Tesla's mission is no longer 'sustainable', VW Buzz lives, and more

We are alive.

When you've soloed the trick podcast, I am Fred Lambert, your host.

And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintra doing good set.

I'm good.

Having a nice holiday.

Yeah.

Up here in Vermont.

All right.

Yes.

Doing some snowboarding as usual set as a big snowboarder.

For those who don't know, I hope everyone is having a beautiful holiday season.

Christmas, if you celebrate all that good stuff, as you can imagine, even though we

were working this week, I mean, it is a Christmas week.

A lot of people are on vacation.

Not a lot of EV news come out.

Some of the news nonetheless that we got discussed a little bit, but it's going to

be a quicker show today, most likely, unless you guys have a lot of things to

talk about, because at the end, as usual, we're going to take your guys comment.

We have a skeptic already in the house here.

Nice to see you.

I hope you have a good holiday, but we are live and we take live questions.

So if you guys have questions, you can put them in the comments section.

I'm going to remind you in a few minutes after we go through the news that we

wanted to discuss as more people chime in into the live chat.

All right.

First off, let's discuss Tesla's mission because Elon on Christmas Eve, you

know, I'm not kidding, I mean, I decided to update this mission yet again.

So for those who don't know, like Tesla, probably, I mean, it's arguable, obviously,

but I think it had had one of the most important corporate mission for a

for-profit company ever, really, and that mission.

It evolved a little bit over the years, but originally it was to accelerate the

advent of electric transport and it evolved into accelerate the advent of

renewable sustainable energy.

And that might seem like a big change, but, you know, there was the

acquisition of solar city, the Tesla energy launch and all that.

And it's, it doesn't, it doesn't supersede electric vehicles.

Like it's more, the logic was still sound because if you have an

electric vehicle, if you have a battery powered electric vehicle, you can, that's

the only way to have that powered by renewable energy, like combustion

engine will never be powered by renewable energy.

So these two missions clearly go well together.

So the advent of sustainable energy, sustainable economy would have worked

to because obviously transport and energy is the foundation of our economies.

So, so yeah, great mission.

Like no notes don't need to change anything.

Yeah.

But obviously Tesla's a company has changed quite a bit in the last few years.

And you know, as push that change to go towards AI, go towards robotics, and

he's slain that this has become an AI and robotic company.

Even though that's not reflected in Tesla's financials just yet because, you

know, selling cars is still Tesla's main business.

They are hoping that soon enough it's going to change toward that.

But more than that, so you would think that maybe Tesla's mission is becoming

some sort of, you know, becoming the leader in AI and robotics or something like

that, but that's not sexy enough.

Like that's, you know, okay, who cares?

Like there's 10 ton of other companies that have this, this mission.

So Elon, Elon needed something a little bit better than that.

And he's been on this, on this trip lately and a lot, a lot of very rich

people on this trip, a lot of techies, a lot of, a lot of suspicious people.

Let's just put it like that.

This idea of abundance, the age of abundance that it's, it's coming and

it's going to come through AI and robotics that's going to lower the cost of

everything that's going to do all the works for everyone.

And it's all going to be super smooth.

It would become somehow universal high income as the site Elon Musk is going

to come and, you know, keep everyone from eating each other because there's no

job anyone.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of olds in that theory, but Elon has decided to nonetheless

make it Tesla's mission.

So in the last few months to, over the last two years, he's been talking

about this transition over the last few months, he's been more specifically

saying that this is Tesla's mission.

And at the investor, the investor day, and then following that the shareholders

meeting, he made it clear that Tesla's mission is now sustainable abundance.

So I didn't make a big deal out of this because even though I've been saying

myself for a while that I'm not okay with the transition from Tesla's mission

is the reason I sold my shares in Tesla last year.

I just, I cannot support this, the Tesla's lack of support for its own

mission, let's say, but, but sustainable abundance.

It's hard to argue against it because, you know, sustainable is a great word.

Like if something is not sustainable, it's unsustainable.

No one wants that.

Obviously we live in the world with finite resources.

So you want to be sustainable in everything you do is just make sense.

And we want to be financially sustainable.

You want to be, uh, apparently sustainable.

You want, you want both on New Year's Eve, but you're not New Year's

Eve, excuse me, Christmas Eve.

