AD #3912 - Tesla to Sell Robotaxi for $30,000; CEO Tavares To Retire from Stellantis in 2026; Future of VW Plant in Germany Up in The Air

Speaker 1: This is autolne Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry, and let's dive right into Tesla's big event last night that it called we Robot. Its

top hands free driving system right now is called supervised FSD, but Elon must says that Tesla will launch unsupervised FSD next year in the Model three and hy. He expects

it to first be available in Texas and California and will expand to wherever regulators will allow it. All of

its models will be capable of having the feature, which will still be based on an AI and vision system.

But Elon says, you could fall asleep behind the wheel and wake up at your destination. That would mean to

me that Tesla is going from a level two plus system with supervised FSD up to level four or five with unsupervised. The company will also put what Elon called

an overspect version of the system into the cybercab that it revealed at the event. To me, it looks like

the model is based on the Model three and why, but it won't have a steering wheel or pedals, so it too could be limited by regulators. It also won't

have a charging port and will instead rely on inductive charging.

Tesla will make the cybercab available for purchase, estimated to start in the low thirty thousand dollars range. Elon believes

that it could be used five to ten times more than a regular car and will one day be ten times safer than a human and cost twenty cents a mile to operate. He predicted it could be available in

twenty twenty six, but then quickly said before twenty twenty seven.

Beyond the cybercab, Tesla pulled the wraps off the Rooboven.

It's spelled Robovan, but Elon pronounced it roboven. The autonomous

vehicle can deliver packages or other goods or carry up to twenty people. Elon thing that could one day operate

at five to ten cents a mile. There was no

time given for when the Roboven will launch, but Elon says it will build it and it will look like this, to quote the CEO, the future should look like the future.

The last highlight of the Wei Robot event was Tesla's actual robot. Optimists Musk envisioned to future where the robots

cost less than the price of a car and people might have one or even two of them in their house, serving drinks and doing chores like mowing the lawn. But

like any Tesla event hosted by Elon Musk, we'll have to wait to see if the company can pull it off in the CEO's projected timeline and for it to operate at the level of capability talked about during the presentation.

That big shake up at Stalantis we reported about yesterday happened today. The headliner is that the contract of CEO

Carlos Tavares will not be extended beyond twenty twenty six, so the company is hunting for a new leader, and maybe that person is one of the other people that it just promoted. At the top of our list would

be the CEO of JEEP, Antonio Filosa, who just added COO of North America to his title, replacing Carlos Arlanga, whose next position will be quote subject to a further announcement.

The same was said about the CEO of Alpha and Maserati, who was also replaced as well. The COO of Europe

and the CFO were also replaced, but they decided to leave the company rather than take another position. Tavarrez's contract

expires in early twenty twenty six, so he has just over a year left at Stalantis. Good news for automakers,

it looks like the industry will avoid another chip shortage.

There was concern after flood damage from Hurricane Helene down to companies that mine high purity courts in North Carolina.

That courts is used to make semiconductor chips, and the sites in North Carolina are one of the only ones in the world that mine it. But one of the companies,

the Sibyl Code Group, announced that it has restarted operations and is ramping up to full capacity. The other company,

the Courtz Group, says it's too early to tell when it can resume, but it doesn't expect any disruptions in supply to customers, so it looks like the auto industry can breathe a sigh of relief. Nissan says it's going

to start offering bi directional charging with its evs starting in the UK in twenty twenty seven. Customers will be

able to use energy stored in their EV's battery to power their home, or they can sell it back to the grid. The system requires a special home charging unit,

but Nissan says it's trying to get the cost comparable to a one way home charger. While the UK is

first in twenty twenty six, other markets in Europe will follow after that. And one way to really take advantage

of bidirectional charging is with home energy storage. Not only

can use wind and solar to charge the unit, which you can also use to power your home or sell electricity back to the grid, but your bi directional charging EV can be added in for even more storage capability or to charge the home storage unit itself. And GM

is launching its own solution that it calls Energy Power Bank.

They have either ten point six or seventeen point seven kilowat hour units available that can also be combined together for more storage. The Energy Power Bank is part of

the Gas Energy Home System bundle, which also includes the charger, the inverter and everything to operate it, costing twelve seven hundred dollars, or you can just buy the storage unit if you already have the home system, but we weren't able to find the price for that. Last month, Volkswagen

shocked the auto industry when it warned it will likely have to close factories in Germany, something it has never done in its history. And now it looks like we

know one of the plants that could be shut down. Portie,

which is part of the VW group, announced that it's halting production of the caman and boxter at VW's Osnabrook plant in Germany. It will instead produce them at its

main factory in Germany starting in twenty twenty six. The

Osnabrook plant also builds the VWT Rock, but that's going out of production next year, which puts the plant's future up in the air. It has the capacity to build

one hundred thousand vehicles a year, but last year it only may twenty eight thousand. The site employees twenty eight

hundred workers, but Germany's Manager magazine reports that VW could cut up to thirty thousand jobs in Germany, so that's why more closures are expected. Car sales in China were

up last month. According to the China Passenger Car Association,

Retail sales of new passenger vehicles totaled more than two million units in September, up two percent from a year ago.

It was also the first increase in retail sales in China in the past five months. Not surprisingly, new energy

vehicles or anyvs fueled the growth sales of BEVs, PHAs and e Revs reached one point one to two million units, a fifty one percent gain. Through the first nine months

of the year, automakers have sold fifteen and a half million vehicles in China, up two percent, with electrified models accounting for seven point one million sales, up thirty seven percent from last year. BMW is showing off an open top,

two seat roadster that it calls the sky Top. Its

design is highlighted by a spline that extends all the way from the hood to an aluminum bar on the trunk.

The illuminated twin kidney grill also adds a nice pop.

The roof consists of two removable sections that are stowed in a special compartment in the trunk. The Skytop is

powered by a gas burning four point four liter V eight that's mated to an eight speed automatic transmission, which sends its power through an all wheel drive system. It

cranks out six hundred and twenty five horse power and can move from zero to one hundred kilometers an hour in three point three seconds. But the Skytop is a

limited edition model, with only fifty examples being built. But

that brings us to the end of today's show. Thanks

for making autoline a part of your day and I hope that you have a great weekend.

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AD #3912 - Tesla to Sell Robotaxi for $30,000; CEO Tavares To Retire from Stellantis in 2026; Future of VW Plant in Germany Up in The Air

Tesla Cybercab

Dodge Charger

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