Hello, everyone, and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving, and much, much more. My name is Bodhi and I am your host and on today's episode we have news. It's going to be a shorter episode than it was than the last episode, but we still got some news. Before we get to the news, we have a little bit of clarification. A few weeks ago, Joe gave us some really good information on battery tips. And those battery tips were specifically for nickel manganese cobalt batteries or NMC batteries. with the LFP batteries. He says the caveat I need to put in there is that LFP batteries often do in need 100% charge cycles in order to accurately predict range. Technically that holds true to some extent for all batteries, but not a health thing. It's a usability thing as far as that calibration goes. So there is Joe's update on that. Thank you, Joe, very much for the clarification. And let's go ahead and jump into the news. Starting off, Jeep is not going to be building the 2026 version of the Wagoneer SEV in the United States for 2026. There's not going to be a 2026 model. I'm sure you could still pick up a 2025 model. But one of the reasons why they're not going to build the 2026 model is just picture this and jeep sold 10,864 wagoneer evs in 2025 sorry losing my voice in 2026 we're still in the 2025 model year but in 2026 they only sold 175 wagoneer evs in the entire first quarter so not a lot of not a high demand vehicle. It may even be that there's still a lot of Wagoneer S EVs in inventory. So for 2026, we're not going to get a model year 2026 Wagoneer S, but it is expected to come back in 2027. All right. A report from Cranes Detroit Business, which is, I'm guessing, an industry outlet, automotive industry outlet, they're claiming that GM is suspending their next-gen electric trucks and SUVs, and they're saying that GM will be suspending them indefinitely. Now, to be clear, that doesn't include their current-gen vehicles, that's just their next-gen. So according to Crane's Detroit business, GM was set to do a big update in 2028, for the Silverado EV, the GMC Sierra EV, the Hummer EV, and the Cadillac Escalade IQ. So not sure what's going to happen with these current generations if this report is true, but it sounds like the next generation, again, if the report is true, is, I don't know, it's not a great sign if true. GM says that when asked for comment that they do not disclose any potential plans or timing for any next generation battery electric trucks, and it will not engage in speculation. As always, we will cover GM's earnings call for Q1 2026, and hopefully an analyst will ask a question about this move, whether or not it's true, or if they can add any color. And I apologize, but my voice is going. I was at a track meet this evening, and I didn't really yell that much, but my voice is going. So let's try to get through this. BYD's new Blade batteries, we've talked about this, the Blade 2.0 batteries, will charge from 10% to 97% in less than 10 minutes, which is, you know, very impressive, as long as you're on the right charger. You don't get that for just being on a regular supercharger. You need their flash charger, which is a one and a half megawatt charger. But CATL has just introduced the third generation Xin Xin LFP battery, and it will charge from 10% to 98% in six minutes, according to CATL. and it's actually six and a half minutes but there there's about a three minute improvement in CATL's battery in terms of you know the charging speed when you compare it to BYD. Both are still very fast both are still very impressive. Now BYD or excuse me CATL broke it down in a really cool way here. If you are at 10% and you need to get to 35% charge you can do that in one minute which is very impressive if for some reason you just need to dip in and dip out but if you can stay for three minutes and 44 seconds you can charge from 10 to 80 so in less than five minutes you can pretty much get what you need in your battery to get back on the road which is super impressive that might actually be faster than filling your require with the equivalent amount of gas I don know we have to time it to see The other thing that I think is really cool here is that when it really cold outside I mean, like really cold, CATL says at negative 30 degrees Celsius or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit, right, it'll charge from 20 to 98% in as little as nine minutes. So if it's super cold outside, and that battery is, you know, batteries don't like the cold, they like it to be warm for them to accept a fast charge, you can do that in as little as nine minutes. Now, the phrasing as little is nine minutes makes me think that they were able to do it in as little as nine minutes sometimes, but it was a higher number than nine minutes other times. So, you know, if you see that number is in nine minutes that they can do this in, you know, 30 degrees Celsius weather, sometimes they can do that. I don't think that's every single time. But they use this really cool self-heating technology. They call it Pulse. I think it's Pulse technology. But what it is, this is directly off of C.A.T.L.'s website. They create a weak short circuit between the battery and the electric motor and by adjusting the electric motor control. The battery is quickly warmed up by the pulse current that forms in the high voltage loop. It saves up to two-thirds of the heating time compared to the conventional approach, they're actually able to warm the battery up six degrees Celsius per minute. So that's pretty impressive. Okie doke, that is our EV news. Before we move on to our Tesla news, just want to let everybody know, again, we have a Patreon, we have a Supercast. If you want to support the show, you can go to supportkilowatt.com. I'm not going to do the whole thing. I will spare you the pitch, but if you want to