Crisis Averted
The US Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown with the passage of a bipartisan funding bill, but the process laid bare the persistent challenges of governance in an era of heightened partisanship and external influences.
After reporting a record $1.14 billion in net income in the second quarter (Q2) 2021, Elon Musk criticised Apple, saying that unlike iPhone the electric car-maker does not use cobalt in its vehicles.
“Tesla uses no Cobalt and almost none in the nickel-based chemistries. On a weighted average basis, we might use 2% Cobalt compared to say Apple’s 100% Cobalt,” he said during the earnings call on Monday.
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“There is somehow a misconception that Tesla use a lot of Cobalt, but we actually don’t. Apple uses I think almost 100% Cobalt in their batteries in cellphones and laptops,” he added.
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Apple is reportedly developing an electric self-driving car under a project code named Titan.
“Some cobalt mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been linked to human rights abuses such as child labour,” reports CNBC.
In 2019, in addition to Tesla and other major technology companies, Apple was named as defendants in a human rights lawsuit, according to The Guardian.
Musk said that he needs the supercharger network to grow globally.
“For the supercharger to be useful to other car companies, we need to grow the network faster than we’re growing vehicle output, which is not easy. We’re growing vehicle output at a hell of a rate. So Superchargers need to grow faster than vehicle output,” he said.
On Cybertruck, he said that ramping up its production “will be difficult because it’s such new architecture”.
“It’s going to be a great product, our best product ever. But there’s a lot of fundamentally new design ideas in the Cybertruck. Nobody’s ever really made a car like this before. A vehicle like this before,” Musk told the analysts.
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