Given price elasticity of demand, projected improvements in e.g. batter capacity, and assuming production capacity is there:
- Top-down model: EV sales will grow from c. 1.3M in 2018 to c. 26M in 2023 (20x increase, up to about 1/3 of total global sales) - Musk: sounds about right, might be off 1-2 years
- Bottom-up: estimating Tesla will deliver 1.6M vehicles in 2023, which would translate to a price target of c. $700 - $4,000
In 2018 Tesla doubled global fleet through exponentially expanding production capacity — in 2018 made about as many cars as in all previous years combined.
Too many people think linearly, not exponentially.
Musk: guess for 2021 = Tesla makes 1.5M cars
Musk: guess for 2023 = Tesla makes 3M cars
In the long-term, Tesla cars are merely the carriers for the autonomous software that runs on them.
Musk: the last 1-10% of autonomy is incredibly difficult. Suspect will be feature-complete for self-driving in 2019. Doesn't mean it won't need human intervention, so now on "march of 9's" How many 99.9999...% of certainty do we need before regulators + general public accept and are ready to shift to self-driving?
Guess when Tesla will think sleeping at the wheel is safe: end-2020. No idea when regulators will agree.
In autopilot, advantage Tesla has that is difficult to overcome is vast amounts of data on interventions / corner cases...customers are literally training the system.
Musk: advantage is in the long tail of weird events (in data)...have vastly more data, which is increasing exponentially, as the fleet is increasing exponentially
Autopilot AI computer is soon in full production
Tesla had to build own chips to take advantage of hardware + software combo to continue accelerating autonomous AI
Having own + better hardware means you don't have to spend nearly as many resources on optimizing software and making tradeoffs, e.g. can now process 100 frames per second with all cameras at full resolution, using Tesla hardware.
The change will be: it's unsafe NOT to have autopilot
Prioritized highways for autopilot because of higher speeds + mental overhead of dealing with congestion.
Open to other automakers using Telsa's Supercharger network and autopilot system, but without requiring changes.