Tesla is taking its most affordable model off the market next month. In order to “simplify the ordering process,” the automaker has decided to abandon the Model S 60 and 60D, according to its official newsletter.

It hasn’t even been a full year since the 60kWh trim returned after the more-expensive Model S 70 replaced it in 2015. Good riddance.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, by its absence, that there isn’t any advertising for Tesla products. Elon Musk is pretty good at generating buzz without having to pay for it. For example, a number of media organizations recently ran the news that Musk took the advice given to him by a fifth-grade girl — via her dad’s Twitter account — on how to publicize his electric cars.

Bria Loveday had a school assignment involving writing and mailing a letter to a noted person and, the way the story goes, she chose Musk. In her letter she noted that while Tesla doesn’t advertise, a number of Tesla enthusiasts have produced their own entertaining commercials for the EV maker, and Bria suggested that Tesla hold a contest for the best one. The winner would get his or her ad aired and then receive some kind of prize like a free year’s worth of supercharging at a Tesla station.

We’ve covered a number of accidents involving Tesla’s nifty but not fully-autonomous Autopilot system already — some unfortunate, one fatal, but mostly just embarrassing.

This video, shot months after Tesla founder Elon Musk hammered home the technology’s limitations as investigations swirled, shows a crash that falls into the latter category. It also perfectly showcases the technological and human failings that have led to Autopilot-related crashes.

After posting a profitable fall quarter, Tesla returned to spending more than it made. However, its fourth quarter losses, announced on Wednesday, were substantially less than originally assumed by analysts. The electric carmaker’s stock price continued to climb during the final three months of 2016, despite losing $448 million from its operations.

Tesla has been throwing a lot of money at projects and acquisitions. It recently purchased SolarCity and Grohmann Engineering, so going into the red was to be expected. However, the dark cloud looming in the distance isn’t related to capital — it’s about production.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk knows a unionized workforce would add another variable to his lofty, carefully crafted production plans, and an unpredictable one at that: labor strife.

Until now, the electric automaker’s top boss has fended off the possibility in a progressive-sounding way, but a simmering unionization movement, which reared its head this week, shows no signs of abating. Since the appearance of a scathing blog post written by a Tesla assembly plant worker, Musk has found himself on the defensive. A paid union agitator, Musk claimed, wrote the post to rile employees. Then the UAW jumped into the fray.

Now, it’s one big battle. Musk likely wishes a recently introduced bill to amend the National Labor Relations Act was on his side.

Some employees at Tesla Inc.’s Fremont, California factory have been moving ahead with efforts to unionize. Fronting that campaign is Jose Moran, who claims to have worked at the plant for the last four years. He and other disgruntled Tesla employees have reached out to the United Automobile Workers, claiming they work long hours for low pay under unsafe conditions as the company pursues aggressive production deadlines.

While Tesla’s CEO has responded with his own claim that Moran was paid by the UAW to join his company and proselytize for a union, the organization promptly refuted that suggestion by accusing Tesla of spreading dreaded “fake news.”

Tesla is planning to halt vehicle production for one week in February to prepare for Model 3 pre-production, which the company says will begin February 20.

According to Reuters, the short-term shutdown of its Fremont, California assembly plant will give Tesla time to add capacity to its paint shop as it plans for full-scale production of the Model 3.

In the world of corporate automotive name changes, this one isn’t on the same level as, say, anything involving Chrysler over the past 10 years.

Tesla Motors, builder and purveyor of tech-laden ecomobiles, isn’t the same fledgling company it was when the Tesla Roadster was still a hazy promise a few could conceive of an automaker offering home energy products on the side.

Now that its business umbrella covers both vehicles and the offerings of recently acquired SolarCity, the company needs to change things up. Well, just the name, really.

The former director of Tesla’s Autopilot program has choice words for his former employer.

