Welcome to electrified. It's your host Dylan Loomis. And yes, I have implemented casual Fridays here at electrified. We got a report from Bloomberg that Tesla has reduced production in China, according to people familiar with the matter. Tesla earlier this month instructed employees in Shanghai to lower production of the Y and the three. They're moving to working five days per week instead of the usual six and a half days. The production lines run on to 11 and a half hour shifts per day, which remains unchanged. Output has been trimmed starting earlier this month, and the staff has not been given a clear indication of when production will go back to normal context for the overall auto market in China is always important.
The passenger vehicle sales increased 17% in the first two months of the year. Any of these sales rose 37 and a half percent for Tesla China year over year. Their wholesale sales are down 6%, but their domestic sales are up 15%. That is largely thanks to the unwinding of the wave. However, some of the production lines at Tesla's Shanghai plant, including the battery workshops, are subject to longer suspensions. Tesla has told staff and some suppliers to be prepared for extended production limits through April. So far, Elon has not denied this report.
We've said all year the competition in China is for real and last year in 2023, Tesla and BYD were operating at near 100% utilization rates for its factories, while a majority of the auto industry in China was well below 100%. This may be somewhat unusual for Tesla, but looking at the entire industry, it's certainly not unprecedented. If we assume Gigashang High slows down for one month, going down to five days a week from 6.5 is about a 23% reduction. Assuming Tesla China does roughly 75,000 units per month, if you take 23% off of that, that would be losing roughly 17.3,000 units of production. Seder is parabas.
In a Brad Sloane video, about 370 Cybertrucks were spotted at Giga Texas, Elon said production is ramping. The real question becomes, when will Tesla remove the Cybertruck from the other cars category so we can have the specific breakdown? I do think it may happen as soon as later this year, once it would surpass typical Model S and X sales. You may recall, initially there was chatter that Tesla was only going to sell about 1000 Foundation Series Cybertrucks, but given they may do around 3000 in Quarter 1, I think they're going to comfortably exceed that number. I'm not at all trying to argue I think Tesla's Q1 margins will be good, let's just say I'm curious to see how things play out with the high price of the Cybertruck, but also with all of the costs that Tesla will be moving into Cogs for the quarter. There's certainly a lot of new machinery that's required to make this beast, but come Quarter 3 or Quarter 4, I have some hope that the Cybertruck could be margin accretive for Tesla.
在布拉德·斯隆(Brad Sloane)的一段视频中,大约有370辆Cybertruck在Giga Texas被发现,埃隆表示生产正在加速。真正的问题是,特斯拉何时会将Cybertruck从其他汽车类别中移除,以便我们可以得到具体的分析数据?我认为这可能会在今年晚些时候发生,一旦它超过了典型的Model S和X的销量。你可能还记得,最初有传言称特斯拉只打算销售约1000辆Foundation Series Cybertrucks,但鉴于他们第一季度可能会做到约3000辆,我认为他们将轻松超过这个数字。我并不是要争论我认为特斯拉的第一季度利润率会很好,让我们只说我很好奇看看Cybertruck的高价钱会如何发挥作用,但也要考虑到特斯拉在这季度将要承担的所有成本。制造这个庞然大物需要许多新的机器设备,但到了第三季或第四季,我有一些希望Cybertruck可能会给特斯拉带来边际收益。
That learned about the Model Y video from Tesla on X ended up being pretty basic, however it was well done and Brenda was enjoyable to listen to, so if you need a video to share with friends or family members, she does cover a fair amount of features on the Model Y, so I'll have the video below if you want to bookmark it. Yes, Gigawiper did eventually get that last little bit of snow off as well. A quick sympathy strike check in for Tesla and Sweden for Quarter 1, there's still the top brand with 22.1% market share, with just a 265 unit lead over Volvo. With all of the opposition Tesla's facing in Sweden right now, I find this fairly impressive. Robert Scobel, who's big in the AI space, said Tesla AI is very underrated.
