The company is as quick as a flash given the excavation was completed last February.
Elon Musk announced via Twitter that the first operational tunnel under Las Vegas was almost done on Tuesday. “Tunnels under cities with self-driving electric cars will feel like warp drive,” wrote the founder of The Boring Company.
Continue reading… “First operational boring tunnel under vegas almost done, Elon Musk announces”
The average vehicle coming off a three-year lease has lost 52 percent of its value, but a Model 3 only loses about 10 percent, one study finds.
On average, your average new sedan depreciates 39 percent in its first three years. Trucks go down 34 percent. But electric vehicles drop an astonishing 52 percent, according to iSeeCars, which evaluated values of cars coming off lease.
The outlier is the Tesla Model 3—both compared to other EVs and the market as a whole—which iSeeCars estimates is worth only 10 percent less coming off lease after three years than when it was new.
Tesla’s technological advantages—real and perceived—are a big reason the 3 keeps so much of its value. They help keep the Model S and X above average as well.
For people who buy new vehicles, expected depreciation can be an important factor in trying to estimate what their shiny new object will be worth in a few years. The U.S. used-car market in recent years has seen electric vehicles suffer from particularly high depreciation rates, but there’s at least one EV that’s done playing by the rules.
Continue reading… “Tesla Model 3 bucks trend of electric vehicles depreciating rapidly”
Rosendo Nevarez makes the rounds at John Hine Mazda in Mission Valley on May 26, cleaning surfaces to maintain hygiene standards during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The numbers are in and the economic consequences wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic landed a body blow to new car sales in California, with dealers reporting a drop of 48.9 percent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same three-month period of 2019. Year-to-date vehicle sales are off 26.9 percent.
The statistics reflect the full effect of safety and social distancing protocols that kicked in by mid-March and dramatically curtailed or even temporarily shuttered some showrooms across the state.
“Obviously, with the fuller impact of the pandemic, it was very clear sales were going to drop at the end of the first quarter, beginning of the second quarter,” said Brian Maas, president of the California New Car Dealers Association. “The good news is they didn’t drop nearly as far as we initially feared. And while a nearly 27 percent drop is not ideal, it’s a lot better than it could have been.”
Dealerships have reported signs the market is regaining some footing as the economy tries to crawl back to some sense of normalcy. Economists with the new car dealers association predict new vehicle registrations in California will finish the year 22 percent lower than in 2019, falling from 2.09 million units to 1.63 million. They project the number to rise to 1.81 million in 2021.
Continue reading… “Quarterly sales of new cars in California down almost 50%”
Tesla has launched its own car wrap service through delivery centers starting with five cities in China. Could it be introduced in other markets?
Over the last few years, Tesla has reduced the number of color options on its vehicles in order to streamline production and facilitate repairs at service centers.
It resulted in many owners turning to wraps in order to get different colors and differentiate their vehicle from the increasingly larger Tesla fleet.
They had to rely on third-party suppliers and installers to wrap their cars.
But now Tesla is launching its own service through delivery centers in China.
The official Tesla customer service Weibo account announced it yesterday:
Continue reading… “Tesla launches its own car wrap service”
Tesla is about to get into the auto insurance game, CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday.
On a call with investors, Musk said that Tesla is in the process of “building” what he called a “major insurance company,” Business Insider reports. By the end of the year, he hopes to have launched in a handful of U.S. states, generating premiums and rates for drivers based on data collected by their cars’ internal sensors.
Continue reading… “Elon Musk says Tesla is launching an insurance company”
Tesla’s Autopilot software, which relies on various cameras and sensors to operate, can be updated remotely.
‘I’m very confident about full self-driving functionality being complete by the end of this year,’ he says. ‘It’s because I’m literally driving it’
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the electric car maker will have fully self-driving vehicles on the road by the end of the year.
During an earnings call with investors on Wednesday, the serial entrepreneur revealed that he is already testing an updated version of the firm’s Autopilot software on his commute to work in Los Angeles.
“It’s almost getting to a point where I can go from my house to work with no interventions, despite going through construction and widely varying situations,” he said.
Continue reading… “World’s first fully self-driving car will be ready this year, Elon Musk claims”
The science channel got access to Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada for their new show ‘Super Factories’ – giving us a rare new look inside the plant.
