The Downey City Council will convene in a special session today at 2 p.m. to pave the way for the arrival of a Tesla Motors assembly plant on the former NASA site adjacent to Downey Studios.
Downey Mayor Mario Guerra had revealed just such a meeting Monday when contacted by The District Weekly to confirm that [...]

Tesla Motors has selected the City of Downey over the City of Long Beach as the manufacturing site for its new Model S, a four-door all-electric family sedan, The District Weekly learned early this afternoon—apparently, we discovered about 5 p.m., at about the same time as The Downey Patriot was learning the same thing.
“We’re very [...]

Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske to Tesla Motors: save the last dance for Long Beach
Armed with a snippet of the classic “Save the Last Dance for Me”—and a photo of Downey Mayor Mario Guerra delivering a gift basket—Fifth District Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske composed a short video she dropped Sunday evening as part of a final effort to [...]

Tues | SEPT 1 Unemployment in these parts is somewhere between 12 and 13 percent, according to the Press-Telegram (and who should know better than the Press-Telegram, where unemployment is somewhere between 50 percent and “Anybody here . . . here . . . here?”). So, it comes as encouraging news that Tesla Motors CEO [...]

Will Tesla Motors bypass Long Beach and strike a deal with Downey, to build assembly facilities on land where workers once built airplanes–and the Apollo 11 vehicles?
The Press-Telegram’s Paul Eakins and John Canalis seem to say that’s at least possible.
After breaking the news yesterday that Downey was a finalist for the electric car plant, the [...]

Opened this week’s edition of The New Yorker to discover a long profile on Elon Musk, the 38-year-old chairman, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, which plans to have top-of-the-line electric cars in full production by 2011—and is considering producing some of them in Long Beach, on the property where Boeing used to make [...]

The Tesla Motors CEO talks electric cars with David Letterman
Tesla Motors chairman and CEO Elon Musk was on Wednesday’s Late Night With David Letterman, and as we might have expected, Musk in no way addressed reports that Tesla is interested in buying or leasing the former Boeing 717 airliner factory here in Long Beach.
That aside, [...]

The sometimes droll Los Angeles Times automotive writer Dan Neil sobers up
to review the Model S electric sedan from Menlo Park-based Tesla Motors–which, as you’ll recall, may or may not be planning to build a manufacturing facility at the old Boeing 717 airliner factory here in Long Beach.
“The Model S, aimed to rival conventional mid-market [...]