Robotaxi launch, Model S/X updates, & Elon Drama | Tesla Motors Club Podcast #74

Hey there.

Welcome to another TeslaMotors Club podcast.

My name is Lewis.

I am Doug.

I'm Mike.

In today's episode,we'll talk about the Robotaxi.

Finally launching?

We'll also discuss the new ModelS and X updates, and of course, asalways, ongoing drama with Elon.

All that and more we'reepisode number 74 starts now.

Hello gentlemen.

Hey.

Hey,How is, everyone today?

it's been a while.

been a while.

It's been a, it's been a little bit, beenbusy.

this weekly podcasthas become monthly andnow maybe quarterly, soWell, you know, there'sbeen a lot going on, so wehave lots of things to discuss.

I'm actually, kind of curious aboutthis whole Robotaxi thing becauseTesla's been talking about it forever.

Elon's been talking about it for ages.

It's so central to Tesla'ssuccess as a business.

It's the future.

Uber tried to do it, and gave up likeso many other companies failed at it.

But we're finally here.

We're claiming we're doing it inAustin where I live, so what happens?

So we should say, Elon saidthat, it would launch on the 12th.

Now, as of this recording, the 12thhas passed and it hasn't happened yet,and a couple days before the 12th.

He said, , we're pushingit to the 22nd.

He said, he put out a tweet sayingthat they just wanna be extra careful.

Okay.

Good idea.

He also mentioned that on the 28th acar would drive from the factoryto be delivered at someone's home.

, that's great though.

What does that even mean?

, that could be this particular person'shome that we mapped it ahead of time , andwe made sure it actually worked first.

And can't give a whole lot of,faith that's a very meaningfulthing that he's talking about tohappen on the 28th as an aside.

But, , yeah, to launch the thing, Idid say, you know, as my prediction,and I've said before, that's somethingthat they should do, do a littlegeofence thing in probably Austin.

And that's what they seem to be doingbut the question is on what level?

There was video that came out , maybe thefirst week of June where we saw a car witha logo on the side that says "Robotaxi".

Like they asked a deranged personwith a magic marker to writeRobotaxi, and that's their logo.

So you'll be able to identify these.

, and there was a car driving.

No one in the driver's seat.

Okay.

Very impressive.

Except it had a chase car.

There's another car behind it,probably with the dude with the laptop,making sure nothing terrible happens.

It is interesting because, there'sbeen a lot of, , shade thrown about howwhen you look at companies like Waymo orCruise that were, doing self-driving carswith customers actually running in cities.

We have Waymo here in Austin, for example,, on the Tesla side, they always throwshade about, oh yeah, but it's geofencedand oh, they have remote operators andthat's exactly what they're doing.

Exactly.

, and then you look at whatTesla's now doing and it's oh,they're doing the same thing.

Which to be fair, I'm not criticizingthem I think it's a good idea whenyou first start out and doing it.

You should haveextra safety precautions.

It's a reasonable step.

it's, a reasonable step.

it's not just that.

It's also the custom FSD code andthe custom cameras they're using.

This is not a factory Y.

Well, is it, I think the wholepoint is it's supposed to be a factoryY. The only thing that might be different

is they might have some differentsoftware.

I mean, it must actually,they've already said,straight up different software.

that Elon has said that it's anupdate that will be distributed to everyOh, right, right.

Now again, these are Hardware4 cars and what subset of thatis probably hardware 4 Ys even.

Because it's only the Ysthat have that front camera.

Though, it's unclear to what level thatnose or chin or front fascia, howeveryou want to describe the location ofthe camera, how that's being integrated.

But we'll see.

I guess,We will see,You got Elon time.

When you say it'll be integrated,that could be tomorrow, thatcould be six months or two years.

Well, the funny thingabout Elon time is, it's not likeit's Elon doing the code, right?

Mm-hmm.

That'sit's really the people thatactually have to do the work.

And I feel like the real thing about ElonTime is , he wants to instill a sense ofurgency into everybody that works for him.

So by saying it will happen, a particulartime that's lighting a fire under thepeople that actually have to do it.

And that's , his management style.

it, is interesting to me 'causewhen he said the 12th and then rightbefore the 12th, he said, oh no, the22nd, it very much gave me, vibes ofhaving worked in industry for a longtime, there's some teams, certainengineers even, so even the people doingthe work where it's always an every twoweeks thing is a running joke, right?

They do agile, scrum on sprints, two weekintervals of doing work and delivering,and they have this fun thing of, ohyeah, we didn't get it done this time.

We'll get it done in the next twoyeah, in the next two weeks.

In the next two weeksand you go six monthsbefore you get something.

And so.

Elon is notorious on overlyoptimistic scheduling.

but somehow I wonder like, tosay 10 days is pretty arbitrary.

Like somebody probably toldhim , if we have that we can do it.

you would hope.

, I'm debating if I'm going toactually go and try one of theseOh, you have to.

sure.

I should,you're reporter on the spot.

You have to try it.

I mean Austingeographically is spread out.

A lot of the cities in Texas areactually spread out 'cause land ischeap and so there's a lot of highways.

Waymo, for example, willnot drive on a highway.

So like I can use a Waymo if I'm downtown.

Because it'll just do all the localstreets and stuff, but I can't get a Waymoto come to my house because there's twohighways between me and downtown thatit would technically have to get on.

Is that 'cause it hasn't mappedout the highway or they've justchosen not to doI think it's for safety, likeI think they just don't use highways.

I mean, I could be wrong.

Ihaven't actually used a Waymo here inMaybe it's the Texasdrivers that they're afraid of.

it's not just in Texas.

