Cars

Switzerland-based Kyburz is now selling the EROD (via elektroauto), a small electric vehicle offered both as a kit car and as an assembled vehicle. It looks like a lot of fun to drive – see a few videos below.
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Building on the relative success of the Formula E, a long-time rumoured electric GT race circuit has been confirmed this week via Transport Evolved. Electric GT World Series is said to be the world’s first all-electric GT championship and it will launch its first race season next year with 10 teams all racing with their own Tesla Model S P85+.

The new championship shared a few details about the new GT race circuit.
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It seems like Tesla’s problems with direct sales laws are endless. After two consecutive small wins in Indiana and Utah, where state committees decided to temporarily table bills that would have prohibited Tesla to sell its cars directly to consumers, now the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association (VADA) filed a lawsuit against Tesla and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner, Richard D. Holcomb, to stop the automaker from opening a second store in the state, according to Reuters.
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After revealing European prices last week, today Tesla confirmed its Canadian Model X pricing and reservation holders can now access Tesla’s design studio to configure their vehicle.

If you reserved the vehicle a few years ago when the Canadian dollar was still holding its ground against the USD, you better be seated when scrolling through the Model X’s pricing because it starts at $122,700 for a base 70D model and can get as high as $208,300 for a fully-equipped P90DL.
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A new video with multiple angles and new pictures of the Google’s self-driving car hitting a bus last week and its aftermath have been released today. The accident is believed to be the first where Google’s system could be found at fault.

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After delivering only a few hundreds Model X’s late last year, there’s been doubts about the current state of production ramp up of Tesla’s new all-electric SUV. We now learn that several reservation holders who turned their reservations into orders are now receiving Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) as high as 5,000 and up, which could indicate a significant acceleration of the production ramp up.
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An interesting fact about lego bricks: the first hands to touch a Lego brick are the hands of a customer since the entire manufacturing process is automated.

Granted, plastic blocks are significantly less complicated than li-ion battery cells, but since Tesla hired a long-time Lego manufacturing executive to lead the Gigafactory effort, it is an interesting analogy for the potential level of automation at Tesla’s battery factory.
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Autonomous and semi-autonomous driving systems are already getting pretty good under favorable driving conditions, but one of most people’s main concern is about how a self-driving car would handle heavy rain or snow.

Although not recommended, Tesla’s Autopilot can already handle snow to a certain degree, but several systems in development are focusing on especially nailing winter self-driving. Ford recently released a video featuring what it calls “Snowtonomy.”
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Since coming out of stealth mode last December, Notorious hacker George “geohot” Hotz’s self-driving car/machine learning startup “comma.ai” hit a few roadblocks, including a cease-and-desist letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for operating a “level-4” autonomous vehicle.

Though Hotz is contesting the DMV and says his prototype is currently only a “level-3” semi-autonomous car, but the cease-and-desist is still slowing him down as he now can only test the vehicle in a private parking lot.
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Tesla last night posted 11 “howto” videos showing how to use the giant capacitive touch display in the middle of the center console as well as the smartphone app. Veteran Model S owners will find them mostly repetitive but there might be some nuggets of wisdom inside. However, new and prospective owners need to see all of them to understand how the car works.  See all embedded below:
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We have been wondering why only a few people have received an invitation for the Model 3 unveiling, which is now only 3 weeks away. As of now, only the winners of the referral program have reported having received the invite for the event taking place in Los Angeles.

The last event Tesla held in Los Angeles, the “D event”, was at the company’s design studio and over 4,000 people were in attendance, including hundreds of Model S owners and Tesla employees, but this time around, long-time owners who usually get invited to these events have yet to hear from the company.
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Update: Elon Musk said in a tweet today that the American Enterprise Institute meeting was not secretive and that he was not there to talk about Trump.

The AEI meeting wasn't secret and I was only there for a few hours to talk about Mars and sustainable energy. Nothing to do with Trump.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2016

According to a report from the Huffington Post, Elon Musk was among a handful of tech CEOs and Republican establishment members who recently met at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum to discuss how to best stop Donald Trump.

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Fortune is running a Koch Industry advertisement-as-commentary piece today ‘authored’ by Jim Mahoney, the employee signaled out in a Huffington Post article last month as leading a $10M campaign against EVs.

The piece doesn’t directly reference Tesla by name, but it does feature pictures of the Model S both in Fortune’s article and subsequent social media push by the publication (see above).

We advised that these hit pieces were coming but didn’t know they’d be coming so soon.

It looks like electric vehicles are still in the “fighting phase” as we learn today that billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are planning to back a new group of lobbyists with a focus on “boosting petroleum-based transportation fuels and attacking government subsidies for electric vehicles”, according to refining industry sources talking to the Huffington Post….

According to the Huffington Post, the Kochs are teaming up with James Mahoney, a member of their company’s board, and lobbyist Charlie Drevna, who until recently was the head of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. Their mission will be to “make the public aware of all the benefits of petroleum-based transportation fuels”.

Mahoney is a petroleum industry veteran who uses a few tired gems like:
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A somewhat amusing moment was caught on camera at Tesla’s booth during the Geneva Motor show last week. A reporter from the German magazine Wirtschafts Woche was interviewing Tesla’s head in Germany and Switzerland Jochen Rudat, a rising-star in Tesla’s organisation after the company’s success in Switzerland.
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Tesla is already calling the Model X “the safest SUV ever made”, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has yet to confirm its independent test ratings for the vehicle. Through its own internal testing of the vehicle, Tesla expects the Model X to become the first SUV to get 5-star rating in each of the safety categories.

The Model S surprised NHTSA 3 years ago when it first tested it and the car even broke the agency’s roof crushing machine during testing. Now, Tesla claimed they couldn’t even “flip” the Model X during testing, according to Dougherty analyst Andrea James who recently talked with the company.
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The BMW Group celebrated its centenary by highlighting its vision of the future, which will be electric and autonomous although the company is more ambiguous about the former. To embody the vision, BMW unveiled a new concept vehicle called ‘NEXT 100’, but never directly mentioned its powertrain, though it did make several references to its electric ‘BMW i’ division and its “Born Electric” moto.

The concept is reminiscent of rival Mercedes’ own autonomous vision concept unveiled last year, which is just as futuristic looking although in the shape of a minivan…
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Martin Hansen, a Tesla enthusiast from Northern Germany, designed his own miniature 3D version of a Tesla Supercharger fitted with a USB cable to charge your smartphone.

DIYers will be happy to know that Hansen released the .stl files of all the components so you can make one yourself at home.
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A company is only as good as its employees and a new PayScale survey gives us an interesting look into the employee demographic of some of the top tech employers. Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX particularly standout in the survey for ranking at the bottom for their bellow average salaries and at the top for most stressful environments, but also and maybe more importantly, at the top for being the two most meaningful places to work out of the 18 tech firms listed in the survey.
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Update: Tesla responds to Singapore’s Model S CO2 emissions test, and could it be as simple as poor math?

If you think it’s difficult to buy a Tesla in Texas due to direct sales law, wait until you learn what consumers in Singapore have to go through to buy a Model S. Singaporean Joe Nguyen reportedly spent months trying to get a licence for his car to be driven on local roads and instead of having access to the Carbon Emissions-based Vehicle Scheme (CEVS) rebate of $15,000 SDG (~$11,000 USD), he was charged a tax of the same amount after the government determined that the car is not “fuel-efficient”.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke directly with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who assured him that he would investigate the issue.
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