Electric Cars

Tesla
At Tesla Motors’ annual shareholder meeting and Battery Day 2020 event, CEO Elon Musk announced that the electric automobile manufacturer is preparing to release a private beta of the “full self-driving version” of its Autopilot driver-aid software in the coming months.”It’s kind of hard for people to judge the progress of Autopilot,” Musk told a crowd of shareholders present at the event, each social distancing in their own Tesla Model 3, drive-in style. “I’m driving a bleeding edge, alpha build of Autopilot, so I sort of have insight into what is going on.”

For more like this
Subscribe to the Roadshow newsletter, receive notifications and see related stories on CNET.

Musk went on to explain how Tesla’s engineers recently had to overhaul major parts of the Autopilot, including a rethinking of how the system sees the world.”We had to do a fundamental rewrite of the entire Autopilot software stack… We’re now labeling 3D video, which is hugely different from when we were previously labeling single 2D images,” Musk explained, referring to the way the Autopilot software understands what the objects it sees with its eight cameras are, and how it should react to them. “We’re now labeling entire video segments, taking all cameras simultaneously and labeling that. The sophistication of the neural net of the car and the overall logic of the car is improved dramatically.”Musk hinted that drivers may get a chance to experience this more sophisticated version of Autopilot soon. Tesla shareholders showed their socially distanced approval by honking the horns of their individual Model 3s.
Tesla
“I think we’ll hopefully release a private beta of Autopilot — the full self-driving version of autopilot — in, I think a month or so? And then people will really understand the magnitude of the change,” said Musk adding, “It’s profound. You’ll see what it’s like, it’s amazing.”Attendees showed their approval for Musk’s promise by honking the horns of their safety bubbles.We’ll be keeping an eye out for this next-generation of Autopilot over the next few weeks. In the meantime, check out the rest of our coverage of Tesla Battery Day 2020 for more announcements and breaking news.  More

Tesla
At Tesla’s Battery Day event on Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk announced that the long-rumored Model S Plaid is now available to order, with deliveries beginning in late 2021. The Model S Plaid has its fair share of superlatives in a seemingly obvious dig at rivals like the Porsche Taycan and the recently revealed Lucid Air: A range of over 520 miles, a top speed of over 200 mph, a 0-to-60-mph time of under 2 seconds and a quarter-mile time of under 9 seconds. Tesla says the Plaid powertrain uses three electric motors and has more than 1,100 horsepower, but there aren’t many more details beyond that. Musk previously said the Plaid would set a new lap record at the Nürburgring, and prototypes were spied last year circling the track with enhanced aerodynamic bits, larger wheels with sticky tires, big brakes and other modifications. Musk has also said the Plaid car would have a battery pack larger than 100 kilowatt hours and mark the return of the Model S’ rear-facing third row of seats, although the latter seems to not yet have come true.
The only thing more insane than Ludicrous is Plaid. Arrives late 2021— Tesla (@Tesla) September 22, 2020

During the announcement a short video played showing a Plaid prototype with those same aero enhancements at the Laguna Seca race track. Musk said the Tesla team was at the track over the weekend and set a time of 1 minute, 30.3 seconds, adding that they expect to be able to chop a few more seconds off that time. That would make it one of the quickest production cars around Laguna Seca — of all time.

Now playing:
Watch this:

New Tesla Battery tech reveal event in 27 minutes

27:39

The Model S Plaid is up on Tesla’s configurator and while it seems like the car looks the same as a standard Model S, the configurator might not be fully updated until the car is fully revealed. The Plaid starts at $141,100 including a $1,200 destination charge, and options include extra-cost paint colors, larger 21-inch wheels, different interior schemes and Tesla’s $8,000 “Full Self-Driving” option.Battery Day is still ongoing, so we’ll update this story if we learn anything new about the Tesla Model S Plaid.

Get today’s top news and reviews collected for you. More

Today, the least expensive Tesla in the lineup is the approximately $38,000 Model 3.
Tesla
Ultraperformance $140,000 Plaid models and fancy self-driving tech are cool (and certainly what brings all the fanboys to Tesla’s yard,) but I think that the only way electric cars will ever have a shot at replacing the combustion engine type is to bring the price way down. Fortunately, it seems Tesla CEO Elon Musk also knows this and he’s “confident” that the electric car company can build a $25,000 electric vehicle in the next few years.At Tesla’s annual shareholder’s meeting and Battery Day 2020 event, Musk and Drew Baglino, Tesla senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, outlined an extensive plan to reduce the cost of battery and electric vehicle manufacturing with changes to nearly every aspect of how Tesla builds cars.

For more like this
Subscribe to the Roadshow newsletter, receive notifications and see related stories on CNET.

Tesla estimates that a 14% reduction in cost per kilowatt-hour can be achieved with its new “biscuit-tin” battery cell design and a further 18% from its new smaller, more efficient Terafactory manufacturing design. By streamlining how the batteries are put together, Tesla estimates that it will be able to manufacture 100 gigawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity by 2022 — that’s on top of the cells that it buys from suppliers LG and Panasonic — stretching to 3,000 GWh (3 terawatt-hours) of production capacity by 2030.
Tesla
Further gains from new silicon anode chemistry, innovations in lithium recycling and nickel cathode chemistry and a new “structural battery construction” technique — which also leads to a lighter, stiffer EV chassis — add up to an estimated 56% total reduction in cost per kWh. The benefit is an estimated 54% increase in vehicle range from the same energy capacity and lower manufacturing cost. And the company is sure that it can pass that reduced cost onto the consumer.”What does this mean for our future products? We’re confident that long-term we can design and manufacture a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle,” Musk stated to the honking applause of his socially distanced audience, viewing the presentation drive-in-style in individual Tesla Model 3 sedans — the automaker’s current approximately $38,000 affordable electric sedan. It’s worth noting Musk hinted at a much cheaper EV in the past already, so it’s not the first time a cheap Tesla’s been on his mind. This time, though, it sounds like the program has some legs.Tesla shareholders showed their socially distanced approval by honking the horns of their individual Model 3s.
Tesla
“Our first car was an expensive sports car and then a slightly less expensive sedan and then the mass-market premium Model 3 and Model Y,” continued Musk. “But in the early years, it was always our goal to make an affordable electric car. I think probably in about three years from now we can make a very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that’s also fully autonomous.”This is maybe not the most bombastic claim that Elon has made (or the most controversial), but the impending arrival of EVs with usable range and compelling value is probably the most exciting bit of news today for fans of the intersection of affordable cars and electric ones. During the course of his presentation, Musk also stated a goal of eventually building 20 million cars per year — a number derived from a desire to replace “a least 1% of the total vehicle fleet on Earth.”Of course, Musk then capped off the show with a sizzle reel highlighting the ultraperformance Model S Plaid’s “beyond Ludicrous” track time at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. I suppose you’ve gotta finish with a bang.

Now playing:
Watch this:

2021 Lucid Air vs. Tesla Model S: EVs go head-to-head

3:48

First published Sept. 22. More

Today, the least expensive Tesla in the lineup is the approximately $38,000 Model 3.
Tesla
Ultraperformance $140,000 Plaid models and fancy self-driving tech are cool (and certainly what brings all the fanboys to Tesla’s yard,) but I think that the only way electric cars will ever have a shot at replacing the combustion engine type is to bring the price way down. Fortunately, it seems Tesla CEO Elon Musk also knows this and he’s “confident” that the electric car company can build a $25,000 electric vehicle in the next few years.At Tesla’s annual shareholder’s meeting and Battery Day 2020 event, Musk and Drew Baglino, Tesla senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, outlined an extensive plan to reduce the cost of battery and electric vehicle manufacturing with changes to nearly every aspect of how Tesla builds cars.

For more like this
Subscribe to the Roadshow newsletter, receive notifications and see related stories on CNET.

Tesla estimates that a 14% reduction in cost per kilowatt-hour can be achieved with its new “biscuit-tin” battery cell design and a further 18% from its new smaller, more efficient Terafactory manufacturing design. By streamlining how the batteries are put together, Tesla estimates that it will be able to manufacture 100 gigawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity by 2022 — that’s on top of the cells that it buys from suppliers LG and Panasonic — stretching to 3,000 GWh (3 terawatt-hours) of production capacity by 2030.
Tesla
Further gains from new silicon anode chemistry, innovations in lithium recycling and nickel cathode chemistry and a new “structural battery construction” technique — which also leads to a lighter, stiffer EV chassis — add up to an estimated 56% total reduction in cost per kWh. The benefit is an estimated 54% increase in vehicle range from the same energy capacity and lower manufacturing cost. And the company is sure that it can pass that reduced cost onto the consumer.”What does this mean for our future products? We’re confident that long-term we can design and manufacture a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle,” Musk stated to the honking applause of his socially distanced audience, viewing the presentation drive-in-style in individual Tesla Model 3 sedans — the automaker’s current approximately $38,000 affordable electric sedan.Tesla shareholders showed their socially distanced approval by honking the horns of their individual Model 3s.
Tesla
“Our first car was an expensive sports car and then a slightly less expensive sedan and then the mass-market premium Model 3 and Model Y,” continued Musk. “But in the early years, it was always our goal to make an affordable electric car. I think probably in about three years from now we can make a very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that’s also fully autonomous.”This is maybe not the most bombastic claim that Elon has made (or the most controversial), but the impending arrival of EVs with usable range and compelling value is probably the most exciting bit of news today for fans of the intersection of affordable cars and electric ones. During the course of his presentation, Musk also stated a goal of eventually building 20 million cars per year — a number derived from a desire to replace “a least 1% of the total vehicle fleet on Earth.”Of course, Musk then capped off the show with a sizzle reel highlighting the ultraperformance Model S Plaid’s “beyond Ludicrous” track time at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. I suppose you’ve gotta finish with a bang.

Now playing:
Watch this:

2021 Lucid Air vs. Tesla Model S: EVs go head-to-head

3:48 More

Tesla
At Tesla’s Battery Day event on Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk announced that the long-rumored Model S Plaid is now available to order, with deliveries beginning in late 2021. The Model S Plaid has its fair share of superlatives in a seemingly obvious dig at rivals like the Porsche Taycan and the recently revealed Lucid Air: A range of over 520 miles, a top speed of over 200 mph, a 0-to-60-mph time of under 2 seconds and a quarter-mile time of under 9 seconds. Tesla says the Plaid powertrain uses three electric motors and has more than 1,100 horsepower, but there aren’t many more details beyond that. Musk previously said the Plaid would set a new lap record at the Nürburgring, and prototypes were spied last year circling the track with enhanced aerodynamic bits, larger wheels with sticky tires, big brakes and other modifications. Musk has also said the Plaid car would have a battery pack larger than 100 kilowatt hours and mark the return of the Model S’ rear-facing third row of seats, although the latter seems to not yet have come true.
The only thing more insane than Ludicrous is Plaid. Arrives late 2021— Tesla (@Tesla) September 22, 2020

During the announcement a short video played showing a Plaid prototype with those same aero enhancements at the Laguna Seca race track. Musk said the Tesla team was at the track over the weekend and set a time of 1 minute, 30.3 seconds, adding that they expect to be able to chop a few more seconds off that time. That would make it one of the quickest production cars around Laguna Seca — of all time. More

Tesla
At Tesla Motors’ annual shareholder meeting and Battery Day 2020 event, CEO Elon Musk announced that the electric automobile manufacturer is preparing to release a private beta of the “full self-driving version” of its Autopilot driver-aid software in the coming months.”It’s kind of hard for people to judge the progress of Autopilot,” Musk told a crowd of shareholders present at the event, each social distancing in their own Tesla Model 3, drive-in style. “I’m driving a bleeding edge, alpha build of Autopilot, so I sort of have insight into what is going on.”

For more like this
Subscribe to the Roadshow newsletter, receive notifications and see related stories on CNET.

Musk went on to explain how Tesla’s engineers recently had to overhaul major parts of the Autopilot, including a rethinking of how the system sees the world.”We had to do a fundamental rewrite of the entire Autopilot software stack… We’re now labeling 3D video, which is hugely different from when we were previously labeling single 2D images,” Musk explained, referring to the way the Autopilot software understands what the objects it sees with its eight cameras are, and how it should react to them. “We’re now labeling entire video segments, taking all cameras simultaneously and labeling that. The sophistication of the neural net of the car and the overall logic of the car is improved dramatically.”Musk hinted that drivers may get a chance to experience this more sophisticated version of Autopilot soon. Tesla shareholders showed their socially distanced approval by honking the horns of their individual Model 3s.
Tesla
“I think we’ll hopefully release a private beta of Autopilot — the full self-driving version of autopilot — in, I think a month or so? And then people will really understand the magnitude of the change,” said Musk adding, “It’s profound. You’ll see what it’s like, it’s amazing.”Attendees showed their approval for Musk’s promise by honking the horns of their safety bubbles.We’ll be keeping an eye out for this next-generation of Autopilot over the next few weeks. In the meantime, check out the rest of our coverage of Tesla Battery Day 2020 for more announcements and breaking news.  More