Elon Musk: Tesla Doubling Production Every Year

Elon Musk was recently interviewed by the BBC. You can watch the video above for the whole deal. Some key summary points are:

1. Elon Musk had to reiterate Tesla’s “secret master plan” to explain a variety of things many of you already know.
2. He was also practically forced to say that Apple is building an electric car, which he called an “open secret.” This has gotten a lot of headlines, but really… it is an open secret. There’s no news there, imho.
3. He also talked about the S-curve of disruptive technology, and his thought that EVs will grow much faster than most people are anticipating. (I’m fully onboard with all of that and try to highlight it any chance I get — see video below.)
4. However, there was a snippet I found quite interesting. Elon said, “Every year, we are doubling our total cumulative production. [long pause] So, um, at the beginning of last year, we had 50,000 cars in total on the roads worldwide. And then last year we produced another 50,000 cars, so the total fleet of Tesla vehicles doubled last year, and will approximately double again this year.” That seems to indicated that Elon is guiding ~100,000 sales in 2016. Hmm, perhaps I need to increase my projections.
5. Elon also showed how Tesla has been inspiring conventional automakers to launch, accelerate, and improve electric car programs. But he also drops some obvious criticism on them.
6. Elon also noted that the Tesla Model S was the top-selling car in its class in the US last year (something I just covered).
7. Elon again states that he expects, in the future, no one will buy a car that isn’t autonomous. Buying a non-autonomous car would be like having a manually operated elevator, or having a horse rather than a car.
8. He also explained, concisely, the difference between autonomous cars and deep AI (artificial intelligence).
9. Elon concedes that he has had nightmares about AI.
10. There’s much more about AI in the interview that you may want to listen to.
11. Again, Elon comes across as extremely humble and good-hearted to me, and it may make me finally write an article I’ve been planning to write for months… stay tuned.

In regard to point #3, here’s a talk where I focus on that quite a bit (with charts and such to go along with the words):

h/t Kyle Field