Tesla Semi nails big test, BMW iX3 range impresses, Xpeng catches up to Tesla, and more

Set Wintrom: Foreign.

Fred Lambert: M. We are live for a new episode of the Electric podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host and as usual I'm joined by Set Wintrom.

Set Wintrom: How you doing?

Fred Lambert: Set?

Set Wintrom: I'm good.

Fred Lambert: All right, microphone is in. We're locked in, people. Uh, what are we going to talk about this week? No sponsor this week. No sponsor. So we're going to skip you the ads this week. We're going to talk about, uh, Tesla semi that went through the grapevines. One of the tougher situation that can get for uh, heavy trucking and apparently it aced it. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and talk a bit about uh, Tesla changing. Oh, sorry. Having some um, uh, being a little bit sneaky. Sneaky Tesla with retroactively changing the FSD contracts to people. That's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we gotta talk about that. It's. It's a wild one. Um, we're gonna talk about camera wipers on Tesla vehicles. So that's interesting. The BMW ix3 getting a real world range test out of Norway and uh, impressive results. Xpeng. I will talk a little bit about, uh, just yesterday I had a cool interview with the ED of AI Mr. Shine. Charming. Um, Leo, the head of uh, AI at XPENG. Uh, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. Um, BYD is doing something very interesting with their FSD competitor in term of liabilities. So we're gonna discuss that too. And then Toyota putting pulling the plug on one more ev, unfortunately. All right, let's start with a test smi. So if you ever been through the grapevines north of Los Angeles in California, a very common site is a lot of trucks just slowly climbing on the side of the road on the right lane because uh, it's extremely difficult on, on heavier vehicle. And um, yeah, they can slow down traffic and it's just. It can be a dangerous situation on the way down also because you know, brake failure happen. And it's one of the places where you have uh, you see a lot of those, um, what they call them, the. The place where the trucks literally crash into like a bank of sand. There's a name for that. But um, there, there are embarkments designed especially for trucks to just, you know, if you're Break, um. Break. You have to uh, to go through that.

Set Wintrom: Um.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, the grapevines are runaway Ram. Thank you, Dan. Um, and the um. Yeah, it's. It's one of the toughest tests out there. 4,000ft of elevation and uh, so a company didn't know them Covenant and separately Covenant Logistics are probably one of the biggest trucking companies in the U.S. one of the biggest logistic company. They have thousands of trucks. So through one of their customers they were doing uh, a test of the test SMI over the last few weeks specifically in the Grapevine and um, VP of Sustainability Innovation Matt McClelland said that the vehicle was amazed at the performance of the SSMI and felt a level of confidence that was hard to match in a diesel truck. Uh, so the, the uh, did they share the efficiency result? They were supposed to share more result in the coming weeks but uh, we haven't seen them just yet. So there's just a Hurley, uh, early results so far but it said that the, the run through a 6% grade for five miles. So, so that's the thing with the, the grades are not, you know, some of the grades are pretty steep but they're also very long. So 6% grades, not too bad but still you know, decent. But over five miles it adds up. Um, but then on the way down to the biggest advantage is like you have all that region that just takes over. So yeah, it's, it's one of the toughest tests to see that this SMI just uh, ace it. It's, it's very good news that for the vehicle. We're, we're kind of getting little drips of information when it comes to this SMI because it's supposed to be in production now for, for a couple months and volume production because obviously it's been like low volume productions for three years now. Um, but you know we see it getting in the ends of a few more customers, more in those type of pilot testing programs. But it's still, it's better than nothing in uh, I, I'm hoping to see maybe like a few hundred trucks maybe delivered in the second half of the year. That would be, I think that would be reasonable.

