Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Dylan Loomis. Quick shout out to Peter Jay. Thank you for choosing to use my Tesla referral link and congratulations on your new Tesla. The White House has chosen Chicago's Monroe Capital for audio listeners that's M-O-N-R-O-E, Monroe, not Sandy Monroe, to raise a $1 billion private credit fund devoted to funneling money into the US automotive supply chain. It's called the Drive Forward Fund and it'll raise money from institutional investors and receive additional capital from US Small Business Administration Loans or SBA. The fund will have an advisory council made up of auto industry experts including representatives from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. This alliance represents companies from manufacturing to equipment suppliers, battery producers, and semiconductor makers. Plus on their website they are advocating for the EV future saying the future is electric, let's drive there together. Monroe will begin raising money from institutional investors immediately including auto industry sources like OEMs and pension funds and they hope to issue loans from the fund by the end of the year. It's basically a fund for smaller automotive companies throughout the supply chain to help them innovate and they said the fund will also evaluate growth opportunities to invest in battery component manufacturing and materials recycling. Reuters did say the fund is supposed to help the industry shift from gas powered vehicles to EVs.
欢迎来到 Electrified,我是你的主持人 Dylan Loomis。先来感谢一下 Peter Jay,感谢你选择使用我的特斯拉推荐链接,祝贺你拥有了新的特斯拉。
白宫选择了芝加哥的 Monroe Capital(为音频听众拼写一下:M-O-N-R-O-E,Monroe,不是 Sandy Monroe)来募集10亿美元的私人信贷基金,该基金旨在将资金注入美国汽车供应链。这个基金叫做 Drive Forward Fund,将从机构投资者那里筹集资金,并获得美国小企业管理局贷款(SBA)的额外资本支持。基金将设有一个由汽车行业专家组成的咨询委员会,包括汽车创新联盟的代表。该联盟代表了从制造商到设备供应商、电池生产商和半导体制造商的公司。官网上还提到,他们支持电动汽车的未来,口号是“未来是电动的,让我们一起驱动前行”。
Monroe 将立即开始从包括汽车行业来源如原始设备制造商(OEMs)和养老金基金在内的机构投资者中筹集资金,并希望在年底前开始发放贷款。该基金主要是为汽车供应链中的较小公司提供创新支持,并表示还将评估投资于电池组件制造和材料回收的增长机会。据路透社报道,该基金还旨在帮助行业从燃油车转向电动汽车。
Unfortunately, the vandalism at EV chargers across the country is still on an upward trend. According to J.D. Power, this year through June, nearly one in five US public charging attempts ended in failure. Roughly 10% of those aborted sessions were due to a damaged or missing cable. The Vice President of Electrify America said in 2024 so far, Vandals have cut 215 of the company's cords up from 79 in the year earlier period. We also have the CEO of ChargePoint that now regularly makes trips to their company's lab where they're taking saws and shears to their EV chargers for testing. A director from EVGO said ultimately there needs to be a larger law enforcement response to this. If it was up to me and somebody cuts a cable off and they get caught, well, we cut your finger off. I know the narrative out there is that these Vandals are cutting cables to get the copper so they can sell it, but the truth is even if they cut a DCFC cable they're only getting around $50 of copper per cable. So I think at least part of it is a group of people that have been programmed to hate EVs.
We now have FSD12.5.4 rolling out to a small group of vehicles and I know a lot of you are frustrated stuck on 12.3.6 but remember as I've said before, the latest and greatest with this regard is not always the best. I've read tens of reviews from people saying that they wish they would have stuck with 12.3.6 as that was the version they preferred. However, 12.5.4 does include actually SmartSummon with some updated features for both hardware 3 and hardware 4. There's now the option to have your vehicle play a completion sound when actually SmartSummon completes its trip. For those of you with a juvenile sense of humor, you can have emissions on a board so if some in a board you can have the vehicle fart.
The option to adjust the room for the side clearance has been removed and when it comes to FSD itself, the latest version now has vision based attention monitoring with sunglasses on. But it does not yet have the N10 network on the highway or FSD for Cybertruck. It looks like this updated version of SmartSummon also has a wider operating radius. On X, Zach said same parking lot screenshots taken exactly one hour apart looks like an increase in range of around 100 feet, about 50 feet in either direction. And if you zoom in on the photos and pick a reference point, you can see that with 12.5.4, it encapsulates more area.