Waymo's operate that way in California.

yeah, so they have,Waymo, for example, is runningright now in Mountain View.

Now it's kind of funny becausethe way it works in Mountain Viewis, or at least the last time Ichecked, they didn't have, whateverauthorization to actually charge money.

So the Waymo's running in, inMountain View, they're free rides,but it's employees or people thatcan get on a special trial listthat get to actually ridein them, but you see them.

, but yeah, they can't charge money,but they won't go on the highways.

They'll just stay on, the sort of surfacestreets, which is, how Waymo started.

I don't think it was called Waymoback then, it was just Google.

, and they had what Steve Jurvetson calleda little Hello Kitty car, this little car.

And it was really a different approach.

It was like the other end of Teslawhere Tesla starts on the highway.

The reason is that is a muchmore predictable environment.

right.

environment's not predictable.

it's not predictable,but the speeds are much lower.

Yeah.

If you have a crash at 20 milesan hour, that's a lot lessdangerous than atI, think you've got the timeto figure things out before youcrash at 20 miles an hour versus80 miles an hour.

that could be part of it.

, but also, , if you saw how that carwas designed, it was designed tobe very pedestrian safety oriented.

And I think those cars at mostwould go like 30 miles an hour,even if the road might be faster.

they're Basically neighborhood,electric vehicle type, very limited.

Yeah.

It was that kind of design.

In fact, they didn'thave a steering wheel.

It had a little, , joystick.

fun.

That's how those, cars got around.

the cost of failure islower, at lower speeds.

So you mentioned, , being ableto book it, I don't know that theWaymo app works here necessarily.

I think , I can book it through Uber,so I think I can use like the Uber app.

I. In the preferences, I can

say , I prefer a Waymo or something.

And That's there's away to book it that way.

that's what they advertise to me.

Again, I've never actually done it yet.

'cause I don't usuallygo downtown very much.

And when I do, I bring my ownTesla, like I'm driving down there.

So, but yeah, so I'll try tocheck it out at some point, butit'll be interesting to see theRobotaxis when they're going around.

I'll probably see them beforeI use them, but it'll be cool.

I'll definitely plan the report.

Hopefully they come out safely.

I don't wanna see anybody get hurt.

I hope they're taking this very seriously.

Tesla engineers that I know andhave met, , in Austin, , theydo tend to take this seriously.

They understand how important itis and how, dangerous it can be.

So,dude, the whole companyis riding on this, right?

Tesla can't make normal sales you know,at least, they're having issues with that.

And, their stock price isbased on this.

Except he alreadystarted moving the goalpost.

. 'cause Optimus.

So they already started going Well, yeah.

whole company doesn't ride on this becauseOptimus is around the corner, right?

Optimus is, what'd he say?

A $23 trillion, thing.

And, and the head of Optimus just left.

Correct.

Back to the Robotaxi thing,you know, we talked about Waymo.

Waymo in LA with someof the protests going on,I burned him into the groundYeah.

have to sort of wonder now, part ofthe reason maybe those Waymo's wereburned is, their cameras that lawenforcement are able to get access to.

So it's like, you know, I'mYeah,these people,but people will see it.

Oh, it's a roving narc,that Waymo spying on you.

You need to burn it.

When we had our last episode,, there were these Tesla protests going on.

Mainly because of Elon's activities.

Elon has since stepped back a bit,but I don't know that he's, beengiven a lot of credit for that.

When you have this thing launch in Austin,you gotta think that while these carson some level are a bit of a target.

There has been some vandalismthat we talked about last time.

And I wanna mention that, I had mycar parked in New York City, back inApril, , upper East side, which is prettynice neighborhood for the most part.

and I found a spot managed topark my car for a few days whileI was staying with some friends.

And I went to go check on my car and I waslike, oh, I got a ticket, but it wasn't aticket, it was a folded up piece of paper.

And I unfolded that piece of paper.

And there was a printed out message thatsaid, "Burn a Tesla, Save Democracy."

Oh.

Now, I'm not quite sure howyou save democracy by burning Teslas.

I don't think they quite correlate.

But I just remember getting,I was like, wow that's a kindof a threatening thing to say.

But fortunately it was just a noteand , nothing was marked on my car.

It wasn't even like drawnin dirt or anything.

It wasn't keyed, , just a note to,make Tesla owners think, I guess.

so I was happy nothing worsehappened yeah, you canleave a note in my car, fine.

I'm happy with that.

, but, that's my personal car.

And people with any sense gonna be like,okay, destroying someone's personal carIt hurts themmore than the company.

It hurts me,doesn't hurt the company.

And especially since I have a, at thispoint, an older three now, we havethese cars that are marked specificallyas Robotaxi and no one's in them.

And so, you know, theonly owner of it is Tesla.

maybe they're a little bitmore of a target at that point,Fair.

hopefully nothing like that happens.

I want it to be successful.

But Tesla has chosen thisroute of cameras only.

I think it's a little bit risky inthat they don't have a fallback.

We know that cameras aren't perfect.

And recently, , an article cameout in, I think it was Bloomberg,it was on June 4th.

And yeah, it's about a fatal accidentfrom November, 2023 in Arizona.

Now, as far as I know,this is the only pedestrianfatality that we know about.

There have been , maybe dozens, somethingon that order of fatalities from peopleusing Autopilot or FSD where their carhas crashed and the driver has died.

And perhaps in passengers too.

But, , this is the firstpedestrian fatality.

And primarily it's because thecamera was blinded by the sun,And you can see it in the videoclip as they came around the curve.

You know the sun just head on.

So that's concerning, right?

And this rollout is gonnabe in Austin metro area.

