I came into this project, I thought that Tesla was not going to be happy about it. I thought they were going to be super protective, they didn't want people modifying their vehicle. Turns out I was way wrong. They have been nothing but super friendly, super supportive, and insanely excited about the modifications that we've done to the Cybertruck, which in turn made me much more of a Tesla and Cybertruck fan because I see that they genuinely care about their customers and their vehicles and they're willing to do cool stuff. And they got a great captain at the helm with Elon Musk. So overall, they definitely want to be over and earn a lot of my respect. Welcome to Electrified, it's your host Dylan Loomis. Kristen, Alexander, and a few others have put together a Tesla shareholder letter writing campaign to Judge McCormick regarding that $6 billion fee the lawyers are requesting. Important to note, Elon does approve of these efforts. If you'd like to help sending a letter of your own, here's the address to send it to, register letters would be better, and of course, the sooner you can send it, the better. I think it may be helpful to reference the case number somewhere on your letter, so here it is if you'd like to do that. Here's the letter that Alexandra is sending just to give you a template and some ideas. Don't forget, you can use Grok, you can use Bard, you can use Chat GPT to help you get a baseline and then add anything or edit whatever you'd like. I do think these letters will have more of an impact if they are written respectfully. On appeal in 2021, the Delaware Supreme Court highlighted a shareholder approval letters in upholding a lower court's dismissal of claims, stating the letter showed market validation of the deal price. So, while letter writing campaigns alone rarely dictate case outcomes, when coupled with other evidence, letters from shareholders can reinforce legal arguments and influence courts' final rulings on appeals. If your international and sending a letter is going to take a few weeks, you may want to look into mailform.io. A big shout out to everybody organizing this, the Tesla community is pretty special. This image of the upcoming Tesla diner supercharger location was shared, saying that it's almost ready. That's certainly up for debate, I would not expect this to open until maybe the fall of this year. But you can see on the right, this is the north side of the location, one screen is going up. The word is a welder on site said the second screen on the west side over here cannot go up until these power lines are taken down, which AT&T has to do. Holmars shared a solid meme, drive Cybertruck with no autopilot, or drive Model S with FSD version 12. Sharing though, because Elon said that is an actual choice I face every day, which means not even Elon has FSD on his Cybertruck. Historically, Elon has had the most cutting edge FSD on all of his vehicles, so I would say this is a bearish indication for full self-driving coming to the Cybertruck anytime in the near term.
The two obvious reasons would be one, different camera placements and heights on the Cybertruck compared to the other Tesla vehicles, and two, different driving dynamics on the Cybertruck, things like steer by wire, rear wheel steering, etc. When it comes to a wider release of version 12 on any Tesla vehicle, Tesla scope has some bad news, delayed for the unforeseeable future due to a specific incident that happened. They said this incident was a crash that occurred a little under one week after the initial deployment of .2.1 and required an internal investigation the following day, but nobody was injured and the vehicle only experienced minor cosmetic damage. If I had to guess, I would say this might be that parking lot instance we reported on last week.
Tesla scope was expecting a wide-er release of version 12 this weekend, not a full-on wide release, but that has been delayed and no new timeline has been given. It's unfortunate, but also a good reminder that even if one person lets the testing go too far, then ultimately everybody else is going to pay for that. In a new Tesla service bulletin, it says for the Cybertruck, an updated rear steering actuator that provides a tighter turning radius is available for retrofit. The previous rear steering actuator does not affect or impact vehicle safety or reliability. The word is newer Cybertrucks should be coming from the factory with this updated actuator.
The official Cybertruck owners manual is now live, so I'll have it linked below. Sometimes these can be fun to browse through. Thanks to the owners manual, Tesla scope had a chance to look through it and confirmed that currently delivered Cybertrucks do not currently have access to steam due to the lack of a dedicated GPU and the infotainment board only having 8GB of RAM when Tesla currently has the requirements at 16GB for steam. Their speculation here is that Tesla might introduce the more powerful infotainment computer soon, either in the cyber beast or prior. You may have seen this ridiculous video of a Cybertrucks front end up over and into the garden of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The initial reporting was it was being driven by the valet that caused this accident, but Gregor truck got a message from the organization saying that was not the case. The valet business owner himself took the time to reach out and to say that the Cybertruck was not driven by the valet last night, it was the owner. Holmar said Cybertruck is the most comfortable Tesla and Elon said that is what surprises people most. Early early on in Cybertruck production there were some anecdotes that showed the tonneau cover didn't really keep the vault fully dry if it was raining fairly hard. Maybe there was an update Holmar said drove through a ton of rain and the Cybertruck vault kept every drop out.
