[Riegerb]

I agree, although I think Musk is thinking much more fundamentally than cars with Tesla... we as a civilization need an efficient way to produce, store, and consume energy from the sun. The car is a logical near-term path/product to advance the 'store' and 'consume' technologies while having a near-term positive environmental impact and a sustainable business model.

[threeseed]

I also suspect that Tesla is a battery company that happens to sell cars.

But there's a problem. There is just so much R&D being done in energy storage devices and battery technology that Tesla will need to do quite a bit of M&A in order to stay relevant. That's a weird thing to do whilst you are still selling cars.

[Riegerb]

Yes. I would associate Tesla with Samsung as much as with Apple. Samsung LCD/OLED technology is in many high-end mobile device for example, even though they have flagship products that directly compete.. they are selling the more fundamental technologies. In the same way, Tesla (Elon) would much rather be selling batteries to many other car manufacturers and home battery storage manufacturers (the patent release makes a lot of sense within this line of thinking).

The challenge with energy storage is not only in the R&D, but also in the manufacturing at scale, cars are a great avenue to approach this challenge.