Hey everybody Rob Maor here and today we've got an update on Gigabrelin news on the Cyber Truck as well as Hertz's EV program and a few other items as well. Tesla stock on the day today was down 2.9% to close at $227.22, a little bit tougher of a day for automakers in general, but the NASDAQ despite its volatility finishing flat on the day. We'll talk quickly about CPI, which was of course released this morning so the consumer price index came in a little bit higher than expected. As we can see, we capped by Bloomberg, month over month, headline CPI came in at 3.10% vs. 2.10% expected, with core CPI, so excluding food and energy coming in roughly in line with expectations month over month, and the year over year changes for both coming in 1.2% to 2.10% higher than expected. Following the report though, interest rate expectations for January or March largely unchanged from the CME Group FedWatch tool and actually leaning slightly more towards earlier rate cuts than a day ago.
All right, moving on to Tesla specific news, one piece of news that we got towards the end of trading that seemed to cause a bit of a dip in the stock before close was a report from Reuters that says that Tesla is going to be pausing production at Giga Berlin for a couple of weeks. They say, quote, Tesla will suspend most car production at its factory near Berlin from January 29th to February 11th. The company said on Thursday, citing a lack of components due to shifts in transport routes because of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, end quote, those conflicts are not a topic that we have covered previously, but there have been other companies that said that there might be delivery delays on some product because of those conflicts. And although Reuters did not link to any statement directly from Tesla, they say that Tesla said that quote, the armed conflicts in the Red Sea and the associated shifts in transport routes between Europe and Asia via the Cape of Good Hope are also having an impact on production in Grunhadep. The considerably longer transport times are creating a gap in supply chains and quote, so if this report is accurate, I would be surprised if it's not if it's accurate though, this would be about 15% of the quarter for Giga Berlin. I think there's a possibility they could compensate for some of that throughout the rest of the quarter, but from a calendar perspective, that's about what it would be. Of course, though, Giga Berlin is right now relatively small part of Tesla's production capacity, maybe somewhere in the ballpark of 10%. So we're talking about roughly 1.5% of Tesla's quarterly production that this could be affecting. And we're in Q1 right now, which is generally a seasonally weaker quarter in the automotive industry. And while it would certainly be preferable for Tesla to have full control over their production schedule and not be influenced by factors like this, I think the overall impact of this, as it's currently described, is pretty minimal. We'll keep an eye out for further confirmation and updates on the situation.
Alright, in more exciting news, we do have some Cybertruck updates today. Over the last 24 hours or so, there have been numerous reports of customers that have no affiliation, truly no affiliation this time, not employees, or other various ties to the company that are now receiving vehicle identification numbers for their Cybertruck orders. Furthermore, we've even got a report on the Cybertruck Owners Club forums from Suzu 2142 that today they received a call from the Sunnyvale California Tesla store that their all wheel drive Cybertruck is ready for pickup today, January 11. They say it is scheduled for 3 30 pm Pacific time today. I'm not quite there yet. As I'm recording this, by the time this is published, we'll probably pass that so we'll keep an eye on this. But they did share a screenshot from the Tesla app that does show their delivery being scheduled for today again at 3 30. They shared that they received their vehicle identification number yesterday. They also shared the Cybertruck order agreement. There's always a chance of people photo shopping or whatever else to try to have some fun and trick some people. But from all the information that is being shared, it seems pretty legitimate. We'll continue to watch this closely and hopefully by tomorrow we'll have some evidence to be able to confirm this. And if there really is one delivery happening now, then there are probably many others that aren't too far behind. We've already got some great Cybertruck insight from a number of videos so far, but it's going to be really exciting to see these in normal customers' hands. We'll get a lot more data, a lot more insight on this crazy vehicle and start seeing them around more, which is exciting as well.
All right, next up, we've got a new SEC filing relevant to Tesla that was filed by Hertz today. This may have had an influence a bit on the stock as well. The Hertz filing announced that Hertz has made the decision to sell approximately 20,000 electric vehicles from their US fleet about one third of their global EV fleet over the course of this year. While they do say this will cover multiple makes and models, of course, primarily their electric fleet is comprised of Tesla vehicles after their announcement of a massive order plan for Tesla vehicles a couple of years ago.
Essentially, their goal here is to right size their fleet. They think it's become too EV heavy. So they say they expect to reinvest a portion of the proceeds of the sale of these EVs into the purchase of ICE vehicles. So it's unfortunate, kind of a frustrating update, but if you remember the previous quarterly earnings call from Hertz, which we talked about pretty extensively, this is certainly not coming without warning or any sort of a major surprise given the updates at that time. So this is a big part of their EV fleet, but they do still have a large EV fleet remaining. And they do note that they'll continue to execute their strategy around EV mobility. So it's not like they're completely exiting this business or anything. They just think that they went a little too far a little too fast.
As we talked about from that last earnings call, they were experiencing pretty heavy depreciation because of the pricing action that Tesla and others took on EVs. So there's a little bit of buying at the high selling at the low here for Hertz. Not that EV prices won't continue to come down, but probably not quite as rapidly as what we've seen during this period. And these vehicles one to two years in ownership are probably taking the steepest part of the depreciation curve during that window. So that depreciation increased their cost structure more than they expected. And they also saw higher damage and repair costs than what they initially modeled for, which we'll talk about more in a second.
Their CEO did go on CNBC today and shared some comments around this announcement. A couple of notable things he commented on their partnership with Uber, which of course a lot of Tesla vehicles involved in that. He said that's been very strong. So this is more coming from the rental side of the Hertz business. And although as I mentioned, they are saying higher damage or repair costs, he also did say that there are differences between how an EV would be used in a rental fleet and how it would be used for an actual EV owner said quote, there are those that experiment and their knowledge of how to drive this car, which is a little different than a combustion engine car may be part of the issue. And quote, as you may remember, one of the critical details that we highlighted from the Hertz earnings call where this conversation began was there mentioned that quote, studies of current EV ownership evidenced lower incidents of damage and collision than for ICE vehicles, not higher as we are experiencing. End quote. So this shouldn't be seen as an indictment of EVs being inferior or more expensive, etc. At least part of what they are experiencing is unique to the rental market where you have people that are maybe less familiar driving these vehicles. In many cases, maybe for the first time that could be unfamiliar with EVs could be unfamiliar with the acceleration. And maybe don't quite care as much about being careful because it is a rental not something that they don't.
Except for that piece, which is really just the nature of the business over time as EV familiarity in general grows, some of those impacts that Hertz is seeing should diminish their CEO did say that quote, at some point the reality of EVs and Tesla's being the best selling car will at some point render them the best rental car. End quote. He just said for Hertz and how they have invested so far, it's not quite there yet. Now I do think there are a number of things that could be done to improve these from a consumer education perspective, from a business modeling perspective, and advertising perspective, a lot of things I think they could properly do better. We don't need to go into all those things, but ultimately up to Hertz to decide how to manage those things. Anyway, hopefully some of those details are helpful. This was a pretty widely reported story to that.
Next, we've got a report from Bloomberg that Tesla has given notice to workers in Fremont that all US production associates, materials handlers, and quality inspectors will be getting a quote, market adjustment pay increase end quote. Of course, this would be widely expected following the completion of UAW negotiations at the end of last year. And we've seen other reports of Tesla offering pay increases we talked recently about one for Gigabro lint. So not too surprising and probably the most interesting detail would be how significant these pay increases are. But Bloomberg says that the document that they viewed did not say how big the increase would be.
Next, we've got a few quick updates from X first one on Tesla energy from the Tesla megapack account, which has announced the commissioning of a 565 megawatt hour megapack project in capoei Hawaii. Always nice to see those, especially on islands where energy storage just seems to be such a no brainer.
