Automotive – Page 43080 – I wish I had more to offer

Millionaire on a big foot

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UPDATE 3-Uber confidentially files for IPO – sources

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Tesla May Consider Buying Idle GM Plants – Bloomberg

Tesla May Consider Buying Idle GM Plants Bloomberg Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he may be willing to buy some of the five factories General Motors Co. will idle next year … Go to Source

E-Mobility is the Innovation Driver for Schaeffler

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Tesla needs ‘seasoned’ operator to take on execution hurdles: Analyst

Tesla still has execution hurtles, says expert
2 Hours Ago | 03:28

Tesla needs to consider adding a “really seasoned operator” to manage the mass-market manufacturer, Consumer Edge Research's James Albertine told CNBC on Friday.

“They need to prove that there's true independent, sort of, checks and balances between the board and senior management,” the senior analyst said on “Power Lunch.”

Albertine, who is equal weight on the stock, commended CEO Elon Musk for making his mark in the automotive industry with his electric car company. But Tesla needs a “different skill set” to build 500,000 units a year and expand into China, he contended.

“There are significant execution hurdles ahead,” Albertine added.

Musk's leadership skills have come into question ever since he started acting erratically months ago. Most notably, he found himself in trouble with the SEC when he tweeted about taking the company private. He also appeared to smoke pot on a podcast.

Albertine said Tesla has to continue to progress from its third-quarter earnings before he decides to upgrade to a buy rating. He will take into consideration who the company nominates to the board of directors.

“This is a long overdue sort of call here for more streamlined kind of focus on operations and kind of corporate governance from an independent board perspective,” he said.

On Friday, a Jefferies analyst raised Tesla's price target from $360 to $450, saying the company improved productivity.

Shares of the automotive company reached a turning point Thursday when they closed higher than the roughly $360 conversion price on the $920 million in convertible bonds due in March. It was the first time they closed above that price since early August when Musk floated the idea of taking the company he co-founded private.

The stock dipped 1.4 percent Friday to close at around $358.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Disclaimer

Electric upstart Rivian plans for dealers, but not to sell trucks

Rivian R1T electric pickup concept
Electric cars worry traditional car dealerships.

Tesla sells cars nationwide without dealers—even if buyers have to drive over state lines to get them in some cases. Electric cars eat into one of dealerships' main profit centers, service, because they don't need oil changes, spark plugs, or even air filters. And traditional dealerships have trouble selling electric cars; many have trouble even keeping them charged and ready for buyers to test drive.

That's why Rivian, the Michigan-based startup planning to sell a new electric pickup and SUVs, doesn't plan to have traditional dealers in most places.

DON'T MISS: Rivian R1T all-electric pickup revealed: 400-mile range, 160-kw DC fast charging

As with Tesla, buyers will order directly from the company. Unlike Tesla, though, Rivian does plan to enlist dealers, though most will only be for service and support.

Speaking with Green Car Reports and Motor Authority at the LA Auto Show, Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe said the company will open service dealerships to support its trucks, but plans to sell them directly to consumers.

READ MORE: Rivian R1S electric SUV goes family style with 7 seats, 410-mile range

When it comes to sales, the internet, he says, has brought consumers more knowledge than ever before about the vehicles they're buying and virtually put an end to haggling. With most cars selling at rock-bottom prices, it has cut into dealerships' bottom line in sales—which has never been one of their more profitable lines of business anyway.

“Existing dealers are all recognizing that there are changes happening to their business,” Scaringe told Motor Authority. “There are aspects of what the dealers do that don't get talked about enough,” he said, namely sales and service.

To that end, Scaringe says Rivian has received a lot of interest from dealers in becoming the company's service and support centers, which will allow them to focus on aspects of their business that are most successful. Those service dealerships could be at other brands' traditional car dealerships or at independent repair networks.

CHECK OUT: Why Tesla's court battle to sell cars in Michigan could set national template

The company will also set up its own stores or galleries similar to Tesla's to sell its 400-mile electric pickup starting in 2020. Its stores won't be in malls, but also won't look like traditional dealerships with a showroom surrounded by acres of parking lots to store lots of inventory, he said. Instead, they will be brand experience centers where customers can test drive and order cars. The company is already accepting $1,000 refundable deposits.

In states where such direct sales from automakers are forbidden, such as Michigan and Texas, however, Rivian may try to partner with existing dealerships to sell their trucks, he said.

Elon Axios Interview: How Model 3 Production Ramp Almost Killed Tesla, The Massive AI Threat, & Moving To Mars

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Published on November 26th, 2018 |

by Steve Hanley

Elon Axios Interview: How Model 3 Production Ramp Almost Killed Tesla, The Massive AI Threat, & Moving To Mars

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November 26th, 2018 by Steve Hanley

On Sunday night, an Axios interview with Elon Musk aired on HBO. If you don’t have an HBO subscription, you might want to get one. It is, as the expression goes, “appointment TV.” That is, it offers programs too good to miss. But in case you did, here are three takeaways from the program.

How The Model 3 Almost Killed Tesla
Earlier this year, as Tesla began ramping up production of the Model 3, Musk told Axios the company came within a few weeks of going out of business. Tesla “faced a severe threat of death. Essentially, the company was bleeding money like crazy and just … if we didn’t solve these problems in a very short period time, we would die. And it was extremely difficult to solve them.” Asked how close the company came to actually shutting down, Musk replied, “I would say within single-digit weeks.”