If you think Elon has competition, you're simply wrong, there is none, mainly referring to FSD. Elon said, yeah, 99% of people have no idea and improvement will accelerate dramatically now that we are no longer AI training compute constrained. This is a first for Tesla in a long while. In my opinion, the most likely reason this is now the case, that Nvidia H100 cluster is now fully online, it first went online in August of 2023, but it takes some time to get it fully set up and running. There's always the looming possibility that Dojo begins playing an increased role in Tesla's compute. Don't forget Tesla spending $1 billion on Dojo by the end of this year, 500 million of which is going to set up Dojo at Giga New York. A third one that goes overlooked, Elon did say on X January 26th this year that Tesla will buy from AMD as well. Elon's answer yes was in response to the question any plans to buy any chips from AMD, so that could be something for the future. Now, all we really have to do is wait and see what this accelerated progress really looks like. I'd argue the most impressive thing here and something that I feel like goes overlooked when this conversation comes up, it's not just about the amount of raw compute that a company can gather, at the end of the day it's really only as good as the data that it's training.
So if you have one AI company training like one petabyte of data compared to Tesla, those are very different animals. Tim Zommen, ex-Tesla engineer said, Due to real world video training, we may have the largest training data sets in the world, hot-tier cash capacity beyond 200 petabytes, orders of magnitudes more than LLMs. Further, when it comes to Tesla's infrastructure, he said, it's all on the premises, all owned by Tesla. Many organizations say we have, which usually means we rented, very few companies actually own, and therefore fully vertically integrate. This bothers me because owning and maintaining is hard, renting is easy. The TLDW, I would argue Tesla has the best data set in the world when it comes to autonomy and it's continually growing. We now pair that with the fact that they are no longer compute constrained and as we've been saying, things should be incredibly interesting over the next six months. Most of us here like data, so have a listen to this. According to a recent study done by N. Haynes, nearly one third of the US population is at risk for at least one vitamin deficiency or anemia. 95% of adults have an inadequate vitamin D intake. 45% of the US population had inadequate vitamin A. 46% for vitamin C, 84% for vitamin E, and 15% for zinc.
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Monroe Live was asking about a high voltage open connector that they found on the Cybertruck. Wes, a Cybertruck engineer, quote posted something saying, don't forget, you can always check the service documentation. The post that Wes shared was a picture from the service manual and that user said inductive charging. I'll take that as a pretty good indication the Cybertruck is future-proofed for inductive charging so that open port would just be for a coil or a plate to be later installed. So when you drive over one of the wireless chargers, you're good to go. It should be noted some automakers will leave open connectors like that for general assembly purposes so they can do some testing if need be but sounds like in this case it will have a further purpose at Tesla. Drew Baglino also replied to Wes with some eyeballs so I'll also take that as a confirmation. In case you're new, last year Tesla bought a company called Wytherian who did a lot of work with inductive charging. Later Tesla sold off part of the company, presumably kept most of the IP and some employees and since Tesla executives have said multiple times Tesla is working on inductive charging for passenger vehicles.
Monroe Live询问了他们在Cybertruck上找到的一个高压开放连接器。Cybertruck工程师Wes引用了一段话,表示不要忘记,你总是可以查看服务手册。Wes分享的帖子是服务手册中的一张图片,那个用户说是感应充电。我会把这看作是Cybertruck已经为感应充电做好了准备,这个开放端口可能只是为了以后安装线圈或板。所以当你开车经过其中一个无线充电器时,就可以继续前行了。值得注意的是,一些汽车制造商会留下类似那样的开放连接器用于总装目的,这样他们需要时可以进行一些测试,但听起来在这种情况下它将在特斯拉有进一步的用途。Drew Baglino也回复了Wes并发了一些眼珠表情,我也会把这当作确认。如果你还不知道,去年特斯拉收购了一家名为Wytherian的公司,他们在感应充电方面做了很多工作。后来特斯拉出售了该公司的部分股权,据推测保留了大部分知识产权和一些员工,自特斯拉高管已多次表示特斯拉正在为乘用车研发感应充电技术。
I'm sure this will wear off over time with me but right now I actually enjoy plugging in my car each time because it's a reminder that I'm not at a gas station. The group behind that Pwn to Own event that Tesla has participated in every year when it comes to cyber security held another initiative and Tesla participated and it paid off. Ironically enough Tesla will be paying off these hackers as they won $200,000 and a new Model 3. The team of security researchers dubbed Synactive managed to hack Tesla's ECU electronic control unit and the vehicle can bus. Typically we gloss over these events but I think it's important to remember this is actually one of Elon's biggest fears when it comes to Tesla.