Set Wintrom: Yeah, that'd be good. One other thing about um, regenning down hills, especially as big as the Grapevine, is like one, one of those trips will just like destroy some brakes like because you know, diesel trucks have no other way to stop besides you know, old fashioned brakes. And that's what goes out all the time. So the fact that Tesla can just regen all that, they don't even need to worry about brakes. That's saving them a ton of money on, on breaks as well.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, even just the maintenance after that like you go get your maintenance, that's downtime. Downtime is money you're losing. So yeah, you're Right, it's uh, another win right there. All right, that was a big article this week that the release where uh, over the last few weeks to months we received reports of um, people having issues exiting their full self driving contracts. So that's not exactly new. I've heard that before. There's ways around it if it doesn't work necessarily in your Tesla account online, sometimes it works on the app, sometimes it doesn't or neither. So there's been a growing issue with that. But we uh, had uh, a Tesla owner, Oliver Abcarious uh reach out to us and he noted another problem that goes a little bit beyond just not be able to access the contract. So Oliver is actually is a 2018 Model 3 owner. So Hardware 3 and um, kind of got fed up with the Hardware 3 situation with Tesla, um, with the latest admission that unsupervised self driving will not happen on Otherware 3 and with the let's say the lack of clarity around the remedy to the situation from because of Tesla, uh, the you know, the idea of like the retrofits and everything without any concrete plans and um, you know the vague idea that uh, Tesla will give you discounts uh, to upgrade and things like that. He just, he wanted to go for a refund. So start building his refund case for full self driving. He goes to his dislike and looks at a contract and he has a 2018 Model 3 but he bought FSD aftermarket so you can buy it as a Software update in August 12th, 2019. So he looks at his Tesla account and first thing that you notice is that his contract for FSD is now called full self driving supervised in parentheses 8-12-2019. So then he clicks on it and you cannot even access it. He cannot even get access to his contract. But the more egregious thing here is that Tesla didn't use the term supervise in 2019, that that term was introduced in 2024 uh, with Tesla FSD. And um, this left move from like the FSD beta, ah to FSD supervised wanted to remove the beta, uh you know, said that and, and slowly over the course of 2024, 2025 kind of reintroduce full self driving. Now as you're not really buying unsupervised self driving in the future, you're buying what it is right now. Full self driving, supervised and uh, um yeah, that's it now. Now obviously it's a subscription only so it changes even more where you know, you don't have any expectation of future capability in the system. Because you're paying monthly for this. But that was not the case in 2019. So 2019 it was full self driving capability. You're buying. And in the actual notes of the system it will tell you Tesla was promising you unsupervised self driving in the future to software update depending on a regulatory approval and all that. But uh, yeah the promise was there and the name was full self driving capability. Now it's been retroactively changed on the 2019 contract to supervise. And Oliver is not alone in that situation. He noted that his own wife's car, which is a 2020 Model Y, uh, has the same issue and actually uh, a similar issue but not exactly the same because his wife bought the car with fsd. There's not a separate full self driving contract. The contract is in the motor vehicle purchase agreement and that now that is what is not accessible that she cannot download. She can download all the other things just like uh, Oliver by the way, he can download the other document that you see here if you're watching on the screen, just not the full self driving one. In the case of his wife she can download everything except the motor vehicle purchase agreement which happens to be the one to include the full self driving reference because it was purchased with the vehicle rather than after the fact. Now a bunch of, we verified that with a bunch of other owners. Most of them have the exact same issue. Um, some of them however if they go through the app are still able to access it. The supervised has been added there and only the line item in the contract says capability. So yeah, this is uh, this is a weird one to, to say the least because uh, you know back editing sign contracts is kind of illegal. It's, it's kind of getting into the, the fraudulent uh, realm of things. It's uh, and it's uh, also it's just, it's just going to be a terrible look at, for, for Tesla in court if any of these states actually gets to court. Because we've seen similar um, similar examples of this in this in court where the, the, the lawyers for the plaintiff specifically use Tesla, you know, changing its, its verbiage around these contract, changing terms as an example of, of this not really wanting to, to, to deliver on the promise. And this is probably the most flagrant example of that. So I'm sure that we uh, will see version of that in court in the future. Moving on, the other uh, Tesla item I wanted to discuss today was the, a new patent has been granted for Tesla. Tesla has been granted a patent for camera Wipers, um, for self driving vehicles. So it's something that we've been talking about for a long time that's been missing in a Tesla stack or for autonomy is that you know, the cameras get dirty and if you want to be truly autonomous and not rely on, on someone being inside the vehicle and being able to do these things, uh, you need to find a way to clean those cameras. And for, for the front facing cameras, you know you have the same solution that as a human does. You have the you know, windshield wiper but for the side facing cameras you just don't have that. We've seen Tesla finally addressing the issue with the robotaxis in Austin. We've seen them having washer um, jets that would shoot up water on the camera. Uh, so that was you know, a solution. But now this has also another lens cleaning solution that they actually were granted a patent. So this is not a patent application, this is a full patent granted. Where you see the camera enclosure here and there's a wiper directly on it with uh, yeah you see a little bit better here. There's a wiper on it directly with a jet linked to a dispenser, a fluid dispenser in the back where it's basically just a tiny little wiper with washer fluid for your camera lens. Specifically uh, designed for the side, side cameras on the, on, on, on Tesla vehicles. Um, honestly decent technology that looks like it would work. I'm glad um, that they're working on this. But the problem is just one more doubt. For Tesla owners that have been promised full self driving is like okay, we thought that all the art were necessary to achieve autonomy was supposed to be in the car since 2016. We know that a computer was on the case, we know that the camera was on the case because that's, that's the thing that people are forgetting with Auto War 3 stuff. Now in the last admission because there's been a couple admission, Elon was clear that it's actually not just the computer, the problem, the compute power inside the car, the hardware, three cameras also lower resolution. And he now does believe that you need the higher resolution to, to reach this. So to reach unsupervised autonomy. And um, so these need to be replaced too. We know that's a little bit too complicated and especially as uh, adding this here which you know you have the um, the, the, the container for the fluid that's attached to this but this needs to be then attached to like a bigger fluid container that can be refilled because that's just not practical to be refilled here. So we, we've seen that with other solution like uh, the Xiaomi for example as uh, as these washer on the cameras, the, the yu7 and it's directly linked to the um, washer fluid in the windshield. So you just have to replace to refill that and refills everything. But all these connection needs to happen. There's just, there's just no way this is retrofittable in an existing vehicle. It's just not going to happen.

