Hey everybody Rob Merritt here and today we've got new insight on some recent reporting around Elon Musk. We've also got new data out of China, an update on Gigamexico and more. Not a strong day for Tesla stock today, closing down 2.3% to $234.96 while the NASDAQ rallied back and did finish up about 1.10th of a percent on the day.
We'll start off with a couple updates out of China. We are starting to get the final December numbers broken out so previously we had the whole sales figure. We now have that broken down between retail or domestic sales and exported vehicles for the month and the Model 3 and Model Y breakdown between the whole sales figure.
We'll start with retail sales though, almost 76,000 vehicles sold domestically in China in December. It's a strong way to close the year, this is nearly a record month for Tesla in China following a couple thousand vehicles short but this does move Q4 as a whole to almost 170,000 sales in China for the quarter and that is a record quarter by about 8% over the previous record. Nice to see such a strong end to the year for Tesla in China.
For exports we have about 18,000 vehicles exported in December and then for wholesale sales we can see the breakout between Model Y and Model 3 at first glance nothing too notable 31,981 Model 3, 60,158 Model Y but that Model 3 number is a record wholesale sales figure for the Model 3. We already had a pretty good idea about this but more evidence that Model 3 Highland Production after that transition continues to be quite strong.
And then because this is December we now have the full year figures so retail sales are domestic sales in China up 37% year over year to just over 603,000 vehicles and exports up 27% for the full year to about 344,000. Of course those are both records as well.
So we move into 2024 and we've got our first China insured vehicle numbers for the year with the week of January 1st through the 7th coming in at 3,200 vehicles insured for Tesla in China. Now obviously this is a significant decline from the previous weeks but as we can see from the chart pretty typical for a week 1 of a quarter. This is actually up 50% from the first week of last quarter and 3 times more vehicles than last year's first week. Of course as we can see here from Q4 that first week the quarter sales really doesn't mean too much in terms of where the total quarter ends up.
Alright moving on we've got a continuation of our discussion from yesterday about a Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk had used illegal drugs. As I mentioned yesterday one of the examples that the Wall Street Journal used as evidence of this was a SpaceX company update back in 2017. Specifically they said that Musk was an hour late for this company update that when he finally took the stage he was quote unquote strangely incomprehensible at times saying that he slurred his words, rambled for around 15 minutes and that Gwynne Shotwell had to step in and take over the meeting because of this behavior. The suggestion was that Elon was just so drugged out that he couldn't make it through the presentation.
Well SpaceX has the receipts last night they posted the full company presentation that is being referenced in this article. I'll link to it in the description you can check it out yourself but as I was watching I kind of kept waiting to get to that 15 minute mark and see what transpired where ultimately Gwynne Shotwell had to eventually take over the meeting sounded pretty interesting right but shockingly note this hark has him there. Shockingly this moment never came I'm going to play a clip from one hour into this company update it's about a minute long and let's just listen and see how Elon sounds in this clip. And the economic feeling pretty optimistic about the economics of earth to earth transport for a couple of reasons. One is that because it's moving so fast you can get 10 times as much use out of it as an airliner. So if you go for LA to Sydney it's about a 14 hour flight. You can't even do a round trip and even if they're absolutely best it would take more than 20 or take 28 hours and that's if they land and they get like forming a one style fuel injection it's 28 hours. This is California to Australia 30 minutes. So maybe 35 you know round up a little extra 5 minutes a minute. But the point is that it's more than a it's what you can use you can use this system 10 times for every one use of a commercial airliner. Like wow like that that's that's that's quite a revelation. So your capital cost is then 10 times better than than an aircraft provided we have truly achieved a rapid reflike without refurbishment. Which also I'm highly confident can be done for earth earth earth stuff.
All right so yeah there's a little bit of stuttering that's normal for Elon we hear that all the time. There's a little bit of slurring but again this isn't 2017 this is during the most difficult stages of the model three ramp up this is one of the most difficult periods of time in Elon's history and he even mentioned in this update that he was extremely low on sleep. So is this peak lucidity Elon peak annunciation Elon probably not but is the only possible explanation for this drugs absolutely not if this was incomprehensible to anybody maybe those are the people that are on drugs. And again this is an hour into the talk there is no point in time where shot well in any way takes over the meeting she assists with parts. Elon asks her to take some pieces of it because he doesn't have as much familiarity with those pieces again the focus during the period of time for Elon was very likely to predominantly Ben Tesla during one of the most critical periods of Tesla's history so I'm not seeing how that would at all be surprising.
In any case reviewing this it's very clear that the reporting from the Wall Street Journal again unsurprisingly does not accurately reflect this situation so if it weren't already the case which should have been certainly calls into question the other parts of the article as well. All right so we'll move on from this but again the full video will be linked in the description it's actually a pretty interesting video about SpaceX in general so even setting this stuff aside probably still actually worth a watch.