Musk’s notes about living, sleeping, and eating at the factory during that stressful time have become a bit of a joke on the internet, but Musk says it was no joke for him personally. “I was in the paint shop, body shop … end of [the] line where we do final check out of vehicles,” he said. “I personally redesigned the whole battery pack production line and ran it for three weeks. Pretty intense.”

“I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that I’m like the chief engineer like that. I actually do lead engineering of the rockets and lead the engineering of the vehicles and production. Ninety percent of my day is spent on engineering and production.

“No one should put this many hours into your work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. This is very painful. It hurts, it hurts my brain and my heart. It hurts. … There were times when I was working literally 120 hours. This is not recommended for anyone. I just did it because if I didn’t do it, then [there was a] good chance Tesla would die.”

The Existential Threat From Artificial Intelligence
When the topic turned to artificial intelligence, Musk’s remarks took on a somber tone. “My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year. But I’m still pro-humanity. We’re like children in a playground. … We’re not paying attention. We worry more about … what name somebody called someone else than whether AI will destroy humanity. That’s insane.”

He worries that AI will soon outstrip human intelligence, rendering humans subservient to digital masters. AI is “just digital intelligence,” he summarizes. “And as the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin. It’s obvious.”

“When a species of primate, homo sapiens, became much smarter than other primates, it pushed all the other ones into a very small habitat,” Musk said. “So there are very few mountain gorillas and orangutans and chimpanzees — monkeys in general. They occupy small corners of the world — cages, zoos. Even the jungles that they’re in are narrowly defined so they were sort of like big cages. So, you know, that’s one possible outcome for us.”

Musk has founded Neuralink, a company that is working on finding ways to interface the human brain with computers, which he sees as a way of preventing pure AI from dominating the human race. Neuralink is comprised of about 85 of the “the highest per capita intelligence” engineers ever assembled. “The long term aspiration with Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. To achieve a sort of democratization of intelligence, such that it is not monopolistically held in a purely digital form by governments and large corporations.”

What is he talking about, exactly? An “electrode-to-neuron interface at a micro level — a chip and a bunch of tiny wires implanted in your skull. I believe this can be done — It’s probably on the order of a decade.”

In a way, we are already halfway to such a reality, Musk says. “And by the way, you kind of have this already in a weird way. You have a digital tertiary layer in the form of your phone, your computers, your watch. You basically have these computing devices that form a tertiary layer on your cognition already.”

One of the first applications for the technology could be helping people with spinal cord injuries. “We already know how to do this. Implant electrodes into the motor cortex of the brain, then bypass the severed section of the spine and have effectively local micro controllers near the muscle groups. It could restore full limb functionality. As people get older, they lose their memory — incredibly sad to have a mother forget her children, and that can be solved too.”

Then the conversation turned darker. “You could make a swarm of assassin drones for very little money. By just taking the face I.D. chip that’s used in cell phones, and having a small explosive charge and a standard drone, and just have it do a grid sweep of the building until they find the person they’re looking for, ram into them and explode. You could do that right now. No new technology is needed.”

Even scarier to Musk is the ability of AI to impact the electoral process, something America should be wary of as the revelations about Facebook and the 2016 presidential election continue to emerge. He warns us about the power of AI to create “incredibly effective propaganda … influence the direction of society … influence elections.” It can hone a message by watching online feedback and reacting to news, then making the message “slightly better within milliseconds.”

The government is largely blind to the threat, Musk says, and hopelessly behind in its feeble attempts to control AI. “The way in which regulation is put in place is slow and linear. And we are facing an exponential threat. If you have a linear response to an exponential threat, it’s quite likely the exponential threat will win. That, in a nutshell, is the issue.”

Is Mars An Escape Hatch For The Rich?
Musk told Axios there is a 70% chance he will be one of the people who travels to Mars aboard a SpaceX rocket in the future. He thinks the first trip could happen within 7 years. A ticket to Mars could cost as little as “a couple hundred thousand dollars,” a sum some suggest will make Mars an “escape hatch” for wealthy people as the Earth warms to the point where it can no longer sustain human life.

Musk scoffs at that idea. “Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than earth. Really, the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton’s ad for going to the Antarctic. It’s gonna be hard. There’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space.”

Once someone arrives there, it will not be a life of leisure, reclining by the pool and eating bonbons. “You’ll be working nonstop to build the base. So, you know, not much time for leisure. And even after doing all this, it’s a very harsh environment. So there’s a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we’re not sure. Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?”

So, why go? “There’s lots of people who climb mountains. People die on Mount Everest all the time. They like doing it for the challenge.”

It is fair to say that Elon Musk is not risk averse. Indeed, he seems to thrive on risk, feed off it, and then actively seek out more. That appetite for skating up to and sometimes over the edge is what separates him from normal mortals. And it may be the factor that allows Musk to save us from ourselves, although there is no guarantee anything can keep people from sowing the seeds of their own destruction and reveling in the process.

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About the Author

Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may take him. His muse is Charles Kuralt — “I see the road ahead is turning. I wonder what's around the bend?”

You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.

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