Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, part 2 is expected this week

By Bruce Brown Published July 11, 2016

Seeking social media buzz? Tweet a hint. Entertainers, politicians, and bleeding-edge entrepreneurs increasingly employ savvy social media drops to make, break, and hint upcoming tracks, policies, and product news. A master of Twitter drops, Tesla CEO Elon Musk lit up the wires this weekend sharing his hope to publish the Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2 later this week, as first reported by Electrek.

Working on Top Secret Tesla Masterplan, Part 2. Hoping to publish later this week.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2016

If Part 2 is coming this week, that begs obvious questions: What about Part 1? When did that happen? And what did it say?

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Almost ten years ago, on August 2, 2006, Elon Musk published “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)” on the Tesla blog. What’s most interesting are the last six lines of the post — quoted below:

“So, in short, the master plan is:

Build sports car

Use that money to build an affordable car

Use that money to build an even more affordable car

While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

Don’t tell anyone.”

So, looking at the first “secret” plan, Musk and Tesla Motors have completed or made significant progress with all parts of the plan — well, except the “Don’t tell anyone” part.

The Tesla Roadster was the sports car. The Model S is the company’s first “affordable” car. The Model 3 is the “even more affordable car.” The Tesla Powerwall along with the firm’s prospective purchase of SolarCity shows how the company intends to generate, store, and distribute zero emission electric power to Tesla’s zero emission electric-powered cars.

Some might argue Elon Musk and Tesla should get the Model 3 on the road and get the energy-generation piece fully in place before announcing new ideas, but that misses the point of 10-year-forward plans. At this point, the Model 3 and the bits and pieces (all of which exist) of the energy-generation option are sufficiently on their respective paths to completion, in their Tim Gunn “Make it work!” phases, that it’s high time for the visionary to look further.

And apparently, that’s what’s been going on. Unless Musk likes to throw out a short deadline to do a last-minute rush to get the paper in — you remember, like in college — odds are pretty high that he’s about to do a big reveal of the next Top Secret Master Plan, which might be good for another ten years.

What will be in the next Master Plan? Well, we don’t know, but we can offer some easy guesses, along with some long shots. Chances are pretty high we’ll hear about Tesla electric urban rideshare cars, light trucks, motorcycles, a new roadster, maybe a Formula E car (in a friendly take that message to Faraday Future), and possibly a “real” SUV (like one you would feel OK going off-road in). But all of those are easy sauce.

A bigger challenge would be a carbon-fuel-free solution for long-haul freighters that doesn’t involve pantographs — overhead wires — or buried power lines. No one else is close to figuring that one out.

It would also be interesting to learn of a tie-in with SpaceX and Tesla Motors — that one’s harder to imagine, but that’s what Musk seems to enjoy, doing what others can’t imagine.

So we’ll be waiting for the Secret Master Plan, part 2, when it drops, hopefully later this week. Chances are we’ll first hear about it on Twitter.

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Contributing Editor

Bruce Brown Contributing Editor As a Contributing Editor to the Auto teams at Digital Trends and TheManual.com, Bruce…

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Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues

Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

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Audi halts vehicle deliveries to the U.S. as it mulls impact of tariffs

2021 Audi Q5

If you’d been thinking of buying an Audi, now might be the time. The German brand, owned by the Volkswagen Group, has announced it would halt shipments to the U.S. in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on all imported vehicles.
Audi is currently holding cars that arrived after the tariffs took effect, on April 3, in U.S. ports. But it still has around 37,000 vehicles in its U.S. inventory, which should be able to meet demand for about two months, according to Reuters.
Automakers on average hold enough cars to meet U.S. demand for about three months, according to Cox Automotive.
Audi should be particularly affected by the tariffs: The Q5, its best-selling model in the U.S., is produced in Mexico, while other models, such as the A3, A4, and A6 are produced in Germany.
Holding shipments is obviously a temporary measure to buy time for Audi and parent company Volkswagen. If tariffs stay in place, vehicle prices would likely have to go up accordingly, unless some production is shifted to the U.S. Volkswagen already has a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is planning a new plant in South Carolina. That latter plant, however, isn’t expected to be operational until 2027 and is currently dedicated to building electric vehicles for VW’s Scout Motors brand.
Other global automakers have also taken drastic measures in response to Trump’s tariffs. Jaguar Land Rover on April 5 said it is pausing shipments of its its UK-made cars to the United States this month. The British sports-luxury vehicle maker noted that the U.S. market accounts for nearly a quarter of its global sales, led by the likes of Range Rover Sports, Defenders, and Jaguar F-PACE.
And on April 3, Nissan, the biggest Japanese vehicle exporter to the United States, announced it will stop taking new U.S. orders for two Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs, the QX50 and QX55.

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Waymo faces questions about its use of onboard cameras for AI training, ads targeting

Two people exit a Waymo taxi.

In an iconic scene from the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, on-the-run Agent John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, struggles to walk through a mall as he’s targeted by a multitude of personalized ads from the likes of Lexus, Guinness and American Express, everytime hidden detectors identify his eyes.
It was clearly meant as a warning about a not-so-desirable dystopian future.
Yet, 23 years later that future is at least partlially here in the online world and threatens to spread to other areas of daily life which are increasingly ‘connected’, such as the inside of cars. And the new testing grounds, according to online security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, might very well be automated-driving vehicles, such as Waymo’s robotaxis.
On X, Wong unveiled an unreleased version of Waymo’s privacy policy that suggests the California-based company is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including interior cameras, to train generative AI models and to offer targetted ads.
“Waymo may share data to improve and analyze its functionality and to tailor products, services, ads, and offers to your interests,” the Waymo’s unreleased privacy statement reads. “You can opt out of sharing your information with third parties, unless it’s necessary to the functioning of the service.”
Asked for comments about the unreleased app update, Waymo told The Verge that it contained “placeholder text that doesn’t accurately reflect the feature’s purpose”.
Waymo’s AI-models “are not designed to use this data to identify individual people, and there are no plans to use this data for targeted ads,” spokesperson Julia Ilina said.
Waymo’s robotaxis, which are operating on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, do contain onboard cameras that monitor riders. But Ilina says these are mainly used to train AI models for safety, finding lost items, check that in-car rules are followed, and to improve the service.
The new feature is still under development and offers riders an opportunity to opt out of data collection, Ilina says.
But as we all get used to ads targeting based on everything that’s somehow connected to the web, it seems a once-distant vision of the future may be just around the corner.