Emotional Reactions and EV Reflections

[00:00:21] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving and much, much more. My name is Bodhi and I am your host on today's episode. On today's episode, I've got some news for you. Listen, I know I say I'm busy all the time. I really feel like it is. I use that excuse way too much, but the truth is, is I'm really busy and I missed Tuesday's episode and I couldn't even catch up. Like at this point in time, I'm not going to be busy.

[00:00:51] I'm not going to catch up Tuesday, Tuesday's episode, which is weird because while I've been late on episodes, I don't think I've missed an episode in quite a long time. Like my dad died in like 2017, 2000, yeah, 2016, 2017. And I missed a couple of episodes when he died, but I don't think I've missed anything since. Maybe, maybe, but I can't think of it. But here's the thing.

[00:01:21] Right now, I've got stuff I'm studying for work and that ends at the end of the month, but very busy studying for stuff for work. I've also got a part-time job and I'm going through the classes for the part-time job. It's three months worth of classes and I'm at the end of that.

[00:01:41] And that's taken a lot of time. And this third module that we're in for the part-time job is, it's a lot. It's a lot of work, a lot more than the first two for sure. And the first two were pretty, had me pretty busy. And then you tack on in March, in the beginning of March, I went to Thailand for two weeks to hang out with some family and friends there. And that was a lot of fun. I've been to Thailand several times, love going to Thailand.

[00:02:10] So that was a nice part of the break that I took. But I came back to all of those things that I just said. And I had a very relatively short amount of time to get these things done. And I was just, there was just too much to do.

[00:02:28] So having said that, if I owe you an email or I said, I was going to talk about some certain things on the podcast based on your email, that's not going to be this show. Maybe next show, but not going to be this show. Also, if you've emailed me and I haven't emailed you back, it's not because I'm ignoring you. It's just because right now I am in getting all these other things finished mode. All right. Let's see here. Going through and going through. Okay.

[00:02:55] So this is next part is kind of a funny story, but this is, this is actually the reason why I didn't end up recording on Tuesday. And then I just never recovered after this on Tuesday afternoon, like two o'clock, three o'clock, I drove to my local sprouts, got a mushroom cola because I am 50 years old and that's what you do at 50. And drove home, didn't think anything of it.

[00:03:22] I got a message on my iPhone. I got a message on my iPhone that my tire was low on my car and I have a slow leak in my front left tire. So I was like, well, okay, I'll just go fill it up right before I leave. Cause my kids had a track meet at four and, uh, go out to the garage, open up the garage door. And sure enough, my back, right tire, not my front left tire, but my back, right tire is completely flat.

[00:03:51] And I was like, Oh, that sucks. And then the first thing I think is that I get like Tesla takedown. Did somebody, somebody slash my tires. So I look on the cameras, you know, on the, the century mode recordings and no, I didn't, there was nobody around my car when I went to sprouts.

[00:04:08] I was like, okay, well maybe I just hit, it got a nail or something in it and filled my tire up and it filled up just fine. Called discount tire said, can you slip me in? Cause they, they close at six. And by this time it's, you know, getting pretty close to four. And the guy's like, yeah, man, just bring it down. They've always treated me nice at this discount tighter. So I drove down to discount tire and I said, listen, I got to go do some stuff at my kids track meet. Um, I was a volunteer.

[00:04:34] So, uh, once everything's fixed, I'll come back and pick it up right before six. And he said, cool. That works for me. I was like, great. He calls me up probably 40 minutes later. And he's like, Hey man, you have a razor blade in your tire. And I'm just, I'm not judging. I'm, uh, well, kind of judging. I'm volunteering at the high jump station. And I was like, son of a gun. I did get Tesla takedown. Somebody slashed my tire with a razor blade.

[00:05:00] So, uh, jumped at a Waymo because, uh, Waymos are pretty prevalent here and, uh, spent $30 in Waymos back and forth by the way. And I was like, listen, I'll call you right back. This isn't the time for me to talk. My wife took over so that I could go and, uh, so I can go get the, the tire stuff taken care of. And, uh, and, uh, on my way there, I call him back and I said, Hey, let's, let's go ahead and just replace all the tires. Cause I have about 23,000 miles on my tires.