Some early videos testing the updated Smart Summon are also showing that it's no longer reversing for forward visibility before moving forward. Instead, it's going straight into drive. Tesla Scope did confirm that this 12.5.4 release with the new Smart Summon is a very small wave including both hardware 3 and hardware 4. On X, TechGeek Tesla also shared that Tesla apparently has fixed the hard braking pedal behavior with actually Smart Summon. I'm sure many of you will remember this braking behavior was so bad the last time around it caused Chris from Dirty Tesla to actually think that his car drove into a curb.
Frida DeWann is an investment analyst at altimeter capital with Brad Gerstner and I'd encourage you to follow her on socials if you're not already. On X, she said after months with FSD12, I've gone past the wow this is magic phase. The analyst and me scrutinizes every disengagement and edge case. But today, I just had one of those tears in my eyes moments. I won't read everything but she said FSD handled a very curvy and windy road nearly to perfection and added that it passed the coffee cup test. Elon reposted that saying it only gets better from here.
I know looking back at this past 3-6 month period it can really feel like FSD has stagnated when it comes to progress ever since they released FSD12 and the end to end neural net. So I just want to put the reminder out there that as with many things Tesla does, it's often times a lot of seemingly nothing for long periods of time and then everything really always happens at once. Additionally, if you go back and look at all of the incremental features that we've got, whether it's Auto Park or the Vision-based monitoring or Smart Summon, the progress may not be as fast as everybody wants but progress is being made.
On X, the official Tesla account shared a video of actually Smart Summon highlighting the new feature and Elon shared that saying you can summon a driverless Tesla from anywhere in the parking lot, rapidly approaching the ability to summon from anywhere at all. However, to keep expectations in check, just a quick reminder that September 3rd of this year, Elon said Tesla actually Smart Summon going to wide release next week. We're now 3 weeks removed from that day and I don't know about you but I still don't have actually Smart Summon. If we go back to the AI roadmap that Tesla released earlier this month, they still need to deliver on Cybertruck FSD and the end to end network on the highway.
In fairness, a lot of these have not yet gone to a wide release so maybe they should only be counting for a half check mark but there's also still one month left in September. And as Sawyer just pointed out, Auto Park for Cybertruck is now going to a bit wider release. Here's a quick video of the new and improved actually Smart Summon from AI driver. The drive is definitely solid but by far my favorite part of the video is the pedestrian reactions. Listen close.
Not perfect yet as evidenced by a different clip from Chuck Cook. It should have continued on and it jammed him in there. I think the learnings that Tesla will get from actually Smart Summon are critical to the future of an actually autonomous future. So we definitely need Tesla to collect as much of this specific data as possible. Keys on X who's been doing an awesome job covering the decast regulations across the EU gave us an update and said it turns out the UK has dropped a last minute proposal to limit FSD supervised to highways and block system initiated maneuvers with hands off driving. Their reasoning is they think there's not enough experience with this technology in the EU. And it's not just the UK but apparently Sweden is now starting to push back against this as well.
尚不完美,正如Chuck Cook的另一段视频所展示的那样。它本该继续行动,但结果却卡住了。我认为特斯拉从实际使用智能召唤中获取的学习对自动驾驶的未来至关重要。因此,我们确实需要特斯拉尽可能多地收集这类具体数据。《X上的关键人物》(Keys on X,他一直在全面报道整个欧盟地区的法规调整)提供了一则最新消息,说英国最后一刻取消了一项将完全自驾(FSD)限制在高速公路上的提议,并阻止系统在手放开方向盘的情况下进行操作。他们的理由是认为欧盟对这项技术的经验还不足。不仅是英国,瑞典现在似乎也开始对这一提议表示反对。
He said, I believe we might still get FSD supervised but don't be surprised if these two countries throw more obstacles in the way. Companies are now scrambling to prepare presentations for the next GRVA meeting to save some common sense in Europe. Certainly nothing is set in stone here but it's looking like a minor speed bump relative to the updates we've been hearing as of late. A Swedish journalist said Norway is installing diesel generators and their electric buses to heat the cabins in the winter. Elon replied saying then the battery packs of the buses are too small. Tesla's can operate well even above the Arctic Circle.
Also buses will not be needed when Tesla rolls out unsupervised FSD as they will take people point to point for a similar cost to a bus ticket. You can go and start looking up the average pricing for bus tickets but it's obviously so region dependent and then length dependent you can take bus trips across the country or you can take them across town.
And if you are hoping for a Tesla bus one day in the future I think this post pours an awful lot of cold water on that idea. The Department of Commerce is proposing a block on the import and sale of cars that rely on Chinese software and this is expected to take effect on new models in 2027. A further ban on Chinese hardware will come into force in 2030. This ban will affect Russian and Chinese technology. It'll block sales of cars including hardware or software designed to connect the cars to the internet including microchips used to receive and transmit information. The proposed ban could also include cars that use Chinese technology for keyless unlocking.
