Tesla Tweets About New Product Line That Is ‘Not A Car’

Shares of Tesla Motors rose after CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that a “major new Tesla product line – not a car – will be unveiled” at the company’s Hawthorne, California, design studio on April 30.

Although Musk didn’t provide any details about the new product line, there is a great deal of speculation that it will be related to storage batteries for residential customers or businesses. However, a Tesla representative would only say that the company will have “more information to share” in the coming weeks.

Back in February, Musk explained that the company was working on a battery that collects energy from the sun during the day and stores it for use at night when people are at home.

“We’re going to unveil the Tesla home battery, or consumer battery, that will be for use in people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon,” Musk said at that time. “We have the design done, and it should start going into production in about six months or so. It’s really great.”

Musk’s vague Tweet certainly has people talking. Although the company has already been supplying home battery technology to SolarCity, which has made them available in small parts of California, perhaps this announcement indicates that the company is planning to increase the availability of its home battery technology in the near future. Certainly, if Tesla takes the lessons that it has learned in battery design and applies them to home power on a wide scale, it could prove to be very disruptive for utility companies. There could be the potential for homeowners to use Tesla’s batteries to decrease their reliance on local utilities, and even to take that all the way to going “off the grid.”

It is said that other companies have home battery concepts in development as well, including General Electric, Honda and Samsung.

Tesla is currently building a $5 billion battery plant near Reno, Nevada, which the company calls a “gigafactory” that is designed to more than double the world’s supply of lithium-ion batteries, thereby reducing costs and making electric cars a more affordable choice. The battery packs that are made at the factory are initially intended to be used in Tesla’s all-electric Model S sedan and the upcoming Model X sport utility vehicle, as well as in stationary storage applications. Bloomberg Business has reported that, according to a job description posted by the company, Tesla projects that its stationary storage business unit “will be a multi-billion dollar per year one in the near term.”

Is it possible that Tesla will release a storage battery for residential and business use that will help to reinvent the power grid over time?

Certainly, the long-term ecological impact of relying on coal, oil and natural gas is a growing concern, resulting in an increasing demand for renewable resources for the future. We’ll be watching closely for further developments to see exactly what Tesla has up its sleeve with its new product line. As interesting as the speculation is, all we actually know for sure at this point is that it’s “not a car.”