Tesla has officially launched their long-awaited “Supercharging” network last night to a star-studded crowd in Southern California. (We assume it was star-studded since our invitation got lost in the mail.) The EV network promises to enable Model S and Model X owners to charge 150 miles of range in 30 minutes. What about your Roadster? Sorry, you aren’t invited to this charging party. Have a Tesla and a LEAF? You’ll have to be satisfied with separate but equal charging facilities as the Tesla proprietary charging connector restricts access to Tesla shoppers only. Is this class warfare or do we parallel the computer industry where connectors come and go with the seasons?

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Venture capitalist extraordinaire Tim Draper says Tesla has the resources to beat the Detroit Three. Detroit already has lost the electric war, Draper says, and it should pick a different battle to win. Like making flying cars. (Read More…)

What good is a twenty-minute test drive?

Well, when most sources are getting a ten minute test drive, a twenty-minute one is twice as good. The problem, of course, is that range is as critical to an electric car as tensile strength is to parachutes; it’s the difference between a safe arrival and a harrowing trip. Without a genuine understanding of the Tesla’s range, we can’t say for sure whether it’s a great car or not.

That doesn’t mean we can’t pass along what we did learn during those twenty minutes.

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Tesla’s 10 minutes test drives have received a lot of flak in the press. The Fourth Estate (at least parts of it) is trying to get to the core of that car, and that is its stellar battery performance. What is wrong with the tried and true practice of having the car for the day? A weekend?  This would give a tester time to find out when the battery runs out.  300 miles as per Tesla? 265 miles as per EPA? How much as per reality? Until journalists drive the Model S more than just a few times around the block, we have to go the unorthodox route of asking an inferential statistician. (Read More…)

With California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate looming it is only a matter of time till we see an EV from each of the major players in the California market. Nissan has the Leaf, BMW has the Active E, GM has the Volt and Honda electrified a Fit and Ford has electrified everything that isn’t nailed down. That brings us to the elephant in the room: Toyota. To give us some insight into Toyota’s CARB (California Air Resources Board) compliance plans and to see the fruits of the unlikely Toyota/Tesla marriage, Toyota flew us to sunny Southern California to sample the 2013 RAV4 EV.

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Brokerage Wunderlich Securities downgraded Tesla to “sell” from “buy.” The reason: Tesla has downshifted its production plans, reports Reuters.

“While initially saying that it would produce and sell 1,000 cars in the third quarter, Tesla now says it will certainly be 500 cars,” Wunderlich analyst, Theodore O’Neill, said in a research note. (Read More…)

The GE Wattstation killed my Leaf! That’s the story being reported by the New York Times as well as PlugInCars.com. As the tale goes, 11 Leaf owners have had their chargers “damaged” while charging with GE’s Wattstation home charging station. The relative significance of only 11 failures aside, the Nissan Dealer in San Pablo, CA confirmed to PlugInCars.com that Nissan North America has notified dealers of a potential problem with the Leaf and the GE home charging station. TTAC contacted Hilltop Nissan and they have yet to return our calls. Rather than just parroting back the usual news reports we dug deep. We contacted GE and Nissan, consulted some professional electrical engineers and read though hundred of pages of boring SAE documents. Click past the jump to learn more about EV charging than you ever wanted to know. (Read More…)

A study by consulting firm McKinsey says that the cost of the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles could tumble by as much as 70 percent by 2025, thanks to a combination of factors.

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Summer is always a slow time in the industry, so what better way to boost traffic than to manufacture a controversy out of thin air about a “third rail” topic like electric cars?

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Tesla’s 10 minute driving time limit at their Model S press events are leading some to cry foul – “how can a journalist reasonably evaluate the new EV without getting an idea of its battery range?”.

The bigger question is “what value do press trips really provide to the reader?”

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Tesla Motors has almost used up funds from a Department of Energy loan program – but the startup car maker also says that they’ll start paying back the money at the end of 2012.

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Tesla is sitting on more than 10,000 orders for its all-electric Model S sedan. Tesla might finally deliver the first units next month, slightly ahead of plan, says Reuters. The only thing that keeps the production from starting is a successful completion of crash tests required by U.S. safety regulators. If the car doesn’t bomb during the crash, customers can soon flaunt their high-priced environmental responsibility while tooling down the car-pool lanes in solitary fashion. (Read More…)

Toyota is only planning to sell 2,300 RAV4 EVs over the next three years! Can anyone say “compliance car”?

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The Emir of Abu Dhabi is tired of the car business. Germany’s Spiegel Magazin heard that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Aabar wants to sell all stock in Daimler. Aabar also wants out of Daimler’s Formula 1 team and the joint investment in Tesla. (Read More…)

An article in the New York Times Dealbook blog claims that Tesla is using their customer deposits on upcoming models as a major source of cash to finance operations.

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