Welcome to Electrified. Electrified. I'm Telling I'm telling you, I don't revel in others misery, but when you bet against Tesla, eventually you will be sleeping in the bed you make. According to data from S3 Partners, this year Tesla short sellers have lost $12.68 billion in market market losses.
Now yes, coming out of 2022 where they made $15.8 billion they were riding high, but they've so far collectively given back most of those gains. If you'd like to attribute part of Tesla's recent stock rally to short covering things of that nature, be my guess, but I've been around the markets long enough to know that very rarely can you ever pinpoint a stock move to one or even a few different things.
Case in point, you can see the beginning of 2023 Tesla's market cap was $336 billion. Fast forward to today and it's currently hovering around $815 billion. So the question becomes, over the last 6 months or so has Tesla's business model fundamentally changed to the tune of almost $500 billion? The answer of course is clearly no, despite all of the great news we've received. Which of course is just one of the many reasons I am now focused more on time in the market rather than timing the market because I can promise you plenty of people in the Tesla community have missed this run because they just couldn't take the pain of 2022.
But yeah, ultimately betting against a company that's doing so much to make our future brighter and safer, this is where I would say sorry, not sorry. Last night Elon said we built the supercharger network out of desperation since no one else was doing it. And here we are today.
For the first time ever we have a big US city hitting a pretty big electrification milestone. In San Francisco, in March, over 50% of all new vehicles registered were electric. Yes, this includes hybrids. This is the first time a major US city has reached that threshold. That was more than three times that of the United States average, which was 16.6% during March and drilling down into just full B.E.V.s. That number was 34.2% in San Francisco in March, more than the US average in March, that was 7.3%. So back to including hybrids, we have five designated market areas. Verification rates surpassing 30% in March. Those cities include Seattle, San Diego, Portland, Los Angeles and Sacramento, the first two of which exceeded 35%.
Just FYI, historically these DMA's are actually regions where Nielsen's would measure TV ratings and thus they actually have a lot of demographics for these certain cities. Tesla's FSD beta 11.4.3 has been rolling out to a wider audience. But in response to that news, now we have Elon saying 11.4.4 goes out the end of this week. No word yet on if this release will just be bug fixes or something a bit more significant.
What do we have here? Well, the Cybertruck spotted in Palo Alto, California. Of course, first thing you'll notice is the camouflage wrap, but the second thing from this image, it looks like an actual round steering wheel, not the yoke wheel mixture thing we saw last time. When it comes to why Tesla wrapped this vehicle, I really don't know, but what I do know is that Tesla has actually been wrapping vehicles in-house in China now for the last two years or so. That was confirmed on Weibo toward the end of 2020.
If I had to guess, I would say no, at least to start Tesla will not do any in-house wrapping for the Cybertruck. They won't want to deal with the warranties. They won't want to add any manufacturing complexities either. But I do think this looks awesome and is of course free marketing and a reminder for everybody who may not love the look of the stainless steel Cybertruck that, hey, this is going to be a super easy vehicle to wrap.
And there's a reason I said Tesla is not trying to hide this vehicle. That's because they chose to drive it through an in-and-out in Mountain View, California. And if you're looking at the light bar on the front and thinking it looks a little weird, just remember when it comes to pixels and cameras and refresh rates, that will look like that when it's captured by a camera, not necessarily in real life. And notice the only people standing around are doing what? Taking pictures free marketing. Replying to that video, Elon said it's a tradition. So yeah, maybe this is very close to the final variant of the production version we'll eventually see.
If any of you have experience wrapping a vehicle, let me know if you would plan to wrap a Cybertruck. I've never done it and would love to hear some real world feedback. Example are peeling concerns valid living in a snowy wet, dreary climate.
We hear a lot about how the top engineers after college want to work at Tesla and SpaceX. Well, Tesla's been busy actually going and getting some talent before they even get to college. Tesla just had signing day at Gigatexas. The manufacturing development program prepares graduating high school students to start successful manufacturing careers at Tesla. Tesla Korea tweeted out the first domestic deliveries of the Model S and X begin on June 16th.
