Fred is the editor in chief and main writer at Electrek. He mainly covers electric vehicles, autonomous cars and ride-sharing platforms.
You can read his work on Electrek, 9to5mac.com and 9to5google.com
You can contact him by email at fred@9to5mac.com
Tesla has started rolling out Apple Shortcuts integration in a new mobile app update, helping owners to automate and use Siri for vehicle controls.
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Tesla has started to push a new software update that is known as its “holiday update” with Apple Music, Mahjong, and more features.
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Tesla is teasing the integration of an Apple Music app into its vehicle software, and the info came from an interesting place.
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Elon Musk says Tesla (TSLA) could soon be worth more than Apple (AAPL), and the company is putting its money behind this position with a $5 to $10 billion share buyback.
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Elon Musk said that Tesla is going to consider adopting Apple’s AirPlay protocol to improve audio quality over the current Bluetooth.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sent an official offer to buy Twitter and sent it as an ultimatum as he basically threatens to sell his shares if the offer is not accepted.
And the saga continues.
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A new SEC filing revealed that Elon Musk, better known as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, invested almost $3 billion in Twitter and now owns almost 10% of the social media platform.
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Apple announced a massive new energy storage project in California, and we learned that Tesla will supply its Megapack battery systems for the project.
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Fisker, Henrik Fisker’s latest electric vehicle startup, wants to build an electric vehicle with Foxconn, a massive Chinese company better known for being an Apple supplier.
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Tesla is working on adding Apple Music and Amazon Music as new native in-car music services inside its electric vehicles.
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Elon Musk has confirmed rumors that he tried to sell Tesla to Apple not so long ago, but Apple CEO Tim Cook wouldn’t even take the meeting.
Cook probably regrets it since Musk said that he was willing to let Tesla go for 1/10th of its current value.
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Tesla is currently suing a former Autopilot engineer who they claim stole the source code of the autonomous driving system for a Chinese competitor, Xpeng.
Now the former employee has admitted to uploading the Autopilot source code to his iCloud at a suspicious time in his move to Xpeng, but he denies misconduct.
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Apple reportedly offered to buy Tesla at around $240 per share back in 2013.
The bid from six years ago is now being reported as Tesla’s share price has dipped under the price Apple was allegedly willing to pay.
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Tesla is launching new iPhone cases today as part of the launch of its new Amazon store to sell its merchandise and eventually maybe more.
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Tesla is launching a new product today: the ‘Tesla Wireless Charger’.
Surprisingly, the product is not for your Tesla vehicle, but for your smartphone.
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GM’s autonomous driving division, Cruise Automation, announced the launch of the beta version of its autonomous ride-sharing app currently being used by employees in San Francisco, where they operate a fleet of autonomous Chevy Bolt EV test vehicles.
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Last year, Apple was rumored to be working on an autonomous all-electric car codenamed ‘Project Titan’. The company later confirmed development work on an autonomous driving platform and CEO Tim Cook even referred to it as “a core technology” for the company, but it showed signs of giving up on developing an actual car.
But now Apple is reportedly working on electric car batteries with China’s biggest battery maker.
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Renowned car designer Henrik Fisker is about to officially launch his new electric car company and unveiled its first vehicle, the EMotion, a $130,000 long-range premium sedan.
Ahead of the launch tomorrow, some “great people” at Apple apparently got a preview of the vehicle.
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On Electrek today, we reported that Tesla’s battery research partner announced that they managed to double the lifetime of the batteries in Tesla’s products 4 years ahead of time.
They achieved that through a new method to test battery cell longevity and we now learn that Apple also bought the same machines developed through the method.
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Last month, we published an exclusive report on our sister-site Electrek about Tesla’s upcoming new mobile app: ‘Tesla is about to release its biggest app update yet: Touch ID login, widget integration, and more‘.
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With some high profile exceptions, it is generally accepted that Apple ships some of the most reliable high-tech products out there – at least if you believe the customer satisfaction reports. Things are far murkier for Tesla in that department, especially at its relatively early age.
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After our attempt at explaining the 500% markup on Apple’s new solar array yesterday, further information has now confirmed that Apple’s new stores – starting in the brand new San Francisco location – will be utilizing a new walkable solar glass floor technology for electricity generation. According to a document on Onyx Solar’s website, Apple “has decided to commit itself to OnyxSolar’s designer photovoltaic technology for its new stores. The first of these is located in the heart of San Francisco, the company’s home town.”
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The automotive industry is a capital-intensive industry. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne knows it and that’s why he is open to work with Google or Apple:
“Google can buy every automaker out of petty cash. And Apple — they made a net profit of $24 billion in one quarter. This is nonsense. What are we defending? What?”
In a not yet released 2-hour interview with Automobile Mag‘s Georg Kache, Marchionne discusses the recent rumors of a FCA partnership with Google for self-driving cars and how the automaker wants to position itself in an industry disrupted by the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an affectionate nickname for Apple: The ‘Tesla Graveyard‘. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk said. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple”. He made the comment after being asked about the so-called “poaching war” between the automaker and the consumer electronic giant following the start of Apple’s electric car program: ‘Project Titan‘.
We follow who’s coming and who’s going at Tesla pretty closely at Electrek and it’s clear that the two companies share a lot of former colleagues. Tesla’s senior engineering staff and leadership are full of former Apple directors and VPs, while the Cupertino-based company hired quite a few former Tesla engineers, but rarely any senior leadership… until now.
9to5Mac, in collaboration with our sister-site Electrek, has exclusively confirmed and discovered respectively that Apple hired former Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering and former Aston Martin Chief Engineer, Chirs Porritt, to work on “special projects”, and we know that “special projects” is where Apple’s Titan car project lives.
