Tesla Motors

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k]

Until Tesla updates their Youtube channel, here’s the short video if you weren’t able to stay up that late last night. My big takeaway was the price. I had expected to see something in the $$5-$10,000 range though for bigger homes that have electric cars, you will need 2 or more of these so the price starts creeping up.

https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593995583733379074

Also, from the way Musk talks, he believes that they are going to make a ton of these. It will be interesting to see how battery stocks react today…and home generator companies.

[tweet https://twitter.com/llsethj/status/593991515602583553]
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11:24 PM
power wall is “beautiful, fits on the wall, garage wall or outside wall of your house. 6 inches thick. 3 feet across and tall. Really easy to fit in garage or your house.”

[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: Connected to Internet.
Smart micro grids
Ten year guarantee
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: “Nothing remotely in these price points”
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change how the world uses energy”
[11:26 PM] Seth Weintraub: Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.

[11:27 PM] Mark Gurman: Musk says great for cold climates when there are power outages and ice storms
Good thermal management system for very cold environments

[11:29 PM] Jon Jivan: Wayyy below suggested price of $13k by some outlets. Nice to see it come in so cheap.
[11:29 PM] Mark Gurman: “Going to be huge in Germany”

[11:31 PM] Mark Gurman: Doesn’t require heavy foundations
“the integration at the system level is the big differentiator”
Ready to scale to a very large scale today

[11:32 PM] Mark Gurman: they’ve been using it for a year in house

[11:33 PM] Mark Gurman: Tesla will continue to open source the patents on all these
[11:34 PM] Mark Gurman: Giga factory designed in the same as a giant car
Fundamentally different way than approaching manufacturing and engineering

[11:39 PM] Mark Gurman: Installable by two people in half hour to an hour
Installation prices up to distributors

[11:42 PM] Mark Gurman: “This would be bigger in terms of pack utilization than the car industry, actually comparable size”
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: international, still need to figure out certified installers however

[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: it’ll scale as fast as we can scale it.

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: international next year
Germany and Australia late this year

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: China early next year

Musk said “we own tesla energy.com” when asked if they’d change from tesla motors as name

Update: Here’s our first look. Looks familiar

https://twitter.com/TomerDavid_/status/593964617161805824

https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593967615887872000

Update: Tesla Energy!

Tesla Energy Press Kit

We’ll be covering the Tesla Battery announcement later tonight but Tesla just unleashed the livestream page. Check back soon. We’ll run down the highlights here. We’re expecting Tesla to announce home and industrial battery products that allow users to store solar and lower cost, high availability electricity for use at night or during higher cost/watt time periods.  The battery will be a down payment and rental fee which should more than pay for itself in electric bill savings.

There has been further speculation that, with this announcement, Tesla Motors will change its name to Tesla, Inc or Telsa Energy to note that it is an energy storage company, not just a car company.  We’ll find out more soon, stay tuned.

While Tesla’s stock price gained 6% this morning after a note from Deutsche Bank, short interest on Tesla’s stock increased to 21.3% of the outstanding shares. This is the highest level of short interest on Tesla in the past 13 months. Short interest contributed greatly to the previous few surges of Tesla’s stock price. In early 2013, short interest was over 30 million shares when Tesla reported a profit. Investors started covering their short position, which created a lot of demand for Tesla’s stock.

Tesla is holding an event Thursday to announce their home energy storage products. Historically, Tesla’s stock price increases prior to an announcement and then decreases after the event. This is commonly referred to as “buying on the rumor and selling on the news”. So far, this current event is not an exception with Tesla’s stock price gaining over 20% since Elon Musk tweeted about the upcoming event to be held at Tesla’s design studio in Hawthorne.

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Tesla Motors’ website and Twitter account were hacked late Saturday afternoon by a group claiming to be the “Autismsquad” or “RIPPGANG” on Twitter. From about 4:30 PM ET and for a little less than an hour, the website displayed the images pictured above (we have been removed the faces since showing seems to be part of the hacker’s plan).
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It is without any public announcement that Tesla updated its website Friday night to include a section for pre-owned vehicles. 178 cars were available in 11 locations in the US.

