Tuesday 5 May 2015

Tesla Energy is Elon Musk's battery system that can power homes, businesses, and the world

The Powerwall can be used to create smart microgrids or supply back-up power

 Source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8525309/tesla-energy-elon-musk-battery-announcement

      Tesla has finally taken the wraps off Tesla Energy, its ambitious battery system that can work for homes, businesses, and even utilities. The system breaks down into two separate products: the Powerwall is a home battery system, that comes in a 10 kWh version for $3,500, or a 7 kWh model for $3,000, excluding installation and the inverter. The unit is about three feet by four feet in size and six inches thick, and comes with integrated heat management and can fit either on the inside or outside of the wall of your home. The system is connected to the internet — Elon Musk said that the system can be used to create "smart microgrids" — and can be used as a redundancy system, or potentially allow a home to go off the power grid entirely. "The whole thing is a system that just works," Musk told reporters during a briefing this evening.
The big brother of the Powerwall is what Musk and his team are calling Powerpack — and it's where things get really interesting. They describe it as an "infinitely scalable system" that can work for businesses, in industrial applications, and even public utility companies, that comes in 100 kWh battery blocks that can scale from 500 kWH all the way up to 10 MWh and higher. "Our goal here is to change the way the world uses energy at an extreme scale."



Musk's ambitions with the battery are tremendous. He opened the press event by invoking climate change, and saying that it's "within the power of humanity" to change the way we produce and use power. He went on to say that he sees the Gigafactory under construction in Nevada as a product, the first of many. With 160 million Powerpacks, we could power the United States, he said, and with 2 billion, the world. The entire presentation and party, Musk said, was powered by stored solar energy.
While the system is being announced today, Powerwall has been testing for a year, and has already been on sale to select customers. For the Powerpack system, Tesla will start taking orders later this year and then really ramp up production as Tesla's battery-building Gigafactory comes online...
 See more here

Tuesday 21 April 2015

Monaco Top Marques 2015 : Larte Design and Tesla Model S



You are perfectly entitled to find that the Tesla Model S has a soft design and not very aggressive. Certainly the initial design is very successful, but inject a little more testosterone in the lines would not have been refused by many. The Russians with the comapny Larte Design have what you need with the "Elizabeta".It is in the Top Marques show in Monaco that Larte Design presented for the first time its aesthetic modification program called the Model S Elizabeta. The shapely style of the sedan is very attractive originally but it has nothing really vindictive, which may be surprising compared to incredible performance it offers. 

For the Elizabeta, we can find different appendages in carbon fiber or basalt fiber, just to gain a few pounds, are declined on the sedan 0 emission. Tesla Model S Elizabeta leaving discover its shields, air intakes, reworked grille and side skirts or even diffuser and spoiler.

Larte Design also promises wheels but also made some adjustments to the cockpit. Finally the company also announced
that the interior was also redesigned and equipped with a unique audio system but photos were not unfortunately shown.






Elon Musk nearly sold Tesla to Google in 2013


       This story is excerpted and adapted from Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, due out May 19 from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

On May 8, 2013, Tesla Motors shocked just about everyone by posting its first-ever quarterly profit, reporting higher-than-expected demand for its Model S electric sedan. That moment marked the beginning of a turnaround for Elon Musk’s tumultuous automaker. The next year would see the Model S win most of the automotive industry’s major awards and Tesla’s share price rise roughly fivefold, to more than $200. The 2013 profit announcement was fortuitous. Just weeks before, Tesla had been on the verge of bankruptcy.

Earlier in 2013 the company was struggling to turn preorders of its vehicles into actual sales. As Musk put his staff on crisis footing to save Tesla, he also began negotiating a deal to sell the company to Google through his friend Larry Page, the search giant’s co-founder and chief executive officer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal. 

Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes and Google spokeswoman Rachel Whetstone declined to comment. “I don’t want to speculate on rumors,” Page said when I asked him if Google had considered buying Tesla, adding that a “car company is pretty far from what Google knows.”
Although Tesla spent several years designing and building its flagship Model S, the car was still missing some features when it went on sale in June 2012. Its safety elements, software, and interior room were better than those of most luxury cars, but it didn’t offer the parking sensors and radar-assisted cruise control of rivals like BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Glitches with the 2012 Model S door handle irked early buyers, as did some aesthetic choices such as the car’s sun visors, which had unsightly seams.