Set Wintrom: Wasn't there a patent for like an ultrasonic like uh wiper kind of thing?

Fred Lambert: Uh, if I remember correctly it was actually laser literal laser system. I don't know if that was ever granted. That application was like a few years ago. But yeah it was. The Esther was talking about cleaning up the windshield with a laser system mounted on the front of the vehicle. I think you switch microphone maybe again. Uh yeah, now I hear you a little bit better. All right, we have um, moving on from Tesla we have a few more news items to discuss and then we can uh talk to you guys. So I uh see a few people are in already. But if you guys have question for us you can put it in the comment section below. Comment can be about any of the topics we're discussing today or any other topics in the EV world that you would like uh, or take minor or set stake on. So you can put uh, in the comment section right Now Live on YouTube, uh, Facebook X and LinkedIn. All right, uh, there is uh the annual Norwegian um NAF test. What's NAFT again? I keep forgetting it. Uh, the Norwegian Association Automobile Federation. They do these yearly uh, well bi yearly, a summer and then a winter test that are always super useful for each vehicle to try to get a. Ah, um, m Mainly comparing the real world range with their wltp. And uh, in this year's test that was released on Motor Magazine this week we got a few new entrants and the uh, biggest one, the most surprising one was the BMW IX 350X drive which based um, on spec only we found really impressive. It's looks to be one of the longest range SUVs that you can buy out there. And um, while it didn't break all the records, mainly not the elusive air records at 517 miles, 833 kilometers, it did break uh the SUV record now with 485 miles of range 781 which I think is also longer than their WLTP. Do we have the WLTP. No, but here's a top 10. So. Top 10. The second was the Lucid gravity. Um, also, you know, lucid still always on top when it comes to efficiency. Uh, 720 kilometers, 447 miles. Mercedes is also not too far behind with the CLA at 675. Ah. And uh, the GLC at 66, 665. You have, uh, the Chinese automakers up there too, with expand with The X, uh, X9 at just over 400 miles. The Polestar 3 at 373 miles, 601 kilometers. Um, yeah, Mercedes is like three times in there in the top ten. That's, that's, that's really good. Uh, these SUVs have a pretty decent range. The CLA 350 CLA is considered an SUV.

Set Wintrom: That can't be right. CLA. It's like a sedan.

Fred Lambert: Yeah.

Set Wintrom: Huh. Well, there.

Fred Lambert: Is there an SUV version of it?

Set Wintrom: No, I don't think so. It's not like the eqs. Yeah.

Fred Lambert: Everything else is. Is an SUV in there?

Set Wintrom: No.

