10 Ideas: New industries that Tesla could enter

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.

Some of my favourites this week:

• Electricity price arbitrage: Refit container ships as massive battery packs. These ships can then travel around the world arbitraging power prices between different countries and continents.
• This will probably happen: Start a fragrance line — ‘The scent of Musk’ — it could be a subtle blend of musk and rocket fuel
• Drone taxis: On the assumption that full autonomous cars are still 10+ years away, what about having fleets of drone drivers sitting in low cost countries driving taxis. Full situational awareness, and the driver is still licensed by the relevant regulatory body.

The full list:

Vehicles

• Sell cars — They look like they sell cars but they don’t since we haven’t seen what re-sale prices looks like and how the second hand market works in scale. If they could develop a secondhand Tesla market / auction place then they might broaden their appeal outside of rich people who want to look cool
• Logistics. Make a low end tesla that’s specifically designed to disrupt Fedex
• Drone taxis. On the assumption that full autonomous cars are still 10+ years away, what about having fleets of drone drivers sitting in low cost countries driving taxis. Full situational awareness, and the driver is still licensed by the relevant regulatory body.
• Uber Tesla
• A Tesla motorbike — you thought insane mode on the model S was cool. Wait until you experience the power to weight ratio on the Tesla motorbike.
• Build Tesla boats. A Tesla speedboat could be really cool

Urban transport

• Release an electric bike. There’s a lot of possibility to reinvent urban commuting with a better bike with more range. The engineering challenges would be really easy. And hard not to see Musk selling 100,000 at $1000 a bike — that’s a handy $100m
• Tunnelling!!
• Tesla trains and metro
• Buses. Urban buses with a reasonable degree of autonomy and battery power.

OEM

• Offer refitting of existing cars with L4/5 autonomy. That’s a huge potential market
• Become an OEM that sells battery and autonomy componentry to other automobile manufacturers.

Utility

• Become a power utility by using the power in Tesla cars + Powerwalls to offer a retail product
• Become the world’s first global power utility. By getting into renewable generation beyond solar there’s probably the opportunity to guarantee Tesla drivers and power wall owners even lower operating costs
• Invest heavily into the broader renewables market. Given the companies operating in wind generation are pretty similar to the scale incumbents SpaceX faced in the rocketry market — there’s probably a substantial opportunity to improve the cost/quality mix.

Finance and arbitrage

• Become a finance company and lend people money to buy their cars / powerwalls
• Refit container ships as massive battery packs. These ships can then travel around the world arbitraging power prices between different countries and continents.

Data

• Sell the telemetric data from their cars to google to improve maps
• Sell the car destination data to data analytics companies
• Build a personal CO2 emissions tracker using data from your home (Powerwall), Car (Tesla)
• Start a ISP by using the cars as a mesh network to deliver wi-fi coverage. Sell the data of use patterns to google

Space

• Buy NASA / the ISS — apparently for sale
• Satellites

Beauty

• Start a fragrance line — ‘The scent of Musk’ — it could be a subtle blend of musk and rocket fuel
• Start a jewelry company where you have a chain with a real Mars rock on it to wear around. Sell these for $100k but you have to put down a deposit of 50% now and get it in only 5 years when we get to Mars and back with some rock. “only’ sell 1m of these = $5bn cash…Put in some fine print that if the Mars thing doesn’t happen then you get an Earth rock

Tesla @ home

• At the moment anything Musk sells can merit a $1bn+ presale. Sell a Tesla vacuum cleaner with a 3 year pre-sale to deal with working capital issues
• Merge/ takeover Dyson
• Home robotics
• Solar extension to every home

Other

• Heart replacement
• Teleportation
• Mobile phones — design one with a battery that actually lasts!

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.