually bug me when I think about it, we have things like this happening at Cruise and no one in the media or the public for that matter seems to care very much. Of course, with this specific Cruise situation, we'll see what the next few weeks bring, but I can assure you, it'll not be met with the same level of vitriol that Elon and Tesla have received. The ones by the way that actually care more about safety than anything else.
So if these texts are true, Cruise knowingly actually did what Tesla has been accused of, rushing out technology that was not ready and really had no business being on public streets, how they chose to roll it out. And who knows if anyone on the Cruise team actually said the words, I don't care about these glaring issues with the system, but even if they didn't, actions always speak louder than words anyway.
So I'll just say it, Cruise should be blown up and restarted as something very different than what it has been. At the very least, it sounds like it needs a complete overhaul when it comes to the management from the top down, but honestly, I'd be fine with it ceasing to exist despite wanting autonomy to progress at all companies, not just Tesla, but with Cruise allegedly lying about accident details, just now hiring a safety officer, allegedly rushing out technology they knew was dangerous and not ready, they deserve to be exposed if these reports are indeed true.
I had to get that off my chest because it's really things like this that the public actually should be upset about and pushing back against not what Tesla and Elon have been doing.
We have an HSBC analyst picking up coverage of Tesla stock and they see 35% downside. Let's learn a little bit about this Tesla stock guru, Michael Tyndall who has a $146 price target. You guys know ordinarily I pay zero attention to these Wall Street updates, but because it is new coverage, it's gonna be worthwhile learning a little bit about Michael and HSBC's view on Tesla. In fairness, his model assumes FSD Dojo and Optimus are successful by 2030. We think the expected cost of capital for these businesses should be well above the group average given regulatory and technological challenges they face. Elon's global fame has afforded the group a customer awareness that far outweighs the money it has spent on marketing and advertising. Leaving aside, current legal issues Elon faces, we think his prominence presents a considerable single man risk at the group. We see considerable potential in Tesla's prospects and ideas, but we think the timeline is likely to be longer than the market in valuation is reflecting.
He said overall the market is too optimistic on Tesla and there is a fair degree of hope in the current share price.
他说总体而言,市场对特斯拉过于乐观,目前的股价存在一定程度的希望成分。
I don't know how accurate these tip ranks actually are, but again, let's just assume there is some level of truth here. Mike's track record has not been setting the world on fire by any stretch. I did read some of his work on LinkedIn. It looks like he's focused on the European auto market. Ultimately, he's really just saying that the transition to EVs may take a little bit longer than people had been expecting, and that legacy auto is going to put up more of a fight for longer than people were expecting. There's really no actual analysis here and it's nothing we haven't already heard before.
I had a convo around this topic with a friend this morning, let's go back to 2019 when Elon said, model three drive unit and body is designed like a commercial truck for a million mile life. Current battery modules should last 300 to 500,000 miles. We won't touch on replacement costs because of inflation and other factors, but something to keep in mind when people talk about cost of EVs, if Tesla's really do on average last around 500,000 miles in your typical ice car, only last what we'll call it half of that, pretty dramatically changes that TCO or total cost of ownership equation. I will say, I wish we had a lot more real world reliable data on the Tesla battery pack average lifespan as it is now out in the fleet. Naturally, over time we'll have more data, but just don't forget this talking point when it comes to EVs versus ice.
Like Spreyman uploaded a new conversation with Elon Musk, I was able to watch the parts that were pertinent to our purposes here and here are some of the takeaways. Talking about autonomy, Elon said, it does appear at this point, the car will be able to drive better than a human, even with hardware three and 100 watts of power. And really, if we really optimize it, it can probably be less than 50 watts. On optimists, Elon said, there are hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs. None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none. So we had to develop our own, design it specifically for what a robot needs. It's designed to be manufactured in the same way we would make a car, and I think ultimately we can make optimists for less than the cost of the car. It should be because if you look at the mass of the robot, it's much smaller and the car has many actuators in it. The car has more actuators than the robot.
