When Ramon Laguarta told CNBC PepsiCo would get its first set of Tesla Semi on Q4 2021, we mentioned it looked like something Elon Musk would later deny on Twitter. It took only four days to confirm that. When asked about it, the Tesla CEO said it would not happen.
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When a Tesla fan asked Musk about Semi deliveries, the executive said that the “company is constrained by chip supply short-term, cell supply long-term.” That said, it would not be “possible to produce additional vehicles in volume until both constraints are addressed.” Ironically, Musk did not mention the issue with batteries is even more profound than just supply. It relates to achieving mass production of 4680 cells.

As we have said over and over, Tesla has based all its new products on the new battery format. It built two new factories expecting to produce vehicles conceived around it. Yet, the company has not finished developing that crucial element for both the factories and the cars they will make. That is a precarious thing to do, to say the least.

If the 4680 tabless cells were ready, then Musk could talk about a supply constraint. At this point, there’s not even a 4680 cells supply: it is yet to be created. This is what made it so evident that the Semi, the Cybertruck, and the Roadster will not arrive anytime soon, as optimistic as Tesla customers such as PepsiCo may be.

With Musk’s public dismissal of Semi deliveries in 2021, all that is left is to see what PepsiCo will do about that. Laguarta may admit he was wrong. He may also just avoid talking about it in hopes that people will eventually forget about it. A more extreme measure would be to cancel PepsiCo’s Semi orders and buy anything the competition can deliver right now. Volvo already sells the VNR Electric, and there are plenty of competitors about to hit the market.

“Where we differ is our standard on quality and reliability,” Zipse said Wednesday at a Handelsblatt conference. “We have different aspirations on customer satisfaction.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co. sued Tesla Inc. seeking a $162 million payment related to a series of stock warrant transactions that were affected by Elon Musk’s short-lived attempt to take the carmaker private three years ago.

The biggest U.S. bank bought the warrants from Tesla in 2014 to help the automaker mitigate risk that its stock would be diluted by issuance of convertible notes, and to make certain federal income tax deductions, according to a complaint filed Monday in Manhattan federal court. When the warrants expired, Tesla would owe JPMorgan a payment of shares or cash if its stock traded above a certain strike price.

JPMorgan claims it had the discretion to adjust the strike price based on factors including the volatility of Tesla’s stock. The bank made two modifications in August 2018 — one after Musk tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private, and another when the chief executive officer abandoned the effort weeks later.

Now that the warrants have expired, JPMorgan claims Tesla has shorted the bank what it’s due.

“Even though JPMorgan’s adjustments were appropriate and contractually required, Tesla has refused to settle at the contractual strike price and pay in full what it owes to JPMorgan,” the bank said in the complaint.

Tesla wrote JPMorgan in February 2019 to argue the adjustments the bank made six months earlier were “unreasonably swift and represented an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of changes in volatility in Tesla’s stock,” according to the complaint.

But JPMorgan claims Tesla didn’t make specific challenges to its calculations or back up its assertion, and hasn’t objected further in the last two years. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

The dispute dredges up one of Musk’s most controversial episodes. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued the CEO and Tesla in September 2018, alleging that Musk had committed securities fraud and the company lacked adequate controls of his social media activity.

Musk and Tesla each agreed to pay $20 million in a settlement without admitting wrongdoing. The CEO was forced to give up the role of board chairman for three years, and Tesla agreed to have a lawyer pre-approve material information Musk wants to communicate to investors.

The controls haven’t stopped Musk from stirring up controversy on Twitter. Early this month, he polled users on whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stake. He’s offloaded about $7.8 billion of the company’s shares since then, precipitating a stock sell-off.

The case is JPMorgan Chase Bank v. Tesla Inc., 21-cv-09441, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Tesla recently announced that it would be opening Supercharger use to other brands of EVs in a bid to increase revenue by billions. This is great news for owners of cars like the Porsche Taycan, as the EV giant has more than 25,000 of these charging stations across the globe. This is all part of the brand's aim to expand even further, but not everything the brand does always benefits the consumer.

The company has been constantly hiking the prices of a number of its vehicles and now the price it costs you to charge your car has been hiked too. But it's not an entirely bad thing.
To understand the pricing update, we first need to understand what the previous structure was like and why it needed updating. The former arrangement was that Tesla per-minute charging rates were split into two tiers, with Tier 1 representing all chargers that charge at or below 60 kW, while Tier 2 was for chargers that could do 61 kW and above.

Now there are four tiers. The cheapest per-minute cost is on Tier 1, where a 60-kW or lower charge is being supplied. Tier 2 now means chargers that work in the range of 61-100 kW, Tier 3 is 101 kW to 180 kW, and the most expensive is Tier 4, where you get 180 kW and above. These are obviously the quickest chargers.

This is great news for those who use lower charging rates, but those who were formerly paying what is now low- to mid-level pricing are paying up to four times as much. As the video above explains, the old system says the 0-60 kW range costs $0.12 per minute while 60 kW and up costs $0.24 a minute. With the new tiers, 0-60 kW is $0.17 per minute, 60-100 kW is $0.45 per minute, and 100-180 kW costs $0.84 per minute. The highest level of 180-250 kW now costs $1.35 per minute - which is certainly not cheap. What this translates to is that your pricing changes as your Tesla Model Y or other vehicle experiences varying charging curves. The bottom line is that charging has become both a lot cheaper and a lot more expensive at the same time.