The Huffington Post is reporting that a plane owned by Tesla electrical engineer Doug Bourn has crashed shortly after takeoff. The plane was en route from Palo Alto to Los Angeles and was carrying two other Tesla employees. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, was not believed to be on the plane.

We’ll provide more details as they become available.

Source: Huffington Post

Bigfoot. El Chupacabre. The Loch Ness monster. Honest politicians. People swear that they’ve had encounters, and swear on a stack of bibles that these critters exist. The Tesla Model S, revealed to the public just about one year ago, fits in the same realm; call it “auto-cryptozoology”. With clean lines reminiscent of a Maserati, it looked to be the out-of-the-park home run alternative to Chevy’s plain vanilla Volt electric sedan.

Tesla Roadster Sport

In a move that could interpreted as “ballsy” or “utterly insane”, Tesla Motors has simultaneously announced an IPO and the end of Roadster production in 2011. Roadsters, built largely by Lotus at their plant in Hethel, England, share body structures with the Lotus Elise / Exige. Both the Elise and Exige are due to be replaced by new models, as yet unannounced by Lotus.

Apparently sourcing inspiration from a generic beige socket plate, the tuning experts from Deutschland have introduced to us the Brabus Ultimate High Voltage Concept. Underpinned by the comically compact smart fortwo and co-developed by the master electricians over at Tesla, the Brabus Ultimate High Voltage is the biggest performance upgrade on a city vehicle we’ve seen since that kid from the bike messenger shop down the street started wolfing down Power Bars.

Boasting a design scheme rivaled in its dearth of creativity only by the Velcro Stride Rite’s your Grandpa wears and featuring a similarly uninspiring 82-horsepower 206 lb-ft lithium ion battery pack, Brabus brags the Ultimate High Voltage is capable of sprinting from 0-35 mph in 3.7 seconds, and 0-62 mph in 9.8. To prevent any oblivious pedestrians from being mowed down by all that silent white-knuckle speed, Brabus outfitted the Ultimate High Voltage with an artificial sound generator designed to mimic the exhaust note of a snarling V8.

The Model S.

Tesla is going against the grain in California, which is losing high-tech manufacturing jobs (like the NUMMI GM/Toyota plant, scheduled to close at the end of the month) to other states at an alarming rate, by building a new manufacturing facility in the middle of Silicon Valley. The new three-building Palo Alto facility will employ 350, with space for up to 600 in the future, and will produce drivetrain components for its Roadster and Model S cars. The new facility is largely the result of the federal funding that Tesla received being invested to increase production capacity. Tesla seems to be defying the odds to make a real run of it, but with stiff competition in the form of the Fisker Karma, they’re going to need more than simply a headstart in order to succeed. We’ll let you know more as it becomes available.

[Source: AP and OC Register]

Opel Ampera

Unless you’ve been living in a cave on the Moon with your eyes shut and hands over your ears, you know that electric vehicles are the future. Not a week goes by where there isn’t some announcement about the car that will break the ties of petroleum oppression. For you, dear readers, I have assembled a list of some of the more notable entrants into the EV market with the pros and cons of each. From econoboxes to SUVs, grocery getters to exotics. Enjoy.

Mercedes Benz SLS AMG

Even though the Mercedes SLS has only unofficially been sighted in various places Sasquatch-style, it is not surprising that the German automaker is also planning an all-electric version of the upcoming supercar. Not surprising because it has been a mere two months since Mercedes plucked up a 10 percent stake in American electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla.

Tesla has been banking on getting federal loans for a while, and the ever-quixotic Elon Musk has apparently made a strong enough case to the feds to warrant a $465 million loan, the full amount Tesla was after. This should allow the company to build the Model S, or give Musk enough time to slip out of the country before the Detroit automakers can frame him for something. We kid about the last part. That being said, Tesla’s got a lot of work to do, and we’ll see if this loan improves their cash-flow problems in the long-term.

[Source: AP]

Now that the calendar reads ‘2009′ and summer is upon us, we can already begin shutting the book on the first decade of the new millenia. All the cars that will be produced have either made it to dealerships or have half a dozen reviews already printed in some magazine collecting dust on your shelf.

This decade closes much like the 1960s, in an atmosphere of uproar and protest, with rumors of war and peace and revolution at hand. The auto industry has experienced a second Golden Age, bigger and grander than the first, and has again sunk into crisis, darker and dimmer than the one Baby Boomers remember. And enthusiasts young and old fear that a similar fate awaits them in the coming years with news of outrageously stringent CAFE standards, and fear-mongering legislators fuel anxieties that we’ve already seen the best cars of the next thirty some odd years.

So it is that we turn back to this decade already a bit nostalgic. Here lie the future legends, the autos of myth and lore. With the future unclear, we ask ourselves which cars made the glorious 2000’s the decade we will all miss more than we know?

I didn’t want any stock in Chrysler, but now I have some. So do you. The government is buying up Chrysler stock with our money, and without our permission. As far as I know, the constitution doesn’t give the president the right to be the forced stockbroker to every citizen in the country. Maybe I missed that part.

Anyway, here are the facts:
Chrysler is going bankrupt, but not normal Chapter 11 bankruptcy, they’re going into “managed bankruptcy“. The US taxpayer is putting up the majority of the cash, at least $12 billion, and we only get 10 percent ownership in the company. I say “at least $12 billion” because the original estimates were always way too low, so there is no logical reason to think this new estimate will be any different. Read on for more: