the Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Dylan Loomis. Quick shout out to my newest patron, Skipper. Thank you for choosing to support the channel. Haters will say this is photoshopped, but we just saw there is indeed video as well. It's kind of funny because when you look close, it actually does kind of look like it's photoshopped. It's not, but I am curious if Lars kept his left foot off the tonneau cover on purpose, or it just happened that way.
Seta Tawasen, Thailand's Prime Minister is 6'4". They said they want more of a Tesla presence in Thailand, to which I would respectfully say, get in line.
After all this time, we now have the designer of the DeLorean making some comments about the Cybertruck kicking it off with, Tesla Need Not Panic. He said, when you step outside the norms, it's almost always seen as a provocation. It happens in all fields from furniture to cooking. Everyone wants to distinguish themselves. It's a market necessity, and the Cybertruck will surely be successful. I'm sure of it. I'm convinced it will find its admirers. Don't panic about what? Well, some of the negative feedback. This part was somewhat comical where they talked about, the Cybertruck has been plagued by serious powertrain breaking suspension, structural and sealing issues, all according to a motor trend report. Tracking down that report, it was from January 2022, and it was actually just referencing those leaked files from a German source. Regardless, it was still in the development phase. Of course, they're going to have challenges and things they need to work on.
But he continued saying, I don't want to judge the Cybertruck as beautiful or ugly. It certainly has its admirers who want a vehicle to stand out. Cybertruck has had its fair share of critics already, whether it comes to fingerprints all over the stainless steel or panel gaps. Well, in about two weeks, Tesla will finally have its chance to prove the doubters wrong.
I haven't seen too many real world pictures of the new Model 3 Plus right next to the older Model 3. Here we had one, and I do think this really shows off how mature the newer model looks. Yes, it's subjective, but that's my personal opinion. Don't get me wrong, I liked the old design, but the new one is definitely more mature and refined.
Fremont's been busy as of late when it comes to tours. We have the Indian Commerce Minister, Piyush Goyal, saying, proud to see the growing importance of auto component suppliers from India into the Tesla EV supply chain. It's on its way to double its components imports from India. Missed Elon's magnetic presence, and I wish him a speedy recovery. To which Elon said, it was an honor to have you visit. My apologies for not being able to travel to California, but I look forward to meeting at a future date. So what did Elon need to recover from? As far as I can tell, still a mystery. Some of you will remember though, that's actually old news. If you go back to the beginning of September this year, we heard that Tesla had invested $1 billion in components from India in 2022, and for this year they were looking to have that number at $1.9 billion. I do believe that's what Piyush was referring to, not that Tesla was going to go from $2 billion this year to $4 billion next year. Is it possible? Absolutely, I just don't think that's what he meant.
In the weeks ahead, we will undoubtedly hear more about Tesla potentially needing to raise its wages in response to the UAW contracts that are being ratified. On that note though, we have CNBC this afternoon saying that three major GM plans have voted against the pact in recent days. One like GM could fail while Ford and Stellantis may go through, but too early to tell right now. Just some numbers to keep in the back of your mind. Jonas said, they estimate Tesla has 45 to 50,000 workers between Fremont, Austin and Reno, representing a combined, all in US labor bill between $4 and $5 billion. Taking the high end of those estimates if you take the annual labor bill, divide that by 50,000 workers, if that was the number, roughly 100,000 per worker. You would think they're including some level of stock compensation in this figure, but they don't make it explicit. But I'm sharing this because if we learn Tesla does raise wages in the US by 10, 15% whatever it may be, this would give you some rough numbers of what that could look like in terms of additional costs.
Over the past few years I've read, thought and talked a lot about Tesla. Would you believe me if I told you before I got knocked off track, I was even more plugged into the wellness and fitness world? It's alright if you don't, but the truth is, I was. Getting sidetracked by that parasite has taught me innumerable lessons, but one strong reminder, do not ever take your health for granted. That's part of why I'm still a proponent of AG1, the sponsor of this video. Ultimately, it's just something you have to try for yourself.
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One question I often ask, am I making choices my future self will thank me for? If you want to invest in your future self and your health, you can get five travel packs and a one year supply of Vitamin D3K2 at drinkag1.com slash electrified linked below. As always, thank you for considering supporting the channel. We actually delay ours by one year relative to Elon, so maybe it should be two years, but here's where we've learned how important Tesla's proprietary data is. It's five million robots around the world. Crews didn't have anything like that. It had hundreds. Five million robots around the world collect data every day and send it back to Tesla. Tesla has more corner cases, which means disengagements, accidents, information like that, than all the other companies in the world combined. And I have to tell you, watching the breakthroughs in AI that we are seeing, they are astounding. The speed at which this is moving. So it is interesting. I think it's a data issue.
