Interview in Denmark

he is one of the most talked-about CEOs in the world right now the main behind companies such as SpaceX and Tesla mr.

musk it's a great pleasure to have you in Copenhagen yeah thanks for having me I'm glad to be back what brings you to Denmark well I'm here to see the Tesla Danish team I'm actually visiting a number of countries on this visit I just came from Luxembourg and I'm headed to Germany and Netherlands and Belgium so here here to see the team so you could see how things are going talk to some of the people in government and so forth what message do you bring to show Denmark oh well I think the most important message is that is that Denmark is a great leader in renewable energy with wind and I think that there's an opportunity to be a leader in sustainable transport as well but although Denmark is doing incredibly well on on wind that if you look at how many

cars going down the road or electric there's very few well under 1% so I think it's it's very important that government policy continue to support electric vehicles and and you know as more wind energy is generated it didn't make sense to put that into sustainable transport I think it's but there's sort of two very important halves of the same problem so I think it's it's a Denmark an interesting and market for for Tesla a small country like Denmark yeah I think the Forte for Denmark I think they're more conserve as an example to the rest of the world to say what can be done with the sustainable transport so with with larger countries it's difficult to make a big impact but with smaller countries you can say hey this this is what it can be like to to

other countries to say you know with the right policies you can have a significant number of electric vehicles on the road so I think demo can be an important leader in the world as an example in this regard you mentioned when Denmark has the world's largest windmill maker Vesta large production of sustainable energy right but we do have trouble storing the wind energy yeah can you help us with that absolutely so the electric vehicles themselves can be obviously a great recipient to buffer a wind energy so depending upon where what level of wind energies is being generated you can actually have the pricing of electricity very so that people can charge their electric cars depending upon if there's a large amount or small amount of energy being generated

from the wind then in addition Tesla has a battery pack a stationary battery pack that is under development or going to significant production later this year and so combining wind energy with a stationary storage is very powerful because that provides a complete solution would you consider setting up a facility in Denmark even yeah that that is that is certainly something under consideration yeah Tesla is improving battery technology really fast how do you expect your battery technology will change the auto sector as well as the energy sector in the coming years well for the battery technology both for for electric vehicles and for stationary storage is a critical piece of the equation for a long-term future of sustainable energy so you need to have

sustainable energy generation which i think is going to be primarily as wind and solar and then you combine that with stationary storage which is needed because of the intermittent nature of renewable energy generation and then you can and then the third piece of the equation is electric transport so if you have all three of those pieces sustainable generation storage and electric vehicles then you have a complete solution for the future and then we have a good future but how do you feel about taking on such large industries as the audience industry and the energy industry well it's definitely it can be quite difficult at times the you know the big car companies and the big energy companies have quite sharp elbows so they try to you know first times they

try to squash small companies like Tesla but I think we you know we have the support generally of of where the popular support and everywhere a team at Tesla so man it's hard but I think you know we're making good progress Tesla is really getting sales going really getting cars out there you've been able to get a head start on other electric car makers but they're really coming along now what I think is great yeah yeah what what is yours response to to the new competing electric sports car such as Porsches new electric car yeah well you know the reason that we're doing Tesla is to try to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport to have there be more electric cars in the road and and to that end we actually open sourced all of our patents so we said

you know any car company can use our technology it's no problem that I didn't have to pay a fee to us so so for us you know we're very philosophically motivated you know we care about at the advancement of electric vehicles because we think you're and unless there's sustainable transport it's going to be the future is going to be terrible so so I'm glad to see these announcements of these other companies I hope they they move even faster than they announced but don't you expect you may be your investors to expect you to fight off these competition rather than embracing it well yeah I mean I did say that when we were in public even I said look your Tesla has a strong ideological motivation so they shouldn't invest if they disagree with that so they know

from the beginning I've always been very clear about that but as long as we make compelling products I think Tesla will do ok so it's it's not you we shouldn't do ok just because the competition failed I mean we should do okay because we make good cars that's the only reason I want to get into your vision for missions for electric cars musk am when will we break the thousand kilometer range you mark for an electric car a thousand kilometers hmm well it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers as it is the record right now for Model S is 800 kilometers that's the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S so we could be close yeah we're pretty close now in order to do that they did drive at a relatively slow speed so you know we're talking

I think they drove maybe at 40 or 50 kilometers an hour or something like that but I I think my guess is probably we could break a thousand kilometers within a year or two okay yeah so within 2016 maybe even I say if you say 2017 I'd say 2017 for sure.

How far can a Tesla drive on a single charge in 2020?

In 2020 we could probably make a car go 1,200 kilometres okay it's that kind of the pace going forward moving battery so yeah if you think maybe um you know five to ten percent a year something like that okay yeah do you have any current plans for a self-driving Tesla we do I mean the they can tell me about that yeah sure so the the Tesla that is currently in production has the the ability to do automatic steering or order pilot on highways and that's currently being but beta tested and we'll go into wide release hopefully next month so we're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving at least for highways and for relatively simple roads I mean my guess for when we will have full autonomy is about three years three years approximately three

years however regulators will probably not allow full autonomy for maybe at least one to two years may 1 to 3 years after that so it depends on this on the particular market some markets will be the regulators will be more forward-leaning than others but in terms of technic winner will be technologically possible I think three years what kind of costs are we driving twenty years from now I hope civilization is still around in 20 years if it is yeah exactly I think in 20 years I think you will see hopefully a very long percentage of cars being electric probably all cars being built will have full autonomy in 20 years but it but it is important to bear in mind like sometimes people think I think of cars like consumer products like a phone or something like

that but in the case of a phone the the average ownership time for a phone is is 2 or 3 years but for a car a car typically lasts 20 years before it is finally scrapped so the the total fleet of cars and trucks in the world is about 2 billion and that fleet is increasing probably to two and a half billion and the new car production is is about a hundred new cars and trucks about a hundred million per year so in order to change the fleet if if all cars become electric say immediately then it would take more probably more than 20 years to change the fleet for autonomous driving that may be less because if a town was driving means that fewer cars and trucks are needed then it's a probably a smaller period of time but it's probably still at least 10 to 15

years okay so that's an important consideration we think when thinking about how fast can things changing in cars and as I mentioned earlier the if you want to say how how we're doing in terms of electric cars in terms of sustainable transport you know I'd say just look at the cost going down the road count how many electric cars out of a hundred and that's that tells you how many how much progress has been made been made and even in a place like Denmark which is relatively forward-leaning less than one percent what can we do here in Denmark - - well help you reach the goal of the sustainable future sure well I think it's it's it's it's formerly for for all electric all companies making electric cars Tesla being one of them it's really important particularly

in the early days of electric cars to have the incentives remain in place they don't have to be there forever but but if the if the rug is pulled too quickly for electric cars then you have a industry which is just a baby it's just a little tiny tiny thing and it's it's I think too early to sort of pull pull incentives for a industry that isn't in its infancy and in the future no problem but now would be difficult