...What we know about the Model 3 is limited. It is expected to have a starting price of $50K (US$35K) before any incentive and a range of more than 200 miles on a single charge – much like the Chevy Bolt EV...

I was not aware that Tesla would be taking deposits as early as the unveiling of the Model 3 in March, I hope I can afford it by then!

Denmark’s best-selling car in December was for the first time an electric car: the Tesla Model S

In December, the Tesla Model S not only outsold every other electric car in Denmark, but every single car model regardless of if they are gas-guzzling or battery-powered.

Tesla delivered 1,249 Model S’s in December in Denmark, easily beating the second best-selling vehicle; the Peugeot 208 with 903 vehicles sold during the month.

http://electrek.co/2016/01/07/denmarks-best-selling-december-electric-car-tesla-model-s/

No one wants to buy electric cars.

Americans bought just 102,600 such vehicles in 2015, a 17 percent decline from the previous year, according to researcher Autodata. Nissan Motor Co. sold 43 percent fewer of its all-electric Leaf and General Motors Co. reported an 18 percent drop for its Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in model that’s driven by an electric motor and has a gasoline engine to recharge its batteries.

And who can blame them?

Apart from being poky and tinny and smug and expensive and utterly useless for long distances, electric cars are also terrible for health and the environment, as even environmentalist Bill Gates has recognised:

People think, Oh, well, I’ll just get an electric car. There are places where if you buy an electric car, you’re actually increasing CO2 emissions, because the electricity infrastructure is emitting more CO2 than you would have if you’d had a gasoline-powered car.

Electric cars, in other words, are the motoring equivalent of a neon sign saying: “I am a total wanker.” Which is why everyone who is not a total wanker prefers gasoline-powered vehicles. With the oil price so low – and looking to stay low for some considerable time yet – it makes perfect sense.

Since gas prices have been declining for a year now, and the national price of a gallon of unleaded is about $1.97 at the moment, Americans just aren’t making fuel-efficiency a priority with their new car choices. The biggest winners in 2015’s record-breaking new car-a-palooza were Jeep, Ram and any brand with a lot of SUVs, trucks and crossovers.

In Britain, it’s just the same. Not only are consumers shunning electric cars but they are gravitating towards bigger, gas-guzzling cars which they might previously have considered impractical. I’m one of them. When the lease on my diesel-powered Skoda runs out, I’m almost certainly going to buy a big, chunky, 4 x 4 like, maybe, a second-hand LandRover Discovery. If, as I do, you live in the remote country and you need to drive very fast so as to ensure the milk doesn’t go sour on the epic journey back from the supermarket, then clearly it’s very important that if you smash into an obstacle – a muntjac deer, say; or a gang of Romanians who’ve just pinched the lead off your church roof; or a Prius driver on their way to save a sett of tubercular badgers – you do so with minimum damage to your own vehicle.

That’s what God is trying to tell us through the medium of low oil prices: that a) He absolutely loathes the Middle East and everyone in it (apart from the Israelis, obviously, who are His Chosen People) and b) that He is sick to death of bleeding heart mimsers who take weird pride in the tinny crapness of their eco-cars and that He wants them all to die.

Even if it isn’t what God wants, though, it’s definitely what the free market is telling us. This is the glory of the untrammelled economic system: it is the collective product of million upon million voluntary decisions by free individuals based on informed calculations. No economist, no government functionary could ever replicate this system through management or regulation because they could never hope to gain access to the complex and ever-changing data which informs all these consumer decisions.

But that’s never going to stop our political leaders trying, is it?

Obama, who has staked his presidency on his environmental record, is doing everything to push electric cars short of making them compulsory.

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, Obama renewed a call he made as a candidate in 2008 to get 1 million plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2015. But sales have been far slower than expected – only about 490,000 vehicles, including 115,000 in 2015, down 6 percent from 2014. Automakers have been forced to cut EV prices and sales forecasts.

The UK government shares Obama’s delusions:

Ministers see electric vehicles as key to decarbonising the UK’s transport sector, and meeting the Climate Change Act 2008 target for an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases against 1990 levels by 2050.