I don't know how much ofan issue the low sun is.

In urban areas that tends to be,you don't really get the low sunas much because you got buildingsaround you that would block it.

you'll get it a littlebit, especially on the, roadsgoing east to west, right.

And,by the river and stuff.

Here on the West Coast,, it's actually a big deal.

I had this happen in Utahon my last road trip.

You could not see in frontof the car because the sunbeing literally in your eyes.

And FSD refused to function forthe better part of 45 minutes.

You tried to engage it and it'd workedfor 30 seconds and just, I can't see.

I'm, I'm done.

So now what, car wasthat, Mike, and what software?

Yeah.

This was my new Y, withthe latest software.

Well, the latest three months ago,and it still wasgetting, blinded by the sun.

absolutely.

it struggles withBright sunYeah, and so this accidentwas a model Y in 2023, November.

assuming, I don't know definitively,but at that time, FSD 11 was out.

. , so it had somewhat of a newer model,

you know, certainly on theyeah.

I'm not sure what hardware levelthis Y would've been on a 2023.

It could have been either or.

It wouldn't matter, right?

Because FSD 11, that was writtenfor hardware three, right?

Even if you had a hardware four car.

So the hardware four car, I don'tthink would act much better.

hardware 4 has better cameras.

Oh, yeah.

Newer cameras.

, so that's something to discuss.

In the last earnings call in theQ1 earnings call, which happenedin April an analyst, asked aquestion specifically about this.

I think it was, Colin LanganYep.

from Wells Fargo,Okay.

, how about we listen to that?

Sticking withthe vision only approach.

Uh.

Lot of the autonomous people stillhave a lot of concerns about, youknow, sun glare, fog and dust, aany color on how you anticipateon, on getting around those issues?

'cause uh, my understandingit kind of blinds the camerawhen you get glare and stuff.

Uh, actually itdoes not blind the camera.

Um, the, we use a, an approachwhich is, uh, direct photon count.

So when you see the,the a processed image.

So the image that goes from the, uh, withsort of photon counter, the silicon, thesilicon photon counter, that, that thengets, goes through a digital sig signalprocessor or image signal processor.

Um, that, that's, that'snormally what happens.

And then that the, then the imagethat you see looks all washedout because if it's you pointthe camera at the sun, it it, thepost-processing of the photon counting.

Um, washes things out.

It, it, it actually adds noise.

Um, so quite a big breakthrough thatwe made some time ago was to go withdirect photon counting and, and bypassthe, uh, image signal processor.

Um, and, uh, that, and then you candrive pretty much straight at the sun.

Um, and you can also see in whatappears to be the blackest of night.

And, uh, and then here in fog we cansee as well as, uh, like people can,um, probably better, but I'd sayprobably slightly better than people,um, but than the average person anyway.

Um, and, um,yeah,so so the camera is ableto see when there's direct glare on it.

Yeah.

I'm surprised by that.

Yeah,Okay.

Yeah,I call BS on that.

the explanation he gave it'sbasically true, ? It makes sense that

when , you have a camera, like yourown camera, video camera, and there'ssomething very bright in the frame.

Typically there's some processing thatwill renormalize image to balance outto the brightest thing that's there,and then everything else seems washedout 'cause you don't have enoughdynamic range to see what you wanna see.

And it makes sense that instead of havingthat processing, you look at the levelof signal from each individual pixel.

and then, train on that,that makes perfect sense.

I take issue with him callingit direct photon counting.

Okay.

that's something that we can actually do.

I've done that in the lab with like aphoto multiplier tube type, technology.

and , since those analog days and sincethe days of CCDs, now we have CMOS andthere are equivalent things with CMOSdetectors to detect single photons.

SPAD and QIS.

Yeah.

that's what Icall, counting photons.

It just bugs me that he is gonnacall this direct photon counting.

It's, measuring an intensity,which of course is correlated tothe number of photons, but you'renot actually counting the photons.

Come on.

Do you know what doesuse photon counting sensors?

Lidar.

Yeah.

Yeah,Lidar actually uses SPADUh,does photon counting, whichExactly.

of course, lidar is filtered down to thespecific, wavelength of the laser thatright.

And it's also, got a very narrowwindow several things going on here.

you have this fatality that happenedbecause the camera was literally was,I don't care what he says, He could saythat we have some mitigation, but to actlike this doesn't happen is ridiculous.

it does happen.

.

Now, you could ask a question,Unlikely it's possible if itwas at just the right angle.

But again, it's filtered down to thespecific wavelength that you need.

, and maybe you lose gap of a fewpoints, But it's not blinded,as a, pixel array could be.

so I don't know why he said it that way.

It seemed preemptive.

Now that, earningscall was back in April.

This accident happened in 2023, but we'reonly hearing about it in June of 2025.

it's interesting because thereare ways to mitigate this problem.

All of them require additional costsin, parts and manufacturing sensors.

Lidar would probably nothave had this exact problem.

You could also solve this problemwith additional cameras, radartechnologies, and other types ofthings that could all, play a factor.

But as we've seen.

Tesla, one of their, primary engineeringobjectives is to reduce costs.

Simplify the amount of assembly componentsand all the other things, right?

They want to get it cheap.

So, theargument of Hey, I'mdoing photon counting.

No, you're not those sensors exist.

They're more expensive.

and we're not using them.

Yes, it's good.

You're not using the image processingon , the cameras that you have.

You bypass that.

That's good.

I'm glad that Tesla's doing that.

That's not the same thing.

.

So the question is how much is thisespecially when you start going torobotaxis or other types of things.

Is this gonna be an ongoing occurrence?

