Elon Musk redefines cars of the future
Tesla might have hit a few roadblocks, but that’s just a bump for the billionaire and entrepreneur
Tesla might have hit a few roadblocks, but that’s just a bump for the billionaire and entrepreneur who wants to popularise solar power |
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors, sat in a glass-walled conference room here last week in the company’s auto factory. Around him, workers and robots were building the $70,000 (Dh257,120) luxury vehicles that have redefined how people think about electric cars.
But autos are just one of Musk’s many projects. A South African-born billionaire and entrepreneur, he is the top investor in the country’s largest provider of rooftop solar power, runs a private rocket company, and in a blog post on Wednesday pledged to create a ride-sharing car service and battery-powered trucks and buses.
And then there is his plan for the world’s largest battery factory. Based in Nevada, the Gigafactory is to be unveiled this week.
“What’s going to be really crazy about the Gigafactory is not just that it’s giant,” Musk said. “You can’t change the world with tiny factories that move slowly,” he said. “We need big factories with high-velocity output.”
Scale and speed are watchwords for Musk and his savethe-world view of business, which addresses some of the biggest pressure points in climate change. Musk wants to create an alternative to fossil fuels by popularising solar power Elon Musk | and by using batteries to store energy from the sun and wind to power homes, cars and businesses at any time of day and in any season.
But while his clean-energy empire is viewed as visionary — even urgently necessary — by scientists worried about climate change, it has hit a major speed bump.
Autopilot failure
In late June, federal safety officials opened an investigation into the death of Joshua Brown, who was killed when his Tesla Model S smashed into a tractortrailer that had turned across its path.
It was the first known fatality of someone operating Tesla’s Autopilot system, a technology meant to prevent such disasters by controlling both steering and braking. Tesla acknowledges that neither the car nor Brown engaged the brakes, and it says that the Autopilot system failed to see the white trailer against a bright Florida sky.
Critics say Tesla was premature in putting the collisionavoidance system on the market in October — technology that Musk hailed soon after as “probably better than a person right now.”
And they say Tesla sent a dangerous message by calling it Autopilot, suggesting that the system could operate the car by itself, even though it requires drivers to stay completely engaged in case something goes wrong.
“Tesla shouldn’t make guinea pigs of its buyers,” said Joan Claybrook, a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In essence, critics say, a company bent on speed needs to understand when to slow down. But Musk said a regret of his was not having introduced Autopilot even sooner.
With a view of the Tesla factory floor, and searching an invisible horizon as he collected his thoughts, he said Brown’s death was “very sad.” Still, the technology enhances safety, he insisted, and one death in what the company counts as 140 million miles driven using Bill McKibben | Autopilot does not undermine that idea.
“The easy decision would be to, or easier, I suppose, from the standpoint of minimising attacks and criticism, would be to delay it and try to wait for some point where it’s theoretically better,” Musk said of Autopilot. “But if you wait for any point past the point that it’s better than the cars that exist, you’re making a decision to kill people with statistics.”
But many on Wall Street say it matters little whether Tesla changes the world if it also keeps losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Electric utility companies also view Musk warily, filing regulatory challenges to his bid to revolutionise the way energy is generated, transported, stored and paid for.
SolarCity
In June, Tesla announced a bid to take over SolarCity, which is valued at roughly $2.6 billion. Musk, the SolarCity chairman, described the acquisition as a way to complete his vision of a single company capable of providing solar power, electric cars and battery storage.
Although many in the financial community dismiss the merger proposal as mainly a way for Musk to have Tesla shareholders protect his investment in SolarCity, environmentalists say the consolidation plan makes a lot of sense.
Musk devotees say his great talent is taking green-energy ideas, which others have long discussed in theory, and turning them into realities.
“He makes a reasonable bid to be the Henry Ford of this era,” said Bill McKibben, the environmental activist and author. “He’s trying to kick off the mass market for renewable energy.”
Musk says there is no time to spare. “It’s the most serious thing that humanity faces,” he said of climate change. “It’s the biggest problem in the world.”
“The faster we can transition to low carbon, maybe, ultimately, to a negative carbon economy, the better.”
In high-desert heat outside Reno, Nevada, last week, J.B. Straubel looked out at a vast dirt patch, a construction site that had just broken ground.
“This will be building batteries in 12 months,” said Straubel, Tesla’s chief technology officer and a co-founder of the company with Musk.
Behind Straubel was another part of the factory, already built and partly up and running. The buildings here will eventually make up the $5 billion Gigafactory, covering one million square metres and projected to put out what the company says will be more lithium-ion batteries each year than were produced globally in all of 2013.
Tesla was hosting a grand opening last week of the Gigafactory, intended to be Musk’s 21st-century answer to Henry Ford’s sprawling River Rouge plant near Detroit, which transformed the concept of mass production in the 1920s.
Straubel said speed was of the essence in getting the factory up to full production. “There’s a sheer business need for it. Compressing the schedule tends to make things cheaper.”
It is a view he clearly shares with Musk.
“If affordability improves,” Musk said during the interview in Fremont, “then more people can buy an electric car, more people can buy solar, more people can buy stationary storage.’’
To help make his electric cars less expensive, Musk is intent on picking up the pace at Tesla’s car
What’s going to be really crazy about the Gigafactory is not just that it’s giant. You can’t change the world with tiny factories that move slowly. We need big factories with high-velocity output.” He makes a reasonable bid to be the Henry Ford of this era. He’s trying to kick off the mass market for renewable energy. It’s [climate change] the most serious thing that humanity faces.”