Category Archives: Tesla

Tesla delivers underwhelming earnings despite Cybertruck launch and high vehicle deliveries

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Electric vehicle manufacturer’s earnings in the fourth quarter of 2023 missed analyst expectations

Despite putting a new vehicle on the market, announcing another for 2025 and beating Wall Street’s expectations for vehicle deliveries, Tesla was not able to shake off its disappointing third quarter.

The electric vehicle manufacturer brought in $25.1bn in revenue and posted $.71 in earnings a share in the fourth quarter of 2023, missing analyst expectations of 25.76bn in revenue and $0.74 earnings a share. The company’s fourth quarter revenue increased 3% year over year from $24.3bn in 2022.

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Tesla pauses German production after Red Sea shipping attacks

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Delays in delivery of parts result in suspension of manufacturing at factory near Berlin for two weeks

The electric car manufacturer Tesla is to halt most production at its factory near Berlin for two weeks because of delays in deliveries of parts because of attacks on ships in the Red Sea.

Shipping delays in the Red Sea, caused by attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants, has caused Tesla to suspend most production at its German factory from 29 January to 11 February.

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China’s BYD overtakes Tesla as top-selling electric car seller

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Build Your Dreams outsells rival in final quarter of 2023 figures for battery-only vehicles

Elon Musk’s Tesla has been overtaken by its Chinese rival, BYD, as the world’s top selling electric carmaker.

BYD, which has been backed by the US investment billionaire Warren Buffett since 2008, has beaten Tesla’s production for a second consecutive year.

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Tesla loses legal action in Sweden as dispute with Nordic unions escalates

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Court decides postal service does not have to deliver licence plates, for now, in latest twist in row over collective bargaining

Tesla has lost a legal action against Sweden’s postal service as a dispute with Nordic trade unions escalates.

A Swedish court said on Thursday that PostNord did not, for the time being, need to deliver licence plates to the electric carmaker that were being blocked by the postal service’s workers, in the latest twist in a battle over collective bargaining agreements.

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UAW launches push to organize at Tesla and other non-union car makers

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Union drive will cover nearly 150,000 workers at factories largely in US south

Less than two weeks after ratifying new contracts with Detroit automakers, the United Auto Workers union announced plans on Wednesday to try to organize workers simultaneously at more than a dozen non-union auto factories.

The UAW says the drive will cover nearly 150,000 workers at factories largely in the south, where the union has had little success in recruiting new members.

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Tesla sues Sweden’s transport agency in escalation of strike row

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US carmaker claims ‘discriminatory attack’ after industrial action stops new cars receiving Swedish plates

Tesla is suing the Swedish transport agency, accusing it of a “discriminatory attack” on the US electric carmaker, after strike action prevented its new vehicles from getting licence plates in Sweden.

The lawsuit is an escalation in a row that started between the car company and the union representing Swedish Telsa workers, who are calling for collective bargaining rights and have been on strike for five weeks.

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Toyota sales chief says EVs ‘impractical’ for Australian drivers as Tesla retaliates against ‘cynical’ attack

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Sean Hanley says hybrid vehicles are ‘better fit’ in Australia but Electric Vehicle Council says brand’s comments could undermine lithium industry

Australia’s most popular car brand, Toyota, has launched a stinging attack on electric vehicles claiming they are not ready for our roads, not as green as they seem and remain “impractical for the vast majority of Australian motorists”.

But Australia’s most popular electric car brand and industry groups claim the argument is a “cynical” attack by a company “too slow off the mark” and at risk of losing the future automotive race.

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Tesla trial begins over whether ‘experimental’ autopilot caused driver’s death

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Lawsuit claims company knowingly sold defective car that led to Micah Lee’s 2019 death while Tesla blames ‘classic human error’

The lawyer representing victims of a fatal Tesla crash blamed the company’s autopilot driver assistant system, saying that “a car company should never sell consumers experimental vehicles,” in the opening statement of a California trial on Thursday.

The case stems from a civil lawsuit alleging that the autopilot system caused the owner of a Tesla Model 3 car, Micah Lee, to suddenly veer off a highway east of Los Angeles at 65 mph (105 kph), where his car struck a palm tree and burst into flames.

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Tesla investigated over funds ‘used to build secret Austin house for Elon Musk’

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Reports suggest plans for ‘Project 42’ included a glass structure that contained a residential element for the chief executive

US prosecutors are investigating Tesla over alleged use of company funds for a secret project described internally as a house for Elon Musk, the electric carmaker’s chief executive.

Information sought from Tesla by the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York includes personal benefits paid to Musk, how much was spent on the project and its purpose, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Tesla beats Wall Street expectations to produce record number of vehicles

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Report comes amid concerns Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, Neuralink and Twitter, is spread too thin

Tesla narrowly beat Wall Street expectations in the second quarter of 2023, but shares began to fall in after hours trading following an earnings call that offered shareholders little reassurance surrounding Tesla’s promised Cybertruck release and other production concerns.

Revenue for the quarter topped $24.97bn compared to analyst predictions of $24.7 bn.

