Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Dylan Loomis, quick shout out to my newest patron, ENN. Thank you for choosing to support the channel. There was just a celebration in Arizona for two different battery storage projects, one totaling one gigawatt hour and the other 360 megawatt hours. And the former is now Arizona's biggest project of its type, that being standalone to date. The smaller project is expected to come online this week and the bigger one should be online in the next few weeks, ahead of the rough Arizona summer. But it's a celebration for all of us because both of these projects are equipped with Tesla megapacks. The larger project alone will use 275 Tesla megapacks, which is roughly $550 million in revenue for Tesla. The developer of these projects did also talk about the augmentation process that usually happens after three to five years that we talked about yesterday and that is the case as well for Tesla's megapacks.
Contrasting with that news, we have things in Germany still headed the wrong direction. The government is working on new regulations for battery storage that will most likely slow down the process of new projects. The situation is moving from one with a lack of clarity around permitting and regulations for storage to one with clear but potentially more complex regulations. Right now when it comes to permitting, there seems to be very minimal clarity and depending on who you ask, you may get different answers. The head of a developer said the danger is these regulations being made, it may become so slow and overregulated, nothing will happen anymore. There are not yet clear general guidelines for the complete country neither on environmental permitting nor on building permits.
Morgan Stanley put out a new Tesla stock note and the gist, do not sleep on Tesla energy. Most of it is not news to our audience but they did say they're forecasting Tesla energy revenues to be over $7 billion for 2024 but Tesla did just over $6 billion in energy revenue last year so that may be a bit low especially given storage deployments may be up 200 to 300% this year. That was according to Elon but we know that the actual payments or revenue for Tesla may be on a lag so we may not start to see some of that revenue until the later quarters this year. Their clean tech analyst said Tesla's renewed focus on the energy business combined with its innovation, scale and growing brand loyalty is a recipe for real disruption for incumbent players in the market. Honestly I have to tip my cap to Adam Jonas and Morgan Stanley they really are trying to get into the weeds and understand Tesla. They are educating their readers saying Tesla's network operation center offers 24-7 monitoring, leveraging software to manage complexity. Power hub manages storage, generation and microgrids, Opticaster optimizes energy use in real time, the micro grid controller autonomously maintains grid stability.
And with a megapack the systems require minimal maintenance and include up to a 20 year warranty, the megapack has deployed 16 gigawatt hours across 16 countries with best in class energy density and lowest cost to install. And they said of our $310 Tesla stock price target, we value Tesla energy at $36 per share. And if you're wondering why they're only expecting a 23% gross margin by 2030 when last quarter it was over 24%, they're of course expecting more players in the market and it to be somewhat of a race to the bottom. They did highlight they expect Tesla energy margins to surpass Tesla auto margins by this year. As we know that already happened in quarter one Tesla's energy margin was 24.6% and Tesla's auto margins were 18.5%. So they're expecting that trend to continue for the rest of the year.
The new word on that ransomware attack for many of the dealers in North America, they're not expecting it to be resolved before June 30th. Given that they're doing everything with pen and paper, many customers are now just waiting to buy a car until this is all figured out. And as we said, this is affecting service as well. The black suit hacking group made up of Russian and Eastern European hackers appears to have been behind the attacks. They were demanding tens of millions of dollars and the word was CDK, the company that was hacked was planning to pay the ransom. Ford EV customers were expecting to get their Tesla adapter for the supercharger network by June 30th but that's been delayed now to August 31st. The word all along has been that companies like Ford are reliant on Tesla to actually manufacture these adapters. So we don't know if Tesla's layoffs have something to do with these delays or its Ford and these other companies working on some sort of software integration on their end.
