In this week’s top stories: Solar costs are down 25% in five months, Tesla Gigafactory doubles in size in our September update, Mercedes unveils its all-electric ‘EQ’ brand, and much more.
We obviously follow the climate change ‘debate’ pretty closely here and as the cause moves into popular culture, we’re here to cheer it on. Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood will hit the National Geographic Channel on October 31st,
In the clip screenshot above and embedded below, it appears that DiCaprio is touring the Tesla Gigafactory 1 outside of Reno Nevada. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is tells him that 100 of these factories are needed to remove fossil fuels from the global energy equation and move to sustainable energy.
Also making appearances in the movie are Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Bill Clinton and John Kerry, among others.
Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a company-wide email to employees in which he urged them to “build and deliver every car they possibly can” since the company was on the “razor edge” of profitability.
Today, a month later almost to the day, he sent another company-wide email, but this time to congratulate employees on what he describes as “likely the best ever [quarter] in the Tesla history”. But he also added a reminder not to give discounts on new cars.
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We don’t know much about the SolarCity solar panels that are coming out of the South Buffalo plant but Chairman and likely soon CEO of the combined Tesla/Solar City entity Elon Musk told investors last month:
“It’s a solar roof, as opposed to modules on a roof.”
Musk continued:
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Sam Altman of Y Combinator recently had the opportunity to have a 1-on-1 sit down with Elon Musk. During the interview, they conversed about various subjects including whether or not he [Musk] thought people getting their PhDs is generally useful, the colonization of mars, and artificial intelligence. But one statement, in particular, that Musk revealed in his talks with Altman stood out like a sore thumb: he believes that the team at Tesla can increase the speed on the production line by, a staggering, 20-fold.
Elon Musk has warned people to stay vigilant and “revolt against the propaganda of the fossil fuel industry which is unrelenting and enormous”.
Now Tesla is having its own fight against the oil industry and it’s not one to promote electric vehicles. The company is suing an oil pipeline services firm and its Chief Financial Officer who Tesla says tried to impersonate Musk to gain confidential information about Tesla’s deliveries during the current quarter.
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While I was completing a transcript of the conference call with Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 of the automaker’s operating system, I realized that a very interesting quote by Musk went mostly unnoticed. Tesla’s CEO defended the company’s decision to push level 3 semi-autonomous system, a system under which the driver basically acts as the backup to the autonomous technology.
Several companies developing self-driving technology, like Google, Ford and Volvo, came out publicly against such a system citing safety concerns with the transfers of controls between the human drivers and the “robot driver”. Instead, they are advocating for a jump directly to level 4 full autonomy.
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Tesla released its blog post about the Autopilot’s new radar processing capability today and CEO Elon Musk made himself available for a 1-hour long press conference during which he explained in more details the upgrade and took a few questions from reporters.
The talk was more technical than usual and Musk gave a few great examples for applications of the Autopilot’s new radar processing technology. And since it’s technical and going in details about the Autopilot systems, including a lot of details unannounced or unconfirmed until now, I think it’s worth making a transcript of his talk for future reference.
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This is part 7 and the last part of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4, part 5 and part 6.
Now here’s part 7:
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This is part 6 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4 and part 5.
Now here’s part 6:
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This is part 5 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4.
Now we are at part 5:
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This is part 4 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A. Now part 4:
Alex Roy – The Drive
Hello everyone how are you? Would have the improvements in Autopilot 8 mitigated or saved Josh Brown’s life?
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO
We believe it would have.
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This is part 3 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A:
Tim Stevens – Roadshow
Hi Elon, you mentioned the radar working well with signs and thing like that but mentioned perhaps something big and fluffy might be a challenge. Can you give me an idea of what that means for something like a moose, a deer or horses?
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO
Yeah it’s a good question. Actually, it should work for something like moose- because something like a moose is quite a big mass, but it may not work for say a small deer. A small deer probably would not trigger braking, but a moose I think would. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I think it would trigger on a moose.
We got a lot of customers in Canada and other places where there are moose-size creatures so I think we will get good information on that and obviously, you definitely want to brake for a moose because they are very big and it can cause a lot of harms.
I think it will (stop for a moose), but if not, I’m confident we can tune it to do so.
