by Darryl Siry
Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Service - Tesla Motors

Today, in an article about Shai Agassi’s new startup, the New York Times incorrectly reported that the production delay we announced was caused by “battery related issues.” I spoke with John Markoff, the author of the article, and he said he was apologetic for the error and will issue a correction and change the story online. After he reviewed his research for the article, he realized he had incorrectly connected our reported delays to battery problems. The primary cause of our delay has been and continues to be issues with durability and reliability of the transmission, as we have reported before.

This comes on the heels of a couple of phone calls I received recently from reporters telling me that they had heard rumors that we had decided to scrap our battery pack and were looking for a replacement. This is also completely untrue.

One development that may have caused some confusion was Think’s announcement of a different battery supplier. (Tesla had originally planned to supply lithium-ion battery packs to Think.) After Michael Marks became CEO of Tesla Motors, one of the first actions he took was to inform Think that we would not pursue the development of battery packs for them at that time because we had to be focused entirely on our own vehicle programs. We hope to work with Think in the future, but for now it is important that we stay focused on our own vehicle programs. Naturally, it would have been inappropriate for Tesla to announce this news to the public because in this case we were the supplier and Think was the customer, so it was up to Think to manage how they communicated this development to their customers, investors, and the public.

One of the realities of today’s connected world is that rumors can quickly spread, so I hope to quell this one by providing some clarity as to the situation here in the blog and in an email to our customers.

To the readers of this blog – I would appreciate any info you have on the source of these rumors and if you would help me by linking to this blog when you see this rumor incorrectly reported elsewhere. Thanks in advance.

(From Tesla blog)