Well Tesla is clearly the mindshare leader when it comes to electric cars and they make a whole bunch of them but they do a lot of other things.
You know them for autonomy.
You know them for Elan Musk, you know them for their stock market story.
There's a lot of things going on around that brand when customers just wanna say Does anyone have an answer to does an electric car work for me?
Now what?
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Jim Stevens Well, now we've got a lot to work with here because Tesla just had an event, kind of Apple Esque.
It was called battery day but it covered a lot more than that.
But let's start with the battery Tech Tim Tesla did have some new battery technology.
Announcement kind of wonky stuff, but it looked impressive.
What do you think.
As with all things Tesla, we got to take a little bit of grain of salt here because you never know when we're actually going to see the technology.
But to understand what Tesla announced it to kind of look at the composition of the average battery in an electric car.
Most people think well, I have an electric car.
So therefore I have a battery.
That's true, but the batteries are actually made up modules.
And then those modules are actually made up of individual cells.
And in a Tesla, they are still to kind of look like a double A battery.
They're about twice the size.
But what Tesla announced at their battery there was a new type of cell that's been called a biscuit tin or 4686, which is considerably larger than before.
Still cylindrical cells still would look like what you might think a battery would look like.
But because they're bigger, they have more density.
And because of some changes that Tesla's making for the individual packaging of those individual cells, then kinda get more stuff in there and cut down on the cost as well.
The net result they say will be an increase of density of about 15% which means for a given Wait, the battery will have about 15% more range.
But more importantly, they think they can get the cost of those cells down by over 50%, which would mean a significant reduction in the cost of electric car.
That's a huge price decrease and as you mentioned, they have to deliver this first, and even on the range front, they're 15% that would take a model three that might currently be rated around 320 miles.
Up to much closer to 403 70 or something so you have both an increase in mileage but you also have a mental increase in the car being a 300 ish car to being almost a 400 ish car which plays well with consumers, but I'm mostly.
Excited about the potential for price reduction?>> Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, When most people are looking at ease, they're primarily looking at how far can I go in a charge, and how much is this going to cost me, and if you can increase both of those things at once, ultimately you can have an Eevee with lower range, that's significantly cheaper than right now,or as you mentioned, a model three that might be goes 400 miles, and range in still would be cheaper.
than right now.
The cost of the battery electric car still.
Almost about half the cost of the overall car sale should be dropped the constant battery by half cost of the Eevee itself goes down by about 25%.
And particularly important for Tesla cars because they aged out of the federal subsidy program some time ago the penalty of success Well speaking of price now the next headline they had was, I think came out of left field to me anyway was the idea of a $25,000 car.
You talked about salt a minute ago.
How much do you sprinkle on that one?
[LAUGH] Couldn't be a lot of sort for this one.
We still have not seen the fabled $35,000 model three In any numbers and yet now, Elon Musk is already talking about a $25,000 model three, you know if they can deliver on all the promises of this new battery cell technology and the construction technology and a lot of other efficiencies and other changes they mentioned as well.
If all of that can come together and drive the cost of sales by 50%, that's definitely a reasonable number.
But again, the question is, when are we ever going to see it?
You know, as I mentioned, Musk is promised 35,000 miles or we haven't seen, but he also dug through the archives and way back in 2006.
He promised us a $30,000 Evie By 2010 so he's running 10 years late on that promise.
It's gonna be a little while I think before we see 25 grand Tesla, I'm sorry,
They had a new model s kind of sorta Model S plan an odd name for what from what I can see in our coverage is just basically a new level of.
Barn burning performance.
So to understand what plaid means you got to be a Millbrook Spaceballs fan because plaid was of course the ultimate fastest speed you can go in that movie and we've already got Ludicrous model.
So you know the next breed of.
Wow I totally miss that.
Okay [LAUGH]
So there you go.
Although I do hope that they have some like GTX Plan interior treatments.
We'll have to see about that.
But ultimately, what the Molas plan is we've got the same Models we've been seeing now for about eight years, which has had some cosmetic updates, but it's still largely the same car, but with a next generation powertrain that will make it outrageously fast.
We're talking zero to 60 less than two seconds Quarter mile time, less than nine seconds faster than a Dodge demon fast enough that if you were to take it to any drag strip in the world, they would kick you out and make you come back with a roll cage and over 200 miles an hour top speed so outrageously incredibly fast performance.
But at a pretty outrageous price.
The starting price of these will be at about 130 to $140,000 price point.
But then look at the performance you're getting for that price.
Yeah.
It's a lofty price.
