The Atlantic: Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business

Elon Musk still makes some of Americas 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 worlds 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.

Now, imagine how good Teslas could be if Musk apparently wasnt so bored with making them. With the exception of the struggling Cybertruck, Tesla hasnt released an entirely new electric car in five years. Musk has indicated that he wants Tesla to primarily focus on building robotaxis androbots. Autonomous-vehicle technology is the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company,he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years. All the while, Tesla has continued to make almost all of its money from selling cars.

But now its clearer than ever that Teslas future is not in selling cars. The companys latest Master Plan IV, 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 sustainable abundance. To the extent that cars are mentioned at all, its 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.

This new master planreleased on Musks platform, X, naturallymight be easy to ignore. The roughly 1,000-word document is exceedingly vague and includes language like this: The hallmark of meritocracy is creating opportunities that enable each person to use their skills to accomplish whatever they imagine. Even Musk conceded on X that the plan needs more specifics. But Tesla has released only three previous master plans since its founding in 2003, and generally, they have paved the way for Teslas 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 Teslas competition still follows the same road map. Then, in 2016,Master Plan, Part Deuxstressed a deeper vision for more electric cars, including a future SUV that became the Model Y and a new kind of pickup truck. What that one was ispretty obvious today.