In a documentary about the Stanford Solar Car Project, Stanford University’s team participating in the World Solar Challenge, Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel describes the team has a “key thing” during the early days of Tesla Motors as he recruited his friends from the team to start the company.
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Tesla and the LA Times have an interesting history, mainly revolving around a suspicious article from last year that misleadingly asserted that Elon Musk’s companies, especially Tesla, received $4.9 billion in subsidies. Last week, Musk revealed that he believes the article originated from the fossil fuel industry and was planted in the LA Times as a strategy to counter the IMF study that found that the fossil fuel industry was receiving the equivalent of ~$5 trillion in subsidy a year.
Now the LA Times fights back this week with a new hit piece on Tesla called “Tesla throws cold water on its own hype by admitting huge risks in building the Model 3“. The article used boilerplate risk disclosure statements from Tesla’s latest SEC filing to assert that the company is “admitting huge risk” for the Model 3 production ramp up.
Risk disclosure is something you’ll find in almost every quarterly or annual report of any publicly traded company like Tesla. It simply outlines to investors what the company sees as potential risks that could prevent them from executing their business plan.
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Elon Musk presented the Tesla Model 3 as the “best vehicle you can buy for US$35,000”, regardless of the fact that it is all-electric or what kind of incentives are available to you, but the truth is that a lot of customers will have the opportunity to buy the car for much less (without options) – thanks to government incentives to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles.
I have a reservation and here in Quebec, if all goes well, I should still be eligible for a CA$8,000 (US$6,200) rebate by the time the car becomes available, which should go a long way to help alleviate the price difference due to the exchange rate between CAD/USD.
But the incentive in Quebec has nothing on Singapore’s. Singapore’s Minister of Transport Khwan Boon Wan said this week that under the global city’s Carbon Emissions Vehicle Scheme (CEVS), the Tesla Model 3 is eligible to up to SGD$30,000 (US$22,000) in incentives.
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Last year, the city of Los Angeles announced that it will lease 288 electric vehicles, including 160 fully-electric vehicles (BEVs), which resulted in Los Angeles operating the largest city-owned fleet of pure electric vehicles. Among the selection of vehicles distributed to the city’s different departments, the LAPD got a Tesla Model S P85D.
At the time, the department said that the Model S will be used for “testing and research by (LAPD) technical experts to determine how this technology can support their future needs”. Now we learn that the vehicle is being tested as a ‘high-pursuit’ police cruiser.
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A Tesla Model S driver in Utah, Jared Overton, says that he parked his car behind a trailer before running an errand for a few minutes. When he returned to his vehicle, he says he found it crashed in the back of the trailer with the windshield crushed by the trailer’s bed – picture above.
The owner claims the car decided to move forward on its own, but after verifying the logs, Tesla claims that the ‘Summon’ feature, which allows the vehicle to drive itself on short distances without anyone in the car, was activated seconds after the car was parked.
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The Tesla owners community in Portugal held their first meeting this weekend and published a video to make a plea to Tesla to open a service center and store in the country. The owners gathered in Lisbon, from where Tesla drivers have to travel 750 miles (1,200 km) to service their vehicles to the nearest Tesla Service Center.
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In the SEC filing following its first quarter 2016 financial results and the announcement of its new Model 3 production plan, Tesla listed some of the key assumptions on which its ambitious plan is based. There are a lot of things that needs to come together for Tesla to deliver its anticipated $35,000 long-range all-electric sedan, and the company is making sure that investors are aware of the risks.
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While Tesla was far from the first automaker to introduce assisted driving features in its production vehicles, it was the first to market the features as “semi-autonomous”. We could argue on what constitute a “semi-autonomous driving system”, but Tesla’s Autopilot certainly feels like one due to its unofficial hands-free capability.
The more advanced driver assist features found in luxury vehicles before Tesla still required you to steer the vehicle. While some were equipped with lane keeping, it would only activate if it would detect the car going outside the lane or pressure on the steering wheel.
Although not recommended, Tesla’s Autopilot allows for complete hands-free driving under certain conditions as the system is constantly active in the vehicle. Yet, GM doesn’t think it can be called a “semi-autonomous driver-assist technology” and claims it will beat Tesla to market with its ‘SuperCruise’, which the automaker as yet to launch.
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Just last month, we published an article arguing that automakers entrenched in fuel cell hydrogen vehicles, like Hyundai, Toyota and Honda, appear to be succumbing to physics and finally warming up to battery-powered vehicles.
Now Hyundai is coming out saying that it is only temporary.
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We talked about MotorTrend scoring the first media photoshoot of the Model 3 prototype a few times now since they have been teasing it on their social media, but now it’s not just excerpts from Facebook or Snapchat. The publications released a complete video with beautiful shots of the Model 3, and as a bonus, the new facelift Model S and the Model X were also at the Gigafactory to complete Tesla’s S3X lineup.
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Tesla’s Battery Swap Program impressed a lot of people when it was unveiled back in 2013. It probably was one of Tesla’s most well-organized presentation. Elon Musk narrated a live test on stage during which the company performed two automated battery swaps while live-streaming a Tesla employee filling up a gasoline car.
Despite the impressive nature of the system, Tesla launched the program very carefully and it took over a year before it opened its first “pilot facility” in Harris Ranch, California. Only a select few Model S owners were allowed to participate in the program and swap battery packs.
