Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis.
So real quick, I do just want to touch on what happened on Friday, this FSD beta drive with Ross Gerber and Dan O'Doud, where we had this stop sign situation at the end of the day so it doesn't get out of control.
It was really just a takeover, and I'm telling you right now, NHTSA is well aware that takeovers are a normal thing for FSD beta in its current state.
And yes, it's a shame that it happened with Dan O'Doud, but there's a reason so many people told Ross not to do this.
Dan O'Doud is not trying to understand the system, he's trying to get a video just like that so he can smear Tesla and their FSD beta, because remember he has a directly competing company, Green Hill Software.
The most likely outcome here is unfortunately that clip is going to circulate through the news for another few weeks, but then most likely things will proceed as normal.
And shout out to Alexandra, her husband and Nikhil, because they went back to that very same intersection and did multiple tests.
Long story short, under 35 miles per hour, FSD beta handled it fine, stopping at the stop sign. It's at 35 miles per hour or above when it's just too fast and Tesla FSD would stop in the middle of the intersection.
And just to show you, here's one of those videos where they set FSD beta to 30 miles per hour and watch how it behaved at the same stop sign.
And now it should stop. See stop sign, it will stop. Okay, 30 was good. But it didn't see the warning sign. It didn't show the warning sign. It didn't react to the warning sign. And it didn't see it, it didn't show it on the screen.
It feels like a good time to remind everybody, just because Tesla may not visualize something like a stop sign warning sign on the screen, does not necessarily mean that the car didn't see it, it just might not put it on the visualization yet.
And here's just one last time in slow motion, a little bit zoomed in, make sure you watch the blue circle right here showing FSD's engaged, and you can see the speed he's going so you can draw your own conclusions.
Over the weekend, we got a lot of new really good footage of the latest version of the Cybertruck. So I'm going to put together all the footage, let you watch it. And on the screen, I'll show you what to be looking for during those clips.
And remember, although the Cybertruck we see continually looks better and better, this is still not an official production version.
And just so everybody's on the same page, what rear wheel steering actually is, at higher speeds, the back wheels will turn the same way as the front wheels for better cornering and handling around turns. Then at lower speeds, the back wheels will actually turn counter phase or the opposite way of the front wheels to make the turning radius much better, which of course makes navigating tight spaces or U turns a lot easier.
Yeah fingers Middle loved cars are Toes.
So If I missed anything with the pop ups for the features that we were looking for, one thing I am going to be watching for going forward, hopefully we start seeing more of these pull through supercharger locations for people with the Cybertruck that plan to tow trailers and other things.
It's just going to make the experience that much better.
I feel like every supercharging location should have at least one.
On the charging port of the Cybertruck, I know a lot of people are concerned with the location, but look, I'm sure there's a reason they chose to put it there and not in the stainless steel.
And I would also add, they've been testing it worldwide in the snow and the cold weather, so they put it through the paces.
And sadly, we can't really tell if it's going to be that 500V configuration port or the 1000V configuration because they look nearly identical from the outside of the vehicle.
But of course, based on everything we've heard, we should be expecting the 1000V configuration for the NACS in the Cybertruck.
Shifting gears to Project Thailand, we have Chris Zhang saying, Tesla China's Model 3 inventory has been sold out. We'll see what happens.
And going to the Tesla China webpage, looking for a new inventory, this is what we see.
We also have Wu Wao saying, according to several Chinese media sources, the new Model 3 will be confirmed for release next month. Mass production will officially start in September and will launch volume deliveries in 2024.
I would just be very careful with this one for Tesla to come out and say and confirm in any way that they're going to start production of a next gen vehicle about a month in advance. That would lead to an Osborne effect. So unless this is a rumor that's leaked from somewhere, I would just be skeptical with this reporting. It may turn out to be true, but let's just wait and see.
We have Zhao Fan Li on YouTube sharing a shock's recent presentation at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference 2023. Our team has shipped the full self-driving Vida software to everyone who has purchased it in the United States and Canada. There's roughly 400,000 vehicles and today they have driven up to 250 million miles on FSD Vida. For context, the last update we got on Tesla's FSD Beta was that by the end of around March this year, it had traveled around 130 million miles. Now all of a sudden, we're up to 250 million miles. So think about that. It took Tesla's FSD Beta two years from March 2021 to March 2023 to travel about 130 million miles. Then in the last two and a half months, we've added another over 100 million miles.
