Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis. Quick shout out to my new patrons, Jeff C, David P, Jim L, Doug T, Bill W, Marlene K and Mike C. Thank you all for choosing to support the channel.
A lot of you had requested I touch on the Tesla stock each day, so happy to do that. Today, Tesla stock ended the day down 1.7% while the Nasdaq was up 1.4%. Right now, I just have my automotive watch list up so you can compare. I won't go through each one every day, but let me know if there are any other companies you would like to see each day on this list for a comparison to Tesla.
Additionally, this blue line at the bottom is Tesla's market cap because personally I like tracking the market cap. It just helps me contextualize things and future potential better than the share price alone. Finally, in the bottom right corner, you'll also see the daily volume. For example, today, Tesla's volume was 107 million shares, about 3 million below the average for the last 30 days.
A Chinese source late post is reporting that Tesla started buying cathode coils from two second-tier Chinese battery makers in the second half of last year and is shipping those two Texas to produce 4680s. Tesla chose these two suppliers after auditing the cylindrical cell production lines of several Chinese battery companies. This practice of sourcing coils from China before making them into batteries could continue into the third quarter of this year, and a person close to Tesla said Tesla's battery supplier Panasonic would not start producing 4680s cells until quarter three. The report is that Tesla wanted to buy these cathode coils from CATL and BYD, but they were turned down. Those companies want Tesla to buy complete cells directly. They're saying it's costly to source cathode coils from China and ship them to the United States. The coils require high ceiling for transportation, special packaging, and need to be made into cells in a short period of time. Typical coils develop quality issues after sitting for about one week. The reason Tesla went to the trouble of importing the coils was to expand 4680s battery production capacity.
From the report, Tesla has only achieved dry coating of the anode, but has not yet done so for the cathode. As Jordan from the limiting factor said, Tesla was using a wet coated electrode imported from China at CATO Road for the Gen 1 cell. But all indications were they had successfully implemented dry coating of the cathode at Texas for Gen 2. They told us that in Vesterday they were coating both the cathode and the anode in Austin. They did confirm in the Monroe interview the cyber cell was dry and the electrode produced here.
At this point, I know if you don't follow the battery space closely, this is all very confusing and it's confusing even if you do. There are now conflicting reports about exactly what's going on, so potentially a good question for the earnings call next week.
To try to clarify for now, this is a quote from Drew Baglino from Q1 2023. Same with a cathode precursor. We've successfully demonstrated a lower process cost zero wastewater precursor process that we described on Battery Day at both lab and pilot scale. And we're on the detailed design phase for incorporating this technology into the front end of our Austin cathode facility on cathode production where 50% equipment and 75% utilities installed at our new cathode building in Austin with our goal to begin dry and wet commissioning this quarter and next quarter with a target to produce first material before the end of the year, which of course would mean last year translation.
Tesla's goal was to begin both wet and dry production of cathodes in Giga, Texas by the end of last year. It's far too easy for me right now to start speculating about, well, maybe Tesla didn't hit their goals. That's why they now have to source some of this cathode material from China. But it could also just be that Tesla is wanting to add additional cathode supply from China to scale 4680 production, like the report said, to try to meet all of this cyber truck demand.
At Reuters report from a few weeks ago, the sources were saying that Tesla was not having any trouble dry coating the anode. It was the cathode it was still struggling with. We all know what they say about assuming so for now let's just wait until we get some more information, hopefully next week.
On the surface, this one is great, but when you get into the details, most likely you'll be rolling your eyes. The Biden Harris administration today announced it's awarding $150 million to 24 grant recipients in 20 different states to make existing EV charging infrastructure more reliable.
The grants will be used to repair or replace nearly 4,500 existing EV charging ports, and in some cases bring them up to code. If you're asking yourself how can any of these relatively new charging ports not be up to code, let's not forget in many states and jurisdictions the utilities and the people working there aren't really well versed on the electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
This tranche of funding is coming from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula program, otherwise known as NIVI. Doing a little bit of digging, you can actually find where these grants are going. It's to the 20 states highlighted in green on the map, specifically 14 state departments of transportation and 10 local entities.
