\n<\/p>\n
Elon Musk still makes some of America\u2019s best electric cars. Earlier this summer, I rented a brand-new, updated Tesla Model Y, the first refresh to the electric SUV since it debuted, in 2020. Compared with even just two years ago, when the Model Y became the world\u2019s best-selling car, many companies make great EVs now. Some of them have the Model Y beat in certain areas, but for the price, the Tesla is still the total package.<\/p>\n
Now, imagine how good Teslas could be if Musk apparently wasn\u2019t so bored with making them. With the exception of the struggling Cybertruck, Tesla hasn\u2019t 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 \u201cis the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company,\u201d he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. \u201cPeople will be talking about this moment in a hundred years.\u201d All the while, Tesla has continued to make almost all of its money from selling cars.<\/p>\n
But now it\u2019s clearer than ever that Tesla\u2019s future is not in selling cars. The company\u2019s latest \u201cMaster Plan IV,\u201d 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 \u201csustainable abundance.\u201d To the extent that cars are mentioned at all, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This new master plan\u2014released on Musk\u2019s platform, X, naturally\u2014might be easy to ignore. The roughly 1,000-word document is exceedingly vague and includes language like this: \u201cThe hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine.\u201d Even Musk conceded on X that the plan needs \u201cmore specifics.\u201d But Tesla has released only three previous master plans since its founding in 2003, and generally, they have paved the way for Tesla\u2019s 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\u2019s competition still follows the same road map. Then, in 2016, \u201cMaster Plan, Part Deux\u201d stressed a deeper vision for more electric cars, including a future SUV that became the Model Y and \u201ca new kind of pickup truck.\u201d What that one was is pretty obvious today.<\/p>\n
If this week\u2019s 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\u2019s board unveiled a new potential pay package for its CEO, promising him as much as $1 trillion\u2014yes, trillion<\/em>\u2014if he meets certain targets, including deploying millions of robots and robotaxis in the next decade. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Granted, Musk is onto something here. Many in the auto industry believe that technologies such as electric power and autonomous driving will converge over time, which is why they\u2019re bullish on EVs in the long term. But Musk\u2019s view of that timeline is likely overly ambitious. Nobody\u2019s making any \u201cpassive income\u201d from a self-driving Tesla, as Musk said they would by 2020. Even its driverless \u201crobotaxi\u201d service is up and running in only Austin and San Francisco. Tesla is far behind Waymo, the driverless-taxi service owned by Google\u2019s parent company that is picking up riders in five cities, and is quickly spreading to many more. Meanwhile, Tesla\u2019s humanoid \u201cOptimus\u201d robot is unproven, and the project has reportedly struggled with delays and leadership turnover.<\/p>\n But by betting everything on AI, Tesla is sacrificing the very thing that the company knows how to make so well: cars. Autonomy has already<\/em> come at the expense of new EVs. Last year, Musk reiterated that he feels it would be \u201cpointless\u201d to make a $25,000 car unless it was fully autonomous. Tesla could be financing its self-driving-technology dreams by making that affordable EV or a more conventional pickup truck, but Musk seems to see that as some kind of distraction. If his master plan doesn\u2019t pan out, there won\u2019t be much left of Tesla. The company\u2019s sales have collapsed across the world, in part because of Musk\u2019s politics and in part because Tesla is getting hammered by EV newcomers from China. The master plan doesn\u2019t outline any way forward.<\/p>\n Musk has learned the hard way that making cars is a brutal business. The costs are high, and the profit margins are slim. Fighting over market share with Volkswagen and Ford isn\u2019t an expedient way to colonize Mars. But Tesla\u2019s retreat from the electric-car business is everyone\u2019s loss. Tesla is a big reason that so many automakers have frantically begun to make EVs in the past few years. It showed the rest of the industry that if you build high-tech electric cars and they\u2019re actually good, people will buy them. Under Donald Trump, as incentives to make and sell EVs are vanishing, plenty of automakers in America are already walking back their once-ambitious electric plans. If the biggest seller of EVs continues to move away from what it helped create, Americans will end up with cars that continue to pollute. That certainly doesn\u2019t get us to a world of \u201csustainable abundance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elon Musk still makes some of America\u2019s best electric cars. Earlier this summer, I rented a brand-new, updated Tesla Model Y, the first refresh to the electric SUV since it debuted, in 2020. 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