#Tesla

Is the long-awaited, stripped-down $35,000 Tesla Model 3 profitable? Company CEO Elon Musk won’t say, brushing off the question during a late Thursday conference call.

“Yeah, we’re not going to talk about that. Next question,” said Musk, who last fall warned that releasing the lower-priced car prematurely could sink the company. The nearly three-year wait period for the 220-mile electric sedan saw a constantly evolving end date, though the anticipated March deliveries jibes with Musk’s October prediction of four to six months.

What doesn’t jibe is Musk’s Thursday admittance that, after two profitable quarters, his company will likely sink back into the red.

The $35,000 Model 3 is here. Fittingly, perhaps, it’s three years late.

Tesla has promised a $35,000 version of the Model 3 since announcing the car in 2016, but the company focused on more-expensive variants at first to help get the model off the ground without tanking the company in the process. It needed the large profit margins from the higher-priced Model 3 to help the company turn a profit for back-to-back quarters for the first time.

Now you’ll be able to buy multiple versions of a Standard Range trim. The base version of which will be available for $35,000 and have a 130-mph top speed and a range of 220 miles. Zero to sixty should take 5.6 seconds.

Less than a year after bestowing a coveted “Recommended” label on Tesla’s Model 3, Consumer Reports is taking is back. You can just imagine the outrage in the online Teslaverse.

Consumer Reports’ secret ownership by shadowy oil execs and General Motors notwithstanding (this is clearly false, don’t sue us), the retraction of what amounts to a “buy this, you probably won’t be sorry” label is a blow to the automaker, and CR claims it’s all Tesla’s fault.

At least Tesla can say it isn’t alone in the recommendation withdrawal camp.

There’s a study you should read, and it delivers black eyes to both Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

You probably remember the fatal crash of a Tesla in Mountain View, California last March, a crash that occurred as the victim’s car cruised along in Autopilot mode. Unexpectedly, the vehicle steered itself out of a lane, impacting a highway divider at high speed. Once again, the effectiveness and safety of Tesla’s Autopilot system came under scrutiny as Tesla scrambled to defend itself. The automaker pointed to the findings of a 2017 NHTSA report released in the wake of a fatal crash from 2016. That study claimed the automaker’s Autosteer system, when introduced as part of the Autopilot suite of automated features, lowered Tesla crash rates by 40 percent.

Don’t believe everything you read, says R.A. Whitfield, director of Quality Control Systems. Whitfield filed a lawsuit and waited nearly two years to get to the bottom of that 40 percent figure.

The police seem convinced a “confused” Autopilot system caused a single-vehicle Tesla crash on a New Jersey highway Sunday, but one has to wonder about the driver’s attention level.

Thus far in 2019, price changes at Tesla have occurred with roughly the same frequency as storm warnings in the Northeast. The electric automaker has now dialed back pricing on its Model 3 for the second time this (very young) year, and the third time in recent months, with the company’s CEO claiming the long-promised $35,000 sedan is now here — in a way.

Fancy math required.

Volkswagen has agreed to spend $2 billion improving the United States’ adolescent charging infrastructure over the next 10 years as part its diesel-related agreement with federal regulators. As part of that arrangement, the automaker established Electrify America as the subsidiary responsible for most of the leg work.

While it invests heavily in the nation’s EV charging network and drops a few million here and there to raise ecological awareness and encourage the adoption of zero-emission vehicles, it also has to be careful to remain brand neutral.

None of Electrify America’s programs can be seen as catering to VW, resulted in some interesting bedfellows. Case in point, Electrify America just announced plans to install Tesla Inc battery storage packs at more than 100 charging stations across the U.S.

Tesla’s stock price took a tumble after CEO Elon Musk announced, at the end of a Thursday night earnings call, that Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja was heading into retirement.

Ahuja joined Tesla in 2008, 15 years after first joining Ford and becoming CFO of its AutoAlliance joint venture with Mazda. He then served in an identical role for Ford’s southern Africa region. At Tesla, Ahuja returned to the CFO role after a two-year retirement hiatus from 2015 to 2017.

