Hey everybody Rob Manward here and today we've got some big updates on Tesla charging, also really strong China sales, some interesting job listings for Tesla and more.
Better day for Tesla stock today, finishing up 2% to close to $257.22, the Nasdaq up to 3rds of a percent on the day today.
今天是特斯拉股票的好日子,收盘上涨2%,接近257.22美元,纳斯达克指数当天上涨了三分之一。
Alright, we'll start off with a couple of quick cyber truck updates we talked yesterday about how over the weekend Tesla had opened up more order invitations for the cyber truck and then those order invitations were shortly thereafter closed for some people that didn't act quickly. Looks like those have now been opened back up at least to some extent, with some reservation holders able to confirm orders today. The cyber truck owners club tracking sheet that we talked about yesterday, which had 172 entries at the time, is now up to 183.
Pretty small increase so far, so not a huge number of people likely able to convert on those orders today, but nevertheless worth checking the accounts, just in case you are able to order.
Yesterday we also talked about Lars' comments about potentially being able to convert the cyber truck into something that could operate at least for a short period of time as a boat. Elon yesterday commented on this on X, saying that quote, we are going to offer a mod package that enables cyber truck to traverse at least 100 meters of water as a boat, mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals. With the cyber truck now in production it seems like that aspiration that Elon has held for quite some time remains. Of course no timeline given here by Elon. But the language is also not hedged at all saying that we're going to look at it or we're likely going to do it. He just says we are going to do it. So we'll see obviously that would add to the lower of the cyber truck and I suppose be helpful in a post-apocalyptic scenario. I'm not sure how much real world appeal it has day to day, but hey, it's interesting and if they can do it with relatively little work then I suppose why not. As Elon has said many times it can't just be about solving hard problems all the time there's got to be some fun too.
Okay, moving on from the cyber truck we've got new China insured vehicle numbers for the week. This is the 11th week of the quarter and this week there were 18,003 people who were 300 Tesla's insured in China. This is the second best number this year. A very strong number as we head into the final two weeks of the quarter. This moves the quarter to date figure through 11 weeks to 138,200 extending the quarter to date lead from previous quarter to date. This is 15% above Q3, 10% above Q2 which ended up being the record so far and 29% above Q1. To surpass that Q2 record Tesla needs about 22,000 more in the last two weeks or about 11,000 per week based off of the last few weeks. Of course this looks very achievable. Model Y continues to do very well most of this number being Model Y only 3900 Model 3 so we've continued to see that be quite a bit below the production capacity of Giga Shanghai with a large portion of highland production being exported. So the possibility of even higher weekly numbers than this is certainly there just depends on Tesla's allocation strategy. In any case nice to see these strong numbers in China.
Alright next up we've got a few charging updates the first of which is Volkswagen announcing that they have finally capitulated and they are going to be adopting the North American charging standard. This will apply to the Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche and Scout motor brands beginning in 2025.
Some of these announcements from other automakers have said that in partnership with Tesla they'll be offering an adapter for vehicles that were produced prior to the switch to NACS. This announcement a little bit different says Volkswagen is exploring adapter solutions for existing vehicles to access the Tesla Supercharging Network starting in 2025. So unlike some of the previous announcements it sounds like that adapter piece isn't quite locked in yet for Volkswagen.
With this announcement Rebecca Tenucci of Tesla's charging team said quote earlier this year the North American charging standard was just an idea. Today with the VW Group's commitment almost every major automotive manufacturer is on board rallying behind a shared vision of improving charging experiences for all EV drivers. This is only the beginning of our industry wide efforts to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. I agree that there's a lot more to be excited about with charging in the future and we'll talk more about that in a second.
But in terms of NACS adoption in North America this was really the last automaker to fall. We still have stellantis as one hold out but Volkswagen was by far the biggest one remaining. It'd be pretty nonsensical for stellantis to not adopt it at this point. So very exciting to see NACS truly now adopted as the standard and hopefully some of the funding requirements that at least in some states have pretty much required CCS to also be included in charging infrastructure build out can react properly to this change and drop those types of requirements.
Also importantly on this topic today we had hinted at this coming a couple of days ago but SAE formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers now just SAE International announced today that they've released the technical information report or TIR for the SAE standard covering development and implementation of NACS. They say the release of this TIR means certain critical engineering and development parameters have been established to allow developers to proceed with certainty about many critical aspects of deployment and commercialization of the NACS connector. So any third parties should now be fully equipped to use NACS however they see fit. A couple of very big milestones to that.
Now outside the US we've got a report from Tesla Roddy that Tesla has started to offer supercharging to non-Tesla EVs in Ireland, Romania and Hungary. Like we have seen in other regions it isn't every single supercharger and Tesla supercharger map isn't fully up to date yet but at some point it will be and that is a good spot to check for which of these would be accessible by third party vehicles.
Alright the last update today on charging quite a handful here but the last one comes from a job listing from Tesla, Alexander Murs on X found a couple of these that were pretty interesting today. The first is for a senior business development manager for charging which will be responsible according to Tesla for scaling a business to business hardware sales program in North America within the charging organization. Tesla says that as the business development manager you will enable tremendous growth of the EV charging market working with top executives at Fortune 500 companies across a large range of industries. In just the last few months we've seen partnerships with BP, with Hilton, with Best Western. This hasn't received a whole lot of attention but Tesla's ambitions here are becoming quite clear and this assists with that clarity as it seems like Tesla is trying to greatly grow these types of partnerships and massively increase charging availability. With NACS becoming the standard in North America this will be great for all future EV owners. So really a lot to be excited about right now with charging.
