Cybertruck price increase, BYD makes everyone look bad, and Donut Lab update

One, we are live on the episode of The Electric Podcast, I am Fred Lindberg, your host.

And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintron.

How are you doing this week, Seth?

I'm good.

All right.

Let's jump in.

We have plenty to talk about this week.

We were going to talk a little bit about this little Cybertruck update last week.

We talked about, we didn't know exactly what was going to happen with it and how we know.

The BYD basically shamed the entire auto industry this week with a bunch of unveiling regarding

its latest battery technology and its charging technology making basically everyone look bad.

We have another Donald Lap update, and that's becoming like a little weakly thing for us

to talk about.

Is it real or not?

And yeah, we'll up there update also that we're going to discuss.

Well, let's jump right in starting with the Cybertruck.

So probably the weirdest trim launch ever, if you don't remember, Tesla announced

a new all-wheel drive Cybertruck at $60,000, and it's the new cheapest Cybertruck ever,

production one at least.

And unlike the rear-wheel drive launch at $70,000 last year for a very short lifter

at a time with completely decontended with a bunch of feature missing, this one

was actually pretty good value if you are willing to say that about the Cybertruck.

But it came with a weird deadline of like only for 10 days, and that's what Elon said.

Then he later clarified that the price is only for 10 days.

And then even weirder than at all, he says that Tesla's going to use this 10-day period

to gauge the demand for the vehicle and then it will increase the price accordingly,

which makes no sense because the data is completely invalidated by the fact that

you just created an urgency to buy the vehicle.

So you won't really have a real idea of the demand at any price, even at the $60,000 price.

You don't even have a real good demand idea for the vehicle.

But what happened is basically exactly what we expected.

10 days happened, March 1st, Tesla increased the price to $70,000 or $10,000 in price of the price.

If you compare it at the very least to the $70,000 rear-wheel drive version of the truck that they released last year,

it is a big upgrade.

You basically just lose a little bit of range.

You still get 325 miles of range on a single charge, but I think it was closer to 340 for the rear-wheel drive.

You don't lose the rear-wheel drive because it's still a dual-motor all-wheel drive system.

And you have the tonneau cover, you have the power plugs, the outlet in the back.

You have the air suspension too, I think.

No, that was the one thing they moved, I thought.

Or wait, maybe not.

You have the power share access too, so it's bi-directional charging,

even though I'm pretty sure you had that on the rear-wheel drive too, it makes no sense.

I thought the suspension was the one thing that they did pull out.

I mean, they have to pull out a few things to get down to $10,000, but no, I'm blanking on it.

Yeah, that's a damping.

So yeah, you probably lose the, because the Cybertrux, the standard Cybertrux,

the $80,000 Cybertrux now has active air suspension

and active sieve damping.

Now, if they just mention that sieve damping.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much it.

So it's going to be interesting to say, I don't think that saves the Cybertrux.

I think definitely they probably got a big boost of order from the $60,000 version

because $60,000, again, actually made a lot of sense.

It was like a $20,000 drop versus the previous version, so it's huge.

So I think they got a big back level of order for that.

And then at $70,000, I think they're still going to get some orders from them.

But once we're through the backlog that they created, I think the vehicle program

goes from like five to, I mean, best case scenario, 10,000 units a quarter,

which is still like way below capacity.

So I don't know what they're going to do with that exactly.

But they probably saved themselves for like the about another year

out of the Cybertruck program, I think, with that.

We'll give them that.

It was a smart move.

Even the smart move for smart, but desperate move, let's call it

because it's just it's just not a great look that we did that.

Oh, yeah.

And before we go to the Canadian model three inventory, I want to discuss

this one because they also screwed a lot of people over with that one

where they did say, and I mean, I see these crew people over.

I think they're going to always give up on this thing.

It's another one of Elon's poor, like urgency, like artificial urgency

creation to create demand.

It's the FSD transfer was officially extended for one more, one last quarter

until March 31st, but then amid the Cybertruck situation,

the $60,000 Cybertruck, you know, the production slot work

were quickly filled out for the whole quarter.

So Tesla did say that it would be order if you order by March 31st,

you will get your Cybertruck, your FSD transfer, including on the Cybertruck.

But then the switch it out from order by March 31st to delivery

by March 31st, which screwed up basically the vast majority of people

who did order the $60,000 Cybertruck.