[00:05:27] And I don't, when I replace the other three tires, I'm going to replace four tires at a time anyway. Um, I'm not going to just replace three tires. So I figured ultimately, well, I don't want to spend, it was $1,300. I don't want to spend $1,300 to replace my tires.

[00:05:44] I'm going to spend $1,500 or even $1,600 in total if I don't replace all of them now. So I made that choice and I was asking him, I was like, Hey man, um, how did, well, how was I able to fill it up? If there's a razor blade in the tire? Cause you know, sidewall. And he goes, no, no, no, it was in your tread. I was like, Oh, okay. I misunderstood. I thought somebody slashed my tires. He was like, no, it's just a razor blade in your tread. So no Tesla takedown.

[00:06:10] Um, I, I just, um, I, I just, that's where my brain went to. And listen, I'm telling this story for, um, a reason. So, uh, and I was telling my co-host on Beyond the Post this week, this same story and, uh, Rob Dunwood and, uh, and Rob's head went there too. And God bless Rob because he, he got mad on my behalf. And I was like, Hey, Hey, calm down, calm down. It's not, that's not that.

[00:06:38] Um, but, um, here's the thing. Uh, I, I had a really strong emotional reaction when, when I first saw my tire, my flat tire in the garage and I have an even stronger emotional reaction when he told me that there was a razor blade in my tire. And, uh, while I was walking, cause you know, Waymo doesn't pick you up where you want to be picked up. It picks it up. You picture up where you, where it wants to pick you up.

[00:07:05] I was walking to the location that I needed to meet the Waymo and I had so many tweets that some of them weren't so nice. I had so many tweets lined up.

[00:07:14] Like I'm going to post this and post this and post this and every single one of them I deleted. Thank goodness. But my, the lesson here is, you know, don't, don't, don't assume, don't react immediately on emotion. Um, because I was hot. I was, I was really angry.

[00:07:36] And had I posted what I wanted to post, I would have looked like a real idiot. Um, and I wouldn't have deleted them because I think once you kind of, uh, make those statements, people don't forget about it anyway. Um, but yeah, I, I, I'm really thankful that I, that I didn't actually post that.

[00:07:59] And the reason, the thing that I'm trying to convey here is I'm just as guilty. A lot of you praise me because I'm even handed at things and I'm not political when I'm on this podcast. And, and that's, there's a couple of different things for that. One is I have the time to be even handed and think through things because this isn't a live podcast and I write all my notes beforehand.

[00:08:21] And two, I'm not political because I don't think electric vehicles should be political or technology in general should be political one way or the other. I also don't think talking about the environment or human rights or any of these other things should be political.

[00:08:34] We can disagree on certain aspects of those things, but I think we can all agree. We want, we don't want people to be indentured servants or people to be treated poorly or, you know, somebody to just go and wreck a, an entire forest that people, you, you know, uh, depend on for a variety of different reasons.

[00:08:55] Like I'm from Alaska and a lot of my family and friends live in the middle of nowhere on purpose. So if some company came in and decided that they were going to disrupt their lives with a lot of like, uh, extricating rare earth metal minerals and stuff like that, they would have something to say about that. And these people range in political opinions, like from one side of the spectrum to the other, but they would all have a problem with it.

[00:09:24] Um, so my, my, my, the point of this is, is I'm guilty just as much as anybody else is of having an emotional reaction. And I was almost guilty of letting that show out in public in a very embarrassing way for me. So I, I, I know I talk a lot about, Hey, uh, let's not, um, burn electric vehicles because we're mad at somebody.

[00:09:52] Let's not shoot into a Tesla showrooms because we might actually kill somebody that has nothing to do with what you're mad at. Yeah. It could, what might not even be a, might not even be a Tesla employee. It might just be somebody there cleaning at night. You know, this, this kind of stuff is, uh, out of hand. I do understand the emotional reaction.

[00:10:14] So I, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to expose myself to you. Uh, cause I really feel like when people like, Oh, I appreciate how fair you, you, you, you keep things. Um, you know, I try to keep as much bias out of this as humanly possible, uh, as it can anyway.

[00:10:33] And, uh, in reality, I'm, I'm, you know, I, I feel guilty about that because I definitely have strong reactions to this kind of stuff, just like everybody else does. But I do try to take a minute, uh, or even, you know, some cases, several days to really digest information before I form a strong opinion one way or the other. That doesn't mean the emotional reaction goes away to be, believe me, but the strong opinion, uh, part, I really try to keep that open.

[00:11:03] And, uh, yeah, so I appreciate everybody listening to, to that part of, of this episode. Um, but yeah, $1,300 for tires and, um, the nice people at discount tired got me taken care of. Unfortunately they couldn't take care of me that day cause I'd wait till the next day for the tires to be put on. But we live in such an angry world. I, uh, and I don't think it's, I think it's angry online. I don't think it's angry in general.

[00:11:31] Like when I walk around, I have very pleasant interactions with people, but, um, online there's just a, a very angry feel. And, uh, you know, everybody just take a minute and, uh, relax and let your blood pressure go down. Then start forming your opinion based on what's actually going on. And maybe not so much as what you're feeling, not to say what you're feeling isn't valid.

[00:12:00] But, sometimes it's not reality. Not all the time. Anyway. We're Teresa and Nemo. And that's why we've been switched to Shopify. The platform, the before Shopify used, has used regularly updates, which have caused sometimes to cause the shop to not work. Finally makes our Nemo Boards Shop also a good figure on mobile devices. And the illustrations on the boards come now much clearer, what is also important to us and what our brand also makes us out.

[00:12:30] Start your test today for 1€ per month on shopify.de. All right, let's move on to our news segment here. And, um, I'm going to be honest, like when I was writing up our news, I got four pages of news or almost four pages of news just before I even got to the Tesla stuff.

[00:12:57] Um, so there's no Tesla segment this week and not because of any other reason except for I've already got a full show and I didn't want to make it much longer than it needed to be. So starting off, Nikola Motors filed for bankruptcy and it's currently selling office assets to pay off creditors. Nikola is headquartered just down the road from me in Tempe, Arizona, and they have a factory in Coolidge, Arizona.

[00:13:25] Now, Lucid Motors, not Nikola, but Lucid Motors is not far away from them in Casa Grande, Arizona. Lucid announced that it has reached an agreement with Nikola Motors to acquire that Coolidge factory as well as Nikola Motors headquarters in Tempe and some other facilities. Um, for about, it's, the deal is valued at about $30 million, which seems like a steal. I don't know if it is, but it does seem like it's a steal.

[00:13:53] Uh, that, that adds over 884,000 square feet of real estate to Lucid's footprint. So that it's not, it's not a ton, but it's not nothing either. That's a lot of, that's a lot of square footage. Lucid will also offer jobs to over 300 of Nikola's employees. And I'm not sure how many employees Nikola has at this point, but I think that's a pretty kind thing for them to do. Now, this deal, like I said, is valued at $300 million.

[00:14:23] That is both cash and non-cash considerations. So I don't know if that includes stock, but which Nikola's stock right now is like at $2.80 or something like that. It's not very good. So I don't know what the non-cash considerations are included in there, but yeah. And honestly, Nikola announced that they were going to be building a factory in the late 2010s area, 2016, 2017, somewhere around there.

[00:14:53] Nikola announced that they were looking at Buckeye, Arizona to build their factory, which is in the West Valley of the Phoenix metropolitan area. And I was like, oh, that'd be really cool. And then something happened there and they ended up picking Coolidge. And around the same time, Lucid Motors had picked Casa Grande. Those two obviously are very close. I think they're about 30, 40 minutes apart. And I thought, oh, wow, because, you know, we don't have much of an auto industry here in Arizona.

