Founder, Publisher, and Editorial Director of the 925, LLC publications.
Seth Weintraub is an award-winning engineer, journalist, and publisher who won back-to-back Neal Awards from 2007–2010 during his three-plus years covering Apple and Google at IDG’s Computerworld.
From 2010-2011, Weintraub covered all things Google for Fortune Magazine, amassing an impressive rolodex of Google contacts and a love for Silicon Valley tech culture.
It turns out that his hobby – the 9to5Mac news site – was always his favorite, and in 2011, he went full time adding his Fortune Google followers to 9to5Google, in addition to adding the style and commerce component of 9to5Toys gear and deals site. In 2013, Weintraub bought one of Tesla’s first Model S EVs off of the assembly line, which began his love affair with electric vehicles and green energy — this, in turn, became Electrek in 2014. To cover the burgeoning world of drones and UAVs led by China’s DJI, DroneDJ was born in 2018, and then more recently, Connectthewatts and SpaceExplored were launched to cover connected fitness and space.
From 1997-2007, Weintraub was a Global IT director and Web Developer for a number of companies, with stints at multimedia and branding agencies in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Madrid, and London before becoming a publisher/writer.
Seth received a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in Multimedia and Creative Technology in 1997. In 2004, he received a Master’s from NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s ITP program.
Weintraub is a licensed single-engine private pilot and a certified open-water scuba diver, and he spent over a year backpacking to 60 cities in 23 countries. Whatever free time exists is now guaranteed to his wonderful girlfriend, Alana, and two amazing sons.
More: About.me. BI 2014 profile.
Tips: seth@925.co, or llsethj on Threads/BlueSky or link at top of page.
US fast charging network EVgo has again decided to switch up its charging prices. The DC fast charger network that operates in 34 states charges its users on two tiers: Pay-as-you-go and Membership. EVgo charges based on time rather than electricity transfer and as of next week, prices are about to change…
Tesla ended its Q4 2018 earnings call with a bit of a surprise, albeit one we’ve heard before: CFO Deepak Ahuja will be retiring. In his place, Zach Kirkhorn, previously the company’s vice president of finance is taking over.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped an email to employees last night at 1am PT, which was also released publicly and filed with the SEC, to announce important job cuts to control costs. It also served to temper profit expectations for TSLA stock holders.
[Update: TSLA stock down nearly 10% in early morning trading]
In it, he details the challenges ahead for Tesla as it tries to reduce the price of its Model 3 to the $35,000 price point and make its other products more competitive to fossil fuel equivalents.
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Fresh off its CES LEAF 62kWh unveil, Nissan today at the 2019 North American International Auto Show in Detroit took the wraps off its IMS concept car based heavily on its similarly named IMx concept. Have Nissan reached Concept-ception?
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CES is overwhelming to say the least, but we’ve crowned two products with our “Best of CES 2019” awards for their unique contribution to green transportation. Both are 2-wheeled vehicles but they couldn’t be more different.
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Nissan’s new 62kWh LEAF powertrain was announced today at CES 2019 in Las Vegas and we are on hand to get all of the details.
The new LEAF is now entering a more crowded EV market than when the LEAF debuted almost a decade ago, but Nissan’s long pedigree with EV buyers will certainly help it win customers. But is this the EV that Nissan should have created a long time ago?
Anthony Levandowski has had quite the run recently. The autonomous driving prodigy worked at Google for almost a decade and was an integral part of its autonomous driving efforts that spun from Google (X) into Waymo. In 2016, he exited from Google’s Waymo to found a startup called Otto which was snapped up by Uber that is partially owned by Google Ventures. Unfortunately for all involved, Levandowski left the GooglePlex with more than just his belongings and ended up the main defendant in a rare Waymo vs. Uber civil case which was settled where Google got an even bigger chunk of Uber and a promise from Uber not to use its tech.
In the meantime, Levandowski established a religious organization called ‘Way of the Future’ to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence. It reads like a “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords”.
Now he’s back with an interesting startup called Pronto.ai that promises to change autonomous driving with a new product and what appears to be a new world record for autonomous driving…
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Watch out Chevy Bolt!? Hyundai dropped a bomb on us today with the announcement of the US price of the Kona Electric with 64kWh battery and 258 mile range. Are you sitting down?
If you’ve ever seen a shipping container, there’s a good chance it has said “Maersk” on the side. That’s because the Danish group AP Moller Maersk is the world’s largest container shipping company and ships one out of every five containers worldwide. Those many football field sized, mini cities on water also run on bunker fuel, which is the leftover hot dog parts of the oil world, making its transportation significantly dirtier than even typical hydrocarbons like gas or even diesel.
But that’s set to change as the line pledges to go carbon neutral by 2050. And while that initially may sound like too little, too late there is a lot of good news to unpack here…
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As Tesla moves its Model 3 output to Western Europe, it has alerted its first customers there to configure their Model 3s. We’ve got reports from France, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Netherlands. Spain and a few others. Only the performance long-range AWD and the long-range AWD models can be ordered at the moment for delivery in February.
While we were disappointed that Nissan decided to cancel their unveiling of the new 60kWh LEAF at the Los Angeles Motor Show last week as its now former CEO was being brought up on charges, we were content to learn all about the very interesting Nissan Energy group.
