Louis: 0:00

Hey there. Welcome to another Tesla Motors Club podcast. My name is Lewis.

Doug: 0:04

I am Doug.

Mike: 0:05

I'm Mike.

Louis: 0:06

In today's episode, we'll talk about the Robotaxi. Finally launching? We'll also discuss the new Model S and X updates, and of course, as always, ongoing drama with Elon. All that and more we're episode number 74 starts now. Hello gentlemen.

Doug: 0:24

Hey.

Mike: 0:24

Hey,

Louis: 0:25

How is, everyone today?

Mike: 0:27

it's been a while.

Louis: 0:28

been a while. It's been a, it's been a little bit, been busy.

Doug: 0:30

this weekly podcast has become monthly and now maybe quarterly, so

Louis: 0:36

Well, you know, there's been a lot going on, so we have lots of things to discuss. I'm actually, kind of curious about this whole Robotaxi thing because Tesla's been talking about it forever. Elon's been talking about it for ages. It's so central to Tesla's success as a business. It's the future. Uber tried to do it, and gave up like so many other companies failed at it. But we're finally here. We're claiming we're doing it in Austin where I live, so what happens?

Doug: 1:06

So we should say, Elon said that, it would launch on the 12th. Now, as of this recording, the 12th has passed and it hasn't happened yet, and a couple days before the 12th. He said, , we're pushing it to the 22nd. He said, he put out a tweet saying that they just wanna be extra careful. Okay. Good idea. He also mentioned that on the 28th a car would drive from the factory to be delivered at someone's home., that's great though. What does that even mean?, that could be this particular person's home that we mapped it ahead of time , and we made sure it actually worked first. And can't give a whole lot of, faith that's a very meaningful thing that he's talking about to happen on the 28th as an aside. But, , yeah, to launch the thing, I did say, you know, as my prediction, and I've said before, that's something that they should do, do a little geofence thing in probably Austin. And that's what they seem to be doing but the question is on what level? There was video that came out , maybe the first week of June where we saw a car with a logo on the side that says "Robotaxi". Like they asked a deranged person with a magic marker to write Robotaxi, and that's their logo. So you'll be able to identify these., and there was a car driving. No one in the driver's seat. Okay. Very impressive. Except it had a chase car. There's another car behind it, probably with the dude with the laptop, making sure nothing terrible happens.

Louis: 2:27

It is interesting because, there's been a lot of, , shade thrown about how when you look at companies like Waymo or Cruise that were, doing self-driving cars with customers actually running in cities. We have Waymo here in Austin, for example,, on the Tesla side, they always throw shade about, oh yeah, but it's geofenced and oh, they have remote operators and

Mike: 2:46

that's exactly what they're doing.

Louis: 2:48

Exactly., and then you look at what Tesla's now doing and it's oh, they're doing the same thing. Which to be fair, I'm not criticizing them I think it's a good idea when you first start out and doing it. You should have extra safety precautions.

Doug: 3:00

It's a reasonable step.

Louis: 3:01

it's, a reasonable step.

Mike: 3:02

it's not just that. It's also the custom FSD code and the custom cameras they're using. This is not a factory Y.

Doug: 3:08

Well, is it, I think the whole point is it's supposed to be a factory Y. The only thing that might be different is they might have some different software. I mean, it must actually,

Mike: 3:17

they've already said, straight up different software.

Doug: 3:19

that Elon has said that it's an update that will be distributed to every

Mike: 3:24

Oh, right, right.

Doug: 3:25

Now again, these are Hardware 4 cars and what subset of that is probably hardware 4 Ys even. Because it's only the Ys that have that front camera. Though, it's unclear to what level that nose or chin or front fascia, however you want to describe the location of the camera, how that's being integrated. But we'll see. I guess,

Mike: 3:44

We will see, You got Elon time. When you say it'll be integrated, that could be tomorrow, that could be six months or two years.

Doug: 3:51

Well, the funny thing about Elon time is, it's not like it's Elon doing the code, right?

Louis: 3:56

Mm-hmm.

Mike: 3:57

That's

Doug: 3:57

it's really the people that actually have to do the work. And I feel like the real thing about Elon Time is , he wants to instill a sense of urgency into everybody that works for him. So by saying it will happen, a particular time that's lighting a fire under the people that actually have to do it. And that's , his management style.

Louis: 4:15

it, is interesting to me 'cause when he said the 12th and then right before the 12th, he said, oh no, the 22nd, it very much gave me, vibes of having worked in industry for a long time, there's some teams, certain engineers even, so even the people doing the work where it's always an every two weeks thing is a running joke, right? They do agile, scrum on sprints, two week intervals of doing work and delivering, and they have this fun thing of, oh yeah, we didn't get it done this time. We'll get it done in the next two

Mike: 4:40

yeah, in the next two weeks. In the next two weeks

Louis: 4:42

and you go six months before you get something. And so. Elon is notorious on overly optimistic scheduling. but somehow I wonder like, to say 10 days is pretty arbitrary. Like somebody probably told him , if we have that we can do it. you would hope., I'm debating if I'm going to actually go and try one of these

Doug: 5:03

Oh, you have to.

Louis: 5:04

sure. I should,

Mike: 5:05

you're reporter on the spot. You have to try it.

Louis: 5:07

I mean Austin geographically is spread out. A lot of the cities in Texas are actually spread out 'cause land is cheap and so there's a lot of highways. Waymo, for example, will not drive on a highway. So like I can use a Waymo if I'm downtown. Because it'll just do all the local streets and stuff, but I can't get a Waymo to come to my house because there's two highways between me and downtown that it would technically have to get on.

Mike: 5:30

Is that 'cause it hasn't mapped out the highway or they've just chosen not to do

Louis: 5:33

I think it's for safety, like I think they just don't use highways. I mean, I could be wrong. I haven't actually used a Waymo here in

Mike: 5:39

Maybe it's the Texas drivers that they're afraid of.

