AllThingsD » electric car

Social Media Warfare by Nissan as Also-Ran Looks to Win

Michael Ramsey — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:00:23 +0000

Nissan Motor Co. has long been the also-ran of the J3 here in the U.S., an image that it is trying furiously to dislodge. Indeed, they have said a driving motivation behind the introduction of the Nissan Leaf electric car was to take the lead in something.

Having gained market share on Toyota Motor Corp. and being not far from passing Honda Motor Co. in the U.S. in sales, the scrappy underdog is turning a bit more into the playground bully.

Case in point: Toyota was going for the maximum splash in revealing its new Camry today at locations in Los Angeles, Dearborn, Mich., Georgetown, Ky. and New York. And they promoted they would show the vehicle early through Twitter. Too bad Nissan had purchased the top search term “Camry” for Twitter and when you search for that word, the first tweet that appears is something from the Nissan twitter feed.

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Mission Motors Closes a Round of Funding (And Swears It Won't Blow It All on Awesome Electric Motorcycles)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:31:10 +0000

San Francisco-based Mission Motors holds a land speed record for an electric motorcycle and, as of this week, also holds a $9.3 million Series B round of funding to commercialize that bike — or at least parts of it.

Sadly, CEO Jit Bhattacharya informed me his company won’t be using the cash to make more of its achingly fast electric motorcycles.

But, even if the bike remains a rarity, the funding is real enough.

The round, led by Warburg Pincus, also includes a hefty line of credit to the company — a provision that makes sense when you realize how capital intensive the real next step will be.

That’s because Mission Motors is moving to become a supplier of electrical drive systems to vehicle makers — “OEMs” in industry speak.

Specifically, it is “looking at [applications] where size and weight are a factor,” said Bhattacharya.

So what does that mean exactly?

An electric drive system, at its most basic, is made up of three components: Batteries to store power, a motor to convert the electricity to physical motion and a speed controller that governs how fast it all happens.

Mission Motors isn’t doing game-changing battery research. Nor is it inventing a fundamentally new kind of motor.

In essence, Mission’s team is not unlike an uber-geeky group of high school car nuts — spending time and money trying to squeeze a little more performance out of a bunch of off-the-shelf parts.

This game of inches gets especially important when you are trying to shoehorn an electric drive system into tiny places.

Bhattacharya mentioned applications like small hybrids, where designers must fit an internal combustion engine, an electric motor and a battery package in the same car.

“If you drop the weight of the components, you basically improve the range,” he said.

So, where will we see a Mission Motors power system next?

Bhattacharya wouldn’t say, although the company has already worked with Honda on prototype cars.

All I could get from the CEO, after much badgering, was, “Our focus is on building compact systems that could go into all kinds of applications.”

In any case, I stopped by Mission Motors’ new office in SOMA to see if I could ride its record-setting, electric pavement monster and at least I got a video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Viral Video: A Dilemma Solved (And Also for Perez Hilton?)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 07:20:11 +0000

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming movie “The Dilemma,” minus a joke that used the word “gay” in a negative manner.

Universal Pictures replaced the original teaser trailer after there were protests about it. In it, actor Vince Vaughn said: “Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars…are gay.”

With the recent spate of bullyings of gay teens that have ended in tragedy, such a move is probably wise and not too surprising.

More surprising was the video below it, in which gossip blogger Perez Hilton vowed to stop being so mean on his popular Web site.

Since a lot of his repertoire consists of nasty drawings and comments scrawled over photos, along with cruel nicknames for celebrities, it will be interesting to see how this change impacts his dubious success.

Here are the videos:

Tesla Stock: Well, the Brakes Work

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:02:18 +0000

After a few ebullient days in the left lane, Tesla Motors’ stock has careened to the right, dropping well below its offering price after an impressive IPO.

Shares in the electric-car company, which spiked to $30.42 before closing Friday at $19.20, slipped more than 15 percent Tuesday, falling to about $16–a dollar below the initial offering price of $17.

Quite the round-trip journey–and completed in just a week. Seems investors are slowly awakening to Tesla’s (TSLA) fundamentals, which, as I’ve noted here before, don’t exactly inspire the same confidence as its technology.

Tesla Shares on Another Joy Ride

John Paczkowski — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:04:46 +0000

Tesla’s newly listed shares roared out of the garage again today, climbing higher still in their second day of trading. After spiking 40.5 percent Tuesday, even as the broader markets tanked, shares of the electric-car company are on another tear this morning, up 22.23 percent at $29.20. Quite a run for a stock initially priced at $17.

But when a single share of Tesla (TSLA) made more Tuesday than the entire company has to date, is it sustainable?

A troubling and entirely realistic question, though one that seems to have been overlooked–or purposely ignored–by investors. Though Tesla’s technology may be formidable, its fundamentals are not. It is a company with mounting losses, falling revenue, no real production chain to speak of and a single $109,000 product, the Roadster, of which its has sold only 1,063. Sure, the company has plans for a cheaper vehicle, the $50,000 Model S sedan, and that seems to be part of what has investors so juiced about its IPO. But while Tesla says it will bring the S to market in 2013, the company admits it’s not a sure thing.

“We have not completed the design, component sourcing or manufacturing process for the Model S, so it is difficult to forecast its eventual cost, manufacturability or quality,” the company said in its IPO filing.

So why is Tesla a buy at $29.20–or, for that matter, $17?

D8 Video: Ford CEO Alan Mulally Tells Jason Calacanis Why We're Not Going to Drive Electric Cars Anytime Soon

Peter Kafka — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:39:19 +0000

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis loves his Tesla. So why can’t the rest of us drive an electric car, too? Ford (F) CEO Alan Mulally fielded the question in the final panel of the D8 conference today.

Bonus question for our readers: Since Calacanis won’t tell us how much his Tesla cost, can anyone hazard a guess?

[ See post to watch video ]

Nokia Slashes Prices

John Paczkowski — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:00:03 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Tesla Motors Plans IPO

John Paczkowski — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:44:14 +0000

Add Tesla Motors to the list of companies planning to avail themselves of what may, or may not, be a fledgling IPO recovery this year. The electric car maker said Friday that it’s planning an initial public offering to raise up to $100 million.

Tesla’s S-1 form doesn’t specify the share price or where the stock will be traded. It does, however, note that stock will be issued “as soon as practicable”–whatever that means. A few other details worth noting:

Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), J.P. Morgan (JPM) and Deutsche Bank (DB) are listed as underwriters.
To date, Tesla has sold 937 Roadsters in 18 countries.
Tesla had sales for the first nine months of 2009 of $93.4 million. Losses for that same period were $31.5 million
Since its inception, Tesla has had revenue of $108.2 million, with cumulative losses of $236.4 million.

Tesla Foiled

John Paczkowski — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:42:04 +0000

While $25 billion in low-cost federal loans keeps General Motors (GM), Ford (F) and Chrysler churning out SUVs through the econalypse, the wheels are coming off cleantech car company Tesla Motors. Without access to the same sorts of loans given its Detroit colleagues, the country’s leading electric car maker is delaying production of its Model S sedan, sacking an unspecified number of employees and shuttering two offices. “These are extraordinary times,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in post to the company blog. “The global financial system has gone through the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and the effects are only beginning to wind their way through every facet of the economy. It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks, and this is true for Silicon Valley as well.”

Google: Beyond Thunderdome

John Paczkowski — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:00:27 +0000

Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity–enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.”

– Keyword: Evil, Harper’s Magazine, March 2008

You can make money without doing evil. You can also make it without using so much fossil fuel. That’s the word from Google, which today unveiled a $4.4 trillion plan it says will reduce the nation’s dependence on coal and oil.

Google’s “Clean Energy 2030” plan as its described by Jeffery Greenblatt, Google.org’s climate and energy-technology manager, proposes to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 by relying on power from wind, nuclear and geothermal sources instead. It also calls for raising the standard car fuel efficiency from 31 mpg to 45 mpg and increasing usage of plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars.

It’s an ambitious plan, to say the least. Expensive too–a jaw-dropping $4.4 trillion dollars. But Google (GOOG) believes it could generate net savings of $1 trillion over its 22-year span. It might even save our children’s grandchildren from a world in which they rove post-apocalyptic desert wastelands scavenging for food and gasoline, terrorized by marauding biker gangs. And who could place a monetary value on that, eh?

“We see a huge opportunity for the nation to confront our energy challenges,” Greenblatt explained. “In the process we will stimulate investment, create jobs, empower consumers and, by the way, help address climate change.”

And lest we think Google is hiding its own self interest (Read: Lower data center electric bills) behind a $4.4 trillion dollar mask of altruism, consider this remark from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at an event in San Francisco Wednesday evening: “We’re going to likely consume more energy,” he said. “We’d like the prices to go down … We save a lot of money when prices go down. It’s good for shareholders, good for earnings.”

And in the end, what’s wrong with approaching clean energy from a capitalist position? We certainly approach dirty energy in that way.