Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Is Tesla Still a Car Company? w/ Ed Niedermeyer | Tech Won't Save Us

Transcript

Is Tesla Still a Car Company? w/ Ed Niedermeyer | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: the whole issue of distracted driving gets to the heart of this is the equipment in your car there to make your use of the car better or is it a way to make you feel better about being stuck in your car.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, the car business has gotten to a kind of unhealthy place around and then sort of US culture more broadly around sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome to Tech on Save Us Made in Partnership with the Nation magazine.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host Parris Marks, and this with my guest is Ed Niederminer.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ed is the author of Ludicrous, the Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and a co-host of the Atonocast.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you are a regular listener to the show, you will be quite familiar with Ed because he's been on a number of times to talk about Tesla, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and so many of these other topics over the past number of years.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's a lot that's been going on with Tesla lately, especially after Elon Musk left the White House, but also in the wider electric vehicle industry.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I figured this was worth having head back on the show to dig into in a bit more depth because I think there are some really interesting things happening that we need to be paying attention to.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we talk about some of the recent litigation that Tesla has been facing and what that might mean for the autopilot and self-driving systems that is trying to sell.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk about Tesla as a company more broadly that seems less and less interested in actually making and selling electric cars and more interested in these big ideas like robots and things like that that we're both very skeptical of whether they're actually going to work out.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then beyond that, of course, Tesla is not just the only electric vehicle maker in the world anymore.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are many other companies that are competing on this front end.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to talk to Ed about what we're seeing in other parts of the world and from other automakers when it comes to electric vehicles.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And often that is a discussion about China and BYD in particular, and certainly that comes up in what we're talking about here.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: but also in the United States in Europe including of course in Korea and automakers like that where we are seeing real innovations on the electric vehicle front and I wanted to understand where Ed thinks this might be going because he's been reporting not just on Tesla but the wider car industry for many years.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I think that there are a lot of really interesting things happening now for us to be paying attention to, and only one part of that is whether Tesla is going to keep being a meme stock, and will turn Elon Musk into a trillionaire or something like that if he's able to pull this off, which he shouldn't be able to, but who knows, investors have let him get this far, so it's hard to know where things are going to go from here.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So with that said, it was great to have Ed back on the show.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, I think this is a really important subject matter.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think a really interesting one as well, right?
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: As we're seeing Tesla's position be further challenged by these other automakers.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, as Elon Musk tries to remake Tesla into something else, and it's really not clear that makes any sense.
• 2:58
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• 3:02
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• 3:06
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• 3:12
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• 3:14
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• 3:17
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• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ed, welcome back to the show.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, it's always a pleasure to talk to you.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's always Tesla things happening, and that means I need to have you back on to dig into all of it.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: There has been just a wave of news over the past few months, not all great things.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I want to start with this kind of
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: wild story about this new pay package that the board has approved is put forward for Elon Musk that could see him being paid up to a trillion dollars depending on if the valuation hits the targets that they've said and all this kind of stuff run us through this and what you're making of this decision because it seems absolutely wild to me.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that makes it the most interesting company around in a lot of ways is that it exists in this purely symbolic realm.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're through the looking last on Tesla.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, as someone who for many, many years, you know, sort of stayed out my position as being like, I'm the guy who's interested in the fundamentals of this company and its business and things.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of that matters.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've crossed over into this realm where again, it's all semiotics, right?
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's all symbolism.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is what this pay package is about.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the headlines, right?
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think with anything that Elon Musk does, you can usually sort of judge what he's up to, based on the headlines that comes out of it.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here the headline was Elon Musk to be the first trillionaire.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: essentially.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, a question mark, right?
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I was on the gym on the elliptical machine and watch my heart rate spike, because I saw even on bus, first Chilean air question mark on CNN.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: What does that say about our society if you love?
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, even if we have a trillion air, but the second of all, if the trillion air is Elon Musk.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, look like that's what he's selling, right?
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Elon Musk profile and persona has, I don't know, I don't know, of grown, but like evolved, right?
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sort of sluffed off the things that used to be fundamental, right?
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He used to be sort of engineered and in the weeds and in the lab.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like that was that was the image that he tried to sell for a long time.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And and that's all fallen away now.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now he's this
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: spirit of pure capitalism where and not even capitalism really it's this new oligarchism where him being a trillionaire is the goal unto itself it's like a social media following you know I think that's sort of as I look at his history and his evolution over the long term I think that's kind of what sets him apart who he is is that he's someone who kind of had like a 20 year head start on the world that we sort of are just
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: have been entering into where everything the matter is building your following and and having people support you and building this culture around you, whether it's in politics and in he shows in business that that's also sort of the way to go.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this is him, this is sort of the apotheosis of that, just as you know, on the business side selling, you know, the idea of cars that drive themselves everywhere.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now taking that to the next level of robots, like this race of mechanical slaves, it's going to overturn the laws of economics.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, all of everything around him is
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: this new point.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think as always with him, the real problems and the real challenge with this part of what he's doing is, how does he keep it going?
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: How do you go from here?
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because once you've said, I'm going to be a Chilean heir and my mechanical men are going to, you know, except bringing an era of poxlip to abundance, you know, where everyone can have everything for free.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where does the hype go from there?
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to go much higher than that, right, to justify getting to that trillion dollars.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were a few things I want to pick up on there.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like just on the pay package, like Robin Denholm, who is the chair of the Tesla board, came out and defended it and said it made sense and all this kind of stuff.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And like,
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that we had some stories, when was that?
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Probably last year, I think, or maybe it was early this year, about maybe the board finally being like, Elon, you need to spend more time at Tesla, you know, questions about his leadership and all that stuff, like, what is up with this board at this company?
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I guess they have just bought in that, like, they need Elon Musk and the story or else the company just isn't there, so they need to give into whatever he wants, like is that how you would see it?
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's a meme coin and not a company, right?
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's the valuation of the stock is the thing.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why to get people excited and by the way, as we record this, Tesla's recording it is trading it at like all-time highs, the stock.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's working, right?
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This idea that, again, like what matters is that the stock is going up, what matters is that Elon will become the oligarch, right?
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, it's like almost like a,
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: a new form of feudalism or something where you you pledge yourself to your leg and they're going to be the one that comes out in the top of the game of thrones and like a lot of people weirdly enough by and to that whether or not they can buy into it forever is another question because at the end of the day you know there is still a car company at the bottom of all this that as you sort of alluded to is not really doing so great.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in the short term, you know, this pay packet, right?
