Tesla’s Model 3 electric car was the focus of today’s chatter in the wake of the company’s quarterly earnings report, which posted revenue that was stronger than expected ($2.79 billion vs. $2.51 billion, pre-estimated by Thomson Reuters) and a loss per share that was lower than expected ($1.33 vs. $1.82 pre-estimated). In the wake of last week’s first 30 Model 3 deliveries, Tesla said 1,800 net reservations are coming in daily. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the net backlog stands at 455,000 reservations, with 63,000 would-be buyers canceling their reservations (and getting their deposit back).
Elon Musk shows off one of the first Tesla Model 3 electric cars, plus a graph showing how he expects the production rate to rise. (Tesla via YouTube)
As thousands of employees and fans cheered, Tesla CEO Elon Musk drove a red Model 3 electric car onto the stage at the company’s factory in Fremont, Calif., tonight – and then handed over the first 30 cars to customers.
The glitzy ceremony marked a milestone in Tesla’s campaign to produce an electric car targeted at a mass market, with a base price as low as $35,000. It also marked the start of what Musk called “production hell … for at least six months, maybe longer.”
“As the saying goes, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’” he joked.
In a pair of tweets, Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off “Production Unit 1” for the Model 3, which rolled off Tesla’s assembly line in Fremont, Calif., and went through final checkout.
As you can see, the car is basic black. In a follow-up tweet, Musk noted that Ira Ehrenpreis, an early investor in Tesla who’s also on the company’s board, had the rights to the first Model 3 because he was the first to put down a full deposit.
However, Musk added in Twitter shorthand that he “gave those rights to me as my 46th bday present. Tks Ira!”
Pre-production prototypes of the car have been spotted over the past few months, but in a series of tweets on July 2, Musk said the model met all of its regulatory requirements two weeks ahead of schedule and is ready for purchase.
Musk said the first 30 customers would get their Model 3’s at a party on July 28, and that the production rate at Tesla’s plant in Fremont, Calif., would ramp up to 20,000 cars per month by the end of the year
Waymo’s call for early riders highlights Phoenix-area families who are already participating in the company’s autonomous-car trial. (Waymo via YouTube)
It’s been a good day on the streets and in the courts for Waymo, the driverless-car company that was spun out from Google as another Alphabet subsidiary last year.
First off, Waymo opened up its closed trial for autonomous driving in the Phoenix metropolitan area for public signup. This means Arizonans can apply to become “early riders” in the self-driving minivans and SUVs that Waymo is testing.
In a blog post, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said the rider pool will be expanded from a handful to hundreds over the course of the trial. “The goal of this program is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that’s about twice the size of San Francisco,” he said.
The cars will be made available for free to the households of applicants selected for the trial, with rides provided in an area including Phoenix, Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert. To accommodate the extra riders, Waymo’s fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans will be expanded from 100 to 600 vehicles, Krafcik said.
Uber has been talking about flying cars for months, but today the ride-sharing company fleshed out its plan to become a flight-sharing company in 2020.
“We actually get to live in this era of flying cars,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, said today at the first-ever Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas. “I hate that term, by the way, but we’ll have to live with it.”
The Dallas-Fort Worth region in Texas and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates have been targeted as the pilot cities for the Uber Elevate Network, Holden said. Eventually, the company sees urban aviation as a service that can roll out to the hundreds of cities that Uber serves around the world.
An artist’s conception provides a speculative view of what the Tesla Semi might look like. (Jan Peisert Illustration / Peisert Design)
Getting the Tesla Model 3 electric car on the road clearly isn’t enough to occupy Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX: Today he tweeted the time frame for unveiling Tesla’s autonomous, all-electric Semi truck and a smaller pickup truck.
But wait … there’s more: The Tesla Roadster, which was the first vehicle the company put on sale, is coming back. And this time, it’ll be a convertible.
Musk’s timetable for executing the next steps of his “Master Plan, Part Deux” spilled out in a series of tweets.
Tesla Model 3 candidates are being road-tested in preparation for production. (Credit: Tesla Motors)
For a time on April 10, Tesla edged out GM in market capitalization to become the most valuable U.S. automaker, even though Tesla is on track to lose almost a billion dollars this year while GM is expected to make a $9 billion profit.
The share prices for both car companies dipped today, putting GM ever so slightly back in the lead with a market cap of just less than $51 billion. What’s more, U.S. automakers still fall short of foreign companies such as Toyota and VW. Nevertheless, the rapid rise in Tesla’s share price left some observers predicting a sea change in the auto industry – while others were left just shaking their heads.
“Clearly General Motors is undervalued and Tesla is overvalued,” AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson was quoted as saying at a forum setting the stage for this week’s New York Auto Show. He said Tesla was “either one of the great Ponzi schemes of all time or it’s gonna work out.”
A release candidate version of the Tesla Model 3 hits the streets. (Elon Musk via Twitter)
Tesla’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, is showing off a video of the company’s more affordable Model 3 electric car – but he’s also touting Tesla’s pricier models.
A clip that shows a black release candidate version of the Model 3 zipping down the street popped up this morning on Musk’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, and quickly picked up tens of thousands of views, plus thousands of shares.
Tesla says its Model 3 electric car is on track to go into initial production in July. (Tesla Photo)
Tesla says it’s “on track” to start producing its mass-market Model 3 electric vehicles in July, and plans to build 5,000 of the cars per week by the end of the year.
The company, which reported financial results for 2016’s fourth quarter and the full year today, also said it’ll pick locations for as many as three more Gigafactories this year. Tesla’s first Gigafactory, in Nevada, is already turning out power cells for the company’s energy storage system, while its second factory is building solar panels in New York.
“We start 2017 well positioned to scale our business significantly,” Tesla said in its typically upbeat quarterly letter to shareholders.
Quarterly revenue exceeded Thomson Reuters’ expectations, reaching $2.28 billion rather than the predicted $2.19 billion. Tesla’s loss per share amounted to 69 cents, which was more than Thomson Reuters’ forecast of 42 cents but less than Bloomberg News’ advance estimate of $1.14.