Louis: 5:43

it's not just in Texas. Waymo's operate that way in California.

Doug: 5:47

yeah, so they have, Waymo, for example, is running right now in Mountain View. Now it's kind of funny because the way it works in Mountain View is, or at least the last time I checked, they didn't have, whatever authorization to actually charge money. So the Waymo's running in, in Mountain View, they're free rides, but it's employees or people that can get on a special trial list that get to actually ride in them, but you see them., but yeah, they can't charge money, but they won't go on the highways. They'll just stay on, the sort of surface streets, which is, how Waymo started. I don't think it was called Waymo back then, it was just Google., and they had what Steve Jurvetson called a little Hello Kitty car, this little car. And it was really a different approach. It was like the other end of Tesla where Tesla starts on the highway. The reason is that is a much more predictable environment.

Louis: 6:32

right.

Mike: 6:33

environment's not predictable.

Doug: 6:35

it's not predictable, but the speeds are much lower.

Louis: 6:38

Yeah. If you have a crash at 20 miles an hour, that's a lot less dangerous than at

Mike: 6:42

I, think you've got the time to figure things out before you crash at 20 miles an hour versus 80 miles an hour.

Doug: 6:48

that could be part of it., but also, , if you saw how that car was designed, it was designed to be very pedestrian safety oriented. And I think those cars at most would go like 30 miles an hour, even if the road might be faster. they're Basically neighborhood, electric vehicle type, very limited. Yeah. It was that kind of design. In fact, they didn't have a steering wheel. It had a little, , joystick.

Mike: 7:10

fun.

Doug: 7:11

That's how those, cars got around. the cost of failure is lower, at lower speeds.

Louis: 7:17

So you mentioned, , being able to book it, I don't know that the Waymo app works here necessarily. I think , I can book it through Uber, so I think I can use like the Uber app. I. In the preferences, I can say , I prefer a Waymo or something. And That's there's a way to book it that way. that's what they advertise to me. Again, I've never actually done it yet.'cause I don't usually go downtown very much. And when I do, I bring my own Tesla, like I'm driving down there. So, but yeah, so I'll try to check it out at some point, but it'll be interesting to see the Robotaxis when they're going around. I'll probably see them before I use them, but it'll be cool. I'll definitely plan the report. Hopefully they come out safely. I don't wanna see anybody get hurt. I hope they're taking this very seriously. Tesla engineers that I know and have met, , in Austin, , they do tend to take this seriously. They understand how important it is and how, dangerous it can be. So,

Doug: 8:05

dude, the whole company is riding on this, right? Tesla can't make normal sales you know, at least, they're having issues with that. And, their stock price is based on this.

Louis: 8:14

Except he already started moving the goalpost.. 'cause Optimus. So they already started going Well, yeah. whole company doesn't ride on this because Optimus is around the corner, right?

Doug: 8:23

Optimus is, what'd he say? A $23 trillion, thing. And, and the head of Optimus just left.

Louis: 8:28

Correct.

Doug: 8:29

Back to the Robotaxi thing, you know, we talked about Waymo. Waymo in LA with some of the protests going on,

Mike: 8:36

I burned him into the ground

Doug: 8:37

Yeah. have to sort of wonder now, part of the reason maybe those Waymo's were burned is, their cameras that law enforcement are able to get access to. So it's like, you know, I'm

Mike: 8:48

Yeah,

Doug: 8:49

these people, but people will see it. Oh, it's a roving narc,

Mike: 8:51

that Waymo spying on you. You need to burn it.

Doug: 8:55

When we had our last episode,, there were these Tesla protests going on. Mainly because of Elon's activities. Elon has since stepped back a bit, but I don't know that he's, been given a lot of credit for that. When you have this thing launch in Austin, you gotta think that while these cars on some level are a bit of a target. There has been some vandalism that we talked about last time. And I wanna mention that, I had my car parked in New York City, back in April, , upper East side, which is pretty nice neighborhood for the most part. and I found a spot managed to park my car for a few days while I was staying with some friends. And I went to go check on my car and I was like, oh, I got a ticket, but it wasn't a ticket, it was a folded up piece of paper. And I unfolded that piece of paper. And there was a printed out message that said, "Burn a Tesla, Save Democracy."

Mike: 9:48

Oh.

Doug: 9:49

Now, I'm not quite sure how you save democracy by burning Teslas. I don't think they quite correlate. But I just remember getting, I was like, wow that's a kind of a threatening thing to say. But fortunately it was just a note and , nothing was marked on my car. It wasn't even like drawn in dirt or anything. It wasn't keyed, , just a note to, make Tesla owners think, I guess. so I was happy nothing worse happened yeah, you can leave a note in my car, fine. I'm happy with that., but, that's my personal car. And people with any sense gonna be like, okay, destroying someone's personal car

Louis: 10:19

It hurts them more than the company.

Doug: 10:21

It hurts me, doesn't hurt the company. And especially since I have a, at this point, an older three now, we have these cars that are marked specifically as Robotaxi and no one's in them. And so, you know, the only owner of it is Tesla. maybe they're a little bit more of a target at that point,

Louis: 10:35

Fair.

Doug: 10:37

hopefully nothing like that happens. I want it to be successful. But Tesla has chosen this route of cameras only. I think it's a little bit risky in that they don't have a fallback. We know that cameras aren't perfect. And recently, , an article came out in, I think it was Bloomberg,

Louis: 10:54

it was on June 4th. And yeah, it's about a fatal accident from November, 2023 in Arizona.

Doug: 11:00

Now, as far as I know, this is the only pedestrian fatality that we know about. There have been , maybe dozens, something on that order of fatalities from people using Autopilot or FSD where their car has crashed and the driver has died. And perhaps in passengers too. But, , this is the first pedestrian fatality. And primarily it's because the camera was blinded by the sun,

Mike: 11:24

And you can see it in the video clip as they came around the curve. You know the sun just head on.

