Last week Elon Musk tweeted that he would come out with an updated "Tesla Master Plan", but after being a bit busy with overseeing the successful Falcon 9 launch and land in Cape Canaveral on Sunday, the reveal were pushed to this week.
Although three days late, it´s still a improvement measured in Elon time.
Four main points in the new master plan:
Tesla is sticking to it´s overarching goal of a sustainable energy economy and part two of the master plan should be seen as their plans going forward the next 10 years, and how we can achieve a sustainable energy economy sooner.
Integrate energy generation and storage:
Tesla wants to create an integrated solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, so individuals can be their own utility. Individuals around the world are already doing this today by putting up solar panels, batteries and buying electric cars, but the process to make it fit together may seem a bit daunting to many. Tesla envisions that it can delivery it with one installation, one service contact and one phone app.
"We can´t do this well if Tesla and Solar City are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barrier inherent to being separate companies"
Address most of the automotive market:
Today Tesla adresses a relatively small segment of the automotive market with it´s premium sedan and SUV. But with the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck, they will cover most of the consumer market.
In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of vehicles Tesla wants to build to address the whole automotive market: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport.
To get to a sustainable future, Elon emphasize that they need 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."
Autonomy
Full autonomy has been on Tesla´s plan for a while, but in the new master plan, Elon elaborates that they aim for fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car could break and your car will still drive itself safely.
Tesla expects that worldwide regulatory approval of autonomy will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). With it´s current fleet learning at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.
Sharing
Musk confirmed that once Telsa achieves full autonomy and it gets approved by regulators, Tesla owners would be able to loan their car to a 'shared autonomous fleet', and make money while not using it.
"You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost"
You can read the entire "Master Plan part 2" post here.