Get in test with technology with text Stuff from how stuff dot com. We're there, we won and welcome to text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren foc Obama, and we are going to continue our discussion about Tesla Motors, the company that strives to bring electric vehicles to everyone as long as you have lots of money, lots of money right now. They have they had solid plans for the future, and it's really impressive for a company that's only been around since two thousand three, right, especially for a company that went through so much public turmoil. I mean, there were a lot of moments that we talked about in our last episode where you could have looked at that at the time and thought, Okay, the writings on the wall, this company is not going to last. But it lasts. It's still around. I mean, you can you can buy Tesla's now, so yeah. Yeah. At the end of our previous episode, we were talking specifically about some of the financial problems that were happening um and during which Elon Musk talked to his brother Kimball and went like, I really just need just a little bit more private funding. And one of the things that Kimball said to him, was like, are you sure, Are you sure that's what you need right now? Like, are you sure it's going to be worth it? Right? And? Uh, you know, Musk is a determined individual. I think you would say, especially if you'd listen to our episode that we recorded about Elon Musk last year. Uh, he's he's certainly, he's got He's got that vision and the determination to follow through to achieve that vision. That is pretty important in this kind of industry. So August two thousand nines where we're picking up, and that is when Tesla Motors relocates its headquarters from San Carlos to Palo Alto. Over the course of two thousand nine, they would produce about eight hundred roadsters um and managed to get the production cost down to some thousand dollars a piece, which is a lot better than the hundred and forty thousand dollars a piece that they were operating at a couple of years previous, especially since they were selling them at a hundred nine thousand dollars a piece. So now they're selling them at a profit profit as opposed to add a loss. Yeah, it's a in general, I mean, I don't know a lot about business, but I do know that you generally want to sell something for more money than it costs you to make it. Uh at least that's I mean, I probably a missing something here. But in January, Tesla registered for an initial public offering, which is kind of interesting because, like we said, they had just you know, asked the government for four hundred and sixty plus million dollar a loan, but they were getting ready for it, so they were registering it. And that's not exactly when they held it, but that's when they registered. UM. The key to that loan, if you remember from our previous episode, was that Tesla had to have a mass production facility UM and they did not have that yet. But in March of Musk secretly toward Knew Me, which was a or is a two acre vehicle production plant in Freeman, California that's valued some like one billion dollars UM. It belonged at the time to Toyota and General Motors. Well. GM had backed out of the plant UM in two thousand nine after declaring bankruptcy, and Toyota was planning on stopping production the following month and in April, so this plant was basically up for grabs, and no one else in the auto industry was doing well enough to really want to take it over. Yeah, that global financial crisis had really hit the auto industry, particularly in the United States, really really hard. Akio Toyota, that the president of Toyota himself had actually arranged this tour for Elon Musk and would develop a friendship with Musk over the next couple of months. Uh, they like test drove the roadster together and like towards SpaceX and bonded over through you what. Yeah, I know that happened. There, there's journalistic evidence of this thing. You mean that maybe one day I too might be able to sit across the table from Elon Musket and Joyce fro you. I think I think it's possible, especially if you become the president of a multinational corporation that ask can greatly profit from. Oh it's nothing but a gravy train from myro on outfolks. All right, So May two thousand ten, Tesla ends up buying that plant. Yeah, for just forty two million dollars. You just told me it was worth a billion. That is exactly what I said. But you know, it's it's that thing where really no one else was in a position to buy it, and they were fro Yo buddies at this point. So so yeah, you know, nothing, nothing really greases the wheels, like like Oreo, Like an Oreo crumbled Froyo. But yeah, sotwo million dollars. This incredible, right, Yeah, Meska had budgeted that amount for a much more modest factory and and ended up with this massive place, this massive place. Yeah. And and Tesla and Toyota also announced an agreement. Oh yeah, they said they were going to start developing electric vehicles together at Toyota agreed to purchase shares in Teslas. So in June, Tesla has its initial public offering and joins the NASDAK Stock Exchange. Now, that public offering was very successful, at ray more than two twenty six million dollars, and it was the first American car company to complete an I p O since Ford's way back in Yeah. So at that point, right, this is the same wired piece that a quote from our previous episode had had been in. Right, that's when Elon Musk said, at that point, every day was like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. I'm not positive that was a dramatic reinterpretation, you guys, um, but uh, yeah, that's that. That was a quote from two eight or so when things were really not looking very good for for for Musk and for Tesla, and so things had turned around at this point a whole lot. Musk at this point said, I'm not staring into the abyss of death anymore. I'm just eating glass now. It's like sunshine and puppy dogs. Uh. And And that that wired piece, by the way, is how Elon Musk turned Tesla into the car company of the future, by one Joshua Davis. And it's a really triffic piece. I'll try to remember to link it on social so that you guys can enjoy it as well. Yeah, it's great. It's a great resource for this this whole podcast. In January two thousand eleven, Tesla reports its financial results and they have to do this so publicly traded company has to report part of the because you have the responsibility to your shareholders as well as the government, and revealed that it lost a hundred fifty four point three million dollars in twenty ten, not a big not a big surprise. I mean again, because the roadster was really the only thing they had, uh as to sell. They had received some investment money and alone, but they hadn't They didn't have any more product to move yet, right, and they still weren't producing a whole whole lot of them. Yeah. In fact, roadster eventually, I mean spoiler alert, eventually the the full number of roadsters that they produced was somewhere just south of two thousand, five hundred, so not that many. Now we skip ahead a whole year, so let's all go dolululu little in January two twelve now, and Peter Rawlinson, who was vice president and chief engineer, and Nick Sampson, who was a vehicle and chassis engineering supervisor, both resign on the same day. At the as soon as the news breaks, shares drop nineteen per cent. So it's part of the problem here is that, uh, both of these guys were very heavily involved in developing the models, and the fear was that this was going to lead to some sort of problem with the model lesque production and that people lost confidence in tesla Um. And also they decided to do something else that was a little radical. Uh yeah, that that is when they in fact ended production on the roadster before I could get one. Were you planning on getting a roadster? Plan is a strong word, dream or hope? Are you planning on getting a driver's license? I know I was playing on getting a driver and a roadster. The hard part is sitting in the back of a car that only has two seats. That that part I hadn't figured out yet. But anyway, February two thousand and twelve, that's when Tesla unveils a new vehicle. Yeah, the Model X, which is an Suv yep, to go on sale in early it's not it's they're they're supposed to be delivered sometime this year. But although in another spoiler alert here, if you were to put in an order right now, it would essentially be a pre order. They can't guarantee delivery till two thousand fifteen, so I'm telling you guys know. But but they were. They were taking five thousand dollar deposits for the vehicle, and it has my favorite feature of a vehicle ever. So now, okay, if the roadster can't be mine, I'm not a big suv guy in general, but this one I would get for this one feature. It has freaking goal wing doors, you know, like the yea yeah, and hey, hey that would have a back seat, so you could have a driver. That's right, that's all right. I can have my driver driving around in the electric STV. Okay, got a new goal. I'm all right, I've recentered myself. So May two thousand twelve, Tesla announces it will begin delivering Model S cars to customers