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like this with the 2018 pay package did.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was that was really the turning point for Tesla.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for Elon Musk personally, in terms of like breaking free from sort of some of the constraints of being a guy who's running a business, you know, which to the extent he was always good at sort of, you know, skating above, above that and creating these narratives and these perceptions that made all that easier.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But 2018, what changed there was that the incentives, it wasn't just the size of the package.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: turning point for him and for Tesla, it was also that the incentives were that increasingly tight to the stock price rather than to any kind of particular performance metrics.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like that's a little bit different this time because now it's like he has to bring out a million self-driving cars, which of course is a lot of ways to complete games with that.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guess if we got this robot, you know, so there are some like physical realities that he has to deliver on to get these awards, but now it's like the size of it.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: is even bigger.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so all of it just continues to serve to push him further down this track that he's already been on.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, like the board, it's all or nothing.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's the board's calculation is that there's no halfway strategy here anymore.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like you're either either in and out.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, at this point, they're in there.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've all made life changing money.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you say Tesla is trading at like an all time high right now.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could almost I guess if you're like an investor just wait until the moments where it drops by and wait until it goes back up again and so like it's pretty predictable I feel like the way that the stock kind of like waves you know kind of goes up and down and just based on that like based on what you're saying we're in this moment with Tesla where
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The company is struggling to sell cars.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It feels like the Robotaxi roll out.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Correct me if I'm wrong, did not go so hot.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like that as you're saying, the fundamentals don't seem to be there, but it doesn't seem to matter.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, and this has been the story for a really long time.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, they had their moment where the car business was doing well.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It could be talked about sort of that COVID era thing.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That has absolutely,
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: fallen off.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's supposed to be more affordable vehicles, even there was the super low cost car, which they canceled, but then they're supposed to have a sort of a decontant version of the model.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why?
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was supposed to be in production already, not hearing anything about that.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have sort of a six-seat version that looks very awkward looking thing and China, but that's trying to only
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they don't, they don't have products, you know, the cyber truck is used to be fly again.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it's, we've been in this stasis, it's actually fascinating.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're kind of a book of the history that it feels like in so many ways sort of since sort of the role out of full self-driving, sort of in the model why came out, and then full self-driving came out, you know, the cyber truck has been such a non-empty that basically nothing has changed really since
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: almost 2020.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, been in this real holding pattern and yet of course the stock is coming way up and down and a lot has happened and a lot has changed.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But fundamentally Tesla has not delivered full self-driving and that's the thing that Elon said that the company's value depends on.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's certainly there's no reason to believe that they're going to deliver on the robots if they can't deliver on the full self-driving.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: with full self-driving.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think if you go and you know, I spend some time in Austin looking at what they're doing there and it's interesting, but it's a performance just like everything else with full self-driving over the years.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a more plausible performance than they put on in the past for sure.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the way they're doing it is totally at odds with what they've always said their strategy is.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a defense constrained, they've got that, and I said, you spend some time in that G-offence, and they just plaster it with test and validation vehicles.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So again, the idea that they're just drawing data off their customer cars and that's what's allowing them to create this general salute.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like none of that is remotely true anymore.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in order to create even the performance of driverless, which they weren't able to, they still
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: have someone in the car, right?
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to get close to that, they had to completely throw out everything they've ever said about how they're approaching this technology and essentially sort of cobble together a very labor-intensive version of what Waymo does essentially.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, I'm working on a book about this because I hope people see sort of this whole story and understand sort of what
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: this strategy was and how completely it's had to be abandoned just in order to, and again, like it's not like this rubber taxi thing.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's what they're building.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is not some serious effort to get into that business.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't want to be in that business.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just another performance in this long string of performances.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I hope at some point people, this is just a technology literacy problem and when people sort of see it all in one place.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: they'll be able to see what's going on here, but the clock is ticking now too though because about a year from now, Elon has said that that's when you start to see the revenue streams from full self-driving and when he's sitting right-hailing, we'll start to replace the losses on the car business side.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's never said that before, right?
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's always saying, he's always framed full self-driving in terms of like feature complete or safer than a human or all this very like kind of abstract thing.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only human matters is, right, like you take legal responsibility for it.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: when you do that then it's then self-driving until that point it's not.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he's he's created a new sort of similarly real benchmark for himself now in terms of saying autonomy is going to actually deliver meaningful revenue which it hasn't yet.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we'll see it and again he's saying that because he has to say it because the car business itself is falling apart.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would be surprised, as I'm sure you wouldn't be if it's just another one of those statements that is made and that nothing really amounts to it, right?
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I remember when he said there'd be a million robot taxis by like 2020 or something wasn't it?
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not one of his performance.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not something he has to be incentivized to do.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Him saying that they were going to do it was not sufficient incentive.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now the board has to give him more shares to deliver on something that he promised was that
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a wild man and but like we've discussed that fundamental of the business doesn't seem to be impacting the actual share value because it's about a story, but you are mentioning there and we have been seeing these stories for quite some time that sales of Tesla's are stagnating in many markets they're going down, you know, they've recorded a sales decline and things are not looking great on that front.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: you are mentioning that the model lineup is very stale, suggestions of lower cost vehicles that were supposed to may become don't seem to be materializing.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you see any real hope on that front of Tesla actually being able to turn it around and start selling vehicles again or has the company like given up on that?
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abby looked like car sales in general.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of inertia.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once you build the brand in the car space, it takes a while for that to it doesn't just go it almost never just goes away overnight right if it does it's because the company went bankrupt not because people just stop buying the cars.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a lot of people, they just, they like how a Tesla looks and, and that is what matters and they're going to buy it because of that right and they don't care about anything else.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of that.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think that like sales are going to go to zero and they can't because where else is the revenue going to come from.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's the real issue.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, no, we don't see new products on the horizon.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's always possibility that somebody's gonna cook up.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know they just partnered with Uber on the semi truck, which has been sort of quiet, but they've been building a factory.
