Tesla’s manufacturing capabilities are about to get a big boost, CEO Elon Musk told a crowd gathered at the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas for Investor Day 2023, and apparently artificial intelligence will be the magic bullet that gets them there. This is all part of what Musk calls Master Plan part 3.
This is indeed Musk’s third Master Plan, with the first two coming in 2006 and 2016, respectively.
These have served as a roadmap for the company’s growth and development over the past 17 years, as Tesla has grown from a fledgling startup to the world’s leading electric car manufacturer. “There is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth by 2050 and it does not require the destruction of natural habitats,” Musk said during his keynote address. “You could support a civilization much larger than Earth is today.
A lot more than 8 billion people could actually support themselves on Earth and I’m just often shocked and amazed at how few people realize that,” he continued. He promised the company would release a “detailed whitepaper with calculations and assumptions” via Twitter during the event.
The Master Plan aims to create a sustainable energy economy by developing 240 terraWatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable energy generation, which would require an investment of around $10 trillion, or around 10% of global GDP. Musk notes, however, that this amount is less than half of what we spend today on the internal combustion economy.
Overall, it predicts that we would need less than 0.2% of the world’s land area to create the necessary solar and wind generating capacity.
All cars will be fully electric and autonomous,” Musk said, once again arguing that internal combustion vehicles will soon be treated with the same disdain as horses and carriages. He also announced possible plans to electrify aircraft and ships. “As we improve the energy density of batteries, you will see all transportation become fully electric, with the exception of rockets,” he said. No further details were announced as to when or how this might be achieved.
A sustainable energy economy is possible and we must accelerate it,” added Drew Baglino, SVP Powertrain and Energy Engineering at Tesla. After Musk’s opening statement, Tesla executives Lars Moravy and Franz von Holzhausen took the stage to discuss production difficulties and the challenges of making the Cybertruck out of stainless steel.
However, the lessons learned from it, Moravy argued, will help Tesla build Gen 3 vehicles more efficiently, and in a much smaller factory space. von Holzhausen announced to rapturous applause that the Cybertruck would be released later this year, a significantly closer date than Musk’s previous public estimate that production would not begin until next year. Unfortunately, there will be no new vehicle unveiling at this event, von Holzhausen said.
That announcement will be made “at a later date.” The company showed a new video of the Tesla robot walking autonomously and without the help of a support frame, although there was no live demonstration of the robot. Despite the difficulties in finding the right equipment for the humanoid robot platform, “we’re going to have to actually bring and produce to market at a scale that’s useful much faster than anyone else,” Musk said.
Furthermore, he expects the company’s robots to become so successful that we may soon see them one day outnumbering humans.
I think we might surpass the one-to-one ratio of robots to humans,” he added.
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