In recent advice to ministers on the fifth carbon budget (2028-2032), the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says that, under a central scenario, plug-in hybrids and battery electric vehicles should account for 9% of UK new car and van sales by 2020 and around 60% by 2030.

But an automotive firm has told the CCC that manufacturers are currently selling electric cars at a loss and the market is failing to grow in the way some forecasts predicted.

So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand consumers are sending a very clear signal to the markets: “We don’t want electric cars. They’re boring, they’re stupid, they suck.” On the other hand the dead hand of the State – from the Obama administration to the nations of the EU and, perhaps most especially, the People’s Green Socialist Republic of California – is using every available tool from bribes and incentives (eg free parking and taxpayer funded charge points for electric cars) to regulations and mandates to force this unwanted and unnecessary technology on consumers regardless.

In California, for example, by 2020 10 percent of all vehicle sales must be EV or fuel cell cars; while nationally fleets must average 54.5 mpg by 2025. (Currently we’re at 24.7 mpg).

Now imagine if the entire basis of this enforced drive to electric depended on the erroneous beliefs that oil was running out and that we needed to cut our carbon emissions to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Imagine just how disgusted and rebellious we’d feel then…

But God is speaking to us through low oil prices

lukerobinho posting a Breibart article with distorted figures and emotive innuendo, what a shock.

You'd think conservatives in the US would be jumping on Musk's dick for representing the finest characters of the enterprise capitalism and the free market, making an awesome, plainly superior product while trying to help make the world a better place, but once again the mind of many conservatives is shown to be more based on fear of what is new and different rather than any stated ideological theory.

But God is speaking to us through low oil prices (and not the foreign policy strategy of Saudi Arabia, who were the ones who actually lowered the price), so who am I to disagree?

Shit, shit article. For all the arguments that could be made against Tesla, that was by far the worst conceivable.

Edited by paladisious: 13/1/2016 06:47:26 AM

Tesla’s Elon Musk: Apple’s electric car is ‘open secret’

It is “an open secret” that Apple Inc. is making an electric car to rival Tesla Motors Inc.’s TSLA, +1.02% vehicles, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said Monday.

Apple AAPL, +1.45% has not officially said it is planning on an electric car but “it is pretty hard to hide something if you hire over a thousand engineers to do it,” Musk told the BBC.

The BBC billed the interview with Musk as an “exclusive” at Tesla’s design studio in the Los Angeles area.


Musk did not sound too worried about Apple. The iPhone maker’s entrance in the electric-car business would expand the market, he said. Tesla’s goal will still be make the best electric cars it can, while helping other companies make electric cars as well, Musk said.

Musk also took a swipe at Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.02% founder and CEO, who also owns privately held aerospace company Blue Origin.

Blue Origin is a competitor of Musk’s other company, Space X. But when the BBC asked about the rivalry between the two companies, Musk answered: “Jeff who?”

In the interview, Musk predicted that in the future, people will drive cars as a hobby rather than as a necessity: Cars that are not autonomous will become an anachronism before too long, he said.

He confirmed the Model 3, Tesla’s much-awaited mass-market electric car, will go into production at the end of 2017. Musk has said Tesla would start taking orders for the car in March 2016.

Tesla updated its cars’ software over the air on Sunday, adding a self-parking or “summon” feature that allows owners to park or fetch their cars without being inside it.

On Twitter Sunday, Musk said that in about two years Tesla owners would be able to summon their electric cars to drive themselves, even if the owner is in Los Angeles and the car is in New York.

If there was no market for electric cars, the two most valuable companies on the planet wouldn't being investing billions in developing them

yep...because Google and Apple understand a car now is just a big shell with lots of computer software

Tesla Model 3 likely to ship “autonomous ready” with new sensor suite

Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference last week about the release of the latest version of the company’s software for the Model S and X. The update added new and improved autonomous features to the automaker’s fleet.