This is gonna be a common problem.

now what I'm curious of is backin 2023, there was all the drama,even in 2022 of removing radar.

but they have put radar backinto some of their cars.

And I guess what I'm curious of is withthe Robotaxi, does that have radar?

Are they leveraging radar thatwould've helped mitigate this or not?

There's now a front cameraright on the front of the car somaybe this is less of a problem.

or maybe they're helpingmitigate it through some of thosemeans, but yeah, I don't know.

And again, I, I just don'tget, , Elon has passed the word downas if , this is, , papal infallibilityor something that we don't need lidaror that , we'll never use lidar.

not that long ago, I was ata mini reunion with somepeople , in a research group.

I was associated with a lot of peoplein optics, and one guy, , workedat a company that , makes lidar andmakes the kind of lidar I've beentalking about with , some kind oflittle linear array that would have,Like a sweep.

yeah.

Of like, 170 degrees or something.

and , I asked them about thesesensors, how much are they?

And they said, , at volume,they're like 150 bucks each.

,gee, you know, a car should, why not?

And especially if it's gonna be arobo taxii where, the cost of thoseindividual things should be, amortizedover all those trips that you're taking.

Yep.

Allthose lawsuits you won't have,But again, that'shundreds of millions of dollarswhen you look at, scale,especially when he is saying it'sgonna be in everybody's consumer vehicle.

Not just,the official Robotaxis orthe company owned Robotaxis.

Yeah.

Lewis, you know, you make a point,but your sensors still have to work.

If they're not working, then you'regonna lose a lot more money,lawsuits, liability, blah, blah, blah.

or not having a product to sell.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, but apparentthey're still trying to sell it.

yeah, so I agree with you, andI think that similar to what Waymodid, , I would hope that Tesla wouldgo, Hey, you know what, robo Taxii,it's a little bit more bleeding edge.

\We're not quite as refined.

We're still developing things.

Maybe you put some extra sensors in there.

Maybe you put some extra hardware inthere to improve the quality, improvethe reliability, and make it safer.

and then as you improve thebut that soundslike what they're doing.

you can do it without,I mean, they're rentinga non-standard load for FSD,supposedly something we'll get.

In the future.

and that's software,though that doesn't count.

I think at some levelunderstand what you just said.

Yeah.

What we have right now isn'tworking well enough to be a taxi.

Now, whether it trickles downinto the commercial worldor not, remains to be seen.

Yeah,Anyway, it'll be interesting.

I wish that we wouldn't find outabout, accidents like this years later.

That's seems crazy to me.

I would hope you wouldfind out about it sooner.

but, , yeah.

we'll have to see how it goes,certainly there'll be a tonof scrutiny, so if anything happensin Austin with this,uh, Anything that happens onpublicstreets, IYeah, we will.

We will know about it.

it'll be posted to Reddit orTwitter in, within minutes.

but yeah, so anyway, it'll beinteresting to see I wish that Elonwouldn't say things in, answeringquestions that try to sound smart.

and was a little bit more accurate insome of what he says, but whatever,He said, it's not a problem.

He said, it doesn'tget blinded by the sun.

And it's like, , the Bill Clinton," definition of what 'is' is,"What "is" is, yeah.

Does that mean right nowfrom when he said it onto thefuture or some amount in the past?

He said for a while now we'vedone this with the cameras.

How long is a while?

Does that mean hardware 4 cars?

I mean, Mike, you have a hardware4 car and that's definitelybeen blinded by, the SunI do have a hardware 4 and itstill struggles with bright light.

Yeah.

when you saystruggles, what do you mean?

so it's not justhead on that has an issue.

The pillar cameras get blinded.

If the sun is at a very obliqueangle in the evening, and you turnwhere the pillar catches that lightalmost on a, horizontal plane.

The, you'll get a, warning on the screenor it'll disengage you completely.

Okay.

So you don't just mean like thecamera image on your screen iswashed out.

You mean like, FSD shuts off.

Okay.

wheel.

It bailssomewhat contradictswhat Elon claims.

In Utah.

I'd been on FSD for probably three or fourhours and the sun hit that magic height.

And FSD says, ah, I can'tsee where I'm going.

Disengage completely.

You know, all the red alarmstake control right now.

And you'd go to reengage andit'd work for 30 seconds aminute, and then it'd fail again.

depending on the angle of thehighway or what corner you were in.

but it also struggled at night.

again, in Utah it gets reallydark in the middle of the desertwhen you're on the highway.

'cause there's no lights, no moon.

And I was getting messagessaying your camera's occluded.

No, there's just no light.

nothing wrong with my camera.

But FSD wouldn't drive, it wouldn'twork because it, thought therewas something blocking the camera.

Gotcha.

Well,resolve this issue.

Yeah, well, we'll see.

We'll be interesting to see.

Well, we'll certainly give everyoneupdates , once it releases which isvery likely to do before our nextpodcast, even if it gets delayed again.

No, I'm justjust kidding.

yeah.

Well, everybody'swatching, that's for sure.

So tesla recentlysurprised everybody.

They did a bit of an update again on theModel S And X.

They did.

And they kind of snuck it in there.

Some of that made mejealous as a Model S owner.

Mike, can you give us a bit of a breakdownon what's new in the newer Model S and X?

So , they've got two new colorsone's called Frosted Blue Metallic,and the other's called Diamond Black.

you know, paint's paint.

what's interesting though isthey've increased the range butnot for the Model S long rangethat stayed the same 410 miles.

If you've got an old S Plaid, your maxrange was 348, the new one will be 368.

If you've got a Model X longrange, you go from 329 to 352.

If you've got the Model XPlaid, you go from 314 to 335.

What I can't find anywhere is ifthey change the battery packs orif this is just efficiency changes.

The rumor is it's efficiency changes.

it sounds like the same packs are in use.

Even though thevehicles are a little heavier.

Yeah.

That's what's being reportedanywhere from 20 to 80 pounds.

it's not a lot, but it is a little bit,Interesting.

they've changed the bumpersslightly on both cars, improvedthe looks a little bit.

They've added a front camera.

They've taken a page fromthe Cybertruck and the, new Ythe 2025 Y Juniper and gaveit the front bumper camera.

Finally.

not sure exactly what it'sgonna do, but at least it's there.

So that's a step in the right direction.

Now that leaves the new HighlandModel 3 as the only one in the lineupwithout a camera in the front bumper.

they've added a new wheel option,which I like the new wheels.

They're kind of aggressive looking donein kind of a matte black bent spoke look.

you will pay somewhere in the neighborhoodof $5,000 for this particular option fora set of wheels, so they're not cheap.

and the new wheels do have a cost.

you'll give up some top endspeed and you'll give up alittle bit of range with 'em.

, if you're tracking the car, itprobably doesn't matter, but ifyou're hoping to get groceries,you might want to pay attention.

There is some new ambient lightingfor those that like the prettylights in the inside of your car.

You'll be able to, , have multicolor,you can change the intensity.

It's kind a wraparound look.

Along with the center console, they'vealso given you mood lighting foryour foot well, And you have an entryanimation , so when you open the doors geta little light show in the cockpit nowsomething that I'd really liketo hear , is they have supposedlyimproved the noise isolation.

So they've got both wind and road noisereduction and Tesla says that they'veimproved their active noise cancellation.

, I would like to test that myself.

The X supposedly has improved suspension.

So a smoother ride.

they've probably taken some lessonsfrom the new Y, which rides really good.

And the yolk.

The yolk is now a thousand dollars option.

The round wheel's the default.

So if you want a yolk, you're gonnahave to cough up a few bucks for it.

what didn't change was the MCUand the FSD hardware, hardware.

Except for the new camera.

It's hardware 4,Still hardware four.

yeah.

and all of this goodness willonly cost you $5,000 more for the car.

yeah.

5,000.

theprice.

5,000across the board.

that makes perfect sense,they need to sell the carsThat they already have.

By raising the price,people can make that choice.

Am I gonna wait?

look at better deal.

Yeah.

And in fact, think they're lowering theprice on the existing cars, like they'regiving discounts and stuff on them.

Yeah.

that, way they'renot Osborne-ing themselves.

That's fine.

Because probably once thatexisting inventory is gone,maybe the newer versions, theymight lower the price a littlebit or something.

that's kind of the model they didwith the Y. When I bought my 2024 Y,

it was just before Juniper came out,three or four months before it cameout, they had some killer deals tomove the inventory of the non-Junipermm-hmm.

And now that Juniper's here, allthose deals have kind of gone away.

so mentioning that one thingthat they didn't do, which is a littlebit of a surprise, is they didn'tbring back the turn signal stalkdid not.

like they did for, the Y.

Yeah.

Well, they only brought backone for the Y. Not both.

Yeah, that's why Ispecify the turn signal stalk.

But I have to say overall, this ispretty disappointing, though, isn't it?

it's cosmetic.

Yeah.

most of these updatesare things you could have doneafter market, like lighting.

all the lightings, aftermarket,suspension mods could be.

aftermarket, even wheels and tires,Probably, even if you couldroute a camera through to the computer,you could do the front camera.

The only thing is , like the noisestuff, like either the double panewindows.

noise cancellation.

that and the actual physicalthings they do for the noise, whichI assume is some sound insulation,the double pane window sort of stuff.

I guess you could say, okay,these are low volume vehicles,but what did we actually want?

Like, we wanted the steer by wire stuff.

We wanted the 800 volt,Charging system yet.

Yeah.

systems48 voltfor the low voltage.

So you reduce all the copperwire and weight and whatnot.

Yeah,yeah, it's, kind of disappointing.

Again, it's a low volume vehicle but.

didn't really do muchof an upgrade at all.

What we want is a proper refresh.

And along with that, thatwould mean maybe changingthe nose of the thing a bit.

If you look at the, pictures,it's a very modest change.

You'd be hard pressed to notice it.

I think they tried to makethe Plaid a little sportier,Originally the Model S had this fauxgrill thing the Model X came out,people were calling it fish lips,it kind of looked like the MCP fromTron, like this wide stretched outface, if anyone gets that reference.

Then they gave , the Sthe look that the X had.

A lot of people were disappointed,like, what the heck is this?

It doesn't look like aclassic vehicle anymore.

Now , changing the nose is not that hard.

'cause it's not like themetal body panels likeyou have on the door and theit's a plastic bumper.

right?

So instead of having to change stampingdies , it's probably injection molded thefront and the rear fascia are plastic.

So without too much of an investment, youcan redesign those things as they have,they've made some very minor changes here.

But if they're gonna be serious about it,you want it to look actually different.

Yeah.

Here's a brand new car.

yeah, or at least it looks like it.

But the stuff that we reallywanted not just the steer bywire , but also put an outletin the trunk.

A lot of people like the camp withtheir X or S and people don'tnecessarily want the cyber truckfor everything it represents.

but they might want someof those features in theirS and X. They should do it.

Yeah.

so I dunno, I assume that theydid the math in terms of what theiractual sales volumes are and theyonly make these cars in Fremont.

yeah, , the volume's prettylow and it's gotten lower of late.

People in right hand drivecountries like, , the UK and Australia,some people would like these carsbut , because of the l volume, theystopped offering right hand drive.

if they did steer by wire, maybe righthand drive would be easier and cheaper.

'cause you're no longer dealingwith the, steering column.

Louis: that's true.

Months ago, , Lars said, " wehave a few things in store for the Sand X," but it just feels very minor.

and it's not really, I think,what most people were hoping for.

It's not getting me to run outand trade my car in for a new one.

Right.

It's, it's not worth it.

Well, it is what it is.

Hey, it's more than we expected,as in we didn't expect anything.

But it's a little underwhelming whenyou look at the effort they put in.

So, I guess we can move on to someslightly less Tesla topics to discuss.

This happened a few months ago.

xAI buying X, formerly known as Twitter.

So that came up in a previousepisode, but I wanted to wait on yourtake on this.

Okay.

So what's your take?

so what's my take?

So what's my take?

Why did it happen?

Okay, so I'll preface this as somebodywho has worked for a number of startupsand also has my own startup and hastalked with many investors, and I knowthe types of things that investors, Ithink this is mostly investor driven asin investors and X, basically felt likethey lost a lot of money and they wanteda way to get their money back or get theirmoney out in some reasonable timeframe.

That's one aspect.

And then the other was Elontrying to raise money, and toget more investment dollars.

, nobody was gonna give Twitter money.

, so Twitter is just not thatinteresting of a business.

xAI being an AI company, for thosethat have been living under a rock,AI is all anybody cares about, forwhatever reason, despite it being abunch of garbage for the most part.

So AI gets all of the investment dollars.

Like if you were to look at every VCcompany and all, money funneled intotech startups and tech companies, I wouldsay the numbers are well over 90% ofall money goes into AI specific things.

I could say from experience, even if youhave a company that is worth hundreds ofmillions of dollars or even billions ofdollars and you want to raise more money,better have AI.

the only thing investors are gonnacare about is what is your AI strategy?

How are you using ai?

What are you developing in ai?

What technology they,that's all they care about.

so for Elon to basically try to raisemore money, , it made a lot of sense.

You have xAI, which made almostno money, and Twitter, which madesome money, maybe not net revenue,but had revenue.

XAI is valued significantly morebecause the potential of what AI can do.

So basically this was a way for, again,Elon to raise more money, the investorsinto X, including Elon, to get somemoney back and to mitigate some oftheir losses on the Twitter purchase.

, and a way to try to scale andgrow things into the future.

It also helps him consolidate talent.

If you recall one of the reasonshe even said xAI started iswhen Elon bought Twitter, hewanted to make it an AI company.

He wanted to do all these technologiesas a big counter to Open AI.

So he tried to hire AI talent andthey all basically said, well, I'mnot going to X. Why would I do that?

It's already a big company,it's on the decline.

What's my financial incentive to go there?

You can't pay me enough to go there.

Whereas if they made a new companythat was worth very little, but hada potential to be worth a lot, he wasable to attract some solid talent.

So it's also a means of getting talent.

So yeah, so investor dollars, scalingthe company, extracting some revenue.

It was a stock swap.

It didn't cost him any money, itactually freed up some capital.

allows them to , hire betterpeople, , have more flexibility.

On paper it makes a lot of sense.

What I wouldn't understand is whyanybody in xAI would want to do it.

But the thing to remember is, and Ilooked up the numbers, Elon owned themajority stake and had majority control.

So because he had majoritycontrol, nobody could stop him.

So anybody that invested in xAIwas not interested in this deal.

Anybody that was investedin Twitter was interested.

in the deal.

very interested.

Yeah.

and Elon is in both, and he getsto also cement and, maintain his control.

So it was very much a Elon decision.

He's a smart businessman for doing it.

Like it makes a lot of sense for hisown personal and it helps the company.

It's also not the first timeElon has done this, right?

We've seen him do thiswith his other companiesTesla acquired Solar City.

Yeah.

Tesla acquired Solar Cityis the same kind of argument.

So, , yeah, I was not surprised by it.

What I will say again, somebody workingin tech and I work very closely with ai.

Like, literally, that's what I do all day.

I am very bothered by the notionthat you can start a company andin like a year, it's worth Tens ofbillions of dollars on paper, eventhough you don't make any real money.

That drives me crazy.

Like I fundamentally hatehow , the system works with AI.

, it is such a ridiculous bubble.

It drives me crazy.

But, , anyway, , that'sbasically what happened.

, we'll see if it impacts anything.

He's still trying tomake X the Everything app.

They technically have a paymentscompany, , they're working onall these different initiatives.

xAI's product is Grok.

, I think they might have someother products in development, I'mnot sure, but it's mostly Grok.

, so yeah, we'll see where it goes.

But at the end of the day, it changesnothing for any of the end users.

It's more, businessy peopleand money shuffling aroundAs an aside, always find it sofunny how Elon has stolen all thesci-fi terms know, Grok was from ina Strange Land, it was a Martian termthat basically meant understand, butit had whole bunch of different uses.

xAI.

I think they're building orhave built some huge data centersomewhere in Memphis, Tennessee.

There's some controversy becausethey built a natural gas powerstation that, powers a thing and It'sin some lower income neighborhood.

And, people are,out tons of pollutants.

that's what I've heard.

. But the name of this data center, they

called it Colossus, you know, and again,it's another sci-fi, uh, reference.

There's this book.

But then they made a moviecalled Colossus: The ForbinProject, which I think sixtiesor seventies when that came out.

Great movie actually.

About, AI going rogue and,controlling all of humanity.

I mean, that's spoiler alert.

