Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Lumis. First up today, Alexander is highlighting 86 new job postings for Tesla Semi Development. To be clear, these are not all new jobs, but ones like this super intended for semi-construction lineup with everything we've been seeing from the drone flyovers. This job will support the construction of the new ground up semi-truck manufacturing facility that requires exceptional talent. Just a few I thought were interesting, a senior architect for never built before production lines. This one, the role is in the name, technical service advisor, a software engineer who will determine where to put power, communication, sensors, actuators, and compute in a new or updated vehicle. Antenna Design Engineer to work on ongoing antenna product development efforts covering a significant portion of the radio frequency spectrum. Role also in the name for this one, Global Supply Manager, manufacturing engineer for battery joining that will work on the structural joining and sealing processes for our cutting edge battery products. Somebody has to drive these bad boys, so Tesla hiring for a commercial semi-driver, night shift. And finally, there are plenty of listings for mechanical design engineers for different parts of the semi. As I said months ago, a silver lining of Tesla pushing back volume semi-production will be the opportunity to continually innovate on the design of the semi-truck for a year plus. That's exactly what they've been doing and are clearly continuing to do.
One pretty big feature with FSD12 I did not mention yesterday is the curb-to-curb option. So in prior iterations, when you arrive at your destination on FSD beta, it would just sit in the middle of the road right in the way. So far, with early testing of FSD beta 12, it's actually pulling off to the side when you arrive at your destination out of the way. Theoretically, that means Uber drivers would be able to go curb-to-curb destination-to-destination without having to disengage at all. Just to ensure I don't sound biased here after watching all of Omar's initial drives, there are absolutely still bugs and things that Tesla needs to work on. I'm just operating under the assumption that that's a given at this point.
Tesla in Sweden is now opening up a vertically integrated body repair shop to avoid collective agreements as the previous workshop was subject to those sympathy strikes. This Tesla expansion would be the first damage repair shop for Tesla in Sweden. Currently, Tesla is looking for seven new employees, including painters, claims adjusters, and sheet metal workers.
The Tesla China Weekly Insurance data came in at 11,700. Plugging that into the table, if you wanted to compare it to week 3 of quarter 4, that number was 8,100. This 11,700 number was broken down to 2,900 Model 3s and 8,800 Model WIS. Through the first three weeks of the quarter, we are now 5,700 units ahead of the Q4 pace that did ultimately turn out to be a record quarter for Tesla China deliveries. This number was the highest third week of a quarter ever. We also got the Tesla China production figure for December. It came in at 85,833, consisting of 28,400 Model 3s and 57,300 Model WIS. This means in Q4, Tesla China comfortably set a new quarterly production record by over 16,000 units. The second best quarter is now quarter 2,2023.
The only other thing I would really highlight here is looking back on the Model 3 Plus transition. We started hearing around September that the factory was going to be shut down for upgrades and all in all they did an incredible job. Hopefully Tesla can do the same thing, pulling off a pretty seamless transition in Fremont.
Tesla has appointed a new country manager for Mexico, Teresa Gutierrez Smith, who has spent over 20 years at companies like Nestle, Mattel, Proctor & Gamble and Ruppy, Mexico. Creeping on her LinkedIn page, the news has been confirmed. If you like Tesla doing advertising, there's a chance this hire is very encouraging for you as she has a pretty heavy media and digital marketing background. Her most recent job at Ruppy, where she was a regional general manager, this was a tech company committed to driving growth by accelerating the adoption of e-commerce. I think this role Teresa is stepping into is going to be a pretty critical one for Tesla as they build their brand in Mexico. I like what I'm seeing in terms of where she was coming from as Ruppy was the first super app in this region in Latin America and it's a platform for digital commerce. In her new role, Teresa will lead sales service and delivery operations. She'll oversee the expansion and growth in the Mexican market playing a pivotal role in shaping our corporate image.
This is a Tesla Model Y painted in the Europe exclusive Midnight Cherry Red Paint. Now it costs over £2,000 and you might be wondering why is it that much? Well I'll show you why. It's because they layer up the paint over 13 different layers. You can see here how they do that as paint is applied over and over again till you get to the 13th layer which is the final coat.
There's been a lot of talk lately about vehicles operating in the cold weather. Fun fact on that point, did you know that your PSI can drop one for roughly every 10 degrees Fahrenheit that the ambient temperature drops? That's because the air in your tire condenses so if driving your vehicle doesn't warm up the tires, bringing your PSI back to where it should be.
I have a solution for you. This right here is the Fantic X8 Apex, a portable tire inflator. It'll inflate one PSI in about 10 seconds so you can go from 25 PSI up to 33 in about a minute and a half. The Fantic can pump continuously for about 40 minutes and then it just recharges via USB-C and even if you don't need to inflate your tires this is an easy way to digitally check your tire pressure. You can set the desired PSI with the press of a button. It also has presets and there's a light for filling up at night.
