Hey everybody Rob Bauer here and today we've got some exciting updates on the cyber truck. We'll also talk a little bit about a special investigation from Reuters. We've got some auto wiper updates which would be nice to see and a few other items as well.
Alright looking at the stock, tough day in the market, tough day for Tesla, Tesla down 3.9% today closing at $247.14. You can see the drop a little bit after noon today and similar drop in the NASDAQ around that time as well. Tesla had started to underperform a bit before that but you know in general, tougher close to the market today. Not sure exactly what drove that. If you know NAS thoughts on that definitely feel free to share those in the comments today but we'll see if things improve tomorrow.
Alright we do have some exciting news though for the cyber truck. It looks like real or normal or however you want to define it cyber truck deliveries have started to begin the test browser channel on YouTube publishing a video of a first delivery here to presumably regular customer. I think Zach and Ella are their names here and just great to see how much fun they're having driving the cyber truck around off the lot today. So exciting for them, exciting for all of us as well.
With of course this being you know only three weeks or so after the first delivery event which of course is going to generally be going to you know early supporters of the company, people that maybe have close ties to the company as well. And then maybe employees is kind of what we sort of would normally expect. So for this to be extended now to just general regular customers is is extremely exciting in terms of the prospect for where that is where that reflects Tesla's ramp being.
With the product this complex and with the sort of delays that we have seen it wouldn't have been very surprising to see Tesla do sort of a sort of a ceremonial delivery event and then wait a little bit longer for really deliveries to ramp up from that point. Now that we are seeing these go to again regular customers though I think that's a just that the ramp should be progressing probably pretty quickly which is exciting.
So just in terms of how that reflects on the ramp it's I think it's exciting and hopefully we'll be getting you know first impressions from drivers like this of the cyber truck to outside of just the handful of reviews that we've got so far. So definitely exciting to see that we also have Ryan Torres on Instagram that also shared a post looks like they took delivery of a cyber truck as well they've got a truck loaded dogs back there and they tagged their VIN number four for eight here as well. So again a couple of reports of this happening today.
Also in good signs we saw another update from Joe Tagmire as we've been seeing so frequently lately of lots full of cyber trucks at Giga Texas which again hopefully reflects pretty positively on the ramp in general. Now like I said we could have been seeing a ceremony or ramp I think we got a little bit of clarity just from the sort of access that Tesla gave at the actual delivery event to the production facility what we have seen since then was Sandy Monroe touring the factory it really does seem like Tesla's got this ready to go so you know this is another encouraging sign of that as well.
All right and then also on the cyber truck today we've got some complementary words being shared by Italian designer Georgecho I knew I was gonna mess this up. Georgecho Giudjaro something around there not my forte but this is the designer of the DeLorean. So probably not terribly surprising that he has complementary words about the cyber truck but today he called it the Picasso of automobiles. Notice noted that the similarities with Picasso were that he was the artist of decomposition of reality and felt that the cyber truck also sort of embodied that completely destroying all expectations of how a pickup truck should look when it obviously looks like the cyber truck. So some very complementary words being shared there said quote it will be hugely successful because people want to stand out it does not represent the search for harmony and perfection but for emotion and robustness and also added quote I give Elon Musk credit for having courage and understanding people's designer desire to stand out.
So of course Franz today also shared his thoughts on this he says words from a legend a childhood hero and a continued source of inspiration so nice to see that for the Tesla design team for Elon the whole crew. Very exciting praise there.
All right and then the other sort of related update we've got here make sure I didn't miss one there. I guess not related here but the next update we've got is on auto wipers with autopilot or FSD. This has been a source of frustration I think for many people for a long time. It can be a little bit annoying at times Robert Skobull today noting that the neural network that runs the windshield wipers on my Tesla just had a major update six years after my buying the car wipers are way better today thanks to AI. Elon commented on this and said true.
So like we talked about with the release of FSD beta whatever dot version we're on these days with the release of that this wasn't a particular release note but like we had talked about sometimes there are things in there that Tesla doesn't call out in the release notes and from Elon's comment here this seems to be one of those items. So I haven't had a chance to test this personally I saw a few people on X saying that this was improved hopefully that's the case. We'll wait to hear a little bit more feedback on that but I think a very exciting update for many people if that is true and then in addition to this it sounds like also I've not confirmed this but it sounds like you can now actually turn off auto wipers on autopilot or on FSD which previously had not been the case.
So I think that would be a welcome change for people that still aren't finding this to be exactly what they're liking but hopefully the need for that would be reduced with this update. So let me know your thoughts on that if you are seeing any difference in your vehicle.
