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
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter today to elaborate on the Model 3 launch which happens tomorrow. Perhaps to hedge expectations on how much will be revealed, he noted that there would be a second, more thorough reveal closer to the production cycle which is currently set at late 2017.
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Earlier today, CNBC published a poll asking “Would you put down $1,000 for the new Tesla Model 3?”. After over 12,000 respondents, the results showed that a strong majority were going to place a $1,000 deposit for the vehicle. Then later in the day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned the poll on Twitter and said that it “looks like we may need to increase production plans for the Model 3”:
[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/714963420316049411 align=’center’]
Musk probably made the comment half-jokingly, but as Jon mentioned in his post this morning: Don’t Wait: Why you should reserve the Tesla Model 3 on Thursday, we are indeed expecting a significant backlog of Model 3 reservations in the next few days – yet we should not take that poll seriously.
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A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.
According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”
The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.
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Following the persisting rumor that Tesla is planning a “facelift” or at least new options for the Model S starting this spring, we learn that the automaker could also increase the price of its flagship sedan in the US as soon as next month, right after the Model 3 unveiling set for March 31st.
We are hearing several reports of Tesla representatives reportedly warning prospective customers that the Model S will see a price increase by the end of April.
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SolarCity’s Solar Bond Program is looking more and more like SpaceX’s private investment platform. After market close yesterday, SolarCity revealed in a SEC filling that it expects Elon Musk’s rocket company to buy $90 million of the $105 million in new Solar Bonds issued.
Last year, SpaceX already purchased solar bonds from SolarCity on two separate occasions: another $90 million followed by $75 million. SpaceX’s involvement in SolarCity’s Solar Bond Program is set to total around $255 million, which should help finance a lot of solar installations.
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Last year, famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tesla investor Steve Juvertson recalled a conversation he had with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:
Travis recently told me that in 2020, if Telsas are autonomous, he’d want to buy all of them. He said all 500,000 of estimated 2020 production, I’d want them all, but he couldn’t get a return call from Elon.
Well apparently Kalanick couldn’t wait any longer and reportedly already placed an order for 100,000 autonomous Mercedes S-Class sedans, according to sources inside Daimler and Uber talking to German magazine Manager Magazin.
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A Tesla Model S test vehicle with a new suite of sensors has been spotted in the San Francisco Bay Area last night, as reported by a Redditor on the Tesla forum.
The vehicle appears to be equipped with LiDAR sensors on the side mirrors, a new front-facing camera, and additional sensors around the car. Although it’s definitely a Tesla Model S, it doesn’t necessarily means the car is owned by Tesla or that the automaker is testing this particular hardware suite.
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In an effort to lobby Nevada lawmakers for the development of solar energy following the Public Utilities Commission’s decision to slash net metering, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive organized an event Wednesday night at the Gigafactory for Nevada politicians and top government officials.
Tesla and SolarCity executives held presentations meant to be “forward-looking and educational” and the whole event also included a tour of the Gigafactory.
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Earlier this week we reported on emerging signs of a production ramp up for the Tesla Model X after several reservation holders who turned their reservations into orders are now receiving Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) as high as 5,000 and up. Now Tesla is adding to those signs by sending an email blast to everyone with a Model X order to update their delivery schedule.
In the email, Tesla’s President of Global Sales and Service Jon McNeil says that the automaker has been working through performance testing and that CEO Elon Musk has been personally testing Model X’s as they come off the assembly line.
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Since coming out of stealth mode last December, Notorious hacker George “geohot” Hotz’s self-driving car/machine learning startup “comma.ai” hit a few roadblocks, including a cease-and-desist letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for operating a “level-4” autonomous vehicle.
Though Hotz is contesting the DMV and says his prototype is currently only a “level-3” semi-autonomous car, but the cease-and-desist is still slowing him down as he now can only test the vehicle in a private parking lot.
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We have been wondering why only a few people have received an invitation for the Model 3 unveiling, which is now only 3 weeks away. As of now, only the winners of the referral program have reported having received the invite for the event taking place in Los Angeles.
The last event Tesla held in Los Angeles, the “D event”, was at the company’s design studio and over 4,000 people were in attendance, including hundreds of Model S owners and Tesla employees, but this time around, long-time owners who usually get invited to these events have yet to hear from the company.
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Update: Elon Musk said in a tweet today that the American Enterprise Institute meeting was not secretive and that he was not there to talk about Trump.
The AEI meeting wasn't secret and I was only there for a few hours to talk about Mars and sustainable energy. Nothing to do with Trump.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2016
According to a report from the Huffington Post, Elon Musk was among a handful of tech CEOs and Republican establishment members who recently met at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum to discuss how to best stop Donald Trump.
Update: Tesla responds to Singapore’s Model S CO2 emissions test, and could it be as simple as poor math?
If you think it’s difficult to buy a Tesla in Texas due to direct sales law, wait until you learn what consumers in Singapore have to go through to buy a Model S. Singaporean Joe Nguyen reportedly spent months trying to get a licence for his car to be driven on local roads and instead of having access to the Carbon Emissions-based Vehicle Scheme (CEVS) rebate of $15,000 SDG (~$11,000 USD), he was charged a tax of the same amount after the government determined that the car is not “fuel-efficient”.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke directly with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who assured him that he would investigate the issue.
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Elon Musk shines in MIT Technology Review’s recently published top 10 list of technology breakthroughs of 2016. According to the MIT, the list “identifies innovations from the past year that solve difficult problems or create powerful new ways of using technology”.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is directly involved in 3 of the 10 projects identified by the MIT.
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