Car Throttle

In what Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is calling "the worst day in Tesla history", three Tesla executives were killed today in a small plane crash in Palo Alto, California. The names of the three victims are unclear, but the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the plane was owned by Doug Bourn, a senior electrical engineer for Tesla Motors. As the names have not been confirmed, it is unclear if he was onboard. They were only identified as high-ranking executives of Tesla Motors, along with two other employees. UPDATE: Tesla VP of Communications Ricardo Reyes & VP Diarmuid O'Connel were not on board the flight. The plane is a twin-engined Cessna 110, manufactured in 1976 and registered to Air Unique, Incorporated in Santa Clara, California. The cause

A lot has been happening at Tesla in the past few weeks and months - store openings, moving of corporate headquarters, profitability reached, and most recently new investment garnered from an appearance at the Frankfurt Auto Show. On the business side of things, something very important got lost in the shuffle of all the news and hubbub of such a big automotive show. And that news is the hiring of new sales and communications executives- and it's significant because both are from big, successful companies. John Walker was Audi’s former general manager of sales and he will be Tesla’s vice president of North American sales. Walker spent time with Audi’s Australian and Canadian divisions, and has General Motors and BMW on his resume. The second hiring is

As part of the global expansion it is undertaking, Tesla Motors made an appearance at the Frankfurt Auto Show, and a big one at that! There has been a lot of introductions happening, but some big news happened on the business side of things there well. There's not a whole lot of information about the whole deal as of yet, but apparently equity investment company Fjord Capital Management has invested $82.5 million in Tesla. That's no small bit of cash, and it comes on the heels of a recent string of positive news for Tesla - DOE government loan approval for the Model S, worldwide real store openings and hitting the goal of profitability for the first time. If you remember, the outlook for Tesla last year

When I said things were going really well for Tesla lately, I wasn't kidding. Government loans, profitability reached, store openings - now, a dropped lawsuit. If you've been following Tesla, you might remember that on May 26th former Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Telsa and it's CEO Elon Musk. The claims were interesting: Eberhard said that Musk had "defamed" him, he was owed wages, he had received a damaged Tesla Roadster, and to top it all off, he said that Musk was taking credit for founding the company when Eberhard was the founder. Wow, that's a lot of grievances there! Tesla had previously filed a motion to dismiss the whole case, but that didn't work out - the judge ruled it could proceed and

A little over a month after unveiling the Model S sedan, Tesla Motors has announced today that the company has received over 1,000 orders. That is no doubt an impressive figure! Consider this; the company has no factory yet to produce the model and the purchase price is at around $50,000, in luxury territory. 1,000 orders is a number to be excited about. I can see why the car reached so many orders too. The car offers an incredible value proposition and Elon Musk has guaranteed to personally refund deposits should an "Armageddon scenario" happen to the company. This is the guy that founded PayPal and SpaceX; I think people have a lot of confidence that he will be able to deliver on the Model S's promises. Like

Like Autoblog pointed out, GM's Bob Lutz was often the most quotable auto executive out there, proving over and over again his propensity to say - interesting - things and get headlines because of it. Apparently Elon Musk thinks so as well. Free publicity! It all started with an original editorial in the New York Times, back in November of 2008. In the article columnist Randle Stross ripped Tesla. Witness: “It's all-electric technology remains woefully immature and don’t-even-ask expensive....The Roadster is not much more than a functioning concept car that sells for $109,000.” Needless to say, it was scathing. After a dustup with Tesla buyer and Silicon Valley tech guy John Calcanis, apparently NYT did a retraction and the article was rewritten. Why this is still relevant right now, I