According to a report by CNBC, Musk said the Gigafactory factory – with costs estimated at about $5 billion – will be funded by revenues from the sales of Tesla Model S and X cars, along with some outside capital. In Tesla’s own blog post on the subject, Musk said: “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied”. The company, meanwhile, claims its Autopilot system was not at fault. At a starting price of around $35,000 USA, the Model 3 will be Tesla’s least expensive vehicle, partly because of battery cost reductions. Elon Musk has explained that “Mobileye’s ability to evolve its technology is unfortunately negatively affected by having to support hundreds of models from legacy auto companies, resulting in a very high engineering drag coefficient”.
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Musk said the Model 3 is now engineered and expected to start production in the summer of 2017.
At the Gigafactory event yesterday, Elon Musk said that the first vehicle battery packs will come out of the factory in about 6 months and will be used as development battery pack for the Model 3. “They’ll go their way and we’ll go ours”. If everything works out, the Gigafactory will be 100 percent sustainable and able to produce batteries for half a million electric cars per year.
Mobileye, which provides Tesla with chips and software that interprets data from a camera, will not continue its agreement with Tesla past its use of the EyeQ3 processing platform, said Mobileye chief executive officer Amnon Shashua in a call with analysts Tuesday. He added there is “much at stake” in terms of Mobileye’s reputation, and that’s it is best to end the relationship with Tesla by the end of the year. He thinks that the ease in manufacturing and declining battery costs via the Gigafactory will help the automaker to produce the vehicle at the planned price points. The Model S struck the 53-foot-long truck and passed under it, killing Brown in the process.
Brown, a 40-year-old Navy veteran from OH, was pronounced dead at the scene.
“After exiting from underneath the semitrailer, the vehicle coasted at a shallow angle off the right side of the roadway, travelled approximately 297 feet, and then collided with a utility pole”, the report continues.
The National Transportation Safety Board said its preliminary findings showed the Tesla was traveling at 74 miles (119 kilometers) per hour ahead of impact, but noted that investigators have not yet completed an analysis of the crash data or assigned a cause for the fatal collision.
In the meantime, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asked Tesla to hand over information about the design, operation and testing of its Autopilot technology.
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The NTSB does not normally investigate vehicle crashes in which a single person dies, but it launched a full investigation of the Tesla crash to scrutinize the emerging technology.
