Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis, quick shout out to my newest patron, John W. Thank you for choosing to support the channel. Last week we touched on the graphite market heating up after those Chinese export controls and over the weekend, Saraw Resources started its active anode material production at its new facility in Vidalia, which is in Louisiana. This positioned Saraw as the first vertically integrated natural graphite supplier outside of China and from this facility in Louisiana, it's meant to supply Tesla. This chart from mining.com showed that in 2020, graphite made up 97% of the anode materials used in a lithium ion battery and they're predicting that by 2030, graphite will remain at 90%. Yes, silicon adoption could exceed expectations over the next few years, but the point remains graphite is not going anywhere. Plus, in terms of weight when it comes to lithium ion batteries, graphite is usually the largest component making up roughly 20 to 30%. But due to losses in the manufacturing process, it can take 30 times more graphite than lithium to actually make these batteries.
We touched a few times last week on Tesla finally making an appearance at some of these national auto shows both in the United States and in Canada, and here's a quick 5 second video of why that's most likely a good decision for Tesla. We got the Tesla China data for the week. It's almost not even worth covering though because this week it was predominantly covered by the Chinese New Year celebrations, which this year ran from February 10th to the 17th. With that in mind, the figure for the week was 2,600 and if you wanted to compare it to the same week in quarter four, that number was 16.3,000. So given the holiday shutdown for quarter one, Tesla has now fallen behind the best record quarter ever for China, which was quarter four. If you want a better comparison, quarter one of 2023 would work because the first seven weeks of that quarter did actually encapsulate part of the Chinese New Year. Thus, through the first seven weeks of quarter one in 2023, Tesla was at 47,135, meaning so far this year, Tesla is 14.3% ahead of that pace. I'm not sure what to make of this one and it was last week, but just so everybody is aware, China Finance News reporting that they learned from Tesla China, there is no Model Y facelift plan for the Chinese market this year. Keep in mind, Tesla China has already done a partial refresh of the Model Y. For example, they have the interior ambient lighting, but it's only in the front of the vehicle not for the back passengers. If there was any truth to that report, it's most likely just Tesla playing a sales game trying to avoid the Osborne effect. I'm still expecting a full refresh to Model Y from Giga Shanghai sometime later this year.
On X, Tesla, Konami said it's a matter of if not when Tesla reaches between 10 to 20 million vehicles delivered per year. Replying to that, Elon said it will be a very hard climb to 10x output, doable, but it is an immense amount of work. From everything I read online, it seems like most Wall Street analysts have written off that 20 million unit per year number for Tesla, so if Elon still thinks it's doable and seemingly is striving for it, there's certainly still some alpha there over the next decade.
I'm sure most of you have seen over the weekend, Tesla's FSD version 12.2.1 is going out to Tesla employees and special groups for the first time. This build does include support for hardware for vehicles. And fast forward just one day, and we have FSD version 12 going out to randomly disperse groups of Tesla owners as well, not just influencers or special groups. AI driver shared a clip saying FSD v12 handles a large dip in the road. I've tested this exact scenario on nearly every version. This is the first time it's succeeded. He also posted a quick video saying FSD version 12 can make you turns, but the best part, there was...
...a reply to this post from Paril Jain, the head of planning for Tesla's AI and optimus who said the best part, no dedicated effort went into, quote, let's make you turns work. So quite literally no programming, no custom written code for this specific scenario, just the neural nets actually watching other drivers do this maneuver and then deciding, hey, you know what, I can do this myself. That highlights what we've been talking about now for the better part of a year. Version 12 is going to be all about the rate of improvement. So the faster Tesla can roll out version 12 to a wide release, the more data it's going to collect, the more edge cases it can cover and the faster it can learn. It won't be limited by engineers having to write manual code for each and...
...every edge case, it's just feed more data of something similar so the car can learn on its own. It's certainly still worth pointing out that by and large, the auto wiper feature is still brutal. Two things of note as Arthur said on X, version 12 handles speed bumps perfectly and it performed a California roll through a stop sign meaning it did not come to a complete stop. On the other side of the coin though, Holmar said of this new version, disappointing. Very slow and hesitant compared to the previous version, found myself getting frustrated, could be typical new version cautiousness or the rain. Then he said...
...second drive painfully slow as well, both zero takeover drives but extremely slow and more jerky compared to the last build. Rain pretty heavy so could be a factor. Two things to keep in mind, first with new releases there can often times be new regressions, second when these releases go to a wider audience, sometimes Tesla will nerf certain features to make the system a bit more cautious, more careful because obviously more people have it that might be new to the system. I will say of all the early feedback I've read online, most of it is very positive, same thing, superhuman like Colin said Holmar's was not overhyping V12 if anything he's underhyping...
