Elon Musk hints Tesla may not build a bus after all

Tesla CEO Elon Musk backed away from the company’s vague plans to build an all-electric bus during a call with investors today. Musk cited his own new project focused on creating a system of subterranean tunnels as one of the reasons why he doesn’t think Tesla needs to make what he had been calling a “high passenger-density urban transport” vehicle.

Musk hasn’t talked about the Tesla bus much, but he claimed it was in development when he released his second “master plan” for the company last summer, and that it would be unveiled sometime in 2017. He first made mention of the project at a Bloomberg conference in April of last year. “We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus, but would solve the density problem for inner city situations,” Musk said then. “Autonomous vehicles are key... I don’t want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say.”

On the call today, Musk spoke with an even more uncertain tone. “I don’t know if the bus thing really makes sense in the shared fully autonomous environment,” Musk said in response to a question about the project. “If it costs less than a bus ticket to make use of a shared autonomy fleet to go wherever you want, point to point, well why don’t you just use that? So I don’t know.” Musk then added that he thinks traffic and urban density “can be fully alleviated with tunnels.”

Musk also said “something like a higher density Model X or something like that, that’s got, say, 10 or 12 seats in it” might make more sense than a bus — a curious statement considering Musk had previously said that the bus would be built on the Model X’s platform. But as we learned with today’s news about the Model Y now being built on a whole new platform, Tesla’s plans often change. We’ve reached out to Musk for clarification.