Elon Musk

The impact of the Model 3 is being felt in the automotive industry long before it actually hits the market in about 18 months. Since the reveal last month, GM has hinted that the range of the upcoming Bolt will be closer to Tesla’s, Ford announced that it is developing a vehicle to compete with the Model 3 and Fiat-Chrysler might even copy Tesla’s platform.

During his recent visit to Norway, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he was surprised by the number of reservations the company received for the $35,000 all-electric sedan and referred to the event as a “wake up call” for the industry.
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Norwegian media are reporting that Tesla’s Norway operations have been hit with 240 payment demands from creditors over NOK 2 million (~$250,000) in unpaid bills and as a result, the company has received a ‘C’ credit rating – the worst credit rating it can get in Norway.

The reports suggest that the most recent unpaid bill claims coincide with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s visit in the country last week.
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Tesla recently confirmed that the base version of the Model 3 will be able to travel over 215 miles on a single charge with a battery pack “smaller than 60 kWh”. The relatively small battery capacity makes it clear that the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance is crucial to achieving the range, much like it is for the Model S and X, even with their higher capacity battery packs.

It became clear that Tesla knows the importance of aerodynamics after both the Model S and X achieved the lowest drag coefficient (Cd) in their respective segments. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he expects the Model 3 to achieve an incredibly low 0.21 Cd, which should be enough to make the Model 3 the most aerodynamic mass production car ever made.

Tesla is said to use Exa’s digital simulation tools to design its vehicles and Exa’s Vice President of Ground Transportation Applications, Ales Alajbegovic, shared his thoughts on the Model 3’s aero innovations.
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Last year, Tesla announced a restructuring of its sales leadership after it reassigned its Vice President of Global Sales and Service, Jerome Guillen, to a new role leading customer-satisfaction. Guillen later took a leave of absence from Tesla and the company hired Jon McNeill as President of Global Sales, but Tesla kept looking for new executives to lead sale operations in each of its main markets (NA, EU and Asia).

While Tesla filled the North American and Asian roles last year by hiring former Burberry executive Ganesh Srivats as Vice-President for North America Sales, and Ren Yuxiang as Vice-President for Asia-Pacific, now Electrek has learned that Tesla just filled the European role by hiring Willem Haitink, O’Neil CEO and former long-time Nike executive, to lead sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
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Tesla CEO Elon was in Norway today where he gave a keynote address at a government sponsored conference on ‘Future transport solutions’. Musk gave a quick presentation and then sat down for a public talk with Minister of Transport and Communications, Ketil Solvik-Olsen (picture above).

His presentation was titled:”How to reduce global warming through renewable energy production and consumption“. He shared his views about the necessities to accelerate the transition to a post fossil fuel economy in a similar way as he did during his Paris talk last year.
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In a weird Twitter conversation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered a wager to former SUN Microsystems CEO and co-founder, Scott McNealy, on whether Tesla received less in government subsidies than McNealy’s SUN.

For some reason, today McNealy decided to reply to a tweet Musk sent out two weeks ago. The Silicon Valley executive claimed that Musk’s supporters were unwilling taxpayers and he referenced a LA Times article from last year that mistakenly implied that Musk’s companies, especially Tesla and SolarCity, received $4.9 billion in subsidies.
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In order to limit any negative impact following some reported misuses of the Autopilot, Tesla pushed more constraints to its semi-autonomous driving system through a software update late last year. The automaker made it clear that it was only a precaution and that it wasn’t aware of any accident caused by the system.

On the other hand, we learned of a few accidents that was prevented by the Autopilot (here and more recently here). When releasing the feature, Tesla made it clear that drivers should keep their hands on the steering wheel while using ‘Autosteer’, but of course Tesla owners would naturally want to push the limits of the feature, and of course we now see that even Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s wife is not using it as recommended.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an affectionate nickname for Apple: The ‘Tesla Graveyard‘. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk said. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple”. He made the comment after being asked about the so-called “poaching war” between the automaker and the consumer electronic giant following the start of Apple’s electric car program: ‘Project Titan‘.

We follow who’s coming and who’s going at Tesla pretty closely here at Electrek and it’s clear that the two companies share a lot of former colleagues. Tesla’s senior engineering staff and leadership are full of former Apple directors and VPs, while the Cupertino-based company hired quite a few former Tesla engineers, but rarely any senior leadership… until now.

Electrek, in collaboration with our sister-site 9to5Mac, has exclusively discovered and confirmed respectively that Apple hired former Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering and former Aston Martin Chief Engineer, Chris Porritt, to work on “special projects”, and we know that “special projects” is where Apple’s Titan car project lives.
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Tesla announced after market close on Friday that its 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the “2016 Annual Meeting”) will be held on Tuesday, May 31, 2016, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

During the meeting, shareholders will vote on the reelection of two board directors, the reappointment of Tesla’s public accounting firm and on a stockholder proposal to eliminate limited supermajority voting requirements. Following the formal part of the meeting, CEO Elon Musk generally makes a short presentation followed by a Q&A session.
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While we’ve seen the exterior of Tesla’s Gigafactory from almost every angle – we even shared a time-lapse of its construction yesterday – we haven’t seen much of the interior of Tesla secretive battery factory.

