Community News Submissions

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[00:00:54] story. In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary. Hello everyone and welcome to Killawada podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving and much, much more. My name

[00:01:30] is Bodhi and I am your host. And this episode is late. And I don't have a good reason as to why it's late other than to say when you go on vacation for two weeks and you

[00:01:43] haphazardly put in articles into your queue that you want to talk about for your podcast on electric vehicles. And then when you get off vacation and you're ready to record a show,

[00:01:54] you're going to have a lot. You're going to have a lot of articles. I was very optimistic on what I wanted to cover when I came back. Honestly, I cut a lot of those articles out.

[00:02:05] I was like, this is an important. I still had a 12 ish page show and it was going to be long. It was going to be bloated probably well over an hour. So on Tuesday night,

[00:02:19] I made the decision this is not a good time to record this because I've got to pair this down to something more reasonable. Wednesday morning I woke up and I was like, okay,

[00:02:28] here's how we're going to do this. We're going to get rid of all the Tesla news, which honestly was mostly about Elon's pay package and the upcoming shareholders meeting, which is actually going to happen tomorrow. So we'll talk about all that stuff probably

[00:02:40] anyway. So that was just a repeat. So I was able to cut all that out. I added a few more things, took away a few more things, and this is the show you got today. So hopefully you enjoy it. I apologize. It's a little bit late, but yeah,

[00:02:53] it, I wanted to do so much. Sometimes I suffer for, from optimism, fatal dose of optimism sometimes when it comes to doing this show, because there's so many fun things to talk about, but then the show can get bloated real fast. So we're going to try

[00:03:13] to stay away from the bloat. So let's go ahead and jump into the EV news. Q merit is known for installing electric vehicle supply equipment, which is what we all call a wall charger, right? For your home level two wall charger. And they don't actually do the install

[00:03:30] Q merit. They put you in touch with an electrician and the electrician comes in and does the install. I actually did this for my house. It worked out really well. I could have saved

[00:03:40] a little bit of money by just going to electrician directly, but I felt like if I had a problem, I could go to Q merit and Q merit would fix it versus if I went to some random

[00:03:51] electrician, I may or may not get it fixed. So I paid a little bit more for the name basically. And by the way, everything worked out fine. The electrician did a good job. Q merit was

[00:04:03] great to work with. No, no problems there, but I digress. So let's get back to the topic. Can you see why the original episode was bloated? It's this kind of thing. I haven't

[00:04:17] talked to you for two weeks. There's so much I want to catch up on. Anyway, they have a new service and they are installing bi-directional charging equipment to your house. They're doing some other things. We'll talk about that in a minute, but the biggest thing is

[00:04:28] they're installing the bi-directional charging equipment, which would allow, if you don't know, homeowners to power their homes by using the battery in their car. It's called vehicle to homes. This is great. It could also technically, I guess, be vehicle to grid, but Q merit

[00:04:44] specifically calls out vehicle to home on their website. A little bit of warning for this before you have something like this installed, you should know which vehicles a support bi-directional charging and B you need to buy bi-directional charging equipment that supports the vehicle

[00:05:02] you own. If you want to buy a cyber truck, but you install the F-150 lightning bi-directional charging setup, you just wasted your money. I'm sure Q merit is on that. They're not going

[00:05:17] to let you do that, but it's something you should know. The new service is called powerhouse by Q merit and powerhouse offers some additional services as well like solar panels, energy storage, digital load centers, heat pumps and generators. This is not an ad for Q merit,

[00:05:36] but again, I did get my wall charger installed there. It was about a thousand dollars. I think it was about a thousand seventy five and then I paid, you know, whatever another $400 for the Tesla wall connectors. So I'm just to write around $1,500 for the total install. So if

[00:05:50] this is something you're looking to do, I would definitely check out Q merit to see if it's right for you. Again, not an ad because it got real addy at the end there, but not an

[00:05:59] ad. Vinfast may be looking to delay their four billion dollar plant in North Carolina. This is according to a person familiar with the matter. So the plant would have the capacity to produce 150,000 vehicles per year and those vehicles would qualify for the

[00:06:21] inflation reduction act, the $7,500 tax credit if they were built in North Carolina. Great news, right? You get jobs for people in North Carolina, people here in the United States. If they want to buy one of those vehicles, get $7,500 off the price of the vehicle.

[00:06:38] One little problem, Vinfast sold less than a thousand vehicles in the United States in 2023. So even I had a really dumb podcaster can look at those numbers and say, maybe we see how

[00:06:52] many cars we sell in 2024 before we commit to spending $4 billion on a plant in North Carolina. Now, Vinfast is a part of VIN group, which is a big conglomerate in Vietnam, sort of like Samsung or Hyundai. So I say all that to say that

[00:07:11] Vinfast is not your typical EV startup. It is an established company in Vietnam. It's part of a conglomerate. If they wanted to spend the money, they probably could, but the numbers need to make sense. And right now the numbers don't make sense.

[00:07:30] Speaking of the numbers not making sense, Faraday Future delivered 10 FF91 EVs in 2023. So if you don't know what a Faraday Future is, Faraday Future was one of the early EV startups when Tesla was still selling the Model S and maybe the Model X in 2016.

[00:07:50] There were two companies that I talked about when I started this podcast regularly, Faraday Future and Tesla, and then it became Lucid. And then all of the other OEMs were announcing that they would have EVs in 2020 and they didn't. But we won't talk about that

[00:08:10] because we've talked about that in the past. So Faraday Future looked like it had a future way back when they were going to build a big factory outside of Las Vegas. They actually showed off the FF91 at CES. I can't remember exactly which year, but in the video,

[00:08:28] it shows the FF91. I believe if I'm remembering is correct, it's leaving the stage and it drives through a parking lot and then it's supposed to park itself and ends up bumping into a car. Still very impressive. I don't know if it was faked or rigged or not.

[00:08:44] Nobody's come out and said it was, but it was a very impressive demo. It's got a bunch of LiDAR on it. There's a lot of tech in this vehicle. Anyway, Faraday Future went through

[00:08:53] a bunch of problems financially and they also had a bunch of people leaving at the upper end. It seemed like this company was going to go out of business so many times. And then last

[00:09:05] year they built their first FF91, which honestly looks like a futuristic station wagon. If you think of the station wagons from the 70s and 80s and then you make that look like what people

[00:09:18] in the 70s and 80s thought cars would look like in the 90s, maybe even in the 2000s, that's what an FF91 looks like. It's a big car. I actually saw it at CES when I went there

[00:09:29] in 2023. This car has a base price of $309,000. And like most vehicles, you have two choices. You can buy one, you can lease one. Now I can't remember whether or not I mentioned this already,

[00:09:42] but they sold four and they leased six of them. So again, if you wanted to buy it, starting price is $309,000. And actually, I think that was just the price. I think they gave you everything for the $309,000 because budget. But if you wanted to lease one,

[00:09:58] you had to put $15,000 down and then it's $4,990 a month. You lease it for 36 months and you get 12,000 miles a year. So even if you lease this vehicle, you're not getting a great deal. Right now, according to SEC filings, it costs Faraday Future about $4 million

[00:10:18] per vehicle to produce. So those 10 cars, and I think it was a little bit more than $4 million. So those 10 cars cost Faraday Future right around $46 million to produce. Obviously, that'll get better as they're able to scale up. I don't know what scale looks like

[00:10:37] when you're selling a car for $309,000. I would imagine it's in the hundreds or low thousands and not in the hundred thousands. At one time, Faraday Future did talk about putting out a

[00:10:51] car that I think was around the $50,000 mark. And this is in the mid to late 2010s, so 2017, 2018. I would imagine that car would probably be in the $60,000, $70,000 range now based on inflation and how much cars cost at the moment. I think it'd be a little bit harder for

[00:11:09] them to hit that $50,000 mark. But yeah, this is not obviously great news for Faraday Future, but they didn't ship any cars in 2022. So 10 cars in 2023 is a significant improvement. Let's move on to General Motors. If you're wondering what the status is on GM's access

[00:11:31] to the supercharger network, it's still on schedule. Mary Barra made a comment that it would be later 2024 or something like that. And then a bunch of comms people at GM said, no, it's on schedule in 2024. But they didn't exactly say when in 2024. I know there were some

[00:11:51] dates thrown out. I don't know how reliable they are, but we'll just say GM vehicles are going to get access to the supercharger network sometime in 2024. All right. I got a few more GM stories here. Marissa West, who is GM's senior vice president and president of

[00:12:13] Global Markets Leadership Team, she has two titles there, said that the next generation Chevy Bolt is on track to be the most affordable EV offered in the United States. So at the moment, that would be less than $30,000 because the Nissan Leaf comes in at $29,280. However,

[00:12:35] Stellantis CEO Carlos Taveras said that Jeep has plans to release a $25,000 or less EV in the United States very soon. He didn't elaborate on when very soon was, and we don't have any further information on the vehicle. But if GM wanted to stay

