Yesterday was Tesla Investor Day and the very long presentation was not exactly an exciting show, to say the least. They simply went through all parts of Tesla’s process and talked about what they have done so far and what they plan to do going forward.
A lot of the presentation focused on how they manufacture cars. It may seem boring, but the point is that if they do it right, it will result in a much cheaper car in the end. They often talked about the next generation of cars but unfortunately didn’t reveal much.
As you can see in the picture above, they plan to unveil two new models. One of these is a minibus-like vehicle that, along with the Cybertruck, they expect to sell as well as Model 3 and Y combined. To the far right, we have the upcoming cheaper car that they expect to sell twice as much as Model 3 and Y combined.
We can conclude that the new model will be cheaper than Model 3, the question is just by how much. Tesla seems to have streamlined everything so there is hope.
As an example of many, they mentioned the new drivetrain which costs $1000 less to manufacture, and the factory is half the size of the previous drivetrain factory. Overall, they expect the manufacturing cost of the car to be half, which is incredibly significant.
Elon took the opportunity to diss the other manufacturers a bit, saying they are doing the same thing Ford did with the Model T. They also talked a lot about how they do everything in-house. Competitors have a supplier for most of the car’s parts, and that supplier has several other suppliers, making it impossible to get them all to work together quickly and efficiently.
One interesting thing is that they will be switching from 12V to 48V in upcoming cars.
The world will become electric
A large part of the presentation was about how we can have a better future if we stop using fossil fuels. Elon and Tesla believe in solar and wind power in combination with batteries to store the energy until the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. To get enough solar and wind power, we will need to use less than 0.2% of the total land area in the world. This should be compared to agriculture, which uses 12.5% of the land area. From a manufacturing standpoint, there should be no problem solving the battery issue. We have the raw materials, and it will be cheaper than continuing to invest in fossil fuels. In a Tesla future, they claim that we will need less energy overall and that we will need to dig up fewer things in the mines.
Elon believes that by 2050, we can live sustainably 100%.
Optimus could become as big a business as the cars
They ended by talking about their humanoid robot, Optimus. Elon said that it is the part of Tesla that people outside of Tesla seem to care about the least, but he believes that in the future, that part will be bigger and more profitable than the car business. He also expects that at some point in the future, we will have as many robots like Optimus as we have humans on Earth.