Doug: 11:29

So that's concerning, right? And this rollout is gonna be in Austin metro area. I don't know how much of an issue the low sun is. In urban areas that tends to be, you don't really get the low sun as much because you got buildings around you that would block it.

Louis: 11:46

you'll get it a little bit, especially on the, roads going east to west, right. And, by the river and stuff.

Mike: 11:51

Here on the West Coast,, it's actually a big deal. I had this happen in Utah on my last road trip. You could not see in front of the car because the sun being literally in your eyes. And FSD refused to function for the better part of 45 minutes. You tried to engage it and it'd worked for 30 seconds and just, I can't see. I'm, I'm done.

Doug: 12:12

So now what, car was that, Mike, and what software?

Mike: 12:15

Yeah. This was my new Y, with the latest software. Well, the latest three months ago,

Doug: 12:19

and it still was getting, blinded by the sun.

Mike: 12:22

absolutely. it struggles with Bright sun

Louis: 12:25

Yeah, and so this accident was a model Y in 2023, November. assuming, I don't know definitively, but at that time, FSD 11 was out.. , so it had somewhat of a newer model, you know, certainly on the

Mike: 12:38

yeah. I'm not sure what hardware level this Y would've been on a 2023. It could have been either or.

Doug: 12:45

It wouldn't matter, right? Because FSD 11, that was written for hardware three, right? Even if you had a hardware four car. So the hardware four car, I don't think would act much better.

Mike: 12:54

hardware 4 has better cameras.

Doug: 12:56

Oh, yeah. Newer cameras., so that's something to discuss. In the last earnings call in the Q1 earnings call, which happened in April an analyst, asked a question specifically about this.

Louis: 13:06

I think it was, Colin Langan

Mike: 13:08

Yep.

Louis: 13:08

from Wells Fargo,

Doug: 13:10

Okay., how about we listen to that?

Colin Langan: 13:12

Sticking with the vision only approach. Uh. Lot of the autonomous people still have a lot of concerns about, you know, sun glare, fog and dust, a any color on how you anticipate on, on getting around those issues?'cause uh, my understanding it kind of blinds the camera when you get glare and stuff.

Elon: 13:30

Uh, actually it does not blind the camera. Um, the, we use a, an approach which is, uh, direct photon count. So when you see the, the a processed image. So the image that goes from the, uh, with sort of photon counter, the silicon, the silicon photon counter, that, that then gets, goes through a digital sig signal processor or image signal processor. Um, that, that's, that's normally what happens. And then that the, then the image that you see looks all washed out because if it's you point the camera at the sun, it it, the post-processing of the photon counting. Um, washes things out. It, it, it actually adds noise. Um, so quite a big breakthrough that we made some time ago was to go with direct photon counting and, and bypass the, uh, image signal processor. Um, and, uh, that, and then you can drive pretty much straight at the sun. Um, and you can also see in what appears to be the blackest of night. And, uh, and then here in fog we can see as well as, uh, like people can, um, probably better, but I'd say probably slightly better than people, um, but than the average person anyway. Um, and, um, yeah,

Colin Langan: 14:56

so so the camera is able to see when there's direct glare on it.

Elon: 15:01

Yeah.

Colin Langan: 15:01

I'm surprised by that.

Elon: 15:03

Yeah,

Colin Langan: 15:04

Okay.

Mike: 15:05

Yeah, I call BS on that.

Doug: 15:08

the explanation he gave it's basically true, ? It makes sense that when , you have a camera, like your own camera, video camera, and there's something very bright in the frame. Typically there's some processing that will renormalize image to balance out to the brightest thing that's there, and then everything else seems washed out 'cause you don't have enough dynamic range to see what you wanna see. And it makes sense that instead of having that processing, you look at the level of signal from each individual pixel. and then, train on that, that makes perfect sense. I take issue with him calling it direct photon counting. Okay. that's something that we can actually do. I've done that in the lab with like a photo multiplier tube type, technology. and , since those analog days and since the days of CCDs, now we have CMOS and there are equivalent things with CMOS detectors to detect single photons.

Louis: 16:00

SPAD and QIS. Yeah.

Doug: 16:02

that's what I call, counting photons. It just bugs me that he is gonna call this direct photon counting. It's, measuring an intensity, which of course is correlated to the number of photons, but you're not actually counting the photons. Come on.

Louis: 16:13

Do you know what does use photon counting sensors? Lidar.

Doug: 16:18

Yeah. Yeah,

Louis: 16:19

Lidar actually uses SPAD

Mike: 16:21

Uh,

Louis: 16:22

does photon counting, which

Doug: 16:25

Exactly. of course, lidar is filtered down to the specific, wavelength of the laser that

Louis: 16:30

right.

Doug: 16:30

And it's also, got a very narrow window several things going on here. you have this fatality that happened because the camera was literally was, I don't care what he says, He could say that we have some mitigation, but to act like this doesn't happen is ridiculous. it does happen.. Now, you could ask a question, Unlikely it's possible if it was at just the right angle. But again, it's filtered down to the specific wavelength that you need., and maybe you lose gap of a few points, But it's not blinded, as a, pixel array could be. so I don't know why he said it that way. It seemed preemptive. Now that, earnings call was back in April. This accident happened in 2023, but we're only hearing about it in June of 2025.

Louis: 17:18

it's interesting because there are ways to mitigate this problem. All of them require additional costs in, parts and manufacturing sensors. Lidar would probably not have had this exact problem. You could also solve this problem with additional cameras, radar technologies, and other types of things that could all, play a factor. But as we've seen. Tesla, one of their, primary engineering objectives is to reduce costs. Simplify the amount of assembly components and all the other things, right? They want to get it cheap. So, the argument of Hey, I'm doing photon counting. No, you're not those sensors exist. They're more expensive. and we're not using them. Yes, it's good. You're not using the image processing on , the cameras that you have. You bypass that. That's good. I'm glad that Tesla's doing that. That's not the same thing.. So the question is how much is this especially when you start going to robotaxis or other types of things. Is this gonna be an ongoing occurrence? This is gonna be a common problem. now what I'm curious of is back in 2023, there was all the drama, even in 2022 of removing radar. but they have put radar back into some of their cars. And I guess what I'm curious of is with the Robotaxi, does that have radar? Are they leveraging radar that would've helped mitigate this or not? There's now a front camera right on the front of the car so maybe this is less of a problem. or maybe they're helping mitigate it through some of those means, but yeah, I don't know.