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Tesla directors agree to return $735m to settle claims they were grossly overpaid

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Shareholders sued the directors over stock option awards in 2017, accusing them of unfair and excessive compensation

Tesla Inc’s directors will return $735m to the company to settle claims they grossly overpaid themselves in one of the largest shareholder settlements of its kind, according to a Monday filing in a Delaware court.

The settlement resolves a 2020 lawsuit by a retirement fund which holds Tesla stock and challenged stock options that were granted to Tesla directors starting in June 2017.

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Fast-growing BYD launches Dolphin EV, Australia’s cheapest electric car. Here’s how it compares

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Latest vehicle from Build Your Dreams, which in less than a year has become the counry’s second-biggest electric vehicle seller, has a starting price of $38,890

Many Australians haven’t heard of BYD, the Chinese brand now selling the country’s cheapest new electric car.

BYD, or Build Your Dreams, is the biggest threat to Tesla globally and has garnered a cult-like following that’s translating to sales success locally.

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Mercedes-Benz beats Tesla for approval of automated driving tech in California

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German carmaker becomes first to gain permit for offering self-driving cars in California, but with strict conditions

The California department of motor vehicles has approved Mercedes-Benz’s automated driving system on designated highways under certain conditions without the active control of a driver.

California is one of Tesla’s largest markets, accounting for 16% of the carmaker’s global deliveries last year, according to Reuters calculations.

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Twitter and Tesla’s interests at odds in Elon Musk’s quiet China visit

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The world’s richest person lapsed into an unusual silence on social media during his trip to the electric carmaker’s second largest market

Followers of Elon Musk didn’t know what to expect from his trip to China. Would he speak about Tesla, a company with a large market and manufacturing footprint there? Or SpaceX, with its symbiotic relationship with the American state? Or even Twitter, the social network he bought because “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”?

The one thing no one expected: silence.

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Report: ‘massive’ Tesla leak reveals data breaches, thousands of safety complaints

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Whistleblower files reveal customer and employee information plus complaints about driver assistance system

Tesla has failed to adequately protect data from customers, employees and business partners and has received thousands of customer complaints regarding the carmaker’s driver assistance system, Germany’s Handelsblatt has reported, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential data leaked by a whistleblower.

The Handelsblatt report said customer data could be found “in abundance” in a data set labelled “Tesla Files”.

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Elon Musk subpoenaed over JPMorgan’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s activities

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US Virgin Islands is suing the bank over sex trafficking by Epstein, saying he ‘may have referred or attempted to refer’ Musk as a client

The US Virgin islands subpoenaed billionaire cars-to-rockets entrepreneur Elon Musk on Monday to obtain documents in its litigation into the role played by JPMorgan Chase bank in the activity of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein when he was a customer, according to a court filing.

The Virgin Islands government is suing the bank over sex trafficking by Epstein. The Virgin Islands has been trying to serve Musk with a subpoena, the filing noted, adding that Epstein “may have referred or attempted to refer” Musk to JPMorgan as a client.

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Nick Kyrgios’s Tesla allegedly stolen from mother at gunpoint – tennis star uses app to track car for police

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Officers chase bright green vehicle after gunman raided the sportsman’s family home in Canberra, Australia, court documents say

Tennis star Nick Kyrgios helped police by using a phone app to remotely track his Tesla after it was stolen from his mother at gunpoint on Monday morning.

Kygrios was inside his family’s Canberra home about 8.30am when a masked man wearing all black knocked on the front door, describing himself as “Chris”.

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Black former worker awarded $3.2m in Tesla factory racial-harassment suit

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Originally awarded $130m, which a judge reduced to $15m, plaintiff opted for new trial against the electric vehicle maker

Tesla will pay about $3.2m to a Black former employee after a federal jury in San Francisco ruled the electric-vehicle maker failed to prevent severe racial harassment at its flagship assembly plant in California.

The amount is far less than the $15m that the plaintiff, Owen Diaz, rejected last year in opting for a new trial. Diaz asked for a new trial on damages after the judge reduced the amount he was awarded in a 2021 ruling from $137m to $15m. Diaz accused Tesla of failing to act when he repeatedly complained to managers that employees at the Fremont factory frequently used racist slurs and scrawled swastikas, racist caricatures and epithets on walls and work areas.

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Elon Musk broke law with threat to Tesla workers’ stock options, court rules

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Appeal judges uphold previous ruling, citing ‘implied threat’ in CEO’s tweet directed at Fremont employees who wanted to join union

A US appeals court has ruled that Elon Musk violated federal labour law by tweeting that employees of Tesla would lose stock options if they joined a union.

The New Orleans-based 5th US circuit court of appeals upheld a decision by the US National Labor Relations Board that said the 2018 tweet amounted to an unlawful threat that could discourage unionising and ordered Musk to delete it.

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Musk tells court he lacked ‘specific’ funding to take Tesla private

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CEO of electric carmaker says finance was ‘not an issue’ but he did not have binding commitments from investors

Elon Musk expected strong financial support when he tweeted that he would take Tesla private in 2018, but lacked specific commitments from potential backers, according to testimony he gave on his third day of questioning in a San Francisco federal court.

Musk is accused of defrauding investors by driving up the price of Tesla stock by tweeting on 7 August 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take the electric carmaker private.

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