Just Kidding, No Break

[00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, autonomous driving, renewable energy and more. Doesn't that just roll off the tongue? My name is Bodie and I am your host.

[00:00:34] I know I said earlier this week that I was overwhelmed and had lots of stuff to do and there probably wouldn't be a Friday episode and I was right, there was no Friday episode.

[00:00:43] It was only a Saturday morning at 6am episode which is the one we're doing right now. I do have to apologize and advanced because I've got some sort of weird breathing issue going on. It might be bronchitis, they're not sure yet.

[00:01:01] It's probably not pneumonia but yeah, I'm wheezing a lot despite the fact that I'm on Albuterol and Prednisone. Every now and again you're gonna hear me wheeze and I'm not gonna cut it out. I'm also breathing a little heavier than normal although right now it seems like

[00:01:16] it's okay because I got that tightness in the chest when everything's all constricted and it's difficult to breathe. I don't have asthma so this is a weird thing that's going on but yeah, so there you go, you're caught up. What are we gonna talk about on today's show?

[00:01:34] We're gonna talk about Chevy Pausing the 2024 Blazer EV. We're gonna talk a little bit about what Neo announced on their Neo Day. We're gonna thank our patrons and yeah, we're gonna get into a little bit of Tesla news that's

[00:01:50] gonna end negatively but I don't think it's such a negative thing. But it's gonna feel negative at first. Before we start, I do wanna let you know that there is a really good episode of the

[00:02:04] SMR podcast where Chris Ashley goes over his trip from North Carolina to Tennessee to pick up a trailer and then from Tennessee back to North Carolina with that trailer. And I think he said his trailer was about 5,000 pounds so if you wanna know how an F-150

[00:02:24] Lightning does towing through the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina or just in that general area, listen to that episode it's really really good. I'll put a link in the show notes but it's also called the SMR podcast.

[00:02:40] And we have some recommendations for stories from SMR podcast host Robert Dunwood so stay tuned. Fisker delivered 4,700 Fisker Oceans in 2023 and honestly way more than I thought they would. Despite the fact that I am seeing people posting pictures of them on Twitter more and

[00:03:03] more, again I know I've seen one maybe two. I thought I saw a third one but it turned out to be a different car entirely so I'm pretty sure I've seen two in my area so good on you Fisker that's really good compared to where

[00:03:21] I genuinely thought they'd be about 800 and that would have been my prediction when they announced that they were starting deliveries not based on their last quarter earnings report. Let's see Chevy has paused sales for the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV and you might be asking yourself

[00:03:40] they just released this thing what could possibly be wrong with it? Well turns out software issues it's not very good. Turns out remember when we talked about how the GM executives shouldn't be throwing shade at companies like Apple and Google for their unsafe Apple CarPlay and Android Auto

[00:04:02] well it turns out that your software is not so great either. They said that GM said that it's not for safety issues with the software and it only affects a limited number of vehicles wouldn't you only have a few hundred vehicles or a

[00:04:22] few thousand vehicles out there I would imagine that limited number is all of the vehicles because it's a software issue but I guess the quality for this software is bad. Kevin Williams from Inside EVs got a chance to drive the Blazer and more than just

[00:04:40] a little test drive around a track they actually got a journalist drive and this is a summary from an electric article that I actually read this from and I thought the summary was really good so I just stole it.

[00:04:57] So here we go the Blazer EVs infotainment operating system powered by Android Auto all but completely died multiple times on the journalist's drive as in very concerning screen flashing which then culminated in a total black display no apps no navigation no

[00:05:20] charging route bizarrely the software was able to be reviewed temporarily which means that when they handed over the car to the journalist they're like hey review the whole car there's no NDAs and then they said well hold on for everybody else there's going

[00:05:39] to be an NDA and then there were some charging issues and that may or may not have been the Blazer's fault it also could have been the network that they were using their fault I believe they were

[00:05:49] using Electrify America for that but there was also early charging issues with the Hummer EV you would think that they would have had that worked out on Chevy's side and they may maybe they did I don't know but yeah it turns out software is really hard who knew

[00:06:11] I did me and everybody who's ever worked at a software company creating something except for the marketing people in those software companies because in my experience they didn't understand it at all. All right let's move on to our first Rob Dunwood recommendation Rob was on a call