Doug: 18:42

And again, I, I just don't get, , Elon has passed the word down as if , this is, , papal infallibility or something that we don't need lidar or that , we'll never use lidar. not that long ago, I was at a mini reunion with some people , in a research group. I was associated with a lot of people in optics, and one guy, , worked at a company that , makes lidar and makes the kind of lidar I've been talking about with , some kind of little linear array that would have,

Mike: 19:07

Like a sweep.

Doug: 19:08

yeah. Of like, 170 degrees or something. and , I asked them about these sensors, how much are they? And they said, , at volume, they're like 150 bucks each., gee, you know, a car should, why not? And especially if it's gonna be a robo taxii where, the cost of those individual things should be, amortized over all those trips that you're taking.

Mike: 19:30

Yep. All those lawsuits you won't have,

Louis: 19:34

But again, that's hundreds of millions of dollars when you look at, scale,

Doug: 19:38

especially when he is saying it's gonna be in everybody's consumer vehicle. Not just, the official Robotaxis or the company owned Robotaxis.

Mike: 19:44

Yeah. Lewis, you know, you make a point, but your sensors still have to work. If they're not working, then you're gonna lose a lot more money, lawsuits, liability, blah, blah, blah.

Louis: 19:55

or not having a product to sell. Yeah, exactly.

Mike: 19:57

Well, but apparent they're still trying to sell it.

Louis: 19:59

yeah, so I agree with you, and I think that similar to what Waymo did, , I would hope that Tesla would go, Hey, you know what, robo Taxii, it's a little bit more bleeding edge.\We're not quite as refined. We're still developing things. Maybe you put some extra sensors in there. Maybe you put some extra hardware in there to improve the quality, improve the reliability, and make it safer. and then as you improve the

Mike: 20:25

but that sounds like what they're doing.

Louis: 20:27

you can do it without,

Mike: 20:28

I mean, they're renting a non-standard load for FSD, supposedly something we'll get. In the future.

Louis: 20:34

and that's software, though that doesn't count.

Mike: 20:36

I think at some level understand what you just said. Yeah. What we have right now isn't working well enough to be a taxi. Now, whether it trickles down into the commercial world or not, remains to be seen.

Louis: 20:47

Yeah, Anyway, it'll be interesting. I wish that we wouldn't find out about, accidents like this years later. That's seems crazy to me. I would hope you would find out about it sooner. but, , yeah. we'll have to see how it goes,

Doug: 20:59

certainly there'll be a ton of scrutiny, so if anything happens in Austin with this, uh, Anything that happens on public streets, I

Louis: 21:06

Yeah, we will. We will know about it. it'll be posted to Reddit or Twitter in, within minutes. but yeah, so anyway, it'll be interesting to see I wish that Elon wouldn't say things in, answering questions that try to sound smart. and was a little bit more accurate in some of what he says, but whatever,

Doug: 21:23

He said, it's not a problem. He said, it doesn't get blinded by the sun. And it's like, , the Bill Clinton," definition of what 'is' is,"

Mike: 21:31

What "is" is, yeah.

Doug: 21:33

Does that mean right now from when he said it onto the future or some amount in the past? He said for a while now we've done this with the cameras. How long is a while? Does that mean hardware 4 cars? I mean, Mike, you have a hardware 4 car and that's definitely been blinded by, the Sun

Mike: 21:49

I do have a hardware 4 and it still struggles with bright light. Yeah.

Louis: 21:52

when you say struggles, what do you mean?

Mike: 21:54

so it's not just head on that has an issue. The pillar cameras get blinded. If the sun is at a very oblique angle in the evening, and you turn where the pillar catches that light almost on a, horizontal plane. The, you'll get a, warning on the screen or it'll disengage you completely.

Louis: 22:13

Okay. So you don't just mean like the camera image on your screen is washed out. You mean like, FSD shuts off. Okay. Okay.

Doug: 22:21

wheel.

Mike: 22:21

It bails

Louis: 22:22

somewhat contradicts what Elon claims.

Mike: 22:27

In Utah. I'd been on FSD for probably three or four hours and the sun hit that magic height. And FSD says, ah, I can't see where I'm going. Disengage completely. You know, all the red alarms take control right now. And you'd go to reengage and it'd work for 30 seconds a minute, and then it'd fail again. depending on the angle of the highway or what corner you were in. but it also struggled at night. again, in Utah it gets really dark in the middle of the desert when you're on the highway.'cause there's no lights, no moon. And I was getting messages saying your camera's occluded. No, there's just no light. nothing wrong with my camera. But FSD wouldn't drive, it wouldn't work because it, thought there was something blocking the camera.

Louis: 23:11

Gotcha. Well, resolve this issue.

Mike: 23:15

Yeah, well, we'll see.

Louis: 23:17

We'll be interesting to see. Well, we'll certainly give everyone updates , once it releases which is very likely to do before our next podcast, even if it gets delayed again. No, I'm just just kidding.

Mike: 23:28

yeah. Well, everybody's watching, that's for sure.

Louis: 23:31

So tesla recently surprised everybody. They did a bit of an update again on the Model S And X.

Mike: 23:37

They did. And they kind of snuck it in there.

Louis: 23:39

Some of that made me jealous as a Model S owner. Mike, can you give us a bit of a breakdown on what's new in the newer Model S and X?

