Items tagged with Elon Musk
Elon Musk and the crew over at SpaceX have announced that the company will be shedding about 10% of its workforce, which currently totals over 6,000 employees. SpaceX said that it was going to "part ways" with some workers noting that it had "extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead." The cuts came despite a successful 2018 for the company. A SpaceX spokesman said in an email Reuters obtained, "To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either of these developments, even...
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Tesla has been making some changes to its pricing strategy over the past week, and the biggest change in quite some time comes today with the premium-market Model S and Model X. CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to announce that the 75 kWh battery pack for both electric vehicles will be discontinued and that customers only have until Sunday night to place orders for vehicles with that battery option. For those that don't keep up with all things Tesla, the Model S 75D with the 75 kWh battery has a base price of $76,000 and can travel up to 259 miles with a full charge. The heavier $82,000 Model X 75D...
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When Elon Musk first announced the mainstream Model 3 electric vehicle from Tesla in mid-2016, he proclaimed that the vehicle would have a base price of $35,000. However, as is often the case with Tesla product launches, the company has instead pushed pricier trim levels and has yet to actually release its promised $35,000 car. As a result, up until this point, the cheapest Model 3 that you could purchase featured a base price of $46,000. Tesla announced today that it is now dropping the price of that particular Model 3 by $2,000, bringing it to $44,000. This move is in response...
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Tesla is ready to begin testing the next generation self-driving platform, which is called Autopilot Hardware 3.0. While Tesla's current-generation Autopilot 2.0 platform makes uses of NVIDIA hardware, Autopilot Hardware 3.0 will be using custom Tesla-developed AI neural net hardware with vastly superior processing capabilities. According to an internal email obtained by Electrek, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has put out a call to employees to help test Autopilot Hardware 3.0. Musk is looking for "a few hundred" internal participants to basically serve as beta testers for the hardware/software...
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We all know that Tesla is working on a burly pickup truck to add to its electric vehicle family, but it isn't the only company that is looking to take on the titans in the industry. Rivian, a U.S.-based automotive startup, is hoping to turn a few heads with its new R1T. This is a mid-sized pickup that would compare favorably in size and capacity against the likes of the Toyota Tacoma, Nissan Frontier, Chevrolet Colorado/GMC Canyon and the upcoming Ford Ranger. What's most mind-boggling about the R1T is its alleged specs. Being that this is an electric vehicle, it will come from the...
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We're still not quite there when it comes to full Level 5 autonomous vehicles that you can purchase from dealer lots (or with the a few mouse strokes as you can with a Tesla), but we're getting closer. Tesla just announced the launch of Navigate on Autopilot, which is a further expansion of self-driving capabilities incorporated into its electric vehicles. Navigate on Autopilot is a new active guidance feature within Software Version 9.0, and is part of the Enhanced Autopilot self-driving suite. With Navigate on Autopilot, Tesla says that drivers will be able to travel on a highway from...
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Elon Musk and SpaceX have been doing some very cool things over the past decade with rockets. While the rockets SpaceX has been sending into space aren’t the sort capable of flying to the moon or Mars, they are capable of ferrying cargo safely to the ISS in Earth orbit and mostly returning to Earth in one piece. The big news this week was the unveiling of the SpaceX BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) spacecraft that can fly to the moon and beyond. During the unveiling of the rocket, Musk said that the BFR already has its first passenger booked, but during the event, no names were offered. When Musk...
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One lucky person is about to “boldly go where no [private passenger] has gone before”. SpaceX recently announced that they have booked the world’s first private flight to the moon. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk promised in early 2017 that two tourists would take to the stars by the end of of 2018. Musk hinted that the potential passengers had already paid significant deposits and would begin training for their flights later that year. The passengers were originally supposed to be aboard the Falcon Heavy carrying a Dragon capsule and take off from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad...
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A funny thing happened earlier this week. SpaceX founder Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan's podcast, drank a little whisky and puffed on a blunt rolled with weed and tobacco, and the Internet went bananas. Shares of Tesla, the electric vehicle company Musk co-founded and currently serves as CEO, fell afterwards. Musk smoking weed made plenty of headlines, but that wasn't the most interesting part of the podcast. What grabbed our attention was when Musk teased an imminent Neuralink announcement, along with his thoughts on fusing human brains with a "high-bandwidth" interface, effectively merging us with...
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When it comes to electric vehicles, the Tesla Model 3 is arguably the most talked about product on the market. After the success of the Model S and the Model X, Tesla aimed down-market with the smaller Model 3 sedan. While the promise of a true $35,000 (before $7,500 federal tax credit) version has yet to be achieved, that isn't stopping Tesla from expanding the Model 3 family at the high-end, as witnessed by the recently introduced dual-motor variant. The Model 3 (for now) starts at $49,000 for a rear-wheel-drive car, and jumps to $54,000 for dual-motors (all-wheel-drive). However, selecting the...
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Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, as it's being used in everything from our smartphones to our digital assistants to even the vehicles we drive (or rather, are driven for us). However, as AI becomes even more powerful, there are those that say that the technology should have limits on where it can be applied. Most often, those limits are envisioned for robots that would be placed on the battlefield and would have the ability to target and potentially kill without human oversight. A group of researchers and companies that has expertise in the...
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Tesla has been fighting the media over the past few months as it has struggled to reach production milestones with the Model 3 mainstream electric sedan. Along the way, it has battled bad press surrounding Autopilot failures, and CEO Elon Musk has even questioned the journalistic integrity of some publications in what he sees as an "conspiracy" against Tesla. Now, a new result from the Luxembourg Testing and standardization authority (ILNAS) has Tesla screaming bloody murder about biased testing procedures. The testing and standards body put a 2015 model year Model S, which...
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In an excited email to employees, Tesla founder and chief executive officer Elon Musk wrote, "We did it!!," making sure to add an extra exclamation point for emphasis. What Tesla did, according to Musk's email, is finally achieve the automaker's goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 electric vehicles in a single week, hitting the goal in the last week of the quarter. But that's not all. "Not only did we factory gate over 5000 Model 3’s, but we also achieved the S & X production target for a combined 7000 vehicle week!," Musk added. 7000 cars, 7 days ♥️ Tesla Team ♥️ — Elon...
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We haven't heard much about the Tesla Semi in recent months, but development of the revolutionary electric vehicle (EV) is still ongoing and new interest in the vehicle sparked this week in a tweet. Despite the "production hell" that Tesla is currently experiencing with the Model 3 -- along with accusations of internal sabotage -- Elon Musk has given an update via Twitter on one peculiar feature that is under development for Autopilot: a Mad Max mode. Fully autonomous vehicles tend to take a more cautious approach when it comes to lane changes, leaving a few car lengths in between vehicles...
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