The Atlantic’s Marina Koren explains that prior space-bound mementos were “the purview of governments” who deliberated “with a certain amount of seriousness about what it would say about the senders, what it would all mean.” After all, what they decided to send “flying into the cosmos… ad astra” (to the stars) might someday be interpreted by someone else (maybe aliens?), somewhere out there in the universe.

The Falcon Heavy carried something radically different than the serious stuff from the rockets of the past — it carried Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster. What was the unique mission given to the Tesla? Koren explains that, “Musk told reporters in a teleconference Monday he expects the Tesla to coast comfortably in space for hundreds of millions of years.”

Furthermore, Koren notes that, “Instead of a rosy time capsule of Earth and its history and inhabitants made for consumption by unknowable alien civilizations, it carries a dummy in a SpaceX space suit, and will blast David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ at top volume from its speakers. Any other payload, Musk said when he made this public in December, would have been ‘boring.’”

But why? Korens acknowledges, “The decision to make the payload a Tesla was a clever show of cross-promotional marketing that only someone like Musk is capable of. Some have groaned at the idea, describing it as nothing more than a cheesy publicity stunt for Tesla… and yes, the placement of a Tesla on top of a brand-new 230-foot-tall rocket with 27 engines, three times more than Musk’s flight-proven and reliable fleet of Falcon 9s, certainly helps with publicity.”

That said, “this cargo does carry some meaning. It’s just not the kind we’re used to… As it turned out, the Tesla bears a unifying message on its circuit board, which Musk revealed for the first time only after the successful launch, and after this story was published. The label is heartwarming — and yet another reminder of which group of humans, exactly, made that car and put it in space.”

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Matt Pressman

Source: The Atlantic

The symbolism behind Elon Musk’s decision to send a Tesla into space [Video] was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was only recently that Tesla publicly revealed that it is working on its own AI hardware. At the NIPS machine learning conference in December, Elon Musk announced that Tesla is “developing specialized AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world.” The company has offered few details, but it’s widely assumed that the main application will be processing the algorithms for Tesla’s Autopilot software.

As Bernard Marr reports in a recent article in Forbes, there’s little doubt that Tesla is way ahead of its potential rivals in the data-gathering department. Every Model S and X built with the Autopilot hardware suite, which was introduced in September 2014, has the potential to become self-driving, and all Tesla vehicles, Autopilot-enabled or not, continually gather data and send it to the cloud. The company has many more sensors on the roads than any of its Detroit or Silicon Valley rivals, and the number will mushroom when Model 3 production hits its stride.

Tesla is basically crowd-sourcing data not only from its vehicles, but from their drivers -internal sensors can pick up information about a driver’s hand placement on the instruments. The company uses the data not only to improve Autopilot by generating data-dense maps, but also to diagnose problems with its vehicles, which can be fixed by over-the-air software updates. Many believe that this sort of data will prove to be a valuable commodity that could be sold to third parties (much as data on web-browsing habits is today). McKinsey and Company has estimated that the market for vehicle-gathered data could be worth $750 billion a year by 2030.

Forbes explains that the AI built into Tesla’s system operates at several levels. Machine learning in the cloud educates the entire fleet, while within each individual vehicle, “edge computing” can make decisions about actions a car needs to take immediately. There’s also a third level of decision-making, in which cars can form networks with other Tesla vehicles nearby in order to share local information. In the future, when there are lots of autonomous cars on the road, these networks could also interface with cars from other makers, and systems such as traffic cameras, road-based sensors and mobile phones.

At this point, no one knows what new forms of AI technology the mad scientists in Palo Alto are cooking up, but Forbes found some clues on the Facebook page of Tesla’s hardware partner Nvidia: “In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.”

This unsupervised learning model contrasts with the more familiar approach of supervised learning, in which algorithms are trained beforehand about right or wrong decisions. Each approach has its pros and cons, and it’s likely that Tesla’s strategy includes both.

