Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Dylan Loomis. First up today, last night in response to Sawyer and Lars talking about Cybertruck almost being able to float, Elon said, we're gonna offer a mod package that enables Cybertruck to traverse at least 100 meters of water as a boat, mostly just need to upgrade the cabin door seals. That would be a little bit longer than the length of one football field.
Now how useful would this feature be? That's certainly up for debate, but strictly from an engineering perspective, it would be a pretty cool thing to pull off, and undoubtedly it would make for some great social media content. Recently, BYD actually announced its own emergency only floating mode in its U8, where they say it can move forward at 3 kilometers per hour by accelerating and turning the wheels. Adding the U8 can stay afloat for 30 minutes. They did however highlight and stress that this mode is only for emergencies like floods and it's not for fun like crossing lakes or rivers. It's a good reminder not just when it comes to the Cybertruck accessories team in-house, but for all third parties looking to build products and mods for the Cybertruck, it'll be a sight to see in the years ahead.
What's that they say? Better late than never well today in a press release, we finally hear that VW and its subsidiary brands have decided to adopt the NACS. VW, Audi, Porsche, and Scout EVs will use the NACS in 2025 and they're exploring adapter solutions, but also they're not looking to implement any adapters until 2025 as well, whereas many companies are looking for adapter solutions as soon as next year. The agreement will give these brands access to more than 15,000 superchargers when many of the other deals had listed 12,000. Details of the planned integration of the NACS for specific models will follow as the launch date of 2025 nears. As far as the volume automakers go, that really only leaves stellantis and Mazda as the remaining NACS holdouts.
Also today I had to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me with this headline that said the White House back's industry effort to standardize Tesla's EV charging plugs. A quick aside, it was confirmed more than 1 million EVs have been sold in the US in 2023 for the first time ever. We've known this was coming, but today SAE International has confirmed as a new standard Tesla's North American charging standard connector. This will ensure that any vehicle or charging equipment supplier or manufacturer will be able to use manufacturer or deploy the connector. They said the new standard ensures that any vehicle or charging equipment supplier or manufacturer will be able to use manufacturer or deploy the connector and expands charging access for current and future EV drivers across the country. What we got today really was just a formal announcement and they reiterated that Tesla plans to open 7500 of its chargers to non-Tesla's by the end of next year. However, a Biden official has said we're still going to have several years of millions of CCS connector vehicles on the road and they're going to last a long time. Until we know how the automakers are actually going to distribute these adapters, to me it's really unknown how it's going to help solve this problem over the next few years if you're an existing CCS owner. Basically arguing there's going to be some adapter confusion in the years ahead where customers don't know what's going on.
The thing is, part of that confusion stems from this. Just today, the Federal Highway Administration put out this saying they'll soon publish a request for information to get feedback on their plans to update the minimum standards and requirements for ED charging stations to allow for new tech and continued innovation. This matters because it's those minimum standards and requirements for the federally funded chargers. In case you've forgotten, current federal requirements allow for alternative types of connectors on all federally funded DC fast chargers so long as there is also a CCS connector. At least as it stands now, we have what 90-95% of the auto industry adopting the NAC standard but we have this 7.5 billion dollars of federal funds for a public EV charging network that is still requiring CCS plugs to get that funding. To be clear, I would not argue they should have no CCS ports because the truth is there are still thousands of vehicles that have a CCS port and those vehicles shouldn't be totally left in the cold until they have their own adapter. But to require that all locations have a CCS plug to get any federal funding at this point doesn't make much sense to me.
In case you see it elsewhere, the new standard name for the NACs from SAE is J3400TM. We know Mercedes-Benz is rolling out their own charging network and they have plans to feature CCS1 and NACs connectors. Separately, we also have that group of OEMs including GM, BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Hyundai, Kia and Stellantis forming that joint venture. Those 30,000 chargers are all set to have both NACs and CCS connectors at all locations. Hopefully something changes with the CCS requirement for federal funding but zooming out looking at what's going on here, it really is a pretty momentous occasion.
Tesla, this little company that no one believed in is now the charging standard for the entire auto industry minus a few holdouts that will most likely be on board. It's just a matter of time. When you consider that the number one complaint of the general public when it comes to EV adoption is the public charging experience. This really does become a massive deal and if briefly you just think about a world where an X adoption didn't happen and it became a free-for-all, it would have been an absolute nightmare.
