For the first time since 2016, students in Flint, Michigan, will drink clean water from water fountains installed in their schools. This was made possible through the efforts of The Musk Foundation, a private foundation founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk in 2002, which donated $480,350 to Flint back in October 2018. A total of…
Everyone who’s been following the story of Tesla is well aware of the war between the iconoclastic automaker and the country’s hidebound auto dealerships. After a decade of highly colorful struggle and strife (which I cover in detail in my history of Tesla), the US is a patchwork of policies regarding Tesla’s direct sales model —…
Way, way back in 2019, which seems like about seven years ago at least, I interviewed a woman living in Europe about her Tesla Model 3. That time was obviously pre-Covid-19; the world today is quite different in many ways. In parallel to the pandemic, the presence of electric vehicles continues to expand in our lives,…
As electric vehicle owners, we often field questions from EV-curious drivers, and some of them … let’s just say they highlight the low level of EV awareness among the general public. You may be tempted to respond to your Facebook-educated neighbors with smart-ass answers, but this is unlikely to promote wider EV adoption, so I…
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) revealed the results of its Tesla Model Y crash safety tests recently. Like all Teslas, the Model Y earned the highest-possible rating during these tests. But there was also a surprise. When looking carefully at the results, it’s clear that the Model Y electric SUV has proven even safer than the Model 3,…
In the early days of industrialization, most manufacturing companies were vertically integrated. Automakers such as Ford owned mines and steel mills, generated their own power, and operated their own delivery fleets. Over the decades, as global supply chains grew more sophisticated, automakers outsourced more and more, and nowadays some automakers depend on outside firms for…
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post (which Steve Hanley already skewered), the author wrote about the recent icy traffic disaster on I-95 in Virginia but imagined a scenario where the only vehicles were EVs. The issue, the writer claimed, was that if everyone had been driving EVs, the mess could have been worse. He brought up the fact that…
There are times on the road when it pays to have a vehicle with enough power and torque to evade a potentially serious and life-threatening accident. For a Tesla owner in China, this definitely was the case as the all-electric crossover’s instant torque and raw power allowed the vehicle to avoid what could very well…
The Biden administration has proposed a number of initiatives to promote transport electrification and clean energy. Three of these are specifically targeted at the auto industry: a reboot of the federal tax credits for EV purchases; a major investment in EV charging infrastructure; and a new set of fuel economy standards. Which of these three…
Tesla Model 3: fast, high-tech, reasonably affordable, and able to mine cryptocurrencies? A Tesla Model 3 has been converted into a partial cryptocurrency mining rig by owner Siraj Raval, who makes at least $800 a month through the system; enough to pay for his Tesla and then some. Using free Bitcoin mining software, along with…