这笔资金是来自国家电动汽车基础设施配套方案(National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula program,简称NIVI)。通过一点调查,你实际上可以找到这些资助金的去向。它们将用于地图上被标记为绿色的20个州,具体来说是14个州交通部门和10个地方机构。
For the California dot, if you take the actual funding divided by the estimated number of ports they're supposedly fixing, that's almost $49,000 per port just for repairs. You don't need a calculator for this one, how about Connecticut getting $684,000 for two estimated ports, over $340,000 to fix or replace one port. And you can't argue, well, maybe with ports they mean actual sites because in Indiana, that would only be $35,000 for two entire sites, which clearly is not the case.
In fairness, some of them are reasonable for repairs. This city in Michigan getting $13,000 to fix two ports. That would be what I would expect to see mostly across the board. $148 million total divided by about 4,400 ports is roughly $33.2,000 to repair each port. I really don't want to be too critical here because fixing these chargers is a great step. But when you compare that with Tesla, maybe installing superchargers for under $50,000 for more reliable chargers, you start to wonder why we're not just building out more superchargers.
Remember the headlines about how a Tesla vehicle was used to track a spouse in a nefarious way? A thread that's worth keeping an eye on is the data collection that's happening at all automakers, not just Tesla. I think most of us here would trust Tesla to do the right thing with our data, but when it comes to all other automakers, can we really say the same? As you can see, some automakers like Toyota are now sharing their customers' data with insurance companies.
As a way to fight back against all of this, I've partnered with DeleteMe, the sponsor of this video. Ricky from 2Bit Da Vinci was just advocating for DeleteMe in his recent conversation with Sandy Monroe, but seriously, go google yourself. The ability to collect consumers' personal data and to sell it to data brokers is a legit business. DeleteMe does all of the work for you when it comes to actually removing your personal data from these data brokers. I just got another quarterly report from DeleteMe, and they have now removed 93 listings of my personal information from online, saving me a fair amount of time and hassle. I currently have 30 removals in progress, and DeleteMe shows you the updated status of the removal from each different data broker. Think about your family members, DeleteMe makes it very easy to protect your entire family. So if you want to do what you can to avoid scam calls, phishing emails and identity theft, you can check out joindeleteme.com slash electrified and use my coupon code electrified to get you 20% off. As always, thank you for choosing to support electrified.
为了对抗这一切,我已经与这个视频的赞助商DeleteMe合作了。最近,2Bit Da Vinci的Ricky在与Sandy Monroe的对话中对DeleteMe进行了推荐,但是,你可以自行搜索一下。收集消费者个人数据并将其出售给数据经纪人是一项合法的业务。当涉及到从这些数据经纪人那里真正删除您的个人数据时,DeleteMe会为您完成所有工作。我刚刚收到了DeleteMe的又一份季度报告,他们已经从网络上删除了93个我个人信息的列表,为我节省了相当多的时间和麻烦。目前我正在进行30个删除操作,并且DeleteMe会向您显示每个不同数据经纪人的删除状态更新。考虑一下你的家庭成员,DeleteMe非常容易保护您的整个家庭。所以,如果您想尽力避免骚扰电话、网络钓鱼邮件和身份盗窃,您可以访问joindeleteme.com/electrified,并使用我的优惠码electrified享受20%的折扣。一如既往,感谢您选择支持electrified。
In new promotional materials for Tesla in China, it looks like the cyber truck is going to begin a national tour. Let's not get carried away, we just heard Elon say getting the cyber truck approved for the roads in China would be incredibly difficult. This is really just a brand recognition move. I would imagine they'll try to educate the public on all of the technological marvels that are beyond just the design of this truck.
From the cyber truck guy, Tesla has pushed delivery timelines for new cyber truck orders, not reservations, to between February and April 2024 for the all wheel drive trim. Previously, it was January to March 2024. The estimates for the cyber beast are still mid to late 2024. Once again, you can interpret this as not enough 4680 supply or much more all wheel drive demand than they expected. Personally, I would lean toward the latter because we're still in the neighborhood of around 50 cyber trucks being produced per day. That number could definitely fluctuate significantly, but Tesla has enough 4680 production to meet those numbers in my opinion.