A select few local media outlets were allowed to take pictures last month and then leaked pictures gave us a decent look at the Powerwall assembly line, but now we should be about to get our first official look inside the plant.
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Update: The screenshot above is no longer available and the base price was updated to $83,000

Tesla today opened its Model X configurator a day after CEO Elon Musk had planned for yesterday. The Model X Recall probably delayed plans slightly.

Besides the configurator, it appears at 1st glance that the Model X will get a new 75kWh battery option (though initially there is some confusion on the website, see above).
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Last week we reported on Tesla announcing that it will open Model X orders online and in-store in “a couple of weeks”. Now we learn through a deleted tweet from CEO Elon Musk that it could start as soon as tomorrow.

In the same tweet, Musk also made a peculiar comment about the price of the Model X.
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Notorious hacker George “geohot” Hotz created some buzz after his self-driving car/machine learning startup ‘comma.ai’ came out of stealth mode last year. Hotz released an email conversation he had with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in which he was offered a contract with a “multimillion-dollar bonus” for him to build a new Autopilot system for Tesla.

Hotz refused the offer and said that he could build a self-driving car system himself. He then reportedly made a bet with Musk that his system, which he installed in an Acura, will beat a Tesla Model S with Autopilot on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. At the time (Dec 2015), the hacker said that he would release a video of the challenge “in a few months”.

We have yet to see that video, but now it looks like the rules of the challenge have changed. 
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Tesla has mostly welcomed electric vehicle competition since it contributes to its mission to accelerate the advent of electric transport, though it didn’t stop CEO Elon Musk to literally laugh at competition on occasions. Nissan is another automaker with a strong commitment to EVs and it has a similar approach to competition in the market.

CEO Carlos Ghosn commented on Tesla having received an impressive number of Model 3 reservations since unveiling the all-electric $35,000 sedan last week and he referred to the vehicle as “good competition.”.
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The last time Elon Musk commented on the short interest on Tesla’s stock, he warned that anyone holding a stock position against the company will have a “tsunami of hurt” coming for them. During the 12 following months, Tesla’s stock price increased by 461%, a lot of which was attributed to a short squeeze after Tesla reported its first quarterly profit in Q1 2013.

Today as short interest on Tesla is close to an all-time high, Musk commented on it again. Though he was more cautious in his choice of words than last time – so maybe not a tsunami 2.0. 
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Real-time Supercharger availability data is a feature Model S owners have been asking Tesla to implement for a while now. It’s something we know to be possible since the automaker already displays the data of each charger stalls of its most popular Supercharger locations in real-time on the ‘Supercharger Dashboard’ located in its design studio in Hawthorne (see above), but the feature is not available in Tesla vehicles.
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Tesla’s stock (TSLA) was up over 4% in early trading this morning after CEO Elon Musk spent his weekend answering questions on Twitter about the newly revealed Model 3 and sending out updates about the number of reservations Tesla is accumulating.

Since Tesla unveiled the vehicle last week, 8 financial analysts issued new notes updating their analysis of Tesla’s outlook and currently the general consensus is a “buy”, but with an average price target of $253 – representing only a ~6% upside.
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After a highly anticipated multi-step reservation process starting with Tesla and SpaceX employees, followed by in-store reservations, which created long queues at Tesla’s retail locations, and finally online reservations just an hour before the unveiling, Tesla finally launched the Model 3 – its first mass market electric vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has been updating the public on the number of reservations the company is accumulating and here’s a quick timeline of those updates:
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Electrek learned that Tesla’s Chief Information Officer Jay Vijayan quietly left the automaker during the last quarter to create a startup in stealth mode. Tesla Vice-President of Information Technology, Ganesh V. Iyer, is taking over Vijayan’s responsibilities as acting CIO and he will report directly to CEO Elon Musk, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Tesla had a relatively stable C-level executive team since Elon Musk took over as CEO in 2009, but it now adds up to two C-level changes in just a few months with Vijayan’s departure from the company and Tesla’s long-time CFO Deepak Ahuja announcing his retirement late last year.
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Never one to shy away from controversial accounting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk today tweeted his take on the initial Model 3 sales numbers which are at 180K barely 24 hours into sales. By his math, which he estimates an average of $7000 in options on each Model 3 sold and more controversially, counting every Model 3 reservation as a sale, he’s come up with a $7.5 billion payday for Tesla.

Model 3 orders at 180,000 in 24 hours. Selling price w avg option mix prob $42k, so ~$7.5B in a day. Future of electric cars looking bright!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

Clearly, everyone who put down $1000 yesterday and today isn’t going to buy a Model 3 worth an average price of $42,000. But a huge number of those people will and more importantly, many more people will try to get in early to reap the $7500 tax incentive from the US government over the coming months.

Update: The reservation count is now nearing 200K and we’re likely nearing the end of the $7500 tax credit window.

Thought it would slow way down today, but Model 3 order count is now at 198k. Recommend ordering soon, as the wait time is growing rapidly.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

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