• 15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't see that being a real serious product, but now it seems like they're trying to make some kind of push to sell that in some volume.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is technically a product.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cyber truck is, there's nothing to do there.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no fixing.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: that mess and then you know you have issues around like the door handle thing which you want to discuss which is a really big problem for Tesla because they've always said that you know sort of safety is important to them and to be totally fair to Tesla the passive safety of the vehicle body itself you know it's very tough you know they've done some some good things on safety that you do just in a pure crash scenario Tesla versus a lot of other cars
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: the passive safety is quite good.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This issue around if your car catches on fire and there's no way because of the way these door handles are designed to get out and people have died this way.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of those kinds of things that gets the heart of Tesla's biggest weakness which is styleable substance.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, Tesla, I've always said this, everything is a trade-off in engineering and design and they everything all the trade-offs are all weighted towards short-term impressions.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Tesla does, and their problems are all over the long tail.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of those things, finally, that we've known has been out there for a long time, that like, look, you have the door handles are cool.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is part of what people like about Tesla's, but at the end of the day, you know, the ice over when it's winter, there's the inconvenience factor.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there's the safety issue, and I think that it's telling that Tesla is now buckling on this.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right?
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the Chinese have said they're looking at it, and now they're looking at a recall or something.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: If there's a recall, like you can't just replace all the door handles all the time.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like that's not something you can fix and over there software update, you know.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a huge deal.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both in terms of like, is there liability now for the vehicles that are out there, either run the regulatory side or then maybe through civil liability, right?
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because once the regulators start talking, then the trial lawyers move in.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then going forward, our Tesla's going to just have normal door handles now, or they're just going to go to like the same supplier that
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where does it go?
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the hard of who this company is.
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I found that story really fascinating, because to me, it fit into this broader conversation about, say, design trends that Tesla had kind of legitimized and a lot of other automakers felt that they needed to follow along with in order to appear stylish forward-looking things like that.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, you know, the big example then is the big touch screen that we see in many vehicles now.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in particular, how many brands have moved a lot of the physical buttons onto the screen
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course the growing conversations around safety with relation to that, right, you know, if you can't actually feel what you're doing, then you need to look away at the screen because you don't have that tactile feedback.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know, believe it's in the European Union, that they've actually changed the rules so that automakers will have to provide buttons for certain functions, I think, to start to move away from that.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, to me, it spoke to like, it's another one of these examples of things that look really good, that look futuristic and whatnot,
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: that have real consequences that we're not properly considered, I guess.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you know, the pendulum swings always, right?
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in politics and in taste and products and all kinds of things.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, we saw the pendulum swing really hard towards Tesla and the whole time I was like, hey, there are reasons that car comforted, right?
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like this is these are technologically impossible problems to solve, having a big screen, having these flush door handles, having connected car.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are all things that, you know, it's not impossible to do, but Tesla rushed into them, and they got all of this credit and all of this cash A for being the leader in those things.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what we're seeing almost across the board with a lot of these trends is the pendulum swinging back, because at the end of the day, you know, Toyota became Toyota.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've always used Toyota as the foil for Tesla, because they've never had the sexiest cars.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't like how nice say this by the way.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think and this is historically true and they made they made efforts in drachia Toyota to make their cars more stylish and you know and things like that but like historically the brand has been built not by the sexiest cars but it because people rely on these things it needs to be affordable right and needs to be repairable and and needs to be rugged and durable and reliable and everything else is sort of gravy and so we've seen not just regulators but the market swing away we've seen perceived quality scores go down on vehicles related to
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We said companies like Honda already even before any regular toy pressure start to bring buttons and physical controls back on the connected car front We've seen it looks like a sort of peak and maybe local and it may not be the end of the long-term trend But certainly in the near term there's been a peak and sort of interest in in sort of subscriptions and stuff which is The whole point of doing a connected car.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's great to be able to do software updates to the car, but you know you could also just get the first time that'd be good.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm like, you know, I think for Tesla having that connected car thing has been really important because it's fueled the whole narrative around full-subscribing, right?
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: We pull the data off the fleet.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We then push the updates and then someday your car will drive itself and you won't have to bring it into the the shop for that to happen.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right, so it's played into that narrative but is the value there?
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because really, they've had to, and if you look at the history too, they've had to do a lot to control access to that data.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've used that data in ways that were not sustainable in terms of, you know, kind of violating their own user agreements to like use the data against the people who had actually sort of belonged to.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've now, in this benefitus case, this autopilot case, they've been caught not just concealing it from the lawyers, but concealing it from police.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, and, and again, this is something that there's been lots of, you know, hints of throughout throughout the history of autopilot.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the point is that is that having a connection vehicle is a liability, as well, right?
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you're not making enough money on it, it becomes this regulatory challenge in this PR and liability sort of question that's a huge headache.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think we're just seeing that on almost all of the things that Tesla has sort of pushed forward.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the pendulum has sort of started to swing back and we'll see how far back it goes but it's definitely the vibe is shifted for sure.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have so many questions based on all the things that you just said.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: First off say the new Prius is they're not anything like the old Prius is they look pretty stylish so they've definitely made some advances there.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: For sure my comparison isn't historical one absolutely no the new Prius is our fly as hell yeah.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I looked at what I was like, maybe I should get that.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, you know, you're talking about the connected car thing specifically, right?
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all of these features and kind of the pendulum swinging back and all that kind of stuff.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: What immediately came to mind to me as you were saying that is obviously we've had a lot of car makers kind of rush to follow in many of those trends.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like nowhere has that been stronger than in China.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: with these Chinese automakers that are really focused on the connected car on making sure that these like infotainment features are there in adding a lot more of that kind of stuff than what we would have traditionally in the United States and the European Union, right?
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you think that, you know, and obviously you mentioned that China has been looking into the door handles and other aspects of this, do you think that that like kind of hits the model of like the electric vehicle that Chinese automakers have been pursuing potentially?
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that the Chinese auto industry has been very influenced by Tesla, and it makes sense, right?
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, China tried to build an auto industry for a really long time through a number of different policy means, and essentially realize a while ago that catching up on internal combustion technology was not going to be the way to do it.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think Tesla was helpful and catalyzing for them, the vision for the opportunity.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think they did already sort of seen it, but the opportunity to build a new auto industry around these new technologies.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, part of it is, is right so they've gone out and they've dominated the entire stack for EVs, right?
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether it's pulley minerals out of the ground in Africa, whether it's processing them, whether it's putting all of that.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've gone and they've dominated that, but they've also separately established a really dominant position in like sort of the Internet of Things supply chain ecosystem as well.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so China has its own strategic interest in having things be connected.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, some of that is even security related and intelligence gathering related.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to be conspiratorial about it, but I think they see a lot of benefits to sort of dominating that sort of supply chain and stack as well.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think in the Chinese market, what you see is a market that is a market of Tesla's.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think what's interesting there, though, is he wears the differences we're here in the US, we'll kind of only have Tesla as a company that we sort of can point to as this innovative,
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: new company and I think that's one of the big reasons they've gotten away with so much terrible terrible stuff over the years.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that politicians don't want to be seen as standing in the way of innovation and this happened next.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with China, it's refreshingly the opposite.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have so many Tesla's that if you lose the original Tesla, I don't think it's even a US thing.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they just want, and this has been an issue for a while for them, is they want fewer car companies.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: then all the better, and that allows them to have higher standards.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's fascinating comparison because it really pulls the rug out from under one of the most dominant tropes around all of this in the US culture, which is that regulation, stifles innovation.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not conclusively the case.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that if you have a lot of innovation, you can afford to regulate it.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the problem is is that we have to make this argument because we're actually not doing so great in the innovation department.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like how all that competition in the Chinese case has actually not just allowed them to really advance their car industry in a relatively short timeframe, but leave it open so that the government can come in and say, listen, these things need to change.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's all these companies.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you guys can figure it out.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the connected car front as well, there was that Chinese piece of it that immediately came to mind, but part of the story that I've heard as well about, say, the other U.S.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: automakers and European automakers and some of the difficulties that they've been having in recent years also relates to
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: software and the difficulty that they've had in developing a quality software suite in order to run their vehicles, especially what a modern vehicle and especially an electric vehicle requires.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: If there is a move away from, say, the connected car thing and the expectation that that's going to be such an important component of the future vehicle, does that potentially make it easier for them than to, you know, move into this space and become properly competitive again?
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if it's the connected car piece of it alone.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think what it is is it's a general shift back to cars being cars again.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we went through this phase where cars were devices.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're in real terms cars.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're becoming more like devices.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we just thought that it was buying around the idea that that was not just a trend, but a good and inevitable kind of trends.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of broadly across all of these.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there's different things happening and sort of each one of these areas.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: precinct quality, things like that, but I think broadly speaking, the hope behind all of this was that cars are this platform, right?
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's why you wanted to be a device right from an investment sort of capital perspective is that you look at cars and that it's like, you know, in the same way that search engines were and now LLMs are becoming sort of our vehicle for exploring the virtual world, right?
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cars are our interface,
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: for a lot of people with the physical world.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that sort of choke point, that it's a platform, right?
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Harser built it massive scale.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think there was just a lot of hope that that would become a platform for software.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fundamentally, and I understand why, right, like creating a platform for software is you create the whole gold rush.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look at what smartphones did.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But cars are just different.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cars are not
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, there's about exploring two different things.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You want your device for the physical world and you want that developed for the physical world.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there are ways to use connected services and things like that that can be helpful to that.
• 27:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think the whole issue of distracted driving gets to the heart of this is the equipment in your car there to make your use of the car better or is it a way to make you feel better about being stuck in your car?
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think those are two really separate things.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, unfortunately, the car business has gotten to a kind of unhealthy place around and in sort of US culture more broadly around, sort of what are you doing when you're behind the wheel?
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how serious is it?
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you're doing behind the wheel?
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how serious is what they're doing when they're building cars?
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that the pendulum kind of has to, if nothing else, because of, I think more and more and more lawsuits.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you're going to see that pendulum swing back towards a kind of older paradigm in the car business of, yeah, more traditional approach to both the design of the vehicle and sort of orienting it around that driving experience more and more, because systems like the autopilot have not relieved people from the responsibility to drive.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they have, and then they've died.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're rolling the dice with your life and that's not sustainable business model either with your right if your customers are are gambling with their lives using your products and so I think that it's going to be a difficult transition back and again we'll see how far the pendulum swings back the other way but I think that at a high level that's sort of broad is that we get cars are getting back to being cars again.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is a good thing, obviously, because you don't want them to be a device like this.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like, on the one hand, a lot of these automakers tried to sell these additional services, these monthly services, all this kind of stuff, and people were just not having it.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in some cases, like, really got annoyed.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then I feel like one of the kind of nails in that coffin, too, was when BYD, I believe it was, announced that it wasn't going to be charging for its assisted driving features.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: and then the other automakers were like, well, we can't charge then if they're not going to, you know, maybe you could in the American market because view ID isn't here, but other than that, like, yeah, when a and a car, if a car requires a subscription, is it really even a car anymore?
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the problem that they have is they created this product class.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: that's rooted in a century of tradition and subscriptions fundamentally change that.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole point of a car is that it's free of anything tying it down.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is part of the problem with the move to EVs, is that you are sort of stuck to a charger in ways that you weren't before and it's a little bit of the old world struggling to die and new world's struggling to be born and now is the time of monsters as in so many other things.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned the legal cases.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to go to that quickly before we get back to the bigger picture.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you already kind of mentioned this earlier, but we've obviously seen Tesla in some legal troubles, I guess, in California and Florida recently.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that you were at the thing that was going on in California and in Florida, obviously Tesla was ordered to pay.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was $240 million, we can correct me if I'm wrong.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: As a result of this kind of fatal autopilot case that it was involved in.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: where it seems like the company for the first time has had to accept some degree of responsibility for what happens when someone dies in an autopilot crash.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk a bit about what happened there and the ramifications of the decision?
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's the first time that an autopilot case was tried in federal court, which as far as I can tell was Tesla's idea.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It really thought it would win or.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a number of families have sued Tesla and Tesla has settled.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every time if you go through the history as I have been of autopilot, every time something comes out, we learn something new.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's because something was done a little bit differently.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right, so like going back to, you know, the first case in 2016 in China, the court sort of maintained and this is often been the case also with the Josh Brown case.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the maintenance of the of the chain of custody of the onboard vehicle data.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it has like can't just sort of say like, oh, well, we have the remote data and it says this and then we get possession of that data and then we can sort of say whatever we want about it.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there's always there's been a lot of questions over the years and when we again when we've learned.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: more about what's really going on.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's been, or when there've been some form of consequences for Tesla, even just in the realm of PR, it's been when people have not trusted them and have made certain critical choices.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the key things in this case, the benefit of this case, was that actually, so there's one survivor and then the family of the woman who died,
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They sued the guy behind the wheel first.
