Tesla – Page 2

Used Tesla prices tumble as embarrassed owners look to sell

Cars, Tesla, used ev prices / DJ Henderson / March 16, 2025

Similarly, one should take with a pinch of salt a website offering to steal Teslas from owners who are unable to find a buyer themselves.

According to data from Car Gurus, used Tesla prices have fallen twice as fast (-3.7 percent) as the wider car market (-1.5 percent) over the last 90 days. Year over year, used Tesla prices are down 7.5 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for the market as a whole. And that’s on top of steep depreciation caused by a series of new car price cuts over the past few years, as well as rental car companies and other companies disposing of fleets of Teslas en masse.

The Model 3 has been on sale longer than the Model Y, and you’d expect the older cars to have depreciated more. Indeed, the average price of a 2017 Model 3 is just under $20,000 now. But even recent model years are shedding value rapidly—a model-year 2022 Model 3 is worth just $25,000 on average.

Model Y prices have decreased by a greater degree, although the higher MSRP and younger age of the Y mean prices haven’t dropped quite as far as the 3, yet. But CarGurus has seen between 16–21 percent drops for each model year of the Model Y, year over year.

CarGurus isn’t the only one to notice this trend, either. According to its data, iSeeCars says used Teslas have dropped by 13.6 percent, year over year. The Models 3, Y, and S were all in its top four EVs for depreciation, although top place went to the Porsche Taycan (which might be starting to look like a bargain).

For its part, Tesla has been trying to boost its image with the help of President Trump. On Monday, the president took to the South Lawn of the White House to promote Tesla’s cars, apparently buying one despite having campaigned on an explicitly anti-electric vehicle platform.

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Nissan’s latest desperate gamble—see if Tesla will buy the company

Cars, Nissan, Tesla / DJ Henderson / February 23, 2025

Senior politicians in Japan are not going to let Nissan die easily. The automaker has been struggling for some time now, with an outdated product portfolio, ongoing quarterly losses, and soon, the closure of factories and thousands of layoffs. The Japanese government has been trying to find a suitor and had hoped that Honda would do its patriotic duty and save its rival from extinction.

That deal—one branded “a desperate move” by former Nissan CEO and fugitive from Japanese justice Carlos Ghosn—fell apart last week after Renault demanded a price premium for its shares in Nissan, and Nissan demanded a merger of equals with Honda. In reality, it was always going to be a takeover, with very little in it for Honda in the way of complimentary product lines or access to new technologies.

Today, we learned of yet another desperate move—the former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is among a group that is trying to get Tesla to invest in Nissan instead.

Such a merger seems exceedingly far from likely, even if Tesla CEO Elon Musk wasn’t completely distracted dismantling the federal government and its workforce. While the company still maintains a ludicrous market capitalization thanks to retail investors who believe it is poised to sell billions of humanoid robots to every human on earth, as an automaker, it may well be struggling almost as much as Nissan.

As experts told us last year, Tesla is not a well-run enterprise. Its product range suffers, like Nissan’s, from being outdated compared to the competition. It appears that consumers have turned against the brand in Europe and increasingly the US, and its quarterly financial results have been more than disappointing of late. Tesla’s free cash flow fell by 18 percent in 2024 to $3.6 billion, although such is the value of Tesla stock that, were a Tesla-Nissan deal to happen, the former could pay for the latter with equity, should it entertain the idea seriously.

Nissan’s latest desperate gamble—see if Tesla will buy the company Read More »

Protesters demonstrate outside Tesla showrooms in US

Cars, elon musk, syndication, Tesla / Beth Washington / February 18, 2025

“The worry of the Street is that Musk dedicating so much time—even more than we expected—to Doge takes away from his time at Tesla,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

“In addition, Musk’s Doge-related actions and more powerful alliance with Trump clearly could alienate some consumers to move away from the Tesla brand.”

About 50 to 100 protesters turned out in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, carrying signs saying, “Dethrone Musk” and “If Tesla survives, your country dies.”

Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, was one of them. Since Musk’s power is not derived from election to public office, he said, boycotting and divesting from Tesla is the only tool available to curb his agenda.

He argued that Tesla was overvalued and that its core business of making and selling cars was deteriorating. Significant losses could force investors to sell, triggering a drop in the share price and forcing Musk to sell a portion of his shares to meet a margin call.

“Every Tesla sale that you prevent, every dollar not spent servicing a Tesla, not charging at the Supercharger—these further degrade the business,” Niedermeyer said.

“It’s not easy, it’s not guaranteed, but we do have the opportunity to wipe out a huge amount of Elon Musk’s wealth.”

