Tesla has been leading its customers through a merry little dance lately, shuffling its vehicle lineup around and raising and lowering prices. Buried among all the recent repricings is an announcement that has attracted little attention, but that offers a clue to Tesla’s future plans to deploy an automated ride-sharing network.
A new report from PA Consulting with the title How Long Is The Road To Driverless Vehicles? Assessing how close the Nordics are to autonomous vehicles explores what roadblocks lie ahead before the world embraces driverless and fully autonomous vehicles that provide Mobility as a Service (MaaS) to us humans.
New incentives meant to increase community member use of plug-in electric and hybrid vehicle use have been revealed by the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy, at a recent press conference.
Tesla has now delivered the first 50 of the 200 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs that were ordered as part of a deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that is intended to eventually lead to the deployment of an autonomous taxi fleet, as we reported a couple of months back.
What will the self-driving automotive world of the future look like? Nobody really knows, although a lot of people seem convinced that they do. Predictions are all over the place, and in a few years we’ll see that some of them were right, and some were wrong. The only thing certain is that autonomous vehicles will trigger huge changes that will disrupt every automobile-related line of business, and then some. Another point that the pundits all seem to agree on: Tesla is poised to be one of the major players.
Will there come a day when your Tesla simply pays for itself? According to the Wall Street Journal, that day may be coming soon. “Thanks to ride sharing and the looming introduction of self-driving vehicles, the entire model of car ownership is being upended—and very soon may not look anything like it has for the past century. Drivers, for instance, may no longer be drivers, relying instead on hailing a driverless car on demand, and if they do decide to buy, they will likely share the vehicle—by renting it out to other people when it isn’t in use.”
Last year, when I presented* at a big institutional investment conference in India, there was a lot of talk about solar, but little about electric vehicles. Of course, a large portion of my presentation was about Tesla and electric cars. The presentation* from Indian Minister of Coal, Power, and New & Renewable Energy, Piyush Goyal, highlighted the highly competitive cost of solar power but didn’t really touch electric vehicles.
One year ago, when Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas initially needled and nudged Elon Musk to talk about a potential Uber-like service from Tesla, Elon basically admitted that something was in the oven, but also that the details weren’t yet clear. As it turns out, one of the dramatic differences between what Tesla is going to offer and what Uber is offering is where the money goes.
