Tesla Motors

Rich Heley was one of Tesla’s biggest hire and quickly rose in the executive ranks of the automaker. We broke the news of his hire back in 2013 when he was still leading Alloy Engineering at Apple. Now we learn that only 3 years later, the engineer, who until recently was Vice President of Product Technology at Tesla, is now leaving for Facebook.
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Today is the first trading day for Tesla’s (TSLA) stock after the automaker released its second quarter production and delivery results – missing its goals for both. The automaker confirmed missing its delivery guidance of 17,000 vehicles in Q2 with only 14,370 vehicles, while also missing its production guidance of 20,000 vehicles with only 18,345 vehicles.

The stock price fell sharply (over 4%) in pre-market. Now the first Wall Street analysts are commenting and adjusting their earnings prediction to account for the new information released by Tesla.
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Tesla (TSLA) released today its production and delivery numbers for the second quarter 2016. The automaker confirmed missing its delivery guidance of 17,000 vehicles in Q2 with only 14,370 vehicles, while also missing its production guidance of 20,000 vehicles with only 18,345 vehicles.
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Tesla’s stock (TSLA) rallied last week following comments by Ron Baron. The rally didn’t last long after rumors of a potential problem with Tesla’s suspension started to spread quickly at the end of last week.

While the rumors have been mostly shut down at this point, Tesla’s stock is having difficulty recovering and a new report about the automaker’s sales in Europe is not helping.
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Analyst Brad Erickson from Pacific Crest issued a new note to clients today following a visit of the Tesla Fremont Factory. The analyst noted that Tesla appears to be on track to exit the second quarter at the a production rate of 2,000 cars per week (Model S and X combined) and it is tracking toward its annual delivery target of 80,000 to 90,000 vehicles.

While Erickson appears confident that the automaker can achieve its short-term delivery goals, he is more cautious about Tesla’s new plan for 500,000 vehicles in 2018.
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It’s a good day for Tesla. Earlier this morning, we reported on the company knocking VW out of the top 10 car brands in the BrandZ annual report. Now we learn that the automaker also won the AutoPacific award for the highest satisfaction rating of any premium brand – building on its Consumer Report survey score of 97%.
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Tesla’s brand has significantly increased in value over the past year, especially since the Model 3 unveiling and the more than 373,000 reservations it received. On the other hand, Volkswagen’s brand took a big hit following the ‘Dieselgaste’ scandal, so much so that Tesla has now surpassed the company’s VW brand in “brand value”.

BrandZ published its annual report of the 100 most valuable brands and Tesla knocked VW out of the top 10 in the car category.
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Ron Baron, the billionaire founder of Baron Capital, was on CNBC this morning to discuss his latest favorite investment: Tesla Motors (TSLA). The mutual fund manager said that he sees Tesla becoming one of the largest companies in the world and he sees his fund holding it stock for the next 10 to 20 years.
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Tesla has been tuning its referral program for close to a year now. The automaker went through 3 rounds with different rules, rewards and discounts. The last round ended in mid-April and the company hasn’t updated the program until now.

This weekend Tesla reactivated the referral links and now a new offer of $1,000 in credit is available through the new referral program with both Model S and X orders.
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2017 Electric Blue Chevrolet Volt

The fine folks at GM have given us a shiny new (OK, 500 miles) electric blue 2017 Chevy Volt to test drive for the next week. I’m keeping a diary of my experiences every day here and will wrap up the week with my conclusions. (Day 2, Day 3-4, Conclusion/Wrapup)

Day 1, Delivery and Setup
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This morning a reader brought to our attention that the Tesla.fr domain, which is not owned by Tesla but is a premium domain in France, was redirecting traffic to the BMW i3 page of the German automaker’s French website.
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In a surprising turn of event last month, several BMW executives in the automaker’s electric vehicle leadership, also known as the BMW ‘i’ brand, left the German automaker to join a newly formed Chinese EV startup, Future Mobility Corp, backed by Tencent Holdings.

Now Electrek has learned that two Tesla executive joined the BMW leadership at Future Mobility.
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Goldman Sachs’ analyst Patrick Archambault issued a new note to clients today about Tesla (TSLA) and sees 22 percent upside for the company’s stock, which has been down following its financial results earlier this month and the announcement that Tesla aims to increase its annual vehicle production to 500,000 cars in 2018 – two years earlier than previously planned. 
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In a documentary about the Stanford Solar Car Project, Stanford University’s team participating in the World Solar Challenge, Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel describes the team has a “key thing” during the early days of Tesla Motors as he recruited his friends from the team to start the company.
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Following Tesla’s announcement that it plans to double its total production output to 500,000 vehicles in 2018 and 1 million in 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was asked by analysts how and where he plans to manufacture those vehicles.

While the company has been talking about plans to build more vehicle factories in Europe and China, Tesla’s Fremont factory remains its only full-fledged car manufacturing facility. Company officials have always referred to the Fremont plant’s total capacity to be around 500,000 cars per year once optimized, which is what Toyota and GM were producing when they owned the factory, until now.
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Tesla reported its first quarter 2016 financial results and the company missed earnings expectation slightly with a loss per share of $0.57 vs $0.54, but also beat revenue expectation by a very slight margin with $1.6 billion.

The automaker’s stock (TSLA) still surged because of the announcement of a new build plan advancing its 500,000 units per year guidance by two years to 2018. The stock gained 7% after the announcement, but it is holding up 3% in after-hour trading.

Here are the highlights of Tesla’s shareholders letter:
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Tesla is set to release its first quarter 2016 financial results on Wednesday, May 4 after market close. As usual, the release of the results will be followed by a conference call and Q&A with Tesla’s management at 2:30pm Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time). Now here’s what to expect on Wednesday:
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