Elon Musk

Historically, most technology innovations in automobiles start at the high end and gradually work their way down the lineup until they've become standard features of even the humblest of cars. From automatic transmissions to disc brakes, turbochargers to fuel injection, high-end audio systems to...

It all started when stock analysts circulating an estimate from auto-industry trade journal Ward's Auto that Tesla's U.S. sales were down 26 percent for the first nine months of 2014, compared to the same period in 2013.. It was covered in a Wall Street Journal story on the company's new lower-cost...

The Tesla Model S electric luxury sedan has now been on sale in China for six months, but it recently received a major sales incentive from local officials in Shanghai. That city's municipal government has ruled that Tesla buyers will be exempted from paying the $12,000 registration fee required to...

Car dealers often come in for criticism, especially among electric-car advocates and Tesla Motors supporters who have watched state dealership lobbying groups make Tesla's direct-sales model illegal in a number of states. Since 2010, those lobbyists have been altering state laws originally designed...

Well, that makes two: Toyota confirmed yesterday that it had sold a portion of its shares in electric-car maker Tesla Motors. The Japanese company's sales appear to have taken place at roughly the same time that German automaker Daimler sold its 4 percent stake in Tesla, adding $780 million in cash...

Elon Musk says the carmaker may switch to a "hybrid system" of Tesla Stores and franchised dealers in the future.

In the end, the online rumors proved to be largely accurate. Last night, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk revealed an all-wheel-drive version of the Tesla Model S electric luxury car--known as 'D'--whose most powerful P85D version will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.2 seconds. DON'T MISS: Tesla...

While Tesla Motors now sells electric cars in North America, parts of Europe, and--perhaps most importantly--China, it continues to expand its sales footprint. The most recent addition is Japan, a notoriously closed market where only one of the three largest makers has any interest at all in...

Historically, auto dealerships have made as much or more money selling used cars as new ones. Since electric-car maker Tesla Motors doesn't have dealerships, but sells cars online directly to buyers, that has left the supply of used Teslas solely to individual owners who may want to sell. Now...

The Internets exploded yesterday following a photo tweeted by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, with the caption, "About time to unveil the D and something else". Feverish speculation over what it meant took up terabytes of server space. Then, yesterday afternoon, a photo surfaced that purports to show a...

Tesla Motors sales in China are "robust," and the company may have as many as 4,000 reservations for its Model S--which it only started selling in China five months ago. The upbeat assessment came from Patrick Archambault, a Goldman Sachs analyst who has followed Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] since its...

When an unknown automotive startup from Silicon Valley unveiled an all-electric sports car with supercar performance back in 2006, the shock was enough to make industry giant GM sit up and pay attention. That, plus the desire to gain some of the green halo seized by Toyota's Prius hybrid, led GM's...

Carmaking is very, very, very expensive. A conventional vehicle platform or architecture generally costs about $1 billion to design, engineer, test, certify, and put into production. And the various models derived from that architecture usually last about seven years. Multiply that by multiple...

Have we just seen the first crack in the facade of auto-dealer opposition to Tesla Motors selling cars directly to retail buyers? An opinion piece in auto-industry trade journal Ward's Auto concludes with the following remarkable sentences: We can keep Tesla busy defending what are basically...

Autonomous vehicles have become a hot talking point in recent years, as major firms like Google continue high-profile development of the technology. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] has also expressed an interest in recent years, and now tells Nikkei that the firm could introduce...

As expected, Tesla Motors announced yesterday afternoon that it would build its first battery gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada. The electric-car maker released platitudinous statements from CEO Elon Musk, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval, and state Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick. Much of the business...

A press conference to be held this afternoon may answer one of the major questions for the future of electric-car maker Tesla Motors: Where will it locate its gigafactory? The answer appears to be Nevada. The office of state governor Brian Sandoval said he would make a "major economic development...

The 2015 Tesla Model X could be a bigger success than the Model S, according to Morgan Stanley.

How does a car-company CEO get to be a rock star? It helps, of course, if your company makes a five-passenger luxury sedan that outdrags a Porsche 911, uses half the energy of a Prius, and has the highest crash-safety rating ever recorded. But Elon Musk has done something else to separate himself...

The Silicon Valley electric-car maker Tesla Motors seems to be in the news almost every day. Over the last two weeks, the company faced fallout over glitches in early Model S cars, and upgraded its powertrain warranty. It also turned the screws on states competing for its multibillion-dollar...