Tesla branches out from electric cars into buses, trucks & ‘solar roof batteries’
Elon Musk, chief of electric vehicle firm Tesla, has confirmed his intent to branch out from cars to a catchily titled ‘solar-roof-with-battery product’ as part of his latest masterplan for the business which will also see it build a new generation of buses and trucks.
This electricity storage medium would be suitable for installation on the roofs of people’s homes and is intended to dovetail with the manufacturers existing fleet of electric vehicles, making them fully carbon neutral.
With one eye to the future Musk also harbours ambition to launch a shared fleet when autonomous driving finally takes off, enabling vehicle owners to make cash from their cars when not in use by lending them out to others.
Introducing his ambitions Musk said: “We must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse.
"Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better."
Not everyone was impressed with this vision however with some analysts critical of a lack of specifics and any hard and fast timeframe to deliver these goals.