And similar on the right side, driving straight and then someone just comes in and cuts us off. It's quite dangerous, but then the system up right away early. The reason why this is different than what you would think that AB systems have been there for since 1980 is what is new about this. I think Tesla is the first component to ship this emergency braking for crossing vehicles to the best of my knowledge. And the reason that crossing objects are harder, unlike vehicles that are in your own lane, is because for crossing objects, you need to know whether they're going to stop in time or not. What are the stop line? Do they have traffic lights?
And if they were to turn, which lanes would they turn into? There's a ton of work that needs to happen to understand where the crossing objects would go and likely to go. Do they have room to stop? It's not as simple as just directing a vehicle and having their velocities and things like those. Yeah. Like I said, I believe Tesla is the first company to ship crossing AB. And it's already in customer's hands in the last several months.
Dojo is our training hardware that we have custom built at Tesla that is starting production next month, essentially. And with that, we think we are on the way to become one of the top compute platforms in the entire world. And we also think that in order to train these foundational models for vision, we need a lot of compute and not just train, compute for training this one model, but compute to try a lot of different experiments to see which models actually work well. And that's why it's super exciting for us to, you know, be in this spot where compute is going to be abundant and it's just going to be modeled by ideas of engineers.
And the part is just this is not just being built for the car, but also for the robot. We already have the occupancy networks, for example, and other few other networks all shared between the car and the robot and actually works quite well and generalizes across these platforms. And we want to extend it to all the tasks that we have. You know, like lanes and vehicles, for example, should not be specific to cars. If the robot say happens to walk to the road and looks around, which should understand roads and vehicles and how vehicles move, etc., all of this are just be built for what the platforms and you know, any other future robotics platform that would also need this. Pretty cool stuff. I'll have the full presentation below.
I do think it's important to note on a few different occasions, Elon has thrown out a number of miles that may be needed for that real world driving for regulatory approval globally. Of course, it's going to vary region to region, but it's always been in the billions. Many times he's been talking about autopilot miles, which we need to distinguish between FSD beta miles, but with FSD beta at 250 million approaching that one billion mark. And we can see how things are accelerating quickly.
He's also talked about a six billion mile number, which was in master plan part two. And that had to do with autopilot miles. And March of last year, he also threw out a 10 plus billion miles of vehicle data number. So again, is he talking about FSD beta or autopilot? It's not always clear. But again, they're just guesses and assumptions. So once FSD beta mileage gets over that one billion mile mark, then things could get a little interesting. And one more from summer of last year, billions of miles of training data.
And as Tasha and Ark invest just said, according to their research, they think Tesla's FSD beta is doing 1 million miles every 14 hours. Doing the math at this pace of a million miles every day, that's 583 days to go from zero to one billion FSD beta miles. We get some reporting from some Chinese sources. So there may be some things lost in translation, but the main takeaway is they're now expecting Gigat Mexico up and running in quarter one of 2025. Let's be careful with this one.
But they said Tesla previously underestimated the difficulty of building a factory in Mexico. And look, it's true. We thought we would have seen the groundbreaking at Gigat Mexico sometime this month. And as far as we can tell, nothing has started yet. As we heard last week, it's being reported again that Tesla is still applying the pressure to its Chinese suppliers to set up shop in Mexico and to do so before 2025 or else.
And this is coming from the perspective of Tesla's suppliers. They're saying that Tesla's purchase price buying these supplier components in Mexico is about 18 to 20% higher than in China. The cost to make those components is only about 15% higher than in China. Meaning Tesla's suppliers in China may actually make a few extra basis points of margin operating for Tesla in Mexico than in China. Although Tesla's suppliers on the product side in Mexico may have slightly higher margins, they also have some drawbacks to setting up shop in Mexico.
Things like the average labor rate being slightly higher in Mexico compared to China and the proficiency of industrial workers may not be as good as those in China, plus things like higher overtime pay in Mexico. And some other suppliers in China that have tried to expand their business in Mexico have ran into problems with the local transportation, not finding enough trucks and being forced to ship products by air. All of that to say though, it sounds like most of Tesla's Chinese suppliers are already on board to set up shop in Mexico, citing the growth of Tesla's Mexican factory is predictable and unprecedented. One of the suppliers though that may be holding things up for Tesla, Ning-D times they've apparently given up their plans to build a factory in Mexico, instead they're negotiating a licensing deal with Tesla in the United States.