Elon took to Twitter and announced that, um, I'm changing the Tesla

mission wording from sustainable abundance to amazing.

Oh, yeah, he was higher.

Oh, they're not that re-read it.

I'm like, Oh my God, that sounds like a high thought.

Like that would have sustainable abundance to amazing abundance.

And then when, but not even when asked, just, you know, elaborating on it, it says

the latter is more joyful.

So he says amazing abundance is more joyful than sustainable abundance, even

though the implication here set is that it doesn't have to be sustainable.

Right.

Uh, did I catch you?

Are you muted?

Sorry about that.

I was muted.

Uh, it is, uh, less, uh, green focused and it's more pie in the sky.

Let's not, let's not rock the boat.

Let's not, uh, yeah, it, it doesn't seem like sustainability obviously is

even a thought anymore.

It would be, it, yeah, I'm sorry.

It, it, it just seems comical at this point.

Yeah, you know, less forward and I, and I get it.

It's, uh, I mean, there's no, it's not inspiring.

That's one thing.

Like, you know, this is mission.

We, we, you and I both talk to a lot of people that work at Tesla over the years.

And, you know, we, we, some people we agreed with, some people were great.

So we're really impressed with others.

Let's so, but for the most part, there seem to be one common thing is that they

were all passionate about the mission.

And that's a way to attract people.

That's a way to retain people.

That's a way to, um, to make them work harder.

Cause you work for, what do you work for?

Oh, obviously you work for paycheck and, and, and, and, but ultimately you

want to, you want to have, uh, an ambitious goal.

And that mission was that now amazing upon this just sounds lame as hell.

It reminds me of, um, don't look up.

Remember that movie?

Yeah.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

Don't worry.

Everything's going to, it's just going to be abundance.

Like, and if you dig a little deeper and you look at, you know, where

Elon is coming from with that stuff, that's where things get a little bit

scarier.

And I went through that on my post here because, you know, Elon is now

openly a white nationalist.

Like he said it.

He said that white people needs to reclaim their nations.

What are those nations that are white only?

I don't know.

I don't know of any, uh, but, uh, uh, there was one though that, uh, he

was born in that was trying to do that, but, you know, in a long time ago,

maybe evolve from it, but it is, it is a weird thing to have someone who's, uh,

you know, raving on social media about, you know, white nationalism for weeks,

months, you know, even close to a few years now at this point, was also

talking about creating this utopia, you know, the two together, historically

speaking, if you know your history, it has not been a very successful outcome.

And, uh, it has attracted a certain type of people that, um, when

bended together, didn't do great things for humanity.

Uh, so I'm, uh, I'm a little bit concerned.

And on the more practical way for everyone that's like calling for

abundance and it's, uh, we talked a little bit about it last week, but, you

know, Elon, Elon, you know, said that Michael Dell didn't need to give his

money away because, you know, charity is not going to be necessary because

the property is about to be handed by AI.

And, um, there's going to be a high universal income.

One thing that I keep failing to see from the people that are these, uh,

proponents to, you know, this age of abundance is the actual mechanism to

deploy that universal income.

Uh, I, uh, kudos to, uh, Mark Cuban.

I've seen Mark Cuban talking about it lately.

So Mark Cuban is one of those rare billionaires that, uh, is of the

concern about it is like, yeah, I mean, uh, we need to talk about the

actual way that that's going to happen.

So it has to be a tax on the robot attacks on the AI attack.

Like there has to be something happening here, but that's not something

you hear from Elon or because, you know, he doesn't, he's not calling for

a tax on the AI right now because he's heavily invested in AI.

And I agree.

Maybe the timing is not great for it or something.

I, that, that might be the case, but we still need to engage in the conversation

because for someone like Elon was extremely rich, the transition period.

And, and again, that's if the age of abundance even happened in the first

place, I'm not saying that it's coming, but even if you believe in this, you

have to agree that the transition is going to be messy as hell, like ultra

messy, and especially for the people, for people that are not a set rich and

are not, not very liquid, don't have any money.

Like this is going to be extremely difficult for them.

And, uh, there's no, there's no talk about that.

There's no talk of how are we going to end all that.

But at the core of it, you would want someone that's pragmatic about it,

but Elon is kind of pie in the sky.