But we also know at one point GM, Volvo and Polestar were all expected to have access to the supercharger network by spring of this year and that deadline has come and gone. Jim Farley has said that Ford is currently waiting for around 90,000 adapters from Tesla. I would preface this by saying for most consumers, this isn't really something to stress about but if you like to nerd out, this is for you. Kyle Connor put out a PSA of sorts saying make sure you do everything possible not to get the LG pack in your Tesla because the charging performance is not great. Remember the Panasonic packs have the 2170 cells that are being manufactured in Gig and Nevada and it's those LG packs that are actually being imported and it's those vehicles that do not qualify for the credit so he's saying even if you don't qualify for the credit, try to get one of those vehicles that do actually qualify. Yes, this does bring up a moral question about taking a vehicle that qualifies for the credit when you yourself are not applying for it or don't qualify essentially taking that vehicle away from somebody else that does. But I know we have some battery fanatics here so do with that information what you will.
We've already talked about this one but just as a reminder to share this with family and friends because this is a big part of EV FUD. There are real Teslas out there doing over 430,000 miles on original battery packs and original motors and that 2016 Model S still gets around 185 miles of range. You can also tell them progressive is saying a conventional car lasts for around 200,000 miles. So when it comes to the total cost of ownership and the fact that newer Teslas should have the ability to last even longer EVs and Tesla in this case become even more desirable. And this is from the Bureau of Transportation so in the United States looking at these blue bars for passenger cars, the average age of light duty vehicles is at an all time high nearly at 14 years old. Just over two decades ago, the average age was only about nine years old. So as that fleet ages, let's do what we can to educate our networks with the US presidential debate set for this Thursday, the media propaganda has hit all time highs.
Many of you have already reached out to tell me how much you've been enjoying ground news, which is exactly how I stay up to date with breaking news without all of the media bias. Ground news sponsors the channel, but this is a company I would gladly support as I think the work they're doing of eliminating algorithm based echo chambers and alerting readers to the political bias of every source is critical in 2024. In seconds, I can see all of the different sources reporting on a story and with these tags, I can see the political leaning of that source left, right, or center. Ground news also tells me the factuality of each source. So I don't waste time reading fluff pieces and personally, I will only read high factuality articles. Ground news will also tell you who owns each reporting source like this one being partly owned by Tucker Carlson.
It's quite simple ground news has made it much easier for me to stay up to date with breaking news. I have a custom list for Elon Tesla and AI news and ultimately we're all just looking to separate the signal from the noise and ground news has been a valuable tool for me to do just that. And just so you know, I do actually pay for the vantage plan because I want to support this company. Ground news is offering 40% off that same vantage plan for my subscribers at ground news slash electrified, which is linked below or if it's easier, you can use the QR code right on the screen. The CEO of X-Pang did get a chance to test FSD version 12.3.6 and he said the performance was very smooth. It handled most road conditions in a way that made me feel secure much like a human driver. However, the complexity of roads in China is higher than in the US with more traffic and pedestrians.
I'm very excited to see how FSD will perform in China. Currently, our X-Pang XNGP is fully adapted to Chinese road conditions. We invite Elon to come to China to experience it. In another post, he said he also tested at Waymo in San Francisco and from his perspective, Waymo performed better in downtown San Francisco, while FSD excelled in Silicon Valley and on the highways handling many road conditions quite smoothly. I'm truly impressed by the significant progress FSD has made in just a few months, but even better than his summary thoughts on the official X-Pang YouTube channel, they uploaded a 30 minute video of the actual drive with a commentary and there were some interesting clips.
I think it's been quite stable except that some places, maybe it was too hesitant, it wasn't really decisive, but most of the time I felt safe and very comfortable, it did not really take up too much time and it felt like a very regular driver. Of course, we just experienced a journey with very light traffic, not many people, not many cars, but it's performed very smoothly in such good road condition, feels very comfortable, not too fast or too slow. While look here, if I were driving, I would have to actually hesitate because it just crossed the road with great determination.
