Tesla's Master Plan II Revealed

Posted by: JackSawyer // Student

Elon Musk has revealed the second master plan for his electric car company Tesla - although in a couple years it may be a lot more than a car company. I made a prediction on what Elon's plan might entail last week, and with that, went into aspects of his first plan and what kind of success it had and it's effect on the EV industry. I did manage to predict a couple of his new goals rather accurately, however, that being said, there are a couple of points I missed out on that could be huge for pushing clean energy and creating a more efficient automobile infrastructure.

Tesla's Master Plan Part II has four main components.
- Integrate energy generation and storage
- Expand to cover the major forms of terrestrial transport
- Autonomy
- Sharing

The four components share a common goal of trying to advance society towards a more sustainable energy economy. The first objective, integrating energy generation and storage, entails creating a "beautiful" solar roof with battery that is simple to purchase, install, and utilize. In order to make achieving this task easier, Tesla wants to purchase SolarCity. Despite negative feedback from stockholders when the company were rumored to be setting up a merger, now that this plan is out, and based on Elon's successful track record, the newly released plan may help sway stockholders opinions and we may see Tesla buy out SolarCity by the end of the year. I talked about the idea of a Apple-esc system for solar panels that would make the whole process easier and more streamline and it looks like Tesla is attempting to take on this approach.

The second component and the other two that follow, fall more inline with Tesla's roots - electric vehicles. The company wants to expand its product line by creating heavy duty electric trucks and a vehicle that serves as a high density passenger transport, i.e. a bus. According to Musk, both vehicles are in the early stages of development and are expected to be unveiled next year. Another major aspect to this second goal is the idea of improving the rate of production. Tesla wants to accomplish this task by making their factory a product. By selling their factories as products they hope to increase the production of EV's significantly. The company believes that if they can build and sell the machine that builds the car they can ramp up electric car production by at least a 5 fold improvement.

The third component to the plan is autonomy. As you probably know Tesla has implemented an autopilot mode into its car line through a software update last year. Despite an accident last month, the progress this autonomy has made is incredible, thanks to data collected in each cars sensors, mapping, and machine learning algorithms, the autopilot is able to improve its abilities and will eventually become truly autonomous. Elon sees autopilot becoming more widespread once their software has gotten worldwide approval by regulators, which he thinks will require around 6 billion miles. Currently the software is in beta, however beta does not mean that their are quirks in the software which is traditionally associated with the word, the company plans to remove "Beta" once the autopilot is 10x safer than the average U.S. vehicle. This is the third objective.

Sharing, the fourth component, is contingent on the third part being achieved. With autonomy Tesla wants to give you the ability to share your Tesla vehicle with others. Almost like giving you your own uber business. When you are not using the car it would be driving around other people autonomously and while doing so earning you money. This would not only make your car cheaper as you would be making money back on it, but it would also be reducing the amount of cars on the road and making those that are, carbon free. This is the part of Tesla's plan that I think could truly be revolutionary - it could change what it means to own a car. Furthermore, with more autonomy on the road there would be less human error and in turn make driving more safe and efficient.

Tesla's second master plan has the potential to create yet another breakthrough in the EV market and in large the auto industry as a whole. Whats more, with the plan to expand into solar, the company could grow significantly and really have a profound impact on several industries. This would bring them even closer to achieving their goal of green economy.

What do you think of Tesla's second plan? Will it be successful? Can the company achieve their goal of creating a greener economy?

Musk, Elon. "Master Plan, Part Deux." Tesla Motors. N.p., 20 July 2016. Web. 22 July 2016. <https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux>.