Tesla’s founder and managing director, Elon Musk, has revealed the American company will build a pick-up and a compact SUV in the future.
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The solution? Make what comes out of the plug greener, and that’s something Tesla wants to do through its controversial, yet-to-be-passed bid to acquire SolarCity – a company Musk co-founded.
“We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of six billion miles”, Musk wrote in his Tesla Master Plan, Part Deux, which was released Wednesday night and provided a loose time table for when consumers can expect fully driverless cars on the road.
Tesla plans to unveil the new models for trucks and high-passenger transport vehicles sometime next year.
As Tesla’s affordable Model 3 sedan looks set to arrive in 2017, Musk is now ready for phase two.
As well as cars he wants to build electric trucks and buses and set up auto sharing and solar energy systems, though he doesn’t say in a blog post how quickly that could be done or how much it would cost.
Apart from consumer vehicles, Tesla wants to build two other kinds of battery-powered vehicles: “heavy-duty trucks” and “high passenger-density urban transport”, which are now in early development stages and will be unveiled by 2017.
He anticipates both will be ready for unveiling next year.
Speaking of the buses, Musk wrote that with the advent of autonomy, Tesla will be able to shrink the size of the buses and will transition the role of a bus driver to that of the fleet manager. The CEO stressed that Autonomy is in beta and drivers are made aware of that, but says that even partial autonomy is “significantly safer” than the average human driver – and therefore it would “be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability”.
“Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the USA vehicle average, the beta label will be removed”, he said.
“You will…be able to add your auto to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost”, he said.
Once cars become fully autonomous, people will be able to summon their Tesla from anymore, and then sleep, read, or safely play Pokémon GO enroute to their destinations.
“You will also be able to add your vehicle to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation”, Musk wrote.
It’ll be a bit like turning your home into a mini power station, making you a lot less reliant on conventional electricity networks.
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Considering people only use their cars for about 5 to 10 percent of the day, “This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where nearly anyone could own a Tesla”, the blog states.
