Tesla Roadster Options Will Be “Crazy” Says Elon — Rocket Thrusters For SpaceX Package
Elon Musk has tweeted new details about the SpaceX options package for the new Tesla Roadster. He calls it “crazy.” It may be even more than that.
Elon Musk has tweeted new details about the SpaceX options package for the new Tesla Roadster. He calls it “crazy.” It may be even more than that.
Road trips are the final frontier for electric cars to totally outshine combustion-engine vehicles (gas/diesel cars). Already clearly a better technology than combustion vehicles in every other respect, of all the electric cars currently on the market, only Tesla so far provides truly compelling road trip ready offerings. This is an area that other carmakers need to pay much more attention to if they have a hope of ever competing with Tesla’s stratospheric demand and world-leading EV sales volume.
As the Tesla Model 3 gains significant production volume, with most of the 2018 deliveries going to US customers, other players in the US small and midsize luxury car segment look set to see their sales halved in Q3 and Q4.
The Tesla Model 3 continues to open up its lead over every other plug-in car on the US market. For all the hype about a slower than projected Model 3 production ramp up, it seems there isn’t another plug-in vehicle that comes within two laps of touching it. It sits at about triple the sales of the #2 Toyota Prius Prime (a plug-in hybrid) and nearly 4 × the sales of all 7 of BMW Group’s plug-in models combined.
One of the more interesting revelations to come out of the 2018 Tesla Shareholder Meeting was updated information about Tesla’s current battery costs and projected reductions over the next 2 years.
With cobalt prices soaring and ethical questions about artisanal mining continuing, Panasonic has announced that it is in the process of developing cobalt-free EV batteries. Panasonic, the world’s largest automotive lithium-ion battery manufacturer and Tesla’s exclusive battery cell supplier for the Model 3 sedan, produces the cells at the joint Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have pulled back from his initial all-in position on the automation of the Model 3 production lines in recents weeks but don’t make a mistake about the course correction — it’s not an abandonment of his pursuit of autonomous factory lines. In fact, Tesla shared with Bloomberg that the “Model 3 body line is now 95 percent automated, including the transfer, loading, and welding of parts.”
The NTSB has issued a preliminary report about the fatal crash of a Tesla Model X in California earlier this year. Its final report may not be completed until a year or more from now.
Tesla is Very Close to Break-Even Point. We crunch the numbers.
Tesla dropped a number of info bombs in its shareholder meeting this week. We’ve summarized 28 of them in two separate articles. Beyond the headlines about production numbers and finances, Tesla announced a few major new developments, including some insights into its work on battery recycling.