Photo: Tesla Motors
Twitter has been quite a lonely place lately, and it is all down to Elon Musk's unusually discreet presence - at least by the standards he's gotten us used to.
After the veritable storms that have preceded the Model 3 unveil in March and the publication of the second part of his Master Plan, Musk didn't really have any reasons to celebrate. First, it was the now famous fatal crash involving Joshua Brown and his Model S cruising on Autopilot. More recently, there was the Cape Canaveral incident where one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets exploded just days it was supposed to deliver a satellite into orbit.
All-in-all, though, Musk would probably call 2016 "a good year." Tesla has just registered its best ever quarterly sales in Q3 2016 with a total of 24,500 units sold worldwide, but perhaps the most important thing of all was the positive reception that the Model 3 had. With close to 400,000 people having placed registrations already, Tesla has effectively sold its entire production for the first year, and once the (presumably) favorable reviews start pouring in, the 400,000 will be followed by many more.
Another great achievement for Tesla comes from a very unlikely place: Stuttgart. The German city is best known for hosting two of the country's premium brands, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, both of which are planning to release their own long-range electric vehicles. And how is this good news for Tesla? Well, particularly judging by Mercedes-Benz's decision to launch a dedicated brand, this signals the moment the traditional car makers accept the fact that EVs are the future. Or, at least, they pretend they do very convincingly.
But Tesla's year is far from over. A few weeks ago, Elon Musk merged Tesla Motors and Solar City to create the platform for one of the bullet points of his Master Plan: an off-the-grid household capable of generating and storing its power which can then be used to charge an EV. The CEO's latest tweet speaks of an event connected to this merger that will be made public on October 28, but he doesn't go into more details.
He's just as secretive about another mysterious unveiling, this time, related to a Tesla product, scheduled for October 17 (that's one week from now). A quick browse through all the possible subjects he could be referring to seem to single-out the Autopilot 2.0. Just like it did with the first version, Tesla is likely to start selling cars with built-in Autopilot 2.0 hardware before the vehicles are equipped with the necessary software as well.
An October release of the new sensors would match the one-year time frame Tesla seems to have adopted after releasing the initial hardware in fall 2014 and making the software available to all last October. However, Musk did say it was something "unexpected by most), so we might be in for a surprise.
All-in-all, though, Musk would probably call 2016 "a good year." Tesla has just registered its best ever quarterly sales in Q3 2016 with a total of 24,500 units sold worldwide, but perhaps the most important thing of all was the positive reception that the Model 3 had. With close to 400,000 people having placed registrations already, Tesla has effectively sold its entire production for the first year, and once the (presumably) favorable reviews start pouring in, the 400,000 will be followed by many more.
Another great achievement for Tesla comes from a very unlikely place: Stuttgart. The German city is best known for hosting two of the country's premium brands, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, both of which are planning to release their own long-range electric vehicles. And how is this good news for Tesla? Well, particularly judging by Mercedes-Benz's decision to launch a dedicated brand, this signals the moment the traditional car makers accept the fact that EVs are the future. Or, at least, they pretend they do very convincingly.
But Tesla's year is far from over. A few weeks ago, Elon Musk merged Tesla Motors and Solar City to create the platform for one of the bullet points of his Master Plan: an off-the-grid household capable of generating and storing its power which can then be used to charge an EV. The CEO's latest tweet speaks of an event connected to this merger that will be made public on October 28, but he doesn't go into more details.
He's just as secretive about another mysterious unveiling, this time, related to a Tesla product, scheduled for October 17 (that's one week from now). A quick browse through all the possible subjects he could be referring to seem to single-out the Autopilot 2.0. Just like it did with the first version, Tesla is likely to start selling cars with built-in Autopilot 2.0 hardware before the vehicles are equipped with the necessary software as well.
An October release of the new sensors would match the one-year time frame Tesla seems to have adopted after releasing the initial hardware in fall 2014 and making the software available to all last October. However, Musk did say it was something "unexpected by most), so we might be in for a surprise.
Tesla product unveiling on the 17th (unexpected by most), followed by Tesla/SolarCity on the 28th
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 9, 2016
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