Cosmic Log
Billionaire Elon Musk doubled down on Tesla Motors’ autonomous driving features today, saying that every vehicle produced from now on will offer the option of full self-driving capability. But that capability won’t be turned on immediately.
“The foundation is on board to bring full autonomy,” the Tesla CEO told reporters during a teleconference.
Tesla car owners are getting an upgrade to their Autopilot semi-autonomous driving software, but this won’t be your standard software upgrade: CEO Elon Musk says Autopilot 8.0 will put more emphasis on radar readings as well as crowdsourced, networked information about potential hazards on the roadway.
Musk said the upgrade might have prevented the kind of collision that led to the death of a Tesla Model S driver in May. “These things cannot be said with absolute certainty, but we believe it is very likely that, yes, it would have,” Musk told reporters during a teleconference on Sunday.
That accident involved a crash between the Model S and a freight truck that was making a left turn from the opposing direction. Preliminary data suggest that Autopilot’s camera system did not recognized the reflective signature of the truckagainst the background of a brightly lit sky. As a result, the car smashed with full force into the truck, killing Tesla driver Joshua Brown.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it’s investigating the accident.
The Federal Trade Commission has given its approval for Tesla Motors’ acquisition of the SolarCity power panel company, saying that the combination would create no antitrust concerns.
The go-ahead removes another hurdle to the $2.6 billion all-stock deal, which was proposed in June. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is the largest investor in both companies. He’s the CEO of Tesla, and the chairman of SolarCity.
Musk argues that the deal will create a consumer-friendly, one-stop energy shop for electric cars, solar panels and battery storage systems.
The next hurdle is a vote by the disinterested shareholders of the two companies, which will exclude the shares held by Musk and other executives. That vote is expected to clear the way for the merger to take effect later this year.
The bad news is that SolarCity, the power-generating company that has Elon Musk as its chairman, is losing money. The good news is that it’ll be rolling out a new product: a roof with built-in solar arrays.
“It’s not a ‘thing’ on the roof, it is the roof,” Musk said Aug. 9 during a conference call with analysts.
He said the integrated, power-generating roofing structure would be a “fundamental part of achieving a differentiated product strategy” for SolarCity.
Peter Rive, SolarCity’s chief technology officer and Musk’s cousin, said the company would ramp up production of the roofing components at its factory in Buffalo, N..Y., in the second quarter of next year.
SolarCity is counting on such innovations to boost its sales as it heads toward a $2.6 billion merger with the Tesla electric-car and battery company, which has Musk as its CEO.
The boards of directors for Tesla and SolarCity, two companies that have billionaire Elon Musk as a top executive, have given the green light for a $2.6 billion merger.
The two companies said the combination would create “the world’s only vertically integrated sustainable energy company,” bringing together Tesla’s electric car line and its home battery offerings with SolarCity’s power-generating business.
“By joining forces, we can operate more efficiently and fully integrate our products, while providing customers with an aesthetically beautiful and simple one-stop solar + storage experience: one installation, one service contract, one phone app,”Tesla and SolarCity said in a joint press release.
The approvals came after a review of Tesla’s merger proposal, the terms of which were laid out publicly last month. Musk helped orchestrate the deal, but he stayed out of the review or the board vote to head off conflict-of-interest concerns. He serves as the CEO of Tesla, and he’s the chairman of SolarCity as well as the biggest shareholder of both companies.
In a tweet, Musk emphasized that his privately held space venture, SpaceX, does not figure in the deal and would never merge with Tesla.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has just shared his once-secret master plan for the electric-car company, which he now casts as a solar power and energy storage company as well. Here is the plan, as summarized by Musk in a post on the Tesla site.
The expansion of Tesla’s product line will include “heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport,” Musk says in the post. “Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year. We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate.”
– Story by Todd Bishop and Alan Boyle
Tesla Motors says it’s cooperating with federal authorities in the investigation of the first known traffic death involving a driver who was using the Autopilot self-driving feature on the company’s Model S electric car.
In a report posted online today, Tesla said it had just learned that the National Highway Transportation Safety Board was opening a preliminary evaluation into Autopilot’s performance during a fatal crash. In a statement, the NHTSA said the opening of an investigation shouldn’t be construed as a determination that “there is either a presence or absence of a defect in the subject vehicles.”
Tesla’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, expressed his condolences to the victim and his family today in a tweet.
Tesla Motors says it will ramp up production of its best-selling Model 3 electric car much more quickly than planned, with a target of producing 500,000 automobiles starting in 2018 rather than 2020.
The plan, announced as part of Tesla’s first-quarter financial update, comes in the wake of phenomenal advance sales for the Model 3, Tesla’s lowest-priced model to date. More than 325,000 reservations were placed during the first week of sales last month. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that pace was two to four times stronger than even he expected.
Model 3 production is due to begin in late 2017. During a conference call to discuss the quarterly earnings, Musk said that suppliers are being asked to deliver their parts by mid-2017 in order to meet Tesla’s timetable. “As a rough guess, I would say that we aim to produce 100 to 200,000 Model 3’s in the second half of next year,” he said. “That’s my expectation right now.”
He said he was so focused on the production issue that he’s taken to sleeping in Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif.
“My desk is at the end of the production line,” Musk said. “I have a sleeping bag in a conference room adjacent to the production line which I use quite frequently. The whole team is super-focused on achieving rates and quality at the target cost.”
In the week since Tesla Motors unveiled its Model 3 electric car at the not-so-ludicrous price of $35,000, would-be owners have put in orders for more than 325,000 cars, company CEO Elon Musk reported April 7.
Even Musk admitted that the response was two to four times higher than he expected it to be. “No one at Tesla thought it would be this high,” he said in a tweet.
In a blog post, Tesla Motors noted that the reservations could translate into $14 billion in sales. (That’s based on the assumption that the average option package would bring the per-car cost to $43,000.)
When Model 3 production ramps up, starting in late 2017, Musk is aiming to turn out as many as 500,000 cars a year. But hitting that mark could pose a challenge.
Tesla Motors’ Model 3 electric sedan may be geared for mass-market affordability, but CEO Elon Musk made it clear at tonight’s unveiling that he doesn’t intend it to be a third-rate car.
“It will be five-star in every category,” Musk told a standing-room-only, occasionally raucous crowd at Tesla’s warehouse-sized design studio at Hawthorne, Calif.
The $35,000 Model 3’s promised capabilities were arguably the biggest surprise of the evening: Musk said the scaled-down sedan would still have ample room for five people, thanks to a design that moves the instrument panel farther forward than the panel in the $70,000 Model S.
Even the base model will go from zero to 60 mph in less than 6 seconds, Musk said. And the driving range will be at least 215 miles on a charge.
“These are minimum numbers,” Musk said. “We hope to exceed them.”