Hey everybody Rob Bauer here and today we are going to be talking about some news on Tesla's energy plans in the UK. We've also got updated China insured vehicle numbers, more confounding updates from Toyota those never seem to end, and a few other items as well.
Quickly looking at the stock, Tesla today rallying into close to barely finishing the green up less than a tenth of a percent closing at $269.79 while the NASDAQ was up just over half a percent. Still an underperformance seemed to be less of an impact today from the rebalancing concerns amongst the top stocks in the NASDAQ 100 like we had talked about yesterday, but six of the top seven stocks finishing positive today.
Alright, getting into the news, we'll start off with an update on Tesla Electric which of course we know Tesla has started in Texas, but has said they plan to expand over time. From a job listing noticed by the telegraph, it looks like those plans in the immediate future likely include the UK. The title of the open position according to the job listing is head of operations for Tesla Electric in retail energy based in London, England, and the tasks of the job according to the description will include the responsibility to quote scope and manage build out of all required resources, systems and processes to prepare for commercial launch of a retail electricity product in the UK.
Now of course outside of Texas, this still might seem a little bit familiar for the UK because back in 2020, Tesla had partnered with a company called Octopus Energy for a Tesla specific electric plan that integrated Tesla energy products. So perhaps not too surprising to see Tesla working towards expanding Tesla Electric in the UK where they've got some experience from this past partnership, which did end a few months ago. The update on Octopus Energy's site about Tesla Energy does say that because of current market conditions, Tesla have decided to retire the Tesla energy plan from the UK, which I think makes it pretty clear that was Tesla's decision and was very much a precursor to what we will now see from Tesla on their own.
Alright, next week got another week of data for China insured vehicle numbers, this being the first week in the third quarter, and although I briefly mentioned it yesterday, let's take a quick look as well at the last week of Q2, which was June 26th through July 2nd. Tesla did 17,400 vehicles insured which helped lead to that record quarter in China and overall, but we also talked about how the export number was a little bit lower at around 19,000 vs. 30 to 35,000 from the first couple of months of Q2. So that being said, it gives us a little bit of context for the number that we're seeing here in the first week of July, which was just 3,200 units, the fourth lowest week in the last 3 quarters, and down 82% week over week.
So despite all the talk of unwinding the wave, this looks very much like an artifact of that wave that we've seen so many times, especially on the heels of that lower export number. So maybe still a little bit of a push from Tesla to try to maximize that quarterly number and still unwind the wave, balancing those priorities, or maybe even something as simple as this is when Tesla wanted to schedule ships for for pricing reasons or whatever else, making this in particular a heavier export week. So obviously just one week we'll continue to keep an eye on it as things come in.
Alright, we do have a couple of other quick Tesla updates, but I do want to shift to Toyota for a second because we've got some more interesting news from them. Reuters today with a headline of Toyota targets Europe, China, and Hydrogen Sales Pivot. Now, I have to admit my first reaction to reading this headline was that they were going to focus more on hydrogen in these markets than on battery electric vehicles, but that isn't what this headline is saying. It's not quite that bad.
What they were saying is that for their hydrogen vehicle production efforts, they're going to focus more on distributing those in Europe and China versus North America. In isolation, reasonable enough, and it doesn't sound like this includes any changes to their hydrogen vehicle production plans, which are for 200,000 vehicles by 2030. Their chief technology officer saying, quote, this may be a strange way of putting it, but 200,000 is not a big number. We believe this number and more can be achieved, end quote, but that is still many, many multiples from where they are at today with about 4,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles sold in 2022.
So sure, sell those in Europe, China, wherever I think they said something about it being better infrastructure wise, but if we brought in and out and look at it more holistically across their entire business plan, it very quickly seems to start to conflict and not make a lot of sense with the updates that we have had on their supposed battery breakthroughs within even just the last couple of weeks. We've talked a few times now about Toyota's claims of breakthroughs on solid state batteries. You release similar to claims they made five plus years ago, but even just a few days ago, the president of the Research and Development Center for Carp and Neutrality said that they believe that they can now make a solid state battery with a range of 745 miles that could charge in 10 minutes or less.
And this isn't the only such claim that they've made recently. The question is, if you could actually do that, why would you pursue hydrogen even a little bit for the light vehicle segment when the two main advantages are supposed to be and it's a little bit debatable, but supposed to be refueling time and potentially energy density. So, Toyota actually believed that these breakthroughs that they themselves are talking about, they would have no reason to continue to pursue, continue to put resources into hydrogen, which is already at best extremely questionable against today's battery technology.
To me, it seems very similar to saying that you've got a battery that's going to be able to charge in five minutes in all circumstances, and although you say that, you continue to invest heavily in battery swapping. Like if you actually had that battery, there would be no reason for battery swapping. That seems to be almost exactly what Toyota is doing here. It's just going to be more expensive, less infrastructure, lower economies of scale, probably lower safety, only for a benefit that Toyota is saying that they have already figured out with another technology. So you don't even need my skepticism or anybody else's skepticism on these battery breakthrough announcements from Toyota because you can just look at the company and what they are saying, it shows their own skepticism about their own announcements.
At the beginning, I said this is another confounding update from Toyota, but maybe that's mislabeled because now it's starting to become consistent, and at this point can we say it's in any way surprising? Probably not really. The only real counter argument I can think of here is just to try to continue to develop that technology in hopes that it becomes valuable in other ways, or I guess just kind of as a hedge in case you're wrong about battery progress, which is maybe a little bit more reasonable, but if Toyota was big on hedging when they'd be a little bit further along with battery electric vehicles, which have very obviously been the single biggest risk to their entire business for a decade plus now.
Alright, anyway, let's move on from Toyota and back over to Tesla, and we've got a nice supercharger project to talk about here, Drive Tesla Canada reporting on a new project in Arizona that is going up with 88 superchargers. This will be the biggest supercharger station in the US outside of California and is essentially just across the road from another 36 stall supercharger location. I always think it's impressive to see these supercharging locations and just because we were just talking about hydrogen, this location is probably bigger than any hydrogen fueling station that we'll see in a long time, maybe ever, probably not a completely fair comparison given the difference in turnover time, but even factoring that in you would need what 1520 pumps or something like that at a hydrogen station, and it's kind of tough to imagine that there would be that much demand really at any point, but if I'm wrong on that, let me know.
Alright, last couple of quick things here, we've got some new photos of the Cybertruck testing out in California, so nothing new there, we've seen it plenty of times now, but testing continues, and Elon today tweeting an older photo of the camouflage version as well, so we'll just continue to see more excitement about the Cybertruck and hopefully this is the quarter.
And then today there was also a Wall Street Journal report about some investigations within Tesla about use of glass which had come up as a Bloomberg story maybe, I don't know, nine months ago. It was pretty vague at the time, but there were some questions about a specific glass purchase and the intended use case for it, the Wall Street Journal is saying that maybe it was going to be used for a house for Elon, maybe not, maybe it was like a museum, and they say the intent changed over time, so I don't really think there's many new details in here, but a headline that's getting some attention today, so I don't want to omit it, but at least with the details that we have right now, probably not something that's particularly noteworthy.
And then lastly for today, just a quick look at the calendar, we do have the CPI Consumer Price Index report tomorrow morning before market open, and then the following day we'll have the Producer Price Index or PPI report. Those can always interject some volatility in the markets, but that'll wrap it up for today, so as always, thank you for listening, make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications, you can also find me on Twitter at Tesla Podcast, and we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday, July 12 episode of Tesla Daily.