Tesla Stock Jumps $40 this week to $390 - Why and Where it goes from here.

It's time to launch our raid on the Tesla Service Center in Chesterfield, Missouri. This is a brand new Tesla Service Center I've never been to. I've seen it twice.

I really haven't had a lot of problems with my Tesla Model 3. This is an early February 2013 Model X that has been with me for 25,655 miles. 26,466. That's not fast enough. Averaging 4,000 miles per year. We think it's a new record for Tesla.I don't know. So we beat it to death.

We changed the tire. The battery. I think I did something on one of the mirror shots. I did. And now it makes a clunking noise whenever we take off and stop. And that's gotten worse and worse over the last 25,000 years.

If you'll recall, the early 2013s, many of them had a failure of the drive unit in the first 35,000 miles. It was all in the first 30 days that these guys had it. And they're driving hard.

I've driven this with 0 to 35 miles in 10 seconds usually. And mostly around 22 miles an hour. Occasionally to the same level as the Model X. And that's what we're going to do today.

The St. Louis area Tesla had a nice service center in kind of a cringy part of the University City behind a fish shop. It was packed in there. You couldn't turn around in the parking lot.

And now I think they're in pretty nice digs. Chesterfield is very west of St. Louis. Very nice area. I hope they have supercharging there. You could see it from the interstate. I saw a few devices up there. So we’re going to drive the Model S up there. And Dan and I are going to chase in the Model 3. And we're going to have them examine the car. And my hope is that they change out the driving at no cost.

Elon Musk claimed that he had extended the warranty on the motors to match the battery because of the problems they were having with the motors. We're going to find out today if it's worth it. We'll see what happens.

And if they can determine that it is the right unit and if they're willing to replace it. State of affairs about Tesla's service. Who contacted you? How long ago? It was first of the month. When we actually could have gotten an earlier appointment and because of all the scheduling, we moved it back a full week. Yeah, we did. Because it was just Thanksgiving, complexities, and Thanksgiving. But they gave us an earlier option and we opted to go. You didn't tell me that. I didn't opt for anything like that. Anyway, the 11th of December. It's been a couple of weeks. But we're going up there now. We'll see what happens.

Right there at the airport. My warranty on the batteries would run out in February of 2021. Meaning just about every Tesla Model S, X, and 3 are still under battery warranty.

I heard from a guy this week who had a Model X. And he was past the warranty. How he did that, I'm not sure. But they wanted $11,000 for a refurbished battery. We'll take it for him. And he was shopping for something better out of a junkyard. I said, Bart, grab it. That's right. Absolutely.

Let's get it going, guys. It's almost there. We're at the brand new Tesla auto repair facility. We were almost killed three times by autopilot on the way up. What are you YouTube fanboys talking about? That is even close to ready for prime time. Autopilot is a killer. It's deadly. Don't turn it on, ever. And then, we got here.

Chesterfield is right on Highway 40. But we got off and went through the damnedest cheese maze I've ever seen to get here. We are actually standing in front of Nowhere, Missouri. Right over there is the highway. You can't get there from here. You have to go seven other places consecutively to get from where we stand to the freeway over there. I'll show that to Daniel. It's right there. But we have to go seven other places first. We can't get there from here. How did they do this?

They managed to find a slum here. On par with what they had in University City. When we drove, our navigation system took us right to the exit. And we came right in here with one turn. One exit ramp and one turn, and we came right to the left turn. But we were in a different way. Your navigation system had it down. I am going to need some software. Tell us software. It's too smart, I guess. We were standing over here looking for you. Well, let's go inside and see what we can get charged up.

Where are we? It was 111 miles from our shop to the Tesla shop. And my 310 mile Model 3 had 47% left. I don't think we would have gotten home. That's only 225 miles. Of course, I drove about 73 miles an hour up here. These things have a tendency to slip up on you, too. You have to peek out and come back. It's all uphill, too. Well, both ways. Both ways. But going downhill might be better. So, we stopped here.

This is the Supercharger Center, Tim Stahl's, at Melville. The South County Shopping Center in St. Louis. And that's over at Lindbergh and Highway 55. And 55 is what we take home. So, this is the perfect place for the Supercharger Center. But I was surprised they had no supercharging and really no charging at the Tesla Service Center.

I was surprised about that, too. They had a row of chargers for their test drive cars. And they offered me a loader car. I said, I don't need a loaner car. That is true. Probably shouldn't have taken him up on that. Probably shouldn't have. I could have drove around in it all week. But I said, oh, we've got to change the car.

They're going to have to keep the car and take a look at it. It does have something to do with the drive unit. But the point I wanted to make was we were about 36% by the time we got here. And we did enough in about 20 minutes to do all we needed to do. But Richard and I had to finish our Cinnabons. Cinnabons, yeah.

The American way. That's the Fat Boy's fat pill, but only available in the city. And so, yeah, it takes an hour to charge it. But half the hour is on the last 20%. 15, 20% it tapers down. We were charging at 135 kilowatts. And in 20 minutes, it had dropped to 44 kilowatts. And we've already got the good out of this. And have more than enough to get home.

So the car charged quicker than we could get in. Use the little boy's room and get us the Cinnabon. Yep, it did. And get back out. You're right. Basically, that's exactly what happened. Went to the restaurant, got a Cinnabon. Car was charged. And that works for me.

Let's go home. All right. Model S is at the service center. They're going to let us know. And that's a problem. You know, they're 111 miles from us at home. But it's still doable. Took us kind of a day trip. Very nice claim facility. It's beautiful. And this is a beautiful dark city. So let's hear it. Let's go, guys. Cut. We're rolling. We're rolling. Over here. OK, here we are with our infrared crew.

And we're hiding a Tesla Model 2.9. It'd be a Model 3, but it kind of had a wreck. It had. Well, it should be more than three, I guess. Two part, two foot long. I don't know. We put two of them together. I don't think we quite got one yet. The Tesla Trinity. You tell me.

It's very important that I can share the experience with the viewers. Is that right? Yes. Very important. You need to become an expert on the topic. I won't be able to feel it. To live it, breathe it. Be the Model 3. There you go. Well, he unfortunately had some assistance. And Ziqi and Danu have kind of taken a few days off of our really quite.

It's getting to be a grind. Cranking out Model 2s. There's a battery controller. They do. Module controllers. It's got to be a hot item here. It's a little box to run Tesla Model S battery modules. We bought two Model 3 cars, wrecks. And I wanted them for parts.

No way. If anything could accelerate, it can be fixed. That was my thought right off the bat. I supervised. That part there is bent. It needs to be stretched. You don't want that. I love it when you talk tech talk. We even had, what was his name, Todd or something come in? Brad, trhe body man. The body man worked on it a little bit.

He did help a little bit. The plan basically was to remove the wreck. It had one bash in the back. And it was one bash in the back and one bash in the front. So we took the front off the one. I did call a body guy.

And then he advised that getting into axle, drive shaft, unibody welding would probably be over our heads. And you would have a lot more complexity. So we chose the unit with the good drive unit, charge cable and all that.

And it avoided the drive unit and quite a bit of that complexity there. But there was quite a bit of substantial damage. Complete hood disruption, front end gone, both the fenders substantially bent and the two doors.

So it had gotten into a lot of... And some of the structural. At 2,430 miles by the way. And we went to put... I don't think we even ever had the driver's... How many miles did the other one have? 746 or whatever. Between the two wrecks. We didn't have 3,500 miles. We didn't have 3,500 miles. Somebody's unhappy somewhere. I don't know whether... I don't want to run over you. They get mad when I talk over the top.

It's kind of like Duck Dynasty here, but at EVTV. Yeah, EVTV. So we are... So, you guys had to swap the door, the fenders, this front structure. Really, the whole front kind of comes unbolted. So that's a lot more doable than the back, which is all kind of integral to the car. And so, the hood, both front doors. Both front doors. Both front doors. Both driver and passenger. A radiator. Radiator. Cooling system. Air conditioning. And we got the cooling errors to go away. Earlier video, I explained this to you.

It's a Motorex M5.0 hybrid technology coolant. Beware, it reacts with your normal antifreeze and makes brown gunk. And so, if you take regular antifreeze and put it in a Model 3, you create kind of a gummy gunk through the whole battery system and the drive unit heat exchanger.

And I don't think you can ever get the car back. So, water is okay. And otherwise, you have to use the Tesla recommended coolant. We did a whole video on that, probably nearly a year ago. I remember that. Yep.

And so, then we had a bunch of errors. Yes. TPMS error. Yep. And how did that go? Well, the car was sitting for so long, so the wheels hadn't spin so long. So, I think what happened mostly was the car couldn't recognize the TPMS sensors anymore.

We actually had to replace three of the tires because this wreck, whenever they hit the brakes, they had worn out the bottom entirely. And there was one of that. It took some hide off of that tire, too. It took the tires from the other car. So, to reset the TPMS sensors, we just actually drove around for a while and the car picked it up. So, you didn't have to program them like the early Model S. Now, we thought we were going to have to.

