We’ve seen the VIN tallies and how that affects the market. The questions analysts are asking: Can Tesla announce 6,000 Model S deliveries for the quarter. That would put Tesla 1000 over its yearly estimate and on a 24,000/year run-rate.
Some Danes took their Tesla (not sure if it was tuned for German roads) on the autobahn just in case you want to know how your Tesla will fare at over 200km/h.
The biggest single trade in Tesla options at midafternoon Monday was a bet that looks for the electric-car maker’s shares to soar more than 31% through the end of the week. Nine of the 10 most-actively traded contracts were ones that also looked for shares to move higher, though more conservatively so, to profit.
“It’s been as wild as I’ve ever seen it around earnings,” William Lefkowitz, options strategist at asset management and brokerage firm National Securities, said of the trading in and prices of Tesla options Monday. “People are looking for big swings,” he said.
Tesla shares gained $13.03, or 8%, to $175.02 Monday. That leaves the stock up 417% so far this year, but 9.5% below its closing record of $193.37 seen Sept. 30.
You knew Fox News was going to stage a takedown of Tesla at one point or another. Here is Lauren Fix’s interview on the Tesla Fires (above).
‘Interviewer’: “…Something about Tesla Cars that cause them to blow up”? Just … No
Fix: “supposedly a piece of metal that supposedly punctured the battery box” All facts. Seattle fire: Metal into the underside of the battery box at highway speeds. What would happen if it hit a gas tank?
Fix: “NHTSA didn’t investigate”. They did. They found no reason to push forward and the car acted like expected.
“After reviewing all available data, the NHTSA has not found evidence at this time that would indicate the recent battery fire involving a Tesla Model S was the result of a vehicle safety defect or noncompliance with federal safety standards,” the agency said in a statement.
Fix: “I assume they offered him a deal on a new car”. No. Published reports say the Seattle driver happily bought another one with the money he got from his insurance
Fix: “If this were Ford, GM, Toyota…[Congress] they would call them on the carpet and basically and draw and corner them” There are hundreds of vehicle fires every day. I don’t think that Congress acts on every one of them?
Fix “Something happened in a hit a wall but here wall on a regular combustion car your car is not likely to blow up” Actually the car did a lot more than bust through a wall. It was called an extreme accident where the vehicle travelling well over the speed limit experienced a violent crash with low wall after it jumped curb and went airborne. The driver walked away without any permanent injuries.
Fix: “There’s hundreds of people that complain; many many of these owners are happy because they’re environmentalists they want to be cool” There are quite a bit of owners who are speed freaks and who love havin a 7-seat sports car that is quiet and requires no maintenance. Motor Trend and Consumer reports must be crazy.
Yes, it is a sloppy, stupid takedown but unfortunately there are a lot of ignorant and elderly people who watch Fox and actually consider it to be a source of information. The oil industry is a hundreds of billions of dollars per year industry. These attacks will only grow more prominent in the coming years.
It took the top two as well. Important note: 7 of those Zip codes are in New York City where Tesla wasn’t the top pick. Why? It is hard to hook up your own charger in a public parking lot or on the street. If you don’t include those 7, Tesla Model S is the best seller in almost half of the wealthiest 18 ZIPs. Expand Expanding Close
Its always fun to watch the finance folks talk technology. Putting hybrids in the same category as the Model S makes little sense and negates all of the negative factors associated with them. For instance Hybrids must run two redundant power trains. They must store 2 types of fuels and have systems that (usually poorly) switch between the two.
None of the hybrids coming out has anywhere near the battery capacity of the Model S. None of the other companies have the Supercharger infrastructure which is already covering the US and Europe. The BMW i8 does look cool but can it seat 7 and have room for luggage?
Tesla announced early this morning that it had secured its Lithium battery supply from Panasonic to the tune of nearly 2 billion cells over the course of four years. This is an expansion of their 2011 arrangement which has been successful at launching the Roadster and Model S.
Math time:
At around 7000 cells per car for the 85kWh model, that’s around 286K vehicles over the next 4 years. Not a bad clip if you consider Tesla’s 2013 goal of 25K cars. Keep in mind, Tesla has also announced battery deals with Samsung and others – so there is a lot of upside to this. Also keep in mind 7,000 is the 85kWh model. Assuming there are around 5,000 batteries for the 60kWh model, there is plenty more upside. If Tesla only made 5000-cell cars, that is 400,000 cars for the 2B batteries.
So, putting on my analyst hat for a second, I’d estimate that Tesla’s worst case estimates put a floor of around 100K cars averaged until 2017 when the contract ends (or is likely renewed).
2017 should be well into the $30,000 Model E (which is forecasted to have lower amounts of cells) so growth at the tail end of the deal is likely factored in.
It also means that there likely won’t be some crazy “supercapacitor” type technology coming to mass market any time in the next few years. Even if it did, Tesla Model S and Model X allow for easy battery swaps and firmware could be adjusted accordingly.
In case you are wondering, that Yugo-looking EV is called the Buddy EV. The Norwegian electric vehicle’s range is 25-60 km (16 to 37 miles) via a 13 kW motor, and has a max speed of 80 km/hr (50 mph) while under 100 inches long.
The groundbreaking Tesla Model S earned Consumer Reports highest test score and it aced crash tests, yet we could not truly recommend it—until now.
Based on data collected from more than 600 owners in our 2013 Annual Auto Survey, the Tesla Model S earned an average predicted reliability score. Owners of the 2012 model reported very few problems, although 2013 owners cited quite a few more. The combined score allows us to recommend it.
Quite interesting that they saw different reliability in the 2012 and 2013 models since they are the exact same thing. Also, since they are rolling off the line, you’d expect the earlier ones to have more problems (like sunroof squeaking) that were fixed in later ones.
