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Tesla Top 5 Week in Review: Solar Roof, P100D Race Car Composites, Model 3 sighting, and more

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The top articles of the week at Teslarati revolved around some of the Biggest Tesla Stories for 2017, with solar roof production at Gigafactory 2 and a Model 3 prototype sighting taking the news fast lane. But sometimes the small voices are the ones that are heard the loudest, with an upcoming Tesla commercial as the result. Tesla has become the first company to provide large magnitude solar energy for a utility, and a self-described vegan hippie race car chick will unveil an electric GT Tesla P100D race car later this month — and it’s made of biocomposite materials. Here are those stories, and more.

Tesla gears up for Solar Roof production at Gigafactory 2, Panasonic will have major role at plant

Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, dubbed Gigafactory 2, will be a site of solar roof tile manufacturing. Panasonic, Tesla’s strategic partner, will manufacture solar cells there with ancillary help from Silevo, which SolarCity acquired in 2014. Panasonic, which  has a $250 million investment in the facility, will also produce full solar panels in Buffalo, and those will be sold to Tesla. Panasonic has agreed to grant adjustable pricing to Tesla for solar products it purchases from the Japanese electronics company over the next 10 years.

Read the article here.

Tesla Model 3 spotted testing along Hyperloop track outside of SpaceX

A polished and very complete-looking silver Tesla Model 3 prototype was caught in rare video footage this week doing test runs on a street outside SpaceX and the Hyperloop test track. Unplugged Performance, which produces upgrades for Tesla vehicles, spotted the prototype cruising around the nearby area. The Model 3 is newest vehicle in the Tesla catalog, with a starting price of $35,000 and an expected production date of summer, 2017. The prototype has made guest appearances at a number of events and venues, including an investor event in January.

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Tesla launches “Project Loveday” contest for fan-made commercials

This week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk — whose Twitter feed is a much-visited social media site by journalists, Tesla owners, and cleantech aficionados — announced that he would hold a contest for homemade advertisements after receiving a challenge from a fifth grade student. “Thank you for the lovely letter. That sounds like a great idea. We’ll do it!” Musk tweeted to young Bria. The “Project Loveday” contest, which will end on  May 8, 2017, will review the best fan-made commercials. According to the blog post on Tesla’s website, entrants can submit a link to a 90 second or less YouTube video along with a brief description.

Read the article here.

Tesla locks in 20-year deal to provide solar electricity to Kauai Island Utility

On Kauai, which is described by many as the most picturesque of the Hawai’ian islands, daytime reliance on solar energy and other renewables has traditionally dissipated when the sun sets. Now that’s all changing, as the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) is drawing energy from 272 Tesla power packs to provide electricity after dark. The measure will save KIUC 1.6 million gallons of diesel fuel annually and will cut KIUC costs per kilowatt hour from 15.5 cents down to a fixed price of 13.9 cents for the next 20 years. The agreement shifts the power generation from the utility to Tesla, and Tesla is the first company with which any utility company has contracted for a system of this magnitude.

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Leilani Münter will help showcase Tesla race car “biocomposites” made of natural fibers

Electric GT’s Tesla P100D race car will be in Paris on March 15 with Leilani Münter showcasing the car’s high performance composite material made from natural fibers. Swiss firm Bcomp configures natural fibers into ultralight components known as “biocomposites” for the Electric GT race vehicles. These materials are formed by a matrix which mimics the structure of the living materials, maintains strengthening properties, and provides biocompatibility. An environmental activist, Münter believes it is essential for humans to adapt and evolve to a sustainable way that does not destroy the world. The racer is an advocate for renewable energy, solar power, electric cars, and plant-based diets and has been a longtime Tesla protege.

Read the article here.

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Carolyn Fortuna is a writer and researcher with a Ph.D. in education from the University of Rhode Island. She brings a social justice perspective to environmental issues. Please follow me on Twitter and Facebook and Google+

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Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.

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SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.

The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.

Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors

Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.

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For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.

The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.

The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.

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Tesla Supercharger for Business exposes jaw-dropping ROI gap between best and worst locations

Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business calculator reveals an eye-opening all-in cost and location-based ROI projections.

