The road to Elon Musk’s self-driving cars, trucks, and buses (Infographic)

Photo credit: Dan Taylor/Heisenberg Media.

Elon Musk is an inspiration to dreamers and disruptors everywhere. So it’s good to keep up with what he’s dreaming up next. Recently, he wrote out his Master Plan, Part Deux in a Tesla blog. (Deux is two in French, by the way.)

The road ahead for Tesla is dotted with self-driving trucks and buses, not just cars. Elon Musk visualizes heavy-duty self-driving trucks as being safer and “fun to operate,” apart from reducing the cost of cargo transport. He expects to unveil them next year.

That’s not all. Self-driving buses are also in early stages of development at Tesla. He envisages the bus driver transitioning to the role of fleet manager. And a solar battery panel on the roof.

He wants to shrink the size of buses by eliminating the center aisle. Another idea for reducing road congestion is “matching acceleration and braking to other vehicles, thus avoiding the inertial impedance to smooth traffic flow of traditional heavy buses.”

His first “secret” master plan, written on the Tesla website exactly 10 years ago, spoke of building an electric-powered sports car and using that money to build lower-priced, larger models. Few expected to see those on the road within a decade. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see self-driving trucks and buses too, even if hardcore business analysts remain skeptical.

See: 7 quotes from Elon Musk that will inspire you to think out of the box

The road to self-driving cars

Elon Musk wasn’t the first to dream of self-driving vehicles of course. Carnegie Mellon University in the US as well as some European universities, in association with car makers like Mercedes Benz, experimented with autonomous vehicles way back in the eighties.

The US defense department’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which created the internet, even held “Grand Challenge” races for self-driving cars. Nobody completed the race in 2004, but Stanford University won the race next year, with Carnegie Mellon taking the second and third spots. Here in the following infographic by Tracxn, you can drive along the rest of the road to self-driving cars.