...A follower of Pete Trane's FSD said certain behaviors that consistently would make mistakes on version 11 are now just completed effortlessly. It also passed the wife test as she said there's something palpably different about this software. And at least for this anecdote, they did not notice any regressions. In response to Tesla girl on X highlighting Tesla's problem with auto wipers persisting, Yoon Tassai said the new improvement should go out soon. If you didn't know, Yoon is a senior staff engineer for Tesla AI.
一位Pete Trane 的 FSD 追随者说,某些在版本11上经常犯错误的行为现在仅仅轻松完成。他的妻子也通过了测试,她说这个软件有明显的不同之处。至少在这个轶事中,他们没有注意到任何倒退。对于特斯拉女孩在 X 上突出出现的特斯拉自动雨刮器问题,尤恩·塔赛表示新的改进应该很快出台。如果你不知道的话,尤恩是特斯拉AI的高级工程师。
Some of you may know I'm on a mission to expose the scam that is browsing in incognito mode. I mean, just read the fine print, it's right here. Think about the practical problem. Every time you use Wi-Fi, whether it's at home, at your family's house, at the airport, at a hotel, the admin of that network can track your online activity even if you're in incognito mode. And it gets worse, your home internet service provider can see and track your online activity, then they can actually sell that data to advertisers and get away with it. And this is only part of why I'm an advocate for Surfshark VPN, the sponsor of this video. A VPN encrypts all of your network activity so that your data stays private. Surfshark works across all of your devices and even better, one account will protect your entire family. It's really easy to use and with one click up your mouse, you can be protected in seconds. Surfshark can also get you better deals on flights and hotels, as well as unlocking new libraries of content no matter where you're at in the world. For whatever reason, I think people think VPNs are expensive, it's just not the case at all. We're talking less than one cup of coffee per month. So if you'd like to support the channel and take your privacy back, you can use my code electrified to get an extra three months free at surfshark.deals slash electrified a link below, or you can use the QR code right on the screen.
You Canadians be encouraged, Tesla scope was asking about FSD subscriptions for the Canadian market, Rohan Patel say looking into this one now, unless there are legal or other blockers I don't know about, we'll get this done. It gets better, drive Tesla asks, could you please look into annual premium connectivity subscriptions and Rohan said apologies for not looking into this sooner, we'll get better answers on this one as well. These simple messages highlight a much bigger story, one that is the adoption of Tesla's FSD does not have to be people paying 12 grand up front for a software they don't know much about, the subscription feature is a big deal and it's not available in that many markets. Yes, right now the Tesla configurator is only live for about 45 different countries around the world, say there's roughly 190 total, that's only about 23% of global countries that Tesla is actually selling vehicles into. Compare that with a company like Toyota who on their own website says that they have sales in countries and regions totaling 170 plus. Well Dylan, why isn't Tesla in more countries by now? Well one, before they enter a country successfully they need infrastructure to be set up, namely for charging. Tesla is still a relatively new company and this type of thing takes time but the point is there's a huge total addressable market for Tesla to still grow into.
I saw two interesting takeaways from a new Tesla stock note from Morgan Stanley. They did a three question survey of 84 investors, part of the results, less than one in four of those surveyed C Tesla as a good way to play the AI theme. That just brings me to what I said over on X, this is what the market thinks Tesla is up here and most of us here know this is what Tesla really is. So if you ever need to explain to somebody what's going on with Tesla stock, well this is a great analogy and picture to use. The water may be receding slower than some would like but the time is coming when all of this is going to be revealed. One of the questions, where do you expect Tesla shares to bottom before the end of 2024? 48% said about $150. But get this another 20% said $100 and 7% said below $100. Only 25% think Tesla has already bottomed at $180. Now look, given that only 24% of people said yes they think Tesla is a good way to invest in the AI theme, I would not be putting any confidence into any of these predictions by this group of investors but understanding the sentiment out there can be of our advantage.
Cybertruck deliveries are expanding to new states, now we have Utah on the list and add North Carolina to the list while you're at it. This kid's reaction to just seeing the Cybertruck was too good not to share. There are now a total of 5 different colors for a Cybertruck PTF wrap but still this is only available from 4 locations in California. If for whatever reason you doubted the impact that the IRA has had so far, maybe this will change your mind. CATL is quite literally restructuring its entire company just to take advantage of IRA tax credits and to avoid being treated as an FEOC for an entity of concern. Now yes, officially CATL is saying this is to help it adapt to changes and to improve its decision making power. However, this restructuring is coming shortly after Biden actually released some of the requirements for what classifies as a foreign entity of concern. It's also true that Robin Zhang is the chairman of CATL who previously held over 25% of CATL shares but he has very close ties to the Chinese government. We also know that that joint venture between Ford and CATL that was earmarked for Michigan has been facing a ton of backlash because of concerns about Chinese ties. This wouldn't just be a big deal for Ford and CATL though, obviously CATL is a major supplier of Tesla which would greatly open up their optionality for battery supply in the North American market.
According to an analysis by EV Data, Tesla is installing more charging plazas than any other company funded by the 2021 infrastructure law. Tesla has one almost 13% of all EV charging awards more than any other company. That's earned Tesla a total of more than $17 million in infrastructure grants. But there's a better story than just those numbers. Tesla is proposing stations that are bigger than what other companies are building. Meanwhile as we've known Tesla is building their stations at sharply lower costs.
Many states have tried to entice charging companies to pay for a higher percentage of the cost of building each station than the federal government requires. That requirement by the way is 20% meaning that's the amount the companies have to pay. Meaning if the total project bid was $100,000 whatever company gets that bid has to pony up at least $20,000 to qualify. However, more than other firms Tesla has refused to do so. Why is that? As we know Tesla doesn't really need this money, it's really just a cherry on top. The founder of EV Adoption said speaking of Tesla, they're just a machine. They have a massive team of suppliers and vendors. They can just get this done at the speed of light.
Federal guidelines call for these locations to have at least four charging stalls, but in many cases Tesla is proposing 8 or 12. Despite that Tesla's average funding per site is $414.5,000 dramatically lower than most other suitors. Rather than giving in to the demands of the state to try to get more money, Tesla is capping its contribution at that 20%. Then the CEO of EV Adoption said their cost structure is just so much lower than everybody else. This is a case of the rich getting richer.
It looks like Elon has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Marius Nielsen, a politician from Norway. Part of the reason, Elon's adamant defense of dialogue, free speech and enabling the possibility to express one's views in a continuously more polarized world. He also applauded Starlink in places like Ukraine and Israel and he said the multitude of tech companies, Elon founded Owns or Runs, aimed at bettering societies, increasing knowledge of both Earth and Space in addition to enabling communication and connectivity globally has helped make the world a more connected and safer place.
A short list of nominees for this Nobel Peace Prize will be drawn together through March and then judges will review and nominees will be announced in October. The current administration seems to be backing off some of those tailpipe emissions regulations by 2030 in response to all of the public pushback. Under the revised final regulation expected to be made public as soon as next month, the EPA will slow the pace of its proposed yearly emissions requirements through 2030. The new pace is expected to result in EVs accounting for less than 60% of all vehicles produced by 2030, when before, of course, it was going to be more than 60%.
The revisions are expected to increase stringency more gradually and occur over a greater period of time. The new proposals remain under review and just a quick aside, they did say that Tesla officials had a separate White House meeting on February 9th. Among those lines, Tesla's policy advisor, Rohan Patel, said a few weeks ago, Lars and the Tesla engineering team hosted a broad set of government academic and non-governmental organization leaders. This safety research day was focused on Tesla safety advancements, both active and passive.
Rohan said we're most happy to share these learnings with regulators and researchers to get the maximum benefit for the public and not just Tesla owners. These are the types of things I wish the general public knew about Tesla. They're actually sharing all this information that it's learned in-house from its own testing and all of the iteration to then actually help the industry and ultimately other auto manufacturers to make their vehicles safer as well, making the roads a safer place for everybody.
Tesla club India said Tesla India seems to be gearing up to have its first Indian office space operational in Pune, India. The video is from a live films which makes corporate videos and ads. I think most of you have heard about this by now but in case you haven't, Elon posted on X, Tesla has been able to do real world video generation with accurate physics for about a year. It wasn't super interesting because all of the training data came from the cars, so it just looks like video from the Tesla, albeit with a dynamically generated not remembered world. We have been short on training compute for FSD so we haven't trained with other video but we certainly could. We'll do it later this year when we have some spare capacity. AKA, Elon thinks sometime later in 2024, Tesla will not be compute constrained when it comes to training FSD. On a space last night, Elon said in passing that spending between 2 to 4 billion dollars on AI compute this year to remain at the top of the field may jump to double digit billions by 2025. Clearly, if there's going to be one limitation for version 12 throughout 2024, it's obviously that Tesla is already training compute constrained and adding all of this extra video training data is not going to help the matter. So it could be until 2025 when they're not constrained where we start to see some pretty incredible progress. Clearly that doesn't mean that we're not going to see any progress from version 12 throughout this year, it's just something to keep in the back of your mind. And Tesla having this skill in its back pocket, the ability to do real world video generation should greatly help with those edge cases on FSD 12. Rather than waiting for a car in the real world to approach that random edge case time after time, they can just create that exact scene by inputting some text.