That same Reuters report I just mentioned said that Tesla in Austin alone was making enough 4680s for about 24,000 cyber trucks per year or about roughly 500 per week. That number would not include any saved capacity that Tesla had been storing in preparation for this time from last year and nothing from Cato Road, which as far as we know is still down for upgrades currently.
From drive Tesla, the cyber truck is making an appearance at the Montreal Auto Show this weekend, marking the first time the cyber truck will be on display at a public auto show anywhere in the world. This show runs from January 19th to the 28th and they're saying this year it should mark a significant expansion in the scale of the show. VW, Nissan, Ford, Chevy and Kia are all confirmed to be in attendance.
Club Tesla Quebec will be an exhibitor at this event and they'll also have two model wise on display plus many members of the club will be answering questions and Tesla will have sales delivery service and technicians available to also answer questions and provide cutting edge insights on what's new at Tesla. Just to give you a feel, this is footage from the Montreal Auto Show from 2023. Bear in mind supposed to be much bigger this year.
We've known it was coming, but Bloomberg NEF is now saying more Chinese companies are entering the tier one list for battery energy storage. The full list has not been revealed publicly, but energy storage news is confirming that fluence and Tesla are both tier one suppliers. The head of battery storage for BNEF said while there are quite a few notable incumbent suppliers in the energy storage space, we've seen a significant uptick of lesser known suppliers, especially from China. The Chinese domestic market has picked up in battery manufacturing competition is leading a lot of those companies to integrate systems to provide to downstream customers. Many integrators are going upstream and manufacturing their own batteries. Every time I see quotes like this, it just reminds me to be thankful that Tesla is in the fire working on making their own batteries despite all of the challenges. The way things are shaping up with China leading the way a decade from now, if you're not making your own batteries in house, it's going to be very hard if not impossible to compete from a price perspective.
Checking in on Tesla's megapack, the earliest delivery date is now Q4 2024. So roughly one year down from a two year backlog that we have seen in years past. This is another one you could interpret either way, but I see this as an improvement in Tesla's throughput capacity that we should see in their financial results as we go through the next few quarters. I also wanted to bring that up to throw this out there. I've been wondering why Tesla hasn't been going faster with ramping more megapactories, Pat Titt Brad Ferguson from Rebellioner. I know the megapactory in Shanghai is being built as we speak, but they still have a one year backlog in the United States. I'm assuming these megapack factories only cost roughly around a billion dollars max. So why not get started on a third site somewhere because we know eventually they're going to. I guess I'm just wondering what they're waiting for. The only argument would be the longer they wait the more they can refine the design, maybe the battery chemistries. Maybe it really does have to do with all of the backlogs when it comes to actually getting these battery storage projects connected to the grid as that queue keeps growing. Maybe Tesla's just overall being very cautious about the economy potentially slowing down sometime this year. I could ramble on, but I was curious to get your thoughts.
On that front, the German government is now officially on board for battery energy storage. Their strategy does not yet have specific actions, but their new release puts electricity storage on the German political agenda for the first time with the support of the government. Without the flexibility provided by storage, the country will face higher economic costs, caused by increasing gas imports and expensive curtailment of renewable generation. Crutailment basically that wasted energy. There is a great potential for increasing the uptake of utility-scale storage, but uncertainties in the regulatory and political space cause unnecessary delays for our customers and their projects, for example during the approval processes or obtaining network access. We urge politicians to look at ways to create security for investors and better market access for storage. Same problems in the United States.
Bosch, one of the largest automotive suppliers in the world, wants to cut 1,200 jobs in its software development division by the end of 2026. The main reason given for the move, which sees 950 cuts in Germany alone, is the significantly slower than expected development of fully automated driving. The company said, a weak economy and high inflation caused among other things by increased energy and commodity costs are slowing down the transition.
Add this one to the list of all of these companies that have publicly backed off of fully automated driving, and now they're just focusing more on level 2 technology. It's all part of the reason I'm so confident in saying Tesla's lead in fully automated autonomy generalized, not geo-fenced, is growing. In part because, yes, Tesla is making some progress, but it's also because all of these other companies are just falling off and not trying at all.