Forbes reports that Tesla’s use of AI is not limited to Autopilot — the company employs machine learning in the design and manufacturing processes, to process customer data, and even to scan the text in online forums for insights into commonly-reported problems. It’s ironic that some in the press choose to portray Elon Musk as an AI Luddite, when in fact Tesla may be one of the most sophisticated users of the technology.

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris

Source: Forbes

Elon Musk an opponent of artificial intelligence? Far from it. was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s no wonder — Tesla has ~450,000 pre-orders for the Model 3. Is this the beginning a sea change in the auto industry? Christian DeHaemer at Energy & Capital reminds us that, “In 2011, Morgan Stanley put out a 50-page investment note on Tesla with a price target of $70, up from the price at the time of $23.71. Obviously, it was a good call… The basic logic of the note was that in 1900, there were almost no cars in New York City. And 13 years later, there were almost no horses.”

As an investment, DeHaemer prefers BYD to Tesla, but acknowledges: “It is true that Tesla’s stock price has done very well over the past five years and now has a market value of $59 billion. You could have made a small fortune by following it.” DeHaemer also points to massive growth potential for electric vehicles in India and China, “As these countries walk up the economic food chain, they desperately want clean air… If you’ve ever been to an Asian city like Mumbai or Beijing, you know that the smog is horrible.”

There are more factors pushing the electric vehicle movement forward, “oil prices are moving higher again. Gas prices are going up at the same time battery prices are dropping.” And it’s not just a difference at the gas pump. Tesla’s sales model contrasts Big Auto’s approach. The company sells its cars direct-to-consumer online. And it’s physical stores are often located at a fashion mall neighboring an Apple store instead of another big dealership car lot.

And while most car dealerships are populated by salespeople pouncing on customers that walk though the door, Tesla stores are different. There’s no commissions, no negotiating, and store staff is focused on educating visitors in lieu of hard-nosed sales tactics. The stores are even teaching customers about solar and home batteries in order to live a 360-degree clean energy lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports on lines at Tesla stores to see the new, lower-priced Model 3. Speaking with 18-year old Arjun Sharma after viewing the Tesla Model 3, the college student remarked, “This technology is brand new, and my generation is all about technology, and there’s no other car like Tesla. I feel like my entire generation wants one.” He added, “I looked at so many pictures, but seeing it in person is just so different, it’s a dream come true.”

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Matt Pressman

Buggy Whips and Batteries: Electric vehicles emerge with Tesla leading the charge was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the other corner, the mastermind of PayPal, SolarCity and SpaceX, the archetypal Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who wants to electrify transportation and save Planet Earth — and if that doesn’t work, he’ll take us to Mars to start over. Elon Musk!

Back in the day, Bob Lutz was a champion of Tesla and Musk, citing the Roadster as a major inspiration for the Volt, and saying that he would “always owe them a debt of gratitude for having kind of broken the ice.” After Lutz left GM, he founded Via Motors, which set out to build plug-in hybrid vans and pickup trucks for commercial fleets, but has had a difficult time finding its market. The 85-year-old Lutz has written extensively about the auto industry. For whatever reason, he has evolved into a harsh critic of EVs, and especially Tesla. In 2016, he compared Musk to the leader of a religious cult. (Musk responded on Twitter, saying, “Dear cult members, I love you.”)

Lutz launched his latest salvo against the California upstarts at a forum sponsored by a provider of insurance for collectible cars, suggesting that collectors buy a Model S now, before Tesla goes belly-up. He had nothing but praise for the car itself: “A Model S, especially with the performance upgrades, is one of the fastest, best handling, best braking sedans that you could buy in the world today,” he said. “The acceleration times will beat any $350,000 European exotic.”

However, Lutz said Elon Musk “hasn’t figured out the revenues have to be greater than costs…when you are perennially running out of cash you are just not running a good automobile company. I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to fix that, so those of you who are interested in collector cars, may I suggest buying a Tesla Model S while they’re still available.”