• 31:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it looked like he was fighting them.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then sort of what happened was, there was sort of this new wave of investigations at Nittza and stuff.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that was when they settled with them.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: When he sort of laid out his affirmative defense, he was sort of saying, this isn't all just on me.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is part of it is your irresponsibility because you parked in this place, whatever, but part of it is Tesla.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he settled with them.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the family's had, we don't know how much money, but probably they got a couple million dollars out of this driver.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it was one of the first times that there was a settlement where a family went into the legal battle with Tesla with some kind of financial cushion.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: where they didn't feel like they had to take the very first offer or even, and even both of these plaintiffs, they made offers to settle for 60 million apiece, and Tesla said no, and yeah, the punitive damages ended up being 200 million.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So one of the key things was that they had the money, they were able to sort of force Tesla into a realm of compensation that they've been able to stay away from.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that was really pivotal in this case was
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it's sort of a whole long story.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's probably too long to go into all the details here, but essentially the Florida Highway Patrol, when they investigated it, this case, played about the onboard vehicle, the computers where the onboard data was logged, to Tesla, a technician at Tesla.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: tried to read them said that they couldn't said that this is corrupted.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the police.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also sort of in an affid, even afterwards, said a lot of stuff that wasn't true.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They said that the police officer let them out of their site when they plugged this in.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the officers like, no, I had to get a custody.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I signed that evidence out and I was with them the whole time.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why they would have said that.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they also said that one of it, the autopilot control unit, which is where the really meaningful data was, they said, well, we weren't even able to power it on.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it turns out, not only did they power it on, but when they did it deleted the data, which often happens.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it wasn't until years later, this all happened in 2019 right after, you know, in the months after the crash, wasn't until 2024 that the plaintiffs hired this hacker, by the time of green the only, he's been responsible for exposing a lot of really interesting details about autopilot.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did this amazing thing, he basically sort of pulled the chip off the
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: sort of like metadata and figure all this out.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: They realized, oh, it had been plugged in when the employee said in their afternoon, it hadn't been.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: When it dated deleted that data or some of it, but it also had in the moments after the crash, they found out it had in fact sent remote data, a snapshot, a snapshot, two Tesla to their thing.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla was like, oh, goodness me, we just couldn't find it.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they lied to the, to the play well.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, from the perspective of the court, they sort of give them the benefit of the doubt on all of this.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the pattern is pretty ugly, where it's like the shenanigans with the police, when they're trying to obtain the data, the shenanigans with lawyers in discovery, where Tesla's saying we don't have this stuff on our server.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Forget about the shenanigans with the onboard data.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The server is not there.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, oh, well, once you get the hacker to say, like, oh, no, we know that it uploaded right after the crash.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's on your server.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're like, oh, well, we just didn't have the unique ECU number,
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Totally just completely unbelievable stuff.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was really crucial to this whole thing happening.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think what it illustrates is not only that Tesla is not a good actor here, but that we don't really know the extent of all of this.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There may well be a lot of crashes that have happened that we're either actively covered up.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or, you know, the person died and they weren't there to say, hey, I was on autopilot and therefore Tesla never had to answer the public sort of hue and cry about it, let alone subpoenas and things like that in an actual court case.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think this is really crucial story to kind of get out there because it shows like what we know about how Tesla's managed autopilot is really bad, but then some of the stuff like this that we know implies that it's way worse than we may ever know.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's why they hear you even describe that.
• 35:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there any real process to try to actually get to the bottom of that in any meaningful way or have the regulators just like I know that Nitzel was doing a bit more as you were saying the national highway transportation safety agencies in the United States was obviously looking into this or looking into aspects of it as I understand things have changed now that the Trump administration is in power.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there any prospect of finding out more about that and does a result like this in this case in Florida?
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Does that have any meaningful implications now for the company moving forward?
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it has in the sense that it's raised the price of settlements.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lawyers that tried that case had another case, the modern auto case that actually just yesterday, I think was settled.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, the number was not made public.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was led to believe that that settlement would have to be close to $100 million.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think for that to be something that things may well have changed.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the number was.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But clearly, that cost is going up.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And again, Tesla's business is not doing better.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is something I've tried to say for a long time, is that Tesla, the way Tesla does business, it leaves these time bombs sort of strewn around the place, not only do they hurt, you know, as real people being hurt and their lives being turned upside down and horrible things happening, but there's this long tale of consequences that is bound to catch up with Tesla at some point.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, if you look at the history of this company, which I'm sorry, is everything that Elon has done,
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: to avoid those consequences, and to avoid more of a perception of crisis at any given point along the way of this.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So from the regulatory perspective, you know, look, like I caught Tesla using non-disclosure agreements to cover up defects in 2016, and the regular said, that's notty, and then nothing happened.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I didn't try to let you defect in that case, but the examples, one of the examples that I used in that case was a guy who's suspension broke,
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it wasn't until 2020 that China forced a recall for suspension breakage that then it's all looked at it and then spent a couple of years and then didn't do anything.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now with the door handles you see China's leaving the way and it's just following behind them.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're in the fascinating situation here in the U.S.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: where on terms of auto safety regulation, we have to waive the Chinese regulators to do something before our regulators feel sufficient shame to go after them.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But look, I think like all of this, right?
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think with Tesla's history shows the need for more serious
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: legal frameworks around automated driving and around this very shady boundary between level two driver assistance systems, which are clearly anything but and something that's actually full self driving we need to we need to do a lot of work there and it's not it's not an easy thing to regulate and I grant that but clearly something is happening but the other piece that really needs to happen is vehicle data.
• 38:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We, by law, sort of like event data recorders, which there's a statutory definition of these things, they record right, you know, the moment of a crash right before and during a crash certain kinds of data, but that doesn't include, you know, was driver assistance being used.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't include really important stuff.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we have a law that says that EDR data is yours by law.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Tesla after preventing people from accessing it, eventually 2018 released this readers.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But basically, if cars are going to be, if they're going to have these autopilot devices, and they're going to be connected, then we're generating all this data, we need laws that really unambiguously make it clear that that data belongs to the public, or to the people who own it, the car.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they can access it anytime in a ways that are independently verifiable, that don't depend on the goodwill and trust,
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the company because you cannot trust this company.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think a really great point and something that really needs to be taken up and you know, it's battling to hear you say that often we need to wait for the Chinese now to look into Tesla for US regulators to do anything.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's also wild to me that the Europeans aren't more aggressive on this.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, they have no particular stake in needing Tesla to be successful, but that's a whole other point, I guess.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there have been fewer autopilot crashes in Europe.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's been one of the factors fair enough.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's also limitations on what's available there as well.
• 39:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, full self driving is not even allowed, right?
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not, no, and even with autopilot, you know, they don't let you have as much control authority.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can't take it around as sharp of corners and stuff like that, which is I think fundamental to the whole play of autopilot and full self driving, which is seeming full self driving, right?
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so there's a number of factors.
• 39:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to move back to looking at the bigger picture for a while Tesla has been positioned at least as kind of this dominant player in the electric vehicle space.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know that there's more competitors out there now.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk a lot about the Chinese competitors, of course, and how they're moving into more and more markets globally and capturing.
• 40:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: more and more market share.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But obviously there are Western automakers that are trying to really catch up even as there have been questions about the sustainability of the EV market, especially as the United States kind of pulls back on ambition.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to talk about a few different pieces of that.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for me I feel like the company I've been watching most closely the past number of years with this has been forward.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: because I find there's CEO really interesting in some of the things that he has been saying and they have obviously had this team in California that's been trying to like devise a new production process and just recently started to shed more details on that, obviously they haven't shown off an actual vehicle yet that's coming soon-ish.
• 40:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I wonder after seeing that and after hearing the things that they're saying.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of what Ford is doing, and does this actually sound like something that could work to make it a real competitor in the EV space, you know, thinking not just against Tesla, but increasingly these Chinese companies that are capturing so much market share.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I've always been forward to be a fascinating company because they are now kind of one of the smaller global automakers right they're very dependent on the US and they have to make very pragmatic choices, you know, they're sort of they're very dependent on their truck big truck business, but they know it won't last forever and managing that transition is this constant never ending challenge and preparing for the next downturn, which they tend to be really good at.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I do think that this Ford Skunkwigs thing, it sort of illustrates two things.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: One, it illustrates their desperation, I think.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They know that they're in a tough spot.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They put a lot of money into EVs and they put out some products that were well reviewed, in terms of the Ford Lightning and the Maki.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the products were not profitable.
• 41:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were not the foundation of a real business.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were symptoms of this EV kind of bubble period.
• 41:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that this new, what do they call the Ford Universal platform?
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that this is the first sign of them really doing being really serious about EVs.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it has a shot.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's actually interesting and has a shot.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we were just talking about connected cars, about sort of the challenges there on the consumer side.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, you know, the data seems to suggest that people just don't want subscriptions on their cars.
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was sort of one to try it, but hasn't really lasted.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they haven't found a way to create that sustainable recurring revenue.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where that's not true.
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, both this and sort of smaller battery EVs is the other challenge in consumer adoption, right?
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: As he can't sell an EV that doesn't have 250 miles of range, essentially.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: At least that's the conventional wisdom.
• 42:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think we've talked about this before how like Tesla kind of set this model this idea that a vehicle needs to have this massive battery, but that is inherently very expensive and, you know, made this kind of difficult.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, all these automakers then chase that that model and then have these really unprofitable EV businesses as a result.
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the market has stalled out because there's a lack of affordability.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Ford's taking an interesting approach to this because the way they're brand us positioned, they do, they're sort of this hybrid between consumer products and work vehicles.
• 43:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think you know, a lot of consumers
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: who buy a Ford, they like it and park as it has that sort of blue collar, kind of hardworking, kind of image, right?
• 43:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they have an opportunity to make something work here.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what that, that's something is, I think, is one platform that has consumer-facing products on it, but also build scale in the, in the fleet space.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And not just scale, actually.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the past, that was sort of what would happen, right?
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do build a consumer car, and you build, like, a bunch of really, like, low-end versions of a car or truck, right?
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A little bit of really low-end version, and dump it in the fleet.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there was like almost no margin in it, but it built your scale, which then propped up your margin on the consumer side, right?
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is that that's like inverting a little bit because in the commercial space, you can do two things that you can't do in the consumer space.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is you can sell a vehicle on EV with a smaller battery because businesses and we may have discussed this a little bit before in the past, but businesses, they don't get whole up on like,
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, what if I need to go to the mountains once a year or what if I, you know, what if this or what if they like they know what their mobility needs are generally speaking like almost nobody drives more than a hundred miles a day day and day out.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly businesses right so it's deliveries and it's logistics and it's stuff and it's like we know we can make we have the chargers we can make a hundred fifty miles work.
• 44:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is the an impossible cell to consumers.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that's really interesting is that when your fleet management does require connected vehicles, that data is useful in part because it helps you know what size battery you need for your EVs, among many other things, right?
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does any maintenance, you know, keeping tabs on where things are, so you can reroute stuff.
• 44:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in the commercial space, the connected vehicle thing and then the recurring revenue
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, you're creating scale on not just the vehicle platform, but then like the cloud and all the other sort of IT infrastructure that goes around that, which then potentially makes it easier to find ways to maybe maybe make that work on the consumer side.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if you can't, you still have it popping up margins on the fleet side, which is, you know, in the past, the fleet again is not where you would look to prop up margins.
• 45:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're seeing an interesting inversion and new technologies in particular.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's options for monetizing them in the commercial space that are not that don't really exist at all in the in the consumer space or at least look very different in the consumer space and I think by doing one platform and addressing both of those markets I think you have an opportunity to again do things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do with the purely consumer car have a smaller battery option have margin padding connected services.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's fascinating.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It brings to mind when I was looking into the history of electric vehicles.
• 45:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I saw this kind of suggestion I haven't looked into it closely, but that, you know, because electric vehicles were more common in the early days of the automobile, right?
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a competition for what kind of, you know, I guess fuel source was going to power these things.
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what I read was that in industry, in certain industries, that actually electric vehicles stuck around quite a bit longer than say in the consumer space that was taken over by the internal combustion engine, right?
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know Ford to me seems really interesting.
• 46:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You still have GM saying that, you know, it's looking at electric vehicles.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's pushback.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of timelines on for adoption.
