It’s Saturday night! For me, that means work, work, work (which I love) — including publishing our top 20 stories of the week. In case you missed any of these, below are the 20 CleanTechnica stories that borrowed the most eyeballs and brain cells over the course of the last 7 days.
The media appears to enjoy bashing Tesla and Elon Musk right now. It’s like someone invited the press to a “troll-a-thon” gone wild — journalists just can’t stop themselves. James Francis (via Tech Central) gives some examples: “Elon Musk is out of control! We need to take him away from Tesla! He needs to be reined in! Please, will someone think of the shareholders?”
Tesla is looking for two new independent directors. There are many very capable candidates outside the normal business circles. We want candidates that will stay true to Tesla’s mission, and can even protect Musk from market pressures by keeping an eye on the future.
How often have you heard the complaint that all the electric cars on the market aside from Teslas are only compliance cars and that the carmakers have no intention to make enough of them to sell the cars in high numbers?
A review of the Renault Zoë from an extensive test drive and charging session by two old dinosaurs.
CNBC is reporting that Elon Musk and Tesla have settled the lawsuit brought last Thursday by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging fraud as a result of Musk’s biggest August tweet, a tweet saying he was considering taking the company private and had already lined up the investors he needed to make that happen (“funding secured”).
I wonder whether the SEC picked the wrong cherries from Elon Musk’s deposition.
The Nissan LEAF is infamous for its battery problems. It started with the fast degrading 24kWh battery in the original 2010 Nissan LEAF. That battery was not up to the hot conditions of US Southwest states. It was replaced by a battery with a different chemistry, the 24kWh “lizard battery” in 2014. In 2015, the model year 2016 (MY2016) LEAF got a slightly larger 30kWh battery option. In the MY2018 Nissan LEAF, an even bigger 40kWh battery was offered.
Tesla employees are being offered an opportunity to become beta testers for the company’s full-self-driving software in exchange for providing feedback on their experiences. The trial will last through the end of 2019.
The European passenger plug-in market grew slightly above average last month (42% in August vs 41% year to date). The continent registered some 30,000 plug-in cars, pulling the year-to-date (YTD) count to some 242,000 deliveries and pushing the 2018 market share to 2.3%. For the month of August, the market share was 2.7%.
