Seth Weintraub

Musk also said Tesla would open a China factory within 4 years (which in Tesla years means 5 years). The TSLA Stock price was up significantly today closing over 218.

UPDATE: I’m told that the ribbon cutting has been pushed back to 10:00am on Thursday. The Supercharger is now live however.

Image Via TeslaMotorClubForums

Funny Earth Day story: I’m on my way back to New York today and could really use this thing (2) to be open today not tomorrow:

Join Us for the Grand Opening of Our 100th Supercharger in Hamilton Township, NJ!
Hamilton Township Supercharger
425 Market Place Blvd, Hamilton Township, NJ 08691
Tuesday, April 22nd at 10am
We are excited to announce our 100th Supercharger worldwide and our first Supercharger in New Jersey! The Hamilton Township Supercharger will be opening on Tuesday. To commemorate this important milestone for Tesla and our New Jersey community, we would like to invite you, your family and your friends to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony and celebrate with Tesla corporate staff.Details
Please submit your RSVP if you would like to attend and let us know how many guests you will bring. Due to the expected volume of Model S owners, there may be a wait for charging. Please plan accordingly.

The Hamilton NJ supercharger would bridge the Newark, Delaware and the New York City area superchargers including JFK and the few on Long Island and Connecticut. It will also help those going to the Jersey Shore this summer (guilty).

The Earth Day celebration will mark Tesla’s 86th US Supercharger which added to the 14 in Europe give it triple digits for the first time.

Coverage
North America
Today – 85 stations
Complete West and East Coast coverage
Coast-to-coast travel
2014 – 80% of the US population and parts of Canada
2015 – 98% of the US population and parts of Canada
Europe
Today – 14 stations

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4T8a-UtLMU]

Little bit snowier than expected. Check the highlights here and part one here.

In a quote to Quartz:

“We are gratified by the level of enthusiasm our plans for the Gigafactory have generated from suppliers throughout the battery industry,” a spokeswoman for Tesla said in an email. “Since our announcement in late February, there has been tremendous interest from potential partners in collaborating on all aspects of the project. This has led us to take additional time to evaluate new inquiries along with our ongoing partnership discussions.”

Remember that big mod that was going to get done to the Tesla Model S?

It would appear that Saleen, an third party aftermarket car modifier, has left the drive train alone and focused on modding the body, brakes and wheels. The look and mods definitely aren’t my cup of tea but certainly they will appeal to the Saleen set.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn_L05WLc94]

Smart move from Nissan which will subsidize public charging for two years for its Nissan Leaf at ChargePoint, Blink Network from Car Charging Group, AeroVironment and NRG eVgo charging stations.

As an EV buyer, knowing you won’t pay a penny for public charging for 2 years is a great incentive.

Details in press release that follows:
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6kuf5yLzW4]

Just get a Chevy Spark EV.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSnl7-x8DAY]

Looks good!

Reuters:

Hoping to boost demand for its slow-selling Volt hybrid, Chevrolet is planning to sell two versions of the redesigned 2016 Volt, including a lower-priced model with a smaller battery pack and shorter driving range, supplier sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

The second-generation Volt is slated to go into production in about 16 months at General Motors Co’s Detroit Hamtramck plant, the sources said.

Here are areas where the Volt could be improved:

• More internal space (aim to beat Prius or Ford Energi)
• Better, not worse range
• More mainstream utilitarian styling
• Performance that would beat even the Chevy Spark EV
• Better marketing focusing on performance and cost of ownership

The Reuters report seemed to miss the whole scoop about the actual range giving the Gas+ Electric specs, omitting what the electric only would be.

The standard Volt won’t deviate dramatically from the current model, which is priced from just under $35,000 and has a driving range of up to 380 miles, according to Chevrolet.

GM also wants to offer a lower-cost edition, priced from just over $30,000 that would likely have a range of less than 300 miles, with less equipment, the supplier sources said.

So figure moving from a 45 mile range to 30-something on electric only?  Pass and give me a Chevy Spark EV!

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vVLOhlXOxU]

The video above is equal parts amusing and frightening for how it echoes much of the talk of EVs today. Specs weren’t quite as impressive as today’s EVs however:

Ford Comuta The “future” of EVs had a range of 60 km (37 miles) and a top speed of 40 km/h (25 mph).  The Comuta was powered by four 12-volt, 85-amp lead batteries.