Unsurprisingly, most of the cars are equipped with the performance package. 116 out of the 178 pre-owned vehicles available in the US are P85 or P85+. When Tesla announced the new Model S versions with dual motor in October 2014, a significant number of performance Model S owners were showing interest in upgrading to the P85D.

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The US Dept of Energy released its eMPG ratings for Tesla’s new Model S 70D and it is the first Model S to go over the 100 MPGe.  In fact it is more that a 6% gain over the Model S 60 it replaced. Some of that efficiency will be chalked up to the dual motors that Elon Musk discussed in the launch of the D lineup. However, such a huge gain in performance might also be attributable to losses made in the weight in the vehicle since the S60 was launched 3 years ago.

If you look at the compare to the heavier battery 85KW models, you see particular gains in city driving where stopping and starting is more prevalent – a place where weight matters. Musk noted that the P85D would see some loss in efficiency due to the performance tires on the 3 second 0-60 supercar model.

Some older Tesla Model S stats below:

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Tesla Offers Slight Glimpse Into Model 3’s Status”. The article is based on yesterday’s filings with the SEC about Tesla’s upcoming shareholders meeting. The only new information we have about the Model 3 from these documents is that Tesla didn’t complete the alpha prototype of the Model 3 in the last 4 months. I don’t think this is the best way to look at this information.

In their last 10K filing published February 26th,  Tesla estimated the completion of the Model 3 alpha prototype as “probable of achievement”. The completion of the prototype is a milestone for Elon Musk’s CEO stock compensation plan and Tesla needs to disclose the probability of achieving the milestones in order for shareholders to estimate potential stock compensation expenses.

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Late last year, Tesla announced the Roadster 3.0, an update for Tesla’s first model that will include a new 70KWh battery pack. The new pack combined with an upgraded body is expected to allow for a range close to 400 miles.

Details about the timeframe for this update were unclear until now. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, confirmed via Twitter that the update should be available to Roadster owners in August this year after safety validation in July.

@bonnienorman New Roadster battery should complete safety validation by end of July, so likely available in August

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2015

Earlier today, Tesla filed their notice with the SEC for their 2015 annual shareholders meeting to be held on June 9th. In these filings, Tesla is required to review transactions with related parties. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is Chairman and an important shareholder of SolarCity. Therefore Tesla needs to publicly acknowledge transactions between the two companies.

Tesla recently confirmed in an email to investors that their announcement on April 30th will indeed be a home battery system and an energy storage system for utilities. It has been known for a while that Tesla was testing these home battery systems through SolarCity. In the same filings last year, the company confirmed approximately $1.6 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2013 for the sales of stationary batteries.

Today, Tesla confirmed that the revenue from SolarCity for stationary batteries went up to $2.7 million for the fiscal year 2014.

According to Rod Lache from Deutsche Bank, if SolarCity were to reach their goal of 1 million customers by 2018 and if Tesla would equip half of their customers with home battery systems, Tesla could generate $1.5 billion of revenue through 2018 from SolarCity. Tesla made $3.2 billion in revenue last year.

Tesla is going to make a home battery announcement on April 30th. It will be a big deal. But it isn’t hard to find some of the details on the batteries Tesla is going to offer. Analysts, like above^ are claiming to have “secret info” on the announcement: Tesla secretly tested its battery solution with 300 customers.

But that info and much more is available on Solar City’s website. In fact, Tesla’s Home Batteries including pictures and lots of details are all  hidden in plain sight:

Tesla will announce a consumer battery pack for running a house in the coming months

— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) February 12, 2015

Tesla also gave plenty of details on their earnings call in February where Musk talked about releasing a consumer battery project:

Yes, we’re going to do — we’re going to unveil some of the Tesla home battery consumer battery that will be for you using and people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have to design and it should start going into production probably about six months or so. We’ll probably got to wait to have sort of product availing it’s probably in the next month or two. It’s really great. I’m really excited about it.

If you’ve talked to Solar City, they may have provided you with the specs of Tesla’s prototype battery:

Tesla will certainly announce some new innovations that perhaps differentiate them from other batteries. Being able to Supercharge your Model S at home would be nice. Perhaps a Webb/App controller with some novel uses would be good.