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tesla v4 supercharger

Tesla has launched an online calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving property owners their first transparent look at what it really costs to install Superchargers on site and what kind of return they can expect.

The program itself launched in September 2025, allowing businesses to purchase and operate Supercharger hardware on their own property while Tesla handles installation, maintenance, software, and 24/7 driver support. As Teslarati reported at launch, hosts also get their logo placed on the chargers and their location integrated into Tesla’s in-car navigation, meaning drivers are actively routed there. The stalls are open to all EVs, not just Teslas.


The new online calculator, announced by Tesla on Wednesday with the note that “simplicity and transparency” have been a problem in the industry, lets any business enter a U.S. address and get a real cost and revenue model. A standard 8-stall V4 Supercharger site runs approximately $500,000 in hardware and $55,000 per post for installation, bringing an all-in price just shy of $1 million. Tesla charges a flat $0.10 per kWh fee to cover software, billing, and network operations. Businesses set their own retail price and keep the margin above that fee.

Tesla expands its branded ‘For Business’ Superchargers

 

Taking a look at Tesla’s Supercharger for Business online calculator, we can see that ROI is not uniform, and the gap between a strong location and a poor one can stretch the breakeven point by several years.

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The biggest driver is foot traffic and how long people stay. A busy rest station, hotel, or outlet mall brings in repeat visitors who need to charge while they’re already stopped, pushing utilization numbers higher and shortening payback time.

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Local electricity rates matter just as much on the cost side. Markets like California carry some of the highest commercial electricity rates in the country, which eats into the margin between what a host pays per kWh and what they charge drivers. At the same time, dense urban areas with high EV adoption tend to support higher retail charging prices, which can offset that cost if demand is strong enough. Weather also plays a role. Cold climates reduce battery efficiency and increase charging frequency, but they can also suppress utilization in winter months if drivers avoid stopping in exposed outdoor locations. Suburban and rural sites face a different problem: lower baseline EV traffic, which means a site with cheaper power and lower operating costs can still take longer to pay back simply because the stalls sit idle more often. Tesla’s calculator uses real fleet data to pre-fill utilization estimates by ZIP code, so businesses can run their specific address against these variables rather than relying on averages.

The program has seen real adoption. Wawa, already the largest host of Tesla Superchargers with over 2,100 stalls across 223 locations, opened its first fully owned and branded site in Alachua, Florida earlier this year. Francis Energy of Oklahoma and the city of Alpharetta, Georgia have also deployed branded stations through the program, as Teslarati covered in January.

Tesla now exceeds 80,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide, and the calculator makes the economic case for accelerating that number through private investment rather than company-owned sites alone.

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Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla’s folding V4 Supercharger ships 33% more per truck, cuts deployment time and cost significantly.

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Tesla V4 Supercharger installation ramping in Europe

Tesla is rolling out a folding V4 Supercharger design, an engineering change that allows 33% more units to fit on a single delivery truck, cuts deployment time in half, and reduces overall installation cost by roughly 20%.

The folding mechanism addresses one of the least glamorous but most consequential bottlenecks in charging infrastructure: getting hardware from factory floor to job site efficiently. By collapsing the form factor for transit and unfolding into an operational configuration on arrival, the new design dramatically reduces the logistics overhead that has historically slowed Supercharger rollouts, particularly at large or remote sites where multiple units are needed simultaneously.

The timing aligns with a broader acceleration in Tesla’s network strategy. In March 2026, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet after more than seven years and 15,000 units, pivoting entirely to V4 cabinet production. The V4 cabinet itself is already a generational leap, delivering up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, while supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. The folding transport innovation layers logistical efficiency on top of that technical foundation.

Tesla launches first ‘true’ East Coast V4 Supercharger: here’s what that means

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Tesla Charging’s Director Max de Zegher, commenting on the V4 cabinet when it launched, captured the operational philosophy behind these changes: “Posts can peak up to 500kW for cars, but we need less than 1MW across 8 posts to deliver maximum power to cars 99% of the time.” The design philosophy has always been about maximizing real-world throughput, not just peak specs, and the folding transport upgrade extends that thinking into the supply chain itself.

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