Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the corporate’s electric Roadster, its first model, in January 2009.
Corbis via Getty Images
Elon Musk’s 18-year-old manifesto, during which the technology entrepreneur laid out his vision for the electrical automotive maker shortly after the primary public event, has disappeared from the corporate’s blog page, together with all posts by Musk and Tesla executives prior to 2019.
The “Secret master plan,” the corporate’s de facto charter, laid out Musk’s view that Tesla’s primary purpose was to reveal how electric vehicles and solar energy could help combat climate change, including by developing increasingly more inexpensive electric vehicles—a view that has modified dramatically with the billionaire’s political stance in recent times.
This month, Musk appeared to interrupt from his previous views on the risks of counting on carbon-emitting oil and gas sources in his interview with climate skeptic Donald Trump, whom he supports as a presidential candidate.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas … are quite moderate,” Musk said during their discussion“I don’t think we should demonize the oil and gas industry and the people who have worked very hard in those industries to provide the energy necessary to support the economy.”
This is a far cry from his positions from Tesla’s early days: “The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I fund the company) is to accelerate the transition from a hydrocarbon mining and burning economy to a solar-powered economy, which I believe is the primary but not the only sustainable solution,” Musk wrote in his 2006 blog. In it, he also promised that every subsequent Tesla model can be cheaper than the previous one, with the goal of creating electric vehicles widely inexpensive.
Tesla’s blog entry “Secret Master Plan” from August 2006 not appears on the automaker’s website.
Tesla via archived screenshot
Despite Tesla’s success because the world’s most precious automaker and record sales of 1.8 million cars last 12 months, Musk has also backed away from his goal of the corporate selling 20 million vehicles annually by the tip of the last decade. Instead, he has focused on promoting robotaxis and autonomous vehicles as key to Tesla’s future and profitability.
Searches for the post Musk published on August 2, 2006 – when he was the young automaker’s largest investor and before he took over as CEO – now lead only to the corporate’s blog page, where the oldest entry is a post dated January 18, 2019. The updated version of his vision, “Master Plan, Part 2,” published on July 20, 2016, before Tesla’s acquisition of the failed Musk-backed solar panel installer SolarCity, can be not available. The text and pictures of the missing blogs may be found on quite a few Tesla fan pagesbut they are not any longer accessible via the Internet archive Wayback Machine.
Musk’s “master plan” for Tesla can not be found on the Wayback Machine.
Internet Archive
The 2006 blog was published shortly after Tesla’s first public event in July 2006, when the corporate invited media and public officials, including then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the disclosing of its Roadster EV, a Lotus Elise sports automotive powered by the startup’s battery pack and motor system. It served as the corporate’s basic statement of intent at a time when the electrical vehicle market didn’t yet exist. And within the years since its publication, Musk’s manifesto made him and Tesla darlings of the environmental community, helped the corporate raise money ahead of its 2010 IPO, and even became studied at Stanford University Business School.
The purge of older Tesla blogs comes after media began Reporting last week that an organization post from October 2016 claiming that “All Tesla cars now being produced have fully autonomous hardware” had disappeared. The company is facing a Class motion lawsuit He accused Musk and the automaker of misleading buyers about their vehicles’ autonomous driving capabilities. Although Musk has said the corporate is a pacesetter within the technology, Tesla engineers have repeatedly confirmed that Autopilot and FSD (full autonomous driving) features are driver-assist technologies that require an individual to be able to take control of the vehicle in any respect times.
California regulators have also accused the corporate of false promoting regarding its claims about Autopilot and FSD, and the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NTA) identified 13 fatal crashes involving Autopilot earlier this 12 months and located that using that name to explain the system “can lead drivers to believe that automation has greater capabilities than it actually does and to over-trust automation.”
Musk and Tesla didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger test drives the Tesla Roadster at the corporate’s first public event in July 2006.
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
