Electric car

According to the registration data coming in for November in European markets, Tesla delivered 157 Model S’s last month in the Netherlands – up from 145 units in October. The Netherlands continue to be an important market for Tesla. It is the second biggest European market for the company with Norway being the first.

Year-to-date, the company delivered 1,613 cars in the country, which represents a 44% increase versus the same period last year.
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According to Nasdaq’s latest short interest update, the total short position on Tesla’s stock increased to 27,367,931 shares – its highest since March 2014. The short position is almost as important as Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s own stake in the company: 28,371,342 shares or about 29% of the float.

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Mitsubishi CEO Osamu Masuko talking to Automotive News confirmed that the company will launch the Outlander PHEV in the US around “mid-2016”. The plug-in hybrid version of the Outlander consistently reach the top of the best-selling lists for plug-ins in European and Asian markets where it is available, but the Japan-based automaker has been delaying a U.S. launch for quite some time now. If we are to believe CEO Osamu Masuko, 2016 might finally be the year.
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Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.

Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.

In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
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After the success of its Formula E Championship, the FIA group announced a new race series with driverless electric cars in partnership with Kinetik. The new championship is called ‘ROBORACE’ and aims at providing a competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions that are now being developed by automotive and tech companies.

ROBORACE will “piggyback” on the Formula E Championship with each race taking place on the same circuit right before the Formula E race. FIA and Kinetic plan for 10 teams, each with two driverless cars, to compete in 1-hour races.
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It’s no secret that Tesla’s retail strategy is inspired by Apple’s. In 2010, the automaker hired George Blankenship as VP of Store Design & Development. Blankenship was a GAP veteran who led Apple’s real estate business from 2000 to 2006 and to whom Apple Store’s early success has been largely attributed. 

Blankenship retired in 2013, but apparently it wasn’t the end of the connection between the retail strategies of the two companies. We learn that earlier this month, Tesla hired the team leader of the architectural team for Apple Stores at Callison, an international architecture firm.
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DragTimes took delivery of its Tesla Model S P90D with Ludicrous mode just a few days ago and it already posted its first race. They raced the 5,000 lbs electric sedan against a 3,500 lbs Ford GT supercar.

Watch the full video below the fold:
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Sky News staged a race between Nissan’s battery-powered LEAF and Hyundai’s hydrogen fuel cell ix35 SUV. The race started at Sky’s studios in London and the finish line was in Paris for the COP21 Conference. Spoiler alert: the ix35 won.

The 270-mile journey was well within the 369-mile range of the ix35, but with the LEAF’s 84-mile range, it needed to stop to charge its 24 kWh battery pack.
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Fully Charged’s latest video features Jonny Smith’s modified Enfield 8000 ECC now called the “Flux Capacitor”. The vehicle beautifully illustrates how far batteries have come in the last few decades. When originally manufactured in 1974, the car was equipped with 300 kg of lead-acid batteries for 96 volts, now Smith equipped his with 145 kg of li-ion batteries for 378 volts.

The video and specs below:
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According to a recent government filing obtained by Reuters, U.S. regulators are delaying a ruling on low-speed sound alert requirements for electric and hybrid cars until at least mid-March 2016.

A ruling on this issue has been in the works since 2013, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimated that the odds of an electric or hybrid vehicle being involved in a crash with a pedestrian are 19% higher compared with a louder gas-powered vehicle.
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In a new note issued this morning, Credit Suisse analyst Dan Galves reiterated an ‘outperform’ rating and $325 price target on Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA) . The analyst considers the fourth quarter guidance to be “achievable” and he sees a “reasonable path” to $4 EPS in 2016 – compared to the ~$2.30 annualized loss per share in the last quarter.
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According to PlugShare’s quarterly report, Tesla added 858 charging stations across the US from September 2014 to September 2015. The increase is largely due to Tesla’s “Destination Charging” program, which now accounts for over 80% of Tesla’s charging points in the US.

The automaker operates two different types of charging networks, the “Superchargers” and “Destination Charging“. Supercharger stations can charge a Model S at a rate of more than 300 miles of range per hour and they are mainly located next to popular routes to facilitate road trips.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company can’t offer the Autopilot as a retrofit. There are a few aftermarket options available to add driver assist features to a car, but nothing close to Tesla’s ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’ features… until now.
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When Tesla first unveiled the Model X in September, the vehicle was widely reported to cost $132,000, but a lot of publications failed to understand that it was the sale price of the limited “Founders series”. Then Tesla opened orders for the “Signature series” – for people who reserved the vehicle with a $40,000 deposit – and now Tesla finally opens the order book to the reservation holders for the production version.

There’s no surprise. The base version is the “Model X 70D”, which starts at $80,000 ($5,000 more than the Dual Motor version of the Model S) and has an EPA-rated range of 220 miles. Tesla says that new orders will start shipping in “mid to late 2016”.

You can see a screenshot of the Model X design studio below:
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Between established automakers accelerating their electric vehicle programs and the newcomers in the EV industry – like Apple, Faraday Future or Atieva – engineers with battery experience are not short on employment opportunities. Earlier this year, Apple poached several battery tech experts from A123 Systems and we also reported that about 1 in 8 of Faraday Future’s ~400 employees is formerly from Tesla Motors.

From an executive’s standpoint, retaining talent in a specific field can be challenging on its own, but for Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, it can be even more complex when both companies he’s managing require talent in the same field…
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On November 20th, Tesla completed the Supercharger route between Melbourne and Sydney by opening a location in Gundagai. The company now operates 7 Supercharger locations in Australia and they are all located between Victoria’s coastal capital and the capital of New South Wales.
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Earlier this summer, Lucasfilm announced that Fiat’s FCA will be one of six major brand participating in an “expensive and historic” promotional campaign for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As part of the campaign, FCA unveiled a custom-painted Fiat 500e stormtrooper at the LA Auto Show last week.

The Fiat 500e is equipped with a 24 kWh battery pack and can achieve 87 EPA-rated miles on a single charge. At a MSRP of $32,795, the 500e can be an interesting smaller alternative to the Nissan LEAF, Chevy Spark or Kia Soul EV, but like the Soul EV, it suffers from the price comparison with its gasoline-powered counterpart, which starts at $17,990.
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Last Friday, Tesla issued a voluntary recall on all Model S’s manufactured in the past 3 years to check for a possible defect with the front seat belts. The reason for the recall is due to a customer in Europe reporting earlier this month that her seat belt disconnected when she turned to talk to someone in the back seat. The defect didn’t cause an accident and the seat belt has been repaired.Tesla already inspected 3,000 other Model S sedans, but the company didn’t find the same problem with any of them.

Nonetheless, Tesla decided to issue a recall on the Model S to check every single front seat belt as a precaution. The company referred to the cost of the recall as “immaterial” since it only requires owners to go their local service center for a short inspection. Owners who already completed the inspection are reporting that they were in and out in under 5 minutes, but to make it even less on an inconvenience, Tesla dispatched technicians to Supercharger stations to inspect the seat belts while the cars are charging.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were in Korea this week and they attended the Energy Korea Forum 2015. Local South Korean news reported on comments made by Straubel during a Q&A session at the forum, the CTO said that Tesla is “committed” to the South Korean market and that he sees a “great potential” there. Although he didn’t offer a concrete timeline on when the company plans to start selling cars in the country.
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