Discussion covers Tesla's Cybertruck struggles with production halts, discounts, and low sales versus capacity, raising questions about profitability. GM faces legal troubles over selling driver data and a massive engine recall. China's EV growth contrasts with record fossil fuel use, while battery storage and virtual power plants expand, especially in Texas. Europe's auto suppliers suffer job losses amid declining sales. Innovations include Porsche's robotic paint inspections and BYD's expansion into South Korea with affordable EVs. The episode also highlights the rise of home EV charging networks addressing infrastructure gaps.
Topics:tesla cybertruck sales and productiongm data privacy issues and recallschina fossil fuel use and ev growthglobal battery storage expansionvirtual power plants and energy gridseuropean auto supplier job lossesrobotics in automotive manufacturingbyd ev market expansionhome ev charging infrastructureev adoption challenges
- Cybertruck Called a Flop - GM Banned from Selling Customer Data For 5 Years - NHTSA Says 877,000 GM Engines Potentially Defective - China Burns Record Level of Coal - EVs Are 9% Of China’s Car Fleet - Battery Storage Is Soaring - Virtual Power Plants Expand to Texas - EU Suppliers Ax 54,000 Jobs - Porsche Uses AI for Better Paint Jobs - BYD Adds Another Cargo Ship - BYD Enters South Korean Market - EV Charger Sharing Gains Popularity
"...ctor has a net loss of ninety four thousand jobs. Cl EPA says that unless the market picks up and supp..."
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Speaker 1: This is Autoline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry.
Speaker 2: Is the cyber truck a flop?
Speaker 1: That's what Carl Brauer, the executive analyst at IC Cars, is saying. Tesla is now offering a sixteen hundred dollars
discount on new orders and twenty six hundred dollars off if you buy one out of inventory. The fact that
Tesla even has an inventory backload calls into question it's build the order strategy. The company reportedly stopped production of
the truck for three days last month, and it's now reassigning workers from the cyber truck over to assembly of the model why. Cox Automotive reports that Tesla sold just
under thirty nine thousand cyber trucks last year, which isn't a bad number, except that Tesla tooled the gigafactory in Austin, Texas to make one hundred and twenty five thousand a year.
That means the line is only running at thirty one percent of its capacity, which almost certainly means that the truck is losing money. Just a few years ago, Elon
Musk bragged that they would sell two hundred and fifty thousand cyber trucks a year, but at this point that looks highly unlikely. General Motors is having a bad day. Previously,
it was caught selling customer data collected in their cars by OnStar to third parties like insurance companies, and it wasn't anonymized data. It was data specific to millions of
individual drivers. So now the Federal Trade Commission has banned
GM from disclosing sensitive geolocation and driver behavior data to outside parties. The FTC says GM misled customers because the
sign up process for on Star was so confusing that consumers didn't know that GM would sell their data to third parties. But the settlement with the f TC is
not the end of the story. The Attorney General of Texas,
Ken Paxton, is suing GM for false, deceptive, and misleading business practices, and if that lawsuit is successful, we wouldn't be surprised to see other states pile on with their own lawsuits. Meanwhile, NITSA is opening a probe into potential
failures with gms V eight engines that go into the company's most profitable full size pickups in SUVs. NITSA says
a bearing failure could cause the engines to seize up.
The recall involves over eight hundred and seventy seven thousand engines that were made from twenty nineteen through twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: While China is.
Speaker 1: The global leader in EVS, it's burning record amounts of fossil fuels to power those vehicles and its other energy needs.
According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the country's fossil fuel power plants set a power generation record last year, with output increasing one and a half percent compared to twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: Production of coal and natural.
Speaker 1: Gas hit record highs, and crude oil hit its second highest total last year. And while China is leading in
renewable energy deployment, it's not keeping pace with the growth in fossil fuels. As we said, China is the leader
in EVS, but there's still a small part of China's total car fleet. Car News China reports there are three hundred.
Speaker 2: And fifty three million vehicles.
Speaker 1: On Chinese roads, and of those, thirty one point four million are nvs, which include beev's pheaves and e revs.
Fully electric cars account for twenty two million of the NEV total, or a seventy percent share, and the share of electric cars is only going to keep growing. Last year,
nyv's accounted for forty one percent China's new car sales, and this year they're expected to account for more than half of sales. Global battery storage is seeing significant growth.