Fred Lambert: Uh, the EV4 KAV4 is not an SUV. Well, that test was just for SUVs, right. Because otherwise there would be, you know, other cars in the top 10. Uh, that makes no sense. Maybe it's typo in there. But Good job on BMW. We've been impressed with the, with the iX3 so far. It's, uh, the next gen from the MW is, uh, very interesting. All right. Uh, yesterday I had a very interesting talk. If, uh, if you're interested in, uh, expans AI effort. I, um, I had the opportunity to, uh, to talk to Xiaoming Liu. He's the head of Xpeng's, uh, AI effort. He was, uh, in the US yesterday. Well, this week at cvpr, the. The Computer Vision Conference. And, uh, it was. It was a big deal for Xpeng because they were like right back to back after a shock from Tesla. That was there too. Doing a talk. Waymo, um, President vp, uh, of Vision, um, was there too. So it put Xpeng at the same level to them and they were really excited about that. So they wanted to give, uh, me some time with, uh, uh, Xiaoming and uh, pick his brain a little bit. Was really interesting talk. I put the video on YouTube on the electric Channel, if you want to check it out. And I have a little summary of it on Electrek too. But a few things, a few interesting things that I thought were worth mentioning from that is, uh, you know, the Tesla fan often use Xpeng as like a um, validation for Tesla's vision only approach because XPENG has done the same and quickly we're able to catch up Tesla with FSD capabilities through their VLE system. Uh, and, and that's true, Expand is, is you know, mostly aiming to vision only system. But at the same time I was testing other vehicles in China a few months ago and they still have a radar on them, still have ultrasonic sensors, things that are still removed. So I asked um, charming. What, what's the, what's the situation around that? Do they do sensor fusion? Do they, do they use these different uh, sensors for. And the uh, answer was very interesting. Where they are the driving. The AI driving system is an end to end vision only system. Much like Tesla. There's differences but you know the poor idea is the same. But um, the radar and the ultra sensor are still used for the active safety feature. So like automatic emergency braking for example, a ah, big one, still use radar. And the way they feel about it is like the way the system treats human drivers should be the same way that um, that they treat AI drivers. So in this case the VLA system, their FSD competitor. So the radar, the uh, uh, AAB system using radar, if it detects an inevitable crash, it will override the AI system and applies the automatic brakes. And they think that should be pretty obvious that that's the better system. Um, and that makes kind of, when he said that I was like that actually makes a ton of sense and it feels like Testa was definitely too early to remove that from their vehicle and relies entirely on vision. It seemed very short sighted to me in that very moment because I asked him and then, okay, do you think there's a world where the vision only AI system gets so good that you actually don't need uh, radar and other sensors for the active safety features? And he was quite honest with me. He was like, I don't, I don't see that, I mean maybe like it can be perfect but you don't see, you don't think, he doesn't think it's possible at least in the near future. He thinks that you know, the system will always make mistakes. And if you have a radar system that can operate in different conditions and also have uh, you know, a clearer long um, vision in terms of uh, you know, static objects, specifically at high speed. It's like this is super useful to have and it can, it doesn't need to be, you don't have to rely on, on a complicated sensor fusion system. It's just a separate feature activity feature on top of the AI that can overrides it kind of sense to me. I also ask him if you're following the xpeng stuff you might have heard like last year uh, when uh, he made this uh, famous bear shaming, made a, with, with Xiaopang, the CEO of uh Expand made a bet that uh, if they don't catch up to Tesla FSD by the uh, end of August 2026, Charming is gonna have to streak naked on the Golden Gate. Um, so I asked him like hey, they were coming up on, on two months now, uh, from, from the goal, how uh, do you feel about it? And it was, you know, you laughed it off. But he, he's pretty uh, he thinks he doesn't have to because I, I might have misunderstood a little bit the bet. I thought the bet was specifically like Beat V14, Beat Tesla V14 but apparently it was to be Tesla uh, FSD at the beginning of the year which was V13. Pretty convenient. No, but and honestly having tested the VLA 2, I think I, I think that's fair. I think they've got, they've caught up to V13 pretty well. I think they are pretty much in the ballpark of V14. Uh, so, so I think he's fine on that, on that front. But they also exclusively gave us the, the news that they are spending 300 million RMB, uh you know, over 40 million a month just on training alone. Their, their, their system, their neural net, there's their end to end AI system and uh, that's, that's impressive. I, it's a lot of money. But obviously if you've been following the AI spending of, of most you know, big companies these days, it's uh, drop in the water really.

Set Wintrom: Yeah.

Fred Lambert: So I think the, the thing to highlight here is that expound over you know, the last, I don't know exactly they've been working, but they've been you know, working more seriously towards this in the last two years or so spending you know, roughly half a billion a year. They were able to catch up to Tesla fsd. I, I think it you know, builds up to my point, uh, uh, that I think these level two system, advanced level two system are going to be completely commoditized by uh, by the end of the year. I think you know, Rivian obviously, uh, is working on its own in China. You have byd, Expand, Xiaomi, you have all of them just working on, on similar stuff like that. I, I don't think these price is going to hold up for that. I don't paying a hundred dollar a month where if it's. Yeah, just. I don't, I don't think that's going to be sustainable.