“Twenty-five years from now, [the Model S] will be remembered as the first really good-looking, fast electric car,” Lutz told the LA Times. “People will say ‘Too bad they went‎ broke.’”

This time, Musk does not appear to have responded publicly to Lutz’s zinger, but naturally a number of his disciples have come to his defense. Enrique Dans, writing in Forbes, notes his admiration for Lutz’s writings on the auto industry, but believes that “he has missed something enormously important. In fact, possibly the most important difference between the old and the new economy: fundamentally, timeframes.”

Lutz (along with legions of stock-market analysts) sees Tesla’s ongoing losses as a sign of the company’s inevitable failure. However, according to Dans, “Seeing the bottom line as the be-all and end-all of management is problematic…The principle that revenue must exceed costs is Management 101. The tricky bit is how you define the timeframe in which that has to happen.”

As anyone following the Tesla story knows by now, the company’s stock market valuation has no apparent connection to the number of vehicles it’s producing. Tesla’s market cap, currently around $59 billion, exceeds that of Ford, and rivals those of GM and Honda (which, interestingly, was once the subject of the same sort of criticism now levelled at Tesla). Stock-market pundits tend to see this lofty valuation as madness, proof of the irrationality of Elon Musk’s mindless minions. However, Enrique Dans finds the reason in fundamental differences in the companies’ missions, and the timeframes in which they expect to fulfill them.

If you parse the pedantic “mission statements” on the legacy automakers’ web sites, you’ll find that they basically amount to: “We want to sell cars.” Tesla’s mission statement is very different: “To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”

Tesla doesn’t just want to sell cars, it wants to change the world. This massive difference of ambition is reflected in the longer timeframe that Tesla envisions.

“In the economy Bob Lutz and other traditional car industry players understand, the goal and the metrics were clear: the quarterly results,” Dans writes. “If they were below what the analysts expected, bad; if they were higher, good. End of story. But the rules have changed…For today’s companies, profits are not the goal, they’re the cherry on the cake. Because the idea is, in the long term, to move toward an infinitely more ambitious goal, one that entails a whole new level of change. Companies that have grasped this can spend many years, even decades, without making a profit, as long as they are able to create a narrative that shows they are on the right track toward the defined goal.”

Tesla’s long road to ultimate triumph is not unprecedented — it’s a path that’s been trodden by other tech companies that set out to transform an industry. “For how many years did Amazon continue turning in negative quarterly results while its share price rose steadily?” asks Dans. “Did Jeff Bezos…supply his investors with drugs to maintain their confidence? Yes, he did, actually: a powerful substance called growth and clarity in the use of funds obtained. Amazon’s mission was never to sell stuff, but to change the world.”

Amazon is not the only example. In this age of instant communication, in which whole industries can be radically transformed, or even disappear, “reporting a profit each quarter has never been less important.”

“If Lutz is right, if the grand plans for a new economy that will change the world are bullshit, Tesla will go bust,” Dans concedes. “But if Tesla’s plans and strategy make sense, it may well spend a long time in the red, but it will end up as the auto industry’s benchmark.”

Change is taking place ever faster, and humans’ attention spans are growing ever shorter, so it may seem counter-intuitive that the timeline for corporate success should grow longer. However, even in the fast-paced internet era, changing the world, or even one industry, can’t be done in the space of one quarter. Tesla’s mission is a risky one, but so far investors are willing to accept that risk.

Bob Lutz and Elon Musk look at the world in two different ways, and they have very different visions of the future. Which one will prove prophetic? We shall see.

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris

Source: Forbes

Behind the bluster: Bob Lutz vs. Elon Musk was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The automaker in question? Honda in the late 1960s. Fifty years later, Tesla and Elon Musk are the objects of great admiration, but also constant targets of criticism. In a recent article in The Globe and Mail, Brendan McAleer tells a fascinating story of a young company with a charismatic leader, which finally found great success by tempering its expansive dreams with a dose of reality.

In the sixties, Honda and its founder, Soichiro Honda, faced attacks very similar to those being launched at Tesla today. Mr. Honda’s pride and joy was the Honda 1300, aka the Coupe 9. It was an innovative, forward-looking little car, with an air-cooled four-cylinder engine, independent suspension and excellent fuel efficiency.

The problem was Soichiro Honda himself, who apparently couldn’t resist the urge to keep improving his design. At one point, he ordered the assembly line to stop so that new features could be added. “Eventually, his engineers set up a desk in the factory to deal with his constant interfering,” McAleer writes (sound familiar?). “Honda was forced to step back and his engineers worked to combine his passionate ideas with the practical needs of modern mass manufacturing. The next car they produced was the Honda Civic. You could say it did pretty well.”

Like Mr. Honda, Elon Musk is famous for his interest in every detail of his company’s vehicles. However, it’s safe to say that the extremes of emotion Elon inspires go far beyond anything ever aimed at Mr. Honda, at least in the Western press. Is Musk “a messianic figure or the fraudulent leader of a cultish mob?” McAleer asks.

Noting that the truth surely lies somewhere in the middle, McAleer lists some of Tesla’s strengths and weaknesses. The latter include a consistent failure to deliver product on time, quality-control issues and “an apparent inability to turn a profit” (which it might be more accurate to call a lack of interest in turning a profit).

McAleer goes on to say that Tesla’s corporate culture appears to discourage internal criticism, and cites Model X’s Falcon Wing doors, which even some at Tesla have characterized as a mistake, as a symptom of a top-down culture. He doesn’t seem to be enamored of some of Model 3’s innovations: “Clean-slate thinking is one thing, but ignoring the lessons learned by others is a mistake.”

Tesla’s greatest strength is the fanatical devotion of its customers, and in today’s brand-centric business world, that may be an insurmountable advantage. As a brand, Tesla is one of the greatest in history, right up there with Harley-Davidson and the Grateful Dead. Legacy automakers are gearing up to offer vehicles to compete with Tesla (as they reportedly have been for several years now), but it’s difficult to imagine any of them ever rivaling Tesla’s brand loyalty.

Elon Musk has set out to electrify the world’s transportation system — a far loftier goal than anything Soichiro Honda thought about doing. But as Honda’s story illustrates, those who would change the world need to ground their dreams in reality. Hopefully the continuing rollout of Model 3 will demonstrate that innovative ideas combined with a healthy respect for the practical aspects of manufacturing and consumer behavior add up to a winning formula.

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris

Written by: Charles Morris; Source: The Globe and Mail

What Honda’s success can teach us about Tesla was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What were the numbers? It’s reported that, “The average cost to operate an EV in the United States is $485 per year, while the average for a gasoline-powered vehicle is $1,117, according to the study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.”

That said, costs can vary dramatically from state to state skewing the results. However, the study notes that: “in no state is it cheaper to fuel up on gasoline,” compared to charging an electric car.

In fact, in some states the results are especially compelling. For instance, “The difference is greatest in Washington state, where gasoline will cost that average motorist $1,338 [per year], compared to $372 to charge up.”

In addition, there are other cost savings that come with electric vehicle ownership including: “the maintenance cost for electric vehicles [which] has also been found to be lower because they have fewer moving parts, no exhaust system, less need for cooling, less abrasive braking options, and no need to change oil, fan belts, air filters, timing belts, head gaskets, cylinder heads and spark plugs.”

Forbes spoke with Harvard scientist James Anderson who came up with similar findings based on his own comparison. A noted atmospheric chemist, Anderson concludes: “Electric cars are vastly better than internal combustion devices. I mean they are incredibly fun to drive, they’re quick, fast, quiet… [and] they don’t have carbon dioxide spewing out of the back.”

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Matt Pressman

Source: Forbes

New Study: Electric cars cost less than half as much to drive was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve now been driving my Model 3, one of the first in South Florida, for about a week, and I’d like to share some of my observations about the car, without repeating what those of you who follow the vehicle already know from earlier reviews.

