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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has accused a Tesla employee of "quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations," according to an email obtained by CNBC. In the all-hands email to Tesla staff, Musk wrote that the employee had made "direct code changes" to the company's production systems, as well as exporting "large amounts" of Tesla's data to unknown third parties.
According to Musk's email, the unnamed employee claimed he had become disgruntled after failing to receive a promotion. However, the Tesla CEO also suggested the alleged saboteur could have been working with short sellers, oil and gas companies—whom he described as "sometimes not super nice"—or "the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors." Of this last group, Musk reminded his employees that, since the traditional OEMs have been known to cheat emissions tests, "maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways."
[...] Tesla has faced plenty of criticism about its ongoing troubles in ramping up Model 3 production. But that may have been unwarranted if those problems were due to sabotage. We reached out to Tesla regarding CNBC's story, but the company declined to comment at this time.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:01AM (1 child)
True, but they wouldn't be above trying to kneecap Tesla while they scramble to catch up in EVs.
I've shared this before, but my brother is an automotive engineer in the R&D division at Ford. Ford just got a new CEO recently, and the word out of the confab with his exec team last summer was, "Tesla, Tesla, Tesla." In their minds, they're chasing Tesla.
Meanwhile at the auto shows this year nearly every major company was showcasing its own EVs. My brother says the timeline from debuting a concept at an auto show to a production model is 5 years. So if we take that as an expectation, then we're talking about 4-5 years before the general supply of EVs on the market really begins to swell. Tesla could grab a lot of market share in that time, if they can get past this Model 3 production bottleneck. Worse, given too much of a lead they could establish themselves as the standard that would position them with a lot of pricing power in the EV market.
We already know that the Model S has been out-selling its competitors at the high end of the market. Those are the models where Mercedes and BMW make most of their money. So it's a big deal for them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @12:56PM
Meanwhile, it looks like Chevy Bolt sales are slightly exceeding the production schedule, see https://insideevs.com/chevy-bolt-continues-to-slide-while-volt-gains-ground/ [insideevs.com] This is pretty recent, from June 1, 2018:
Chevy Malibu sales (to pick just one car line) are still more than an order of magnitude higher than the electric Chevys -- http://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chevrolet/malibu/chevrolet-malibu-sales-numbers/ [gmauthority.com] has a table of sales by month for anyone interested.