According to Bloomberg NEF, total global energy storage capacity reached eighty nine point six gigawatt hours in twenty twenty three, up from just seventeen point five gigawatt hours in twenty twenty.
China is the leader and overtook the US as the largest energy storage market in twenty twenty three, and last year China was expected to have added thirty six gigawatt hours compared to about thirteen gigawatt hours in the US, mostly in California and Texas. And while this isn't really
an automotive story, the growth in battery storage should help volumes and economies of scales for eves.
Speaker 3: There's nothing wrong with heavy metal, hey, light and up, but with world class composite material taging automotive technologies makes vehicles lighter, safer, and more eco friendly.
Speaker 1: We're starting to see an expansion of virtual power plants or VPPs, basically any residents or business with solar panels and or energy storage devices are combined together into one big power provider, and then the operator of the VPP sells that energy back to the grid.
Speaker 2: Tesla has operated.
Speaker 1: Its own VPP for years, and now a couple of companies are offering Texas homeowners free solar panels, two twenty kilowad hour stationary storage batteries, and a discounted energy rate if they sign up to join their VPP. Homeowners will
pay twelve cents per kilowat hour, which is lower than the nineteen to twenty cents that is typically charged in Texas.
For the VPP operators, the benefit is being able to sell all that energy back to the grid, and in this case in Texas, they'll use that to cover the costs of the solar panels and batteries. So the more people,
the bigger the VPP, the more money it makes and it helps stabilize the energy grid. As of September of
last year, the Texas Virtual Power Plant had committed over forty megawat hours of residential battery power to the Texas market, and in some cases evs with bi directional charging are getting added into the mix, so these VPPs are only going to grow. The European auto industry is going through
a tough time, and that's especially true for suppliers. New
vehicle sales in Europe are three million units lower than they were before the pandemic, and last year European suppliers got rid of fifty four thousand jobs. According to CLEPA,
which is the European Association of Suppliers, two thirds of suppliers lack the finances to invest in new technology or plant modernization. Since twenty nineteen, the European supplier sector has
a net loss of ninety four thousand jobs. Cl EPA
says that unless the market picks up and suppliers achieve a turnaround, the job losses will continue for years and will put the industry in a dangerous position. On yesterday's
Auto Line, after Hours, Ed Marches from ABB Automotive Robotics talked about how robots are being used more and more to make the cars that we drive, and Porsche says it's not only using robots to paint its cars, which are more efficient than humans, but it's also using robots to inspect the robot paint jobs to robotic arms with sensors attached to them are used to scan an entire car body, and then AI scans the roughly one hundred thousand pictures for any defects. Porscha says it only takes
about seventy two seconds to scan a car, and if any defects are found, that's when it finally needs to be touched by human hands.
Speaker 2: BYD just launched.
Speaker 1: Another car hauling ship, and this one's even bigger than the rest. The ship can haul up to nine two
hundred vehicles, which is about two thousand more than.
Speaker 2: Its next biggest.
Speaker 1: BYD launched its first one a year ago, and it now has eight ships in its fleet, and one of the models it's going to be shipping is it's Ato three suv. BYD just announced it will start selling vehicles
in South Korea this year, beginning with the Addo three, which will then be followed by two other models. The
electric suv will have a starting price of just over twenty one thousand dollars. Initially, that might seem like a
really low price, but the Atto three is over five thousand dollars cheaper in China, and as we reported the other day, Hyundai is charging about nineteen thousand dollars for its inster EV in South Korea, so it won't be the most affordable electric, but it will be interesting to see if South Korean consumers are accepting of BYD. Even
though more and more public EV chargers are opening up, there's still a lack of at home EV chargers, which is said to be holding back EV adoption. According to
a survey from charge Lab, fourteen percent of EV owners are enabled to charge at home, and two thirds of owners use public chargers every week. So to help drivers
charge their evs, there's a growing number of what's called friendly neighbors, or people who allow others to charge at their home. According to Plugshare, a company that maps public
charging infrastructure, there are now thirty one thousand residentss across the US that offer charging to anyone who needs to plug in. The trend is especially popular with first time
EV buyer who want to help grow EV adoption and for those living in urban areas where at home charging isn't available. And that brings us to the end of
today's show. Thanks for making autoline a part of your
day and I hope.
Speaker 2: That you have a great weekend.
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