Remember that Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan we talked about that gets the $7,500 credit with 30 miles of EV range? Well, 17,000 of them are now under investigation for battery fires. The ODI received 4 complaints alleging battery fires in these plug-in hybrids even after these vehicles had received an interim fix from an original recall. NHTSA is now performing a recall query to examine the effectiveness of the recall. I'm sharing because the original recall was triggered by 12 incidents of fires from 2017 and 18 model years. All of the minivans were parked and turned off, and eight of them were connected to chargers when these fires began. Owners were advised to not recharge the minivans and to park them away from structures and other vehicles, but these vehicles were allowed back on the road after this initial recall despite the fact that a root cause of the battery fires is still unknown as of November last year.
Tesla Roddy had an article talking about the model 3 plus getting 5 stars in China's EV STA intelligent vehicle integration test. I just wanted to make a correction if you saw this, the upgraded model 3 they said was able to receive a good score in all 4 metrics. However, if you go to the actual report you can see the scale right here. G is excellent, A is good, M is average and P is poor. Yes, it's confusing, but the green is actually excellent. So just think G for great in all 4 categories Tesla scored excellent, not good. We don't need to go through the whole report, but some parts of it don't make much sense to me right here. Driver monitoring Tesla got zero out of one point, at least in the United States Tesla's new driver monitoring system should be scoring two out of one point. They also have active seat belt pretensioner Tesla scoring zero out of one point when we know Tesla has this technology. Despite those oddities, the model 3 plus still scored 5 out of 5 stars and excellent in all 4 categories.
It's still not officially official, but the Model Y is going to be Europe's number one selling car for 2023. Tesla has roughly a 19,000 car lead on number 2 the Dasea Sandera, which is significantly more affordable. According to data representing 97% of the sales for the EU. If the lead stands, which it should, that'll mean the Model Y is the first electric car to finish the year number one, first midsize car to do it, first premium car to do it, and the first non-European car in the modern era to finish the year number one. When you really stop and think about each of these bullet points and what it means for Tesla being able to achieve something like that in the EU, it really is pretty incredible.
The robotic startup figure has just signed a commercial deal with BMW, so honestly great for them. This is that robot we just showed last week making the cup of curried coffee. This partnership is to deploy figures robot in BMW's manufacturing facilities in the United States. They did not say how many robots BMW will be using, but they said they're going to start small and expand if performance targets have been met. They'll be integrated into the factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the largest auto exporter in the United States, with 11,000 employees. The robots will be integrated into the manufacturing processes, including the body shop, sheet metal and warehouse in the next 12 to 24 months, after being trained to perform specific tasks. Last year, figure raised $70 million valuing them at around $400 million, so pretty impressive for a company this small to sign a deal with BMW. It'll be something entirely different to see how this actually pans out.
From not a Tesla app, at least in the EU, for now the Model 3 Plus, the high beams now adjust to reduce square for other drivers and cyclists, meaning adaptive headlight functionality is now here. By detecting other road users and selectively dimming individual pixels of the headlights, the high beams can remain on longer, enabling better visibility at night. They said this edition is currently only for the new Model 3 and it does not appear to impact vehicles with matrix headlights.
I am a bit confused with this one because as far as I know, matrix headlights are actually adaptive headlights, so does Tesla have some adaptive feature outside of just the matrix headlight. If anybody has a better understanding, please let us know below, but at least for now, some encouraging news that adaptive headlight functionality has arrived to the EU.
It's the Wall Street Journal, but they're giving credit where I think it's due to Hyundai and Kia for now becoming one of Tesla's biggest competitors. The article talks about things we've already been over. I wanted to point out though, Hyundai went from leasing around 5% of its EVs sold to more than 40%, mainly driven by the tax credits because buying these Hyundai Kia vehicles do not qualify because they're manufactured outside the United States. As we've seen though, leasing these vehicles does mean they can qualify for the credit.
And we have Kia's executive vice president saying it's like a horse race. You have to get out in front as soon as possible, speaking about the EV transition. That statement is of course contrary to what we've seen from the likes of Ford, GM, Toyota, and others.
Don't forget to go google yourself and then come back and check out Delete Me to take advantage of that discount. You're welcome. Hope you guys have a wonderful day. Please like the video if you did. You can find me on X-Link below and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.