I think Jeff and Herbert did a great job breaking down the Sandy Monroe tour of Gigatexus when it comes to the Cybertruck HFS just wanted to play a quick clip. As you can see with all the equipment, we're ready to roll at like high volume. That was just like, how do we ramp? You know, go slow, get quality, right? Dave installed, you know, somewhere in the order, not every station's going to be equivalent but this 125k annualized capacity and it looks like from hearing some of the other supervisors and managers speak, it sounds like that there's more equipment coming in but in terms of a very large operation, like they've installed and they have the product.
One of the big milestones of getting a product into production, which you would hate to see, by the way, if you're watching one of these videos, is a bunch of people kind of manually wrapping on these parts or are doing a bunch of stuff like because the production operation isn't ready to go and it looks like there is a full end to end production operation to do all the stainless up and running. I know it sounds like, well, okay, that's great Captain Obvious but in many cases, sometimes companies start at low speeds and their production operation isn't working the way they want even at the low speeds and they take it and they do something manual in the meantime and it looks like that they've really got everything in place and as Lars said, they basically turned the dial to the left and they start at low speeds and try to get the really focused on the quality side of the equation.
So when you're when you're ramping a factory, you've got these two knobs and you're basically you're you're trying to turn the volume and the speed up to the right. So you're putting more material in, you're running the machines at a little bit faster rate and then you've got the quality lever on the other side of it. Kind of think of it as an accelerator break analogy and on the quality side, you're trying to make sure that you're not losing more material through the process because that'll take your scrap cost up that'll take your overall vehicle cost up and you're not causing a bunch of quality defects that are going to slow you down or cause a reliability or upstream issue as you as you pass that material.
So that's the stage that it looks like they're in now they've got all the production operations and they'll bring in more in terms of volume and quantity and replicating what they have but it looks like they have everything there to make make the truck using all production tooling, which is a great sign. So Tesla will most likely still go slow for the next few weeks, if not months, maybe on that one production line however, when the time comes to ramp it up, it's not like they're doing much if any manual work or production of the cyber trucks now, all of the automation or production equipment is in place, which in theory could lead to a faster ramp than maybe some of us like myself have been expecting for 2024.
Tesla has informed workers at its battery factory in Sparks, Nevada that some hourly workers will see pay increases of around 10% starting in January. CNBC viewed internal materials that said workers had been informed of cost of living adjustments. Those pay increases may help Tesla stave off workers interest in forming a union and pushing for collective bargaining in Nevada.
Many people were expecting Tesla to do something like this, whether it had anything to do with the UAW deals and those 25% pay hikes for their employees with a big 3, or if it was more of a routine cola raise that Tesla would have done for its employees at Yiggin Nevada anyway, we don't yet know for sure. From my perspective, the chances of UAW gaining any traction at Tesla was already very low and this certainly would not improve those chances.
Just wanted to pass this one along because I have never really seen anything like this from Tesla, it's a pop-up store in Dubai. Ordinarily pop-up stores like this are temporary and for specific events, but you'll also find this page on the Tesla website.
Adrian in the Hat who's been reporting on Gigamexico progress said Nuevo Leone state employees were on site, defining the areas each of the different four contractors will be in charge of the highway expansion and Tesla site ramps and overpass. If you head to the Tesla careers page, you'll see they're hiring for indirect procurement manager, for construction and facilities in Nuevo Leone. This role will execute the infrastructure development sourcing strategy for the new plant located in Nuevo Leone. In a nutshell, this role is responsible for sourcing supplies and commodities for the infrastructure of Gigamexico.
Speaking of hiring, you'll also now find senior business development manager for charging. This role is built around extending the reach of Tesla's charging products. You'll work with top executives at Fortune 500 companies across a large range of industries. You'll become an expert on superchargers, wall connectors, and semi-charging products. They'll scale a business-to-business hardware sales program in North America within the charging organization. It sounds like this role will be creating a sales program for more deals like we just heard when it comes to BP and Tesla, where BP bought $100 million of Tesla superchargers. But the listing wasn't just for superchargers, it was for wall connectors as well, which brings in the hotel deals like we just saw with Best Western. And before that, we heard about the deal between Tesla and Hilton. I will say, it is somewhat of a bummer that we don't have more insight into the back end of these deals, specifically when it comes to the financial arrangement and how Tesla may be benefiting.
Because the reality is, if you take a look around, Tesla is just taking over the entire EV charging market. It will of course take time to hire for this role and then build the sales program, but you would assume that they're doing this because of the initial success and the presumed demand for more deals like the ones I just pointed out.
The Irish Times is reporting that five of Tesla's nine superchargers in Ireland are going to be opened up to non-Tesla EVs. As we've seen elsewhere, there will be a monthly subscription option for these non-Tesla owners to get access to lower supercharging rates. And perhaps more importantly, these non-Tesla customers will have to download the Tesla mobile app and sign up for a Tesla account, bringing them right into the Tesla experience.
