The future of transportation is electric. Tesla proved with the Model S that customers would want to buy luxury vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries. Other EV startups like Faraday Future, Byton, Lucid Motors, and SF Motors are chasing after Elon Musk. And major automakers like Jaguar, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz have each released their own Tesla challengers. There are obstacles, such as the need for a more robust charging network. But battery-powered cars are here to stay.
The company’s sales in January and February are down nearly 43 percent year over year, according to new registration data from the EU. Meanwhile, overall electric vehicle registrations are up 28 percent across the continent, as EVs capture 15.2 percent of total EU market share. People still really like EVs, just not the one associated with Elon Musk.
The Chinese automaker reports 777 billion yuan ($107 billion) revenue for 2024, comfortably topping Tesla’s $97.7 billion over the same period. The two companies shipped similar numbers of EVs last year, but add in BYD’s hybrids and it delivered more than double the vehicles Tesla did.
Last week the company unveiled car charging tech that’s twice as fast as Tesla’s, delivering 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
[bloomberg.com]
Tesla news lately includes a leader with a second or maybe seventh job in politics, protests, vandalism, a White House lawn advertisement, record high trade-in numbers, and a Cybertruck recall to fix glued-on trim pieces that can’t stay attached.
So, to beat the allegations that it might be cooked, tonight Musk and Tesla put on a hastily announced “all hands” meeting that was streamed publicly. Business Insider reports employees were only notified of the unusual event shortly before its scheduled start at 9:30PM ET. You can watch it here (Tesla says you should skip to 28 minutes in since it didn’t start on time, or try YouTube), but today’s Decoder episode on Tesla is probably better and shorter.
One of Tesla’s usually favorable Wall Street analysts, Dan Ives from Wedbush, published a note pleading with CEO Elon Musk to spend less time at DOGE. “Tesla and Musk are facing a defining chapter in their future and how Musk handles this next few months will be pivotal to the long term growth trajectory of Tesla in our view,” Ives wrote. Another thing Ives says Musk needs to do is prepare lower-cost vehicles for 2025.
The Tesla Takedown movement is rallying against Elon Musk, and it’s only getting bigger.
The Financial Times compared the electric automaker’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and discovered that $1.4 billion has “gone astray.”
Looking at last year, in the third and fourth quarter combined, Tesla spent $6.3bn on “purchases of property and equipment excluding finance leases, net of sales” according to its cashflow statements. Over on the balance sheet, however, the gross value of property, plant and equipment rose by only $4.9bn in that period, to $51bn.
$6.9 billion minus $4.9 billion equals $1.4 billion, or the sum the paper says appears unaccounted for. It’s a bit complicated, but unless Tesla reports the missing money in its next earnings report, it could indicate that something fishy is going on — beyond a stock collapse amid a global protest movement.
The automaker’s bigger EX90 EV got CarKey last year, and now Volvo is adding it to the smaller EX30. Volvo’s software rollout on the EX90 has been buggy, with features like CarPlay arriving slowly and owners complaining that their digital keys don’t work.
Can you trick a Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot system, which has been linked to hundreds of crashes, using simulated rain, fog? Will it barrel through a wall covered in an image of the road beyond, like Looney Tunes’ Wile E. Coyote slamming into the Road Runner’s fake tunnels?
Yes you can, according to Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober’s testing. (Bonus: Rober also uses LiDAR to map Disney’s pitch-black Space Mountain coaster. )
The electric crossover (based on last year’s concept) will be the first built on BMW’s Neue Klasse EV platform, which introduces an 800-volt architecture and new “Gen6” battery packs featuring higher density cylindrical cells for up to 30 percent better range. The iX3 will kick off new technologies that will be introduced in more than 40 models of various drivetrains by 2027. BMW Group also announced its first hydrogen car slated for 2028 at its annual press conference.
The Lanzador EV concept-based vehicle will also “allow for up to 2,000” horsepower according to Volkswagen Group and Porsche CEO Olliver Blume, who shared the details at an annual media conference. Future Audi, Porsche and Bentley vehicles will share this new platform, however, Blume teases that the Lamborghini will have “a very specific set-up.”
Tesla has been promising more affordable models as the thing that will help pull it out of its current rut. But a new report out of China (by way of Electrek) suggests that they’re likely to be stripped down Model Ys. This follows reports that the company was testing sub-$35,000 Model 3s in Mexico with cheaper materials and fewer screens. Based on the 36kr report, the project is being spearheaded by Tesla’s Chinese engineers — which makes sense, because car companies in that country have really cracked the code on cheap EVs.
After filing for Chapter 11 in the US in November, Northvolt — which worked with Volkswagen, Volvo, Audi, Porsche, and BMW — has now filed for bankruptcy in Sweden. The company was founded by two ex-Tesla executives and was one of Europe’s leading efforts to rival US and Asian battery manufacturers before racking up billions in debt.
“As the bankruptcy process unfolds, the court-appointed trustee will determine the future of Northvolt’s businesses and their assets, including technology and production facilities.”
[northvolt.com]
