Tesla owners will be able to add their vehicles to a “Tesla shared fleet” that allows autonomous vehicles to give rides to the general public. Cities without enough volunteer auto owners will receive special fleets of cars from Tesla to make up the deficit.
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Musk says Tesla wants to focus on selling integrated energy generation and storage, as well as expand the use of autonomous driving technology in trucks and buses.
“We can’t do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies”.
Through computerized “fleet learning”, self-driving cars will eventually be 10 times as safe as manually driven ones, he claimed.
Commenting on the time it will take to see fully autonomous cars hit the road, Musk writes: “Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators”.
Earlier this month Tesla missed its vehicle delivery target for the second time this year. He called it “morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability”.
He also addressed the issues asking to disable Tesla’s Autopilot, stating that it would no more make sense to disable the system than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft.
Dubbed “Master Plan, Part Deux”, the post follows on from the first “master plan” published a decade ago which included proposals for the Model S, X and 3.
He anticipates both will be ready for unveiling next year.
This is were Musk starts talking autonomy – which has been a hallmark of his vision, and caused Tesla to be investigated by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for an accident caused by the forerunner, Tesla’s Autopilot system.
The updated plan includes an explanation of why Tesla wants to purchase SolarCity, the solar energy company that Musk is chairman of. General Motors Co and Toyota Motor Corp are among the auto companies working on vehicle sharing and forging alliances with ride hailing companies.
The first point of the plan is to “create a smoothly integrated and lovely solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world”.
To fund projects Tesla in May sold about $1.7 billion (roughly Rs. 11,427 crores) in new shares.
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Analysts are skeptical about whether the company can meet the expectations for the vehicle because of the company’s history of missing self-imposed deadlines and the costs that will accompany its transition to a mass production automaker.
