The Australian Strategy
Elon is making some moves in Australia.
On July 3rd, an announcement from major Australian Telecom company Telstra stated that they would be partnering with SpaceX to use its broadband satellite internet service Starlink to reach their more rural clients.
Telstra will reportedly be using Starlink to provide broadband and voice services to Australians living in remote areas - which will likely lead to higher download speeds than the legacy copper-based lines the country has been using in rural areas up till now.
Starlink has been used to connect isolated communities for some time now - Hawaii, Haiti, rural North America, Ukraine during the war - even Antarctica. And SpaceX has landed deals with RV users and Cruise Liners to provide mobile support - It’s what the service is good at.
What makes this announcement such a big deal is that this sort of partnership with a major Telecoms company hasn’t happened before. It would be like if Bell Canada, or AT&T, or Deutche Telekom announced that they were going to use Starlink’s satellites to reach rural users.
Like we said earlier, Starlink has been setting up in remote areas of other countries before - but partnering with a big telecom is a much bigger step - it brings a level of legitimacy to the service that we haven’t seen before.
And more than that, it’s starting to look like Elon’s got bigger plans for Australia.
Musk’s company Tesla has had several big projects in the country already - one of the most important being the Virtual Power Plant rolled out in Australia’s Southern State.
The idea of linking several Powerwall users into a single network so they could support each other during power outages - and sell their electricity back to the grid when they make more than enough - was an idea that caught on in other countries as well.
Not to mention one of Tesla’s first Megapack battery facilities is in Australia.
The Victoria Big Battery project was built and activated in 2021, and was made to help stabilise the notoriously shaky Victoria power grid on hot days. The original facility was built to power more than 650,000 homes for an hour, giving the stressed grid time to catch up to peak demand.
And by all accounts it’s been a huge success - leading to more megapack installations and VPPs around the world.
But it’s not just the company’s experiments with power generation that have marked Australia as a special interest for Tesla.
Around this time last year, Elon mentioned that Tesla would be trying to get their FSD Beta for right-hand drive vehicles up and running in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 2022. That didn’t end up happening, but on June 29th, Tesla posted a job ad on LinkedIn looking for a Test Driver in Australia - and one of the job’s primary requirements was to “help drive the improvement of Tesla’s Autopilot system”.
The temporary position was filled pretty quickly, and Tesla isn’t taking applications anymore - but the job posting would seem to indicate that the company is looking to get some extra data on how their Autopilot systems work with the right-hand drive vehicles in Australia - a sign that Tesla might be getting close to starting their FSD beta there.
So, while it doesn’t look like Tesla is sizing Australia up for a new Gigafactory - it certainly looks like Elon has an interest in the country.
Admittedly, while it’s not the perfect place for a new factory, it is a pretty good place for testing technology - Similar economy, language, and demographics to the US, extremes of weather and climate - and it’s close enough to Southeast Asia to be convenient for trade.
Tesla even announced some cuts to the prices of Model 3 and Model Y vehicles there on July 1st - and just last week, the Cybertruck was spotted in New Zealand, making use of the dedicated testing grounds there.
All this activity in the area shows that Tesla is at least getting very comfortable with testing their products in Australia and New Zealand - and Elon has been hinting that they’re still looking for more than one location for a new facility.
Maybe a car factory wouldn’t be needed there, but a megapack production building or a private testing area might not be out of the question.