But can you believe we're sitting here in 2020 saying that 150 grand's an awful lot to pay for a sub-two-second car?
Right, And it's quicker than any Ferrari, any Lamborghini, you know, out of Isn't the speed of the drone is higher but ultimately this thing will get to 200 miles an hour quicker than then this room.
So you know, this is an outrageously fast car faster than any exotic on the road right now.
Really, really impressive performance and $450,000
If you're purely looking at that quickness per dollar that's that's quite an advancement and what ultimately this is it's almost a development platform for the next generation Tesla Roadster.
The Tesla Roadster Of course was the first proper Tesla that came in the road.
It was basically a rebuilt Lotus Elise it was a really cool car was kind of the first Eevee that came to market and said This is just a cool car that happens to be electric and that's kinda been Tesla's ethos ever since.
The rebooted roadster the 2.0, which was supposed to be in production right now is still coming down the road and that ultimately will be built on a similar version of this drive train.
That will we will first see in the Model S plan,
As we are standing here now in three quarters of the way through 2020 What's your guesstimate on cybertruck in terms of arriving and arriving the way it was shown,
there are a lot of questions about cybertruck.
And ultimately the only answer we got was how many pre orders they had which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000, which is a lot of pre orders, but you have to keep in mind that to do a pre order, all you need to do is put down 100 bucks and so that's a pretty that's an easy thing for a lot of people to do just to kind of register their age.
Interest.
So the question mark, of course is, when will we see it?
And yeah, will it be, look like it does now because it's such an outrageous design.
A lot of people thinking that it'll never pass pedestrian crash safety regulations.
And there's a lot of skepticism there, but I'm honestly pretty bullish about the look of the thing purely from a crash.
Test standpoint because I know with the model three in the model why Tesla crash test safety was a huge part of the design of those cars and I have a hard time believing that they would then launch a major new product that that wasn't designed with crash testability in mind when we're gonna see it.
That's a big question.
As I mentioned before, The roadster 2.0 was supposed to be in production by now.
Now we're hearing more about maybe 2022.
The cybertruck supposed to be in production by next year.
I wouldn't be surprised if that also slips by 2022 because right now for Tesla, the most important thing for them is to show a major increase in volume and the best way for them to do that.
See a model three and model y out there to get reliable and getting cheaper.
And I think that stuff like roaster and cybertruck those are gonna be kind of a nice to have things that they can push down the road a little further.
I seem to recall hearing the term model two bandied around a couple of times and it might have just been in Questions from the audience that refers to what?
So if we're talking about two I think at that point we're talking about an even cheaper car a more attainable car.
Okay.
Ultimately, there's not been any sort of announcement from Tesla anything official, but I think what people are hoping for something a little bit more attainable so that might be Indeed there were a $25,000 model that was gonna be separated from the model three, that might be your model two.
Okay, so model two is just a term some people are using.
It's not a Tesla term yet.
Not yet.>> Okay, let's wrap up here with self deliving.
This is more perhaps the most contentious area about Tesla.
The company's been.
Taken the task repeatedly for terms like autopilot or full self driving, not meaning what they would infer.
Now Ilan says we are on the cusp of being able to deliver exactly that and at least some small volume.
What do you read into the next layer of Tesla doing self driving.
It's so hard to parse because they've called this full self driving stuff for a long time now, but, you know, the question is what exactly does that mean?
Does that mean I can get in my car and take a nap and it'll talk at the horn when I get to work kind of thing, or is it going to be down is still going to need to be there paying attention, but maybe I can efficiently take my hands off the wheel for the first time.
We still don't know exactly what that means, but musk did say that they'll have a beta version of their.
Full self driving program available to Tesla owners as little as one month.
And that's that's pretty exciting the idea that that self driving car might be on the road in a month but you know, if you stop and think about all the hurdles that need to be overcome before you can even use a system like that It's hard to believe that that's that's realistic.
self driving cars are not legal in the vast majority of the United States and those places where they are legal.
Most of the time you had to actually go get a separate special licence to operate a car like that and you need to file Reports with the state and all sorts of things ultimately to be able to get in a car that is a quote unquote self driving car.
So it's hard to imagine that being really deployed to consumers in any number as soon as one month or even once a year for that matter.
So I'm definitely very skeptical but Musk made a big deal talking about the details of all the algorithms and the AI learning that's going on.
Yeah.
With the car, talked about rewriting the entire system and it's definitely intresting to go a little bit of inside into that but ultimately again the question is, when can I download it to my Model S and actually have it take me to work?
I think we still have a long way to go, sorry to say.
Tim Stevens is Editor in Chief at Road show.
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