So my biggest Tesla specific takeaways, the processing power Tesla needs for FSD is so much smaller than the competition like Waymo and Cruise. And at this point, Cruise is on the doorstep of irrelevance as they may be on their deathbed as we speak. Elon did say that hardware five is going to be even better, but hardware three may be good enough for true FSD. And on the optimist front, it's actually designed for manufacturability just like the vehicles, which means again, it's really not comparable to Atlas from Boston Dynamics. So when you see people making those comparisons as if they're apples to apples, it's just not the right way to look at it. And we've known that Tesla is designing and building the motors and the actuators and the actual hardware for optimists itself and in-house because there's nothing available on the market that worked like they wanted it to. If you only have a few minutes, I'd encourage you watch the last chapter about hardships. So many people think they want to be Elon, but he always said, people don't want to be me. His mind is constantly in a war of sorts. And it's tough not to empathize with him when he shares things like that and talks about how at times he does feel lonely. Just a good reminder of the sacrifice he makes on a daily basis to push our future forward and to try to make it better.
We have a rare physical Tesla recall of about 160 Model S and X vehicles from 2021 to 2023. It sounds like there are two different types of airbags, whether it's a round wheel or a yoke and some of these cars had the wrong one. Tesla service will inspect and replace the driver airbag as necessary free of charge. We're not going to get into the details here because in past episodes, we've already talked about VW's plans to invest with X-Pang and Stellantis's plans to invest in LEAT motor.
I've said in the past, this was a sign of these companies waving the white flag saying that there are certain competencies and technologies that they don't think they can't compete with or in. Now we have the CEO of an industry advisory firm saying, this is a sign how far behind global automakers have fallen in the EV race. It really is a sign of the times and a changing of the guard because for decades, we had a Chinese companies paying Western legacy OEMs to help them build vehicles.
Fast forward to today and we have those same legacy OEMs who are now flipping the script and actually paying Chinese companies for access to their technology. There's a hint of desperation to these VW and Stellantis deals because the companies they're investing in are both actually struggling in the Chinese market. As X-Pang has pushed back its break-even goal to 2025.
I did want to continue going through some of the lesser-known talking points when it comes to AG1, the sponsor of this video, because I'm sure you guys hear a lot of the same things repeated on other channels. Real quick, if you're totally new, AG1 is a nutritional drink with 75 vitamins, minerals, and probiotics in every serving. If I have the option, I always want to give my hard-earned dollars to companies I think are trying to do the right thing, making the world a better, safer, cleaner, healthier place. In AG1's impact report, we talked about switching from plastic bubble mailers to a craft paper mailer. This year, they've been phasing out plastic spoons and they're moving over completely to a reusable metal scoop. If you're saying Dylan, who cares? It's just a little scooper. I'm telling you, it's the little things that often tell you the most about a company, attention to detail.
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Troy Tess, like said, Model 3 production at Gigashang High in October was 28,000, much higher than he was expecting. This could mean more exports for Q1, more China sales in Q4. Ideally, the next weekly insurance number should be at least 16.1,000 in total with 5,500 Model 3s. I was not able to find a reliable total production number, so I'm not sure about Model Y production for the month, but looking at the context for Model 3, you can see compared to the last few weeks, that's a great result. The highest monthly production of the Model 3 ever at Gigashang High, of course, of the prior variant was only 32.5,000. So within a few weeks, Tesla's already at about 86% of that rate. The Model 3 Plus ramp looks like it's going very well.
On X, this image was shared of a random customer review of the Model 3 Plus. I won't read the whole thing, so go ahead and pause if you'd like. Quick takeaway, this individual was very impressed with things like closing the door, that noise or thud that you like to hear the door make. And they said, I'm extremely enthusiastic and can only agree it's a huge step forward in all areas.