A big part of the problem was a lack of resources, says former Tesla engineer Ali Javidan. “It was either hire a team of 50 people right away to make one of these things happen, or implement things as best and as fast as you could.” Musk chose the latter, Javidan says. Tesla also struggled to get top-rate suppliers to take it seriously, says chief designer Franz von Holzhausen. With the sun visors, he says, “We ended up having to go to a third-rate supplier and then work on fixing the situation after the car had already started shipping.”

Tesla’s first customers were proto-typical early adopters who wanted a computer on wheels. By the end of 2012, many were grumbling about the bugs still to be worked out, and sales slowed to a trickle. “The word of mouth on the car sucked,” Musk says. By Valentine’s Day 2013, Tesla was heading toward a death spiral of missed sales targets and falling shares. The company’s executives had also hidden the severity of the problem from the intensely demanding Musk. When he found out, he pulled staff from every department — engineering, design, finance, HR — into a meeting and ordered them to call people who’d reserved Teslas and close those sales. “If we don’t deliver these cars, we are f---ed,” Musk told the employees, according to a person at the meeting. “So I don’t care what job you were doing. Your new job is delivering cars.”

Read more here 

Tuesday 31 March 2015

New Tesla product at the end of April!


Elon Musk CEO of Tesla announced a surprise for the end of April.

Elon Musk announced via a tweet an important new Tesla product line, which will be unveiled on April 30!



He published via a tweet today that it won’t be a car. The CEO and co-founder of Tesla promised a new product that will be unveiled in his design studio in Hawthorne. He didn’t specify whether it is a mechanical product, a bicycle,an electric motorcycle, or anew range of innovative products.

After electric cars, Tesla could propose a motorcycle?



LiveWire, the electric motorcycle prototype of Harley Davidson

Various rumors indicate Elon Musk could unveil an electric power motorcycle. Tesla Group already offers two cars, the Model S (with the option P85D) and the Model X. By positioning itself in the world of motorcycles, the group could appeal to a wider audience and a new community. An exceptional motorcycle like the Tesla cars could be proposed in April.

Other rumors suggest that the CEO of Tesla could produce electric batteries for household use that could come equip people who live in remote areas.

All this is based on rumors, so it’s necessary to wait until the end of April…

Monday 30 March 2015

P85D Update

Already capable of impressive performance, the Tesla S P85D will become even more efficient with a change in its software.


Tesla P85D is now known for its formidable performance. This sedan is already able to beat a BMW M4, and the last P85D 700 horsepower version of the same can be measured by a Lamborghini Aventador and a Ferrari.




 And P85D model will soon be able to further accelerate a little louder: the boss Elon Musk said on twitter that last software update would allow the sedan to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph (96 km / h) in 3.1 seconds. It's getting very quick!


Tesla Model S P85D vs Lamborghini Aventador

Can An Electric sedan beat a Lamborghini Aventador on a straight race? Warning, you would be wrong to leave with a priori.
The Lamborghini Aventador is among the best sprinters in the world. With its four-wheel drive and 700 horsepower, it can jump from 0 to 100 km in 2.9 seconds. Only the Nissan GT-R, Porsche 918 Spyder, the Bugatti Veyron, the LaFerrari and P1 are officially better.

While the Tesla S is known for its impressive acceleration capabilities (already seen beating a BMW M4), so you can think it’s slower than the Italian supercar straight.

But here there is a Tesla S P85D pushed to 700 horsepower. Surprising the Italian!











Saturday 28 March 2015

Tesla P85D VS Ferrari 458 Italia

We saw that the Tesla model S P85D is not exactly a weak electric car. With pure acceleration, it is able to cope with very powerful supercar thanks to its high power electric engines: 700 hp in total. After the BMW M4 last week, the P85D version of the Tesla S faces this time an Italian high performance car: the Ferrari 458 Italia. And yes, this big electric sedan jumped like a supercar.