The Rave Model 3 Plus reviews continue as it won the 2024 drive car of the year best urban EV under $100,000. This award is arguably the most hotly contested arena for EVs. This is a new category for 2024. Today, locals living near Gigabrelin have voted against plans to expand the facility in a non-binding public survey. There were 3,499 votes against and 1,882 in favor. This equated to a turnout of around 70% of the small settlement east of Berlin. Opponents of the expansion say part of the project will impact a water protection zone. Economic Minister York Steinbach said Tesla should try to approach the result as an opportunity to fine tune the plans. It shows that the scales tip considerably towards people's concerns and fears. I see the result of this vote also as a motivation for the local authorities and for Tesla to find conceptual solutions in the coming weeks and months for those concerns not yet assuaged. To be very clear that was not an official vote meaning the expansion is now dead, it was just a public survey to get a sentiment of how people are feeling about the project.
Rave Model 3 Plus的评论继续,因为它赢得了2024年度最佳城市电动车奖,售价低于10万美元。这个奖项可以说是电动车领域最激烈的竞争。这是2024年的一个新类别。今天,住在吉加布雷林附近的当地居民在一项非约束性的公共调查中投票反对扩建工厂的计划。有3499张反对票和1882张赞成票。这相当于柏林东部这个小聚居地约70%的投票率。反对者认为项目的一部分将影响水源保护区。经济部长约克·施泰因巴赫表示,特斯拉应该把这个结果视为一个微调计划的机会。这表明天平明显倾向于人们的担忧和恐惧。我认为这次投票结果也是对当地政府和特斯拉的一种激励,在未来几周和几个月内找到概念解决方案来解决尚未缓解的问题。要非常清楚的是,这并不是官方投票,意味着扩建计划现在已经取消,这只是一次公共调查,了解人们对项目的看法如何。
For my Australians, construction has begun on a 500 megawatt-hour battery energy storage project in partnership with Tesla in Queensland. What always makes these even sweeter is this is at the site of a former coal-fired power plant and the goal is to have the site energized by mid 2025. The sympathy strikes against Tesla in Sweden have now backfired on companies with collective agreements as ironic as that is. EF Metall convinced Hydro-extrusions, which by the way is a company with a collective agreement to fight against Tesla through these sympathy strikes. Now 20 Hydro-extrusions employees have been laid off. The aluminum supplier had some reservations about joining against Tesla in this strike and among its concerns was that Tesla could quickly replace the parts Hydro-extrusions produced with other suppliers. That's exactly what happened. We've already known this to be the case but on X Elon confirmed Tesla will never make a concept car that does not become reality. So over 10,000 of the cars used by Uber and Lyft in New York City are now electric. That's 12% of the total fleet of the two ride hailing companies. This means the drive transition in both fleets is happening faster than expected.
针对澳大利亚人,特斯拉与昆士兰州合作,开始建设一个500兆瓦小时的电池储能项目。更令人振奋的是,这个项目是在一座曾经的燃煤发电厂的基地上进行的,目标是在2025年中旬让该地点通电。在瑞典对特斯拉的同情罢工中,现在反过来损害了拥有集体协议的公司,这种讽刺更是让人啼笑皆非。 EF Metall说服了Hydro-extrusions公司,后者是一家有集体协议的公司,通过这些同情罢工来对抗特斯拉。现在,已有20名Hydro-extrusions员工被裁员。这家铝供应商有一些顾虑参与这场罢工,其中之一就是担心特斯拉会迅速用其他供应商替代Hydro-extrusions生产的零件。这正是所发生的。我们早已知道这是事实,而埃隆(Elon)也证实了特斯拉永远不会打造一个不会成为现实的概念车。如今,纽约市Uber和Lyft使用的超过10,000辆车现在已实现了电动化,占这两家乘车共享公司总车队的12%。这意味着两家公司车队的电动化转型正在比预期更快地进行。
Spitting in the face of Kia, some dealerships are marking up Kia EV9s by up to $7,000 over MSRP. It's not happening at all dealerships but clearly at some and Kia was already offering to pay dealers $2,000 for every EV9 delivery that went smoothly. The dealership model remains broken. Some people were surprised by this. Ford has cut the prices of the Mach-E between $3,000 and $8,000 but after it lost the $3,750 tax credit at the end of last year, it really did not stand a chance against the Model Y if it didn't add some sort of incentive. Ford credit is also offering 0% financing for 72 months to qualified buyers, plus a $7,500 cash incentive on leased vehicles. Ford did say it wants to make way for the 2024 Mach-E and now the Mach-E starts at $39,800. Over the weekend VW unveiled the new ID7 Tour but this is only going to be for the European market at least to start. So far they said they have no plans to bring this to the United States.
