PUBG Mobile probably isn’t the first game you’d expect to have an electric vehicle tie-in, but it’s here all the same. Krafton and Tencent Games have rolled out a 1.5 update for the phone-focused shooter that includes a raft of not-so-subtle plugs for Tesla and its cars. Most notably, you can find a Model Y on Erangel that can drive itself when you activate an autopilot mode on the highway —not that far off from the real Autopilot mode.
You’ll also find a Gigafactory on Erangel where you can build the Model Y by activating switches, and self-driving Semi trucks roam around the map dropping supply crates when you damage the vehicles. No, despite the imagery, you can’t drive a Cybertruck or Roadster (not yet, at least).
The additions are part of a larger “technological transformation” for Erangel that includes an overhaul of the buildings and new equipment, including an anti-gravity motorcycle.
As is often the case, you shouldn’t expect these updates in regular PUBG — the battle royale brawler for consoles and PCs has a more realistic atmosphere. The PUBG Mobile update is really a not-so-subtle way for Tesla to advertise its EVs in countries where it doesn’t already have strong word-of-mouth working in its favor.i
Tesla’s redesigned Model S and Model X will have a very unconventional and possibly controversial feature: automatic shifting between park, reverse, neutral, and drive (or PRND). There will be an option to change drive modes on the touchscreen, but CEO Elon Musk made the case for automatic shifting on Twitter late Wednesday night.
“Car guesses drive direction based on what obstacles it sees, context & nav map,” Musk tweeted. “After you drive without using a PRND stalk/stick for a few days, it gets very annoying to go back & use a shifter! You can override on touchscreen.”
An internal Tesla document obtained by Electrekexpands, slightly, on what Musk means by “guesses”:
The vehicle uses its Autopilot sensors to intelligently and automatically determine intended drive modes and select them. For example, if the front of Model S/X is facing a garage wall, it will detect this and automatically shift to Reverse once the driver presses the brake pedal. This eliminates one more step for the drivers of the world’s most intelligent production cars.
That’s just one example, and we’ve asked Tesla for more, though the company reportedly no longer has a PR department and has not responded to questions The Verge sends to its general press line since September 2019.
The general idea behind the decision fits into the larger Silicon Valley ethos that Tesla subscribes to, though, of “eliminating friction.” The consequences of trying to automate PRND won’t be clear until people start taking deliveries of these new cars, which is supposed to happen in a matter of weeks.AUTOMAKERS HAVE TINKERED WITH PRND SELECTORS FOR YEARS, TO SOMETIMES DEADLY EFFECT
Automakers have tinkered with the look and location of drive mode selectors for years, enabled by the rise of automatic transmissions and the ability to change modes via software (also known as “shift by wire”). Many companies have ditched the classic steering wheel stalk in favor of a knob on the dashboard or the center console or separate physical buttons.
The removal of the PRND stalk that the Model S and Model X previously featured is part of a wider overhaul of the interior design of those vehicles, but it’s not the only one to conjure a debate about safety. Tesla has ditched its circular steering wheel in favor of one that’s U-shaped — a decision that Roadshow reports has already drawn the interest of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal safety regulator for motor vehicles.REGULATORS HAVE BEEN CONCERNED ABOUT MODE CONFUSION FOR DECADES
When asked whether NHTSA is looking into Tesla’s decision to automate PRND, the agency answered with a fairly stock response: “Manufacturers must certify their vehicles [to] meet applicable Federal motor vehicle safety standards before putting them on the road,” and that it will require vehicles found noncompliant or that contain a safety defect to be recalled and may impose fines if a manufacturer does not recall vehicles in a timely manner.” The agency said it’s in “regular communication with manufacturers to discuss potential safety concerns” and that it reviews consumer complaints and company data to screen for safety risks.