[00:06:29] with him earlier this week and he's like hey what do you think about the Chinese cell phone maker Xiao Mi building an EV and I said what now and he said yeah they built an EV to compete with Tesla

[00:06:40] and Porsche that's like that's crazy a cell phone company jumping into electric vehicles seems like a stretch but if you remember Neo jumped into cell phones Neo the electric car company in China

[00:06:56] said hey we're gonna do cell phones now and electric cars so yeah that's kind of cool it's going to be called the Su7 sedan or the Su Qi hopefully I said that right it has very ambitious specs and features which I'm not going to talk about now because

[00:07:14] by the time the car comes out very little of that stuff will be actually true but we'll see what happens as we get closer to release this is kind of a cool thing I highly doubt that we're

[00:07:26] going to see anything over here in North America or at least in the United States because of our relationship Xiao Mi phones as far as I know aren't sold here you can buy one import it and

[00:07:40] use it here but I don't believe because of some government stuff that stuff is sold here here our next Rob recommendation this Rob caught me completely off guard this week Volkswagen and JAC group in China have previewed the first sodium ion battery

[00:08:02] or excuse me I should say the first electric vehicle featuring a sodium ion battery so sodium ion is cheaper than lithium it's about 10% cheaper but it's got lower energy density than the the ion batteries there's definitely some trade offs but some of the benefits of the sodium ion

[00:08:22] battery are better low temperature performance better charging speeds longer life less degradation and they're less prone to overheating so that's cool this is a five seater vehicle it'll be called the flower fairy it's called something else in Chinese which I was not able to pronounce

[00:08:41] or read so I'm going to stick with flower fairy the battery on this vehicle is quite small we're looking at 25 kilowatt hours which will get you about 250 kilometers or 150 miles according to

[00:08:53] JAC group and Hyundai but this is definitely a test this is they are they are testing the waters with these the CV I don't really know when it's going to come out we'll never see

[00:09:05] it here in the United States and nobody listens to my show in China but it'll almost be a Chinese exclusive at least initially so we'll keep an eye on this as it goes and if you don't know

[00:09:15] who JAC group is in China uh Western automakers or foreign automakers I guess would would be better term they have to partner with a Chinese manufacturing group and uh JAC is VW's partner in China and actually right now it looks like Volkswagen owns about 50% of JAC group which

[00:09:37] is another thing Rob told me this guy he talks about tech news on the Daily Tech News show and the SMR podcast and uh he's he's beaten me to stories over here on the Kilowatt podcast where I exclusively

[00:09:50] talk about electric vehicles anyway 25 kilowatt or about a 250 kilometers about 150 miles this is great uh sticking on a story with the Volkswagen group Volkswagen group has adopted the NACS standard you you might know that this isn't exactly new news came out last week but the Volkswagen group

[00:10:13] includes Volkswagen Audi Porsche and Scout which is a brand they're reviving and should be out here I think in 2025 or 2026 so I think it's just Stellantis here in North America that has not fully

[00:10:30] embraced the NACS adapter for electric vehicles if I'm wrong on that let me know I can't think of another company right off the top of my head though uh one more story about NACS and we'll

[00:10:41] move on the NACS standard has received support from the White House now that the Society of Automotive Engineers has made it into a standard and it belongs to the world instead of belonging to

[00:10:56] Tesla the White House has said uh yeah this is a good thing we should definitely be doing that all right I mentioned we were going to talk about NEO so let's do that NEO Day was held

[00:11:07] this week uh NEO Day is where NEO shows off all of their cool stuff that they're doing they announced the ET9 and this is a car for rich people this is a car that would

[00:11:20] rival um the Lucid air like the high-end Lucid air this is a four-seater vehicle in the back this is this is where everything interesting is in the car because uh that's where the owner of

[00:11:34] the car sits is in the back the the driver sits up front I'm sure there's plenty of cool stuff up there but the luxury is really in the rear of the vehicle you get an executive bridge with comfy

[00:11:47] seats and a sizable console between those seats so think of two very fluffy recliners and a big old console in the middle with a swivel table uh between the two seats it looks really nice

[00:12:03] some of the features they announced are steer by wire which we talked about with the Cybertruck and it also has rear wheel steering in the pictures this car didn't look all that long

[00:12:14] but in countries that aren't nor in North America you know sometimes you have to make tighter turns than we do here in the US uh so yeah I'm guessing the rear wheel steering is to help for maneuverability

[00:12:27] in some of those those cities that are a little bit uh tighter turning radiuses active suspension 900 volt architecture they say 158 miles of charge in five minutes or 255 kilometers of

[00:12:44] charge in five minutes and again this is all a big we'll see I think that Neo is a is a really good company with really good investors uh they'll probably come closer to hitting the features

[00:12:58] that they announced then Xiaomi will will come with the features that they announced but uh yeah as far as the rest of the features we'll see when the car comes out and go from there

[00:13:11] we're expecting this car in first quarter of 2025 so yeah uh it's cool uh it's cool cool looking car one more Neo story before we go the United Arab Emirates invested in a another investment firm

[00:13:31] which invested in Neo and they invested 2.2 billion dollars in Neo so that's a sizable amount but Neo's gonna burn through this money pretty quickly if they don't pull their act together because right now they are currently losing about 12 000 for every car that they sell

[00:13:50] which is not a a good business model especially when you consider this company's been around since at least 2018 probably a little bit before that but they've been selling cars since at least 2018 and when you consider that they are taking over factories and they're trying to get their

[00:14:09] more affordable model line going uh 2.2 billion dollars may not be enough which seems like a weird thing to say it doesn't all right it is that time for a Patreon plug I

[00:14:24] want to make sure to thank everybody who supports the show not only financially but all the folks who email in with great information we have a very educated audience which is intimidating hosting

[00:14:36] this show because there are people with uh lots of of titles behind their name that listen to the show that I'm not going to go into but we got some really we've got smarty people who listen

[00:14:48] to the show and why you listen to me stutter through it every week is beyond me but I do appreciate each and every one of you for doing it it really means a lot and I also appreciate

[00:14:57] our patrons so I'm not going to do a Patreon plug here you know where to go if you want to become a patron but I am going to take a moment to thank everyone who supports this show

[00:15:08] on Patreon and Acast Plus and I'm going to do dates here and I'm going to put them in order so 2018 patrons the first year that I started the Patreon I actually started this podcast I think

[00:15:24] in 2016 the patron started two years later so here we go James from True North AVs Mark Nate Cameron Dawn and Dale next up we have Sierra my kid supports the show she doesn't listen but

[00:15:41] she supports it she doesn't need to anyway Chris and Chip that was 2019 in 2020 we have Tomasso 2021 we had Rolando Michael Muskie Bruce C Howard which is a little reminder here that

[00:15:58] Howard may or may not have written a whole album called The Piano Inside My Mind so I'll put a link to that in the show notes if anybody's curious and you can see how talented the people in this

[00:16:10] community are moving on with her thank yous we have Isaiah Bruce W Steve S Jerbo Joseph that's all in 2021 big year in 2121 for this podcast and then we go to 2022 with friendly 66 one of my favorite usernames Alan Alex Steveny Christopher R and that rounds

[00:16:35] out 2022 moving on to 2023 we have David C Don Mo Cowbell another great one Jaime Chris B and now there's a couple of Chris B's we have so it's the Chris who whose last name begins

[00:16:52] with the B and ends with an E so yeah thank you very much Jean Scott Ravi electron raceway fabricator these are so clever Charles F just another Nick you're the only Nick on this list Nick

[00:17:10] so thank you Sean John B Paul and Charles S thank you all so much for supporting this show if I didn't give you a little shout out it's because I don't know if you if you want me to say

[00:17:24] anything about you and then in some cases I do I genuinely don't know anything about you but I love you all the same just like I love my kids all the same my daughter a little bit less today than I

[00:17:35] did yesterday but I'm sure she'll recover anyway no I love my daughter she's really good kid we just had a moment but yeah I do appreciate everybody who supports the show financially because

[00:17:49] it's not cheap to do this show it's not overly expensive to do it I already have all the equipment but when it comes to pain for the hosting and all the other stuff that goes around this it does

[00:18:03] get expensive so thank you so much for helping out and and supporting this show and if you don't support the show that's okay we have ads and and the ads pay me to help support the show the show

