“Working on top secret Telsa masterplan, part two”.
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In 2006 Musk revealed a similarly cryptic message on a blog which eventually led to the publication of plans for the Tesla roadster, the Model S sedan and the Model 3 sedan. “Hoping to publish later this week”, Musk tweeted out over the weekend.
Musk last week used his Twitter account to mount a defense of Tesla’s decision not to disclose the accident until June 30, when NHTSA said it was launching its investigation.
Tesla shares were down slightly in after-hours trading.
The company said it submitted (on the same day) a filing to the SEC about its plans to sell $2-B worth of stock, including almost 2.8-M shares sold by Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk. The blueprint at that time entailed building a sports vehicle, then continually reinvesting the cash from those models to build more affordable versions.
Moreover, Tesla says its investigators did not get the chance to recover the complete logs until May 18, when they inspected the vehicle and the crash site.
In this situation, Musk argues that the merger would help create “a seamlessly integrated Tesla battery and solar panel product that looks attractive”, while critics argue that the deal would cause stress for both businesses, referring to it as “corporate governance at its worst”.
Tesla alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US car-safety regulator, to the crash and investigated to determine whether the vehicle was using the company’s Autopilot system, which lets cars drive themselves under certain circumstances. This is something Tesla has said since launching Autopilot previous year, but a quick scan of YouTube shows that not all drivers have heeded that warning. Meanwhile, the advanced autonomous driving feature may have been involved in two other recent crashes. Tesla said that any available technology is not agile enough to respond to such a situation.
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The “master plan” seems to be an allusion to Musk’s original Tesla Master Plan. The Street remains bullish on Tesla as it has a 12-month price target of $260 on the stock, reflecting 15.66% upside potential over the last close.
