Working on Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2. Hoping to publish later this week.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2016
If Part 2 is coming this week, that begs obvious questions: What about Part 1? When did that happen? And what did it say?
Almost ten years ago, on August 2, 2006, Elon Musk published “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)” on the Tesla blog. What’s most interesting are the last six lines of the post — quoted below:
“So, in short, the master plan is:
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
Don’t tell anyone.”
So, looking at the first “secret” plan, Musk and Tesla Motors have completed or made significant progress with all parts of the plan — well, except the “Don’t tell anyone” part.
The Tesla Roadster was the sports car. The Model S is the company’s first “affordable” car. The Model 3 is the “even more affordable car.” The Tesla Powerwall along with the firm’s prospective purchase of SolarCity shows how the company intends to generate, store, and distribute zero emission electric power to Tesla’s zero emission electric-powered cars.
Some might argue Elon Musk and Tesla should get the Model 3 on the road and get the energy-generation piece fully in place before announcing new ideas, but that misses the point of 10-year-forward plans. At this point, the Model 3 and the bits and pieces (all of which exist) of the energy-generation option are sufficiently on their respective paths to completion, in their Tim Gunn “Make it work!” phases, that it’s high time for the visionary to look further.
And apparently, that’s what’s been going on. Unless Musk likes to throw out a short deadline to do a last-minute rush to get the paper in — you remember, like in college — odds are pretty high that he’s about to do a big reveal of the next Top Secret Master Plan, which might be good for another ten years.
What will be in the next Master Plan? Well, we don’t know, but we can offer some easy guesses, along with some long shots. Chances are pretty high we’ll hear about Tesla electric urban rideshare cars, light trucks, motorcycles, a new roadster, maybe a Formula E car (in a friendly take that message to Faraday Future), and possibly a “real” SUV (like one you would feel OK going off-road in). But all of those are easy sauce.
A bigger challenge would be a carbon-fuel-free solution for long-haul freighters that doesn’t involve pantographs — overhead wires — or buried power lines. No one else is close to figuring that one out.
It would also be interesting to learn of a tie-in with SpaceX and Tesla Motors — that one’s harder to imagine, but that’s what Musk seems to enjoy, doing what others can’t imagine.
So we’ll be waiting for the Secret Master Plan, part 2, when it drops, hopefully later this week. Chances are we’ll first hear about it on Twitter.