Set Wintrom: Not when it's commoditized.

Fred Lambert: No. And not when BYD is doing this on top of it all that was the big news this week. Uh, last year we made a big deal when BYD took responsibility for the first time for its self parking system. We thought uh, this is a great direction and I, I even said back then that I think that going forward probably the biggest benchmark, the biggest you know, proof of milestone of improvement in you know, advanced driver system is going to be taking liability for it like being responsible for it. So them doing that for the self parking system with the first step. But now this week they have uh, they went further than that for uh, their God's eye system but more specifically for the, for the Navigate on autopilot feature. So that's, that's the closest one that we know. Your sound is cutting out consistently. Am I, am I cutting out sir?

Set Wintrom: Uh, maybe it's me. It sounds okay to me.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, I've been sounding fine too. That's strange. So navigate autopilot is there FSD basically. Tesla used to have a feature called Navigate on the pilot which was the predecessor to fsd. Uh so BYD as an equivalent in, in China under its got eye system which you have got eye CBA with different level of uh capability. And now they announced that for the first year, so the first year of utilization they're going to take full responsible liability for them. So um, BYD will cover all Z economic losses the vehicle is liable for. So repur to the owner's car third party property damage. So the other people's car or you know if you ram into a wall or something and personal injury, uh, they will, they will cover it all with no payout cap um for or no, no need to get separate insurance on top of it. So with your current insurance system they will cover everything for the gut, I, A and B. So the two top systems, I think those are the one that have the LIDAR in them and everything. Um, yeah, this is great progress. Now why only the first year that, that one is. I, I would assume that it is kind uh of a temporary solution just to get people to use the features, get people um, you know, get dip their toes in them. Uh because, and I think, I think in the future and more like mid to long term future they're going to want a specific insurance built around that. So that's something that Tesla is kind of a lead on in the US at least where they have their own insurance system and they do start to include FSD more and more into it. So but, but, but they don't take responsibility for fsd. Even if you have Tesla insurance on a Tesla vehicle using Tesla FSD and paying lower if you do crash on fsd, Tesla is going to make you pay for it. That is a guarantee based on historical um, the recent examples at least. But DYD at least for a year now it will take care of it. So that shows, it shows great confidence for them because, because there's been crashes. I, I talked to them last year about it. It's like when, like if I think it was two months after the, the launch the uh, liability for self parking and like have you guys received some, some claims on that? They're like yeah we got a few which is not surprising. I mean there's millions and millions of BYD now with uh, I mean with the God's eye is probably maybe low millions but still.

Set Wintrom: Yeah, I mean there's four times the amount of people there as in the U.S. so take any number that we're doing times four.

Fred Lambert: Exactly. All right, we're gonna finish on a little sad news coming from Toyota but then we're gonna jump into the comment section with you guys. So if you have question for us don't hesitate. Um, get to it in just a few seconds. So the uh, this is the Lexus LFZ C. It was unville a few years ago. The Japan Mobility show there was a big hit. People love the design, love the concept. It's just a concept though. Um, but it was one of those concepts that we did report on because Toyota or Alexis uh, was uh very adamant that we actually bring this to production as soon as 2026. We have you know probably not exactly this but you know something close to it. They're like this is um, not the production version but we, it's not going to look too much different than this. Uh we're aiming to bring this to production. It's going to be the next like dedicated platform for electric vehicles for Lexus, for the luxury brand of Toyota and uh, bring all electric vehicle to um, um uh on, on a ground up basis designed from the ground up. But this week they announced that uh, they killed it. So we decided to cancel the LFZ uh ZC development project as part of a company wide review of vehicle development project. The spoke person said the cancellation of this specific development project does not mean that we have Given up on developing next generation babs? No, but it is a pattern that we've seen too often unfortunately. And including from Toyota, the um, they follow the whims of uh, politics and they've never been you know, super excited about all that battery electric vehicles in the first place. You know, they prefer the plug ins and they had, they flirted with the hydrogen for a while too. So yeah, a little bummer from Toyota.

Set Wintrom: That would have been an interesting looking car to see on the road, but.

Fred Lambert: Oh well, yeah, look cool. All right, uh, what did the common say?

Set Wintrom: All right, Dan Ober says up is the Tesla direction, down is the Nicola direction. Talking about Tesla semi there.

Fred Lambert: Yeah.