Next we've got a new credit partnership for Tesla. Tesla's partnered with Origins which is a credit union services company essentially so they help you know link companies with credit unions. The largest or the leading credit union lending technology company they say has announced a partnership with Tesla to offer credit union financing for Tesla buyers directly via the Tesla website. So they say that this partnership will provide more options through credit union financing. So hopefully that ultimately leads to lower rates more affordable payments for Tesla customers and it sounds like that will be integrated directly into the checkout process on Tesla's site. Anything that you know helps bring those payments down obviously welcome especially during this period of time. So we'll see how that integration goes let's keep an eye on there.
And then today a lot of headlines around a Reuters investigation so we tend to see these from times of time relating to Tesla. This one I think the simplest way to summarize this for people that didn't get a chance to read this today would be to say that Reuters you know got their hands on years of Tesla service records and really just did their best to pick out whatever could be you know maximally sensationalized as kind of how I would put it. So we can even see that in the headline Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts that knew a long new word effective.
The use of defective here I think if you read through the whole article is their interpretation of Tesla service discussions or engineering discussions around how to make things better right. Of course there are going to be points of failure of course those points of failure are going to vary in frequency those that are more frequent Tesla is going to spend more time discussing they're going to put action plans into place to improve that product that's Tesla's whole MO is continual iteration and improvement.
So if there are parts that are you know more frequent points of failure of course those are going to be discussed and you know tried to there's going to be efforts made to improve those over time. So that's certainly not how Reuters is framing it that is my assessment having read through the article and of course like I said maximally sensationalize it so as they tend to do like we have seen with things about autopilot before they'll pick out you know from they say you know tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures I mean yeah Tesla's got millions and millions of cars on the road now so of course there's going to be tens of thousands of customers that have some sort of an issue with the vehicle and that is completely to be expected just percentage wise it's the automotive business this stuff is is part of the business so that's completely to be expected they say the automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicles abuse but Tesla documents show to track the chronic flaws and failures for years so again of course they're going to track points of failure that would be almost malpractice if they weren't doing that and then they try to frame it as though Tesla is just ignoring customers not paying for any fixes or things like that but in their very own article they talk about how two-thirds of these parts they were highlighting they highlighted a number of different areas but two-thirds of this specifically were replaced under warranty for that example they say Tesla paid for most of the 120,000 vehicles repaired under warranty in this example so they try to present it as though Tesla is making the customers liable for these you know defective quote-unquote parts while still sort of sliding in there that Tesla is covering the majority of these under warranty so I just found it to be a little bit you know misleading I guess to be kind
Here's another case where we actually get some statistics from Tesla's perspective from a case with the a part of the suspension Tesla said that the occurrence of such failures in China where they were actually forced to do a recall that we had talked about on one of these parts was approximately 0.1 percent and elsewhere outside of China less than 0.05 percent so exceedingly rare nitzas looked into this has not requested Tesla to do a recall in this part yet again just one of the parts that they're talking about in this report and as we know nitza of course no stranger to working with Tesla no stranger to putting some pressure on Tesla to issue recalls like we have just seen earlier this week on areas that they feel are unnecessary so again I think it's really just writers got their hands on some some service records from a number of years looked in there to find what they could sensationalize the most of course they pick out very specific antidotes from individuals that perhaps happen to be the least unlucky or were the least well taken care of in terms of service certainly there are going to be issues right no company is perfect I'm sure there are customers that have had a poor experience with Tesla that probably have not been treated fairly and obviously you want that to be zero and work towards getting that as close to zero as possible but we again we have millions of customers an organization with hundreds of thousands of people I think sometimes things like that are expected to happen so without nitza or without writers here being willing to share kind of the full set of data that they have which you know they'd have to anonymize and things like that but unless they're going to present it in a way like that I think it's difficult to to put much weight in in an article or in a quote unquote investigation like they have said here so feel free to read through that and and form your own opinion but that was kind of mine after spending some time working through it all
right next up we got a report from Bloomberg talking about employee compensation so it reads that Tesla managers told some salary employees that the company isn't offering merit-based equity awards this year the company didn't give a reason for the change but four employees from different departments told Bloomberg they believe the move was widespread some employees some Tesla employees who reached the end of their four year vesting cycle though were given stock quote unquote refreshers in order to keep their total compensation competitive I don't exactly know what a stock refresher would be maybe just a you know an RSU restricted stock you know that they previously would have been granted on the system maybe that's just going to a more select group in this case um a little bit unclear to me so on this you know Tesla from time to time will change compensation all organizations will do that of course when we're talking about bonuses bonuses are something that have to be earned Tesla this year of course has had a tougher year than I think they would have expected from a profitability perspective.
