Even Tesla’s detractors concede that, when it comes to battery technology, the California carmaker has a lead of at least a couple of years over its theoretical rivals. The legacy brands are taking various approaches to try to close that gap, but Tesla is far from standing still.
Tesla Autopilot miles have been soaring as the company has scored insane sales growth in recent quarters. None of those Autopilot miles have been fully autonomous, of course. However, what many Tesla enthusiasts have learned — yet much of the market seems to discount or not know at all — is that Tesla vehicles with Autopilot hardware (which is all new Teslas in recent years) are learning with every tire rotation. The ones with the software enabled must be a learning a bit more, since they are processing how Autopilot thinks it should drive and where and how drivers occasionally correct it, but I’m sure the vehicles with Autopilot latent are still gathering important data.
The Tesla Semi has captivated scores of corporate customers. Pre-orders for Elon Musk’s electric trucks are growing. Competitors, however, aren’t so impressed. The Wall Street Journal spoke with a potential adversary in the trucking space, Cummins, for their take on Tesla, electric trucks, and their thoughts on how governments around the world should deal with carbon emissions.
It’s hard to argue that Germany isn’t the heartbeat of automotive excellence. That said, an invader is coming (soon) to its home turf. According to Automotive News Europe, “Tesla will start the European rollout of its Model 3 in February, putting pressure on German premium brands that have seen the Model S outsell flagship sedans such as the Mercedes-Benz S class.”
Co-creation is all the rage lately, but it can amount to little more than focus groups after decisions have been made. In our ongoing Byton series, the company invited us to its co-creation event. This showed how the green mobility global startup is using early input to catch potential problems.
Toyota announced that it will be unveiling a new automated driving test vehicle at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 7th, and CleanTechnica was invited to see it first-hand at the reveal. The new vehicle, dubbed the P4, is based on the new kid on the block 5th generation Lexus LX 500h, which has been loaded up with the Toyota Guardian and Chauffeur systems which it will continue vetting in its automated test fleet in spring of 2019.
Following up on EV battery and EV charging #NewsBonanza posts, here’s one on 11 autonomous vehicle & AI stories from the past couple of months that we thought should be covered but we never got to for individual stories. Enjoy.
This may be the biggest year of growth from one company in the history of the auto industry.
The Falco, a ferry owned by Finferries, the state owned ferry company of Finland, has become the first autonomous ferry in the world thanks to technology supplied by Rolls Royce.
Daniel Burrus is the author of seven books including the best-sellers Flash Foresight and TechnoTrends. The New York Times referred to him as one of the top three business gurus in spectacularly high demand as a speaker. It turns out that Burrus recently decided it was time for a new SUV. Something unusual happened when he decided to take the Tesla Model X on a test drive.
