There must have been one helluva marketing meeting to come up with this PR stunt.

"No one believes electric vehicles have pulling power!"

"Let's prove they do!"

"With a 287,000 pound plane!"

Silence.

Six months later...

On a remote taxiway at Melbourne Airport, a Tesla Model X P100D with the greatest pulling power of any electric passenger vehicle came face to face against the newest star of the Qantas fleet, a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner.

The stunt earned a new Guinness World Record for "heaviest tow by an electric production passenger vehicle," according to CNN Money.

That time we towed a plane with a Tesla Read the rest

Tesla burned $710m last quarter but hopes to be profitable soon. In the meantime, don't ask Elon any boring questions!

"We're going to go to YouTube. Sorry, these questions are so dry. They're killing me."

Instead, Mr Musk took questions from YouTube vlogger and journalist Galileo Russell who was listening to the call. Mr Russell hosts a YouTube talkshow called HyperChange TV, dedicated to the financial side of Silicon Valley technologies.

Mr Musk encouraged Mr Russell to keep asking questions, because they focused more on technology, rather than business

Here's the official theme tune of your Tesla deposit:

Read the rest

Tesla was extremely upset to learn that the employees who'd been injured and maimed in its factories spoke to Reveal News about the unsafe working conditions and culture of cover-ups at the Tesla plants. Read the rest

Deep-sky photographer Rogelio Bernal Andreo did the calculations, then managed to catch footage of Starman and the Tesla Roadster that were launched via the Falcon Heavy rocket. Read the rest

People who drive Tesla's Model X have a cool "easter egg" feature built right into their vehicle: a holiday music and light show set to the tune of Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s "Wizards In Winter"! When activated, this all-electric luxury vehicle will display a synchronized show using the car's headlights, turn signals, and falcon wings.

The video above was shot by a woman in Ohio who writes:

"My daughter and I were going to deliver her fundraiser sales when she stopped me and said mom look it’s a Tesla! It was in our next door neighbors driveway and honestly I didn’t know what was so special about the car. We are pretty close with our neighbors so we went over to ask who’s car it was and here it was their insurance guys car. He heard us ask and said come on out and let me show you something. My husband wasn’t home at the time so I wanted to video it to show him later. I was amazed with it to say the least and thought everyone else would like to see it to, so I posted it on Facebook..."

Here's a better look at it, a video from 2015 showing three vehicles in sync:

More importantly, here's how to turn on the show:

Press and hold the Tesla “T” for 5 seconds

When the “PLEASE ENTER ACCESS CODE” prompt appears, enter the code “holiday” or “ModelXmas” and press “OK”

A prompt will appear that reads “The show will begin after you exit the car, close all doors and press the lock button on the key.

The FBI published 160 pages of its files on inventor Nikola Tesla last year, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request. It's gone viral, perhaps due to the slavering anticipation of the forthcoming JFK Assassination files release.[via]

Yes to Peace Rays! Read the rest

Tesla sells both 60kWh and 75kWh versions of its Model S and Model X cars; but these cars have identical batteries -- the 60kWh version runs software that simply misreports the capacity of the battery to the charging apparatus and the car's owner. Read the rest

When this 97-year-old Toronto man was born, the auto industry was just turning mainstream. Roads made for horses were being paved over for automobiles and the "average" family could consider buying a vehicle. Read the rest

Way back in 2011, major American automakers were slow to realize that "companies in Silicon Valley have for some time been looking at cars just like another mobile device or app." When the disruption, hit, it hit hard, writes Nick Bilton: Read the rest

Jalopnik posted spy photos of a Tesla Model 3 that that is likely "damn near production-spec." It makes me miss my 1986 Honda Accord hatchback.

(photos: Brian Williams/Spiedbilde/Jalopnik) Read the rest

In this footage from Europe, the autopilot on a Tesla warns driver Frank van Hoesel of an accident about to happen. He doesn't even realize why his car is braking suddenly until he sees the crash occur—forty yards away. Read the rest

Tesla released a video of a commute from home to office, including parking as a demonstration of its fully self-driving hardware. "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons.

He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." Read the rest

From Tesla's release notes for its upgraded Autopilot technology based on radar as its primary control sensor:

The net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions.

Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front - using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal - and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar. The car in front might hit the UFO in dense fog, but the Tesla will not.

Of course they're kidding. Or so they'd like us to believe.

Video clip from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Read the rest

Wallpaper took on the daunting task of narrowing down 20 years of design innovations to just over 100 eclectic choices, including the Tesla Roadster, the 9/11 memorial, Instagram, the bushy brow, and Ilse Crawford's IKEA collection, above. Read the rest

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiah

by Nigel Cawthorne

Chartwell Books

2014, 192 pages, 7.2 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches

$9 Buy a copy on Amazon

Mad scientist. Inventor. Philosopher. Visionary. Eccentric. A man who was terrible at business, but great with pigeons. A mythic figure, Nicola Tesla was all these things and more. Examining his life and career, Tesla: The Life And Times Of An Electric Messiah is a lengthy, oversized book filled with illustrations, photos, diagrams of his many inventions, and brief, informative vignettes about his friends, colleagues, business associates, and rivals.

Tesla's own words are pulled from writings and correspondence, and help flesh out a turn-of-the-century futurist, although they can be somewhat dry and academic. His eccentricities liven things up considerably. For instance, did you know he once fell into a vat of boiling milk, and lived on a diet of bread, warm milk, and something mysteriously known as 'Factor Actus'? Did you know he had a strange aversion to women's earrings, and would become feverish at the sight of a peach? Tidbits like these keep the book moving at a nice pace, as the man became more reclusive and odd toward the end of his life.

His War Of The Currents with Thomas Edison is detailed, as well as his battle of radio with Guglielmo Marconi. His experiments with wireless transmission of energy, X-Rays, flying machines, remote control, and artificial intelligence are also described, as well as the mystery surrounding the disappearance of his papers concerning his invention of a death ray by the US government. Read the rest

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today said it is opening a preliminary investigation into 25,000 Tesla Model S cars, following the death of a driver who was killed using the vehicle's Autopilot mode. Read the rest

In my weekly segment on KCRW's “Press Play” news program with host Madeleine Brand, we listen to Elon Musk wax poetic about artificial intelligence and whether life might be a dream--and his plans to send humans to Mars by 2025. Read the rest