Wow, the traffic light was not really obvious, honestly, I might have to stop in hesitate, I did not see the traffic light at all. I was wondering how to go, but it already cost. I think we should applaud here. Where is it taking us? I suspect that FSD has developed some sort of wisdom. That part was actually really funny, there came a time when they engaged FSD without a destination and just let it drive and eventually it did make a right turn. I've done that myself for a time and I've never found a rhyme or reason for where it goes without a destination.
If you have any experience letting FSD go without a destination, let me know what you think. As sort of like a new driver in California, FSD is definitely driving better than the me in most situations. This is kind of strange and I'm a little worried about FSD. I think if it's a rule-based situation, traffic lights for Tesla, it's going to be very challenging. It might take them very long to end a China, but with AI training, maybe just a few months, US highways are more complicated in China because the speed is higher.
But city roads in China are like 10 times more challenging because we have a lot of road situations and a lot of participants like cars, construction vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, and also you have some sporty equipment and some two-wheel vehicles. So this kind of combination is particularly common in China cities or smaller towns, which pose a lot of difficulty and challenges for AI. I would like to add that because I've been to India several times and I think Indian cities are even more complicated than China's cities. I drove to suburban areas in India and I had to row down the window when I turned because I have to push people away and say please, please, before I can turn right or left, it's never happened in any other country to me.
So I think a ton of striving is going to be a lot more difficult in India. I think Tesla's technology definitely is even more hardcore than ours. This means that actually they've put more effort into the underlying technology but experience is relatively sort of American style. Yeah, especially when it comes to the voice assistant, X-Panc's voice assistant is very smooth and natural, especially after recent upgrades. But when I talk to Tesla's voice assistant, it's sometimes difficult to even have it to navigate. I think our voice assistant is definitely one of the best in China.
I really enjoyed the video because it seemed like he was genuinely just trying to experience the tech and comment about it naturally, not playing politics. Overall, a very balanced review, a lot of praise, but some criticism as well and some things that he believes X-N-G-P does better than FSD. And the last point he brought up, why are American voice assistants still so bad in 2024? Stiefel Financial has initiated coverage of Tesla stock with a buy rating and a price target of $265. Their note, however, was as basic as it gets if you want the summary, they said FSD could generate significant value and Tesla's energy business is seen as a potentially significant growth driver.
To top it off, the revamped Model 3 and upcoming Model Y refresh at bolster sales, followed by the commencement of its next-gen vehicle production, which will likely garner very strong demand. Groundbreaking analysis there from Stephen Gengaro, who's the actual analyst, his tip-ranks rating is about 2,900 of roughly 8,900 Wall Street analysts. Here's the news that will unfortunately dominate headlines the Cybertruck has to, physical recalls both covering most of the Cybertrucks already made.
The first one is because excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to fail. Tesla service will replace the wiper motor free of charge. This recall impacts about 11.7 thousand Cybertrucks. Honestly though, is anybody that surprised that Gigawiper is causing some problems? The other recall impacting about 11.4 thousand Cybertrucks is because part of the sale adhesion may not have been installed according to specs, which may cause the sale to become loose or separate from the vehicle. Basically, a trim piece on the Cybertruck sale was not installed properly and it has the potential of coming loose so Tesla will ensure that doesn't happen in the future. Just to heads up, these may not be the last physical recalls for the Cybertruck, given how many new manufacturing processes are involved with this truck, it would not be a surprise.
And even with more traditional cars, early recalls are not that out of the ordinary. And even for manufacturers doing it for decades, we have 4 to recalling over 550,000 pickups in the US because the transmissions can unexpectedly downshift to first gear no matter how fast the trucks are going. In case you see this article from Yahoo Finance, they were trying to do some backdoor math to figure out Cybertruck production from those recall numbers. They said Tesla has an average monthly delivery rate of 1.7 thousand Cybertrucks but the problem is they took that and then extrapolated that for the rest of the year.