Set Wintrom: All right. Haven't heard Nicola in a while. That's last from the past. Uh, my bike blew up today. I think you're in the wrong podcast, but we'll uh, we'll hear you next week. Kia up 133% EV sales. Hybrids 179% up. Equinox EV. Hard to find a dealer. Hard to find on the dealership lot. Yeah, the um, it's weird the when the cost of gasoline doubles, like EV sales go up, it's bananas.

Fred Lambert: We've been, we've been seeing it quite a bit lately. Like the, all over the place. EV cells are through the roofs. It's hard to secure one. Uh, hopefully it lasts. Hopefully people don't have short memory. And I always put the context here that I'm not talking about the war, I'm not talking about gas prices. I hope these, both the war stops and the gas prices come down. But I hope that it stays in the mind of the buyers that like hey, these things happen and then they happen, they hurt bad and there's an easy way to get around it and it's driving electricity.

Set Wintrom: Yep. All right, next one. What do you two think about cattle's announcement of upcoming lithium air batteries with a uh, 12 kilowatt per kilogram theoretical maximum energy density capability. It seems to be more than just R D hype. Well I would just say that our uh, battery uh, BS detectors are very finely tuned. Like everything that any claim, even from cattle, uh, is you know, heavily scrutinized. Um,

Fred Lambert: I know he's talking about theoretical here, but when you say like the meter of battery like 12 kilowatt hours per kilogram like it's going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Have you heard about this? Because I, I've not like ah, lithium hair. I feel like it's like metal hair. Batteries have been right paralyzed for, for a long Time. I feel like in the early days of, of electric we were talking about it already like 2015, 2016, but I've haven't heard about them for a while.

Set Wintrom: Yeah, it's very interesting. Um, so that, that sounds good for like an airplane application. Like if, uh, you're trying to build a electric airplane. Uh, having 12 kilowatts for every kilogram is amazing. But, um, for cars that probably isn't quite as important. And for stationary storage, it's almost pointless. So.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, you're right. You're getting to a level now that's uh, it's like why you start. You need to ask why. Unless there's other advantages than the energy densities. Obviously that's uh, as the case. But yeah, right now I would find it more on hype than R D or both are linked.

Set Wintrom: Anyway, greetings out there. They, uh, have Jake breaks. That help a lot. We're talking about the semis, I think at this point.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, that's right.

Set Wintrom: Uh, we found out about the sound. So my house renovation project includes a new Tesla solar roof. Sadly, it has taken forever. One of the many issues is sloppy work which caused the town building inspector to fail inspection.

Fred Lambert: So you got the roof installed and you think that the, the roof itself is what led to the. Or the installation of the roof led to unbuilding failing your inspection. Okay, well, I'd be interesting, uh, to, to, to hear about this. You can, you can always, uh, email me. Antonio, uh, at Fredlectric Co. I'd be curious to, to hear about your situation. Sorry that you're experiencing that.

Set Wintrom: All right. This was a bold move by byd. Tesla could make a decent business case of bundling monthly FSD supervised and Tesla insurance. With Tesla taking responsibility for any accidents while using fsd. I think we've talked about that possibility. Maybe even Elon's commented on that.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, but I mean, recently they've been doing moves where to. To reduce your insurance cost through using FSD more. And they add this deal with lemonade too. That's doing the same thing. Um, I, I've heard, you know, mix reviews about both of these, uh, offerings, but uh, yeah, there's definitely a case to be made. Like if you're very confident about it, then, then do it. Bundling the two is not a bad idea. But I think you need to take responsibility for any accident while using fsd while doing that. And Tesla doesn't seem interested in that whatsoever right now.

Set Wintrom: I'm hoping you all, ah, visit one of the EOL European one wheel races. I Would love to see more news coverage on their battery engineering. Again, different podcast, but uh, those one wheel races are crazy. I don't know if you've seen those. No, they're basically like unicycles and they're.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, I've seen the people like riding them like in full motorcycle. Yeah, yeah. It feels like something that Micah could, could get into.

Set Wintrom: We don't, we don't want to lose Micah. Ah.

Fred Lambert: Uh, I mean as a reporting situation that is as racing.

Set Wintrom: All right. In theory will be fixed Monday and will be online for a few weeks if Seth wants to take a look. He lives driving distance. He's more than welcome. I will welcome suggestions you might have. What are we talking about again?

Fred Lambert: Uh, that's the solar.

Set Wintrom: That's the solar roof. Yeah. You know there's one in uh, Croton Hudson as well.

Fred Lambert: Mhm.

Set Wintrom: I um, just saw the other day. So um. Yeah, we'll take a look at that.

Fred Lambert: Nice.

