Elon Musk has shared a video via Twitter of a Tesla car ‘talking’ to pedestrians, claiming that the feature will be making its way to the range of electric cars ‘soon’.
In the tweet, Musk states that “Telsas will soon talk to people if you want”, and just to make sure we didn’t doubt the veracity of the embedded video, he also claimed that “this is real”.
The video is short, but shows a Tesla Model 3 driving past with a speech recording playing externally – ”Well don’t just stand there staring, hop in”. It’s unclear at this point if the feature will use AI in order to actually interact with pedestrians or if it’s purely an audio player.
One Twitter user asked if the feature could be added to Sentry Mode – an automated video surveillance security measure that Tesla vehicles employ – and Musk responded with: “For sure!! This will make for some epic robber confusion”.
As far as usefulness is concerned, the benefits of such a feature aren’t immediately clear. It’s possible that Tesla owners driving for ride-sharing services like Uber and Ola could use the feature to hail down their customer, but this is a bit of a stretch.
On the other hand, this could be seen as rather problematic, especially if the speech isn’t restricted to certain phrases and can be customized by the user – nothing will sooner cause issues than a car with its windows up harassing passers-by.
Sony’s CES 2020 press conference was a brief one, but it did have some interesting news. The company revealed the PlayStation 5 (aka the PS5) logo for the first time, although we didn’t get to see what the next-gen game console will look like quite yet. The company also shared some new sales milestones for its existing PS4 platform and its PSVR virtual reality headset.
Sony also revealed a first for the Japanese consumer electronics giant: an electric car called the Vision-S. While it’s technically a concept car — it doesn’t sound as if Sony has any intention of mass-producing the vehicle — it does show off Sony’s penchant for intriguing, futuristic industrial design.
The automobile has 33 sensors for monitoring both the inside and outside the car, “immersive” audio, widescreen displays, a panoramic screen, and always-on connectivity, according to Sony. Technically, the car was built in partnership with auto manufacturer Magna, and it’s filled with gear from companies like BlackBerry and Bosch, so it’s not solely packed with Sony technologies.
We don’t have much else to go on regarding Sony’s plans for the car, but it’s a physical product here on the ground in Las Vegas, and it “embodies our contribution to the future of mobility and contains a variety of Sony’s technologies,” Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida told the crowd at CES.
Segway is on a serious roll with new personal electric vehicles lately. The latest is a hoverboard-style self-balancing motorized chair know as the S-Pod that is equal parts fascinating and dystopian.
Remember those hoverchairs that society used in the Pixar movie Wall-E?
You know, the ones that were pod-like floating recliners, ferrying people around in an organized fashion, making walking a relic of the past?
Well Segway’s newest product, set to be officially unveiled at CES 2020, is eerily close.
The Segway S-Pod is a 24 mph (38.6 km/h) self-balancing electric wheelchair of sorts. But this isn’t your typical handicapped wheelchair. The Segway S-Pod is designed for everyone as a new form of urban transportation.
The idea makes sense, in a way. Segway’s most prolific products right now are its electric scooters, which are scooting around cities all over the world. But as convenient as those standing scooters are, many people feel more comfortable in a seated, bike-like position. That might explain Segway’s recent announcement that it would enter the seated electric scooter market. But the S-Pod takes it one more step by removing the handlebars and footpegs entirely.
Instead, the S-Pod uses a hand knob that adjusts the lean angle, and thus the center of gravity, of the S-Pod. Because the S-Pod is self-balancing, leaning the chair forwards will cause it to propel forwards at any speed the user prefers, up to a limit of 24 mph (38.6 km/h). Braking is accomplished similarly by turning the knob the opposite way and causing the S-Pod to lean back. The rider doesn’t need to lean like on a typical Segway or hoverboard, all driving inputs are managed by the hand control.
And before you go running in terror thinking an S-Pod will be flying down your local sidewalks soon, ready to take you out at the waist, know that Segway initially plans the S-Pod to be used on closed campuses. As the company described in a statement, “the Segway S-Pod is a first-class smart transporting pod for enclosed campuses such as airports, theme parks and malls.”
Segway-Ninebot has unveiled a handful of new electric kick scooters ahead of next week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including one that the company claims is the “most compact, lightweight, and energy-efficient kick scooter ever introduced to navigate a city environment.”
That new $799 e-scooter, called the Air T15, is different from the ones that Segway-Ninebot provides to the e-scooter-sharing services around the world in that it doesn’t have a throttle. Instead, Segway-Ninebot says riders will simply kick the Air T15 along, and the e-scooter will instantly calculate “the friction and condition of the road and automatically adjusts your speed so you can maintain a constant rate of travel.” Speeding up will be as simple as giving the pavement a few more kicks, while slowing down will be managed by tapping on the rear wheel brake. In other words, it’s like an electric scooter with cruise control.SEGWAY-NINEBOT CLAIMS IT’S ULTRA COMPACT AND ENERGY-EFFICIENT
Segway-Ninebot is also promising portability with the Air T15. To that end, the scooter folds up with one touch of a button into a nearly flat structure. It does weigh 22 pounds, which is not light, but that is half the weight of Boosted’s rugged electric scooter.
The Air T15 is powered by a 300-watt hub motor that will get the scooter up to a top speed of 12.4 miles per hour, even on inclines of up to 15 percent. The scooter can regenerate energy back into the battery during braking, which helps squeeze out a range of a little more than nine miles. It also has an integrated display in the handlebars.
Segway-Ninebot isn’t just unveiling the Air T15 next week. There’s another kick scooter called the T60, which the company calls “a revolutionary product,” referring to it as a “roboscooter.” The T60 has a “reverse tricycle chassis” and says the vehicle is made for global scooter-sharing service providers. It’s not clear what will make it a “roboscooter,” though, as the company didn’t release any more specifics.
Segway-Ninebot will also show off a new version of its popular Max e-scooter, which it says is tailor-made for “the challenges of an urban fleet.” That means it will have bigger wheels, cables that are hidden away to protect them from the elements, and other ruggedized features that the company says will make the e-scooter easier and more stable to ride. The new Max will also have a swappable battery, which would make it easier to recharge without making people take them home or to an overnight facility to be plugged in.
There’s a slew of other non-scooter vehicles, too. Last December, Segway-Ninebot announced that it would show off the company’s first electric motor scooter and moped at CES 2020. And just today, the company announced that it will also debut the S-Pod, an egg-shaped self-balancing wheelchair at next week’s show.
Elon Musk wrote a two-part “super-secret Master Plan” for Tesla that the company has been following fairly closely over the last 14 years.
Tesla already unveiled almost all of the vehicles that Musk announced in the plan… except for one.
The main points of the plan were:
Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car, and…
Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.
With the Roadster, Model S, Model 3, and Tesla Energy, Tesla has mostly completed that original plan – although they are still working on higher volumes for both Model 3 and Tesla Energy.
In this new plan 3 years ago, Musk laid out Tesla’s plan to expand solar and energy storage, launch a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck.
Today, the company has made great progress on all of those projects, with new solar products, like solar roof tiles, new energy storage products, like Megapack, the new compact SUV turned out to be the Model Y unveiled earlier this year and the “new kind of pickup truck” was the Cybertruck unveiled last month.
Musk’s plans also included Tesla’s ambitious initiative to have autonomous cars in a shared fleet, which Musk now says should happen by the end of next year.
“In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport. Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year. We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate.”
Tesla did end up unveiling the Tesla Semi, the “heavy-duty truck”, but it never unveiled a vehicle for “high passenger-density urban transport.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk treated us to another reservation update on twitter, letting us know that the Cybertruck has now broken 250,000 pre-orders.
The update comes less than a week after the truck’s reveal.
Not only is the new number huge for less than a week of sales, but the rate at which reservations are coming in seems to be holding strong.
Tesla got 41,000 reservations in ~23 hours between Saturday and Sunday. This new number represents an increase of 50,000 in 49 hours since Musk’s last update on the matter.
That 50,000 reservations could be worth a minimum of $2 billion in potential revenue – if everyone follows through and orders the truck, even at base model prices. Which they won’t, there will be dropouts and some will order higher option levels.
This represents a drop in reservation rate, as should be expected, but the point is that there are still a lot of people getting in line for this unreleased truck even after several days. In general, especially with such a low, $100 bar of entry, one would expect takers to be quite front loaded.
