On Friday, Tesla announced a voluntary recall of every single damn Model S on the planet to check the front seatbelt installed on those cars. According to the automaker, one belt in a car that was sold in Europe wasn’t connected to an outboard lap pretensioner. The car was not involved in a crash, nor was anyone injured because of the defect.
According to Tesla, the automaker has inspected more than 3,000 Model S cars for similar faults and found none.
Regardless, the automaker said it would ask owners to bring in 90,000 Model S cars — literally, all of them — for inspection because having a seatbelt that doesn’t work is probably bad.
“WE GOT A CALL A FEW MINUTES AGO… SOMEBODY PUT A CHILD IN THE TRUNK.”
Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s!
When I first heard about this video a couple of days ago, I had what I’ll call the Typical Car Guy’s Reaction: Those stupid pigs. Why are they harassing a family with a Tesla? What percentage of criminal behavior in the country is perpetrated by people who own Teslas? Is it because the people in the video aren’t lily-white? Is it because the cops were bored? Because they wanted to exercise their authority on yet another hapless family of meek motorists?
Every anti-police cliche ran through my head. It didn’t help to actually watch the video and see the cop order the little kid back into the car like he was El Chapo or something.
Sometime this year, Tesla Motors quietly ended its Ranger program that would dispatch service technicians to fix or send for service Tesla cars for a flat rate, Automotive News reported.
The program, which was touted by the company in 2012 as “transforming automotive service” said the service would cost $100 “regardless of how far away owners live from a Tesla Service Center.” Tesla’s service page now says: “Tesla Ranger service may be available in your area. Service begins at $100 per visit and increases based on your distance from the nearest Tesla service center.”
A four-year, prepaid service plan for the cars, which cost $2,400 and included unlimited Ranger service visits, now only costs $1,900 without mentioning Ranger service, according to the company. A spokesman for Tesla didn’t immediately comment on the report. (Read More…)
Tesla could start building cars in China within two years, which could help the automaker jumpstart sales there and increase volume for the small automaker, Reuters reported.
Tesla chief Elon Musk said the car company could cut costs on cars for sale there by one-third. Normally, foreign automakers are required to partner with domestic companies before building cars in China. For example, General Motors has partnered with SAIC Motor since 1998, who also partners with Volkswagen.
Musk said Tesla is already partnering with Baidu, China’s largest search engine, to provide GPS data.
Wait. Tesla is already partnering with China’s largest search engine company? That sounds, um, interesting.
Almost three out of four electric cars on the road are leased — not purchased — according to data from Edmunds, which was compiled by CNBC. (The leasing data excludes Tesla, who does not report leasing rates.)
The overall lease penetration rate for electric cars, which is 74.9 percent, is much higher than the overall rate for all cars, which is 28 percent. The leasing rate for luxury cars is roughly 50 percent, according to Edmunds.
According to the report, EV drivers are more likely to be early adopters but are hesitant to own the vehicles due to increasing battery capacity and rapidly evolving technology. In other words, electric cars are becoming the new iPhones.
I stumbled on a thread where a Tesla owner with a failed part was able to purchase a replacement from the EV manufacturer. However, and this is key, Tesla would not supply instructions for installing it.
Tesla’s direct sales structure and independent nature allows it to bypass almost all regulations and agreements currently in place relating to service information and repair software. These regulations and agreements exist to allow owners and independent shops to have the same information and diagnostic tools as dealers so they have the ability to perform repairs properly on their own.
Police say a photographer with the Reno Gazette-Journal on Oct. 9 trespassed at Tesla’s battery factory in Nevada and struck security guards there with a car.
According to Storey County Chief Deputy Melanie Keener, the photographer, Jose Andrews Barron, was charged with misdemeanor trespassing and two counts of felony battery. He was taken to Storey County Jail and held in lieu of $30,000 bail. It’s unclear if Barron is still at the jail.
In a post on its corporate blog, Tesla said Barron and another newspaper employee climbed over a fence and took pictures of the battery factory. When approached, Barron and the other employee jumped into a car with Reno Gazette-Journal stickers. Barron struck a security guard on his way out and hit another security manager on an ATV. According to the newspaper, the driver’s side window was smashed and a seatbelt was cut in half. (Read More…)
Tesla will begin rolling out its firmware update Thursday to enable some Model S and Model X cars to partially drive themselves, the company’s CEO announced on Twitter.
Tesla’s AutoPilot feature will reportedly steer the car during some highway driving and help parallel park the car. A valet feature that would park and retrieve the car without a driver will reportedly come later. It’s unclear how autonomous the cars will be after Thursday, so we’ll save up the $75,000 and let you know as soon as we can.
John Martin, Nissan North America’s senior vice president of manufacturing and supply chain management, had some harsh words for Tesla on Friday. According to him, Uber — not Tesla — is the real disruptor, and what Tesla is doing now is relatively easy, Automotive News reported.
“Lot’s of people are calling Tesla a disrupter. They are not,” he said while arguing that building a performance vehicle that’s priced over $100,000 is much easier than manufacturing an electric car for under $30,000.
And what about Apple and Google? Martin doesn’t foresee either of them getting into the auto manufacturing business anytime soon.
A self-professed reformed BMW enthusiast says backlash against Tesla comes from car owners “stuck in the past” who consider grease under their fingernails as a “manliness” status symbol among “nostalgic car weenies.” Basically, military-grade trolling.
Mike Barnard, a writer at Slate.com, says that the time is coming for internal combustion engine fans to give up the ghost and get with Tesla because:
People who don’t like hybrid race cars and production supercars are saying that they don’t like better all-around performance—they just really only love things with cylinders and pistons, make of that what you will.
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas issued a lower target for Tesla on Wednesday, saying the automaker’s SUV price tag is too hefty for the carmaker to meet its production volume goal for 2016.
Even allowing the Model X (average transaction price) to decline over time through the introduction of lower-spec models leaves what we believe to be a higher-priced vehicle than we expected that may struggle to meet the volume expectations of the market and our forecasts.
The world is abuzz this week with news of the all-new Tesla Model X, which is a minivan that looks like it may at any moment take flight and get tangled up in some power lines.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s right: Tesla has brought the first gullwing minivan to market, and people are excited. And not just slightly excited. Elon Musk is giving press conferences to delighted admirers. Tesla fans are running up and down the streets in Palo Alto screaming “THE TESLA IS COMING! THE TESLA IS COMING!” And Pacific Gas & Electric engineers are currently on the job trying to figure out how to get the first Model X down from some high-voltage wires near Tarzana.
Tesla finally rolled out its third model, the Model X last night to loyalists and some media (not us) Tuesday in California.
The SUV’s falcon doors and ludicrously insanely fast 0-60 mph times (3.2 seconds for a car that weighs 5,441 pounds) may get most of the headlines, but the rest of the car’s features and specifications are just as impressive. Tesla says that the batteries in its Model X — which are the same as the Model S — are good for 250 miles. The combined torque for its front and rear engines motors, which produce 259 hp and 503 hp respectively, is more than 700 pound-feet.
And the air filtration system inside may protect you from mustard gas, or something.
“There must have been lots of VW engineers under pressure — they’ve run into a physical wall of what might be possible so trickery was the only option,” he told the publication. (Read More…)
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