Tesla CEO Elon Musk was front and center for his company’s most recent Investor Day event and he provided some limited glimpses of where Tesla is heading and what the future of electric transportation holds.
Musk laid out his company’s latest “Master Plan,” which includes a new gigafactory in Monterrey, Mexico where Tesla’s next-generation of vehicles will be produced. Tesla said the plant could help raise production across all of the company’s facilities to a combined 3.5 million vehicles per year. The Mexico plant will be built to handle production for Tesla’s upcoming lower-cost model.
Just how low will the costs get for the next generation of Teslas? The company said it plans to cut prices in half with the help of new manufacturing techniques. That means, as the Associated Press points out, a brand new Tesla could start out around $25,000 in the future.
To support a future full of electric vehicles, Musk envisioned the road toward full sustainable energy on Earth by 2050.
"You could support a civilization much bigger than Earth…and I'm just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this,” Musk said, according to Engadget.
That sustainable energy future will require 240 terraWatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable power generation, which Musk said will require a roughly $10 trillion investment. But even with all that capacity, he said the plan would require only 0.2 percent of the world’s land area to accommodate the necessary solar and wind power infrastructure.
Musk seemed confident that all cars will fully go electric and autonomous and predicted that internal combustion engine vehicles “will soon be viewed in the same disdain as the horse and buggy.” He said aircraft and ships will also likely go fully electric at some point, but rockets will be the one exception that continues to rely on burning fuel.