Mike: 23:47

So , they've got two new colors one's called Frosted Blue Metallic, and the other's called Diamond Black. you know, paint's paint. what's interesting though is they've increased the range but not for the Model S long range that stayed the same 410 miles. If you've got an old S Plaid, your max range was 348, the new one will be 368. If you've got a Model X long range, you go from 329 to 352. If you've got the Model X Plaid, you go from 314 to 335. What I can't find anywhere is if they change the battery packs or if this is just efficiency changes. The rumor is it's efficiency changes. it sounds like the same packs are in use.

Doug: 24:33

Even though the vehicles are a little heavier.

Mike: 24:35

Yeah. That's what's being reported anywhere from 20 to 80 pounds. it's not a lot, but it is a little bit,

Louis: 24:41

Interesting.

Mike: 24:42

they've changed the bumpers slightly on both cars, improved the looks a little bit. They've added a front camera. They've taken a page from the Cybertruck and the, new Y the 2025 Y Juniper and gave it the front bumper camera.

Louis: 24:56

Finally.

Mike: 24:57

not sure exactly what it's gonna do, but at least it's there. So that's a step in the right direction. Now that leaves the new Highland Model 3 as the only one in the lineup without a camera in the front bumper. they've added a new wheel option, which I like the new wheels. They're kind of aggressive looking done in kind of a matte black bent spoke look. you will pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 for this particular option for a set of wheels, so they're not cheap. and the new wheels do have a cost. you'll give up some top end speed and you'll give up a little bit of range with 'em., if you're tracking the car, it probably doesn't matter, but if you're hoping to get groceries, you might want to pay attention. There is some new ambient lighting for those that like the pretty lights in the inside of your car. You'll be able to, , have multicolor, you can change the intensity. It's kind a wraparound look. Along with the center console, they've also given you mood lighting for your foot well, And you have an entry animation , so when you open the doors get a little light show in the cockpit now something that I'd really like to hear , is they have supposedly improved the noise isolation. So they've got both wind and road noise reduction and Tesla says that they've improved their active noise cancellation., I would like to test that myself. The X supposedly has improved suspension. So a smoother ride. they've probably taken some lessons from the new Y, which rides really good. And the yolk. The yolk is now a thousand dollars option. The round wheel's the default. So if you want a yolk, you're gonna have to cough up a few bucks for it. what didn't change was the MCU and the FSD hardware, hardware.

Louis: 26:39

Except for the new camera. It's hardware 4,

Mike: 26:41

Still hardware four.

Louis: 26:43

yeah.

Mike: 26:43

and all of this goodness will only cost you $5,000 more for the car.

Doug: 26:48

yeah.

Louis: 26:49

5,000.

Mike: 26:50

the price. 5,000 across the board.

Doug: 26:52

that makes perfect sense, they need to sell the cars That they already have. By raising the price, people can make that choice. Am I gonna wait?

Mike: 26:59

look at better deal.

Doug: 27:00

Yeah. And in fact, think they're lowering the price on the existing cars, like they're giving discounts and stuff on them.

Louis: 27:04

Yeah.

Doug: 27:05

that, way they're not Osborne-ing themselves. That's fine. Because probably once that existing inventory is gone, maybe the newer versions, they might lower the price a little bit or something.

Mike: 27:15

that's kind of the model they did with the Y. When I bought my 2024 Y, it was just before Juniper came out, three or four months before it came out, they had some killer deals to move the inventory of the non-Juniper

Doug: 27:27

mm-hmm.

Mike: 27:28

And now that Juniper's here, all those deals have kind of gone away.

Doug: 27:31

so mentioning that one thing that they didn't do, which is a little bit of a surprise, is they didn't bring back the turn signal stalk

Mike: 27:39

did not.

Doug: 27:40

like they did for, the Y.

Mike: 27:41

Yeah. Well, they only brought back one for the Y. Not both.

Doug: 27:44

Yeah, that's why I specify the turn signal stalk. But I have to say overall, this is pretty disappointing, though, isn't it?

Mike: 27:50

it's cosmetic. Yeah.

Doug: 27:52

most of these updates are things you could have done after market, like lighting.

Mike: 27:56

all the lightings, aftermarket, suspension mods could be. aftermarket, even wheels and tires,

Doug: 28:00

Probably, even if you could route a camera through to the computer, you could do the front camera. The only thing is , like the noise stuff, like either the double pane windows.

Mike: 28:10

noise cancellation.

Doug: 28:11

that and the actual physical things they do for the noise, which I assume is some sound insulation, the double pane window sort of stuff. I guess you could say, okay, these are low volume vehicles, but what did we actually want? Like, we wanted the steer by wire stuff. We wanted the 800 volt,

Mike: 28:28

Charging system yet. Yeah.

Doug: 28:29

systems

Mike: 28:30

48 volt for the low voltage. So you reduce all the copper wire and weight and whatnot. Yeah,

Doug: 28:35

yeah, it's, kind of disappointing. Again, it's a low volume vehicle but. didn't really do much of an upgrade at all. What we want is a proper refresh. And along with that, that would mean maybe changing the nose of the thing a bit.

Mike: 28:49

If you look at the, pictures, it's a very modest change. You'd be hard pressed to notice it.

Doug: 28:54

I think they tried to make the Plaid a little sportier, Originally the Model S had this faux grill thing the Model X came out, people were calling it fish lips, it kind of looked like the MCP from Tron, like this wide stretched out face, if anyone gets that reference. Then they gave , the S the look that the X had. A lot of people were disappointed, like, what the heck is this? It doesn't look like a classic vehicle anymore. Now , changing the nose is not that hard.'cause it's not like the metal body panels like you have on the door and the

Mike: 29:24

it's a plastic bumper.

Doug: 29:25

right? So instead of having to change stamping dies , it's probably injection molded the front and the rear fascia are plastic. So without too much of an investment, you can redesign those things as they have, they've made some very minor changes here. But if they're gonna be serious about it, you want it to look actually different.

Louis: 29:41

Yeah.