I got 5 of these 4 family members for Christmas, 3 of which I did pay for and it was a smashing success. See the text from both my dad and my uncle about how much they've been enjoying it. Fantic also has the V8 Mate Cordless Car vacuum. My wife is a walking crumb machine and this saves trips to a gas station that may or may not have a vacuum. It comes with multiple attachments and has a low and high gear.
I was able to get everybody here 30% off these Fantic products and the discount codes will be in the description below. Enjoy.
我成功为大家争取了这些Fantic产品的30%折扣,并且优惠码将在下面的描述中给出。尽情享受吧。
From the unofficial Tesla app updates on X they said it looks like Cybertruck deliveries at some point will be getting metal keycards instead of plastic ones.
I wanted to make two points about this Wall Street Journal article today talking about why it makes sense for new EV drivers to look outside of Tesla. A full 59% of EVs sold through US dealerships in December were leased rather than purchased. The highest share in three years. Meanwhile Tesla's lease rate was 2% in the fourth quarter, the lowest in at least four years. First thing, nowhere in this article do they say anything about Tesla not offering a buyout option at the end of a lease. Not that having higher lease rates is somehow better or worse. It just seems like something worth mentioning in an article like this. Second thing to keep in mind over the next few years, the more vehicles that are leased for the competition, the more chance they have for future write downs if the residual values continue to deteriorate. And there's a decent chance that they will because Tesla will most likely continue to drive down prices making their vehicles more accessible to the masses. Simply put, if these companies try to keep up with Tesla in terms of price cuts that will lead to lower residual values and more depreciation for their leases.
From the driven, the total installed capacity of Australia's public charging network grew a staggering 33% in just the fourth quarter of 2023 and more than half of that growth came from Tesla. The new installations were dominated by 126 Tesla V3 superchargers adding 30.5,000 kilowatts to the network or 60% of all new capacity.
Sawyer put this image together of the rapid rate of progress for Tesla's Optimus Bot starting with Bumblebee in September of 22 to where we're at now with Optimus Gen 2, which was unveiled just one year after Bumblebee. So pretty impressive progress, thought that might be worth screen shotting and having in your back pocket.
Sawyer整理了这张图片,展示了特斯拉的Optimus机器人从22年9月的Bumblebee到现在的Optimus Gen 2的快速进展。Optimus Gen 2在Bumblebee发布后仅仅一年就亮相了。所以进展相当惊人,我觉得这可能值得截屏保存在你的后备文件夹里。
The AI driver on YouTube just uploaded a really cool video overlaying Tesla's high fidelity park assist with the real world drone video. It was remarkably accurate in some instances, but in some others, it was not as accurate. But I want us all to hear one thing that he said. Although I think a lot of this can be fixed in future software updates by giving the car a little bit better of a memory and better detection, I do have to admit that I think that the cars with the front bumper camera are actually going to perform much better with this park assist. Because when you're backing up using the super wide angle camera at the rear of the car, it does a much better job visualizing everything accurately. And to be honest, I pretty much always back into parking spaces, so not having the ultra wide camera on the front of the car isn't too big of a deal for me, but I know most people do like to nose into parking spots, so it is something to consider.
So while high fidelity park assist definitely isn't perfect yet, and there are some improvements that need to be made, I do think it's a big step up even right now compared to ultrasonic sensors. And to be clear, I think there is a reason cars with ultrasonics haven't gotten this update yet. In parking scenarios like the one with the dumpster we looked at, ultrasonics probably would have performed better and given you more accurate distances. But remember, they can't see curbs or other low objects that can still damage your car at all. And at least the new park assist gets those things right most of the time.
If you're not familiar with AI driver, he does not pull punches, so I think what he said does absolutely carry some weight. And remember, this is the worst this iteration of the high fidelity park assist is ever going to be Tim Zommen and ex Tesla engineer said FSD 12 is very impressive. I suggest anyone with a Tesla give it a spin tricky driveway intersection offsetting peaking very natural and promising behavior. I now wonder if they'll solve self driving before solving the auto wiper replying to his own post he added full self wiping when Tesla is now marketing the cyber truck tour in China. The word is initially it'll stop at eight different cities.
After a long time of silence, we finally get updated plans on what the USPS is planning for its future EV fleet. The postal service is rolling out the first of its new EV charging stations that are going to be at the sorting and delivering centers or S&DCs. They plan to have 100 of these locations up and running by the end of this year and over 400 S&DCs in the next three years. These locations are where they will pick up mail in packages and charge the vehicles. The agency also expects to receive its first next gen vehicles from the vendor Oshkosh defense this summer. USPS will start deploying its EV trucks in Georgia, then expands other locations across the country throughout the year. The postmaster general said speaking of some of the outdated USPS locations, most of them I'd be afraid to plug a coffee pot in, let alone an EV charger.
