Cars

Independent rendering artist X-Tomi Design shared his vision of a station wagon version of the Model 3. 
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Tesla has a presence in Sweden since late 2013, but sales in the country have been lagging until mid-2015. Based on registration data, Tesla delivered only 268 Model S’s in Sweden in 2014, but last year the automaker delivered 996 cars, which represents a 271% increase.

This increase made Sweden an important market for Tesla in Europe, where it now holds the 6th position in term of volume – ahead of countries like France and the UK – despite Sweden’s size.

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Tesla launched the production version Model X in September last year, but the company has only been taking orders from reservation holders and it never opened its online design studio to potential buyers.

This week, Tesla started contacting reservation holders who have yet to turn their reservation into an order to encourage them to configure their vehicle because the company has “ramped up Model X production” and will open orders online and in-store in “a couple of weeks”.
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There are so many things to be impressed about with the Model 3 that its hard to get my head around all of the goodies. But that doesn’t mean there are some disappointments too.

One thing that struck me, as a Model S owner looking perhaps to either downsize or get a second electric car, was the lack of storage, particularly up front in the area Tesla and its fans called the ‘Frunk’. Here’s a picture of one of the AWD Model 3s with its Frunk open via Reddit:

That’s about the same room as you get beneath the seat on a regional jet and almost pointless in size unless you need secure purse storage. That bag looks about 8 inches thick at the rear and maybe 3 inches thick at the front and about 18 inches long and at most 3 feet wide at its biggest point. You can’t put groceries here or a stroller (2 things I put in my RWD Model S frunk). Besides the tailor-made handbag above, it is hard to imagine what use this space can provide to the typical user. Tesla could put a roadside emergency kit with tire fix can? Maybe you can fit a squeegee for the windows since Electric cars don’t stop at gas stations? How about a very small ball pit?

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The last time Elon Musk commented on the short interest on Tesla’s stock, he warned that anyone holding a stock position against the company will have a “tsunami of hurt” coming for them. During the 12 following months, Tesla’s stock price increased by 461%, a lot of which was attributed to a short squeeze after Tesla reported its first quarterly profit in Q1 2013.

Today as short interest on Tesla is close to an all-time high, Musk commented on it again. Though he was more cautious in his choice of words than last time – so maybe not a tsunami 2.0. 
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in France earlier this year. During a special event for Tesla owners at the automaker’s French headquarters in Chambourcy, Musk reiterated that in the near future Tesla will need to establish some manufacturing capacity in Europe. But this 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.

The comment wasn’t really serious and Musk only brought it up as a potentially good option geographically speaking, but the comment certainly didn’t fall on deaf ears. Today, French Energy Minister Ségolène Royal said that she already suggested a site to Elon Musk and she will meet with “Tesla executives” later this month.
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Real-time Supercharger availability data is a feature Model S owners have been asking Tesla to implement for a while now. It’s something we know to be possible since the automaker already displays the data of each charger stalls of its most popular Supercharger locations in real-time on the ‘Supercharger Dashboard’ located in its design studio in Hawthorne (see above), but the feature is not available in Tesla vehicles.
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After our exclusive report that Tesla hired legendary chip architect Jim Keller from AMD as new “Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering” earlier this year, we were expecting some new hires to complete Tesla’s growing Autopilot team – especially since CEO Elon Musk said the project was “super high priority” and even encouraged people to apply via Twitter.

Sure enough, Keller’s former colleague at PA Semi and Apple, Peter Bannon, followed him at Tesla just a few weeks later. And now in a significant sourcing move, Electrek has learned that Tesla poached a team of high-profile chip architects and executives from AMD to develop the next generation Autopilot under Keller’s leadership.