During the press call, Musk reiterated that the current sensor suite the company is using to implement new autonomous features will not support full autonomous driving, but the CEO was extremely vague about the timing of the roll out for the new hardware suite that could enable fully self-driving cars.
When asked about when Tesla plans to build in new Autopilot hardware in the Model S, Musk answered:

“Well we don’t want to comment on future product transitions, but it’s certainly not immediately. We are working on a new hardware suite, but it will be some time before it enters production.”

This new hardware suite is required for Tesla to introduce a fully autonomous system, which Musk believes could be ready in about two years:

“I’d be very surprised if it’s beyond that point. […] Within that timeframe [24 to 36 months], It will be able to drive on virtually all roads at a safety level significantly better than humans.”

The timeframe Musk is referring to coincides with the expected launch of the Model 3, which Tesla recently confirmed is on track to hit the market in late 2017.

Even though the timing makes sense for the Model 3, some are worried that the system might not be included in the car due to Tesla aiming for a much lower base price of $35,000 versus the Model S’ $70,000 base price.

Tesla not only uses the sensor suite to incorporate driver assist and convenience features, but also autonomous safety features. In the Model S and X, every car comes equipped with the sensor suite and the safety features it enables, like automatic emergency braking and steering, but the company sells the activation of the convenience features — Autosteer, Autopark, Lane Change and Summon — for $2,500 at the point of configuration for the vehicle or $3,000 after delivery.

Considering Tesla recently joined several automakers in a commitment to include automatic emergency braking on all new vehicles, the Model 3 will without a doubt be equipped with a sensor suite to allow the safety feature. It is also unlikely that Tesla will develop a hardware suite only for safety, if they already develop the feature on the same suite for the Autopilot and other autonomous features.

Tesla is partnering with Mobileye for its Autopilot hardware. The current system consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree ultrasonic sensors. Mobileye revealed that it is developing a similar, but new system that could allow fully autonomous driving.

The new system includes a forward-looking trifocal camera, a radar, four additional cameras around the vehicle and one camera looking back. The suite will be powered by five of the company’s EyeQ3 chip, which Tesla recently confirmed it wants to use in future products.

Mobileye CEO Ziv Aviram said that the new suite was already being tested by an automaker without specifying which, but he said during a recent conference that Tesla is willing to push the envelope “faster and more aggressively than any other OEM.”

Tesla is expected to unveil the Model 3 in late March. We should know more by then about the vehicle’s self-driving potential. Although, even if the Model 3 ships with the new hardware suite, it doesn’t mean the car will be fully autonomous right away. Tesla will likely update the vehicle over time.

For example, Tesla started equipping its vehicles with the first generation Autopilot hardware in September 2014, but the company didn’t release the Autopilot update until October 2015.
http://electrek.co/2016/01/15/tesla-model-3-autonomous-sensor/

With a slow production ramp up and over 25,000 reservations, it was inevitable that a few early Model X owners would try to make a quick buck by flipping their new all-electric SUV, and this listing appears to be the first attempt.
For about $200,000, you can join the ranks of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, legendary VC Steve Jurvetson and others, as owner of a ‘Founder Series’ Model X.
The Founder Series are believed to be limited to about 60 units and reserved only for important company insiders, investors and a few top referrers. The Founder Series is not the only limited edition Model X. There’s also the Signature Model X which required a $40,000 deposit to reserve. Signature series are limited to about 1,000 units. Then there’s the regular production version.
The listing doesn’t disclose all the options, but it’s safe to assume that the $200,000 price tag represents a roughly 40% premium on a brand new Model X similarly equipped....
http://electrek.co/2016/01/22/pre-owned-tesla-model-x-founder-series/

The Volkswagen Group confirms this week that CEO Matthias Müller will introduce a new strategy for the company this summer and it will include plans to introduce 20 new electric vehicles through the group’s brands by the end of the decade.

Müller confirmed the news in somewhat of a confrontational manner. He said:

“The automotive future should not be left to Silicon Valley.”

Likely referring to Tesla, Apple and several other Silicon Valley-based companies reportedly developing electric vehicles. The CEO asks European policy makers to encourage autonomous driving and electric mobility......
http://electrek.co/2016/01/27/vws-brands-20-new-electric-vehicles-2020/