Q2 2024 Delivery Numbers

[00:00:12] 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. And on today's episode, we are going to cover delivery numbers, not just for Tesla though,

[00:00:35] we're going to hit multiple companies and their delivery numbers. So this is going to be a little bit of a different episode just because we are right before the 4th of July here in the United States.

[00:00:50] The news, there was plenty of news, not much of it was interesting. So we're down to the bottom of the barrel in terms of news stories. So I'm going to try and make it as interesting as possible while still trying to leave some news for Friday.

[00:01:06] Unfortunately for us, Allison Sheridan did share with us thoughts on Apple CarPlay and Tesla's Entertainment System or Infotainment System and how she uses them. And a little spoiler alert, I do something similar.

[00:01:21] And what we'll get to that here at the toward the end of the show, we'll close out with Allison. Let's start off with General Motors, their delivery numbers for Q2 2024. And it was pretty decent for GM, not decent for other companies in terms of EVs, but decent

[00:01:39] for GM. GM delivered 21,930 EVs in Q2 2024. And you'll have to forgive me because my eyesight is going out. I can't read my own notes. I'm going to make this bigger. All right. 21,930 EVs. That number is up 31% from Q1 2024.

[00:02:03] So that breaks down like this, the Blazer EV they sold 6,634, the Equinox 1013, the Silverado EV 21,096. We have one member of our community that I know for sure is getting one. We might have more but one I know for sure and I'm very excited for them.

[00:02:26] The Cadillac Lyric is 7,294 which by far the best followed by the Blazer EV. And then the Hummer EV which was delivered 2,929. So not too shabby for GM. Some of these other companies did better, some did worse.

[00:02:46] Normally, what I would do is pair GM with Ford's delivery numbers but we don't have them at the moment. But according to Electric, Ford CEO Jim Farley was talking and he said that Ford was going to be unveiling a $30,000 EV coming soon.

[00:03:07] Ford and Volkswagen also have a partnership in terms of technology, licensing technology from one company to the other. I am curious if this will be a $30,000 EV from Ford but on ID like Volkswagen's ID platform. And it's not called ID platform, it's called MEB platform, Modular Electric Drive.

[00:03:35] That was my fault. Anyway, we'll see what happens. Hopefully we'll get that announcement sooner than later. Let's move on to Rivian. Rivian delivered 13,790 EVs in Q2 2024 which is pretty consistent with previous quarters in the last years, fairly consistent with last years.

[00:03:57] Some quarters are higher, some quarters are lower. Rivian did shut their normal Illinois plant down so anything that happens in Q2, we've already talked about this, I'm not too worried about good or bad. They were shut down for I think a month total.

[00:04:14] It does look like Rivian will still hit their 2024 goal of 57,000 EVs produced. I don't know what their goal is for deliveries. And just kind of as a side note here, if you own a Rivian, beware of the accelerator pedal it might get stuck underneath the floor mat.

[00:04:33] I don't think this is a widespread problem but it was an issue that someone mentioned on one of the Rivian forums. So this is good advice for all car, if you own any car honestly. Depending on your floor mat situation, this could happen for any vehicle but specifically

[00:04:54] this was called out in a Rivian forum. Everybody just, if your accelerator seems stuck it might be because of your floor mat. Okie doke, let's move on to Polestar. Polestar delivered 13,000 or right around 13,000 EVs in Q2 2024 which is down 18% year over

[00:05:14] year and it's their third delivery decline in a row. So the last three quarters have not been great for Polestar which is unfortunate because I think Polestar is a great company. Let's see, Neo delivered over 20,000 EVs for the second straight month in a row.

[00:05:34] So that's pretty good for Rivian. That brings their total for Q2 2024 to 57,373 vehicles delivered which is up 143% when compared to Q2 2023 and in addition to that this is their best quarter ever for deliveries. So that's really good for Neo.

[00:05:57] We'll see what happens in the future because there are tariffs in Europe that are going into effect I believe this month in July. So we'll see what happens with their Q3 2024 numbers. I am very curious to see as you know how that affects their business outside of China

[00:06:16] which is mainly where they do business. That is it for our EV news. Before we jump into our Tesla news or Tesla delivery numbers, we do have some actual Tesla news in there as well. I do want to let you know we have a Patreon for this show.

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[00:07:11] And as always all the money goes back into the show none of the money goes into my own pocket. All right let's move on to Tesla and we're going to start with their delivery numbers.

[00:07:22] Tesla's delivery numbers are down when compared to Q2 2023 so a year ago but they're only down by 5% so let's talk about this. We're going to do the amount of vehicles that they produced and the amount of the vehicles that they delivered.

[00:07:37] Tesla gives us production numbers as well as delivery numbers. Let's start with Q2 2024's production numbers. The Model 3 and the Model Y they produced 386,576. They produced that many which seems like a low number for Tesla but we'll get to delivery soon as again.

[00:07:59] Then we have Model S, Model X and Cybertruck. I would have really liked to have seen them break out Cybertruck numbers from Model S and Model X but if I had to guess I would be wrong so I'm not going to speculate on it.

[00:08:15] Now let's talk production totals. So for the total of Q2 2024 they produced 410,831 vehicles. That is very impressive. Alright let's talk deliveries. Deliveries for Model 3 and Model Y in Q2 2024 is 422,405 vehicles and then deliveries for Model S, X and Cybertruck we're looking at 21,551.

[00:08:46] For a grand total of 443,956 which is technically a down quarter for Tesla. But not down by that much. It's pretty good. I think sometimes we split hairs about this stuff. We just talked about GM. GM is doing great things with EVs. Hyundai is doing great things with EVs.

[00:09:12] When I say Hyundai I'm including Kia and Genesis and then Ford is doing great things with EVs. Polestar they are doing great things with EVs. They're not selling a whole lot. Polestar is not eating into Tesla's market this quarter.

[00:09:26] But over time Tesla's dominance is going to window away and of course they are going to have less and less delivery numbers. They have competition and they have really good competition. This does make sense to me.

[00:09:45] One other little bit that we got out of Tesla's Q2 2024 numbers is Tesla deployed 9.4 gigawatt hours of energy storage which is a record for them in Q2 2024 which is great. That is up 132% quarter over quarter. So Tesla doesn't need to deliver a bunch of cars to make money.

[00:10:12] They can deliver a bunch of cars and have all of the other businesses that they got going to make money as well. What I'm trying to say is the sky is not falling.

[00:10:21] It is not reasonable for any company whether it is a technology company or a company that makes carpets to have continuous growth. At some point you are going to that curve is going to level out and then it's going to dip down a little bit.

[00:10:35] This is how business works. And I don't think anybody in this audience is worried about Tesla's numbers to be honest with you. Everybody in this audience is smart enough to realize that sometimes you have a down quarter. That doesn't mean it's bad.

[00:10:49] I'm seeing a lot of headlines out there that's talking about Tesla's down quarter, down quarter, down quarter but it's down by a few cars. In the grand scheme of things it's not a lot. Alright I have three more quick things here and then we'll get to Allison's clip.

[00:11:09] We're going to start off with Tesla has resumed hiring folks for Giga Mexico. This comes after massive layoffs at the company and hiring freezes and Elon's 40 something billion dollar pay package. Well now they've decided to start hiring again in Giga Mexico which is interesting

[00:11:29] because Giga Mexico is kind of on hold. They're like you know what we're going to build the more affordable whatever it's going to be called the Robo Taxi EV. They're going to build that a gig of Texas and initially we thought it was going to go

[00:11:41] to Giga Mexico to be built but Tesla said no we got capacity at Texas. We'll go ahead and do it here because it's just easier with all over engineers in Texas and then we'll do you know Giga Mexico some other point.

[00:11:54] Well looks like maybe they maybe they'll start building some cars in Mexico based on this information. Let's see a little bit about FSD. Tesla's rolling out full self-driving super-froious 12.4.2 to beta testers. The beta testers says they say it's phenomenal which they always say that I'm skeptical

[00:12:18] because with each new update in the early days I gave it a lot of weight and I took Elon and what other people were saying at their word that it was great. And then I would experience it in someone else's Tesla and we're like this is not great.

[00:12:37] This is not what this is not as good as everybody says it is so it might be as good as Elon and the beta testers say it is. It might not be. They have a vested interest to say good things about it. So I honestly don't know.

[00:12:54] Elon did say on X because 12.4.2 was delayed and Elon said the delay was due to training on too many interventions and not enough normal driving. And this does make sense if you are constantly looking at how the car reacted in certain situations

[00:13:16] but you're not concentrating on the normal driving experience as well. I can see where you'd kind of get blinders on and just tunnel vision into one specific problem and not instead of looking at everything else that's going on around you.

[00:13:35] Like sometimes and this is my experience I'm not saying this is Tesla's experience. Sometimes I can get tunnel vision on a problem and just kind of leave everything that's outside of where my vision is at the moment out and the solution is just

[00:13:49] outside of that my little my tunnel vision if that makes sense. So I can see where you would need to be like hey we need to look at these interventions and make sure we're correcting for them but also don't forget about that the car has

[00:14:01] to drive itself the 85 90% of the time that it's doing fine. We still need that to do a really good job as well so that makes sense. Next up, Cybertruck. Now Cybertruck you can now I'm trying to go to the web page here.

[00:14:18] You can now order a non foundation version of Cybertruck and we have prices and specs for you so let me get to the Cybertruck page here. I'm going to say order now. All right, so if you would like a rear wheel drive Cybertruck.

[00:14:39] So this is not like what I was going to get was the dual motor for $50,000 and 300 miles. That was what my reservation was for. This is what you're going to get a rear wheel drive.

[00:14:51] You will get it sometime in 2025 you'll get a 250 mile range which is estimated and 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds for that you will pay $60,990. Now if you're saying to yourself, nah, that's not that's not for me. I need something with more range.

[00:15:15] Well, you can go all wheel drive which is the package I was going to get. It'll be delivered in sometime in 2025, 340 mile range estimate, 0 to 60 in 4.1 seconds, 112 miles per hour top speed, 600 horse.

[00:15:31] It'll have 7,435 pound feet of torque and it will tow up to 11,000 pounds for that bad chicken. You're going to pay $79,990. Most of that car right there when they announced the Cybertruck that was supposed to be the $50,000 version. The towing might not have been as much.

[00:16:00] The 0 to 60 may have been a little bit less. Maybe the horsepower was a little bit less but that was supposed to be the $50,000 version and now it's $79,000 almost $80,000. Now if you're still looking to get in the Cyber Beast, you can get a Cyber Beast.

[00:16:17] You're going to come with all of the little extras that Tesla gave people who are currently ordering the Cyber Beast like we've already ordered it. You'll get a delivery in 2025.

[00:16:28] When I say the extras, I mean like the bidirectional charging and all the, I think they got like a credit for an electrician and all that stuff. You're not going to get that stuff.

[00:16:38] So if you want the Cyber Beast just straight up truck, nothing else that's going to come with it. You're looking at $99,990. It'll be delivered sometime in 2025. 320 mile range, 2.6, 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds. That's frightening. 130 miles an hour top speed, 845 horsepower, 10,296 pound-feet of torque and it will tow 11,000 pounds.

[00:17:08] Let's just click on one and see what kind of options we have here. I'm going to click on the all-wheel drive. I haven't done this yet. Oh, nope.

[00:17:16] So I can click on the all-wheel drive and then it just tells me you can now pay with your Apple wallet. I'm not going to pay $250 to see what comes next.

[00:17:28] I was kind of hoping we'd get like a look at the wraps that Tesla has and all that stuff, but I guess they don't have that up here yet. All right. That is our news this week.

[00:17:39] I did mention that we had an audio clip from Allison where she talks about Apple CarPlay and Tesla's infotainment system. Let's go ahead and listen to the clip and I'll talk to you on the other side.

[00:17:51] I'm a big fan of the giant screen in Tesla's, especially because of how they display navigation. In the Model S and X, the screen is vertical. While in the Model 3 and Y that Steve and I own, the screen is in landscape orientation.

[00:18:03] On the left side you get a visualization of the vehicles. You can also see traffic lights. I mean it actually shows you whether it's green, yellow or red. You can see pedestrians and even things like trash cans along the side of the road or those orange cones.

[00:18:16] When I turn on my turn signal, the rear-facing camera on that side shows me the over-the-shoulder view, so I don't hit a bicycle on the right or a car on the left.

[00:18:25] The right two-thirds of the screen is almost all navigation and it's really good looking with lots and lots of detail. But everyone else on the planet who has experienced CarPlay says that it's amazing.

[00:18:37] We rented quite a few cars with CarPlay and while I didn't favorite it at first, it's kind of growing on me. The audio turn-by-turn directions are great. Some of my favorites include not this light but it's the next one turned left

[00:18:51] or maybe take the right two lanes to exit north on the 405. However, the Tesla navigation gives much better situational awareness on the map. It's not just that the screen is giant. It also chooses a zoom level that makes sense for not just seeing the next block or two

[00:19:07] but where you're going miles ahead. You always get more information on the Tesla screen than you do on a CarPlay screen. Now, CarPlay has so darn much clutter with their cartoony graphics that I'm always frustrated with not being able to see that big picture.

[00:19:21] Now, I know with fancier cars than the ones I rent, there are touch screens so you can pinch and zoom but on rental cars it's super annoying to use the buttons and knobs to get to zoom in and zoom out mode.

[00:19:33] Again, the graphics are coarse so they don't give the detail I get on the Tesla. But on CarPlay my Apple Watch is in the game so if a turn is coming up and I'm not watching the map closely

[00:19:42] my watch will give me the little gentle taps to tell me to turn. I know that a left turn and right turn are supposed to be a different rhythm of taps but I've never gotten the hang of knowing which one is which.

[00:19:53] It's easy enough to glance at the screen when I feel the tap though to see which way I'm supposed to go. Listening to podcasts with the Tesla audio system is trivially easy.

[00:20:02] I set up a playlist on my iPhone and if Bluetooth hasn't connected to Steve's phone instead of mine that day I hit play and the audio comes out of the car's speakers. I use the scroll wheels on the steering wheel to jump forward and back in a show.

[00:20:15] I can stop altogether and change the volume all without messing with the touch screen. Now I even know how to skip to the next podcast ever since I did that full on detailed review of everything overcast can do.

[00:20:27] I can also see what podcast is playing at the bottom of the left side of the screen. With CarPlay though you can directly access your podcatcher of choice or at least Apple Podcasts or Overcast without even looking at your phone.

[00:20:40] You can use the screen to navigate the podcatcher's interface and choose different shows and episodes. But I don't really want to do that kind of thing while I'm driving. When Steve is driving the rental car and I'm the passenger

[00:20:52] it is a pretty cool way for me to be able to make the changes while he keeps his eyes safely on the road in front of us. The best part of CarPlay and audio is how it's intelligent about what to do when audio is playing

[00:21:04] but audio navigation instructions also need to be heard. If you're playing music it automatically ducks the music down while the navigation is red and then brings the music back up when it's done. But if you're listening to a podcast it stops the audio while navigation is being played

[00:21:20] and then starts back up where it left off. That's genius! It's the best of both worlds. Sadly in the Tesla the audio of the podcatcher music just keep on playing while navigation is being said out loud.

[00:21:31] The Tesla system doesn't really know anything but hey I'm connected to Bluetooth, good to go. You can see I'm conflicted on which one I like better. But after owning my car for four years I realized I can have the best of both worlds.

[00:21:45] The other day I was going to meet a friend for lunch and I was about a half hour away in an unfamiliar location. My iPhone offered to start directions for me because it saw the event of my calendar.

[00:21:55] I wanted to share my ETA with my friend in case I ran into traffic so I told Maps, knock itself out, do the navigation for me. Then in the Tesla map interface I typed in the address using the on-screen keyboard to start my navigation.

[00:22:09] I started my podcast and as expected the show started playing through Bluetooth to my car. But what surprised me was that the audio navigation instructions came through from the iPhone over Bluetooth 2.

[00:22:21] Now I had the audio navigation turned off on the Tesla so it was actually coming from my phone. And you know how I was jealous that CarPlay pauses podcasts when it needs to give driving instructions?

[00:22:34] Since this was the iPhone itself that's controlling that in CarPlay, not the head unit in the car, the same thing happens in my Tesla. It was awesome! I'm sure someone is yelling into the phone right now that I'm missing out on one big problem,

[00:22:48] that the two nav systems could choose different routes and things could get confusing. You're right, that could happen and it did on my drive. On my way to lunch the iPhone told me I could cut three minutes off my drive time if I took Katella.

[00:23:02] I had no idea when Katella was coming up or what I would do if it didn't, if I didn't take Katella, so I just kept following the Tesla screen. I didn't want to look down at my phone which is on a charging pad below the big screen

[00:23:13] so I simply ignored the confirmation request. Turns out Tesla Nav took Katella anyway so I never had to decide between the routes. I think in general, if the two are in disagreement, I'm going to do what the Tesla tells me to do

[00:23:26] just because that's the one I can see, not because it's necessarily better or worse. On my way home from my lunch date there were several options for where to get off the freeway but none of them and none of them are necessarily wrong.

[00:23:38] The two systems suggested different paths so I just took the one I normally prefer and I'm pretty sure it was less efficient because it turned out to be under construction and it was the one neither of them had suggested I take.

[00:23:49] But here's the thing, I'm really not in that much of a hurry when I'm driving. I've learned in my 50 years of driving that rushing about doesn't actually get you all there all that much sooner

[00:23:59] and it's a lot of stress to worry about making every light getting ahead of the other cars. I'm a mellower driver than I was when I'm younger so if it takes me five minutes longer to get somewhere I don't lose my mind.

[00:24:10] The bottom line is that I've thought all along that I had to decide between my two available navigation systems but I now know and realize I have the best of both worlds. I have the best parts of carplay plus the best parts of the Tesla navigation.

[00:24:25] So I actually do something similar to what Allison's doing here. For the longest time I would not connect my phone via Bluetooth to the infotainment screen to listen to music or directions or anything like that because there was something wrong

[00:24:39] whether it was with my phone or with Tesla where the audio sounded really slow and there's nothing I could do to fix it. Like I tried resetting things in the Tesla app, I tried resetting things on my phone and it just constantly happened.

[00:24:53] I even took it to Tesla. I was able to get the advisor, the service advisor, he connected his phone to it and it did the same thing and then like one of the techs connected their phone to it and it didn't do it at all.

[00:25:08] And then, it was just a real bummer. So the service advisor went out with his phone and connected it and it was fine. Everything was fine. So they gave me the car back and I was like, you know what?

[00:25:19] It is not illegal in Arizona to drive with headphones on. I have headphones in my ears most of the time anyway so I'm just going to drive with my headphones on and I'm not going to connect my phone to this.

[00:25:29] So after Allison sent me this I was like, you know what? I'll try it again. And guess what? No issues. For like months, probably six, seven, eight months. Every time I would connect I would try to maybe it's better this time.

[00:25:43] The car got an update and my iPhone got an update. Maybe it'd work and it didn't work and for whatever reason now it works. I don't have a good reason as to why it works.

[00:25:52] I don't know that there are a lot of people out there experiencing this problem like me but yeah, it was super frustrating. Anyway, I would do something similar as I would put my Apple Maps up. I have a little, I don't know, dangle.

[00:26:10] I have a little wart attached to my screen where I can connect my phone with the magnets and then I'll listen to the directions but I'll also put the directions into the Tesla as well

[00:26:23] and I'll have that big screen up and I prefer Tesla's screen over Apple Maps because it's just so big and it's easy to read and see but I prefer Apple Maps over Tesla's navigation system all together.

[00:26:37] So it's just kind of like nice to have both is really what it comes down to now. And I just found this out yesterday that I can do this. Now I can take my phone and just connect it to Bluetooth

[00:26:50] and I don't have to have my headphones in. And it's actually, I didn't think it would matter to me that much but it does matter a lot. It turns out it matters a lot. All right everybody, that is it for me this week.

[00:27:01] I want to give Allison a big thank you for sharing this content with us. Did you know that Allison is about to release her 1000th episode? Which is huge. Now I played a role in her 999th episode and I'm very proud of that.

[00:27:21] She replayed my interview with the folks from Telo Trucks but yeah, 1000 episodes every single week, not one interruption with a little asterisk on that. But it's a huge feat. Go to podfeet.com and subscribe to the NoSylic-Ass and listen to the 1000th episode

[00:27:41] and guess what, little spoiler alert, I'm on that episode as well in a small clip but I'm still on it. All right everybody, thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this episode. I hope you all have a wonderful week

[00:27:53] and if you're here in the US, a safe 4th of July and I will talk to you on Friday.

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