We finally got some info on the 2024 Acura ZDX which yes is going to be on GM's Altium platform. It'll start at $65,000 just higher than the Lyric which starts right under $60,000. The base A-Spec has a 102kWh battery pack and estimated to give 325 miles of range in the rear wheel drive version and 315 for all wheel drive. The ZDX is set to arrive at US dealerships early this spring. Tesla is asking for help yet again when it comes to the nonsense taking place in Oklahoma. These are detrimental bills that could jeopardize Tesla's ability to continue to operate galleries in Oklahoma. If passed these bills could put Tesla locations and Oklahoma jobs at risk. The proposal would ban educational and informational activities about Tesla and its products. As far as I can tell from that hearing it actually passed by a vote of 10-3. So the bill has now passed the Senate and Tesla is asking for help to try to vote it down in the house.
In Oklahoma right now Tesla's workaround has been having these galleries. They can't actually have sales there but they can talk to customers about the products then the customer can actually place an order online. But now clearly Oklahoma is not done trying to get Tesla out of the state entirely. Look the truth is no matter what happens here Tesla is going to find a workaround like it always does and the silver lining. The fact that these politicians in Oklahoma are spending so much time trying to keep Tesla out of the state by any means necessary just goes to show how much of a threat Tesla really is. Just a PSA to those of you in Oregon the EV rebate incentive may come back later this year in case you didn't know. This week we were waiting to hear about South Korea and EV incentives for Tesla. Well they decided to reduce those financial incentives for buyers of the Model Y. The rebate has effectively been cut in half from 3.8 thousand US dollars down to 1.4 thousand. This one is bound to be interesting. According to Auto Week GM is now rushing to get new plug-in hybrid EV variants of the Chevy Silverado and GM CC era to market as quickly as possible in a new crash program. Pretty interesting choice of words for a vehicle.
特斯拉目前在俄克拉荷马州的解决办法是设立这些展廊。他们实际上不能在那里进行销售,但他们可以与客户讨论产品,然后客户可以在网上下订单。但现在很明显,俄克拉荷马州并没有打算就此放弃赶走特斯拉。事实是,无论在这里发生什么,特斯拉都会像往常一样找到解决办法,这也是一线希望。俄克拉荷马州的政客们花费大量时间尽一切手段试图把特斯拉赶出州外,这只表明特斯拉真的是多么的威胁。提醒俄勒冈州的人,可能在今年晚些时候将恢复EV折扣激励措施,以防你不知道。本周我们正在等待关于韩国和特斯拉的EV激励措施的消息。他们决定减少为Model Y购买者提供的财政奖励。该奖励实际上已经从3.8千美元减少到1.4千美元。这个情况肯定会很有趣。根据《汽车周刊》的报道,通用汽车公司正在紧急推出雪佛兰Silverado和GM CC era的新插电混动车型,以便尽快推向市场。对于一辆车来说,选择这些词汇确实很有趣。
GM was trying to hold strong there publicly saying that they were fully committed to a full BEV future but now behind the scenes they're capitulating just like Ford and apparently shifting focus to plug-in hybrids. Now the thing is we knew that this was coming but publicly GM was saying that they're just going to do it casually as they need to to meet their emissions requirements which by the way are being loosened as we speak. But now we're learning if this report is true that GM is rushing to bring these vehicles to the market. Why? Maybe it's because their full BEVs are not coming online as soon as they expected. Top gear just put out a video with the Lucid Gravity SUV. I would show you some but they're notorious for copyright claims so it'll be linked below if you're interested.
Tesla stock closed the day at $193.76 per share after dipping down to $189 intraday while the NASDAQ was down 0.92%. It was an average volume day for Tesla trading about 4 million shares below the average 30 day volume. Now for whatever reason people are making these headlines in video dethroning Tesla as Wall Street's most traded stock as this being somehow a good thing for Nvidia and a bad thing for Tesla. I'm not so sure that's the case. Ultimately more trading means more volatility thanks to more derivatives and more attention on the stock which yes can mean bigger swings to the upside but it means the same thing on the downside. Translation, if you don't like volatility this is actually a good thing for Tesla stock holders. Don't forget check out Surfshark linked below literally just a few dollars every month in my opinion it's a screaming value. 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.