Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, said on Monday that Apple's rival electric car venture is an open secret. Although the company did not officially announced, hiring a thousand engineers to do the job is quite difficult to hide, he said during his interview with BBC in Tesla's design studio in Los Angeles.
Even with Tesla's already existing competitors like Nissan and BMW (which are the top-grossing electric car brands but, as of now, run at loss) as well as the emergence of China-backed Faraday Future, Musk did not seem worried over the new possible competition with Apple. Instead, he said that the company's entrance to the industry will all the more expand the market.
Tesla will still aim to design and create imperative electric cars and, at the same time, will help other companies make electric vehicles also. He still sees a future of driverless and autonomous cars that will become more of a hobby rather than a mere necessity. Furthermore, to him, non-autonomous cars will eventually become an anachronism.
Meanwhile, Musk affirmed Tesla's upcoming electric car Model 3, which will go on mass production by the end of 2017, but its pre-ordering will start this March. Tesla aired on Sunday that it recently updated its cars' software by optimizing a self-parking or "summon" feature, which permits car owners to park or get their cars even if the driver is not behind the wheel through the use of their smartphones.
Musk further surprised saying that in a couple of years' time, Tesla cars can be summoned even when the owners are in other places or even in different states. Musk envisions a car that will drive across the country and even charge itself on different stations just to get to the owner's location.
Following the recent conclusion of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week and the Detroit Motor Show this week, Musk noted that electrification and autonomy are two of the industry's biggest ideas.