support the show, all the money goes back into the show. Just go to supportkilowatt.com and you will see both ways to support the show there. Thank you very much. All right, let's move on to our Tesla news. Tesla is hiring full self-driving vehicle operators in nine new countries. So let's start off with Asia. They're hiring in Seoul, Korea, Kowloon, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Thailand, and Mumbai, India. In the Middle East, we're looking at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Istanbul, Turkey. and then in europe vienna austria oh man i'm gonna butcher this and he's next to vilnius lithuania and voluntary romania so yeah nine new countries that's pretty cool um if you don't know a vehicle operator uh they basically drive tesla and vehicles around and they test FSD for each location. That's effectively their job. And then also, I happen to know some Romanians, and man, do those folks have stories. They have lots of stories. A lot of fun to hang out with. Anyway, moving on to our next story. Tesla is looking to build two private supercharger stations in Arizona. Take that, Austin and San Francisco. Although they did try to do this in San Francisco and right before the planning committee meeting, they pulled their permit and they said, no, no, no, we don't want to do that anymore. So, yes. So they're looking to build two private supercharger stations right here in AZ, just miles from my house. This will be the first supercharger stations specifically for their robo taxi service, meaning they're not open to the public. public. The plans were submitted to Chandler, Arizona, which is a city in the East Valley, and Mesa, Arizona, which is a little bit further east. Both fairly decent-sized cities. I don't have a lot of information on what they were asking to build, especially in Mesa. I have no information but in chandler what we do know is they're asking for 56 v4 stalls so they're going to be building 56 version 4 superchargers um and i would imagine the mace is going to be somewhere close to the same in terms of size that is nutty like um there are certainly planning to have a lot of robo-taxis in this area if they're wanting to put, we'll just say, conservatively 56 stalls in. So yeah, we will keep an eye on this story. Okay, and that brings us to our final story. I actually thought this was going to take longer to get through, but we are burning through it. Okay, so let's look at the newest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report on self-driving cars. So we're just going to kind of hit this at a high level. There's more information, obviously, that goes into this, but I'm trying to make this easy to digest over a podcast. So looking just at the numbers and crashes Waymo reported 697 crashes total AV Ride reported 41 crashes Zoox reported 32 crashes and Tesla reported 18 So why such a big discrepancy between the numbers? Well, it really comes down to fleet size. So Waymo has, you know, thousands of cars driving millions of miles across varying locations. And Tesla and Zoox and I don't know where AVRite is entirely, but they're just not that big. And then it is important to kind of mention here that the data set does not include FSD supervised. So what you and I can buy for the Tesla, it isn't included in this data. This is only for the unsupervised level four autonomous vehicle, aka robo taxi. None of the FSD level two stuff is in this report. All right, let me see here. So there is a little bit of a transparency gap when it comes to how the crashes are reported. So for example, Waymo and Zoox, when a vehicle crashes, they explained exactly what happened and we're talking about like multiple paragraphs that you can go in and read they detail the lane changes the intersection behavior the actions of the human drivers were people wearing seat belts it just goes on and on and on which is really helpful and then tesla they redact their reports so um when you when you look in in the the description area. It just says redacted. It may contain confidential business information. And that's it. They don't put anything else in there. And here's my problem with that, if I'm being honest. I think if you're going to, as a company, going to be testing on these roads, this information should be available for everybody to view. You know, as we're going to talk about in just a moment. These vehicles are getting into minor accidents. If there's injuries, they're minor injuries. They're not even that big of a deal. So what's the reason to redact the information? If Waymo, companies like Waymo and Zoox can actually provide paragraphs on what was going on, there's no reason my Tesla can't. And they owe it to the public because they are testing on public streets to be as transparent as possible. And honestly, this isn't being transparent at all. So I don't, I don't really dig that. Tesla might experience some negative press depending on, uh, on what, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to speculate, but if there was somebody out there, um, who was going to speculate, not me, but if there was somebody out there who was going to, you know, willing to speculate on this again, not me. I would guess that they would speculate that maybe somebody in the C-suite makes promises that are maybe not 100% achievable, even though what they're doing is amazing. It doesn't, you know, what the cars are doing doesn't always match up with the narrative that's being given. So maybe that's why they redact it. I don't know. I mean, that person that is speculating that. I don't really agree with them 100%. But, you know, that's what they're speculating. And again, not me, just them. Okay. All right. So let's talk about accidents. So when a Waymo crashes, it tends to be in heavy traffic and it tends to involve other cars. Again, Waymo's in a lot more places than those