With the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck, we plan to address most of the consumer market. Today, Tesla addresses two relatively small segments of premium sedans and SUVs. 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.Įxpand to Cover the Major Forms of Terrestrial Transport That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history. We can't do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app. Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner:Ĭreate 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. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.
It's not some silly, hippy thing - it matters for everyone.īy definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. Unfortunately, the blog didn't stop countless attack articles on exactly these grounds, so it pretty much completely failed that objective. Part of the reason I wrote the first master plan was to defend against the inevitable attacks Tesla would face accusing us of just caring about making cars for rich people, implying that we felt there was a shortage of sports car companies or some other bizarre rationale.
While at least some people would be prepared to pay a high price for a sports car, no one was going to pay $100k for an electric Honda Civic, no matter how cool it looked. Without economies of scale, anything we built would be expensive, whether it was an economy sedan or a sports car. Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.Īlso, a low volume car means a much smaller, simpler factory, albeit with most things done by hand.
As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. The list of successful car company startups is short. I thought our chances of success were so low that I didn't want to risk anyone's funds in the beginning but my own. The reason we had to start off with step 1 was that it was all I could afford to do with what I made from PayPal. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.
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