I suggest people check out the movie, but, another name stolen, that new drive-inmovie theater, Supercharger Stationla.

in la It's called Milliways.

Milliways is, again, it's a nerdthing, but that's from, Restaurantat the End of the Universe fromthe Hitchhiker's Guide series.

Like, okay, come on dude.

Find something original.

You gotta steal 'em all.

be fair, naming things is hard.

Yeah.

So when you have an inspirationof some kind of specific, nerdy thing,Well, but also when those nameshave potentially negative connotations,if you understand what they are,Sure.

like Colossus is kind of scary.

Is that where we're going?

It makes me think of, , PeterThiel and his, Palantir.

I don't think of thePalantir as a positive thing.

it's notit's the way, , Sauron,the way he looks in on people.

Sauron saw it as a positive.

So I mean, it depends on your perspective,So, Peter Thiel is Sauron.

Yeah.

he envisionedhimself as Sauron, youOr Saruman.

Maybe he's Saruman.

yeah.

Yeah.

alright.

enough nerdcan't take nerds anywhere.

anyway.

So I guess there's some, NASAupdates and some interestingSpaceX stuff going on there.

Yeah, there's someupdates in terms of the funding.

, everything's still up in the air,but a lot of it has to do with, Elonreally.

It's all Elon dramawith the Trump administrationThere's just so much going on.

like, the big surprise ifwe're gonna , move throughchronologically was outta nowhere.

literally days before the NASAAdministrator confirmation vote.

And he would've been confirmed totally.

Jared IsaacmanGot whacked.

his nomination was pulled.

And the reason given was, oh, hehad contributed to some Democrats.

That's ridiculous becauseclearly, the Trump administrationwould've already known all that.

And of course, Elon has probablycontributed to Democrats and Trumphimself has contributed to Democrats.

all billionaires havecontributed to both sides.

They literally haveYeah.

You play both sides.

And his biggest contribution was toTrump's inauguration . He like gave a

million bucks or something so, there hadto be other reasons, but it's a shock.

I've always, , been up two minds about it.

I thought he's a great pick, a kind ofexciting pick in terms of someone who anoutsider, yet he's been to space twice.

He is very enthusiastic aboutboth the science and the humanexploration sides of NASA.

but on the other side, hewas definitely Elon's pick.

Trump has no idea who this guy is.

So definitely, it was Elon's influence.

And then, the budgets that have beenproposed for NASA are terrible, cuttingfunding for most of the science,cutting funding for missions thatare already in space like, oh,we're gonna just not pay the peoplethat would be running the missions.

you know, like the Chandra X-Raytelescope or some other projects.

On human space flight, , we were makingpredictions about, , the future ofArtemis and looked like they were fundingit at least through Artemis III whichis supposed to be the landing part.

Interestingly enough, Artemis IIIdepends heavily on Starship as a lander.

And we haven't seen muchof Starship as a lander.

Starship barely makes sense as a lander.

As it is, the last three launches,the ship has had trouble.

We haven't even gotten to the pointof testing the heat shield or someother things that they want to test.

And they need to get through orbitalrefueling and they probably needto actually land on the moon beforethey do it with people in it.

At the same time, Blue Origin hasbeen showing off their lander andthey even have people in the NeutralBuoyancy Lab actually testingout coming down from their lander.

Sure.

I don't know where all that's going.

anyway, I think that's enoughof a, NASA update except forthe trouble that followed aftergonna take my rockets and go home.

after,yeah, after Isaacman was...,

that the nomination was pulled.

There's this whole Twitter spatbetween Elon and Trump we don'treally need to rehash that.

I'm sure everyone here has seenthe details and since then Elonhas deleted some of those tweets.

And tweeted.

he went too far.

He pulled some of the things he said.

he pulled some, hedidn't pull all of 'em.

He said he regrettedsome of what he said.

The question is, whatdid he actually regretsaying?

Which part?

Yeah.

Probably the hardest one interms of his relationship with Trump topull back was that he claimed that thereason the Epstein files haven't beenreleased are because Trump is in them.

well, duh,already knew that?

,Doug: That seemed very similar to whatabout this diver guy that literallysaved this soccer team in Thailand,because they were stuck in a cave.

Part of the path was underwater.

So some diver went and saved them andElon inserted himself into this thing.

Having his team design a submarine thatnever would've worked because it had togo around corners and here's this rigidthing that would hold one small child.

Elon got upset about it becausethe guy basically said that wouldnever have worked and it was apublicity stunt or something.

And Elon claimed the guy, I don'tknow if YouTube is gonna penalizethis, but claimed the guy was apedo, called him "Pedo Guy " onTwitter before Elon owned Twitter.

And this feels like thesame kind of thing.

It's like a knee jerk reaction . Let's

just call somebody the worst thingthat can be claimed about somebody.

It's the kind of thing where theaccusation alone screws up people's lives.

Maybe not someone like Trump, butsomeone like this diver, you know,it could screw up their lives.

yeah, Elon went, that way.

But to me, the most upsetting orworrying thing is that in response toTrump saying, "Well, maybe we shouldpull Elon's government contracts."

Elon says, "I'm decommissioning theDragon space capsule immediately."

now.

Yeah.

Hello?

That is our only way to theSpace Station right now.

And that's really concerning that,someone can unilaterally decide thatUS access to space can just stop.

Now, part of it is Boeing hasbasically failed with the Starliner.

Sierra Space has been slowwith their Dream Chaser.

In fact, they haven't even gotten to testtheir cargo version of Dream Chaser yet.

It's the success of SpaceX.

SpaceX has been extremelysuccessful, such that it's reallythe only ticket to space right now.

