Elon Musk will present his third “Master Plan” during Tesla’s Investor Day event on March 1st, the CEO announced on Twitter last night. The plan will outline “the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth,” he said, adding that “the future is bright!”
Musk has been teasing the third iteration of Tesla’s strategic vision for nearly a year. Unlike the first “Master Plan” and the cheekily titled “Master Plan, Part Deux,” this version will include updates regarding Musk’s other two companies, SpaceX and The Boring Company, he said in a March 2022 tweet.
“Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI,” Musk wrote. “But I will also Include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.”
Tesla has already said that it would reveal concrete details about its next-generation vehicle platform during its Investor Day event. The company is working on a refreshed version of the Tesla Model 3 as well as a robotaxi designed to be a shared vehicle.
The first “Master Plan”
The first plan was publicized on August 2nd, 2006, in a blog post titled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me).” At the time, Tesla only had one model for sale: the Tesla Roadster. But the company’s “long term plan” was to introduce a range of electric vehicles, including “affordably priced family cars.” The first plan was a detailed look at how Tesla would move from a niche maker of electric sports cars to a mainstream automaker.
In essence, the plan was a simplistic look at the strategy that Tesla executed over the next decade: build a sports car (the Roadster); use that money to build a more affordable car (the Model S); use that money to build an even more affordable car (the Model 3 and Model Y); and provide electric power generation options (home batteries, solar panels, etc.).
Part Deux
Ten years later, on July 20th, 2016, Musk released the second plan, which focused on selling integrated energy generation and storage and an expansion into other forms of ground transportation, like trucks and buses as well as autonomous driving technology. It also touched on Tesla’s plan to allow owners of its cars to share their vehicles with others in order to have the car make money when it isn’t in use — a goal that the company has yet to achieve.
Part Deux is also where we got our first hints of the Cybertruck — a “new kind of pickup truck” — as well as “heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport.” But while Tesla has delivered on its promise of an electric semi truck, it has yet to make any headway on an urban transport vehicle.
Musk’s The Boring Company once positioned itself as a futuristic transit system but has since scrapped those plans in favor of the current “Teslas in Tunnels” service it operates in only one city.
What’s in part three?
Robotaxis and the next-gen platform will for sure get more fleshed out during Musk’s presentation. Given his focus on scaling Tesla’s operations to extreme size, we should expect some mention of the long-promised $25,000 EV. And some mention of the company’s controversial Full Self-Driving system and how it will plan into Musk’s stilted vision of an autonomous future is all but guaranteed.