[00:12:53] competitive with that very affordable Jeep, it would be right around the $25,000 mark. And honestly, I think that GM could probably hit that $25,000 mark for the Chevy Bolt EV if they wanted to. It would probably require them to keep that vehicle very simple. But as long as

[00:13:15] they keep the spirit of the Chevy Bolt that so many people love, I don't think that's going to be a problem. Like if they take it and they strip it down and make it soulless and

[00:13:24] make it into something that is a money grab, even at a very low profit margin, I don't think people are going to respond to it. But the Bolt's a good car. The Bolt's a cool

[00:13:36] car. The styling isn't something I'm a huge fan of, but I know a lot of people love that vehicle. And honestly, for me, if I couldn't afford the Model Y that I have, the Bolt,

[00:13:50] the bigger Bolt EUV would definitely be a consideration because I have kids and I needed a little bit bigger vehicle. And the price is right. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. Reportedly, it's supposed to be out sometime in 2025. So I'm sure we'll get

[00:14:07] more information on that soon. GM says they intend to build a few less EVs than they initially reported in 2024. So initially GM targeted between 200 and 300,000 EVs. They updated that target to between 200 and 250,000 EVs, which is still in the ballpark.

[00:14:32] That's still pretty good for GM. And hopefully they'll be able to hit that number. The Chevy Equinox is coming out, EV, and the Blazer is doing really well. I don't know if they're

[00:14:43] making money on the Blazer, to be honest with you, but the Blazer is doing pretty well. As a matter of fact, let's talk about the Blazer. The Chevy Blazer EV is getting a little bit more affordable if you're willing to lease it. So unlike the Faraday Future car,

[00:14:57] this is actually a pretty decent deal on a lease. Cars Direct is reporting that the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV can be leased for $369 a month. That is $1,679 due up front. It's a 24-month lease. You get 10,000 miles, which is a little less than what I would consider

[00:15:19] normal. 12,000 seems like the magic number there. And you know what's really interesting is if you wanted to lease the gasoline equivalent of the Chevy Bolt, it would cost you $10 more altogether than it would just to lease the EV version. So let me break that down for you.

[00:15:39] And I didn't write the numbers down here and I apologize for that. But the Chevy Bolt or the Chevy Blazer gasoline version, you have to put, I think it was like $5,600 down and then

[00:15:51] it's $299 a month for a 24-month lease. So if you ended up dividing that all out, it ends up being $10 less than the Chevy Blazer EV. So if you're looking at getting a car the

[00:16:08] size of the Chevy Blazer, you're okay with leasing for two years with a lower mileage. A 369 is pretty good and $1,679 due at signing is a pretty low number. So salads generally for most people are the easy button, right? For me, that wasn't an option. I

[00:17:09] never really was a salad guy. That's just not who I am. But Neum worked for me. Neum.com real Neum user compensated to provide their story in four weeks. The typical Neum user can expect to lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may vary.

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[00:17:53] job on linkedin.com slash spoken today. All right. So we've talked about Faraday future Q merit and a bunch of other things. I on break, I got a few people who sent me emails

[00:18:09] and like, Hey, did you see this? This is really cool. So I'm going to highlight three of them. And if I didn't do yours, re email me because I think I thought I hit everybody

[00:18:20] on this, but this is these are community submitted articles here that I'm going to do. First up is Bruce. Bruce sent me an email about the eco car challenge. Now I've never heard of the eco car challenge, but the companies and organizations involved in this

[00:18:38] uh, challenge include general motors, Argonne national laboratory, us department of energy and math works. So the, the premise of this is 15 North American universities team up or excuse me, there are 15 different teams from the North American

[00:18:55] universities and they're given a 2023 Cadillac lyric, Evie with the goal of optimizing energy efficiency while maintaining performance and driving experience. Sometime in the fall of 2023, the teams received their lyric and they began re-engineering the vehicle. And in May of 2024,

[00:19:15] which is not, not all that long, you know, we're looking at six, seven, eight months for them to make these changes. They began re-engineering the vehicles and they, um, had a series of tests that they had to go through. Now I'm going to go,

[00:19:29] I'm not going to go over the evaluation process. I'll just say that the top score that a team could get was a thousand, a thousand points. The Ohio state Wilberforce university, they teamed up. They actually took first place with 781 points out of a thousand Georgia tech took second

[00:19:48] with 756 points and McMaster university ended up taking third with 750 points. I don't know where everybody else scored in the competition, but those are all pretty close in my book. A big congratulations to all the teams who competed, but the real winners are us,

[00:20:07] the consumers, because the folks who took part in this competition are really smart, obviously, college students and that what they learn from this contest will eventually make its way into the automotive and other technology industries. And on some level, what they learned from this

[00:20:31] will go into that technology. We may never know that it did it, but we're going to benefit on some level, even if it's a small little teeny tiny bit. So I think that's really cool.