The suspense would be killing me if I didn’t already know the result.

The above lawyer is trying to get a settlement out of Tesla using the so called ‘Lemon Laws’. Tesla has a different story however that it laid out in a statement below.

The TL;RD: We are continuing our efforts to work with the customer and are happy to address any legitimate concerns he has about his Model S. Customer service remains of utmost importance to Tesla, and no Model S owner should be unhappy with their car. However, we would also like the public to be aware of the potential for lemon laws to be exploited by opportunistic lawyers.

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Tesla Model S owners have long been tantalized by the $1000 CHAdeMO adapter that would give them access to the network of Fast DC chargers that are built for cars like the Nissan Leaf. Alas, it has been in the “coming soon” phase of market testing since the original Model S launched over a year ago and Tesla hasn’t been able to say when and if they are actually coming. It would make a lot of sense for Tesla to launch these for the Japanese market which is saturated with these DC fast chargers. Some quick facts about CHAdeMO:

• CHAdeMO is the trade name of a quick charging method for battery electric vehicles delivering up to 62.5 kW of high-voltage direct current via a special electrical connector. It is proposed as a global industry standard by an association of the same name.
• CHAdeMO is an abbreviation of “CHArge de MOve”, equivalent to “charge for moving”. The name is a pun for O cha demo ikaga desuka in Japanese, translating to English as “How about some tea?”, referring to the time it would take to charge a car.[2] CHAdeMO can charge low-range electric cars in less than half an hour.
• The number of CHAdeMO DC Quick chargers installed up to today is 3643. — (Japan 1,967, Europe 1072, USA 592, Others 12)

So it was surprising to see that the Plugshare folks who are sponsoring the big #EpicEVTrip have been using the CHAdeMO Tesla Adapter in the image above. In a brief Twitter conversation (below), they told me that the adapter was in Beta but it would charge the Tesla as fast as a Supercharger (note since this writing, the image of the CHAdeMO Tesla Adapter has been removed). I’d note that the speed of the charging is probably not quite Supercharger level since it is 62.5kW vs. the 120-135kW that a Tesla Supercharger puts out.

Update: Plugshare updates their Supercharger comparison:

[tweet https://twitter.com/plugshare/status/454341602866368512]

Note the current rollout of Chademo adapters is much more spread out than the Tesla Superchargers in the map below:
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drKgAhvoHxc]

An amusing look at the 60 Minutes segment where editors added ICE engine sounds to the Tesla Model S and were later forced to omit/apologize for doing so.

In a post on the company blog, Tesla outlined its new leasing program for small to medium sized businesses.

…our customers in small and medium sized businesses have been asking for a leasing program for the ease and simplicity of being able to deduct the payments from their business taxes. We’ve been listening to those requests, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of leasing for business owners.

Our leasing program is straightforward and transparent, and we’ve designed it to be user friendly. To begin with, business customers can easily see upfront their monthly cost of leasing while configuring their car on our website.

While customers have become accustomed to lease agreements that run as long as 10 pages, we found that we could say all that needed to be said in less than three pages – and it’s written in plain language.

In keeping with the Tesla way of doing things, our customers can handle and sign their lease agreements completely electronically. Customers are able to view an electronic version of the lease agreement upfront before delivery. Even the signature process at delivery is simple: a one-button tap on the 17-inch touchscreen in their new Model S is all it takes.

The Tesla business lease is available through Tesla Finance, a subsidiary we’ve set up especially to offer this new product to business customers. The lease program completes a suite of products, including the Resale Value Guarantee and loans from our banking partners, that covers a comprehensive range of financing needs for Model S customers. These financing options, when combined with the fuel savings of Model S, provide an attractive value proposition compared to what’s available for a gasoline-powered car.

A new finance subsidiary makes Tesla more like the GMC Credit, Ford Credit, etcs of the world but again with Tesla’s simplification, use of plain English and ability to do almost everything online. There is a lot of innovation space available in the auto financing world with the bottom line being more people will be able to justify driving electric cars.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFGX43vubM]

It is fun to see Top Gear starting to let itself and its Shell corporate sponsor start to go electric. We’re really waiting for the Tesla Model S. vs. Maserati show though.

