Category: Tesla

Fred Lambert 

Tesla’s recently announced $25,000 electric car could be coming sooner than we thought, according to newly unveiled documents about Gigafactory Shanghai.

When talking about what Tesla’s new battery cell and “structural battery pack” architecture could enable at Battery Day last year, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be making a $25,000 electric car.

By Jeff Yeung

Footage has surfaced showing a TeslaModel 3 making a round trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles using its Autopilot Full Self-Driving mode.

The video came from YouTube user Whole Mars Catalog, whose entire channel appears to be dedicated to testing Tesla’s Autopilot FSD functionality. According to the channel, the drive was made possible via the latest Beta version of Tesla’s software, and the entire round trip was completed with close to no human intervention at all, except for one scenario where debris had shot up from the road after the car in front passed over it and so the driver had to take control immediately for just one second.

Fred Lambert 

Is he getting ahead of himself?

Last weekend, Tesla started pushing a new software update that Musk had been hyping as ‘fire’ over the last few weeks.

The update ended up consisting of a few user interface changes and the main new features were 3 new in-car video games and a new ‘Boombox’ feature to play custom sounds through external speakers.

Musk followed up the update with several comments regarding in-car video games and entertainment, which he sees as “critical” when achieving autonomous driving:

Kirsten Korosec

SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk speaks in front of Crew Dragon cleanroom at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California on October 10, 2019.Elon Musk would consider leveraging Tesla’s mega $554 billion market cap to buy a legacy automaker, but only if it was on friendly terms, the billionaire entrepreneur said Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner.

Musk, who received an award Tuesday from the media giant, discussed his various interests and businesses, notably SpaceX and Tesla, both of which he leads.

Döpfner noted that Tesla’s valuation far exceeds the market cap of incumbent automakers like BMW, Daimler and VW, which along with others in the industry once dismissed Musk’s ability to make electric vehicles mainstream. When asked if it would be a serious option to buy one of the legacy automakers, Musk said it was possible, but only under certain conditions.

Elon Musk recently highlighted that the upcoming Tesla Semi truck will work towards establishing an on-road range of around 1,000 kilometres, a claim – if proven true – that could contradict Bill Gates’ opinion of heavy battery-powered vehicles being rather unfeasible. The massive per-charge range on the Tesla Semi may be made possible by making use of in-house batteries being developed by the EV-maker.

Musk has been vocal about the range capabilities of its 36,000-kilo capacity vehicle with the initial figure pegged between 480 and 800 kilometres. This figure was ramped up to around 960 kilometres but now, the Tesla CEO is claiming that a 1,000 kilometre-range is also possible and that that could make the Semi a winner in long-haul journeys. “If you want, for long-range trucking, you can take the range up to, we think, easily 800 km, and we see a path over time to 1,000 km range for an heavy duty truck,” he was quoted as saying by Electrek.