In Chicago, protesters carried a banner saying “Stop buying Nazi cars.”

City resident Lisa Pereira said she came to the demonstration because “you have to do something.” She said she was disturbed by the administration’s attempts to crush diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, its aggressive immigration enforcement, and the power wielded by Musk.

“Everything is a little off the rails,” she said. “So I decided I had to show up. I had to be in cahoots with my soul.”

Chris White said he attended on Saturday because he fears “we’re living through a fascist coup.”

“My kids are trans,” he said. “I’m getting told they don’t exist. I don’t know if their healthcare will exist.”

Though one man yelled from a truck, “Elon’s my hero!” most passers-by in the heavily Democratic city expressed support.

“I’d rather buy a Rivian,” said one, referring to the electric-truck maker whose showroom was a block away from the protest.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Protesters demonstrate outside Tesla showrooms in US Read More »

Queer-friendly data on car crash deaths removed from NHTSA website

auto safety, car crashes, Donald Trump, elon musk, highway safety, lgbtq, nhtsa, Policy, Tesla / 9u50fv / February 13, 2025

Potential road hazard ahead

Trump targeting car crash data sparks concerns over datasets collected since 1975.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In early February, a dataset tracking car crash deaths in the US curiously went missing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website.

Unlike other Donald Trump-ordered changes to government websites in which entire studies were removed and later court-ordered to be restored, only the most recent data on car crash deaths from 2022 was deleted from download files on NHTSA’s website.

The odd removal sparked concerns that the Trump administration may be changing or possibly even ending the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)—a collection of police-reported data from every state that has tracked car crash fatalities since 1975. The Health department has said the data is used to help reduce deaths from not wearing a seatbelt or deaths involving a drunk driver.

NHTSA did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But the agency eventually provided a vague response to Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an organization that advises lawmakers and bills itself as a “unique partnership of insurers, law enforcement, public health, and consumer experts working together to make America’s roads safer.”

“The file was taken down for some minor corrections and should be back up by the end of this week,” NHTSA told Advocates without any further explanation of what fixes were needed.

Ars spoke to several safety organizations and auto industry analysts who depend on FARS data to analyze trends, including efforts to flag the most dangerous cars in America.

A rumor began circulating that the 2022 data was yanked because NHTSA began allowing “other” sexes to be monitored in FARS data starting with that report. It was expected that NHTSA pulled the data down to comply with a Trump executive order “defending women” by banning government “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex.”

To get to the bottom of the rumors, Ars consulted an archived version of the FARS downloads page, which showed that the 2022 dataset was available as recently as January 30. The uncensored data showed that unlike prior years, 22 car crash victims were documented using a category in 2022 for sex that had never been tracked previously, “Other (e.g., “X”, Non-Binary, Not Specified, etc.).”

NHTSA has not directly confirmed if the dataset is being changed to remove this data or if other “minor corrections” were needed. More will be revealed once the dataset comes back online, supposedly within the next few days.

Karl Brauer, an executive analyst for iSeeCars.com, which offers a car search engine and uses FARS data to help buyers steer clear of the “most dangerous” vehicles on US roads, told Ars that NHTSA’s public silence on the missing data means industry stakeholders don’t really know right now how FARS data might be changing.

“We can only speculate regarding NHTSA curtailing access to FARS data, but it’s disappointing given FARS’ value as a reference point for vehicle safety,” Brauer said. “Hopefully, this is a temporary situation that will be resolved shortly and not an indication that NHTSA no longer plans to compile this data. Consumers should be able to review all aspects of a vehicle’s safety, including how many fatalities it has been involved in.”

Trump targeting car crash data

Among the most dangerous cars on the road last year, iSeeCars flagged the Hyundai Venue, Chevrolet Corvette, Mitsubishi Mirage, Porsche 911, and Honda CR-V Hybrid as the “top five most dangerous cars.” Those cars had “fatal accident rates nearly five times higher than the average vehicle” from 2018 to 2022, their report said.

And “despite Tesla’s advanced driver-assist technology,” the Model Y and Model S both made the list, too, with Tesla maintaining “the highest fatal accident rate by brand.”

Back in December, when Trump was preparing to take office, a document seen by Reuters reportedly showed that his transition team was angling to “drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla.”

This car crash data, which is compiled due to a mandatory reporting requirement from carmakers, is different from FARS data, which comes from police reports. But a source told Reuters that Musk maintains that the mandatory reporting rule is “unfair” to Tesla because Musk “believes” Tesla reports “better data” than other car brands. That “makes it look like Tesla is responsible for an outsized number of crashes involving advanced driver-assistance systems,” the source told Reuters.

