After its successful debut of its volume-selling Model 3 compact sedan completed Musk’s original decade-long vision for the electric Vehicle maker, he has now announced his “Master Plan Part Deux” on the company’s website.
Advertisement
Musk’s new master plan is a follow-up to a 2006 blog post, which detailed plans to build an electric sports vehicle, followed by more affordable models.
Tesla, he said, needs to “create a smoothly integrated and attractive solar-roof-with-battery product that just works”, but insisted, “we can’t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies”.
Other than consumer vehicles, there are two other types of electric vehicle that Tesla will be focusing on: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport, which will be akin to either buses or trams (perhaps buses more than trams).
Speaking of autonomy, Musk has maintained that all Tesla vehicles will boast the hardware required to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability (“meaning that any given system in the auto could break and your auto will still drive itself safely”).
This would enable the company to operate autonomous ride-sharing services to challenge the likes of Uber, while it could also revolutionise the haulage industry and generate owners money when they aren’t driving the auto themselves.
To do this he wants to combine Tesla with SolarCity – a solar energy company that was largely created from Musk’s own brain.
Last month, the gruesome death of a Tesla driver was a reminder that the autonomous technology still has a long way to go.
Finally, Tesla will continue to expand beyond just automotive vehicles and into solar rooftop energy and energy storage. Tesla will likely announce the mentioned vehicles in 2017, together with the company’s existing fleet of electric cars.
Heavy duty transports are also included in Musk’s to do list. It is safe to say that this pertains to the vehicles Model S and Model X.
Musk writes that Tesla can not achieve this alone, so Tesla will merge with SolarCity to pursue this goal, using Tesla’s Powerwall and SolarCity’s solar energy solutions.
“We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety and making it really fun to operate”, Musk added.
Tesla’s main aim over the next phase of its lifespan is to develop an Autopilot function that is 10 times safer than the United States average vehicle driven by a human. Owners will tell their cars when they’re not needed, like at night, and they’ll make their own way around earning cash. However, it expects to take more time to deploy new features updates from then on, and expects regulators worldwide to allow fully autonomous systems once the Autopilot hits six billion miles. 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”.
Advertisement
Tesla will also run its own fleet in cities where demand exceeds supply of customer-owned cars.