You, we won't need poverty or there's one need to be, uh, any charity because

they won't be poverty, but I keep coming back to, I think the only way that

you get universal income in the future where there's AI, there's abundance

through AI is going to be through charity because all the wealth, like our

system does already right now, accumulates in the hands of the few and those

that owns the model, that owns the data or data really that, that is building

those models are going to acclimate that immense trillion dollars of wealth.

And, uh, to trickle down to us, uh, it has to be somewhere like that.

The, the, there's a magically trickle down as we have learned from the rig

and economics by now, like it's, it clearly keeps accumulating in, in those

hands. So the charity is either like Dell's, a Xerec charity where you, you

give money to the people directly or it has to be a tax.

And I would argue that a tax on the rich is charity from the rich because

they've captured the, the, the political class, uh, and, uh, and they

have successfully managed to avoid paying more taxes.

So in a sense, if it is going to go through a tax, it's going to be through

the charity of billionaires to allow the, the captured political class to, to

increase taxes.

So the, in, in the sense of it, Elon's argument is like, you know, don't

worry, the age of abundance is coming and, uh, don't worry about charity right

now. You don't need to be charitable because once we have accumulated even

more wealth than we have right now, we're going to be charitable.

Which I think there's a bit of a flaw in the logic there.

Yeah, I don't like that at all.

If you, especially if you look at Elon's own charitable donation,

which almost exclusively goes to his own foundation, uh, you know, sometimes he

does extra, uh, stuff, but for the most part, like the, the billions of

dollars, it's its own foundation.

And then it goes to the foundation funds like his, you know, towns, like

schools and, you know,

Exactly.

Like it becomes a way to control the school of your employees.

And then even, even funded with this foundation, a bar for first base

sex employees, like, how is that charitable foundation to, to have a

bar for like engineers?

Like, I don't know, I think the bottom line is you can trust oligarchs to

make a charity.

You need to enforce it.

Yeah, but in, in our day and age set, that's like, it needs to be said.

It sounds like it's like obvious, but no, no, uh, need to remind me everyone.

Yeah.

All right.

Earlier in the year, the week I had another report about the sociable

taxi because I talked to a young gentleman, uh, very impressive young

gentleman in the name of Ethan, um, McKenna, Ethan McKenna was a 19 year old

engineering student out of Texas A&M and he, um, he managed to basically

reverse engineer the Tesla Robo Taxi app, uh, to, to be able to find the exact

mechanism that the EPI, um, basically stuck data for, uh, the, um, the

wait time, basically the availability of the Robo Taxi.

Uh, in the, he's made this whole, uh, tracker available on the website.

That is the link in the article that I wrote about it.

Um, let me tell you the name for those that wants to check it out that they're

not in the article.

It's a Tesla Robo Taxi tracker.com.

And it's, um, it's, it's really well made.

And there's, there's a bunch of interesting things for that.

We, the tracker has been around for a while, but at first it focused on, on

smaller things like tracking the actual number of Robo Taxi's known to date.

So that's been one of the way that we use it before, uh, that we know that by

now there's 32 Tesla Robo Taxi's in Austin, which basically matched with the

claim that Tesla made about increasing the fleet.

It's still far from, you know, the thousand than it was supposed to be.

And then the 500 and then the hundred that was supposed to be at the end of the

year, Elon kept changing his, uh, his number, uh, moving the goalpost, but it

matched what it was supposed to be.

However, what I found really interesting about the latest version of his

tracker after reversing engineering the API to be able to, to get all the data is

that even though there's been 32 different Malawai with different plates,

um, spotted working in the road taxi network, only a few of them are out at the

same time.

And that's what is tracker makes very clear because the data from the tracker

showed that the service in Austin is completely unavailable about 60% of the

time that, and that time to be clear is the official working hours.

So I think the, like from like two AM to like six AM, they're officially not

available, but, uh, in the working hours between that, only 60% of the time you

can actually get one.

Um, so he pings them at 11 different location, all spotted throughout the

service area in Austin.

And then the rest of the time, it's only a few area where it's available and the

average, uh, time varies between like 15 minutes, like something 45 minutes, uh,

to get a car.

Uh, so that points to a very low volume of vehicle available.