We actually pursued that and we couldn't get it to do anything. They didn't want to reprogram. And we borrowed the tire reader. Driving back to take the tire reader back, it just automatically clicked up. Uh-huh. Reset your sensors now. And I hit okay and that was it. Uh-huh. How about our supplemental restraint system? So, this car, the one we built onto, we had four airbags.

Well, two airbags deployed and two seatbelts that were deployed. And we replaced the two airbags and then we replaced the two seatbelts, which was the driver's seatbelt and the rear passenger seatbelt. And then we also had to get the center module sent to… Out of the console. Yeah, we had to ship that. We sent that off to a guy that had it reset. I saw on eBay today, reset software for that, $4.95. I still don't know how it works, but anyway, you do have to reset the airbag computer.

Yep. And after that fix, it still had that one error that said, safety restraint system malfunction or error. You pulled those? We found out. This is a SRS front bumper airbag impact sensor. And it goes on this, which is actually behind the bumper. And you can see a couple of tubes here that are kind of a RAM system that absorbs shock, part of the crumple zone system. And then we picked that up and show them the two remaining impact sensors. There's actually three of them on there. And we have replaced one.

Of course, we took the good one. This one's all messed up. We took the good one off the blue car and installed it. But we're getting a SRS impact sensor error. And we've changed out the sensor. And guess what happened? Nothing. It didn't fix anything. By the way, Tesla is still offering software updates to the car. And we're taking them, and we've updated the software.

But we still have this one little nagging error over this device. But at this point, we kind of think it's the wiring, which is not very robust. Some little wires and a connector that go to this. Actually, there's two wires in it. Yep. Yeah. And on one of them, one connector is reading, what, 2.9? Yep, mega ohms. And the other one you're reading? It was open. Open. And that happens to be the one that's indicating is the problem. Yep. So we're going to have to pull a wiring diagram and trace out these wires. And guess what it's going to wind up being? A new wire. A new wire. How long have you been here, Richard? I don't know. Come on, guys. Connector. Of course. Have you ever met a connector you like? No. No. I'll just decide that $50, anybody wants any of it, that it winds up being a connector. Okay. Anybody want to take any of that? No. No, you don't. And so that's it. But it charges now. It drives.

It drives very good. I have not driven a car, Richard. I've driven it a lot. I love it. It's fine. Does it go fast? It goes fast. Does it go smooth? Goes smooth. Handles, corners, does everything properly, yeah. Steers, okay? Steers fine. Regens? Regens, yes. Everything's fine. And what we did, we replaced one part of the front A-frame structure that snapped, and that's over there.

Well, there were several things replaced like this was, too. You just recently discovered and replaced that one. I'm just saying on the structure of any of the operation of the car besides body parts. So it may not be exactly in line. Yeah. No, the parts fit right back in and everything. And it feels good driving. Feels fine to me, yes. All right.

So we've got a working car. I don't know that we'll ever get it fully. I think we might be able to get rid of this error message, but I don't even know what that means.nYou've got to get it certified by Tesla or something, or they may not know it's wrecked. I want to take it down to Miner and see if it works on the supercharger. A good project.

So we're shooting in the dark here, and so is Tesla. Interesting tweet this morning from Elon Musk's mother. How about that? With a photograph of a very young Elon Musk with his first car, a 1978 BMW 320i. nThat he purchased in 1993. And he didn't have any money, so he had to get this car working with parts from a junkyard. Isn't that cute? And he says he liked doing that, building up a car with parts from a junkyard.

How about a little sympathy for these poor yucks out there trying to fix Model 3s, Elon? With parts from a junkyard, since you have such fond memories of that. And guess what the photo shows him working on? The right side door window glass. Has there been any window glass incidents with Elon any time recently? Does this strike anybody? The irony is quite ironic. Yeah, the photo is him working on the window glass in his first BMW. First car.

And we just finished the Cybertruck with him throwing two fronds. Ball bearings or whatever. One kilogram. Still balls. Yeah. Into the windows. So you still need to keep after the windows, Elon.

But I would urge you to have a sympathetic view towards the people who are trying. Who don't have all the money in the world. And are trying to pick them up a Model 3 wreck and get it back on its feet.

We didn't use any shims. We did not really use any large washers to straighten and position. The car repositioned pretty quick.

And the hood had been pushed back. And we had an adjustment in the engine. But these things are very repairable.

They're very precision made. So just a couple hundred years after Eli Whitney. We may get this interchangeable parts thing down.

That was not very hard. That's excellent, Richard. There's actually a chunk gouged out down below out of the body.

So I don't think we can ever get this to pristine. Right now, it is a fairly unique Tesla two-tone paint job. Gray and blue.

But we don't know if it's a blue car or a gray car. It depends on whether it's coming toward you or going away. That's right.

I'm up. But it's rolling. I'm on the inside.

And we're down to one error message. So good job, guys. We're learning quite a bit.

But I don't think we're going to turn into a Model 3 repair shop anytime soon. Somebody is, though. It's fixable.

And the radiator. See, there's no motor. The whole explanation kind of misses that.

You're hanging in stuff. There's smelly liquids. I've rebuilt and worked on, you know, internal combustion hot rods.

It's a big weight. You can't get a round thing. This, you could get both sides.

It was completely open. It was a lot easier to repair. Most of the whole front end of the car does just unbolt.

It just unbolted, yeah. And Tesla now lets you order some parts online. Some they do and some they don't.

It's kind of random. They have restricted parts and parts you can order. Again, I don't get any of that.

Tesla just lost their third general counsel in the last year. And I wish Elon had fired a whole bunch of them. He did survive the lawsuit from the pedo guy.

That was, uh. Who will, for the rest of his life, be known as the pedo guy. But he did win his lawsuit.

But his main corporate lawyer quit the next week. And so I wish you'd quit listening to those guys and do what you already know makes sense. I'm going to talk a little more about Tesla in a little bit.

Things are pretty good today. Yes, they are. I'm up 23 bucks.

I have an interesting take on why. And as of this afternoon, nobody knows why Tesla's stock went up $23 today. I kind of do.

I guess. I could be wrong. Okay.

We'll see. Stay with us. For about the last three years, we've been doing a little more about solar.

And a little less about electric vehicles every day. I don't think we've done anything about building an electric vehicle in two years. That might be strange for a show titled Electric Vehicle Television or EVTV.

There's a method to my madness. But it's kind of hard to deal with all the comments in the public. So I kind of have to bring you along with me along the trail slowly.

Long time viewers will recall my inexplicable comments eight or nine years ago when you were all in a frenzy sucking up to the public utility companies as your allies against the big bad oil companies. Understand that we built an electric car on our first try without really a diagram or a clue in two and a half months, working half days, falling down drunk in yellow shoes. And it drove 94 miles an hour on the first drive and 110 miles on the first charge.

And it dawned on me before our first EVTV video that what we have here is not precisely a technical problem. And I can say that I never had any doubt how that was going to come out. And it has come to pass.

Oh, I guess it hasn't yet. It has come to pass in my mind sufficiently that it's barely even interesting. We kind of have gotten to the point where we're a Tesla fanboy shop.

And I actually have lost interest in the Audi E-tron. You know what I mean, E-tron? The Jaguar I-Pace, the Porsche Taycant, and any of the others. They're just, I just don't care.

I've seen most of this before and it's a little late and lame. But I do admire the Tesla. And I particularly admire Elon Musk.

So why have, for the last couple of years, we've been so focused on solar energy storage using remaindered Tesla battery modules? In August of 2017, we started this series. And I described for you a concept called selfish solar. And elaborated on that, that you need to get over the concept of making as much as $40 a month off your roof that you paid $60,000 to put the solar panels on.

And the whole kumbaya moment that goes to us participating in the production of electricity with our friends at the utility grid. And all holding hands and marching into the future. And that they may not actually be your limit.

And in fact, in that period, they have done everything they could to basically emasculate, castrate the whole concept of residential solar, even commercial solar, where you actually produce part of your own electricity. While I've advocated a concept, the selfish solar is the short title, but what it refers to is the point of use, generation, and storage of electrical power. It's kind of like the acculturation of the electric vehicle.

It's not so much a technical problem as a conceptual and economic one. And if you're buying electricity for 8 cents a kilowatt hour, everything I'm describing makes no sense to you at all and can't ever. But I don't live where you live.

I don't even live in your time zone. Generally speaking, if you see me doing it, you can't afford it. And by the time you can afford it, I'm not doing it anymore.

I'm no longer involved in that. And by that, I'm not trying to be arrogant and belittle you for not having as much money as I do. It really doesn't have anything to do with how much you have.

It has to do with how you spend it. And when I'm doing stuff, all the parts are one-off or done by very small cottage industry people involved in the tinkerer and innovator stage of the adoption curve. Way, way, way, way ahead before predating the early adoption curve.

