Considering most specs about Tesla’s batteries are kept secret, it can sometimes be difficult to understand the company’s competitive advantage in this space. Experience and data are certainly important factors. Tesla was the first company to treat battery cells as a commodity and build large battery packs using thousands of common cylindrical li-ion battery cells. That was over a decade ago.
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If you want a minivan and don’t want to burn fossil fuels to get around, your options are extremely limited currently. You could obviously buy a very expensive Tesla Model X which ticks off a lot of the minivan features and adds a bunch of sports sedan goodies. But that sticker price of $75K is going to eliminate a broad swath of the population. From there, your options are all but nothing. You could squeeze into a Kia Soul EV which seats 5 and is a little higher off the ground than a typical car but at this point, you’d be better served to (head to the West Coast) and buy a Chevy Bolt with its 238-mile range.

This is where the Chrysler Pacifica steps in. Introduced almost a year ago from the inventor of the minivan comes a Plug-in Hybrid version of the popular Pacifica high end mini-van. This hybrid was touted as having 30 miles of range on electric only before its 500+ mile range with ICE kicked in.

Some good news on that front…
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While Hyperloop One, the main startup developing hyperloop technologies and deployment projects, is moving full steam ahead with its test track in Nevada and several full-scale projects around the world, another startup called Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) is also trying to carve itself a place in the space.

Hyperloop One has been taken more seriously than HTT since it has been backed with more money from serious investors, but today the company announced that Hyperloop One is not the only hyperloop company capable of raising capital and confirmed a $30 million round of investment and a $100 million total investment to date, but that’s based on some unconventional math to say the least.
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Despite its “Sunshine State” nickname, Florida ranks among the lowest states for solar power deployment thanks to anti-solar regulations backed by local electric utilities. But on election day, the citizens of Florida showed interest in solar energy by rejecting the anti-solar Amendment 1, which according to solar installers, including SolarCity, would have made it easier for utilities to add fees to make solar more expensive for customers.

Following the election, Tesla’s SolarCity is the latest solar installer announcing an expansion in Florida today now that it will become economically viable for a lot more households to install solar arrays on their homes.
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In order to circumvent the regulations imposed by NHTSA on his aftermarket driver assist device, the ‘comma one’, George ‘geohot’ Hotz announced that his startup is releasing a new version of the product, ‘comma neo’ (an anagram for one), for free as an open-source platform.

Hotz, who describes the capabilities of the system as only matched by Tesla’s Autopilot, says that NHTSA’s regulations only apply to products for sales and that way, comma.ai can still get its product out there and now focus on what was described as a “pivot” to helping other companies develop autonomous driving systems and get more data for fleet-learning to improve its own platform.
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In a profile published back in August, Bloomberg revealed a new electric vehicle startup founded by the former Geely executive who oversaw the takeover of Volvo, Freeman Shen, and reported that they managed to raise over $1 billion in just over a year in order to launch mass-market electric vehicles by 2018.

The company called WM Motor unveiled its first 3 models this week through press content sent to Chinese media and now making its way to international media. It appears that one of the first concepts of this billion-dollar EV startup is simply photoshopped images based on promotional pictures of the 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander.
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