Trump reportedly tasked his transition team with coming up with a 100-day strategy to kill off the reporting requirement. That move seemingly would make FARS data even more important to safety organizations and government officials that would otherwise lose data that helps track vehicle safety concerns, particularly with innovative automated-driving systems.

The University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute houses the Center for the Management of Information for Safe and Sustainable Transportation (CMISST), which also regularly analyzes car crash data. A CMISST spokesperson told Ars that NHTSA has also removed Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) data from 2022. Even temporary removals make it harder for outside researchers to get a clear picture of road safety, the spokesperson told Ars.

“These datasets are world-leading in their scale and completeness, with FARS a complete census of fatal crashes involving someone who died within 30 days as a result of a crash on public roads,” CMISST’s spokesperson said. “CRSS is in some ways even more world-leading because it is a well-designed complex probability survey of police-reported crashes across the US, which allows us to have nationally representative estimates of the incidence of such crashes, including many key characteristics of the circumstances, the vehicles, and the people involved.”

Joseph Young, director of media relations for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), told Ars that, like many others, his organization had “previously downloaded the dataset and continues to use it for analysis, so this removal doesn’t cause any immediate issues for our team.” But Young agreed that “it does complicate others’ ability to access the full dataset.”

Currently, the official FARS query tool still shows 2022 data, Young noted, but an Ars review confirmed that the tracking of “other” sexes is not available through that interface. So the only way to see changes once NHTSA uploads the new file will be to consult the archived dataset.

FARS saves lives, experts say

FARS data is released as soon as it’s available to try to prevent as many vehicle fatalities as possible. The version of the 2022 data that is missing from NHTSA’s site today is not the final draft, which is expected to be published in the spring. Around the same time, the first draft of the 2023 data should be available, CMISST’s spokesperson told Ars, as long as the Trump administration doesn’t de-prioritize sharing the data. Young told Ars that IIHS’ “bigger concern” than the missing 2022 data is whether there will be delays in posting new data.

“The latest FARS data is used extensively for research purposes and also for informing the public and decision makers about important trends in traffic safety, so it’s important that it be available as soon as possible,” Young told Ars.

Peter Kurdock, general counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told Ars that the key government datasets that his organization relies on to monitor highway safety do not currently appear to be at risk. But those reports are frequently updated, and any potential delays could make it harder to answer granular data-driven questions like “What type of pedestrians are being hit?” or “What time of day are they being hit?”

“All that stuff’s very important to the policy we develop, and we have to answer questions from policymakers as well,” Kurdock told Ars.

Advocates’ senior research director, Shaun Kildare, added that carmakers shouldn’t want this dataset to be messed with any more than outside safety researchers, because otherwise they would have to rely on spotty customer reports to monitor issues with their vehicles.

“In the past 50 years, [there were] 860,000 lives saved [and] nearly 50 million people that avoided injury,” Kildare said, citing NHTSA data. “I think the overall benefits [of collecting FARS and other crash data to set Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards] were somewhere in the $17 trillion range in terms of benefits and cost savings to the US,” he added.

A CMISST spokesperson told Ars that there remains a critical need to closely track car crash fatalities, which, despite safety stakeholders’ best efforts, reportedly continue to rise in the US.

“Given that fatalities have been going in the wrong direction over the last approximately 15 years, these data are critical to knowing where we are at with fatal (and non-fatal) crashes and which groups of crashes (e.g., pedestrians at night) are particularly on the rise,” CMISST’s spokesperson said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Queer-friendly data on car crash deaths removed from NHTSA website Read More »

Tesla turns to Texas to test its autonomous “Cybercab”

Cars, robotaxis, Tesla / Mike M. / February 11, 2025

If you live or drive in Austin, Texas, you might start seeing some new-looking Teslas on your roads later this summer. Tesla says it wants to start offering rides for money in the two-seater “Cybercab” that the company revealed last year at a Hollywood backlot. California might be the place with enough glitz to unleash that particular stock-bumping news to the world, but the Golden State is evidently far too restrictive for a company like Tesla to truck with. Instead, the easygoing authorities in Texas provide a far more attractive environment when it comes to putting driverless rubber on the road.

During the early days of its autonomous vehicle (AV) ambitions, Tesla did its testing in California, like most of the rest of the industry. California was early to lay down laws and regulations for the nascent AV industry, a move that some criticized as premature and unnecessarily restrictive. Among the requirements has been the need to report test mileage and disengagements, reports that revealed that Tesla’s testing has in fact been extremely limited within that state’s borders since 2016.