And I have to tell you that almost everybody, 100 percent of the people that try to develop a little bit of a business at that tinkerer and innovator stage wind up bankrupt, financially dead. These are pioneers in the ditch at the side of the road with arrows in their backs. Now, I can pat them on the butt and tell them they did a good job, but I can't change the way it works, even for me.

I was trying to bring you along a little bit in the last year on why some of this could be and how things were going to change in the future, not to your advantage. But I struggle with your willing suspension of disbelief. I don't mind you thinking I'm a crazy person, personally, but if you think I'm too far out there, you simply won't listen at all anymore.

And so we've talked about things like the increasing efficiency of our electrical devices, like geothermal air conditioning and heating, and light-emitting diode lighting, and how 80 percent of our lighting is still incandescent, and that winds up being 10 percent of our total electrical usage. And just by converting to LED, we drastically decrease our use of electricity, which we're going to want to do as the utility companies raise the rates. And why do they have to raise the rates? Well, because their economic model is based on you using more electricity each year, and you're using less since 2016.

That's a pretty believable story. And, of course, I can appeal to your shared aversion to the use of fossil fuels and the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. Hydro doesn't really make up very much.

Wind is a mechanically flawed concept because of the mechanical forces applied to the equipment. They don't last very long. They're a maintenance nightmare.

It's very difficult to get something that has those kind of push forces and those kinds of rotational forces to be maintainable over time in that environment. Hydroelectric shares some of that, but is a little better contained and more accessible, believe it or not. You have basically politically and conceptually rejected the concept of nuclear power.

And I have tried to get you to think a little more broadly about what nuclear power would look like. If it was done in 2019 rather than repetitively building a 1965 design over and over. But my heart really isn't there because it omits some of the political and economic strife of contending with an ancient corporate monopolistic structure that is ill-suited to serve anyone, even themselves.

They don't know what's in their best interest and cannot be relied upon to do not only what's in your best interest, but you cannot rely on them to do what's in their best interest. And I have mentioned that we had five incidents in the United States in 1980 where we lost power for over an hour. And that in 2010 we had 550 such incidents.

What part of that is difficult to grasp? Now the interesting part, I defer to Margaret Thatcher and her views on socialism, which in a way our electric grid is socialism. And that is that sooner or later you just run out of other people's money. If these corporate structures fail us, guess who gets to pay the freight? We do.

And I'm going to show you a little bit about that. But I want you to kind of pay attention because the time has come to show you the future and kind of a dark future if you don't mind the pun. And I'm going to use that to explain some things about today and the $23 jump in Tesla stock price, which as of this afternoon, Monday, December 16th, nobody gets it and nobody knows.

None of the stock market analysts have got a clue. They think it has something to do with China. Everything has to do with China these days or an impeachment.

That's your two picks for what causes everything. But first, I found a guy on YouTube that has done an excellent, I would say superb video, but really kind of a classic example of journalism without a whole lot of bias, without a whole lot of opinion and with a great deal of information. His name is Juan Brown, and he lives in California.

And he's going to walk us through the Pacific gas and electric fiasco. And I want you to pay close attention to several things there. Let's take a look.

It's Thursday, the 12th of December. I hope I got the month right this time. My name's Juan Brown.

You're watching the Blanco Lirio channel. And today we're going to discuss the recent PG&E bankruptcy settlement as a result of the devastating wildfires that have been occurring here in Northern California. ♪♪♪ In order to avoid going to a jury trial, PG&E has agreed to settle on a $13.5 billion settlement for victims of four wildfires here in Northern California.

Those four wildfires include the Camp Fire, the most devastating wildfire in California history, resulting in the loss of over 85 lives. The Ghost Ship Fire, that was that warehouse fire in Oakland, California, I believe, of which PG&E does not claim any responsibility for. The Tubbs Fire and the 2015 Butte Fire.

The $13.5 billion settlement, I believe, will be paid out half in cash and half in PG&E stock to the victims involved in these fires. This also includes an additional $1 billion that PG&E will be paying to cities and counties and municipalities and an additional $11 billion to insurance companies that are involved with all these California wildfire settlements for a total of $25 billion from PG&E as a result of these four fires. Estimated losses for the cost of wildfires here in California for 2017 and 2018 alone are about $24 billion in insurance damages.

By agreeing to these settlements, PG&E is able to quickly get in and out of bankruptcy by 30 June of 2020. The reason they want to stay on this timeline, this allows PG&E to take advantage of another California state program of $21 billion worth of money towards future wildfire losses caused by PG&E. Along with this settlement was a 700-page report by the California Public Utilities Commission about the cause of the campfire.

And in that report, they're finally releasing the photographic evidence of what actually happened and it's just as we've been reporting this whole time. It was the failure of a power line on a transmission tower on the Caribou-Palermo line in the Feather River Canyon near the town of Pulga that initiated the campfire. It was Tower 27-22 on that line where the C-hook failed and the line hit the side of the tower causing the sparks that fell to the ground, the dry grass below, that initiated the campfire.

From pictures from the report, which I'll post in a link down below, here's a picture of Tower 27-221 failed transposition jumper and here's where that hot cable tagged the side of the metal tower sending down the sparks before circuit breakers could shut down the circuit. Here's the picture of the failed hook and notice how little area remained of the hook in operation at the time that it failed in the high winds. The rest of that hook had been worn out over years of neglect similar to many of these other hooks found along the same Caribou-Palermo transmission line.

The Feather River Canyon is notoriously windy and over the years these hooks swaying in the wind slowly erode away, wear away, both the hooks and the hangers just like this. That report discusses 12 violations by PG&E regarding the maintenance of this Caribou-Palermo line and this tower in particular. One of them is that this tower was last inspected in 2001, nearly 18-19 years ago.

The company policy is to have these towers inspected every 3-5 years. I believe that means sending a guy climbing up the tower to visually inspect the components of the tower. PG&E has been, up to this point, inspecting via helicopter with a high-speed flyby of the tower which does not allow you to carefully inspect the individual components of the tower like these aging C-hooks.

When you do a flyby in a helicopter, you're basically able to see are the wires still attached to the tower or not. The Caribou-Palermo line is that line that runs down the Feather River Canyon upstream from Oroville Reservoir. It's one of California's first hydroelectric power grids built in the state.

It was first built in 1921. These towers have an expected life expectancy of about 65 years. This particular tower, 27-222, was 68 years old.

Some of these towers along the Caribou-Palermo line have been replaced over the years as various landslides have taken some of those towers out. Here's a map of the Caribou-Palermo line, a series of stair-step reservoirs, small reservoirs and penstocks, and power plants. And to those folks that say, why don't you just bury those lines, I've never been down the Feather River Canyon.

It is steep and nearly pure granite rock. So let's discuss a little bit further of how we got here and what does the future hold for California. How are we going to possibly ever dig out of this aging infrastructure hole that we've found ourselves into.

This latest settlement is frustrating to long-time California residents who remember just back in 2010 the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion caused by PG&E that resulted in 8 fatalities and a $1.6 billion fine. As a result of the San Bruno explosion, PG&E was put on federal criminal probation and yet still PG&E failed to maintain its infrastructure. In order to understand where we are today with PG&E, we've got to go back and look at a little history all the way back to the previous PG&E bankruptcy back around 001.

PG&E went bankrupt during a series of drought years, a lack of hydroelectric power in California forced PG&E to go looking for power outside of the state. They got caught up in the giant Enron scandal that was going on at the time as power regulations were deregulated at the time. Enron was able to jack up the prices artificially and amongst many other factors eventually bankrupted PG&E.

By the way, this also resulted in the recall election of the then Governor Gray Davis and we ended up getting Governor Schwarzenegger in office and he ran all the way from 2003 to 2011 and then Jerry Brown got in office and ran for two terms and now we have Gavin Newsom. PG&E is regulated following the guidance of the California Public Utilities Commission, one of the largest public utility commissions in the entire nation with over 1,200 employees. The folks that run the California Public Utilities Commission are appointed by the Governor of California and often have little or no power experience.

The latest Public Utilities Commissioner is Maribel Batjer, a former casino executive and a longtime California bureaucrat. During the terms of all these governors at the CPUC and stung by the effects of the first bankruptcy at PG&E, the CPUC directed PG&E to go out and seek green power, green additional sources of power for PG&E besides simply hydroelectric power. This drive for green renewable energy by the CPUC for PG&E has resulted in a lot of solar power plants, wind-powered power plants, and a lot of new renewable energy for PG&E.

And California has since doubled down on this effort when Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 100 committing California to 100% renewable clean energy by year 2045 with the following goalposts, 33% renewable energy by 2020, 50% renewable energy by 2030. But this comes at a cost. However, this came at the cost of the maintenance of the fundamental PG&E hydroelectric infrastructure that results in these wildfires today.

Ironically, all the smoke from these wildfires far exceeds any of the carbon footprint gains gained by the green energy that we've been struggling so hard to achieve here in California. So no matter what the source of your renewable clean energy is, of which hydropower is part of that, you still have to transmit it safely over your tired old distribution system. For the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.

