Cars

Tesla officials have been discussing the possibility to establish a first factory in Europe for a while now. I say a “first factory”, but Tesla already has a plant in Europe – in Tilburg – but only for final assembly processes.

Earlier this year during a special event for Tesla owners at the automaker’s French headquarters in Chambourcy, CEO Elon Musk reiterated that in the near future Tesla will need to establish some manufacturing capacity in Europe – referring to a full-fledged factory to manufacture cars.

At the time, he nonchalantly brought up the possibility to build its first European electric car factory in Alsace, a northeastern French region on the Rhine River plain bordering Germany and Switzerland. It didn’t take long for French Energy Minister Ségolène Royal to suggest a site and meet with executives.

Now Spain wants to throw its hat in the ring and launches a campaign to attract Tesla’s first European factory.
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Tesla has been promising a special event to celebrate the opening of its battery factory in Nevada for a while now. Attending the event was even part of the prizes of Tesla’s second round of the Model S owner referral program. Now it finally has a date: July 29th. The company sent out the invitations to the top Model S referrers last night.
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Earlier this week, Tesla confirmed having closed its recent secondary offering with $1.7 billion in net proceeds to finance its Model 3 production program, but part of the offering was also a significant set of transactions in order for Elon Musk to exercise 5,503,972 stock options and then sell 2,782,670 shares to pay taxes.

In a SEC filing issued last night, Tesla confirmed that Musk sold the shares at $213.22 for a total of just over $593 million. After the transaction, Musk’s stake in Tesla stands at 31,100,644 shares worth just over $7 billion.
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The fine folks at GM have given us a shiny new (OK, 500 miles) electric blue 2017 Chevy Volt to test drive for the next week. I’m keeping a diary of my experiences every day here and will wrap up the week with my conclusions. Catch up on Day 1 or Day 3-4.

Day 2:

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A new study from Green Street Advisors and first reported by CNBC shows that total tenant sales in 24 malls with a Tesla store are on average $105 higher per square foot than in malls were Tesla has no retail presence. The study concludes that the effect is not only due to Tesla’s own high average of sales per square foot, but that the automaker is also driving overall mall sales.
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During the Model 3 unveiling event in March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an important announcement curcial to the success of the Model 3: the expansion of its two networks of charging stations. He said that Tesla will double the number of Superchargers to 7,000 units and quadruple the number of Destination chargers to 15,000 units within the next 2 years.

We reported last month that the company already started expanding the Supercharger with permits or started construction at 11 new locations (~90 new Superchargers) since the unveiling event. Now Tesla announced an expansion in Canada with 5 new locations – all in eastern Canada.
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A Tesla Model S driver published a video of his car crashing into a van while on Autopilot which acts as a great PSA to remind Tesla drivers not to always rely on the Autopilot and be ready to take control at all time. In this particular case, the video shows quite clearly what went wrong and the data could actually be useful to Tesla to help prevent the event from happening again.
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The PSA group, which includes the French automotive brands Peugeot, Citroën and DS, announced this week 2 new electric vehicle platforms on which the company will build 4 new all-electric vehicles and 7 new plug-in hybrids by 2021. The company says that the first models will hit the market in 2019
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2017 Electric Blue Chevrolet Volt

The fine folks at GM have given us a shiny new (OK, 500 miles) electric blue 2017 Chevy Volt to test drive for the next week. I’m keeping a diary of my experiences every day here and will wrap up the week with my conclusions. (Day 2, Day 3-4, Conclusion/Wrapup)

Day 1, Delivery and Setup
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Just a week ago, Tesla (TSLA) announced a new public stock offering to raise between $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion – depending on the underwriters exercising their option to purchase additional shares – in order to finance its ambitious Model 3 production program.

In a SEC filing today, Tesla confirmed having closed the offering and that the net proceeds were “approximately $1.7 billion, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses.”
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If you can handle watching a Tesla Model X getting ripped apart, Brock Archer and Advanced Extrication have an interesting video for you to better understand the Model X’s unique structure and its Falcon Wing doors.
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Earlier this month, we reported on the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) and the DMV holding hearings to decide whether or not to allow Tesla to get a second dealership license in order to operate another store in the state without having to go through a third-party franchise dealerships.

Now we learn that the DMC ruled against Tesla obtaining a second dealership license last week, which results in the automaker’s latest store in Charlotte having to operate as a ‘gallery’.
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Earlier this year, design and engineering firm Italdesign unveiled its latest creation: GTZero. We missed the original release, but as the company is letting more info on the concept, I think it’s worth taking a look.

The concept is designed on two different platforms: all-electric and plug-in hybrid. We will get into the electric platform, but first of, let’s take a look at the stunning design.

I know electric car enthusiasts are not really waiting for other entries in luxury segments, but it’s not like EVs represent anything close to a significant percentage of the luxury vehicles on the market and therefore, any new entrant is good for the industry. As a Gran Turismo, the GTZero’s design goes a long way in helping electric vehicles dissociate themselves from the ‘weird-mobile’ look some automakers have been pushing. 
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Faraday Future barely broke down on its $1 billion electric vehicle factory in Nevada, yet it is now reportedly in negotiation to acquire lands in Vallejo, California, in order to build another production facility. As if we needed more links between the electric vehicle startup and Tesla, it looks like both companies are now aiming to each have factories in the Bay Area (Vallejo for FF and Fremont for Tesla) and Nevada (North Las Vegas for FF and Sparks for Tesla) – something unusual for car companies.
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It’s a well-known fact at this point that Tesla has a very unusual way to communicate new information for an automaker. The company shares more news through Elon Musk’s Twitter account than with press releases and this latest instance is a perfect example.
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Today the company released new data related to its Autopilot program and is now reporting “~100 million miles” driven with Autopilot active. The figure includes Autosteer and/or Traffic -Aware Cruise Control – the Autopilot’s main convenience features.
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Elon Musk once said that Tesla’s fleet of vehicles is ‘zombie apocalypse proof’ because the Supercharger network is connected to solar power installations, so even if the grid goes down , you’d be able to travel.

Sadly only a few Supercharger locations are now equipped with solar panels and energy storage systems as the company decided to focus on increasing the number of stations to support its growing fleet.
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This morning a reader brought to our attention that the Tesla.fr domain, which is not owned by Tesla but is a premium domain in France, was redirecting traffic to the BMW i3 page of the German automaker’s French website.
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In a surprising turn of event last month, several BMW executives in the automaker’s electric vehicle leadership, also known as the BMW ‘i’ brand, left the German automaker to join a newly formed Chinese EV startup, Future Mobility Corp, backed by Tencent Holdings.

Now Electrek has learned that two Tesla executive joined the BMW leadership at Future Mobility.
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While daily commuters could relatively soon be able to fall asleep in their car and wake up at their destination, currently there’s no commercially available autonomous driving system that allow so little control over a vehicle – even Tesla’s fairly advanced semi autonomous system: the Autopilot.

Yet it doesn’t stop people from abusing the technology as evidenced by a Tesla Model S driver caught on camera while apparently sleeping at the wheel.
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During the conference call discussing Tesla’s 2015 fourth quarter financial results earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk called the Northeast region of the US an “under-penetrated” market for the company.

The issue has been partly attributed to a negative perception of electric vehicle performance in winter conditions, something Tesla addressed last winter with a lot of content about the Model S’ winter driving performance, but now Tesla is addressing another reason; its retail presence in the region.

Tesla will be going after summer vacationers with new stores in the Hamptons and Cape Cod.
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