And I'm not going to give away Troy Teslikes paid information but let's just say that Tesla's weekly Cybertruck production rate may or may not be over 1000 per week. Sam Fiirani from Auto Forecast Solutions just came out and said that he's not expecting the auto market to become EV centric until 2040 or later. The problem with this getting plenty of headlines is that he doesn't really define what EV centric means.
Is it 50%? Does it include hybrids? Is it 75%? Either way, his rationale was looking around the industry most legacy OEMs are looking at a hybrid approach, meaning certain platforms where they can build EVs or ICE vehicles. And of course, actual hybrids. It's true that Auto Forecast Solutions can sometimes have some insider information based on the work that they do but a prediction out to 2040 doesn't have that same type of info. Weimo put out a new blog post saying that their rides are now available to everybody in San Francisco. They said in total nearly 300,000 people including those who live, work and visit San Francisco have signed up to ride with Weimo since they first opened a waitlist. That number works out to more than 25% of the city's population. We've been welcoming new riders to the service incrementally and now we're excited to open it up to everybody. With more than 20 million rider only miles and nearly 2 million paid rider only public trips under our belt, we're now bringing the safety benefits of the Weimo driver to more people in San Francisco.
As a reminder, here's what a former Weimo exec said last night. Well, that's what you mean on time by on time. My daughter is about four and my thesis was by time she's ready to drive robo taxis would be ready. So it gives us about 12 more years. It's always around the corner, but it takes more time than people think, Brian, because of regulation, the cost of the vehicles to do it well. And it also just, you know, the density of enough driverless cars in any city to have a ride take 10 minutes or less to get to your door when you order one. That's right. A whole lot of them all the time. There are people accepting that a computer is driving a car and if it makes a mistake, they don't shut down the whole program. What's happening in California a bunch of times. And these things are expensive. The Weimo cost of that whole vehicle with all that spinning thing you see on the top of the car is about $300,000. That's not going to replace a driver financially anytime soon. I'm not at all trying to discredit Weimo here. I'm happy that they're making progress. It's just I still see people online saying that Weimo is way ahead of Tesla when it comes to autonomy, but they don't seem to factor in the cost part of the equation.
The weekly Tesla China number came in at 17.5,000 comparing that to the same weekend quarter one that number was 13.6,000. This was an awesome week that really nobody out there was actually expecting. It was the best week so far this year and there were only three weeks dating back to the beginning of 2023 that were higher than this week. Now quarter over quarter Tesla China is up 13.7% but year over year still down 6.8%. Also of note this number was made up of 6,000 Model 3s by far the highest since the new Model 3 began deliveries which leaves 11.5,000 Model wise. I'm guessing here but I think the higher Model 3 number is due to the Model 3 performance having begun deliveries.
BMW is planning to revive its six series and it will be in the form of ice, hybrid and fully electric. But they're saying it'll be a niche vehicle so not many produced and it's set to enter production in Germany in July 2026. VW is now planning to invest up to $5 billion and part of that will be a joint venture with Rivian. If you go to the actual press release it says VW will initially invest $1 billion in to Rivian and then that number through the joint venture could grow up to $5 billion through 2026. VW and Rivian shall each hold a 50% stake in the joint venture and it should be equally controlled. Upon successful implementation of the joint venture VW would receive immediate access to Rivian's electrical architecture tech for using it in EVs.
The actual establishment of the joint venture depends on a series of different parameters. In particular the final results of the further review of the technical feasibility of the integration of that electrical architecture in VW's vehicles but they still have to finalize further negotiations and deal with regulatory approvals. So many people out there doing the headline reading only type of thing but just know a final decision on this joint venture is not established yet. If the joint venture is established and VW invest this additional capital it would be invested in to Rivian in two tranches of $1 billion each one in 2025 and one in 2026 but it would be contingent on Rivian and the joint venture achieving certain milestones. Reuters said the partnership will help VW accelerate its plans to develop software defined vehicles with Rivian licensing its existing IP rights to the joint venture. On XRJ Scurinj posted a picture with Oliver Bloom saying this partnership brings Rivian's software and electronics platform to a broader market through VW's global reach and scale while providing an expected $5 billion of capital to Rivian as we bring our two and our next gen vehicles to market.
