Samsung Banner sticky Advertisement
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Tesla plans to open about 52 new service centers in 2021: Electrek

Tesla plans to open about 52 new service centers in 2021: Electrek

28th October 2020
"The electric carmaker has been expanding its network of service centers and Superchargers to keep up with its growing fleet."

Tesla Inc plans to add at least one new service center every week in 2021, Electrek reported on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The electric carmaker has been expanding its network of service centers and Superchargers to keep up with its growing fleet.

Last week, analysts at Brokerage RBC noted that Tesla’s investment in service and quality has not been enough to keep up with its increasing sales and has the potential to damage the brand.

Service could be particularly important as Tesla continues to try to expand outside its core market.

The company, which has repeatedly said that it needs to expand its service center locations, operates 466 service centers around the world, according to Electrek.

Tesla could not immediately be reached for comment.

Source: Reuters


Reviews is conducting a weekly contest. Answer a simple question and get a chance to win exciting gift hampers from Aiken Care Package. Go to our Facebook page for more details or also can check the details on our Instagram page.


Also Read:

MICROSOFT CLOUD BUSINESS GATHERS STEAM AS PANDEMIC BOOSTS GROWTH    

WAYMO, DAIMLER PARTNER IN DEVELOPING SELF-DRIVING SEMI TRUCKS    

ROYAL ENFIELD METEOR 350 LAUNCH IN INDIA. SOON IN NEPAL?    

HERO UNLEASHES ELECTRIC SCOOTER, HERO NYX HX WITH 210 KM MILEAGE    

TIPS FOR LONG DISTANCE BIKE RIDE    

MICROSOFT SAYS IRANIAN HACKERS TARGETED CONFERENCE ATTENDEES    

VERIZON'S YAHOO ZOMBIE APPEARS AGAIN AS PURPLE PHONE    

Compiled by : Kiran Shah Kiran Shah

Tesla makes $104M profit in 2Q despite factory shutdown

22nd July 2020
"Tesla makes $104M profit in 2Q despite factory shutdown"

Tesla overcame a seven-week pandemic-related shutdown at its California assembly plant to post a surprising $104 million net profit for the second quarter.

It was the electric car and solar panel maker’s fourth-straight profitable quarter, qualifying it to be included in the S&P 500 index of corporate titans. That decision will be made later.

Local government restrictions forced Tesla to close its only U.S. assembly factory in Fremont, California, from March 23 to May 11. Even with no production, the company paid roughly 10,000 workers for part of the shutdown and Tesla continued health care and other benefits.

The profit, compared with a $408 million loss a year ago, pushed Tesla’s shares up 5.7% to 1,682.99 in after-hours trading Wednesday.

But the company likely would have lost money without $428 million it earned from selling electric vehicle credits to other automakers so they can meet government fuel economy and pollution regulations.

Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn said he expects money from the credits to double this year over the $594 million the company made in 2019, but said Tesla is not managing its business assuming that credits will contribute significantly in the future. The company is counting on manufacturing efficiencies to increase profits, he said.

Also Wednesday, Tesla said it has picked the Austin, Texas, area as the site for its second U.S. assembly plant. Austin was the front runner, but Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a possibility.

On a conference call with analysts and investors, CEO Elon Musk said that sometime in the future, Tesla will build a compact vehicle and a higher-capacity passenger vehicle, but he didn’t give a time frame. He said Tesla is on its way to making vehicles more affordable through manufacturing and design efficiencies.

“The thing that bugs me the most about where we are right now is that our cars are not affordable enough,” he said.

Musk also said he’s confident about rolling out full self-driving technology by the end of the year and said it already works well during his drives to work. The company based in Palo Alto, California, has updated its Autopilot driver-assist software to recognize stop signs and is working on navigating intersections and city streets, he said.

Last year he predicted Tesla would get regulatory approval from a few states by the end of 2020 for autonomous vehicles to drive on roads. A ride-hailing service involving millions of Tesla autonomous vehicles now seems to be farther into the future, with Musk saying it will depend on regulators.

Critics have said Tesla doesn’t have the right sensors to fully automate driving. The National Transportation Safety Board has blamed two fatal crashes in part on Autopilot. In both crashes the system failed to spot tractor-trailers crossing in front of a Tesla. The company would use the same sensors that Autopilot uses for its self-driving system, but with vastly increased computing power. Tesla says drivers always have to pay attention while using Autopilot.

Excluding one-time items such as $347 million in stock-based compensation, Tesla made $2.18 per share. That beat Wall Street estimates of a break-even quarter, according to FactSet. Revenue was down 4.9% from a year ago to $6.04 billion. That still beat estimates of $5.15 billion.

