Elon Musk

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive and Chairman Elon Musk are officially announcing a new high-efficiency solar panel today at the Inside Energy conference. During an interview at the conference, Elon Musk was talking about his other venture, Tesla Motors, and he revealed that the recent launch of the Model X caused a big uptick in orders for Tesla’s other vehicle, the Model S.
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SolarCity announced today that it has built the most efficient rooftop solar module with 22% efficiency according to a third party tester: Renewable Energy Test Center. Until now, SunPower’s X-Series panel was considered the most efficient rooftop panel with 21.5% efficiency.

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive says that the new modules will produce between 350 to 360-watt compared to the company’s current 260-watt panels.
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One thing a lot of us were wondering as Tesla delivered the first few Model X’s yesterday is what software version would the Model X be using considering Tesla is still beta testing the upcoming v7.0 with new Autopilot features.

It turns out the Model X is running a unique update of v7.0 without the new Autopilot features: Autosteer and lane changing.

DragTimes published a quick video of the UI at the Model X launch event. You can watch the video below the break:
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Tesla launched the Model X last night in Fremont. You can read our quick overview of Elon Musk’s walk-through of the vehicle here, but here’s the video of the event and a roundup of the videos shot during the press day leading up to the event.

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Some reservation holders have been waiting for over 3 years for the Model X, and now it’s finally here. Tonight Tesla launched its all-electric SUV in Fremont, California in front of a crowd of reservation holders, employees and journalists. We already knew a lot about the Model X prior to the launch – 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 secs, AWD, up to 257 miles range – but Tesla CEO Elon Musk still had a few surprises…
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Tesla Motors is holding a launch event tonight for the Model X at the former Solyndra building near Tesla’s Fremont factory. The company will open the doors at 7PM local time (10PM ET) and the event will start at 8PM (11PM ET). Tesla will livestream the event on their website and we will be live-blogging it here:
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If you have been following news about Tesla Motors lately you know that the company is launching the Model X today, but you might have also heard that they will launch a “600+ miles vehicle” in about 2 years. Several publications have been publishing articles with a variation of the following headline: “Elon Musk says Tesla will have a 600 miles vehicle by 2017“.

These headlines, to no fault of Musk, are due to either a severe lack of knowledge about electric vehicle range or a malicious click-baiting attempt.
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Earlier today Forbes released its updated list of most influential young people in business – 40 Under 40 – and Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder JB Straubel (39) took the second position.

The CTO is only outdone (according to Forbes) by Adam Neumann, the co-founder and CEO of WeWork, a provider of shared workspace and services to entrepreneurs and startups.

In his short profile, Forbes credits Straubel for being the person who convinced Elon Musk to invest in Tesla. 
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This is part 2 of my report on the beta version of Tesla’s Autopilot. Please read part 1 if you haven’t yet. 

Most advanced commercially available autonomous features

The language about the responsibility around the ‘Autopilot’ is somewhat straight-forward. The system is clearly not intended to turn the Model S into a self-driving vehicle with a bunch of redundant autonomous features, but it’s rather an evolutionary step toward self-driving. It alleviates some tasks for the driver, but without ever taking any responsibility.

Tesla uses very clear legal language throughout the beta release to place all the responsibilities with the driver. The driver can and should take over control if he or she thinks it’s necessary.
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As images of the Tesla Model X are rolling off the assembly line, we are seeing a number of improvements to the car over prototypes that have been publicly shown. One such improvement was revealed in a video showing the front trunk or ‘Frunk’ of the Model X. Compare the size of the Frunk in the shipping model above to a Prototype shown off by CEO Elon Musk last year.

Another image of the Model X Frunk, straight on the assembly line, is below. 
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‘Wild’ may be an exaggeration but at the Tesla plant in Fremont, a spy caught a prototype Model X opening and closing (video below) its Falcon Wing doors . The spies seemed to be concerned about the door closing mechanism, and many of the mules we’ve seen have had partially opened doors,  but it is unlikely that this is the final design/spec.

In any case, we’ll be live on the Model X launch on the 29th, come back and join us! 
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Tesla is still tuning the Model X’s options ahead of its launch scheduled for September 29th at the Fremont factory. Earlier this month, the company added an option for hitch accessories directly at the purchase of the vehicle in order to get around the limitations of the ‘Falcon Wing’ doors. Later, it updated the EPA-rated range to 250 miles for the P90D version of the all-electric SUV. Today we learn Tesla now added an option for a 6-seat configuration to the vehicle.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in the Netherlands today for the opening ceremony of Tesla’s second plant in Tilburg. The company already had a ‘final assembly factory’ in the city (see picture below), where the company completes the assembly of the Model S’s going to the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.
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Tesla (and Space X CEO, Solar City Chairman) CEO Elon Musk made some important remarks yesterday at the “Business for Tomorrow” summit at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy yesterday. While the translations and the moderation/questions at the end are frustrating, Musk’s comments at the beginning are poignant.

On Refugees:

“Today’s refugee problem is perhaps a small indication of what the future will be like if we do not take action with respect to climate change. Today, the challenge is in terms of millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is, the problem will be in the hundreds of millions and much more severe.”

On taking action:

I think it’s very important that we take action today to recognize that we are making a very significant change to the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans. One that is almost impossible to reverse…

And where you could really feel some emotion:

If you go 20, 30, 50 years in the future, what do you say to your kids or your grandkids? It’s almost, like, scientists have all said that these bad things are going to happen, it’s, like 97 percent… So, to say to your kids or grandkids, like, ‘Did nobody tell you?’

No, everyone was telling us. ‘

So why didn’t you do anything?’ What’s the answer?

…I think it’s very important that we do something.

The full video, queued up at Musk’s remarks is below:
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is currently traveling across Europe to meet with  Tesla employees and European politicians. During a press conference in Belgium, he briefly commented on the current Volkswagen scandal and cheating on emission-tests:

What Volkswagen is really showing is that we reached the limit of what is possible with diesel and gasoline.

If you need to cheat in order to pass emission tests with diesel and gas, maybe you should use something else? We expect Musk would prefer if manufacturers would use electric powertrains, like Tesla Motors…

Here’s the Video:
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Tesla World, an international conference about Tesla Motors organised by the Tesla Club Belgium, launched today in Antwerp and you can watch it live below.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, although not announced, is expected to be the “anonymous speaker” scheduled for 10:40 eastern time – 16:40 local time.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is currently traveling through Europe to meet with Tesla’s teams in European countries and meeting with politicians to promote electric vehicles. He is expected to visit Belgium on Friday and since we have been analyzing electric vehicle sales through car registration data, we decide to take a look at Model S sales in Belgium.
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This morning Tesla updated the pre-order webpage for its upcoming all-electric SUV, the Model X, to indicate that new reservations will only ship out during the “second half of 2016”. Only yesterday, the estimate was “early 2016”, but with a growing backlog of reservations ahead of the September 29th launch, it is not surprising for Tesla to warn new buyers about the delivery schedule.
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During a press conference today in Germany, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla is in talks with “some [auto] manufacturers” to share the Supercharger Network.

In the past, Tesla confirmed being opened to the idea of sharing its extensive network of fast charging stations, which now operates over 2,900 chargers at over 500 locations around the world, but until now, we couldn’t confirm that any automaker showed interest in the offer.
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