Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Thursday night to announce that Tesla is ramping up the hiring for the Autopilot software team in order to achieve “generalized full autonomy”. Under its current version, the Autopilot can steer the car on highways and change lane by simply activating the turn signal, but to get to full autonomy, Tesla will need to update its software and suite of sensors.

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/667516705116065792 align=’center’]

Musk describes the project as “super high priority”. The CEO added that the Autopilot team reports directly to him and no prior experience in the automotive industry is required, but he is looking for “hardcore” software engineers.
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Tesla is temporarily disabling the ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’ features of the Autopilot for Model S owners in Hong Kong after a formal request from regulators at the Transport Department . The features were recently introduced to the Model S with the version 7.0 software update. 
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A new source with connections at Tesla’s design group has informed me that late stage tweaking of the Model 3 is being done with an eye towards extreme minimization of wind resistance. The Model 3, which of course is the renamed Model E, is scheduled to be shown off for the first time publicly in March of 2016. The mass market Tesla is expected to be a smaller sedan/crossover platform that resembles the BMW 3 series in size. The range of the vehicle is expected to start at 200 miles and go up from there with various size batteries and drivetrains. The majority of Tesla employees are now working on this car.

What I’m hearing internally is that CEO Elon Musk is intensely driving the engineering designers to deliver a design with a drag coefficient lower than .20 which would make it the lowest of any mass production car in the world and close to extreme vehicles like GM’s EV1 and Volkswagen’s XL1 (pictured above), – both cars that have flat rear wheel covers…
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk described the Gigafactory in Nevada as a product, calling it the “Gigafactory 1” – implying there will eventually be a “Gigafactory 2”. This second battery factory could end up being built in Germany according to comments made earlier today by Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel.
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Since Tesla is taking its sweet time to starts delivering the Model X in volume, we thought you might want to get your eye-candy fix of the all-electric crossover. Tesla delivered the very first Model X, a ‘Founder series’ P90D, to its CEO Elon Musk and a Tesla Motors Club member recently spotted the vehicle at the Hawthorne Supercharger.
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Last month, Consumer Reports stopped recommending the Tesla Model S because the vehicle scored below average on its reliability survey. Following the announcement, Tesla’s stock price went down by 10%.

The pulling of its recommendation was a surprise to many since just a few weeks before, the magazine grabbed headlines by announcing that the Model S “broke” its rating system by scoring 103 out of 100.
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Over a year after Elon Musk first announced in his now famous “All Our Patent Are Belong To You” blog post that Tesla will be open-sourcing all its patents. We now have the first confirmation that some automakers have actually taken Tesla on the offer.

During an interview with Ron Baron last Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk very briefly mentioned for the first time that he believes companies are now using Tesla’s patents:

“I think actually there are a number of companies using our patents.”

Musk’s comment was in response to Baron asking why companies are not taking advantage of Tesla’s technology considering it is “free” and that the company is achieving higher safety and emission standard than the competition.
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Tesla recently reported its third quarter financial results and the company disclosed delivery guidance for 2016. Tesla expects to produce and deliver between 1,600 and 1,800 vehicles per week on average next year – meaning a yearly total of 83,200 to 93,600 units. If the company can achieve the higher end of its guidance, it would deliver more cars in a year than it did since the company was founded in 2003.

The automaker delivered 11,603 cars from July through September, which made the last quarter its best to date, but the company is aiming to significantly increase production this quarter in order to deliver between 17,000 to 19,000 units during the last three months of year.
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Adam Jonas, a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley covering Tesla Motors and the automotive industry, is nothing if not persistent. During Tesla’s recent conference call to discuss third quarter financial results, the analyst again asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk about the possibility for the company to join the likes of Uber and Lyft in the ride-sharing industry.

