Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2020. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty )

Update (May 21): Tesla's lawsuit against Alameda County has been dismissed at Tesla's request . The move comes a week after Alameda County signaled that it wasn't going to try to stop the company from re-opening its Fremont factory despite a continued shelter-in-place order in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Original story (May 11) follows:

Elon Musk is planning to defy county officials as he battles to reopen Tesla's Fremont factory in the face of a continued shelter-in-place order in Alameda County, California, Musk announced on Twitter on Monday.

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  In 1980, Volkswagen built the ARVW concept car, the most aerodynamic vehicle it has ever created. It achieved a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.15. By contrast, most road cars have a Cd of between 0.3-0.4. [credit: Volkswagen ]

With no car launches to work on thanks to COVID-19, some automakers' press offices are filling the gap by digging into the archives to share interesting stuff with the rest of us. On Thursday, Volkswagen North America reached out to tell us about the company's most aerodynamic car ever. It was called the Aerodynamic Research Volkswagen, and it was built in 1980 as a demonstration of how to make a vehicle as slippery as possible, with a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.15. Powered by a 177hp (132kW) 2.4L inline-six cylinder engine, the ARVW reached a speed of 225mph (362km/h) at the Nardo test track in southern Italy. But the ARVW isn't the lowest-drag vehicle ever built, just the lowest-drag VW. So what is the most aerodynamic car of all time?

Production cars

When Tesla revealed its Model 3 sedan a few years ago, it was justifiably proud of the car's Cd of 0.23, which bettered the Models S and X by 0.01. Tesla didn't optimize the Model 3's aerodynamics just for bragging rights. The lower a car's drag, the further it can go per unit of energy because it doesn't have to work as hard to push its way through the air. However, a Model 3 is only this slippery through the air when the car's 18-inch wheels are fitted with the aero wheel covers, something Car and Driver put to the test late last year . (If you're a Model 3 owner and into hypermiling, you can cut your car's drag—and thereby boost its range—even further by fitting aftermarket front- and rear spoilers .)

But the Model 3 isn't the lowest-drag car to have gone into production. Porsche's Taycan battery EV bested Tesla's best when it went on sale last year. Both the Taycan Turbo and Taycan 4S manage a Cd of 0.22, although again, only with the most aerodynamic wheels fitted. The Taycan Turbo S uses a different design and in the wind tunnel, that adds 0.03 to the Cd.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2015. (credit: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images )

Tesla will raise $2 billion in a new stock offering, the company announced on Thursday morning.

Tesla's shares are worth more $780 on Thursday morning—up 2 percent over Thursday's closing price. That's still down from the record high of the more than $940 the stock reached last week.

CNBC notes that as recently as two weeks ago, Musk was saying that Tesla wasn't planning to raise more cash. But the spectacular performance of Tesla's stock over the last two weeks may have made this an opportunity too good to pass up.

Enlarge / Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua. (credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

A lot of media coverage of self-driving technology has focused on a handful of big companies with well-known brands: Google, Uber, Tesla, and GM. But there's another company working on self-driving technology that might ultimately prove even more important. That company is Mobileye, an Israeli startup that was acquired by Intel in 2017.

Mobileye doesn't have Elon Musk's star power or Google's billions. But it has something that's arguably even more important: a dominant position in today's market for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Mobileye had a very public split with Tesla back in 2016, but it continues to do business with a lot of other carmakers. Mobileye says it shipped 17.4 million systems last year, which means 17.4 million customers bought cars with Mobileye's cameras, chips, and software.

In a Tuesday speech at the Consumer Electronics show, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua made clear just how big of a strategic advantage this is. He laid out Mobileye's vision for the evolution of self-driving technology over the next five years. And he made it clear that he envisions Mobileye staying at the center of the industry.