After almost a year of rumors and speculation, Elon Musk did everything but confirmed today that the Tesla Model 3 will not feature a head-up display. Interestingly, Musk didn’t offer any alternative for the instrument cluster and instead, he said that drivers don’t need the information as much due to autonomous driving.
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Elon Musk is not done with his Tweetstorm today on his way to Cape Canaveral in Florida for SpaceX’s upcoming launch. After confirming that the Tesla Model 3 will not be available with all-wheel-drive dual motors at launch and releasing a video of the first Model 3 release candidate drive, he now talks about the upcoming vehicle’s battery pack.

He confirmed that with the energy density of current battery cells and modules, the Model 3’s shorter wheelbase only allows for battery packs up to 75 kWh.
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Tesla already started gathering a list of people interested in their new ‘solar roof tiles’ since the launch of the new product line last November, but now they are about ready to start taking orders.

CEO Elon Musk confirmed today that they plan to open the order book next month.
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Some speculated that Tesla’s upcoming all-electric crossover/compact SUV called Model Y could follow the Model 3 closely to production in order for Tesla to deliver on its ambitious production goals of 500,000 vehicles in 2018 and 1 million in 2020.

Today, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the Model Y is still “a few years” away.
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Elon Musk has released the very first images of the very first Tesla Model 3 release candidate. As we reported last week, Tesla started production of release candidate Model 3 vehicles, which are cars made almost entirely on production machines in order to test both the production process and the vehicles themselves. 
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Bad news for early Tesla Model 3 reservation holders who were hoping to order the vehicle with dual motor all-wheel-drive. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the dual motor Model 3 will not be available “until next year”. 
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After Florida voters approve solar law by 73%, utilities attempt to add on solar limiting rules – In the last election in Florida, voters decided to support tax breaks for commercial companies going solar. Florida politicians decided that the law – instead of focusing on tax breaks – ought also add additional requirements, strategically chosen, to make residential solar a little more complex. One of the strange aspects of the law is that it says you cannot use past history prices to predict future energy savings. Best part is that one of the politicians pushing the law says we don’t actually need the law today in Florida since there aren’t any contractors breaking the law – but you know – just in case someone might want to break this law, we ought make a law.

Southern Company Says $7B+ ‘Clean Coal’ Kemper Not Viable as Coal Plant, Blames the Public Service Committee – At the end of spending $7B a clean coal plant is said to not be economically viable burning coal – and of course, it isn’t the technologies fault but those who are hoping to protecting rate payers. Coal has significantly cleaned itself relative to pollution of yesteryear – wikipedia says coal plants are 77% cleaner than they used to be. And imagine, even so much cleaner coal is releasing twice as much CO2 per kWh as natural gas.

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As Tesla is getting closer to bringing the Model 3 to production, we are learning of more contracts from suppliers. Earlier this week, we reported on an Austrian company announcing that they secured an order of high-power cables for the Model 3.

Now we learn of Pegatron Technology reportedly landing an order of control computers for the Model 3.
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This past weekend we saw not one, but two new quarter-mile records set by Tesla Model S P100Ds on the drag strip. And today we learn of another new record, this time by the folks over at the Tesla Racing Channel.  They’ve managed to bring the record down by another two-tenths of a second, with a whopping 10.44 @ 124.21 mph.

This run is slightly different from the previous “stock” runs though, as the car received a few modifications to achieve such a quick time.

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Daimler and Tesla have an interesting relationship. New Tesla fans might not know that Daimler actually saved the electric automaker from bankruptcy, according to CEO Elon Musk, when they invested $50 million for ~9% of the company back in 2009.

What is interesting is that despite this early show of confidence in the company, it has taken years for the German automaker to launch its own serious electrification effort, but it’s now ready to do it and they thank Tesla for having paved the way.
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