Hyperloop Technologies Inc. announced today a deal with Nevada officials to build a new test track for “Propulsion Open Air Test” (POAT) in the state. Hardware will begin arriving this month at the Apex Industrial Park in the City of North Las Vegas, and testing should begin in early 2016.
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During the conference call to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results on November 3rd, Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned that the company will push software updates to add restrictions to the Autopilot.
Now we learn that Tesla started pushing these constraints to some Model S owners on Sunday – about a month after announcing it.
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On the margins of the UN conference on climate change in Paris, Elon Musk was at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University yesterday for a talk about what can be done to curb CO2 emissions, which he followed with a Q&A with students.
The main point Musk was trying to make during the talk was that the fundamental problem with carbon emission is that companies are currently incentivized to use fossil fuels rather than sustainable energy. He argued that to end the incentives, you need to attach a price to carbon emissions, and the best way to that is to introduce a carbon tax.
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Local news reports in Chile are stating that “senior Tesla executives” met with government officials to evaluate a partnership with state-owned mining company Codelco in order to source lithium in the country.
The agreement would presumably be to supply Tesla’s Gigafactory under-construction in Nevada.
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According to Nasdaq’s latest short interest update, the total short position on Tesla’s stock increased to 27,367,931 shares – its highest since March 2014. The short position is almost as important as Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s own stake in the company: 28,371,342 shares or about 29% of the float.
Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.
Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.
In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
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It’s no secret that Tesla’s retail strategy is inspired by Apple’s. In 2010, the automaker hired George Blankenship as VP of Store Design & Development. Blankenship was a GAP veteran who led Apple’s real estate business from 2000 to 2006 and to whom Apple Store’s early success has been largely attributed.
Blankenship retired in 2013, but apparently it wasn’t the end of the connection between the retail strategies of the two companies. We learn that earlier this month, Tesla hired the team leader of the architectural team for Apple Stores at Callison, an international architecture firm.
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Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya announced via Twitter that he took delivery of his ‘Founders series’ Model X #13, which he described as the “sickest car on the planet”. He joins a select group of Model X ‘Founder’ owners including, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson and Tesla CEO Elon Musk himself.
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SpaceX is moving forward with its Hyperloop prototype test track for its “pod competition”. The company released the revised specifications of the test track (embed below) in which the competing teams will race their pods. The track will be 1-mile long , have a 6-ft diameter and be capable of creating a 99.8% vacuum environment.
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Between established automakers accelerating their electric vehicle programs and the newcomers in the EV industry – like Apple, Faraday Future or Atieva – engineers with battery experience are not short on employment opportunities. Earlier this year, Apple poached several battery tech experts from A123 Systems and we also reported that about 1 in 8 of Faraday Future’s ~400 employees is formerly from Tesla Motors.
From an executive’s standpoint, retaining talent in a specific field can be challenging on its own, but for Elon Musk, CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, it can be even more complex when both companies he’s managing require talent in the same field…
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were in Korea this week and they attended the Energy Korea Forum 2015. Local South Korean news reported on comments made by Straubel during a Q&A session at the forum, the CTO said that Tesla is “committed” to the South Korean market and that he sees a “great potential” there. Although he didn’t offer a concrete timeline on when the company plans to start selling cars in the country.
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According to Reuters, Tesla issued a voluntary recall for all of its Model S sedans on Friday. The cause of the recall appears to be a seatbelt assembly.
Nov 20 (Reuters) – Tesla Motors Inc said Friday it is recalling all 90,000 Model S sedans produced to check for a possible defect in the front seat belt assemblies.
The cost of the worldwide recall will be “immaterial,” the company said. The problem was discovered after a single report to the company in early November of a seatbelt assembly breaking when a customer in the front passenger seat of a Model S on the road in Europe turned to talk with passengers in the rear seat.
TSLA’s share price is dipping 5 points or 2.5% currently as a result.
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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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During the past few months, rooftop solar installer SolarCity has been watching its stock price plummet, along with most of the solar industry. During the past week, Chairman Elon Musk bought 3 blocks of shares between $25.20 and $26.45 to add over 500,000 shares to his now total of 21.3 million shares or about 21% of the company.
Now just a few days after the disclosure of the stock purchase, we learn through a press release from Silver Lake Kraftwerk that Musk invested an additional $10 million in the company through convertible senior notes along with $100 million from Silver Lake and $3 million from SolarCity CEO and Musk’s cousin, Lyndon Rive.
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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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