There was a post on Facebook from Lucky Five Motorsport saying Australia finally got their highland. This time, it's Australia's first model three highland through our doors to engage in our services. Meaning, first customer deliveries of the Model 3 Plus have begun in Australia.
在Facebook上有一篇来自Lucky Five Motorsport的帖子,表示澳大利亚终于有了他们的特色高地。这一次,我们迎来了澳大利亚第一辆Model 3高地款通过我们的大门来享受我们的服务。这意味着Model 3高地款的首批客户交付在澳大利亚已经开始了。
In the past, we've often talked about how Tesla is such an American made a company they don't get nearly enough credit from the general public or our own government. However, this is a very interesting thought I've never really considered myself. Rohan Patel said, it's hard to be definitive about this, but based on data I've seen, I think Tesla is not only the most American every vehicle sold in America is made in America, but is also the most European for Gigabrelin and the most Chinese for Gigashang High. This is based on local content and is part of a regionalization strategy to enable the most environmentally sustainable products and also most resilient to supply chain or geopolitical disruptions.
In case you're not picking up on it already, this right here is a big part of why so many countries around the world want Tesla to set up shop in their regions because of the ancillary business and economic activity that Tesla then generates through its supply chain. That's because they're hyper focused on efficiency everywhere, including the supply chain.
This one is more common than anything I had to pass it along because this is coming from a United States senator. Blumenthal says Tesla's autopilot is responsible for crashes and deaths and the government has to make sure the world's richest man knows they mean business. Elon Musk has mocked this federal agency. He's called them the fund police, which is no cause for comfort or complacency. NHTSA has to put its legal muscle where its mouth is.
I did want to quickly touch on this article. It was actually a study done by Lendingtree talking about the brands with the worst drivers. For some reason, there were people out there saying that this study shows that Tesla's autopilot is not as safe as Tesla claims, but I definitely don't see it that way at all.
Just to highlight for this study and all of the data they share, their driving incidents include accidents, but also DUIs, speeding and citations. Then if you scroll down to the very end of the article, you will find a list of what things are included for citations. You may notice that most if not all of this list directly falls on the driver and their own competence and it has nothing to do with Tesla's vehicle technology.
Just so you know, this study gathered data from November last year to November of this year, but when you read things like Tesla had the second worst drivers in the country, with 31.1 driving incidents per 1000 drivers. Just remember that data includes much more than actual accidents.
I did find it interesting BMW drivers have a significantly higher number of DUIs compared to other drivers. We know Tesla's are fast and fun to drive, meaning a lot of teenagers want to be in these cars and plenty of them do dumb things in their Tesla. So even though the data says Tesla drivers have the highest accident rate compared with all of the brands analyzed, I'm not really sure this should be such a negative reflection on Tesla like some people are making it out to be. So if any of you Tesla drivers are getting a little wild out there, let's rein it back in for the sake of the group.
Today, Tesla has asked a US judge to pause a federal agency's lawsuit, the one accusing Tesla of racial harassment, saying there are two similar cases that need to play out first. In a filing yesterday, Tesla said the federal court should decline to wade into a third lawsuit until the existing cases are resolved, basically saying simultaneous prosecution will result in inefficient and wasteful use of judicial resources.
Mercedes just got approval to add a fourth light color to the exterior of some of its vehicles when drive pilot is enabled. In the future, if you see turquoise blue lights on a Mercedes vehicle that appear at the back and front of the vehicle around the tail lights and the headlights, it means that vehicle is using their drive pilot system, which allows the driver to take their eyes totally off the road. Don't forget though, drive pilot is the one that only works in a very specific situations like right now it's only California and Nevada under 40 miles an hour in ideal weather, etc.
We got the Tesla China weekly number and it was big 18,300 comparing it to the same week in quarter three, that number was 8,500. Through the first 11 weeks of quarter three, we were at 120.2,000 and through the same 11 weeks, quarter four were at 138.2,000 to set a new all time record when it comes to quarterly numbers, the last two weeks would have to be just over 9,200 units, which is squarely in play. I will note the sources that I check for this data had model three figures ranging anywhere from 2,900 up to around 4,000. So I just split the difference and called it 3500 model three plus, meaning roughly 14,800 were model wise. You guys may recall a few weeks ago, I said I was excited to see the numbers in this range right here. So this was exactly what I was hoping for for what it's worth. It is the third best week of all time from gigashang.