starting on June twelve. And then on June twelve, they had an Apple like launch event where they started to deliver the first Model S vehicles in person and for the first three anyway. Uh I watched the video on this and it was definitely very much like an Apple event, although I guess it was more of an internal company event that press were invited to. I think it was mostly Tesla employees and it was more of a you guys, we did it. This was something that people said was impossible. Everyone kept saying that, uh, it was the company was not in good shape, that the global crisis had caused us to lose sight of everything. That never happened. It out here it is. And at that time there were ten owls and reservations for the models, and most of those people had never seen one, let alone Saturn one let alone driven in one. So that's that's a lot of promise. Yeah, and you've got, Yeah, you've got. Some might say it's a little cultish. It reminds me of another car company, the Saturn Car Company, where people who got Saturn's early on. Did you ever meet anyone remember some of the hype surrounding it, But I didn't know anyone at the time. Now, yeah, well, Tesla they talked about being a community, especially the roadster community early on because those very few people, very exclusive, right, But same sort of thing, Like it was this idea that you're being inducted into this sort of exclusive club. But also because you shared this vision of an electric car future with zero G emissions. I mean this was a big deal for a lot of people. Sure. Speaking of cults, has that cult going? The cult of Matt? Oh, the Matt one. Yeah. See, I'm not allowed to talk about that. I also can't talk to my family anymore. But other than that, it's great. This is all Ben, Ben and Matt of stuff. They don't want you to inducted Jonathan into a call they did. I'm not sure if Scott bought in. Its kind of a holdout. Yeah, it's Okay, we have people watching his house all the time. But if you go to their YouTube channel you can check out Jonathan on that. Yeah, it's fantastic. So getting back to the model s, it's a four door sedan. This is that that luxury sedan that they had been talking about years before, right and they here it is finally coming out. It has an optional seating for seven. As it turns out, there's a lot of extra cargo capacity when you remove the need for exhaust systems and thermal shieldings so that you don't cook your passengers like eggs on an engine block, the catalytic converters and etcetera, etcetera. It's also the body is made mostly of aluminum instead of steel to cut down on weight, obviously very important so that you can not have to use as much power to move the vehicle. Uh And unlike the Roadster, it actually had two battery options, so you had one that would give you the bigger battery package option would give you three hundred six miles of range or about four kilometers on a single charge, and the smaller had more arrange that was closer to the Roadster, which was about two hundred forty four miles or around three kilometers. Now, it was also designed to be very aerodynamic to cut down on drags, so again to try further reduce the load on that battery exactly, and it had regenerative breaking to again reduce the load on the battery some more. And uh, you know, the recharging thing still kind of an issue, especially since some people just can't get over that idea that oh, I want to be able to drive as far as I want, whenever I want, and not worry about running out of juice. Well, it has a mobile connector that can plug into a hundred ten vault or two hundred forty volt outlets. Uh. But you know, usually you would just plug it in at night. If you were to plug it into one of these outlets, you would get only a fract faction of your full range. So yeah, if you were on the road and you wanted to charge your car, Uh, let's say you go to a public charging station and you recharge the battery at a rate where you get about twenty two miles or kilometers for every hour of charge. Some can charge a little faster than that. A two forty volt outlet will provide thirty one miles or fifty kilometers of range per hour of charge. But they're super charger stations, and I'll talk more about them in a little bit, but they can provide one seventy miles or two hundred seventy four kilometers of range for just thirty minutes of charge, and that's pretty incredible. Still, it's a half hour, right, It's a lot different than it's much more cumbersome than pulling up to a gas station and being out in under ten minutes. Yeah, So that that's something that some people still ball cat, even though I think most of us if we were to actually right down how many miles we traveled in a typical day, I think for most of us it would be significantly below the range of the Tesla. Again, some people, obviously are are exceptions, but I think the majority of us would be able to uh comfortably drive that range and then plug in at night and be fine the next day. Of course, if you forget to plug in your car, then you're you know, up the creek. So the car has a frunk, which is a front trunk of that work. I don't approve of it, it does. It just sounds dirty, but that it's got it's got a frank. But yeah, I don't I don't like the that that version of front trunk either. I mean having a front trunk awesome. That's fine. By calling calling it a fronk not good. But yes, you can store stuff there excellent. Well. And the Roadster just like the Roadster, it has an electric motor and fixed gear drive, but it has a liquid cool power train. Unlike the Roadsters, which, as you recall from the last episode, exactly it just brought in air from the vents, this one had a liquid cooling system and again it uses lithium ion batteries just like the Roadster did. One of the big shiny elements of this car was it's or is it's seen UM touch screen for all of the controls and UM media communication. You can you can do everything from controlling the temperature in the cabin or know all that kind of stuff. There's some people who I know have said that that was a little scary to have a big panel that could be distracting to the driver but sor that could electrically short out and stop stop giving you, you know, importantality and information UM. But chief designer friends von holtz Heusen said, uh, it's like the leap of faith Apple took with the iPhone. There's a cleanliness to the interior and the screen is the hero. We're in the midst of a transition toward a new way of thinking. For me, that's an iPhone moment, and it is an impressive display. I mean, i've I've I've only seen pictures of them, because George is not one of those places. We we live in Georgia, and George is not one of those places that has a lot of the supercharger stations. In fact, we have one, and it's in Savannah, which, for those who are not familiar with Georgia geography, is way the heck away from Atlanta, about five hours travel time by car. Yeah, so you're not gonna see a lot of these. Not saying that no one has them in Atlanta. I'm sure there are a few, but I haven't had a chance to see one in person, but I've seen the pictures and they are pretty so. When it launched, they had talked about the base price of the lower end models without any options on it or anything, was around sixty thousand dollars, and the one with the larger battery pack was around eighty thousand. Um, those numbers are different from today's numbers. And also they changed year to year and based upon all the different options. So that was the idea of when it first launched. Um. And also there was this optional third row seat that that idea that seventh, it wasn't that you would set three people in the front and four people in the back or something. You know, it's meant just for children. And it meant that they also had to put in extra safety features. Sure. Well, the this this third row was facing backwards, and uh, if customers order the car in this layout, it includes a special rear bumper like like double bumper in the back. Yeah, it meant more there was more crumpled space there in case of a rear collision. So if if a collision happened at highway speeds, then uh, it would be just as safe from the rear as it would be from the front. So uh, and we'll talk more about its safety record when we get into the second half. In fact, this is a good place to take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we've worked our way up to September two thousand and twelve, the models has come out and at this point, Tesla announces that will build out that supercharging network that I had talked about. So the super charging stations were places that are our places rather where people can quickly recharge their Tesla vehicles. They use this proprietor arry kind of of connection between the supercharger and their vehicle, and for absolutely free of charge for any Tesla user, they can start to recharge their car and after about half an hour they've got you know, a hundred seventy mile range. Like we said in the earlier part of this podcast, they would announce a year later the the option to have um in instead of sitting there for half an hour and charging your car, just swapping out the battery pack, which