https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-stock-price-master-plan-elon-musk-electric-vehicles-51675946886

Cue dramatic music: A new master plan is about to be unveiled by Tesla.

Investors seem to be expecting a lot of exciting news. Shares of the maker of electric vehicles are racing higher heading into the event.

Tesla TSLA +3.00% (ticker: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday evening that Master Plan 3 would be unveiled at the company’s March 1 annual meeting and investors event being held in Austin, Texas.

What will be in the report is anyone’s guess, and Barron’s has some thoughts.

First, a little context. There have been two other plans that were strategic documents in entertaining essay form. The first came out in 2006 and the second came in 2016.

Plan 1 dated from 2006, about six years before Tesla started selling its first production-line car, the Model S. The plan outlined Musk’s vision to move the world toward a solar-electric economy, and away from a fossil-fuel based economy.

The first step in Plan 1 was to build a sports car, the Model S/X platform. The next step was to use the money generated to build an affordable car (the Model 3/Y platform), and then use the money generated from the lower-priced Tesla vehicles to build an even lower-priced Tesla.

That final step of Plan 1 isn’t finished. There isn’t an EV from Tesla below the 3/Y level. Eventually that will matter because Teslas, roughly speaking, cost $50,000-plus. The bulk of new-car sales happen in the $30,000 range.

Plan 2—or Master Plan, Part Deux as it is titled—introduced the idea that energy storage was a key pillar to moving the world toward a sustainable-energy future. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow, so renewable-energy producers need batteries to provide electricity consistently.

Tesla has shipped about 16 gigawatt hours of battery storage over the past four years. Storage sales in 2022 amounted to about $3.9 billion.

Part Deux also introduced Tesla’s ambition to produce a pickup truck and heavy-duty truck. The Tesla Semi just began shipping in December. The Cybertruck ships later this year.

The final bit of Part Deux also introduced the idea of self-driving cars, which would make driving safer and provide car owners the ability to make money while not using their vehicles by sending them out as part of a so-called Robotaxi fleet.

Like Plan 1, the final step of Plan 2 isn’t complete yet.

What will Plan 3 contain? It should update progress made producing lower-priced and self-driving cars. Those aren’t new goals, though. It should also reiterate Tesla’s plan for a sustainable energy future. That isn’t a new idea, either.

Energy production and trading might be a moonshot idea that Musk introduces as a new goal in Plan 3. Tesla has all the technology required to be a utility, and it can make solar panels, batteries, and software to control it all.

Investors always like new businesses. In the more-immediate future they want to see a lower-priced model come out. It will expand Tesla’s addressable market, and defend market share.

The stock will react to the March event mainly on the next, lower price, model platform. The stock’s starting point, of course, will also factor into what it does after the plan reveal.

Tesla stock has been on a tear after a terrible 2022. Shares are up about 68% so far this year after dropping about 65% in 2022.