A Tesla Semi has been caught on video cruising the streets of Sunnyvale, California and the Tesla Model 3 will be on display in selected east coast showrooms beginning January 19.
Navigant Research has issued its annual report on self driving cars. It says GM is in the lead and Tesla is in last. Does that surprise you?
Ah, to be in your early 40s and have about 1 billion yuan ($155 million) burning a hole in your pocket! That is exactly what’s happening with Xiaopeng Motors chairman He Xiaopeng’s clothing, so he is now betting his fortune on yet another Tesla killer (YATK).
It seems there have always been two general views of Tesla — 1) disruptor ready to take over the world and 2) clueless upstart on the verge of a dramatic crash & burn. As the company has grown and matured, you might think these divergent readings of the electric vehicle and sustainable energy leader would have merged more, but it appears they haven’t. With the larger scale, the visions of 1) world domination and the visions of a fiery Silicon Valley + Wall Street spectacle seem to have both just grown respectively.
While Nissan has without a doubt been one of the top firms in the plug-in electric vehicle sector over the last decade, the reality is also that the company has seemingly spent a fair amount of that time stalling. As an example, when the Nissan Leaf first hit the market, it was in some ways revolutionary, a very solid offering. It won several notable awards. It was fresh, innovative, and interesting. But the company spent the next few years refusing to update the Leaf much at all and didn’t roll out other electric cars.
The survival of the federal electric vehicle (EV) tax credit is a good thing for the US auto industry and consumers, but a huge flaw in its design will give EV laggard automakers a significant competitive advantage beginning around 2020.
This is the story of Ferrari, FIAT, Chrysler, and Tesla. And this is also the story of how engineers working on a project not ready for primetime can come back 10 years later.
Recently Business Insider published a fairly thoughtful, historically informed, but ultimately inaccurate opinion piece saying that GM just hadn’t bothered crushing Tesla yet, but was about to. In other words, it looked backward well, but forward poorly.
Tesla’s Supercharger expansion plans are apparently a hot item these days, as ~75,000 readers decided to check out the Supercharger growth plans James Ayre summarized for us on Saturday.
My lease is up. My BMW i3 — my snappy and ugly duckling — has been returned to AVIS. There was a waiting line, so no chance of extending the lease. I have a reservation for the Tesla Model 3 due to be delivered by the end of the year. So, while I ponder on what to do next, let me recap which EVs I have experienced in the last 7 years. Luckily I have a bunch of electric bikes (some hand-built) that I can ride in the meantime, and I promise you they are nothing you would expect — but that’s another story.
