Musk announces second master plan outlining four major objectives

22 Jul 2016

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Tesla chief, Elon Musk has announced his second Master Plan, which does not contain anything about world domination, but outlines four major ambitions for the company in the years ahead.

Under the plan, the company would focus on 1) solar power, 2) a ten-fold improvement to self-driving car software, 3) the creation of self-driving trucks and buses, and 4) making it possible for self-driving cars to make money for their owners by operating as taxis when not in use.

Starting with solar power, Tesla had made an offer for SolarCity, a firm of which Musk is chairman, with the idea of offering quick and easy roof deployments of solar panels that were simple to manage.

''[We will] 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,'' Musk wrote.

This would dovetail neatly with Tesla's plans around battery storage, as Musk explained, ''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,'' he said. Powerwall is Tesla's home battery storage system.

The second major development was to move Tesla self-driving car development into two major new areas - trucks and buses.

According to Musk, in the near future all Tesla cars would be self-driving. This was good for safety Musk predicts and one day, autonomous vehicles would be at least 10 times safer than human drivers.

Meanwhile, Dan Schroeder writing in Mashable, cited Robert Kiyosaki author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad as saying in the book that if one's car was not earning money through a business, it was a liability not an asset.

Schroeder writes that the idea was still hard to grasp for many but with services such Uber and Lyft, this had started change for some. He said, if Musk's predictions were correct, in a little over five years it would change for everyone.

According to Musk, "true self-driving" would get worldwide regulatory approval after autonomous vehicles drove around 6 billion miles, which, at current fleet learning levels of 3 million miles per day, should happen in about 5.5 years.

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