2017 Tesla Model S on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Woz pranks the Internet with 'his' Tesla Model X

This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. People pay attention to Steve Wozniak. People pay attention to Tesla Motors. Put the two together, with the bonus of a not-yet-available Model X, and you've got the makings of Twitter gold. This was proven yesterday, when Woz Tweeted a picture of himself with what he said was "our new Tesla!" Excited admirers offered their congratulations and wanted to see the cool Falcon doors in action. But it was all a dream too sweet. The Model X, after all, isn't due until the end of the year and even an Apple co-founder can't bend time that much. Tech editor at The Street Chris Ciaccia popped the bubble with this Tweeted explanation: "Despite @stevewoz tweeting a pic of him w/the Model X, not his new car. Just a photo op with the display model at that charging station." So, really, "Woz's" Model X could belong to anyone who wants to go to wherever the display model is located and snap a picture. We would not be surprised, though, if Woz is one of the 12,000 (guesstimated) pre-orders for the Model X. The all-wheel drive, all-electric CUV can hit 60 miles per hour in under five seconds thanks to a powertrain similar to the one in the Model S. Like the popular S, the X will come with either a 60- or 85-kWh battery. You can see the Falcon doors move up and down, digitally, here.

Tesla co-founder Ian Wright surprised at company's success

New Zealander Ian Wright was one of the three original founders of Tesla Motors in 2003 and helped pitch Elon Musk on backing the company the following year. Wright's interest was an electric sports car, and he didn't give up on that idea when he left Tesla in 2004; in 2005 he founded Wrightspeed and produced the X1 prototype, an electrified Ariel Atom that slew ICE supercars, but that company folded in 2008. Looking back at his popular creation, he recently told the San Francisco Business Times that although Tesla's fortune has gone, "quite a lot better than I expected it would," he's still "out of sync" with Tesla's aim. You can see his lack of faith in Tesla by the way he sold his stock after the IPO in 2010. Wright still doesn't fully support the position that simply lowering the price of electric cars will turn into mass adoption. "I still think that's not possible," he says. Wrightspeed the electric car maker has become Wrightspeed Powertrains, building drop-in electric propulsion systems for industrial applications like garbage and delivery trucks, and he's already got companies like FedEx trialing his systems. But he doesn't begrudge Tesla's success: "[They've] done vastly better than I expected that they would, so maybe I'm wrong," he says, and, "What Tesla has achieved in terms of changing people's perceptions about electric cars... is beyond my wildest dreams." In the video above, Wright answers five questions put to him by the SF Business Times about his Tesla experience.

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.