Tesla's 'flying' Roadster, Elon's pay, new EVs from Japan, and more

We are live for a new episode of the Detrick Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm

joined by Seth Wintra. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. All right, what are we

going to talk about today? We're going to talk about, I mean, our friend Elon Musk is

on the, just dropped the hot new podcast with Joe Rogan today. And I put it real

quick. Like, literally it was a few hours ago, so I didn't have time to read, to listen to

the three hour podcast. So I dropped it in Gemini to make sure I'm not missing anything

about Tesla specifically. And out of the three hours, he talked a good 10 minutes about

Tesla. So I was able to watch that at least, tell you any new information coming out of

that. In a few minutes, then we're going to talk about RoboTaxi, where we actually

have some useful data about RoboTaxi, thanks to Tesla, to a degree. A little V14, FSDV14 data that

came out, we're going to talk about CyberCAP, new information coming from Robin and Home was on

doing the little media tour right now for the composition package, which we're going to talk

a little bit about too. Then Canada may be getting Chinese EVs, there's new rumors going

around. Lucid talked a little bit about its autonomous roadmap, involving its midsize EVs

coming next year. Then we have a bunch of new EVs that were unveiled, or at least prototypes or

concepts for EVs that were unveiled at the Japan Mobility Show this week. So we've got a few

new EVs on that front. And then we're going to end on another EV that's been, they keep

using the word pause or outed or in the US because of the change in the regulations.

But it's basically going to be dead probably. And yeah, that's all the news that we're going to

discuss today. But then in the end, as usual, we're going to be able to take you guys questions

or suggestion of topics where you want to take on. So you can put that in the comment

section and we can get to it towards the end of the show. I'm going to remind you of that

later on in the show as more people join in, because we are live everywhere on YouTube, Facebook,

X, everywhere. And if you do enjoy the show and you're watching live right now, you can hit that

like button and share button. These things are free to do. And it helps the show get to more

people and more people get to enjoy listening to us talking about EVs. Speaking of EVs,

the Tesla Roadster. So there's been a lot of chatter about the Roadster lately,

which is rare. Because, you know, for those who remember, it was on the village 2017 was supposed

to be in production in 2020 and has literally been delayed every single year since. What happened

in the last few days is that, well, people got really excited because Tesla posted a job

listing for a manufacturing engineer for the Roadster battery pack. So manufacturing engineer,

Roadster battery pack. So that would mean, oh, Tesla's actually going to manufacture that thing.

Now, to be fair, they are looking right now to hire a manufacturing engineer to build the

processes for the battery pack for the Roadster. So if they're hiring someone for that right now,

even if all goes well, I wouldn't expect, you know, best, best case scenario if everything goes

well, like end of next year, some production, but I would most likely be 2027. And again,

at this point when it comes to Roadster, I am firmly in the case that I'll believe it when

I see it because otherwise there's no point of getting excited. And 2027 will be at 10 years

since the announcement, a full decade. Great timing. But that's the thing too is like, yeah,

that's when the unveil in 2017, like now there's no point in making that like it's been like

surpassed already by a bunch of other supercars out there. There needs to be a next next-gen

Roadster to be unveiled. And that is something that Elon has been talking about for a while.

And lately, one of the other things that's contributing in some kind of

renewed excitement around the Roadster is that Elon has been talking about

a demo by the end of the year. There's also been some talks like earlier this morning,

I wrote an article on Sal Maaltman posting that he cancelled his Roadster reservation after 7.5

years. And he got a little like ghosted from the apparently the reservation process email

that they use for the Roadster has been disabled entirely. So he thought he could just

cancel it like that. And he got a big gold look. Nope, that's not working. And we talked about that

a few weeks back to a month back when MKBHD also went through the process of canceling his Roadster.

And it's not a sports reservation. And that's that's not easy to do. But what happened today

is the Joe Rogan podcast. And on Joe Rogan, like I said, it was very little talk about

Tesla's during the whole three hour podcast. He didn't try to sell the Rogan on the

Cybertruck for like five minutes or so and not really any new information other than like he thinks

it's this is best product ever. And then Rogan was the one that prompt Elon to talk about the

Roadster. He said, is it is it still happening? And then he said, yes, it's still happening.

And he said that Tesla is getting close to a demonstration of the new version of the Roadster

because again, it needs to be in this year, which is two months from being over.