can take as little as nine seconds. Yeah, yeah, there was. There was one demo where they showed it being done in something like thirty seconds. But this was you know, in a in a scenario that was specifically engineered to be as fast as it possibly could be, all right, and that is for a service fee. And I think that the formula that they use is is the market price of fifteen gallons of gas, which they estimate to be somewhere between sixty and eighty dollars. Yeah, that's exactly what I've heard as well. So in other words, you can if you if you have the time, you can sit around for half an hour and let your car recharge, or if you're gonna get going, you can dish out the sixty to eighty bucks or whatever the equivalent is at that given moment and get a new battery switched in and it'll be fully charged and does give you a full range of travel. Again. So the other thing about this proprietary technology is it means that only model S vehicles can um plug into this stuff. So it's not like there's any kind of uh market sensibility to to get these things into as many charging stations as possible. It's really just based on Tesla putting them in. Yeah, because if you drive any electric vehicle from any other manufacturer, you cannot take advantage of these superchargers. Um So it's it's kind of uh, it's kind of Tesla guaranteeing that they're going to have an invested base because they've they're built, they're the ones actually putting the infrastructure out there. They're not depending upon other UH entities to do that. So far, they have built seventy nine of those supercharger stations in the U s um it's a it's a mostly West coast trail. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. If you look at the map, um, imagine that it starts in Seattle. It didn't really start in Seattle, but just think of it. It looks like it's looks like it's a snake in a way that the one end of it is in Seattle. Then goes down the West coast with lots of stations in California, starts to loop inward. You guys who are not from the United States are going to get a really weird sense of geography here. But starts the loop inward and goes into Arizona and New Mexico before arches northward and goes into the upper Midwest States. Lots of stations in Chicago, so once you get to Illinois, there's a good cluster there. Then it continues into the northeastern part of the United States, then trails down the East coast, which is where we get you know, the one in station goes down into Florida, and then you have a disconnected pocket of supercharged stations in eastern Texas. In fact, Bernie Burns of of Rooster teeth has a model s Tesla and talks about how it's great. He loves it, and he loves the supercharge stations, and he's frustrated about a certain law that we will talk about in a little bit. But yes, Um, Tesla plans to continue building out this network of stations to get better coverage, and in fact says that they estimate by the end of two thousand fourteen they'll have eight percent of the United States covered in parts of Canada as well, and by the end of two thousand fifte percent of the country should be covered, so that you should have a supercharger within range of your vehicle and another one within range of that one. Meanwhile, Europe does have a few yeah, yeah, more than a dozen. Yes, that's how many they have right now. And I didn't see any indication on the website about Tesla's plans to build that infrastructure out very much. I would imagine that they do plan on doing it, but they didn't have any numbers like the eighty or that they had for the United States. I'm sure that as sticky as the legal situations here in the States are right now, Um, probably they're they're trying to They're they're picking which fish they are going to fry at which time. Frying fish is a very delicate procedure. It is. But in two thousand thirteen, in February, Musk had his his little tiff with the New York Times. Oh right, that was when John Broder wrote this this kind of hypercritical article of the model asque called stalled out on Tesla's electric highway. Yeah. He claimed that that he ended up losing juice um and that the Tesla vehicle did not adequately warn him, and Musk ended up writing an extremely detailed blog post where they took lots of metrics straight from the car from the car, that right, and they said, look, we looked at what you did in our car, and it's not the same thing as what you said in the article. In fact, you wing two. When you were charging it, you said that you need to go sixty one miles. The vehicle had indicated that you had enough of a charge for thirty two miles, and then you stopped charging and started driving away, and you still went fifty one miles. And then we're surprised, apparently when you didn't go the full sixty sound miles. Yeah, so what Musk was saying, is that you are not being honest, You're being disingenuous with this report. And there was a lot of back and forth between Broder and Mosque and The New York Times in general, and eventually Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, offered a quasi apology, saying that there was some errors in precision, but not in integrity. So it's almost like a very double speak kind of apology. Yeah, so the end of the day didn't hurt Tesla's sales at all. People still had interest in the model s So this review didn't didn't end up um or this article, I guess I should say, didn't end up having a huge impact. Though Musk at the time had claimed that because of that, from a corporate standpoint, they lost about a hundred million dollars in potential potential investment. I I honestly think that it was It wound up driving positive hype for the company um and at any rate, by Tesla would have its first ever profitable quarter. YEP, they made five sixty two million dollars in revenue. I have no idea how much they made in profit because I don't know what their costs were and uh I pulled this information from their initial report, so I'm sure there was a more specific report that goes into the profit. But consumer reports, Um, they had some nice things to say, right Uh yeah, unlike unlike the New York Times. They gave the models their highest rating for a car ever, which was out of there a hundred point scale. Now, meanwhile, there were some other competitor companies that were also trying to get into this electric car market. Uh. And they included companies like Coda and Fisker, and both of these had been struggling for a while. Coda would end up going bankrupt the week before Tesla announced its profitable quarter, and Fisker would eventually follow suit, declaring bankruptcy later on. Uh so you know this. This was again another story about how Tesla was able to defy the odds and and see success while other companies were trying to do the same thing. We're failing right right Um. As of Junior or June and or July of Tesla paid back that four d and sixty five million dollar loan from the Department of Energy and simultaneously raised a billion dollars from investors. That's pretty impressive that is also the time period that they started announcing those battery swapping stations that we were just talking about a moment ago. And so then in August two thousand thirteen, Tesla announces that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration awarded the Model S a five star safety rating across all categories and sub categories. And according to a press release on Tesla's website, they said that the combined score technically, like when they would show scores, that five was the top, but in reality it could go a little higher than five. It's just that they would say it's a five star rating. They so that there's ended up being a five point four, which was the highest that any car had ever received as far as safety rating is concerned. And this included I think the car that they sent over for testing was one that had that seventh additional seat, and so you know, they decided they tested this thing by doing lots of crumple zones. They said that the but the fact that has a frunk means that has a bigger crumple zone because it doesn't have that engine block there, so that helps protect the driver and passengers from head on collision. They also strengthened the car's sides, They strengthened the back. In fact, one of the Tesla representatives said, you know, technically there are ways you can gain the system because you know which ways they're going to test the vehicle. So so what we did was we strengthened those parts of the vehicles first and then said, okay, how do we make the rest of the car as strong as these strong points. Yeah, and and a few of those other really basic electric car um contrivances, uh necessities really mean that the the overall strength of the car can can be based on the underbelly. It can be completely flat, which can allow you to cut down on on a lot of annoying stuff like a like road vibration and stuff like that, and and also make it much more U crash compatible. Right, and also it's got a you know, the fact that you've got the battery pack down there beneath the floor pan means that has a very low center of gravity, which actually helps not only in the handling but instability. It means