Tesla Model S Coupe rendered, looks like a winner

Our friend Theophilus Chin has a thing for creating Tesla vehicles that we can't have. Earlier this year, he made a digital Model ST wagon appear and he's now back with a sleek Tesla Model S Coupe. The rendered results, which you can see in the gallery, are an elegant, smaller take on the nearly universally praised Model S design from Franz von Holzhausen. Chin writes, "There's a huge market for an electric 2+2 GT. And I feel Tesla has the right product for that niche."

As he did with the ST, the front end is left intact, with all of the changes happening in the rear. At its core, this is just a Model S with the second set of doors removed and Chin has so smoothly meshed the lines so that you almost don't notice anything's missing at first glance. We can only speculate what the smaller size would mean for reduced battery pack capacity, and if the new style would make up for the expected range loss. Which leads us to this important question: does the Model S coupe still have a frunk? Also, does the car appeal to you?

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Tesla to earn $250 million from sales of California environmental credits

Tesla Motors is expected to release quarterly earnings figures within the next few days, and the Silicon Valley automaker is thought to have attained profitability for the first time ever. As it turns out, a good bit of that profit will reportedly come from the State of California.

According to an article from the LA Times, Tesla, which is reportedly on pace to sell 20,000 vehicles in 2013, receives as much as $35,000 in environmental credits from California for each Model S it sells. These credits can then be sold to other automakers that do business in the state but don't sell zero-emission vehicles of their own. Some experts believe Tesla could earn up to $250 million from such ZEV credits.

While profits from ZEV credits equals good news for Tesla, some experts and rival automakers aren't very pleased with California's strong-arm tactics when it comes to the sales of electric vehicles. "At the end of the day, other carmakers are subsidizing Tesla," said Thilo Koslowski, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, counters by saying, "We are in the air pollution business, not the car business... There is some jealously of Tesla going on here." Check out the entire article from the LA Times here, it's an interesting look into the inner-workings of the business side of the eco-friendly automotive marketplace.

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Tesla lowers Model S financing costs, guarantees highest resale value of any luxury sedan

A month ago, Tesla Motors announced what it called a "revolutionary" financing option, and waved some magic pixie dust around to come up with a monthly cost of like $500. Today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a bunch of changes to the financing options and to Tesla's online calculator to be more realistic and better represent people's real-world costs. Despite an early reshuffling of the numbers, Tesla got a lot of negative feedback regarding the pixie dust and today, Musk said, "We decided we were wrong and other people were right and we decided to fix it."

Here are some of the changes:

• Most importantly, Tesla has raised the guaranteed resale value to be the highest of any luxury sedan made in volume. That means that a "leased" Model S will be worth more than the average resale value of all Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Lexus or Jaguar vehicles in the same price range (based on ALG resale value numbers).
• In the online calculator, where Tesla talks about the "true cost of ownership," many defaults have been changed. The "time saved" option is now turned off, the expected gas price has been lowered, the MPG of the gas car has been raised. In short, the defaults are more conservative, but anyone can still enter any values that apply to them.Tesla financing partners are now also offering longer-term loans (72 months instead of 63) that will "reduce the monthly payment considerably," Tesla says. Tesla's new numbers, featuring less pixie dust, are "a monthly rate of $580 taking only gasoline savings into account" and, if you buy the car for business and we assume that 70 percent of the miles are for business use, the "effective monthly cost" is just $315. Musk said he believes that financing (or leasing, as most of us call it) is the right way to buy an electric car because, "it really highlights the savings you get form gasoline every month."

Musk said that so far, around 20-25 percent of the Model S vehicles sold since the financing options were announced have been financed, and that he expects this number to jump to 60 percent or more in the future. Early birds who jumped at the chance in April don't need to fret, since the improvements to the financial offering will be retroactive to anyone who already took advantage of the Tesla financing.

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