Sterling Anderson is being sued by Tesla for stealing confidential information, which he allegedly put to use at a new autonomous vehicle start-up. According to Bloomberg, the electric automaker isn’t happy about his attempts to hire away Tesla employees, either.

In his response to the suit, Anderson doesn’t have very nice things to say about Tesla.

2016 wasn’t just a disappointing year for celebrities.

After stating that it would place between 80,000 and 90,000 vehicles in the hands of adoring customers before year’s end, Tesla failed to clear the delivery bar it had set for itself. While production numbers crossed the threshold, 2016 deliveries fell short, numbering only 76,230.

Still, the electric automaker — which has set much loftier production goals for the near future — doesn’t seem too concerned.

Tesla announced Friday that it will impose an additional fee of forty cents per minute on vehicles left idle in a Supercharger space for more than five minutes.

The new expense is apparently another attempt by the company to clamp down on the habitual misuse of its charging network. Since many Supercharging locations are literally parking spots and a Model S takes longer to “refuel” than a gas-powered car, it makes sense that Tesla drivers might wander off to search for coffee.

For a company that prides itself on clean performance, a massive lawsuit and public claims of less-than-advertised power wasn’t great PR.

Tesla just swept an annoying bit of litigation into the dustbin of history by promising a different kind of green to 126 Norwegian owners, all the while claiming it did nothing wrong.

With lengthy repair times, parts shortages, and colossal distances between locations, Tesla is having real difficulties effectively servicing its current customer base as complaints begin to mount.

While certainly unfortunate news, this will be nothing compared to what it will face when the upcoming Model 3 starts needing the EV equivalent of an oil change.

Tesla’s free Supercharger network was one of the best parts of being a Tesla owner. Free electricity and the lofty social status that comes with EV ownership? What’s not to like? Well, the the company just announced it’s about to make a “change to the economics of Supercharging.”

After issuing emails urging customers to stop hogging the network last year, Tesla has decided only to allow certain early adopters to make use of the fast-juicing power grid free of charge. Meanwhile, all customers purchasing vehicles after January 2017 will have to pay up.

Tesla’s Model S 60 has come and gone only to show up again as the “bargain” Tesla, even though it’s actually just a cheaper Model S 75 with a stingy computer.

Now, inside information suggests it’ll be going up in price even if you decided not to add the company’s cool new transparent roof. With the automaker seemingly hoping to squeeze every last buck out of its lineup, the top-flight versions of both of its models have now been propelled into the pricing stratosphere.

My wife and I visited the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago. Our plan was open-ended and started with a one-way ticket to Oakland and two nights at the Westin in Union Square. Since parking in San Francisco is expensive, we decided to forgo renting a car at the airport and took an Uber into the city.

After exploring the city for a bit, we decided to head up north and visit some wineries. One of the more convenient options to rent a car for the day is the new Audi On Demand service, so we picked up an A4 and headed north.

A severe head-on crash in Indianapolis last night claimed the lives of two people — but because it’s a Tesla, the story made national news.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the Model S impacted a tree, throwing debris 150 yards and starting a fire that consumed the vehicle. This isn’t a story about whether the vehicle or its electronic systems may have caused the crash — police made it clear that speed was a factor.

Rather, the aftermath of this crash shows what firefighters face when the lithium-ion battery pack in an electric car catches fire.

Are you an absolutely shameless individual who is sick to death of walking and loves gimmicks? Ford has you covered with an entry from what it has dubbed a “Cult of Disruption Innovation.”

That, there’s a certain popular Japanese vehicle built in Canada that won’t be going to Europe (thanks to the United States), Tesla is now inexplicably in the glass making business, and minivans are in danger of going seatless in the event of a supplier strike… after the break!

Volkswagen’s expensive diesel emissions scandal has forced cost cutting on anything that isn’t electric and its rally team is next on the chopping block. Quitting while ahead is ideal but abandoning a program due to financial woes and public shame after a hot streak doesn’t exactly smack of going out on top.