it's really hard to flip it over. In fact, they said that in the tests where they were you know, trying to flip the car, they had to go through extreme measures in order to get the car to flip because the center gravity was so low. Perhaps in response to this innoc hoper m, a bunch of kind of sensationalistic news stories began popping up about fires breaking out and model SS And to be fair, these these fires were popping up in cars that had that had just been in a crash. Um and I haven't heard any stories of these fires getting past the cars safety firewalls into the passenger compartments. It was all just in the confined to the battery. And uh uh, some of the emergency response teams that showed up didn't know entirely how to deal with an electric car fire as opposed to a a gasoline engine fire. The method of dealing and containing that kind of thing is pretty pretty different. Yet um and Uh Musk and True Musk style post a really calmly derisive blog response about how driving around with large tanks of highly flammable fuel really isn't um more safe than his electric batteries. So sends a lot like saying that, hey, just because he used bitcoins to launder money, you know what else is used to under money? Dollar bills way more as it turns out same, SAME's worth of thing. It's it's funny that we're recording these episodes so close together, and and the themes are so close. February two fourteen, Tesla announced a planned five billion dollar giga factory factory. Yeah, I can't help but think of quagmire. Uh, this giga factory, this is just to produce um there's lithium ion batteries four vehicles. Yeah, and in fact, this would be an attempt to make them easier to get to because as it turns out, Uh, there are several large companies that supply lithium ion batteries, but Tesla's pretty much beholden to them, right. That's that's where it's the only source they can go to to get these. They say that they're planned twenty twenty production using this factory building these lithium ion batteries, that the the amount they produced in that factory would actually be more than the global cell supply in two thousand thirteen. So in this one factory they would be able to make more cells that would be assembled into batteries than they could get if they had the the corner on the global market right now. Yeah, and and this is all part of the third step of that plan that we talked about in our first episode for for the company to uh, you know, first produce a sports car and then produce a Family Sedana luxury Family Sedan granted, but then to begin producing electric cars for the common person. Yeah, and so uh they say that this twenty twenty production would allow them to create to produce as many as half a million vehicles in a year once it goes online. So they're looking right now, it's the factory is not built. They're looking at different potential sites to build this factory. Uh. They first went ahead and discounted California, so it's not going to be there. They said that it will probably be in either Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, or maybe Texas. But although at this point it's looking like maybe not Texas. Yeah. So March two thousand fourteen, Texas had already passed this law that I'm about to talk about. But this is when New Jersey joins Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and Arizona by passing legislation that bands Tesla from using direct sales to sell cars to customers. Right, as we said earlier, Tesla uses direct sales, they don't go through a third party dealership, um. And dealerships don't really like that so much. No, And in fact, they often have a lot of political sway of particularly in certain states like I don't know, Texas. So you get into these the states where you have politicians who say no, you know, Tesla needs to play by the same rules that these automakers are playing. They do also claim that it's better for shoppers and owners alike to be dealing with third party party sellers um, and that that's going to encourage competition. Yeah. I don't know, Lauren. Have you ever gone to a dealership where someone told you that whatever car you were interested in was not the right car for you? I have, Um, I have so many opinions about car dealerships and the way that they sell cars. I have gone through this process twice in my life, and um I I don't genuinely hate many things, but car dealerships are something that I have that it's like, it's like flames on the side face. Yeah, No, I mean, I mean burning fiery passion. So see, this is it's interesting to me because Tesla's approach otherwise is very much like apples Now. Now, granted, you can buy Apple and other stores, so it's not it's not completely analogous, but but it's pretty vertical. I mean, yeah, Apple has its own store that you can go to and you can buy from Apple. You can either buy it online or you can go to the physical store and buy it there. Uh, but you can also go to Best Buy or whatever and buy Apples. That's some of those. But in this case, Tesla is very much like the pure Apple experience, saying you come to us, we will sell you a car. And these states have said you cannot do that, and in fact, uh, at least not in our state. So if you want to buy a Tesla and you live in one of these states, you have to leave the state first to buy it. You can bring it back to here, then that's fine. Yeah, it's not. It's not the driving the vehicle in New Jersey or Texas is illegal. It's not, but it's illegal to purchase it the way Tesla sells it. So people like like Bernie Burns that I mentioned, have to leave their home state to go and purchase a car that they want. I mean, like I said, Texas even has some of those supercharger stations available. They have some of the infrastructure, but they still have this law that says you cannot buy direct from Tesla, which is one of the reasons why some people think that Tesla may not choose Texas to be the home for that gigaf fector or perhaps Arizona at that point. Yeah. True, Yeah, so it may be that Nevada is gonna win out on that one. We'll see. But anyway, these days you could buy a models if you have the you know, the wherewithal. There's also the Model x A, right, you can put down a reservation for that, although like we said earlier, like Jonathan said earlier, Um, the deliveries of those are if if if you preserve today, are not planned to be in right, so there should be Model x is on the road before the end of this year. I don't think any have rolled off the assembly lines yet from the customers that I'm personally aware of. And the roadster is officially off of the market, so I'm sure that a few of them are floating around here, and that like a you know, fifty grand or so, you might might be able to pick up a used one. Uh anyway, So yeah, that's the story. Of Tesla Motors so far. It actually, to me is a remarkable story on multiple fronts. For one thing, the idea of a company that is coming at the electric car problem from a totally different direction than other companies do. Write other companies coming in from let's let's really target the echo environmentally friendly market. Tesla says, let's go with these cars can be sexy. Yeah, let's go with a really high end user and and and convince them convinced the world that this is something that they want. And and you know, therefore, by trickle down effect go you know, when when they put out something that's cheaper, have the common guy go like, oh man, that's that company that makes those incredibly sexy cars. I want incredibly sexy cars. Especially since by that time they've built out a lot of the infrastructure that you would need to charge your vehicle if you ever had to do it when you're out on the road. That makes it practical. So I think really savvy. Yeah, they went about it in a really really interesting way. Obviously it wasn't smooth sailing to make the entire time smooth road sailing. Yes, yeah, And by the way, we're not suggested that Tesla cars are like boats. Um. Anyway, it will be really interested to see how this goes. I'm very curious to see in the next five or six years what kind of of the lower cost cars Tesla comes out with, assuming that they do continue on that path. Yeah, I'm excited about that potential Giga factory thing. Yeah. I would love to be able to to see Tesla dealerships or stores what I guess they're technically stores pop up in a lot more places to to and uh maybe even see competing um companies come out with their own electric vehicles that are just as compelling to to the average driver as the Tesla has been so um. Yeah, and plus it also means that we're going to see other alternatives as well, like the hydrogen fuel cell cars. It's really exciting to me to see this kind of development away from the internal combustion engine as we are all familiar. So if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech stuff, here's the thought. Let's know about them. Don't just whisper it quietly into your pillow at night. We can't hear that anymore, and I say, has told us to cut that out. But if you would send us an email, send that to tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on the social networks we frequent, which include Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. We use the handle tech Stuff hs W and you should too, and we will talk to you again, really soon