First, the big picture — Model 3 is a truly transformational vehicle. It provides high performance, long range, and a premium aesthetic at a broadly affordable price. But you already knew that. Let me talk about what you may not know — the good things and the things that might need some improvement.

Now, full disclosure — many of the early owners of Model 3 have been past owners of Model S or Model X. I’m one of those people. I’ve had over five years of driving experience with Model S and almost two with Model X. Many of my observations naturally lead to comparisons between S, X and 3. I’ll save most of that for another post.

So, let’s begin …

Charging Speed. The first time I tried to charge Model 3 in my garage, I was surprised to learn that Model 3 charging using the new Tesla Universal Mobile Charging Cable (UMC) is limited to a maximum of 32 amps. That means that charging on a 240V 40-amp, NEMA 14–50 outlet will get you about 22–24 miles of range per hour of charging. That’s not great, but it’ll be absolutely fine for overnight charging.

Because I also own a Model X with an old UMC, I immediately swapped out the new UMC for the old one and achieved a full 40-amps and a charging rate of between 32 and 38 miles of range per hour (actually more efficient than either Model S or X). The difference between the old UMC and the new UMC is pretty significant!

If you’re the owner of an older Model S or X, hold on to your old UMC and use it instead of the cable that comes with Model 3. And if you’re a first time Tesla owner and you want faster charging at home, you might want to consider buying an old UMC through the used components marketplace.

Information Placement and Ergonomics. Every reviewer mentions the lack of a binnacle — the place directly in front of the driver where a conventional speedometer and other instrumentation appears. You get over this in about 5 minutes.

The placement of the speedometer and other critical driving information and functions on the left-hand side of the landscape display works well. It can be scanned with no more eye movement that that required to scan the binnacle.

However, because this critical information takes up some of the screen real estate, all other functionality is pushed right on the display. In general, it’s not a big problem, but it can be annoying and possibly even distracting if you must reach or look to the far right side of the display (say, for example, to see turn-by-turn directions from the nav system). There are a number of ways this can be remedied through a software update, and I suspect Tesla will do so in the near future.

Audio. I’m not an audiophile, but the sound system in Model 3 is really, really good — crisp with clearly defined high frequencies and solid bass. The “immersive sound” option makes all the difference — be sure you turn it on. In my opinion, the Model 3 sound system is better than the standard sound system in Model S or Model X. The user interface is servicable, but I suspect that it will evolve over the coming months.

Interior Features. The Model 3 interior design language is minimalist and sleek. Visually, there is little design ‘noise’ to break the smooth flow of the interior geometry. It is, in my view, groundbreaking.

One reviewer from CNN lamented the fact that there were no buttons and knobs in the driver compartment, a clear indication that he completely misunderstands the design intent and has no clue about the future of automobiles. But I digress.

Although Model 3 has a collection of typical interior features including lighted visor mirrors (an inside joke for Model S owners), the primary focus is the center console. As the guy who designed the very first center console for Model S — EVANNEX’s critically acclaimed Center Console Insert (the CCI) — I’d like to commend Tesla for a well-executed center console for Model 3. It contains everything you’ll need to store your stuff, charge and view your smartphone display, and easy access your USB and 12V ports. It provides closed storage with smoothly operating covers and doors.

Three quibbles:

1. The standard gloss black surface of the center console shows every finger print, every spec of dust and every droplet of liquid that might inadvertantly spill. Therefore, the surface becomes messy very quickly.

2. The center console surface is smooth and quite attractive, but its smoothness is also a minor liability. The center console is where the driver puts stuff — keys, ID cards, a pencil, even a smart phone when it’s not in its own compartment. As I mentioned, Model 3 is nimble, and during a quick turn everything the driver places on the center console surface goes flying. It’s happened to me a few times already.

3. In my opinion, the physical height of center console violates the interior design language. It’s unnecessarily high. Hopefully, a future iteration will place the top of the center console at the same height as the seat cushion, allowing this important element to better blend with the interior. Sure, you’ll lose a little vertical storage space, but you’ll gain a better aesthetic.

