Hey everybody Rob Merr here, welcome back to Tesla Daily. Today we've got a few updates to catch up on with the Cybertruck, including some new details on hidden features. We also got some updates on Vision Park Assist, which of course started rolling out last Friday, so we'll talk about the first impressions of that, and we have some updates on incentives as well as a few other items today.
Alright, looking at the stock, tougher start to the week after a pretty strong close to the week last week, Tesla down in a little over half a percent today, to $252.08, underperforming the NASDAQ, which was up 6.10% on the day today. I don't know if it was super related, but I did happen to notice that other automakers struggle a bit today too, so you can see here Ford, GM, Stellantis, all the other US automakers down today. I guess if you exclude Rivian and Lucid, didn't look at them, I think Rivian was up. But the legacy OEMs down today, Ford and GM a little bit worse than Tesla, and also they seem to trade differently than the NASDAQ.
Sometimes we see Tesla kind of follow a similar pattern, but we can see most of the automakers starting in the green today and finishing in the red versus the NASDAQ actually started closer to flat and finished closer towards the high of the day, certainly higher than trading in the morning. So just wanted to point that out, seems like a little bit of correlation there for the other automakers in the US.
But getting into the Cybertruck, some exciting news over the weekend, Tesla started to expand orders or invitations to order rather for the Cybertruck. So it looks like we're up to 172 orders on the Cybertruck Owners Club order tracking sheet now. Many of these coming in the last couple of days. In fact, Tesla has now actually stopped allowing the ordering to some of these customers that had been invited to order. So unfortunately had to act pretty quick on that. I think in some cases there was even some orders that were configurable or could be placed that were not, Tesla didn't actually communicate via email. So you just kind of had to log in and check on it. So keep an eye out for the things like that in the future.
But for now, 172 orders in here, I don't know what that would mean in terms of total orders that Tesla's allowed, maybe something like 1000 at this point for the foundation series. And that could be why they have stopped, at least for the time being. But nice to see these orders. And importantly, these orders were placed outside of in many cases, California and Texas, which that first wave had a couple of people like that, but they had some tied to having ordered in Texas or California before. Now, we have, you know, you can see it from the order tracker here, Florida, Maryland, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, et cetera. So a lot of different states now being opened up, which is very exciting to see that expansion, even with this initial founder foundation series set of cyber truck orders.
So we keep an eye on that Tesla did, I think also adjust the delivery timeframe estimates for some customers to looks like the cyber beast version has maybe been pushed out a little bit. We'll have to wait and see more on that. It's tough with such few orders out there to get really, you know, precise or accurate information on that, but we'll keep an eye on that as well.
And then getting into some new details, we've got a couple of pieces of new content. First, Lars and Franz were on Jay Leno's garage. So this was posted at a leave today and gives us an exciting look at some of the details that they thought about when making the vehicle. Some things that maybe we haven't really quite learned about yet. So want to go through some of those.
One of them, which was one of them, which was kind of cool. Lars pointed out that there is a 48 volt accessory connection on the top of the cyber truck here to make it really easy to connect something like the light bar accessory. So that's what this is here. It can plug in directly at this connection point. And it also then integrates with the user interface that sounded like so you're able to control it via the, you know, the UI via the touchscreen. So I think pretty cool implementation of something like that. We've got a little bit more detail on the other accessories or the light bar accessory too that we'll talk about here. So just tried to recap that for everybody. I would definitely recommend this one. This one is linked in the description below.
But just to kind of recap things that they said about the cyber truck in general, Franz did confirm they do have over two million deposits. So that is kind of what the reservation number had indicated. Elon had previously said more than a million. So it looks like that reservation indicator ended up being accurate, which is nice to see over two million deposits for the cyber truck. Obviously super impressive. We'll see what the conversion rate is, but that's a big backlog for interest. So far, so great point to start from.
They talked about the design from specifically said that Tesla did not want to add the mirrors, the side mirrors, but they couldn't get the regulations changed. So they had to ship it with them. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.
They talked about the glass, the strength of it. He said if glass, Lars said if the glass gets chipped, it will create a stress ring rather than continuing to kind of spiderweb out, improving repairability of the vehicle of the glass rather. So that's I think a nice, nice note, especially as we talked about the price. I think it's a reasonable price, but still $1,900 for the part to replace the cyber truck window. As that is, I think one of the biggest pieces of automotive glass, if not the biggest, that windshield there.
They talked about the American made aspect of the cyber truck, which especially for a truck is really nice to see as those are often touted as America. It's a big market for America or for trucks rather, of course, the biggest market. So Lars assumes that this is like Tesla's other vehicles wanting going to be joining the top five most American made car index next year. He said he couldn't think of one part that's not made in the US. So we'll be excited to see that and should be something that is probably made a little bit bigger of a deal out than has been historically for Tesla vehicles.
And then on supercharging, Lars did mention charging it up to 355 kilowatts. We've heard 350 before, so it's not a huge difference, but looks like maybe even there's a bit of capacity above that. Like we've seen with the V3 superchargers occasionally going a couple of ticks above 250.
And then they talked about the wiper. Lars said that the 48 volt architecture helped make the wiper possible. In the interview, he said that that could take up to 600 to 800 watts of power, but he later clarified that on X here to around 120. So not quite that much, but still something that would be very aided by the 48 volt architecture in terms of bringing that power to the wiper.
They also talked about the cyber truck in water. So Lars did comment that Elon really did want it to be capable of being a boat essentially. It's not quite there, but he did say that it can traverse up to two and a half feet of water depth without issue when it's in wade mode. They talked a little bit about the pressurization of the battery pack, which we had talked about before. Lars basically just said this adds a little bit of air in the pack to help keep water out from any potential leak areas. So we've talked about the waterproof rating and how that I think steps it up. That's what the addition of air is helping do there. And he did happen to say that the cyber truck quote unquote almost floats and a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit serious as we sometimes see from Tesla. He said that you could add some buoyancy and use the 220 volt outlet to add an onboard motor and an outboard motor on the back and use it as a boat if you wanted to, probably keeping in mind that depth and things like that. Just to avoid water in the cabin. If you wanted to seal up some of those things and try, you could probably even do a little bit more than that. So interesting to see that. I'm sure at some point we'll get all sorts of experiments out there on that accessories.
They did talk about the tent a little bit. Franz mentioned that the tent can be set up in less than five minutes. The video kind of showed it inflating and things like that. So a nice note on the tent.
And then like we talked about the light bar that integrates with the UI and they said it has about 500 meters of visibility for off-roading use cases, which, you know, I'm sure there are other third party things that are out there for vehicles now that can do that. But nice to have that in a way that's easily attachable with this integration here that they pointed out and something that then automatically connects to the UI, which is something that something anything third party would obviously struggle with.
And then they did happen. You mentioned a couple of other things. Franz did confirm they are working on wireless charging. So we saw that a little bit of a teaser at investor day of, you know, doing doing cool things in the future. And that was an image that was shared on that slide kind of hinting at wireless charging development.
The context of what they were discussing that was during home charging. So that seems to be at least one intended use case for that. And then of course, a lot of people imagine that that would be something that would be helpful in the context of a robot's XE fleet, something like that.
And then on the semi, Lars did say that they have close to 100 Tesla semis testing internally at Tesla. I don't know if that's in addition, the number that is with Pepsi, but somewhere around that number, at least in total, if not just internally to Tesla. And they said that they're testing with Pepsi, Lars said to prepare for volume production next year. So this is very recent, of course, that's a good sign that they are continuing to track towards that. So keep an eye out on kicking a matter for the semi.
And then I mentioned the mirrors here that Tesla didn't want those. They have designed them to be quite easy to remove. So we've got a video here from RapBully's on YouTube walking through a little bit of the wrapping process for the cyber truck, but this video specifically focusing on the mirrors. And you can see it's just three torque screws here that are removable. And then you just slide the mirror out. Unfortunately, the video ends and they don't really show what it looks like after that. You can't really get a good sense for it, but should be something that's really easy to remove for people that are interested in doing that.
And then, you know, if any sort of additional covering needs to be put there, I'm sure third parties can can help out with that if Tesla doesn't offer anything themselves, or maybe it just is fine without anything there. So for those that are interested in that, that should obviously improve the aerodynamic efficiency of the vehicle and help with range. If you are comfortable without having those side mirrors, of course, the camera is there to substitute. So a lot of cool details there.