That, Toyota invents a box that allows anyone to use your car, Tesla’s zero-emission credits may soon be worth less, and Ford makes peace with its Canadian autoworkers at the buzzer… after the break!

Bob Lutz has worked as an executive for General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and BMW at various points in his storied life. Saying he’s a man who is well-versed in the automotive industry would be a colossal understatement. And that expertise has led him to the assertion that a certain manufacturer is a cult led by a false god.

That, Audi has abandoned its wildly successful career in endurance racing for something far less popular, Ford takes a financial body blow, and Volkswagen Group continues to suffer with Porsche as its sugar daddy… after the break!

Yesterday, after a brief delay and weeks of teasing, Tesla Motors said it will equip all of its new vehicles with the hardware needed for fully autonomous driving. Starting yesterday, the technology comes standard on every model, including the upcoming Model 3 sedan.

But that doesn’t mean you can use it anytime soon.

The Los Angeles Police Department loves the idea of Tesla patrol cars so much, it’s rekindling a dream it put on ice earlier this year.

The city’s coffers haven’t suddenly become flush with cash, and a previous testing cycle saw the LAPD cross the automaker off its list of potential electric vehicle suppliers. Still, it looks like the idea of a black-and-white Tesla Model S with Ludicrous Mode is just too great to pass up.

Mini has revealed what form its new hybrid will take.

That, the e-tron name lives on in Audi’s first dedicated electric SUV, Unifor squares off with Ford, and hype man Elon Musk reschedules his alleged big announcement … after the break!

Sparks flew when Tesla teamed up with Panasonic to produce battery packs at the automaker’s Nevada Gigafactory. Of course, it helped that the Japanese battery maker brought $1.6 billion of its own money to the table.

After it tested the waters and liked what it saw, Tesla has now inked an agreement with Panasonic to bring jobs — hopefully long-lasting ones — to Buffalo, New York.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk vigorously defended his Autopilot system when accident reports rolled in earlier this year. Even when a fatal Florida crash was blamed on a temporarily blinded Autopilot, Musk assured citizens, Tesla owners, regulators and everyone else that the semi-autonomous driving system made his vehicles the safest things on the road.

Just do the math, Musk told the skeptics. Well, someone finally has.

To help make its promise of producing 500,000 vehicles per year a reality, Tesla Motors wants the city of Fremont’s approval to nearly double the size of its assembly plant.

The expansion plan comes as the electric automaker’s CEO promises something unexpected next week.

The brief uptick in share price Tesla enjoyed after beating production estimates this week was swiftly erased by a newly critical Goldman Sachs Group.

The investment bank downgraded the company on Thursday, sending its stock back down the hillside, Bloomberg reports. It’s bad news for CEO Elon Musk’s fundraising plans.

Since General Motors showed the Chevrolet Bolt EV Concept at the 2015 North American International Auto Show, the company has been adamant the car would compete with Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 in terms of pricing, range and certainly in terms of consumer adoption.

The Teslarati, on the other hand, don’t seem to agree.

Tesla’s stated modus operandi since inception is “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.” But for fans of the Silicon Valley brand the M.O has been twisted into Tesla or bust, leading to straw man arguments and arbitrary analysis.

Electrek’s latest Tesla versus Chevy op-ed by Fred Lambert is a perfect example.

A materials engineer fired by Tesla Motors earlier this year is suing the automaker, claiming that his age led to the dismissal.

The discrimination suit filed by Thomas Flessner, 69, paints a picture of a Logan’s Run-like corporate atmosphere that values youth above all else, Fusion reports. It’s the latest in a steady stream of complaints about the youth-focused culture within the tech industry.

After a second quarter that was anything but hot, Tesla Motors surprised analysts by delivering 24,500 vehicles in the third quarter — a 10,000-unit jump over the previous tally.