other companies that we mentioned. Of the 697 incidents, 613 of them were only property damage, so no injuries reported. When it comes to injuries, all of the injuries, as far as I know, were minor, but 23 incidents required hospitalization. Now, here's what I'm going to caution us on here. When we see required hospitalization, we need to be very careful because one, unless somebody is unconscious or altered in some way, you are not required to ever go to the hospital. You know, if you're unconscious, we assume that you would want to go to the hospital and be treated. Or if you're altered in some way, if you have low blood sugar, you're inebriated, or, you know, you have something else going on that makes you altered, we would assume that you would want to go to the hospital. But if you're in your right frame of mind and you have your leg dangling off, or maybe even you're missing it entirely, and you say, I don't want to go to the hospital, we don't take you to the hospital. There are very few cases, incidents where you're required to go to the hospitalization hospital. Now, I don't think that that's what they mean in this case, but the way that they're putting this, it makes it feel to me like the incident was bad enough for the person to go to the hospital. that isn't the case either you know we are not in the habit of declining people's right if people want to go to the hospital so if somebody's in a minor accident there's no damage to either vehicle and this has happened before no damage to either vehicle and somebody says they want to go to the hospital we take them to the hospital did that require hospitalization probably not but we took them so it was because it was their choice so that is you know we got to be careful just because somebody went to the er does not mean that they were they were required to go to the er or maybe even they met the status or the the uh maybe they just went to the hospital because they wanted to be sure. They wanted to just kind of double check. And that's okay. We do that all the time. Also, when I see required hospitalization, that also means to me, when I read that, it means to me that this person needed to stay at least one night at the hospital. In even serious car accidents, I mean, not like super serious car accidents, But even in serious car accidents where somebody might have maybe a slight concussion or something like that, people are generally out within a few hours. They don't usually get admitted to the actual hospital. They're usually at the ER and then they get treated and moved on. So, yeah. So there's that as well. The way that it's written to me sounds worse than it probably is, is what I'm saying. So, let's see, 51 incidents were minor injuries, but required no hospital visit. Again, the required thing, I mean, if somebody's leg is falling off, like I have literally run on a gentleman who was shot in the leg. He didn't shoot himself. Somebody else shot him. Not only did he not talk to the cops, he also did not want to go to the hospital. He said he'd take care of himself. And he needed to go. He had a bullet hole went through the outside of his thigh and it traveled through and probably hit his femur somewhere in there. And then there was an exit wound. so yeah i mean he needed to go to the hospital but he didn't want to so we didn't take him he wouldn't even let us take his blood pressure so anyway let's move on to to tesla so when tesla had reported incidents it was more often that they hit some sort of stationary object you know some of the things listed were curbs, poles, cyclists, animal, a bus. Um, for all of all 18 of Tesla's crashes, the FSD unsupervised, the level four was activated, but yeah, uh, you know, overall, I don't think these numbers are awful. Like it, it, it's never fun to be in an accident. And as a matter of fact, today, when I was coming home from my kids track meet, I was driving alongside a lady and older lady. And she she was sitting super close to the steering wheel. And I could see because it was getting dark. I could see her phone and she had her phone not off to the side, like directly in front of her face. And she had two hands on her phone while she was driving. in in that situation i would much rather uh have her in an autonomous vehicle like a waymo or a tesla even if there's a risk of them getting into a minor accident because that lady's probably going to get into more than a minor accident i mean she could literally blow through a crosswalk and and take somebody out uh now could a waymo do that yeah uh sure but it's it's more likely that she's going to do it and she it was at least a mile i i followed her for at least a mile i didn't honk at her because i didn't want to startle her but i did try to make her feel uncomfortable um but she didn't she was just in the phone and like when i say in the phone like two hands on the phone, pinch to zoom that whole thing. I don't know what she was doing. And I probably shouldn't have been paying that much attention to her. But I also didn't want to get in front of her and then have her hit me. So yeah. Anyway, I'll take the minor accidents over what that lady was doing is really what I'm saying here. Okay, everybody, that is it for today. it's like 11 o'clock on Tuesday so I will I recorded this on Tuesday I'm going to release it on Wednesday morning and then on Friday's show we will have Tesla's Q1 2026 earnings call so I hope everybody had a great weekend and I hope you have an amazing week and if you want to email me it's bodee at 918digital.com you can find me on LinkedIn if you just search Bodie Grimm it's B-O-D-I-E G-R-I-M-M and yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna end this before my voice goes I feel like I kind of got some of it back but it's I'm losing it again so thanks everybody and I will talk to you soon We'll be right back.