Other states, mostly ones blessed with good weather, have become a refuge for AV testing away from California’s strictures, especially car-centric cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas. Texas amended its transportation code in 2017 to allow autonomous vehicles to operate on its roads, and it took away any ability for local governments to restrict testing or deployment. By contrast, companies like Waymo and the now-shuttered Cruise were given much more narrow permission to deploy only in limited parts of California.

Texan highways started seeing autonomous semi trucks by 2021, the same year the Texas House passed legislation that filled in some missing gaps. But Tesla won’t be the first to start trying to offer robotaxis in Austin—Waymo has been doing that since late 2023. Even Volkswagen has been driving driverless Buzzes around Austin in conjuction with MobilEye; ironically, Tesla was a MobilEye customer until it was fired by the supplier back in 2016 for taking too lax an approach to safety with its vision-based advanced driver assistance system.

Tesla turns to Texas to test its autonomous “Cybercab” Read More »

Hertz continues EV purge, asks renters if they want to buy instead of return

Cars, chevy, Chevy Bolt, Electric vehicles, EVs, Hertz, Tesla, tesla model 3 / Kelly Newman / December 27, 2024

Apparently Hertz’s purging of electric vehicles from its fleet isn’t going fast enough for the car rental giant. A Reddit user posted an offer they received from Hertz to buy the 2023 Tesla Model 3 they had been renting for $17,913.

Hertz originally went strong into EVs, announcing a plan to buy 100,000 Model 3s for its fleet by the end of 2021, but 16 months later had acquired only half that amount. The company found that repair costs—especially for Teslas, which averaged 20 percent more than other EVs—were cutting into its profit margins. Customer demand was also not what Hertz had hoped for; last January, it announced plans to sell off 20,000 EVs.

Asking its customers if they want to purchase their rentals isn’t a new strategy for Hertz. “By connecting our rental customers who opt into our emails to our sales channels, we’re not only building awareness of the fact that we sell arsenal but also offering a unique opportunity to someone who may be in the market for the same car they have on rent,” Hertz communications director Jamie Line told The Verge.

Hertz is advertising a limited 12-month, 12,000-mile powertrain warranty for each EV, and customers will have seven days to return the car in case of profound buyer’s regret.

According to The Verge, offers have ranged from $18,422 for a 2023 Chevy Bolt to $28,500 for a Polestar 2. We spotted some good deals from Hertz when we last checked, with some still eligible for a federal tax credit.

Hertz’s EV sell off may be winding down, however. Last March we saw more than 2,100 BEVs for sale on the company’s used car site. When we checked this morning, there were just 175 left.

Hertz continues EV purge, asks renters if they want to buy instead of return Read More »

No more EV app folders: Universal plug-and-charge is due to launch in 2025

Cars, electrify america, EV charging, EVgo, Ford, General Motors, GM, plug and charge, Rivian, SAE international, Tesla, universal plug and charge / Beth Washington / December 4, 2024

To fill a car with gas, you generally just need a credit card or cash. To charge an EV at a DC fast charging station, you need any number of things to work—a credit card reader, an app for that charger’s network, a touchscreen that’s working—and they’re all a little different.

That situation could change next year if a new “universal Plug and Charge” initiative from SAE International, backed by a number of EV carmakers and chargers, moves ahead and gains ground. Launching in early 2025, the network could make charging an EV actually easier than gassing up: plug in, let the car and charger figure out the payment details over a cloud connection, and go.

Some car and charging network combinations already offer such a system through a patchwork of individual deals, as listed at Inside EVs. Teslas have always offered a plug-and-charge experience, given the tight integration between their Superchargers and vehicles. Now Tesla will join the plug-and-charge movement proper, allowing Teslas to have a roughly similar experience at other stations.

The Electric Vehicle Public Key Infrastructure, or EVPKI, has a good number of the major players on board, and it builds on the ISO standard (15118) to make it faster and more secure for cars to be authenticated and authorized to charge at stations. A whole bunch of certificates are in place at every step of the charging process, as detailed in an EVPKI presentation, and the system includes a Certified Trust List. With an open standard and authentication system, there should be room for new charging networks and vehicle makers.

No more EV app folders: Universal plug-and-charge is due to launch in 2025 Read More »

Judge again rejects the Elon Musk Tesla pay plan now valued at $101 billion

elon musk pay plan, Policy, Tesla / Shannon Garcia / December 2, 2024

The new stockholder vote could shift the burden of proof, but only if the vote is “fully informed and uncoerced,” McCormick wrote. Shareholder Richard Tornetta, the plaintiff who launched the lawsuit that got Musk’s pay rescinded, “has demonstrated that the vote was not fully informed,” today’s ruling said.

