Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) isn’t “a business”; it’s a cash incinerator

Also in July Musk published a much-hyped (in anticipation) single page vision of where he wants to take Tesla in the future. Unfortunately for him though, Tesla is far behind deep-pocketed competitors in nearly every facet of this vague and unfinanced “plan,” something easily discerned by conducting a simple Google search on each of his stock-pumping buzzwords. Here’s  one example, here’s another and here’s  a third. I could easily post twenty or thirty more.

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More details on Audi’s Tesla Model S competitor emerge

Audi’s upcoming four-door luxury electric car will have a 311-mile range, along with Level 4 self-driving features (essentially full autonomy, for those keeping track) and three separate electric motors, according to a new report from Autocar. The car is set to go head-to-head with the Model S, based on these new stats, and will likely be called the “A9 e-tron” when it goes on sale sometime in 2020, the publication says.

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Tesla Is Worse Than Solyndra

Yet despite all the public celebration, both Solyndra and Tesla stand as warnings of the dangers in deputizing bureaucrats to play bankers and venture capitalists. In both loans, the government walked away laughably undercompensated for the risk it accepted in the startup companies. In fact, the Tesla deal was arguably far more costly for America than the Solyndra fiasco.
Solyndra exposed the first way the taxpayer could lose out. The traditional advantage of making a loan (as opposed to buying stock in a company) is that lenders often get paid something even when the borrowing company fails, because they hold collateral. Solyndra’s bankruptcy revealed the ephemeral value of the government’s collateral. Taxpayers have yet to recover a penny from the company.

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Why NASA thinks the Tesla Autopilot is a bad idea

NASA has been studying the pyschological effects of automation for decades, and thus may have something to teach Tesla, notes Scientific American.

“News flash: cars in 2017 equal airplanes in 1983,” Stephen Casner—a research psychologist at NASA’s Human Systems Integration Division—told the magazine.

For the public at large, the name “Autopilot” seems to imply a similarity to the automated systems that help fly planes, although the capabilities of the Tesla system are much more limited.

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Tesla has faster cars, but we were promised Jetpacks

The problem for Tesla, and anyone who bid up its stock Tuesday afternoon, is that it has already pushed investors’ horizons out so far, in the interest of raising more capital, that even going beyond “ludicrous speed” on its flagship car doesn’t get pulses racing. If your CEO has spent months and months talking about a new mass-market vehicle, home batteries, buying SolarCity, electric trucks and robo-taxis, then cutting that zero-to-60 lag by 3 tenths of a second seems rather humdrum.

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