Musk Says Upcoming Small EV Will Operate Mostly Autonomously, And You Can Definitely Believe Him This Time

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Stop the presses, folks. We’ve got a big, breaking story here. A HUGE story, even. We’ve just received word that Tesla will soon have a new small electric vehicle that will operate almost entirely in autonomous mode. And it will cost about half as much as the current Tesla Model 3. It’s conveniently just around the corner where you can’t see it and can’t prove that it isn’t happening, but it definitely is. For real.

CarScoops reports that while speaking at the Morgan Stanley Conference yesterday, Elon Musk spoke about the upcoming small car, which will presumably be called the Model 2. You would think he would have said more about it during Tesla’s 2023 Investor Day, but nope. He saved the good stuff for the fine folks at Morgan Stanley.

“There is a clear path to making a vehicle, a smaller vehicle, that is roughly half the production cost of our Model 3,” Musk said at the conference. “That vehicle will be used almost entirely in autonomous mode. The thing that is gigantic for Tesla is autonomy. And people that have used the Tesla Full-Self Driving and have seen how rapidly the Full-Self Driving capabilities has been evolving, it should be obvious that that is the most profound thing [for Tesla].”

And since Elon Musk said it himself, you know you can believe it. Not only will there soon be a $25,000 Tesla that you can buy, but it will also be super duper autonomous. You’ll barely have to drive it, if ever. And no, you shouldn’t bring up the fully autonomous cross-country drive that never happened. Or the recall of Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving software. Or any of the other investigations into how unsafe Tesla’s software is. Or Musk’s weird insistence that it can get to full autonomy with cameras alone despite the fact that every other automaker and self-driving startup uses radar and lidar in conjunction with cameras. That would just make you a hater.

Similarly, if you dare suggest that I will not grow to be 6’4″ this year, win the Powerball, retire at 35, buy a yacht, and start dating Emily Ratajkowski, you are also a hater. Those things are all definitely happening, and it’s incredibly rude of you to suggest otherwise.