We've then got a couple small updates on the Highland Model 3, which Elon was actually asked about on X where that name came from. He replied and said it's not real, and then he actually got community noted on this one because there are references to Highland in the electronic parts catalog for Tesla. Maybe it became that way after people talked about it so much, or maybe Elon's just saying it's not realized that's actually not the name of the new Model 3, just an internal name. That's probably my best guess, but not really of much consequence here. Anyway, we are starting to see Highland Model 3 show up in Tesla stores first in California. And like for the Cybertruck, a better theater is keeping a running list of where these Highland vehicles have been spotted in Tesla stores. So keep an eye on that. If you're interested, I would imagine this becomes more ubiquitous at Tesla stores pretty quickly than the Cybertruck.
接下来,关于Highland Model 3有一些小的更新,有人在X节目上问埃隆这个名字的来历。他回答说这个名字并不是真实存在的,但因为特斯拉的电子零件目录中有对Highland的提及,他实际上为此事发表了一则社区记录。也许这是在人们讨论这个名字之后才变成这样的,或者埃隆只是在表示这个名字实际上并不存在,只是一个内部名字。这可能是我最好的猜测,但对于现在并没有太大的影响。无论如何,我们正在开始看到Highland Model 3首先出现在加利福尼亚的特斯拉店铺中。就像Cybertruck一样,一个更好的影院正在持续更新这些Highland车辆在特斯拉店铺中被发现的地点清单。所以请留意。如果你有兴趣的话,我想这辆车会比Cybertruck更快地在特斯拉店铺中普及开来。
Then the last one from X, one of Tesla's senior software engineers, Clive Chan, announced that he is going to be leaving sounds like the nojo team to work at OpenAI. Never loved to see people leave, but he did comment on dojo to another Tesla engineer saying that the future is bright for dojo. So sometimes people read into the departures like that. I think it's also worth noting that comment could just be a platitude, but also there are plenty of other platitudes that you could go to without being that specific on the project.
All right, last couple of things today, we've got some headlines around Toyota and solid state batteries. Again, tell me if you've heard this one before, but Toyota is saying that they will have solid state batteries ready to go in quote unquote a couple of years. This was at the Gujarat summit in India, so the head of Toyota India commenting on this. And I think just probably repeating the announcements that we've heard from Toyota previously and saying that this will enable a vehicle that will charge in 10 minutes have a range of 1200 kilometers or 750 miles with a very good life expectancy. So I don't think anything new here Toyota had most recently said 2027 to 2028. I don't think the couple of years comment is meant to replace that timeline or anything. I think it's just something that was brought up probably among many future things that Toyota wants to do and then is getting picked up and reported on. If I could take the under on the specs in the over on the timeline, I would definitely do those things.
All right, last item for today, then Lucid has reported their Q4 delivery and production numbers. They delivered at 1734 vehicles in the fourth quarter and produced 2391. Both of those were up a bit quarter over quarter remember last quarter production was down because they had 700 vehicles that went over to Saudi Arabia that were nearly finished.
But from a year over year perspective, production was down 32% deliveries down 10%. The demand constraints that I think Lucid is dealing with are becoming more clear by the quarter using the same calculation that Tesla uses to calculate days of inventory.
This would put Lucid at 230 days of inventory about 5,300 vehicles that they have produced that they have not delivered in combination with a slowed production rate well below what their initial targets were. It's really tough to see how they get anywhere close to anything that could be a profitable business when they're losing so much money on each vehicle at the scale they're at. Yeah, they've got the Lucid gravity that will come at some points and maybe that helps a little bit with scale as well. And then they obviously want to make next generation vehicles that are cheaper, but it's very difficult to justify those types of massive investments when you're not able to hit a cost structure that is anywhere close to working so far.
If this didn't have the capital backing from Saudi Arabia, I'm not sure if Lucid would even still be around at the point that we're at right now. So we'll keep watching it, but a pretty bleak picture I think for Lucid.
Alright, that'll wrap it up for today though, so as always, thank you for listening, make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications, and also find me on X at Tesla podcast. And we'll see you tomorrow for the Friday, January 12th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.