More Aggressive Plans from Tesla

The company that has put the automotive world on its head and takes the lead that most other automakers try to follow has announced expansion plans to its platforms and offerings in the future. Even though Tesla is still at least two years away from being able to fulfill its dream of volume production at 500,000 units per year and the first true volume vehicle hasn’t even rolled off the assembly line they are looking to the future to see how they will work to change the mobility world once again.

Whether it’s sheer bravado or the most intelligent direction for a car company to go Tesla has been the automaker without a gasoline engine for the past several years. Every vehicle made by Tesla comes powered by electric motors with a full floor of batteries to give the vehicle the fuel needed and the balance desired. Until the reveal of the Model 3, Tesla was considered a brand only those who could afford a luxury vehicle would purchase with the Model S, but now that the Model 3 has been unveiled and finalized it seems Tesla will be an affordable brand for every driver to be able to enjoy.

In recent chatter on Twitter Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, revealed some of the future plans of the company. The first part of the plan is to create a compact SUV off the Model 3 chassis which will be called the Model Y. Even though their naming scheme isn’t the most creative, having a high volume SUV offering in the compact lineup will be something that will make a huge difference for the company and bring more models to the masses as affordable vehicles that operate solely on electricity, giving us a large number of clean energy vehicles.

The future of Tesla doesn’t end with a new SUV offering. In the commercial world there is a need for the same pollutant reducing technologies to be used. The idea is to create a self-driving bus that will be based upon the Model X chassis and be able to change the face of public transit systems. Because this bus would be much smaller than busses we currently use the vision is to have them pick up and drop off right at the doorstep of anyone who chooses this mode of transportation, making for a much more convenient system of mobility in urban areas.

Another area that Tesla is working on is the need for an EV semi-truck. While Mercedes-Benz already has their own version of this and will begin offering it to the world next year, there is room for other companies to also build electric semi-trucks in order to change the transportation world. Currently the challenge is to create a truck that will be able to handle the long haul without the delays encountered when it comes to recharging the batteries of these vehicles. The model built by Mercedes-Benz offers a range under 200 miles on a charge, which is where Tesla may be able to make serious improvements.

Finally, the last part of the current visionary plan at Tesla is to build a cargo van that will be able to compete with the current lineup on the market. This would give smaller businesses an EV van to get the job done as an alternative to the pollution that’s expelled with current cargo vans on the market. The two most popular models on the market right now are the Ford Transit and Mercedes Sprinter, which are the two Tesla will target as direct competition in order to build their new van.

When you think about where Tesla is now all this sounds like its far off, and it just might be, but having a direction to work toward is important in any company. Once we see that Tesla finally has the ability to produce 500,000 or more vehicles in a single year we will finally get to know if they can expand their enterprise to these other ventures. The potential for Tesla is amazing as the leader in the EV market at the moment, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see other brands develop EV technology for their products to stay competitive with Tesla.