Fast forward to this week and we’re hearing that the expected 60kWh Nissan LEAF will be coming at CES with some possible surprises in tow.
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Well folks, November is almost over and with it comes the last day to order a Tesla Model 3 and be guaranteed delivery in 2018 with the full $7500 federal tax credit. If you were considering ordering one, today is a good time.
I would of course be appreciative if you used my referral code which nets you 6 months of free supercharging.
If you are waiting for the $35,000 model or your current lease to run out, let me do some explaining why it might make sense to order ahead of time as well…
I’d be hard pressed to find a more exciting car here at the LA Auto Show than Audi’s announcement of its sport-back e-tron GT. Although the teasers and camo version drip released over the previous 2 days made it out to be a S7 sportback body plopped onto a 2019 Porsche Taycan powertrain, we were pumped to see more.
Seeing the real thing in person at an Audi event this week, which we were brought to on Audi’s generous dime, was an experience unto itself.
When looking for the perfect ebike, there are a lot of things to consider. There’s price, weight, capabilities, performance and something that’s hard to quantify: feel. That’s a combination of factors that is affected by the geometry of the bike, its materials, components and other nuances. I took a ride on the crowd-funded Carbo folding bike this week and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as comfortable on a folding bike in the city as I did on this extremely light, yet powerful ebike.
We’ve all been waiting for faster charging, because until now, Tesla’s been at the top of the heap with its ~120kW Superchargers which have pretty much plateaued since their debut 5 years ago. Porsche of course has been touting its 800V 350kW charging system for its Taycan and Mission E prototypes…
Chevy today announced a high powered electric conversion of its iconic 2019 COPO Camaro sports car designed for the drag strip…
Winter is coming fast here in the Northeast and my ebike coffee shop commute is going to be impossible soon with my daily ebike. I was intrigued by a post in May by Micah which touted a fat tire ebike for $700. I decided to start there and tailor the build to winter needs while still keeping it at around $700. What I wound up with is a ton of fun…
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Nio was nice enough to invite us to London on the tail end of our 2018 Paris Motor show journey to witness the unveiling of its 2019 Formula E racing series car. As a background, the Chinese company has competed in the FIA Formula E championship since its inception in 2014, sponsoring the inaugural Drivers’ Championship winning team with Nelson Piquet Jr.
The company has some compelling consumer vehicles as well and we’ll take a look at them below but since they are in a quiet period after their recent US $1B IPO, we couldn’t talk much about them beyond what is already known.
Nio also got a huge vote of confidence this week from Tesla’s largest private stakeholder Balllie Gifford which reportedly bought over 11% of the automaker.
As we depart the Paris Mondial Motor Show, we’ve seen all matter of electric vehicles from Tesla and the big legacy carmakers, new ebikes that use new 2170 cells all the way down to Chinese scooters. But one big surprise was seeing the iconic Moke mini Jeep-like electric vehicles in not just one but two different booths in a variety of shapes and sizes, including a speedy, AWD version with…
We’re here at Interbike and between bombing Northstar Mountain on any mountain bike we can get our hands on and speeding around the test track on powerful new e-bikes. We stopped by Tern to see updates to its already awesome folding and cargo bikes which we’ve already put tons of miles on…
I’ve used Greenworks lineup of 40V then 80V line of lawn equipment to take care of my acre of grass (and driveway in the winter) for over 5 years. Overwhelmingly, the experience has been positive with clean, quiet, vibration-free battery power really taking the edge off of lawn maintenance. If you are used to gas mowers, do yourself a favor and try an electric mower –– environment aside, it feels like pushing around a box fan compared to a loud, vibrating, smoke belching, antique.
When we learned Greenworks were launching a commercial lineup of Zero Turn Lithium mowers to compete with Mean Green Mowers and more importantly compete with the awful machines that commercial lawn care companies use, we had to take a look…
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Tesla, after almost three weeks of flirting with going private, will stay public according to an 11:11PM Friday night blog post from the company’s CEO Elon Musk.
Bosch’s PowerTube batteries aren’t the first e-bike in-tube batteries by a long shot, but because Bosch maintains such a big share of the premium e-bike market, the new in-tube variant of their 500Wh batteries allow premium brand bikes to hide their power source better. And that means better looking and performing bikes.
We reviewed the Trek Supercommuter 8 last year which had Bosch’s old battery system, still integrated into the frame, and thought the $5000 price tag was tough to swallow, even for the premium components and experience. But we’re going to step it up a notch today with the dual Bosch PowerTube batteries (1kWh total) Riese & Müller Supercharger which we got on loan from Propel bikes in Brooklyn/Long Beach that retails for around $7000 kitted out.
So I had a few hours yesterday with the new Tesla Model 3 Performance. To be honest, the conditions weren’t great. The weather was amazing per usual in Southern California but I was basically stuck in the middle of West LA during rush hour for this review. I tried to make a dash for Malibu and the mountains but alas, there wasn’t enough time, and they were already full of commuters heading home for the weekend.
I also wasn’t allowed to record video or stills beyond the livestream we posted earlier and some parked footage (below). But that was enough time to know that, for many people, this could easily be —– the best car on the road, at any price.