Next up we've got some new reporting on Gigamexico this is coming from a radio formula out of Mexico they are saying that Governor of New Wave of Leon St. Milgarcia has announced that the start of construction for Gigamexico will begin in the first quarter of 2024 also known as this current quarter. The report goes on to mention that Garcia has assured that the works that correspond to the government of New Wave of Leon have already begun and will begin to be visible in the first month of this year. So from that piece it's a little bit unclear to me if he's actually talking about Tesla starting their work on the Gigafactory or if he's referring to the municipality starting some of their work on the infrastructure for the Gigafactory. The direct quote that they provide although we don't have the full context around it sounds more like it's referring specifically to Tesla starting it says and Tesla as soon as they finish they call it a production line construction begins the start should be this quarter obviously a translated quote there too. I would not be surprised if there is infrastructure work beginning I would be a little bit surprised if Tesla is actually starting construction this quarter that doesn't really seem to fit with the most recent status update comments from Elon regarding Gigamexico so for now I'm taking this with a grain of salt I feel like we've heard Samo Garcia say quite a few things we probably haven't had enough time to evaluate the track record on those things yet but there have been enough of them that I am a little bit skeptical at least at this point so we'll see but I'm not putting a whole lot of weight in this report right now.
Next we've got a quick model three update there were some reports that Tesla on the schedule a demo drive page on Tesla's website in the United States had displayed a photo of an updated Highland Model 3 in the Model 3 section it looks like this has already been changed back to a pre refresh version so even though we did have a rumor yesterday about the Highland update I'm not taking this as any additional indication that that might be correct or anything like that I think it's more likely that somebody just grabbed the wrong asset by mistake and now it has been corrected.
接下来我们有一个关于Model 3的快速更新。有报道称特斯拉在其美国的网站上的试驾页面上展示了一张更新的Highland Model 3的照片,但目前已经改回了更新之前的版本。尽管昨天我们曾听到关于Highland更新的传闻,但我不会将此视为任何额外的证据来证明这可能是正确的或其他相关信息。我认为更有可能是有人不小心选错了资源,现在已经进行了更正。
Alright last couple of items for today yesterday we had talked about the 60 second video that Tesla put together around Cybertruck features I mentioned off-handedly that I didn't think it'd be a bad idea for Tesla to just give a Super Bowl ad a shot see how it goes and I got a bunch of comments saying that it doesn't make any sense for Tesla to advertise the Cybertruck because of the order backlog so the first thing is that I didn't say they should run this specific video as the Super Bowl ad I was just saying that Tesla in general as a company shouldn't consider a Super Bowl ad but I do think those strongly worded comments do bring up an interesting discussion and because sometimes I like to be contrarian or play Devil's Advocate and consider the other side of things I wouldn't go so far as to say that if Tesla were to advertise for the Cybertruck that it would be something that would be entirely pointless just because of the obviously significant order backlog.
Before I elaborate on that let me reiterate that I'm not advocating for this I just think that there are some interesting points worthy of discussion that while ultimately may not raise it to the level of being worth doing probably raise it a little bit above pointless. The first and probably most obvious thing is the brand the Cybertruck is a vehicle unlike any other vehicle it is a great halo product for Tesla making people more aware of what the Cybertruck is as a vehicle all the technology in it all of its capability that can very easily help people's perception of Tesla's other vehicles as well. Another layer of that is that the Cybertruck is so crazy so attention getting so conversation starting that even just the inclusion of it raises questions peaks interest and then maybe those people do some research and maybe through that research they found out a little bit more about Tesla about EVs in general and maybe another Tesla product is one they would actually buy even though the Cybertruck is what initially peaked their interest.
Similarly maybe they see a long wait time for the Cybertruck but they decide in the interim period to buy or lease a different Tesla. Even for the Cybertruck itself car buying decisions are big decisions these are most people second most expensive purchases it can take people a long time to make those decisions so raising awareness earlier on even if they're not going to place an order for a year or two is probably helpful and if you're able to introduce the Cybertruck into the customer's possible decision set then perhaps they're going to hold off on buying another vehicle a nice vehicle that they would have otherwise bought while they say hey I really want this it's going to be a little bit but I can definitely extend the life of my current vehicle another year or two and just get to the Cybertruck versus otherwise maybe buying another vehicle in that period. Are those type of things enough to make it worth doing? I don't know that's for Tesla to decide but it's far from being worthless or pointless if they did decide to do it.
I think the risks of advertising are pretty low sure it's going to cost them cash but Tesla is not cash constrained at the moment and haven't been for quite some time so the opportunity cost of not learning about it is probably quite a bit greater than any cash consideration and it's not a fundamental part of the cost structure because if this were not effective Tesla could obviously stop doing it at any time and return to the same cost basis that they had before
so maybe it seems a little bit antithetical to how Tesla is historically operated but if Tesla spends some cash that ultimately doesn't have a good ROI as they learn about advertising I'm not going to have any problem with that as a shareholder the learnings I think are going to be much more valuable than any possible ROI on a few million dollars here or there as Tesla tries to learn about it.
Anyway I know there are plenty of counterpoints to be made it's tough to have those type of conversations when it's a one-sided recording like this but wanted to at least clarify what I was saying yesterday and raise some of these points as well.
Alright last item for today then Honda at CES has announced their next line of electric vehicles this is supposed to begin in the US in 2026 it's called the series zero lineup and originally it's going to start off with two vehicles which are apparently going to be called the saloon and the space hub the saloon would be the flagship sort of sedan-like vehicle which very kind eyes might view as sort of Lamborghini-esque which probably means a very low chance of any production version actually looking like this and then the space hub which is sort of a mini van esque platform which I guess looks a little bit more like something that could actually end up being produced at some point.
Honda says they'll be introducing series zero vehicles in 2026.
本田表示他们将于2026年推出零系列车辆。
Alright that'll wrap it up for today then 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 tomorrow for the Wednesday January 10th episode of Tesla Daily thank you. you.