I’m going through and dissecting Elon Musk’s second “Master Plan” this morning. 

I love how he drops earth-shattering news in such a casual and honest way. Two days ago he tweeted that he was planning to pull an all-nighter to complete the “master product plan.” And then yesterday, he outlined his vision in a simple – and at times personal – blog post for how Tesla is going to change the world. It all feels very genuine.

Will be working at Tesla on Autopilot & Model 3 today, then aiming to pull an all-nighter and complete the master product plan

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2016

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There are so many interesting snippets from the master plan, that I’m simply going to quote them all here. There’s lots to think about and discuss.

A reminder of the broader vision:

The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That’s what “sustainable” means. It’s not some silly, hippy thing – it matters for everyone.

By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

The solar roof and other electric vehicles that Tesla has in the pipeline:

Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.

In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport. Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year.

Thoughts on self-driving vehicles:

Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.

The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.

Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed.

Why an even lower cost vehicle (compared to the Model 3) may never be necessary:

You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

And finally, Uber has a new competitor (that, to me, is a good thing):

In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are.

I’ll provide my thoughts on all of the above in a subsequent post. I’m out of writing time for today.