Tesla New News

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[00:00:56] A podcast about Electric Vehicles, Renewable Energy, Autonomous Driving and much, much more.

[00:01:00] My name is Bodhi and I am your host. And on this episode we are going to talk about all

[00:01:05] Tesla. Last episode we talked about our other EV news. Today is just going to be Tesla news.

[00:01:12] I do want to let you know yet again that Rob and I were on the Daily Tech News show.

[00:01:18] Their Experiment Week, we did a show of Beyond the Post which is about digital creation.

[00:01:24] If you're interested in that kind of thing, I'll put a link in the show notes. I'm really proud

[00:01:28] of that episode and if you like it or don't like it, send some feedback to the Daily Tech

[00:01:34] News show and let them know what you thought. Also, you should subscribe to the Daily Tech

[00:01:40] News show. It's good show. Alright, let's go ahead and jump into our Tesla news starting off.

[00:01:48] Let me increase the font because I'm getting old. We're going to start off with some

[00:01:52] follow-up. We talked about Tesla removing the rear wheel drive version of the Cybertruck,

[00:01:57] the much more affordable $60,000 version and leaving the foundation and the Cyber Beast.

[00:02:04] Well, Tesla Cybertruck lead engineer West Morrill, he put some, he gave us some context

[00:02:12] as to why they did that. And this is what he said. Our continued goal is to make it

[00:02:17] extremely easy to order. It was overly complicated and it has been simplified based on what we are

[00:02:25] producing today. Now, my question to that is overly complicated for who? Tesla or the consumer?

[00:02:34] I would guess it was overly complicated for Tesla. Having said that, I do think that Tesla will

[00:02:39] add more affordable versions of the Cybertruck back into the lineup. But when I say more

[00:02:45] affordable, I don't mean like affordable for everybody. I just mean cheaper than $100,000.

[00:02:52] We have one more bit of follow-up. We talked recently about Tesla bundling full self-driving,

[00:03:00] the connectivity plan and unlimited supercharging together for three years. It cost $5,000. If you

[00:03:07] bought a Model S or Model X, you could add this bundle to it. It didn't have an official name

[00:03:12] when we talked about it initially, but it does now. It's called Drive Anywhere. So just so you wear

[00:03:19] in the future when we talk about the Drive Anywhere bundle, that is what we're talking about.

[00:03:24] All right. Let's move on to some new news. You're a fan of the New Heights podcast.

[00:03:31] I am. I like Jason and Travis Kelsey. Anyway, this is new Tesla news. Tesla is recalling

[00:03:39] 9,136 Model Xs from the 2016 model year. The problem is there's a roof trim piece that can separate

[00:03:48] and could cause an accident. We don't know if it would call an accident. This is actually a physical

[00:03:54] recall, which is why I'm mentioning it here. I stopped talking about recalls that Tesla was

[00:04:00] issuing that were software updates. That's not to me, that's not a recall. That's a software

[00:04:04] update, but this is an actual physical recall that you have to go in and have replaced. So

[00:04:12] you have to go into a service center to get that done. I know at least one of our Canadian listeners

[00:04:16] has a Model X from around this timeframe. I can't quite remember which year it is,

[00:04:23] but yeah, that's another reason to mention it as well. Unrelated to this, I'm going to give you

[00:04:29] a podcast to listen to. Go listen to True North EVs. That's James's podcast. It is fantastic.

[00:04:39] And don't let the fact that he hasn't posted in a while detour you. He has a back catalog that

[00:04:44] is well worth listening to, and I know for a fact that James is very busy. So go subscribe,

[00:04:52] listen to the past episodes, and when he comes out with a new episode, you will be blessed with

[00:04:56] a new episode. I highly recommend James's podcast. All right, and I'll try to remember to put a link

[00:05:01] in the show notes. Moving on, the city of Baltimore has decided to buy Teslas for their employee fleet.

[00:05:09] So right now, Baltimore, the city of Baltimore has approved up to a $5 million purchase,

[00:05:17] which is approximately 147 EVs. Honestly, don't know if this is a lot of vehicles for a city

[00:05:25] the size of Baltimore or not, but $5 million is $5 million. I'm not going to say no to it for sure.

[00:05:33] Now, the city of Baltimore may want to listen up on this next story because some Tesla owners are

[00:05:39] very unhappy about the long wait times for service. In some cases, it can take as long as

[00:05:46] two months to get your car taken care of if there's something wrong with it. And I'm not

[00:05:50] saying that's every case. That's just some people's experience. But I'm going to bring this back to

[00:05:57] this summer. Do you remember when Tesla laid off 20,000 employees? According to Electric,

[00:06:03] one of the impacted divisions was service. Now, I'm not saying that this is the reason for the

[00:06:10] delay. It could be parts, it could be labor. They may not have enough people to work on

[00:06:15] the cars. I don't know. But if it is the case that this problem is happening because of the layoffs,

[00:06:22] that's not good. But what is good is Tesla is bringing the referral program back. In April,

[00:06:30] they decided to put it into the program or put a pause on the program. They've done this several

[00:06:35] times over the last 10 or so years. This version of the referral program, in my opinion, is the

[00:06:42] simplest yet. The way it works is if someone uses your referral code to buy a Model S, a Model X,

[00:06:48] a Model 3 or a Model Y, no Cybertruck or Tesla Semi. But if they use your referral code to get one

[00:06:56] of those four vehicles, they're going to get $1,000 off their vehicle and you're going to get

[00:07:01] $500 that you could apply to any Tesla product. So it sounds like that includes like

[00:07:08] power walls, vehicles, home chargers, coffee mugs, whatever you want. You get $500, you're going to

[00:07:15] apply it towards that product. Which I'm not sure if this is the most generous referral program Tesla

[00:07:23] has offered to this point. But it is definitely the easiest. I don't like it when companies use

[00:07:29] points because you don't really know what the value of a point is. I don't like it when

[00:07:36] Tesla is giving away like supercharger free supercharging because that eventually will expire.

[00:07:42] At least if you get $500 applied to your Tesla account and you know that it's going to expire at

[00:07:48] some point, you can make sure to spend it before it expires. If you have supercharger,

[00:07:54] it's just harder to use those supercharger miles, especially if you have a lot of them. And

[00:07:58] when they expire, you really felt like you did something and got nothing out of it.

[00:08:02] So I think this is overall a better solution. Is it the most generous one? I don't think so,

[00:08:08] but it's a better solution. All right. Tesla semis have been seen in Europe. And when I say Tesla

[00:08:15] semis, I mean two Tesla semis were delivered to Giga Berlin and some people in Germany took

[00:08:21] pictures of them while they're on the transport vehicles. We don't know why they're there

[00:08:31] testing of the Tesla semi in Europe, but I'm sure we'll find out in due time what exactly they're doing

[00:08:37] there. And one more Tesla semi story. A Tesla semi with a bunch of data collection devices that were

[00:08:44] typically used for FSD testing was spotted just outside of Giga Nevada. This has led some to

[00:08:52] speculate that Tesla is testing full self-driving on Tesla semi, which honestly makes a ton of

[00:08:57] sense in my head. I figured that from the moment that Tesla announced the Tesla semi,

[00:09:05] they were on some level testing full self-driving. Like whoever can solve level five autonomy for

[00:09:12] the trucking industry is just going to make boatloads and boatloads of money. So this

[00:09:18] totally makes sense. And I wouldn't be surprised if they've been testing this for longer than

[00:09:24] just a couple of weeks. It just makes sense that they've been doing this for a long time.

[00:09:29] Let's move on. Sticking with full self-driving, Tesla has started rolling out full self-driving

[00:09:34] 12.5 on hardware three equipped vehicles. Although I did see in some of the documentation in the

[00:09:44] communications from Tesla that they were calling them AI three and AI four vehicles. So maybe

[00:09:50] they have hardware three and hardware four vehicles are now called AI three and AI four.

[00:09:57] I have not seen that prior to today when I read that the first time.

[00:10:01] Anyway, we have talked about full self-driving 12.5 coming out on hardware three vehicles.

[00:10:08] It was a little delayed. Initially Elon said it would come out 10 days after

[00:10:13] FSD 12.5 came out for hardware four vehicles or AI four vehicles, but

[00:10:20] turns out it was a little bit longer than 10 days. I don't know the exact number off the top of my

[00:10:25] head. I think it was somewhere around 30 days, but it doesn't matter. It took them a little

[00:10:28] bit longer to figure out how to get 12.5 on hardware three vehicles. And we have a little

[00:10:35] bit of insight as to why Tesla's director of autopilot software, Ashok Alaswamy gave us a little bit

[00:10:44] insight as to what took so long. He says on Twitter or on X he says we were able to achieve

[00:10:49] similar performance as the AI four 12.5 release with a relatively smaller model for AI three.

[00:10:58] Deploying the larger model requires us to implement a few kernels in the compiler

[00:11:04] to emulate the same operations that are natively supported on the AI four hardware.

[00:11:11] The team is actively working on implementing and verifying verifying those operations,

[00:11:16] combined with other model compression techniques, we think we can run on the same 12.5 model

[00:11:24] on both or excuse me, we think we can run the same 12.5 model on both hardware platforms

[00:11:30] in the future. That said, the model perimeter count is just one of the many axes of performance

[00:11:37] improvements. A data set distribution, data set quality, model architecture, training compute,

[00:11:45] etc all have tremendous impact on final performance. And honestly, I think this is awesome. I love

[00:11:52] that Tesla's trying to have parity between AI three and AI four equipped vehicles or hardware

[00:11:59] three hardware four, however we want to use that term going forward. And I do have thoughts on this,

[00:12:06] but I'm going to be very mature in this situation. And I'm not going to talk about

[00:12:11] Elon's 2016 promise of every vehicle being built after lives like October 2016

[00:12:19] would have level five autonomy. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm not going to talk about

[00:12:24] you know, the fact that we're pushing up against the technical limits of hardware three,

[00:12:29] because I'm going to remain positive. But I am curious as to what you think so you can email me

[00:12:34] bodi b o d i e at 918 digital calm and tell me what you think about that. I'll let you tell me

[00:12:41] I'm not going to tell you. Anyway, let's move on to our final story, which is just a little

[00:12:47] quick blurb here that I tagged on at the end. The Cybertruck is getting the vision park assist

[00:12:54] feature, which gives you a 3d representation of the world around you when you're trying to park

[00:12:58] your car. Honestly, it's one of my favorite features, you know, as much as we complain about

[00:13:04] the delay and 12.5 for hardware three vehicles, you know, Cybertruck's really far behind

[00:13:10] in the full self driving realm, but Tesla will do it as much criticism as I have for Tesla,

[00:13:16] because I have a lot of love for Tesla too. So my love for Tesla is far outweighs my criticism that

[00:13:22] I have for Tesla. They tend to do what they're going to say, just not in the timeframe they're

[00:13:28] going to do it or for the amount of money that they said they would do it for. But it does tend

[00:13:32] to get done. All right, everybody, this is a short episode. So I'm going to leave it here.

[00:13:39] I hope you all had a wonderful weekend I did we had lots of people in town visiting and

[00:13:45] hanging out, which is why this is getting really stunned on Sundays instead of Saturday.

[00:13:50] But now I have to record the Rivian episode that's going to go out on Tuesday. So

[00:13:56] I hope you all have a wonderful week I will talk to you on Tuesday. We'll talk to you soon.

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