Elon is set to meet again with the French President Emmanuel Macron after they just met on May 15th. Topics, factories and tech regulation. As well as AI, social media, regulation framework, perhaps around FSD, and of course cars and batteries. Macron said I'm going into that meeting with an agenda. Get in line buddy. The French Minister of Digital Affairs said France has already invested in an entire sector of electric batteries, noting four Gigafactory projects committed for the Northern region, saying it'll be great to have a Tesla factory in France. There's been a lot of effort and energy to make sure this is possible and this can happen. The truth is France was recruiting Elon and Tesla before Tesla even chose Gigabralin, so this is really just more of the same.
Reuters just mentioned a factory which leaves the door open for a megapack factory, but CNBC did go as far as mentioning a Gigafactory which would imply both cars and batteries. The lovely Tesla boomer mama said of France, having lived there most of my adult life 24 years, I know the mentality, bureaucracy, labor unions, employment laws, this is mission impossible. She is not in favor of a Gigafactory in France. What say you?
Rizedad Energy is projecting a battery energy storage deployments to surpass 400 gigawatt hours per year by 2030 10x the current rate. Global best capacity additions were up 60% in 2022 compared to 2021. Total new installations in 2022 were 43 gigawatt hours. Another 74 gigawatt hours is expected to be added in 2023, up 72%. Here's a bar chart showing that growth. This of course in gigawatts which is the power, not the capacity which is gigawatt hours. Another way though you can see the breakdown in terms of country, Asia expected to lead the way by a large margin with North America trailing in second. Of course Tesla megapack will be a major driver of this growth over the next decade plus.
A big driver behind this growth, yes lower battery costs but the Inflation Reduction Act incentives. I really think this legislation will go down in history if it can stay in place for at least the next 5-10 years as really changing what America looks like from a manufacturing standpoint. Tech AU is reporting that we now have 10 cars in Australia with Tesla's FSD Beta up from 2 the last time we heard, not yet in consumers hands just for employee testing. According to Tesla Fi we now have the Model 3, Model Y and Model S all testing FSD Beta in Australia. The price for the base Model Y all wheel drive went up $250, no changes to the other two variants. As you can see that variant is still down 5% from where it began the year. Also for the base Model Y only right now you cannot choose the white seats, it's only black. Is this temporary? Hopefully maybe it's a shortage, maybe it's Tesla trying to encourage people into higher trim levels for a period of time, only time will tell.
We have Goshen who's parent company has direct ties to the CCP looking to set up shop for some battery factories in Michigan, they just got the green light. There's a lot of local opposition to this but if it goes through Goshen is planning to spend about $2.4 billion for two separate battery factories. And yes as you would imagine taxpayer funding is in the mix. GM and Samsung just announced a new $3 billion battery factory in Indiana. This is now GM's 4th joint venture in North America, the 3 other ones are with LG, 2 of them are still in the works but the one in Ohio is now building cells. This new facility with Samsung will build nickel rich prismatic and cylindrical cells and should have a 30 gigawatt hour capacity when it's done. Construction is expected to begin in the next 12 months. I would just say 4 joint ventures each of which is supposed to be around 30 gigawatt hours, that's a lot of batteries for a company that isn't really selling that many EVs yet and can't possibly have that much anticipated expected demand. Point being GM better bring it with this first wave of Altium electric vehicles because if it doesn't it's going to run into an oversupply of batteries sooner rather than later.
Today Ford has opened its new EV production center in Cologne Germany that's been undergoing a $2 billion renovation. First, this facility will produce Ford's new all-electric Explorer that's only for Europe, next will be a sports crossover and once this factory is ramped they're looking at about 250,000 EVs per year.
After its 90% stock collapse since prior highs, Rivian is going to be removed from the NASDAQ index by June 20th. It's waiting in the index has fell below the threshold for 2 consecutive months so it's getting the boot.
This insider wrote an article about a road trip with the Toyota BZ4X basically saying it wasn't great charging experience was poor to which Elon said they should join the NAS coalition. And if you go to EV stations Tesla NAS charger adoption tracker and scroll down you can actually sort by the date announced to see the most recent announcements and today we had to one from email xway and another from Enviro spark joining the NAS coalition.
Replying to a chart shared by Genevieve showing how the money supply has really contracted since 2020 Elon warned deflation is coming. Remember you have inflation prices going up you have disinflation prices still going up but the rate has slowed and then deflation is actually prices going down for my visual learners here it is.
And yes Elon has thus been added to the prediction tracker I will be hanging out with Herbert from brighter here sometime soon so be sure to check out his channel for that one. You can find me on twitter at dillilumus22 hope you guys have a wonderful day.