The January ruling in which McCormick voided the pay package said the deal was unfair to shareholders and that most of the board members were beholden to Musk or had compromising conflicts. In Tesla’s subsequent request asking shareholders to re-approve the pay plan, the company said that a yes vote could “extinguish claims for breach of fiduciary duty by authorizing an act that otherwise would constitute a breach” and correct “disclosure deficiencies” and other problems identified in the 2018 stock award.

“Tesla debuted the argument in the Proxy Statement, which described stockholder ratification as a powerful elixir that could cure fiduciary wrongdoing—not for those harmed by the wrongdoing, but for the wrongdoers. Tesla told stockholders that the Post-Trial Opinion got Delaware law wrong and that their vote would ‘fix’ it,” McCormick wrote.

But the claims in Tesla’s proxy statement are “materially false or misleading,” McCormick wrote today. “As discussed above, under Delaware law, ratification cannot be deployed post-trial to extinguish an adjudicated breach of the duty of loyalty,” and it “cannot cleanse a conflicted-controller transaction” without a full suite of required legal protections.

304 million Tesla shares

Musk’s pay plan would provide options to purchase nearly 303.96 million Tesla shares for $23.33 each, McCormick wrote. Tesla’s stock price soared in recent months and was at $357.09 today.

The plaintiff argued that the value gained by shareholders when the pay package was rescinded “equals the intrinsic value of the freed-up shares, which is the trading price, minus the exercise price, multiplied by the number of options,” McCormick wrote. The plaintiff came up with a value of $51 billion based on the $191.59 per-share closing price on the date of the January 2024 ruling. As previously noted, the latest Tesla price suggests the pay package could have been worth $101 billion to Musk.

Judge again rejects the Elon Musk Tesla pay plan now valued at $101 billion Read More »

Trump team puts EV tax credit on the block, Tesla is on board: Report

Cars, EV adoption, EV tax credit, Tesla / DJ Henderson / November 14, 2024

Ending the tax credit is not something the incoming administration can do via executive action—Congress controls government spending, and this would require new legislation. But the budget reconciliation process results in bills that cannot be filibustered, and Reuters says that the Trump transition team will likely use this route as part of a larger revamp of tax laws.

Tesla was a major beneficiary of the new clean vehicle tax credit; under the previous scheme, an OEM was only eligible until it sold its 200,000th plug-in vehicle, at which point the credit available to its customers began to sunset. Tesla—which exclusively sells plug-in vehicles—was unsurprisingly the first to reach this threshold, at which point its EVs became more expensive than competitor cars. But the sales cap was eliminated under the new rules.

One might expect the company would be up in arms over this proposal. But according to Reuters, that’s not the case—Tesla is in favor of ending the clean vehicle tax credit, and CEO Elon Musk has previously said such a move would be far more damaging to rival companies than to Tesla.

Trump team puts EV tax credit on the block, Tesla is on board: Report Read More »

Why is Elon Musk talking to Vladimir Putin, and what does it mean for SpaceX?

elon musk, Putin, Science, Space, spacex, Tesla / DJ Henderson / October 25, 2024

NASA chief says ties between SpaceX CEO and Putin should be investigated.

Elon Musk wears a black “Make America Great Again” ball cap while attending a campaign rally with Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, in October. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

In a blockbuster story published Friday morning, The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin for about two years, with the discussions covering a range of issues from geopolitics to business to personal matters.

There are no on-the-record sources confirming the regular conversations between Musk and Putin, and Musk did not comment to the news organization. A Putin spokesperson said the Russian leader and Musk have had just one telephone call. However, the report is plausibly true, and the Journal cites “several current and former US, European, and Russian officials.” This is also not the first time there have been reports of contact between Musk and Putin.

The new story about Musk’s direct links to an avowed enemy of the United States immediately raised concerns among some prominent US officials who work with the billionaire entrepreneur, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

“I don’t know if that story is true,” Nelson said in a conversation with Semafor on Friday morning. “If it’s true there have been multiple conversations with Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then that would be concerning, particularly for NASA and the Department of Defense.” Nelson added that the report should be investigated.

To Russia, with love

Musk’s motivations for speaking directly with Putin are not immediately clear. His largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, do not do business directly with the Russian government. In fact, the rise of SpaceX as a dominant player has substantially harmed Russia’s space business in multiple ways: it helped force US rival United Launch Alliance to stop buying Russian rocket engines, it reduced demand for Russian commercial launch services, and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle allowed NASA to stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year for Russian transportation to the International Space Station.