A few days after Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s new Cybertruck, he posted a video of the truck taking part in a tug of war with a Ford F-150, which showed the electric Cybertruck easily overpowering the Ford pickup. But after accusations that the competition was unfair, Musk has agreed to a re-match, saying he’ll aim to record a new video next week.
A numberofblogs pointed out the apparent disparity in the match-up. The F-150 seems to be a rear-wheel drive model while the Cybertruck is all-wheel drive. The F-150 looks to be a lower-spec STX package with a 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6 engine, meaning it’s probably lighter than the Cybertruck. It even seems like Tesla’s vehicle is given a head start!
The video was controversial enough that scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson waded in to offer his opinion on Twitter, pointing out that electrical vehicles are “famously heavy” over the axles, which would give the Cybertruck greater traction in a tug-of-war.
And Ford itself also got involved, with Sundeep Madra, vice president of the automaker’s venture incubator Ford X, challenging Musk to an “apples to apples test.” Musk responded quickly: “Bring it on,” adding that he’ll “aim to do this next week.”
Will it happen though?A Ford spokesperson told Motor1 that Madra’s tweet was “tongue-in-cheek,” though that doesn’t answer the question of whether the challenge was serious. We’ve reached out to Ford and will update this story if we get a confirmation.
Really, though, Musk can’t lose in this sort of a competition. The market for pickups in the US is deeply loyal, with customers generally sticking to one of a handful of brands, including Ford’s F-series and Fiat Chrysler’s Ram trucks. If Tesla is going to make in-roads here it needs to be as visible as possible, so a little bit of chest-thumping can’t hurt.
Even if the Cybertruck lost in a re-match, Musk could say that Tesla will improve the vehicle before it starts rolling off assembly lines (scheduled for 2022). Better still, he could demand a tug-of-war against Ford’s own upcoming electric F-150, which is currently in the works. Now that would be “apples to apples.”
We’ll have to wait and see if the re-match happens, but whatever the outcome I’m sure Ford and Tesla fans will only want to see more.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk just unveiled the company’s first electric pickup truck, also known as Cybertruck, at an event in Los Angeles, California. The truck will come in three versions with 250 miles, 300 miles, and 500 miles of range, respectively. And it will start at $39,900, Musk said. The truck won’t be rolling off the assembly line until late 2021, but preorders can be made at tesla.com/cybertruck.
Always a showman, Musk put the truck through its paces in an effort to demonstrate its ruggedness. He had Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief of design, hit the door of the truck with a sledgehammer several times, claimed it was practically bulletproof, and showed the truck winning a tug-of-war with a Ford F150 and a drag race with a Porsche 911.
However, when he tried to show how shatterproof the glass was, things went awry. A metal ball thrown by Holzhausen shattered both the truck’s windows. “We’ll fix it in post,” a sheepish Musk quipped.
Musk has spent the better part of a decade poking at the idea of a Tesla pickup truck. He tweeted in 2012 that he “[w]ould love to make a Tesla supertruck” with “crazy torque” and “dynamic air suspension.” By 2013, he told Business Insiderthat the company was actually planning to make one. The pickup was even featured in his second “master plan” for Tesla, which he published in 2016.
Musk continued to toy with the idea in public, saying in April 2017 that a reveal event would happen in “18 to 24 months.” In 2018 he said the truck had taken on a “futuristic-like cyberpunk, Blade Runner” design, and that he didn’t even care much if people didn’t like it. He’s since said the pickup truck is his favorite project out of all the ones Tesla’s working on.
While the pickup truck has obviously been a pet project for Musk, it could also be a great opportunity for Tesla’s business. Not only are pickup sales on the rise in the US, but trucks command high average selling prices and high profit margins.
“Pickup truck buyers spend a lot on their trucks,” says Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics consulting at JD Power. “A $50,000 pickup truck is a very common occurrence now. People are willing to spend on this segment to haul their toys, to support a lifestyle.”
Tesla’s business could arguably use the bump. While the squeaked out a $143 million profit this past quarter, it only did so after including $164 million worth of regulatory credits and money that it’s banked from customers who’ve paid for the yet-to-be-released “full self-driving” version of Autopilot. This despite the fact that the Model 3’s profit margin continues to inch higher, and the car becomes increasingly popular around the world.
