Tesla has been promising a special event to celebrate the opening of its battery factory in Nevada for a while now. Attending the event was even part of the prizes of Tesla’s second round of the Model S owner referral program. Now it finally has a date: July 29th. The company sent out the invitations to the top Model S referrers last night. expand full story

Earlier this week, Tesla confirmed having closed its recent secondary offering with $1.7 billion in net proceeds to finance its Model 3 production program, but part of the offering was also a significant set of transactions in order for Elon Musk to exercise 5,503,972 stock options and then sell 2,782,670 shares to pay taxes.

In a SEC filing issued last night, Tesla confirmed that Musk sold the shares at $213.22 for a total of just over $593 million. After the transaction, Musk’s stake in Tesla stands at 31,100,644 shares worth just over $7 billion. expand full story

The fine folks at GM have given us a shiny new (OK, 500 miles) electric blue 2017 Chevy Volt to test drive for the next week. I’m keeping a diary of my experiences every day here and will wrap up the week with my conclusions. Catch up on Day 1.

Day 2:

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German newspaper Handelsblatt, which has often produced reliable insider reports on the German auto industry, now cites insider sources saying that Volkswagen is about to present to its board of directors a plan to build a ‘multi-billion euro battery factory’.

The publication suggests that the plan is likely to be approved.

The battery cell supply chain is close to the number one priority of any automaker looking to manufacture electric vehicles in high volume. Ever since the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal, VW has been under pressure to introduce more electric vehicles to its lineup and earlier this year, it announced plans to introduce 20 new electric vehicles through the group’s brands by the end of the decade. expand full story

A new study from Green Street Advisors and first reported by CNBC shows that total tenant sales in 24 malls with a Tesla store are on average $105 higher per square foot than in malls were Tesla has no retail presence. The study concludes that the effect is not only due to Tesla’s own high average of sales per square foot, but that the automaker is also driving overall mall sales. expand full story

During the Model 3 unveiling event in March, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made an important announcement curcial to the success of the Model 3: the expansion of its two networks of charging stations. He said that Tesla will double the number of Superchargers to 7,000 units and quadruple the number of Destination chargers to 15,000 units within the next 2 years.

We reported last month that the company already started expanding the Supercharger with permits or started construction at 11 new locations (~90 new Superchargers) since the unveiling event. Now Tesla announced an expansion in Canada with 5 new locations – all in eastern Canada. expand full story

Solar Power now has more employees than either the Oil & Gas or Coal Extraction industries in the United States. The solar industry employed approximately 208,000 individuals at the end of 2015 versus 185,000+ in oil and gas, or 190,000 in coal extraction. Solar power employment is expected to grow an additional 15% in 2016 to almost 240,000 individuals. Globally, solar power now directly employs 2.8 million people as the largest renewable energy employer.

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A Tesla Model S driver published a video of his car crashing into a van while on Autopilot which acts as a great PSA to remind Tesla drivers not to always rely on the Autopilot and be ready to take control at all time. In this particular case, the video shows quite clearly what went wrong and the data could actually be useful to Tesla to help prevent the event from happening again. expand full story

The PSA group, which includes the French automotive brands Peugeot, Citroën and DS, announced this week 2 new electric vehicle platforms on which the company will build 4 new all-electric vehicles and 7 new plug-in hybrids by 2021. The company says that the first models will hit the market in 2019 expand full story