“Exclusive Excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Latest Book: Elon Musk”, 2023-09-08 (; backlinks):
[Example of Musk cycling & delusions around Tesla’s inadequate self-driving car tech, and how Tesla management works around him to do the right thing regardless of his impulsive mistakes, akin to Gwynne Shotwell handling SpaceX & Starlink: don’t take his decisions too seriously, outlast moods, exploit the latest obsession like the Cybertruck, and let him take the credit.]
In November 2021, Musk gathered his top 5 lieutenants in Austin to brainstorm this future over an informal dinner. They decided that the Robotaxi would be a smaller, less expensive, less speedy car than the Model 3. “Our main focus has to be volume”, Musk said. “There is no amount that we could possibly build that will be enough. Someday we want to be at 20 million a year.”…By the end of the summer of 2022, Musk and his team realized they had to make a final decision on the issue they had wrestled with for a year. Should they play it safe and build in a steering wheel and pedals? Or should they build it to be truly autonomous? Most of his engineers pushed for the safer, conventional option. They had a more realistic outlook on how long it would take for Full Self-Driving (FSD) to be ready. At a fateful and dramatic meeting on August 18, they gathered to hash the issue out.
[Note: as of September 2023, the Tesla self-driving car was still nowhere near ready and was making fatal mistakes within 20 minutes of deployment like attempting to drive straight into oncoming traffic at a stop light, as demonstrated by Musk’s livestream demo in August 2023.]
…He suggested that they make a car that had a steering wheel and pedals that could be easily removed. “Basically our proposal is to bake them in right now but remove them when we are allowed to.” Musk just shook his head. The future would not get here fast enough unless they forced it. “Small ones”, von Holzhausen persisted, “which we can remove pretty easily and design around.”
“No”, Musk said. “No. No.” There was a long pause. “No mirrors, no pedals, no steering wheel. This is me taking responsibility for this decision.” The executives sitting around the table hesitated. “Uh, we will come back to you on that”, one said. Musk got into one of his very cold moods. “Let me be clear”, he said slowly. “This vehicle must be designed as a clean Robotaxi. We’re going to take that risk. It’s my fault if it f—ks up. But we are not going to design some sort of amphibian frog that’s a halfway car. We are all in on autonomy.”
[Manic/grandiosity] A few weeks later, he was still jazzed about the decision. On his plane flying from dropping his son Griffin off at college, he joined the weekly Robotaxi meeting by phone. As always, he tried to instill a sense of urgency. “This will be a historically mega-revolutionary product”, he said. “It will transform everything. This is the product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion-dollar company. People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years.”
…At the end of the summer of 2022, after Musk made his pronouncements about being “all in” on a Robotaxi with no steering wheel, von Holzhausen and others at Tesla set about persuading him to cover his bet. They knew how to do it in a non-challenging way.
“We brought him new information that maybe he wasn’t fully digesting in the summer”, says Lars Moravy, one of Tesla’s top executives. Even if self-driving vehicles were approved by regulators in the U.S., he argued, it would be years before they were approved internationally. So it made sense to build a version of the car with a steering wheel and pedals. For years they had talked about what should be Tesla’s next-generation offering: a small, inexpensive, mass-market car selling for around $25,000. Musk himself had teased the possibility in 2020, but then he put a hold on those plans, and over the next two years he repeatedly vetoed the idea, saying that the Robotaxi would make the other car unnecessary. Nevertheless, von Holzhausen had quietly kept it alive as a shadow project in his design studio…The global market for such a car was huge. By 2030, there might be up to 700 million of them, almost twice as many as for the Model 3/Y category. Then they showed that the same vehicle platform and the same assembly lines could be used to make both the $25,000 car and the Robotaxi. “We convinced him that if we build these factories and we have this platform, we could churn out both Robotaxis and a $25,000 car, all on the same vehicle architecture”, von Holzhausen says.
After the meeting, Musk and I sat alone in the conference room, and it was clear that he was unenthusiastic about the $25,000 car. “It’s really not that exciting of a product”, he said. His heart was in transforming transportation through Robotaxis. But over the next few months, he got increasingly more enthusiastic.
…At a design review session one afternoon in February 2023, von Holzhausen put models of the Robotaxi and the $25,000 car next to each other in the studio. Both had a Cybertruck futuristic feel. Musk loved the designs. “When one of these comes around a corner”, he said, “people will think they are seeing something from the future.”
The new mass-market vehicle, both with a steering wheel and as a Robotaxi, became known as “the next generation platform.” Musk initially decided that Tesla would build a new factory in northern Mexico, 400 miles south of Austin, designed from the ground up to build such cars.