That said, a lot will happen between now and when the truck starts shipping. Not only will Tesla soon start producing Model 3s in China for the Chinese market, making it less of a burden to sell cars there, the company is also releasing the Model Y crossover at the end of 2020. One of the only segments rivaling the growth of pickup trucks over the last few years is the SUV segment (and especially the small SUV segment). If things go according to plan for Tesla, the company’s business will already be in better shape by the time the Cybertruck ships, meaning whatever profit it can reap from the pickup will be gravy.
Tesla has led the charge into long-range electric vehicles, and there’s currently no mass-market electric pickup truck available for sale. But the landscape will change by the time the truck ships. Ford has an all-electric F-150 on the way, General Motors confirmed it will put an electric pickup on the market in 2021, and EV startup Rivian — which is now backed by both Ford and Amazon — is scheduled to release its electric pickup in late 2020. Depending on how things shake out with all of these plans, Tesla could wind up releasing the Cybertruck into a market that’s already somewhat established — which would be an unfamiliar position for the company.
In the Cybertruck Event held today in order to unveil the long anticipated pickup track, Elon Musk threw out an ATV to compliment the futuristic vehicle.
Lets see how the other ATV and Side by side would reach from this move!
Currently there are not so many information available about the Tesla ATV but stay tuned in this space to learn more!!
Last month we reviewed the portable charging cords OEMs provide with their North American electric vehicles, and the results were wild. We gave Tesla’s Gen2 UMC an A+, Audi an A, Nissan a B, Hyundai a D, GM a D-, BMW an F, and Jaguar an F-. Now we have our first look and some exclusive details about what Ford is calling simply the “Ford Mobile Charger”. Based on what we know so far, we can confidently predict an A rating, but probably an A+, and we may have to level down all the other OEMs besides Tesla. And Ford is including a couple of extras that Tesla doesn’t.
Ford Mobile Charger key details:
Supports everything from 120V-8A to 240V-32A and in between, just like Tesla’s UMC. It’s smart enough to detect whatever the outlet is offering.
It will come standard with both 5-15 and 14-50 swap-able adapter plugs, just like Tesla used to do before Tesla only included the 5-15. (Mind you, Tesla only charges $35 for their adapters).
20′ long, same as Tesla’s.
Update with Temperature range: has an operating temperature of +60C to -40C, better than Tesla’s rated range (+50C to -30C). And according to what we heard last night, it will even allow charging up to 85C while slowly drawing down the current. This may beat Tesla’s Gen2 UMC, we’ll need more details.
Update with Lighting info: the unit has sleek lighting which displays whether it’s charging, not charging, or charging at a slower rate due to extreme temperature ranges. Very cool.
With the Mustang Mach-E, you can control all aspects of charging from the phone app or the car itself, just like a Tesla. So the unit itself has no buttons or state of charge (SoC) readout, same as Tesla, which I think is good for both durability and privacy. This differentiates it from the Audi / Porsche one, which we also liked.
We lauded Tesla and Audi for offering an optional wall mount, as it helps drive home to consumers that EVs don’t need hardwired charging boxes. Well, Ford is including it standard with every Mustang Mach-E, bravo!
Behold, your first look at Ford’s Mobile Charger, shown with the included free wall mount:
Ford Mobile Charger with swappable 14-50 plug, offers RWD Mustang Mach-E 22 miles of charge per hour.
First, if you don’t understand our enthusiasm, you haven’t read our OEM portable charger review, which you really should. It gives the necessary context and terminology to understand how badly most car makers screwed this up.
The Ford Mobile Charger with its 14-50 plug, on a dedicated 40/50amp circuit (so, an electric-oven outlet), will pull 32 amps, giving the Ford Mach-E Mustang RWD 22 miles of range per hour. That’s 264 miles of range over a 12 hour period, surely enough for 99%+ of drivers. BUT, if you really need more, Ford is also offering a hardwired, 48 amp wall box, which will get you 32 miles of range per hour.
The remaining key question for us is what adapters will be available for purchase beyond the included 14-50 and 5-15. This will determine if Ford has fully matched Tesla. Hopefully, at a minimum they will offer a 5-20 and 14-30 (the Tesla 14-30 was featured by YouTuber Kim in a recent LikeTesla video).
Which adapters do you want most? Let us know in the comments. And if you don’t know what any of these numbers mean, read our OEM charging guide & review.
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