The other job listing that was pointed out was a listing for Tesla in Mexico. Tesla's got a listing for an indirect procurement manager in the category of construction and facilities which they say they're looking to hire to execute the infrastructure development sourcing strategy for the new plant located in Santa Catarina, Neway Bullyone.
I think any signs of life for Gigamexco always welcome. We do have another report on Gigamexco today from Millennio. They were covering comments from Governor Samuel Garcia who we often hear from. There were some general comments about the incentives for infrastructure that we had recently talked about. Basically him just saying that they'll have a positive return on investment and that these incentives were very favorable compared to some other projects in the area in the past.
Garcia saying that Tesla told them that they don't want gifts like the previous company they just want help with infrastructure. So with those incentives that's what we highlighted as being more important than the actual dollar value is the commitment to getting that infrastructure built because that's a fundamental need of course for the factory as opposed to capital which Tesla can provide themselves.
Garcia also commented somewhat separately quote we are not sure about the scope of each of the works because every meeting we have with Tesla makes us see that the amount they told us is going to be far below the real amount. The implication there is that each time they discuss things with Tesla the plans for the factories seem to grow bigger. We'd probably need a little bit more context to understand the meaningfulness of that we already know Gigamexco is always kind of planned to be a huge factory. I think the timeline is probably more important to most than the ultimate end state size. Those longer term plans can very much change at any time for a large number of reasons. So I'm not putting a ton of weight in that comment specifically and then Garcia also added that quote the size of the factory that they told us is going to be double or triple and that not only will it produce the new Tesla designed economic car but the cyber truck probably another production line for the Y and batteries end quote.
So we talked about the cyber truck part of that before Garcia had posted on Instagram hinting to the cyber truck being eventually produced at Gigamexco but that post was the lead in. So I also didn't put too much weight in that but now this seems to be doubling down on kind of that same comment which I continue to think doesn't really make a whole lot of sense as this is very close in proximity to Gigat's access and especially with the cyber truck at least initially being a more expensive vehicle it's hard to see a case for that but I guess we'll see even for the model why I think that would apply a little bit but certainly the next generation vehicle and batteries make a lot of sense.
Another factory update here CNBC is reporting that Tesla hourly workers at Gigamexco have been informed that they will be receiving a roughly 10% increase in pay beginning in January. In some cases the increase is even larger. I'd imagine that we'll probably see similar actions at other Tesla factories I think we've already heard similar reports for Gigapirlin of course pretty normal to increase compensation over time and this year we have the added effect of the UAW contract we negotiations which I think most would expect would probably at least have some impact on non unionized automakers as well.
Alright last couple of things for today there was a report from Lendingtree that got some media coverage with headlines that Tesla vehicles have the highest accident rates of any brand. That headline picked up a lot of places but we'll look at Lendingtree's report directly. They say that quote Tesla drivers have the highest accident rate compared with all the brands analyzed during the periods analyzed Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1000 drivers Ram and Subaru were the only other brands with accident rates over 20 per 1000 drivers.
So kind of interesting I guess you could speculate a number of reasons on why that might be the case but if we look at how this data was collected that's also important to pay attention to it says researchers analyzed tens of millions of quote wizard by Lendingtree insurance quotes from November of 2022 through November of 2023.
So this is using accident data from people that are shopping for insurance policies on Lendingtree which may not be a representative sample for any number of reasons I can think of one big one Tesla insurance which would maybe filter out people that are in fewer accidents they're likely to have a lower rate with Tesla insurance and therefore probably less likely to be shopping for another insurance policy vice versa those with higher accident rates may be more likely to be looking since Tesla insurance presumably would be more expensive for them.
That's just one item Sentry Mode could be a factor here too where for another brand if you don't have something captured on Sentry Mode maybe you don't report it and go through the hassle of insurance and the possible raised rates on future insurance quotes like we may be seeing here you might be more likely to get it repaired yourself versus if you have something that was caught on Sentry Mode well then you're probably more likely to be filing a claim and going through that process. These are just a couple of examples of things that could skew this there's also no accounting for number of miles driven this is just per 1000 drivers if Tesla vehicles are being driven more than average which we have some indication of from Tesla's impact report then of course there's a higher opportunity for a driver to be in an accident. So already a number of factors there that could influence this in a higher direction enough problems I think with this that it's not really something worth paying much attention to in my opinion certainly nothing more than just kind of saying oh well that's interesting and moving on from there.
Unfortunately the media is going to want to present it in a way that makes it seem like oh there's just something inherent about Tesla vehicles that causes them to be in more accidents without taking a moment to even consider let alone acknowledge some of these other things. Anyway last item for today Bloomberg is reporting that Audi is scaling back on some of their electric vehicle rollout plans in what Bloomberg describes as an effort to avoid burdening factories and dealers amid slower growth rates in EV sales. They got a comment from Audi's new CEO which said quote we first looked at what order and density of launches the organization could handle in the end we decided to spread it out to not overwhelm the team and the dealerships end quote.
So unsurprisingly and like we have heard from others less aggressive EV plans which maybe is beneficial for them in the short term but I think longer term is going to present a significant challenge in terms of getting to competitive scale and profitability. Alright that'll close it out for today as always thank you for listening make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications and also find me on X at Tesla podcast and we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday December 20th episode of Tesla daily thank you.