Tesla Space #33: ⚡ Shorts getting obliterated — Spy shots on refreshed Y and robotaxi — Update 2024.26

X OF THE WEEK ties into our story today

This one ties into the story we made last week that went quite wide on the Internets — our deep dive on why Elon might hire Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, to run the Tesla Robotaxi network.

We managed to stir up over a few hundred thousand views for this on X, and then also created a video for you on this very research that has gotten over 170k views so far on Youtube:

PS — we also posted the video in our X channel a little later here, with 57k views by now. Do follow us on X @TheTeslaSpace, we’re planning to upload more videos there - and memes!

Anyway, as we kind of hoped, Elon decided to reply around those rumors at first with no confirmation:

and then more directly saying it is False that Elon has hired Travis to advise/run the Robotaxi division:

If you haven’t thrown out your tinfoil hat completely yet, then although we seem to have gotten a straight-up confirmation we’re wrong, there’s still some chance left that something is still coming:

• This tweet uses the words hired which leaves him wiggle room to say he hadn’t hired the guy yet later on;

• There might be another role Travis plays in this, be it a board seat, some other position, or

• Perhaps there’s a version of collaboration with Travis’ CloudKitchens ghost kitchen company which could be a possible integration for food deliveries and competition for Uber Eats;

Elon denying a rumor isn’t always a sure thing, as we saw with Model 3 Highland which he claimed didn’t exist, yet we later found it actually imprinted on some M3 parts…

TESLA, GLOBALLY

Q2 results are in:

Tesla sold
443,956 EVs globally in the second quarter (-4.76% YoY), and
830,766 vehicles in the first half of the year (-6.55%).

Tesla produced 410,831 in the Q2, and 844,202 total in the first half of the year.

Here’s a wild number for you: Tesla has now delivered a total of 6,227,920 electric vehicles since Model S production started in 2012.

The spotlight on this quarter, however, is on the massive jump in Tesla Energy deployments: 9.4 GWh deployed, which is up +157% Year-over-Year, and +132% from Q1.

In 2024, Tesla has deployed 14.72 GWh, which is nearly as much as Tesla deployed for the whole of 2023. Most of the deployments go to large peaker plants for grid stabilizations.

Here are the quarterly deployments since 2019:

It is likely that the Lathrop Megapack factory is now nearing full 40GWh/year operational capacity. Shanghai’s 40 GWh factory is under construction now, and should start production in early 2025.

Tesla has also dropped the Megapack prices have dropped quite a lot since April, from about $482/kWh to $266/kWh, according to the pricing on website.

Q2 earnings call will take place on 23^rd of July at 4:30 pm CT.

$TSLA stock: look at it run 📈 

In a great turn of events, Elon replied this to a post from Wholemarsblog saying “Suck my balls” to the “$TSLA bears”, and Fortune magazine actually published it.

Here’s what we’ve got within one month from today:

After Tesla released its Q2 delivery report, the short sellers lost over $3.5B in just two days of trading. Meanwhile, short positions in $TSLA have reportedly just climbed to their highest since 2021 at 3.84% of the float (~$31 billion worth of shares shorted).

Don’t they know how much the high short interest motivates Elon? It’ll drive him to execute like crazy.

The company is now back at around $792.6B market cap, last time it achieved it was in mid-December 2023, and the first time it ever climbed there was in the beginning of 2021.

In case you ever wondered, Musk confirms Tesla is the only publicly traded stock he owns.

🇰🇷 Tesla Model Y & 3 have become the two best-selling EVs in Korea in the first half of the year. It is also the best-selling imported car in the country. That must be painful for Hyundai & Kia…

Meanwhile, the $TSLA stock has now retaken the spot of the #1 foreign stock held by Koreans today (from Nvidia), news to which Musk replied “Smart people”.

🇩🇪 Tesla gets preliminary approval for expansion of Grünheide (Giga Berlin) plant!

🇨🇳 Tesla Model Y is included in China's local government (Jiangsu province) purchasing catalog for the first time. This is interesting as govs banned Teslas in their fleets over security concerns before. If now allowed, we will probably see a lot more of that.

🇺🇸 Here’s the latest update on the case on Delaware court that Tesla shareholders (led by Amy Steffens) help fight against the ridiculously high attorney fees — over $7.2 billion — Tesla would need to pay in the Tornetta case (the one that challenged Musk’s compensation package).

🇺🇸 🇨🇦 Tesla now offers all new US & Canada S3XY buyers 3 months of free Supercharging, if taking delivery before Aug 15th. Couple that with the extended FSD transfer we talk about below and the incentive package is shaping nicely.

THE VEHICLES

Here’s how a Tesla Semi fitted with LIDAR suite looks like (from this video).

Context: Tesla does this with their ‘fleet validation vehicles’ often also with other models: they validate the info gathered by vision in Teslas.

A likely Model Y refresh spotted testing. It was about 6 months before the Model 3 refresh launched that we started seeing these, so early 2025 launch seems to be realistic.

By the way, Musk said in a closed subscriber-only chat on X that I had privilege to have seen: “There is no new Model Y this year. Please stop hinting that there is, as it damages our sales of the current version.”

And more on the ‘spy shots’: Someone witnessed Tesla “Engineering Vehicles” without mirrors driving in Bay Area, with test cameras on the rear. We’ve seen other vehicles with new camera spots on rear windows, so I find it it’s likely these are test mules for robotaxi applications.

Tesla manufacturing prowess: Tesla’s input cost per vehicle averages at <$30k (across all models), a Bank of America analysis says, which is ~$17k cheaper than none-Tesla EV component costs and ~$10k cheaper than the industry average.

