The Roadster Unveil Again.....Again

[00:00:20] 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 this is our weekend edition of the show. I got last week's weekly edition out a little bit late, but weekend edition of the show we're getting back on track. So hopefully the next time you hear my voice it won't be too long from now.

[00:00:50] I do want to say though on the 24th, which I believe is a Thursday, Tesla's going to have their Tesla Semi event and we'll cover that as well. I would assume that they're going to live stream it, but I also thought they were going to live stream the CyberCab event and they didn't. So who knows? The Roadster event is also supposed to be live streamed, so we'll see.

[00:01:19] This is what it comes down to. All right, let's go ahead and jump into our news. BYD is planning three new EV factories and one battery factory in Europe. We don't have a lot of details at the moment. We just know that that is their plans. We do know that they currently have a factory in Hungary and they're just about ready to start ramping up.

[00:01:48] Production for that factory. So that's exciting for the folks in Europe. They're also looking at maybe putting from what it sounds like a second factory in Hungary and it looks like Spain and France are some of BYD's preferred locations for their factories. So that's exciting.

[00:02:11] Bolt is Europe's largest ride sharing platform. Bolt has more than 200 million customers, four and a half million drivers or, you know, drivers and couriers. And they operate in 850 cities over 50 countries. So if Bolt sounds familiar to you and you're like, that's something we talked about recently.

[00:02:38] Yeah, there was code in Tesla's app, I believe it was, that when you took your car in for service, you would have a choice between getting a cyber cab or paying for a service loaner or getting a, you know, ride in Bolt. And we talked a little bit about it there. Well, we now know that Lucid Motors announced a partnership with Bolt.

[00:03:06] Bolt is going to provide the platform, the ride sharing platform, and Lucid will provide the cars as well as Bolt and Lucid are going to work on the technology, the level four autonomy that comes with that. Now, that's not going to be on their current vehicles. We're looking at their mid-sized SUVs, which would be the Cosmos and the Earth.

[00:03:31] Lucid currently has a partnership with Uber and Nuro to work on autonomous vehicles. This isn't that. So in that partnership, Uber is doing the ride sharing platform, which makes sense. Lucid is providing the cars, which also makes sense. And Nuro is working on the autonomous vehicles. In this situation, it would be Lucid and Bolt working on the autonomous side of things.

[00:04:00] In this partnership, it sounds like they're using NVIDIA Hyperion technology. And it's basically NVIDIA's robo-taxi stack. So lots of autonomous car companies are using this. And if you're really listening and you're really following this stuff, you might have thought to yourself, you know what?

[00:04:29] Lucid doesn't have a mid-sized SUV at the moment. They have the gravity, but that's not mid-sized. That's a three-row SUV. And you would be right. And you might even have thought to yourself, wait a minute, Lucid just pushed back the announcement or the preview or the, you know, whatever they're going to call the show-off day of the Lucid Cosmos, which is their mid-sized EV. And you would also be right.

[00:04:55] I would imagine that Lucid is sharing what the, you know, the timeline with Bolt as to when the Cosmos is going to be coming out. And I would imagine that they're working together to get that out as soon as possible. But here's the thing. Right now, Lucid has a factory here in Arizona. And then they also have a factory in Saudi Arabia.

[00:05:20] And we heard a couple months ago that Lucid would be building the Cosmos mid-sized SUV in Saudi Arabia first, and then it would come to the United States. Well, Saudi Arabia, I don't know how many people know this, but check your maps. Saudi Arabia is closer to Europe than America is.

[00:05:42] So this actually starts to make more sense as to why Cosmos would be built in Saudi Arabia first and then, you know, eventually it would make its way to the U.S. Because while Saudi Arabia does own a large percentage or Saudi Arabian interests owns a large percentage of Lucid, it's still an American company. So just interesting. But now it makes sense.

[00:06:12] Okay. Our final EV story comes from Mark K in the UK. Mark sent a couple of different stories, so you'll hear his name at least one more time this week. Kia announced the sales of the PV, like photovoltaic, PV5 minivan. And we'll talk about the sales in just a minute. I would call it a minivan.

[00:06:40] I don't know if it's technically a minivan, but the PV is, they call it modular. It can have a lot of different top hats. Basically, it can do different things. So it's got a cargo. It can be a cargo vehicle for delivery and logistics and whatever else you are going to use a cargo van for. Pulling off heists, that kind of thing. And then it's a passenger van as well.

[00:07:02] You can configure it that way and think that's more of the minivan where you can do a shuttle service or just drive your family around. So in terms of specs on the PV5, which is not here in the U.S. or North America as far as I know. I think it's only in Europe and Korea at the moment. The cargo van version comes with a 43.3 kilowatt hour battery.

