Hey everybody Rob Bauer here and today we're going to be talking about the November FOMC meeting, the results from that and obviously the impact on the stock today. We've also got an update on Q3, Tesla sales in California, China sales as well and a few other items to go through.
Alright, looking at the stock, Tesla up 2.4% today, nice day closing at $205.66. The market's really strong today as well, the NASDAQ finishing up 1.6%, rising about 1% after the FOMC meeting started today. So we'll start off there, obviously that's probably the biggest driver of the results today. But one quick thing before we get in that is Ron Barron commented this morning as he tends to do on Tesla and SpaceX. Never hurts the stock I don't think, of course stuff that we've heard before but he reiterated that Tesla, he views Tesla's valuation as possibly hitting $4 trillion in the future, also noting that SpaceX has the chance to be even bigger. So always good to hear from Ron Barron, he was on market watch this morning to share some of those thoughts. So that may have impacted Tesla a bit but as we can see throughout the day, performance, I think the FOMC meeting a bigger driver.
So with the FOMC statement that came out a couple hours before market closed, that didn't have as much of an impact as the commentary afterward. As we can see here, not many changes in the language, I know I'm covering that a bit. Here's the old statement from September, here's the new one from today. So they just updated the language here saying, you know, expanding at a solid pace to expanded at a strong pace in the third quarter, referencing the GDP growth that we had seen, the preliminary GDP growth that we had seen earlier. And they also added that job gains have moderated since earlier in the year, but remains strong. Previously, that just said that job gains have slowed in recent months but remains strong. So again, pretty similar language, not anything too major. We added financial to tighter credit conditions, so tighter financial and credit conditions, noted in that second paragraph. So nothing too major.
Again, mostly what we heard from the call or from the conference afterwards, these were kind of my notes from there. As we expected going into it, I don't think we heard too much news. So I don't think there was one thing that we can go through on pinpoints. Okay, you know, although the market's pretty clearly, you know, rose here at a specific point in time listening to it. I don't think there was a specific moment or specific comment that did this. I think probably just commentary throughout.
So looking at the notes here, Powell said that they are not confident yet that they have achieved a sufficiently restrictive stance, but also not confident that we haven't. So again, just continuing to kind of pause right now and see where things go said that they're looking for persistent material changes. They've been pleased with some of the data that they've been seeing so far with inflation figures starting to come down, particularly the core PCE he noted for the third quarter came coming down six tenths of a percent. But he said financial conditions have clearly tightened. We just don't know how persistent that will be. So that's in essence why they have paused. Again, nothing. I don't think too surprising there. Maybe if I had to pick one comment that I could point to you that, you know, read a little bit more, um, dovish for inflation rates or for interest rates would be him saying that they are getting reports from housing that the effect of increased rates could be quite significant and that they're starting to see slowdown in that sector that's been a little bit stickier, particularly with rents, particularly how that gets reported in some of the inflation data. But they he did note pretty clearly here that they're starting to see that change a little bit. So that's probably a positive in terms of expectations. He did say that they're not thinking about rate cuts at all. Pretty standard, you know, language there from him. Haven't made a decision for December. Not difficult to raise again after a long pause. So like we had talked about yesterday, I don't think anything too surprising coming out of that. But nevertheless, the FedWatch tool here from the, uh, from CME group does show expectations for continuation of the pause in December, increasing a little bit. So, you know, 70% previously now up to an 80% expectation for that pause. And then you're kind of seeing a similar shift in future meetings as well in terms of expectations, maybe about a 10% increase in those expectations for pauses or, um, future rate cuts, uh, when those, you know, maybe appropriate. So again, I think mostly just kind of getting through the meeting without any surprises is, is probably welcome news, uh, for the market.
All right. So getting into Tesla stuff, we don't have a ton today, but Subaru did announce that they are going to be adopting the North American charging standard or NACS. So they'll be joining the supercharging network in 2025. They also do talk about offering an adapter at that point as well, not that they're a huge EV player, but they have done some development work with Toyota. So shortly following the Toyota announcement, not too surprising to see Subaru join as well. But you know, limited impact on, on that.
And then just a quick one here, Tesla's increased the price of the solid black paint, particularly for the model Y for some reason, by $500. So previously it was $1,500. They've bumped that up to 2000. This used to be the free base color. So I guess if you had black at that point, welcome news that this is now a more expensive color, but maybe that'll help Tesla's margins a little bit. If they find this is one of the more popular colors, and maybe there's a little bit less pricey elasticity on it, um, could boost things a little bit.
And then we also got an interesting video here from Joe Taggmeyer from his Joan Flyover video of Gigataxis today showing the Cybertruck doing some driving around, maybe a little bit of testing kind of seems to be doing something that would be akin to a crab walk that we've seen in vehicles like the Hummer, the EV Hummer. You can kind of see the frame of the vehicle covered it up there, but you can kind of see the frame of the vehicle seems to not be exactly straight as the vehicle's driving forward, which would mean that both of the, um, both the front and the rear axle tires are facing the same direction causing the vehicle to look like that. And that could be referred to as a crab walk. So it's not the most highly angled version of what we've seen with this. So it's a little bit unclear if this is going to be a feature that that Tesla offers with this, but since we know that the rear wheels are capable of doing that, it wouldn't be too surprising to see that be a feature. So maybe Tesla doing a little bit of testing there from Joe's video. So nice to see that.
