Short EV Episode

[00:00:10] 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, we are going to cover our EV news. It's an EV news episode.

[00:00:37] We're going to cover Ford's Q2 2024 earnings call, but today EV news. Let's go ahead and jump into it. You know what? We're going to start with Tesla news because I only had three Tesla stories that I thought were interesting and that was it.

[00:00:54] So we'll start with Tesla news and then work our way to the other EV news. Starting off, the data center at Giga Texas is closer to becoming reality. This data center is going to house 100,000 NVIDIA H100 and H200 chips for training the neural network.

[00:01:14] This will be for full self-driving and an optimus, the humanoid robot. So just to give you an idea, an H100 NVIDIA chip costs between $30,000 and $40,000 and H200 is right around $60,000. So to outfit this, we're between three and four billion dollars total for Tesla to outfit

[00:01:43] this data center, which is just massive. Speaking of massive, there's going to be massive fans because you got to keep this building and these chips cool. So they're going to be massive fans installed inside the building as well as four giant

[00:01:57] water tanks to help with cooling as well. Elon did give the data center a name and it'll be called Cortex. Tesla has secretly been testing some faster charging at their supercharger network. So right now you have V3 superchargers, which are capable of 250 kilowatts of delivering

[00:02:20] 250 kilowatts of energy to the battery. And you have V4 supercharging, which is capable of delivering 350 kilowatts. The problem is, is Tesla's having a hard time for whatever reason of deploying the V4 superchargers. So in the meantime, they kind of have a temporary fix.

[00:02:41] And I don't know if they're doing this because of the testing or if they're doing this because they can't get enough of the V4 cabinets. But right now they are running a trial with version three cabinets, but actually are equipped with version four charge posts.

[00:02:56] They're calling them V3 plus stations. And these V3 plus stations are delivering over 300 kilowatts of energy, which is great. Now we have to give credit to Tesla Tino on X because he was the one who discovered this.

[00:03:15] He hooked his cyber truck up to one of these bad chickens and was able to get And nearly, or right around is what he said actually, 900 amps for about one minute. So it wasn't sustained for very long, but it did hit those numbers where previously

[00:03:33] on V3 superchargers, you know, you're getting a ride around 250 kilowatts and you may be asking yourself, well, why is it that if V4 superchargers can deliver 350 kilowatts, why is it, you know, up around 300 to 325 kilowatts? Why isn't it delivering more than that?

[00:03:54] Well, that is because the V3 cabinets have limitations that the V4 charge posts inside those cabinets can't overcome. All right. That is it for our Tesla news. I know I said I was going to do three stories, but after going over the third story again,

[00:04:35] I didn't think it was very interesting. So we're just going to skip it. But I will do a Patreon plug right now. If you want to support the show and get rid of the ads for a dollar a month, go

[00:04:45] to patreon.com forward slash kilowatt or support kilowatt dot com and you can support the show for as little as a dollar a month. And all the money that you spend on Patreon goes right back into the show. None of the money goes into my own pocket.

[00:04:58] It all goes to support the show 100 percent. So if you have a dollar laying around and you want to help, go to patreon dot com forward slash kilowatt or support kilowatt dot com. Thank you in advance. All right. Let's move to our EV news.

[00:05:12] Lucid Motors has received another one point five billion dollar investment from Saudi Arabia. This was. Announced at the Lucid earnings call that happened actually today or yesterday, yesterday, and we'll cover that more next week, but just FYI, they got a big old infusion of cash.

[00:05:37] We've talked about Colorado's EV incentives in the past. If you're not familiar, let me catch you up here. If you live in Colorado, you get five thousand dollars off most EVs and then you get another

[00:05:50] twenty five hundred dollars off if the EV costs less than thirty five thousand dollars MSRP. Well, Washington has a pretty good offer as well in terms of incentives. Washington is offering an EV lease incentive of nine thousand dollars for middle to lower

[00:06:07] income residents. So to qualify for this nine thousand dollars, you need to earn less than forty five thousand dollars or forty five thousand one hundred and eighty dollars as an individual or ninety three thousand six hundred dollars as a family of four.

[00:06:24] And the MSRP of the vehicle needs to be less than ninety thousand dollars, which is a lot of EVs, not every EV, but that's a lot. So it's estimated that thirty seven percent of residents in Washington would qualify for this program. So if you bought like, let's say.

[00:06:45] So let's say you leased a Chevy Equinox for around forty thousand dollars, you would get the seventy five hundred dollar federal tax credit in addition to the nine thousand dollar Washington credit, which would dramatically lower your lease payment. And those those leases are for worth three years.

[00:07:02] So so if you live in Washington, think you qualify for this deal and your need of a new car and you can afford that monthly lease payment, it's definitely something to look into. Not that long ago, we had an interview with Forest North and Jason Marks of Tello

[00:07:20] Trucks. Well, let's just do a little Tello Truck update here. I know many of you who are part of this community already followed Tello Trucks and even more than that, were very interested in what they were doing after the interview. So I thought an update was in order.

[00:07:38] So they did secure five point four million dollars in funding, which is not a lot when it comes to EV startups. But, you know, it also helped get them through at least the early concepts and prototyping phase, which leads us to our next thing.

[00:07:56] They need to deal with California manufacturer Ari Group, Aria Group. Aria specializes in early concepts and rapid prototyping. And then one of the original Tesla co-founders, Mark Tarpening, has joined Tello's board. So I'm not sure or not if that was mentioned when we did the

[00:08:18] interview with them or if they had talked about that offline. I know he was an advisor. They had mentioned him. I don't think they said he was a board member. So that's good for Tello. They seem to be under good leadership and it seems like, you know, they're

[00:08:33] heading the right direction. I really hope this this company is able to be successful. All right, let's go from one successful startup to one startup that it's not quite so successful. Electra Mechanica had a really cool idea.

[00:08:48] And what their idea was is they were going to make an EV that was a single seat, three wheeled EV called the Solo. Technically it was a motorcycle. It sold for around eighteen thousand dollars.

[00:09:00] They sold a total of right around four hundred and twenty eight here in the U.S. It was a neat idea. There was an issue with the vehicle that caused the motor, the electric motor, just to shut down.

[00:09:14] And a recall was issued and Electra Mechanica was bought by another company and they just didn't really do a fix. So they ended up buying all the Solos back so that they could be destroyed. And right now in Gilbert, Arizona, they're sitting in a landfill just

[00:09:31] piled up like cordwood. I really hope that they will end up recycling as much of these cars as they possibly can. You know, the batteries, the electric motors, I hope they strip these things for everything that was valuable and then they continue recycling them

[00:09:49] because it's a shame four hundred and twenty eight vehicles just being crushed and then not being recycled seems like a waste. And if you're thinking to yourself right now, like Electra Mechanica, I do remember there was a show on this.

[00:10:02] Steve and Allison Sheridan and myself, we all took a test drive of the electric Mechanica solo and it was a lot of fun to drive. I had some small complaints here and there, but it was still it was a lot of fun to drive.

[00:10:17] Allison tried to convince me to buy one and I was not comfortable with that and I'm glad I didn't. But it was still it was still a lot of fun to drive. I guess it would have been pretty if they bought them all back, it

[00:10:28] would have been pretty low risk on my part. But yeah. All right. Let's move on here. We've talked a lot about Geely and mostly we talk about their brands like Volvo, Zika, Lotus, Polestar. But Geely is not just a group of automotive brands.

[00:10:51] They have their own branded vehicle called Geely. And we don't talk about that company all that often. But Geely has an all new electric SUV. It's called the Geely Galaxy E5. It is going to come in five different trims.

[00:11:08] The specs are going to be mostly the same for all five trims, with exception the range will be a little bit different. But this is a single motor vehicle. It's going to have on the lowest trim lower trims.

[00:11:22] It's going to have a forty nine point nine two kilowatt hour battery pack zero to 60 miles per hour or zero to 100 kilometers in six point nine seconds, two hundred and seventy three miles of range. You know, the top end model is going to have a 60.22 kilowatt hour battery

[00:11:40] with three hundred and twenty nine miles of range. This vehicle's got really decent storage in the back and it's got a floor that you can lift up and there's under the floor storage. That's pretty decent as well as well as under seat storage.

[00:11:55] This is a five seater vehicle. Power doors, power seats. Looks like from the videos that I saw, it looks like the seats will also be heated and cooled. Wireless cell phone charger, the flush door handles.

[00:12:07] And when you walk up, they kind of present themselves to you, which is cool. A digital instrument cluster behind the steering wheel looks nice. The infotainment screen looks nice. There's some tactical buttons. This looks like a really nice vehicle. Now let's get to the best part.

[00:12:24] The base price of this vehicle is fifteen thousand four hundred dollars and the top end model is going to be twenty thousand four hundred and fifty dollars, and it's going to be available in global markets.

[00:12:36] There were no specifics given, but we can assume that it's going to be China first and then since it's Chinese company and then, you know, the rest of the world will come later. Now recently, you know, the U.S.

[00:12:51] and Europe, the European Union have levied some tariffs on these vehicles. So I would not count on the prices being that affordable in those places if it actually gets to those countries and the European Union. But still, that's a that's a pretty affordable car, even if it's

[00:13:14] thirty thousand dollars for the top end model. That's still a really good deal, especially when you look at the range and the features you get for the money. It's not shipping yet, but it is available for preorder

[00:13:27] if you're interested in such things and you live in a place where you can get it. And that leads us to our next story and our final story. Yeah, we we burned through those pretty quick. Not a lot of news this week.

[00:13:42] I'm sure there'll be more next week. Let's end the show with some good news. And that good news is the cost of battery packs has come down a lot in the last 16 years. We all know the battery pack is a significant part

[00:13:58] of the cost of an EV in 2008. It cost about one thousand four hundred and fifteen dollars per kilowatt hour for a battery pack. So a 70 kilowatt hour battery pack would cost ninety nine thousand fifty dollars.

[00:14:14] Significant. That is a lot of money for a 70 kilowatt hour battery pack in 2023. The average cost now this isn't the cheapest. This isn't the most expensive. This is the average. The average cost in twenty twenty three was one hundred and thirty nine dollars per kilowatt hour.

[00:14:30] So for that same 70 kilowatt hour battery pack, you're looking at nine thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars, a 90 percent decrease in cost, which is huge. And honestly, it makes me hopeful for the next 16 years of what we're going to see

[00:14:48] when it comes to the prices of these battery packs dropping even further. But I seriously doubt we're going to see a 90 percent decrease in what we have now. You know, we're definitely going to be under one hundred dollars in 16 years.

[00:15:05] Where we're going to be, I don't know, but I doubt we'll be, you know, we're not going to be down to thirteen dollars per kilowatt hour or anything like that. But. We do have some other things to look forward to.

[00:15:18] We have, you know, breakthroughs in different battery chemistries, breakthroughs in different technologies and advancements in terms of energy cell density and then just having more efficient EVs overall. So even though maybe the battery packs, maybe they get down in, you know, 16 years,

[00:15:38] maybe they get down to, let's say, fifty dollars a kilowatt hour, which may be optimistic, to be honest. But on that same 70 kilowatt hour battery, instead of traveling 300 miles, we can go 380 miles for that same battery just because of the efficiencies and increased energy density

[00:16:00] that we could see during that time. So honestly, I'm very hopeful for these advances. And we'll we'll we'll bring this up and again in 16 years. Remind me and we'll have another chat about this. All right, everybody, that is it this week.

[00:16:18] There wasn't a lot of news that I would call super interesting. You know, there's a lot of stuff in the political realm when it comes to EVs, but I didn't want to talk about that. So I hope I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.

[00:16:32] And on Friday, we're going to talk about Ford's Q2 2024 earnings call. And yeah, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you on Friday.