1 Record car deliveries for Tesla (BBC) In a record
quarter, Tesla delivered just over 25,000 cars in the first three months of the
year. The electric car maker said that was a 70% rise on the same period of
2016. It is a rebound for the US company after production problems late last
year resulted in a 9% fall in deliveries in the fourth quarter.
Tesla was founded in 2003 and is controlled by
entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also owns the space rocket firm, SpaceX. Last week
China's Tencent Holdings bought a 5% stake in Tesla for almost $1.8bn.
That was a boost for the company which has been
investing heavily in raising production and faces an expensive year, with the
launch of the new Model 3, which is due to go on sale in the US this year
priced at $35,000.
That would be significantly cheaper than Tesla's
current models - the Model X, an SUV, and the Model S, a sporty saloon, both
priced at more than $70,000. In the first quarter Tesla delivered 13,450 Model
S cars and 11,550 of the Model X.
2 German car capital Stuttgart faces bleak days
(John Vidal in The Guardian) The mood in Stuttgart, the car capital of Europe
where the automobile was born in 1886 and where Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch
and many major auto suppliers have their HQs, is far from confident. All the
social, technological and political trends point to a rapid demise of the
polluting internal combustion engine, the coming of electric cars and the end
to German car dominance.
In the wake of “Dieselgate”, when VW was found to
have cheated emission figures, and the arrival on the car scene of digital
companies such as Uber, Tesla and Google, all jockeying to introduce driverless
and electric cars, the sedate German industry is waking up to the fact that it
may be left behind by the US and China and that if it does nothing its cars
could soon seem like antisocial relics.
“The industry is at a crossroads. German car
companies have had their heads in the sand. They cannot compete with companies
like Tesla, or with China, which will determine the future markets for the car.
The Chinese market is 23 million cars a year. In Germany it is 3-4 million,”
says Christian Hochfeld, director of Berlin-based transport thinktank Agora.
With one in three of all industrial workers in
Stuttgart in the car industry, the unions see the coming decarbonised world as
dangerous. An internal combustion engine has about 1,200 parts, an electric
motor only 200, suggesting far fewer workers will be needed, says Frederic
Speidel, head of strategy at IG Metall, Germany’s biggest union with more than
500,000 car workers.
Germany lags behind some European countries in the
electric car stakes. Norway, with just 5 million people, has more than 100,000,
the UK has more than 35,000 registered but Germany, with 80 million people, has
only 25,000.
3 Singaporeans spend half their day on gadgets (Lin
Yangchen in Straits Times) Like it or not, gadgets have become a key part of
people's lives in Singapore, as consumers spend most of their waking hours on
digital devices - 12hr 42 min a day on average.
This is according to survey findings released in
February on the impact of digital devices - such as mobile phones, tablets,
computers and video game consoles - on people. Accounting for the most time
spent on a gadget in a day on average is the mobile phone, at 3hr 12min.
The top gadget people use here is also the
smartphone, with 95 per cent saying so, and its effect on people is telling -
almost 80 per cent of them check their smartphones when waking up in the
morning or just before going to bed. While many - nearly 30 per cent - said
that their sleep has been negatively affected by mobile gadgets, a similar
number said there has been a positive impact.
Even so, about 70 per cent have enjoyed a boon in
communications with their friends and are better able to complete personal
errands and multitask, thanks to smartphones and tablets. The top online
activity they engaged in using their gadgets daily was reading personal
e-mails, with 90 per cent of respondents doing so.
But the heavy use of digital gadgets is not without
issues. About a third of respondents admitted that they were addicted to
smartphones and tablets. People are generally spending way too much time on
their digital devices, said Dr Michael Netzley, academic director at Singapore
Management University Executive Development. "The problem is not the
technology. The problem is a lack of disciplined use of the technology",
he says.
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