As he sat w/some of the country’s top #oil execs at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one exec complained how they continued to face burdensome #environmental#regulations despite spending $400M to lobby the #Biden admin…
#Trump’s remarkably blunt & transactional pitch reveals how he is targeting the #oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his #environmental agenda for a second term, including rollbacks of some of #Biden’s signature achievements on #CleanEnergy & #EVs.
Read the wild email Tesla is sending to suppliers amid Supercharger chaos
Supercharger projects being cancelled, including halting rollout in the entire country of Australia, including sites that had already been subject to long-term leases and given the go-ahead for construction which will now be abandoned
#Tesla#Sweden#Unions#LaborRights#LaborStrikes#EVs: "Globally, Tesla has fought off any attempts by unions to organize its workplaces and establish collective bargaining. Signing up its employees is a priority for the United Auto Workers, the industry’s largest American union, and for its counterpart in Germany, where Tesla operates a big factory outside Berlin. UAW President Shawn Fain, who won extensive wage concessions from Detroit’s three major automakers with a strike last year, has cheered on the Swedes and called their effort “a blueprint for future leveraging campaigns.” Encouraged by this support—and armed with enough funds to pay the idle Tesla workers for around 500 years—IF Metall has stuck to its guns. The strike has now lasted four times as long as the UAW’s in 2023.
If Tesla had reached a collective agreement when it arrived in Sweden a decade ago, it’s likely nobody would have cared. For IF Metall, which signs hundreds of such accords each year, it hardly would have warranted a public declaration of victory. And Tesla could have rationalized it as an obligatory acceptance of local customs—comparable to removing one’s shoes when entering a Swedish home.
Now the company’s approach risks tarnishing its image in a region at the vanguard of the green transition. Scandinavians are among the world’s fastest adopters of electric vehicles: EVs and hybrids accounted for 60% of new cars sold in Sweden last year. Norwegians, Danes and Finns also buy electric cars at rates far above those in the US. Global automakers are fighting for the business of these affluent customers, who also happen to be broadly supportive of organized labor." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-29/tesla-strike-in-sweden-previews-elon-musk-playbook-for-us-unions
Tesla’s relationship with India has also suddenly become tense. Musk’s trip to China appeared to be an implicit snub of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On April 10, Musk had promised to visit India, fuelling hopes about an announcement to build a $3bn electric car plant, only to drop out 10 days later citing “very heavy Tesla obligations”. Nine days after that, he appeared in Beijing.
Longer term, experts are also worried about more clashes between his commercial interests in China and Beijing’s heavy-handed controls on free speech and any criticism of the government. Critics in the US claim he operates a double standard over China and its politics.
During his time in China, Musk used X — despite the platform being banned in the country — to share an audio clip of comedian Jerry Seinfeld bemoaning the negative influence of “the extreme left” and “PC crap” on television comedy. “Make comedy legal again!” Musk wrote, apparently unaware that his hosts in Beijing have recently cracked down on the art form."
I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world who has solar panels on their roofs who has wasted quite some time in the mornings watching the magic of the power coming on.
This smugness is matched by looking back at a bell curve graph of production for the day where you've used up almost everything that the panels have produced and yet drawn almost nothing from the grid.
This is truly one of the more baffling decisions I’ve seen in a long time. Tesla is a leader in charging infrastructure, to the degree that virtually every other carmaker is even adopting its standard.
Then Elon Musk laid off the entire Supercharger team.
In 2021, Elon Musk said the government should end all EV subsidies. Yet new data shows Tesla received more money from Biden’s grants to expand EV charging networks than anyone else — $17 million, or 13% of all EV charging awards.
Elon Musk is betting Tesla’s future on using self-driving fantasies to boost the share price instead of building a real car business. He just gutted the teams working on the Supercharger network (right as other companies are adopting it!) and new vehicles.
#Exxon CEO Darren Woods made a bold statement on Friday. #FossilFuels, he claims, are "not in decline" - despite markets & #EVs + decreasing transport sector #oil⛽️ demand painting a very different picture 📉https://buff.ly/3WkHhmr
"Federal auto safety investigators say in a new report that they've identified hundreds of crashes — 13 of them deadly — in which Tesla's Autopilot system failed to protect its drivers and passengers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigations (ODI) flagged 467 crashes over a period of about 15 months from 2022-23."
:welp: Linux is now an option for safety-minded software-defined vehicle developers
—Ars Technica
「 "The beauty of our concept is that you don't even need to safety-qualify Linux itself," said Moritz Neukirchner, a senior director at Elektrobit overseeing SDVs. Instead, an external safety monitor runs in a hypervisor, intercepting and validating kernel actions 」
Elon Musk once promised Tesla vehicles would have insanely high resale value because they’d all be robotaxis. Owners must be pissed he keeps gutting the value of vehicles they paid much more for a few years back.
😹 It'll be cosmically hilarious if a Kia car ends up putting the final nail on Tesla
「 The timing of the sighting is particularly significant given recent news that Tesla may have canned its plans for a $25,000 mass-market “Model 2” vehicle. Elon Musk reportedly mothballed the affordable EV in favor of going all in on the company’s plans for a fully autonomous robotaxi 」