In a nod to the future of autonomous vehicles, Tesla is already starting to explore potential multimedia options for its vehicles. CEO Elon Musk confirmed last week that a handful of old-school Atari games will be included in the company’s highly anticipated version 9.0 firmware.
This story is about Tesla’s moats, but I don’t mean to imply that Buffett would invest in Tesla. Tesla is far from the value investments of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Rather, Buffett’s comments are to demonstrate the importance of moats. Morningstar even has a guide called Why Moats Matter. Understanding the moats a business employs is clearly important to understanding the business and its future.
We’re approaching one year of operation with Tesla Shuttle — city-to-city transport in a Tesla, airport pickups & drop-offs, special event show & tells, and a bit of Uber use. Just passing 50,000 kilometers of service and approximately 100 passengers, it seemed like a good time to reflect on some of the lessons learned and customer reactions.
As I noted a moment ago, I recently took a small risk, faced a short freakout, and then made it through my first Tesla software update. The reason I cut it close on the timing and installed the update was that it was a fun Christmas one that I knew my older daughter (3 years old) would love.
In the past month, we’ve gotten multiple reports of Tesla Model 3s rolling around the streets of Florida, Texas, New York, and even Canada. Tesla staff, SpaceX staff, and reportedly Tesla engineers at certain stores needing to get familiar with the cars have been receiving early units. I finally decided to go grab some Model 3 spy shots from Instagram and Twitter in order to share the excitement here … and I discovered that numerous new Model 3 photos have been hitting instagram in the past several hours.
Tesla’s latest software update brought with it a number of new features, including Summon for Hardware 2.0 vehicles … and a new Easter Egg. This time, the new hidden “Easter Egg” feature is a sketchpad feature for the touchscreen.
Following close on the heels of the news of a new Model X Easter egg for Model X owners, Elon Musk dropped news of two more Christmas bonuses for owners of the S and the X. These two new surprises seem to work in all models of the S and X, which can’t be said for most of the previous Easter eggs.
If you have a Tesla Model X and missed Elon Musk’s tweet early this morning (late last night), note that you can now activate a Christmas-related Easter Egg — “ModelXmas” — with a few easy steps. Here’s the tweet:
As expected, the new Tesla “Easter Egg” teased last week by CEO Elon Musk will boost the performance of the company’s cars notably — purely through software optimization delivered by an over-the-air update.
Ah, Sir Elon — he can’t stop having fun. One of those quirky things about Tesla cars that many of us love are the Easter eggs the clever Tesla team embeds into the software. Previous Easter eggs have included turning your Model S into the James Bond Lotus Esprit that Elon bought at an auction for $1 million, shooting into Ludicrous mode like in Spaceballs, and unlocking the secret of life, among other things.