I’d like to see it compared against home generators which cost a lot more, even before considering the savings against time of use metering in power. We’ll be on hand on the 30th to see what is on offer.

Great interview, not much new however if you follow Tesla and its CTO into the energy industry. Some interesting bits:

Why did Tesla act differently? For a start, it does not think of itself as a carmaker. “I see us more as an energy-innovation company,” says Jeffrey “JB” Straubel, the firm’s chief technology officer, and one of the co-founders of Tesla, along with Elon Musk, the chief executive. “If we can reduce energy-storage prices, it’s the most important thing we can do to make electric vehicles more prevalent,” says Mr Straubel. “Add in renewable power and I have a direct line of sight towards an entire economy that doesn’t need fossil fuels and doesn’t need to pay more to do it.”…

Mr Straubel met Mr Musk, a freshly minted multimillionaire from the sale of his PayPal digital-payments company to eBay. “One lunch was the beginning of what eventually became Tesla,” says Mr Straubel. “We spent most of the meal talking about electric aeroplanes. But as we were wrapping up, I said I was working on a fun crazy project with cars, trying to build a lithium-ion battery pack that could last 1,000 miles.”…

“Most other companies do not believe that battery volume will grow as fast as it’s going to,” Mr Straubel counters. “They don’t understand the tight linkage between cost and volume. We’re at this crossing-point where a small reduction in cost is going to result in a ridiculously big increase in volume, because the auto industry is so big.”…

“No one wishes we could come up with a technology that makes today’s chemistry obsolete more than me,” says Mr Straubel. “We could sell more cars at a lower price. But we’re not waiting.”

Not much new but holy hell, when is Tesla going to deliver this thing?!

Text below the fold:
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Tesla’s Model S (or a wrecked one) got the IHS Supply teardown treatment and if you are wondering what makes the car tick, it is a worthy watch/read (PDF). Notably Tesla “really wanted to do things differently and employed virtual controls—rather than physical knobs and buttons—to take over the user experience. This approach required a major investment in big displays and touch panels, similar to the approach Apple took when designing the iPhone and iPad.”

It is no secret the NVidia processor runs the display and the center stack. Other notables:

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I’m very excited to announce that I’m going to be going to LA for the Tesla D event launch and will be liveblogging it as it happens. Come back here Thursday evening at 7PM for all of the excitement.

We know a few things about the event, I’ve heard whispers on some other stuff, and I’ve got some learned speculation on other possibilities that might be announced. Here we go…
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We might now know what Elon Musk teased about in his Tweet yesterday. The below shot was taken at a central California Airport and appears to show a P85D Model S (It doesn’t appear at first glance to be ‘shopped but you never know).

That Beechcraft in the background is registered in Mojave, CA. Full info on that plane: Aircraft Data N5717V, 1966 Beech 35-C33 C/N CD-1027. Metadata from the picture says it was snapped on Sept. 19th.

At this point it would seem that the new version could include AWD with Dual motors which would make it great for the upcoming Winter. We’ll know in a few short days.

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Elon Musk is teasing on Twitter the launch of a new Tesla product. At first blush Model X Crossover SUV built on the Model S chassis would be assumptions. I’m not sure what the D stands for but jokes aside it could have something to do with the garage or the naming of the product.

D could stand for ‘Driver Assist’ that showed up in recent forum leaks from new Teslas.

D could also stand for ‘deliveries’ of the Model X though the latest word is that the Model X isn’t supposed to start deliveries until Early 2015.

Or perhaps, D could be a new version of the Model S or the Model 3 which was slated to be announced at the N. American Motor Show in Detroit. “D” could stand for Dual Motors for AWD.

We’ve got a week to find out.

About time to unveil the D and something else pic.twitter.com/qp23yi59i6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2014

I love the Internet. Comments had me literally ROFL. No, it wasn't intentional. Glad I didn't mention the other letter!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2014

Although it has already leaked more than a few times, here is the official Blog post.  Absent are some of the pre-announced features like music improvements:

Today, we’re announcing details about new software being delivered to Model S customers through an over-the-air update. The new features further personalize the Model S ownership experience and help make the car smarter about owners’ individual preferences. This is the latest in a series of software updates issued since we launched Model S in 2012, enabling new features such as hill start assist, smart suspension controls, and energy saving sleep mode.

