NEW YORK – With the exception of the struggling Cybertruck, Tesla hasn’t released an entirely new electric car in five years. Musk has indicated that he wants Tesla to primarily focus on building robotaxis and robots. Autonomous-vehicle technology “is the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.
“People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years.” All the while, Tesla has continued to make almost all of its money from selling cars, Forbes reports.
But now it’s clearer than ever that Tesla’s future is not in selling cars. The company’s latest “Master Plan IV,” which was released earlier this week, makes no mention of any new electric cars in the works.
It is instead a technocratic fever dream, predicting a future in which humanoid robots made by Tesla free us from mundane tasks and create a utopia of “sustainable abundance.” To the extent that cars are mentioned at all, it’s in the context of robotaxis, or the batteries that power them. In other words, Tesla, the biggest EV company in the country, wants out of the car business.
This new master plan—released on Musk’s platform, X, naturally—might be easy to ignore. The roughly 1,000-word document is exceedingly vague and includes language like this: “The hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine.” Even Musk conceded on X that the plan needs “more specifics.”
But Tesla has released only three previous master plans since its founding in 2003, and generally, they have paved the way for Tesla’s future. The first one, published in 2006, laid out the path that Tesla would end up taking with its EVs: Start with an expensive electric car, then use the profits from that to branch out into more affordable ones. Nearly all of Tesla’s competition still follows the same road map. Then, in 2016, “Master Plan, Part Deux” stressed a deeper vision for more electric cars, including a future SUV that became the Model Y and “a new kind of pickup truck.” What that one was is pretty obvious today.
If this week’s master plan reflects a company that is dead set on moving beyond cars, the divergence started back around the time of that second report.
Even in 2016, Musk envisioned a future in which fully autonomous cars generated passive income for people while they worked or slept. The third master plan, released in 2023, is a 41-page white paper about the future of sustainable energy and how it could power fleets of autonomous vehicles. But the latest version is far more focused on AI than its predecessors were.
Even just the visuals are telling: In one image in the master plan, a family plays Jenga on their coffee table while a Tesla robot waters the plants behind them. Right now, Musk has more of a reason than ever to go all in on robots: Today, Tesla’s board unveiled a new potential pay package for its CEO, promising him as much as $1 trillion—yes, trillion—if he meets certain targets, including deploying millions of robots and robotaxis in the next decade.
(Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)
Read more at Forbes
