Tesla Model 3 Is The Most American Electric Car

The most American electric car you can buy isn't a Ford or a Chevy. It's a Tesla.

That's according to the 2021 Made in America Auto Index released by American University's Kogod School of Business.

The index, now in its ninth year, ranks models on sale in the US based on how much of their labor, parts, manufacturing, and research and development come from domestic sources. Vehicles also score points if their company is based in the US and if profits land in the US.

The Tesla Model 3 came in third overall in this year's ranking, with 65% of its parts coming from the US or Canada. It earned an overall score of 82.5. The electric-vehicle maker builds its US-market models at a plant in Fremont, California. It's working to open up another US factory in Austin, Texas.

The Model 3 was only beat out by the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray and Ford Mustang GT, which topped the list. Last year's winner, the Ford Ranger pickup, dropped to 16th place after its US/Canadian content was reduced from 70% to 45%.

Tesla's Model S sedan and Model Y SUV tied for fifth place, while the Model X SUV took eighth, tying with the Ford F-150. The next most American EV is the Chevrolet Bolt, which comes in at 55th place. Ford's Mustang Mach-E SUV took the 75th spot, with 15% US/Canadian content and an overall score of 19.5. It's assembled in Mexico.

Credit: businessinsider.com

Tesla's Push For Service To Catch Up With Sales

Tesla has told staff that it is preparing a massive push to expand service capacity as it attempts to catch up to its rapid growth in sales.

Over the last few years, Tesla has been growing at a ferocious pace with deliveries and production capacity seeing important increases. Now the Tesla customer fleet has reached over 1 million cars.

Unlike most other automakers who rely on third-party franchise dealers to provide service to customers, Tesla owns its entire global service infrastructure, which it is trying to ramp up alongside sales and production.

In recent years, it hasn’t been able to keep up with Tesla’s growth. Over the last 12 months, Tesla’s deliveries grew almost 50% year-over-year, adding over a half million vehicles to its fleet. But over the same period of time, Tesla’s service centers grew by only 12% and its mobile service fleet by 8%.

Last year, Tesla made several statements about expanding service after CEO Elon Musk admitted a “foolish oversight” of Tesla’s service coverage and plans to open many more service centers around the world. Things moved slowly, but they started to ramp up last quarter with Tesla adding 20 new service centers in just a few months.

A source familiar with the matter has said that Tesla communicated to its staff that it plans to significantly ramp up service over the next year with at least one new service center opening per week in 2021. It means that Tesla plans to add over 52 new service centers in 2021. Tesla currently operates 466 service centers around the world.

Tesla president of automotive, Jerome Guillen, has also recently stated that he is on the lookout for real estate that the company can quickly turn into Tesla service centers. The new service centers are going to be located where Tesla is seeing strong demand for its vehicles and where they see service-center capacity already lacking.

New service centers also create more demand for Tesla. Musk has previously said that Tesla has found expanding service centers, and the Supercharger network are Tesla’s two best ways to bring in more customers.

This is good news. Service delays are a recurring complaint from Tesla owners in some markets where Tesla never seems to catch up to growing sales. On top of expansion in markets lacking a service center altogether, there are many markets in the same situation that need a new location to help lower the demand on existing locations.

Let’s hope that Tesla delivers on this goal of a new center every week next year. Tesla owners are going to need it if Tesla delivers what is expected to be ~800,000 new cars next year. That will push Tesla’s fleet to more than 2 million vehicles, meaning that the fleet will have doubled in less than two years.

Credit: electrek.co

Tesla Quietly Killed Its 'No Questions Asked' 7-Day Return Policy

The policy was intended as a display of confidence in the quality of its cars. Recent quality control issues might be to blame for the change.

Tesla has stopped offering its "no questions asked" 7-day return policy. CEO Elon Musk had touted the unique guarantee as a show of confidence in the quality of his company's products, but the change in policy comes at a time when the automaker is dealing with mounting complaints about the quality of some of its recent cars. The move does the exact opposite of instilling confidence.

The company's policy previously stated the following:

“Owning a Tesla vehicle means you are driving one of the most advanced, best performing and safest vehicles available. We are confident that you will feel great about your new vehicle, and so are giving you time to experience and enjoy your new Tesla. Subject to the terms and conditions of this policy, if you are unhappy with your vehicle, you may return it to us within seven (7) calendar days.”