And he got some other information from other people saying that, uh, apparently,

um, the, the location where Tesla parks those vehicles, um, the lot has been

spotted and you can see that Tesla only pulls out about, um, one to five vehicle

at a time from, from there.

So sometimes there's only like one or two vehicle, sometimes, you know, five,

sometimes six, uh, vehicle operating in Austin.

So you see like this is the map that what it looks like.

So that's when I wrote the article, it was like one PM Austin time and you can see

that most of the places you couldn't get one at all, which means, you know, people

think like, Tesla use the icerous demand as an excuse, like, as if like there's so much

demand right now that that's why you cannot get one.

But it's, it's not a demand issue.

It's a supply issue.

And anyone that has ever used a ride ailing app would know, like the, the, the advantage

of riding on that list to quickly match a car with a customer near the drop off location

of the pickup location needs to be near the drop off location of the customer.

And you, you need to do that and you route them through a system.

And so if, if you see like 27, there's, there's nowhere on the other than Southeast Austin,

which happens to be closer to Tesla's a giga factory.

That's the closest one, eight minute.

And then the next fastest one is North Austin at 10 minutes.

And then the other only three other location available is between 23 and 27 minutes.

And the rest, you cannot get anything.

So that means that there's basically like a car between North Central Austin and North

Austin, maybe two or three cars around Southeast Austin.

And that's about it.

That's what's happening with the river taxi.

I found this interesting.

Why, because, you know, we've been trying to determine the actual crash rate of the

river taxi.

And because Tesla doesn't want to release that, even though all other companies do,

we were able to determine that at one point, based on Tesla releasing 250,000 miles in September

for the, they did that to the investor.

They, they announced that.

And then we had the NITSA crash data at that up to that point, which gave us an idea of the

crash rate at about 60,000 miles per, between crashes, which is way worse than a human

driver. And that's with a supervisor inside the car, potentially preventing more crashes.

Since then, we, we didn't have any update on Tesla's mileage at the river taxi.

The assumption has been, you know, you take the mileage rate between June and September

and you keep hiding it week per week.

However, now I think that this, this paints a different picture that the, the, the mileage

rate, but I've gone way down because so Tesla looks like what Tesla did is they operated the

river taxi Austin pilot project at higher volume early on, even though it was a smaller fleet,

the, all the cars were out with drivers or safety monitors, whatever you want to call them,

to, for the early surge in demand from all these Tesla influencers that were running,

the, you know, some of these Tesla influencers were like all day in the river taxi going from

all around the Austin and the circle, basically. So, and then after that is done,

and you see a lot fewer videos of it too, of course that could also just be because there's

less demand for those videos because it's kind of boring, but still the, the mileage rate might

have gone way down, which might look now the latest crashes that we've seen even worse.

Yeah, it just reinforced what I've been saying since the beginning that this is not a real

example of deployment of level four self-driving ride ailing system. It's

more of a smoke and mirror show all for optics to make Tesla look like it's deploying one in,

in order to give, you know, Elon a win on the self-driving front amid competition,

basically lapping Tesla like Waymo rapidly expanding right now, it just makes Tesla look

bad. Imagine if, and I know like if you've been following electric, you know a lot of this stuff

already, you've been up to date on that stuff, but imagine like the casual, like a more casual

observer here. Imagine if Tesla didn't even have the river taxi program right now to, you know,

create some sort of illusion that they are, you know, at the same level as Waymo, even though

they are operating much smaller, and it's just like FSD is the only autonomy effort from Tesla.

It would, in 2025, right now when Waymo is heading, you know, new cities every other week

and expanding fast, how badly it looks at like for the casual person, like you couldn't create

the illusion that Tesla is leaning. No, it's terrible. All right, a few more news items to

discuss, and then we're going to jump into the comments section. So if you guys have comments

for us, any, any topic you want us to discuss, you can put it in the comments section right now

when I get to it in just in just a few minutes. Another battery plant is changing hands somehow

in in the US. We've seen the deals with Ford and SK. Was it SK or LG? I think Ford was working

with SK. Yeah, SK, yeah, yeah. So Ford with SK, basically, SK gets one factory, Ford gets two

factory, the undo their joint venture situation. Now, a similar situation is happening between

Honda and LG in that plan is in Ohio. Yep, the big Ohio plan that they're doing. So that was a $4.4

billion investment between Honda and LG. They were supposed to start production at the end of

the year, but it was pushed back until next year. And now basically, Honda is taking over the plan.