And if you do the math, if you had FSD on it and now you need to buy it,

if you are, you are basically better off just buying a $70,000 one.

If you could get delivery right now, then the $10,000 of, well,

I mean, now it's a subscription only so you can get the value difference.

Basically, it's the same thing.

So yeah, it's a classic old Tesla.

You got Musk.

That's a new thing now people are seeing.

Yeah.

Musked.

So it's a quick imagine you buy like the Cybertruck to save Tesla,

like save the vehicle program for Tesla.

And then the first thing they do is screw you over.

It's just not a great look.

It's kind of like the Model 3 performance as soon as everybody on the waitlist got

got their cars, they dropped it like like $10,000 or something.

Yeah.

$5,000 within two weeks after people after filling up the demand of the people

that have been waiting for like four years to get the vehicle.

But they did reverse that after I made my complaint.

Yes.

And they did reverse it.

You were the hero and the anti-hero based on whether or not you had

just purchased a Model 3.

Well, even if you didn't like, I think it was the right thing to do.

But then I got some crazy emails from that.

Like, I got like, that's what the beginning of when I started to see

just how like wrong the Tesla community were going, like it was becoming

super toxic and especially around the cult of personality of Elon.

Cause I remember receiving like emails from people of like, how dare you

like tell Elon what to do, like enforce him to do this?

Which all I didn't force anything.

I was just like, I just pointed out that it was wrong.

I cannot force him to do it.

But like you can't is that was my first investigation.

Like, oh, I challenging the Elon is no, no for a lot of these people.

And yeah, that was the beginning of the of the end for for the feedback loop

at Tesla on the Canadian front, while Canadian in the U.S.

is involved here, too, was interesting situation this week.

So we saw that the Canadian Model 3 inventory just disappeared in Canada.

And there were a lot of Model 3s left in Canada just for the because of

all of them came from the U.S. tariffs.

I got like one of the last one that was not.

Well, at least you never actually know if like they say like it's

the idea if it never was any tariffs applied to it or just Tesla

is just eating it, but I was one of the last one that was

listed inventory pre tariffs that I got in December.

And there were still a lot of them sitting around in Canadian lots

because it was just Model 3 was super expensive.

That's the Chinese one or no, it was a U.S.

Yeah, so it was before the so that the Chinese tariffs have been on since

twenty twenty four in Canada.

So those have been, you know, this hasn't been a new one since.

But the there was a period between twenty four and twenty five

where the model three was coming for the U.S.

Another crazy bad price still not as good as the Chinese Model 3, for sure.

But then the twenty five percent tariffs on U.S.

EVs that Canada implemented due to the the tariff war that the U.S.

initiated that that killed the model three price in Canada.

It was cheaper to get the Model Y from Berlin than the Model 3.

And so now there was no solution really for that.

They were sitting there for a while, but not as a different solution

with the Canadian opening up to Chinese EVs again.

That includes Tesla's Chinese EVs.

So what we think is happening is Tesla sent.

Well, we know they sent them back in the U.S.

We have sources that confirm it to us, but they sent them back to the U.S.

and expectation that they're going to be able to fill their inventory

back up with cheaper Model 3s from China soon enough.

We might have even seen like they might be on the way really because.

We saw like in January, for example,

Tesla extremely poor sales in China.

But they had the record export.

So maybe some of the export are going to to Canada again.

So something keep an eye on.

All right, that was it for Tesla this week.

Well, not too much to lose.

We're going to jump right away.

We have a lot of B.Y.D. news this week.

So that the two big with B.Y. News.

The first one is the Blade Battery 2.0.

So the Blade Battery has taken over the industry in the last

I want to say three years or so.

Even Tesla uses them now.

It's like top of the line LFP cells that basically all the benefits of the LFP

cells and like all the lower end benefits of NMC cells.

So still strong energy density, but also longevity,

safety and longevity.

And now they have a next level one, the Blade Battery 2.0,

which B.Y.D. claims that it enables a thousand kilometers, 600 miles EVs.

That's on the CLTC standard.

But still we're talking about like 500 mile vehicles and 500 miles vehicles

to at a decent price.

That's I think that's the main thing here to keep in mind.

They talk and also the new it enables a new level of charging.

They call it flash charging, which can charge from 10 to 70 percent

in five minutes and from 10 to 97 percent set in just nine minutes.

They also talk a little bit about the temperature performance.