There was always the caveat that the car must be returned with no damage and less than 1,000 miles on the odometer to get a full refund, so it wasn't exactly possible to do a coast-to-coast Cannonball Run with one of the cars anyway, if that's an idea you ever had.

According to Electrek, there isn't a new stated policy to replace the 7-day offer, and dissatisfied buyers will be referred to Tesla's service department if they want to return a vehicle. Tesla knows what it's selling, so why does it feel the need to walk back its generosity and bravado now?

Where's the confidence? Tesla has been running into a lot of quality-control issues with the new Model Y, including problems with the exterior paint and misaligned doors, not to mention the incident when the sunroof flew off one owner's car while he was driving down a highway. It's possible that the company hopes it can dissuade nervous customers from returning their vehicles for a refund when they have to actually speak to an employee.

The 7-day return policy was appreciated by customers exactly because of those issues, it can take multiple days of driving to actually identify problems like leaking windows. The company often identifies issues in its first cars to roll off the line and then fixes its manufacturing process to remedy them in later vehicles.

Tesla is obliged to fix faulty cars, but it's notoriously slow at completing such repairs and doesn't authorize third-party shops to fix its vehicles. Owners have reported waiting months or even up to a year for Tesla to complete requested repairs.

By offering a generous policy, customers were more willing to forgive Tesla for any issues. The company is lucky that other automakers have been so far behind in electric, but it can't afford to continue this way as they start to catch up.

Credit: inputmag.com

Also: Tesla previously offered a two- to four-year warranty on used Model S and X vehicles, but now only offers a warranty of one year or 10,000 miles over the original policy.

Tesla & The Next-Gen, Lower-Cost, 'Million-Mile' EV Battery

KEY POINTS:

• As Tesla plans next-generation electric vehicle batteries, focus is turning to lithium iron, not the lithium ion that has been the fundamental chemical engineering science powering EVs to date.
 
• Elon Musk’s car company and GM, among other auto companies, want much longer-range and more durable battery cells.
 
• New battery technology is possible, allowing cars to go 400 miles or more between charges and lasting as long as 1 million miles. That could spur EV sales the same way the first 100,000-mile warranties on gas cars once did.
 
• Eliminating the rare, expensive and controversial element cobalt from batteries is among the biggest aims.

The future of the auto industry may boil down to the difference made by a single letter: R. As in, the difference between a lithium-ion battery, like those found in today’s electric vehicles made by Tesla and others, and the lithium-iron phosphate batteries coming soon to market.

As Elon Musk’s Tesla has been talking up new battery technology development as part of the lead-up to the company’s first-ever Battery Day for investors, Wall Street is buzzing about the difference the next generation of batteries may make. Vehicles with lithium-ion batteries, also used in cellphones, are expected to give way over the next few years to cars and trucks made with lithium-iron phosphate and other chemistries. This will cut costs, extend vehicle ranges to 400 miles or more between charges and enable batteries to last as long as 1 million miles.

Reducing Tesla’s own costs and spurring mass adoption of EVs remain critical priorities for Tesla, as echoed in a message from Musk to employees on Monday (6-29-20) saying it would be a challenge to break even right now.

The new technology will change the experience of owning a car, whether a Tesla or one made by rivals like General Motors, which is also working on new battery technologies, analysts said. In particular, the extremely long life of batteries soon to hit the market are likely to mean the batteries hold their value well enough to be resold when owners trade in their cars, possibly for use storing solar electricity for homes. And the next-gen batteries’ long lives may let them be used in ridesharing businesses that demand cars that can take the pounding of near-continuous use.

“If you’re talking about batteries that can last twice as long for the same price, it completely changes the math for the consumer,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. “Iron phosphate batteries are safer, and they can have second or third lives as electricity storage.″

Musk recently said its Battery Day is tentatively scheduled for September, the month and day to which Tesla recently pushed back its annual shareholder meeting. Originally, both events had been planned for June.

“We want to leave the exciting news for that day, but there will be a lot of exciting news to tell,” Musk said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “I think it would be one of the most exciting days in Tesla’s history.”

Efforts to reduce the use of cobalt have been ongoing for a few decades already, and Tesla has made significant. But one of the major advantages of building batteries with cobalt is how easily it allows complex chemical structures to be engineered.

