What’s next for Tesla?
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read
As a fun exercise, I thought about what Tesla should do in the next 3 years (apart from what they are already planning to do) to become even more successful:
- Tesla should design and develop its own GPU and visual processing unit tailored specifically to its narrow use cases rather than relying on NVIDIA’s general purpose GPUs.
- To make Tesla cars cooler, Tesla can add Augmented Reality capability to the windows of Tesla cars and an HUD on the front window.
- Tesla can provide users information about the area they are driving through — events going on in the area, distance to their favorite coffee shop, places to see in the area, restaurants, supercharger locations, etc. through a voice-based interface (somewhat like Alexa).
- Tesla should seriously pursue the idea of becoming an electricity utility provider in developing countries. Tesla’s sustainable energy generation and storage technology can enable communities to leapfrog to continuous sustainable energy which will make them self-sufficient. There is tremendous interest from many governments in the world, especially the government of India. In the next 5 years, the Indian government is planning a 5-fold in increase renewable energy capacity — from 36.6 GW today to 175 GW in 2022. Like Tesla’s ongoing South Australia project, doing a big sustainable energy generation and storage project in a developing country like India will increase trust in Tesla’s capabilities and a lot of other governments and utility companies will want such systems too, thus increasing Tesla’s revenues.
- Since batteries are so central to Tesla’s business, Tesla should look into alternative battery chemistries like graphene batteries to ensure that Tesla can meet all future demand.
- To maximize the efficiency of its factories, instead of using architects to create floor plans for new factories, Tesla should use advanced topology optimization software to specify certain constraints and giving the computer full design freedom to create the factory plan. Max Planck Institute’s Wendelstein 7-X fusion device was built using topology optimization which allowed it to become the world’s largest stellarator nuclear fusion reactor (which are much more efficient than conventional nuclear fusion reactors but have traditionally been hard to scale up).