So it works great at minus 30 C minus 20 Fahrenheit for a full 24 hours.

Still charge.

So you leave that you leave it in that cold for 24 hours

and it will still charge 20 to 97 percent in 10 minutes.

12 minutes, sorry, which is pretty good.

Yeah, I think also you like you can charge it tonight.

So they said they keep they say 97 percent instead of the 100 percent.

And because not because you need to keep it the buffer like that,

like most EVs for longevity and FB cells, you need a lot less of that.

So they say that more for the for realtor braking, because, you know,

if you if you're a hundred percent, your region doesn't work.

And for some people, if you get used to it,

it can be a bit disconcerting when you get out and now you don't have it.

So the U7, so the Wang, the Yang Wang, which is their luxury brand,

they're going to launch a new U7 vehicle.

They already had the U8 and U9.

And the U7 is going to be the first to use this,

but it's going to go through the entire lineup,

because I think they already unveiled one.

What else on the battery cells?

So do we know what kind of form factor the U7 is?

Because, you know, the U8 is a SUV.

The U9 is like a sports car.

I think it's going to be a sedan.

Yeah. Well, I think this is it, right?

You know, this is this is the new U7.

Yeah. So it's kind of going to be like a Model S competitor.

Well, former Model S.

The thing is, you're going to be able to fit a hundred and fifty

kilowatt battery pack in there like this is.

I can I can I see a little bit of the Taycan on the

side profile here.

But super aggressive headlights, a little bit too big for me.

They also have the Denza.

So the Denza Z9 is also going to use this.

And it's one of the is the first vehicle that's that's going

to get to the 1000 kilometer range, the 744 miles

against on CLTC, but still should be close to 500 miles without it.

Well, I should say 559 miles on WLTP on the U.S.

It would be 450 miles, pretty, pretty giant difference here.

Yeah, we were talking in the room about how Mercedes had the

EQXX concept car that was going to go over 100 miles.

But that's a concept, obviously.

Yeah. But what's kind of cool about that thing is it's

so aerodynamic that you could get to 1000 miles on a 100

kilowatt hour battery.

It's kind of nuts.

Yeah, it shows the difference between if you go for efficiency,

if you go for just more batteries.

And for BYD, BYD makes its own batteries.

And you know, they just throw more kilowatt hours at it.

Yeah, they control the cost pretty well.

So they're like, yeah, I mean, we don't mind putting more

batteries in it.

I mean, and they can still do improvement on the

aerodynamic front, like after on different models.

All right, so then the flash charger, a little bit more

information on this from Jamie did a follow-up post.

So it's 1,500 kilowatts, so 1.5 megawatts at the

consumer-level vehicles.

And they have actual examples of this.

We posted one this morning.

This is happening right now.

It's, you know, they already had 1000 kilowatt chargers

there.

We don't even have that in North America, other than like a

few megachargers for like commercial vehicles.

But it keeps emphasizing just how far behind the rest of the

world is it's falling behind China because like it's the

chicken and eggs situation is like why one of the reason

we don't have megawatt chargers in North America is

because we don't have the vehicles to take that kind

of power anyway.

But then if you don't have this kind of vehicles, you

won't have the charging.

If you don't have the charging, you don't have these

kind of vehicles.

So like you're stuck in this, and meanwhile, they already,

a year later, they are at 1,500 kilowatts.

It's hard to keep up.

So one thing to be fair, though, so like the BYD and the

announcement talk about installing like 20,000 of

them by the end of the year, they were saying this

like similar things about the megawatt charging

two last year and it didn't get quite close to the

what they were saying.

So it's, I'm sure they're going to deploy them like fairly

pretty fast, but take these actual deployment rate

with a grain of salt here.

What else?

Yeah, there was a demonstration.

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is not a children's story

if you get the reference.

Yeah.

Then last thing on BYD, they also unveil the first images

and some specs on their coming three row SUV.

So they, they have a lot of things, you know, they have

a pretty deep lineup, but they were missing a little

bit on that front.

So and everybody else kind of unveiled that in China

this year, you know, we've been tested out with

them a little YL, but also XPANG as one, NIO as one,

LeapModer as one, Zikr as a very popular one too,

with Geely.

So they kind of needed to follow on that.

And this is the Great Tang, I'm not sure I like that.

The BYD Great Tang is the name, 950 kilometers

arranged for the single mortar unit.