So like two months ago, he said by the end of the year is going to be this incredible

demonstration. And the podcast, he did again, say like maybe a few months, we are hoping by

the end of the year, but he was a lot less confident about it. So and if Elon is not

confident about it, don't put a lot of stock in it. But yeah, he said that and then

he hyped up the demonstration as being like, all right, it's gonna

unforgettable. I want to possibly the best demonstration ever, the most

yeah, unforgettable. And he said like it could go bad, it could go well, but it's gonna be

unforgettable. And then, you know, Rogan prompt him to like, all right, why like why would it

be like that? And then he said, my friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed

to have flying cars, but we don't have flying cars. If Peter wants a flying car, we should

be able to buy to buy one, we should be able to buy one. And then Rogan asked, all right,

you're actually talking about making the rooster like a flying car. And then Musk was like,

all right, you're gonna have to wait for for the demo. But he had it look, I think I think

it has a shot at being the most memorable product on the lever. This is some crazy,

crazy technology we got in this car, crazy technology, crazy, crazy, he was rambling

a lot in this whole thing. Is it even a car? It looks like a car. Let's just put it

this way. It's crazier than anything James Bond. If you look at all the James Bond cars,

combine them, it's crazier than that. So the guy is in full month full height mode. But

I think it was weird because like Rogan was like pressing him was like, well, okay,

what's it gonna be? It's gonna have wings. It's gonna like if it's a flying thing,

it can be on the road, but it can be flying too. So it's gonna have retractable wings and

things like that. And then Elon was like being vague and everything. And I think Rogan actually used

the word sly, like don't be sly about it, like just just talk about it. And and so it's clear

that you know, the way that Elon was talking about it and referencing Peter Till talking

about the future with flying cars, that Rogan is actually thinking of what most people think

when you think of a flying car, which is, you know, a road safe legal vehicle passenger car on the road

that can, you know, transform into a flying vehicle flying aircraft for a reasonable but

useful distance. You know, and to be fair, there are some EVTOL aircrafts these days

that are getting close to to that. But they are they are either like very much a car that

can do something or you can they're most in some city if they are called an EVTOL, they're most likely

a vehicle that flies and doesn't really drive. And they have a lot of limitation in

term of like, you know, there's the Jetson one that I think is considered like a light not

the pivotal one is considered a lightweight aircraft. So you don't have to have a permit,

but the flying limitation or extreme, you cannot do much with it. It's not obviously,

I don't think anyone is really, it believes that this is what Tesla is going to do with the roadster

here. And that is why Elon is being sly about it and he's being vague. Rogan thinks that's because

he's being secretive ahead of the demonstration. But the real reason is because he's being

purposely vague to let people think that that's actually what they're going to do. But

you cannot do a vehicle like the roadster that has that's going to have the performance,

the road performance of a roadster and that can fly for any kind of meaningful distance,

length, height, altitude or anything like that. Yeah. So I was thinking about that,

you know that car that was at Goodwood that it sticks to the ground, it has like those fans or

whatever. I was wondering if you like reverse that it could just be like a hovercraft.

Yeah, I mean to a certain degree, but that car is like super light as a very small battery

pack. And like it probably doesn't have all the safety requirements to be road legal and all that.

So it's not going to be that. So there's ways to do like things like you said or a true EVTOL,

but to have a road legal vehicle, especially a super car that's like James Bond like, like he

said, and he said it looks like a car and you want to have like you were supposed to be

like a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack capable of 1000 kilometers, 600 miles of range in that

roadster. I don't know if that's silly case, but you cannot do that. And the car is going to be able

to fly for any kind of signal. Now you can do what he talked about before, which is put cold air

thrusters inside the car and put air compressor system that can like just pump the air and

compress it and then use it in cooler thrusters. And you can do that to like, you know,

have downforce had acceleration and possibly even, you know, if you really want to

have it like jumped a little or even hover for a few seconds, that's really possible. And that

will be impressive to be fair. I think that would be like an impressive demo. I'm sure he's

right about that. But I think he's doing to set this service with this appearance on the

Rogan show and hyping it as it's going to be a flying car as what Peter Thiel wanted. It's like,

it's not going to be that. It's not going to be close to that. So why are we having that?

Like it makes no sense. It's kind of weird that they're friends again. I mean, I guess,

you know, like Peter Thiel kicked him out of PayPal. Like that was, they were enemies for a while.

They have some common things, a lot of things in comments, I think they figured out. I think

they can work past that. Mostly just money, but yeah. Yeah, money. Well, they're both from

South Africa, right? I think he's South African too. I think so. Or at least he has some roots

in South Africa. I think they both like to use government money to get richer too. I think

they both found that to be a very useful path to acquiring wealth and power.

Palantir, yeah. Palantir and Elon two SpaceX contracts and they both like to have influence

in the government. And they seem to both be heavily backing GD vans to be the

puppet leader of the US in the next election. I think they have a lot of common

and haircut in common to these days too. Like he's starting to look more and more

like it for people that don't see if we have the YouTube video on right now and

he's starting to look a lot like Peter Thiel. It's a weird one. I'm not backing it. When I'm

streaming on the stream, you're under the back button. It's not working as well.

All right. Rebel taxi. So that was probably my biggest article of the week.

So we had a new NHTSA report for the ADS crash reporting. So under the standing order,

that's probably not going to last that long because Trump has signal that he wants to

remove that. And you know, these are big cuts at NHTSA. So they probably,

it's probably one of the first thing you want to remove. And Elon wants it out too.

And it looks like he's back in the good graces of Trump. So this might be one of the last of

those reports that we got. But these reports force automakers to share data about any crash

that happened with ADS systems. So for Tesla, that's autopilot and fossil driving and ADS for

the autonomous driving system, level three to five. And that has been for the most part, Waymo.