One of the other problems with the CPUC and PG&E in general is something we've discussed many times in this channel regarding infrastructure improvements, the events over at Oroville and the events up at Boeing, is the replacement of the folks with the technological knowledge to maintain an existing system. Those folks have systematically been retired or replaced over the years with less and less technically savvy folks and more and more bean counter or management-type folks, and in the case of the CPUC, folks that are more interested in green energy alternatives rather than maintenance and safety of the existing system. It's hard to keep and retain these folks with the technological skills and capability as the folks with these capabilities, especially in the regulation side of the industry, as we've discussed before, because once they've established that they have the capability to do these sort of jobs, they are often wooed away to higher-paying, more exciting jobs with less bureaucracy instead of sticking around working for as a regulator.

As a result of lawsuits from wildfires and other disasters, PG&E is slowly trying to rebuild its infrastructure and get caught up, but it's woefully behind spending spent on green renewable power energy initiatives. Some of these improvements are happening right here in my neighborhood already this year. So let's go out front and show you some of the improvements that PG&E is making on their infrastructure right here in our neighborhood, where we're one of the first neighborhoods to receive these improvements.

Here in our neighborhood in Northern California, just outside of Nevada City, we're one of the first neighborhoods to get our distribution lines replaced by PG&E under a program that is to replace over 7,000 miles of these distribution lines in a 12- to 14-year period. This year, they got about 150 miles done. The program here is to replace all the old uninsulated wire with insulated wire.

It's the same size or gauge of wire underneath the insulation, the same power capability, capacity, but they're adding, finally, an insulated layer of plastic to the outside of the wire to help prevent the wires from arcing in the event that a tree branch falls on them. Once you add the insulation to the wires, you've got to rebuild all the rest of your infrastructure as well because the insulated wires are bigger and heavier. You've got to replace the arms that hold the wire.

You've got to replace the telephone pole itself that supports the wire, and, of course, the transformers. So the entire infrastructure needs to get replaced. But at that rate, 100, 150 miles per year, according to a recent Georgia Tech report, it's going to take 230 years for PG&E to completely refresh all of the wires in its system.

According to this new report by Georgia Tech, by the way, Dad is a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech, though he went into the aerospace industry, and the math on this is not too hard, in order for PG&E to keep things refreshed at a reasonable rate of 67 years, they need to step up the rate of rebuilding their infrastructure to about 1,200 miles of transmission wire per year needs to get replaced in order to keep all the transmission wire fresh on a 67-year basis. Wire itself has a life expectancy of about 83 years. Some of the metal towers that hold up the larger transmission wires have a life expectancy of about 67 years or so.

So PG&E is way behind on maintaining their aging infrastructure. And to this end, in year 2017, PG&E only budgeted about $23 million towards aging infrastructure improvements as far as replacing transmission lines. For 2020, they bumped that number up to a whopping $781 million to work on replacing the aging wires throughout the PG&E power area.

So where does that leave us today? Well, with years of catch-up to get our infrastructure back up to speed, that means the PSPS, or Public Safety Power Shutdowns, are gonna be a way of life here in California for years to come. You might as well get the generator hooked up to the house because it's gonna take years for us to dig ourselves out of the situation that we find ourselves in today. And let the rest of the nation heed this warning of what's happening here in California with your infrastructure nationwide.

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers puts out a report about infrastructure across the entire nation. Right now, we're looking at a D-. As we get more information, we'll continue to keep you posted here.

Calpocalypse 2019, America's Aging Infrastructure. It's an ongoing theme on this channel. Hit like and subscribe and we'll see you here.

Brought to you in part by Santa Barbara Chocolates, Santa Barbara, California. Tell Jason Blanco Lirio sent ya. And my over 850 supporters on Patreon.

Become a member of the board for just $5 a month. Thank you for your support on Patreon. At the time Juan, Thomas, Mr. Brown did this, there was some celebration over a 25 billion with a B settlement that Pacific Gas and Electric was agreeing to to settle the lawsuits and bring them out of bankruptcy.

Now that's sort of the cliff notes from Juan's perspective. The real issue is that after Pacific Gas and Electric implodes and explodes, there's still some hydroelectric facilities, there's still some electrical distribution, and there are still people paying their utility bills. Who owns that? And the issue is between the shareholders and the bondholders.

And for reasons unknown to either of them, I can assure both of them that neither one of them wants the damn thing. They should run screaming from the hills. The way utility companies work in recent years is they milk the public for all they can get and give the money to pensioners and pension funds through dividends.

Pacific Gas and Electric was trading at $70.80 on the 1st of August, 2017. They have no dividend now and as of the 1st of October, 2019, they were down to $3.55. Today they were up to a little bit over $9.00. But that was under attack because this morning Governor Gavin Newsom declared that he was not in favor of the settlement. Let me see what this remarkably astute Californicator governor had to say about that.

In his view, the company's restructuring plan maxes out all the potential financing available to the company other than issuing more equity, which would dilute the shareholders' existing stakes. That plan would leave PG&E with a significant amount of debt at the holding company level and limited tools to finance itself when it needs to access capital to make billions of dollars in safety investments, he wrote. As one described, there's $25 billion to pay homeowners who lost their homes in several of these fires.

Another $11 billion to pay the insurance companies that have already paid those homeowners. So we get a double payment there. Several billion dollars to the state and local governments.

But of course, they did have policemen driving around and firemen, and just about everybody else. But as Mr. Brown describes, they have about 7,000 miles of aerial lines that have to be replaced with insulated lines and bolstered with heavier carriage to carry them across the ground in the sky. And how did this happen? California pays a pretty good amount for electricity already.

Where did the money go? That tower that started that fire, apparently, was last inspected in the year 2001 with a humanoid. There may have been some helicopter flybys that noted that the tower was still there, but no inspection by a person for the last 18 years. The C-hooks that were on that had waved in the wind for 68 years until they wore through on the little sharp piece of metal they were hung on to the point where a tiny sliver of metal holds them in the air at all.

And that was the tower that broke. Most of the other towers are the same age and have suffered the same criminal neglect. Inspections and maintenance of this type of equipment as part of being granted a monopoly are mandated by law.

They are not shy at all about quoting the law to you, but they weren't following it, even partly. For decades, the Public Utilities Commission that is supposed to be overseeing this has been entirely replaced with technically incompetent people who believe in global warming and green energy fervently, but without a clue as to what either one might be. And that's their sole issue in dealing with a very complex electrical infrastructure.

It's an organic thing. It isn't that we built it in 1920 and it's getting a little old. It's organic.

It has to be replaced, repaired, and redone every day by thousands of crews and bucket trucks who used to be able to get your power back up in a day or two days. Now it takes two or three weeks because they have gotten rid of a lot of those people and a lot of those trucks. They're very expensive to maintain.

That's why they were getting the money, honey, in your rate base. And across California, we're looking at 50 or 60 or 70 cents a kilowatt hour now for prime-time electricity from 4 to 9 p.m. In a new law that has been enacted already by San Diego Gas and Electric and will be by PG&E and Southern California Edison, I'm told by the end of the year. But wait, there's more.

Where's the $25 billion come from? At $9 a share, which today is probably the last day of that, Pacific Gas and Electric has a market capitalization of $4.9 billion. There would have to be 12 PG&Es to have the market cap of Tesla. They don't have $25 billion.

They don't have another $25 billion to replace and repair this infrastructure. They don't have any of that. And what Newsom is so quaintly putting is there are limited financial options to raise capital.

Who's going to buy stock in a company like this? They need $50 billion in capital and they're worth nothing. What kind of bondholder is going to buy a bond? What of any of this is going to be doable? Only in California could such a notion have traction at all. If we're going to blame the fires on PG&E and in the case of at least one fire, it can be directly traced to a specific tower and points to their neglect in maintaining their system, who's going to pay? The California taxpayers? These people are lost.

They don't know how to get out from under humanoids parking on the sidewalk and shitting in the street. They don't know what to do about that. They're celebrating a surplus.

They're over $200 billion in debt. They can't tell up from down. Debt from surplus.

Money from no money. They think money comes from one percenters or something, movie star. I don't know, but I can tell you where it's going to come from.

It's going to come from you. If you want electricity and we're not talking about 50 cents a kilowatt hour. We're not talking about a dollar a kilowatt hour.

We're not talking about $2 a kilowatt hour. You're talking about $3 and up. Per kilowatt hour to get back to even.

Now I can front out for you how all this happened and how you have these aging corporations that bleed off all their good people while we're chaining the riffraff and the hangers on until there's nobody left but riffraff in a maturing industry with very little opportunity. But it is what it is. They're a dinosaur and they have already screwed the pooch, so to speak.

The infrastructure's gone and it's a lot less expensive to maintain than to rebuild. So poor PG&E in Oakland and San Francisco and points north. I want you to stop and think.

