#tesla

On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that Tesla will begin opening up portions of its proprietary charging network to all electric vehicles by the end of 2024. While the move could undermine one of the most desirable aspects of owning a Tesla, by forcing owners to share what’s likely to be the largest and most reliable charging network in the country, the EV purveyor isn’t coming away empty-handed. The arrangement comes under a new $7.5-billion federal program to electrify the nation's highways stemming from the $1-trillion infrastructure package signed in 2021.

Hertz has reportedly fallen short of its promise to buy 100,000 electric vehicles from Tesla last year. Though, taking a look at the role EVs are playing in the rental industry right now, the company might actually have made the correct decision.

There are photos on the Intertoobz of the Tesla Cybertruck testing, undisguised, in California.

Automakers would love to have you believe that they all march to their own drummers, but the reality is that the market is tied together in ways both obvious and less so. Yesterday, Ford announced it would cut prices and bump production for the Mustang Mach-E, a likely response to Tesla’s massive recent price cuts. Most other automakers are yet to respond, but Volkswagen wasted no time announcing that it would not follow Tesla and Ford with price cuts on its EVs.

Another day, another Tesla Cybertruck delay. After its reveal in 2019, CEO Elon Musk promised deliveries in late 2021, but a pandemic and global supply chain crisis threw a curve. The automaker’s next target is coming up soon, and Musk does not appear confident the company will meet that goal.

When we talk about car sales, we typically look at units sold and profit made, but automakers and analysts look at deep metrics. S&P Global recently an overview of customer retention metrics in the industry, and it showed that many brands are having trouble holding onto customers beyond a single vehicle purchase. 

VinFast, a Vietnamese electric-vehicle maker, made waves in America before any of its vehicles are even on sale. The company’s debut announcement outlined a novel battery leasing program that involved confusing pricing and terms, but it later backed away from that plan. It’s not done fiddling with numbers just yet, however, as the automaker announced a new promotions program to help it compete against EV market leader Tesla.

Regardless of how you feel about Tesla, there’s no amount of wishful thinking on anyone’s part that makes its “full self-driving” technology work as advertised. The company’s cars cannot drive themselves, do not operate without a human watching, and cannot safely manage complex situations on the road. That hasn’t stopped Tesla from trying to convince everyone, though, and as we’re now learning, its efforts haven’t always been above board.

Mr. Guy wrote this morning about Tesla and how it appears that the company's cars are being sold to rental fleets. As most of you know, large fleet sales are often seen as a negative mark on the health of a company and can also tank resale values.

There’s never any shortage of topics to discuss about Tesla – whether it’s nattering about Musk’s behavior, the company stock price, or its hands-off driving aids allegedly causing a pile-up on a busy motorway. 

This morning, a pundit tweeted they saw beaucoup de Tesla sitting idle at a Hertz location, suggesting the company may be stuffing rental channels in a bid to inflate sales. In quick succession, it then became clear that Tesla has slashed prices on all its models – big time.

Earlier today I wrote about how Tesla seems to be pushing for fewer safety guards on its so-called "Full-Self Driving" system even as it opens the program up to more "beta testers" and even as accidents involving the system and Tesla's Autopilot pile up. What I didn't mention, probably because I suspect it's common knowledge among our readership, is that there aren't federal rules governing these sorts of beta tests on public roads.

Stop me if you've heard this before -- Elon Musk tweeted something that has him and/or one of his companies in trouble with regulators.

Recently I got a bit annoyed with two New York Times columnists for seeming to be surprised that legacy automakers were pumping out EVs to compete with Tesla.

Today, it's the Washington Post's turn to annoy me.

Happy New Year, TTAC! We’re less than a full week into 2023 and there’s already a ton of EV and EV-adjacent news to cover that I was struggling to figure out where to start — that is until Stellantis took the wraps off the new Ram Revolution BEV concept truck at CES last night!

Alert readers may recall a post just prior to New Year’s about Tesla putting $7,500 cash in the frunk of several models in an attempt to juice sales before year-end. Beyond the irony of that move in the first place, after years of the company and its fanbase raking legacy automakers over the coals for doing the same thing, reports are surfacing that numbers still failed to meet expectations.