Good news for USPS, the natural resources defense council and the UAW dropped their lawsuits against USPS for arguing they were not going green enough. In response to all of that backlash, USPS went back to the drawing board and now they're making EVs a majority of their next gen fleet. They plan to buy 66,000 EVs over the next five years as part of a $10 billion spending plan. In total, the agency expects to buy 100,000 EV and gas power delivery vehicles through 2028. They expect EVs will make up at least 62% of its new fleet. USPS is not totally out of the legal woods yet as they still face two remaining legal challenges from environmental groups that are still arguing they need more EVs and less ICE vehicles for their next gen fleet. USPS owns about a third of all federal vehicles and ranks second only to the defense department in terms of agencies with the largest vehicle inventory.
Here we have it, the Apple disaster, the latest update in their EV car project. They have now pivoted to a less ambitious design with the intent of finally bringing an EV to market. Before they talked about a fully autonomous vehicle, now they're working on an EV with more limited features according to sources. Despite the more conservative goals, they're still delaying their plans as they look to introduce the car in 2028 at the earliest, roughly two years later than their last announcement. It wasn't ever an official announcement, I just mean through the sources. They started this project, codename Titan or T-172 back in 2014, 2028 at the earliest, that's 14 years of development.
Now, after realizing it will not be able to solve a self-driving vehicle by 2026, they're instead going to focus on a level 2 plus system. Internally, the word is either Apple is able to finally deliver this product with reduced expectations or top executives may reconsider the project's existence. It's also still possible Apple reverses course again and takes a new tack. The company has been meeting with potential manufacturing partners in Europe to discuss this new approach.
After their initial debut, they hope that this system later will support level 4 autonomy. It sounds like to close 2023, there were plenty of meetings involving all of the top execs, including Tim Cook, they were pressing Apple's leadership about the timeline for this project.
Project Titan has been one of the most expensive R&D projects for the better part of a decade for Apple, with them spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on salaries, cloud-based systems, closed road testing and engineering for both vehicle parts and chips. Apple has spent years working on powertrain, self-driving hardware and software, car interiors and exteriors and other key components, and yet the vehicle has never successfully reached a formal prototype stage. The word is Doug Field left in part because he did not believe top executives would ever formally approve the release of a vehicle. Even now, some Apple executives are skeptical that a vehicle could ever provide the kind of profit margins that they enjoy with iPhones.
Whatever this means, they said the latest plan for the car is seen internally as a Tesla Mi 2 product, one that does not break significant new ground. As part of this new plan, Apple is weighing further management changes to both its hardware, engineering and autonomous software teams. I'm an Apple fan, I have all Apple products, but my biggest takeaway from this whole thing is the hubris that Apple has showed, thinking they were going to have a fully autonomous vehicle by 2026. At this point, despite the billions of investment into this project, they still might be better served, just focusing on continued and advanced carplay integration.
It seems like Panasonic goes back and forth on this every few weeks, but the latest is that now they're going to hold off on that third manufacturing battery plant in North America. Previously, they said they would announce it by the end of March, now they're saying we need to think about it thoroughly and about raising productivity before setting up a third location.
In some new application documents, Weamo is looking to expand pretty significantly in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Here's an image of the new expansion territory for LA. Right now, in LA, Weamo is in the test phase inaccessible only through invitation, so the full operation of its fleet in LA now awaits regulatory approval. We also just heard about Weamo expanding to the freeways in Phoenix. We've heard about Weamo looking to expand in Austin, Texas, so quietly Weamo has been slowly expanding and staying out of the headlines for negative reasons. We'll see if this expansion gets approved, but honestly, good for Weamo.
It is plain as day that the chairman of Toyota, a Kiyo Toyota, is fed up hearing people talk about Toyota lagging when it comes to electric vehicles. From Toyota times Japan, he just said no matter how much progress beevs make, I think they will still only have a 30% market share. The remaining 70% will be hybrids, fuel cells and hydrogen engines, and I think engine cars will definitely remain. Earlier in his speech, he said it right here. All I hear is Toyota is behind in beevs. In fairness though, here's the context of what he was saying. 1 billion people around the world live in areas without electricity. For Toyota, we also supply vehicles to those regions, so a single beev option cannot provide transportation for everyone. The problem is, to use these smaller markets to then extrapolate what's going to happen in the major auto markets, China, USA and Europe, it's not a wise choice. Toward the end of 2023 in China alone, full battery electric vehicles were already pushing 30% of all new car sales. I'm fairly confident that number is not going to go down anytime soon.
Toyota said engines will surely remain and that the EV shift won't happen as quickly as many think. The truth is, it would be easy to bash a Kiyo here for these comments, but it's always more nuanced than just these broad generalizations. Sure, in certain markets, beevs adoption isn't going to happen for a long time, and in other markets, even right now, hybrids are actually doing well. However, to use all of that as an excuse to not push forward with a beev innovation in the biggest markets that matter the most, thinking about China first, it doesn't seem like a wise choice.
Redwood Materials posted the cathode accounts for over 50% of a battery sales cost, but today, manufacturing is based entirely outside of North America. To fix this, they're building a huge cathode plant with more than 1 million EVs per year of capacity at their Nevada campus. Don't forget, Tesla is also putting the finishing touches on their own cathode facility in Austin.
I know most of you are not in Connecticut, but how about this? You can now get up to $16,000 in upfront incentives that are available per customer for residential battery purchases. They have now more than doubled the maximum amount that was available before. And customers in multifamily affordable housing are now eligible for a low income rate, which will unlock opportunities for landlords to install batteries for rented accommodation.
We also have New York making encouraging progress, replacing their peaker plants. Battery storage is playing an active role in helping New York City retire its fleet of peaker power plants. According to a new report, about two-thirds of their fleet has either retired or put in place plans to replace turbines with cleaner technologies.
Nissan just said it's planning to cut 6% of its US production in the first quarter or about 10.2,000 vehicles in response to their days of supply being at 106 days, more than 50% higher than the national average of 70 days for comparison Tesla sits at 16 days. Nissan dealers said cutting production does not solve their profitability problem. Nissan told dealers nearly a third of the US retail network operated in the red late last year. Nissan dealer Chairman said we need a plan that increases sales volume. We need to sell more cars, not less.
Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is now facing the reality that turning its location into an EV production hub is more challenging than they may have thought. As of December last year, the kingdom's only auto factory opened September 2023 had reassembled only 800 vehicles based on supply from Arizona from, you guessed it, Lucid. For Saudi Arabia, one of their biggest challenges is establishing a local supply base because right now there's no significant local industry to provide the supply. For now, Lucid's factory in Saudi Arabia is still only reassembling cars previously put together and quality testing these vehicles from the Arizona site. The main reason for Lucid doing this, to access lucrative Saudi incentives for localization. However, this could hamper the expansion of local manufacturing as the country would continue to import foreign-made cars. The public investment fund owns 60% of Lucid and has invested at least $5.4 billion into the company as of August last year. So far, things are not going well for Saudi or Lucid's EV production ambitions.
Polestar CEO said the end of 2023 was a particularly tough situation where the competition has gone to discounts at a level which we just simply said no to. He did say he still believes Hertz is going to buy 65,000 Polestars over 5 years as originally planned. Polestar is also replacing their heads of sales and finance.
The word on the street is that this year GM will unveil the Cadillac Lyric V-Series A Performance variant.
街头传闻称,通用汽车今年将发布凯迪拉克Lyric V系列A型Performance版。
Here is Tesla's company compiled consensus. Go ahead and take a screenshot. Zoom in if you'd like to see anything in detail. Some of you have asked me to do more spreadsheet analysis like Rob used to do for Tesla earnings and I think he's still going to do at least for some time. There is a reason however I don't. I personally want to be the voice that de-emphasizes the quarterly results. In the background, I'll still be going through everything in painstaking detail as usual and I'll pass anything along if I think it's worthy. But to do projections and everything that goes with it, I personally just don't find it a valuable use of my time having followed Tesla so closely now for so long. Plus there's other people like James Stevenson that still do it and do it incredibly well.
My de-emphasizing quarterly earnings disclaimer aside, here's what I would really be focusing on to keep things simple. Wall Street will be watching AutoGross margins X credits, the Wall Street expectation number 16.7%. For context, in Q3, this number for Tesla was 16.3%. Wall Street will be closely watching any guidance from Tesla when it comes to production and 2024 deliveries. Wall Street is expecting 2.187 million deliveries, which implies 21% year over year growth. Tesla's company compiled consensus estimate a little lower, 2.16 1 million, implying 19.5% year over year growth. Then we have what Tesla has said is their focus, operating margin. For this number, Wall Street is expecting 8.3%. For Tesla, it was 7.6% in quarter 3, 9.6% Q2, 11.4% Q1, and 16% back in Q4 2022.
Per the usual, no video from me tomorrow on Wednesday for earnings day, I'd just like to take it all in, and then I'll recap with the most important things and anything people may be missing on Thursday.
Tesla stock closed the day at $209.14 per share and the NASDAQ finished the day up 0.43%.
特斯拉的股票以209.14美元每股收盘,纳斯达克指数收盘涨了0.43%。
It was an average volume day for Tesla, trading about 2.5 million shares lower than the average 30 day volume.
对于特斯拉来说,这是一个平均交易量的日子,交易量比过去30天的平均交易量低了大约250万股左右。
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Hope you guys have a wonderful day, enjoy the day tomorrow, you can find me on X linked below, please like the video if you did, and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters.