#Tesla

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.

There are no fully self-driving cars on the market. That's a simple truth. The Society of Automotive Engineers has determined that there are five levels of autonomous driving, with level five being fully autonomous. As of last year, there were no cars that went beyond Level 2 -- a few potential Level 3 systems were awaiting regulatory approval.

As I wrote a week or two ago, the outside world is finally catching on to what automotive journalists, industry analysts, and car enthusiasts have long known about Tesla. This week, two columns in The New York Times showed that well-known pundits like Farhad Manjoo and Paul Krugman are catching on/catching up.

After what seems like an eternity of supply chain troubles and other assorted headaches driving the price of new and used vehicles through the proverbial roof, Tesla – of all manufacturers – could be signaling a reversal in market trends. According to recent numbers, the average price of a used Tesla has cratered – and there’s plenty of money on the hoods of new ones, too.

Would you buy a used Tesla right now, given all of Elon Musk's controversies with Tesla and Twitter?

Would you pay $44,000 for one?

As the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. and very nearly a brand (if not an entire economy) unto itself, major news about the Ford F-series pickup is almost always going to be the most significant automotive news of a given week – but, while there is huge F-150 news this week, the Blue Oval brand is going to have to take a back seat to this shocker: For the first time in well over a decade, the cost of making an EV battery has gone UP.

Ever since Tesla boss Elon Musk took over Twitter, he's found himself mired in controversy, often of his own making.