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This is part 2 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 here: Transcript: Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update [Part 1]
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO:
Radar sees through rain, fog, snow, dust, and essentially quite easily. So even if you are driving down the road and the visibility was very low and there was a big multi-car pileup or something like that and you cant’ see it, the radar would and it would initiate braking in time to avoid your car being added to the multi-car pileup.
In fact, an additional level of sophistication – we are confident that we can use the radar to look beyond the car in front of you by bouncing the radar signal off the road and around the car. We are able to process that echo by using the unique signature of each radar pulse as well as the time of flight of the photon to determine that what we are seeing is in fact an echo in front of the car that’s in front of you. So even if there’s something that was obscured directly both in vision and radar, we can use the bounce effect of the radar to look in front of that car and still brake.
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Today, Elon Musk apologized for the delay in releasing his blog post about the updated Autopilot under v8.0 citing “unusually difficult couple of weeks”, presumably due to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 anomaly on September 1, but now he sets the date for tomorrow afternoon:
Will do some press Q&A on Autopilot post at 11am PDT tmrw and then publish at noon. Sorry about delay. Unusually difficult couple of weeks.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2016
The fact that he is holding a press conference before the release of the blog post is a good sign of the importance of the information that will be released.
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Last week, we reported on comments made by Elon Musk in a company-wide email obtained by Bloomberg. The publication had only published excerpts from the memo at the time, but now that we have the full email, we learn that Elon Musk actually thinks that Tesla could be GAAP profitable in the current quarter – something the company hasn’t achieved in over 3 years.
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Since he has been seen traveling the world while wearing his Tesla gear (pictured above), you might know that famed actor Morgan Freeman is a longtime Tesla owner, but now we learn that he is also a Tesla (TSLA) investor and a big supporter of CEO Elon Musk.
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After publishing its second quarter 2016 financial results last month, Tesla said that it plans to deliver about 50,000 vehicles during the second half the year to bring the total to 80,000 vehicles. The volume will generate a lot of cash flow for the company and now CEO Elon Musk says that it could be enough to be profitable during the third quarter, which will end by the end of the month.
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Another interesting tidbit of information coming out of Tesla’s SEC filing for its proposed acquisition of SolarCity yesterday – following our reports about Tesla’s board first turning down the merger and Tesla planning another round of financing – now we learn that the Rive Brothers are going to forfeit over $100 million worth of stock options through the merger.
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There are few interesting tidbits of information coming out of Tesla’s SEC filing in regard to the proposed merger with SolarCity, like the fact Tesla is currently planning another round of financing, but now we also have a detailed timeline of the behind the scene work for the merger and it includes an interesting information.
CEO Elon Musk first brought up the idea of buying SolarCity to Tesla’s board 6 months ago (Feb 2016), but the board turned him down at the time. The automaker only started considering the merger 3 months later.
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When SolarCity first launched its Solar Bond Program, it was presented as an interesting way for people to invest in solar with minimum cost requirements and without having to install panels on their roof. It ended up looking more like SpaceX’s private investment platform after Elon Musk’s rocket company bought most of the bonds over the last year – about $255 million worth.
Now Elon Musk is also personally investing in the Solar Bonds, along with SolarCity co-founders Lyndon and Peter Rive, ahead of SolarCity’s merger with Tesla.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk just confirmed that Tesla is about to make a product announcement at noon California time – 3pm ET – 7pm UTC:
Tesla product announcement at noon California time today
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2016
We don’t know what it is yet and there are a lot of possibilities. Let the speculation begin!
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on SolarCity’s conference call for its second quarter financial results today, which is unusual for the Chairman, but understandable considering the impending deal for Tesla to acquire the solar installer. During the call, Musk announced that SolarCity will unveil a “solar roof” as opposed to “solar modules on a roof”.
While Musk didn’t elaborate on the product itself, he made it clear that Tesla/SolarCity will go after the roof industry with its new products, rather than only installing solar modules on existing roofs.
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There’s no doubt that Tesla has suffered several delays on its product launches (heck, even its events rarely start on time). From the Roadster to the Model X, and now even Tesla Energy products are being slightly pushed back a few months. But what about its most important product to date and arguably the most time sensitive: the Tesla Model 3?
Tesla says it will arrive in late 2017, but in its latest issue, the popular automotive magazine Car and Driver claims the Model 3 will not arrive until late 2019, 2 years late, and it backs its prediction with a set of formulas.
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