We've sent a lot of unusual things to space, guitars, AI robots, even a golden record, but none of that compares to what Elon Musk sent up at the start of 2018. His very own $100,000 cherry red, convertible Tesla Roadster. With the top down and a dummy at the wheel listening to David Bowie, strapped to the most powerful, operational rocket in the world, no less, The Falcon Heavy.

CEO Elon Musk said the electric car maker will have achieved fully autonomous self-driving technology by the end of 2019, though regulatory hurdles could prevent a mass-market rollout in the near future.

System detects when a pet is locked in a vehicle.

We’ve published something like a bazillion Tesla sales charts and stats. (See “30 Nasty Charts,” for example.) But this is actually a new one. Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has his 2018 tally wrapped up and it puts the Tesla Model 3 in the #1 position globally among all plug-in vehicles. In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model. The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Series and #3 Nissan LEAF each had 4%.

Tesla Inc has agreed to buy energy storage company Maxwell Technologies Inc for $218 million in an all-stock deal that could help the electric car maker produce batteries that hold more energy and last longer at a time when it needs to cut costs and faces growing competition.

A Tesla Model 3 owner says that his car’s emergency braking feature powered by Autopilot saw a stopped vehicle in the middle of the road during a snowstorm before he could himself see it and helped avoid an accident. The whole incident was caught on dashcam.

As Tesla ramps up production and gets more cars on the road, the company is still working out a few speed bumps when it comes to service. When something goes wrong, getting it fixed tends to take longer than many owners are willing to wait. In September of last year, Elon Musk promised to make fixing service times a priority. On an earnings call today, he outlined two ways they’re working on it: more spare parts at service centers, and giving Tesla cars the ability to automatically get the process started by calling a tow truck as soon as it detects an issue.

The Tesla Model Y — the SUV electric vehicle that CEO Elon Musk has been teasing and talking about since 2015 — will begin volume production by the end of 2020, the company said Wednesday in a letter to shareholders. The automaker, which has yet to show a prototype of the vehicle, said it will begin tooling for the Model Y this year. And unlike Tesla’s other electric vehicles, the Model Y will most likely be produced at the company’s massive “gigafactory” in Nevada, Musk said during an earnings call.

The first-ever flying car conference got underway earlier this week in Dallas, a two-day affair put on by Uber called the “Uber Elevate Summit,” which was chock-full of panels and a big prediction: By 2020 Uber will be testing out its commuter aircraft. On Friday, Elon Musk seized another opportunity to shoot down the idea before it lifts off. “I’m in favor of flying things,” Musk told interviewer Chris Anderson during his lengthy interview at the TED 2017 conference in Vancouver, before repeating a biting joke he first made in a February Bloomberg article.

One of the most impressive machines from Tesla isn’t a car, but a factory. The first Gigafactory, a giant operation that first took shape in a dusty nest in the Nevada desert is a massive battery factory is part of a plan to help transition the world onto renewable sources, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims that 100 such installations would be enough to cover the world’s energy needs. Tesla’s first Gigafactory is a behemoth. Its planned annual production rate is set to reach 35 gigawatt-hours by 2020, exceeding the total global production of batteries in the year 2013.

Electric carmaker Tesla has said it will cut its workforce by 7% after the "most challenging" year in its history. In an email to staff on the firm's website, founder Elon Musk said that growth had been strong. But he added it was difficult to make Teslas with their new and developing technology as cheaply as conventional cars, and the firm's cars were still "too expensive for most people". Tesla employs more than 45,000 people, indicating it will cut about 3,000.

Like many, I’ve been watching the developments in Boca Chica, Texas, with great interest. SpaceX, one of Elon Musk’s companies, is building the “Starship Hopper,” a shorter and simpler version of a spacecraft that could revolutionize space travel. Seeing images of the mostly complete test vehicle, clad in shiny stainless steel, makes me feel like a kid again. These are exciting times to be alive. We are at the beginning stages of the electric car revolution. We have access to much of the knowledge of our species at our fingertips. Rockets are being launched, and they mostly return to the ground for the next adventure.

Elon Musk has been making some crazy claims about the next generation Tesla Roadster, but now he is topping them off with a claim that it will actually be able to hover over the ground. When first unveiling the vehicle, Musk claimed a list of insanely impressive specs for the new Roadster, including 0-60 mph in 1.9 sec, 620-mile of range, and more. Musk has been teasing those specs as the “base specs” and other versions could be even crazier.

The family of a Florida man who died in a high-speed accident involving a Tesla has sued the automaker, alleging that his Tesla's battery was defective and that the company was negligent when it removed a speed governor on the car. According to the lawsuit, Edgar Monserratt v. Tesla—which was filed Tuesday in Broward County court—Monserratt's 18-year-old son was a front-seat passenger in a 2014 Tesla S being driven by another person, Barrett Riley.

Tesla’s fourth-quarter production tally didn’t excite most investors earlier this week, but the electric-car maker’s shares are benefiting on Friday from its confirmation that Model 3 deliveries will soon start in China. Tesla said customers in the world’s largest EV market can begin configuring and ordering Performance and Dual Motor all-wheel-drive versions of the sedan starting today. Initial deliveries should begin in March, according to the company.

In an incident caught on video, a Tesla Model 3 on Autopilot drove on some ice and slid out-of-control, but the owner claims that the driver assist system regained control of the vehicle by itself and brought it back into a lane. Driver assist systems to prevent a vehicle from going out of control is nothing new. Vehicles have traction and stability control for years, but a Model 3 owner in Quebec claims that Tesla’s Autopilot did a lot more than that.

Tesla is way ahead of the competition, but it's not because others can't build EVs. It has much more to do with Tesla's laser-focus on battery tech and production.

Tesla knocked $2,000 off of the prices of its cars in the US on Wednesday to help offset a recent reduction of the federal electric vehicle tax credit. The automaker also announced initial delivery and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2018, showing that the frenzied pace it carried through most of the year — led by the big Model 3 push — helped Tesla set new company records, even though it cooled toward the end.

Tesla’s fully-autonomous driving system is “about to accelerate significantly,” CEO Elon Musk told employees in an email circulated this week. The firm, which announced back in September that it plans to use a team of internal employees as early testers, is now looking for a few hundred more participants ahead of the launch of the in-house A.I. chip.

Tesla is working to bring to market its new Autopilot Hardware 3, which consists of a new neural net computer that they claimed will be the ‘world’s most advanced computer for autonomous driving’. The company is now testing the new hardware in employee vehicles as part of its ‘Full Self-Driving Test Program’. Earlier this year, Tesla sought “hundreds of employees” to test its full self-driving system and offers free Autopilot upgrades with new purchases.