*By Michael Teich*
Tesla's Model 3 Performance vehicle is bad news for the company's haters, said Wall Street Journal auto columnist Dan Neil.
"Tesla runs their company in a different way, and it drives people crazy. But you can't argue with the results," Neil told Cheddar in an interview Friday.
Earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk announced the high-performance Model 3 Performance vehicle on Twitter. According to Musk, the dual-motor, all-wheel drive car "will beat anything in its class on the track." Neil was the first person to test drive it, and he was thoroughly impressed.
"This thing is magnificent, a little rainbow-farting space ship," he said in his review. "They have a schedule of innovation ahead of them."
Sans additions, the base price of the Tesla Model 3 Performance is $64,000, but it may sell for $78,000 with certain upgrades. The car is advertised with a 0 to 60 mph acceleration time of 3.5 seconds.
Whether reviews of the souped-up version will make up for recent struggles at Tesla remains to be seen. Many Wall Street analysts have grown skeptical of the company's capacity to meet expectations for even the regular version of the Model 3, which is supposed to cost as little as $35,000, though that configuration isn't available yet. And CEO Elon Musk's latest [blunders](https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/17/technology/elon-musk-twitter-investors/index.html) on Twitter aren't helping. Even if Tesla overcomes the hurdles of production, investment bank Needham says consumers are losing patience: the analyst estimates that about one in every four Model 3 orders is canceled, about twice the rate of late year's reports.
For the full segment, [click here.](https://cheddar.com/videos/behind-the-wheel-of-the-tesla-model-3-performance-vehicle)
Paul Tracey, Founder & CEO of Innovative Technologies, and author of 'Delete The Hacker Playbook' and 'Cyber Storm', joins Cheddar to discuss the most effective ways to protect small businesses from cyber attacks, the labor shortage's effects on cybercrime, and how businesses and employees can stay cyber secure while working from home.
NASA has announced that the first official full-color images will be beamed back to Earth from the James Webb Telescope on July 12. Gregory L. Robinson, the director of the James Webb Space Telescope Program in the NASA Science Mission Directorate, joined Cheddar News to discuss the anticipated image drop. “We expect to see the universe different," he said. "Webb will allow us to see much, much clearer and deeper into the universe."
Dave Burg, EY Americas Cybersecurity Leader, joins Cheddar News to discuss the rise of quantum computing and how it can compromise existing security measures at play today, and what the timeline looks like for quantum computing to become a reality.
Nicolas Halftermeyer, Communications & Product Branding Director, SoftBank Robotics, and Emile Kroeger, Robotics Engineer, Humanizing Technologies, join Cheddar Reveals to unveil Pepper and NAO, the humanoid robots designed to interact with humans.
On this episode of Cheddar Reveals, Christopher Atkeson, roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses what the robots of the future will look like, the role they will play in society and different industries, and if they will they ever reach human-level sentience; Nicolas Halftermeyer, Communications & Product Branding Director, SoftBank Robotics, and Emile Kroeger, Robotics Engineer, Humanizing Technologies, unveil Pepper and NAO, the humanoid robots designed to interact with humans; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'iHuman.'
Christopher Atkeson, roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, joins Cheddar Reveals to discuss what the robots of the future will look like, the role they will play in society and different industries, and if they will they ever reach human-level sentience.
When it comes to diversity in children's toys, we have come a long way as a society but we still have a ways to go. One group of students decided to take matters into their own hands. Truly You! Character Creator is a fashion illustration activity set made for youth by youth. Lindsay Buckingham, one of the toy’s creators, sat down with Cheddar News to talk all about it.
