Elon Musk might be the most prolific inventor and entrepreneur since Thomas Edison — that’s a somewhat ironic comparison for a man who named his company after Edison’s greatest rival, but there’s some truth to it. Musk has something of a deranged genius persona. He’s known for investing in risky companies like the private-sector NASA (called SpaceX) and, of course, Tesla Motors, which manufactures high-end, fully-electric vehicles. Musk also has a vision for a transit system that would take passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco — normally a six-hour drive — in thirty minutes. Tesla Motors is bringing a lot of the stuff promised on The Jetsons to reality.
Musk recently announced a slew of new features to be rolled out in its cars.
Among them will be advanced driverless technology, most notably manifested in the car’s ability to be “summoned” by its driver when on private property. That’s right, if you’re standing at the end of your driveway getting the mail, and you’re suddenly struck by the urge to go for a drive, you’ll be able to request that your car drive itself to your location, at which point you can get in and take over.
But the car will also be able to auto-brake and detect objects in your blindspots, all in the hopes of providing a semblance of the kind of safety that a driverless car would offer. For his part, Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk thinks that cars that can’t drive themselves will one day be illegal. His theory is that when self-driving cars are on the market they will reduce car-related accidents and fatalities to such a degree that allowing humans to operate their own cars will become unthinkable.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re excited about the prospect of self-driving cars. But Tesla is consummating the world of tomorrow in much more substantial ways, too.
Tesla makes fully electric cars
As an automaker, Tesla wants to foster a consumer market in which cars that burn fossil fuels are irrelevant. As a company, Tesla is leading the way in renewable energy, and this is a cause that Musk has been championing in more than one way. Musk’s cousin Lyndon Rive is the CEO of Solar City, a company that Musk himself has invested heavily in. Solar City leases solar panels to residential customers, allowing them to power their homes using solar energy for a rate that is less expensive than coal-powered electricity provided through traditional city utility companies. Solar City also sells excess energy created by these panels back to utility companies, which helps them fulfill power quotas and makes Solar City a profit, all while pushing renewable energy forward.
What Solar City and other renewables are in need of now is a way of storing the energy that they generate.
Naturally, when the sun isn’t shining solar panels can’t create new energy, and on the other hand sometimes in periods of heavy sunlight the panels produce more energy than can be used by the houses they power. Of course the grid system allows for that excess energy to be diverted to other places where it’s needed, but Tesla Motors is developing a battery unit that homes using renewable power sources could use to store the excess energy their generators create. With grid integration, utility companies could still use excess energy to power other consumers, but it would also allow someone with a battery to have a consistently reliable power source regardless of external conditions.
The future world that was imagined by designers and dreamers in the 50s may be edging its way closer all the time, but it comes with constraints that people living at that time didn’t anticipate, like a warming climate and dwindling natural resources. Whether or not Tesla Motors will introduce a car that flies remains to be seen, but in the mean time look for companies of their ilk to lead consumer products into the future with the flashes of sci-fi tech you crave alongside the energy-savvy solutions our planet desperately needs.
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Your Thoughts
- Other than the ability to fly, what’s the next technological advancement you’d like to see in automobiles?
- Would you rather see self-driving cars on the roads in ten years, or cars that don’t use fossil fuels? Why?