So they're selling it for $2.9 billion. But I guess LG is selling their part of the plan to

Honda, who's going to take over. Honda says that it's business as usual for them. So they're going

to keep, they're just going to keep operating the plan, keep owning the plan. And the plan is going

to be where the iCura RSX, the new electric SUV from the ground up from Honda iCura coming next

year is going to be built. And the batteries are also going to come from there, obviously.

So this is interesting. It's, you know, the Koreans are kind of exiting the...

Yeah, I was wondering. They're like, yeah, I don't know how they, they enjoyed that

thing in Georgia. That was LG as well, right? I mean, that was cool.

That was Hyundai and, and now we're just doing LG here. Yeah, it was the battery manufacturer

involved. Yeah. Yeah. So now you have SK and LG pulling out of two, two more plans.

Yeah, I guess it maybe it doesn't make sense to join JV anymore as well. Maybe just sell it,

you know, sell them a big plan. Yeah, I guess, I mean,

the idea of it, yeah, you're right. Because at the end of the day, so it's the, no one wants to

make a big commitment without making sure that at least part of the demand is going to be covered.

So you can do it differently with, you know, LG building the plan themselves. And then

on duck and say, all right, I'm going to commit to buying a certain percentage of your,

of your battery production there. But so I guess this is just an alternative with the JV. But

in this case, I guess LG sort of built battery production, battery cell production for Honda

at that plan. And now Honda paid for it after the fact rather than, you know, up front.

It's one way to look at it at least.

All right, BYD demonstrated their latest charging technology in China. They have some

wild charging capacity. So in a new video, the CEO showed charging capacity of 250 miles,

400 kilometers in just five minutes. Yeah, yeah, it's just like stopping at the gas station at

this point. Now, I assume this is sales CLTC charging cycles though. So it's probably closer

to 200 miles a range or so that that's still still impressive. So it's a 1000 m, it's 10 C

charging, mega watt 1000 kilowatt charging. And I assume you did this with the hand because that's

the one that the main one that can take the capacity here. Yeah, that looks like the BYD hand.

So this one is the one I saw it in China and it has two charge port. So you one of the one

charge port can take 1000 kilowatt one megawatts. But if you are at a station that doesn't have

because it's not, I mean, they're starting to get quite a few out there, but not that many.

If you have two of them that are 500 kilowatts, you can plug them both together and get 1000

kilowatts. I've not seen that yet though. I think they demonstrated the one I think with a

the first demo. So it's the Tang, no the Tang L SUV that they use. So the hand is the sedan,

the Tang is the SUV. I mean, you could like roll into a electrify America and basically use

all the power from the whole area. Yeah, and those stations that I've seen, like I've seen

a 1000 kilowatt station when I was in Shenzhen, and it was like eight stalls. And I'm pretty sure

that all eight stalls were 1000 kilowatts. That's why I'm not mistaken. All right, one more piece

of news before we jump into the comments. Volkswagen gave us a little bit of an update on

the ID buzz because last week a lot of people thought, okay, is it over in the US? Is it done?

We got a little bit of an update this week just to clarify the situation. So

the what we heard last week is that they are skipping a year that they are not going to produce

2026 ID buzz, but the they're skipping the body. Sorry, I'm just sorry about that. I just

they are skipping the model year 2026. So that is they are, I'm going to cite the actual comment

here. We're leveraging current inventory of 2025 model year early in the year 2026, aka they have

a lot of inventory that doesn't make sense to keep producing. They need so many. They're just

not going to make any for a year. Yeah, and you talked about it quite a bit last year, last week

said, but like the pricing situation for the ID buzz is just not super attractive. So now we're

moving straight to model year 2027 and later in 2026 and no changes in the model and the vehicle

for model year 2026. So basically, and the company claims to have sufficient inventory of 2025 to

meet demand. So they're probably right about that as we discussed. So the idea is like the ID buzz

is fairly recent. So a new model year, even though might have a few changes, there are rarely major

changes. So we're not missing out on anything on that front. It's more, it's more going to be about

just how long your car has been like sitting around maybe because if they stop production,

that could be a problem. But we've seen that with a cyber truck, for example, like some people were

buying like a cyber trucks that brand new cyber trucks have been produced like a year prior. So

it's not it's a similar situation. And then the OPE here, even though from the comment, it's not

100% clear is that maybe you know, as some manufacturers do, especially European manufacturer,

sometimes they will release the next small year, like in this case of 2027, quite early in 2026.