Get in test with technology with text Stuff from how stuff dot com. We're there, we won and welcome to text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren foc Obama, and we are going to continue our discussion about Tesla Motors, the company that strives to bring electric vehicles to everyone as long as you have lots of money, lots of money right now. They have they had solid plans for the future, and it's really impressive for a company that's only been around since two thousand three, right, especially for a company that went through so much public turmoil. I mean, there were a lot of moments that we talked about in our last episode where you could have looked at that at the time and thought, Okay, the writings on the wall, this company is not going to last. But it lasts. It's still around. I mean, you can you can buy Tesla's now, so yeah. Yeah. At the end of our previous episode, we were talking specifically about some of the financial problems that were happening um and during which Elon Musk talked to his brother Kimball and went like, I really just need just a little bit more private funding. And one of the things that Kimball said to him, was like, are you sure, Are you sure that's what you need right now? Like, are you sure it's going to be worth it? Right? And? Uh, you know, Musk is a determined individual. I think you would say, especially if you'd listen to our episode that we recorded about Elon Musk last year. Uh, he's he's certainly, he's got He's got that vision and the determination to follow through to achieve that vision. That is pretty important in this kind of industry. So August two thousand nines where we're picking up, and that is when Tesla Motors relocates its headquarters from San Carlos to Palo Alto. Over the course of two thousand nine, they would produce about eight hundred roadsters um and managed to get the production cost down to some thousand dollars a piece, which is a lot better than the hundred and forty thousand dollars a piece that they were operating at a couple of years previous, especially since they were selling them at a hundred nine thousand dollars a piece. So now they're selling them at a profit profit as opposed to add a loss. Yeah, it's a in general, I mean, I don't know a lot about business, but I do know that you generally want to sell something for more money than it costs you to make it. Uh at least that's I mean, I probably a missing something here. But in January, Tesla registered for an initial public offering, which is kind of interesting because, like we said, they had just you know, asked the government for four hundred and sixty plus million dollar a loan, but they were getting ready for it, so they were registering it. And that's not exactly when they held it, but that's when they registered. UM. The key to that loan, if you remember from our previous episode, was that Tesla had to have a mass production facility UM and they did not have that yet. But in March of Musk secretly toward Knew Me, which was a or is a two acre vehicle production plant in Freeman, California that's valued some like one billion dollars UM. It belonged at the time to Toyota and General Motors. Well. GM had backed out of the plant UM in two thousand nine after declaring bankruptcy, and Toyota was planning on stopping production the following month and in April, so this plant was basically up for grabs, and no one else in the auto industry was doing well enough to really want to take it over. Yeah, that global financial crisis had really hit the auto industry, particularly in the United States, really really hard. Akio Toyota, that the president of Toyota himself had actually arranged this tour for Elon Musk and would develop a friendship with Musk over the next couple of months. Uh, they like test drove the roadster together and like towards SpaceX and bonded over through you what. Yeah, I know that happened. There, there's journalistic evidence of this thing. You mean that maybe one day I too might be able to sit across the table from Elon Musket and Joyce fro you. I think I think it's possible, especially if you become the president of a multinational corporation that ask can greatly profit from. Oh it's nothing but a gravy train from myro on outfolks. All right, So May two thousand ten, Tesla ends up buying that plant. Yeah, for just forty two million dollars. You just told me it was worth a billion. That is exactly what I said. But you know, it's it's that thing where really no one else was in a position to buy it, and they were fro Yo buddies at this point. So so yeah, you know, nothing, nothing really greases the wheels, like like Oreo, Like an Oreo crumbled Froyo. But yeah, sotwo million dollars. This incredible, right, Yeah, Meska had budgeted that amount for a much more modest factory and and ended up with this massive place, this massive place. Yeah. And and Tesla and Toyota also announced an agreement. Oh yeah, they said they were going to start developing electric vehicles together at Toyota agreed to purchase shares in Teslas. So in June, Tesla has its initial public offering and joins the NASDAK Stock Exchange. Now, that public offering was very successful, at ray more than two twenty six million dollars, and it was the first American car company to complete an I p O since Ford's way back in Yeah. So at that point, right, this is the same wired piece that a quote from our previous episode had had been in. Right, that's when Elon Musk said, at that point, every day was like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. I'm not positive that was a dramatic reinterpretation, you guys, um, but uh, yeah, that's that. That was a quote from two eight or so when things were really not looking very good for for for Musk and for Tesla, and so things had turned around at this point a whole lot. Musk at this point said, I'm not staring into the abyss of death anymore. I'm just eating glass now. It's like sunshine and puppy dogs. Uh. And And that that wired piece, by the way, is how Elon Musk turned Tesla into the car company of the future, by one Joshua Davis. And it's a really triffic piece. I'll try to remember to link it on social so that you guys can enjoy it as well. Yeah, it's great. It's a great resource for this this whole podcast. In January two thousand eleven, Tesla reports its financial results and they have to do this so publicly traded company has to report part of the because you have the responsibility to your shareholders as well as the government, and revealed that it lost a hundred fifty four point three million dollars in twenty ten, not a big not a big surprise. I mean again, because the roadster was really the only thing they had, uh as to sell. They had received some investment money and alone, but they hadn't They didn't have any more product to move yet, right, and they still weren't producing a whole whole lot of them. Yeah. In fact, roadster eventually, I mean spoiler alert, eventually the the full number of roadsters that they produced was somewhere just south of two thousand, five hundred, so not that many. Now we skip ahead a whole year, so let's all go dolululu little in January two twelve now, and Peter Rawlinson, who was vice president and chief engineer, and Nick Sampson, who was a vehicle and chassis engineering supervisor, both resign on the same day. At the as soon as the news breaks, shares drop nineteen per cent. So it's part of the problem here is that, uh, both of these guys were very heavily involved in developing the models, and the fear was that this was going to lead to some sort of problem with the model lesque production and that people lost confidence in tesla Um. And also they decided to do something else that was a little radical. Uh yeah, that that is when they in fact ended production on the roadster before I could get one. Were you planning on getting a roadster? Plan is a strong word, dream or hope? Are you planning on getting a driver's license? I know I was playing on getting a driver and a roadster. The hard part is sitting in the back of a car that only has two seats. That that part I hadn't figured out yet. But anyway, February two thousand and twelve, that's when Tesla unveils a new vehicle. Yeah, the Model X, which is an Suv yep, to go on sale in early it's not it's they're they're supposed to be delivered sometime this year. But although in another spoiler alert here, if you were to put in an order right now, it would essentially be a pre order. They can't guarantee delivery till two thousand fifteen, so I'm telling you guys know. But but they were. They were taking five thousand dollar deposits for the vehicle, and it has my favorite feature of a vehicle ever. So now, okay, if the roadster can't be mine, I'm not a big suv guy in general, but this one I would get for this one feature. It has freaking goal wing doors, you know, like the yea yeah, and hey, hey that would have a back seat, so you could have a driver. That's right, that's all right. I can have my driver driving around in the electric STV. Okay, got