Unlike Tesla’s complicated interactions with China, which give that country some leverage over Musk’s finances, Russia has no such levers. The most plausible answer for why Musk is conversing with Putin is that he sees himself as a global power broker and wants to do bold things like solve the Ukraine crisis. Musk has ideas and views for how the world should be, and developing relationships with world leaders will help advance those ideas. Musk is also opportunistic and must believe that he can manage Putin in a way that is advantageous to his personal and business aims.

One concern for US policymakers is that this could represent a break in a long-running symbiotic relationship between Musk and America. For a couple of decades the United States’ and Musk’s ambitions—to build electric cars, reusable rockets, and solve the world’s big problems with technology—have moved forward more or less harmoniously. Musk thrived amid America’s ethos of freedom and capitalism. The nation benefited from world-leading technology and economic development.

Nowhere has this relationship borne more fruit than at SpaceX, which has almost singlehandedly assured US preeminence in space for at least the next decade and probably beyond. Musk builds the best rockets, operates the only proven US human spacecraft, and flies more than half of the active satellites in Earth orbit. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe turned to SpaceX to get its most valuable satellites into space, and Starlink provided essential communications in Ukraine. NASA’s lunar program only succeeds if SpaceX’s Starship vehicle succeeds.

But in the last two years, the same time frame in which Musk has reportedly been in contact with Putin, the once symbiotic relationship between Musk and the United States has begun to fray. This has also coincided with Musk’s purchase of Twitter and increasing alignment with conservative politics.

Musk goes MAGA

Many Americans are celebrating Musk’s bromance with Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump. They appreciate his embrace of Republican politics and the more than $100 million he has invested in Trump winning the presidency. In characteristic Musk fashion, he has gone all-in on a cause he deems essential to the future of his interests and those of humanity, even temporarily living in Pennsylvania.

But for many other Americans, the response to Musk’s activities has been revulsion. He has used social network X (formerly Twitter) to push an increasingly partisan viewpoint and peddled a stream of ideas and theories that can accurately be described as misinformation. These people are increasingly uncomfortable with Musk’s power over the US space program and the country’s electric vehicle industry, and ability to influence geopolitical affairs through the Starlink constellation for which there is no viable competitor at present. The idea that Musk is regularly conversing with Putin, an avowed foe of the United States and Western democracies, is deeply uncomfortable.

After nursing a libertarian streak for decades, Musk has become ultra-political. He is loved. He is hated. Because he is so personally embodied by the brands of his biggest companies—much of Tesla’s stock value is predicated on Musk’s perceived ability to steer into the future, and for all intents and purposes, Musk is SpaceX—there are bound to be consequences not just for the man, but for his brands.

Musk’s increasingly partisan positions have already affected Tesla, potentially reducing sales to Democratic-leaning voters. But until recently, SpaceX has largely flown above the fray. However, that could change. During Musk’s recent showdown with Brazil, for example, the Starlink Internet service was caught in the crosshairs.

Implications for SpaceX

At a minimum, in the wake of Friday’s report, Musk will likely face increased calls for the revocation of his national security clearance. As the launch provider for sensitive Department of Defense missions, Musk has access to privileged information about the capabilities of spy satellites and other national security assets. He also has critical contracts with the US military for Starlink communication services under the Starshield business unit.

In addition, Musk’s political activities are playing out as the US Space Force is beginning to award contracts as part of the latest round of national security launch missions, known as NSSL Phase 3. It is possible the US military could lean more into the Vulcan rocket and United Launch Alliance.

Some of the more ardent critics of Musk’s behavior have called for the US government to force Musk to divest his interest in SpaceX. Musk founded SpaceX more than 22 years ago and remains the dominant shareholder, with total autonomy to make decisions. This would be a nuclear option and, in reality, probably would do more harm than good to SpaceX, which for years has thrived on Musk’s audacious goals and relentless pressure to achieve remarkable feats. It seems unlikely to occur at this time.

What seems clear is that the publication of Friday’s article reflects the concerns of some people within the US intelligence community about Musk’s behavior, his ability to conduct Cowboy diplomacy, and the power his money and technologies give him as an individual.

What happens next will, undoubtedly, depend to some extent on the results of the US presidential election next month. A Trump victory would likely give Musk carte blanche to continue pursuing his interests, with the clear message to US agencies to enable his businesses rather than to restrict them for regulatory reasons. Musk would likely enjoy increased power to pursue his aims until the end of the Trump presidency or until falling out with Trump. Such a scenario certainly cannot be ruled out among two people who are accustomed to calling the shots and not being told no.