The healthy delivery numbers allow CEO Elon Musk to stick to his promise of 50,000 deliveries in the second half of this year, reports Bloomberg. Still, the production boost failed to buoy the company’s stock, meaning Musk’s fundraising plans won’t be easy.

After its two-year-long bid to gain a sales foothold in Michigan hit a brick wall, Tesla has filed a lawsuit against the state.

The suit, filed in a U.S. District Court in Michigan, targets governor Rick Snyder and other top officials, Reuters reports.

Electric-vehicle buyers in Norway enjoy hefty perks, from tax exemptions to free parking, but not everything is rosy in the world’s EV-friendliest country.

A group of 125 Norwegians has sued American automaker Tesla, alleging that the company’s Model S P85D with “Insane Mode” is simply not fast enough, Bloomberg reports.

Tesla’s dream of establishing a sales footprint in America’s auto manufacturing heartland is dead, at least for now, after Michigan lawmakers slammed the door on its direct sales bid.

The electric automaker’s application for a dealership license was denied after state representatives claimed it violated a law specifically designed to keep companies like Tesla out, The Detroit News reports.

Tesla Motors isn’t backing down in its public falling out with Mobileye N.V., and neither is its former supplier.

This week has seen a constant back-and-forth between the two companies after Mobileye claimed it broke ties with Tesla after becoming concerned about the safety of its Autopilot system.

Clearly, it was a messy divorce.

It’s common knowledge that Tesla vehicles store and transmit data back to the company’s Fremont, California home base, but a hacker working on a wrecked Model S just discovered something startling.

In an interview published by Inverse (h/t to Hybrid Cars), North Carolina computer programmer Jason Hughes claims that Tesla’s Autopilot system actually records video. While working on a center display unit from a wrecked Model S, Hughes found footage of the vehicle’s crash.

The death of a young Chinese man in a Tesla this past January could be the first fatality linked to a malfunctioning Autopilot system.

Tesla claims it is investigating the crash as the company faces a lawsuit filed by the man’s family, Reuters reports. Unlike a fatal Florida crash in May, this collision has video evidence.

Earlier this summer, headlines flew fast and furious around Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot driving system, and the often hazy crashes associated with it.

Now, the electric automaker plans to tweak the system to cut down on driver misuse, according to a report in Elektrek.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk kept journalists waiting for three hours today before revealing his company’s newest product, which he teased in an earlier tweet.

As many expected, the electric automaker will now offer P100D versions of its Model S and Model X vehicles, with the sedan version becoming the third-fastest accelerating production car in history, and the quickest currently on the market.

Click “pause” on that Model S vs. supercar/fighter jet video, Tesla aficionados.

The newest Model S P90D will outrun last year’s top-shelf Tesla while in Ludicrous mode, according to acceleration tests published by Drag Times.

Michigan doesn’t want its residents to order a Tesla, but it sees no problem in owning $72 million in stock to bolster its state retirement fund.

According to The Detroit News, the Michigan Department of Treasury bought a further $48 million in Tesla shares in the second quarter of this year, boosting its stake to 339,623 shares — more than triple the amount it owned in March. Meanwhile, Michigan won’t budge on laws that prevent Tesla from selling vehicles in the state.

In his Master Plan, Part Deux, some of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s visions make a lot of sense, like a compact SUV based on the Model 3 platform, and a pickup truck, which will presumably have more than enough torque to haul around a big load (and plenty of space for a big battery pack).

That’s not at all what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about some of the more speculative parts of the Musk vision: the self-driving vision. ( I first wrote about some of the dystopian aspects of self-driving cars for TTAC in 2010.)

Musk wants you, the owner of a Tesla, to click a button and have your self-driving car go off and Uber itself during the day while you’re at work, earning you money. It will come back to you at the end of the day, ready for you to use again. This vision is going to have a very harsh collision with reality.

The dialogue from Tesla wasn’t all rainbows and puppies this week.

