SAI Weekly 22 - 25: Tesla Robotaxi Debuts, BYD Pauses, YU7 Launches and Folks are REALLY Impressed

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The Tesla STANs were ALL dialed up to volume 12 with the launch of the Austin robotaxi pilot trying to keep the share price pumped up.

I still use the Twitter / X platform and admittedly, most of my follows are in the transportation space so I should get majority auto/EV/AV/battery/chip related posts, but wow – that algo ALSO sends me SO MUCH BS it’s becoming harder and harder to take the social media app seriously. There are a number of folks that I’ve followed for quite some time that still post frequently and that’s one reason I continue to use the platform. And then I had to deal with all the Tesla robotaxi videos this week - almost unbearable, except there are still some Tesla FUDsters as well which makes things interesting. Below are a couple sample posts that made me chuckle.

LOL

Also, a Wiki page lists ALL of Elon’s promises and how many he’s actually kept. According to Wikipedia, 2 of 21.

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Other big news, Reuters is reporting that BYD may be lightening their production load for the time being to bleed excess vehicle inventories at the dealers in China. They have also stuffed the international channels with their large delivery ships hitting the ports of Brazil, Mexico and the EU.

I’ll have some deeper thoughts on both down below.

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I had the pleasure of speaking at the latest MEMA (vehicle supplier advocacy group) event yesterday in Southfield, MI to a crowd of around 60ish people as part of their Adopting China Speed: Best Practices to Drive Competitiveness in North American event. I summarized my latest China trip including what I saw at AutoShanghai2025 as well as my road trip and individual company briefings.

Whenever I focus on China in talks like this I find that there’s a decent number of people in the crowds nodding their heads in agreement with what I am saying, but also a number of people who tend to be defensive and want to point fingers. I point this out to say that the percentage of people that get defensive and rationalize the ‘whys’ has decreased substantially just in the last three years I’ve been back in the US.

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Joe and I had our first LIVESTREAM yesterday on Substack and after some technical difficulties, we both made it on and had a good discussion – mostly on Tesla’s robotaxi launch in Austin and a few other things. Not a bad turnout, but we need to keep it going to build some momentum and we plan to have some surprises before the end of this year to build our followers up so stay tuned for more from At The Wheel real soon!

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