Paul Snyder has mixed feelings about Tesla’s Cybertruck, the first of which will be unveiled during an event for investors and fans on Thursday in Austin, Texas. One of them is horror. When Tesla revealed the vehicle’s design in November 2019, his first reaction was a question. “Like, what is …
Read More »Tesla’s Cybertruck Is Here and It Costs $61,000
Two years after Tesla was due to deliver its first electric trucks, the Cybertruck is really, truly here—and the base model costs $61,000. That’s about $21,000 more than CEO Elon Musk promised when the Cybertruck was first introduced four years ago. And that cheapest model won’t be available until 2025. …
Read More »Tesla Is Suing Sweden
Tesla is suing Sweden as the carmaker hits back at an attempt by local unions to disrupt its business in an ongoing battle over workers’ rights. In the lawsuit, filed Monday, Tesla says it is suing “the Swedish state through the Swedish Transport Agency” because local union members were refusing …
Read More »Why Teslas Totaled in the US Are Mysteriously Reincarnated in Ukraine
This summer, a Vancouver car mechanic named Max got a perplexing ping on his phone: Betty White was in Ukraine and needed his help. This was surprising because she had died on a Canadian highway back in January. When Max last saw Betty White, his nickname for his Tesla Model …
Read More »Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading
Swedish workers are uniting against Tesla. From tomorrow, cleaners will stop cleaning Tesla showrooms, electricians won’t fix the company’s charging points, and dockworkers will refuse to unload Tesla cargo at all Swedish ports. What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an …
Read More »Swedish Ports Threaten to Block Teslas From Entering the Country
Dock workers in Sweden are threatening to block deliveries of new Teslas entering the country, in the most serious labor dispute the company has faced in Europe to date. Teslas arrive into Sweden via four ports, Malmö, Gothenburg, Trelleborg, and Södertälje, according to the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union, which represents …
Read More »How Elon Musk and Tesla Helped Spark the Auto Strikes
Elon Musk hasn’t been sighted at the picket lines in Missouri, Ohio, or Michigan, where autoworkers are striking against the Big Three US carmakers. Yet the influence of Musk and his non-unionized company Tesla have been everywhere since the United Auto Workers called the strike last week. In some ways, …
Read More »If Elon Musk Had Been a Happy Child, Would He Still Be Launching Rockets?
I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s mega-bestseller Steve Jobs. I’m sure somewhere else in the office are covers representing his other subjects—Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, …
Read More »The Auto Strike Threatens a Supply Chain Already Weakened by Covid
In addition to making everyone an epidemiologist, the Covid-19 pandemic schooled the public on the world-spanning network of manufacturers, assemblers, and shippers behind just about every consumer good that arrives on your doorstep. Or driveway. Car prices soared as automakers struggled with a supply chain jammed up by worker shortages, …
Read More »Don't Count on Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer to Jump-Start an AI Revolution
You’d have to be pretty brave to bet against the idea that applying more computing power and data to machine learning—a recipe that birthed ChatGPT—won’t lead to further advances of some kind in artificial intelligence. Even so, you’d be braver still to bet that combo will produce specific advances or …
Read More »