Cars

Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a conference call today to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results with analysts. During the call, Musk commented on the recent release of the Autopilot and the technology going forward. When asked how he sees the market with full autonomous driving and manual driving vehicles, the CEO said that once self-driving cars are being produced, non-autonomous cars will have a “negative value” and be the equivalent of owning a horse – meaning it would be for “sentimental reasons”.
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results today at market close. Management will hold a conference call with Q&A at 2:30pm Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time). You can join on the call through Tesla’s website and join us below the break for live updates:
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After a concert last Thursdays night, Katya Pinkowski, a Tesla Model S owner in Vancouver, returned to her car in an underground parking lot to find it missing. Pinkowski told local news outlet The Province that after making sure her Model S didn’t get towed, she called her husband who quickly checked the Tesla App to confirm the location of the vehicle.

Tesla’s smartphone app allows owners to access certain features of their vehicles like climate control, charge state and fortunately for Katya and her husband Cary, real-time location tracking.
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results later today, but we are already looking at the fourth quarter as registration data are coming in from some European markets. Tesla will need an impressive fourth quarter to achieve its 2015 guidance and it might get it from what we are seeing so far.

The company expects to deliver between 50,000 and 55,000 vehicles in 2015 and with the current official year-to-date total of 33,157 units, Tesla needs to deliver a record-breaking ~17,000 units in the last 3 months of the year to achieve the low-end of its own guidance. It would represent a ~73% increase over the fourth quarter last year.
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Tesla sent out an email this weekend to Model S owners on the waiting list for a retrofit of their Performance Dual Motor Model S to enable the ‘Ludicrous’ mode. In the email, Tesla explained that due to parts and process improvements, the company is now able to offer the upgrade at a reduced price of $5,000 instead of the previously announced $7,500.

The Ludicrous upgrade consists of two improvements to the electronics of the Model S’ battery pack. The first improvement is the replacement of a standard fuse to an “advanced smart fuse” which enables the monitoring of current to the millisecond, and makes it possible to cut the power with “extreme precision”.
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Mobileye is a relatively small Israel-based tech company, but it is rapidly positioning itself as a major hardware and software supplier for the implementation of driver assist and autonomous driving features. In a recent presentation at Citi’s 2015 Global Technology Conference, CEO Ziv Aviram claimed that 90% of automakers are using their products.

Mobileye is also a supplier for Tesla’s recently released Autopilot and during the same presentation, the CEO hinted at the company’s potential next generation hardware suite that could allow for a wider range of autonomous features and maybe even complete self-driving.
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results tomorrow. The company already confirmed record deliveries of 11,580 cars globally from July to September and it marked the very first quarter with deliveries of two different models: the Tesla Model S and Model X.

The Model S remains Tesla’s main source of revenue – meaning there shouldn’t be too much of a surprise on the revenue side, but let’s take a look at what to expect in numbers:
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Yesterday Detroit Electric announced it finally started production on the SP:01, a Lotus Exige-based electric sport car. The company released on its Facebook page a picture (see above) of the first few cars rolling off the production line in Leamington Spa, U.K.

If an electric sport car based on a Lotus rings a bell for you, it’s probably because of the Tesla Roadster which was based on the Elise and at first also assembled by Lotus in England, although Tesla ended up repatriating most of the assembly process in U.S.
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During the press conference for the release of the Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred to each Model S owners as an “expert trainer” – meaning that each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot.

He said that the system should improve every day, but that improvements might only become noticeable every week or so by adding up. Just a few weeks after the release, Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving…
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NHTSA submitted a recall report earlier this week for Daimler to recall all Mercedes electric B-Class over a problem with Tesla’s drivetrain. The report, which we embed below, perfectly highlights the need for over-the-air updates across the whole automotive industry. According to the filing, the recall is due to a problem with the gateway software of the electric powertrain, which is supplied by Tesla Motors, and affects all 2,618 Mercedes electric B-Class produced between November 2013 and May 2015.
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The rules regulating the use of Tesla’s Autopilot are often vague or even non-existent depending on the jurisdiction, but the California DMV is working to change that. The organization is due to release a draft of consumer rules for the use of autonomous features in vehicles.

Earlier this year, the agency sent a letter to Tesla to clarify the autonomous features of the Autopilot update and state officials even met with the company the day before the release (Oct. 14) according to the San Jose Mercury News. Yet the DMV still appears to be confused about the workings of Tesla’s Autopilot…
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‘Press day’ is over at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show and now car enthusiasts can visit the floor of the “Tokyo Big Sight” to see what automakers have to offer. We rounded up galleries of official press photos of the main electric vehicles unveiled at the event:
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Yesterday at the Tokyo Motor Show, Mitsubishi unveiled its 250 miles all-electric crossover eX concept. The company announced the model just a few weeks ago, but we only had renders, now we have the real thing.
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After mostly flat sales during the first half of the year, Tesla experienced a 52% quarterly increased between the second quarter and the third ended in September by delivering 1,345 Model S units for a total of 3,025 so far in 2015. Tesla rarely discloses sales by segment, but CEO Elon Musk made an exception during a recent visit in China and later Tesla spokesperson Gary Tao confirmed the numbers.
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A patent troll is currently suing Apple, Samsung and half the automotive industry – as well as other companies – over the use of a vague, decade old patent that covers operating certain functions of a vehicle, like starting the engine and locking/unlocking doors, through a “watch” – now known as a “smartwatch”.

Intellectual Capital Consulting (LCC), the plaintiff in the lawsuit (which we embed below), claims that the defendants are using patented technology in smartwatch products and software that they are selling or contributing to sell.
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I thought that Mercedes’ recently unveiled IAA concept was weird-looking, but it has nothing on the German automaker’s new “Vision Tokyo” which it introduced today at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show.

The concept is equipped with “fuel cell-powered electric drive system”, which consists of an electric motor powered by both a battery pack and pressure tanks of hydrogen with fuel cells.
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A Tesla driver (note reflection of Model S screen in video) says that Autopilot saved him from a head on collision with a turning motorist on a dark rainy night in Seattle. Reddit user Jhall118 took to the forum to discuss what happened in the video below…
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Nissan had its press briefing today for the opening of the Tokyo Motor Show 2015 and the Japan-based company reaffirmed its commitment to electric vehicles with 3 new EVs on stage.

Watch Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn’s presentation below the break:
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