The Software v6.0 update introduces traffic-based navigation and commute advice, provides an in-car view of daily schedules, enables location-based air suspension settings, and allows owners to name their Model S and start it remotely using their mobile phone.

New features include:

Traffic-Based Navigation (BETA)
The Model S navigation system will be a lot smarter. Navigation will now provide route suggestions based on real-time traffic and calculate estimated travel times accordingly. It will also update dynamically as traffic conditions change throughout your trip. This feature will also take into account traffic data shared by other Tesla vehicles on the road.

Commute Advice
Navigation isn’t particularly useful when commuting between home and work because most of us usually know the way. But if traffic has an effect on a typical route, it’s helpful to know in advance. Now, Model S will monitor traffic before you even start your weekday commute and alert you with a pop-up message on the 17-inch touchscreen when a faster route is available.

Calendar (BETA)
Model S will synch with your smartphone to bring you a large in-car view of your daily schedule. If you’ve already set locations for particular events, you don’t have to worry about re-entering the details into your car’s navigation system. Instead, you can just tap on the event in your calendar to bring up route directions.

Remote Start
You will have the ability to start your Model S using only your smartphone. This function, which is particularly useful if you forget your key fob, will be accessible through the Tesla mobile app and requires you to input your password for each use.

Location-Based Air Suspension
If you regularly drive on roads or driveways that require higher than normal clearance, your Model S will remember where you previously selected high ride heights and automatically adjust the air suspension at those locations. This feature will be especially handy for people who have steep driveways. (Model S must be equipped with air suspension for this function to work.)

Name Your Car
You can now make your Model S nickname official. The car’s name will appear in the Tesla mobile app and in the About Your Tesla section on the touchscreen.

Power Management Options
A new power management option will put Model S into energy saving mode at night to help maximize available energy. There’ll also be an option that allows the Tesla mobile app to always connect immediately to the car, while still saving power.

This software update represents Tesla’s commitment to improving Model S for customers even long after it has left the assembly line. With each update, Model S becomes more attuned and responsive to its owner’s needs without requiring excessive user input. We will continuously fine-tune the software and work on new features in response to customer feedback.

Not only is the car redesigned but claimed to get more than double the current 85Mile range. The design is definitely more pleasing though I have to wonder what that huge front grill is all about.

Nissan is hard at work developing the next-generation Leaf, focusing on improving the range with new battery tech and – as our exclusive images show – a more conventional look. The new car is expected to be on sale late in 2016, with prices starting around £17,000…Nissan bosses are promising new battery technology is on the way, with better energy density for a more usable pure electric vehicle. A figure of about 186 miles is likely to be the target.

via AutoExpress

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/503077090803986432]

Surely there had to be a better way? Personally, I’ve never wanted for much of this but I’ve also never had cars that had these features in the past either.  Full ad pasted below:
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Interesting move. Juniper makes large scale networking equipment that runs on the backbone of the Internet and at ISPs as well as larger corporations. Denholm began her career in Australia serving at Toyota Motor Corporation for seven years and at Arthur Andersen and Company for five years in various finance assignments.

From today’s Shareholder Report(PDF):

In June, we broke ground just outside Reno, Nevada on a site that could potentially be the location for the Gigafactory. Consistent with our strategy to identify and break ground on multiple sites, we continue to evaluate other locations in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The final site for the first Gigafactory will be determined in the next few months, once we have full visibility and agreement on the relevant incentives and processes for enabling the Gigafactory to be fully operational to meet the timing for Model 3. We see these concurrent efforts as prudent. This vehicle will be
our third-generation product and will substantially broaden the addressable market for Tesla, helping to accelerate the transition towards sustainable transportation. Any potentially duplicative investments are minor compared to the revenue that could be lost if the launch of Model 3 were affected by any delays at our primary Gigafactory site.

Conference call will be at 5:30 here. Stock is down in after hours on unit shipment numbers.