In 2006, Elon Musk Had a "Secret Plan" to Mainstream Electric Cars. It's Working

Tesla Motors has been playing the long game since the very beginning. Elon Musk's plan has always been to transform electric cars into a viable, mainstream consumer product, and with the announcement of its $5 billion "Gigafactory," it's on the brink of doing exactly that. The company announced plans to build the massive factory somewhere in the American South, with the intent to mass produce electric car batteries and subsequently bring down costs.

"The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013," Tesla's press release claims. "By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent."

If costs go down that far, so will the final barrier to successful, profitable mass market electric cars. Again—this has been the plan all along.

Elon Musk's decision to start super sleek luxury electric car wasn't just about building the best possible vehicle. It was about making electric cars, with their very expensive batteries, financially viable, and then using the profits and expanding infrastructure to make them cheaper. Eight years ago, Musk wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post called "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan," in which he explained that "the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors … is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy."

It was, in some regards, a response to critics who accused him of building a vanity sports car that wouldn't really have a wide-ranging impact on the environment. At the time, Tesla was only building the super-sleek $90,000 Roadster. The sports car was just the beginning, he argued, of a plan to build "an electric car without compromises" for everyone:

The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model … I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable. In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.

Or, more succinctly, he laid out the company's "Secret Plan" as follows:

• Build sports car
• Use that money to build an affordable car
• Use that money to build an even more affordable car

That is precisely what Musk has done. And he's done it better and faster than even he thought possible. Tesla has won more "car of the year" awards at this point than you can shake a battery pack at. It paid off all of its $465 million in government loans nine years early. It's valued at $30 billion. Its $65,000 Model S is outselling its Mercedes luxury car competitor. And its next car will be the Model E, with a sticker price of $35,000.

Per the release today: "As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible."

So by 2017, we could be seeing affordable electric cars rolling off the assembly line with a sterling, accolade-stuffed reputation at its back—and in the car world, appearance is everything. If Musk and his team pull this off, they will have more or less single-handedly transformed the popular perception of electric cars from hippie punchlines into clean vehicles that are simultaneously future-sexy and totally mainstream. There have been a couple of bumps along the way, sure—some more fiery than others—but you couldn't plot and execute a scheme to catapult electric vehicles into the consumer consciousness any better if you were Lex Luther in a world without Superman.