CEO Elon Musk unveiled a new "master plan" for Tesla Motors that includes fully autonomous cars, the ability to essentially rent your car to others when you're not using it, and Tesla pickups, buses, and semi trucks.
The plan Musk laid out Wednesday, his second in the young company's history, also leans heavily on his bid to buy SolarCity, the solar panel installation firm. The two companies together, along with Telsa's Powerwall home batteries designed to store power from solar panels, could "create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar roof with battery product that just works," Musk wrote on Tesla's website.
Musk has tweeted about the master plan for days, writing at one point that he was going to pull an all-nighter to finish it. The plan's release comes as Tesla is wrestling with several high-profile challenges, most notably two government investigations of a fatality involving its partial self-driving feature Autopilot.
Consumer Reports has called on Tesla to reprogram the Autosteer feature of Autopilot so that it requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel, and to change the name of Autopilot to reflect the fact that it doesn't actually drive the car on its own.
The electric carmaker also has not yet shown that it can build cars at high volume, a challenge it faces to fulfill roughly 400,000 orders for its Model 3. The upcoming small sedan is the most affordable car the company would have at about $35,000. (The company's flagship Model S sedan starts at $66,000, but versions climb well above $100,000.) Production is scheduled to start in late 2017.
Tesla's new master plan, which did not include a timetable, includes four key pieces:
Acquire SolarCity. The combination would create "one order experience, one installation, one service contract, and one phone app," Musk wrote. So people could have solar panels that charge their Tesla Powerwall home batteries and also their Tesla cars. The two companies already know each other well. Musk is the biggest shareholder in both, and his cousin is CEO of SolarCity.
Musk also disclosed that the company is "ready to scale" the Powerwall battery, which it announced last year but on its website still only allows people to reserve one.
Add more vehicle segments. Musk wants to build a compact SUV and "new kind of pickup truck." He also aims to go beyond the consumer market, producing semi trucks and buses.
"Both are in early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year," Musk wrote. "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."
He envisions the buses, which he called "high passenger-density urban transport," as being autonomous, with drivers becoming fleet managers.
Musk also hinted at what he may view as a solution to Tesla's production hurdles, saying the company's "engineering has transitioned to focus heavily on designing the machine that makes the machine—turning the factory itself into a product."
Produce vehicles able to operate autonomously. "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 safety," Musk wrote.
He envisions a time "you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read, or do anything else enroute to your destination." But Musk acknowledges that refining the software to accomplish this will take longer than installing the hardware, and that regulatory approval will take "significant" time.
Musk wrote that Tesla rolled out partial autonomy, or Autopilot now, because "when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves," and he added 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."
Make money from your Tesla. Musk wrote that drivers one day could use add their cars to a Tesla shared fleet by using the company's app. So, for instance, others could pay you to drive your car while you were at work.