I think 850 if I remember.

Where did I see that?

Yeah, 850 kilometers, 528 miles.

If you want the dual motor, all wheel drive version.

And this is a very nice vehicle.

Take a look at this.

The inside captain seats for the second row, zero gravity.

Here's the front.

You have like an instrument cluster and the passengers

greet on top of a giant center display.

This is the third row, which looks spacious right now,

but that's without the front seat.

It looks like if there wasn't recline like that,

there would still be plenty of space.

Yeah, great looking vehicle and I was showing

that did you see the price set?

I didn't, what is it?

Yeah, I want you to guess, give it a guess.

It's still in the IRN version of BYD.

Keep that in mind.

60,000.

You're pretty close.

400,000 in Wien, so that's about $58,000.

2000, come on.

Yeah, the price is right.

You would get some money out of that.

The two tone, I don't know if I like the two tone on this.

But in all black, it looks pretty cool.

Yeah, but this is a very crowded space in China right now,

but it's also something like if you want to see like North America,

this would be obviously would make a killing.

Like it would be a great competitor to like the EV9

and the Rivian or even the, would be a little bit,

not as luxurious maybe as the Rivian R1S, but pretty close.

Finest get off road.

Not really an aim for that, but still pretty good.

All right, we have three more news items to discuss,

and then we're going to jump into the comment section.

I see already plenty of people are asking questions.

We appreciate that, but we're going to have some time

to put a little bit more of them in there

in about five minutes or so we can jump in.

Yeah, bad news from Hyundai.

They've been talking about it for a while,

but with the pullback on the EVs in the American market,

they've been one of the last ones that we were like,

all right, they could still make some foray

with their EVs as they are all in and them,

but now they have officially cut the Ioniq 6

from the lineup in the U.S.

So do we have any delivery numbers on that?

It wasn't the most popular, obviously.

The Ioniq 5 was still the go-to.

No, there's no number on it.

And then there's obviously Kia,

that's also as it's on competitor,

but it's on entry in the same segment

that's now they are considering pulling.

It's not clear if it's going to happen or not.

But yeah, another blowback from the big changes,

regulatory changes in the last year in the U.S.

No, a lot of positive.

I mean, unless you just believe all the propaganda,

but I mean, today we're expecting

55,000 new job creation in February,

and it was minus 92,000.

And manufacturing job,

I've been just dropping like crazy.

And I think the EV sector is actually a big part of it.

Like a lot of manufacturing job have been lost

in the automotive and specifically the EV sector.

Aptera, a little update on Aptera this week.

They announced that they completed their first validation assembly,

their first Aptera solar car from the validation assembly line.

So it's not the assembly line, it's the validation assembly line.

So it's all the same processes,

but just not put together in volume production.

And honestly, I'm not super excited by this news

because it's like they already said that they had validation units out there.

And now they say again,

like if this is going to be used to get like the AP certification and whatnot,

which I thought my other thing is that the other validation units

that were already on the road for the last few months,

we're going to be used for that too.

So is it actually like great progress?

I don't know, but I wish them the best.

Because like we said many times,

we really want to see this kind of vehicle hit the market,

super efficient vehicle.

It's just that with their current financial situation,

bringing that to market is extremely difficult.

And also the price range,

even though they claim having $50,000 in reservation,

that includes, I think you have one set, I have one,

but depending if it comes out at the original like $25,000 price

or the $35,000 price,

there's a lot of,

there's starting to be other EVs out there

that are a lot more practical that are in the same price range.

So it's going to be a tough market for it there.

All right.

The last thing I want to discuss before jumping into the comment section

is Donut Lab.

So last week we discussed the first test,

the charging test that they released.

It was the first independent test of a Donut Lab set

with the miracle battery that they claim to be the first production

solid state battery.

Or it is the first solid state battery to go into a production EV,

the Verge motorcycle electric.

And now they've released the kind of doing small drops

of the independent test results.

Again, last week was the fast charging,

which was very impressive.

This time is the extreme temperature.

We kind of had some idea of that from last week's test

where they were testing a certain temperature

and also testing at what degrees the cells would go at those temperature.

And now it's just regular discharging at the one C rate

but at the different temperature.

So we can see at 80 plus Celsius.

So significant like you would be at like the dead valley at this

80 plus Celsius, I think.

It just charged at 24 amps, delivered 27.5 amp hour,

110% of its capacity.