Lithium-iron phosphate, meanwhile, has never proved to be efficient in the space constraints of an electric car — it was originally designed for the grid storage market due to its energy density profile. But its chemistry is suited to fast-charging and cost efficiency because it does not rely on cobalt.

Battery experts are very curious to learn about the breakthrough Tesla has had, and believe the company could raise the profile of the lithium-iron phosphate approach in the EV market. The key difference in the lithium-iron phosphate batteries is that they do not need to use cobalt, a rare and expensive element that is a big part of the high cost of electric vehicle batteries.

Cobalt prices have tanked during the global economic downturn, declining from as much as $95,000 per ton in 2018 to $30,000 this year, but it remains key to bringing down battery costs. Cobalt is by far the most expensive element in a lithium-ion battery.

Canning cobalt is one of the biggest elements of cutting the cost of batteries below the $100/kWh threshold that is a rough proxy for making electric vehicles as cheap as those powered by internal combustion engines. Today’s batteries cost about $147/kWh, down from about $1,000 in 2010 and $381 in 2015.

There is a limit to the price improvements to come from reducing just cobalt, and that’s because the pricing differential between cobalt and nickel has narrowed in recent years. Tesla’s primary EV battery technology is NCA (based on nickel-cobalt-aluminum oxide chemistry). Most of the auto industry uses an NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) battery chemistry. But with nickel an important part of both approaches, reductions in cobalt alone can’t drive continued step changes in pricing.

It is going to be hard to get below $100 per kilowatt with current nickel-cobalt chemistry. Tesla realized they can’t just get rid of cobalt.

Current battery technology, including NMC, remain a contender to reach the million-mile threshold, but won’t be able to do so on a cost-effective basis with today’s nickel concentrations. Nickel currently ranges in price from roughly one third to as much as one half the price of cobalt. With lithium-iron phosphate, which does not require nickel or cobalt, lab research shows there is a possible pathway to drive pricing down to as low as $80/kWh.

In the laboratory it is becoming clear that it is possible to make a battery that is a long-lived asset, and the next-generation battery technology can achieve the million-mile potential in the next five years. That would not only be a game changer for EVs, but for the energy grid storage market, which lithium iron phosphate technology was originally designed to supply. A major ramp in production would benefit the cost equation for both markets.

Lithium-iron phosphate and its upgraded versions will have a major role in the future of EVs and fundamentally change large-scale energy storage.

Read the complete story at cnbc.com

Finally - My New Tesla Is Here

After much contemplation ...

I finally took the plunge ...

I chose white, no extra charge ...

Got a deal, batteries not included ...

And it was delivered today ...

Take a look for yourself > > > HERE

It's perfect for me!

A friend asked, "How far will it go on a charge?"

I answered, "Unlimited miles - of course. To infinity and beyond."

(click or tap to enlarge image)

Hats off to Elon Musk. Wonder what I should get next?

Tesla Being Hurt By Trade War

Although neither side of the current trade war between China and the United States has directly targeted automobiles with tariffs, Tesla is still being hurt by the tensions between the two nations. Tesla is feeling the impact far more than any other carmaker.

Tesla’s stock took a beating recently, dropping 6.3% and hitting its lowest share price since January 2017. The reason the electric vehicle (EV) maker’s stock is being targeted more so than others is because China is a major part of Telsa’s near-term plan to survive.

In January, Elon Musk broke ground on a Gigafactory in China, and the total investment in the project is expected to exceed $4 billion. This enormous outlay is worth it to Tesla because China represents a clear and immediate path to revenue, something the manufacturer still desperately needs if it is to stay afloat.

Traditionally, the tariffs for autos imported into China has been a 25% duty. These rates were lowered last year to 15%, but increased to a staggering 40% duty during the first round of the U.S.-China trade war. This necessitated Tesla increasing the price of its automobiles to pass on that tax. The current price for a Tesla Model 3 is approximately $73,000, with roughly $30,000 of that price being the result of China’s import tariffs.

If the current trade tit-for-tat boils over into affecting car imports directly, Tesla could very well see the very tight path to profitability disappear before its eyes. China is increasingly important to every auto manufacturer, and none more so than the newest and most consistent cash-burning carmaker on the block. On the other hand, if the trade war results in permanently reduced automotive tariffs, this current pain could be well worth it for Tesla.

Read the complete article > digitaltrends.com/tesla-hurt-by-trade-war