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Submission + - Rematch! Tesla Cybertruck vs. Porsche 911 Drag Race! (This Time It's Not Rigged) (motortrend.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Eric Tingwall for MotorTrend writes, "Back in December, Elon Musk released the Tesla Cybertruck into the world with an incredible claim: “It can tow a Porsche 911 across the quarter mile faster than the Porsche 911 can go by itself,” Musk said after showing a clip of his stainless-steel colossus towing a trailer and narrowly beating the iconic sports car down the dragstrip. Millions of people have already seen Tesla’s video, including you, probably.

"We’ve been fact-checking automakers and testing cars for 75 years at MotorTrend, and to believe Tesla’s claim we needed to not just see it with our own eyes but also drive it with our own feet and hands. So that’s what we’ve done. We rented a dragstrip, lined up two examples of the slowest new 911 you can buy, secured the same trailer that Tesla used, and borrowed Out of Spec’s 845-hp Tesla Cybertruck. Then we raced."

Submission + - Twitter.com now redirects to X.com, nixes Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection

Submitted by united_notions
united_notions writes: Anyone with Twitter.com bookmarked will now be automatically redirected to X.com.

Simultaneously, X.com no longer allows access from Firefox when blocking cross-site trackers and other privacy-indifferent bloat. Users receive a message "Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com". Click the shield in the menu bar and disable Enhanced Tracking Protection, and it's all back to normal, but at an obvious cost. Naturally reports are piling in on X.com and elsewhere.

Submission + - Tesla Must Face Claims It Misled Buyers About Autopilot and Self-Driving (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Tesla must face a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that it misled consumers about its cars’ self-driving capabilities, a fresh setback for the electric-car maker just as Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has staked the company’s future on autonomy. Tesla has been accused of overstating in 2016 that all its upcoming cars would have the “hardware needed for full self-driving capability” and would be able to drive themselves from Los Angeles to New York City by the end of 2017.

California resident Thomas LoSavio, who filed the complaint, says he bought a new Tesla in 2017 and paid an extra $8,000 for FSD. He alleged that statements by Tesla and Musk led him to believe that his car would have self-driving technology within a “reasonably short period.” But by 2022, Tesla hadn’t produced “anything even remotely approaching a fully self-driving car,” according to his complaint.

Submission + - The inside story of Elon Musk's mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: The day before Elon Musk fired virtually all of Tesla’s electric-vehicle charging division last month, they had high hopes as charging chief Rebecca Tinucci went to meet with Musk about the network’s future, four former charging-network staffers told Reuters. After Tinucci had cut between 15% and 20% of staffers two weeks earlier, part of much wider layoffs, they believed Musk would affirm plans for a massive charging-network expansion. The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.

Submission + - Tesla spending ad money to influence shareholders approval of Musk's $55B payday (electrek.co)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Fred Lambert of Electrek writes, "Tesla has now disclosed that it is spending money to promote its shareholders vote to approve of Elon Musk’s $55 billion compensation package. Back in 2018, Tesla shareholders approved one of the biggest compensation plans of all-time: a $55 billion fully stock-based CEO compensation plan for Elon Musk. In January, a judge sided with lawyers representing a Tesla shareholder alleging that Tesla’s board misrepresented the compensation package when presenting it to shareholders. It’s a complicated issue, but in short, the judge found that Tesla’s board and Musk didn’t play by the rules of a public company when it presented the plan to shareholders. The judge found that Tesla had governance issues when coming up with the compensation plan and those issues were not communicated to shareholders before voting on the plan."

Submission + - Ferrari makes even more money in 2023 (fiatgroupworld.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: One thing is to sell cars and lead the volume rankings and a different one is to make money by selling cars. To be popular does not necessarily mean to make money. And there are two brands in the automotive industry that know this perfectly. Ferrari and Porsche, two of the most iconic car brands recorded the highest margins in 2023 despite being at the bottom of the volume ranking for the year.

The latest analysis of the financial results published by the majority of the Western car makers (those coming from Europe, USA, Japan, and Korea) and two Chinese OEMs indicate that the industry had a very good year in terms of revenue and profits. The data collected for 24 OEMs indicates that the revenue (or the money obtained from selling cars and other activities) increased by 11% to 2.25 trillion euro.

Submission + - In 2017, the feds said Tesla Autopilot cut crashes 40%. That was bogus (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has egg on its face after a small research and consulting firm called Quality Control Systems produced a devastating critique of a 2017 agency report finding that Tesla's Autopilot reduced crashes by 40 percent. The new analysis is coming out now—almost two years after the original report—because QCS had to sue NHTSA under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the data underlying the agency's findings. In its report, QCS highlights flaws in NHTSA's methodology that are serious enough to completely discredit the 40 percent figure, which Tesla has cited multiple times over the last two years.

Submission + - Tesla's profitable Supercharger network in limbo after Musk axed the entire team (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.”

Then, one day in April, CEO Elon Musk axed the entire division, even though it was profitable last year.