Why would that happen there and not happen in Utah or Arizona or Florida or North Carolina? Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Nebraska. How are your local utility companies doing in maintaining their infrastructure? By the way, I already know the answer. And I actually know what they'll tell you.

And they don't matter. We are going into a future where there isn't a grid. It fails.

It falls. And if you want electricity from the remnants, you're in a nightmare of government and bankrupt corporation that only has one source of funds to dig out of their hole that they made. And that's your pocket.

And you'll pay. Or you'll be left in the dark. So I want you to begin to picture why we started going this way and I started talking to you about this three years ago.

And kind of full-time two years ago. Point of use generation and storage of electricity is not a pipe dream. It's the only way I can conceptualize for you to survive.

Your civilization does not work without electricity. Your jobs, your economy doesn't work without electricity. You will do it my way or you will fail.

Now if somebody has another concept, I'd love to hear about it. But you focused on generation. And a lot of you put all your energy in nonsense crap about green and global warming and so forth.

Well how about global cooling in your freaking house in February because you're not going to have any heat. How do you feel about that? This is a much more dire and imminent situation than what you're afraid of. Should we be off fossil fuels? Well yeah, duh.

I don't need a global warming to tell me that. I don't need, that whole theory doesn't make any sense to me. We have had a miraculous evolution in the standard of living of mankind based on energy.

All money, all wealth is a proxy for energy going back to our bet, our trade off of if I tame this ox and I feed the little son of a bitch, will he let me plow more to grow more food than he eats? And to cook the food and to be warm, how much deadfall from the forest can I drag and how far can I drag it? And actually in the 16th, 17th century, we reached the point of pretty much the collapse of civilization because we cut down all the firewood. Fortunately discovered coal. Developed coal, what would you say? We used coal, started using coal out of desperation to make heat and cooking and so forth because we're out of trees that are within a distance that's practical to haul.

In the 1880s, the concept of transmitting electricity is such a miracle it hasn't sunk in to most of you people yet. Number one, it doesn't weigh anything. And number two, the transportation is instantaneous.

It's not how many days or how many hours it takes to haul it and how many wagons or how many horses can pull that weight. It weighs nothing and it arrives instantly for our purposes. It's not really instant but go with me on this.

Close enough for government work. And now in the 21st century, we have magic rocks on our roof that can bypass the entire photovoltaic cycle to produce carbohydrates which we later call hydrocarbons. All different but the same thing to produce energy which is itself wealth.

Our standard of living is based on our ability to manipulate energy and to harvest energy. And we're in a miraculous time where we can transmit it basically for free instantly and it doesn't weigh anything. Better yet, it's falling on our roof and we can convert it directly.

This is kind of cool. That's the way out. The naysayers who actually are also stakeholders in the previous dinosaur industries don't think there's enough land on earth to generate enough electricity.

It doesn't even take a trivial amount of the earth to have enough solar for everybody forever. It's an absurd notion. By a freak accident of the universe, our planet rotates on its axis and we have periodic sunshine.

And because of weather and we do want rain, we're not doing very good on our solar today with our PowerSafe 100. And so we have to have storage and that's the way out. The transmission of electricity for hundreds of miles on overhead wires is a 1920s technology.

That tower was 68 years old. I'm 64. It's older than I am.

Move on. The model is absolutely clear. It's point-of-use generation and storage.

And we can grid up locally or even nationally or even globally to exchange energy just like we do money. But that's not the grid you have. They were never going to be part of that.

But I'll tell you who might. Two weeks ago, Elon Musk issued a letter to his people to focus on two things by the end of the year. And one of them was the installation and sales of solar roofs.

And the other one was the obvious, produce and deliver more cars. We had a ball with the Cybertruck. We did two videos.

We got more views than we deserved and from people that we not only don't deserve, we don't really want them to hang out. The Cybertruck's kind of the end of it. Yeah, Tesla stock went up 23 bucks today.

Well, they're hitting on all cylinders. The China factory is going to produce 1,000 cars a week from now to the end of the year. Well, what did you think it was going to do? They were going to build this factory in China, have lots of Chinamen there and then say, oh, well, somebody forgot to hook up the electricity.

I guess this wasn't that good an idea. After all, it's all gone. Well, at some point, it's going to generate cars.

Rumor has it that Tesla is going to begin production and delivery using the Model Y a month sooner than you might have thought. And part of the stock price may be a leak that that's sooner yet than you thought. But I think it's kind of a perfect storm in that he also today said that the solar energy part of Tesla's business could grow much faster and ultimately be much larger than the automobile business.

And this is what I've been trying to tell you about Tesla for years. They're not a car company. They can show off their technology with cars probably better than any other product.

They're a battery company. They've been a battery company from the beginning. I've been telling you for 10 years, it's all about the batteries.

You can wrap any car around the battery you want. It's a battery thing. And their core competency is batteries.

But at this point, they've become such an attractant to engineering talent, they can do anything they want with that. Any technology. But the one that's in Mr. Musk's sights, the one that's wearing his headlights, is the installation, not of solar panels, but of solar roofs and the installation of power walls, which look like a much more elegant version of what I've done here, albeit smaller.

Well, mine's gonna get prettier, but his is gonna have to get to be a lot bigger. And that's where that's going. But ultimately, the concept is point-of-use generation and storage of electricity.

And Tesla would have to publicly abdicate and go home to not lead that charge. And if you think electric cars is a compelling sale, solar roofs and battery backup is gonna be a wild for people that don't have electricity. And they're not gonna be calculating too much about whether it's at the point they can afford it or if they just better watch Jack's videos about it, because some of the issues brought up by PG&E are gonna force the issue sooner rather than later.

And worse, I'm not wrong on this. It's going to be nationwide. These people have criminally mishandled their fiduciary duty, granted them by monopoly to maintain and repair the electrical grid in the United States.

The government is not gonna fix it The utility companies are not gonna fix it. But whatever cabal comes out to try to fix it, you're gonna be the ones that pay for it. And the way out is not to use any of it or use as little of it as you possibly can, because when it hits $3 a kilowatt hour, you're talking about a $3,000 a month utility bill.

And you're not going to like that. But the way forward is pretty clear. I can't say it's cheap.

Again, prices of things are all graven in jello. I can't, you know, you can't nail a jello rattlesnake to the wall. It just kind of crawls around it.

So I don't know what things are gonna cost, but I would suspect that the storage component will be a byproduct of the electric vehicles. And the, I don't know if you saw it, but they did a demonstration of the roof tiles with a hammer. And unlike the ball, it didn't break.

I'm pretty sure that's aluminum oxynitride too. And so the roof will finally be real, I think. And the power wall will finally be real.

But I gotta tell you right now, they're training a few installers in Texas, a handful, a bare handful in Florida, and the rest are all in California. And that's where they're gonna be needed for the immediate future. And so the ability to ramp that up to the number of people that are going to need this technology is suspect.

But it's mainly gonna be a California sport for some time to come. Tesla doesn't really want you installing them yourself. You can't buy it and have it delivered and, hey, I'll take care of it.

They don't want to do that. Maybe that'll change, who knows? But that's the direction it's going. And so Musk has got it.

He knows it's important. And now you do too. Their automotive business is going great.

I consider it a fait accompli with the introduction, the unveiling of the Cybertruck. Now I have a luxury sedan, luxury SUV, a midsize sedan introducing a midsize SUV, and now a full-size pickup truck. I guess they're doing a semi-truck.

That's sort of an entirely different $85 billion market they'll wind up dominating, but it's a sideshow. More blue sky for Tesla. So the nail is driven home on the cars.

And I think even an Elon Musk mug. He's got the China factory going. He's got a deal to do one in Germany.

He's got the models he needs to dominate. I think you'll hear more about the battery technology. Not so very different, but an incremental gain, but a big gain in his ability to manufacture large numbers of batteries in a way that other manufacturers simply cannot do at this point in time.

And other car companies are hopeless to stand by and watch in chagrin. And so the car business is sort of a done deal. The next big blue sky, and it's an unbelievably huge market.

Apple should have bought them at $240 years ago. I suggested that in 2012, by the way. They should have bought them, because the blue sky on solar, just residential roofs, but solar energy production and storage at the residential level is going to be off planet.

It's just going to be completely crazy the amount of money people are willing to spend to have electricity in the face of horribly failing grid. Not just infrastructure, but a conceptual devolution of the whole idea of the grid as we're doing it now. It'll be shown for what it is, a 1920s technology that failed.

Failed badly, if slowly, right in front of us while we're watching everything, but on the news, this is what happened. But I was stunned by Juan Brown's very graphic reporting on this. I'm sitting here talking to you.

He's showing you the C-hooks and the aerial wires and the fires. Just a very well done piece, kind of from his local perspective about what's going on with PG&E. It's worse than he described, but he did allude to the fact that it may not just be limited to Northern California.