Ahuja’s successor doesn’t have quite as lengthy a CV to draw from. Twenty-two years younger than his predecessor and just six years out of business school, Zach Kirkhorn’s rise to the CFO spot has some analysts rattled.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk waded through his company’s entire fourth-quarter earnings call before springing the news that two-time chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja is headed for retirement. It seems likely that Ahuja’s second retirement will be permanent.

Ahuja presided over a year Musk called the most challenging in Tesla’s history. Previous statements from the CEO suggested a second consecutive profitable quarter, and that’s just what Tesla announced last night: a $139.5 million profit in Q4 2018. That’s down from the previous quarter’s $311 million, but far and away better than Q4 2017’s $675 million loss.

It’s also a first for Tesla.

Ever since Ford discontinued the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, it’s become much harder to watch out for cops. Initially, you just had to keep tabs on any Dodge Charger in dark paint, but that quickly evolved into drivers becoming suspicious of every monochrome Explorer, Taurus, Durango, Tahoe, or Fusion Hybrid on the road as law enforcement began adopting the models for official use.

A police department in Fremont, California has added a Tesla that list, garnering tons of media attention in the process. However, after looking into the story, it seems Fremont is only testing a single, second-hand Tesla Model S 85D it purchased a year ago to see if the model is fit for service. Considering this is the same city where Tesla manufactures the vehicle, one would think the Fremont Police could have worked out some kind of deal with the factory. However, what interests us — and probably the department — most is figuring whether or not the 2014 Model S can actually hack it beneath the thin blue line.

The automaker may have worked out production bugs and finally turned a profit late last year, but 2019 is off to a rocky start for Tesla. In an email to employees Friday, CEO Elon Musk said he’ll thin the company’s full-time ranks by 7 percent, warning of a “very difficult” road ahead.

The news comes hot on the heels of a slew of cost-cutting measures, including the elimination of various trim configurations and this month’s culling of 75D base models — a move that leaves only the top-flight 100D versions of the Model S and X in Tesla’s stable. Thursday brought word of the scrapping of company’s long-running customer referral program, prompting tears in the Tesla-boosting blogosphere.

All of this throws Musk’s promise of a true “people’s car” by this summer into doubt.

Shortly after General Motors announced its decision to end assembly work at two car-producing U.S. plants, Tesla CEO Elon Musk floated the possibility of a Silicon Valley rescue of either Detroit-Hamtramck or Lordstown Assembly.

Talks between GM and Tesla did occur, it turns out, but GM CEO Mary Barra doesn’t seem to think much of the chances of laid-off employees finding salvation in a Tesla intervention.

There will be no Ace of Base prizes for the Tesla Model X or Model S in 2019. Just days after promising to cut prices of all its cars by $2,000 in response to the company blowing through its federal tax credits faster than a record producer with a bag of high-test cocaine, the company’s Chief Executive Tweeter has announced the discontinuation of the 75D X and S models.

This is in addition to Tesla cleaving off a number of color and interior trim choices last year. At the time, it was speculated the company was doing so in an effort to streamline production.

So Elon giveth, so Elon taketh away.

During my wayward youth in the Aughts/early this decade, a friend of mine decided it would be funny if he got me involved in a weird little bar game called “icing.” The idea of this game was to order your friend a Smirnoff Ice surreptitiously and/or hide it somewhere, and when he received the drink he must drop to one knee and chug it. There may be other variations to the game, but that’s all I recall.

Like many things that happened culturally during that decade, icing was quite stupid. Stupid as it was, it was also relatively harmless. The “iced” got a free drink out of it, even if it was a terrible vodka drink, and everyone else got a laugh. The late Aughts were such innocent times.

Fast-forward a decade and now there’s a new type of “icing” afoot, though it’s now called “ ICE-ing.” It has nothing to do with booze, but it still involves bros.

The calendar reads 2019, meaning new Tesla customers can’t hope to wrangle more than $3,750 in EV tax credits from the feds — a figure that’s half as much as the incentive enjoyed by buyers up until New Year’s Eve. Of course, you may find yourself living in a state that’s happy to hand out some of its own cash. If so, lucky you.

Looking to soak up some of the difference, Tesla announced a price cut on all models Wednesday. Going forward, or at least until CEO Elon Musk decides otherwise, Tesla is shaving $2,000 from sticker prices across the board — including on the current cheapest model, which recently saw a price bump.