[00:20:42] Next up we have Jamie. Jamie sent me an article that I actually cut out of the show because at the time it wasn't for sure this was going to happen, but he happened to send

[00:20:58] it at the right time while I was actually planning the show for today and adding things back in. And so here we go. The European commission says that it will impose additional duties or tariffs of up to 38.1% on imported Chinese EVs starting July of 2024. This is in

[00:21:21] response to the government of China subsidizing Chinese EV automakers, so Europe doesn't want China flooding their automotive market with cheap Chinese EVs. Now that's not a knock. I know people will say cheap Chinese and then whatever they're talking about after that,

[00:21:43] but these are really affordable cars. So this is a, in theory, this is meant to level the playing field with European automakers. So not all Chinese EV automakers are being hit with the same tariffs. And I don't completely understand why, but BYD will have an additional

[00:22:02] 17.4% tariff, Gili will be 20%, and SAIC Motors will be 38.1%. I don't know if these numbers bring all of these companies up to the same amount or I genuinely don't know. I don't know why they're deciding to impose the taxes or the tariffs at a different rate. NEO CEO,

[00:22:25] because NEO sells cars in Europe, William Lee said that tariffs shouldn't be political, which I took this to mean that if one country or a group of countries like the European Union puts a tariff on another country's goods, let's say, well we'll use China because

[00:22:43] that's what we're talking about. So if China says, hey, we're going to put a 1% tariff on every EV from the European market that comes into China and the European folks say, you know what, we're going to put a 3% tariff on every Chinese EV that's coming into

[00:23:04] the European Union. That's kind of a retaliation type thing. That's kind of a political thing. I honestly think the tariffs that are happening here in the United States with Chinese EVs, it's not a coincidence that this is happening during an election year. I genuinely think

[00:23:23] that no matter who wins, that tariff will either be reduced or it'll just go away or be put back to normal. It's not going to go away entirely. I don't think that it's fair for the Chinese automakers to be subsidized to the point by the Chinese government that

[00:23:42] other companies can't compete who aren't being subsidized. So I do think a tariff is fair, but these large tariffs that are grabbing headlines, I definitely don't think that. I think those are politically motivated and whether or not the European Union one is or not,

[00:23:59] I'm not versed enough in that regard so I couldn't tell you, but I do agree with William Lee in this regard. Now, Jamie also sent another article saying that EV sales in Ireland are down yet again. We talked a little bit about this a few months ago and

[00:24:13] we'll keep an eye on this. I do think that that's going to turn around eventually, however, we'll see what happens with the tariffs. Maybe it won't. All right. Finally, Graham or Kiwi Graham in the Patreon sent us this over the Patreon chat. I don't know if

[00:24:33] you know this and I'm going to do a quick Patreon plug at the end of the show here. We have a chat on Patreon so members of the Patreon can actually go in there and we can chat about

[00:24:45] what we talked about during the week. We can chat about honestly, it's pretty loose. You can chat about whatever you'd like really unless it's profane or abusive. I'm not going to really

[00:24:56] moderate it too much. But yeah, so we actually have a kilowatt chat and people are using it. Not a lot, but people are using it. If you are part of the Patreon and you didn't know we had

[00:25:09] a chat, we do. I would definitely encourage you to use it. I pop in there every now and again as well. So Graham sent this and it's from ABC, which the ABC in this case is not the TV

[00:25:25] network in North America. This is the Australian News Network ABC. The title of the article or the gist of the article is, Are EVs Better for the Environment than ICE Vehicles? I know this

[00:25:37] is a subject we talk about a lot, but this article goes into a lot of detail and they're basing this off of a study that was done. So they break the life cycle of a car down into

[00:25:51] four phases. Manufacturing, production of the battery, that's for EVs, the time on the road, and the disposal and recycling of the vehicle at end of life, which includes the battery. Now I am encouraging everyone to go and actually read this article because there are a lot of

[00:26:08] really good graphs and I don't know that I can fully do it justice on audio. But I'm going to give it a shot. Let's start with manufacturing. To manufacture an ICE vehicle, it takes about

[00:26:21] 8.4 tons of CO2, right? To manufacture an EV, it's about seven and a half tons of CO2. And if you're thinking to yourself right now, you're like, wait a second, I've always heard that manufacturing an EV creates more CO2 than manufacturing an ICE car. Well, you would be

[00:26:45] right because that 7.5 tons of CO2 does not include manufacturing the battery. That is another 7.4 tons of CO2. So an ICE vehicle manufacturing, we're looking at 8.4 tons and for the EV in total, we're looking at 14.9 tons of CO2. Now let's get to when you're on the road.