[00:07:29] But the pedestrian or passenger version starts with a 51.5 kilowatt hour battery. And you can go all the way up to a 71.2 kilowatt hour battery, which, you know, gets you around, according to Kia, 248 miles for that upper end battery. You can charge from 10 to 80 percent in 30 minutes. And it is built on their platform beyond.

[00:07:57] And there's another word there, and I didn't write it down, but it's built on that platform. This last bit of information here will be the same as our next story, but it's going to have a seven inch instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. And then, you know, the option between a 12.9 or 14.6 inch infotainment display. It's built on Android Automotive OS.

[00:08:23] And in the first 13 months of selling these vehicles, they were able to sell 53,530 of them, which is very impressive. And 60 percent of those cars were overseas, which I'm going to assume overseas means outside of Korea. So, yeah, very impressive. And these cars, as far as I know, are built in Korea. So now let's talk about the older brother to the PV5, right?

[00:08:50] You got the PV5 not coming to America. Well, it looks like the PV7 is also not coming to the U.S., but it is two feet longer than the PV5. It'll come in a front wheel drive on or all wheel drive configuration, 800 volt architecture. You can charge from 10 to 80 percent in about 10 minutes. The battery chemistry is going to be nickel, cobalt, manganese.

[00:09:17] 71.5 kilowatt hour battery to start, but it goes all the way up to a 96.2 kilowatt hour battery. And you can configure this with a seven seat or a nine seat variant. And then in terms of range, you're looking right around 285 miles at the top. That was for the cargo van. I don't know what the passenger van would get. But again, this vehicle is not coming to North America anytime soon, or at least not to the U.S.

[00:09:45] because it's built in South Korea and there's tariffs. So, yeah. But Korean Europe, enjoy your PV7 the second half of 2027. And we're thinking the price will be right around 40,000 euros to start. Okie doke. That is our EV news. Thank you so much to Mark for passing on that story. Let's, well, before we move into the Tesla news, I do want to let everybody know

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[00:11:04] And Ashok Alaswamy, which is, he is Tesla's VP of AI, confirmed that the RoboTaxi will soon operate 24-7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and run on FSD version 15, which currently it runs on some flavor of 14. And this is going to happen sometime soon.

[00:11:27] Uh, and, and then even sometime sooner after that, you're going to, it's going to hit customer vehicles as far as the, the FSD version 15. Now, this was actually something that he posted on X, and it was in response to a question that was asked by Holmar's catalog. And actually, he was just making more of an observation. Holmar's catalog, Omar, he said, really wish RoboTaxi was 24-7.

[00:11:57] I want to take CyberCab all night. And Ashok wrote back, next month or so, the next text to merge on the V15 will enable it. Goodness gracious. Now in, sorry about my voice, in tech speak or in Tesla speak, next month or so could mean a year.

[00:12:23] Um, they don't have a great, uh, they don't have a great, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Reputation when it comes to timelines. But that's for RoboTaxi. So who knows what it's going to look like for customers when it comes to, like, when are you going to receive version 15? I will, I would not expect it within the next month or so, for sure.

[00:12:48] If you missed out on pre-ordering a Tesla Roadster nine years ago, in 2017, when they first announced it, when it rolled out of the Tesla Semi. Well, I have good news for you. You can now plop down $50,000 to pre-order a Roadster ahead of the Roadster unveil. Is it the unveil again? Is it the unveil, unveil? I don't know.

[00:13:16] I think I like unveil again. The Roadster unveil again. Maybe that'll be the show title. We'll know. We'll see. Anyway, the Tesla website shows that you need to put $5,000 down on a credit card and they will hold that spot for you. But then you have 10 days to wire the rest of the $45,000 to Tesla. Now, the good news is if you, if you, uh, part with $50,000, it is refundable.

[00:13:45] But I'm, I'm going to tell you something. Uh, when it, we're looking at a hundred dollar refundable, you know, reservation, I, you don't probably need to read the terms of service. You should. But, but you know, it's a hundred dollars. If it, if you end up not, if you get, you end up getting screwed out of your money, um, it, that it really does stink. And a hundred dollars is a lot of money, but it's not $50,000.

[00:14:13] I would, I would, uh, if you're planning on putting $50,000 on this vehicle, I would double, triple, and quadruple check the terms of service and everything else that you're going to agree to along the lines to make sure, you know, exactly how to get your money back. Just in case. To my knowledge, Tesla has not had, uh, an issue giving people their money back when they've wanted to cancel a reservation. This is just so much money.

[00:14:42] You want to make sure you do it in the way that you need to, so you don't lose out. Now I do have a question for everybody. What do you think is we're going to see on October 1st? Some people think we're going to see maybe, you know, just like maybe a little more than the silhouette of a car. The Tesla's not going to give us a lot of details.

[00:15:02] Are we going to see a prototype or will we see a production ready car that's ready to, you know, go on sale in the next couple of months or start deliveries in the next couple of months? Or are we going to see something else entirely? Send me an email. It's Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com. All right. I have two more stories for you here.

[00:15:28] The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave the 2026 Model 3 a five-star overall safety rating. This five-star rating was across every category. And those categories are frontal crash, side crash, rollover resistance. And they also apply to rear wheel and all-wheel drive versions of the car. So that's pretty impressive.

[00:15:55] The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also said that the 2026 Model 3. I'm only saying it like that because I thought I said Model Y and I actually went back and listened to it, but I did say Model 3. So the 2026 Model 3 met NHTSA's 2027 model recommendation performance criteria in all 10 of its recommended active safety technologies.

[00:16:24] But here are just a few of the safety technologies that they're looking for. I'm not going to give all 10. Automatic emergency braking, day and nighttime pedestrian automatic emergency braking, lane keep assist, blind spot warning, and active blind spot intervention. So congratulations to Tesla. That's really cool. Okay, our final story. This is a quick one. Tesla's rolling out passkey support for the Tesla app.

[00:16:54] So what this means, this doesn't have anything to do with your iPhone key. I want to be clear, and I'm actually going to mention this a couple of times. This doesn't have to do with how you get into your car. This is how you secure your Tesla account. Okay, that's what a passkey is. So instead of putting your password in, you can authenticate with your face, your fingerprint, or your device, depending on what kind of device you have.

[00:17:19] And this is, again, securing your Tesla app and your account. And, I mean, I guess if you want to tie it to the iPhone key, which I'm reluctant to do, or the Tesla key, Tesla phone key. Again, I'm reluctant to do this, but it would protect your account so that somebody couldn't get into your account and activate it on their phone and then get in your car and drive away. But, again, nothing to do other than your account.

[00:17:49] I just want to be very clear about that. The good thing about passkeys is that it's basically a security benefit that is resistant to phishing scams. Now, there are a number of different ways that somebody can run a phishing scam to get your password information or your login information. I'm not going to go into those. But notice I said resistant and not foolproof because there are always ways of getting scammed.

[00:18:19] But with passkeys, it's just a little bit harder now. But that does not mean you are not vulnerable. You still are. You know, with all of the security technology that we have, the weakest part or one of the weakest parts still remains us. The squishy parts. The, you know, go listen to Bart Bouchot's and Allison Sheridan's security bits on the NoSilicast.

[00:18:46] And you'll hear all about the different ways and clever, very, very clever ways bad guys have to separate you from your money or whatever other expensive object that you have. It's a lot. It's people as a group. We're a very, very impressive group. We don't do always good things with that power, but we're clever for sure.

[00:19:15] But anyway, now we have passkeys on the iPhone or on the Tesla iPhone or Tesla app. I'm so tired and also I'm so Apple coded. I can't even acknowledge that Android exists. I apologize. There's a passkey for phone. No matter what kind of flavor of phone you have, passkeys now exist. All right.

[00:19:46] I don't know if you can tell, but it's been a long day. It's a good day. It's a great day, but a long one for sure. All right, everybody. So that is our episode down dirty and quick. I actually went through all of the tests. I cleared out the Tesla queue and I only have like nine stories than the EV queue. So, you know, we're kind of, we're kind of getting down to wrapping up the year.

[00:20:13] You know, we're going to have some exciting things happen with the Tesla semi and then the Roadster and then the LA auto shows coming out. And then, you know, we get right into the holidays after that. So we'll get a little bit of a lull and then CES, which I'll be at CES this year. Next year, if I actually retire, there is a scenario in which I would stay. I wouldn't be on a truck, but there is a scenario in which I would stay.

[00:20:41] I haven't been offered that scenario, by the way. But if they do offer it to me, I would stay. But if I'm retired, I might just take a drive to LA for a day and do the LA auto show and then drive back the next day. I've never been. So it'd be exciting to go. All right, everybody. If you want to email me, you can do so. It's Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com.

[00:21:11] Go check out Live With It. I'll try and remember the link in the show notes. It sounds like my episode's coming out soon. I was emailing back and forth with Roger today. And while he didn't give me a date, it sounds like that episode's going to be out sooner rather than later. This week or maybe next. And I think you'll enjoy it.

[00:21:34] We talked all about, like, you know, it's a product reviews podcast or YouTube channel where you talk about the products that you live with. Not just the products that you pick up and use for a day, but you're actually living with them. And I got to talk about the two fire trucks that I drive and the one fire truck that I sometimes drive. And, I don't know, it was a fun conversation with Sarah. I can't remember if Roger popped in. Roger's the producer.

[00:22:02] Sarah Lane is the host. Can't remember if Roger popped in, but I think everybody would enjoy it and maybe learn something. Right. Thank you all so much. And I will talk to you soon.