Forums: Tesla Electric Car

Investors who bought Tesla Motors Inc.’s initial public stock offering last week thought they had a hot one. They did -- for a day and a half. But it has been all downhill since. Shares of the electric sports car maker plunged for a third straight session Tuesday as investors bailed out, pushing the stock below the IPO price of $17. Palo Alto-based Tesla closed down $3.09, or 16.1%, to $16.11. Despite the high hurdles facing the company’s bid to become commercially successful, the hype surrounding the IPO -- the first for an American carmaker since Ford Motor’s offering in...

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk seems to have it all. The electric-car entrepreneur is the toast of Silicon Valley, Sacramento, and Tokyo after unveiling a plan to revive Toyota’s shuttered NUMMI plant last week. And deal-hungry Wall Street bankers are angling to take his company public. He’s even a Hollywood star, with a cameo in the hit Iron Man 2 movie, said to be based on his life story. The one thing he doesn’t have, by his own admission, is money. “About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” he wrote in a court filing dated Feb. 23, reviewed...

In a deal expected to create hundreds of jobs, Tesla Motors announced today that it is teaming up with Toyota to build its all-electric Model S sedan at the recently shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont. Under the agreement, Toyota will invest $50 million in Tesla, which will acquire the NUMMI plant and begin production of Teslas's Model S sedan in 2012. The deal is expected to create more than 1,000 new jobs The joint venture was unveiled by Tesla's CEO Elon Musk at a 5 p.m. news conference with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been eager to highlight job creation....

EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) -- The three people killed on board a small plane that went down in a Northern California neighborhood were all employees of Tesla Motors Inc. The twin-engine Cessna 310 crashed in a residential area of East Palo Alto on Wednesday morning after hitting some power lines. It had just taken off from Palo Alto Airport in heavy fog.

Tesla Motors and the U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday finalized a landmark $465 million loan agreement that will allow the electric car maker to build a power train manufacturing plant in Palo Alto. The agreement also paves the way for Tesla Motors to build a facility in Southern California where it will manufacture its upcoming all-electric Model S sedan. It is only the second loan agreement the Department of Energy has signed with an "advanced technology vehicle manufacturer" under a program created in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The federal agency first reached a $5.9 billion...