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 »
Search Results Found For: "Tesla"
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 »
Tesla expected to (finally) release a CCS adapter in the US
The War of the Charging Standards will only truly be over when any EV can use any public charging station. Tesla is taking another step toward that glad day by releasing a CCS-to-Tesla plug adapter to markets outside of Europe. When Tesla launched Model 3 and Supercharger V3 in Europe, it moved to make CCS… Read more »
Tesla shows off new structural battery pack with 4680 cells at Giga Berlin
Tesla threw a party for the locals to celebrate the upcoming start of production at its Berlin Gigafactory. Kids of all ages dug the carnival rides, the giant Tesla coils shootin’ out sparks, and the obligatory pumpin’ sound-and-light show. For techies, however, the star of the show was Tesla’s new structural battery pack. A cutaway… Read more »
NHTSA finds no cause to investigate Tesla battery fires
Sorry, Tesla-haters. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has declined to open a formal investigation into fire risks involving Tesla vehicles, after finding no relevant incidents in the United States in the last two years. In 2019, a California lawyer filed a petition with NHTSA on behalf of a group of Tesla owners, requesting… Read more »