Today Tesla Motors released quarterly results for Q2 2014, said they’re on track to exceed the goal of 35,000 Model S sales during 2014, verified that they’d broken ground on a potential Gigafactory location in Reno Nevada, and several other things. Let’s take a look. To start with the news…
Tesla Motors and Panasonic today announced the expected agreement for joint operation of the Gigafactory. Under the agreement, Tesla will own the facility and Panasonic will be the primary partner occupying about half the space. Several companies will be on site manufacturing precursor materials, that Panasonic puts together to make…
Those of us wanting to practice self-sufficiency, to grow our own food, and generally live a low-tech lifestyle, will find Practical Projects for Self-Sufficiency a good guidebook. This is a book that’s not only chock full of ideas for living a low-tech self-sufficient lifestyle, growing your own food and all…
The PlugIn2014 Conference has come to San Jose, and I managed to snag a press pass, so expect to see a few reports over the next couple days about conference sessions. The activity today was getting to do test drives with a few electric vehicles. I got to drive…
BMW today joined the ranks of automakers demonstrating seriosity about electric vehicles. The way I measure this is if the company is not just building an electric car in significant quantity, but is working to support build-out of electric car charging infrastructure. We have a “chicken and egg” situation between…
It’s clear to me that hydraulic fracking, or acidizing, or any of the similar techniques to break up shale deposits, extract oil and natural gas, continuing the age of oil, all that’s a bad idea and we collectively need to stop the practice and instead, as a society, embrace renewable…
Recent news has claimed the European version of the Chevy Volt, the Opel/Vauhall Ampera, is being canceled due to poor sales. As I’ve noted before, the Chevy Volt isn’t selling too well in the U.S. itself, and I imagine the European version isn’t doing very well against the Leaf. The…
The Los Angeles area is infamous for sprawl, huge giga-highways, bad air conditions, and people stuck in gridlocked cars for hours at a time. The success of the automobile as a transportation method has led to, in the U.S., a massive system of highways, cities designed for the benefit of…
As we’ve established over the last couple posts, Tesla Motors urgently requires a doubling of the worlds lithium-ion battery production capacity. To do so, the company has turned to Panasonic (the agreement isn’t finalized) to build a huge battery factory – somewhere. At the same time, Tesla (and Panasonic) have…
The story around the Tesla Gigafactory competition is fast moving, so of course as soon as I published yesterday’s story that the Gigafactory was being built at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, that Bob Tregilus (the source on that story) learned construction had halted at that site and the construction workers…
Where, oh where, is the Tesla Gigafactory going to be located? Where, oh where, will it be? Many of us are waiting not so patiently for Tesla Motors to speak the location, while others of us are going out in the field to talk with people, take pictures, and draw…
An electric car with just a 50 mile range can barely be used around town, right? That’s what conventional wisdom says: that a short range electric car is useless because the range is too limiting. What if the real limitation is charging speed, and you couple the short range car…
The Israeli’s and Palestinians are fighting again, because of a long-running dispute over the political system that will control the land which was once called Palestine and is now called Israel. Normally I wouldn’t cover the conflict on TheLongTailPipe because it’s one of those intractable political squabbles where one wishes…
Want to own an electric vehicle, but feel constrained by the short distance? While it’s true that most people drive 40 miles or less per day, we all take those longer trips from time to time. While Tesla Motors understands this, and builds long distance travel into their electric cars,…
Energica Ego in San Francisco CRP’s Energica Ego has been several years coming – in 2010, CRP came onto the TTXGP scene with the eCRP, a bike patterned after the Agni Motors entry in the 2009 TTXGP on the Isle of Man. This was the act of a motorcycle manufacturer…