One thing this partnership tells us is that VW has this $5 billion and they don't think they can do better than Rivian's software with that money. If they did they would not be choosing to pay Rivian licensing fees for who knows how long. Oliver Bloom said through our cooperation we will bring the best solutions to our vehicles faster and at lower cost. I don't love Rivian teaming up with dieselgate I mean VW but I guess honestly though from Rivian's perspective given the rate their burning cash and R2 being on deck a potential cash infusion of up to $5 billion will take many investors' concerns off the table temporarily and this deal really could bridge the gap for Rivian to be able to launch the R2 platform hopefully successfully. One thing I would love to know is if VW ever considered approaching Tesla for their software but we'll likely never know so now we have two companies that still really can't produce an EV profitably now working together hopefully somehow they can figure it out.
And looking down the road toward autonomy I don't know how this will work with VW having Rivian's software but then if they actually want to license FSD from Tesla that just seems like it's going to be a giant complexity that is not ideal. As we know the real game right now is the race toward generalized autonomy. In my mind this deal does not get VW any closer to that goal and I think you could make the argument it may actually make things even more complicated. Now for a lightning round we have CATL saying by 2028 they expect to have an electric aircraft with up to 1,800 miles of range. The company has successfully test flown a 4 ton civil electric aircraft but they expect to release an 8 ton 1 by 2028. This aircraft project uses their condensed battery which has an energy density of up to 500 watt hours per kilogram per cell twice the energy density of current mainstream EV batteries.
Vin Fast is now looking to throw a Hail Mary with a $10,000 electric vehicle that's about 10 feet long which they're going to call the F3. This vehicle will initially be sold in emerging markets in Asia. Vin Fast did say they plan to launch this vehicle in Europe and the United States by next year. ExxonMobil has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with SK. This is for a multi-year off take agreement of up to 100,000 metric tons of lithium from Exxon's project in Arkansas. SK plans to use the lithium minutes EV battery manufacturing operations in the US. The planned project will extract lithium from underground salt water deposits and convert it into battery grade material on site in Arkansas. And in the US, SK currently operates two battery plants in Georgia and is building four more through joint ventures with Ford and Hyundai. After 2025 the annual production capacity of SK in the US alone is expected to reach more than 180 gigawatt hours, which would be roughly enough for 1.7 million EVs per year.
Congress has actually found a way to pass the Advanced Act which is a sweeping nuclear bill that stands for Accelerating Deployment of Versatile Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy. This will streamline the permitting process for advanced reactors, reduced regulatory fees for companies looking to license advanced reactor tech and update outdated rules that limit international investment. It would also require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to develop a pathway to quickly license nuclear facilities at the sites of former fossil fuel facilities, including coal plants. That already have a connection to the grid. GM Defense, which yes is a subsidiary of General Motors, is now providing commercial battery tech that will be evaluated and potentially used by the Department of Defense. They said utilizing the battery technologies of its parent company, GM Defense can help solve the DOD's Energy and Energy Storage Challenges. A professor who's part of the group doing the testing said we're excited to work with GM Defense to test the Altium platform to determine its potential for use in future war fighting applications. The Altium platform still has a lot to prove but this one has union written all over it.
Cruz has hired a new CEO Mark Whitten who used to work at Amazon and Xbox. They said he brings years of experience in the technology industry including as a founding engineer at Xbox and Xbox Live and at Amazon where he was a vice president working on apps and services including Fire TV and Kindle. Tesla stock closed the day at $187.35 up 2.61% while the Nasdaq was up 1.26%. Rivian was up 8.63% on the day but after hours it's currently up over 48%. Don't forget check out ground news linked below. I really think we're going to need it after Thursday. 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. you.