In response to someone who requested a Tesla pickup truck, Musk said, “I promise that we will make a pickup truck right after Model Y. Have had the core design/engineering elements in my mind for almost 5 years. Am dying to build it.”

In terms of size, Musk said it would be comparable to Ford’s F-150 total size, but “maybe slightly bigger to account for a really game-changing (I think) feature I’d like to add.”

This isn’t too surprising given that Musk said earlier this year Tesla planned to show off an electric pickup sometime within the next couple of years. Then, at Tesla’s big semi-truck unveiling in November, Musk revealed an image of an electric pickup truck, which was based on the architecture of the semi-truck. And in Musk’s “Master Plan, Part Deux” in 2016, he described Tesla’s plans to create “a new kind of pickup truck.”

The only hint we have around timing is that Tesla would start making the pickup truck right after Model Y, which Tesla has yet to unveil. The Model Y is a crossover/small SUV vehicle that is reportedly in the more advanced stages of development. Tesla expects to launch the Model Y by 2020.

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Source: TechCrunch

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Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s first electric semi-truck on Thursday evening at an event in Los Angeles that also included the surprise reveal of a new Tesla sports car.

The new Roadster, which has the same name as the first electric vehicle produced by Tesla from 2008 to 2012, emerged from the back of one of the trucks at the end of a presentation that focused largely on the economic and performance needs of truck drivers.

“The point of doing this is just to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars,” Musk said. “Driving a gasoline sports car is going to feel like a steam engine with a side of quiche.”

While the sports car provided a jolt of excitement for Tesla enthusiasts, much of the event focused on pitching the truck to truck drivers – customers with very different concerns than the average Tesla owner.

In typical Musk style, the CEO had hyped the truck on Twitter throughout the week. On Sunday, he promised that it “will blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension”, while on Wednesday he teased that the truck “can transform into a robot, fight aliens and make one hell of a latte”.

There was no espresso machine to be seen, but Musk did promise a laundry list of features that he claimed would ensure the overall cost of ownership will be 20% less per mile compared with diesel trucks. Among them: faster acceleration, better uphill performance, a 500-mile (805km) range at maximum weight at highway speed, and “thermonuclear explosion-proof glass” in the windshield.

Safety features include enhanced autopilot, lane-keeping technology, and a design that makes jackknifing “impossible”, Musk said.

The company plans to build a network of “Megachargers” (as opposed to the “Superchargers” used by other Tesla vehicles) that can produce a 400-mile charge in 30 minutes.

Musk claimed it would be “economic suicide” to continue using diesel trucks, saying the Tesla version, if driven in convoy, would be cheaper than shipping goods by rail.

The CEO’s promises for the new Roadster were no less ambitious. Musk said the car’s acceleration from 0 to 60 mph and 0 to 100 mph, as well as its quarter-mile speed, were all “world records” for production cars.

He said production on the trucks would begin in 2019 and the sports cars would be available in 2020.

Despite the confidence exuded by Musk, questions will undoubtedly arise about the company’s capacity to manufacture the new vehicles.

Tesla debuted its first mass-market sedan, the Model 3, to much fanfare in July, when the waitlist for the vehicle already numbered more than 500,000. Since then, production has not gone smoothly.

In the third quarter of 2017, the company produced just 260 Model 3s – well below the 1,500 it had promised in August. Tesla blamed “production bottlenecks” for the delays. The Wall Street Journal reported that as recently as September, the cars were still being built by hand, rather than on an automated assembly line.

Some workers at the company’s Fremont, California factory are attempting to unionise with the United Auto Workers in a campaign that chiefly cites the factory’s above-average injury rates. The company has also been hit with a number of complaints and lawsuits by employees and contractors alleging gender and racial discrimination.

On Tuesday, the company hit back at media coverage of the complaints, and argued that the attorney representing some plaintiffs has a record of “extorting money for meritless claims”.

“At Tesla, we would rather pay 10 times the settlement demand in legal fees and fight to the ends of the earth than give in to extortion and allow this abuse of the legal system,” the company said in a blog post.

Competition in the electric truck market has been heating up. In September, Daimler AG announced the delivery of its first electric trucks to the United Parcel Service (UPS). Other companies working on electric trucks include Volkswagen, Cummins and Nikola.

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Source: Guardian UK

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The first 30 customers – most of them employees of the company – received their cars on Friday.

Chief executive Elon Musk said the Model 3 was the “best car for its cost, either electric or gasoline”.

Prices start at $35,000 (£26,650), which the firm hopes will bring mass market interest.

The price is still higher than that of rival electric car the Nissan Leaf, which starts at $30,680, or the hybrid Chevrolet Volt, which goes for $34,095.

Past Tesla models, the “S” and “X”, had a starting price of $80,000, putting them beyond the means of many.

The company aims to produce 5,000 units of the Model 3 a week in 2017, and 10,000 a week by 2018. Buyers ordering now are being told to expect delivery late next year.

More than half a million customers have already placed deposits.

If Tesla can successfully produce and sell that many cars a year, it will outperform BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus in the US.

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Source: BBC

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Tencent, best known for its WeChat mobile app, has been investing in a number of sectors, including gaming, entertainment, cloud computing and online financing.

Tesla said the stake was passive, meaning Tencent would not get a say in how the US firm was run.

Shares in Tesla rose 2.3% in early trading following the announcement.

Tesla’s range of electric cars has included the Model S and the Roadster, which was billed as the world’s first electric sports car.

The company also specialises in battery storage, and, through its SolarCity subsidiary, residential solar panels.

The firm has been raising capital ahead of the launch of its mass-market Model 3 sedan, and gained about $1.2bn through a bond and share sale earlier in March.

Tencent, one of Asia’s largest technology firms, has backed several electric vehicle companies in the past.

It was an early investor in NextEV, a Shanghai-based start-up which since has rebranded itself as Nio and has offices in San Jose, California, close to Tesla’s base.

Tencent is now the fifth-largest shareholder in Tesla behind chief executive Elon Musk and investment companies Fidelity, Baillie Gifford and T Rowe Price.

Mr Musk remains the largest shareholder, with a stake of about 21% as of the end of 2016.

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Source: BBC

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The tiles, made from glass, are intended to be a more attractive way to add solar panels to homes, compared with currently-used solar technology.

The launch took place in Universal Studios, Los Angeles, on what used to be the set for the television show Desperate Housewives.

It comes with Tesla due to take over struggling energy firm Solar City.

Some of the electric carmaker’s investors have expressed concern over the takeover, suggesting it is a Tesla-funded bail-out of a company Mr Musk has a vested interest in as its biggest shareholder.

Solar City’s chief executive is Mr Musk’s cousin.

Bringing the solar tiles to the Desperate Housewives set was a way of displaying the idea’s key selling point: it looks far better than solar panelling. Mr Musk jokingly described it as a “sweet roof!”.

No price was given for the tiles, which come in a variety of colours and styles, though Mr Musk did say it would be cheaper than fitting a traditional roof and then adding solar on top.

Also part of the launch was Powerwall 2, Tesla’s home battery product. The primary function of the Powerwall is to store any surplus energy from the solar panels. It will cost $5,500 (£4,511), Mr Musk said.

Tesla posted a surprise profit in its last quarterly earnings – its first in three years.

The $2.6bn acquisition of Solar City seems set to see the company plunge back into the red, but Mr Musk insisted on Friday that the deal made sense as having separate companies would “slow things down”.

Tesla shareholders vote on the acquisition on 17 November.

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Source: BBC

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But despite the cameras, sensors and radars being introduced, it is still expected to be years before the vehicles become fully self-driving.

Tesla introduced its Autopilot system last year, allowing some self-drive functions such as auto-braking.

But it is now temporarily disabling Autopilot on all new cars to allow “robust” testing with the new systems.

Gathering data

Tesla founder Elon Musk said its hardware was “basically a super-computer in a car,” but added it would be up to regulators and the public to decide when self-driving vehicles could actually be used on the roads.

He said it made sense to build in the self-driving tech now – even if it cannot be used for some time – because trying to retrofit the hardware at a later stage would cost consumers more than buying a new vehicle.

For now, the hardware will run in “shadow mode”, gathering information on when the technology may have caused or avoided accidents had it been in command of the vehicle.

Mr Musk said he hoped that Tesla could one day show regulators significant data which demonstrated the self-driving technology was safer than having humans behind the wheel.

Google and pretty much everyone else in this game has the necessary sensor technology at the ready, but the research and development task in making the computer smart enough to intelligently work out what is going on around it. That’s what’s holding self-driving technology back right now.

What Tesla will gain by doing this, however, is a huge fleet of cars gathering data on the world’s roads, something which could hasten the introduction of self-driving technology.

It’s an announcement that seems more designed to keep up investor confidence that Tesla is still worth backing despite missing sales and revenue targets over the past year. He’d promised they’d be comfortably making a profit by now, but he certainly hasn’t managed that.

Press attack

Tesla has an Autopilot feature in its Model S and Model X vehicles, allowing them to automatically change lanes and keep up with traffic.

But it suffered a setback in May when a man was killed driving a Tesla Model S while using the Autopilot function. A preliminary US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report into the incident said the driver had been speeding moments before he collided with a lorry.

Mr Musk was critical of press coverage of this and other related Autopilot accidents, saying there had been a “paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes”.

He claimed that publishing such negative stories risked dissuading people from using autonomous car tech, which would result in deaths.

To underline the point, he retweeted an account of how Autopilot had prevented a Tesla Model X rear-ending another car.

But one expert said it was right that critical articles be published.

“It’s a revolutionary technology, so it’s inevitable that it will attract a lot of attention,” said Prof David Bailey from Aston Business School.

“If it was positive attention he wouldn’t be complaining. But the point is that the press will pick up on things that go wrong, and things will go wrong.

“This technology will radically change the way we get around our cities, and as it’s introduced it’s absolutely right that it be scrutinised both by policy makers and the media.”

New customers

In its last set of financial results, Tesla said it had missed production targets, saw sales below expectations and reported its thirteenth consecutive quarterly loss.

In April, Tesla unveiled plans for its Model 3 vehicle, its lowest-cost to date, due for release next year. It has been reported that so far 400,000 have been pre-ordered. That vehicle will now also include the new hardware.

The basic model will start at $35,000 (£28,500) and have a range of at least 215 miles (346km) per charge. Analysts say the price and range of the five-seater should make the vehicle appeal to new types of customers and could boost interest in other electric vehicles.

The firm faces competition from other similarly priced electric cars that will become available first, including General Motors’ Chevy Bolt and BYD’s Qin EV300.

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Source: BBC

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