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's bringing out a new new version of the bolts, you know, the smaller kind of car that it had, you know, you see Volkswagen, which has really been struggling with the growth of China, but they're starting to push out a lot more electric models, especially in Europe.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wonder, you know, if we're looking at other big automakers, is there anything that really stands out to you?
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're beyond what we see with Ford?
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't talk about EVs without talking about Hyundai here.
• 46:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've been, you know, some of the most aggressive for hasn't had, right?
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like the dare of the Ford tourists where they have like that consumer product that's like huge volume and like everyone, everyone's mom has one kind of thing.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like Ford's not that company anymore.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's trucks and my stings and they're kind of a niche player in a certain respect.
• 46:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The strategy that they're doing is not one that is gonna work in the truly like mass mainstream market.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I didn't hear are doing is I think really pushing towards that right where they're making really compelling products that people find appealing in the way that they found Tesla's appealing but still have that sort of you know real car company finish and quality reliability and service network and things like that.
• 47:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they are relentlessly bringing that same sort of package of appeal down market, right?
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we're just about to see sort of the with the EV3 and the Onik 3 and just, you know, you go to the 9 and then the 5 and then, you know, and you're getting smaller and smaller outside of China.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they're really the standard of air in a lot of ways.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, I'm very curious to see what happens there.
• 47:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, this whole culture taught with ice in Alabama.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it shows sort of the level of strategic sophistication that's going on here.
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else you want to say about that whole situation, which I want to get into because we'll be here all day.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like,
• 47:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hyundai and Kia are doing a lot to bring high tech EV manufacturing to the US, they're supporting now Waymo with their next generation of rubber taxis because the product that Waymo wanted comes from China and they can't make that work anymore.
• 48:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hyundai and Kia in terms of the US market in particular, it's not just in terms of the appeal of their products, but the investments that they're making here, the commitments they're making to building batteries and EVs here is really
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was that, it was quite the choice.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talked about the bigger automakers, right?
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Ford's even Hyundai Kia.
• 48:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, these are major players.
• 48:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We also see more experimental propositions being put forward.
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think of something like, I believe it's called the Slate truck, which is backed by like Jeff Bezos or Amazon or something.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are some different projects like that that are trying to, you know, essentially do something different with electric vehicles.
• 48:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you see much prospects in things like that?
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: fun games that people are kind of trying out, but probably aren't going to hit scale.
• 48:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think it's a good question.
• 48:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's that's what makes slate interesting is as it's an experiment.
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is definitely not going for the sweet spot of the market.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's going for a part of the market that used to exist and hasn't now for quite some time.
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, it didn't exist in electric form, right?
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's that's sort of the wrinkle too, but a small basic affordable electric pick-up
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I see it as sort of like the Volkswagen Beetle.
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no Volkswagen Beetle.
• 49:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, at that time, what made the Beetle happen, obviously it was developed right for the Nazis and for a very different, you know, but it was a people's car from their beginning was meant to be an affordable basic transportation.
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it started to be imported after the war into a US market that was dominated by bigger, right?
• 49:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the wider, it was the Detroit Baroque era where cars just were getting bigger and bigger and more bells and whistles and chrome and tail fins and all this sort of stuff.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was an arms race, it seemed like it was never gonna end.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the V Beetle came in like a comet, you know, hitting the dinosaurs.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't destroy it, right?
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like it was all of a sudden it was earthshattering in the sense that it sort of was like, this car is not playing that game anymore.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think we have something similar happening where vehicles are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more bells and whistles and more connected.
• 50:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: All this stuff and people are starting to say like, do we need this?
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think to kind of tie it back to the conversation we've been having about, if cars are going to get back to being cars,
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: something like the slate is a really interesting opportunity to redefine that, right?
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because also one of the things about cars is that they have to do everything.
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think one of the really interesting things is both with electric and autonomous we see specialization.
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cars are going from this general purpose thing back to the older school model of being more specialized.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think if slate can do that, and I think also that's the question that waymo and rubber taxes are asking.
• 50:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: is, can we say, hey, maybe you want a car for when you go out to the mountains or when you get out of town, but around town, are you interested?
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe just not, like maybe is there a world where you could just write taxes a lot more.
• 50:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla is a company that's pulling new technology enforcing it into the old box of big, heavy, powerful cars.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think what's interesting is that the technology doesn't want to be that.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we're starting to see companies like Slate and Waymo and others.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: lean into, like, hey, maybe there's just a post car, maybe there is a post car reality after all.
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's taken a long time to get going and it may not, it may not actually happen, but we'll see.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also wonder, like, I moved recently back to a place that's very car-dependent and, you know, I had to get a vehicle and I just wanted a small car, like, you know, I didn't need anything big.
• 51:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was kind of startling to me that at a moment when we're talking so much about affordability and how much car prices have really gone up, especially since the pandemic that
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We still lack those kind of smaller, more affordable vehicles in a concerted way.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if there's any kind of prospect of that, of that returning, I don't know if you've been reading, but in Canada, there's like a discussion now that's being pushed by the dealers, obviously taking advantage of the situation with the United States that we should recognize European and Japanese vehicle safety standards to allow those vehicles to be more easily imported and sold.
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that there's more of a market for smaller vehicles in Canada than in the US as a percentage of the population.
• 52:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I find that intriguing.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you think there's any possibility of something like that in the United States, not recognizing other vehicle standards, but actually getting back to having more cars that are affordable again.
• 52:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, most households have more than one vehicle.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that idea that every single vehicle has to do everything is I think we've been we've been like the frog slowly boiling alive and again, this sort of arms race, right?
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like the same in the 50s and 60s.
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think in, you know, it just hadn't no one had said, well, what if we make a really small, really shitty car like it just it doesn't occur to you when you're part of this, you know, growth.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: feedback loop.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Beetle did not change everything.
• 52:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was sort of showed what was possible, which then the Japanese I think were able to go and find kind of a more modern sort of compromise sort of version of what it was.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really disruption.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is really what disruption is.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's when markets form their own dynamic.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's something comes in.
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's much cheaper and more basic and says, hey, like the core utility that you get out of this product can be served with something simpler and cheaper.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think there's a lot of things about the U.S.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: market that make it look right for disruption, one of which is that people think that Tesla is disruptive when it's the opposite of it.
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But people have lost touch with what disruption is.