Mike: 29:41

Here's a brand new car. yeah, or at least it looks like it.

Doug: 29:45

But the stuff that we really wanted not just the steer by wire , but also put an outlet in the trunk. A lot of people like the camp with their X or S and people don't necessarily want the cyber truck for everything it represents. but they might want some of those features in their S and X. They should do it.

Mike: 30:02

Yeah.

Doug: 30:03

so I dunno, I assume that they did the math in terms of what their actual sales volumes are and they only make these cars in Fremont.

Mike: 30:09

yeah, , the volume's pretty low and it's gotten lower of late.

Doug: 30:13

People in right hand drive countries like, , the UK and Australia, some people would like these cars but , because of the l volume, they stopped offering right hand drive. if they did steer by wire, maybe right hand drive would be easier and cheaper.'cause you're no longer dealing with the, steering column. Louis: that's true. Months ago, , Lars said, " we have a few things in store for the S and X," but it just feels very minor. and it's not really, I think, what most people were hoping for.

Louis: 30:41

It's not getting me to run out and trade my car in for a new one. Right. It's, it's not worth it.

Doug: 30:45

Well, it is what it is.

Louis: 30:47

Hey, it's more than we expected, as in we didn't expect anything. But it's a little underwhelming when you look at the effort they put in. So, I guess we can move on to some slightly less Tesla topics to discuss. This happened a few months ago. xAI buying X, formerly known as Twitter.

Doug: 31:05

So that came up in a previous episode, but I wanted to wait on your take on this.

Louis: 31:09

Okay.

Doug: 31:10

So what's your take?

Louis: 31:11

so what's my take? So what's my take? Why did it happen? Okay, so I'll preface this as somebody who has worked for a number of startups and also has my own startup and has talked with many investors, and I know the types of things that investors, I think this is mostly investor driven as in investors and X, basically felt like they lost a lot of money and they wanted a way to get their money back or get their money out in some reasonable timeframe. That's one aspect. And then the other was Elon trying to raise money, and to get more investment dollars., nobody was gonna give Twitter money., so Twitter is just not that interesting of a business. xAI being an AI company, for those that have been living under a rock, AI is all anybody cares about, for whatever reason, despite it being a bunch of garbage for the most part. So AI gets all of the investment dollars. Like if you were to look at every VC company and all, money funneled into tech startups and tech companies, I would say the numbers are well over 90% of all money goes into AI specific things. I could say from experience, even if you have a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars and you want to raise more money,

Mike: 32:27

better have AI.

Louis: 32:29

the only thing investors are gonna care about is what is your AI strategy? How are you using ai? What are you developing in ai? What technology they, that's all they care about. so for Elon to basically try to raise more money, , it made a lot of sense. You have xAI, which made almost no money, and Twitter, which made some money, maybe not net revenue, but had revenue. XAI is valued significantly more because the potential of what AI can do. So basically this was a way for, again, Elon to raise more money, the investors into X, including Elon, to get some money back and to mitigate some of their losses on the Twitter purchase., and a way to try to scale and grow things into the future. It also helps him consolidate talent. If you recall one of the reasons he even said xAI started is when Elon bought Twitter, he wanted to make it an AI company. He wanted to do all these technologies as a big counter to Open AI. So he tried to hire AI talent and they all basically said, well, I'm not going to X. Why would I do that? It's already a big company, it's on the decline. What's my financial incentive to go there? You can't pay me enough to go there. Whereas if they made a new company that was worth very little, but had a potential to be worth a lot, he was able to attract some solid talent. So it's also a means of getting talent. So yeah, so investor dollars, scaling the company, extracting some revenue. It was a stock swap. It didn't cost him any money, it actually freed up some capital. allows them to , hire better people, , have more flexibility. On paper it makes a lot of sense. What I wouldn't understand is why anybody in xAI would want to do it. But the thing to remember is, and I looked up the numbers, Elon owned the majority stake and had majority control. So because he had majority control, nobody could stop him. So anybody that invested in xAI was not interested in this deal. Anybody that was invested in Twitter was interested. in the deal.

Mike: 34:17

very interested. Yeah.

Louis: 34:18

and Elon is in both, and he gets to also cement and, maintain his control. So it was very much a Elon decision. He's a smart businessman for doing it. Like it makes a lot of sense for his own personal and it helps the company. It's also not the first time Elon has done this, right? We've seen him do this with his other companies

Doug: 34:37

Tesla acquired Solar City. Yeah.

Louis: 34:38

Tesla acquired Solar City is the same kind of argument. So, , yeah, I was not surprised by it. What I will say again, somebody working in tech and I work very closely with ai. Like, literally, that's what I do all day. I am very bothered by the notion that you can start a company and in like a year, it's worth Tens of billions of dollars on paper, even though you don't make any real money. That drives me crazy. Like I fundamentally hate how , the system works with AI., it is such a ridiculous bubble. It drives me crazy. But, , anyway, , that's basically what happened., we'll see if it impacts anything. He's still trying to make X the Everything app. They technically have a payments company, , they're working on all these different initiatives. xAI's product is Grok., I think they might have some other products in development, I'm not sure, but it's mostly Grok., so yeah, we'll see where it goes. But at the end of the day, it changes nothing for any of the end users. It's more, businessy people and money shuffling around

Doug: 35:38

As an aside, always find it so funny how Elon has stolen all the sci-fi terms know, Grok was from in a Strange Land, it was a Martian term that basically meant understand, but it had whole bunch of different uses. xAI. I think they're building or have built some huge data center somewhere in Memphis, Tennessee. There's some controversy because they built a natural gas power station that, powers a thing and It's in some lower income neighborhood. And, people are,

Mike: 36:09

out tons of pollutants.

Doug: 36:11

that's what I've heard.. But the name of this data center, they called it Colossus, you know, and again, it's another sci-fi, uh, reference. There's this book. But then they made a movie called Colossus: The Forbin Project, which I think sixties or seventies when that came out. Great movie actually. About, AI going rogue and, controlling all of humanity. I mean, that's spoiler alert. I suggest people check out the movie, but, another name stolen, that new drive-in movie theater, Supercharger Station

Mike: 36:41

la.