Most of that stock compensation went to Musk, who earned a payout of around $700 million in May and on Tuesday became eligible for another $2.1 billion, all based largely on Tesla’s four-fold stock price growth this year.

But Tesla issued a note of caution in its investor letter released Wednesday after the markets closed: “It remains difficult to predict whether there will be further operational interruptions or how global consumer sentiment will evolve in the second half of 2020.”

Musk also said demand for Tesla’s vehicles isn’t a problem, but the company is facing struggles with its parts supply chain.

Morningstar analyst David Whiston said demand seems strong for Tesla’s newer offerings, the Model Y small SUV and Model 3 compact car, rather than the older and more expensive Model S large car and the Model X large SUV.

“As long as they can keep getting credit revenue and they have new offerings ramping up like the Y, they have a chance at continued profit,” he said. “Profit without the credits needs more volume though.”

Tesla said it should have enough money to fund new products and to build two new factories in the U.S. and Germany, as well as cover other expenses. The company said it would begin delivering its electric semi next year.

Tesla generated $964 million in cash from its operations from April through June, and it ended the quarter with about $9.1 billion in cash. But it also had $8.5 billion in debts, according to financial statements.

Tesla’s second-quarter profit came after it announced better-than-expected global sales during the period. The company said it delivered 90,650 vehicles from April through June as it rolled out the new Model Y SUV in the U.S. and China. That’s a 2.5% increase over the first quarter’s 88,400, but was a 4.8% drop from the second quarter of 2019.

  • Tags :
Compiled by : Debashish S Neupane Debashish S Neupane

Tesla's secret battery ambition

23rd July 2020
"With a global fleet of more than 1 million electric vehicles that are capable of connecting to and sharing power with the grid, Tesla’s goal is to achieve the status of a power company, competing with such traditional energy providers as Pacific Gas & Ele"

For months, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been teasing investors, and rivals, with promises to reveal significant advances in battery technology during a “Battery Day” in late May.

New, low-cost batteries designed to last for a million miles of use and enable electric Teslas to sell profitably for the same price or less than a gasoline vehicle are just part of Musk’s agenda, people familiar with the plans told Reuters.

With a global fleet of more than 1 million electric vehicles that are capable of connecting to and sharing power with the grid, Tesla’s goal is to achieve the status of a power company, competing with such traditional energy providers as Pacific Gas & Electric and Tokyo Electric Power, those sources said.

The new “million-mile” battery at the center of Tesla’s strategy was jointly developed with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) and deploys technology developed by Tesla in collaboration with a team of academic battery experts recruited by Musk, three people familiar with the effort said.

Eventually, improved versions of the battery, with greater energy density and storage capacity and even lower cost, will be introduced in additional Tesla vehicles in other markets, including North America, the sources said.

Tesla’s plan to launch the new battery first in China and its broader strategy to reposition the company has not previously been reported. Tesla declined to comment.

Tesla’s new batteries will rely on innovations such as low-cobalt and cobalt-free battery chemistries, and the use of chemical additives, materials, and coatings that will reduce internal stress and enable batteries to store more energy for longer periods, sources said.

Tesla also plans to implement new high-speed, heavily automated battery manufacturing processes designed to reduce labor costs and increase production in massive “terafactories” about 30 times the size of the company’s sprawling Nevada “gigafactory” — a strategy telegraphed in late April to analysts by Musk.

Tesla is working on recycling and recovery of such expensive metals as nickel, cobalt, and lithium, through its Redwood Materials affiliate, as well as new “second life” applications of electric vehicle batteries in grid storage systems, such as the one Tesla built in South Australia in 2017. The automaker also has said it wants to supply electricity to consumers and businesses but has not provided details.

Reuters reported exclusively in February that Tesla was in advanced talks to use CATL’s lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use no cobalt, the most expensive metal in EV batteries.

CATL also has developed a simpler and less expensive way of packaging battery cells, called cell-to-pack, that eliminates the middle step of bundling cells. Tesla is expected to use technology to help reduce battery weight and cost.

The sources said CATL also plans to supply Tesla in China next year with an improved long-life nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery whose cathode is 50% nickel and only 20% cobalt.

Tesla now jointly produces nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) batteries with Panasonic (6752.T) at a “gigafactory” in Nevada, and buys NMC batteries from LG Chem (051910.KS) in China. Panasonic declined to comment.

Taken together, the advances in battery technology, the strategy of expanding the ways in which EV batteries can be used and the manufacturing automation on a huge scale all aim at the same target: Reworking the financial math that until now has made buying an electric car more expensive for most consumers than sticking with carbon-emitting internal combustion vehicles.

