Tesla Is Planning To Make A Pickup Truck

November 18, 2013 Leave a comment

EXCLUSIVE: Tesla Is Planning To Make A Pickup Truck

HENRY BLODGET NOV. 13, 2013, 9:06 AM 84,683 31

Electric car company Tesla is planning to make a pickup truck, CEO Elon Musk said yesterday.

The truck will likely be the same type of vehicle as Ford’s F-Series pickup trucks. The Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle of any kind in the United States. Musk said Tesla might make the truck in 5 years. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spoke at Business Insider’s IGNITION event in New York yesterday. He made his remarks about the pickup truck during a post-interview Q&A session at the side of the stage. After he descended the stage, Musk was surrounded by a crowd of conference attendees, and he answered questions about Tesla and his rocket company, SpaceX, for about half an hour.Musk’s comments about the truck came after he was asked whether Tesla would ever make a fleet truck for the likes of FedEx or UPS. He said that, yes, Tesla was planning to make a truck, but not a commercial one, because the market opportunity for commercial trucks is much smaller. Musk said the Tesla truck would be modeled on Ford’s F-Series in part because of that truck’s remarkable popularity.

60,000 F-150s were sold in the month of September.

(On a related note, I drove a Tesla Model S for the first time yesterday. It was as remarkable an experience as people say. Stomping on the “gas” produces a burst of acceleration that is both breathtaking and silent. I’m not a luxury-sedan guy, and I can’t run a charge cord out my window in the city, so the S isn’t for me. But I quickly put in the first pre-order for the Tesla pickup truck.)

(On another related note, don’t miss this clip in which Musk describes how both Tesla and SpaceX almost went bankrupt at the same time in 2008. In a desperate attempt to save the companies, Musk split his remaining assets between them. But by the end of the year, they were both days away from death. Musk said he nearly had a nervous breakdown. WATCH >)

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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