Should Kamala Harris win the presidency, a lot would hinge on how Musk responds to the election. He could say some mea culpas and probably move on, but if he goes the election-denier route, he and his businesses probably would face heightened scrutiny. US regulatory agencies could act with more zeal, and Musk’s activities could be more closely investigated for violation of US laws. And NASA and the US Space Force could do more to ensure that other US companies can emerge to challenge SpaceX’s dominance.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Why is Elon Musk talking to Vladimir Putin, and what does it mean for SpaceX? Read More »

Tesla, Warner Bros. sued for using AI ripoff of iconic Blade Runner imagery

Blade Runner, blade runner 2049, copyright, copyright law, elon musk, Policy, Tesla, warner bros. discovery, X / Kelly Newman / October 22, 2024

A copy of a copy of a copy

“That movie sucks,” Elon Musk said in response to the lawsuit.

Credit: via Alcon Entertainment

Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon’s copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.

According to the complaint, WBD did not approach Alcon for permission until six hours before the Tesla event when Alcon “refused all permissions and adamantly objected” to linking their movie with Musk’s cybercab.

At that point, WBD “disingenuously” downplayed the license being sought, the lawsuit said, claiming they were seeking “clip licensing” that the studio should have known would not provide rights to livestream the Tesla event globally on X (formerly Twitter).

Musk’s behavior cited

Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so “although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did.” Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla’s cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.

“Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood,” Alcon’s complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.

The “Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk,” the complaint said.

Musk, the lawsuit said, is “problematic,” and “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”

In bad faith

Because Alcon had no chance to avoid the affiliation while millions viewed the cybercab livestream on X, Alcon saw Tesla using the images over Alcon’s objections as “clearly” a “bad faith and malicious gambit… to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk are on the outs with Hollywood,” the complaint said.

Alcon believes that WBD’s agreement was likely worth six or seven figures and likely stipulated that Tesla “affiliate the cybercab with one or more motion pictures from” WBD’s catalog.

While any of the Mad Max movies may have fit the bill, Musk wanted to use Blade Runner 2049, the lawsuit alleged, because that movie features an “artificially intelligent autonomously capable” flying car (known as a spinner) and is “extremely relevant” to “precisely the areas of artificial intelligence, self-driving capability, and autonomous automotive capability that Tesla and Musk are trying to market” with the cybercab.

The Blade Runner 2049 spinner is “one of the most famous vehicles in motion picture history,” the complaint alleged, recently exhibited alongside other iconic sci-fi cars like the Back to the Future time-traveling DeLorean or the light cycle from Tron: Legacy.

As Alcon sees it, Musk seized the misappropriation of the Blade Runner image to help him sell Teslas, and WBD allegedly directed Musk to use AI to skirt Alcon’s copyright to avoid a costly potential breach of contract on the day of the event.

For Alcon, brand partnerships are a lucrative business, with carmakers paying as much as $10 million to associate their vehicles with Blade Runner 2049. By seemingly using AI to generate a stylized copy of the image at the heart of the movie—which references the scene where their movie’s hero, K, meets the original 1982 Blade Runner hero, Rick Deckard—Tesla avoided paying Alcon’s typical fee, their complaint said.

Musk maybe faked the image himself, lawsuit says

During the live event, Musk introduced the cybercab on a WBD Hollywood studio lot. For about 11 seconds, the Tesla founder “awkwardly” displayed a fake, allegedly AI-generated Blade Runner 2049 film still. He used the image to make a point that apocalyptic films show a future that’s “dark and dismal,” whereas Tesla’s vision of the future is much brighter.

In Musk’s slideshow image, believed to be AI-generated, a male figure is “seen from behind, with close-cropped hair, wearing a trench coat or duster, standing in almost full silhouette as he surveys the abandoned ruins of a city, all bathed in misty orange light,” the lawsuit said. The similarity to the key image used in Blade Runner 2049 marketing is not “coincidental,” the complaint said.

If there were any doubts that this image was supposed to reference the Blade Runner movie, the lawsuit said, Musk “erased them” by directly referencing the movie in his comments.

“You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future,” Musk said at the event. “I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”

The producers think the image was likely generated—”even possibly by Musk himself”—by “asking an AI image generation engine to make ‘an image from the K surveying ruined Las Vegas sequence of Blade Runner 2049,’ or some closely equivalent input direction,” the lawsuit said.

