Friday 2/28/25

FYI: any text in italics denotes it’s my take or my own added context. I’d also recommend: after you click an X hyperlink to login on the web if you’re not already. It will make the experience much better and you should also have the option to open the links directly in the X app if you’d prefer

⚡️ Chinese Exec Praises FSD

The former senior director of Xpeng’s autonomous division had the following quotes:

“From an experience perspective, compared to other China based brands that have been fine-tuned over time, the gap is significant. Among domestic competitors, only one company is somewhat close, while the others still lag significantly”. I’m guessing the one brand that’s close is Huawei

Speaking on FSD’s behavior predictions and motion planning:

“This far exceeds my expectation. In a densely mixed traffic urban center with both vehicles and pedestrians, it performed nearly flawlessly”

You can read the entire post here

Tesla’s FSD is even better than in China than I was expecting. I knew it would be good but thought there would be a lot more feedback about glaring limitations. Perhaps it’s out there and just not making it into our interwebs. This is incredibly promising for the rollout across Europe whenever regulators play nice and get with the program. The EU seems to have the most political angst toward Elon for now, but if people can play on their phones or computers while in the car, everyone will want that no matter what they say publicly

⚡️ Tesla x Steak ‘n Shake

They’ve agreed to install Superchargers at six sites with over 20 more in the design review process and SnS has said they want to expand that to over 100 locations

There are just over 400 total SnS locations in the United States. You’ve heard me say it many times, more chargers at locations where people will already be will make a beautiful setup for EV adoption. I for one would love to sit in my car with tinted windows and go to town on a burger and fries watching YouTube or Netflix while I also feed NoSmoke trillions of electrons…

⚡️ Lightning Round

• The entry level Model Y sold out in Australia. Makes for a great headline, but we don’t know what type of allocation Tesla planned for that variant in that market. Safe to say initial demand for the new Model Y has been very strong globally. To be expected…the best car in the world got better

• Elon said, “the long-term outcome for Tesla is very high”. This was responding to a post about Tesla’s stock. Not news for this audience but always nice to hear

• You may have seen some headlines about Tesla making improvements in vehicle reliability as highlighted by JD Power’s Dependability Study. For context, Tesla’s score was 242 PP100 in 2023 (lower the better). This actually came out in early February but if you missed it, here you go:

• The new owner’s manual for the Model Y is live if you like to click around and look for Easter eggs

• Turns out it was Ben and Felicia Horowitz that donated those 10 Cybertrucks to the Las Vegas Police Department. The Sheriff said, “We want these things because the cops inside will be safe no matter what. These stop bullets. They are also a tremendous recruitment tool for us.”

• Peter Rawlinson is set to earn a monthly consulting fee of $120k ($1.44M/year) from Lucid to serve as an advisor for the next two years. Fun fact, Peter made ~$500M in total compensation (cumulative) during his time at Lucid. Over that same time, Lucid lost around $10B (cumulative). I understand this isn’t the fairest statistic I’ve ever shared but the point stands

• Elon said Tesla is waiting for regulatory approval to launch FSD in Europe. Unfortunately we don’t have much clarity on how this is going to play out, but the fact that Tesla is ready to from a software/hardware perspective to have FSD live in North America, China, Puerto Rico and Europe is very exciting. Butts in seats, more social media posts, more chatter about Tesla and people realizing how special Tesla’s FSD really is despite still needing to improve

• The 2024 S&P Global Loyalty Award Winners were announced. This is based on over 13M registrations from 2024 in the US. Tesla won the award for “Overall Loyalty to Make, “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make” and “Highest Conquest Percentage”. This is the third year in a row Tesla has won these categories. Loyalty is determined when a household that owns a vehicle returns to market and acquires another new vehicle of the same make, model or manufacturer. The newly acquired vehicle may be either a replacement or an addition to the household fleet

• You may have seen folks on social media talking about Tesla launching a free ride-hail service. This was reported by the Washington Post. We know Tesla is already doing this (likely for free) for employees in California and there’s a world where to jumpstart initial demand and interest Tesla offers this service for free for a period of time. You may remember Waymo offered free rides and called it the “Early Rider” program. Participants were vetted and had to sign NDA’s and in return they got free rides while providing feedback to refine the service. Perhaps Tesla will do something similar in California. I have not seen any reporting on this for Texas yet. This could also just be WaPo reading too far into the specific permit and inferring something that has not been clarified by Tesla

• There are new inventory discounts for the outgoing Model Y…up to $7,000 off

• TSLA stock ended a rollercoaster day at $292.98 up 3.91% while the IXIC was up 1.63%. TSLA wicked as low as $273 very early after the market open but then had a nice bounce and ended up holding it (despite another dip) into the close. Volume was 47% higher than the average. Still need time to see if this marks the bottom or turns out to be a short lived relief rally

• If you want to see some impressive FSD footage in China, here’s a 20 minute video:

• Here’s a 47 second clip but the reactions are awesome, even in Chinese:

Hope you all have a safe and wonderful weekend. Enjoy it!

• DL ⚡️