Elon Musk’s Real Moonshot: Five Things We Learned This Week
Five Things We Learned This Week (03/31)
Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk says he can make 500,000 cars next year. That’s a dramatic increase for the electric-car company, which made a little more than 76,000 in 2016. The key is his new Model 3, a $35,000 sedan—about half the price of its current line—scheduled to start deliveries sometime next year. At his target, Musk would have to sell more vehicles than the BMW 3 Series and the Mercedes C class combined. Wall Street analysts say that’s not likely, Bloomberg’s Tom Randall reports. And Musk has a history of blowing self-imposed deadlines. “It could happen,” said Salim Morsy, electric car analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “I’m pretty sure it won’t.”
In the future, will there be any jobs that robots can’t do? A Domino’s Pizza franchisee is turning to robots to deliver pizzas in Germany and the Netherlands. Think of them as a Coleman cooler on wheels. The battery-powered machines scoot down sidewalks at 4 miles per hour, Bloomberg’s Jeremy Kahn reports. “With our growth plans over the next five to 10 years, we simply won’t have enough delivery drivers,” says Don Meij, chief executive officer of Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, the chain’s largest franchisee. The robots are already at work delivering takeouts for other companies in south London.