Ha, he said a mouthful there. This is across the land. You've been betrayed by your government and corporate leaders on this topic

And they've gotten away with it for a long time, but it's kind of just by kicking the can down the road, at this point, they have a huge number of cans at the end of a very long road, and there's not much way out of it. Technologically, the way to deal with it is, as I've described, point-of-use generation and storage of electrical power. Now, how do you do that specifically? We've demonstrated that an old man who takes too many naps in the afternoon and a couple of kids can do this in a shop in Southeast Missouri.

It's not a technological problem. Can it be improved on? Uh, yeah. And if I was Elon Musk and had my pick of the top 10% of all the engineers coming out of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Rensselaer, Southern Cal, it'd be easy.

There's no scientific barrier. There's no technological feat. It's an engineering task.

It's a direct engineering task to do this. But you have to get over the, does it make economic sense? It's gonna make a lot of economic sense here pretty soon. A whole lot.

And a good part of the cost of your house is gonna be its power plant. That's the bad news. The good news is you own it then.

And you can collect them, trade them with your friends. Eventually, you can hook up in little microgrids. And guess who has a 26-foot boring machine that could probably be made just as easily into 26 inches to bore completely under the whole neighborhood and pop up in your basement or crawl space to do that.

It's doable. So gridding up is gonna look a whole lot different in the future. And your concept of a grid in the future will be very different from your concept of a grid now.

And we will have one. And kind of a speed-of-light online marketplace for electricity that's all prices are negotiated at the millisecond level for the whole nation. I'm getting out a little far in the future.

Let's restrict this to what I've been telling you for the last two years, more so. And we're watching it play out in real time. Is the sky falling? Is the second coming of Christ all part of this? Not really.

It's pretty predictable stuff. And I've seen it coming for years. And that's why we have a power safe in here.

We're making controllers and so forth. But the guys, again, that do it is Tesla. I believe the Cybertruck will be capable of powering a home if that's what you want to use it for.

But certainly intermittently and as needed as a backup. But I would advise you to have a home battery about the same size and a photovoltaic array that you control, not that the grid controls. Stay with us.

There'll be more EVTV. Richard, you're back. I am back, safe and sound.

Tell me about the drive. We did have a snowstorm that came through yesterday. It was an absolute winter wonderland from about 50 miles north of here.

Roads were clear. They were still removing some cars. But it was absolutely a sunshiny day.

We're 111 miles from the Chesterfield Tesla Service Center, the new one. But I drove straight there and completely clear roads, and it was just a beautiful day to be out driving. And you were just telling me about the drive back.

The drive back, and I always say this, every time I get out of the S, you feel better after you get out of the drive than when you're sitting around doing something else. It absolutely is just very, very comfortable. I get it adjusted, lower the steering exactly the way I like it, and it's like sitting in your Lazy Boy with riding down the road.

It's wonderful. I feel good, you know. No pressure points in the seats.

What's with the hat? The hat, I had, since he's been having such a battling last few weeks, I thought I would bring this out just to say that. It's a MAGA hat. It says, Make Automobiles Great Again.

That's right. Hell yes. And it is, I guess, a show of defiant support in the media that I believe the truth eventually will be told.

And Elon Musk is going to make automobiles great again. He is. He actually already has.

He sure did. He has. This is our 2013 Tesla Model S. Last we talked about it was replacing the windshield.

This is all about electric cars being maintenance-free. The drive unit went out of it, and we were hearing this mysterious clunk. The early 2013s had essentially defective drive units.

And we've just got 25,000 miles on this car going into its seventh year. It was delivered in February of 2013. Probably one of the first, I'd say, 1,200 or 1,500.

They delivered some in 2012, but not very many. It was like 50 or whatever. They did the same thing with the 3 in 2018.

When I got my 3, it was again February. But the early Model S's, it quickly became apparent, had drive units that went out. We had a guy stop in here.

He had 35,000 miles on his Model S. It was on its third drive unit. But they got it ironed out. And my theory that I explained at the time was that there's a bearing in there that has carbon brushes on it that bleeds off induced currents in the motor shaft, and that that was defective.

If that doesn't properly work, then the currents go through the ball bearings of the motor and very quickly wear those out, arcing through the bearings. Maybe, maybe not. Tesla never told me.

It's their secret. Yeah, but this car just turned 25,000 miles. We'll often take it out just to show it off.

Zero to 35 acceleration in maybe 11 or 12 seconds just to let people feel the thrill. So it's not been rode very hard, and it's not been rode very far. No.

25,000 miles, maybe the lowest mileage 2013 in the country. Probably, yeah. But it did develop a clunking noise when you took off, sometimes when you stopped, and that got worse.

We took it to St. Louis, and Rob, I thought he'd get in it and wouldn't be able to reproduce it. It didn't even get out of the parking lot. He pulled one lane of the parking lot and just turned it around and brought it in.

I think he knew what it was. Now, here's the part I don't understand. They didn't know, and we left it there and came back in our Model 3. They called a few days later.

Now, Richard, I've never understood what you told me, but it sounded like when he told me that they'd said that they were replacing the drive unit under warranty. Under warranty. But they wanted us to pay $2,469.

For the driveshafts. For the driveshafts. That's exactly what they said.

Now, did they say the driveshafts were optional, or they needed to change the driveshafts when they changed the motor? No. My understanding, they explained it that the problem actually wasn't the driveshaft, and they were still just replacing your drive unit. Really? That's kind of the gist.

It wasn't a long conversation, and as a whole, with the entire service call, I didn't have really very long conversations with anybody there. They had a young lady named CJ. CJ, who I dealt with.

She managed to convey exactly what she needed to, without telling you anything. That's right. She was very nice today, and very polite.

I want you to find out who the head of warranty and repairs is at Tesla in Fremont. Okay. And I'm going to write them a letter.

Okay. Why would they replace the drive unit, and want me to pay for the driveshafts? That'd be a good question to ask, and I hope they have an answer. I'm sure they do.

Well, we wanted a car back, so we went ahead and paid them. But... It drives like a brand new one. Well, that's great.

It's very nice. I remain confused by their position in changing a $175,000 drive unit. I don't really know what they are.

I've got a room full of them in the other room. And then charge me for the driveshafts, which I also have a dozen of. I don't know.

We'll call and ask. I guess we'll get a little... You're not going to call. I'm going to write them a letter.

Okay. And request a written explanation of what the hell they think they're doing. I'm not entirely displeased, but I'm a little peeved.

Why did I pay $2,500 for a warranty repair that they admit it was the drive unit? You know, I never really got a detailed explanation nor a detailed receipt. They are paperless. Yep.

We've never gotten anything. You don't get any paperwork. In fact, they refused to communicate by e-mail.

Yeah. It was all by phone. So it was a... But they were very nice.

I mean, they treated us very nice. Richard, you're going to be happy to learn that Danu has repaired your Model 3. Amen. Thank you, Danu.

He found, would you believe... A connector. A connector. Amazing.

Actually, he didn't have to look very far. It was the 2-pin connector that connects to the... There is your... Impact sensor. And it had one wire connected and the other wire wasn't.

And this is something that you might want to be aware of. It's sort of a technical troubleshooting technique. Whenever you have two wires on a connector, you want to have both of them connected.

That's what I was... That was the source of that error. This is driving error-free. Amen.

I test drove it today. It's brand new. It drives like a brand new version of my car.

I know. Except, for some reason, the rear-view camera is a lot better on this one. So we need to get somebody to clean my rear-view camera on mine because this one's great.

Now, here's your assignment. Okay. We have a Kydo from Copart.

I've got it. It's almost a year old. Mm-hmm.

And you said it's marked salvaged. Mm-hmm. And you know a way to get it unmarked.

I have to get an over and errors, who knows who, and I've got to get a few people together. But I can get it done, yeah. Well, I want the car titled.

Okay. And I want it registered. And I want it insured.

And you need to kind of keep notes because you've got to explain how you did all that. Okay, I will. I'll take care of it.

Okay. At that point, I'm not too sure how they can tell it's a salvaged one from a not salvaged one. I don't know either.

Even though it's blue in the front and gray in the back. I can't imagine. There's not very many parts other than the body parts.

Well, it charges and it drives great. Mm-hmm. We made a very good decision the way we put it together, I think, just doing the front.

I wonder who made that decision. Me? Yeah, I know. We fixed this car! In fact, we were going to part this out so I could have the battery and the drive unit and some other stuff.

I didn't buy it to drive it, Richard. That was all your idea. I know.

I help where I can. He wanted a Model 3 to drive, and once we had three of them piled up around here, he seemed to think somehow one of them was his and that we ought to be able to swap enough parts in enough different directions that there'd be a rolling car out. What's better than having a Model 3? Having a Model 3 that runs! Right! That's right.

A friend that has a Model 3. What's better than having three broke Model 3s? One that runs. Having two broke ones and one that ain't broke. You got that right.

You got that right. Well, good enough. Let's see if you can win your way through the legalities of making us a titled, registered, insured car.

We're going to try. We're going to try. I'm sure it can be done.