• 53:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think again, with slate, I can't predict what will happen.
• 53:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's too unpredictable because we don't know.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have, we don't have experimental data.
• 53:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, but that's why it's worth doing.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that this will give us experimental data on what is possible.
• 53:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of money has gone into like, oh, well, Tesla's successful, so we'll just copy that and clearly there's not room for a lot of Tesla's like we've run that we have a lot of experimental data around that.
• 53:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: You want to disrupt mobility, you want to explore new opportunities for technology, I think there's a lot there and I think capital should be going towards it and I think what's encouraging is that capital is flowing into things that are more actually, I think disruptive in that classical sense and I would put the slate truck as sort of a key example of that.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also wonder like, you know, obviously in the North American market, we don't have the Chinese automakers, right?
• 54:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I wonder if the Europeans almost have a leg up in the sense that, yeah, there are small tariffs on Chinese vehicles, but they're still like sold there, right?
• 54:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if that makes them have to really compete in a way that the North American automakers don't really have to and sets them up potentially to be even further laggards because they don't have this pressure.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The European car market has always had more affordable options.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's more established part of the market that there are some people who just want a very basic car.
• 54:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's sort of part of their DNA.
• 54:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here in the US, it's a cultural thing as much as an economic thing.
• 54:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Final question for you, we have talked big picture, we've talked to a Tesla, we've talked about everything we're seeing in these different auto companies and things like that.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Going back to one thing that you were saying earlier is these big promises around Tesla in its future and all this kind of stuff.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in the past, Tesla for most people, for everybody was an electric car company, right?
• 55:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were innovating on electric cars, they were trying to move this forward.
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, making it clear that there was a market here that other automakers should pursue.
• 55:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go with the narrative that they have been putting up there, right, and that a lot of people kind of followed.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It increasingly feels like Tesla is not even trying to be an electric car company anymore.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's talking about super computing, even though it just closed down the super computing division, it's talking about Robo Taxis, which is still kind of cars, but a different kind of version of what we've been talking about or what they were presenting in the past.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: At least rhetorically seems to be a lot on these robots where it's really not clear that there's anything tangible there It's Tesla not an electric car company anymore.
• 55:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you make of it back in the day in the good old days of the online Tesla wars 16 17 18 19 the whole narrative was Tesla's not a car company and they were right It wasn't and one of the things I've been told I don't have like multiple sources on this, but I've been told that
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Elon did not want to do the Model Y because it was a boring car and Tesla doesn't do boring cars and it is, I mean it's barely different, it's what the Model 3 should have been in the first place, but it's barely distinguishable, it's a little more so now that they've done the refresh or whatever, but he didn't want to do boring cars, well if you want to be a car, you have to make boring car, the market wants boring cars.
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Elon was never going to lead Tesla.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that this is the thesis of my book literatures, was that Elon's leadership was never going to take Tesla to what at that point was the whole narrative, which is that they're going to become a mass market automaker, the his leadership style and the culture that he built around himself is just fundamentally not one that is suited to the business of making cars at scale.
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a sense, there's no big surprise here, like this is exactly what I've sort of always expected.
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I didn't expect was the opportunity to just endlessly pivot and to pivot to such sort of unserious pie on the sky.
• 56:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think again, we just sort of...
• 56:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're through the looking glass on Tesla.
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to believe that a trillion dollar company can be completely unmorded from reality.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the other way of looking at it is that a company has to be unburnt for reality to be worth a trillion dollars.
• 57:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for them to say now like the CEO stake in that company is going to be worth a trillion dollars.
• 57:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just goes to show it.
• 57:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's become a thing unto itself.
• 57:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're through the stages of Bogeardian progression to where it doesn't even try to resemble an electric car company anymore.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just, it has its own internal logic now.
• 57:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla is just Tesla.
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can't really think about it in other terms.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't take,
• 57:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lessons from other industries, this has been one of my frustrations this whole time of trying to cover them is that it's so hard to take lessons from other companies and apply them and when you when you can and when you do People are just like, oh, it doesn't matter.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's irrelevant.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla's Tesla.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, okay.
• 57:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now we're seeing the consequences of that right.
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you say that often enough.
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla's not a car company.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tesla's Tesla Elon is this unique.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you now spun that up into its own sort of like hardened entity.
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And know what, like how do you create economic value with that?
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because at the end of the day, you have to, right?
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like the laws of economics are not suspended.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Elon Musk is not going to create robots that suspend those laws, right?
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They make them not matter anymore.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we're back to the question of like, you know, capital markets.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what are you doing?
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why do you keep putting money into this thing?
• 58:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, just as with the autopilot, we've learned that there's been stuff happening behind the scenes that we didn't know about.
• 58:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we'll learn.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: there's something similar on the financial side or have been a number of similar things.
• 58:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not plugged into that world well enough to be the one to report on them, but I think clearly you look at it and people are betting on this company for for some other reasons.
• 58:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Other than the current creation of economic value and the prospect for future creation of economic value, it's just not plausible.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think when you look at it, it's also updriving, what's happening there is that it's not that it's plausible, but it's what people want to believe is coming.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's very good at and identify what people want and telling him he was going to give it to them and the only problem is that, you know, at some point he asked it, he has to actually do it and he still hasn't.
• 59:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this October will be the ninth anniversary of all Teslas are capable of a full self driving.
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lot longer than I thought it was going to go on, but I guess if we want to get to your 10, let's do that, like let's just, let's just see where it goes.
• 59:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to keep watching.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's for sure.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, Ed Tesla is a company I follow closely.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Elon Musk is someone I've been following close with for years, this kind of EV and auto industry I follow closely enough, but every time I speak with you, I feel like I learned so much more and it gives me so many new insights into what's happening.
• 59:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm really looking forward to the new book.
• 59:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course we can't encourage people to go pre-order it or anything yet because it's still a bit too early But I can't wait for it to come out and I'm really looking forward to reading it and to interviewing you and chatting all about it when it does come out And of course I'll be letting listeners know when it's so time to take a look for it But thanks as always for taking the time to come on the show.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate it Well, thank you so much.
• 59:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's always a pleasure
• 59:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Edneter Mire is the author of Ludicrous and co-host of the Atonicaz.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tech won't save us as made in partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me Paris Marks.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Production is by Kyla Hucen.
• 1:00:08
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• 1:00:13
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• 1:00:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.