Month: April 2018

Enlarge / The first batch of production Tesla Model 3s, ready to be handed over to their new owners. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla released its much-anticipated production numbers for the first quarter of 2018 this morning, and the results are mixed. The company produced 34,494 vehicles, an overall record for the electric vehicle company. But production numbers broken out by model leave something to be desired.

24,728 of the cars manufactured were Model S and Model X vehicles, down 3,592 from the 28,320 luxury vehicles that Tesla pushed out in Q4 2017.

That leaves us with Model 3 numbers: Tesla said it produced 9,766 Model 3 vehicles, up from an abysmal 2,425 it produced in Q4 2017. Tesla counts vehicles as "delivered" when all the paperwork has been done, so production and delivery numbers differ slightly. This quarter, Tesla delivered 8,180 vehicles, versus 1,550 delivered last quarter.

Enlarge / New customers will pay a bit less for this headset with HTC's new tracking bundle announcement.

New Vive Pro owners will no longer have to pay over $450 for the tracking and controller accessories needed to use the higher-resolution VR headset. HTC announced this morning that a new SteamVR 1.0 tracking bundle, including two tracking boxes and two hand-tracking controllers, will be available starting Thursday for $299.

That brings the "starter" price for a new Vive Pro headset down to about $1,100, while those upgrading from the original Vive can still buy the headset alone for $799. The lower-resolution original Vive package, which also includes two tracking stations and two controllers, now retails for $499, or $200 more than the accessories alone.

"Based on feedback we’ve seen, we realize there was some confusion on the upgrade-only headset, so we’re making this new bundle available on Vive.com for everyone else," HTC said in a statement. "For the majority of consumer users, we believe 1.0 tracking (5 meters by 5 meters) offers a great tracking solution for room-scale VR."

Enlarge / Blue is the new black. (credit: Kyle Orland)

With the consumer-level virtual reality "revolution" now two years old, it's about time to start thinking about what the second generation of high-end headsets can improve upon. But HTC’s first true shot at the "next generation" has us thinking less about the improvements and more about the cost.

HTC's Vive Pro, launching this week, comes with a name and a price tag ($799 for an upgrade from the original Vive, or $1,099 for new Vive owners) that suggests a revelatory jump in the VR experience, well beyond what already wowed us in early 2016. But in practice, the Vive Pro feels more like a subtle refinement of existing ideas rather than a true next-generation follow-up.

In short, the new headset smooths out many of the biggest annoyances with the original Vive: there's a more comfortable headstrap, integrated "spatial audio" headphones, and a higher-resolution screen that makes details pop in virtual reality. Those improvements make the Vive Pro quite possibly the best VR headset currently available for general consumer use.

Jonathan Gitlin

NEW YORK—This year's New York International Auto Show was rather busy when it came to new car reveals. It was the North American debut for Jaguar's exciting I-Pace and Hyundai's Kona Electric electric vehicles. It saw the world premieres of the new Toyota Corolla and Nissan Altima, both of which should sell in their hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the new Audi RS5 Sportback, which almost certainly won't. But unusually for an auto show, the one thing that wasn't thick on the ground was the concept car.

However, the few that we did see were all rather exciting, each in its own way. Most were thinly veiled production cars, stalking horses for models soon to arrive in the showroom, like Lincoln's Aviator. But the most jaw-dropping was a machine unlikely to ever go into production, the Genesis Essentia.