Last week we saw Texas become the first state to require charging companies to include Tesla's Nax connector to get those federal funds that are now flowing through the state to divvy out. Well, second up on the list, now we have Washington State doing the same thing. The state plans to begin the request for proposals process in the fall.
LG Chem said today it started mass production of a next-gen high nickel cathode material made with a single crystal structure. The first output of these single crystal cathodes is said to start in July. LG has said these single crystal cathodes increase energy density in the battery, eventually making an EV perform better by more than 10%. Most importantly, just something to keep in mind, these single crystal cathodes will be used in pouch and cylindrical cells, including the next generation 4680 batteries.
LG Chem今天宣布开始大量生产采用单晶结构制造的下一代高镍正极材料。据称,这些单晶正极的首批产量将从7月开始。LG表示,这些单晶正极可以提高电池的能量密度,最终让电动汽车性能提高超过10%。更重要的是,需要注意的是,这些单晶正极将用于袋式和圆柱形电池,包括下一代4680电池。
Aston Martin and Lucid have agreed to a deal. Aston Martin will give Lucid a 3.7% stake in their company, in return they'll get access to Lucid's high performance tech. Between the cash and the shares that Lucid will get, it's about $232 million of compensation. Aston Martin is planning its first EV in 2025 and it sounds like they'll be using Lucid's electric powertrains and battery systems.
There was a media event for GM's Chevy Silverado. Two main news items, one they have scrapped the $40,000 price tag for their entry level Silverado EV. And they don't expect to have Tesla's Nax charger on a Silverado EV until 2025. It's just going to be an adapter sometime early in 2024. Now impressively, the Chevy Silverado 4WT, the work truck that sadly is only for fleet customers of GM that starts at about $78,000 will have 450 miles of range and Kyle from out of spec is estimating it has around a 210kWh pack.
通用公司举行了雪佛兰Silverado的媒体活动。主要有两个新闻,其中一个是他们放弃了入门级Silverado EV的40,000美元价格标签。另一个是他们预计直到2025年才会在Silverado EV上使用特斯拉的Nax充电器,到2024年初才会推出适配器。令人印象深刻的是,仅适用于通用公司客户的工作卡车Chevy Silverado 4WT,起价约为78,000美元,将具有450英里的续航里程,而来自Out of Spec的Kyle估计其电池组容量约为210kWh。
And this is what I've been curious to see how it's going to unfold. When all of these other companies implement Nax charging, are they going to have their own branded chargers using the Nax or will they somehow be working with Tesla for actual Tesla branded supercharger locations.
GM is saying they're considering installing Tesla compatible Nax chargers at dealerships. Those new GM chargers are likely to carry the Altium Charge 360 brand. So the big question becomes what type of quality control will these GM and Ford and all of the other third party charging stations using Nax actually have. And will the plug and charge experience for Tesla owners at these other sites be as seamless as it is at a supercharger? We'll see.
Because yes, GM also said it has an opportunity to partner with Tesla in developing future locations for EV chargers. GM and Element 25 just signed a deal for a $290 million facility in Louisiana to produce battery grade manganese sulfate production expected 2025. Element 25 plans to use manganese concentrate mined in Australia. Of the total project amount, GM is giving a loan of $85 million. Honestly though, good for GM, this is expected to be the first plan in the United States to produce battery grade manganese sulfate. And for the future of LFP tech and LFP tech, this of course is a great thing.
We've talked in the past about how there will be consolidation in the Chinese EV market, not all companies that we're playing in that space are going to succeed ultimately. Ford's EV sales have flopped in the market, they're completely rethinking their China strategy, VW has yet to have a model rank among the top 10 best selling EVs. And NIO's declining sales this year have dropped their margins for new cars to 5% in the first quarter compared to 18% last year. Now NIO's CEO is saying they don't expect to break even until at least the end of 2024 after cutting prices by over $4,000 earlier this month. That from the company that said they wouldn't cut prices in response to Tesla not giving into the price war as well a couple weeks later and they did exactly what they said they wouldn't.
You can find me on Twitter at dillandlumis22. Hope you guys have a wonderful day. Please like the video if you did and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.