So maybe like this thing comes in the summer of 2026 as a model year 2027.

A lot of noise about not much right there. Yeah, yeah, basically, basically is like,

the ID buzz is not stunning as well as we thought in the in the US. So are we going to just work

with the inventory we have right now and then launch the next version, maybe allows them to

have a bigger upgrade to 2027, maybe they do something better for it. So that's, that's

or make it cheaper. That would be the biggest upgrade really, if you can make it cheaper.

All right, I got a few comments. Skeptica was on as we started. I'm here before the show starts.

I can't think of a ton of EV news this week, except maybe the study that showed that

the world had crossed the tipping point between combustion and electric vehicles.

Do we see that? No, I'm not seeing that study, but make sense. I mean, the the peak for combustion

and combustion vehicle has been, we're way past it. It was like a pre pandemic really.

And since then, not not only has the EVs grown quite a bit, you know, we're not at,

I've said it before, I've said it, I think since like 2018, I was like 2025 is, you know, the last

good year for combustion engine after that is just if you buy one is just out of your mind or

petrolhead or whatever. And I think this has happened basically everywhere except the US,

because you know, China is at 50% Europe is like 30%. Canada, you know, was doing very well until

last few months with the tariffs. But still, I think in 2026, not going to be a great year

for combustion engines, I think globally. All right. Rod Lenker says, I mean, amazing abundance

is a total stoner thought. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I read it on the show. I was like, oh,

I mean, that's like the kind of thing that I would think if I'm like super high, I'm like,

Oh my God, this is a good idea. I'm going to tweet this.

So, must moves to support profit, undermine the company's early resolve to support sustainable

energy. Unfortunately, profit has become the primary focus, which lost many early supporters of Tesla.

I disagree with that. It's not, it's not profiting. It's stock price. Yeah. It's the stock pump is,

I mean, the profits are down. The profits are way down. I mean, Tesla was like making

like a few four, four dollars a share in profit in 2023, four dollars a share. Now,

if they, now they're going to maybe make 150 this year. It's nuts. And it's going to keep going down

because there's going to be huge dilution thanks to the super duty packages that the

Elon's fans have given him and earnings are growing down too. So

it's not profit. It's stock price. Yeah, too bad. They can't make a car that runs on hype.

Oh man.

I wouldn't be scared of the Chinese at the makers if that was the case.

Tech Bro's one AI replaced workers. So what is the mechanism provided abundance to all of those

people or is an amazing abundance just for the rich? Yeah, that's the scary part. I mean, they

already have a crazy abundance like the wage disparity between like the top 1% even top 0.1%.

Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. Yeah, trust the early arcs. Not a good idea. Probably. I agree.

Skeptic, the problem with clarity charity right now is the US is the standard tax

deduction has gotten so high that almost nobody is incentivized to make donations.

Isn't that the other way around? Yeah, I don't know. The fact that there's high deduction,

people do give the money, but I think it's more about like charity in itself is good.

People keep like confusing the fact that there's other some charities that,

you know, only use like 5% of their funds for actual charity. The other 95% goes to the salaries

and all that and fundraising is like, obviously everyone sees that and knows that it's terrible.

It's obvious. But that doesn't mean that they are all like that. There's plenty of great charities

that are way more efficient. But I think the problem with that is more something like that.

Like we talked about the idea that you can just, you know, move, you know, what Bill Gates did.

Then Bill Gates did a lot of real good charities, but it's also just a tax deduction in itself.

Right. I mean, you've been doing that forever. The Rockefeller Foundation,

the Ford Foundation, those are all just big tax dodges.

But I don't know. I don't know if the tax deduction is inherently bad by itself because I

understand the idea of like, I can spend that money more efficiently than the government can

and make a bigger impact is just that. So that in itself is like, I can understand. But at the

same time, you all put the door for abuse of that system at the same time. I bet it's kind of hard

to remotely monitor, drive those taxis. So I wouldn't be surprised if keeping enough of those

qualified operators is a limiting factor. I mean, probably if that one, you know, 20 people working

at the same time, that doesn't seem like a big business. Business Insider actually had a report

this week. It's not about Austin, but it's more about the Bay Area because the Bay Area,

that's less secured, like over a thousand Rebel taxi, about a thousand ride a link licenses.