For 4^th of July, Tesla parked its cars as the US flag at the Giga Texas.

Oh, and when Zuckerberg shared the next version of his 4th of July stunt surfing in a suit holding the US flag, Musk just commented “May he continue to have fun on his yachts. I prefer to work.”

Tesla is showing its appreciation for the US military with a special Tesla Military Purchase Program, granting a $1,000 discount on new Model S, 3, X, or Y vehicles.

🇬🇧 Tesla Model Y is now available in Midnight Cherry Red in the UK.

CYBERTRUCK

🇺🇸 Cybertruck seems to have become the best-selling electric pickup truck in the US in Q2 (final numbers unconfirmed, this is assumed based on recall data which showed 7,810 Cybertrucks produced between April 17th and June 19th).

“Due to continued high demand, we expect to deliver only the Foundation Series through late 2024,” says Tesla on its Cybertruck order invites. This conflicts with what Musk said at the Shareholder Meeting about ending Foundation Series at the end of 3^rd quarter, but 🤷 

RECALL: Tesla issued a voluntary recall for 11,688 Cybertrucks manufactured from 13th of Nov to 6th of June to replace the windshield wiper motor with with a properly functioning gate driver component.

Separately, it also recalled 11,383 Cybertrucks due to the trunk bed trim sail applique could have been improperly attached, become loose, and create a road hazard.

The narrative around Cybertruck design seems to have gone “oh so ugly” to “coolest thing on the block” pretty quick after deliveries started. Here’s ESPN listing some of the sports celebrities with their Cybertruck asking who did it best. The post has 512,136 likes just 15 hours after posting.

👀 Watch tip: “Other trucks look badass, Cybertruck actually is” says Elon after sharing the clip of John from TOSY doing unspeakable things to the poor truck.

👀 Watch tip #2: Here are 29 Cybertrucks being handed off at an event at Marina Del Ray at once. Do you know any other automaker that could run a simultaneous lightshow sequence with their deliveries like that?

TECH, FSD & SOFTWARE

Kyle takes his Cybertruck to Tesla Service, and the service lets him know they’ll swap out one of the drive units for free just so they can study it. It turns out they’ve done it for other owners & other Tesla models too. Smart feedback loop.

Update 2024.26 is about to bring our S3XY:

• YouTube Music; Amazon Music

• Navigate to sub-destinations (such as a specific terminal at an airport).

• Weather forecast: tapping the temp° shows you details about the local weather forecast, high/lows of the day, chance of rain etc. This has been available in China but now makes its way to us.

• Air quality — now shows you the Air Quality Index symbol and value. Good to know when to turn on the Bioweapon Defense mode?

• A redesigned menu for programming charging or preconditioning (select a location, schedule a one-off, repeat specific times or days of the week, and also control when charging starts and stops.

• A redesigned climate control panel;

• When in Auto, the AC fan speed may now automatically lower to reduce the sound of ambient noise during a phone call.

• Zoom meetings now default to full-screen when your car is in Park. You can also log in with QR code.

• TeslaMic support (USB mic for Karaoke app that should be available in Tesla store)

• Updates Battle of Polytopia and Vampire Survivors games.

I saved this for last because it seems especially “out of the box” thinking here by Tesla: parental controls.

Tesla owners will be able to limit vehicle options for teens or other drivers, like setting maximum speed; reducing acceleration by limiting the car to ‘Chill’ drive mode; forcing safety features like AEB, FCW, Speed Limit Warning to be always turned on; receiving notifications when the vehicle is driven after a certain time (like curfew). It can only can be changed again after entering the vehicle PIN.

I bet this will be useful for Turo and similar renting as well, especially setting the top speed.

Oh, and Cybertruck gets 2024.20.7 which improves the DC charging curve.

FSD Updates

Tesla extended FSD transfers again, to all orders delivered before the 30^th of September. Sounds like it was useful in getting more orders in, they wouldn’t extend it this way otherwise.

V12.4.3 is now rolling out to non-employees. @AIDRIVR shares some of his experiences with previous builds, and says the version feels more like a human than ever. Here’s a video from Saturday where FSD reacts to a oblivious driver even though it was clearly allowed to turn first.

Elon commented on the release too:

“This release had far fewer interventions, but suffered in driving smoothness. Part of the issue was too much training on interventions and not enough on normal driving. It’s like a doctor training too much on patients in the emergency room vs training on preventative care. Our next-gen AI model after this has a lot of promise: ~5X increase in parameter count, which is very difficult to achieve without upgrading the vehicle inference computer.”

📚️ Reading tip: Here’s a great writeup from Freda Duan reviewing all the major (~20) L2 self-driving and robotaxi vehicles in US & China. (link)

Oh, and on FSD going vision-only when everyone said it was dumb:

Our comment:

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FUN FINDS AROUND THE TESLA SPACE

Tesla Giga Berlin fire brigade has electric fire trucks. They use a Rosenbauer RT 4x4 Advanced, which has two 66 kWh batteries. Tesla brought these out to an event for a neighboring fire station’s 135th anniversary.

Early celebrity Tesla owners, from Morgan Freeman to George R. R. Martin, shown on this thread with pictures.

Tesla owners show their gas savings & cost of ownership in the replies of this post on X.

👀 Watch tip: A 34-second viral video of a mom showing her kid and husband changed the lock sounds of her Tesla to farts and she doesn’t know how to turn it back.

Let’s play a game: You can join in with Cern for a Robotaxi Unveil Bingo.

This brings us to my “X account to follow” recommendation for you today: @CernBasher, especially for great longer perspective of Tesla humanoid bots. Here’s a collection of his analysis.