[00:18:17] roughly breaks even I haven't looked at the numbers for the entire year of 2023 but as a general rule we break even we don't lose money on this show I have other shows we lose money on but

[00:18:31] that's not a topic for this show all right let's jump into our Tesla news rumor has it that a model refresh is on its way it's coming in a few months this is typical I buy a model why and

[00:18:46] a new model comes out within a year of me purchasing it fantastic it is just a rumor though and I wouldn't put too much into this because for a long time we thought we were going to get a model

[00:18:56] s refresh and I was like we're getting it in November which I think was November of 2019 and we got a couple updates for the model so it was no big refresh eventually we did get that but

[00:19:06] the rumor mill was wrong so what I'm trying to say there and I bought into it hard but speaking of rumors a few weeks ago a few months ago actually we talked about Tesla working on

[00:19:20] wireless charging and the rumor was that they actually bought a wireless charging company which they in fact did well Tesla has now in has confirmed this rumor and says that they are

[00:19:31] working on wireless charging for EVs that was really hard for me to get out for some reason moving on to Tesla Sweden and the union battle there in the Nordic countries I'll be honest

[00:19:43] I did not think that this would be so polarizing for folks in the community I want to say everybody who has emailed in and there were folks that I had not heard from yet who listened

[00:19:56] to the show who emailed in on this topic very very polarizing but everybody was very respectful which is something I really appreciate because it was not like when I first started doing this

[00:20:08] podcast some guy was like hey you suck and you stutter and I was like I know I'm aware of all of these things how do you think I should get better and he didn't email me back so yeah if

[00:20:20] you still listen I'm waiting anyway we're going to talk a little bit about the union issue as it pertains to Tesla because I think it's relevant and we do have people who listen in the Nordic

[00:20:33] countries Tesla has lost an appeal to get the Swedish postal service post Nord to deliver packages to Tesla which includes license plates so they can deliver cars and I don't know if this was a lawsuit against the postal service or a lawsuit against the organization that assigns

[00:20:55] license plates because they wanted them to use a different shipping service and they said now we're going to use postal nerd or post Nord to deliver your packages sorry well they sued and

[00:21:08] they lost and then they sued again and they lost again so there you go so what is Tesla to do they are now delivering cars without registered license plates so they deliver the car and the

[00:21:22] license plate will arrive to the new owner where post Nord will happily deliver it within a few days after taking delivery not optimal but a good workaround and then Nordic institutional investors these are a group of folks that are managing over a trillion dollars in assets

[00:21:43] say that they are deeply concerned about Tesla's attitude towards workers rights in Sweden and demanded that Tesla sign the collective bargaining agreement and if it's there's more than one agreement I'm not really sure here they want them to sign the collective bargaining

[00:21:58] agreement months and they even sent Elon Musk and Tesla a a letter a politely worded letter that they should they should do this they should sign it and they should be respectful of the social norms in these countries I doubt Tesla's going to do anything you would think

[00:22:18] that this investor group whatever they're called it's almost 6 30 in the morning my brain's not quite up to speed yet but you'd think this group of investors would say hey if you don't do this we're gonna remove our investments in you but they did not say

[00:22:32] that they would sell their stake in Tesla they just shared their concerns so take that for what you will last story and this is a big doozy apparently some parts on the on Tesla's the across the

[00:22:50] model line were known to fail internally in Tesla and in some cases fail spectacularly and that's that seems right that they should know that they should have all of that data and that's not really a big issue that happens the issue is is when these parts failed

[00:23:09] in some cases Tesla would blame the customer and make the customer responsible for the repairs now Tesla has built a whole reputation on excellent customer service and it's still really high as it stands today so why would a company who knows that these parts are faulty

[00:23:29] go down the line of blaming the customer and the reason why I would guess is because those parts are expensive and they didn't want to deal with it and they knew there was a problem and

[00:23:40] they're like well if this comes up down the road we'll deal with it I'm going to give you two examples here one is a customer had a front wheel fall off while driving on autopilot at 60 miles per

[00:23:53] hour which I'm sure was terrifying the other example is a nice family spent a sizable amount of their savings on a Model Y so they bought it let's say on a Monday they get their car they're super

[00:24:09] stoked we got a Tesla it's electric oh this is exciting so maybe they get their car with let's say 12 miles on it they go out and they put another 103 miles on the car a total of 115 miles on the