Matthew Chorello on X said love Tesla and his Cybertruck but quote catastrophe failure with steering and brakes while on a road trip with my wife and toddler. Pretty pretty not good oh and service center not open today. And no this is not just some random fud he's getting absolutely flamed in the comments and you can tell by his responses that he is a fan of Tesla he zoned for Tesla's previously this was a real thing that happened. Just one hour ago Portia South Orlando on their site had that Cybertruck they just bought for $244,000 listed for sale.
Luckily someone from the Cybertruck owners club forum took a screenshot of the listing to prove that it was real they had it up for $289.9000 so I'm not sure if they sold it or just took the page down but there you have it. There's also another nice looking black one on atlantaautos.com listed for 237,000. One person that's already sold his Cybertruck the CEO of the auto wholesale business give me the VIN.com. His firm was the one that sold it and he said there have been a significant number of Cybertruck buyers who want to resell their pickups for a profit but they're afraid Tesla will sue them because of the no resale clause. He said we tried to buy a gazillion of them but everybody freaks out because of the $50,000 threat from Tesla. We worked 30 deals to get that truck bought because everybody flaked out when they realized Tesla was going to sue them which so far was just speculation.
His firm also sold another one privately. There are several more Cybertruck's being bought from private sellers that will likely make it to auction soon. A Reddit user shared a photo of a Model X with LiDAR attached to the roof doing some camera validation in Munich, Germany.
I wanted to make it clear that yes it's encouraging to see Tesla doing this validation testing in Europe but this does not mean that an FSD release is imminent in Europe. This is strictly my speculation but I do not expect Tesla to release FSD in the EU until version 12 has gone to a wide release in the United States. Don't forget there are still regulatory hurdles for Tesla's FSD in Europe.
The good news is over the next few days a meeting is going to be held. If a certain proposal is adopted it could be implemented as soon as September of this year which could pave the way for FSD in Europe. However that's not a guarantee because the regulatory body has stated that the DCAS regulation driver control assistance systems will not cover full driving automation.
Tesla scope has said Tesla has been working on significant upgrades to their auto shift functionality and notably the necessity to swipe on the screen will be heavily reduced. No internal timeline has been provided but the engineer communicated that they're very close to a finalized version to send to wave 1 as just a few minor adjustments are needed. Tesla scope speculation our estimation is a tentative release in the first week of April.
So far there has been no indication that this feature is going to roll out to the older Model 3 or the Model Y, the vehicles that still have the stocks. Boca On X shared two pictures of the upcoming Model 3 performance. I believe this tape looking material is actually Velcro that helps to keep the covers on the car or the camouflage. And it's going to be hard for you to tell with this so zoomed in but right here it certainly does look like this is a front bumper camera.
到目前为止,还没有迹象表明这个功能将推出到较旧的Model 3或Model Y,这些车型仍然有存货。Boca On X分享了即将推出的Model 3 Performance车型的两幅图片。我相信这种带状材料实际上是帮助保持车身覆盖物或伪装的胶带。通过这么放大,你很难看出来,但在这里,这确实看起来像是一个前保险杆摄像头。
Before we all go crazy let's not forget before the Model 3 Plus was actually launched the word was it was going to have a front bumper camera and then when it came to market it did not. But if those supply chain issues have subsided there's a chance. I guess there's also a slight chance that's not even a camera but it really does look like one from this picture.
Zooming out a bit we can see the upgraded seats. Having a look at the charge port in the back that would confirm the rumors out there that the Model 3 performance will be launched first in the EU. This image of some bigger 20 inch wheels also leaked and people are saying these are called warp wheels. I think personally this does not look good at all with the lug nuts being exposed like this.
So for now just bear in mind this is not the production variant. Even if this vehicle doesn't get launched in the EU in China until sometime in April I would still have some optimism that it reaches the United States toward the end of quarter two if not the beginning of Q3. Currently Tesla's offering 5000 free supercharging miles if you trade in a vehicle and take delivery before March 31st. These miles will expire after two years from the date of delivery.
This was not just a one off Brad did this test in the same location three times and it did it successfully all three times. Tesla donated one of its cars that was involved in an incident that led to a fire for research purposes. I just wanted to share some data from this article the agency has recorded six EV car fires in Australia since 2010 all of which occurred after their battery packs were damaged.
The head of energy and infrastructure said the small number of incidents do not match the fear mongering from some commentators and the statistics prove EVs are safer than traditional motors. The relative rates of these vehicle fires are such that EVs catch fire about one tenth to one twentieth as often as petrol and diesel vehicles.
I'm not sure if this new Tesla product upgrade will roll out anywhere else but Tesla Chan said they launched a Model Y rear seat upgrade for about four hundred and ten dollars. This image was from the Tesla Taiwan page and this adds three centimeters of leg support. WUWA finally gave us an update on Tesla's mega-pactory in Shanghai.
They said according to the plan Tesla's Shanghai energy storage plant will start construction in the first quarter of 2024 and go into production in the fourth quarter. The battery cell supplier will be Ningdee Times while the utilization rate of self-produced battery cells will be increased in the future.
Said he talked to somebody who is doing other works at the site and he said the construction of this land will be started soon. As you can see there are some building houses and concrete floors on the wet ground which are on the outside of the fence of the energy storage plant. Tesla is in talks with Thailand's government for a potential production facility in the country after having conducted a site survey late last year. The Thai government is offering Tesla 100 percent green energy to run the facility which could produce EVs or batteries. When it comes to peak DC fast charging speeds we now have a new top dog gravity with their flagship location in New York. They just launched 24 500 kilowatt chargers at an indoor parking garage. Yes most EVs on the market cannot even accept these rates but the company has said this is to future proof their stations. There will be on-site attendance and their touting plug-in charge with no authentication for all vehicle types and no interface required. They said our technology can provide a car with 40 miles of range in one minute of charging. In the press release nothing was mentioned about the connector type and I think I know why if you dig around a bit on their website you'll see that for now they have liquid cooled CCS cables. Hopefully in the future they add NACS natively. This is their first full public deployment of their equipment with many additional sites already in development.
Gravity now has the capacity to manufacture and deploy thousands of chargers per year to sites that it operates. Just a little fun fact about the gravity these yellow Mach-E taxis in New York are actually operated by this same company gravity and their fleet includes model-wise as well. The company is claiming its system will support up to 250 kilowatts when charging Tesla vehicles using a CCS adapter. Motor Trend announced its 2024 person of the year, their selection, Sean Fane of the UAW. Look I get it, Fane won historic contracts for his people. I just hope that in a few years it's not those very contracts that are the reasons some of these businesses and these jobs are gone completely. Turns out Samuel Garcia was writing checks he could not cash yet again. No construction has begun on Gigamexico despite Garcia saying it was starting today. Tesla Management's response? Not yet.
Hunter on X said Burlington Washington will soon have their third Tesla V4 supercharging site, encouraging to see that these are still going up in the United States, albeit at a slow pace. Jay Leno put out a new video on the Model 3 Plus with Lars and Franz, just a few things that you may not have heard before. This is now Tesla's most aerodynamic car at a .219 drag-co-efficient. Franz mentioned Tesla has aerodesigners from the Formula One world that are basically on the same team as the design engineers helping to balance downforce and efficiency. This vehicle has better side-crash performance and it might be the only sedan to score the IIHS top safety score in that specific test. There's also a new airbag in between the driver and the front passenger to help prevent heads colliding from a side impact collision. This actually goes beyond what safety regulators have recommended. Tesla moved one of the subwoofers out of the corner of the trunk in the prior version to make the trunk bigger and they put the sub in a different place where it's more efficient. One slightly unfortunate takeaway if you were expecting it, Jay had said it would be great for Tesla to put three motors in the Model 3 but Lars said it would be very hard to fit three motors. So no, I'm personally not expecting a tri-motor Model 3 performance. But who knows, maybe they were just trying to keep that under wraps.
So we use a new kind of shock-absorbing technology called FSD, not full self-driving but frequency selective damping. And what that does is it's a passive system not like adaptive damping like in your Model S. But it really focuses on isolating different frequency ranges. So when you're on bumpy roads, we let the dampers open up and we make sure we get nice and you know free-flowing wheels so you get a comfortable ride. But when you put that steering response in, we can actually separate that input and frequency and make sure you get damping force to get a nice quick response.
And Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure AI, said something very astute I think all Tesla investors should know. Most of you may already know this but it's good to share this with those friends and family that definitely don't know. He said for a long time he was worried about keeping things secret so that nobody else would copy him. But now he said what matters is my team's ability to execute at the fastest possible rate and continue innovating over time. He then gives a list of reasons on why sharing publicly is beneficial but his conclusion, the rate of technological progress is the only true competitive advantage. This right here is one of Tesla's superpowers that most normal folks are not aware of.
On the solar front we have this problem in the United States when it comes to cost but there's a reason for why. Right now rooftop solar is three to four times more expensive in the United States than almost everywhere else in the world at around four dollars per watt. Rohan Patel said one simple solution every single authority having jurisdiction should adopt the solar app which is an organization establishing the national standard for instant solar plus permitting. The Tesla energy team has worked closely to develop the solution with many governments and industry partners. This expediting of permitting can be in any city or county in America that wants to adopt it. Baglino chimed in saying yes streamlined and standardized permitting for residential solar and storage will be massively enabling for the US solar market.
It does seem weird that something can be a non-profit open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit closed source. I mean this would be like let's say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest and instead they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest and sold it for money and you'd be therefore like oh wait a second that's the exact opposite of what I gave the money for. Is that legal? That doesn't seem legal and if it is and in general if it is legal to start a company as a non-profit and then take the IP and transfer it to a for-profit that then makes tons of money shouldn't everyone start shouldn't that be the default? An analogy too good not to share.
Some out there are attributing Teslas very red day to China sales which is laughable if true. Tesla's wholesale number for February came in at 60,365. Naturally everybody's comparing that to February of last year when that number was 74.4,000. The problem last year the Chinese New Year fell in January this year it fell in February. Meaning that's comparing three weeks for this February to four weeks last February. Given the breakdown of 36.5,000 domestic sales and 23.8,000 exports if you do the math given the weekly China data that we get that would tell us that the reading for tonight or tomorrow could be somewhere over 15,000 for the week. Obviously it's not just Tesla with this negative year over year comp. BYD's February sales were down 37% year over year for the similar reason.
The Hyundai Ionic 5 for the global market has gotten a bunch of updates and upgrades one of which is a bigger battery pack. It's going from 77.4 kilowatt hours up to 84 but they've yet to share the new range. This new variant is launching later this month in South Korea and then will expand globally from there. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenloth had some interesting comments. There's an incredible threat in danger if you don't embrace future innovation and believe in that technology. The electric drive trains the innovation in battery, the innovation in modern electronics and software. If you don't participate in that and think you can wait and customers are ready for it, it's an incredible trap. It's an incredible opportunity for Polestar that in that sector of premium performance cars there is indeed not that much competition coming. To tell you the truth, I think it's about being open for innovation in the future technology. I see far too many people hesitating with that and being scared of change. That is just not a good recipe for the future. If you've been around the channel, you will have heard me say something along these lines numerous times usually when talking about Toyota. On Friday California regulators did authorize Waymo's expansion to Los Angeles and more parts of San Francisco. Here are the updated active areas for Waymo.
Nissan has dropped the price of its entry level aria by $3,600 and other trim levels by up to $6,000. And again today, BYD launched a new version of its best selling car at a price lower than the final price of its discontinued predecessor. BYD launched a new version of the ADO3 that's almost 12% lower than the final sales price of the version it replaced. Despite Tesla insurance having not rolled out to any new states now in over a year, Coverger is reporting that Tesla insurance ended last year with $497 million in written premiums up 115% year over year. Given the few states where Tesla is doing this in partnership with State National, with these latest figures, Tesla Insurance Services has become State National's largest producer. The question remains what in the world is going on with the rollout.
Tesla North America posted wraps for the Model 3 Y and Cybertruck are now available at their Austin South Collision location. This would be the first expansion outside of California. Tesla stock closed the day at $188.14 down 7.16% while the Nasdaq was down 0.41%. Rivian and Lucid were both also down over 3% and Polestar was down 9%. It was the highest volume day for Tesla that we've seen in the last few weeks trading 27 million shares above the average 30 day volume.
Hope you guys have a wonderful day. Please like the video if you did. You can find me on X linked below and a huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters.