Jameson Dow

Tesla shareholders have voted once again to approve an absurd, biggest-in-history pay package for Tesla’s part-time CEO, Elon Musk. In doing so, they’ve voted to relinquish any control they could have had over the company, and instead to put it deeper into the hands of its largest saboteur.

Update, Nov 7: Full voting results are out, discussed below.

Formula E revealed its new “GEN4” vehicle for next season, with a huge step up in performance – the series’ biggest advancement yet.

The Australian government is floating a scheme that would share the benefits of solar power with everyone on the grid, offering totally free electricity to ratepayers in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining the strongest.

Tesla shareholders will decide whether to give CEO Elon Musk a stock award that could be worth up to $1 trillion. But another proposal is up for a vote to refill Tesla’s employee stock option pool, and it’s only necessary because that pool was drained to give Musk a payday larger than any other CEO in the history of the world.

Another lawsuit has been filed against Tesla, alleging that poor door handle design in the 2016 Model S trapped five occupants after a crash, leading to their deaths. The lawsuit is filed among heightened public scrutiny of Tesla’s door handle designs.

We recently got a chance to test out a few Chinese EVs in the US, despite that none of the models are actually available here. It gave us just a small taste of the variety and quality of vehicles coming out of the world’s largest EV market – and largest car exporter.

The Kia EV4 will be “delayed until further notice” in the US, according to a Kia rep and reported by InsideEVs. Kia said the change is because “market conditions for EVs have changed.”

Police in Colorado’s Columbine Valley recently tracked down a “porch pirate” who stole a package from a suburban home in Bow Mar, Colorado. The only problem: they got it completely wrong, and the accused had to resort to footage from her Rivian truck to exonerate herself.

Tesla is recalling 6,197 Cybertrucks with the “Off Road Lightbar” attachment, citing incorrect use of adhesives which could lead the accessory to fall off during vehicle operation.

It’s about 10% of the 63,619 Cybertrucks in existence, which we know about due to another recall from last week (though that one was fixed by a software update) – showing that the Cybertruck is selling a lot more poorly than initial estimates would have suggested.

GM is laying off a total of 3,300 workers at three separate manufacturing sites in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, and it directly cites government actions as the reason.

Tesla, a company that prides itself on not advertising, is in the midst of a serious marketing effort. In doing so it’s exploiting employees, attacking shareholders, and retaining outside strategy firms to help it advertise.

It’s running these ads not to boost its falling sales, but rather to advocate for another unprecedented award for its CEO, which would keep the company stuck with him for years even as earnings drop precipitously under his direction.

(Update: This article, originally posted 10/18, has now been updated to acknowledge Musk’s comments this week on “corporate terrorism” and on his desire to “control” an “enormous robot army”)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk managed to find a way to turn lobbying, which is typically one of the most efficient ways to spend money as a company, into a net revenue loser for his company – flipping the script again from a true “innovator” in the field of corporate destruction.

Tesla claimed in today’s Tesla’s Q3 shareholder letter that it started a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area “with Robotaxi technology,” but this is impossible given that the company has no license to operate an autonomous taxi in California.

Elon Musk needs Tesla investors to vote for his $1 trillion payday so that he can control a robot army. Yes, really, that’s what he said.

Tesla no longer promises that all of its cars have the hardware onboard for Full Self-Driving, instead now saying that its cars are “designed for autonomy.”

The change happens amidst a growing call for Tesla to upgrade old cars, sold with the promise of complete autonomous operation, but whose hardware is increasingly becoming incapable of running the latest versions of Tesla’s driver assist software.

A new campaign is adding to the growing chorus of pushback against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s absurdly large proposed $1 trillion pay package, this time led by unions and public interest groups. The campaign encourages individuals to get in contact with their pension or retirement funds and ask them to vote against Musk’s payday.

The two largest independent advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, have both recommended a “no” vote on the proposed pay package for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, citing many concerns about shareholder dilution and other terms of the plan.

EVs are great, and can unlock more transportation convenience with the ease of charging at home. But for apartment-dwellers, this can be a complicated conversation. So a nonprofit called Forth is here to help, through its Charge at Home program.

Tesla is now selling its stripped-down, “more affordable” vehicle, the Model Y Standard, in Europe, just three days after releasing it in the US. Its US release was widely panned as the massive number of missing features outweighed the relatively small price cut. But the new European release has fewer cut features and a larger price differential, making the calculus much different in a territory where Tesla sales have fallen rapidly.

Tesla is now selling retrofit turn signal stalks for Model 3 vehicles in the US, after having deleted the stalks in its update of the Model 3. At first, they were only available in China for certain cars, for the equivalent of ~$350. Now they’re available in the US, but for $595 instead.

Yesterday, we attended a special owners event for the Chevy Bolt, unveiling all the changes for the new iteration of one of our favorite EVs out there.

And almost everything we heard there was good news. Almost.

GM has unveiled the new version of the Chevy Bolt, its popular, affordable EV with an upgraded battery and an otherwise very similar package to its last iteration, and we’re on the scene at a special event for Bolt owners at Universal Studios Hollywood to get you all the info you need.

Tesla’s new ‘more affordable models’ have been released, and they’re stripped-down versions of the Model 3 and Model Y. They’re currently the cheapest cars in Tesla’s lineup at base price of $37k and $40k.

But that price is actually more expensive than the cars were a week ago in the US, due to the expiration of the US federal EV tax credit which Tesla CEO Elon Musk pushed for.

Two Bay Area families are suing Tesla over the death of their 19-year-old daughter and 20-year-old son after a crash which left them and one other teenager dead, trapped inside the vehicle due to what the lawsuit alleges is poor door handle design.