And then we got more because we got the second part of Monroe's interview with the Tesla team. So this was a factory tour with Lars. They showed a lot of cool stuff here. This particular screen is the laser cutter for blanks for panels. So looking at my notes here, they said that this laser cutter, the person describing it said, quote, it cuts up to 30 microns. And it's the first laser of its kind to do that. Typically these machines cut at one millimeter. This was a special development with Tesla and Schuler. So I assume he's talking about the precision of the machine there. 30 microns, that's 3% of a millimeter. So it's extremely small, you know, one, the 33rd roughly of a millimeter. So just kind of shows, you know, how detailed Tesla is getting with the manufacturing process here with the cyber truck.
They also talked about the stainless steel in general, how when they originally started it out the design, it was three millimeters, two and a half to three millimeters thick. They've been able to reduce that now to 1.4 millimeters on most of the panels and then 1.8 millimeters on the doors in terms of the thickness while not having to sacrifice the required strength that they need. And of course, we've still seen the bullet resistance and things like that, those demonstrations. So nice to see that progress from sort of the initial concept in terms of what they've been able to accomplish there. Obviously, the thinner that material is, the more it's going to be the cheaper and easier it is going to be to work with through the rest of the production process.
So Lars talked about the micron precision that you want to have been pushing. Really that is, you know, something that is actually happening at Tesla. Here's a blank. This is the front trunk, you know, the top of the front trunk area there. So they just use an optical spot checker here and then they compare it at, again, micron levels here. Lars was pointing out some that were, you know, within within 20 microns and sort of around that level in terms of various levels of precision coming through from the optical image here. So just kind of cool to get some insight on what they're doing there.
And then they also showed one instance of a door panel here being, you know, going through that airbending process that we heard Lars talk about on maybe one of the earlier interviews with the menorail or one of the other ones that they've done since, which by the way, just exciting that we're getting this kind of access and it's fun to funny here from, you know, broader portions of Tesla's team to give us, you know, more in depth details on a lot of these things. So cool to see that Lars did say that they're only running one shift right now in terms of production, really just working on giving the quality down so that they can ramp up from there. His specific quote was that, as you can see with all the equipment, we're ready to roll at a high volume. Now it's just how do we ramp, go slow and get quality right. So good to hear that. And I think from what we've seen both at the delivery event when Tesla allowed some tours there and through some of this behind the scenes stuff, you know, it definitely looks like Tesla's got this stuff in place, like Lars says, and just working on giving that speed up, which is hopefully exciting for the prospects of where things go from here. And then specific to the door panels here, Lars did mention that this takes about 75% of the side crash loads. So just kind of a nice little tidbit in terms of the, you know, exo-skeleton strength offered by the design of the vehicle there. So overall, really cool. Again, this one is also linked in the description. So I'd recommend both of those videos. This is a quick one, only about a half an hour. And when those garage was about an hour.
All right. And then we do have some first looks at the vision park assist that we had talked about rolling out with the holiday update on Friday. So people getting their hands on this, this video from Ross Nguyen was shared by Ashok from Tesla's autopilot team. And here we can just, I think this video captures, you know, what the feature entails pretty nicely. But particularly you can see here these, the lane lines and the parking lines and things like that visualized as well, which should be a nice help. Just in terms of being, you know, aware of surroundings when parking, that definitely helps with that. So I think with the feature that Elon have deluded to too about them working on a design that would allow you to kind of diagnose and select a parking spot for the vehicle to be able to park itself, you can kind of see where something like that would come in alongside that. So Ashok said that this replaces the 2D obstacle ban that customers had with high resolution 3D construction reconstruction of Tesla's surroundings. This is an extension of our occupancy network with much higher resolution to help with tight parking maneuvers. So he also said that this is the first version of the technology in the future. They're going to have, you know, more improvements, better functionality and things like that. So so far, I think reception has been pretty positive. It's maybe not getting to feature parity. It's a little bit different than the ultrasonic sensor vehicles, which he also said, by the way, would eventually get a feature like this. At some point, of course, this is going to the non USS cars right now. But in the future, that will expand and obviously improve over time. So I don't think it's quite there yet as we have seen with the vision based park assist previously, that was not the 3D rendering and more just replicating the ultrasonics. Not quite up to the accuracy or the precision of the, I guess, probably accuracy of the ultrasonics, but hopefully improving over time. And I think this is something that is going to satisfy people or at least be more satisfactory to people that we're looking more for that bird's eye top down visualization, rather than being someone that something that maybe satisfies people that had complaints about the ultrasonic removal. So again, hopefully over time that'll improve and help alleviate that. But I think overall fairly positive reception with the knowledge that maybe it's not a complete replacement for that quite yet.