Nope. CR says that 2012s scored better than 2013s. Go figure. Expand Expanding Close
The video above is from Merida, Mexico on October 18th. It appears that another Tesla Model S has caught fire after a pretty extreme accident where the vehicle experienced a violent crash with low wall after it jumped curb and went airborne.
The driver and potential passengers were driving at speeds in excess of the speed limit and fled the scene of the accident. From the video, it appears that the fire is also more extreme than the Seattle fire which didn’t compromise the passenger compartment.
Bloomberg says even though the driver fled, he was contacted by Tesla and is unharmed.
“We were able to contact the driver quickly and are pleased that he is safe,” Jarvis-Shean said today in an e-mailed statement. “This was a significant accident where the car was traveling at such a high speed that it smashed through a concrete wall and then hit a large tree, yet the driver walked away from the car with no permanent injury.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vwJ-12xOfU]
A typical car-guy-review of the Tesla Model S
It is interesting to see tech pubs who don’t often, if ever, review cars get behind the wheel of a Tesla Model S.
Ars Technica is no different concluding that it does in fact ‘have a soul’, but stop short of calling it the ‘Jesus car’ that the guys above did.
The Model S doesn’t smell like oil, it doesn’t drink gasoline, and it doesn’t howl when you stomp on it. But even though it lacks a beating mechanical internal combustion heart, it absolutely, positively, most definitely does have a soul. The Model S is a young car without the proud racing history of companies like Porsche or Ferrari, but it’s still an incredibly powerful New World statement that squarely challenges the Old.
In the few days I had the loaner Model S, I gave rides to most of my friends—along with a few of my friends’ kids. The responses were identical, young and old. The slide-out door handles drew gasps from 10-year-olds and jaded thirtysomethings alike; the enormous touchscreen made all eyes pop; the gut-rearranging torque drew gleeful screams of “OHHH YEAAAAAAAAAAH” out of every single person that sat in the cabin.
As for the driving experience—well, you forget about all of the neat electronics and the touchscreen and the battery and the network of Superchargers when you slip behind the wheel because the Model S is not just a great electric car. It’s a great car, period. That’s the highest praise I can give; Tesla Motors has succeeded in making an excellent automobile that also happens to be the best electric car money can buy.
More interesting to me was their description of a Supercharger visit, which I haven’t heard discussed too often:
Supercharging
The Supercharger bypasses the car’s chargers and feeds DC directly into the battery—prodigious amounts of DC, in fact. Once connected, the Supercharger began dumping about 300 volts at 300 amps into our car. After a minute or two, the car started making all kinds of loud noises—fans came on that I’d never heard before. The battery is liquid-cooled, and it’s easy to see how moving this much power would produce significant heat.
Enlarge / During supercharging, the car takes on a LOT of juice very quickly.
Lee Hutchinson
We headed to the restaurant next door to grab lunch while the car charged; when we came back 45 minutes later, 180 miles had been added onto the car’s range. The charging rate starts very high, adding 100 miles of range very quickly so that long-distance drivers can charge quickly and move on to the next Supercharger station. After the first huge dump of electricity, the charging rate tapers off—by the end of the charge, the car was drawing energy at 400 volts and 20 amps. (This helps preserve the life of the battery, since dumping juice into it quickly will degrade the battery pack much faster than a slower charge.)
In an effort to spur lackluster sales of electric cars, California, New York and six other states said on Thursday that they would work jointly to adopt a range of measures, including encouraging more charging stations and changing building codes, to make it easier to own an electric car.
The goal, they said, was to achieve sales of at least 3.3 million vehicles that did not have any emissions by 2025.
The states, which represent more than a quarter of the national car market, said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment, simplify rules for installing chargers and set building codes and other regulations to require the stations at workplaces, multifamily residences and at other places.
Not much not to like here. How does $27,500 go for a $199/month lease? Add in the $7500 tax credit. I’ll be interested to see how low that 82 mile range gets in the winter – oh you can only get on in California and Oregon which have mild winters so we’ll have to wait awhile and see. Expand Expanding Close
As the world loses its mind over the Tesla that caught on fire, it is important to note a few things. Above, from a conversation in July with owners and stockholders Musk indicates some of the pretty incredible considerations that went into building the Model S.
Last month, when announcing the best NHTSA ratings ever, Tesla expanded on Musk’s statement above –that statistically there was likely to be a battery fire.
The Model S lithium-ion battery did not catch fire at any time before, during or after the NHTSA testing. It is worth mentioning that no production Tesla lithium-ion battery has ever caught fire in the Model S or Roadster, despite several high speed impacts. While this is statistically unlikely to remain the case long term, Tesla is unaware of any Model S or Roadster occupant fatalities in any car ever.
The Seattle driver was fine so, as of as of this writing, no one has yet had a permanent injury or death from a Tesla Model S accident.
According to Mysanantonio.com, a Supercharger is coming to the San Marcos Premium outlets between Austin and San Antonio.
With only 17 other stations across the U.S., the Palo Alto, Calif.-based automker said Superchargers provide half of a full charge in 20 minutes and allow drivers to travel for about three hours. The company plans to open four more stations in the state before the end of 2013, with its second opening in two weeks in Waco, according to a spokesperson.
Tesla previously announced its first Supercharger in Texas would open in Dallas, but the spokesperson said the “unpredictable nature of permits and inspection” caused construction in San Marcos to finish earlier.
I’ve always wondered why this wasn’t a product. There are clearly liability issues with a bike that goes 50mph but it would seem to be popular in a better package.
Elon Musk has posted the PDF of the Hyperloop after months of speculation. Nothing seems to out of the realm of possibility here and there are some damn nice drawings.
So $6B for the passenger only version and $10B for the car transport version? Sign me up