And it looks like they're operating closer to 150, 200 cars right now. But they can operate

over a thousand at this point. Maybe not at the same time because I think they have permits for

700 drivers. So they are recruiting like factory workers. Hey, do you want like a side gig of like

at night you drive a robot taxi, you drive a robot taxi, like it's, it's a bit comical to be honest.

Yeah. All right. Skeptic says we have a few new Iona charges in the St. Louis area. I have

plug share alerts for them and it's crazy how much they're being used. Totally different ballgame

than the other charges I have alerts for. Yeah, I mean, if you're an Uber driver,

you know, you're, you're driving around town, those fast charges really help out, especially

if you have like an 800 volt vehicle, like a, you know, a Porsche or Hyundai or whatever.

And I hear good things about Iona as well. Super quick charging is great for Uber drivers and

shows progress, but many of us charge up overnight at home. So this is a new deal breaker for many

of us. Yes, but to keep drawing the EV like at some point, you know, in some market, it's already

the case. The industry has max out people that have driveways, garages and all that and easy

access to home charging. So at some point, you need, you know, the solution. One of them is

fast charging. Some people are perfectly fine to use their car in a city situation, like if they

just have to park on the street and have to go to a charging station once a week. Some people are

fine with that. Other solutions going to be like charging at work, charging, you know, street

chargers now are becoming, you know, so there's a bunch of different solution for cable management

to make them reliable for, for city use. So there's a bunch of different solution, but

you know, I'm charging is the best case scenario for an electric car. I agree with that. It's just

not available to everyone that, that are car owners. All right, the VW Buzz would sell like

hotcakes at price with closer to 45 K. Yeah, I think we were all in agreement on that. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, like think about it, what, how many good three row SUV type vehicles that

are electric are out there, not many that are 45 K and buzz. And even though like it's such a fun

looking vehicle, great looking vehicle, and we're very well touted out in the inside, like it's,

it's very practical in the inside and it's, it's, it's fun to drive. My only concern is a little

bit like the view, like it's a little bit down on this side. But anyway, very well touted out,

but it's not a luxury vehicle in any way inside. Like there's a lot of like plastic, it's, it feels

a little bit cheap at times and everything. So yeah, I agree with Dean on that, like a $45,000

price range. Like you said, there's not a lot of competition in that range, it would be, would be

great. Yeah, Carl and San Diego says BW Buzz was years late and they missed the wave of EV excitement.

I think there's still excitement going on, but it was a little late and they,

they did hype it forever and it's kind of a shame that it's not getting the traction it should have.

And people love it. Like I talked to one, one owner in BC when I was in BC earlier this year

at a charging station in DC. We get so many comments about it. People like

tubs up and smiles on when they see it. So, you know, it's a smart vehicle, but I think that,

you know, we know that Volkswagen has been plagued with a lot of problems and

bringing their EV program to fruition. Hopefully like the Rivian partnership,

you know, I'm hopeful about it and I'm hoping that they expended a bit.

All right, ID Buzz is priced not to take a loss, no room to drop it.

Yeah, maybe, but you know, economies of scale like

sell more of them at a lower price. Our skeptic says no, a high standard deduction means you have

to donate way more than most families can afford before you see any tax benefit. Now that's an

important clarification. And then thanks for your great EV reporting. Happy holidays,

everyone. That's a great way to close it out. Yes, happy holiday to you too, Dean. So that's

our last show of 2025. We're going to catch you next year for more EV coverage at Electric,

both on the website and on the podcast. We appreciate every single one of you that join in

every week to talk to us and to listen. If you are, if you enjoy the show, please give us a like,

a thumbs up, whatever it is on the app you're watching, it helps a ton. It's free to do,

takes a second. Same thing on the audio app. If you're listening on the audio, if you can

invest a five-star rating, if you believe that we deserve it, that helps a ton. So we appreciate

when you do it and we see you same time next week, 2026. Here we come.

Tesla's mission is no longer 'sustainable', VW Buzz lives, and more

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