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 Electrekin 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.
In a recent report, Added Value ranked Tesla’s “VIBE” or Visionary Inspiring Bold Exciting index above Google and other noted big brands.
Several shifts have transpired on the cultural brandscape since 2013, with Tesla gliding into the pole position, ever so narrowly passing reigning champ Google, and lapping all other luxury car makes. Amazon’s VIBE climbed 10% as the company continued to reach into previously unchartered territories (cell phones, drones!). Apple, once the poster child for a brand that radiated VIBE, remains a strong force to contend with, but has continued to slide from atop the perch it held four years ago, when first measured. These brands are joined by culturally vibrant behemoths, Samsung, Microsoft, newcomer Etsy, Nike, and iconic Coca-Cola.
We see that those brands with the greatest cultural vibrancy are more likely to hit the trifecta of 1) delivering purposeful and compelling visions for positive change, 2) establishing truer, deeper, more lasting connections with people, and 3) enriching brand experiences to be more open-ended and on-going.
While not an official race, this does show the insanity of the P85D.
I got a chance to drag race a 691-hp Tesla Model S P85D against a Ferrari and a Lamborghini today, and this is what it felt like:
First impressions: The acceleration is ridiculous. I daily drive an Aventador, and I thought I got used to fast accelerations. But no, the Tesla Model S P85D hauled some serious ass. As a passenger, you do not get a chance to get ready for it at all. My internal organs were glued to the back of my body. I’ve done the P85+ test drive before, and it was already pretty fast. But this P85D is on a whole other level.
We pitted the car’s acceleration against other cars. It pretty much beat everything at the car show (Ferraris and R8s didn’t stand a chance). So I had to pit it against my Aventador, which does 0-60 in 2.8-2.9 seconds. Tesla P85D does it in 3.1-3.2 seconds. Right off the bat, the Tesla got ahead. It gets a good maybe half a car length ahead before the Aventador grips fully and starts hauling. So we decided to make it fairer and only accelerate the Tesla when the Aventador grips and starts moving. That’s when we truly got both cars to start moving at roughly the same time.
But the insane part for me isn’t the raw speed but the fact that this is a 4 door, 7 seat sedan. Meanwhile the Ferrari is a huge, inefficient engine on wheels that gets 10mpg with hardly enough room to seat 2 people.
It is safe to say that this was a special opening (biggest NA flagship store, etc.) but it also served as a introduction for Canadian customers to the P85D which of course is entertaining.
Interesting bit from a smart guy. All that is necessary is that battery/car prices come down and charging stations become ubiquitous. Both seem inevitable. This doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it?
Great interview, not much new however if you follow Tesla and its CTO into the energy industry. Some interesting bits:
Why did Tesla act differently? For a start, it does not think of itself as a carmaker. “I see us more as an energy-innovation company,” says Jeffrey “JB” Straubel, the firm’s chief technology officer, and one of the co-founders of Tesla, along with Elon Musk, the chief executive. “If we can reduce energy-storage prices, it’s the most important thing we can do to make electric vehicles more prevalent,” says Mr Straubel. “Add in renewable power and I have a direct line of sight towards an entire economy that doesn’t need fossil fuels and doesn’t need to pay more to do it.”…
Mr Straubel met Mr Musk, a freshly minted multimillionaire from the sale of his PayPal digital-payments company to eBay. “One lunch was the beginning of what eventually became Tesla,” says Mr Straubel. “We spent most of the meal talking about electric aeroplanes. But as we were wrapping up, I said I was working on a fun crazy project with cars, trying to build a lithium-ion battery pack that could last 1,000 miles.”…
“Most other companies do not believe that battery volume will grow as fast as it’s going to,” Mr Straubel counters. “They don’t understand the tight linkage between cost and volume. We’re at this crossing-point where a small reduction in cost is going to result in a ridiculously big increase in volume, because the auto industry is so big.”…
“No one wishes we could come up with a technology that makes today’s chemistry obsolete more than me,” says Mr Straubel. “We could sell more cars at a lower price. But we’re not waiting.”
The video above would appear to verify that and the speed can obviously increase with more quantity of batteries to charge but I can also say that I’ve charged at over 300KW/h for a long time in my 60 where this seems to fall off of 300KW pretty quick.
One would think that there would be a 85/60 or 42% speed increase solely from a hardware standpoint.
