Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday in an earnings call that the electric car company is currently building a factory in Austin, Texas, for its highly anticipated Cybertruck.
“We’re going to make it a factory that is going to be stunning — it’s right on the Colorado River,” Musk said of the new Gigafactory. “It’s going to basically be an ecological paradise.”
Reports earlier this year indicated Tesla was eyeing Austin for the factory, according to tax documents filed in the area. The location is 15 minutes from downtown Austin, and sits on roughly 2,000 acres of land in Travis County, where officials voted to give the company $14.7 million in tax incentives to build the factory. Musk also said the Austin factory will be open to the public and will have a boardwalk and hiking and biking trail.
Following the announcement, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said: “Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas will keep the Texas economy the strongest in the nation and will create thousands of jobs for hard-working Texans.”
Welcome to Texas, @Tesla.https://t.co/2QaZp4zmvF
— Gov. Greg Abbott (@GovAbbott) July 22, 2020
Tesla said it will continue to expand within Fremont, California, where the company is currently headquartered and where its current Tesla Model S and Model X are built for global sale. The Austin factory will be dedicated to building Tesla’s Cybertruck, Semi, Model 3, and Model Y for the eastern part of the U.S.
Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck last Novemeber, and since then it has made headlines and, more importantly, memes. A lot has yet to be announced about the design of the Cybertruck, but its body will be made with 30x cold-rolled stainless steel, which fends off dents and rust, and its glass panels will reportedly be bulletproof. It will also offer a 6.5-foot cargo box that Tesla refers to as a “vault.”
The Cybertruck will also offer a spacious cabin with six seats and a big storage bin under the rear bench. Its dashboard is an exercise in minimalist design that looks like an evolution of the layout seen in the Model 3 and the Model Y.
The news of Tesla choosing the Lone Star State for its new Gigafactory is too bad for Tulsa, Oklahoma, which recommissioned its Golden Driller Statue to look like Musk and added a Tesla logo to its chest and belt buckle.
BYD has launched the third-generation Qin Plus DM-i in China, and the first thing that caught my eye is its price. According to CarNewsChina, the plug-in hybrid sedan starts at 79,900 yuan, which is about $11,980. That’s an incredibly low price for a brand-new car, especially by US standards.
What’s even more impressive is the range. The Qin Plus DM-i can drive up to 137 miles on electricity alone, which should cover most people’s daily commutes without using a drop of gas. Once the battery runs out, the 1.5-liter engine takes over. Thanks to its 17-gallon tank and roughly 91 mpg with a drained battery, the combined range reaches up to 1,423 miles.
Apple won the PC market’s worst quarter, but that’s not the entire story. It won the race by stumbling less than everyone else.
PC makers shipped just 57 million computers worldwide in Q3, which might look good, but it’s a 21% year-over-year plunge (via Counterpoint Research). And despite Apple’s Mac shipments falling by 11%, to 5.6 million, its market share rose from 8.7% to 9.8%. How did that happen?
Update (October 22 23:54 PT): In response to our query, GM clarified that offline recording support is already available on eligible vehicles. Like Tesla's Sentry Mode, it requires owners to connect a USB drive to save incident recordings, which can be viewed on the vehicle's infotainment screen. The upcoming Connected Cameras feature will build on this by giving owners remote access to these recordings via the revamped OnStar app, allowing them to check footage without walking out to their car.
General Motors has announced plans to add a new Connected Cameras feature to its OnStar service starting next year, giving drivers a way to monitor parked vehicles remotely and capture footage of certain incidents.