Exterior Features. I love Model 3’s exterior — clean, simple, and efficient. For sticklers, the panel gaps on my vehicle were consistently good at approimately 4 to 5 mm throughout, indicating a solid manufacturing process. The trunk opening is much larger than many feared it would be and with the rear sets folded down, you can load a 72” L x 36” wide x 16 “H box into the car. That’s a big box! The trunk hatch requires a bit of a push to close.

The doors open wide for easy entry. Their signature feature are the J-handles that rotate outward for opening. I have two minor quibbles with the doors.

1. The J-handles are very cool, rotating outward with a push on the ‘fat’ part of the handle. The problem is that gripping the handle to pull the door open can be a challenge if you use the wrong hand. On the driver side, your left hand is the one you want to use, but if you’re carrying, say, a grocery bag in your left hand, opening the driver door with your right hand can require a little bit of arm twisting. When you approach the driver door, try to remember to have your left hand free. The opposite applies on the passenger side. From a design perspective, a future improvement might be to have the door handle spring open and stay that way until a pull on the thin end occurs. It would then return to the closed position.

2. You have to be conscious of making sure that your door closes properly. In many cases, a seemingly proper push of the door will leave it slightly ajar. The problem is that the window remains slightly lowered during closing, and if you don’t notice the problem and walk away, its possible for rain to enter your passenger compartment. Be careful with this and check your doors for full closure during your early weeks of ownership.

Suspension and Ride. Most big name reviewers agree that Model 3 is a driver’s car with a tight suspension, very little roll, and nimble response. Its spring suspension allows you to feel the road, and it’s likely that some owners’s will accuse Model 3 of a harsh ride. I would characterize the ride as typical of a true sports sedan.

But here’s something that you should know. The body sits relatively high above the ground. With standard 18 or 19-inch wheels, there’s a lot of space between the outer perimeter of the tire and the wheel well fender cut out. Those owners who want a closer-to-the-ground look will undoubtedly remedy this with special suspension packages in the aftermarket.

Wheels and Tires. The OEM tire and wheel packages for Model 3 are pretty pedestrian. They get the job done and look okay, but if you’re like me and believe that wheels are probably the most important element, other than body design, to a vehicle’s overall exterior aesthetic, there’s a lot of opportunity for you to improve the look of your Model 3. I moved immediately to make a wheel change.

It is true that there are considerations you must address before you buy aftermarket wheels — additional cost and the possibility of poor fit or tire interference. It also worth noting that they’re frowned upon by Tesla, but that won’t stop tens of thousand of Model 3 owners from making a switch. My advice:

Order your Model 3 with standard 18-inch wheels and tires, then, if you’re so inclined, upgrade to aftermarket 19s or 20s to improve the exterior aesthetic. The EVANNEX-AG staggered wheels on my Model 3 are 20s, fit the Model 3 perfectly with no interference, and I think, give the car a very cool premium look with a muscular feel. They’ve already gotten a lot of very positive comments. This approach is somewhat more expensive than opting for the OEM 19s provided by Tesla for a $1600 premium, but I think the result is worth it.

For those that are curious, my wheels are AG M580, 20x8.5 front and 20x10 rear. I opted for Michelin PilotSport 4S tires, 245/35/20 front and 274/30/20 rear. There are other less expensive tire options. By the way, the rolling diameter for the AG 20s and tires is within one percent of OEM 19s, so there is virtually no impact on speedometer or other driving functions.

Summary. I waited almost two years for my Model 3. Overall, it’s exceeded my expectations in almost every category. But like every car, it’s not perfect. I’m confident that Tesla will remedy almost all of the quibbles and minor issues I mention in this post quickly. And for other things, we at EVANNEX will try our best to provide those of you Model 3 owners (or reservation holders) with the ability to make this near perfect car perfect for you.