Doug: 36:41

in la It's called Milliways. Milliways is, again, it's a nerd thing, but that's from, Restaurant at the End of the Universe from the Hitchhiker's Guide series. Like, okay, come on dude.

Mike: 36:56

Find something original.

Doug: 36:58

You gotta steal 'em all.

Louis: 36:59

be fair, naming things is hard.

Doug: 37:01

Yeah.

Louis: 37:01

So when you have an inspiration of some kind of specific, nerdy thing,

Doug: 37:06

Well, but also when those names have potentially negative connotations, if you understand what they are,

Louis: 37:11

Sure.

Doug: 37:11

like Colossus is kind of scary. Is that where we're going? It makes me think of, , Peter Thiel and his, Palantir. I don't think of the Palantir as a positive thing.

Mike: 37:21

it's not

Doug: 37:21

it's the way, , Sauron, the way he looks in on people.

Louis: 37:25

Sauron saw it as a positive. So I mean, it depends on your perspective,

Doug: 37:29

So, Peter Thiel is Sauron. Yeah.

Louis: 37:30

he envisioned himself as Sauron, you

Doug: 37:32

Or Saruman. Maybe he's Saruman.

Louis: 37:34

yeah. Yeah.

Doug: 37:36

alright. enough nerd

Louis: 37:38

can't take nerds anywhere. anyway. So I guess there's some, NASA updates and some interesting SpaceX stuff going on there.

Doug: 37:45

Yeah, there's some updates in terms of the funding., everything's still up in the air, but a lot of it has to do with, Elon really.

Louis: 37:50

It's all Elon drama with the Trump administration

Doug: 37:54

There's just so much going on. like, the big surprise if we're gonna , move through chronologically was outta nowhere. literally days before the NASA Administrator confirmation vote. And he would've been confirmed totally. Jared Isaacman

Mike: 38:08

Got whacked.

Doug: 38:09

his nomination was pulled. And the reason given was, oh, he had contributed to some Democrats. That's ridiculous because clearly, the Trump administration would've already known all that. And of course, Elon has probably contributed to Democrats and Trump himself has contributed to Democrats.

Louis: 38:27

all billionaires have contributed to both sides. They literally have

Doug: 38:31

Yeah. You play both sides. And his biggest contribution was to Trump's inauguration . He like gave a million bucks or something so, there had to be other reasons, but it's a shock. I've always, , been up two minds about it. I thought he's a great pick, a kind of exciting pick in terms of someone who an outsider, yet he's been to space twice. He is very enthusiastic about both the science and the human exploration sides of NASA. but on the other side, he was definitely Elon's pick. Trump has no idea who this guy is. So definitely, it was Elon's influence. And then, the budgets that have been proposed for NASA are terrible, cutting funding for most of the science, cutting funding for missions that are already in space like, oh, we're gonna just not pay the people that would be running the missions. you know, like the Chandra X-Ray telescope or some other projects. On human space flight, , we were making predictions about, , the future of Artemis and looked like they were funding it at least through Artemis III which is supposed to be the landing part. Interestingly enough, Artemis III depends heavily on Starship as a lander. And we haven't seen much of Starship as a lander. Starship barely makes sense as a lander. As it is, the last three launches, the ship has had trouble. We haven't even gotten to the point of testing the heat shield or some other things that they want to test. And they need to get through orbital refueling and they probably need to actually land on the moon before they do it with people in it. At the same time, Blue Origin has been showing off their lander and they even have people in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab actually testing out coming down from their lander.

Louis: 40:11

Sure.

Doug: 40:12

I don't know where all that's going. anyway, I think that's enough of a, NASA update except for the trouble that followed after

Mike: 40:20

gonna take my rockets and go home.

Doug: 40:21

after, yeah, after Isaacman was..., that the nomination was pulled. There's this whole Twitter spat between Elon and Trump we don't really need to rehash that. I'm sure everyone here has seen the details and since then Elon has deleted some of those tweets.

Louis: 40:35

And tweeted. he went too far. He pulled some of the things he said.

Mike: 40:38

he pulled some, he didn't pull all of 'em.

Doug: 40:41

He said he regretted some of what he said. The question is, what did he actually regret saying?

Louis: 40:44

Which part? Yeah.

Doug: 40:47

Probably the hardest one in terms of his relationship with Trump to pull back was that he claimed that the reason the Epstein files haven't been released are because Trump is in them. well, duh,

Louis: 40:59

already knew that?, Doug: That seemed very similar to what about this diver guy that literally saved this soccer team in Thailand, because they were stuck in a cave. Part of the path was underwater. So some diver went and saved them and Elon inserted himself into this thing. Having his team design a submarine that never would've worked because it had to go around corners and here's this rigid thing that would hold one small child. Elon got upset about it because the guy basically said that would never have worked and it was a publicity stunt or something. And Elon claimed the guy, I don't know if YouTube is gonna penalize this, but claimed the guy was a pedo, called him "Pedo Guy " on Twitter before Elon owned Twitter. And this feels like the same kind of thing. It's like a knee jerk reaction . Let's just call somebody the worst thing that can be claimed about somebody. It's the kind of thing where the accusation alone screws up people's lives. Maybe not someone like Trump, but someone like this diver, you know, it could screw up their lives. yeah, Elon went, that way. But to me, the most upsetting or worrying thing is that in response to Trump saying, "Well, maybe we should pull Elon's government contracts." Elon says, "I'm decommissioning the Dragon space capsule immediately."

Mike: 42:18

now. Yeah.

