This week, Mark Harris is back with a story about Tesla. This focuses on the company’s energy business, or more specifically, the opaqueness around its lobbying efforts in the energy sector. Follow him on Twitter @meharris.
Inside Tesla’s solar energy astroturfing
Yes, this is a transportation newsletter. We get it. But Tesla has long pushed itself as a sustainable energy company that covers the entire ecosystem — solar power, energy storage, and electric vehicles. We’ll continue to look through the dozens of Tesla subsidiaries, most of them related to solar, to see what else pops up.
In other Tesla news, ARK Invest has CEO Elon Musk on a podcast; Tesla files its 10K, Consumer Reports pulls its recommendation for the Model 3 and data firm JATO Dynamics declares that the Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling electric car in the world in 2018.
Last announced week a $22 million funding round
May Mobility, an autonomous shuttle company, announced last week a $22 million funding round. This week, the company started testing its third AV shuttle service; this time, it’s in Rhode Island.
May Mobility’s AV shuttle will travel a 5-mile route, its longest to date, along the Woonasquatucket River corridor with 12 stops, from Olneyville to Providence Station. The “Little Roady Shuttle,” as it’s being called, can carry up to five passengers and an attendant. The vehicles began testing this week on low-volume roads as the initial phase of a pilot project scheduled to launch this spring.
Malek said a curious thing to me when we last spoke. In the midst of explaining the differences in complexity between its route in Detroit and Rhode Island, she referred to May Mobility as a transportation service provider.
That’s not unusual, this is an AV shuttle company after all. Except that unlike so many AV startups, May Mobility seems to put the transportation service part ahead of, or at least on equal footing, with its AV efforts.
Malek spent so much time explaining the logistics piece of managing the service, I had to jump in and say “I realize the AV component is important for May Mobility, but it seems almost incidental in the problem you’re trying to solve.”
Malek responded. “Yeah.”
She elaborated. “It’s going to take 10 to 15 years for an AV to cover a whole urban area,” she added. “When you think about the validation and the reliability that needs to have been done and demonstrated before you pull that safety driver, well that’s a really big cross section of things you need to validate and verify.”
Malek also told me that May Mobility will continue to expand into new markets and double down on places it’s already operating, which includes Columbus, Ohio and Detroit.
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