You might have to go back down to Sikeston. I might have to go to Sikeston. I might have to go to Sikeston.

You might have to go to Sikeston. I might have to go to Sykeston. And I want you to be sure and tell us all about that.

And bring me back some of that changed chicken gizzards and livers when you do. We'll do that. No, I'm not going to Sykeston.

You don't go there unless you have a reason. We may go down. See, I never know quite how Tesla and the world works out.

What has happened to these cars. So we're also, while you're in Sikeston. Call the supercharger.

I want you to hook up to the supercharger and see if it'll charge. That'd be interesting. I will do that.

That would be a very interesting trip. I'll do that. I'm not saying that it will.

And I'm not saying that it won't. We'll find out. But if you get liquored up, play with some high voltage, it'll make a nice drive.

That would be. It would. I'll do it.

I'll definitely do it. Right now, this car, despite having a Joseph's multicolored coat paint job. You know, you look at it from this angle, you really can't tell.

It's error free. And it is updated to the latest software, LACN1. And therein is really the story.

The cars are very repairable. I made this point before. I have rebuilt and done some auto work.

We did not shim. We did not jam around, weld, anything. The parts just snapped on there.

And they fit like a glove. Body alignment. And it drives nice.

That means these are very rebuildable cars. They're going to have to do something. Now, I did want to make.

I don't think they are. And I think it's because of the electronics and computers and so forth. And I think Elon needs to not be such a tight ass about that.

Loosen up a little bit. Now that he's lost his third general counsel in the last year, maybe things will get better. Settle down a little bit.

And he's not under quite as much pressure. No, you're right. The pressure is off.

He's all over that point. The Chinese Gigafactory is going to start producing a thousand cars a week. Yeah, that will help.

I think. There may be a surprise announcement coming up. There's something spooky about this stock going up $23 Monday.

And it's kind of backed off about $3 here on Tuesday. But it seems to have held. The number of shorts has fallen from a high of 43 million in May.

We're down to 25 million shares. There were two or three reports, CNBC, fairly detailed. And the Kramer, whatever the guy is.

Kramer is now a Tesla fan and has bought an X. They're moving people. I think the mystique is over. I did want to make a comment about this, though, that I didn't make earlier.

I have been around auto and kind of in the industry rebuilding hot rods. And every time you kind of swap out a motor and you do stuff, you kind of end up with a few extra parts or something just didn't quite. My just gut feeling about all this changing out the drive unit.

It's like a brand new vehicle. I mean, I just I had a different mindset compared to when you rebuild or rework ice car. Change out the transmission.

You're like almost like the ice cars had open heart. It's just been reworked and it's sort of stitched back together. But this to me, just changing out a drive.

It was like it just rebuilt the car or whatever. It's almost like new. If they would give us access to the diagnostics they have, and the ability to flash the drive units on the three or that sort of thing.

Deal with the software. They're actually quite modular and quite simple. Quite simple, yes.

Dropping the whole ass in out of this S, which you kind of have to do to swap out the drive unit. It isn't anything. Compared to pulling a motor with a crane, unbolting a transmission.

Now my second take that I wanted to mention for a while. I think the whole concept of regenerative braking has a tremendous amount of less stress on the car and the components. That braking and ice, when you still have RPM, transmission, you have forces.

Regenerative braking stops the force where the motor is generating the force. I think these cars are going to make a difference. Well, they are technically more modular with less pieces and should be easier to deal with.

But I want to put out a call. Let's turn a negative into a positive. We played with these autopilots on the way up.

And even Dan, by the time we got there, was kind of grabbing the dashboard. It's not good, guys. And I keep watching these guys on YouTube.

And they have got autopilot as being pretty much done. And the greatest thing since sliced bread. And they will actually, it's kind of like, if people want something to work, they'll think it's working while it's braking in front of them.

And I'm telling you, it doesn't work at all. The adaptive cruise control is pretty cool. And it will do a lane change.

But I wouldn't trust this thing as far as I can throw it. And we had three, probably three incidents that were significant enough to be alarming. Just driving on an interstate highway to St. Louis, we didn't even try to let it navigate on autopilot.

You may be able to go a little distance. How about a little bit? I'd like to see, since they have that computer in there. And they have people that are working on said software.

I'd like to see a little effort on setting a new mark on diagnostics and repairability. Just tell you what part you need. Exactly.

The car should diagnose itself. Send you an email, this is what's going on. And send an email to Elon asking him to have one delivered.

There's money to be made in that. And have it charged on your credit card. Just charge your credit card.

And then you should be able to pop up on the screen, detailed instructions for changing the part. From hanging? In other words, instead of trying to make a big deal out of the high voltage hazards of the high voltage battery. Which is frankly absurd.

It really is. I've been bit by 400 volts, 300 times. And it's just not a deal.

Did the lights just go out? A little bit of them. They probably switched over or something. Let's cut.

Well, we had an interesting total failure of our electrical system. Our solar powered battery backup system. As it turned out, we had a smart car and a 4D Transit Connect charging out front.

The Model S at 48 amps. And my Model 3 in the next room. All on the charger at the same time.

That's sort of a fantastical problem to have though. And the sun going down. It's 5 o'clock.

We really are in the dark. And we exceeded what that little 15 kilowatt inverter can do. Charging four cars.

And lighting the place. And running the furnaces. Well, there's your... That would be an unusual problem to have.

I don't know how many people would have that. One of the things I didn't cover in my battery and utility grid soliloquy. Quite excellent.

I wanted to compliment you on. My hat's off to you on that one. Well, it's kind of a way of thinking.

And it's an economical way of thinking, but it's misdirected. And that is that you want an 85 kilowatt or 100 kilowatt hour battery in your car. We keep hearing from guys that want to put 20 kilowatt hour batteries for their house.

I'm sorry guys. Why do you think your house is going to use less electricity than your car? Even with a cyber truck. I want 100 kilowatt hours in the house.

And 100 kilowatt hours in the truck. And I want to have both of them available for power. And unfortunately, that's an expensive proposition now.

But trust me, it will become less so. As more cars are built and more cars are wrecked. Calls here at EVTV.

It'll get better. I believe there are still trailblazers. Well, if you're a tinker and innovator, that's the crowd we cater to.

I prefer the term trailblazers. Talking about 13 kilowatt hour power walls. Picture eight of them from Tesla.

That's going to be bigger. I keep running into people with 6 kilowatts of photovoltaics. And 11 kilowatts of battery or 10 kilowatt hours of battery.

It's coming now. It's not going to cut it. In any event, we have the Model S back.

This Model 3 is ready to go. And you're going to walk us through how to make it legal. We'll take notes and photograph the whole process.

It'll be interesting because in the old days, you had to have the bill of sale from the motor and the VIN number and all this kind of stuff. We have all that, but there's none of those parts really involved in this body parts. I would be interested to know what they want to know.

It'll be interesting to see. We're going to talk to the rebuilder, a local rebuilder. My rant was, why not look at the positive end of this? And why doesn't Tesla take it as a mission to instead of allowing some repairs, to simply make it a goal to make their cars the most repairable by individuals on the planet.

That's one way out of having to provide all those service centers is to get people to... There's an awful lot of people in this world, Richard, that want to do their own automotive work. I have to add one caveat. What's that? A place that looked very busy to me

They're not just... You're not hearing air sockets running and people moving around. It was a fairly antiseptic repair environment. They spent three or four million dollars setting that one up.

It was very nice. I guess the other one's still operating. I don't know.

I thought they closed it down. Did they? I believe so. But they're pretty busy because they changed the motor on the weekend.

She said they had a team out from Fremont to help with deliveries. They brought a bunch of cars out and they jumped in and did it over the weekend. Cool.

Since they were already there. They sure did a fine job. I would say, if anything, it's a little tighter.

It seems like it was wound pretty tight. We're tesseling up around here and have a new... Model 3. Model 3 for Richard to drive around in. I've been grinning for like a week or two.

I've been grinning for a while. I don't know if you've noticed that. That really set me up.

I thought that was over your upcoming nupe jewels. Well, you know that too. I am still happy as I can be, I guess.

Well, we want you to be happy. That's part of it. You can do a lot better at work if you're happy.

That's right. Behind every man, there's a woman somewhere. And a Tesla.

And a Tesla in there somewhere. We all want one. Either a Tesla or a woman.

A woman, Tesla, both. If you drive one, you want a Tesla. Does it work that way with women too? You know, I don't think we need to go into that zone of the conversation.

But, you know, all females are good. And they all deserve to be in a happy marriage. See, I've only ever had but the two.

I'm on three. You've got 19 years out of the first one. Don't take any advice from me.

25 out of this one. I like the second one so much better. I can't wait to meet Mrs. Number 3. Yeah, you told me that.

Although I'm not sure I've got a third one in me. She'd have to be very gentle. Yeah, you have to stay awake.

You know, those kind of things. Well, she'd have to be very tolerant. Yeah, that's right.

Dribbling my oatmeal. Anyway, well done. On all counts.

And we've got the Model 3 working. One wire broken at the pin. Good deal.

And we actually just rooted around and found a pin about that size. And that seemed to work. He crimped it on there and hooked it up and we don't have any error messages now.

Except, once in a while it says parking assist unavailable. I think my other one says that too sometimes. I'm not sure what that means.

Does anybody know what parking assist unavailable is? We did manage to put one of our OBD-II adapters in here. I saw that. And hooked it up with our tablet.

I don't know if that thing is still rounding on or what. That would be another point I would make. After being in the 3 and being in the S, I still like the speedometer right in the center of the steering wheel.

Well, here it is. Of course, the car isn't doing anything, but this is the torque program setup. We've done a setup for gauges.

People should be getting that. You'll like it. It operates wirelessly from our OBD-II adapter.

And I've got 2486.73 miles on this car. It's discharging at 1.7 amps at the moment. 378.7 volts.

67% state of charge. 49.8 kilowatts left. And 13.8 volts on the 12-volt system.

My inverter is at 30 degrees centigrade. And the stator of my motor is at 24. So, all is right with the world.

And this is just a cheap Android tablet. Running a $5 program called Torque. And a pin set that we have to download.

I sure like it. It just tells me a lot more. Plus, that's where your eyes are going to take.

Right over your steering wheel. My eyes can move around. Mine can't.

I've got to kind of keep them on the road. Well, I just had cataracts earlier. You can see everything.

I'm an old man. I've got cataract surgery. They pulled them out.

You came through it quite well, by the way. Yeah, I've got 20-20 vision. It's very nice to be able to see.

Seeing the world completely different. We're glad you're back. So, our raid on Tesla Chesterfield was a success.

And while you were gone, Danu got the last item on the Model 3 fixed. We are error code free. Good deal.

Both cars. And we still need to get licensed. Registrated.

We're going to get it. Pay some taxes on it, probably. It'll be a shit show.

We're going to get it done. I'm glad we got you to handle all that. That's what I'm here for.

It's quite an adventure. I just probably wouldn't do it. My hat's off again to the St. Charles Service Center.

Chesterfield. Tesla Chesterfield Service Center. Very nice.

Good coffee. They were nice everywhere I went. Said hello and were very friendly.

But I did kind of reflect on that. They are selling sort of a luxury product. You think? They are, yes.

It pays to be nice, I suppose, in that environment. Isn't that right? Their service center was nice. I asked a salesman how long he'd been there.

He'd been there since January. And said it was just the best job he'd ever had. He said everybody's happy.

They are. That's right. That's basically the way it was.

He just liked being there. I'm sure there are a lot of easy sells. The momentum's going their way.

It's probably going to continue that. He'd come very close to selling me an X. Yeah. By the way, the X is a lot easier to get into and out of than the S or 3, either one.

I know. White interior. If I had a white interior, that wasn't going to go with me.

You'd kind of get that dirty. You know, with the Cheetos and the KFC. That would be a mess.

KFC. But anyway, yeah. It was a very nice facility.

The people were very nice. And so they're managing to make it a good experience. I would say that.

And that's... Going into other repair centers and other auto dealers is just a little bit more pressurized, I think. A little bit busier. Richard, I can't tell you how terrified these other automakers are.

No. Tesla is outselling everybody. Mm-hmm.

Like all the BMWs combined. All their models combined. All the Mercedes models combined.

Yep. And that's a new... There's a top-selling car in the country now. And it's just astonishing.

And you drive it and opinions don't matter. You feel it and you experience it. Mm-hmm.

And that's what you want. It drives like a go-kart. The Cybertruck is a home run.

I actually had a guy take our whole thing about... Aluminum nitride. Yeah, your plate glass or whatever. Oxygen nitride.

And just sort of like redid the whole video in order. Just as we did it. As if it was his.

It's astonishing all the people on YouTube. But that's a good sign. That's their advertising.

They've got 30 guys out there now that do YouTube channels just to promote their videos. Oh, yeah. And I saw a calculation on one of them that the average Chevy or Ford about $825 of the price of the car is in advertising.

Yep. That's how much of an edge it is. And Elon just doesn't have to do any.

Not right now for sure. Everybody's talking about women. But the big news this week, I think, is... I take this as a victory lap by Elon.

He's saying that the car thing is under control. And in his line of vision, the priority is going to be solar and battery storage. And their energy products.

And he sees that as a lot more blue sky, faster growth, and higher ultimate market than automobiles ever was going to be. I have to point out that Tesla's right today about $68 billion market cap. VW is the largest automotive manufacturer in the world.

Their whole market capitalization is only $97 billion. No, they're crazy. No.

And Toyota's about $240 billion. Higher margins. And probably more models.

And they've got a stake in Tesla. Do they still have a stake? No, no. They got out of it.

I remember that a little bit. The way they got the Fremont factory was Toyota sold it to them for $49 million and bought $50 million worth of Tesla stock. And man, did they make out on that deal.

The stock went up about 4x when they sold it. So, what a financial play by Toyota. And Tesla basically got a free factory.

Yes, they did. And so that was the way to do it. But at this point, the China factory is going.

Plans for the German factory are underway. Sparks Nevada is going pretty good. I think we may be I gotta believe the game is dirty.

And Tesla's stock went up. So much money that I believe well, there's two hopes. One is the realization of the solar market.

How big that could be. That will be. Worldwide it will be.

The other possibility is some inside information floating around there about when the Model Y is going into production. And it could be sooner than it's been stated. If they would come out at the end of the first quarter squirting Model Y's that would be a huge deal.

And if it's a little friendly to get in a little bit more spacious for storage. As I was saying I'd like to claim credit for this. My August editorial on the shorts and the oil companies being behind it and so forth.

But I have no idea. I know in May we had 43 million shorts. 43 million shares shorted.

The week of the quarter announcement of profit we had 36 million. And they're saying now 25 million shares shorted. So it's coming down all right smart.

I think it may have been just the casino effect too. There's a lot of people that say these blow up stocks have always come back down. It may have been just some gambling in there too.

A little bit of a good old fashioned greed. And they finally are taking a much longer view. It's a volatile stock and remains so.

But my $1,500 call by February 2023 that I made in February of 2018 remains $1,500 to share. And you can't get there as an automobile company. And my position has been for a long time that they exhibit technology in automobiles.

But they're not an automobile company. There's a whole lot more meat on that bone. And solar and energy is a big part of it.

If they get every gear clicking and they really get some revenue momentum I could see them I would say 700 by the end of 2021. That's where I They'd be on track. But I think they would have no revenue gains.

Just keep grossing in, grossing in, grossing in bigger and bigger dollars. I don't think the car is that complex. My point is the car in all of it.

He has all the models with the Cybertruck necessary to do the car thing. He's got a luxury sedan, a midsize sedan. Luxury SUV, midsize SUV, and the truck.

Nobody wants anything else, really. And everybody really wants an SUV. Mostly a lot of people do.

Well that Model Y may be coming sooner than we think. But I really think it was the realization of what I've been saying for years. They're not just a car company.

If this solar and home battery thing takes off, man, that's unlimited blue sky. Apple should have taken their shot in 2012 when I told them. It is the long-held American fantasy to give the utility company the bird and be free of that yoke of a utility bill.

As I say in another segment on this show, it's worse than you think. Yes, that sentiment is there. The problem is that the utility companies have actually committed a crime.

And they've been doing it for years. And it's about to come to roost. And the only way to bail them out is for us to pay for it.

At two or three dollars a kilowatt hour. An average home is 900 kilowatt hours a month. At three bucks, that's a $2,700 light bill.

That's pretty steep for most of us. That's all steep for anybody. And so the economics of all this is going to change pretty dramatically.

And Tesla could be in position. In the catbird seat. Well, no, they're going to be in the same problem they got with the cars.

Making it up of them. How do you ramp it up? They only need millions of them. Well, after all, you watch them operate a non-structured solar array that forms through the architecture of the home.

A device that basically is like a refrigerator you buy from Home Depot and you are free. It's all there to be done. It's the electric vehicle concept.

There is no technological magic required to do that. And we can be doing point of use generation and storage. And of course, we'll all be driving on sunshine.

That's right. And that would do right. That would be the next level.

You had your car, your house solar, battery bank. You're driving for free. Then your complete fuel bill goes away.

Nothing went away, Richard. It got moved. It got moved into your control.

And a hard asset. Instead of an expense asset. As I explained to Ziqi, when you burn up all this gas, that $50 is gone.

But if you have a solar array, it's still there when you get done. Yep. Well, let's wrap it up for the week.

Good deal. We had a great week. Thanks for fetching the car back.

I enjoyed the drive. It was beautiful. I thought you might.

So, we're Tesla'd up. We're Tesla'd up. We're coffee'd up.

We'll make Automobiles Great Again up. We just can't make quite enough electricity in the dark to charge four cars at the same time. Remember that.

We're working on it. Stay with us.