Bottom line — the Model 3 was definitely worth the wait!

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Roger Pressman

*Review by Roger Pressman, author of Getting Ready for Model 3, and, founder of Electric Vehicle University. Note: If you’re located in South Florida, feel free to view this Model 3 in-person at a special event (just be sure to RSVP) this Sunday.

Tesla Model 3: The things ‘big name reviewers’ don’t talk about was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This stranger-than-fiction story has been told in various videos and one full-length book, and pieces of it have been told in thousands of print and online articles. For those who prefer a quick, easy-to-digest format, Global Energy Metals has summarized the Tesla story in a large infographic, which comes to us courtesy of Visual Capitalist.

The Tesla saga began with the low-volume Roadster, but the startup became “a real company” with its 2010 initial public stock offering (IPO), which raised some $226 million in capital and started what was to be a stomach-churning roller-coaster ride of growth.

Tesla was the first American car company to make an IPO since Ford went public in 1956.

Ford was already a large and well-known company at the time, and its IPO was the largest in Wall Street’s history. In contrast, Tesla in 2010 was a tiny niche automaker that few outside the auto industry or the environmental community had heard of.

Stock market analysts were skeptical, to say the least, and short sellers (speculators who place bets that a company’s stock will decline in price) flocked to the stock (the short interest in Tesla continues to be huge, despite the fact that the shorts have lost billions).

Despite the wild gyrations that are typical of a high-flying tech stock, the trend for TSLA has been ever upward. A mere seven years after its IPO, Tesla’s market value had surpassed Ford’s, despite the fact that the older company’s sales volume is many times greater. As of the end of 2017, Ford’s stock market capitalization was $49.9 billion, while Tesla’s had reached $52.3 billion.

A tremendous amount happened in those seven years. Tesla acquired its massive Fremont factory in a sweetheart deal with Toyota. It discontinued the Roadster and moved on to the second phase of its master plan, building two native EVs, the now-famous Model S and Model X. The two vehicles went on to win just about every award and accolade in existence, including being recognized as the “safest car ever tested” by the NHTSA and the “best car ever tested” by Consumer Reports. Over 200,000 units have been sold to date.

With partner Panasonic, Tesla built its gargantuan Gigafactory in Nevada, with the objective of reducing the cost of lithium-ion battery packs by 30%. Tesla introduced the Powerwall, a key piece of the puzzle of electric vehicles and home solar energy generation. It introduced Autopilot technology, and built out its worldwide Supercharger network. In 2016, Tesla announced the culmination of its master plan: Model 3, a mid-priced EV for the mass market. The new EV quickly racked up almost half a million pre-orders, making it arguably the most successful product launch in history.

With Model 3 now showing up on roads around the country, Elon Musk has achieved the quixotic goal that he set over a decade ago. However, the Tesla story is just beginning: in the pipeline are the Tesla Semi, a new Roadster, solar roof tiles, massive energy storage projects in Australia, Puerto Rico and elsewhere, loads more Superchargers and all kinds of nifty new features, delivered via over-the-air software updates. The future for Tesla, and for those of us who write about it, looks as bright as the California sun.

Infographic

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris

Infographic: Visual Capitalist

Tesla goes from IPO to surpassing Ford in value in just 7 years [Infographic] was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more obvious than at the big auto industry trade shows, where the spotlights shine on ever-bigger and more powerful gas engines, and the booth bunnies pose with ever-more monstrous SUVs. The plug-in vehicles are there too, but most of them are off in a corner, except for a few spaceship-like “concept cars” that everyone can make fun of.

Enrique Dans, a Professor of Innovation at IE Business School, wrote a piece a year ago bemoaning this state of affairs. In “The automobile industry is stuck in a dead end,” Dans described his dismay after attending the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit, and seeing how the industry’s idea of innovation continued to center on more horsepower and whizzier infotainment systems.

