Elon Musk, Tesla CTO Talk Model X Details, Model S Upgrades

joe5 writes "Tesla Motors tries to keep product details quiet for the most part, but in a recent Q & A session in Norway (Teslas sell extremely well there) Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the company's CTO JB Straubel discussed some interesting nuggets about the Model S, the upcoming Model X SUV, and the company's planned Model E sedan."

Best new feature:

[schneidafunk]

Since the summary is unsurprisingly lacking any details, I found this feature the most important:

"Tesla is shooting for a battery cost for the Model E of 30 to 40 percent less per kilowatt-hour than the Model S. This will help Tesla hit its price target of $30,000 to $40,000, competitive with the BMW 3-Series. Part of the cost reduction will presumably come from the huge "giga-factory" Tesla envisions to build Model E batteries."

Re:Best new feature:

[Kjella]

Reading comprehension fail. Model X is their upcoming SUV, bigger and probably as expensive or costlier than the Model S. Model E is their planned economy model, presumably a smaller car, weaker engine, smaller batteries. They're going to be very different beasts.

Re:Allow me to be the first

[Soulskill]

We're not banning people for anti-beta comments.

The amount of people complaining about the beta across multiple stories and multiple days should be enough to verify that. If not, it's easy enough to test for yourself. What's been surprising to me is how many comments and emails we've seen asking for us to ban people/delete comments about the beta protest.

Side note: we do ban (and have always banned) commercial spammers and bots that try to flood us with traffic. The folks that do that like using proxies, so if you use a proxy, it's possible you'll end up on one that got banned for that reason. If that happens, you can switch proxies or email us at [e-mail].

Re:Best new feature:

[BasilBrush]

The gullwing doors, however, really look like a stupid idea. Sure, they look great, but I would be surprised if they are anything but inconvenient unless you have lots of parking space.

On the contrary, it looks like they need less space than convention doors. They are not like the ones on McFly's DeLorean. They are double hinged. If you can drive into a parking space, you can open the doors.

Re:2012 Lincoln MKS, 2013 Cadillac CTS

[Anonymous Coward]

He talks about no loss of efficiency with the SAME ENGINE. Check your examples, one does not have the same engine, the other doesn't really maintain efficiency if you check around for tests.