[00:15:22] And I was like, well, this would be really cool if we had like a hub for electric vehicles. There's a lot of really talented people who work here. And I kind of thought that that area might blow up into kind of a little mini Silicon Valley is not the right word, nor is, you know, you know, rust built.

[00:15:45] But I kind of thought that area would be more startups and more EV makers and things like that would build in that area. And it really hasn't proven to be true. All right, let's move on to our next story. NIO and CATL are partnering on battery swap stations. CATL will invest $340 million into NIO or into this joint partnership, I should say.

[00:16:12] The best part of this partnership, in my opinion, is they are going to help form and adopt standards for battery swap stations, which I think is fantastic. Currently, NIO is operating 3,172 battery swap stations covering over 700 cities. And most of those are in China. But there are a few in Europe. There's like maybe 50 battery swap stations in Europe at this point.

[00:16:38] In addition to this, CATL is also partnering with Sinopec, which I hope I'm saying that right. But Sinopec is a Chinese company that operates close to 30,000 gas stations in China. And the plan is to bring battery swap stations to 10,000 of those locations.

[00:16:59] So right now, they're going to build 500 or at least 500 this year and then work their way up to that 10,000 number. Sinopec also has regular old BART boring standard DC fast charging stations at their gas stations as well. But yeah, I really love the battery swap station.

[00:17:24] As many of you have listened to this podcast for a while know, it is genuinely one of the, I think, coolest parts of electric vehicles. And right now, we just don't have that here in the US. But I'm glad that companies are working on it. Speaking of something I'm glad companies are working on, BYD has announced a solar powered humanoid robot and it will cost $10,000.

[00:17:49] And again, I want to emphasize the solar power part because when the robot gets low on power, it walks itself outside into the sun and charges. So like the robot's like, oh, need more sun, just walks outside and charges up. So I guess even robots need vitamin D throughout their day. I think it's kind of a weird thing. Like what if you live in a place where somebody could just take your robot?

[00:18:17] I just, I think that it's a cool idea. I'm not, I'm not sure how well it will work in practice. But the robot is called BoyoboD and it's the capital B and boy or bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, d. So basically it spells B-Y-D if you call out the B, the Y and the D in the name. It's a, it's a weird name. As far as the capabilities of this thing, you know what?

[00:18:47] We'll just wait until it's released and we'll see what the actual capabilities are before we talk about that. Cause this isn't a robot podcast, but I am interested to seeing what they come up with here. And you know what? The rest of these stories are all about B-Y-D and I could have added more stories even on top of this. But again, short on time here. The already low cost B-Y-D Seagull just got another price cut.

[00:19:13] So initially the non-smart driving vitality edition of the Seagull was $9,500. Now when I say non-smart driving, B-Y-D came out and they said, hey, we're going to release our autonomous driving suite for free.

[00:19:34] Every car, pretty much every car gets what they call God's eye, which is, is just like a, it reminds me of something that you would see like on the mummy or some, one of those kinds of movies, maybe Tomb Raider. But the, the self-driving or maybe some techno thriller where the AI has gone crazy, but their autonomous driving suite is called God's eye. Um, and they enabled this on most of the vehicles, no additional charge.

[00:20:02] The exception are obviously, you know, the B-Y-D, uh, Seagull vitality edition. You don't get the autonomous driving features for free, but you get a relatively good car because you're going to get a range of around 190 miles or 305 kilometers. But they do have a bigger battery option where that will get you 252 miles or 405 kilometers.

[00:20:26] And the new cost on this is $7,800 for a car, for an electric vehicle, $7,800. We're looking at, uh, a price decrease of almost $2,000. What was that? $1,800, something like that. $1,700 from nearly 10,000 to under $8,000. That's pretty impressive. And you know, when I was in Thailand, I was like, there's B-Y-Ds all over the place in Thailand.

