Tesla Motors confirms it settled lawsuit with former CEO

We had some indication Tesla and its former CEO Martin Eberhard had settled their lawsuit after it just quietly went away last month, but the electric automaker has now finally come out and confirmed as much, although it’s not surprisingly still staying mum on any actual details. As you may recall, Eberhard had sued Tesla and its current CEO, Elon Musk, over a whole host of grievances, including that he was pushed out of the company, denied his severance package, and generally disparaged both in the public and within the company. For its part, Tesla then fired back with some harsh words of its own, saying that Eberhard’s account was “fictionalized,” “twisted,” and “wrong.” Both parties seem to now be doing their best to put all that behind them, however, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has even go so far as to issue a statement saying that “without Martin’s indispensable efforts, Tesla Motors would not be here today.”

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Tesla Motors confirms it settled lawsuit with former CEO originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tesla founder quietly dismisses lawsuit against the company, Musk

Remember that time, way back in June, when we told you that former Tesla Motors exec Martin Eberhard was suing the company and its chief (a certain Mr. Elon Musk) for sundry offenses, including forcing him out of the company, wrecking his car, and besmirching his good name? According to the San Jose Business Journal, the suit was quietly and unceremoniously dropped on August 7 at the request of Eberhard. Of course, the most likely explanation for this turn of events (besides Eberhard’s suddenly finding his Zen and deciding to drop out of the material world for a life of quiet contemplation) is a settlement of some sort. Maybe he’s getting that coveted roadster after all? According to The Register, a Tesla spokesperson refused to “speculate on why Eberhard dropped his suit.” When pressed for a follow-up, the same site received an automated reply: “I am on vacation”.

[Via The Register]

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Tesla founder quietly dismisses lawsuit against the company, Musk originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Eberhard’s RFMC rapid charger for Tesla Roadster now up for order

If you’re one of the lucky few who own a Tesla Roadster, this will certainly be of interest to you. And, for the rest of us — well, let’s indulge ourselves in a bit of vicarious living for a moment, shall we? Eberhard’s just made its rapid charger — the Roadster Foundry Mobile Connector (or RFMC) — available to order. The RFMC comes with adapters that will allow charging at 12, 16, 24, 32 or 40 amps, and a fully depleted battery will charge overnight when charging at 40 amps. All you need to do (owning a Roadster is the hardest part, no doubt) to get the newer, faster charger is send the standard MC120 charger the car came with, plus $960 to EV components, wait for the new RFMC to show up, then go back to your normal life — you know, sitting on a desolate beach in your insane car watching the sun go down.

[Via Autoblog Green]

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Eberhard’s RFMC rapid charger for Tesla Roadster now up for order originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video: MIT working on rapid recharging for electric vehicles

MIT’s electric vehicle prototype may be a long way off from being completed, but if we let that stop us from discussing EVs, we might never talk about them. The headline ambition of this project is a full recharge within 10 minutes, which would eliminate somewhere between four and ten hours of waiting. Speedwise, the Electric Vehicle Team is aiming for a 100 mph top speed from a 250-horsepower / 187 kilowatt AC induction motor, and a not unheard of 200-mile cruising range. To achieve their rapid juicing aim, the students will strap 7,905 lithium iron-phosphate cell batteries from A123Systems to a gutted 2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid body. The batteries’ low internal resistance is what makes things possible, but further hurdles, such as finding a sufficiently powerful energy source, would have to be overcome before any sort of widespread use may occur. Video after the break.

[Via PC World]

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Video: MIT working on rapid recharging for electric vehicles originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tesla goes Big Apple with Chelsea showroom

Tesla goes Big Apple with Chelsea showroom

It’s a time of dire news for auto manufacturers, with losses widening, dealerships closing, and whole brands disappearing. Not so for Tesla, which despite all that bickering up top has managed to scrounge together the funds to open up a shop in Chelsea in western Manhattan, a swanky area full of art galleries and the beret-clad people who frequent them. No surprise, then, that Tesla has outfitted the walls of this new dealership with large prints of its very own manufacturing process — probably not earning it much cred in the ‘hood. Annual operating cost is estimated to be a cool $1.5 million, pocket change by GM and Toyota standards, but surely a little more significant for a small company like this. Tesla used the space to show off the 2010 Roadster, which we still don’t have full details on, but have heard features slightly improved circuitry, a locking glove box, and WiFi to enable remote, wireless diagnostics. Surely a Tesla-branded application store of some sort can’t be far behind.

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Tesla goes Big Apple with Chelsea showroom originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tesla, Ford, Nissan all receive electric car development loans from US government

High five, Tesla fans — everyone’s favorite incredibly controversial electric car company has just been granted $465m in loans from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. The bulk of the money will go towards that postponed Model S factory, while the remaining $100m will be used to fund an electric powertrain manufacturing facility that will sell parts like motors and battery packs to other carmakers. Tesla wasn’t the DOE’s only big winner: Nissan received $1.6b (billion!) to build batteries and EVs in Tennessee and Ford received an undisclosed amount to build two upcoming electric cars, but since those companies have largely drama-free upper management that isn’t constantly involved in lawsuits, it feels a little more routine. Still, it’s an exciting time — let’s hope all these tax dollars turn into affordable, convenient electric transportation sooner rather than later.

