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Tesla Roadster getting 400-mile battery upgrade

A few months ago, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said something a bit cryptic during the company's annual shareholder meeting: Tesla was working on "a fairly exciting upgrade to the Roadster." Mysterious, no? Well, speaking with Auto Express recently, Musk revealed what this upgrade will be: an improved battery pack. "The Roadster had an old generation battery," Musk told Auto Express." We'll upgrade it to a new generation battery pack and it should have a range of about 400 miles, which will allow you to drive from LA to San Francisco non-stop." The Roadster originally came with a 245-mile range, which is good for Los Angeles to Madera, CA. Tesla sold the Roadster, its first car, in the US from 2008 to 2011 and elsewhere until 2012. It's not that the old Roadster batteries were failing regularly – quite the opposite, in fact – but li-ion EV technology advances rapidly, and so now we're extra curious what's in the new pack and how it will work. Will it be compatible with Tesla's Supercharger technology? How much will it cost, both for Roadster owners as well as for Tesla? We've asked Tesla for answers to these questions, but all a spokeswoman would say is, "We have no further details at this time." At the shareholder meeting in early June, Musk said the "exciting upgrade" would happen this year, so if he was talking about the battery upgrade at that time, we should be getting more information on the new packs right soon.

Tesla China president steps down after fewer than 9 months on the job

In July, 2013, before Tesla had delivered its first car to China, CEO Elon Musk called the country a "wild card." A year on, that continues to be the case, with media reports all over the spectrum concerning how Tesla is doing in China. The immediate future won't be any calmer with news that Tesla China president Veronica Wu has resigned from the company, having just taken the job in April. Hers follows the sudden departure of Kingston Chang, the man she replaced; he was hired away from Bentley China in March, 2013 and left in March of this year citing personal reasons. Observers have put the latest departure down to the difficulties of Tesla's expansion efforts. In spite of widely acknowledged pent-up demand and the Model S being priced below expectations in China, the company has stumbled a few times navigating issues such as customs paperwork, on-time customer deliveries, navigation systems with local mapping and the installation of charging equipment for customers in rural areas. Speculative articles questioning the company's actual sales numbers in China inflate the narrative of a "speed bump" in the way of Tesla's ambitions. Tesla China's head of charger network development, Tom Zhu, will run the company in the interim.

Analyst slashes Tesla sales forecast by 40% due to fuel prices

While falling gas prices are cause for celebration among Americans, many of whom are seeing their budget for Christmas presents burgeon on account of the cheap fuel, it's decidedly bad news for Tesla Motors. The electric car manufacturer's fortunes are being seriously impacted by the low cost of petrol, with one of the firm's biggest fans on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas, now slashing his expectations for the Palo Alto, CA-based company. Jonas has a long record of being bullish on the brand, but that hasn't stopped him from lowering his forecast for the company by a whopping 40 percent. In other words, Jonas thinks Tesla will only be able to sell 300,000 vehicles by the end of the decade rather than the half a million that was originally forecast. "While nobody buying a Model S today is doing so to save on their monthly expenses, the longer-term story is far more dependent on the volume success of the Model 3," Jonas wrote, according to CNN Money. "Oil price is a factor for Model 3." Gas prices might not be the only factor that could hurt the Model 3, though. Jonas seems to think that Tesla won't be able to sell its more affordable model for anything less than $60,000, which is a far cry from the $35,000 price that the company has targeted. Jonas doesn't elaborate on why Tesla might miss its target so drastically, but it does help to explain his bearish attitude – if gas prices remain low, there's not really any incentive for customers to join the Tesla family. That's doubly true when the cost of joining said family is twice as much as expected.