[00:24:22] odometer they are hanging out maybe they went to lunch they're pulling into their their neighborhood to go home and charge their new car and from a low speed turn the Model Y front right suspension completely collapses like completely collapses and at this point I'm imagining

[00:24:47] that the owners a are terrified because that's not normal for a new car and b I would imagine that they're really bummed because they got this beautiful car they spent a lot of money on it

[00:24:59] and now this happens and you know it's gotta be a bummer it's gonna be an inconvenience for them but I'm imagining through this there is a little bit of optimism because Tesla has a

[00:25:13] a good name for customer service and the car has 115 miles on it and it's a day old and they've had it for one day Tesla's gonna warranty this no big deal so they call Tesla

[00:25:26] bring out a tow truck flatbed the truck to the Tesla service center Tesla takes a look at it and they go you know what there's previous suspension damage on this car we're not going to warranty it

[00:25:39] sorry pay us $14,000 and we'll fix it so the family's left with no other choice but to pay the $14,000 and Tesla fixes it and then the family's like this sucks not a great experience they sell the car for $10,000 less than they paid for it so now they're down $25,000

[00:26:04] because Tesla didn't want to warranty their parts and they knew that these parts were failing Tesla was instructing their service departments to tell customer the broken parts were not faulty and were therefore not covered under warranty even though that Tesla knew that

[00:26:21] these parts were faulty and a lot of the issues were suspension and steering issues and I don't know why I said issues so weird a lot of the issues were dealing with suspension and

[00:26:32] stealing steering let's get coming to an end folks so why would why would Tesla risk their brand like this and the reason why is there a company they're trying to make money and all of the automakers do this I've owned several Volkswagen's in my life I love Volkswagen

[00:26:53] cars I think they're great at least twice in my lifetime I've received a refund from Volkswagen for an issue that I thought should have been covered under warranty and they said nope not

[00:27:08] covered under warranty you got to pay for it one was around 700 800 bucks and the other one was about 24 to 2600 bucks I got now I paid more on those cars to fix them I didn't pay a lot because

[00:27:21] as a general rule there there wasn't a lot that went wrong with these vehicles one was an oxygen sensor that was the 780 dollar one and I don't remember exactly what the 2400 one was but when

[00:27:33] Volkswagen issued a recall I was able to submit my receipts to Volkswagen they just sent me a no worries which I do appreciate that but if Tesla's got issues that where parts are fallen off and they're blaming customers I'm imagining there's there's some lawsuits coming and hopefully

[00:27:51] there won't be class action lawsuits because these people might not get their full refund they'll get a dollar for for the repair and maybe some Tesla floor mats and then the lawyers will

[00:28:05] get millions and millions and millions of dollars sorry lawyers out there not all the people I know are like that but uh yeah I would I would like to see Tesla be held accountable for folks like

[00:28:17] the ones that I gave you the example of because that's that sucks that's a lot of money Tesla Tesla would definitely make them whole and pay for any sort of other inconveniences they had

[00:28:29] during that time that uh you know just 24 000 like you did they didn't have to sell their car but I get it yeah they're they would definitely sour me on the company for sure but all these companies

[00:28:44] do this uh they are no automaker is immune to this kind of behavior and so with that uh that's me being negative about Tesla but trying to put a more positive expand on it is they all suck

[00:29:00] at this kind of thing and um I am sure that there are consumer rights laws uh if this happens to you go and do your research consult a lawyer if you have that kind of money there's all sorts

[00:29:11] of free services out there so if you if you think you're you're being told you're the blame or it's not their responsibility to fix something you know it does pay to to look into it a little bit

[00:29:24] more all right thank you all so much for listening to the show I genuinely thought it was going to be 12 minutes I did not think we'd be pushing 30 minutes here so I'm gonna say happy new year

[00:29:36] to everybody hope it's wonderful and safe on Tuesday's episode Bart Bouchotte's is gonna give us a rundown of the BYD seal and it's a pretty good one it's a pretty good episode I had a lot of fun

[00:29:50] with Bart we let our hair down just a little bit and got silly towards the end so yeah uh I'm looking forward to editing that today and getting it out on Tuesday all right everybody happy new year and I will talk to you on Tuesday