“We’ve got to really make sure we get a very steep ramp in battery production and continue to improve the cost per kilowatt-hour of the batteries — this is very fundamental and extremely difficult,” Musk told investors in January. “We’ve got to scale battery production to crazy levels that people cannot even fathom today.”

Tesla has reported operating profits for three quarters in a row, driving a near-doubling of its share price this year. Still, Musk’s ambitious expansion plans depend on increasing both profit margins and sales volume.

A number of the technical advances made by Tesla and CATL in battery chemistry and design originated at a small research lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The lab has been run since 1996 by Jeff Dahn, a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage.

Dahn and his team began an exclusive five-year research partnership with Tesla in mid-2016, but the relationship dates back at least to 2012.

Among the critical contributions from Dahn’s lab: Chemical additives and nano-engineered materials to make lithium-ion batteries tougher and more resistant to bruising from stress such as rapid charging, thus extending their life.

The cost of CATL’s cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery packs has fallen below $80 per kilowatt-hour, with the cost of the battery cells dropping below $60/kWh, the sources said. CATL’s low-cobalt NMC battery packs are close to $100/kWh.

Auto industry executives have said $100/kWh for battery packs is the level at which electric vehicles reach rough parity with internal combustion competitors.

Battery expert Shirley Meng, a professor at the University of California San Diego, said NMC cells could cost as little as $80/kWh once recycling and recovery of key materials such as cobalt and nickel is factored in. Iron phosphate batteries, which are safer than NMC, could find a second life in stationary grid storage systems, reducing the upfront cost of those batteries for electric vehicle buyers. 

In comparison, the new low-cobalt batteries being jointly developed by General Motors Co and LG Chem are not expected to reach those cost levels until 2025, according to a source familiar with the companies’ work.

GM declined to comment on its cost targets. Earlier this year, it said only that it planned to “drive battery cell costs below $100/kWh” without specifying a timetable.

source: Reuters

Compiled by : Debashish S Neupane Debashish S Neupane

Bosnian Tesla fan impatient for Cybertruck release builds a lookalike

5th September 2020
"rugged Ford Raptor F-150 into its smallest parts and then transform it into petrol-powered vehicle that resembles a Cybertruck."

A Bosnian fan of both Ford trucks and Elon Musk’s Tesla could not just sit on his hands waiting for the electric carmaker to release its Cybertruck, expected from late 2021. Instead he came up with his own version of the futuristic vehicle.

It took eight months for IT specialists and engineers at Igor Krezic’s Stark Solutions company to disassemble a rugged Ford Raptor F-150 into its smallest parts and then transform it into petrol-powered vehicle that resembles a Cybertruck.

The first drive through the streets of the southern town of Mostar drew a lot of attention, Mario Coric, the company manager, told Reuters.

Everybody was watching and half of them thought we made a tank, because people don’t know what the Cybertruck is. One girl even stopped and asked if this is the place where they are producing Tesla Cybertruck,” Coric said on Friday.

Krezic declined to speak to Reuters.

Though it may not look identical to Cybertruck’s functional prototype the pickup captures its spirit.

The owner wanted us to combine two opposite sides — Ford and Cyber — because he is a fan of both Tesla and Ford, so we merged two souls into one,” he said.

This one uses gasoline and Tesla uses electricity. We tried to copy as much as possible but our car is not the same size as the Cybertruck,” Coric added.

There was no immediate comment from Tesla and Ford.

Coric said Stark Solutions was now trying to register the pickup to be able to drive it on roads but they were encountering problems because sharp vehicle edges like those seen on the Cybertruck are banned in Bosnia.

Tesla plans to build its $1.1 billion Cybertruck factory near Austin, Texas, ending an intense competition with neighbouring Oklahoma, the carmaker’s chief executive Musk announced in July.

With a starting price of $39,000, the Cybertruck resembles an armoured vehicle and takes aim at the heart of Detroit automakers’ profitable truck business.

source: Reuters

Also Read:

TOP 5 CARS IN NEPAL UNDER 30 LAKHS

SUZUKI VITARA BREZZA BS6 PETROL VERSION NOW IN NEPAL 

TOP 5 SUVS IN NEPAL IN 2020 | UPDATED PRICE

NEW UPCOMING ELECTRIC CARS IN NEPAL 2020

TOP 5 PICKUP TRUCKS IN NEPAL

JEEP RUBICON HYBRID 4XE: WRANGLER INTRODUCES FIRST ELECTRIC-POWERED VEHICLE

NEW GENERATION MAHINDRA THAR: IMAGES REVEAL EXTERIOR & INTERIOR DETAILS AHEAD LAUNCH

Compiled by : Kiran Shah Kiran Shah