Almost four hours At Tesla’s marathon investor day, someone in the audience once again tried to bring Tesla (and Twitter and SpaceX) CEO Elon Musk back to the present day. From a stage at the Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, Musk announced an ambitious “Master Plan 3” to save the world. For $10 trillion in manufacturing investment, Musk said, the world could move wholesale to a renewable electricity grid, powering electric cars, planes and ships.
“The Earth can and will evolve toward a sustainable energy economy, and it will in your lifetime,” Musk proclaimed. More details will be revealed in an upcoming white paper, he said. But the presentation lacked details on the part of the electric transition that is in Tesla’s gift: the next-generation vehicle it has been teasing for years, promising something more affordable, more effective and more efficiently built than everything that currently exists. its current range. The vehicle, or group of vehicles, will be crucial to reaching Tesla’s goal of selling 20 million vehicles in 2030; it has sold 1.3 million in 2022.
An investor asked the company’s managers: what would this vehicle be? Musk declined to share. “We would take the lead if we answered your question,” he said, explaining that the company would hold a separate event to roll out the mystery vehicle somewhere later. The slides shown during the presentation simply showed images of car-like shapes under gray sheets.
Instead, 17 company executives shared some information about the vehicle during a series of presentations focused on everything from design to supply chains to manufacturing to environmental impacts and legal affairs .
The next-generation vehicle won’t just be a car, but an approach to building vehicles focused on “affordability and desirability,” said Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of automotive engineering. It will be built at a new factory near Monterrey, Mexico, which was announced at the event on Wednesday and will be Tesla’s sixth battery and electric vehicle factory. Executives said the next-generation vehicle would have a 40 percent smaller manufacturing footprint and reduce production costs by 50 percent.
Wall Street seems to be expecting a little more detail. As of Thursday morning, the company’s stock price was down 5 percent.
“The highly anticipated theme of Master Plan 3 left me with more questions than answers,” Gene Munster, managing partner of Deepwater Asset Management, said in a note to investors.
