Hasta La Gadget!

Tesla has scrapped plans for a small battery version of its Model S all-electric car, claiming tiny driver interest makes the 40 kWh variant uneconomical for production. Only 4-percent of Model S buyers opted for the cheaper Model S, which started at $52,400, Tesla said in a statement today, along with the revelation that stronger than expected deliveries means the firm will make a full profit in Q1 2013. Those who went for the cheapest Model S rung will still get a car, though, borrowing the 60 kWh power pack from the $62,400 version, albeit with a software cap on range.

Even though the car will have a bigger battery than expected – good for 230 miles at 55mph, rather than the 160 miles of the smaller version – it won’t deliver that full range. Instead, Tesla will artificially cap the cheaper Model S using software.

Despite that, there are still some advantages to the strategy, including the ability to “upgrade” the car at some point in the future. Tesla will allow range-loving owners to pay to unlock the extra 20 kWh of potential in the power pack, at any point in the car’s lifetime. Meanwhile, acceleration will also improve, with the software-limited variant matching the 5.9s 0-60mph time of the 60 kWh car, a 0.6s improvement on what customers had been expecting.

It’s not the only bonus Tesla has announced today. The company has also been quietly baking its Supercharger hardware into the 60 kWh Model S, which means that those who later decide to pay to use Tesla’s growing network of cross-US high speed charging points won’t have to have equipment retro-fitted to their car. Previously, the Supercharger tech was only installed by default on the 85 kWh model; it’s a $2,000 option on the 60 kWh Model S.

For investors, though, it’s the big picture around Model S sales that will put the most smiles on faces today. Tesla has confirmed that deliveries of cars this quarter will exceed 4,750, up 250 on the estimates the company previously announced. The result is full-profitability in Q1, both GAAP and non-GAAP, Tesla says, having previously confirmed that it would repay its Department of Energy loans five years early.

Meanwhile, there’s more news afoot. Headline-loving Tesla founder Elon Musk teased a big announcement this coming Thursday, and the car company tells us today’s profitability and Model S tweaking news isn’t it.

Tesla cuts cheapest Model S as buyers opt for range instead is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Things got a tad hairy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Blue Waters supercomputer when IBM halted work on it in 2011, but with funding from the National Science Foundation, the one-petaflop system is now crunching numbers 24/7. The behemoth resides within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 compute nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher. At its peak performance, the rig can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the NCSA, all that horsepower earns Blue Waters the title of the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus. Now that it’s cranking away around-the-clock, it’ll be used in projects investigating everything from how viruses infect cells to weather predictions.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Source: National Center for Supercomputing Applications

We’re only two days out from Expand (get your tickets here — or at the door this weekend!) and the trucks are arriving as we speak to transform historic Fort Mason into a gadget lover’s hall of wonders. By now you already know we have an agenda you won’t want to miss, and an inaugural crowdfunded hardware competition putting 10 awesome projects head-to-head for $25,000 in prizes, but what about the smorgasboard of other cool things that will be going on at Expand?

We’re glad you asked…

Filed under: Announcements, Meta

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The number of cabs per capita in Austin is probably quite reasonable for a city of under a million, but during SXSW, taxis can be difficult to come by, plagued by ridiculous traffic and a surge of carless visitors. So, to make our way from last night’s Engadget+gdgt event to our hotel — a roughly 15-mile drive north of the city center — we turned to Uber’s Android app. Selecting the UberX option, we were told, would net us a free ride, but we were expecting a clunky cab to pull up; instead, we got a brand new Tesla Model S, with a tie-clad chauffeur to match. The driver, we learned, was on loan from Dallas, while the gorgeous all-electric car was likely to quietly roll its way to distant roads following this week’s Central Texas geek fest. But we weren’t leaving Austin without our ride.

Filed under: Transportation

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Tesla had made statements before about repaying its loan to the Department of Energy ahead of schedule, and that it plans on forgoing help from the government in the future in order to thrive as a stand-alone company. Tesla has now stated that it has changed its loan’s terms of agreement, and it expects to pay off the entire loan by 2017. That 5 years ahead of the anticipated December 2022 repayment target.

Tesla first acquired the loan 10 years ago. The U.S Department of Energy granted Tesla $465 million to develop its electric cars. The loan agreement Tesla had with the Department of Energy stated that if it didn’t pay off its loans by 2018, the government would be able to purchase 3 million of Tesla shares at a discounted price. Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer, Deepak Ahuja, stated, ” The terms of the original loan had a very good incentive for us to pay off the loan early.”

With the new amendment to the loan agreement, they will be able to avoid the “vesting of that warrant.” Any cash that Tesla makes that is above their $200 million threshold will be used to repay their loans. Ahuja also stated that if there is any balance remaining by the end of 2017, the company will pay it all off as a “balloon payment.” Things are looking optimistic for Tesla that makes the company believe it will be able to painlessly finish paying off its loan.

Tesla is expected to sell 20,000 of its Model S sedans by the end of this year. Sales of Tesla’s Zero-Emission Vehicle credits reached $40.5 million in 2012, which is a phenomenal increase from the $2.7 million it made in 2011. Due to a California regulation, automakers have to produce a certain amount of electric/plug-in vehicles a year, and those who are unable to meet those demands can buy credits from companies like Tesla in order to meet their quota.

Beginning in 2015, Tesla will begin making accelerated payments on its loan. It plans on producing its next all-electric vehicle, the Model X, late next year, and it also plans on building around 15,000 electric vehicles each year. The company is doing extremely well financially, especially considering 2,650 Model S sedans sold last year, which go for around $50,000 – $100,000+ each after the $7,500 tax credit provided by the government.

[via Bloomberg]

Tesla will repay loan 5 years earlier than expected is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.