A few days ago the news was full of reporting that a Tesla-based patrol car owned by the Fremont CA police ran out of power during a hot pursuit. Apparently the story allowed news editors to push the idea that obviously electric cars aren’t suitable because they run out of…
In early August, Lucid Motors brought a Lucid Air prototype to Laguna Seca International Raceway and definitively smashed the standing lap-speed records set with the Jaguar I-Pace, Tesla Model S and Tesla Model 3. The record was set during testing sessions at the race track, it was driven by a Lucid…
If you “own” something but cannot “repair” it, do you really own the thing? The legal concept is the Right to Repair, that we all should have the right to fix or even upgrade the widgets we buy. Unfortunately many technology companies put up roadblocks in the way of the…
Layoffs are hard on a company, and Tesla Motors is going through a fairly large (9%) layoff. The “survivors” are often left with a kind of survivors guilt, and missing former colleagues, and can easily be demoralized. Those who are laid off must look for their next step in life,…
Should Tesla Motors be the leading or primary car manufacturer? Or should other car manufacturers step up to take a significant role in electric vehicle development, as Tesla is doing? Or should even other start-up car manufacturers participate in the undoing of the incumbent car industry? That’s a set of…
The news about Tesla Motors regularly repeats a complaint about the cash burn rate, the fact that Tesla routinely runs at a loss, is propped up by investors, and eventually the house of cards will come crashing down. There’s some truth to this – the company showed a profit in…
A few days ago a Tesla Model S crash in Germany, on the A93 between Abensberg and Siegenburg, gave the local (volunteer) fire crew a chance to practice emergency recovery of a crashed electric car. What’s nice for the rest of us is they posted a writeup along with detailed pictures…
Tesla Motors is incrementally adding more autopilot autonomous driving features to the Model S and Model X. With the 7.1 update just released, the car will detect the ability to autopark into a space while driving through parking lots, and can drive itself (unoccupied) in and out of a garage.…
Tesla Motors announced today they’d (barely) hit their electric car sales target for Q4 2015 and for all of 2015. This was another make-or-break moment for the company. While the Model X launch is not quite as significant as the Model S launch in 2012, launching production of a second…
Tesla Motors has had a spot of bad news – another Model S has caught on fire, this time not from road debris but while plugged into a Supercharger station. This happened in Norway, according to a news post on fvn.co, for a brand new car. The owner had plugged in,…
The first Tesla Model S theft in Canada results in a quick capture of the thief, thanks to technology built into the car. The car’s owner had been at a concert with a friend, but found the car missing when they returned. Using a smart phone app for the car…
How good is the Tesla Autopilot feature? This feature was rolled out to Tesla Model S owners over the last couple weeks, and marks a large advance towards fully autonomous vehicles. Since then some Model S owners have posted videos of the autopilot system doing amazingly good things, and also…
Bob Lutz is prognosticating the death of Tesla Motors, saying the company is badly run, its costs are too high, it should be working through dealers, it should add a plug-in hybrid model, and oh-by-the-way he likes Elon Musk. Coincidentally, I see from my calendar that in exactly one…
My, how the mighty have fallen. Consumer Reports today announced it cannot Recommend the Tesla Model S, despite that car being so utterly excellent that it “broke” CR’s ratings system. That is, Consumer Reports twice did a review of the Tesla Model S which awarded the car the highest ranking of…
Is it too much drudgery to manually connect the charging cord to your car? Tesla Motors is shown here with a prototype charging cord that, snake like, automatically opens the charging flap, automatically seeks out the charging port, and starts charging once connected. It would remove one of the tasks…
