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Tesla Model S headed to Vukee carsharing in San Francisco

The San Francisco bay area continues to expand as a carsharing hub, and the latest addition is going to attract some attention. Vukee, a Palo Alto, CA-based company, is introducing the Tesla Model S to carsharers in that market as a way to stand out from larger carsharing providers like Zipcar and City CarShare. Instead of spending $70,000 on the luxury electric sports car, Vukee's new carsharing deal offers an affordable behind-the-wheel driving experience, but the exact cost has not yet been announced. The launch happens in April. Vukee will start with 25 Teslas at its charging stations ready for drivers to pick up. Electricity and insurance are included in the rental fee. If you've a fan of this idea, you can make a small donation to Vukee and have your name emblazoned on the hood of one of the Model S EVs. If you donate a lot of money, like Gill up there in the picture, your name will be written very large on the hood. Signing up for Vukee is also easier than becoming a Zipcar or Car2go, since Vukee has no membership fees. You just download the Vukee app, scan your drivers license and credit card and pay as you go. Who wants to go for a drive? This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. vukee Car Spot Indiegogo from Meik-M. Lindberg on Vimeo.

Elon Musk: Teslas will already know where we’re going

In the future, cars will drive us. And probably not surprisingly, they'll often know where to go without us even needing to tell them. That's the theme of a short back-and-forth conversation on Twitter recently between Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk and a user who tagged him in a comment suggesting that "it would be cool" to be able to tell a car where to go. Responding to user James Harvey, Musk replied, "It won't even need to ask you most of the time." Later, after Harvey asked how the car would know where he wants to go, another user suggested that the car would know what time you go to work. "Yeah, don't exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes," Musk tweeted. It won't even need to ask you most of the time — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2017 Yeah, don't exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2017 That the ability to know where we're going will be part of our future driving experience shouldn't be surprising. After all, the smartphones we carry around already possess the ability to predict what we want — think Google's cleverness in tailoring search results or providing traffic information just before your commute, Facebook's highly customized News Feed content or even auto-fill technology, which can predict the words you're typing. And plenty of automakers have been touting their own work in developing in-car artificial intelligence systems. Like Audi's Elaine concept, which will be able to learn, think and even empathize with drivers. Or Mitsubishi's e-Evolution concept, which can not only assist your driving, but also assess your skills and teach you how to improve them. Tesla's vehicles, of course, are being outfitted with all the latest autonomous driver-assist technology, with the automaker eager to one day reach full Level 5 self-driving capability. According to Inc., Teslas will be able to listen and respond to directional commands, and they'll even have access to your calendar to comb for information about where you need to go. Tesla has also said it's developing an update to its Autopilot hardware and remains on track to achieve full Level 5 autonomous driving by the end of this year, which strikes a lot of people as wildly unrealistic. At any rate, the promise of cars knowing what time we're sneaking out to get donuts or picking up the kids is interesting, coming from the man who has warned that AI presents "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization."Related Video:

Tesla strikes back against Lemon Law King over Model S dispute [UPDATE]

*UPDATE: We have now also received a statement from the Model S owner in question, which has been added below. When we asked Tesla Motors for a statement on the lawsuit filed by the "King of Lemon Laws" the other day, the company told us that it does not comment on pending litigation. Fair enough. That's a standard response. But the company has since felt the need to comment on the issue using its own company blog. In a post called "When Life Gives You Lemons...," the Tesla Motors Team called lawyer Vince Megna (indirectly) an "opportunistic lawyer" and basically called him a liar. To wit: "... there are factual inaccuracies in the lawyer's story." Tesla says that the three claimed incidents when the Model S owner in question asked the automaker to buy the car back did not happen (Tesla acknowledges it happening once). And then the company basically says the owner was breaking his car on purpose: ... the car's fuse blew on three occasions. Each time, our engineers explored all possible explanations and were never able to find anything wrong with the car. Still, just to be sure, we replaced several parts that could have been related to the alleged problem – all at no expense to the customer. When the fuse kept blowing despite the new parts, and faced with no diagnosis showing anything wrong with the car, the engineers were moved to consider the possibility that the fuse had been tampered with. After investigating, they determined that the car's front trunk had been opened immediately before the fuse failure on each of the three occasions. (The fuse is accessed through the front trunk.) Ultimately, Tesla service applied non-tamper tape to the fuse switch. From that point on, the fuse performed flawlessly. We've got the entire response below, along with Megna's response to Tesla's statement. The key line: "There are companies, great companies run by Billionaires, that force consumers to give up their Freedom of Speech and Right to Trial by Jury just for the opportunity to buy an electric car." You can watch Megna's original video introducing the world to this case here. When Life Gives You Lemons... By The Tesla Motors Team April 9, 2014 We were taken by surprise by a lemon law claim recently filed against Tesla by a Wisconsin lawyer, describing himself as the "Lemon Law King", who says that we ignored his client's three demands for a buy-back after alleged problems with a Model S.