Alcon is not sure exactly what went down after the company rejected rights to use the film’s imagery at the event and is hoping to learn more through the litigation’s discovery phase.

Musk may try to argue that his comments at the Tesla event were “only meant to talk broadly about the general idea of science fiction films and undesirable apocalyptic futures and juxtaposing them with Musk’s ostensibly happier robot car future vision.”

But producers argued that defense is “not credible” since Tesla explicitly asked to use the Blade Runner 2049 image, and there are “better” films in WBD’s library to promote Musk’s message, like the Mad Max movies.

“But those movies don’t have massive consumer goodwill specifically around really cool-looking (Academy Award-winning) artificially intelligent, autonomous cars,” the complaint said, accusing Musk of stealing the image when it wasn’t given to him.

If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon’s lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged “massive economic theft.”

Musk responds to Blade Runner suit

Alcon suspects that Musk believed that Blade Runner 2049 was eligible to be used at the event under the WBD agreement, not knowing that WBD never had “any non-domestic rights or permissions for the Picture.”

Once Musk requested to use the Blade Runner imagery, Alcon alleged that WBD scrambled to secure rights by obscuring the very lucrative “larger brand affiliation proposal” by positioning their ask as a request for much less expensive “clip licensing.”

After Alcon rejected the proposal outright, WBD told Tesla that the affiliation in the event could not occur because X planned to livestream the event globally. But even though Tesla and X allegedly knew that the affiliation was rejected, Musk appears to have charged ahead with the event as planned.

“It all exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands,” Alcon’s complaint said. “Which of course is exactly what it was.”

Alcon is hoping a jury will find Tesla, Musk, and WBD violated laws. Producers have asked for an injunction stopping Tesla from using any Blade Runner imagery in its promotional or advertising campaigns. They also want a disclaimer slapped on the livestreamed event video on X, noting that the Blade Runner association is “false or misleading.”

For Musk, a ban on linking Blade Runner to his car company may feel bleak. Last year, he touted the Cybertruck as an “armored personnel carrier from the future—what Bladerunner would have driven.” This amused many Blade Runner fans, as Gizmodo noted, because there never was a character named “Bladerunner,” but rather that was just a job title for the film’s hero Deckard.

In response to the lawsuit, Musk took to X to post what Blade Runner fans—who rated the 2017 movie as 88 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes—might consider a polarizing take, replying, “That movie sucks” on a post calling out Alcon’s lawsuit as “absurd.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Tesla, Warner Bros. sued for using AI ripoff of iconic Blade Runner imagery Read More »

Are Tesla’s robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys?

a, AI, AI Elon Musk, Biz & IT, humanoid robots, machine learning, optimus, robot, Robots, Tesla, Tesla Optimus / 9u50fv / October 11, 2024

Two years ago, Tesla’s Optimus prototype was an underwhelming mess of exposed wires that could only operate in a carefully controlled stage presentation. Last night, Tesla’s “We, Robot” event featured much more advanced Optimus prototypes that could walk around without tethers and interact directly with partygoers.

It was an impressive demonstration of the advancement of a technology Tesla’s Elon Musk said he thinks “will be the biggest product ever of any kind” (way to set reasonable expectations, there). But the live demos have also set off a firestorm of discussion over just how autonomous these Optimus robots currently are.

A robot in every garage

Before the human/robot party could get started, Musk introduced the humanoid Optimus robots as a logical extension of some of the technology that Tesla uses in its cars, from batteries and motors to software. “It’s just a robot with arms and legs instead of a robot with wheels,” Musk said breezily, easily underselling the huge differences between human-like movements and a car’s much more limited input options.

After confirming that the company “started off with someone in a robot suit”—a reference to a somewhat laughable 2021 Tesla presentation—Musk said that “rapid progress” has been made in the Optimus program in recent years. Extrapolating that progress to the “long term” future, Musk said, would lead to a point where you could purchase “your own personal R2-D2, C-3PO” for $20,000 to $30,000 (though he did allow that it could “take us a minute to get to the long term”).

And what will you get for that $30,000 when the “long term” finally comes to pass? Musk grandiosely promised that Optimus will be able to do “anything you want,” including babysitting kids, walking dogs, getting groceries, serving drinks, or “just be[ing] your friend.” Given those promised capabilities, it’s perhaps no wonder that Musk confidently predicted that “every one of the 8 billion people of Earth” will want at least one Optimus, leading to an “age of abundance” where the labor costs for most services “declines dramatically.”

Are Tesla’s robot prototypes AI marvels or remote-controlled toys? Read More »