Tesla IPO Raises $226 Million
An anonymous reader writes "Tesla, which will trade under TSLA on Nasdaq, has been priced at $17 per share, allowing the electric car start-up to raise more than $226 million in its IPO. Investors were expecting the share price target range to be between $14 and $16 but the overflow of excitement saw Tesla increase the number of shares it plans to offer to 13.3 million, nearly 20 percent more than originally planned." Reader hlovy contributes a link from Xconomy.com summarizing the skepticism among some analysts as to how much staying power TSLA will demonstrate.
Nope, they stopped making the Roadsters, all work now is on the S-Sedan and licensing their Drivetrain technology to Mercedes and Toyota.
Their cars run on DC motors (or at least get power from a DC source). Yet the company is named after a man who is acknowledged as the father of the alternating current (at least in the US).
Only the batteries are DC. The motor is AC and driven by an inverter in the car's Power Electronics Module.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Because, clearly, I have nothing better to do than show off on Slashdot. I put money down on the Model S because I like the car, I bought stock in Tesla because I believe in the company. That's not flashy, that's just putting your money where your mouth is. The disclaimer was simply to point out my bias.
That particular episode of Top Gear is (especially) derided as FUD. The car never ran out of batteries, they never recharged the car (just an off the cuff remark about it taking 16 hours to charge from their windmill(!?)), and the 'brake down' that they reported was a blown fuse (not a drive train one either, just a regular one like could and does happen in every car). The put the car into neutral and pushed it off the track to 'show what would happen if you ran out of charge', obviously you could say the exact same thing about running out of gas on the track.
To me, that really brought to light just how much the people at Top Gear are biased towards the cars that they like and against the cars that they don't.