Tesla: Corporation Blog

Tesla is considered the most popular electric car manufacturer but like a lot of companies, their journey to what they have accomplished today has been rough. Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California and they first started off by producing an entirely electric sports car in 2008 called the Roadster. The car itself was a successful achievement because its battery range was about 250 miles and it could be charged by simply plugging it in to a standard wall outlet. However, the vehicle was more $100,000, which meant that most consumers couldn’t afford it. After the Roadster was released, changes were announced to the leadership team. Elon Musk, who everyone associates with Tesla today, took over as CEO in October of 2008. The year after, Tesla faced financial problems. The company had insufficient cash on hand but in June of 2009, the Department of Energy handed Tesla a loan of $465 million, which was enough for the company to survive. Tesla also solved their financial problems by entering the stock market. They opened on NASDAQ at $17 a share and raised $226 million. In 2012, the company started producing the Model S, which was a way more affordable car than the roadster. A year later, Tesla announced its first ever quarterly profit. With Tesla vehicles being more in demand, the company decided to build a gigafactory in Nevada. They stated that they would build the batteries for all their factories here and their products expanded to a market outside of electric vehicles. In 2015, Tesla entered the solar power market where they introduced a line of products that would power homes and businesses. It wasn’t a surprise that Elon Musk and the company started producing solar power products. “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”(Tesla.com). The company believes that the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels, the better. With electric vehicles, it’s a step towards a zero emission future. However, in order for Tesla’s vehicles to be efficient, in terms of zero emissions, the electricity that they use has to be sustainable. This means that the electricity it uses can’t come from fossil fuels, which is an issue because most of the world still relies on fossil fuels for their energy. Another issue that Tesla is criticized for their batteries. Their batteries consist of lithium, which isn’t great for the environment. The extraction of lithium is very damaging to the environment and disposing lithium batteries can be difficult. But the damage that Tesla does to the environment is nothing compared to what a conventional car company does. Tesla is becoming more and more popular because it’s a car company that no one has ever seen before. They are technologically advanced, saving the environment, and becoming more affordable. The company just unveiled a new vehicle called the Cybertruck, which is a vehicle that we have never seen before. It has better utility than a truck and more performance than a sports car and its exterior is an exoskeleton made up of stainless steel and armor glass. It’s amazing to see what Tesla is doing at the moment and their future is very promising.         

Meme Assignment

My meme is related to the current crisis of the coronavirus. My meme uses a Spongebob image that uses the message of sarcasm and irony to describe the view of certain people about the sickness. Coronavirus started in Wuhan, China, and it started spreading rapidly because of how contagious it was. At first, coronavirus wasn’t considered that serious. I had seen various arguments over social media that the coronavirus is just another “flu” and that the actual flu is more dangerous than coronavirus. I had read an article in late January where it stated that coronavirus couldn’t even be compared to the flu. The article stated that the flu kills 650,000 people per year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and that the coronavirus only had 4,583 cases and 106 deaths worldwide at the time. But now it is the beginning of March, and coronavirus is way more dangerous then it might have seemed. The death toll for coronavirus is over 3,000 worldwide and there have been two deaths in the U.S. and several states have declared the virus as a public health emergency. The death rate for the coronavirus in Wuhan China is estimated to be 2%, which is higher than the average of people that die from the seasonal flu, which is .1%. Coronavirus is becoming a massive crisis and it’s starting to affect events. The Olympics are scheduled to be in Tokyo this summer but there is a possibility that it will be cancelled due to the outbreak of the virus. Coronavirus is proving itself to be very dangerous and I wanted my meme to use sarcasm in order to target the audience that believes that coronavirus isn’t a big deal. I think sarcasm appeals to emotion and is used through pathos because it’s a way of showing how the author believes that the audience is contempt.  

In Class Rhetoric Write Up

  1. What I have taken away from rhetoric is that it is a way of breaking up a body of work into several parts and deciding whether it is trying to inform or persuade the audience. The author can try to use to inform or persuade the audience by using logos, pathos, or ethos.
  2. Rhetoric relates to critical thinking/reading because it requires you to understand the reading in depth and decide what techniques the author is using to get his point across.

Backpack vs. Briefcases

This article talks about rhetorical analysis and the different elements that are involved. The first part of analysis the article mentions are first impressions. When you’re meeting someone for the first time, you notice several things about the person. You notice things related to their appearance, which includes clothing and jewelry. You draw conclusions based on all of these things. A way people use rhetoric is through pathos. People can use this by telling a personal story in order to persuade another individual. I agree with this strongly because I do this all the time without even thinking. Over the years, we develop a mentality that allows us to draw conclusions. Rhetoric can use a person’s personal story to help persuade the audience. You retain all of this evidence about a person that allows you to draw conclusions, whether good or bad. An important aspect to rhetoric is the audience. Being the audience can allow you to determine the language and seek the whole point of a discussion. A big audience is found in the media.When rhetoric is presented, constraints are the motive, beliefs, or even the attitude of the discourse. Trying to understand the idea of something takes a rhetoric process. When doing so a person draws conclusions from reading into it and seeing the constraints tied to the topic. There are some instances where limitations occur with rhetoric analysis. A lot of the time people do not know they are using rhetoric analysis, and it is even seen as being used as persuasion. 

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