But since the Tesla put the safety driver on the passenger seat rather than the driver's seat

for the Austin Rebel taxi system, they have to report on that too. So for the last few

months, Tesla has reported their first few crashes incident revolving the Rebel taxi.

So all the crash, last month, we talked about the first report that was for July. And in July,

there were three crashes that were reported. So in the first month of operation.

Now there's another crash that's been reported for September. And again, the main issue with

that is that Tesla redacts most of the data about those crashes. So we don't know much about

the crash. What we know about this new crash is that it happened in a parking lot and the

Tesla robot actually it fixed object. Now, what's in that the first thing that's interesting about

this is that this actually release mileage for the robot. And again, this is just the robot

taxi in Austin because the any crash involving the robot taxi in San Francisco, I would fall

into the ADAS reporting because there's a Tesla driver in a driver's seat. It's basically just

FSD Uber with FSD. That's that's what it is. And there's probably crashes with that too. But

it's harder to parse through them because Tesla redacts all the information that post posted to

NHTSA. So it's hard to know exactly like is it the robot taxi or is it just some

irregular model Y. So in the case Tesla just said it's a model Y doesn't say like if it's

using what version of FSD if you're using robot taxi. So the only reason we know this is robot

taxi is because it's the in the ADS reporting and the only vehicles that falls into that reporting

for Tesla is the robot taxi in Austin. And Tesla at the earnings, they did disclose that robot

taxi in Austin have traveled 250,000 miles so far. So we do know now that there's the crash

rate for Tesla robot taxi in Austin and that's for crashes 250,000 miles. That's best case scenario

might be more than that obviously because the 250,000 miles was up to October and this is up to

September. So it could be more we don't know yet. But that's a crash every 62,500 miles.

Now the main thing to focus on here all this is that this might sound good but this is with a safety

monitor inside the car with the finger of the kill switch. So these people these safety monitors

prevent a bunch of crashes that could have been caused by the robot taxi system. So we don't

actually know the the through purely robot taxi crash rate like we don't know how many

crashes these guys prevented. So it's probably much less than a crash every 62,000 miles.

But despite that, so I decided to compare it to Waymo just for for the sake of comparison. But

again, it's not Apple to Apple here. It's Apple to oranges because Waymo, the data that I use

is the ADS reporting where Waymo has been doing that for, you know, five years now. So

1,267 crashes. So a lot more crashes than Tesla lost a lot more mileage. They are at 125 million

miles. So if you do the crash rate on that, that's 98,600. So that's almost twice as good,

like 50% better than Tesla. But again, without any safety monitor inside the vehicle. So

it's Apple to oranges. The only thing it proves is that yes, as we expected,

Waymo is way ahead that Tesla when it comes to autonomous driving.

Because you know, I would like to be able to say to like, oh, there was three crashes in July

and just one crashes in September. So oh, that means the crash rate is going down. But

you cannot even say that really, because really the safety monitors could be getting

better. And we don't know how the 250,000 miles we don't know how many of those miles

were in July versus September, because it doesn't look like there's much expansion,

there's expansion of the area site for the Austin Texas robot taxi, but there's not much

expansion of the actual fleet. So it's, we don't know the mileage rate. So you cannot

actually say that the crash rate is going down. All right. So that's on the robot taxi

front. And now an update on the full self driving supervised and consumer vehicles.

So I, it's been a few weeks since V 14 has been out. So I wanted to do a little report on it,

see how it's going, take some feedback from drivers, take some early data, again, very

early data, we're only at 4,700 miles here. I already said that my expectation for V 14 was

between 800 and 1200 miles between critical disengagement. The data was pointing to 730

when I wrote this article. Now I think it's closer to 800. So it's basically what I expected

on that front, maybe on the lower side. So, you know, I had expectation, but in

terms of the actual performance of the system, there's been a lot of disappointment.

We've been hearing from drivers, there's the, a bunch of hallucinations of the system.

So for example, this is a common example here, you see the Tesla is tracking a car in front

that is that put the signal to the, to the right to, to, to just, you know, turn right at the street

and the Tesla on the FSD abruptly stop on the side of the road because of it. So we think that

this is an hallucination where the car is confusing the turn signal of the vehicle in

front for an emergency vehicle and stops something like that because it's something

that happens quite frequently apparently. And then there's another example of a brake

stabbing where the system looks very hesitant in doing a specific task. So it pumps the brake

rapidly to like, like it wants to go and doesn't want to go, wants to go, wants to go. And that

pumps a brake, which makes for a very uncomfortable ride, obviously. Though Elon actually said that,

that that should be fixed by 14.2 and even recommended that most people probably shouldn't

actually download the 14.1 because of the, it's not the most comfortable ride because of it.

And, and then even worse than that, there's a bunch of people that are reporting that

FSD 14 when they download the latest update, it, it crashed the whole FSD like FSD doesn't

work at all. And so there's been a bunch of bug reports on that that either the

cement feature doesn't work or the whole FSD doesn't work when not only the full update.

So it's not clear what's the actual problem with that. But yeah, it's not ideal.

That's true. I keep forgetting to press the back button.