a new goal. I'm all right, I've recentered myself. So May two thousand twelve, Tesla announces it will begin delivering Model S cars to customers starting on June twelve. And then on June twelve, they had an Apple like launch event where they started to deliver the first Model S vehicles in person and for the first three anyway. Uh I watched the video on this and it was definitely very much like an Apple event, although I guess it was more of an internal company event that press were invited to. I think it was mostly Tesla employees and it was more of a you guys, we did it. This was something that people said was impossible. Everyone kept saying that, uh, it was the company was not in good shape, that the global crisis had caused us to lose sight of everything. That never happened. It out here it is. And at that time there were ten owls and reservations for the models, and most of those people had never seen one, let alone Saturn one let alone driven in one. So that's that's a lot of promise. Yeah, and you've got, Yeah, you've got. Some might say it's a little cultish. It reminds me of another car company, the Saturn Car Company, where people who got Saturn's early on. Did you ever meet anyone remember some of the hype surrounding it, But I didn't know anyone at the time. Now, yeah, well, Tesla they talked about being a community, especially the roadster community early on because those very few people, very exclusive, right, But same sort of thing, Like it was this idea that you're being inducted into this sort of exclusive club. But also because you shared this vision of an electric car future with zero G emissions. I mean this was a big deal for a lot of people. Sure. Speaking of cults, has that cult going? The cult of Matt? Oh, the Matt one. Yeah. See, I'm not allowed to talk about that. I also can't talk to my family anymore. But other than that, it's great. This is all Ben, Ben and Matt of stuff. They don't want you to inducted Jonathan into a call they did. I'm not sure if Scott bought in. Its kind of a holdout. Yeah, it's Okay, we have people watching his house all the time. But if you go to their YouTube channel you can check out Jonathan on that. Yeah, it's fantastic. So getting back to the model s, it's a four door sedan. This is that that luxury sedan that they had been talking about years before, right and they here it is finally coming out. It has an optional seating for seven. As it turns out, there's a lot of extra cargo capacity when you remove the need for exhaust systems and thermal shieldings so that you don't cook your passengers like eggs on an engine block, the catalytic converters and etcetera, etcetera. It's also the body is made mostly of aluminum instead of steel to cut down on weight, obviously very important so that you can not have to use as much power to move the vehicle. Uh And unlike the Roadster, it actually had two battery options, so you had one that would give you the bigger battery package option would give you three hundred six miles of range or about four kilometers on a single charge, and the smaller had more arrange that was closer to the Roadster, which was about two hundred forty four miles or around three kilometers. Now, it was also designed to be very aerodynamic to cut down on drags, so again to try further reduce the load on that battery exactly, and it had regenerative breaking to again reduce the load on the battery some more. And uh, you know, the recharging thing still kind of an issue, especially since some people just can't get over that idea that oh, I want to be able to drive as far as I want, whenever I want, and not worry about running out of juice. Well, it has a mobile connector that can plug into a hundred ten vault or two hundred forty volt outlets. Uh. But you know, usually you would just plug it in at night. If you were to plug it into one of these outlets, you would get only a fract faction of your full range. So yeah, if you were on the road and you wanted to charge your car, Uh, let's say you go to a public charging station and you recharge the battery at a rate where you get about twenty two miles or kilometers for every hour of charge. Some can charge a little faster than that. A two forty volt outlet will provide thirty one miles or fifty kilometers of range per hour of charge. But they're super charger stations, and I'll talk more about them in a little bit, but they can provide one seventy miles or two hundred seventy four kilometers of range for just thirty minutes of charge, and that's pretty incredible. Still, it's a half hour, right, It's a lot different than it's much more cumbersome than pulling up to a gas station and being out in under ten minutes. Yeah, So that that's something that some people still ball cat, even though I think most of us if we were to actually right down how many miles we traveled in a typical day, I think for most of us it would be significantly below the range of the Tesla. Again, some people, obviously are are exceptions, but I think the majority of us would be able to uh comfortably drive that range and then plug in at night and be fine the next day. Of course, if you forget to plug in your car, then you're you know, up the creek. So the car has a frunk, which is a front trunk of that work. I don't approve of it, it does. It just sounds dirty, but that it's got it's got a frank. But yeah, I don't I don't like the that that version of front trunk either. I mean having a front trunk awesome. That's fine. By calling calling it a fronk not good. But yes, you can store stuff there excellent. Well. And the Roadster just like the Roadster, it has an electric motor and fixed gear drive, but it has a liquid cool power train. Unlike the Roadsters, which, as you recall from the last episode, exactly it just brought in air from the vents, this one had a liquid cooling system and again it uses lithium ion batteries just like the Roadster did. One of the big shiny elements of this car was it's or is it's seen UM touch screen for all of the controls and UM media communication. You can you can do everything from controlling the temperature in the cabin or know all that kind of stuff. There's some people who I know have said that that was a little scary to have a big panel that could be distracting to the driver but sor that could electrically short out and stop stop giving you, you know, importantality and information UM. But chief designer friends von holtz Heusen said, uh, it's like the leap of faith Apple took with the iPhone. There's a cleanliness to the interior and the screen is the hero. We're in the midst of a transition toward a new way of thinking. For me, that's an iPhone moment, and it is an impressive display. I mean, i've I've I've only seen pictures of them, because George is not one of those places. We we live in Georgia, and George is not one of those places that has a lot of the supercharger stations. In fact, we have one, and it's in Savannah, which, for those who are not familiar with Georgia geography, is way the heck away from Atlanta, about five hours travel time by car. Yeah, so you're not gonna see a lot of these. Not saying that no one has them in Atlanta. I'm sure there are a few, but I haven't had a chance to see one in person, but I've seen the pictures and they are pretty so. When it launched, they had talked about the base price of the lower end models without any options on it or anything, was around sixty thousand dollars, and the one with the larger battery pack was around eighty thousand. Um, those numbers are different from today's numbers. And also they changed year to year and based upon all the different options. So that was the idea of when it first launched. Um. And also there was this optional third row seat that that idea that seventh, it wasn't that you would set three people in the front and four people in the back or something. You know, it's meant just for children. And it meant that they also had to put in extra safety features. Sure. Well, the this this third row was facing backwards, and uh, if customers order the car in this layout, it includes a special rear bumper like like double bumper in the back. Yeah, it meant more there was more crumpled space there in case of a rear collision. So if if a collision happened at highway speeds, then uh, it would be just as safe from the rear as it would be from the front. So uh, and we'll talk more about its safety record when we get into the second half. In fact, this is a good place to take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we've worked our way up to September two thousand and twelve, the models has come out and at this point, Tesla announces that will build out that supercharging network that I had talked about. So the super charging stations were places that are our places rather where people can quickly recharge their Tesla vehicles. They use this proprietor arry kind of of connection between the supercharger and their vehicle, and for absolutely free of charge for any Tesla user, they can start to recharge their car and after about half an hour they've got you know, a hundred seventy mile range. Like we said in the earlier part of this podcast, they would announce