According to several sources today, Tesla Motors is going ahead with their robotic battery exchange technology and will deploy one battery swap station somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The service will launch by December 2014, and no I don’t know anything more than that. The news came first…
Yesterday Tesla Motors unveiled the ‘D’, the Dual Drive version of the Tesla Model S. The fully tricked out Model S P85D will set you back a minimum of $120,000, and be the fastest 4 door sedan ever built. Raw acceleration is demonstrated by the video below, and the spec…
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has made another of his obtuse tweets, suggesting something will be announced next week – something to do with the letter D – and something else. Good, thank you for sharing that you’re learning the alphabet? A bit over two years ago Elon tweeted about…
Tesla Motors has been criticized for not including any kind of driver assist features in the Model S. Driver Assist features are commonplace among not only luxury cars, but regular cars, now. Some of them take care of tasks like parallel parking, while others help the driver do so safely.…
Last week Tesla Motors excited us by taking a big step toward the promised Gigafactory, that in turn is the necessary big thing to build to enable the Tesla Model 3 electric car. While many people in Nevada are excited to know the Gigafactory is coming to Reno, and it’s…
Back in 2010, Tesla Motors and Toyota surprised us all with a deal to jointly develop the 2nd Generation Toyota RAV4-EV. Toyota also sold Tesla a factory it wasn’t using, with which Tesla now plans to build a half million EV’s a year in 2020. The resulting vehicle is being…
Tesla Motors has chosen the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center to house the Gigafactory. While we’re excited at the fact that Tesla has made a bold concrete step forward with their plans, reiterating the goal of selling 500,000 electric cars a year by 2020, there’s a big question – the incentives package.…
Are “we” doing too-little-too-late to fend off the crises caused by peak oil and climate change and the impacts both will have on the world economy, our food systems, and more? Looking at the level of resistance against clean energy technologies like electric vehicles, it’s easy for gloom and doom…
On Thursday, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced, as we revealed yesterday, that indeed the Reno Nevada area has been chosen as the Gigafactory location. As if to answer critics of the size of the incentive package, Gov. Sandoval stressed the job creation (over 22,000…
According to reports surfacing today, Tesla Motors has gone ahead and chosen Reno as the site of the Gigafactory. Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval is holding a press conference on Thursday to announce “a major economic development announcement” and according to the reports, a special legislative session has been called so…
Tesla Motors is still saying the Tesla Model 3 will go on sale in 2017, despite my prediction the date will slip. To make that date the company has to ramp up the gigafactory, and time is ticking. Since that’s the key, what’s the latest news? It’s been almost a…
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…
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…
