Trucks, transit and solar in a push to sustainability: Elon Musk

We finally know what Elon Musk is thinking.

In the latest version, Musk paints a picture of a renewable energy enterprise, with goals such as creating solar roofs that are seamlessly integrated with battery storage, an expanded vehicle product line that includes heavy-duty trucks and large passenger transport vehicles. He also reiterated the intent to work toward "true self-driving" vehicles that are several times safer than manual driving, and enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it.

Creating the "solar-roof-with-battery product" is the first piece of the plan — and that had been an element of Musk's earlier roadmap. Musk envisions a system that would turn individuals (or perhaps more accurately, homeowners) into their own utilities. This is why Musk wants Tesla to fully acquire SolarCity.

He said Wednesday he considers the fact that Tesla and SolarCity were ever separate to begin with "largely an accident of history," saying that the time is right to combine Tesla's scalable Powerwall wall battery with SolarCity's solar panels.

Secondly, Musk wants to expand Tesla's line to "cover the major forms of terrestrial transport," which are, in short, trucks, buses, and a unique kind of ride-sharing scheme based on autonomous cars.

The company has both a Tesla Semi truck and a "high passenger-density" bus in development, and both should be "ready for unveiling next year," the post said.

As for autonomy, Musk sees the technology improving over time.

"When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else en route to your destination," Musk wrote.

Along with other tech and auto companies, Tesla has been working on making its cars fully autonomous.

Musk explained why the company moved so quickly to stock its cars with its partially autonomous technology, called Autopilot, and why the company has resisted calls to disable the feature after one user died in a crash in May.

He said even partially autonomous cars are "already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability."

He added, that it would "no more make sense to disable Tesla's Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named."

This idea was echoed in comments made earlier Wednesday by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Mark Rosekind, who said the regulator will not abandon its efforts to help speed the development of self-driving cars, despite the fatal Tesla accident.

Give the potential for autonomous driving technology to reduce the vast majority of the car crashes attributed to human error, the auto regulator said it is willing to accept that the technology might not be perfect.

"If we wait for perfect, we'll be waiting for a very, very long time," Rosekind said, according to a Reuters report. "How many lives might we be losing while we wait?"

The availability of autonomous technology will allow Tesla owners to "share" their cars with others, and even collect income as others use them.

Musk said owners will be able to add their cars "to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla."

Tesla's new stated strategy already provoked skepticism and criticism from some analysts.

"Elon Musk's latest plan for Tesla follows the same path already laid out by several other automakers," wrote Karl Brauer, senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, in an email sent to CNBC.

"The idea of combining self-driving technology with electric powertrains is underway at Ford, Google and GM, just to name three. Combining this effort with a Tesla/Solar City merger gives Musk a slightly varied approach, but a negotiated agreement between an automaker and one of a dozen other solar energy companies would nullify that advantage," Brauer said.

He added that the big automakers have the advantage of a distribution and service network Tesla still lacks.

"Elon paints an appealing picture," Brauer said, "but a near-term plan for profitability, or even a substantial improvement in current vehicle quality, would have been more impressive."

In Wednesday's blog post, Musk also said he penned his first master plan as a way to defend himself from the inevitable critics who would say he was "just caring about making cars for rich people."

"Unfortunately, the blog didn't stop countless attack articles on exactly these grounds, so it pretty much completely failed that objective," he said.

The initial plan also aimed to explain how the company's actions fit into a larger picture, "so that they would seem less random," Musk said.

"The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That's what 'sustainable' means. It's not some silly, hippy thing — it matters for everyone," he said.

"Master Plan, Part Deux" evolves this vision with the hope of accelerating the shift to sustainability.