Author: Megan Geuss

Telsa Model Ss in the company's European production center in Tilburg, Netherlands. (credit: Getty Images | Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)

In Tesla’s Q2 2016 financial statement released today, the company reported a net loss of $293 million for the quarter, making it Tesla’s 13^th straight quarterly loss. (By Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, the company lost only $150 million. GAAP standards account for certain things on a car company’s balance sheet, like leased vehicles, differently than non-GAAP bookkeeping does.)

Despite the loss, revenue for the company was up 31 percent year-over-year, with GAAP revenue coming in at $1.3 billion for Q2 and non-GAAP revenue at $1.6 billion.

Still, during Tesla’s Q4 2015 earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised that the electric vehicle company would be profitable before summer. But production issues have continued to plague the company, although Musk and Telsa Vice President of Finance Jason Wheeler were adamant that the company is out of the woods on production issues, despite missing production goals in Q2.

(credit: Björn Láczay)

On Tuesday, investigators in Japan released a report attempting to explain how Japanese automaker Mitsubishi was able to falsify its fuel economy numbers on certain cars sold in Japan. The three-month-long investigation pointed to a “collective failure,” at an executive level, to deal with concerns that employees brought up.

The automaker’s cheating was discovered earlier this year when Nissan, which rebrands some of Mitsubishi’s cars and sells them in Japan, found discrepancies in emissions rates between reported and real-world mileage. Mitsubishi later admitted to having falsified data for over 25 years, in some cases overstating fuel economy by 16 percent, according to CBS News. Nissan’s discovery crushed Mitsubishi’s share price. Since then, Nissan scooped up 34 percent of Mitsubishi for a bargain $2.2 billion (¥237 billion).

In an unrelated discovery in March, Japan’s Department of Transportation publicly called out Mitsubishi, as well as Toyota and Nissan, for selling diesel cars with higher-than-allowed nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions in Japan, echoing the scandal that has embroiled Volkswagen since last September in the US.

(credit: Lawrence Berkeley Labs)

On Monday morning, Tesla announced that it has come to an agreement with SolarCity. Tesla will buy the company in an all-stock deal that would give 0.11 shares of Tesla stock to investors for every share of SolarCity sick they own. The Wall Street Journal estimates this would make the deal worth $2.6 billion.

On a phone conference early this morning, Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who is also a chairman on SolarCity’s board and who is cousins with the SolarCity CEO, Lyndon Rive—said the deal would create a “stronger balance sheet” for both companies and allow the two businesses to build an integrated product that combines electric vehicle charging, solar power, energy storage, and installation and servicing of the whole system.

In a press release from Tesla, the company said that a merger could generate $150 million in “cost synergies” in the first full year after the deal closes. Executives from both Tesla and SolarCity said those synergies would come from decreased marketing expenses and the ability to leverage Tesla’s retail footprint by selling SolarCity panels in Tesla stores, as well as reducing the cost to service customers by consolidating service visits.

A class action lawsuit brought against Nvidia over a slow RAM partition has resulted in a proposed settlement (PDF) that could pay $30 to anyone who bought the company’s GTX 970 graphics card before its troubles came to light.

In early 2015, a group of customers found that the GTX 970—which was advertised to have 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM—experienced performance issues when pushed to the limits of that memory allotment. It then came to light that the graphics card only had 3.5 GB of the high-speed RAM, with the remaining 0.5 GB running roughly 80 percent slower, as Ars Technica reported last year.

Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. A year later, that position hasn’t changed: according to the motion for preliminary approval of the settlement filed in Northern California District Court last week, Nvidia “[continues] to vigorously deny all of the claims and contentions alleged in this Action.” The company, however, “considered the risks and potential costs of continued litigation of this action,” and decided to work toward a settlement, the motion adds.

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In an e-mail to Ars on Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) confirmed that the regulator was ready to begin testing hardware and software that could potentially fix pollution issues with 475,000 2.0L diesel vehicles from Volkswagen Group. The German automaker was caught last year adding illegal software to its cars in order to cheat on US emissions tests—the cars turned on their emissions control system when they were being tested in a lab and turned the emissions control system off when they were being driven under real world conditions.

According to Reuters, CARB now says there will be fixes for three generations of diesels, involving both hardware and software updates. The regulator has said that VW Group must bring its cars within 80 to 90 percent of pollution limits to have any fixes approved. CARB head Mary Nichols told Reuters that VW Group need not bring its cars to 100 percent compliance with pollution limits because the company has agreed to put up $2.7 billion in a pollution mitigation fund that will offset the damage of the still-polluting cars.

CARB is working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and any fix approved by California’s air regulator stands a good chance of being approved by the EPA, too. In January, CARB rejected VW Group’s proposed recall plan by saying the company did not provide enough necessary information to the regulator. The EPA issued a quick statement after CARB’s decision saying that it agreed.

(credit: Philippe Put)

On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled (PDF) that Arkansas could not prohibit companies from making political robocalls to residences. The calls, he ruled, are protected by the First Amendment despite Arkansas’ Secretary of State arguing that forbidding such calls protect citizens’ privacy and safety.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit was filed by a Virginia-based communications company called Conquest Communications, whose clients hired it to automatically call residents in Arkansas and ask them to participate in surveys that urge folks to vote. The robocalls also included “advocacy calls and a variety of other calls made in connection with political campaigns.”

Thirty-five years ago, Arkansas enacted a law that prohibited automatic pre-recorded voice calling for the purposes of “soliciting information, gathering data, or for any other purpose in connection with a political campaign…” as well as standard prohibitions on selling goods or services via robocall.

A stripped down Model S. Tesla batteries will be made at a factory site outside of Reno.

Although the Gigafactory—a $5 billion battery factory built by Tesla and Panasonic in northern Nevada—is only 14 percent complete, by all accounts it is enormous. Speaking to a handful of press on the grounds of the new facility, which began to pump out Powerwall batteries earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, and Panasonic Executive Vice President Yoshihiko Yamada addressed new accelerated goals for auto and storage battery production.

Notably, Musk claimed that Tesla and Panasonic could potentially triple the projected battery output for the factory, delivering up to 150 gigawatt hours of storage per year by 2020. According to Fortune, Straubel told the audience that Tesla is hoping to deliver 35 gigawatt hours of auto and stationary batteries by 2018. The Tesla executives said their confidence in the increased battery production volume stems from logistical changes made to the layout of the Gigafactory.

"The factory itself is a product," Musk told USA Today. "It's the machine that builds the machines and demands more problem solving than the product it makes."

April 29, Pinewood Studios, UK—Writer/Director/Producer JJ Abrams (top center right) at the cast read-through of Star Wars Episode VII at Pinewood Studios with (clockwise from right) Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, Producer Bryan Burk, Lucasfilm President and Producer Kathleen Kennedy, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Andy Serkis, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver, and writer Lawrence Kasdan. (credit: David James)

On Tuesday, a UK-based Disney subsidiary pleaded guilty to two criminal charges of failing to protect its employees on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, specifically Harrison Ford, whose leg was broken by a hydraulic door on the Millennium Falcon set.

The charges were brought by the UK’s Health and Safety regulator, which sued the Disney subsidiary—called Foodles Production—back in February over the 2014 incident.

Ford, then 71, was struck by the Millennium Falcon door and had to be airlifted to a nearby hospital for treatment. A spokesperson for the Health and Safety regulator said in a press release that “the power of the door’s drive system was comparable to the weight of a small car.”

(credit: James Workman)

On Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco gave preliminary approval to a $15 billion settlement proposed by Volkswagen Group and Justice Department lawyers back in June.

The settlement would provide for a buyback of all of VW Group’s 2.0L diesel vehicles sold in the US with illegal software on them—that's 475,474 cars—at the price the cars would have fetched before VW Group’s emissions cheating scandal was made public. In addition, lessees would be able to cancel their leases, and both owners and lessees will get an additional $5,100 to $10,000 in compensation.

VW and Audi owners whose cars qualify for the buyback will also have the option to refuse the buyback and have the cars fixed so that they comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards. So far, US air regulators have not approved a fix, but on Tuesday the head of the California Resources Board (CARB), which has played a large role in the regulatory fallout from Volkswagen’s cheating scandal, told a German paper that regulators were very close to approving a fix.

This reporter would be happy with a Manos: The Hands of Fate reprise.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 will return with 14 new full-length episodes, all of which will be streamed on Netflix, according to the Hollywood Reporter, reporting from San Diego Comic-Con. The new series will feature Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt, playing mad scientist Kinga Forrester and henchman "Son of TV’s Frank," respectively.

Mary Jo Pehl and Bill Corbett, who played Pearl Forrester and Crow T. Robot, will also be joining the revival, and former MST3K writer/actor/director/puppeteer Kevin Murphy will also get in on the action.

The series is the result of a 2015 Kickstarter from Joel Hodgson—the MST3K creator set a minimum goal of $2 million to make three full-length episodes, but they surpassed that goal handily, raising $5.7 million. Hodgson will stay onboard as an executive producer of the show and as a writer.