So that sounds weird, but actually on a solid state battery,

a breathable solid state battery that actually sort of makes sense.

So everything keeps pointing that this is actually a solid state

battery, unlike what a lot of people were questioning

that it could be like some kind of like solid state capacitor.

But now everything points to an actual solid state battery.

There was one failure on the test here,

if I remember correctly, that was earlier in the week.

At 100 Celsius discharge, the cell pouch had lots of vacuum.

So they weren't, they were not sure though,

if it was a packaging issue, an actual cell chemistry issue.

So, but either way is just not a great look.

But again, that's a hundred Celsius.

So it's extreme extreme that there's extreme temperature

than there's extreme extreme temperature.

Like you water boils at 100 Celsius.

So it's different.

But for the most part, like if at 80, it performed well.

So you can, one of the main, one of the claims that they made

is that you can build this with very minimal climate control

like temperature control in the batch pack.

And this seems to be true.

So if you don't go into too crazy of a charge rate

and too crazy of a discharge rate,

you should be able to build this basically without any kind of

cooling system.

But again, this is now, this is the extreme temperature test

and the charging test.

We still need the energy density test.

And then, which was one of the biggest claim,

the 400 watt hour per kilogram,

which would be like industry leading.

And the other one, the most unbelievable one

is the 100,000 cycles,

which can be somewhat tested and extrapolated,

but it's going to be very, very hard to test.

So these tests are the two biggest claim really are still unproven,

but we're going in the right direction, I guess.

All right.

Should we jump into the comment section?

Yep.

All right.

So for me, question.

Hey, what is stuff going to review as EQS?

We are eyeing these crazy deals.

So it's a 2023 EQS.

I did review an EQS in 2023.

That was a 2023.

On a trip to Los Angeles.

So I can bring that back up.

I guess I could do an update on that.

You could do a post specifically on buying cheap luxury EVs.

You can do a quick research on the price.

Well, you already did the research when you bought it,

but you can post that research

and then tell the story across your experience

with the EQS SUV so far.

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people are going through it.

Just as a quick side hit.

It's a great car.

Like it's super smooth.

I haven't had any like mechanical problems with it yet.

The screen and center software is not amazing.

It's rebooted a few times.

You know, like, you know, it runs a car play

and the car play doesn't always connect.

So you have to sometimes manually connect it.

It's like that kind of stuff, which, you know, like,

legacy auto software is not going to be great.

The battery is, you know, kind of been as advertised.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's kind of what I expected for the most part.

So, and I, you know, I paid less than the price

of a new Tesla Model Y for like a far superior car,

which has, you know, 50,000 miles on it.

Still a great car.

All right, let's move on.

Imagine if Tesla had offered the Model S long range for 60K,

they would have sold out of those as well.

I could have kept the Model S viable and competitive.

It's an interesting thought experiment.

Don't know if it's true though.

Yeah.

And also like if you mean like they keep the price like that,

I don't think they would make money on it.

So it's not.

Yeah.

They, you know, that's a small volume high end luxury.

Well, depending on your ask.

Don't know that that would be any good for anybody.

All right.

Skeptic says, do you think Tesla is making any money

on those cheaper cyber trucks?

Not at 60.

Yeah.

Not at 60.

Yeah.

Maybe at 70.

And it's, you know, it depends on actual utilization rate

of the factory.

So I don't know how many they got in orders.

So if they, if they got enough to, you know, build them

at a rate of like 15, 20,000 units a quarter,

then maybe they can get profitable at 70,000.

But it's going to be hard, but you're just,

you're not profitable if you're using a 200,000 units

or a year production line at 10% of the capacity.

All right.

I love my Yang Wang U9.

I really would like to see a Canadian U9 rolling.

And like, you have any, anybody?

Right.

I think right now you have better shot in the US.

I've been hearing a lot of, you know, Miami bro type people

that have managed to import a bunch of them.

I don't know if there's any of them in Canada.

All right.

Two live streams on YouTube are a bit confusing

on which one to use.

Why not just use one?

All right.

So that's, I don't know,

lately YouTube's got a portrait and a horizontal.

So if you're on the phone and you want to look at it like this,

you use the one and the other.

I guess we should label them or something.

I'm going to look into that.

Yes.

One is for phones.

I started on that one by mistake.

Yeah.

Do you think America will be able to purchase Yang Wings

through Canada?