With more than 25,000 charging ports in the U.S. and over 50,000 worldwide, the Supercharger network is the undisputed king of EV fast charging. Widespread, well-maintained and fast, the network has transformed the way people viewed EVs, assuaging concerns about range anxiety for wide swaths of the car-buying public. But with the recent layoffs, Musk cast a cloud over the private infrastructure project.

While some people expected layoffs to hit the Supercharger division, few thought it would be eliminated.

Submission + - Tesla lays off 'more than 10 percent' of its workforce, loses top executives (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks after reporting its first year-over-year decline in vehicle deliveries since 2020, Tesla is now planning to lay off over ten percent of its global workforce, according to an internal company-wide email seen by Electrek. That works out to at least 14,000 of the 140,473 employees that Tesla reported in its latest annual earnings. It’s not clear which teams at Tesla will be impacted.

“There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done,” said CEO Elon Musk in the email published by Electrek. In a later post on X, Musk said that “about every 5 years, we need to reorganize and streamline the company for the next phase of growth.”

As part of the layoffs, Tesla senior vice president Drew Bagliano is also leaving, Bloomberg reports. (Baglino later confirmed the departure on X.) He has been at the company for over 18 years in several roles and was most recently in charge of Tesla’s energy and powertrain division. Electrek also noticed that the Tesla badge has vanished from the X account for the company’s head of policy, Rohan Patel.

Today’s layoff announcement is the latest in a string of bad news for Tesla. The company reported a miss in delivery estimates ahead of its quarterly earnings on April 23rd, alongside a predicted slowdown in sales growth back in January as it prepares for the launch of its next-generation vehicles.

Tesla has also reportedly abandoned its plans to produce an affordable Model 2 that would cost around $25,000 as it shifts to instead focus on a new robotaxi. This comes as the company faces mounting pressure from the one-two punch of waning demand for EVs and more affordable EVs being released by Chinese manufacturers. Last year, Tesla lost the title of world’s top maker of electric vehicles to China’s BYD, which produced 3.02 million EVs compared to Tesla’s 1.81 million

Submission + - In Tesla Autopilot probe US prosecutors focus on securities, wire fraud (reuters.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: U.S. prosecutors are examining whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers about its electric vehicles’ self-driving capabilities, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems assist with steering, braking and lane changes — but are not fully autonomous. While Tesla has warned drivers to stay ready to take over driving, the Justice Department is examining other statements by Tesla and Chief Executive Elon Musk suggesting its cars can drive themselves.

Submission + - Tesla sends out more layoff notices as employees enter 4th week of job cuts (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Elon Musk continues to cut deeper at Tesla. The company sent out another round of layoff notices on Sunday night. The latest round of cuts mean that employees at the company are entering their fourth straight week of layoff notices. Four workers told Business Insider that their managers notified them of additional cuts to their teams on Monday morning. Additionally, several Tesla workers took to LinkedIn to say they'd received layoff notices over the weekend. "After watching my team gradually slimmed down week after week since mid-April, I received the dreaded 'Hello Employee' email this Sunday afternoon," one Tesla worker wrote on LinkedIn.

Submission + - Tesla retreats from next-generation 'gigacasting' manufacturing process (reuters.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Norihiko Shirouzu and Giulio Piovaccari for Reuters write, "Tesla has backed away from an ambitious plan for innovations in gigacasting, its pioneering manufacturing process, according to two sources familiar with the matter, in another sign that the electric-vehicle maker is retrenching amid falling sales and rising competition. Tesla has been a leader in gigacasting, a cutting-edge technique that uses huge presses with thousands of tons of clamping pressure to die-cast large sections of the car’s underbody. On a typical vehicle, the underbody can consist of hundreds of individual parts.

"Last year, as Tesla developed a new small-vehicle platform, it aimed to punch out the underbody in a single piece. But Tesla has since halted the effort, opting to stick with its more proven method of casting vehicle underbodies in three pieces: two gigacasted front and rear sections and a midsection made of aluminum and steel frames to store batteries, according to the two sources familiar with the matter."

Submission + - Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team (electrek.co)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Just after laying off “more than 10%” of its global workforce, Tesla is laying off even more employees – including senior executives and long-time veterans of the company, most notably the entire Supercharging team and the executive responsible for negotiating NACS adoption across the industry. This has already caused Tesla scale back plans for further expansion of the Supercharger network.

Submission + - Tesla Cybertruck Owners' Forum Is Already Full Of Tales Of Broken Cybertrucks (jalopnik.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Lawrence Hodge for Jalopnik writes, "From gunky surfaces to embarrassing off-road exploits to malfunctioning after going through water, the stainless steel Tesla Cybertruck seems like an all-around mess. We cover a lot of those concerns here on Jalopnik, but if you want an even clearer picture of just how dire owners of this machine have it, look no further than the Cybertruck owners forums. We decided to check out the forums for ourselves after we spotted a tweet by @salsadrunkard that featured a screenshot of a Cybertruck owner detailing how their truck broke down a mile from the delivery center. It didn’t take much digging to find the forum and the thread itself on Cybertrucks Owners Club."

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