By Tian DuBelko
When billionaire and visionary Elon Musk speaks, people listen. That was the scene at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting this week, where Musk entertained the crowd and fielded questions during an hourlong Q&A session at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
A consistent theme of Musk’s talk was his vision for an all-electric future. He touched on subjects such as Tesla’s solar roofs and electric cars, discussing how new solar power and electric battery technologies are the first steps to a sustainable global energy strategy. We’ve put together highlights of Musk’s Q&A below:
On Tesla’s solar roofs:
“So with the solar roof, we really try to address at the residential level. I think one of the fundamental inhibitions of adding solar which is aesthetics. People love their homes. They want their homes to be beautiful.”
“I think one of the fundamental inhibitions of adding solar which is aesthetics. People love their homes. They want their homes to be beautiful.”
“If you got a residence that’s got a flat roof and it’s not visible from the street, then there is no need to go with the solar glass tiles because aesthetics are no longer a factor, you can’t see it.”
“But the overarching goal here is to have a set of products or set of roof products where if you were driving through a neighborhood and you looked at the roof, you say like wow, I really like the way those roofs look.”
“The battery packs are important for a number of reasons because the solar power obviously peaks during the middle of the day and then its low at dawn and dusk and it’s not there at night. So it needs something that is load leveling the power.”
On Tesla’s new gigafactory:
“So the Gigafactory is going quite well.”
“We believe it will, within a few years, have a capacity equal to all other lithium-ion battery factories in the world combined in one building.”
“This one factory will output more than [the U.S., China, Europe, and everywhere else] combined. The sheer scale of this is difficult to appreciate unless you are there in person. It’s just staggeringly enormous.”
“That allows us to achieve high economies of scale with very high production rates. We are maximizing economies of scale.”
“Everything has to be at the lowest cost per kilowatt hour in the world. At the same time, have the most advanced batteries. So it’s a combination of the best technology at the lowest cost.”
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On development of Tesla’s new Model 3 electric car:
“Yes, we are definitely on track to deliver the first production Model 3 next month. That’s going to be really exciting.”
“We have kept the initial configurations for Model 3 very simple. This is critical to achieving a rapid production ramp.”
“[A] big mistake we made with the [Model] X, which primarily is my responsibility, [was] way too much complexity right at the beginning. That was rude, that was very foolish.”
“So initially, the Model 3 configurators, it’s kind of going to be like what color do you want and what size of wheels do you want. That’s basically going to be the configurator.”
“In terms of how many [car] factories are in the works, we are really giving serious consideration to three factory locations right now. But we are going to try to hold our powder, trying to keep the powder dry until we are confident of the locations and the timing. But like I said, ultimately probably there is at least 10 of these worldwide and maybe as much as 20.”
