Tesla’s new company roadmap includes building a Semi truck and pickup truck, integrating even further than they already have with SolarCity, and encouraging the wide-scale use of autonomous cars.
CEO Elon Musk wrote in yesterday’s blog post that Tesla hopes to address “most of the consumer market” in the future instead of “two relatively small segments of premium sedans and SUVs.” A “new kind of pickup truck” is also in the works, although it hasn’t been detailed. The electric Semi program is in the hands of former Daimler executive and Tesla Model S program manager Jerome Guillen:
In order to produce these new vehicles, as well to as scale up production on the Model 3 and other vehicles, Tesla will need to change the way it builds its factories as well.
“Tesla engineering has transitioned to focus heavily on designing the machine that makes the machine – turning the factory itself into a product,” Musk wrote. “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.”
The step after that is to produce autonomous, electric trucks and high-capacity public transportation. Bus drivers will become “fleet managers,” monitoring as buses respond to Summon buttons.
Musk also used the ‘master plan’ post to address concerns about the safety of autonomous cars, noting that they are intended to be “highly refined and far better than the average human driver.” While Consumer Reports says that Autopilot is a misnomer, Musk said that “It would no more make sense to disable Tesla’s Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named.”
Autopilot is still technically in beta, with the system learning more and more about the road as it operates under real-world conditions. “Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the U.S. vehicle average, the beta label will be removed,” Musk wrote.
The post also addresses the partnership between Tesla’s Powerwall energy storage and SolarCity. Conversation about combining Tesla and SolarCity has been ongoing.
Tesla’s original “secret” master plan, written in 2006, created a roadmap for the company from the low volume Roadster to “zero emission electric power generation options.”