Update: A “congressional source” has told the AP that Ford’s getting $5.9 billion, so yeah, the Oval’s still the big dog.

Read – Tesla
Read – Ford
Read – Nissan

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Tesla, Ford, Nissan all receive electric car development loans from US government originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tesla founder sues Tesla, Elon Musk

Tesla’s done a good job keeping itself out of the courtroom recently, but the good times don’t last forever — founder Martin Eberhard has just sued the company and CEO Elon Musk for libel, slander, and breach of contract. Eberhard claims that after he and Mark Tapenning founded Tesla, he was summarily pushed out of the company by Musk, wrongfully denied his severance package, and then disparaged both publicly and within the company — and on top of it all, Musk sent the second Roadster produced out for “endurance testing” where it was wrecked instead being sold to Eberhard as promised. Ouch. Interestingly, the core of the lawsuit directly mirrors the suit filed former PR director David Vespremi over the same series of events, so it seems like there’s a pattern here, but we’ll see how much of this is true when Tesla and Eberhard face off in the courtroom — our friends at Autoblog Green just received this statement from legendarily-prickly Tesla PR spokesperson Rachel Konrad:

This lawsuit is a fictionalized, inaccurate account of Tesla’s early years — it’s twisted and wrong, and we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight. Incidentally, Tesla will also be filing counterclaims and in the process present an accurate account of the company’s history.

Yeah, we’d say there are some fireworks brewing. Stay tuned.

Read – Autoblog Green
Read – Wired
Read – Eberhard’s complaint [Warning: PDF]

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Tesla founder sues Tesla, Elon Musk originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia hopes to one-up Touchstone, harness wireless power for “ambient” phone charging

Like a page torn right out of the government’s top secret files on Nikola Tesla, a Nokia research team is working on a wireless energy harvesting mechanism, which sucks up all that cancer-giving RF floating through the air and turns it into electrical current. Their goal is about to capture about 50 milliwatts of power for “ambient charging” — which would at least be enough to top off the battery while the phone is off. Unfortunately, right now their current prototypes are only pulling down 3 to 5 milliwatts, and many in the industry are convinced it can’t be done (don’t worry, Nokia, that’s just The Man, keeping you down). To be honest, we’re not totally sure were comfortable with the thought that there’s enough RF floating around to make this even theoretically possible, but as we slowly come to grips with our own mortality, we imagine we’d gladly pay an extra $70 or so for the privilege of never having to charge our phone again. Nokia itself isn’t over promising: they plan on supplementing this juice with solar power, and thinks it’ll be three or four years until it makes its way into a handset — probably around the time your existing iPhone contract dries up.

[Thanks, CanisMinor]

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Nokia hopes to one-up Touchstone, harness wireless power for “ambient” phone charging originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Daimler buys 10% stake in Tesla, offers parts and know-how

Daimler and Tesla have been working together in a limited capacity for some time now, but the two made their relationship official in a pretty big way earlier today, with Daimler announcing that it has bought a 10% stake in Tesla, and that it’ll be lending a hand with both parts and engineering. Of course, as with most things Tesla, there’s no firm price tag attached to the deal, although it’s said to be in the “double digit millions.” They’re a bit more specific when it comes to the working relationship, however, which will apparently include Tesla “leveraging Daimler’s engineering, production and supply chain expertise” in ways that’ll “accelerate” bringing the Model S to production. Tesla will also reportedly work on battery pack integration and battery management systems for Daimler from here on out, and the two will continue to collaborate on Daimler’s second-generation Smart ED electric vehicle that’s slated to go into production later this year. Interestingly, as AutoBlog points out, the deal also gives Tesla access to the automotive lithium-ion cells being produced by Daimler subsidiary Li-Tec which, when we’re talking about electric vehicles, is no small thing.

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Daimler buys 10% stake in Tesla, offers parts and know-how originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 May 2009 22:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA Tesla GPUs now shipping with Dell ‘personal supercomputers’

Been itching to get your hands on a personal supercomputer, as NVIDIA’s ad wizards put it? The company has just announced that its CUDA-based Tesla C1060 GPU is now available in Dell’s Precision R5400, T5500 and T7500 workstations. And just to put things into perspective, NVIDIA points out that a Dell workstation rockin’ a single Tesla C1060 has enough going on under the hood to power the control system for the European Extremely Large Telescope project (“the world’s largest,” apparently). According to one of the developers, Jeff Meisel at National Instruments, a workstation “equipped with a single Tesla C1060 can achieve near real-time control of the mirror simulation and controller, which before wouldn’t be possible in a single machine without the computational density offered by GPUs.” Wild, huh? If you’re curious about the workout that Tesla GPUs are getting on a wide range of projects, from Bio-Informatics to Computational Chemistry to Molecular Dynamics and more — or if you’re merely a glutton for long-winded PR — check out the good stuff after the break.

Continue reading NVIDIA Tesla GPUs now shipping with Dell ‘personal supercomputers’

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NVIDIA Tesla GPUs now shipping with Dell ‘personal supercomputers’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 May 2009 15:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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