Tesla CEO Elon Musk is currently in Hong Kong to participate in the StartmeupHK tech forum. While in the country, the CEO took some time to share a few new information about how Tesla is doing in Hong Kong and mainland China, as well as the automaker’s future plans in the country.
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A blog post titled “How Elon Musk Stole My Car” went viral on Tesla forums earlier today. In the post, a “Florida man”, who goes by “Marty”, writes in details about a poor customer experience he had when trying to buy an inventory Model S from Tesla.
To summarize the situation, Marty claimed he placed a deposit on an inventory Model S in California, but then Tesla CEO Elon Musk used the car to test the latest version of Tesla’s Autopilot and as a result, the company couldn’t sell him the car anymore because it was now “so aftermarket”.
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When Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted that he expected to the company’s cars to be able to drive themselves across the U.S. from coast to coast within two years, my response was that I might believe the tech could hit that deadline, but not the law. It seems I may be wrong.
The WSJ reports that the Obama administration wants to invest $3.9B in crafting rules and policies to facilitate the rapid rollout of self-driving cars. This would take place at the federal level, ensuring consistent national laws rather than a patchwork of state-by-state regulations …
In its latest video, Drag Times demonstrated a potential application for Tesla’s latest feature. Drag Times used the new ‘Summon’ feature to autonomously move the Model S a few dozen feet to “save” the owner from the rain by picking him up under a porte-cochère.
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During an interview at Tesla’s design studio in Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on Apple’s rumored electric vehicle program, codenamed “Project Titan“. It was hardly the first time the CEO commented on the project, but it always interesting to hear about the possibility of Apple bringing an electric car to market. This time Musk called the project under-development an “open secret” and agreed that Apple is “serious about it.”
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Elon Musk held a press conference with Q&A yesterday for the release of Tesla’s software update v7.1 for the Model S and X. You can find a recording of the call below and a few highlights of the discussion.
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In a SEC filling published this morning, Tesla confirmed that Fidelity increased its stake in the company to just over 10% ownership.
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When Tesla CEO Elon Musk first announced the Gigafactory project, he said that even though the planned capacity of the factory is equal to the entire global production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013, the world would sill need around 200 more giant factories of similar size to support the auto industry’s transition from fossil fuels to electric.
Tesla named the factory in Nevada: “Gigafactory 1”, implying that the company plans to eventually introduce “Gigafactory 2” and so on. Late last year, German Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel confirmed being in contact with Elon Musk over the possibility of building a battery factory in the country. Now we learn that Tesla is also reportedly in talks to build another Gigafactory in South Africa.
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After the well-documented release notes of the 7.1 update for the Model S and X Saturday, Tesla published a short blog update on Sunday and held a press conference to reveal its ambitions for the future of the ‘Summon’ feature, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to describes what he calls the “first baby step” of the ‘Summon’ capability and its potential for the future.
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Tesla released today the version 7.1 of its software for the Model S and X. The new update includes everything we told you about when Tesla started testing the build with beta testers last month: UI improvements, a new self-parking feature, ‘Driver Mode’ and Autopilot restrictions, but the automaker is also introducing the “Summon” feature, which enables the Model S to drive itself without anyone in the car.
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According to Tesla Senior Design Executive Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla first planned to unveil the Model 3, its upcoming mass market electric car, at the Detroit Auto Show 2015, but that deadline passed almost a year ago.
Last year, Tesla updated its timeline to March 2016 and EV enthusiasts are anxious to know if the automaker will stick to the new target. So far so good, a Tesla official confirmed today that the Model 3 is on track for a March unveiling.
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Iron Man director Jon Favreau not only had the chance to get a personal walkthrough of the Model X with Tesla CEO Elon Musk just a few days after the unveiling of the vehicle, but he also arrived at the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere with Musk in his Founder series Model X VIN #1.
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We recently reported on Tesla being on a hiring spree, and now the Wall Street Journal corroborates the news with its own report this week. WSJ specified that the automaker is outgrowing its Palo Alto headquarters and it might be building a consolidated headquarters at an undetermined location in the near-future.
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As 2015 is coming to a close, we decided to review Tesla’s year in pictures. We gathered some of the best photos of Tesla’s most important events of the year and some less-known interesting moments – all in chronological order…
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Even though Tesla has been producing stationary energy storage products at the Gigafactory 1 in Nevada for a few months now, we haven’t had the chance to see any pictures from inside the plant since the walls of the first section of the factory are up.
Today we get our first modest look via professional photographer James Lipman’s Instagram (first spotted by Evannex).
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Update: Just 1 day left to get a chance to win a Model S and promote carbon pricing awareness – CXC’s website.
The Model S is becoming a popular raffle prize and this raffle in particular is for a very good cause in-line with Tesla’s mission. Climate XChange (CXC) is a nonprofit organization with the goal to reduce global warming pollution and strengthen the economy through comprehensive market-based carbon pricing in Massachusetts.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was at Stanford’s FutureFest recently and he described how he evaluates the progress and a timeline for artificial intelligence:
“If any given year you find your predictions are going further out or coming closer in, that actually one way to think of acceleration [of progress] because otherwise what’s the quantitative measure of AI?”
During the same talk, which took place in October, Musk said that fully autonomous cars are about 3 years away, a prediction he made several times in the past year or so. But today we learn that Musk updated his prediction to just 2 years.
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38 company and environmental group leaders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, signed an open letter proposing that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) lets VW off the hook in California for having cheated on reporting emissions in its diesel cars and in return, VW would be forced to significantly invest in electric vehicles or other zero-emission vehicles.
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If you were wondering how Tesla managed to hire away Google’s longtime Vice President of Finance Jason Wheeler, now you know. In a SEC filing published yesterday, Tesla disclosed its new CFO’s stock option plan of ~200,000 shares – worth over $46 million.
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Tesla is currently using a hardware suite of sensors from Mobileye to get the input needed for its Autopilot system to control the Model S on highways and under some specific road conditions. But as it is often the case with Tesla (like for its seats), the company is looking to discontinue Mobileye’s system in favor of bringing it in-house, according to an email exchange between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and George Hotz, a software engineer mainly known for being the first person to jailbreak the iPhone.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was at the AGU Fall Meeting today for the Presidential Forum and made some comments about Tesla’s battery factory under construction in Nevada.
Musk said that the battery cells the company will produce at the Gigafactory in partnership with Panasonic will feature some “moderate improvements” in technology over those in production today.
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Stanford recently released the video of a talk between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and investor Steve Jurvetson. The discussion focused on Musk’s vision of the future and if you are an avid watcher of Musk’s interviews, you probably will not learn much from the hour-long video, but we still found a few interesting moments worth sharing.
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As Signature Model X reservation holders are still patiently (or impatiently) waiting for a delivery date from Tesla, one more Founders series owner managed to get his hands on the all-electric SUV. This time its the #36, a significant jump from the last reported #13 delivered to Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.
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Tesla launches in Mexico this week by opening a “Pop-up” store in the Mexican capital and we learn that the company hired Google’s longtime brand and communications manager for Latin American markets, Ricardo Blanco, to lead Tesla’s communications and marketing in the country.
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