Car makers have already warned swapping out Chinese made software in parts would be challenging. Not that many Chinese companies are currently exporting cars to the US but when it comes to the hardware and the software the scope of this ban is not yet fully known. The ban is focused on features like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular or satellite and officials said these systems are at risk for foreign interference which could lead to disruption and sabotage. Once again throwing around the national security problem. For now this is a proposal and it feels like everything is challenged these days so we'll see how it unfolds.
The financial time shared a new study and the results Toyota, VW and GM have fallen further behind Tesla and Chinese rivals in developing critical software to power their vehicles. The latest ranking of auto groups digital performance from consultancy Gartner shows only three legacy car makers. Four GM and BMW make it into the top 10. The rest are dominated by NIO, X-Pang, BYD from China and Tesla, Rivian and Lucid. This certainly is not new information for this audience but here's the chart if you're interested you can pause if you'd like. A takeaway from the study they said car makers have traditionally relied on in-house engineers for tech and software but they're now being forced to look outside to seek talent from startups as well as big tech like Apple and Google causing culture clashes and internal tensions.
We know all about VW and its software division carry ads problems and now they're talking about Toyota struggling with its internal software unit Woven. Netlases have totaled $888 million the past two years. There's been a major management reshuffle but Toyota said it was still on track to release its new software, Areen, Nextyear and attributed some of the losses to one-off factors. And they said large car makers have so far failed to use their resources efficiently to make the transition to software partly because the top management was not fully committed. It should be noted the scoring system tries to encapsulate each auto maker's ability to actually drive revenue from its software. We know Tesla has developed its operating software in-house over the past decade plus and now an analyst from Goldman Sachs is estimating the cost of developing an operating system for vehicles is at least $11 billion for any car maker. There's a lot of companies touting how many billions of dollars they're going to be earning from subscription and software in the future but the execution of that is going to be much more challenging than they're maybe expecting just like we saw with the actual electric vehicles.
On X Elon said competitors receive vastly more subsidies than SpaceX or Tesla. The success of SpaceX and Tesla is in spite of competitor subsidies. Look at how much was given away for a North American supercharger network to compete against Tesla and it still failed or the massive subsidies to starlink competitors for American rural broadband and they still failed. There are some articles out there about GM's EV sales are taking off and interestingly it looks like GM handed some sales data directly to CNBC. Data that we publicly get quarterly but for some reason this is coming out sooner. They said GM sold nearly 21,000 EVs in the US for July and August almost matching its full second quarter EV sales. GM's EV sales through August were up about 70% compared with one year earlier. GM does currently now have eight Altium EVs available for sale and by the end of the year that number is set to jump to 10. Cox Automotive expects EVs to make up roughly 10% of overall US vehicle sales by the end of the year up from 7.3% in Q1.
GM may finally be on the brink of getting some real EV momentum with Altium but we'll need another couple quarters to confirm. Jeffrey's analyst Philippe Houshois just visited Rivian site in California and he said there's a supplier shortage currently disrupting the Gen 2 production ramp. At recent conferences and in our meeting management discussed issues with a supplier causing a shortage of components for the new enduro motor. The situation continues to fuel internal debate between outsourcing and vertical integration. Between that and limited inventory of Gen 1 and Gen 2 models that could slow deliveries throughout the next few weeks.
Thanks to some consumer protection laws in Quebec the $250 deposit for buying a Tesla is now refundable. Crews just signaled it will return to autonomous driving in California. They've now started remapping the area before they start rides with drivers sometime later this fall. The upcoming supervised testing will include as many as five autonomous vehicles. Their permits for autonomous rides are currently suspended so crews will have to reapply for those when they're ready.
The W is cutting another few hundred jobs in China in their drive to cut costs and Audi will be doing something similar separately. Elon had a recent meeting with Naive Bukhelli the president of El Salvador and Elon on X said we should livestream our next conversation I think people would enjoy hearing it. They toured Gigatexis. Elon called him an amazing leader and Elon said we talked a lot about the nature of reality the future of humanity and how technology like AI and robotics will affect the world.
If you're looking for a laugh today the Cybertruck guy shared this picture of an EV GO DC fast charger in Brentwood, Tennessee. This is one I just have no answers for and he did say the unit is powered on Tesla stock closed the day at $250 exactly up 4.93% meanwhile the NASDAQ was only up 14 basis points. It was a normal volume day for Tesla trading about 10 million shares above the average volume the past 30 days.
Hope you guys have a wonderful day please like the video if you did you can find me on X linked below and a huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters.