Elon Talks Affordable Cars
The 2022 Indonesia B20 summit happened over the November 11th weekend, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk had a much anticipated speaking role.
Musk has obviously had some big things going on in North America, so he joined the conference remotely - and while the first bit of his talk was poking a bit of fun at the billionaire's latest escapades, the most interesting part was when Musk was asked about his thoughts on an affordable electric vehicle program.
Most Asian markets tend to favour compact vehicles. And we're not talking about the sorts of compacts you can find in North America. We're talking about things like the Suzuki Mini-trucks or - for an extreme example - the Chang Li ZYX.
Now, Tesla isn't likely to design anything that small; but the Asian small car is something that Elon says he'd like to look into when he can finally get around to designing Tesla's Affordable platform.
Musk has said for years that he wants to develop a vehicle at the $25,000 price point, but when the pandemic hit those plans were more or less shelved indefinitely. Costs do occasionally go down for Tesla vehicles, but the market has not been kind lately.
But with recent moves into the Indonesian market - and GigaShanghai breaking records on the regular - maybe Tesla sees a path to eventually getting this program off the ground.
Compacts are popular with city-users, and there have been attempts in the past to bring smaller, Asian-style vehicles to North America, but those attempts never stuck. But given how successful Tesla has been at converting drivers to EVs, they would probably be the company to finally bring these smaller Asian compacts over here.
Regardless, that's not very likely to happen inside of the next few years. Tesla has Cybertruck production starting in a couple of months, as well as the Tesla Semi getting its facility up and running. They're probably going to focus on getting those two long-awaited vehicles out the door before starting anything new.
And then there's the constant work on Full Self-Driving software, the Dojo supercomputer upgrades, the Tesla-Bot program, The various Tesla Energy programs starting around the world... Musk's got a lot on his plate even if you just look at his car company.
Either way, it's a good sign that he's talking about this on an international stage. It means cheaper, smaller vehicles are still on his mind, and that he's zeroing in on a likely place to start that program off.
And who knows? Elon's known for spinning many plates at once, maybe we could start seeing some designs thrown around in the near future.