Long read from Fortune about the selection of the Reno Nevada site. Long story short: Nevada’s package and the quick work and willingness of a brothel-owning politician and businessman sealed the deal.
Still, the victory came at an eye-popping price, generating criticism in the press. Nevada is paying more than $200,000 for each of the 6,500 direct jobs the gigafactory is supposed to create. “I read Nevada’s incentive package,” says former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who negotiated with Tesla for its first assembly plant. “They literally handed over Reno and Las Vegas, lock, stock, and barrel.” Richardson is quick to add, in a rueful comment that captures the bind that states find themselves in, “I probably would’ve done the same thing as Governor Sandoval. It’s a lot of jobs in a recessionary period. You create a new kind of economy in your state.”
For his part, Musk noted that Nevada hadn’t even offered the biggest package (San Antonio would claim that title). Low costs and high speed had carried the day, he said. “It’s a real get-things-done state,” Musk declared. “The biggest single factor was time to completion.”
By November, when Musk discussed the deal on an earnings call, he sounded exasperated with continued condemnation of the terms he had extracted from Nevada. Calling the deal a “super-good idea” for the state, he said the criticism “kind of bugs me. I thought we got an okay incentive package, given the scale, but not a super-huge one.”
I’m very much liking this idea. The specs aren’t insane: 100km on a charge, 28mph top speed but very livable and the price is definitely right at €22K. Can’t wait to read an independent review or better yet, send me one to try out!
Tesla Motors – Third Quarter 2014 Shareholder Letter PDF File
• Highest ever quarterly deliveries at 7,785 vehicles, despite factory shutdown in July
• Highest ever peak deliveries in a single day of 907 vehicles
• Majority of Q3 deliveries in North America; 65% increase in NA Sept 14/Sept 13
• Dual Motor and Autopilot introductions further accelerate Model S demand
• Model S orders and deliveries alone expected to increase by 50% in 2015
• Reducing number of Model S options to ramp production faster
Notably, toward the end of the letter, this on the Model X (emphasis mine) Update from the earnings call: Model X delayed until Q3 2015
Work continues on the finalization of Model X with the testing of Alpha prototypes and initial builds of the first Beta prototypes. Model X powertrain development is almost complete with the early introduction of Dual Motor drive on Model S. We recently decided to build in significantly more validation testing time to achieve the best Model X possible. This will also allow for a more rapid production ramp compared to Model S in 2012.
The European auto safety agency, the NCAP, gave Tesla’s Model S almost as glowing marks as the Model S achieved when tested by NHTSA in 2013. In a post on the Tesla Blog, Tesla notes:
Model S is one of just a few cars to have ever achieved a 5-star safety rating from both Euro NCAP and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Additionally, Model S is the only car this year to have achieved both a 5-star Euro NCAP rating and 5 stars in every NHTSA subcategory, including frontal impact, side impact, and rollover. Only two other cars have earned the same recognition since 2011 (when NHTSA introduced its latest rating scheme).
The reason so few models achieve 5-star ratings in both Europe and the U.S. is that each program places emphasis on different safety aspects in the assessment process. NHTSA emphasizes structural and restraint safety, with a deep focus on how well the vehicle can withstand and absorb the energy of an impact while protecting its occupants. It is also primarily concerned with adult occupants. On the other hand, Euro NCAP assesses a wider range of scenarios, including tests for child and pedestrian safety. Unlike for NHTSA, active safety is also an important part of Euro NCAP’s 5-star requirement. Every year, the European organization raises the standard for a 5-star rating to account for technological advances in the industry.
We’ve seen Tesla’s CHAdeMO adapter in the wild and it might soon be hitting the streets. The Tesla Motors Shop now has the adapter, with the same “Coming Soon” designation but with a drastically reduced $1000 $450 price tag. That means there is some movement on the product and you might actually be able to buy one soon.
CHAdeMO is the official DC fast charging option used by Nissan for the Leaf and a few other Japanese electric car manufacturers. As of October 7th, 2014, the CHAdeMO Association web site states that there are 2,129 DC Quick Chargers installed in Japan, 1327 in Europe, 731 in the USA and 54 elsewhere
Tesla charging times vary depending on the amperage on the stations but the fastest will approach the speeds of Tesla’s Superchargers.
@llsethj correction. Just rechecked:118 mi/hr 351v 105a. So halfish SC speed. May be faster elsewhere, we shall see.