Doug: 42:19

Hello? That is our only way to the Space Station right now. And that's really concerning that, someone can unilaterally decide that US access to space can just stop. Now, part of it is Boeing has basically failed with the Starliner. Sierra Space has been slow with their Dream Chaser. In fact, they haven't even gotten to test their cargo version of Dream Chaser yet. It's the success of SpaceX. SpaceX has been extremely successful, such that it's really the only ticket to space right now. And one guy can unilaterally decide that, "I'm taking my toys and going home."

Mike: 42:54

Apparently.

Louis: 42:55

Do you have any insight into why Blue Origin's not been pushing for being able to do this as well? They've not really pursued getting people to the Space Station as part of their project.

Doug: 43:06

Blue Origin has been pretty enigmatic for a while. They've been rather slow. They've been around longer than SpaceX, as a company. The current CEO Dave Limp I kind of feel like they're pushing a little more. But the only thing that people see publicly these days are the New Shepherd launches. You know, like Katy Perry, that thing that happened a little while ago. That's not really pushing us forward that much. New Glenn finally had a launch it was a success, but not as successful as they were hoping. And as soon as they did that launch, they ended up laying off a bunch of people. The next launch isn't even for a while now. So it's a huge amount of time in between doing that launch. So, Blue Origin shows a lot of reasonable plans. They haven't really been working on the capsule type thing. They're trying to be rockets and they actually sued so that they could have a proposal for a moon lander. And their lander isn't until Artemis V But it looks more realistic than what SpaceX has. I don't know what their issue is. They don't have that Elon kind of culture of , you're gonna stay and work 80 hours a week.

Louis: 44:12

Right.,

Doug: 44:12

But maybe they need a little bit of that 'cause they need to move faster. And honestly this opens a window. I think people in government should be really concerned We need to get things going. As a newer company and a company that probably has more leeway to be agile than say Boeing does, if I were in government and trying to get a competitor going, I would probably rather go behind Blue Origin than Boeing.

Mike: 44:36

But wouldn't you say part of Elon's Grand plan, and he has said this to a degree, would be to say,"I'm taking my rockets, I'm going home. I'll launch one rocket to get everybody off the space station and I want it deorbit it. ' cause now you can't do anything with it." He wants it down. He said as much so.

Doug: 44:55

is his vindictiveness.

Mike: 44:56

Yes. But he wants the money that's being spent on the Space Station for his own pet projects.

Doug: 45:02

maybe, SpaceX has the contract to deorbit, the Space Station. Probably because there's really nobody else

Mike: 45:09

could do it.

Doug: 45:10

can do it at a reasonable price. But a while back when they're talking about having to those two "stranded" astronauts, Butch and Suni.

Mike: 45:18

Yeah.

Doug: 45:18

To me that was upsetting because they just straight up lied about it. I can get Trump more than I get Elon. Trump I don't expect him to have a full understanding of the nuance of that. Okay? They took a Boeing Starliner up, but they're going back on a,

Mike: 45:32

SpaceX.

Doug: 45:32

SpaceX Dragon. But to understand that the Dragon that they're going to come down on is already there. It's not like, "Elon saed those people abandoned by the Biden administration."

Mike: 45:43

Armageddon where they have to run the dual Shuttle launch to save the world, you know?

Doug: 45:47

If they needed to come down, they could go down. The whole time they're up there, they could have come down. They could have come down on the Starliner, if they really needed to. Out of an abundance of caution, they decided to wait for the Crew 9 crew to get up there, which came up with two instead of four, and they became part of Crew 9. So they're doing stuff, they're working. It wasn't like they were stranded up there. They're part of the crew. But then, Elon presented it that way. Okay, yes, I'm gonna go up and save them.

Mike: 46:12

More drama.

Doug: 46:13

Yeah. So I was bothered by the way he presented that 'cause it was really disinformation. It was massaging the truth in a way to, I don't know, I guess politics or whatever, to try to have some win from people that aren't even in government anymore. It just didn't make any sense. But some actual NASA astronauts were like, "uh, you know, this is a lie," or whatever. And Elon's response was to , call a an astronaut and a veteran, a traitor. That's a rough thing. When you're in the military to be called a traitor. That's, not a word to be taken lightly.

Louis: 46:46

It's not a joke.

Doug: 46:47

that was, an American, but then European astronaut was like,"Yeah, this isn't true." And then Elon's response was to say, "We should just bring down the space station now. They're not doing anything useful. We should just bring it down now." And that's clearly just to irk people that actually have careers and actually go to space to do science. and, , yeah. I just found that, that's really upsetting. That's an upsetting thing to say. I mean, if anything, the space station up there it's supposed to come down to 2030. We should be getting every bit of science, everything we can,

Mike: 47:16

A real last drip we can get out of it.

Doug: 47:19

Yeah, exactly., and to be like, oh, let's just kill it. That's a jerky thing to do, and it's a jerky attitude to take. So yeah, I don't get it. I'm not a fan of that. anyway, saying that I'm just taking my toys., I'm decommissioning the dragon. It's in the same vein, it's the same kind of thing. Well, let me,, try to irk the people that actually care about this stuff. I would think that Elon should care about that stuff.

Louis: 47:40

it's the same vein of why modern democracy and like what people want for governments and for having power. Like you don't want one person to be able to just greatly screw over lots of people or different people. Like, that's the whole point of having a government structure in a certain way. We're not the right podcast for this, but that's why, billionaires and people that have that much power, it's dangerous. Right? If they have that much power over a certain thing, they can, do things that are harmful to many others. So just on a whim because they've decided. But anyway I think that covers all the topics that we planned on covering. Did I miss anything, Doug?

Doug: 48:15

I think that's enough.

Louis: 48:16

That's enough. That's enough. All right. It's been long enough. All right. there's enough editing to do now. He's got a lot to cut out. Alright. As always, , we do appreciate everyone for coming and hanging out with us and sorry for , the delays in , when we actually aired you can go to the Tesla Motors Club website, become a supporting member there. As always, like, and subscribe, all that kind of stuff. Hit us up on various social media platforms of your choice. and we look forward to seeing you next time