And then we also got some news once that goes away that Tesla has been granted 100% for an ownership in Malaysia, as well as Starlink at the same time. So good news for Tesla there. We talked maybe a couple months ago now about Tesla setting up that entity. So they have just now confirmed that they'll have 100% for an ownership of that. So good news there for Tesla in Malaysia.
All right, then we've also got updated Q three California EV sales or total automotive sales as well. But particularly interesting here, if we look at Tesla's third quarter sales, that's this column here, you can ignore the highlighting. That's something that they put on the document. But for Tesla in the third quarter, 60,000 vehicles sold according to data from Experian for Q two, though, this was actually 69,000. So Q two was the first time Tesla had surpassed Toyota to become the highest volume manufacturer or the highest volume seller in California. Unfortunately, we saw that drop down this quarter. You can see Toyota here at 70,000 Tesla at 60,000. So would have loved to have seen that continue. Tesla's market share figure actually dropped a little bit too. If we look at the year to date number, so in Q two, that was 13.6% versus the annual or sorry, versus the US total at 4.3. And then here, you can see Tesla down at 13 and a half percent again, the total US figure holding study there. So a little bit disappointing of a quarter there. Again, just one state here for California, a big, big portion of Tesla sales though, as we can see. And we saw about a 13% decline there, quarter over quarter. Now we know Tesla had downtime. We don't know how impactful that was to Fremont, which would probably be the most relevant for Tesla sales in California, obviously. We know there was downtime at Kiga Texas though. So Model Y production from there certainly could have played a role in this figure. But most of the downtime seem to be related to things like Project Thailand and at Kiga Texas. We'll see hopefully this will bounce back a little bit more in Q4 when we have hopefully less of an impact of those things. Maybe give us a little bit clearer picture and fingers crossed. Hopefully Tesla can jump back above Toyota for that top spot in California.
And then meant to cover this yesterday, but we did get updated China insured vehicle numbers for the week. So October 23 through 29th, 10,800 vehicles registered a nice increase from the prior weeks, as we can see in the chart, getting back to a more normal type of range for Tesla at this point in the quarter. And of course, we're now starting to see Highland Model 3s delivered. It was about 2300 of these that were highland. So you can kind of see pretty consistent figures there for just Model Y around that 8,000 level now starting to get Highland added in. And I would expect that as we get next week's data, that will increase again. So exciting to see those begin.
And then just a quick note for anyone that happens to be in Illinois, Illinois has now opened a program for EV rebates. So it's up to you, or I guess it is a $4,000 rebate for EVs, $1,500 rebate for electric motorcycles. There is $12 million of funding for this. So only 3,000 rebates. It sounds like they are kind of taking these on a first come first serve basis. They do say that there will be a priority given to low income purchasers if this starts to run low. So I'm not sure exactly how they handle that priority. It's not 100% clear. Outside of that, though, there don't seem to be any really relevant restrictions that would exclude Tesla vehicles. So nice boost there for Illinois.
And then the last couple of things just wanted to highlight a transcript that has been posted by the verge of the recent X all hands meeting. So we've seen a couple of paragraphs about that come out so far talking about some different features that X would add. But really interesting. I actually linked this in the show notes today because I think it was just a great read. And it's not all that relevant to Tesla. I've highlighted here one piece that is they're talking about the Twitter for you or sorry for the X for you feed being determined less on heuristics more off of neural networks, similar to what Tesla has done with self driving. Elon said that they are now calling this version rodeo. So just kind of interesting fun fact there.
So that was really only the kind of the only Tesla related stuff. But again, I would just recommend reading through this. It gives a lot of insight into what's going on at X. It does a way better job of that than any media coverage or anything that you might actually see on X itself. It just gives a really robust and holistic view of what they've accomplished so far and where they're going, which although may not be directly relevant to Tesla, we have seen the impact that that relationship can have. So I still think important to understand.
And then this I just thought was an interesting note to highlight. And I talked about how someone had asked her, you know, what is one thing that people at X should stop doing next year? What is one thing they should start? She said something to stop is kind of just stop paying attention to the noise, right? Stop paying attention to what people around you are saying about the company and things like that, which you could interpret as like, you know, trying to put a filter there, but really just trying to avoid the noise, keep your head down focused on what the team is building. They can see it internally. They can understand what is actually happening. And there's so much there to be excited about. So really just focusing on that. And I think that is, you know, it's been a difficult period, I think with Tesla stock. And although this isn't talking about that specifically, I just think it's a good thing to remember like in general, try to ignore the noise a little bit, try to focus on, you know, long term vision where things are heading long term. And there's a lot there to still be excited about with the company. So again, would recommend reading that.
And then lastly, somebody noticed on X that X AI has filed a couple of trademarks for a couple of presumed products. One is called Grock and one is called prompt ID. So seeing some progress there, obviously just very early stage stuff from X AI, but hopefully we'll hear more about that soon.
All right, that'll wrap it up for today then. So as always, thank you for listening. Make sure you subscribe and sign up for notifications. You can also find me on X at Tesla podcast. And we'll see you tomorrow for the Thursday, November 2 episode of Tesla daily. Thank you.