All right, next news that I want to discuss is the cybercap. So that's coming from Robin

then home to such a woman. She's been doing a little media bliss this week. She went on

CNBC, she went on Bloomberg, she went on a bunch, especially with the financial media

to try to push Elon's compensation package, you know, because she never comes out of the woods,

but unless it's time to get in on paid, then, then she, that's such a weird dynamic. Like,

she's the board of directors. Like, she's the one who's kind of making it just,

it's just a wild, it's a wild situation. And she, she, she mentioned this,

she was asked about the cybercap. So, and that's, that's funny because I was talking to

my friend bestie about this, like literally a day before that news came out, we're talking about

it. And like, were they like, were you talking about Elon's comment from just last week

at the earnings call or the week before that, whatever it was, where

Elon says that, oh, I'm feeling so confident about full self-driving now that I'm increasing

production because the demand is going to come from full self-driving. And, and he said,

most of the production increase is going to come from the cybercap production.

And cybercap is not supposed to have any pedals and the steering wheel. In fact, it's kind of,

Elon described it as a failure. If it has that, he said, no mirrors, no pedals, no steering,

let me be clear, this vehicle must be designed as a clean, rubble taxi.

We are going to take that risk, but we're not going to design some sort of amphibian

frog that's halfway a car. We are all in on autonomy. So all in autonomy means no

steaming wheel, no pedals, no mirrors, which is a problem. If you're going to set up production

to make hundreds of thousands of those a year and autonomy is not solved. Now, Elon says he's

confident about it, but I think there's, it's fair to have room for concern when the guy has

been consistently wrong about this and when it's going to come out. So it's extremely

unreasonable for an automaker to invest billions of dollars into high volume production

of a vehicle that you're not even sure is going to be able to be useful at all.

It's wild. I mean, I guess it could be useful in the context of like the rubble taxi in Austin

with a safety droop. Can you imagine having a safety monitor inside that vehicle? It's a two-seater.

Only one person can use it. You're going to sit next to that guy and be like,

how's your day going? And they're like, apparently they cannot really talk to you

about anything either. So it's so weird. Anyway,

they can't give you a little tour of the city.

Big old guy. Then home kind of opened up the door for Tesla to do what we've been

expecting him to do. And it's actually put a steering wheel on that thing. So she said,

if we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals. So they said

they are preparing for that. So she's signaling to the market is like, don't be

shocked if we actually launched that thing with a steering wheel. And yeah, I mean, I think it

makes sense. So there is actually federal laws in place for that. And there is an exemption that

you can have for each manufacturer can produce up to 2,500 passenger vehicles without steering

wheel and pedals per year. So this is in place. This is like what Waymo is using is what the

few other companies that are developing self-driving are using. And I think there's room

to get an expansion for more and everything, but this is not really what Tesla wants to do.

They want to make hundreds of thousands of those. So it's not, it doesn't work like that.

Now people are speculating that you might be able to actually buy that car and drive it

yourself, which would be cool. Even though I just don't think that the form factor makes a

lot of sense here for a ribotaxi. I mean, there's decent space in the back for luggage,

but it's like it's the two-seater. So it's basically an appterra. People are going to buy

that on an appterra. If anything, like putting a steering wheel and pedals in that thing is a

good selling point for the appterra. It's like, yeah, it is actually a market for a two-seater vehicle.

Yeah, they could put solar on the back too. That would be pretty sweet. They don't have

a rear window. It is actually a lot like the appterra.

Less efficient a little bit. Doesn't have solar on top either.

All right. The other thing that Denholm was pushing all week and in a little media blitz,

and Elon has been, you know, retweeting her on this. And of course, a few weeks ago,

we're also reported that he tweeted himself that he, the threat that he's going to leave

Tesla if he doesn't get his package. And this week, there was a little bit more talk

about that where Denholm repeated that claim. And then she said that

they are looking at internal CEO replacement options. If Devil doesn't go through and he,

I guess he leaves. So they're talking about this very seriously. Obviously, I mean, if you're

the board of Tesla and your CEO is literally out there threatening to leave the company,

if he doesn't get his way, it's your job to have a succession plan in place. So I don't think it's

that much of a tell or anything. And if anything, I think that Elon's threat of leaving is a bluff,

and it basically amounts to blackmailing. Because we've discussed this before, but

there's what I call the Tesla shareholder dilemma where if Elon stays at Tesla,

continues the way he's doing where it's like all in on autonomy, very a lot of disregard for safety

resulting in giant liability through lawsuits, through liability of not delivering full self-driving

on all the other three cars and now very likely other four cars. Because other five is like months

away at this point. And we all know that when there's a new hardware, what happens with the

last hardware when it comes to Tesla cars. So it's, you know, the path is quite clear

at this point. I do believe that this is going to solve autonomy at one point is just by that time

they will, I think there's going to be strong competition. And on top of it, Tesla's going to

have a giant liability to deliver on promises that they cannot deliver. So it's just a bad

but in the meantime, Tesla's very profitable car business is just going downhill because of

Elon again, both on the brand side of things and also on the strategy side of things because

of this all in autonomy strategy. So this is a problem where you keep going with Elon,

you're in trouble. And if you don't go with Elon, if you don't vote for this package, if you vote

out the board, if you, you know, force a change at Tesla's leadership, then what happens is that

the stock will crash at least short term because most of the value in the stock right

now is attached to Elon's promises. And so if Elon goes, then he goes with his promises and then

the stock crash. And then if you literally sell the stocks to like, like when you bought Twitter,

that also puts some pressure on the stocks. And then also, you know, the stock goes down.