At least from a production standpoint, we don't know what their internal targets were elanted. You know, of course they set the public guidance of 1.8 million elanted and expressed hopes to get to 2 million or so for the year. And I'm not sure exactly, you know, I'm sure it varies by position, how Tesla would structure those awards. But you know, if a company misses their internal projections, their internal plans, then that could impact, of course, compensation through the bonus structure, which is part of why it exists in the first place. So, you know, we'll see if we hear any more about this, of course. Yeah, I think we all want Tesla employees to be very fairly compensated. As you know, in general, the company is doing excellent great work, so hopefully that is the case, but also important to acknowledge those things as well. So we'll see on that, see if any more information comes out, give us some clarity on how those structures have changed.
And then a couple more updates here. CNBC reported today that Tesla is in the actually the number one most inflowed company this year in terms of basically the difference between buys and sells for assets that have traded Tesla. So that would really come from volume and then, you know, obviously the difference in share price and valuation over time. If you're isolating on 2023, obviously Tesla started at a low position, had, of course, high volume as it generally uses it generally does, and Tesla gained a lot because it happened to start from such a low point on January 1st this year. So not too surprising. Again, this is something that Tesla is relatively consistently high on for the last couple of years. I don't know how important this is, net inflows isn't an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. It's probably more of a technical analysis type of an area, but thought I'd point that out and share some of my thoughts on that.
And then just a couple more items here. So Toyota announced a recall today of a million vehicles. You know, I've read a number of comments of people having casual conversations with acquaintances and things like that about the Tesla recall. And of course, you know, people are always curious to hear thoughts on, you know, owner's perception of that until they learn that it's just a software update. There's often the sort of double standard accusation of, oh, you know, you're not going to hear about this Toyota recall. If you do actually search for this Toyota recall, you're going to see headlines about it though from sort of all major media sources. So I don't know if that's the best or fairest way to put it, but of course Tesla's just going to naturally attract a lot more attention. More people are going to talk about it in general, so there's going to be more awareness of that than a Toyota recall, which is a million vehicles here, over a million vehicles, and of course not an over their update, an actual recall that requires people to take their car in and get it fixed. So, you know, just part of the car industry again. Recalls happen and they happen to all brands.
Right next, we've got an update on Waymo. They gave a safety update today, saying that Waymo significantly outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7 plus million miles of rider-only driving. 7 plus million miles suggest that sort of over the last quarter or so, they've been at about a million miles per month. So that kind of gives you an idea of their sort of run rate for autonomous vehicle rides. Interestingly, they do point out - let me get down there - they say that's their safety assessment points to an 85% reduction or about seven times lower crash rate involving any injury from minor to severe or a 57% reduction or 2.3 times lower in a police-reported crash rates for these seven million miles that they have traveled.
Now, crews had released similar statistics like this, so it's always important to kind of pay attention to how they're reporting things. They do say that to make sure the human crash data is valid and comparable, the injury and property damage benchmarks in their 7 million mile study, either included underreporting adjustments for police-reported crashes or were derived from naturalistic driving study databases.
So they're saying that the data that they're comparing with isn't really real data, it's adjusted data to try to get it as close to real as possible because there's certainly imperfect data when trying to make these comparisons. So it's not an unfair thing to do, and in fact, it's probably the right thing to do. But whenever an adjustment is made, it opens up the opportunity for that adjustment to skew how the comparison looks. So just something to keep in mind.
I think I have a little bit more faith in Waymo to properly make that assessment than I do with crews, and they did get a little bit of a validation statement from the IIHS with their chief research officer saying that these reports represent a good faith effort by Waymo to evaluate how the safety of its autonomous driving system compares with the safety of humans. driving the results are encouraging and represent one step and are evolving understanding of autonomous driving safety so for whatever that's worth a little bit of validation from a third party and they did publish their sort of methodology in more detail as well.
Alright just calendar item here Kathy would announced on X that she is going to be joining Elon Musk on X spaces later this week so seeking out questions. I don't know when the exact date or time of that would be I don't think that's been announced but something to keep an eye on for later this week and then SpaceX today did their static fire test for their next starship upper stage so well I don't know if they're going to do a static fire for the booster I would imagine they probably will but nice to see some progress here in terms of that next orbital test flight you know we're probably looking at sometime next year now at this point we've only got I think like 11 days left in the year but we'll keep an eye out for that and with the static fire here today a nice milestone towards that third orbital test flight but that are up and 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 X at Tesla podcast and we'll see tomorrow for the Thursday December 21st episode of Tesla daily thank you.