Nicolas on X is saying regarding the Tesla, Sweden strike situation that if the ports are blocked, Tesla has found a workaround by transporting them by truck from other countries. This lines up with what we've been reporting that each step of the way, Tesla just calls an audible and solves problems on the fly to try to keep operations running. I am going to pass this along, but I have to say I have no idea if this is true or not, just an anecdote of some others that we have heard similar to this, that there are only six people out of around 130 actually striking at the eight Tesla service centers. If that's true, there might be more companies involved in these sympathy strikes than there are actual employees of Tesla actually striking.
We have Lucid announcing a new product and feature called Range Exchange, which is kind of a cool name, basically the ability for a Lucid vehicle to charge another EV. The product Lucid will sell here will be the adapter and all Lucid vehicles already have the Wonder Box on board that will enable this feature. They said this could add 24 to 40 miles of range per hour or about 9.6 kilowatts of speed. This vehicle to vehicle adapter will first be available for United States customers. They said in the future, this could possibly allow for future applications like vehicle to grid and time of use optimization. The adapter will be available exclusively from Lucid later this month.
Speaking of Lucid, Farsad said, gonna go out on a limb and say Lucid will be taken private in 2024 to which Elon said, good guess. These numbers fluctuate hourly, but Tesla is back to being one of the world's largest shorted stocks. As of yesterday, the share of Tesla's float that was short interest was 3%. Value-wise, $18.6 billion.
From S&P Global, they did a recent survey of 7,500 respondents about EVs globally and 48% of those people said EV prices are too high. Fewer than half of respondents believe the EV technology is ready for mass market adoption and 62% of respondents are waiting until the technology improves before buying a new vehicle. The second biggest concern behind affordability is still the charging network. 46% of people said they're concerned about the time required for charging. Interesting data point, they said only 51% of current and repeat EV owners have a charger installed at home. According to this small sample size, the narrative most owners recharge at home is barely true. It's always good to be aware of what the non-Tesla bubble public actually thinks about EVs. It should be obvious, but with global adoption only at 11.3%, even if 50% of people are interested in EVs, that's enough demand for the next few years until the other 50% become a bit more educated and their preferences change, hopefully with more better options in the market.
VW just announced they're looking to bring a new EV under $35,000 to the US in three to four years, saying we are not scaling back plans for EVs in the US. VW plans to build this vehicle in the US or Mexico, specifically Chattanooga, Tennessee, Puebla, Mexico, or their new South Carolina Assembly Plant planned for VW subsidiary scout. VW is also looking at localizing assembly of battery packs for the Sub 35K EV to qualify for additional incentives under the IRA. This article also mentioned how Neo is still debating a 2025 entry into the US market. Their US CEO said Neo needs to build infrastructure before bringing EVs to North America and the company is considering any kind of partnerships. We know how much can change in three to four years, and at this point, these legacy OEM EV promises and plans seem super fragile.
Here we have an update on the UAW tentative contracts, but specifically for these joint battery factories. Battery workers will be paid a top rate of just under $31 an hour at the Altium site in Ohio. Stellantis battery plans will also receive 75% of the auto production pay, but at this point, it's still unclear how it's going to work for Ford. It sounds like the UAW is going to be successful at bringing the employees at these joint battery factories under the main agreement for the UAW. However, they're going to wait until 2028 to start negotiating on higher pay for these workers. The next round of talks are set to be in 2028. With Altium at a top rate of $31 an hour, they're saying Ford might be as high as 37.50 an hour. This all may end up in a two-tier system, part of what the UAW is trying to get rid of, but at least for the next few years, it could be one tier being a battery employee tier and the other for ICE.
Remember, no video from me tomorrow on Friday. You will hear from me again on Monday. Check out AG1 linked below. If you're interested, grab those freebies. Thank you if you do. Hope you guys have a wonderful and a safe weekend. Please like the video if you did. You can find me on X linked below and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.