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What is a growth team you ask? A growth team within a company is generally a small data driven group tasked with figuring out how to scale the business. Most often, the day-to-day work will consist of planning growth models and running them in simulations in order to develop the best possible way to expand.
Facebook had an important growth team that significantly contributed to the company reaching one of the biggest user base in the history of any product ever – same thing for Uber, but on a much smaller scale.
Now that Tesla plans to expand significantly in the next few years through the introduction of the Model 3 and Tesla Energy products, Electrek has learned that the automaker has started building a growth team “from scratch”. It started by hiring from Facebook and Uber; two of the best examples of optimizing growth through growth teams.
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According to Agora-Energiewende, and brought to our attention by PV-Magazine.com, on Sunday at 11 AM, 95% of German electricity demand was being met by renewable energy. In one of the most advanced manufacturing countries on the planet – this is an amazing feat of engineering.
Last year, Tesla and Jeff Dahn’s battery-research group at Dalhousie University announced a new partnership that will see the group transition from their 20-year research agreement with 3M to a new association with Tesla under the newly formed ‘NSERC/Tesla Canada Industrial Research’.
Just as the new partnership with Tesla is about to start next month, a year after it was announced, Canada’s Governor General now announces that Dahn will be one of the recipient of the prestigious Innovation Awards.
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The latest third-party system enabling the use of Tesla’s API tools through unofficially supported channels, like the Apple Watch through Remote S, is a method to access a Tesla’s functions through Apple’s Homekit and command the car with Siri.
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Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) published its Q1 2016 Quarterly Activity Report for the Tesla Gigafactory and judged the company’s progress to be satisfactory. You can read the full report embedded bellow.
The most interesting bit of information coming out of the report is the fact that Panasonic invested more in the plant during the last quarter than it did since the beginning of the project.
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At this point, it’s obvious that Tesla and Elon Musk are fond of Easter Eggs. Pretty much every new update coming to the Model S and Model X now contains a new and fun hidden feature, and based on the last two, it looks like Tesla is going for a rainbow theme.
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Faraday Future is in the midst of developing its first production car set to be unveiled later this year and hopefully it will hit the market in 2017. It is reportedly going to be a luxury SUV, or maybe more of a large crossover, with supercar-like performance.
The well-funded startup hasn’t revealed much about the vehicle yet, but lately, it has been releasing glimpses of its mule program. One of the principal engineer behind the program is Matt Lubbers, Principal Engineer of Brake and Chassis Controls for FF, and today the company released a Q&A session with the engineer.
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Tesla announced a new Build Plan for the Model 3 this week. According to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, it could result in the company manufacturing as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Model 3 vehicles during the second half of 2017, and around 500,000 cars in 2018 (Model 3, S and X). It’s a direct response to the storm of Model 3 reservations, now over 400,000, that Tesla received since unveiling the vehicle just over a month ago.
The ambitious plan would not only result in reservation holders getting the car sooner, but also in more (a lot more) American reservation holders having access to the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
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A few weeks ago, Germany officially announced a new incentive and investment program to accelerate the adoption of electric cars in the country. The most important incentive is a €4,000 discount at the purchase of an electric vehicle, but it is capped to vehicles with a starting price of less than €60,000.
Fast-forward to this week, Tesla is now claiming that the government and German automakers purposely included this base price restriction to exclude Tesla from the program. In its official response on its German website, Tesla writes:
“[the plan] was drawn up jointly with the Chairman of the German automobile manufacturers and the relevant ministries.
Unfortunately, it was decided that Model S and Model X customers wouldn’t benefit from this promotion, because what they call ‘premium’ is linked to an arbitrary price limit. This part of the program is obviously directed against Tesla.”
Tesla is right about the EV plan having been negotiated with German auto industry. Even German Chancellor Merkel was directly involved in the negotiations with executives from BMW, Mercedes-maker Daimler and Volkswagen.
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Earlier this week, a 18-year old took her father’s Tesla Model S for a ride with 4 of her friends in Pullach, Germany. She was reportedly driving at an excessive speed and lost control in a turn. The vehicle jumped off-road “and flew 25 meters [82 ft] through the air” then subsequently crashed in a field at full speed before rolling over at least once.
It takes a lot of speed to flip a 5,000 lbs Model S with a low center of gravity, but fortunately and despite the severity of the crash, none of the 5 occupants in the Model S died.
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According to a report today from The Wall Street Journal, GM and Lyft are partnering to test a fleet of self-driving electric taxis sometime within the next year in an undisclosed city. The pilot will reportedly take advantage of GM’s Chevrolet Bolt, a speedy compact crossover all-electric that we took for a test drive earlier this year…
Takata’s already massive airbag recall just got bigger this week by adding 35 to 40 million more airbags, which adds three more automakers to the already long list of affected vehicles: Tesla, Jaguar and Land Rover are now included in the latest recall.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that it is expanding and accelerating the recall of Takata airbag inflators, which have been tied to “ten deaths and more than 100 injuries in the United States”.
Earlier this week, Tesla confirmed that it is introducing its new 75 kWh battery pack to the Model S, like it did for the Model X last month. Now Tesla confirmed that while the option is not available now, it will be by the end of the week, and every updated Model S 70 produced since the ‘facelift’ was equipped with the new 75 kWh battery, but software-limited to 70 kWh.
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