#TeslaModelS

Yesterday’s Tesla “lease offer”, (which turned out to be Elon Musk’s “big announcement”) was a classic display of Tesla’s penchant for theatrics. On the surface, the move is a smart one; most customers in the large luxury sedan segment tend to lease their cars, so Tesla’s move is nothing out of the ordinary.

Just ahead of their Q1 2013 earnings called, Tesla announced that they were profitable in the first quarter of the year, with deliveries exceeding their own targets. In addition, Tesla has also decided to discontinue the base trim of the Model S due to a lack of demand.

Tesla announced plans to pay down their $465 million dollar Department of Energy loan in 5 years or less, as Tesla seeks to achieve profitability.

If Elon Musk is still smarting about how much damage the New York Times has done to Tesla, the fledgling automaker can take comfort in the fact that the positive reviews are still pouring in.

Tesla Motors Inc. released its Fourth Quarter & Full Year 2012 Shareholder letter on Wednesday. While the letter provides a very positive outlook for Tesla’s future, there are some questions looming in the background once we dig deeper into Tesla’s balance sheet.

The drama circling around the New York Times test of the Tesla Model S doesn’t surprise me one bit. Why? Because I understand, perhaps at a deeper level than most of the motoring press, how batteries work. Perhaps that has to do with growing up in a family of engineers and scientists, but battery technology has always interested me. So when people from Phoenix came to me crying in their soup about their LEAFs in the heat and friends started wagging fingers at Tesla and the New York Times, I figured it was time for a battery reality check.

Tesla recorded a third-quarter loss of $110.8 million, versus a $65.1 million loss in the third-quarter of 2011.

Viewers of last night’s Presidential debate may have caught Mitt Romney bad-mouthing Tesla and Fisker during his remarks. Meanwhile, Tesla’s new prospectus shows that they’re hardly out of the woods yet, financially speaking.

What good is a twenty-minute test drive?

Well, when most sources are getting a ten minute test drive, a twenty-minute one is twice as good. The problem, of course, is that range is as critical to an electric car as tensile strength is to parachutes; it’s the difference between a safe arrival and a harrowing trip. Without a genuine understanding of the Tesla’s range, we can’t say for sure whether it’s a great car or not.

That doesn’t mean we can’t pass along what we did learn during those twenty minutes.

Summer is always a slow time in the industry, so what better way to boost traffic than to manufacture a controversy out of thin air about a “third rail” topic like electric cars?

Tesla Motors has almost used up funds from a Department of Energy loan program – but the startup car maker also says that they’ll start paying back the money at the end of 2012.

An article in the New York Times Dealbook blog claims that Tesla is using their customer deposits on upcoming models as a major source of cash to finance operations.

Here’s some gutsy news from one of the gutsier companies around. Tesla filed papers for an initial public offering (IPO) today, hoping to raise up to $100 million. In its Form S-1 registration statement with the SEC, the Silicon Valley start up said the stock would be issued “as soon as possible”. That part is not very surprising, coming on the heels of securing a $465 million loan from the DOE to help build the Model S. But deeper in the that filing comes a couple of juicier facts: Tesla has lost some $236 million so far, and plans to kill the Roadster, its only product on sale, in 2011.