Hertz appears to be taking a page from Tesla’s marketing playbook, using the automaker’s classic “But wait, there’s more!” strategy. Just days after announcing that it would purchase 100,000 Teslas by the end of 2022, Hertz now says it will make up to 50,000 of these available for Uber drivers to rent. Uber and Hertz… Read more »
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Panasonic reveals its version of the new Tesla 4680 battery cell
Tesla showed off its new 4680 cell—a tabless battery cell with a new chemistry that promises to boost efficiency and reduce costs—at 2020’s Battery Day event. Since then, several of the automaker’s battery suppliers have reportedly been working on production versions of the 4680 cell. Now Panasonic has unveiled its version of the Tesla 4680… Read more »
Lithium hydroxide converter to be built near Tesla’s German Gigafactory
Rock Tech Lithium, a company with offices in Canada and Germany, is planning to build a production plant for battery-grade lithium hydroxide in Guben, Brandenburg. The company has acquired a 12-hectare site in the Guben South industrial park—which happens to be just a few miles away from Tesla’s new Berlin Gigafactory. Rock Tech intends to… Read more »
Why is Hertz deploying a huge fleet of Teslas? Hint: it has little to do with emissions.
Are rental car customers ready for EVs? We’re going to find out. Rental giant Hertz theoretically began introducing EVs to its fleet in 2011, and competitors soon followed. However, they were offered only in select markets, sometimes at super-premium prices. Meanwhile, Teslas became popular on the peer-to-peer rental network Turo. Now Florida-based Hertz, which rents… Read more »
Tesla lobbies to increase penalties for automakers who don’t meet fuel economy standards
In the arcane world of federal fuel economy standards, automakers that fail to comply with the US Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) requirements can buy emissions credits from an automaker that has excess credits to sell. This has turned into a lucrative side business for Tesla, the only company that has sold substantial amounts of… Read more »
Tesla deploys first Megacharger to charge Tesla Semi
The Tesla Semi is sure to be a real game-changer when it finally hits the road, but at this point it’s anybody’s guess when that will be (we all know how Tesla hates to set deadlines it may not be able to meet). A massive EV like the Semi is going to need a massive… Read more »
A lesson in innovation: VW’s Herbert Diess invites Tesla’s Elon Musk to an internal conference
A few weeks ago, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess called 120 top-level executives to company HQ for a crisis meeting, at which he announced a series of measures to help his company catch up with Tesla. More recently, Diess went a step further, inviting Tesla CEO Elon Musk to address 200 Volkswagen executives via a… Read more »
JB Straubel talks Tesla, Redwood and the massive challenge of building an EV supply chain in new video
When I was a kid, everyone had a favorite Beatle (mine was George). Now I have a favorite Tesla co-founder: JB Straubel. He’s a visionary who converted a Porsche to electric drive and built a solar-powered racer, long before EVs were cool. He’s the engineering genius who personally went through and redesigned almost every component… Read more »
Yet another generation of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip in the pipeline, to be produced by Samsung
As Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system slowly evolves, it seems to be requiring ever more computing power. Back in 2016, Tesla announced a hardware upgrade, including a new computer from Nvidia, which it said would enable full self-driving capability, with future software updates. Since then, Tesla has upgraded the computer twice. In 2019, it introduced the… Read more »
Tesla announces ludicrous number of quarterly deliveries in China
We already knew things were hopping for Tesla in China. Tesla-watchers predicted that Chinese sales would prove to be a big part of the company’s all-time record deliveries in Q3,and Elon Musk confirmed it at the shareholders meeting, announcing that Gigafactory Shanghai had surpassed the Fremont factory in production volume. (We also suspected that the… Read more »