Old Fashioned EV News

[00:00:11] 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. We got a good episode for you.

[00:00:33] Honestly, I wasn't sure there would be enough news, but I think we have more than enough to get a 20-minute show out the door today. Before we do that, though, I do have a little bit of business to discuss with you.

[00:00:46] First up, I was sent an email by my podcasting host, Acast, and they said, hey, we're going to turn on political advertisements for your show unless you opt out by July 15th. My initial response to this was to immediately go and opt out. Here's the thing.

[00:01:07] Political ads, one, pay quite a bit more than regular ads and two, they're temporary. Here's what I'm going to do. If one person emails me, bodhi, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com and asks me not to put

[00:01:23] political ads in the show or let them put political ads in the show, then I will opt out. But you got to email me before July 13th because the final day to do this is July

[00:01:32] and I want to make sure that everything's all set for the opt out. If you don't care and you just want to skip through the ads, then you could definitely do that and I'll get a little bit more money. If you are just like, you know what?

[00:01:46] I'll just go to patreon.com forward slash kilowatt or support kilowatt.com and I'll just pay you a dollar every month and get rid of the ads that way. That's totally fine too. But I do want to give you the option. I don't like political ads.

[00:02:04] If I was listening to the show, if I put myself in your shoes, I would say, nope. When I listen back to the podcast, I listen back to the ad feed, not the patreon feed because I want to know what ads folks are hearing out there.

[00:02:23] I'll be hearing them too. If you don't want that, just email me and we will turn them off entirely. If you don't care, great. We'll move on if you want to skip them.

[00:02:34] I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but you're allowed to do what you want. It's a free country. All right. Let's go ahead and move on to the news. The Hyundai IONIQ 9 is delayed. It was originally set to launch this summer.

[00:02:48] Now it's looking like it's going to launch sometime toward the end of 2024. And we don't have any official numbers or at least I wasn't able to find any official numbers even on Hyundai's website. But this is a really cool looking three row SUV.

[00:03:02] And as somebody who's looking to replace his wife's car, and of course my wife gets to choose what she wants to drive, but I will make a suggestion. The IONIQ 9 looks like a good suggestion.

[00:03:13] Three row SUV can't beat that or at least in my family you can't beat it. Speaking of something you can't beat, if you live close to Aurora, Colorado or willing to travel to Aurora, Colorado and you're a Colorado resident, then

[00:03:27] Tynan Nissan Aurora is leasing 20, 25 Nissan Leafs for $19 a month. This is a 24 month lease and you get 10,000 miles and you right now I'm sure you're thinking, well, what's the catch? How much money do you have to put down? Zero. You have to put zero down.

[00:03:48] So zero down $19 a month, 24 month lease, 10,000 miles. How is this so cheap? Colorado has an $8,100 EV tax credit. I'm not sure if the 20, 25 Leaf qualifies for the federal tax credit or not, but if it does, that's obviously going to take quite a bit of money

[00:04:07] off this as well. And then Nissan is offering a thousand dollars customer cash back and that's what brings it down to $19 a month. There is a catch and it's not a big deal, but there may be some fees and taxes you

[00:04:22] have to pay in addition, uh, you know, like the, the destination charge and all that stuff. I wasn't too clear on that and the website wasn't super clear on it, but uh, if you need to get a car for yourself, your partner, or if you have

[00:04:34] a child that needs a vehicle, this might be the way to go. There's only 60 vehicles available for this offer. So once that expires, then you know, the leasing deals will be different, but still not too bad.

[00:04:47] And I'll put a link to the dealership in the show notes, if you're someone who's interested in that. GM is getting hit with a fine from the environmental protection agency. This is due to excessive CO2 emissions from approximately 5.9 million GM vehicles built from 2012 to 2018.

[00:05:06] Now GM admitted no wrongdoing in the matter, but they still have to pay $145 million and they're forfeiting 50 million greenhouse gas credits, which could technically be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm not a greenhouse credit expert, but that's what the article said.

[00:05:25] There have been some reports from Handelsblatt that Rivian was going to build the R2 at VW South Carolina factory. Now Rivian has told Reuters that there are no plans to produce the R2 with Volkswagen. And in the past, Rivian's actually said that they plan on starting the R2

[00:05:44] builds at their normal Illinois factory, at least initially. And then once the Georgia plant is up and running, then they'll move the R2 production to Georgia. And since we're on the topic of Rivian, this story came from Alison Sheridan. She shared this with me.

[00:06:02] By the way, if you didn't know, Alison is recording her 1000th episode of No Silicast on July 7th. So if you want to get into her Discord, go to podfeed.com and you can check it

[00:06:14] out there. Or if you just want to listen to the episode and subscribe to her podcast, you can search for No Silicast or I'll put a link in the show notes. You can go to podfeed.com. 1000 episodes is quite a milestone.

[00:06:25] So congrats to Steve and Alison for that. Anyway, back to the story she shared with me. Three Rivian delivery vans caught fire at an Amazon fulfillment center in Houston, Texas. A drone operator was actually out flying and filming something else

[00:06:42] entirely when they saw black smoke coming from a distance. So they flew the drone over and they were able to get really good video of these Amazon trucks that were on fire. And actually, I'm going to use this video for a class that I'm working on

[00:06:58] for this very reason on how to fight these Amazon delivery trucks, these Rivian trucks. So here's what we know. The vehicle was plugged into a charger, but it was not charging at the time of the fire. Rivian called it a thermal event, but they also made sure

[00:07:15] to say that it did not involve the high voltage battery. So I'm not really sure how the thermal event occurred without the high voltage battery unless there was something else going on in the high voltage system. But normally we reserve the term thermal event for a battery fire

[00:07:31] like thermal runaway, that kind of thing. But, you know, firefighters are dumb, so we're probably using it wrong. So the fire started on one of the vans and they eventually worked its way to two other vehicles.

[00:07:45] I will say at about I don't know, it's like 45 seconds into the video. You do see the battery go up like the vehicles on fire. And then all of a sudden, there's like a 20 foot flame that shoots straight from the middle of the van up into the air,

[00:08:00] which to me indicates that the battery is now involved. Even though the video from the drone operator was really good, I don't know enough about this incident to really comment much more than what's in the article. But as we learn more, I'll report back to you.

[00:08:17] I did check some firefighting sites like fireengineering.com and firehouse.com, and I didn't see any articles written up there. So. I'll keep an eye on it and get back to you as we learn more. You know, it's been a minute since we've talked about Electrify America.

[00:08:35] And normally when I bring up Electrify America, it does feel like it's in a negative context. Like, I don't have anything against the company. I want them to succeed. I want them to do well. We really need more chargers across not only this country,

[00:08:49] but all of the countries. So I'm going to bring you a positive Electrify America story. In 2023, Electrify America served double the amount of charging sessions in the United States and Canada as compared to 2022. So in 2023, Electrify America had 10 million charging sessions in 2023.

[00:09:13] Now, I don't know if that's a big number or not, to be honest with you. But when you consider that the previous year, it was around five million and it doubled in 2023. That seems like a pretty big improvement on Electrify America's part.

[00:09:29] In addition to that, Electrify America in 2022, Q1 2022, about 11% of charging attempts failed. So that's kind of a problem. In Q1 2024, that number dropped to 9%. So not only did they increase the charging sessions, they also dropped the failed charging attempts.

[00:09:56] The article that I got this from did not break out all of these charging companies and how many failed attempts that they had, but they did break out Electrify America's, which is obviously nine, and Tesla's, which is 5%. So Tesla is by far the best in the industry.

[00:10:12] But Electrify America, you know, they're slowly getting there. If they can drop one or two percent a year, they're going to they're going to catch up with Tesla within the next couple of years. Right now, Electrify America is operating 950 sites across the US and Canada.

[00:10:28] That is 4250 charge points altogether. So each of those sites, you know, has a couple of chargers. They also plan on adding an additional 750 charge points at 50 or more locations before the end of 2025. So Electrify America is growing. So that's that's that's good news.

[00:10:51] I don't know if I've mentioned this in a while, but I tend to have a stutter sometimes when I'm nervous or really tired or under a lot of stress. I had a stutter a little bit as a kid, not a big one, just a little bit,

[00:11:02] a bit of a one when I was under pressure. And tonight when I'm recording, while I'm recording this right now, my stutter and stammer is on full effect is in full effect. Um, so I apologize if that's bugging you. It's bugging the heck out of me.

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[00:11:40] Tesla has launched a military purchase program. Now, this does not mean that Tesla is is purchasing military equipment, nor are they necessarily selling to the US military or any other military. It means if you're a, if you served in the military or currently serving in the military and

[00:11:58] you got an honorable discharge or you're the spouse of somebody who's served in the military or is currently serving in the military, you can get a thousand dollars off your next Tesla. There is no limit to the number of vehicles that you can purchase.

[00:12:10] And this applies to all of Tesla's vehicles except the cyber truck. It does not apply to the cyber truck. I would imagine at some point, once Tesla gets up and running with the cyber truck production and hits

[00:12:20] volume production that the cyber truck will be added to this as well. There's some new Tesla software slowly rolling its way out to owners of Tesla's. The new update includes the addition of YouTube and Amazon music. You'll now be able to listen to your music in the vehicle.

[00:12:40] And if you pay for Amazon prime, then you get some version of Amazon music. So this should, you should be included in this as well. Some of the other things included in the update are parental controls, which I think this is great.

[00:12:53] So let's talk about parental controls for a second. As somebody who has got children that are about four, four years away from the driving age, you can set the maximum speed limit and acceleration settings.

[00:13:06] So you can set it to chill mode if you don't want your kids driving fast and you can say you can't go over 50 miles an hour or whatever. It'll also give warnings to the young driver about their speed limit. If they're exceeding their speed limit,

[00:13:20] you can enable auto emergency braking forward collision warnings. You can also set a night curfew. So if they go over to a friend's house and decide to sneak out in the middle of the night, then you will receive a notification that the vehicle is being driven

[00:13:34] past curfew. It'll still let them drive it by the way, which I think is really good, but you'll get a notification that they are driving it. And then you enable the parental controls through your app and it's protected by a pin. So once you set it,

[00:13:49] the young person gets in the car, they can't change it unless they get access to your app and the pin. Let's see, there's navigate to sub destinations. So if you're going to the airport, for instance, you can navigate directly to your terminal versus just general

[00:14:08] directions to the airport. And then you got to figure out how to get to terminal four. There's an update to the status bar, which shows weather conditions, temperature, which it already does and the air quality score. But this feature requires a premium premium connection,

[00:14:27] which I think most people who have a Tesla pay for that premium connection. You can use the Tesla mobile app to schedule charging or battery preconditioning. You can set start and end times for charging. You can set up specific days of the week and schedule one off

[00:14:44] charges. So this is great. I find the charging scheduling inside the vehicles infotainment system to be frustrated and very limited. So when do we see these updates? Well, as Tesla does, they slowly roll it out to folks. I haven't gotten it yet.

[00:15:04] So over the next few weeks we should start seeing more and more people with this software update. Speaking of software updates, Tesla is extending the FSD transfer deadline by a month. So if you own a Tesla with full self-driving and you paid the full price for full self-driving,

[00:15:22] you can buy a new Tesla and transfer that full self-driving service to your new car. So this is, this is a great way for Tesla to sell new cars. They extended that by a month. So if you take delivery before September 30th, 2024, if you take delivery, not order,

[00:15:39] but take delivery before September 30th, 2024, you can transfer transfer your full self-driving. Staying on the topic of autonomous driving, Mercedes-Benz autonomous driving system drive pilot is capable of level three autonomous driving. So right now we're calling Tesla's full self-driving a very capable level two because you're,

[00:16:03] you're not able to take your eyes off the road or you're not supposed to take your eyes off the road with level three. You can actually take your eyes off the road, but you still need to be able to take over if there's an issue.

[00:16:14] So maybe you can look at your phone, but you can't take a nap. So level three drive pilot is approved in Germany. I'm not sure if it's approved all over Germany or just in specific locations in Germany,

[00:16:25] but it's also approved here in the United States in two states, California and Nevada. Now, in California there are some rules and I'm going to guess that the rules are similar in Nevada, but I couldn't find a really good list of the rules in

[00:16:41] Nevada, but we're going to assume they're similar. For Nevada, you can only do this on suitable freeway sections where traffic is of high density. So we're looking at bumper to bumper traffic and you can only go up to 40 miles an hour.

[00:17:00] So if you're on the freeway and it's bumper to bumper traffic, you can turn on level three driving. Once traffic clears up, then you got to start driving again. In California, same maximum speed of 40 miles per hour.

[00:17:15] In California is it says you can't operate on city or county streets, but it doesn't specifically say you can't operate on side roads. It just, you can't do it on city or county streets. You can't do it in construction zones.

[00:17:27] You can't do it during heavy rain or fog, flooded roadways, basically weather conditions that may impact the performance of drive pilot. So you might be asking yourself at this point, like, Hey, wait, this is the Tesla section. Why is this? Why are we talking about Mercedes?

[00:17:43] Well, ahead of autonomous driving for Mercedes, Johan Hobb has a problem with other automakers who over-promised on capabilities of their autonomous software packages. So this is what he had to say. We are concerned with,

[00:17:58] I almost did a German accent. That would have been a terrible mistake on my part. We are concerned about others. Let's say promising too much. Hobb said, that's not the way we approach things. The problem is if things are over-promised or underperform, even if it's very seldom,

[00:18:16] the entire trust in autonomous driving itself loses confidence. And that's a bad thing. He went on to say, which I think this is very good advice, do it slowly, but do it the right way. Build trust and build confidence.

[00:18:31] And this very much feels like a dig at Tesla. And actually I think it's definitely a dig at Tesla, but do you think this is fair criticism? If you do, so many moments, Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com.

[00:18:46] But I've been saying for a pretty long time now that Tesla has an amazing product with full self-driving. There is no reason for them to sell people on a feature or a set of features

[00:19:00] that may one day come when what they have right now is still pretty amazing. Now, is it worth $8,000 or a hundred dollars a month? Again, you all know my opinion on this. No, but it's, it's still pretty amazing. So yeah,

[00:19:16] I think you kind of know where I stand with Johan. You, you let me know what you think Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com. All right. Tesla's Model S and XLs are declining according to Fred Lambert at Electrek. Tesla announced last week that they sold 21,551

[00:19:36] Model S, X and Cybertrucks in Q2 2024. Now I don't know if I said this out loud on the show or not. I sometimes I forget and don't remember, but that number seemed low to me. That seemed like a very low number.

[00:19:48] And I'll have to go back and listen to see if I did say it was low or not. Electrek is estimating that Cybertruck deliveries in Q2 of 2024 were right around or in between eight, 9,000 units, which that number actually seems really high to me.

[00:20:05] We do know that there are some, there's like 12,000 or around 12,000, maybe 13,000 Cybertrucks on the road currently. So for that number between eight, 9,000 seems like it still might be pretty high for the second quarter of 2024. But it does look true that SNX deliveries are down,

[00:20:31] which would be if this is true, it would be a 30% decline year over year. Now I do want to point out that there are eight on of viable options in that space. Like the Lucid Air, I think is a much nicer car than the Tesla Model X.

[00:20:50] The Lucid Gravity is going to probably be a better option than the Model X. And it's not because the Model S and Model X aren't great cars. It's just the Lucid has that premium feel that the Model S and Model X lack just a little bit.

[00:21:04] Also Lucid still kind of looks like a spaceship car. With the Model S and Model X, the design has been fairly stagnant. Like there's been a little small changes here and there, but there hasn't been like a big shakeup with the Model S and Model X.

[00:21:21] And I do think that people want the new shiny thing. And it would be hard for my friends to tell the difference between the 2019 Model S or Model X and a 2024 Model S or Model X, depending, if you're not judging it by on how shiny the paint is.

[00:21:39] But if they were just to look at the body styles, I don't think they would know the difference. As a matter of fact, they might think they're the same car because they don't pay that much attention to things. So, you know, you got Mercedes,

[00:21:50] you got BMW all in this price point and the Mercedes looks just amazing. So I think Tesla does have a problem in this regard, especially in this price point. Still very capable vehicles, the Model S and Model X, but so is the Lucid Air. You know,

[00:22:08] we're looking at 400 miles in that same price point of range and it's got a ton of technology. It doesn't have full self-driving, but I think that Tesla overvalues how people feel about full self-driving technology. All right, let's go ahead and move on to our next story.

[00:22:29] A Cybertruck flipped upside down in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Why is this important? It's not important. I mean, everybody in the vehicle was fine. They had minor injuries. The reason that it stood out to me is that it is really hard

[00:22:45] to flip over a vehicle with a battery pack and I've seen some speculation as to why the car flipped over, but I'm going to wait until an official report comes out because some of those things like I'm like, I can see some of that being drawn out.

[00:23:00] I'm like, I can see some of that being true, but maybe not all of it. And I don't want to repeat back things that are incorrect information or people just speculating and then using that as if it's true. So I'm just going to hold off,

[00:23:17] but it is kind of weird because EV battery packs are so heavy. It's hard to flip over an EV. I think we talked a little bit about this last episode, but just in case we didn't or it wasn't clear,

[00:23:30] Elon said at the shareholder meeting that they would start selling non- foundation series all wheel drive Cybertrucks in Q3 of 2024. Well, it's looking more like that's going to come in Q4 of 2024. And I'm going to make this radical prediction that it might be delayed

[00:23:49] till Q1 of 2025. We'll see. But if you were looking to buy a new Cybertruck and you didn't want to pay for the foundation series, you might have to wait a little bit longer. Tesla showed off the Cybertrucks battery passport in their 2023 impact report. Just in case you're curious,

[00:24:14] it's on page 129 if you want to read the report. But here's what we know about the Cybertrucks battery. First of all, the chemistry, nickel, cobalt, manganese. This is not a huge revelation, to be honest. The number of cells in the pack is 1,344.

[00:24:34] The battery pack capacity is 123 kilowatt hours. The cell capacity like each cell is 91.5 watt hours. It's got an 800 volt system. The weight of the pack is 1589 pounds. The energy density is 170 watt hours per kilogram. And the range for the all wheel drive version is 340 miles

[00:25:02] versus the CyberBeast at 320 miles. So if you were ever curious about how the Cybertruck battery stacked up, there you go. All right, here's our final story. Tesla is contacting some early Cybertruck owners to change out one of their electric drive units for free. Why? We don't know.

[00:25:23] It seems weird that Tesla would be upgrading the drive unit out of the goodness of their heart this early on in the process. But Tesla did say there's there's no, you know, current dangerous situation with the drive unit. They said the new drive unit is just more refined.

[00:25:42] So. OK, just another thing we're going to keep an eye on. If you're one of those early folks, you know, and you have thoughts on this, send me an email. Bodie, B O D I E at nine one eight digital dot com.

[00:25:57] I know Kyle Connor from the Out of Spec YouTube channels and podcast. He was contacted and I believe he said yes, of course. I'm going to take a new updated drive unit. Why wouldn't I? More efficient. But yeah, I'm kind of curious as to what's going on.

[00:26:14] Really? It could be that Tesla had always intended on doing this, but that doesn't seem likely. All right, everybody, that is it for me this week. Again, if you want to email me, it's Bodie B O D I E at nine one eight digital dot com.

[00:26:29] You can also find me on on X at nine one eight digital. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will talk to you on Tuesday. Ich bin völlig blind. Manchmal habe ich das Gefühl, meine Tage und Nächte sind auf den Kopf gestellt,

[00:27:09] weil ich Schwierigkeiten habe, nacht zu schlafen und tagsüber wach zu bleiben. Ich leide unter non 24 einer seltenen Schlafwachrhythmusstörung, die viele völlig blinde Menschen betrifft. Möchtest du mehr über diese Erkrankung in Verbindung mit völliger Erblindung erfahren? Rufe kostenfrei an unter 0800 24 24 005.