While federal motor vehicle safety standard number 102 spells out the specific sequence of PRND, and number 114 covers some really basic rollaway issues, it does not appear that any others would necessarily preclude Tesla’s automation or the lack of a physical selector. That’s despite NHTSA saying this all the way back in 1999 in a response to BMW about using alternate gear selection methods like touchscreens, keypads, or voice controls:
We are concerned that, as new designs for automatic transmissions that do not use a shift lever come into the market, there is nothing in Standard No. 102 to prevent misshifting in those vehicles.
Tesla has released the first official picture of a Model Y production vehicle, as well as pictures of the production line pictures — hinting at their previously discussed body manufacturing breakthrough.
With the release of Tesla’s Q4 2019 financial results, the automaker also announced the start of Model Y production, which happened earlier this month, and the start of deliveries in March.
For almost a year now, we have seen Model Y pre-production prototypes on public roads as part of Tesla’s extensive test program.
The vehicle appears to have evolved a little from the original prototype unveiled in March 2019.
Now Tesla is sharing the first official picture of a production Model Y with side-by-side comparison with the original prototype:
The first picture of the production version of the Model Y confirms that Tesla is making the chrome delete standard — a first for a Tesla vehicle, but a popular after-market modification among owners.
It also features some design refinements, especially on the front end of the electric SUV.
Along with the first official picture of the Model Y, Tesla shared a series of pictures of the Model Y production line in Fremont, California:
The images show large body parts to build the Model Y, which is something Tesla said it was working on.
In an interview last year, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla is moving to an aluminum casting design instead of a series of stamped steel and aluminum pieces for the Model Y body:
When we get the big casting machine, it’ll go from 70 parts to 1 with a significant reduction in capital expenditure on all the robots to put those parts together.
This would represent a major breakthrough in body manufacturing, and the images represent the first visual proof that Tesla is making it a reality.
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.
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.
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.
While Elon Musk didn’t want to talk about the upcoming Tesla pickup truck today, he still managed to hype the vehicle up by saying that the ‘Cybertruck’ could be Tesla’s best product ever.
Many people, including financial analysts, are trying to know more about the upcoming Tesla vehicle.
During the conference call following Tesla’s Q3 2019 earnings, Elon Musk didn’t want to comment about Tesla’s pickup truck when asked by an analyst.
Yet, the CEO went on to say that he thinks the pickup truck, which he is now calling the Tesla ‘Cybertruck’, might end up being the automaker’s “best product ever”
That’s despite the fact that Tesla is currently selling three successful vehicles and several industry-leading energy products.
However, Musk did say that he might be wrong about pickup.
Elon Musk gave another hint about the mysterious design of the upcoming Tesla Pickup truck. He says that it is even more ‘Blade Runner-esque’ than this design rendering.
Tesla is continuing to test its new Model S prototypes at Nürburgring race track in Germany, and now the automaker has even installed a Supercharger station at the track.
As we previously reported, following the recent launch of the Porsche Taycan, Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to be on a mission to show that Tesla’s vehicles are still the highest-performing EVs available today.
Musk also said that Tesla has a new 7-seater Model S prototype at the Nürburgring racetrack, and it seems like the track testing could simply be about testing new versions of Tesla’s Model S and the new 3-motor “Plaid Powertrain” instead of going after the Taycan.
The Supercharger station looks like the temporary and portable one on a skid that Tesla sometimes uses at events, or when a permanent station is having some issues.
We asked if it was a temporary one, and the company said no:
Tesla’s vehicles perform better when they are fully charged, and therefore, this new Supercharger station is going to be useful for Tesla owners testing the limit of their cars on the Nürburgring track.
The Supercharger is still not showing on Tesla’s map, and before this new Supercharger, the closest one was over 50 km away:
Without the details on the new Supercharger station listed online, the power output is still unknown, but these smaller stations from Tesla generally have a limited power output.
The power source for the Supercharger station is also unclear.
Nonetheless, it should prove useful for Tesla in its upcoming testing for the new Model S prototype.
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