Elon Musk Outlines His Vision of Tesla’s Future at the Company’s Investor Day 2023

Tesla’s production capabilities are in store for significant growth, CEO Elon Musk told the crowd gathered at the company’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, for Investor Day 2023, and AI will apparently be the magic wand that it will take you there. It’s all part of what Musk calls Master Plan part 3.

In fact, this is Musk’s third such master plan, 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 neophyte start-up to the world’s leading EV automaker. “There is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth by 2050 and it does not require destroying natural habitats,” Musk said during the keynote address.

“You could support a civilization much larger than Earth [currently does]. Far more than the 8 billion humans could be sustained sustainably on Earth and I am often shocked and amazed at how few people realize this,” he continued. He promised the company would publish a “detailed white paper with calculations and assumptions, ” via Twitter during the event.

The Master Plan aims to establish a sustainable energy economy by developing 240 terrawatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable energy generation, which would require an estimated investment of $10 trillion, roughly 10 percent of world GDP. However, Musk points out that that figure is less than half of what we currently spend on internal combustion economy. In all, he anticipates that we would need less than 0.2 percent of the world’s land area to create the necessary wind and solar generating capacity.

“All cars will be fully electric and self-driving,” Musk declared, arguing once again that ICE vehicles will soon be viewed with the same disdain as the horse and buggy. He also scoffed at possible plans to electrify planes and ships. “As we improve the power density of batteries, you will see all transportation become fully electric, with the exception of rockets,” he said. No further details were shared about when or how this might be achieved.

“A sustainable energy economy is within reach and we must accelerate it,” added Drew Baglino, Tesla’s senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy Engineering.

Following Musk’s opening statement, Tesla executives Lars Moravy and Franz von Holzhausen took the stage to discuss the company’s “production hell” and the challenges of building the Cybertruck out of stainless steel. However, the lessons learned from that, Moravy argued, will help Tesla build its Gen 3 vehicles more efficiently, and to do so within a much smaller factory footprint. von Holzhausen announced to loud applause that the Cybertruck would arrive later this year, a date significantly closer than Musk’s earlier public estimate that production wouldn’t begin until next year.

Unfortunately, there will be no new vehicle presentation at this event, von Holzhausen said. That announcement will occur “at a later date.”

The company showed off a new video showing the Tesla robot walking independently and without the help of a support frame, though there was no live demo of it. Despite the difficulties in finding suitable off-the-shelf actuators and motors for the humanoid robot platform, “we should be bringing real products to market at a scale that is usable much faster than anyone else,” Musk said.

Furthermore, he hopes that the company’s robots will be so successful that we may soon see a day when they outnumber humans. “I think we could overcome a one-to-one ratio of robots to humans,” she added. “It’s not even clear what an economy means at that point.”

Developing…