So it's, it's kind of an impossible position they are in. And the threat of leaving, even

though I think he's completely bluffing is, is a very efficient one. It's working. I'm

sure it's working. I'm sure a lot of people are voting for the package because they're scared.

And, and I want to highlight a few things in this is like, first of all,

because one of the main argument I get when I say like, this is a bad package and,

you know, people shouldn't vote for it is like, you don't want Elon to get paid. Is that it?

And with that, I say, well, first of all, I don't care if Elon gets paid or not.

Like he's, he's one of the richest men on earth. Like it doesn't, it doesn't matter

really like to, for him to get paid. But anyway, what I want to highlight is that

he's the one forcing this all or nothing situation. Like it's not,

it's not like you have shareholders have options to vote on like a more reasonable

package or no package at all. It's like, it's no package or this crazy package that

makes no sense. So, so he, and he's the one when negotiate that, when negotiate that,

I'm doing air quotes for those who are listening only with the board. So yeah,

it's his choice to make this is it's his choice to do this all on the thing package. And it's his

choice to treat and shareholders to leave if he doesn't get the control. And then there's

the other side is like, Fred, it's not about the money, this very rich guy that spend a lot

of his time focusing on like promoting wealth is not trying to commit more wealth with this

compensation package. He's doing it to get control of Tesla so that he gets control over

the robot army. And not a crazy person get control of this robot army. There's so much

problem with this with this way of thinking. But the first one is, then why is no one talking

about all the other options for him to get more, more money? Like, first of all, there's

precedent, I put the Jeff Bezos one here, there's precedent for CEOs, we don't get any

compensation whatsoever. I mean, you got $80,000 per year. But like, let's be clear,

this is this is nothing for for Jeff Bezos. But they, sorry, someone's calling me.

He never got extra stock option for his decades of being CEO of Amazon, because in his head,

it was like already on the most stock of Amazon than anywhere else. So I benefit the most of

Amazon doing well. And sure enough, so that was the idea behind Tesla. Because let's be

clear with the young compensation package here. If everything happens exactly like it's

all the milestones in the compensation package happens, but Elon doesn't get any

stock options to the process. Elon's stake in Tesla becomes worth a trillion dollars.

Okay, it goes from like 200 billion, whatever to about a trillion dollars. So the stock

compensation package only is the difference between him having a trillion or two trillion

dollars taken this, which the difference is immense. But in actuality, it's nothing.

Like, it's like, all right, I won't do all of this for Tesla, because I will only get a trillion

dollar out of this, I need two trillion dollars to make it. It's it's that's what he's saying

when he's saying that it makes no sense. Now, if you believe the argument it's about

control, then do it. Do it the elison way. Larry listen, the CEO of Oracle, I guess the chairman

now of Oracle is a close friend of Elon, he probably told him about this is like, you know,

you can do like stuck buybacks and you do your you do enough stock buybacks. Well,

your stake in Tesla that exists will increase in percentage until you reach the level that

you want. This is, you know, a common ways to do it. And it's also a way that doesn't

just benefit him, the largest shareholder, but all shareholders at the same time,

because you have anti dilution instead. So that that makes it a ton of sense. Now,

it only makes a ton of sense if you think that this is undervalued, though, because then you

don't buy your stock if you think your stock is overvalued. And this is the core of the issue

here. Elon knows the stock is overvalued. And know the stock only hinges on his crazy

promises. And he knows that this competition package will make him tens of billions of

dollars, even without achieving most of it. So that that that's the core of it. And that's why

like everything points to this being about money rather than control a robot army or whatever you

want to believe. All right, we're going to move on from Tesla almost straight on the

tournament mark to discuss other things. And then at the end of the show, as usual, we

can take you guys questions or subject in the EV or renewable energy world that you

want to take on. So you can put that in the comment section, we're live on YouTube,

Facebook, Lincoln, acts and everywhere. So you can put your questions or any other subject in

the EV world you want us to discuss when we get to it in about 10, 15 minutes. So first off,

there's some rumors going around that Canada is going to open up to Chinese EVs, remove the 100%

tariffs. Quick reminder, last year, like the US Canada put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs,

mainly to follow the US and protecting local automotive industry. Then the US went

hostile in trade with Canada. And then Canada had to put the US put tariffs on Canadian cars,

and then Canada put tariffs on US cars. And now we have we are kind of stuck without having

much EV supplies or reasonable priced EV supplies. And EV adoption has been falling

all year because of that. So there's been talk about opening up, removing the tariffs on Chinese EVs

and, you know, getting them to enter the market and go back to increasing EV adoptions through that,

which was something that we've been advocating for electric. And now in China, there's been two

sides of things that started a bunch of rumors this week is that first of all,

I think Mark Kearney is still right now in Korea at APEC meeting with President Xi

Jinping and the Chinese president. And apparently the meeting just happened yesterday, I think.

And now he's going to China also to do a state visit soon is what came out of the meeting.

And a potential trade deal is rumored to happen at the same time. So that was part of the rumor.

And then on the other side, there's been rumors coming from China, from local media that

said that a deal is in the work and the deal will apparently involve Canada removing the tariffs on

Chinese EVs and China removing, well, I don't know if it's removing tariffs or removing like,

you know, importation restriction on canola and pork. So crazy deal here, EVs for canola and

pork, but whatever. Also, to be clear too, like people say like, oh, you're so excited about this,

because it's going to hurt Tesla and this is going to be good for Tesla, at least in the

short, the biggest winner out of this is like, it's going to be Tesla in the short term because

right now Tesla, we get some Berlin model wise that, you know, not too heavy of a cost in

Canada, but model three is starts at $80,000 Canadian, which makes no sense. And so,

because we Tesla used to bring their model threes and model wise to from China to Canada,

now they were switched to the US and now they switched to Berlin and the US for the model three.

So it's, it's going to be Tesla is going to benefit the most from this at least in the

short term, because it's going to take a while obviously for Chinese automakers to

set up shop in Canada. It's, it's not exactly easy to do. They need to build out the

distribution and service network takes a while. Tesla's not selling a ton of EVs

in Canada at the moment though. No, I mean, some model wise for sure, because of Berlin,

but even Berlin, I think they don't have the standard range version. So they don't have

the cheapest one. And then the model three is like, if you're buying a model three in Canada

right now, a new model three makes, makes no sense. I think they might have some

in inventory pre tariffs yet, but not a lot probably. All right, there was a little

bit talk from Lucid this week about plans to offer level four autonomous driving in their

vehicles. So the, we talked a little bit about their partnership with neuro, but that's through

Uber deploying 20,000 gravity with neuro technology to drive. But Lucid is also

independently working on its own self driving technology for consumer vehicles.

And I think that wasn't the NVIDIA presentation. Because it was in relation to the new NVIDIA

drive EV, AV, AGX tour computers that were announced. And Lucid was part of the

announcement where they said that for their new mid size lineup that's going to

be on Ville next year or actually in third production next year, they're going to deploy

the new hardware suite that's going to include new sensors and this advanced computer in it.

And the aim for that to be capable of level four self driving. So that's, that's,

that's going to be the goal. Now, I hope they're not going to go the Tesla way and like sell it

right away or anything like that, but it's more like it's the odd word is there. And then,

you know, we're going to deploy more capacity over time. And then you can buy the, the software version.

All right. And then we have a bunch of course from the Japan mobility show in Tokyo this week

that we're on Ville. Subaru, the interesting one, an electric hot hatch, the STI performance

performance STI concept, which look pretty sick actually. Yep. Yeah, it's a good looking car.

And it kind of follow up on the WRX STI and that launched in 2022, but that's, of course,

that's not electric. And so they are making sort of an electric version hot hatch of that.

But it's very much a concept right now. I don't think they confirmed it's battery

electric. And that's about it. I don't think there was spec, they said it's cylindrical battery cells

in there, 15% lower center of gravity. But I don't think they shared much spectator than that, to be

honest with you, nor plans to bring it to production. Another concept that was on the other

show, but with closer potential of production is again, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't

work. So we're

is the Toyota Corolla. So the Corolla one of the crazy for a Corolla. Yeah, I mean, to be honest,

Toyota has been making a lot of improvement in design lately, like the new Prius. I kind of

like that 20 since 2025, 2026 is actually pretty good looking. I think it's a really good looking

car. And now they are making a big upgrade to the Corolla with this Corolla EV concept. So one of the

best selling car in the world could go electric soon. Actually, I think it is already having they

already have an electric version in China. China. Yeah, but it's like one that's produced by a Chinese

company as a Toyota logo on it. This would be like a global version of the Corolla electric

as a light bar in the front. I think it looks a little bit cheap like that. But

the side view in the three quarter side view is actually very sick. Yeah,

and it looks concept. But looking at their latest designs, I feel like this actually

like not not too bad. Yeah, definitely. The interior is definitely a little bit more concept.

So also no spec yet.

But they confirmed an annexion to the Corolla just with it to have an EV, a plug-in hybrid,

and an hybrid version and likely still a nice variant apparently.

There's got four different portraits. Geez.

All right, last piece of news before we jump into the comment section.

The EV4 is not coming to America, at least not now. So they confirmed this week that it's delayed

until further notice. So normally that means get your hack together, change your regulation,

maybe we'll bring it. But for the meantime, I went to Korea earlier this year. Yes, earlier

this year to stop the car. And I thought it was a pretty good car. It was like a great

follow-up to the EV6, which we all liked. It's a little bit smaller, more sedent and crossover,

and more efficient. And as all the same features that we enjoy in the EV6, which a different

form factor, lower price, but not coming to America. Because American don't want EVs apparently.

Yep. All right, let's move into the comments. Carl in San Diego, B14 disaster was what I was

alluding to two weeks ago. It's worse. This points to machine learnings, Blackbox,

AI, Achilles' heel. You don't know what you've learned and unlearned with training.

That's used to be something that Elon warns about when it comes to self-driving

improvement. It's like two step forward, one step back kind of process.

And so when you do that step back, then it's like, all right, it's cruise with your

prediction of timelines. And it's been part of why there's no, it just never makes sense.

All right, Dan, I would say it says how much money are they going to lose with all the

ones they have to give away free to the influencers like Fred. And like Sam too.

Yeah, me too. I think the last time I calculated it was like 36 fully

free ones. And, and then it's like hundreds, if not thousands of like discounted ones,

because you can meet discounted as low as like 10% discounts, I think, and then

up to like 90% discount. And technically, like if you get a 10% discount or a $250,000 car,

it's $25,000. So you kind of might as well just buy it even if it's just to sell it.

Even though I think at first it's going to be a lot of selling pressure on the

on the vehicle. So it's going to affect the market. But yeah, there's there's a real possible

scenario of like Tesla has to deliver, you know, 30 of them for free and then a few hundred with

heavy discounts. So I don't know if that would, by the way, I should say, even the other thing

that you're on set in the podcast is that you blame the delays on the roadster on we've

been working on this crazy new technology for it, which, you know, I don't really believe.

I think it's as, I don't know if that has to do with the fact that, you know, they owe a bunch

of them for free and then discounted ones. But I think I think it has more to do and you said that

too early in the Model Y development in like 2020, 2021, when they started ramping that up,

it's like, we need to focus on ramping up a little why it's going to be a much more

important program to the roadster, which of course he was right about.

But at the same time, you cannot sell a vehicle for years and just keep

doing it for half a decade. Just because, you know, you figured out that you have

more important things to do, it doesn't make sense.

Yeah. And what right now, they're probably blaming autonomy or Optimus or whatever.

All right. Jamie says hovering would be a waste of weight, cost and complexity.

Upforce doesn't make cars faster. Downforce does. Thankfully Tesla's actual engineers,

not Elon, bought a patent for some neat van car tech.

Oh, that's interesting. All right. Elon is at Joe Rogan again. Oh, no.

He'll have to listen to the whole thing for all the crazy.

So my date has to ride in the lap of the safety driver.

Why not your lap? You drive or she gets her own seat. You get in the lap of the safety driver.

Right. There's a lot of options. The worst one is she's in the lap of the safety driver.

All right. Carl and San Diego have shareholders sued Robin and the board yet. If not, they should

for putting Elon's interest ahead of Tesla's repeatedly spending Tesla's money and time

lobbing shareholders to accept extortion. She's a defendant in the lawsuit for the

one regarding XCI for following Elon to just like start XCI and everything.

She's a defendant on that and she's been a defendant on the overcompensation one.

It's obvious that Robin and Holmes deal was when Elon got, you know, and this is the best example

to say like people that said that Elon is afraid not to have control over Tesla and he needs 25%

because he doesn't feel he has enough control now. It was like, can you name a time in the last

that this is 20 years of existence now where Elon didn't have full control over Tesla? And the

best example is he was actually caught with securities fraud by the SEC.

Securities fraud had to settle with the SEC, which normally is the end of your career and

as an executive at public company. You get banned from, or at least like you cannot be

leading a company for a few years. If it's a settlement, that's not what Elon is. Settlement

was you cannot be chairman. You can still be CEO. You cannot be chairman for three years.

And then all he did is like, I'll, I'll just put a puppet chairwoman Robin in home and I'll give

her a great compensation and in exchange, she's going to enable great compensation for me

and do whatever I say. And it's exactly what happened. And like, no one can deny that.

Yep.

All right. At this point, Abterra will soon be able to buy Tesla's failed auto division,

I don't know about that. Failing fast and no fix insane.

Hey, Abterra, I'm still worried. Like I've been keeping an eye on this stock just for fun,

like just to see like if it's still in the game and it's up 8% today at 755. So it's worth

about $200 million right now. So, you know, it's still alive. So that means they can,

they have the ideal to sell, you know, discounted stock for up to $75 million.

So I'm sure they are raising some money right now with that.

Yep. All right. Crazy person gets control of the robot army or Nazi gets control of the robot

army. Six, seven. In this case, the crazy person and the, I mean, I wouldn't say,

I don't think Elon is a Nazi. I think he's a white nationalist, which is very close to

white supremacists. So it has definitely like Nazis, neo-Nazis tendencies. But yeah, I mean,

who wants, what scares you the most to have a bunch of institutional investors take over Tesla

and have control over Tesla's AI and robots or Elon Musk?

Yeah. No kidding. All right. Dan says no tariffs on canola and pork. Good news

for fans of fried pork rinds. All right. Well, Chinese fans of fried pork rinds,

because they're, they would be the one that get the pork canola. We'll get their EVs.

Wes Bungay says, why doesn't Canada just open up and import cars from China like Australia?

