Electric Vehicles

After just over a year at Apple, former Mercedes R&D chief Johann Jungwirth left the company earlier this month to join Volkswagen AG as the new ‘Head of Digital Transformation’. Even though his official title at Apple was “Director of Mac Systems Engineering”, the executive was rumored to be working on the company’s electric car codenamed “Project Titan” due to his extensive automotive background and the timing of the hire, which was followed by several other engineering hires with experience in the auto industry.
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Over a year after Elon Musk first announced in his now famous “All Our Patent Are Belong To You” blog post that Tesla will be open-sourcing all its patents. We now have the first confirmation that some automakers have actually taken Tesla on the offer.

During an interview with Ron Baron last Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk very briefly mentioned for the first time that he believes companies are now using Tesla’s patents:

“I think actually there are a number of companies using our patents.”

Musk’s comment was in response to Baron asking why companies are not taking advantage of Tesla’s technology considering it is “free” and that the company is achieving higher safety and emission standard than the competition.
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Although Apple has yet to confirm the existence of “Project Titan,” it seems like every week brings a new clue that the company is indeed working on an electric car. We learned that Sixty Eight Research, a sketchy firm widely believe to be a front for Apple’s effort in the automotive business, recently attended the 17th Global Car Body Benchmarking Conference in Germany.
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Tesla recently reported its third quarter financial results and the company disclosed delivery guidance for 2016. Tesla expects to produce and deliver between 1,600 and 1,800 vehicles per week on average next year – meaning a yearly total of 83,200 to 93,600 units. If the company can achieve the higher end of its guidance, it would deliver more cars in a year than it did since the company was founded in 2003.

The automaker delivered 11,603 cars from July through September, which made the last quarter its best to date, but the company is aiming to significantly increase production this quarter in order to deliver between 17,000 to 19,000 units during the last three months of year.
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Adam Jonas, a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley covering Tesla Motors and the automotive industry, is nothing if not persistent. During Tesla’s recent conference call to discuss third quarter financial results, the analyst again asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the possibility for the company to join the likes of Uber and Lyft in the ride-sharing industry.

Jonas first brought up the idea at Tesla’s last quarterly conference call after comments made by Tesla board member Steve Juvertson about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick potentially wanting to buy 500,000 autonomous Teslas by the end of the decade. First time around earlier this year, Jonas got a firm “no comment” from Musk, but nonetheless the CEO called his question “insightful” at the time. The second time around during this week’s call, Jonas pushed the question again and although Musk’s first reaction was not to comment, which is rare for the CEO, he implied that an announcement could be coming.
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Since the unveiling of the Chevy Bolt at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, there’s been some scepticism about the planned nationwide availability of the all-electric vehicle, presumably due to GM’s track record of producing compliance cars when it comes to electric vehicles. The Chevrolet Spark EV is primarily available in CARB states in order to comply to regulations and the company recently confirmed that the 2016 version of the Volt will also only be offered in CARB states.

But GM says it will not be the case for the Bolt and the company recently reaffirmed its intention to launch the all-electric vehicle in all 50 states.
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Tesla Motors announced the renewal of its $1,000 referral program for the Model S for 2 more months after the end of the first trial period on October 31. It’s fair to say that the program was a success with a single Model S owner selling 100 cars in only 3 months and hundreds of top referrers selling several thousand vehicles.

The company introduced a few new prizes for top referrers including free Ludicrous P90D Model S’s and invitations to the unveiling of the Model 3 expected in late March 2016.
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Faraday Future announced this morning a planned first phase investment of $1 billion in a U.S. manufacturing facility, which should be announced in the “coming weeks”. The announcement comes just a week after our profile on the company, which linked the firm to the deep pocket Chinese technology company, LeTV.
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During the conference call discussing the company’s third quarter financial results yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was asked about the company’s recurring problems with the drive units of the Model S. Musk assured investors that the drive units being installed in the vehicles right now or “excellent” and he even stated that the company changed its endurance goal for the motors from being able to handle 200,000 miles to now 1 million miles.
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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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