Titled as “Master Plan, Part Deux” (part 2), Elon Musk has come up with a new blog post, detailing the company’s roadmap for the next 10 years. “Tesla’s latest Master Plan includes expanding its electric-vehicle product line to cover all major segments, when it hasn’t been meeting production targets with the limited product line it has now and in the next couple of years”.
Advertisement
“With the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck, we plan to address most of the consumer market”. While Consumer Reports says that Autopilot is a misnomer, Musk said that “It would no more make sense to disable Tesla’s Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named”.
With the launch of the Tesla Model 3 earlier this year, the firm is seemingly nearing completion of the first plan, although it still needs to prove it can produce the Model 3 on a mass scale. “It provides a clear vision of the direction in which the auto and energy industries are heading, but, perhaps with the exception of the Tesla Semi [truck] there is really nothing new in the plan that many others aren’t also pursuing aggressively”.
It was Musk’s second such manifesto; he released the first in 2006, when Tesla was first starting out and hadn’t yet sold its first vehicle, the Tesla Roadster.
“The overarching objective of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution”, he wrote then.
Musk defended the commercial release of Autopilot, stating that “when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability”.
Advertisement
Musk talks of an autonomous world where users will be able to summon their Tesla from anywhere and be able to sleep, read or do anything else, other than drive, enroute to your destination. Cities without enough volunteer vehicle owners will receive special fleets of cars from Tesla to make up the deficit. Well with all of those ticked off, it’s time for the next step in Tesla’s history. Musk seems to be ahead of a pack again planning to “marry” his cars and the exciting technology of solar panels. A Tesla Model S on Autopilot slammed into a semi-truck, killing the driver and prompting an investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company is about to start production on the Model 3, a more affordable sedan.