Tesla is expected to release more features through over-the-air updates utilizing its current hardware Autopilot suite, but the system, which consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree sonar sensors, is limited and not expected to achieve fully autonomous driving. Hence why Tesla is currently developing its second generation Autopilot hardware suite, which is should enable fully self-driving cars.
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China-based electric vehicle manufacturer BYD announced the launch of the newest versions of its two latest all-electric vehicles: the Qin EV300 and the e5. The company is expanding its price range with these additions to its EV lineup and expects to further its already important lead on the increasingly growingChinese EV market.
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When it comes to Tesla, the focus is primarily on the Model 3 these days, but the automaker still needs to keep selling the Model S and X if it wants to bring the vehicle to market. Today, Tesla announced deliveries for the first quarter 2016 and the company missed its delivery goal of 16,000 units, with only 14,820 total deliveries from January to March. It’s the first quarter in which the Model X significantly contributed to the delivery goal with 2,400 units…
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Norway is a very important market for Tesla. It’s the automaker’s biggest in Europe and about 8% of its total worldwide deliveries last year. In 2015, Tesla had flat deliveries in the country after delivering the exact same number, 4,039 Model S units, two years in a row, based on registration data.

It is still impressive for a relatively small country – though with a lot of EV incentives – but Tesla is definitely not growing in Norway anymore, or at least for the time being.
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Over the weekend, app developer Touch Titans published a quick demo video (see below) of what it claims to be a “mind-controlled Tesla Model S”. Although a stretch and gimmicky, the statement is technically correct (if you consider simple brain activity to be your mind).

Touch Titans is using the Emotiv Insight, a brain activity monitor, to record and translate brainwaves into data. Then, it uses Tesla’s API tools to make these inputs activate the same features available through Tesla’s official app.
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Tesla news not directly related to the Model 3 is hard to come by these days, but Electrek learned that Tesla recently hired Apple’s OS Security Manager for a similar role at the automaker. While safety in general has long been an important part of the automotive industry, IT security is just starting to become a factor as connected cars are increasingly becoming a hacking risk.

Consequently, Tesla is building an impressive IT security team led by Chris Evans, not Captain America but the former head of Google’s Project Zero, a team of hackers employed full-time by Google to find zero-day vulnerabilities.
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Tesla’s wheels are generally recognized as a strength of the company’s designs and when Tesla unveiled the Model 3 last week, we weren’t disappointed by the prototype’s wheels. The automaker actually displayed a few new wheel designs during the event.
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Elon Musk took to Twitter this afternoon to answer questions pertaining to the Model 3. The result is one of the most information-dense Elon “tweetstorms” in recent memory.

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After a highly anticipated multi-step reservation process starting with Tesla and SpaceX employees, followed by in-store reservations, which created long queues at Tesla’s retail locations, and finally online reservations just an hour before the unveiling, Tesla finally launched the Model 3 – its first mass market electric vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has been updating the public on the number of reservations the company is accumulating and here’s a quick timeline of those updates:
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Electrek learned that Tesla’s Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan quietly left the automaker during the last quarter to create a startup in stealth mode. Tesla Vice-President of Information Technology, Ganesh V. Iyer, is taking over Vijayan’s responsibilities as acting CIO and he will report directly to CEO Elon Musk, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tesla had a relatively stable C-level executive team since Elon Musk took over as CEO in 2009, but it now adds up to two C-level changes in just a few months with Vijayan’s departure from the company and Tesla’s long-time CFO Deepak Ahuja announcing his retirement late last year.
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There have been a lot of Tesla Model S/X drag races, some more ridiculous than others. But today’s might take the cake.

Australian Airline Qantas put their 737-800up against Tesla’s Model S  along the three kilometre runway at Avalon Airport southwest of Melbourne, Australia. Nevermind that the Tesla Model S can’t even do 181 mph which is the take off speed of this aircraft.

Plane versus car… pilot versus driver. We raced our Boeing 737 against a Tesla Model S to celebrate innovation and sustainability with Tesla Motors.

Who won? My 1st reaction was “certainly not the environment” – they probably used the same amount of petrol that all of Tesla Model S/X in Australia saved together in a year on this stunt. But Qantas says they’ve offset that somehow and have some exciting tie-ups with Tesla Motors. Head south for details…and the drag video… 
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