Toyota Partners With Tesla to Make Electric Cars!

Tesla Model S Sedan, Tesla Toyota Merger, Tesla Toyota partnership, Tesla Toyota investment, electric vehicle, electric roadster, electric car, EV, green tech, green design, cleantech

Here’s some news that’s sure to get green car fans revved up: Toyota just announced that it will invest $50 million in Tesla Motors and the two companies will partner to manufacture electric vehicles to meet California’s growing demand for greener cars. Bay Area residents should be especially excited, as this venture is expected to create thousands of new jobs to San Francisco, and is sure to be a boon to California’s flagging economy. Tesla fans as well should rejoice as the new partnership will allow the EV start-up to bring its highly coveted, iconic design to more affordable electric vehicles like the Model S sedan, which will sell for $49,900 and gets 300 miles on a 3-5 hour charge.

This exciting new partnership will unfold at the ‘New United Motor Manufacturing Inc’ (aka Nummi) in Fremont — a recently shuttered GM/Toyota auto plant which will re-open under the Tesla/Toyota partnership to produce the Model S sedans. Up until this partnership was announced, Tesla had been searching for a site where they could manufacture the highly anticipated Model S, which is slated to be released in 2012.

From Reuters: Toyota gets Tesla stake, Tesla gets Toyota factory >
From SfGate: Tesla, Toyota & Nummi >
From MSNBC: Tesla, Toyota to open electric car plant in California >

5 Comments

Tesla & Toyota Unve... November 18, 2010 at 12:32 am

[...] Earlier this spring we announced the very exciting news of Toyota’s $50 million dollar investment in Tesla and their partnership to build a new mass-market electric vehicle, and now we are thrilled to announce that the new Tesla / Toyota RAV4 electric vehicle sedan was just unveiled this evening at the Los Angeles Auto Show. My lovely sister Katie was on the scene in LA and took a bunch of great photos of the new (apparently very early stage) RAV4 – this design is based on Toyota’s original RAV4 which was launched in 1997, but never made it into lage scale commercial production due to “lack of consumer demand”. Jump ahead to Gigaom for exclusive pics and more coverage of this exciting development. [...]
Toyota Officially Annou... June 14, 2010 at 3:01 pm

[...] month, Toyota shocked us with a triple whammy of an announcement: an investment of $50 million in Tesla Motors, an [...]
pathos June 4, 2010 at 4:44 pm

Plug ins and hybrids will never make it! just like laptops and cell phone. the technology will be obsolete! battery technology is increasing every day, and pretty soon somebody is gonna design a system that isnt hybrid nor plug-in, but is all electric. just wait for it! youll see!
cantwell.carson May 21, 2010 at 4:20 pm

Don’t get your hopes us:

“LiIon propulsion is incompatible with the notion of the ‘green car’.”

http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/Lithium_Microscope.pdf
urgan May 21, 2010 at 11:39 am

FYI, that photo is NOT the Model S. Google Model S, and its the first white car image.