Set Wintrom: Um, yep. Daily podcast. Have you seen a Cadillac X Fairmount deal? They're offering Vistic rides. Huh. Huh. Fair amount. Is that a hotel chain?

Fred Lambert: Yeah, it's the, you know, super fancy hotel chain. Yeah, good idea. In Quebec. Uh, yeah, yeah, we've seen those deal now and again. Like these fancy hotels, they'll give, uh, I don't know if they get rides. They let you rent one at the hotel maybe or something like that. But yeah, that makes sense.

Set Wintrom: All right, uh, Roadster demo.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, they didn't include that into the, the, the, the podcast because I uh, literally posted it like a, uh, few seconds before we went live. But there's the information that came out with uh, a new report just now that says that uh, the, the, the he talked to four people familiar with the matter that says that the demo, you know, the demonstration, the unveiling of the latest roadster has been. Hold your bread there said delayed,

Set Wintrom: uh,

Fred Lambert: from uh, you know, it was supposed to be now basically the latest was like end of May, early June. Now it's apparently end of August or later. And I mean at this point that means nothing like whatever, like who cares? Uh, but there's a little bit more information in the report that they said that one of the reason it's being delayed is that apparently they are really working with SpaceX to get the cold air thruster on this, which if that's the reason why they're not delivered and it's not, obviously I think they just didn't care and they don't want to. Who wants to start a vehicle program where you owe like 200, $300 million worth of vehicle to start with. It's just, it's just not uh, uh, I mean you should do what you said you were going to do, but it's like I think that's this is going to push that thing off as far as they can and that's the main reason. But the one that they are sort of using right now is that shortly after the first roadster was unveiled, Elon talked about making a flying version. And talk about colder Thruster working with SpaceX to um, have you know a compressor inside the vehicle that would you know take ambient air, compress it and when the driver wants it can let go of um, some of it to trusters all around the vehicle to add downforce or to add lift I guess. So you can literally hover the vehicle into the air for a few seconds. It's ridiculous. Like it would be super loud. I don't you want. You really wouldn't be able to use that on the road, on public roads. It would be like for a track kind of situation. Not, not ideal in any way, shape or form whatsoever. And if the reason that it was delayed, it's dumb as hell but apparently it's still something that they want to do and, and they mentioned a dumbed down version of it so they would do it and then they would do also like a regular roadster I guess

Set Wintrom: which I would also appreciate.

Fred Lambert: I mean yeah, if you do ever get one of your free ones it would, I think you would go with the non uh, SpaceX version of it I guess.

Set Wintrom: Well, I mean I would probably sell. I don't know, whatever, we'll figure it out. I don't think it's ever going to happen.

Fred Lambert: All right.

Set Wintrom: Need SpaceX IPO to get Roadster off the ground. I think that's sort of tongue in cheek. And then finally uh, Py Harpin says do you think that charging at hotels is lacking? Yes. Rent. Fred, will you interview somebody at GM Energy? I think they should start a destination charging program.

Fred Lambert: Well we did interview someone at Geminergy just a few weeks ago. Yeah but it was more about the vehicle to everything situation bi, uh, directional charging. Um, yeah, I mean to be honest with you, I don't know if it's lacking at hotels now, uh, or at least uh, you know we've been driving you and I electric for so long and when choosing hotels you know I, I always look if there's an EV charger, is there if I'm driving obviously something that's become like second nature for me. And it used to be difficult. Now it's just not that difficult. So I don't know if it's just um, relative to me like finding it more difficult a long time ago that now it's easy. But it probably, you know, probably is not as. It could be easier, let's put it like that. So. But uh, I see a ton of these deals all the time. I think, I think it makes a ton of sense.

Set Wintrom: All right, last question is uh, frequent traveler 78749. Aren't you worried that the Rivian starts R2 without having been profitable with the R1 yet? I think they, they actually were like non gap accountable last quarter. Right.

Fred Lambert: For a few quarter they were gross margin positive on the vehicle, not profitable as a company, just selling the R1s. Then the Volkswagen deal and the software revenue started coming in and that, that uh, put them in the, in the black for, for a little bit. But I think, I don't think it's fair to say that the R1 is a profitable vehicle, uh, program.

Set Wintrom: So.