Tesla Gigafactory Nevada was the first major step in Tesla’s effort to secure battery cell supply for its ambitious growth.
The automaker partnered with Panasonic to deploy new battery cell production capacity at the facility and Tesla used those cells to build battery packs for its vehicles and energy storage products.
When originally announcing the plan for the factory, Tesla was talking about the plant producing 105 GWh of battery cells per year and 150 GWh of battery packs per year once completed.
Continue reading… “A look inside Tesla Gigafactory Nevada [Updated]”
Tesla (TSLA): Basic functionality for level 5 autonomy is complete this year, says CEO Elon Musk.
Today, Musk virtually attended the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai and participated in a Q&A session.
Musk oversees several projects involving AI, but the most prominent one is Tesla’s effort to deliver a full self-driving level 5 system.
At the conference, Musk briefly discussed Tesla’s effort to reach full self-driving and showed great confidence in delivering such a system soon:
I am extremely confident that level or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think will happen very quickly. I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level 5 autonomy.
Continue reading… “Tesla (TSLA): Elon Musk says ‘very close’ to level 5 autonomy complete”
If reports about the number of reservations it has garnered are true, the Tesla Cybertruck may be the most eagerly anticipated new vehicle in history. Back in February, 532,000 people around the world were reportedly on the waiting list for one of Elon Musk’s segment-smashing vehicles. The no-obligation reservations are little more than a marketing tool for the company at this point. Tesla hasn’t even decided where to build the Cybertruck yet, let alone start constructing a factory. But that hasn’t stopped the company from taking orders for it on its Chinese website, according to Tesmanian.
Continue reading… “Tesla begins taking Cybertruck orders in China, Will drive one across America”
A new electric van could replace the prototype Tesla Model X for future The Boring Company tunnels.
A Southern California airport connector project will work with Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to build a high-speed underground tunnel and a new Tesla vehicle is reportedly part of the plan.
The San Bernardino County Transportation Authority approved a connector line between Rancho Cucamonga with the Ontario International Airport last week. The proposal is for a 2.8 mile-long tunnel that would move riders at 127 mph in electric vehicles. But which electric vehicles?
A county supervisor said that the new system would work with Musk’s electric car company Tesla to develop 12-seater electric vans, as reported in The Mercury News. The projected $60 million project is expected to carry 1,200 people per day to the airport and back.
Tesla announced plans to install 4,000 Superchargers in China this year alone in order to support its growth in the market.
Over the last five years, Tesla has deployed over 2,500 Supercharger stalls in over 150 cities in China.
At their Shanghai office last week, the automaker announced its plan to deploy 4,000 Superchargers in the country in 2020 alone.
This is a massive acceleration of Supercharger deployment for Tesla in China.
Continue reading… “Tesla announces massive Supercharger expansion in China to support growth”
As long as there aren’t enough fast plugs in enough places, buyers and big automakers will stay away.
Rods and waders were already packed into the electric Jaguar I-Pace as it gorged a few more electrons from the wall of my New Jersey garage. A quick glance at a map of northeastern Pennsylvania revealed charging stations clinging to the Delaware River like so many spots on the brown trout I was hoping to catch.
A few days later, I pulled up to one of those chargers on the picturesque main street of Honesdale, only to realize it was a level 2 unit—one step above a standard outlet. It would take four hours before the car had enough juice to make the 100-mile trip home. Eleven miles down the road, it was the same story. And while that spot had a superfast Tesla charger, it was incompatible with the I-Pace. The nearest level 3 charger that would work was 58 miles away. So I gave up and settled in for a while.
Electric car-range anxiety revolves around a brutal equation: Remaining miles of battery life (as estimated by the car) minus miles to destination equals hope (or despair). Making matters worse, the answer varies from one minute to the next, depending on terrain and speed. Desperate battery-powered travelers can be easy to spot: They are often sweaty (no air conditioning), driving slowly and—when going uphill—instinctively leaning forward in their seats.
Failing to note the difference between a level 2 charger and a harder-to-find level 3 charger is often the mistake of an electric vehicle rookie. Had I realized the distinction, I would never have considered a car such as the I-Pace (it was a loaner), or any of the dozens of Tesla rivals set to debut in coming years. For the future of electric vehicles in America, that’s a really big problem.
Continue reading… “Chargers are the final roadblock to America’s electric car future”
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