a year later the the option to have um in instead of sitting there for half an hour and charging your car, just swapping out the battery pack, which can take as little as nine seconds. Yeah, yeah, there was. There was one demo where they showed it being done in something like thirty seconds. But this was you know, in a in a scenario that was specifically engineered to be as fast as it possibly could be, all right, and that is for a service fee. And I think that the formula that they use is is the market price of fifteen gallons of gas, which they estimate to be somewhere between sixty and eighty dollars. Yeah, that's exactly what I've heard as well. So in other words, you can if you if you have the time, you can sit around for half an hour and let your car recharge, or if you're gonna get going, you can dish out the sixty to eighty bucks or whatever the equivalent is at that given moment and get a new battery switched in and it'll be fully charged and does give you a full range of travel. Again. So the other thing about this proprietary technology is it means that only model S vehicles can um plug into this stuff. So it's not like there's any kind of uh market sensibility to to get these things into as many charging stations as possible. It's really just based on Tesla putting them in. Yeah, because if you drive any electric vehicle from any other manufacturer, you cannot take advantage of these superchargers. Um So it's it's kind of uh, it's kind of Tesla guaranteeing that they're going to have an invested base because they've they're built, they're the ones actually putting the infrastructure out there. They're not depending upon other UH entities to do that. So far, they have built seventy nine of those supercharger stations in the U s um it's a it's a mostly West coast trail. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. If you look at the map, um, imagine that it starts in Seattle. It didn't really start in Seattle, but just think of it. It looks like it's looks like it's a snake in a way that the one end of it is in Seattle. Then goes down the West coast with lots of stations in California, starts to loop inward. You guys who are not from the United States are going to get a really weird sense of geography here. But starts the loop inward and goes into Arizona and New Mexico before arches northward and goes into the upper Midwest States. Lots of stations in Chicago, so once you get to Illinois, there's a good cluster there. Then it continues into the northeastern part of the United States, then trails down the East coast, which is where we get you know, the one in station goes down into Florida, and then you have a disconnected pocket of supercharged stations in eastern Texas. In fact, Bernie Burns of of Rooster teeth has a model s Tesla and talks about how it's great. He loves it, and he loves the supercharge stations, and he's frustrated about a certain law that we will talk about in a little bit. But yes, Um, Tesla plans to continue building out this network of stations to get better coverage, and in fact says that they estimate by the end of two thousand fourteen they'll have eight percent of the United States covered in parts of Canada as well, and by the end of two thousand fifte percent of the country should be covered, so that you should have a supercharger within range of your vehicle and another one within range of that one. Meanwhile, Europe does have a few yeah, yeah, more than a dozen. Yes, that's how many they have right now. And I didn't see any indication on the website about Tesla's plans to build that infrastructure out very much. I would imagine that they do plan on doing it, but they didn't have any numbers like the eighty or that they had for the United States. I'm sure that as sticky as the legal situations here in the States are right now, Um, probably they're they're trying to They're they're picking which fish they are going to fry at which time. Frying fish is a very delicate procedure. It is. But in two thousand thirteen, in February, Musk had his his little tiff with the New York Times. Oh right, that was when John Broder wrote this this kind of hypercritical article of the model asque called stalled out on Tesla's electric highway. Yeah. He claimed that that he ended up losing juice um and that the Tesla vehicle did not adequately warn him, and Musk ended up writing an extremely detailed blog post where they took lots of metrics straight from the car from the car, that right, and they said, look, we looked at what you did in our car, and it's not the same thing as what you said in the article. In fact, you wing two. When you were charging it, you said that you need to go sixty one miles. The vehicle had indicated that you had enough of a charge for thirty two miles, and then you stopped charging and started driving away, and you still went fifty one miles. And then we're surprised, apparently when you didn't go the full sixty sound miles. Yeah, so what Musk was saying, is that you are not being honest, You're being disingenuous with this report. And there was a lot of back and forth between Broder and Mosque and The New York Times in general, and eventually Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the New York Times, offered a quasi apology, saying that there was some errors in precision, but not in integrity. So it's almost like a very double speak kind of apology. Yeah, so the end of the day didn't hurt Tesla's sales at all. People still had interest in the model s So this review didn't didn't end up um or this article, I guess I should say, didn't end up having a huge impact. Though Musk at the time had claimed that because of that, from a corporate standpoint, they lost about a hundred million dollars in potential potential investment. I I honestly think that it was It wound up driving positive hype for the company um and at any rate, by Tesla would have its first ever profitable quarter. YEP, they made five sixty two million dollars in revenue. I have no idea how much they made in profit because I don't know what their costs were and uh I pulled this information from their initial report, so I'm sure there was a more specific report that goes into the profit. But consumer reports, Um, they had some nice things to say, right Uh yeah, unlike unlike the New York Times. They gave the models their highest rating for a car ever, which was out of there a hundred point scale. Now, meanwhile, there were some other competitor companies that were also trying to get into this electric car market. Uh. And they included companies like Coda and Fisker, and both of these had been struggling for a while. Coda would end up going bankrupt the week before Tesla announced its profitable quarter, and Fisker would eventually follow suit, declaring bankruptcy later on. Uh so you know this. This was again another story about how Tesla was able to defy the odds and and see success while other companies were trying to do the same thing. We're failing right right Um. As of Junior or June and or July of Tesla paid back that four d and sixty five million dollar loan from the Department of Energy and simultaneously raised a billion dollars from investors. That's pretty impressive that is also the time period that they started announcing those battery swapping stations that we were just talking about a moment ago. And so then in August two thousand thirteen, Tesla announces that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration awarded the Model S a five star safety rating across all categories and sub categories. And according to a press release on Tesla's website, they said that the combined score technically, like when they would show scores, that five was the top, but in reality it could go a little higher than five. It's just that they would say it's a five star rating. They so that there's ended up being a five point four, which was the highest that any car had ever received as far as safety rating is concerned. And this included I think the car that they sent over for testing was one that had that seventh additional seat, and so you know, they decided they tested this thing by doing lots of crumple zones. They said that the but the fact that has a frunk means that has a bigger crumple zone because it doesn't have that engine block there, so that helps protect the driver and passengers from head on collision. They also strengthened the car's sides, They strengthened the back. In fact, one of the Tesla representatives said, you know, technically there are ways you can gain the system because you know which ways they're going to test the vehicle. So so what we did was we strengthened those parts of the vehicles first and then said, okay, how do we make the rest of the car as strong as these strong points. Yeah, and and a few of those other really basic electric car um contrivances, uh necessities really mean that the the overall strength of the car can can be based on the underbelly. It can be completely flat, which can allow you to cut down on on a lot of annoying stuff like a like road vibration and stuff like that, and and also make it much more U crash compatible. Right, and also it's got a you know, the fact that you've got