[00:27:09] Obviously, this is where most of the CO2 emissions come from for vehicles. So for this study, they actually used 189,000 kilometers as end of life. So as long as the vehicle is on the road for 189,000 kilometers, these numbers are accurate. If it died before or died after,

[00:27:32] things change. But this is very important for modeling. So it's 189,000 kilometers for EVs and ICE vehicles. So the CO2 that they measured for this came from general maintenance that you have on your vehicle and then the fuel or energy used to power your vehicle. Now I do

[00:27:52] know that your tires as they wear, they create pollution. They did not include this in any of in the study and I only say that so that I know somebody's going to email me about that.

[00:28:10] Well, what about the tires? They didn't include it. So during the time the ICE vehicle is on the road, it creates an additional 45.9 tons of CO2 where the EV only creates an additional

[00:28:25] 10.5 tons of CO2. Now some of you rightfully so might be out there saying, well, how are people getting their electricity? Because that makes a difference. So when they calculated this, they used 2022 numbers and at that time, 68% of Australia's electricity came from fossil fuels.

[00:28:45] And I'm saying this as a country, right? There's probably more, I don't know if Australia's got states, but there's probably states in Australia that have more renewable energy and some that has less, but they use this as an aggregate, right? 68% of electricity came

[00:29:06] from fossil fuels and 32% came from renewable energy. So that's how they got that number. And that's probably pretty fair from the little that I know about Australia. Now, as far as totals, we've manufactured the car, we drove it at 189,000 kilometers. That gives us a total

[00:29:25] of 54.3 tons of CO2 generated for the ICE vehicle versus 25.4 tons of CO2 for the EV. Now there is a point in the life cycle where the EV becomes cleaner than the ICE car. And that is at approximately, according to their study, 40,000 kilometers. Now, if you use

[00:29:49] cleaner energy to power your vehicle, that number can be less if used to your energy. It could be more obviously, and there's a lot of factors in there, but it's right around 40,000 kilometers, which is what we've talked about in the past in that general area.

[00:30:03] And as you are looking at the chart, the curve really flattens out when you get to that 40,000 kilometer mark, whereas the ICE vehicle continues to grow and how much CO2 it's putting

[00:30:15] in the air. Now, in terms of end to life and recycling, they assumed in this study that all of the vehicles were going to be recycled at 189,000 kilometers. And since much of the vehicles they can be recycled, they actually got a negative number. So because they were able

[00:30:35] to recycle it, the ICE vehicles were, we took 1.6 tons of CO2 out of their lifetime emissions and the EV, we took 2.5 tons of CO2 out of its lifetime emissions. Obviously, if you don't recycle or you just leave the car in your front yard, that doesn't really do anything.

[00:30:57] The total tons of CO2. So we have the ICE vehicle is sitting at 52.7 tons of CO2 for its lifetime, and the EV is sitting at 22.9 tons of CO2. So pretty significant difference between the two.

[00:31:14] If you want to learn more about this, like I said, there's a lot of great graphs in the article. This is actually a really good article. It was really easy to understand because I understood it. Actually, I was sitting with my daughter, Sierra and her boyfriend, Brad,

[00:31:29] when I was reading this article for the first time after Graham and Senate, and I was showing it to them. And we had a really good discussion on not only how good the article was, but just kind of the numbers in general,

[00:31:44] because I left out a lot of stuff. I tried to make it and I was able to do it. I tried to make it as show audio friendly, I guess, as I could. But there's so much more in

[00:31:57] there and I would highly encourage everybody go and check it out. All right, everybody, that is it for me this episode on Thursday. Tesla has their shareholders meeting, which is tomorrow. I'm going to try and get that show done on Thursday, but I got a lot to do.

[00:32:15] So it'll definitely be going out on Friday. So I hope you all enjoy that. That will be a longer show. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening. Go check out the Patreon if

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