Autonomous taxi platforms are the biggest AI project in the world. Therefore, we think Tesla is the best. You've sold Tesla shares. I have to say it, I am so ready for Kathy and Arc to be vindicated on their Tesla thesis. They've maintained their stance all the while going against the current. And one day, I firmly believe whether it's one year or four years, they will be proven right. She was then asked about, well, why are you selling Tesla stock? I need everybody to hear this. Kathy Wood is not a retail Tesla investor. She runs a fund. That means when certain targets are hit on the upside or downside, say Tesla grows 50 or 100%, they trim, take profits, lock them in, reinvest into some underperformers. That's literally what she gets paid to do to manage the fund actively. Some funds actually have hard caps, meaning when a stock hits 10, 15, 20% of the fund, they actually have to sell.
Well, I look outside five years from now and see GM and Ford EVs everywhere. It's very interesting to hear both of them pull back saying, what do you think? I think I don't even know if we'll be talking about GM in four and five years. What is interesting about the news that both of them are pulling back for profitability reasons, they can't be profitable in this space unless they scale. That's how this works. That's the catch-22. So it's catch-22 and their shareholder base is very internal, combustion, engine oriented, and they want their profits now and they want their dividends now. And they don't want that kind of Tesla to do it. Will they be able to? I don't know. All I know is, back to the Tesla question, as they are pulling away, our market share expectations for Tesla go up. We have Kathy Wood and Ark who have been much less wrong about Tesla than many other analysts over the years, saying that Tesla is the biggest AI opportunity in the world.
Contrast that with this. I think over time, markets will become more competitive. The European market will become more competitive. It is becoming more competitive as the Europeans have come out with pretty good EVs and the Chinese are moving in. I think over time, the US market will become more competitive. That's the challenge for Tesla is it's playing in a hyper-competitive marketplace. It's really, really difficult for one player to have outsized share or profitability. And that's ultimately our concern about Tesla longer term is that it is really a car company and the car industry makes it difficult for anyone to have outsized margins or share over the long term.
Is it really just a car company, Tony? Our megapacks cars? Is Optimus a car? Is Dojo a car? I could go on, but for now, all I'll say is that one day the world will really find out.
There is an 800 pound gorilla, BYD in China who is growing much faster than Tesla. They just reported 25% automotive gross margins. Tesla's at 17. They only make EV related cars. And there are others like Lee and Expung who are formidable competitors as well.
Let's talk about those BYD auto gross margins from quarter three. First things first, credit where credit is due. BYD is doing very well in making progress. And let's not forget we need at least 10 probably closer to 30 global auto companies making EVs to move the entire fleet to electric with time.
So if you're really about sustainable energy and more choices for consumers, which over time drives down the cost, you don't really need to root against BYD because Tesla can succeed even with BYD having a ton of success of its own.
Why were BYD's auto gross margins up due to higher sales of their DMI lineup? Dual, motor, intelligent, their hybrids that focus primarily on efficiency. Tony was sneaky in the interview. He said EV related cars, which is technically accurate, but let's not forget about half of BYD's sales are hybrids, which are not comparable to BEVs when it comes to the cost of goods sold.
The truth is BYD better be making profit at these levels. They sold over 2 million vehicles in the first three quarters of this year, roughly half of which still have a combustion engine in them. Despite the volume advantage relative to Tesla, BYD's net profit in Q3 was $1.4 billion compared to Tesla's, which was $1.8 billion.
Gary Black commented on something Martin Vieja just said at an investor conference where he said Tesla is now in an intermediate to low growth period. Martin did chime in and clarify what I said specifically is we're between two major growth waves, the first driven by the three and why since 2017, and the next one that will be driven by the next gen vehicle.
We don't need to dive into this right now, but next year, whether Tesla grows at 20% or 40%, as a long-term investor what really matters is what they're doing come 2027, 2028. So could Tesla have a gap or a down year in 2024 in terms of unit growth? Sure. But that 50% growth target the way they actually meant it, Tesla is still ahead of those numbers.
I can assure the designer of the DeLorean one thing, Tesla executives are not panicking, they're very familiar with what the next major growth wave is going to be and when it's coming. I've said it many times before, but I'll say it again, patients will be rewarded when it comes to the Tesla story.
We also have Goldman Sachs coming out saying that they see Tesla as a leader in the AI field. Their 12-month price target is 235, but they said Tesla stands on a strong footing to emerge as a front-runner in AI-related tech. This confidence stems from the company's extensive resources and exceptional engineering talent across chip design, software, hardware, and data fields.
We believe in an upside-case FSD could be $50 to $100 billion a year of revenue from Tesla's fleet by 2030, up from what we believe is $1 to $3 billion per year, presently. Taking the midpoints, that's a rough 37x in revenue from today's levels.
We have Joe Manchin doubling down saying he wants the strictest possible standards to exclude Chinese battery firms or minerals from receiving tax credits for EVs. He expressed these concerns in a letter to Janet Yellen, saying there were rumors that Chinese battery companies are actively looking for ways to capitalize on the credits. It'd be surprising if they weren't.
The auto industry is still waiting on guidance from the treasury when it comes to how they're going to classify these foreign entities of concern. It comes into play in 2024 for completed batteries. Then in 2025, it comes into play for critical minerals.
Tesla Roddy may have some Swedish sources, and they're saying that the IF Mattel is offering Tesla Sweden employees payment to join the Union strike. However, still, the strike has failed to gain much momentum from actual Tesla employees. But now, the Union is offering employees of Tesla 130% more than Tesla's salary.
Given Tesla already came out and said they offer better compensation than what the Union contracts provide, this 130% more, I'm not sure I would trust that figure. The rumors are still that most of these Tesla employees do not want the Union involved in their employment, but pretty much every other company in Sweden does.
If that new offer from IF Mattel to Tesla employees is indeed accurate, it could just be bargaining as this strike was set to go a little bit further on November 17th and the 20th, with other companies joining in on sympathy strikes. It may be related, it may not be, but if you go to Tesla's careers page, there are a fair number of job listings open right now for things like a truck driver in Sweden for supply chain. They also have listings for paint sprayers and many related to vehicle service, so is Tesla looking to hire to continue to get around the strikes that are taking place? I have no idea if this one would work legally, but it sounded like a good idea from Matthew D.R. saying Tesla should just buy a roll-on roll-off ferry and then have the service on the ship. Then, as he said in the comments, when the strike is over, Tesla has a floating service center, they can call it the SSSC Service Center.
I'm seeing two different reports when it comes to the weekly Tesla China data, we have Tesla Chan reporting 13,000, and then we have Car News China reporting 12,700, so since I like to be conservative, we'll go with this one. Plugging that data in if you wanted to compare it to the same week in Quarter 3, that number was 14,000. Looking through the first six weeks of Q3, we were at 58.3,000. Over the same time in Q4, we're at 54.1,000, still trailing, but plenty of time left. I told you last week I was kind of excited to see what this number in the next few weeks would be, so from that standpoint, yes, I was expecting a number better than this one, but as always, in the grand scheme of things, one week and one market is a big, nothing burger. It could have been partially related to export allocation, but in a few weeks we'll have more data.
Speaking of Tesla China, if you want to interpret this as bullish, be my guest, they did again raise prices on some models between $2 and $500. Rivian, over time, may look to borrow up to $15 billion in the form of bonds with the local government in Georgia for its R2 factory. Rivian's initial investment at this factory is said to be $5 billion. They're looking to create 7,500 jobs, and at capacity, they're looking to make 400,000 vehicles per year. The joint development authority will issue on behalf of Rivian taxable revenue bonds in a maximum amount of $15 billion to fund project costs, promote economic development and job creation, and facilitate a property tax incentive for the company.
Rivian just released a software update that was supposed to fix proximity locking, but it didn't go well and they said this is on us, we messed up, it effectively bricked some of the owners' cars and some may require physical repair in some cases. Rivian has not said how many vehicles were actually affected, but a good reminder that these software updates are not always as easy as Tesla makes them seem.
Lucid just signed a memorandum of understanding at the Dubai Air Show in partnership with an aviation startup of sorts. Their collaboration will explore co-marketing, commercial and operational streams for targeted guests and travelers. This Riyadh Air has plans to be the largest airline in the Middle East in terms of revenue. Now, what these two companies will actually do together outside of marketing is somewhat still a mystery. We're set to get the Lucid Gravity unveil in the next few days, but we did get this image on Instagram from the throttle house. You can't see very much, but there you have it. We also have this image that was shared on a Lucid forum, potentially of a clay version of Lucid's upcoming truck. They have mentioned cars like a coupe and a pickup at some point in the future. I want to give them grace here, but after seeing this, I do wonder if the pickup market is a place they should really be racing toward. That said, there are no guarantees any of these legacy EV pickup trucks are actually around 3-4 years from now, so we'll see.
You know what they say about imitation, that it's the most sincere form of flattery. The Cyber Quad for Kids is back on the Tesla shop in the United States for $1900. My immediate question becomes, what's going on with the Cyber Truck for Adults? Orders will begin shipping late November 2023. Don't forget to check out AG1 linked below, grab those freebies if you're interested, thank you in advance. If you do, Starship, Round 2, this Friday, potentially keep an eye out for that. Please like the video if you did, hope you guys have a wonderful day, and a huge thank you to all of my Patreon supporters. Thanks for watching!.