On February 8, Elon. Musk announced that the third chapter of Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 will be launched on March 1 (Tesla Investor Day), which will be a road to "how the earth moves towards fully renewable energy", and the road ahead is bright.
In 2006 and 2016, Musk released the first and second chapters of Tesla's grand plan, proposing the idea of building electric vehicles, providing solar power products, providing energy storage integration solutions, and automatic driving, most of which have now been realized.
The content of the "third chapter of the grand plan", according to industry insiders, will not only include electric vehicles, energy storage, batteries, but will summarize everything Tesla has done in the past few decades, thus becoming Musk's masterpiece.
In fact, over the past year, Musk has been revealing possible details of this plan step by step.
In March last year, Musk announced that he was working on the "third chapter of the grand plan" and revealed that Tesla would try to expand its scale to the "extreme", which is also the need for humans to get rid of fossil fuels.
At the company meeting last June, Musk gave more details about the third chapter, and "scale" further became the keyword.
"The third chapter of Tesla's ambition will focus on 'achieving very large scale' – a very high scale (support) that must be required in order to transform the entire energy infrastructure and transportation infrastructure on Earth." Musk said.
How big is it? Tesla has previously proposed that in the production of electric vehicles, its annual production of electric vehicles should reach about 20 million by 2030, while automakers such as Volkswagen and Toyota currently produce about 10 million vehicles a year.
In terms of battery production, at Tesla's third-quarter 2022 earnings conference, Musk said that Tesla will expand its own battery production capacity to 1,000GWh per year, which is almost twice the global power battery installed capacity of 517.9 GWh in 2022.
Around the theme of "extreme production", in addition to electric vehicles and related battery production innovations, energy storage may also become one of the highlights of the third chapter.
In an earnings call earlier this year, Musk said the three pillars of a sustainable energy future are electric vehicles, solar and wind power, and energy storage. With these three things, it is possible to transition to a fully sustainable state that is many times larger. Musk said, "There is such a path to a fully sustainable future, and Tesla's goal is to move as fast as possible on that path."
In 2022, Tesla's total installed capacity of energy storage for the year will be 6.5GWh, a year-on-year increase of 64%. Tesla also said that Tesla's large-scale energy storage battery Megapack dedicated factory is increasing production to cope with growing market demand and spread green energy to more parts of the world. In Musk's view, Tesla's energy storage business may even surpass the electric vehicle business in the future.
And that's not all. In an article titled "Believe in Technology for a Better Future," published in China Netinfo magazine last August, Musk mentioned not only clean energy production, energy storage and electrified transportation, but also humanoid robots (Tesla Bot), brain-computer interfaces and space exploration.
Therefore, the Not a Tesla App website also speculates that the third chapter will include some AI content: first, developing the best AI-trained supercomputers to solve real-world problems, which will go far beyond the scope of autonomous driving technology; By building millions of Tesla robots, battery manufacturing is no longer a limiting factor in car production to eliminate the need for dangerous, boring, repetitive work (mining).
The reason why people are so excited about the third chapter of the Master Plan is that this magical blueprint seems to have guided Tesla to where it is today.
On August 2, 2006, Musk introduced Tesla's four-step plan in the blog post "The Secret Grandplan of Tesla Cars (Don't Tell Others)":
Step 1: Create a small production model, which is definitely expensive;
Step 2: Use the money earned to develop a model with moderate production volume and relatively low price;
Step 3: Use the money earned to create a mass-produced model with a price that is affordable to the people;
Step 4: Provide solar power products (to the public).
These goals, through the Model S/X concept version; Model 3/Model Y； The "Powerwall" solar product has been realized. Although the legendary "mass-produced, affordable" Model 2 has never met, the current price and sales of Model 3/Model Y are also worthy of such evaluation.
Ten years later, Musk released the second chapter of Tesla's grand plan on July 20, 2016:
Step 1: Create amazingly efficient solar panels with integrated power storage;
Step 2: Expand the EV product line to cover major market segments;
Step 3: Through a large amount of vehicle driving data, develop autonomous driving that is 10 times safer than manual driving;
Step 4: Car sharing to make your car earn you money when not in use.
Correspondingly, the first step echoes the last step of the previous chapter, and is further realized through energy storage products such as Powerwall and megapack, while Cybertruck electric trucks, Semi semi-trailer electric trucks, FSD systems, etc. have also been launched to achieve the second goal.
As for the third of these, developing a self-driving technology that is "10 times safer than manual driving by humans," Tesla is still developing fully self-driving software, but there is no production version yet.
In any case, it makes the outside world full of imagination about the third chapter of the grand plan.
Finally, Musk gave an Easter egg in the invitation to Tesla's investor day.
The background image may seem like nothing at first glance, but upon closer inspection, it shows a wall on the side of the body, which comes from a real photo. According to Autoevolution's analysis, this seems to return to the basics of Tesla's electric vehicle business. Tesla may share details of its Gen-3 car platform, which will lead to a more affordable electric car than the current Model 3.
At the same time, it also aptly reflects Tesla's ambition to expand production to the extreme.