All right.
And then another, I guess, feature change here that has gotten a lot of attention today. Tesla has sort of removed the Disney Plus app from the Tesla theater. It's not fully removed. If you had recently used the Disney Plus app, it doesn't actually get removed. And if you want it back, you can actually just go to Disney Plus dot com and then it goes back into the Tesla theater.
好的。
然后还有另一个,在今天引起了很多关注的功能改变。特斯拉公司似乎已经将迪士尼加应用从特斯拉影院中移除了。它并没有完全移除。如果你最近使用过迪士尼加应用,它实际上并不被移除。如果你想恢复它,你只需进入Disney Plus dot com,然后它将重新出现在特斯拉影院中。
So a lot of the assumptions so far. I don't think we have any confirmation of this. There's been some rumors and things like that. But a lot of the assumptions so far is that this is kind of Elon pushing back on Bob Eiger for them stopping advertising on X, which of course happened a few weeks ago. So there's been a little bit of a tiff there.
If that's the reason that this change was made, I do think that's a little bit of a misstep. But I also think that the degree of it is relatively minor. Certainly in terms of what is actually affected, it's really not much. Like if you actually use this, it's still there. So you're not going to notice any change. If you didn't use it, well, then it's not there, but you didn't use it anyway. If you want to use it, you can easily go get it back. So it's pretty minor in terms of the again, effectiveness.
The bigger concern is just the, you know, what exactly caused the decision to be made is that decision, the best foot forward for Tesla, which should be the decision that should be made. If it's not, then obviously that presents a problem in terms of what that implication would be. We'll see. You know, I would I'm willing to give Tesla more than a day to kind of see what what happens here, but we'll keep an eye on on that in general.
And then the next few things we've got our quick one here. We heard today from LinkedIn post, I guess a few days ago, I think Sawyer brought attention to this on X today that the LA sanitation department has added about a million dollars worth of Model 3s, 22 different Model 3s to their fleet. Basically, just because they've found it to be the best all around vehicle that they could add for those price points and a lot of things with the order process. So highlighted the cost for the range that they're getting highlighted, the efficient ordering process from Tesla, no restricted ordering windows like they've seen on other fleet orders in the past, seamless communication with the Tesla team, which is nice to see because oftentimes an area that gets criticized for Tesla and fast delivery. They say it only took 14 days to deliver all these vehicles after placing an online order. Compared to legacy OEMs, where in some cases could take three to six months plus a couple months for delivery and then sitting on dealer lots for any sort of attention to minor details and things like that. So 14 days compared to that, obviously night and day difference. Ultimately, they said legacy OEMs need to step up their game. So just some nice props there from the LA sanitation district and hopefully other fleet buyers would take note of things like this as well.
And then we do have a couple of incentive updates. We had previously talked about this possibility, maybe a couple of weeks ago, Germany has now ended their electric vehicle credit program based on some changes to their budget after court ruling, basically repurposed or I guess cut some funds that were previously a part of the budget for I guess green initiatives.
Those have now been cut. And as a part of that, the EV subsidy has been cut as well. And very suddenly there was only about a day or two notice here. Tesla, because of that has said that they are going to be honoring that subsidy. Tesla compensating for it basically out of Tesla's pocket until the end of the year, which was originally kind of the earliest we thought this might change. And I think it stepped down at the beginning of the year. So there was already sort of that urgency for buyers to maybe take delivery. I think Tesla wanting to still take advantage of the urgency because they probably have a lot of people in that situation that were hoping to do that. And then of course, with this going away next year, it's probably going to create one of those demand pockets that we talk about from time to time for buyers in Germany.
So I think that'll level out over time, but obviously that puts margin pressure on Tesla here with having to compensate for that and longer term with the removal of the subsidies.
In Canada, potentially a little bit better, better news on the EV credit front. This release from CBC.ca talks about Ottawa. I think it is talking about a federal level though. They say that CBC News has learned that Ottawa will release final regulations to ensure that all new passenger cars sold in Canada by 2035 are zero mission vehicles. And they're going to help along with that process through the implementation of some EV credits. It says manufacturers will earn those credits based on the number of low or no emission vehicles they sell. Those credits can be bought and sold to other companies like we see many other regulatory credit structures work.
So they also point out that automakers can earn more credits if they help with building out EV charging infrastructure. Hopefully, Tesla would be a party to earning some credits from that, that part of the structure as well. And then again, noting that they can purchase credits if they want. So good to see that. And this will sort of step up by year as we've seen again with other structures. Regulations are going to apply to model year 2026. So sort of end of 2025 sales targets will increase each year until 2035 and model year model year 2026 production year 2025. Increasing till 2035. I don't know if I got the dates right on that the first time.
The federal government wants 20% of all vehicles sold to be zero missions by 2026. That target rises to 60% by 2030 and then of course, 100% by 2035. So these credits will help create an incentive to do that and obviously test the well position to take advantage of those. We should hear a little bit more about this later this week.
Minor point here, but automotive news via Reuters reporting that the head of NHTSA has stepped down. So this is right after, of course, the Tesla recall for the autopilot updates and things like that. The headlines are description of this kind of pairs it. It's really not paired. I don't think because apparently she is stepping down because she was an acting header, a temporary head of the organization and they are limited to being able to be in that position for two years, which we've now come to the end of or getting close to coming to the end of. I guess she's only run it since September, 2022. I think I read that differently the first time I read this, but told employees you will leave her post on December 26 because of a law limiting how long officials can remain as temporary officials. So that seemed to be the reason of the step down, but of course, just timing wise, tied in a little bit with the Tesla recall in some, some media reports today.
In terms of the implications, tough to say, you know, could be good, could be bad, depends on whoever steps into that position in their opinions. So we'll see on that.
And then lastly, not specific to Tesla, but an update on X here, the European Commission has announced that they are opening formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act. So they're assessing whether or not X may have breached that act. They say that the proceedings will focus on a number of different areas here. Each individually, I thought were pretty interesting. So we'll go through through these.
They say the compliance with the DSA obligations related to countering the dissemination of legal content in the EU, relating to some of the things that have gone on, you know, of course, recently. So just they also add, including in light of X's content moderation resources. That part, I think focusing on just reports of, you know, sorry, reports of X, reducing headcount on things like content moderation. X is pushed back on some of those, but that's one of the areas that they're looking at.
They also say the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on the platform, notably the effectiveness of X's so-called community note system in the EU and the effectiveness relating to related policies, mitigating risk to civic discourse and electoral processes.
This one's interesting because I think community notes in general, it's a pretty well regarded system. It's my impression of it at least. And certainly I have a favorable, favorable opinion. So I think seeing that as an area that's being investigated, it does seem a little bit of a double standard because, you know, community notes, even if not perfect and no system is, certainly seems like it would be better than the alternative of not having a system like that, which the vast majority of media or social media currently operates as, you know, why are they not being held to that standard? If we're going to take a look at community notes and say that, you know, there may be some instances where things are incorrect or manipulated or something like that. Certainly there are things that are manipulated in other ways in other forms of media too.
So not sure on that point, the measure is taken by X to increase the transparency of a platform of its platform, the investigation concerns suspected shortcomings and giving researchers access to access to publicly accessible data as mandated by mandated by article 40 of the DSA, as well as shortcomings and X's ads repository.
Again, this seems relatively nitpicky because I don't think there are many other social media platforms that have pretty much pretty much published their entire algorithm. Like X has. Maybe there are some areas that they can improve that, which fair enough, if so. But again, I think in general, transparency from X is probably quite a bit higher than others.
And then they say a suspected deceptive design of the user interface, notably in relation to checkmarks linked to certain subscription products, the so-called blue checks. Deceptive design for having a blue check for someone that paid seems like a, I don't know, that just seems blatantly wrong. Yes, it's different than how it was before, but the system is very clear. So I don't really see how there could possibly be an issue with that one, but I guess we'll see.
So in general, these don't seem the strongest to me, but we'll see what the, you know, what the proceeding comes up with. All right, that'll wrap it up for today. Kind of a long one, but wrap it up. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications. You can also find me on X at Tesla podcast and we'll see tomorrow for the Tuesday, December 19th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.