Ride the Lightning: The Tesla Unofficial Podcast is the world's longest-running weekly Tesla show, made for Tesla fans and owners by Tesla community veteran Ryan McCaffrey. Each week we'll discuss and analyze everything happening with the Cybertruck, Model 3, Model S, Model X, Model Y, Roadster, and more!
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100% confirm this as of yet, but I can confidently report that Quicksilver paint is coming to North America. So I'm told that we can expect to see Quicksilver cars on display at some, not all, some Tesla stores soon. It is possible this that that this is gonna get announced on Tuesday, which is when the earnings call is, but that piece of it, that speculation is purely my own speculation. That is not coming from a source. I just figured this has gotta be imminent if, if my source has been has heard this and is passing it along to me. So if this proves to be true, I went back and checked here. I believe it would be the first time that Tesla has added a paint color rather than replacing 1, in other words going from you know, in this case, it's going to be going from 5 paint colors to 6. This will be the first time that Tesla has added a new paint color since titanium silver metallic in 2015 for the s. That was the last time that it even predates the model x. The model 3 and the model y have never had a paint color added to them unless I'm forgetting 1, which I'm a human being, it's possible, But I did go back and check this, and I am pretty sure that that's correct. So, this would be awesome. We would finally get another color. Six colors still on grayscale, which personally I would like to see more vibrant color rather than shades of gray scale, but Quicksilver from every picture and video that I have seen looks absolutely gorgeous, certainly on the model y, which is the only car that it's currently
Anyway, let me get on to a huge run of good news. Before we get to the big topic this week, the headline topic, which is certainly not good news, and we'll just talk about there's a lot to say. Let's talk about the we'll we'll get to that. But first, this nice wave of good news story after good news story. We'll start here with a quick bit of good news for both current and obviously future cyber truck owners, the first, and I suspect not the last improvement to the supercharging speed. The supercharging curve is coming soon. Tesla's powertrain guru and battery Maestro Drew Baglino posted on X, quote, Cyber truck charge curve improvements are coming over the air later this quarter to unlock up to 154 miles recovered in 15 minutes. Now for context, Tesla currently touts the 15 minutes supercharging curve at 136 miles recovered on the cyber truck. So this over the air update will deliver a very nice, very welcome 13% improvement and all for free. Again, the end user doesn't have to pay anything, doesn't have to do anything. Sometimes I just like to remind myself of how abnormal this is in modern business, just modern corporate society and modern capitalism, I guess, for lack of a better. I know that's kinda like a that words does different things for different people, but in just the current modern day society, we're not used to getting update after update, and I should specify improvement after improvement completely free. Granted you pay a lot of money for the car. Don't get me wrong. We all know that, but free updates. Just keep coming for these cars. All
Posted on X on this topic saying, quote, hardware 4 will ultimately be better, but all training is for hardware 3 with hardware 4 running in emulation mode, end quote. Well, I wonder what better will mean in this case. The higher resolution cameras, I would think, should allow hardware 4 to more quickly and accurately identify things in its field of vision, thus making quicker and more confident decisions. Right? I mean, that's one thing. So I wonder how else it might materially and obviously be different to the end user because there's certainly gonna be back end stuff that's better for Tesla that helps them develop better software and iterate more quickly, but I wonder how else hardware 4 might prove to be materially different to the end user, and by different I'm very much meaning better in this case. Oh, by the way, here's one quick thing that I just missed on last week's podcast, and it is this, congratulations to Tesla on producing your 6 millionth vehicle. And as Tesla tipster Sawyer Merritt noted, this is how long it took Tesla to hit each cumulative car production milestone. 1,000,000 cars took 12 years. 2,000,000 cars, so 1,000,000 to 2,000,000, took 15 months. The next million, 3,000,000 was reached in 10 months, 4,000,000 7 months later, 50000006 and a half months later, and the 6000000 mark was reached 6 and a half months after the 5000000 mark was. And so if we extrapolate that out a little bit, we're probably looking at about another 6 and a half months, maybe a tad less for the next million, for 7,000,000 since
Delivery, that policy I cannot see lasting too long. Because what Elon is mandating here, and he's a smart guy, he gets this, but he's obviously dug in on it. But, boy, as as time goes on and and demand is ramping on Cybertruck and which I guess Cybertruck is the one exemption here. If you're taking delivery of a Cybertruck, you will not be getting an FSD demo because there's no autopilot at all at the moment, let alone FSD beta on any of the cyber trucks. But anyway, my point here is what Elon is mandating is going to take a lot of time, like, a lot of time. I completely get where he's coming from, but when you add this up, every single car, every single new car delivery in the in this quarter and and now that we're heading into q2 here and we'll see if the policy lasts beyond q2, the time investment just doesn't seem like it can scale with the you know, unless Tesla seriously hires a whole bunch more employees in the delivery arm of the company. So you're looking at an ever rising number of deliveries, pretty much every quarter. Like maybe this maybe q one's gonna dip a little, but you're still you are talking about on the order of half a you know, 400 to 500000 deliveries every single quarter, and that is a lot of FSD demo drives to have to give in order to try and show off and of course ultimately try to sell FSD either in the form of the $12,000 outright purchase price or the $200 month to month subscription. So I went and talked to one Tesla employee who works in deliveries. That person brought up a pretty good, point here and that is the calibration aspect of this. Now, when you read Elon's email, he specifically said
But, yeah, the the new 3 has a new daytime running light. So even during the day, you know, it's got a new kinda signature lighting element upfront, and it looks really nice. I think the the new DRL is quite nice. The the DRL on my car, you know, the existing or the outgoing threes, I guess now officially, the old model threes and the still current model y's, there's nothing fancy about it. It's just a very straightforward little very just simple little daytime running light, but the new 3 has a little bit more of a of an identity, let's say, at least when it comes to the lighting in the front of the car. So in addition, getting back to my point here about the demand and the and demand levers here at the end of the quarter, In addition to the new model 3 ramping up in q 2 by the way, I saw a Reddit commenter refer to the new model 3 this past week as the 3 Fresh and I'm really really jealous that I didn't think of that first because that's really good. It's easy to type. It's fun to say. I could have been using that for, like, the past year, the 3 Fresh. Instead of model 3 Highland or the Highland, 3 Fresh is so much more fun. Anyway, the other thing to to take into account for q2 in terms of being an improvement over q1 is that the Cybertruck will also continue to ramp up its production more in q 2. Now speaking of demand levers, since Tesla has been pulling so many of them this quarter, I thought I would make it the subject of this week's Patreon poll. So I asked all of you because you don't have to be backing me on Patreon in order to vote in each week's Patreon poll. It's free. It's open to anybody. You just swing on over to my Patreon page, which can be found at patreon.com/teslapodcast. Stop by.