And one guy can unilaterallydecide that, "I'mtaking my toys and going home."

Apparently.

Do you have any insight intowhy Blue Origin's not been pushingfor being able to do this as well?

They've not really pursuedgetting people to the SpaceStation as part of their project.

Blue Origin has beenpretty enigmatic for a while.

They've been rather slow.

They've been around longerthan SpaceX, as a company.

The current CEO Dave Limp I kind offeel like they're pushing a little more.

But the only thing that peoplesee publicly these days arethe New Shepherd launches.

You know, like Katy Perry, that thingthat happened a little while ago.

That's not really pushingus forward that much.

New Glenn finally had a launchit was a success, but not assuccessful as they were hoping.

And as soon as they did that launch, theyended up laying off a bunch of people.

The next launch isn'teven for a while now.

So it's a huge amount of timein between doing that launch.

So, Blue Origin shows alot of reasonable plans.

They haven't really been workingon the capsule type thing.

They're trying to be rockets andthey actually sued so that they couldhave a proposal for a moon lander.

And their lander isn't untilArtemis V But it looks morerealistic than what SpaceX has.

I don't know what their issue is.

They don't have that Elon kindof culture of , you're gonnastay and work 80 hours a week.

Right.,

But maybe they need a little bitof that 'cause they need to move faster.

And honestly this opens a window.

I think people in governmentshould be really concernedWe need to get things going.

As a newer company and a companythat probably has more leeway to beagile than say Boeing does, if Iwere in government and trying to get acompetitor going, I would probably rathergo behind Blue Origin than Boeing.

But wouldn't you say part ofElon's Grand plan, and he has saidthis to a degree, would be to say,"I'm taking my rockets, I'm going home.

I'll launch one rocket to get everybodyoff the space station and I want itdeorbit it. ' cause now you can't do

anything with it." He wants it down.

He said as much so.

is his vindictiveness.

Yes.

But he wants the money that'sbeing spent on the Space Stationfor his own pet projects.

maybe, SpaceX has the contractto deorbit, the Space Station.

Probably because there'sreally nobody elsecould do it.

can do it at a reasonable price.

But a while back when they're talkingabout having to those two "stranded"astronauts, Butch and Suni.

Yeah.

To me that was upsetting becausethey just straight up lied about it.

I can get Trump more than I get Elon.

Trump I don't expect him to have a fullunderstanding of the nuance of that.

Okay?

They took a Boeing Starlinerup, but they're going back on a,SpaceX.

SpaceX Dragon.

But to understand that theDragon that they're going tocome down on is already there.

It's not like, "Elon saed those peopleabandoned by the Biden administration."

Armageddon where they haveto run the dual Shuttle launchto save the world, you know?

If they needed to comedown, they could go down.

The whole time they're up there,they could have come down.

They could have come down on theStarliner, if they really needed to.

Out of an abundance of caution, theydecided to wait for the Crew 9 crew to getup there, which came up with two insteadof four, and they became part of Crew 9.

So they're doing stuff, they're working.

It wasn't like theywere stranded up there.

They're part of the crew.

But then, Elon presented it that way.

Okay, yes, I'm gonna go up and save them.

More drama.

Yeah.

So I was bothered by the way he presentedthat 'cause it was really disinformation.

It was massaging the truth in a way to, Idon't know, I guess politics or whatever,to try to have some win from peoplethat aren't even in government anymore.

It just didn't make any sense.

But some actual NASA astronautswere like, "uh, you know,this is a lie," or whatever.

And Elon's response was to , call aan astronaut and a veteran, a traitor.

That's a rough thing.

When you're in the militaryto be called a traitor.

That's, not a word to be taken lightly.

It's not a joke.

that was, an American, butthen European astronaut was like,"Yeah, this isn't true." And then

Elon's response was to say, "We shouldjust bring down the space station now.

They're not doing anything useful.

We should just bring it down now."

And that's clearly just to irk peoplethat actually have careers andactually go to space to do science.

and, , yeah.

I just found that,that's really upsetting.

That's an upsetting thing to say.

I mean, if anything, the space station upthere it's supposed to come down to 2030.

We should be getting every bitof science, everything we can,A real last dripwe can get out of it.

Yeah, exactly.

, and to be like, oh, let's just kill it.

That's a jerky thing to do, andit's a jerky attitude to take.

So yeah, I don't get it.

I'm not a fan of that.

anyway, saying that I'mjust taking my toys.

, I'm decommissioning the dragon.

It's in the same vein, it'sthe same kind of thing.

Well, let me,, try to irk the peoplethat actually care about this stuff.

I would think that Elonshould care about that stuff.

it's the same vein of why moderndemocracy and like what people wantfor governments and for having power.

Like you don't want one person tobe able to just greatly screw overlots of people or different people.

Like, that's the whole point of havinga government structure in a certain way.

We're not the right podcast for this, butthat's why, billionaires and people thathave that much power, it's dangerous.

Right?

If they have that much power over acertain thing, they can, do thingsthat are harmful to many others.

So just on a whim because they've decided.

But anyway I think that covers all thetopics that we planned on covering.

Did I miss anything, Doug?

I think that's enough.

That's enough.

All right.

It's been long enough.

All right.

there's enough editing to do now.

He's got a lot to cut out.

Alright.

As always, , we do appreciate everyonefor coming and hanging out with usand sorry for , the delays in , whenwe actually aired you can goto the Tesla Motors Club website,become a supporting member there.

As always, like, and subscribe,all that kind of stuff.

Hit us up on various socialmedia platforms of your choice.

and we look forward toseeing you next time

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