Elon Musk has launched the next stage in his plan for world domination at Tesla Investor Day 2023. Live streaming from the Tesla ‘Gigafactory’ in Austin, Texas, Musk fronted the first Investor Day, designed to reveal phase three of the company’s “Master Plan” which is, legitimately a thing that they have and talk about with a straight face.
Musk was joined on stage by Drew Baglino, Tesla’s Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering where the pair discussed their plan to accelerate the creation of a “sustainable energy future.”
Although investors and shareholders were expecting the announcement of a new Tesla model, Musk spent a lot of time discussing how the global economy needs to shift in its energy and materials sourcing. We did get a few hints towards some new models, including a graphic with some vehicles covered in white sheets, but no official announcement was made.
Tesla’s purpose is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy
Today, we’re unveiling Master Plan 3—the path to a fully renewable energy future for 🌎 pic.twitter.com/fsJ7qDpdqF
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 1, 2023
“Our economy is dirty and wasteful,” read one slide. Telsa stated that 80% of global energy comes from fossil fuels, but only a third of that is converted into actual useful energy. The sustainable future Tesla is driving towards will only require half of the energy that the current one does.
“There is a clear path for a sustainable-energy Earth with abundance,” Musk said.
“Most of the smart people I know don’t see this clear path.”
Musk said that it would take just USD $10 trillion to achieve this sustainable energy economic future. With that, Tesla said that the world will need to create 240 terraWatt hours of battery storage and 30 TWH of renewable power generation. Doing so would only require “0.2%” of the land on Earth for wind and solar power generation, something Musk said was not a big ask and far less than the current land usage of farming.
Tesla’s vision of the future is for all forms of transport, even rockets, to become fully electric and autonomous, something that they have said they will support with the sustainable powering of planes, boats, and other aspects of international shipping.
Much of the presentation felt a lot like some kind of PhD thesis presentation. Lots of talk about mining, fossil fuel use, and the fact that Earth is a “muddy rust ball,” but not a massive amount of detail about what exactly Tesla is going to be doing next.
A string of Tesla execs and specialists took to the stage to discuss pretty in-depth technical details about manufacturing processes. One of the more interesting sections was led by Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s Senior Director of Charging and the only woman to speak in the presentation.
Tinucci said that the costs of installing Tesla chargers is roughly 75% less than the market standard owing to the fact that they manufacture all of their own charging equiptment and are now making their Superchargers virtually plug-and-play by assembling them in-house. Scaling charing is a big challenge of EV uptake and Tesla noted that they will soon be making their chargers available to be used by other manufaturers.
One of the weirder moments was where Musk gave us an update on Optimus, his own fleet of humanoid robots he has been creating. Last time we saw them, they weren’t looking too flash, but now they appear to be able to manufatcure new versions of themseleves according to a video that was shown. Musk theorised about what an economy, and a planet, would look like if there was infinite cheap labour input from robots.
While it was all very falshy and exciting (kind of), Musk didn’t seem as engaged as you might expect. While investors have been concerned that his takeover of Twitter has distracted him from Tesla, Musk decided to go off and tweet about unrelated topics whole he was off stage at the Tesla Investor Day presentaiton.
It’s not a great look and one that may have contributed to the drop in share price that Telsa experienced during the presentation.
Well bring you more as this story unfolds…
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