The new book “Elon Musk” by the famous American biographer Walter Isaacson contains interesting details about the cheapest and most ambitious Tesla model . This model was conceived by Elon Musk as completely unmanned, but in the end his Tesla colleagues convinced him to compromise.
Elon Musk announced a budget model with a price of around $25,000 at the beginning of 2020, but it has not yet come out, and rumors surrounding it have been quite controversial. Now it’s clear why — the answers are contained in the just published book by Walter Isaacson, excerpts from it were published by the American online publication Axios.
Our regular readers know that Musk is obsessed with the idea of a self-driving car: last fall, Tesla even de facto released a commercial release of the “full autopilot” FSD (Full Self-Driving), although from a legal point of view it is not such. Moreover, insider data suggests that the development of Tesla's autopilot is not going as successfully as the company is trying to make it out to be: the lives of thousands of people who agreed to become voluntary beta testers were in serious danger.
Isaacson in his The book tells how Elon Musk’s attitude towards the budget electric car project changed in connection with autopilot. Initially, Musk wanted the budget model to be completely self-driving and have no steering wheel, pedals or traditional rear-view mirrors at all — such a model was supposed to revolutionize the market and become a global bestseller.
Much to Musk’s displeasure, the development of a full-fledged autopilot took a long time, so at some point he put the project of a budget model on pause. Musk's colleagues, including Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen, at secret meetings tried to convince the boss to make the budget model more traditional, with “human” controls — they say, we will bring it to the market in this form, and when the autopilot is ready, we will simply remove it steering wheel, pedals and everything unnecessary. But Musk insisted on a radical option, because he was confident that the autopilot would soon be ready and that it could be quickly legalized.
Nevertheless, even the brain of a visionary when confronted with reality becomes “plastic”: in September last year, during the next meeting, Franz von Holzhausen’s colleagues finally persuaded Musk to back down and agree to release a budget electric car with traditional controls, so as not to waste time and give the market is what it wants — a cheap Tesla. And so that Musk does not think that his company will release an ordinary product to the market, Franz von Holzhausen in February of this year proposed making a budget electric car in the style of the Cybertruck pickup truck, that is, deliberately brutal and angular. Musk liked the idea — they say, at least in terms of design, it will be a car from the future.
Tesla Cybertruck
The Gigafactory in Mexico, announced this spring, with its innovative modular assembly principle, was supposed to be the main one for the new budget model, but then Musk changed his mind and decided to organize its pilot production at the plant in Austin (USA, Texas), next to which the headquarters is located today. Tesla apartment — according to Musk, white-collar workers should be close to production, especially when it comes to launching such a fateful model.
Even the Cybertruck pickup truck, with all its radical concept, is not as important or as complicated for Tesla as the budget model. Pilot assembly of the Cybertruck began in July here in Austin, but the official premiere of the production pickup truck has not yet taken place and many aspects of its design still remain a mystery. As for a budget electric car with a similar design, in Tesla’s plans it is currently listed as the Next Gen Platform (next generation platform) without any time guidelines. Elon Musk is still confident that sooner or later he will be able to make the new model completely unmanned, but it seems that no one except him believes in it.
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