Updated Dec 15, 2017
Elon Musk has a lot to say about Tesla, and the electric vehicle industry in general. This list features some of his best quotes.
Feel free to let us know in the comments what your favorite quote is. Enjoy!
"As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla." (Jul, 2016 | Source)
"We could definitely make a flying car – but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy." (Jun, 2014 | Source)
"We will not stop until every car on the road is electric"
"I’m not the biggest proponent of hydrogen… Success is not one of the possible outcomes."
"The only reason they [the big car companies] do fuel cell, they don’t really believe it, it’s like a marketing thing."
"We actually bring the car and we kind of hit it with a pit crew, like a Formula One pit crew."
"I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against."
"You have to match the convenience of the gasoline car in order for people to buy an electric car."
"In order to have clean air in cities, you have to go electric."
"You should not show somebody something very cool and then not do it. At Tesla, any prototype that is shown to customers, the production must be better."
"With the Model 3, a future compact SUV and a new kind of pickup truck, we plan to address most of the consumer market."
"We believe the Tesla Semi will deliver a substantial reduction in the cost of cargo transport, while increasing safety..."
"There are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport."
"The F-150 is the best selling car in America. If people are voting that's their car, then that's the car we have to deliver."
"The average speed on the line [at the Tesla Freemont factory] is incredibly slow… Including S & X, it’s maybe 5 cm per second. This is very slow. I’m confident we can get to at least 1 metre per second. So, a 20 fold increase at least. To put that into perspective, 1 metre per second is a slow walk, or at least a medium speed walk, a fast walk would be 1.5 metres per second. And then the fastest humans can run over 10 metres per second. So, if we’re only doing 0.05 metres per second that’s very slow." (Sep, 2016 | Source)
"The lithium is two percent of the cell mass [in our batteries]. So it's like salt in the salad; it's a very small amount of the cell mass and a fairly small amount of the cost. But it sounds like it's big because it's called 'lithium ion,' but really, our battery should be called 'nickel graphite,' because it's mostly nickel and graphite." (June, 2016 | Source)
Cover photo from NVIDIA Corporation