Hi, we never touched on this, but on Tesla's AI page under the dojo system, you'll see it says design a public facing API that will bring dojo to the masses. I know that's very vague and could easily be multiple years into the future as I'm still expecting dojo to be all for Tesla in the immediate future. But recently, there was an analyst who said that Amazon's cloud storage business is on a clear path by itself to a $3 trillion value. I'd like to be clear. Personally, I'm not expecting Tesla to use dojo for any cloud services until the end of the decade at the earliest, but it's definitely not something we should be totally writing off.
Here we have an early flop from the W where car news China is reporting the ID seven received 300 orders in the three days following its launch in China. The report said each dealership received zero to one orders for the ID seven. Some of the problems the high price and dissatisfaction with the need to pay extra for features like heated seats, as well as configurations that customers don't actually want. And they said great hardware and I'm assuming build quality are not enough anymore. This is a problem because direct from VW, they said the ID seven is the flagship model in their eV family.
We also just learned that VW's upcoming ID to all concept car was on display with some notable changes, one of which being the return of physical buttons below the central touchscreen. According to the brand's interior designer, this will be a new approach for all models based on recent feedback from customers. Here's a look at that updated interior in all fairness. It really doesn't look like they're overdoing it with the buttons and we know that some people do prefer the physical button. Personally, I'm more of a tech minimalist. So I like Tesla style, but not everybody's like me.
我们还刚刚得知,大众汽车即将推出的ID to all概念车在展示时有些明显的变化,其中之一就是在中央触摸屏下方重新加入了物理按键。根据品牌的内饰设计师所说,这将是基于来自顾客最近的反馈,所有车型将采用的一种新方法。下面就来看看这个更新后的内饰吧。实际上,它并不像他们追求过多按键,而且我们也知道有些人更喜欢物理按键。就个人而言,我更喜欢科技的简约风格,就像特斯拉一样,但并不是每个人都像我这样。
This one is really something we have a leaked sales scheme when it comes to Kia and Canada. They have vehicles that have arrived in Canada from overseas sitting on a storage lot purposely locked, even though customers have been waiting months, if not years to get their vehicles. The new cars are being withheld from Kia Ontario dealerships and many more across the country. That's because of a controversial plan by Kia Canada to game the number of sales in the last six weeks of the year. A video was obtained that was passed down by Kia executives where they said all of you are going to be very unhappy with me today. That from a Kia manager where he said only some of the vehicles will be released to the dealerships, but others will remain on the compounds until the new year. This to avoid appearing too successful in the eyes of the headquarters in Korea. This is all in an effort to secure marketing funds from Kia headquarters for 2024 by reducing sales numbers for this year. Basically saying if they sell too many cars this year then maybe Kia will reduce their marketing budget for 2024 because they won't need it.
I won't read all of the responses from some of the dealers, but as you may guess, they're not happy with this decision. The truth is car companies do play games at the end of the quarter. Honestly though if I was a customer waiting for my car and I knew this was going on I would most certainly not be pleased.
This one's cool and something I've been wanting to see a lot more of now for a while Tesla Energy posted about a new partnership with B.A.Z.R. Homes where they're building communities powered sustainably with the solar roof and powerball in the eastern US. This new construction community will be certified as a zero energy ready home by the DOE. For a long time we've saying that existing roof retrofits are going to be expensive and challenging so for Tesla Energy to really grow when it comes to solar roof, new builds really have seemed like the way to go and this is exactly that.
Some in the battery energy storage market are just now realizing that every battery storage project will require regular upgrades to stay in the game. And yes this is all about upgrades to their software which is something Tesla is excellent at. But it's not just going to be to meet changing power market regulations but also in order to keep up with the revenue opportunities. Now yes one of Tesla's main competitors Fluance does also have some really nice software from everything I read which is called Mosaic if you see it but we have an industry CCO saying the energy storage market is still in its early stages but it's already roaring. That's because the fundamental need for energy storage is converging with the market reality that money can be made from it. The word in the industry is they're trying to encourage more people to think more about these upgrades for compliance regulations and profit opportunities when they're building out sites which of course should volt Tesla higher up the list.
Here we have Jose who works on software at Tesla saying alright folks if you're looking for a chance to be on the team where the magic happens this is it. He quote posted this from Alex Ingram who works on content at Tesla. He's starting a new role at Tesla this week and he'll be hiring up for a series of creative roles. Senior production manager, senior creative lead, senior video producer, cinematographer, video editor and senior video producer. As someone who worked briefly in the social media space professionally for about nine months in a prior life and also of course I'm somebody who's just very interested in social media in general. I'm pretty pumped to see what Tesla has in store for the future when it comes to social media content and most likely more for advertising as well.
I hope you guys have a wonderful day. 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.