In oddly coordinated diatribes, CEO Elon Musk and his vice-president of business development took off the soft driving gloves and laid into their competition and the country’s regulators. The message? Put up, pay up, or shut up.

The Tesla Model S is neither new nor surprising anymore. When the electric sedan entered the market in 2012, it shattered perceptions of electric cars and proved electric motoring viable.

Since then, Tesla has established itself as the go-to brand for geeks and early adopters. We’ve driven the Tesla Model S before, so there’s no need to talk about its most obvious features. But recent events make this a great time to talk about its second-most-important feature: Autopilot.

Is Tesla’s autonomous system any good? Can it be dangerous? How far is it from being truly autonomous? And, besides that, how did the Model S improve over the last few years?

If Elon Musk’s tweets are accurate (and who can prove that they aren’t?), the Tesla CEO plans to build Millennials and hippies their dream ride at some point in the foreseeable future.

As per tradition, Musk took to Twitter to release snippets of detail about his sprawling (but vague) 10-year “master plan,” including what to expect from the automaker’s next two models. One proposed model is a no-brainer, but the other would be worshipped at a counterculture love-in.

To bastardize an old Dodge slogan, if you’re willing to devote your life to sustainable driving and ditch your electricity provider, you could be Tesla material.

The electric automaker announced a deal with solar company SolarCity today — an all-stock agreement worth $2.6 billion. Acquiring the nation’s largest rooftop solar provider gives Tesla CEO Elon Musk the top-to-bottom green company he always wanted, but it opens the company up to new risks.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s drive to develop and market new driving technology is well known, but former employees say he brushed aside their concerns about the safety of the company’s Autopilot system.

Several employees, including a former Autopilot engineer, told CNN Money that their concerns fell on deaf ears, as Musk always reverted back to a “bigger picture” position on safety.

The National Transportation Safety Board didn’t assign any blame in its initial report into the fatal May 7 crash of a Tesla Model S, but did confirm new details.

The agency claims Joshua Brown’s vehicle was in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash, and was travelling above the 65 mile per hour speed limit before colliding with a tractor-trailer, according to Reuters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vision for his company’s future covers all the automotive bases, from personal vehicles to commercial trucks and transit fleets.

In a blog post on Tesla’s website, Musk spelled out the steps of his “Master Plan, Part Deux” — a long-term update of his previous decade-long business plan. With the Model 3 on the way in late 2017, the old plan has come to an end, so the company’s founder is looking for other things to power with electricity.

Tesla’s Autopilot system is many things to many people — an automated folk devil to safety and consumer advocates, or a nice thing to have on a long drive ( according to Jack Baruth) — but it isn’t the cause of a July 1 rollover crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The automaker’s CEO took to Twitter yesterday to claim that the Model X driven by a Michigan man wasn’t even in Autopilot mode at the time of the crash. Elon Musk said that data uploaded from the vehicle shows that Autopilot wasn’t activated, and added that the “crash would not have occurred if it was on.”

Tesla then released those digital logs to the media.

Getting a good price for a used Tesla is now solely up to its owner, after the automaker discontinued a program that allows three-year-old vehicles to be bought back for 50 percent of the purchase price.

Tesla dumped the program on July 1, Reuters reports, allowing the company earmarked for the program for other purposes. The program was created to assure would-be owners of a basic resale value after the Model S entered the marketplace.

Just as it did recently with the Model S, Tesla just took its Model X SUV in for a battery and price haircut, resulting in a new base model.

The automaker’s website now shows the availability of a 60D version of the all-wheel-drive utility, meaning a 60 kilowatt battery and an EPA estimated 200 miles of range. The battery shrinkage makes the new model the shortest-ranged Tesla in the stable, but it also undercuts the price of the formerly base 75D by $9,000.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has no plans to remove the Autopilot feature from his vehicles, despite demands from safety and consumer groups.

