It’s no secret that Uber wants to develop its own self-driving car technology, but much like Google, it isn’t clear if the company only wants to develop the technology to be implemented in existing vehicles or go all the way and develop its own car. The ride-sharing company’s latest hire suggest it could be the latter.

We learned that earlier this month, Uber hired veteran automotive designer Richard Donnelly for the role of “Senior Designer” at the company’s Advanced Technology Center.
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Stanford recently released the video of a talk between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and investor Steve Jurvetson. The discussion focused on Musk’s vision of the future and if you are an avid watcher of Musk’s interviews, you probably will not learn much from the hour-long video, but we still found a few interesting moments worth sharing.
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Another automotive designer, Rain Prisk Designs, released renderings of a wagon version of the Tesla Model S. To be clear, the design is from an independent artist unaffiliated with Tesla and as far as we know, Tesla has no plan to make a station wagon any time soon.
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Before Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2003, they were trying to figure out the best way to break America’s addiction to oil. 75% of the oil consumed in America is used in transportation, and of that, 50% is used for passenger vehicles. So it became clear that what was needed was an alternative way to power cars, but what exactly would that look like? They examined all kinds of interesting alternative drivetrains, from hydrogen fuel cells to ethanol, but they eventually decided that an electric car was the way to go. So they began to learn everything they could about electric cars; how they worked, past attempts to bring one to market, and the engineering challenges of building one. They learned many things which we will not get in to here, but one of the most interesting, and the one I will be focusing on today, was about the demographics of people who bought the LAST generation of electric vehicles.
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