GM/Chevy detailed its next generation Volt today with some nice surprises though they are pretty vague in their assessment.
Some factoids:
80% off all Volt customer trips are EV only.
New battery capacity will increase by 20% on a volume basis when compared to the original cell, while the number of cells decreases from 288 to 192. The cells are positioned lower in the pack for improved (lower) center of gravity and the overall mass of the pack has decreased by almost 30 pounds (13 kg).
20 million battery cells have been produced for the more than 69,000 Chevrolet Volts on the road today with industry-leading quality levels of less than two problems per million cells produced
Many owners are exceeding the EPA-rated label of 35 miles of EV range per full charge, with about 15 percent surpassing 40 miles of range.
Current generation Volt owners have accumulated more than 600 million EV miles
2 motors replace 1 motor and 1 regen. The two-motor drive unit operates approximately 5 to 12 percent more efficiently and weighs 100 pounds (45 kg) less than the current system.
1.5L range extender motor will be more efficient as well
GM will manufacture the Volt battery pack at its battery assembly plant in Brownstown, Mich.
Range estimates will be given at NA auto show in Detroit on January
So not too many specifics but one would think all of these updates would make the Volt an even more appealing package. More room in the back would have also come in handy. If we take the 20% more power in the battery pack combined with the weight reduction and more efficient motors at face value, the Volt may approach 50 miles on electricity.
The question now is who is going to buy the current version (Osborne effect)?
Press Release follows:
Next-Generation Chevrolet Volt Features All-New Voltec Propulsion System for More Efficiency
Debuting in 2015, new model will have increased EV range
Great talk by Tesla/SpaceX Elon Musk given at MIT this month. Most of the talk is about SpaceX but the Q&A hit some points on Tesla (and the Hyperloop). At 1:14:10 (queued up above) Musk lays out his future vision of the Superchargers which would be built around solar or renewable power sources and a battery backup that would not only be carbon neutral but also be able to avoid grid downtimes and outages.
Even more interesting for me is Musk’s recent obsession with AI and the singularity. I say recent but it seems to have started publicly with this tweet in August:
Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
Since then, just about every opportunity he’s gotten, he’s brought up his fear of AI and the Singularity.
This video is no different. When asked a question about AI at 1:07:25, Musk goes real serious-like – like he’s “seen some shit”
Musk: I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
Questioner: So I’ll take it there’ll be no HAL9000 going to mars?
M: Heh. HAL 9000 would be easy to deal with in comparison to the AI he’s talking about. It’s way more complex… it’d put HAL9000 to shame. That’s like puppy dog.
Then he’s asked another question about telecommunications and he’s not listening. He’s still thinking about AI and is clearly a little shaken and needs to be asked again.
I’d like to imagine Musk had a HAL9000 moment with one of his advanced prototype Tesla Model S head unit stacks or something. Like “Elon, wouldn’t you rather run over those people who don’t own Teslas?”
That this fear is coming from a man like Musk, who has seen and executed the future better than almost anyone is a bit rattling. He’s even advocating for government control and oversight which seems strangely uncharacteristic for an entrepreneur like Musk.
PALO ALTO, Calif., October 20, 2014 – Tesla announces that it will post its financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2014, after market close on Wednesday, November 5, 2014. At that time, Tesla will issue a brief advisory release containing a link to the Q3 2014 Shareholder Letter, available on the company website. Tesla management will hold a live question & answer webcast at 2:30pm Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time) to discuss the Company’s financial and business results and outlook.
What: Tesla Motors, Inc. Q3 2014 Financial Results Q&A Webcast
When: Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Time: 2:30pm Pacific Time / 5:30pm Eastern Time
Shareholder Letter: http://ir.teslamotors.com
Webcast: http://ir.teslamotors.com (live and replay)
Approximately two hours after the Q&A session, an archived version of the webcast will be available on the Company’s website for a period of one year.
Tesla Motors Inc. began taking online orders for its Model S electric car in China today, joining General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG in selling vehicles through Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s online shopping mall.
Buyers can place a 50,000-yuan ($8,200) deposit for the electric car through Alibaba’s Tmall.com, according to Tesla China spokeswoman Peggy Yang. “Tmall offers us an opportunity to reach out to general customers,” she said by telephone.
Tesla Motors – Third Quarter 2014 Shareholder Letter 