Musk told the Wall Street Journal that lack of education is the problem, not the technology behind the semi-autonomous driving system. The executive’s comments come after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration delivered a lengthy list of questions to Tesla as part of its investigation into the fatal May 7 crash of a Model S.

Every year, Pied Piper Management sends phony car buyers into dealerships to rank how much deal-landing prowess their salespeople can muster.

This year’s dealership effectiveness rankings put a number of high-end automakers at the top, but the industry’s most innovative company sits at the very bottom for the second year in a row. According to Pied Piper’s Prospect Satisfaction Index, Tesla Motors ranks last by a mile.

Why does an automaker that builds fast vehicles have so little hustle in the sales department?

Was the fatal May crash of a Tesla Model S driving in Autopilot mode significant enough for the automaker to inform its shareholders? The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to find out.

The federal agency recently opened an investigation into Tesla to determine if the automaker broke securities laws by not notifying investors of the crash, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Lately, it seems the only headlines written about Tesla Motors are brimming with controversy, so wonderCEO Elon Musk decided to change the channel the best way he knew how — by generating 100 megawatts of hype.

As he’s known to do, Musk took to Twitter last night to tease something big. Well, a looming announcement of something big. But something that could change the world. But no details just yet. In typical Bond villain-esque fashion, Musk tweeted, “Working on Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2. Hoping to publish later this week.”

The National Transportation Safety Board plans to investigate the fatal May 7 Tesla crash to see if the trend of increased automation in driving functions has a dark side, Bloomberg reports.

Already, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into the incident and the role the vehicle’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system played in the crash, but the NTSB has a broader scope in mind. As vehicles increasingly rely on electronic aids for safety, drivers could be letting down their guard.

America’s highest profile consumer advocacy group is calling out Tesla CEO Elon Musk for waiting a month to disclose the potential risk posed to owners by the company’s Autopilot technology.

In a letter to Musk, Consumer Watchdog demands that Tesla sideline its Autopilot system until it can be proven safe, criticizes the CEO for side-stepping blame in several crashes, and accuses him of putting the public at risk.

Tesla’s bad news week has now spilled over into a second, after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a second investigation into a Tesla crash involving the semi-autonomous Autopilot system.

According to Reuters, the agency wants to know if the Autopilot on the Model X involved in a July 1 rollover was activated at the time of the incident, and if it played any role in the crash. The driver of the Model X, a Detroit-area man who wasn’t seriously injured, claims he was using Autopilot when the vehicle left its lane and hit a guardrail on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

While the NHTSA looks into this crash and the fatal May 7 collision that took the life of a Tesla owner in Florida, the automaker is engaged in a nasty war of words with Fortune magazine over two articles it claims are misleading and false.

Electric automaker Tesla Motors has collected more than 400,000 deposits from customers for its 2018 Model 3 sedan, despite having little more than rough renderings of the car to show prospects. This is a remarkable achievement that speaks to its groundbreaking products and the cult-like following of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

People standing in line to put down deposits and then be willing to wait for a hot car is not without precedent. I sold Honda automobiles during the 1980s and the similarities to today’s Teslamania is striking.

Memo to Musk: If you can indeed increase your production five-fold in two years, I am sure you will move 400,000 Model 3s, but most of them won’t go to today’s deposit holders.

Allow me to explain. The scene was Benson Honda in San Antonio. The year was 1984 …

A rollover crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike doesn’t generate many headlines, unless it’s a Tesla Model X operating in Autopilot mode.

After last week’s revelation of a fatal May crash involving Autopilot, another incident involving the semi-autonomous technology is the last thing the automaker needs, but that’s what happened on July 1, according to the Detroit Free Press.

A Model X owned by Southfield, Michigan art dealer Albert Scaglione crashed outside of Bedford, Pennsylvania, about halfway between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. The vehicle, which the owner said was in Autopilot mode, left its lane, hit the guardrail, rebounded across both lanes and overturned after striking the concrete median.

Neither the owner or his son-in-law were seriously hurt in the crash.