[00:20:54] And I, I looked, they're nice cars. Like the, the window tent in Thailand, they don't have the same laws we do here in the U S. So the tent in some of those cars is pretty dark or I, at least I don't think they do. So it's hard to see inside and you don't want to be weird. Um, especially as a foreigner going up to somebody's car and taking pictures and things like that. But I did take some pictures if I knew no one was in it. But, uh, yeah, the, the, the auto three, nice car.

[00:21:24] Like some of these B-Y-D vehicles are super nice. A lot of the Chinese vehicles, when you see them up close, they are really, um, stunning's not the right word, but they are really impressive. They are futuristic, futuristic looking cars, but also they kind of have an elegance about them that I would not have expected them to have. And for such a affordable vehicle. So yeah, uh, pretty cool stuff.

[00:21:54] Now B-Y-D is known obviously for affordable vehicles, but this next vehicle, this next EV we're going to talk about. Is super unaffordable by comparison, but still pretty affordable. While I was on my break, B-Y-D announced pricing for the Han L sedan and the Tang L SUV.

[00:22:18] And this new, these two new vehicles were going to be built on B-Y-D's super E platform, which is a brand new thousand volt platform. Now, initially the Han L, which is the sedan was going to be priced at $36,000. This gave you an 83.2 kilowatt hour battery. I mean, it's a B-Y-D blade battery.

[00:22:41] Um, 83.2 kilowatt hour battery, excuse me, which would get you 373 miles of range for 601 kilometers. You can upgrade to a bigger battery. It looks like you can get 436 miles of range and 701 kilometers. Now don't expect those numbers to, uh, actually be reality because, you know, when car companies announce ranges that sometimes it matches, sometimes it doesn't.

[00:23:08] So we'll have to see when the cars are actually released, whether or not that is, uh, something that, that they're able to hit. But like I said, the Han L and the Tang L, they're supposed to be capable of megawatt charging on this thousand volt, uh, architecture. And they can add 248 miles of range or 400 kilometers of range in about five minutes.

[00:23:34] Um, by the way, uh, as many of you know, because of the way the charging curves work, this only works if your battery is low on charge. So you need to have a low state of charge when you plug in and, uh, a big enough battery to get that 248 miles of range back into the battery. But when I was looking at this, I was like, well, what are the advantages of a thousand volt architecture?

[00:24:01] We've talked about some of these on the podcast in the past, but I think it's worth mentioning again. Some of the advantages is, uh, it's faster to charge and obviously 248 miles in five minutes is pretty impressive. The other thing is the higher voltage or with the higher voltage, there's lower current needed to deliver the same amount of power. So you can use thinner and lighter wiring, which reduces the weight of the vehicle.

[00:24:28] Thinner wire also means less resistance, uh, in the wiring components, which means less energy and less overall, or excuse me, better overall efficiency for the vehicle. And it's less energy loss, I should say, and better overall energy efficiency. So, and again, I'm, I am not an electrical engineer. So some of these things, uh, I understand other things. I'm just repeating words. So don't ask me any follow-ups is what I'm saying there.

[00:24:58] So what are the downsides? Well, the higher voltage systems can cost more. Uh, the other thing is with higher voltage systems, it could take longer for the energy to discharge from the high voltage components. This isn't really something that the average person probably needs to be aware of, but for people that will be working around these high voltage components, uh, in the event of an emergency, or if they're working on it like a mechanic. So we're talking about first responders and mechanics.

[00:25:27] You want to be aware that there still could be energy left in some of these components and you could get shocked. Um, there are also some engineering challenges that have to do with like, you know, you can't use components for a, like say a 400 volt system necessarily, but you have to have special components for this thousand volt architecture, but that's not the, you know, the end all be all.

[00:25:52] But there was a really good article and I'll put it in the show notes, uh, from Magnus, uh, international. Magna is a company that builds vehicles for other companies. So really good article on this. And I'll pass that along to you if you are not passing along. I'll put it in the show notes if you'd like to read it. Um, so that leads us, we got the cars taken care of, right? That leads us to what other things need to be in place to make this work.

