Elon Musk’s Master Plan #2
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk published his “master plan part 2” on Wednesday night that disclosed a wide-ranging vision for his companies including new future Tesla vehicles, car sharing, urban planning concepts, and a combined SolarCity and Tesla that would sell solar panels and batteries.
Musk’s goals and driving forces behind all of his business decisions, is to deliver “sustainable energy” and end the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. He published the first part of his “master plan” a decade ago during the very early days of Tesla and SolarCity.
In Musk’s blog post, he revealed plans for new future Tesla vehicles, including a semi truck (Tesla Semi), a future compact SUV, a new kind of pickup truck, and what he described as “high-density urban transport,” or a bus.
Musk said that the semi and the urban transport system are in “early stages of development” and could be ready to unveil in 2017. The “Tesla Semi” would lower the cost of transporting cargo and would also make cargo transport safer, said Musk.
Musk also described a more well-designed urban bus that would be smaller, autonomous, free of passenger aisles, and would take riders all the way to their destinations. Bus drivers would be fleet managers, wrote Musk.
Musk’s transport vision also includes car sharing. Tesla customers could add their cars to a “shared fleet” by tapping a button on a Tesla phone app, wrote Musk. That could lower the cost of ownership of a Tesla, because it could generate income for you, he said.
Autonomous cars were also a major theme laid out by Musk as way for cars to travel more safely and to be managed as a group.
Finally, Musk also discussed his concept of making his factories more efficient and innovative, which he calls “the machine behind the machine.”
Next week Tesla will hold a customer party at its “gigafactory,” a massive battery factory under construction outside of Reno, Nev. SolarCity is also building a factory in upstate New York with a plan to churn out highly efficient solar panels.