And we were kind of just talking about that.

Yeah.

Yeah, eventually.

I guess now people are all in Lingda.

So there's, you need to obtain the Chinese,

like a license, but even like Tesla and then applied

to get part of the quotas because there's still

like just 49,000 units a year.

So yeah, maybe that's going to be a BYD strategy

and get into the tenant market with the IRN first.

So, you know, the Tang, the Han,

and maybe even some Yang Wang.

Yeah.

It would be cool, but it's still a problem to get it fixed

unless you live near the border.

Yeah.

I imagine if you have the kind of money,

you can probably just put it on the flatbed

and send it to somewhere.

Yeah.

It's not a cheap car that you and I, it's like $250,000.

It's not the tariff.

All right.

We talked about the QS, the Blade 2.0 and all the news

in regard to solid state out of China feels

like the U.S. is more than behind.

Are any U.S. manufacturers doing any of this?

Rivian is an increasing architecture bolt.

GM does have a magnesium battery chemistry

that their touting is having kind of the best

of LFB and lithium.

But I think they are all looking into solid state.

It's just that, you know, it's not, it's not quite ready yet.

Like even everything you announced in China,

like there's a few of them are going to roll out this year,

but it's very limited.

It's, I think the U.S. is being left behind definitely

on a bunch of the level, including this one.

It's just that if you're not expecting to sell

that many EVs in the year, you're not going to validate

the new battery pack for it anyway.

So you're just going to use what you got.

Yeah, it's terrible in any way because if you were

able to import these batteries in the U.S. right now

without tariffs and use them, that alone

plus the crazy cost of gasoline right now would be

alone, you wouldn't need any more incentive

to accelerate EV adoption in the U.S.

You would just need that.

But yeah, if you think these two things,

I'm not going to change anytime soon, I think.

Maybe at the end of the year, we'll see.

All right.

I know BYD is the media darling, but I saw an article

in the finance this week that Geely has overtaken

them in sales for multiple months in a row.

Is that right?

I mean, Geely's got some big brands.

It's hard to...

Yeah.

It's not impossible.

Like if you combine all the brands together.

Geely also has non-EV stuff still though.

Yeah.

And I guess BYD has plug-in hybrids too,

but everything has a battery in it.

I think Geely still has some that has...

It's purely combustion engine, but probably not much.

I mean, in China anyway, it's like over 50%

of electric now, so.

Yeah.

The article about Nashville and boring was great,

that Elon's original boring machine was originally

built for cutting sewer tunnels.

It tells you all you need to know about

the brands that...

Yeah.

I didn't know a little article on this this week

because I saw that Nashville,

Nashville in the city itself voted against it,

but they actually have no power.

The state has taken over the jurisdiction

for the tunnel there and has given the go-ahead

to Elon and the Barring Company.

But yeah, I mean, the main thing with it,

like I have nothing against tunnels,

tunnels sounds good.

It's just that the way that they build

tunnels, like Carl said, because they're using a smaller

machine makes for sewer tunnels,

not just sewer tunnels, but that's a good example

based on the diameter of the tunnel,

is that you don't really have anything else

that you can build other than this

one-lane route for EVs to use.

You would have to design some kind of brand new rail system,

smaller rail system, smaller subway system

to get in there.

Right now it's just made for like a car can go through

and that's it.

So if it fails, which it could very well,

you're kind of stuck with a fairly useless tunnel

and that's not ideal.

So the other thing is to prove that it works,

it would be fairly easy.

You could do, especially now with AI,

you could do very accurate models,

simulation of the use case of this specific loop system,

which build on those like these small tunnels

or you literally have Tesla vehicles in there,

that's what they're doing.

So single-lane Tesla vehicles going there.

You could do assimilation and that's the first thing,

I remember I said we were two of the first people

that actually got inside the tunnel in LA.

I got the invitation because I bought 10 ads,

10 barring company ads and that's true story.

I bought the ads, we got the invite,

I brought set as my plus one,

we went inside the tunnel and then we party

with the SpaceX and Tesla people at the SpaceX

at quarter, it was a fun night and everything,

but the first question I got to ask Elon

at the event, the press briefing was,

do you have a simulation that shows that your loop system

is more efficient than a regular transit

like a subway and he was like, yeah, of course, yeah,

we're working on that, we're gonna have that soon.

That was in 2018.

