Elon Musk's second Master Plan

in #tesla8 years ago

 The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final stages of completion. It wasn't all that complicated and basically consisted of:  
Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
And...
Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.
The reason we had to start off with step 1 was that it was all I  could afford to do with what I made from PayPal. I thought our chances  of success were so low that I didn't want to risk anyone's funds in the  beginning but my own. The list of successful car company startups is  short. As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't  gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. Starting a car  company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared. Also, a low volume car means a much smaller, simpler factory, albeit  with most things done by hand. Without economies of scale, anything we  built would be expensive, whether it was an economy sedan or a sports  car. While at least some people would be prepared to pay a high price  for a sports car, no one was going to pay $100k for an electric Honda  Civic, no matter how cool it looked. Part of the reason I wrote the first master plan was to defend  against the inevitable attacks Tesla would face accusing us of just  caring about making cars for rich people, implying that we felt there  was a shortage of sports car companies or some other bizarre rationale.  Unfortunately, the blog didn't stop countless attack articles on exactly  these grounds, so it pretty much completely failed that objective. However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a  larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all  this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so  that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That's  what "sustainable" means. It's not some silly, hippy thing -- it matters  for everyone. By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy  economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will  collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that  virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric  and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve  sustainability, the better. Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner: Integrate Energy Generation and Storage
Create a  smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that  just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then  scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one  installation, one service contact, one phone app. 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. That they are separate at all, despite  similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable  energy, is largely an accident of history. Now that Tesla is ready to  scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated  solar, the time has come to bring them together. Expand to Cover the Major Forms of Terrestrial Transport
Today,  Tesla addresses two relatively small segments of premium sedans and  SUVs. With the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup  truck, we plan to address most of the consumer market. A lower cost  vehicle than the Model 3 is unlikely to be necessary, because of the  third part of the plan described below. What really matters to accelerate a sustainable future is being able  to scale up production volume as quickly as possible. That is why Tesla  engineering has transitioned to focus heavily on designing the machine  that makes the machine -- turning the factory itself into a  product. A first principles physics analysis of automotive production  suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable  by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle. The first Model 3  factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0  probably in 2018. In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of  electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density  urban transport. Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla  and should be ready for unveiling next year. 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. With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink  the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet  manager. Traffic congestion would improve due to increased passenger  areal density by eliminating the center aisle and putting seats where  there are currently entryways, and matching acceleration and braking to  other vehicles, thus avoiding the inertial impedance to smooth traffic  flow of traditional heavy buses. It would also take people all the way  to their destination. Fixed summon buttons at existing bus stops would  serve those who don't have a phone. Design accommodates wheelchairs,  strollers and bikes. Autonomy
As the technology matures, all Tesla  vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving with  fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car  could break and your car will still drive itself safely. It is important  to emphasize that refinement and validation of the software will take  much longer than putting in place the cameras, radar, sonar and  computing hardware. 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. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require  something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet  learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per  day. 

It continues here:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

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nice plans on Tesla, good for Elon Musk, someday I hope to see him here in steemit with us 8]