Dragtimes has a nice little rundown of the latest in hacking the Tesla Model S. It turns out that there is an exposed 4 pin connector on the left side of the dashboard that is actually a 100mb Ethernet connection. That connection was actually connected to with a laptop and after some port scanning and sniffing…

The car’s internal 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network consists of 3 devices with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet, the center console, dashboard/nav screen and one more unknown device. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both screens as per the pictures. All of this technology certain brings up the question as to when and if Telsa’s internal systems will be hacked and jailbroken to allow 3rd party applications to run on the large 17″ touchscreen. Hacking your iPhone s one thing, hacking your car is quite another. We should also note that apparently Tesla engineers detected this hacking or exploring and sent a nastygram to the cars owner, “Tesla USA engineers have seen a tentative of hacking on my car.”, “can be related to industrial espionage and advised me to stop investigation, to not void the warranty”. Does Tesla have an network intrusion detection system installed on the cars? Do they have the right to not allow you to tinker with your own car?

All really good questions. Will Tesla eventually allow hacking. IT seems like the type of company that would want to encourage it from its extremely savvy customer base. Its APIs for the app are already being used by various companies for things like Google Glass interfaces and Chrome extensions.

See that big opening in the Tesal Supercharger map between Ohio and Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh? Tesla plans to put a Supercharger in Cranberry Township, PA (NW of Pittsburgh) to close the gap on the cross country Supercharger highway.

I just called the Residence Inn (724- 779-1000) where the Supercharger is located and they indicated it opened last night and Teslas were now charging there. As of this writing, Tesla’s Supercharger Map nor the very helpful supercharge.info website have it updated but this very important station is now confirmed operational.

Why is this so important? Tesla typically spaces its superchargers out about 100 miles apart so that the 60kWh Teslas can easily travel between stations (if the weather isn’t subzero and they drive reasonably). The Somerset PA- Macedonia, OH was the largest gap between chargers to cross the US and it is now filled, allowing 60kWh cars to make the trip without having to drive 40mph.

[tweet https://twitter.com/teslamotors/status/451793292913414144]

And countless more gallons of gas from home electricity charging.

Fun stuff from the AP:

Electric-car company Tesla Motors has filed notice it intends to go to court to appeal New Jersey’s ruling that would stop it from selling its vehicles in the state within two weeks. The notice was filed last week to the state appellate division.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla says it was unfairly targeted last month when the state Motor Vehicle Commission amended its regulations.

The regulations require new-car dealers to have franchise agreements before they can be licensed. That prohibits companies from using direct-sales models as Tesla does.

Tesla says pressure from a state auto dealers’ association prompted the Motor Vehicle Commission’s recent action. Tesla just got a 2 week reprieve after the state banned Tesla at the behest of the Auto Dealers association.  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie blamed others in his administration for the ban after CEO Elon Musk penned an open letter to the people of the state of New Jersey.

Tesla had an incredible month in Norway according to a report from Hegnar.no. The US electric automaker sold an incredible 1493 units for the month and almost 600 in the last week alone. The nation of 5 million is buying the Model S more than any other car to the tune of over 1 in 10 purchases.

During the last week, it registered 597 Tesla Model S in this country, which gave the car model a market share of 12.9 percent. Number two on the list, VW Golf, could boast of 169 vehicles.

In March there were registered 1493 Model S. It is all time high for a car model in Norway in a single month. The previous record in modern times was in December 2006, just before the big tax shift. Then there were registered 1328 Subaru Forester in this country.

Is this a glimpse of the future? Norway has strong electric car incentives, a green conscious and a wealthy population. But it doesn’t sound like it would be hard to replicate this success elsewhere once the word gets out.

Here’s a video from last week that foreshadowed Norway’s huge numbers:

[tweet https://twitter.com/teslamotors/status/451087569569075200]

Amusing April Fool’s day gag from Tesla

Based on an in-depth study of YouTube videos, Tesla has decided against self-driving cars, because pets can do so much better and people already have them.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYKPQziUjrE&start=150]

I know it is April Fools but this aired last night. I’m not sure if Fox’s Oil lobby checks bounced or what but I’ll take an influential endorsement where I can get it.

I’ve queued up the video at 2:30 right where the Tesla talk begins. Caution that the rest of the video is vintage Fox News. Let the email forwards flow!