Jonas first brought up the idea at Tesla’s last quarterly conference call after comments made by Tesla board member Steve Juvertson about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick potentially wanting to buy 500,000 autonomous Teslas by the end of the decade. First time around earlier this year, Jonas got a firm “no comment” from Musk, but nonetheless the CEO called his question “insightful” at the time. The second time around during this week’s call, Jonas pushed the question again and although Musk’s first reaction was not to comment, which is rare for the CEO, he implied that an announcement could be coming.
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Tesla Motors announced the renewal of its $1,000 referral program for the Model S for 2 more months after the end of the first trial period on October 31. It’s fair to say that the program was a success with a single Model S owner selling 100 cars in only 3 months and hundreds of top referrers selling several thousand vehicles.

The company introduced a few new prizes for top referrers including free Ludicrous P90D Model S’s and invitations to the unveiling of the Model 3 expected in late March 2016.
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During the conference call discussing the company’s third quarter financial results yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was asked about the company’s recurring problems with the drive units of the Model S. Musk assured investors that the drive units being installed in the vehicles right now or “excellent” and he even stated that the company changed its endurance goal for the motors from being able to handle 200,000 miles to now 1 million miles.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a conference call today to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results with analysts. During the call, Musk commented on the recent release of the Autopilot and the technology going forward. When asked how he sees the market with full autonomous driving and manual driving vehicles, the CEO said that once self-driving cars are being produced, non-autonomous cars will have a “negative value” and be the equivalent of owning a horse – meaning it would be for “sentimental reasons”.
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results today at market close. Management will hold a conference call with Q&A at 2:30pm Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time). You can join on the call through Tesla’s website and join us below the break for live updates:
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results later today, but we are already looking at the fourth quarter as registration data are coming in from some European markets. Tesla will need an impressive fourth quarter to achieve its 2015 guidance and it might get it from what we are seeing so far.

The company expects to deliver between 50,000 and 55,000 vehicles in 2015 and with the current official year-to-date total of 33,157 units, Tesla needs to deliver a record-breaking ~17,000 units in the last 3 months of the year to achieve the low-end of its own guidance. It would represent a ~73% increase over the fourth quarter last year.
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Tesla sent out an email this weekend to Model S owners on the waiting list for a retrofit of their Performance Dual Motor Model S to enable the ‘Ludicrous’ mode. In the email, Tesla explained that due to parts and process improvements, the company is now able to offer the upgrade at a reduced price of $5,000 instead of the previously announced $7,500.

The Ludicrous upgrade consists of two improvements to the electronics of the Model S’ battery pack. The first improvement is the replacement of a standard fuse to an “advanced smart fuse” which enables the monitoring of current to the millisecond, and makes it possible to cut the power with “extreme precision”.
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Mobileye is a relatively small Israel-based tech company, but it is rapidly positioning itself as a major hardware and software supplier for the implementation of driver assist and autonomous driving features. In a recent presentation at Citi’s 2015 Global Technology Conference, CEO Ziv Aviram claimed that 90% of automakers are using their products.

Mobileye is also a supplier for Tesla’s recently released Autopilot and during the same presentation, the CEO hinted at the company’s potential next generation hardware suite that could allow for a wider range of autonomous features and maybe even complete self-driving.
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Tesla is set to release its third quarter 2015 financial results tomorrow. The company already confirmed record deliveries of 11,580 cars globally from July to September and it marked the very first quarter with deliveries of two different models: the Tesla Model S and Model X.

The Model S remains Tesla’s main source of revenue – meaning there shouldn’t be too much of a surprise on the revenue side, but let’s take a look at what to expect in numbers:
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During the press conference for the release of the Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred to each Model S owners as an “expert trainer” – meaning that each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot.

He said that the system should improve every day, but that improvements might only become noticeable every week or so by adding up. Just a few weeks after the release, Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving…
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After mostly flat sales during the first half of the year, Tesla experienced a 52% quarterly increased between the second quarter and the third ended in September by delivering 1,345 Model S units for a total of 3,025 so far in 2015. Tesla rarely discloses sales by segment, but CEO Elon Musk made an exception during a recent visit in China and later Tesla spokesperson Gary Tao confirmed the numbers.
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NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that he took delivery of a rare Tesla Model X P90D, presumably a ‘Founder Series’ since Signature Model X reservation holders have yet to be assigned a delivery date.
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