Tesla’s Elon Musk recently tweeted, “Great electric car documentary about early days of Tesla, GM Volt, Nissan Leaf & Gadget. So much has happened since then.” Indeed. With the spotlight shining so brightly on Elon and Tesla, it’s hard to remember how far the man (and the company) have come since the early days. Many of the early struggles surrounding Tesla were captured in this fascinating flick, Revenge of the Electric Car.
History is sometimes ironic.
The French state saw Carlos Ghosn’s refusal to merge Nissan into Renault as an obstacle to the growth of the former national car company. They attributed it to his megalomania, and not to sentiments within Nissan and Japan. He could only keep his job at Renault when he promised to make the alliance irreversible, nearly as good as a full merger. That job would be for his successor.
After seven weeks in jail, Carlos Ghosn is getting a hearing in court. His lawyers can ask questions, and he can read a statement. How he should write a statement while he is denied pen and paper is beyond me. What is also beyond me is the Japanese justice system.
As reported yesterday, Carlos Ghosn has been taken in for questioning by the Japanese authorities. He is accused of “serious misconduct” and “numerous other significant acts of misconduct,” according to a Nissan press release. That sounds very serious. What has he done to deserve a prison cell?
Carlos Ghosn has been arrested by Japanese authorities as a result of suspect financial improprieties. He has been one of the champions of the electric car revolution.
Editor’s note: For many moons and months, TeslaMondo was perhaps my favorite thing on the internet. It is a blog that offers insightful and hilarious commentary on Tesla. Hold on, let me rephrase that — it offers tremendously insightful and insanely hilarious commentary on Tesla. Alas, for more than one year, the person* behind TeslaMondo stepped deeper into the shadows and TeslaMondo went silent (*no, that person isn’t me, despite what some people have claimed and how much I wish that were the case).
The Paris Motor Show, “Mondial de Paris,” started a day early with a pre-show symposium for a select public: “Tomorrow in Motion.” Even a few journalists were invited, yours truly not among them. But the whole 5 hour happening was live on YouTube. Arriving early in the hotel near Paris and with pencil and paper in hand, the CleanTechnica delegation was ready for it. As a French organized mondial event, half of the presentations were in French. That means that I have no notion what they were about.
Renault and Nissan integration will be a difficult path. The financial markets prefer a simple single company with one set of shares and one top management structure and don’t care much how the internal structure of the company is functioning.
China is the hottest kid on the block when it comes to cleantech. As such, we try to keep an exceptionally close eye on what’s going on there and share regular reports of the most significant news of the past month or quarter.
Nissan’s strategy when it comes to the plug-in electric vehicle market will be based increasingly around affordability, rather than being focused on greatly improving range, company CEO Carlos Ghosn was recently quoted by the Nikkei as saying.