Well, that's, that's what they're discussing, but we put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs

to back the Americans. Now we're talking about removing those.

Any info about the new Honda Prelude? Is that an EV? I don't think it's an EV.

No. Unfortunately. No, but on that did have an input in there, but it did have an unveiling for

like a nice little like K-Core slash hot hatch electric. But it's just for the Japanese market,

unfortunately. Okay. What is Toyota software like other EVs like as the software

in their hybrids is terrible. Yeah. I don't think Toyota is a real amazing software company. So

yeah, it's one thing that the Japanese need to improve on. The promise is like, oh,

maybe like the Sony Honda car is going to change that. I think the Japanese

going to have great software. I'm like, all right. Sony's really known for their software.

Yeah. That's the thing too is like, I mean, probably among the best in Japanese companies,

but Japan has like, has had great hardware, electronics all over development for years,

but they've never been known for the software. And that translates to car industry also.

Yeah. Toto toilets, not good software. All right. My wife and I just spent a weekend in the

Mount St. Hill there, region of Quebec. You familiar with that? We saw a lot of

Yeah. I grew up right next to in St. Balzil, like 20 minutes away from that.

So a lot of EVs, mostly Teslas, Ionic Fives and Equinox EV. We had a great time eating and

drinking apple treats. Okay. Yeah. It's a lot of apples there. Yeah. I mean, there's,

we have a great adoption rate. We're like 40% at the peak. I think 35, 40% on the peak

EV adoption in Quebec. It's going down this year. But you know, it's

basically every new car. Every other new car is an EV basically.

What SEVs are you recommending in the EU, Poland to buy right now? End of year for tax reasons?

Highway range is important for me. Also low energy consumption will be nice, but not a must.

I mean, it's like, depends what like if you're looking for Mercedes or

Yeah. That is the price range is always useful for when you ask for that.

Because and also like how big of it because this UV for us in North America versus an SUV for

like an Ionic five in Europe could be like kind of an SUV, I guess. Well, here it's a little bit

smaller. So I don't think because for me, like if I want great efficiency, not something too big,

because it's still Europe, even though Poland is not as, you know, it's a little bit more

forgiving when it comes to vehicle size. I would think that is a pretty good option.

But yeah, if you want to go, if you have the money for it, like I love the Q6,

the Audi Q6, I think it's a great car, great size, grace format, you know,

going to be almost twice the price of an Ionic five.

I think they're reminding Steve Jobs did a backdating options thing.

Backdating options.

Yeah. Steve Jobs had a controversy in the early 2000s where he took options and

then he backdated the prices on them.

But I mean, all options are with a discounted price anyway.

He got slapped in the hand.

Robin and Elon just have strong alignment. Yeah.

And not Fred, Elon is very crazy.

And then Elon needs to go back to South Africa and work on domestic issues there.

We are fine in the US without him.

I mean, he's trying. He's going on X and he's like, oh, he's trying to save South Africa,

Germany, the UK. He's really on a mission to save them from more Tesla cells really.

It's the main goal. It seems like I'm always amazed of the X world versus the real world

that people think that X represent the real world.

You see Elon's post getting millions, millions of hits on X.

And you would think like, oh, he has a massive impact.

Like FD is pulling at 26%. It's going to save Germany and all that.

Most people, they don't care about Elon's opinion in Germany.

The vast majority of people and probably in the US too, they don't care.

On X, it seems like a big deal, but in X is not the real world, folks.

It's full of bots. There's bots everywhere too, but I mean, every time I catch myself wanting to

argue with someone on X, I'm like, Fred, this could just be a bot.

Or it could be like a 14 year old trying to troll you just back off.

And that's Elon should heed that advice quite a bit.

All right, that's it for us this week. Next week, I'm going to China.

So I'm going to be in China all week and the next weekend too.

So we're going to have to figure out something for the podcast, trying to make sense.

I'm going to be in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

If you guys have any good idea for me, things to check out in Guangzhou,

I'm going to be a little bit busy with X-Peng.

It's going to be the idea of X-Peng. I'm going to check out.

But then I have a few days in Shenzhen to check out EVs there and other things.

I want to check out batteries too and all that.

So I'm going to be pretty busy for the next week,

but we're going to try to squeeze in a podcast at a time that makes sense.

Might not just be the usual time. We'll see.

And yeah, I hope you guys have a safe weekend.

Have fun and have a happy spooky Halloween.

Tesla's 'flying' Roadster, Elon's pay, new EVs from Japan, and more

About this episode

Tesla Roadster

battery pack

Tesla Cybertruck

flying car

eVTOL

kilowatt hour

Lucid Air

NHTSA

autonomous driving system

Waymo

safety driver

redacts

ADAS

FSD

Tesla Model Y

robot taxi

hallucination

turn signal

brake

full self-driving

autonomy

Aptera

Tesla Model 3

level four autonomous driving

Lucid Gravity

NVIDIA

Subaru STI performance concept

electric vehicle

cylindrical battery cells

Toyota Corolla

Toyota Prius

hybrid

Kia EV6

Honda Prelude

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