2018 Tesla Model X 75d Awd Suv W/enhanced Autopilot on 2040-cars

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Tesla poaches Renault-Nissan communications boss Sproule

Need another sign that Tesla is growing into a force to be reckoned with? Bloomberg reports it has just snagged high-profile communications boss Simon Sproule from Renault-Nissan to become the EV maker's vice president of communications and marketing.
Sproule is an industry veteran, having spent 20 years at Nissan (where he grew to become CEO Carlos Ghosn's right-hand man). In addition, he logged stints at Ford, Jaguar (when it was still a Blue Oval-owned brand) and Microsoft. Despite all that experience, Sproule is still young, at just 45 years of age, as Bloomberg points out, yet he's held positions in the US, Japan and France over the years.
This is all good news for Tesla, which is in need of a strong spokesman outside of company CEO Elon Musk. It's been battling with the state of New Jersey and its governor, Chris Christie, over direct sales in the Garden State.

Superchargers power Tesla Model S EVs for over 8M miles [UPDATE]

Ahead of the company's press conference at the Detroit Auto Show tomorrow, Tesla is talking up its Supercharger network with some impressive numbers. Tesla's Alexis Georgeson told AutoblogGreen that Tesla Model S EVs have driven more than eight million miles on Supercharger fill-ups. That's the equivalent of 33-and-a-half trips to the moon and back. We can see how quickly the free Superchargers are getting popular by comparing this milestone to where we were four short months ago. At the end of September, after the Superchargers had been installed for a year, Tesla drivers had hit 3.2 million miles. The rapid increase since then is due mostly to there simply being a lot more chargers being available now. Tesla representatives told us that there are over 70 Supercharger stations in the world today (58 in North America and 14 in Europe) and that six were installed in the past week. Georgeson didn't have numbers on hand to say which stations were the most popular or other details, but did say that it's safe to assume that the Supercharger in Lusk, WY (pictured), part of a sweeping 'S' shape from Los Angeles through the northern US and on to Chicago and the East Coast, is not the most frequently visited. The next target for expansion is finishing the Boston-to-Miami corridor, which means putting in more Superchargers in North Florida and South Carolina. At CES last week, the Supercharger network won our AOL Technology of the Year award. *UPDATE: Tesla just let us know that 8 million is a little premature. The current number is actually closer to 7.5 million, but the total should crest the 8-million mark soon.

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.