Elon Musk knows no bounds. The tech billionaire wants to retire on Mars, but right now his work on Earth is revolutionizing how we travel, and he wants to build a submarine car next.
This South African-born Canadian-American business magnate is the visionary who made his fortune through PayPal, then plowed his cash into pioneering the rebirth of the electric car.
His car company, Tesla Motors, has turned the image of a tin-box, low-range, battery-operated car into a desirable, practical, fashionable ride.
It might come with a bigger price tag, but the technology used is taking the eco option in the right direction. In fact, Musk is such an advocate of electric cars that he recently announced he would “give away” his company’s technology in order to propel the market.
But the 42-year-old CEO is not stopping at making tracks on the road. In a recent interview with The Independent (UK), he revealed his fancy not only for the flying car, but confirmed he will be building a submarine car. Anybody else would have been laughed out of the room, but when Musk says it, we’re asking when we can get one.
Tesla’s new Model S can travel 310 miles (500 kilometers) on a single charge and hit 62 mph (100 kph) in just 4.4 seconds.
“We could definitely make a flying car — but that’s not the hard part,” he told the newspaper. “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.”
We don’t doubt that Musk has the drive to actually make a flying car, but clearly logistics are getting in the way.
However, what won’t be getting in his way is water.
“We will be making a submarine car. It can transition from being a submarine to a car that drives up on the beach,” he added. “Maybe we’ll make two or three, but it wouldn’t be more than that. It’s not like we’d sell it, because I think the market for submarine cars is quite small.”
Musk’s fascination with amphibious cars has been widely known ever since he bought James Bond’s famous dunkable Lotus Esprit from “The Spy Who Loved Me” for $988,000 at auction.
A submarine car may seem like the pipe dream of an eccentric, but don’t forget this is the man who has built and deployed a space taxi.
His SpaceX shuttle, developed with NASA, has been carrying cargo from Earth to the International Space Station. And he will be taking crew members into space after recently unveiling his next-generation Dragon V2 transportation pod.
It’s all part of Musk’s grand plan to take mankind into the final frontier and ultimately see himself one day set foot on Mars.
Among his other transportation revolutions is the Hyperloop — a high-speed mass-transit concept like no other. The idea consists of train-like pods carrying passengers in low-friction tubes (a bit like those you see at supermarkets that shuttle cash from checkouts) at a speed of 700 mph (1,126 kph) that can get you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes — a journey that takes over six hours by road and an hour and 20 minutes even by plane. The hyperloop proposal seems entirely feasible (there’s a 57-page document to support it), and this “fifth mode” of transportation may one day be the way we travel.
But will the submarine car join it? What we can be certain of is Elon Musk is a truly exciting visionary who’s buzzing with brilliant ideas to help take us into the fast lane.