There's never been any release of study or anything like that

that's more efficient and like I wrote in my article,

what we get right now, the only working system is in Vegas

and it's like less than half of the capacity

of a subway system and that's compared

to the peak usage of it, which was like CES.

I mean, we don't have that much data on like day-to-day use

but it's apparently really minimal.

All right, comments on the US war in Iran

in terms of EV growth.

We were talking about this a little bit before the show.

Spike and oil prices might drive people to EVs

but would also help fuel Russian aggression

and fill the pockets of other oil barons.

True.

Yeah, I mean, especially if it's prolonged

which it's kind of looking like it's not going

to be over in time soon.

Yeah, prices at the pump are always good motivation to buy EV.

Super good motivation.

Yeah, it's just that by skeptics,

it's also good for the people that sells oils.

Like there's no...

Yeah.

All right, regarding Aptera,

this is an important milestone for Aptera

because these validation models help set up

the low volume production line

which will be used to build customer Aptera EVs

later this year.

That's what they're saying.

Yeah.

But there's still a long road ahead, I think.

I do not think that the vacuum loss was actually a failure.

It could be within the design parameters

like the quantum escape SS batteries that swell

and shrink with charging and discharging.

I mean, no, losing your vacuum

and I don't think that's a design feature, I think.

Because the battery didn't blow up until I thought

it was just the package fell.

So it is a failure.

So we had the same thing last week

when I mentioned the heat sink issue

at 90 degrees when it hit 90 degrees of discharging.

It's like, it happened.

It's in the report.

It's worth mentioning.

It doesn't mean that the batteries have cold failures.

It's not perfect either.

DJ New York City says,

yes, I mean when it's like buying a $125,000 car

Yeah, that should be an article that should be something like that.

Yeah, I mean, it depreciated quite fast.

But yeah, I don't know.

I mean, the thinking for me is like

all the depreciation has already happened.

You don't care if it's got 40,000 or 80,000 miles

if it's already dropped to a third at this price, I think.

By the time you have like your battery runs out

and everything like that,

that's when the next big depreciation is probably...

Right.

Yeah, Mercedes has a great warranty

I think 10 years on the battery.

There's nothing innovative about the boring company.

Other tunneling companies have said

that they can tunnel as fast and cheap,

but the size is useless.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't know how entirely it's true

but the speed, I don't know if they work quite a bit

on the machine, maybe it's a little bit faster

and everything, I don't know about that.

But I do know that that is the narrative of other companies

where when Elon claims innovation with the boring companies

most people say like we can do what you do

is just there's no real demand for it.

So the boring company is sort of creating its own demand

with the loop system.

Like this is what we can do with these tunnels

is just that most people that look at this objectively

don't see a lot of value in this specific use of these tunnels

which then means that the tunnels themselves

might not be useful.

All right, Spikes43 says

I really like the Cadillac review this week,

great format going forward.

I would suggest putting efficiency number higher up

in the article, right?

Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, yeah, for people who don't know this,

this is pretty cool.

So my friend Bastien has been hired

for kind of the electric review manager

where he set up a new system, a scoring system for reviews.

So it's more precise.

We're still, you know, everyone at Electric

can do reviews and everything

and we have the freedom to do them as we want

but the scoring is more precise

and carries out across every EVs that we do

including efficiency for example.

I'm going to look into it.

I don't remember where it was in the article

but I do think we put the score at the top too.

So what's going to happen is after we have a few of these

like right now it's not more detailed

because we only have one

but we have a few of them coming up in the next few weeks.

We're going to have a new page on Electric

which is going to be Electric Rankings

and then you're going to have on the one page

all of these reviews listed by Rank

by the one that scored better.

It scored from 0 to 100.

So you get a nice whole percentage score

and yeah, it's going to be quicker

to get an idea to compare them

and yeah, I hope you guys like the review.

If you haven't seen Best Things Review

with the Cadillac Vistick, go check it out

and give us some feedback on their needs

so that we can tune the system appropriately.

Cool, that's all the questions for today.

All right, well that was a quick show this week.

I hope you guys enjoyed it.

If you did, please give us a thumbs up,

a like, a subscribe, whatever it is on the app you're watching.

It helps a ton.

If you're listening only,

if you can give us a five-star rating,

only if you think we deserve it

and also help quite a bit.

Thank you very much.

Cybertruck price increase, BYD makes everyone look bad, and Donut Lab update

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