Fred Lambert: It's fair, it's fair on, on that front. But obviously the you know, profitability. Tesla was not also profitable just with them all snx. Um, they were, you know, a higher gross margin positive on an SNX than they were than the Rivian is with the R1s. That's fair, but um, not profitable as a company. You need the scale to be profitable as a company and that's what R2 is bringing. So uh, am I worried, you know, the ribbon is not out of uh, the, the wet sand like there. They still, they still have a long road until uh, the, on smooth asphalt and just you know, going full throttle. But um, a lot of bad things can happen between now and then. But I, I think they're doing the right direction and everything we've seen from the R2 right now is just, it's a killer program. So yeah, as long as they can make it, make some money on it, I think they're going to do well because this thing's going to sell. Honestly. The main thing that I'm worried about when it comes to Riven is that the timing of the launch and if, if you know, I don't know if you guys seen the markets today, but if a bubble burst can get a lot worse than that and then new coral cells of all kinds kind of crash during those times so that the timing situation can get worse. But you know, hoping for the best.

Set Wintrom: What do you think of the theory, uh, that everybody's pulling out of their bitcoin to buy SpaceX, uh, IPO, you

Fred Lambert: know Elon Musk, one thing is a genius as is like he knows his audience and like if you're, if you're buying bitcoins at $60,000 of bitcoin, you're probably in the market to buy SpaceX at 2 trillion dollar valuation. So that makes sense. It makes sense but obviously I think there's, there's bigger, there's definitely room to be worried about. When you see there's a equity rush right now, you see like Google raising 80 billion, you see entropic rushing to market. I think meta just today, uh, a week after seeing Google raise so much money, they're like hey, we need to tap the market too for a quick 10 billion. All of that is happening at the same time. And normally that stream like uh, let's fill up our pocket as much as we can now before it gets ugly. There's a lot of that going on too. Maybe I'm wrong, hopefully I'm wrong uh, because I think it would be a hard time for a little bit. But uh, we'll see.

Set Wintrom: I mean it's not if it's gonna happen, it's when it's gonna happen.

Fred Lambert: So unless, unless the singularity happens before all of this and fixes all issues like that's literally what they're chasing like right now is like let's just, let's just go as hard as we can and hope that the singularity happens before then. But, and AI, I'm not, I'm not one of those AI Doomer that says like it's not impressive, it's super impressive technology. I, I use it all the time uh, for like transcript and everything like that. It's incredible for kind of they uh, all ah, data manning mining and all that. It's incredible. But damn man, just. Does that mean that it can solve all the world's problem within a few years? I don't know. I don't, I don't think so.

Set Wintrom: All right, we got a few more. Um, Mount Kisco has a lot of level two chargers in town to get online their public parking lot soon. This is in the context of destination chargers charging as much as superchargers like hotels and stuff. Most of my overnight EV charging has been included for free. Some hotels are free. That's the thing. It's, it's a wide variety of situations at hotels. Uh, Dan Overstay says most hotels I've been to have contract L2 chargers at 50 cents per kilowatt hour.

Fred Lambert: That's yeah, that's steep. We're still in this gray zone that some hotels just like don't even care about it. It's just anyone can just come in and plug in at any time. Uh but more and more I think are figuring out that like all right dude, you're, you're, you're, it's a valuable service that, that you're providing to people so I think they probably should charge especially charging also uh, helps in term of you know making sure that the, the spots are being used by people charging and hotel customers too. I think that makes sense. But um, yeah, Tesla ah, has ah, some cool features, some cool connectivity features especially for that. That makes them a great solution. Um but uh, yeah there's, there's other options on there too obviously.

Set Wintrom: All right, uh, last thing is make sense. Thanks for adding tough. Looked up Some Paramount got 10 Tesla destinations. While most don't have powerful not enough chargers so they'll need to upgrade to recharge Vistics and Escalade.

Fred Lambert: Well those are getting the knacks too so you can charge there too. But I guess what he's saying is that probably like bigger batch pack takes a little bit longer. But hotels, that's the thing. You have overnight charging any kind of

Set Wintrom: you can almost buy with a uh, level one sometimes.

Fred Lambert: Yeah, yeah it's better than nothing but yeah, level two will get you, will get you there overnight. Problem. All right, well that's it for us. It's a little bit, yes, it's a little bit of a shorter episode this week. We didn't have that much news but that gives you the time like uh, I, I the audio version of the podcast. I did the special episode with Xpeng. Uh, I think it's not gonna be out until Tuesday I was told but the YouTube version is on right now. It's uh, on the channel if you want to check that out. Uh, Charming is charming is a, is a great guy. Was very interesting to talk to, very knowledgeable uh, AI and the physical AI. So if you're interested in that stuff I would definitely check it out. That's it. Thanks for listening. See you same place sometime next week.