While Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Programs, Jerome Guillen, is working on the automaker’s all-electric heavy truck program, Tesla Semi, CEO Elon Musk made rare comments about the vehicle and more especially, its autonomous driving capacity.
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Tesla’s lawsuit against an oil executive trying to impersonate CEO Elon Musk to get material information about the company and now a subsequent countersuit are starting to uncover what appears to be a plot by the oil industry against Tesla.
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Back in September, we reported on a lawsuit Tesla filed against an oil service company, Quest Integrity, and its CFO, Todd Katz, over an email made to look like it was from Tesla CEO Elon Musk that Katz allegedly sent Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler in an attempt to obtain secret information about Tesla.
Katz, who apparently resigned from his position at Quest Integrity a week after the lawsuit was filed, is now responding to the accusation. He is not denying having sent the email, but he defends himself by saying that the impersonation wasn’t “credible” enough for anyone to believe the email was from Musk and therefore, it shouldn’t merit a lawsuit.
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Even though Tesla just released a new report with the clear goal to pitch the SolarCity acquisition to its shareholders, CEO Elon Musk is now saying that he would be surprised if the merger wouldn’t pass at this point.
He even referenced the early votes which he described as “overwhelmingly in favor” of the merger.
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Bob Lutz, General Motors’ former vice chairman, can’t stop and won’t stop attacking Tesla in the media. CNBC had him on this morning ahead of Tesla releasing its financial results this afternoon and they let him straight up lie about the company’s financial situation without correcting him.
As usual, he also went after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which now makes happier times, like the moment pictured above at the ‘Revenge of the Electric Car‘ premiere, seem like a bygone era.
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla/SolarCity announce upcoming events, Elon Musk challenges Big Coal, Google deploys its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, and much more.
Now that Tesla is venturing further into the energy industry by ramping up its energy storage division, ‘Tesla Energy’, and with solar through its proposed merger with SolarCity, the company is not just causing serious concern to established automakers and big oil, but also traditional energy companies like coal mining corporations.
This morning it became clear that Tesla is not welcomed by those companies either when Robert Murray, a climate-change denier and CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, one of the biggest coal mining firms in the US, called Tesla a “fraud” for receiving subsidies without turning a profit.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter this afternoon to announce an unexpected product launch event on October 17th, just a week away. He further noted that the expected Tesla/SolarCity announcement, which he previously hoped to hold at the end of the month, would indeed be on October 28th…
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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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