"Wait until you see the real steering controls and system for the 3. It feels like a spaceship."
Elon Musk News
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ISSUE 37 🚀🚗🌇 August 23rd 2016
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Featured Quote
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"Wait until you see the real steering controls and system for the 3. It feels like a spaceship."
— Elon Musk
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Sponsored Link
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The pedestal supports the 2nd generation Tesla Wall Connector as well as ClipperCreek charging stations. The dual pedestal is popular with businesses that want to offer charging for all electric cars; a Tesla EVSE can be mounted on one side and a ClipperCreek universal EVSE can be mounted on the other. Click here to read more |
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Elon Musk News
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Elon Musk approaches buzz like no other car company executive. According to Advertising Age, "Tesla Motors has no advertising, no ad agency... and that's no problem." That's right, Tesla's advertising budget is $0. In contrast, let's look at what other big automakers spend on advertising. For context, automakers typically rank as the biggest ad spenders in any industry. Here is a sampling — Chrysler: $1.97 billion, GM: $2.15 billion, and Ford: a whopping $2.56 billion.
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SpaceX
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Crews outside the SpaceX's headquarters in Southern California on Saturday positioned the booster that stuck the first Falcon 9 rocket landing for vertical display, and now the launcher is an unmistakable Space Age trophy visible to passersby on nearby streets and freeways.
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The era of space shuttles visiting the ISS is making way for a new one, where private companies visit with their own crafts. On Friday, that dream came one step closer to reality, as two NASA astronauts, commander Jeff Williams and flight engineer Kate Rubins, undertook a spacewalk to attach a new international docking adopter (IDA).
The adopter will allow spacecraft like the SpaceX Crew Dragon to dock with the ISS. SpaceX delivered the IDA last month, its ninth mission with NASA. In May, Boeing announced a launch date of 2018 for its first Starliner manned flight. The pressure is on SpaceX to beat Boeing to the punch and send its first crew to the ISS, a race that officially started Friday with the dock installation. The IDA opens the door to commercial space travel in a big way. "That is the next major chapter," said Williams.
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NASA has released an image from the Curiosity rover so we Earthlings can get a new glimpse at Mars. The image was made from more than 130 pictures taken by the rover on August 5, and it shows the area called "Murray Buttes" on the lower part of Mount Sharp.
Elon Musk wants to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars by 2018. NASA said in July that it believes it can send astronauts to conduct a fly-by of Mars by 2033. Musk hopes to beat that by sending humans to Mars in 2024.
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Tesla
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Orthopaedic surgeon Jonathan Braman has spent a lot of time working on patients injured in violent car accidents. That's why he knew what to expect for his family and himself after his Tesla Model X was struck by a large GMC truck at over 45 mph after it ran a red light. To his surprise however, all 6 passengers (and his dog) walked away from the severe accident. Braman credits Tesla and Elon Musk for keeping his family away from serious injury or death by designing what could very well be one of the safest vehicles ever built.
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When asked "will Tesla still exist 20 years from now?" Bob said: "As it is presently, no. As they say, "Socialism is great until they run out of other people's money." Tesla burns cash. It's not a car company, it's a cult of fanatics who think Elon Musk can do no wrong. But financially, it doesn't work."
The comment is particularly interesting because under his reign at GM (2001-2010), the automaker went bankrupt and accepted a huge bailout from the government, which ultimately cost $11.2 billion to taxpayers. That's a big difference with the few millions of dollars taxpayers actually made from Tesla repaying its $465 million Department of Energy loan – money from a separate program than the auto bailout, but awarded around the same time.
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During a conference call discussing Tesla's second quarter financial results earlier this month, CEO Elon Musk said that the automaker was expecting its percentage of new vehicle leases versus direct purchases to significantly increase during the next quarter and now we know why.
Tesla introduced last night a new 2-year lease option for the Model S and Model X that brings the entry price to driving Tesla vehicles down to only $593 per month, but only for orders placed by September 12th.
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Tesla carefully made sure that any promotional picture or third-party photoshoot would not feature the interior of the prototypes, presumably because it will be nothing like the production version. While everyone is focused on the horizontal center touchscreen and speculating about a potential heads-up display, which I admit is likely, I am most interested in the steering wheel.
The one on the prototype was unfinished-looking and Musk confirmed that it's not "the real steering system". He referred to it as a "system" and not a "wheel" on a few occasions.
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Tesla has about 35,000 Model X reservations with paid deposits but has delivered only 7,200 so far. Until recently, Tesla was not even offering Model X test drives at its stores, suggesting that it was seeking to constrain new orders until such time as it could get Model X production ramped up successfully.
Based on his analysis, Sparks believes that Tesla will deliver a total of 20,000 to 23,000 cars in the third quarter, split about equally between Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. Tesla could go into the fourth quarter with strong numbers and finish the year by delivering close to 90,000 vehicles.
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SolarCity
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Since then, the roofs have been called "out of left field," and "a sweeping expansion of Tesla's clean energy ambitions," but they are neither. Solar roofs are not some side goof of Musk's; they've been part of his ambition all along.
If Tesla's solar roof (or the Tesla Model 3, or SolarCity) fails but demonstrates that there's a viable market, and other competitors come in to do it better, I don't know that Musk would be pleased. But the larger and more important part of his aim — to unleash consumer capitalism on the problem of sustainability — will have succeeded.
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This Is The End
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Did you enjoy this issue? Yes / No
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