I think one of the biggest risks for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet wide hack. In principle if somebody was able to hack say all of the autonomous Teslas they could say I mean just as a prank they could say like Santa Walter Rhode Island from across the United States and they'd be like well okay that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island that's for sure. We got to make super sure that that fleet wide hack is basically impossible and that if people are in the car that they have a override authority on whatever the car is doing. So if the car is doing something wacky you can press a button that no amount of software can override that will ensure that you gain control of the vehicle. Tesla participating in initiatives like this helps to keep them ahead of the hacking curve.
An ex-user was asking for clarification on the number of supercharger stalls that companies like Rivian and Ford have access to. Rohan Patel said it's actually just over 16,000 stalls that they have access to. An additional 11,000 are just for Tesla customers mostly V2 stalls. Multiple stations being added every week and really our only limiting factor is utility interconnection which takes two darn long. The tree house protesters in Gigabrelin are looking to build more. A spokesperson for the group said even if new requirements make it impossible for us to protest we will stand in Tesla's way beyond May 20th and stay there.
They also noted the group is planning to build more treehouses saying we're in exactly the right place to prevent the interest of the Tesla group from being pushed through like that. The administrative court is currently on the side of the protesters but the police department seems to be against this. For now the police have filed a complaint. In a surprise vote Maine's top environmental regulator rejected a proposed EV mandate. This would have closely mirrored California's mandate that at least 51% of new car purchases be electric by 2028 and 82% by 2032. However the board received around 1800 comments from the people and nearly 84% were not in favor of the mandate.
The reason Maine is far too rural with far too few charging stations and many manors are also concerned about the reliability of these vehicles in the extreme cold. Listen there are definitely still locations and certain use cases where an EV may not be the best choice but for 84% to oppose something like this clearly we need a lot more education. Given the uncertainty in the EV transition Stellantis is laying off 400 salaried workers. These will mainly be positions in engineering, technology and software at the HQ in Michigan. The cuts effective March 31st amount to about 2% of Stellantis's global workforce in engineering tech and software.
Carlos Tavares is still saying that EVs cost 40% more to make than those that run on gas. And Stellantis confirmed they're planning to launch 18 new EVs this year, 8 of those in North America. Honda is another company looking to save money as they transition to electric vehicles. They just said they're going to reduce dealership profit margins on new vehicles and make some other changes. They're planning on a 0.5% profit margin reduction and obviously the dealers are not happy. I think Honda dealers anywhere but Canada should be feeling grateful though because how about this? Honda Canada reportedly expects to reduce the profit margin its Canadian dealers earn on vehicle sales by up to 44%.
Carlos Tavares仍在说,制造电动汽车的成本比使用汽油的汽车高出40%。Stellantis证实他们计划今年推出18款新的电动汽车,其中8款在北美。本田也是另一家希望节省成本的公司,他们转向电动汽车。他们刚刚表示,将减少新车的经销商利润率,并做一些其他改变。他们计划减少0.5% 的利润率,显然经销商并不高兴。我认为除了加拿大以外的地方,本田经销商应该感到感激,因为加拿大的本田据报道预计将减少其经销商在车辆销售中的利润率高达44%。
An action the Canadian Auto Dealer Association is going to fight with substantial legal financial and intellectual resources. The drumbeat continues as we have more auto execs ringing the alarm on Chinese EVs coming to the US. Kersoft the Monroe competitor has broken down over 30 different Chinese EVs as of late. One of those was the BYDC goal. A vehicle that in China costs less than $10,000. A former GM executive who now works at Kersoft said the seagull could be a clarion call for the rest of the auto industry.
It's a significant event. I'm pretty sure the range on the seagull is only around 190 miles and I think the top speeds only around 80 miles per hour but Kersoft did say they found the seagull to be efficiently and simplistically designed engineered and executed but with unexpected quality and anticipated reliability. For what it's worth, Kersoft did say the company BYD still makes some money on the seagull. The expectation however is that if BYD were ever to bring a vehicle like this to the United States they would have to change it and it would most likely cost more. For example the same vehicle is selling in Mexico for about $21,000.
Tesla stock closed the day at $170.83 down 1.15% while the Nasdaq was up 0.16%. It was another very low volume day for Tesla trading about 22 million shares below the average 30 day volume which also keeps coming down. For the week Tesla stock was up 4.7% but year to date it's still down 31.7%. Don't forget check out AG1 linked below if you're interested. Sometimes one good decision can lead to a snowball of many more.
Hope you guys have a safe and a wonderful weekend. 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.