It closed yesterday at $188.59 and is down another $1.49 in early pre-market trade, $187.10 last.
From
Tesla’s Chief Executive Elon Musk didn’t break news during an appearance at the World Energy Innovation Forum on Wednesday, but the outspoken serial entrepreneur delivered a few jabs to rival companies, technologies and business models.
The luxury electric vehicle maker hosted the two-day summit, a gathering of investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers in clean energy, at its assembly plant in Fremont, Calif.
Musk sat down for a discussion with Ira Ehrenpreis, chairman of the forum and general partner with Technology Ventures, an early investor in the company. The interview kicked off with a look back at Musk’s original business venture – he sold a video game at the age of 12 — and soon moved into Tesla’s inauspicious early days.
Musk was characteristically blunt throughout the interview, even when he was his own target.
On Tesla’s early missteps:
In the case of the (Tesla) Roadster … we used a highly modified version of the Lotus Elise chassis.On a recent conversation with Google CEO Larry Page (which amounted to a humblebrag about Model S battery life):
… We ended up changing everything on the car, something like 7 percent of the parts were in common. Why did we do that?
It’s like if you have a particular house in mind and instead of buying that house, you buy some other house and chop down everything except one wall in the basement.
… That was dumb.
Tesla was created on two false premises. One was that we could easily adapt the Lotus Elise chassis … and two that the [drivetrain] technology we licensed from AC Propulsion would work in a production environment. Those were both totally false.
We ended up having to redesign the whole car and the whole power train.
Most people just charge their Model S’s at home, because it’s got 260 miles of range or thereabouts.
I was having a conversation about this yesterday with Larry Page. He was saying all the chargers at Google are filled with [Nissan] LEAFs and [Chevy] Volts.
...MOREI thought, ‘Geez, what are we doing wrong? Do we need to do more to sell Model S’s at Google?’On the overhyping of fuel cell cars, a theme he has hit upon several times (but which hasn’t stopped others from trying.)
He said ‘No, there are lots of Model S’s at Google — but nobody bothers charging them at work.’
[The] current technology of lithium-ion [batteries, which power Tesla cars] is superior to what the theoretical best possible outcome is for fuel cells. And lithium-ion systems are getting a lot better.
Game over. Why are you doing fuel cells?...