the battery pack down there beneath the floor pan means that has a very low center of gravity, which actually helps not only in the handling but instability. It means it's really hard to flip it over. In fact, they said that in the tests where they were you know, trying to flip the car, they had to go through extreme measures in order to get the car to flip because the center gravity was so low. Perhaps in response to this innoc hoper m, a bunch of kind of sensationalistic news stories began popping up about fires breaking out and model SS And to be fair, these these fires were popping up in cars that had that had just been in a crash. Um and I haven't heard any stories of these fires getting past the cars safety firewalls into the passenger compartments. It was all just in the confined to the battery. And uh uh, some of the emergency response teams that showed up didn't know entirely how to deal with an electric car fire as opposed to a a gasoline engine fire. The method of dealing and containing that kind of thing is pretty pretty different. Yet um and Uh Musk and True Musk style post a really calmly derisive blog response about how driving around with large tanks of highly flammable fuel really isn't um more safe than his electric batteries. So sends a lot like saying that, hey, just because he used bitcoins to launder money, you know what else is used to under money? Dollar bills way more as it turns out same, SAME's worth of thing. It's it's funny that we're recording these episodes so close together, and and the themes are so close. February two fourteen, Tesla announced a planned five billion dollar giga factory factory. Yeah, I can't help but think of quagmire. Uh, this giga factory, this is just to produce um there's lithium ion batteries four vehicles. Yeah, and in fact, this would be an attempt to make them easier to get to because as it turns out, Uh, there are several large companies that supply lithium ion batteries, but Tesla's pretty much beholden to them, right. That's that's where it's the only source they can go to to get these. They say that they're planned twenty twenty production using this factory building these lithium ion batteries, that the the amount they produced in that factory would actually be more than the global cell supply in two thousand thirteen. So in this one factory they would be able to make more cells that would be assembled into batteries than they could get if they had the the corner on the global market right now. Yeah, and and this is all part of the third step of that plan that we talked about in our first episode for for the company to uh, you know, first produce a sports car and then produce a Family Sedana luxury Family Sedan granted, but then to begin producing electric cars for the common person. Yeah, and so uh they say that this twenty twenty production would allow them to create to produce as many as half a million vehicles in a year once it goes online. So they're looking right now, it's the factory is not built. They're looking at different potential sites to build this factory. Uh. They first went ahead and discounted California, so it's not going to be there. They said that it will probably be in either Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, or maybe Texas. But although at this point it's looking like maybe not Texas. Yeah. So March two thousand fourteen, Texas had already passed this law that I'm about to talk about. But this is when New Jersey joins Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and Arizona by passing legislation that bands Tesla from using direct sales to sell cars to customers. Right, as we said earlier, Tesla uses direct sales, they don't go through a third party dealership, um. And dealerships don't really like that so much. No, And in fact, they often have a lot of political sway of particularly in certain states like I don't know, Texas. So you get into these the states where you have politicians who say no, you know, Tesla needs to play by the same rules that these automakers are playing. They do also claim that it's better for shoppers and owners alike to be dealing with third party party sellers um, and that that's going to encourage competition. Yeah. I don't know, Lauren. Have you ever gone to a dealership where someone told you that whatever car you were interested in was not the right car for you? I have, Um, I have so many opinions about car dealerships and the way that they sell cars. I have gone through this process twice in my life, and um I I don't genuinely hate many things, but car dealerships are something that I have that it's like, it's like flames on the side face. Yeah, No, I mean, I mean burning fiery passion. So see, this is it's interesting to me because Tesla's approach otherwise is very much like apples Now. Now, granted, you can buy Apple and other stores, so it's not it's not completely analogous, but but it's pretty vertical. I mean, yeah, Apple has its own store that you can go to and you can buy from Apple. You can either buy it online or you can go to the physical store and buy it there. Uh, but you can also go to Best Buy or whatever and buy Apples. That's some of those. But in this case, Tesla is very much like the pure Apple experience, saying you come to us, we will sell you a car. And these states have said you cannot do that, and in fact, uh, at least not in our state. So if you want to buy a Tesla and you live in one of these states, you have to leave the state first to buy it. You can bring it back to here, then that's fine. Yeah, it's not. It's not the driving the vehicle in New Jersey or Texas is illegal. It's not, but it's illegal to purchase it the way Tesla sells it. So people like like Bernie Burns that I mentioned, have to leave their home state to go and purchase a car that they want. I mean, like I said, Texas even has some of those supercharger stations available. They have some of the infrastructure, but they still have this law that says you cannot buy direct from Tesla, which is one of the reasons why some people think that Tesla may not choose Texas to be the home for that gigaf fector or perhaps Arizona at that point. Yeah. True, Yeah, so it may be that Nevada is gonna win out on that one. We'll see. But anyway, these days you could buy a models if you have the you know, the wherewithal. There's also the Model x A, right, you can put down a reservation for that, although like we said earlier, like Jonathan said earlier, Um, the deliveries of those are if if if you preserve today, are not planned to be in right, so there should be Model x is on the road before the end of this year. I don't think any have rolled off the assembly lines yet from the customers that I'm personally aware of. And the roadster is officially off of the market, so I'm sure that a few of them are floating around here, and that like a you know, fifty grand or so, you might might be able to pick up a used one. Uh anyway, So yeah, that's the story. Of Tesla Motors so far. It actually, to me is a remarkable story on multiple fronts. For one thing, the idea of a company that is coming at the electric car problem from a totally different direction than other companies do. Write other companies coming in from let's let's really target the echo environmentally friendly market. Tesla says, let's go with these cars can be sexy. Yeah, let's go with a really high end user and and and convince them convinced the world that this is something that they want. And and you know, therefore, by trickle down effect go you know, when when they put out something that's cheaper, have the common guy go like, oh man, that's that company that makes those incredibly sexy cars. I want incredibly sexy cars. Especially since by that time they've built out a lot of the infrastructure that you would need to charge your vehicle if you ever had to do it when you're out on the road. That makes it practical. So I think really savvy. Yeah, they went about it in a really really interesting way. Obviously it wasn't smooth sailing to make the entire time smooth road sailing. Yes, yeah, And by the way, we're not suggested that Tesla cars are like boats. Um. Anyway, it will be really interested to see how this goes. I'm very curious to see in the next five or six years what kind of of the lower cost cars Tesla comes out with, assuming that they do continue on that path. Yeah, I'm excited about that potential Giga factory thing. Yeah. I would love to be able to to see Tesla dealerships or stores what I guess they're technically stores pop up in a lot more places to to and uh maybe even see competing um companies come out with their own electric vehicles that are just as compelling to to the average driver as the Tesla has been so um. Yeah, and plus it also means that we're going to see other alternatives as well, like the hydrogen fuel cell cars. It's really exciting to me to see this kind of development away from the internal combustion engine as we are all familiar. So if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech stuff, here's the thought. Let's know about them. Don't just whisper it quietly into your pillow at night. 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