[00:26:21] Well, right now there are very few chargers out there in the world that will, you know, meaningfully support a thousand volt system. Like, you know, you're not pulling up to a version three supercharger and you're not going to be charging at a thousand kilowatts. It's just not going to happen. So, um, right now BYD is planning on building 4,000 DC fast charging points across China.

[00:26:50] And each of these stations, each of these charge points will be able to deliver a thousand kilowatts, which is honestly no small task. I, over the years I've talked to several people who have been responsible for this kind of stuff. And there, this is a real challenge to deploy these DC fast chargers. The first thing you need to consider is where to put them.

[00:27:16] Uh, the, the advantage that BYD has is they have data on where all the, the folks that are driving their cars are. So they kind of know, uh, or at least have a really good idea where, where they should be putting these. They're not just, you know, fishing in the dark here. But, uh, you got to know where to put them.

[00:27:32] Once you've decided where you're going to put them, you either need to own the land, lease the land, or make some type of agreement with the property holder that, where you want to put your, your DC fast chargers. And then from there, once you've got all of that taken care of, and that, that's this whole different set of contracts and regulations and all that stuff.

[00:27:56] Once you've got that taken care of, then you need to actually have like regulatory approval. And the, again, I don't know what the bureaucracy looks like in China, but you know, most places in the world, it's, it's pretty bureaucracy heavy. Um, but I think the biggest challenge is a lot of these places are not going to have enough electrical capacity on site.

[00:28:21] So I would say a good percentage of the time they're going to have to come in and bring more capacity to the site. And that's going to require trenching permits, you know, you got to put in new transformers, got to upgrade electric boxes. Like there's just a whole lot more, um, expense that goes in when you're bringing that. And BYD, you know, could definitely pay for this.

[00:28:50] You know, they're not hurting for money, but it is going to be quite expensive and a logistics challenge. But that led me down the road of thinking, do we really need five minute charging? You know, one of the first stories that I talked about, I think it was the second story that I talked about, was NIO's battery swap stations. Don't do, do think, and I'm asking you, you can email me, Bode, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com.

[00:29:16] Do you think that, uh, five minute charging the way BYD is proposing it is a better idea than just going to a battery swap station and swap out? Now I realize BYD vehicles don't have this capability. This is a hypothetical, but what would you prefer? Would you rather just prefer to pull into like a little mini garage and have somebody swap your battery out? Or would you rather pull up to a charging stall and charge in five minutes?

[00:29:45] Uh, I'm genuinely curious here. So shoot me an email and let me know. But, uh, yeah. Do you think we need five minute charging or is, or are we just kind of thinking about things differently? Like five or six years ago, maybe more of us in the community would say, yeah. And I think I'd be part of this. Would say, yeah, I think we need more, uh, we need faster charging so that you can be in and out in five minutes.

[00:30:14] But in reality, do we really need that? Because, you know, we have different ways of traveling. After you've owned an EV for a while, you kind of adapt. And it's not a big inconvenience, in my opinion, to travel when you're on the road. Um, certainly some parts of the country, it could be a little sketchy here and there, uh, depending on what chargers are available or not. But, uh, I think that, I think people are just kind of adapting the way that they do things.

[00:30:43] So I guess it's two questions. The first question is, what do you prefer? Five minute charging or a battery swap that takes about five minutes? The second question is, if you couldn't have the battery swap option, do you need five minute charging? Or are you okay with the 10 or 15 minutes that it takes you to charge your vehicle? So shoot me an email, bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com. And yeah, that's our show this week.

[00:31:12] I want to thank everybody for being patient with me. Uh, many of you have emailed me very kind things over the last month and I really appreciate the kind words. Uh, again, I'm behind on everything. So if I haven't responded to your email or I told you I was going to talk about an email in the show, I definitely will get to that next week. But I hope everybody had a really nice week as I'm talking to you at Friday and I don't know, 930, 941.

[00:31:42] Hope you had a nice week. I hope your weekend is full of fun and joy. And I will talk to you, man, with any luck on Tuesday. Thank you, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.