Tesla has another Cyberflop, lots of cheap Ford electric pickups, VW in trouble, and more

Fred Lambert (0:05)

We are live in the new episode of Electrek Podcasts. Remember to host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Weintraub. How are you doing, Seth?

Seth Weintraub (0:13)

I'm good.

Fred Lambert (0:14)

All right. Big show today, a lot. I think it was a huge week. We have a ton of news to talk about. We're going to talk about the Cybercab that was launched yesterday. Tesla's Full Self-Driving update coming up. Another settling of a fatal crash on autopilot. Ford is getting ambitious with the Fathom electric pickup truck. Range Rover fully unveiling their first EV, first fully electric vehicle. Polestar 4 getting the SUV treatment. A ranking of battery pack that retain their energy the best. The electric vehicles that retain their energy the best. The largest study ever yet on this. Very interesting. We're going to give you the details on that. Rivian rolling out RivianOS 2 across the entire lineup. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Volkswagen having a hard time planning to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shutting down a few factories. We're going to talk about all that. Let's start with the Cybercab. It was a Cybercab launch yesterday.

If you remember, if you were listening to the last podcast, we gave a prediction about it and we were already like, our expectation were as low as it gets. We didn't expect much from it for the main reason that at the core of it, the Cybercab doesn't solve anything for autonomy that Model Y is not already doing.

So it's just a new form factor in the very limited... Is that you?

Let me just use myself. There you go.

Seth Weintraub (2:03)

I want it again.

Fred Lambert (2:05)

Sorry about that.

All the hardware, all the software is virtually the same on Model Y. It's just a different form factor in the very limited Rubo taxi fleet. Now, despite those low expectations, we couldn't even meet that because the event wasn't really even an event itself. It was an event for the people there, but they didn't end up live streaming it, which was very disappointing for a Tesla fan that couldn't get there. And we could speculate exactly as to why they didn't live stream it. My guess would be that they didn't want something bad to happen live and they couldn't fix it. I think that's the most likely explanation. But also, as Jimmy reported earlier this week, this is a relaunching of the vehicle too. So it's not like there's much to talk about anyway.

And sure enough, there was not a ton to talk about. I mean, what they said, they open up a new website to announce the Cybercab, the Bananamu website, where fleet buyers, fleet owners can reach out to Tesla to talk about buying some of these vehicles for their own fleet to then put on the RuboTaxi network, which is something that Tesla has been saying is gonna happen since 2018 If you remember, it said the whole Tesla is now an appreciating asset. That was based on that. It was based on, you buy your Tesla and now you can put it on the, back then it was a Tesla network. Now, it's the Tesla RuboTaxi, but you could put them in that network and then it will earn money. I know of two companies that did that and went bankrupt because of it, because they couldn't make it happen. Mr. Green in Europe, at one point at 4,000 vehicles and they went bankrupt with 40 million in losses, investor money because they believed Elon when he said that. Now, they want to do it all over again with the Cybercab.

Do you think it's going to happen? Do you think some people are dumb enough that they're going to do it? They're going to be the bag-older for the Cybercab? Yeah, right.

Seth Weintraub (4:15)

For sure.

Fred Lambert (4:17)

Yeah. At this point, if you're dumb enough to do it, you're going to be competing with Tesla itself with this. Tesla is going to operate their own vehicle. How are you going to be more efficient than Tesla in operating the Cybercab?

It makes no sense to me at all because you're going to be 100% dependent on Tesla and Tesla unlocking geofence markets one after the other. You're shackling yourself to megalomaniac that's high on ketamine.

Seth Weintraub (4:51)

What's crazy about it is if Tesla truly believed that it was ready to go with the Full Self-Driving and was profitable, they wouldn't give it to anybody else.

They would do it themselves. They would invest all their money in it. The fact that they're selling it to other people is just a bad sign, to put it bluntly.