Strangely enough, no automaker was interested in paying for Professor Dans to attend this year’s NAIAS. However, as he writes in a recent Forbes article, a survey of media coverage of the show was enough to convince him that little has changed. Dans notes a major contrast between CES, where innovations having to do with automobile user interfaces and autonomy were on display, and NAIAS, where exhibitors “still seem obsessed with selling gas-guzzling cars, all of which are futuristic-looking rather than looking to the future.”

Electric and autonomous tech was featured at a satellite exhibition called Automobili-D, but Dans notes that this was kept separate from the main event, presumably for fear that the innovations on display there might infect healthy red-blooded truck buyers.

On the other hand, as even the bitter Mr. Dans acknowledges, change is in the air. The monster trucks may still be hogging the stage at the trade shows, but it’s impossible to argue that nothing has changed from a year ago. The auto industry understands that it is behind the electric curve, and plans to invest a collective $90 billion to catch up, according to Reuters. Ford recently announced that it would increase its investment in electrification to $11 billion between now and 2022 (for comparison purposes, Reuters said Ford’s total R&D budget was $7.3 billion in 2016). Similar strategies are taking shape at GM, Volkswagen and Daimler.

The industry is changing, but as Dans notes, it’s mostly reactive change, not proactive change. The legacy automakers are reacting to trends that are being set by others, notably Tesla, which has demonstrated that mainstream consumers really do want electric vehicles; and China, which aims to leverage electrification to make its auto industry a global player.

Like an aging uncle trying to look like a hipster, Big Auto is desperately trying to give the impression that it is abreast of the latest technology, but it continues to piddle around with dead ends like plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells, while setting target dates for electrification that are decades in the future. As Dans puts it, “the automobile industry is being dragged screaming and kicking into change.” It’s too soon to predict that any of the legacy automakers will go the way of a Kodak or a Blockbuster, but in terms of the industry’s reputation, Big Auto might just end up going the way of Big Tobacco.

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Charles Morris

Will Big Auto go the way of Big Tobacco? was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where does Musk invest his own money? The future. After selling PayPal and walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars, Musk took some big chances. Envisioning a future with electric cars, “Musk had invested heavily in Tesla Motors… [and] joined the board in 2004 after leading the company’s series A funding, and [he later] became CEO in 2008. By the age of 32, he had invested $70,000,000 into the company in a bid to develop, manufacture and sell high-performance, fully electric vehicles.”

But Musk’s investment in clean energy didn’t end there: “Another notable investment is in SolarCity. Founded in 2006 by Elon’s cousins, SolarCity [became] one of the largest producers of solar panels in the world. While Musk only personally got involved when his company SpaceX bought $90 million worth of stock in the venture, his involvement took the company miles ahead to a point where he decided to acquire it all together, at an estimated $2.5-$3 billion through Tesla.”

Musk also invested more into the transportation sector via: “the Boring Company. The idea behind the Boring Company is to revolutionise the way Americans travel, by connecting nearby cities with tunnels underneath. The goal with The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of tunneling while also speeding up production. Musk has hopes that The Boring Company will be the key to unlocking hyperloop travel… To fund the project, Musk [even] started selling hats. On December 16, 2017, Musk announced he had sold 42,000 Boring Company hats.”

The most out-of-this-world investment is SpaceX, “where Elon Musk has invested the most. The California-based rocket and spacecraft manufacturer was founded by Musk himself in 2002. The company, which was started with $100 million from the sale of PayPal, is now worth over $21 billion… The company has been a remarkable success, both financially and technologically, and has made space travel exciting again. At the end of last year, SpaceX had successfully landed 19 rockets and next steps are to take humans to Mars by 2024.”

Between electric cars, space travel, solar energy, and underground tunnels, Musk has accumulated billions with his bold plans to transform the future. Where will he invest next? Check out this infographic from RS Components for more…

Infographic

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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Matt Pressman

*Source: Valuewalk / Charts: Toptal / Infographic: RS Components

Elon Musk: Investing in the future [Infographic] was originally published in EVANNEX Tesla News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.