| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday—and on occasion we focus on the entrepreneur and internet icon Elon Musk. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. And here it is … Are you familiar with the For Dummies book series? You know: Economics for Dummies, English Grammar for Dummies, Quantum Physics for Dummies, and so on. There are literally thousands of titles in the series, and they've sold hundreds of millions of copies cumulatively. The thing about the books, though, is that they're not really for the eponymous dummies. The genius of the concept is that they often take on extremely complicated topics, ideas so big that plenty could use a primer—you often still require a decent lump of gray matter between the ears to get your head around them. My copy of Economic Indicators for Dummies is well thumbed. In a sense, Elon Musk's Tesla Master Plan Part 3, which the world's sometime richest man unveiled last week at the company's Austin, Texas, headquarters, was in the vein of the For Dummies series. There was plenty of interesting stuff in there, but for anyone with more than a passing knowledge of either the climate crisis or the workings of the automotive industry, it was pretty, well … obvious?  A Tesla Supercharger station. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg The master plan itself was only tangentially to do with Tesla. It's the third iteration of what's supposed to be his grand vision for the electric-car maker—the first was back in 2006. This installment was more a road map for the world to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Liam Denning justifiably called it "essentially, a TED Talk." And it's a road map that already exists, in the exhaustive form of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Mitigation of Climate Change report released last year. That initial half hour was followed by three hours of his executives delivering what was just a run-of-the-mill investor day. Sure, there were odds and ends in there that were mildly novel for a carmaker: some more vertical integration, where fewer components are sourced from suppliers than might be typical, and the use of fewer rare-earth minerals, for instance. But there was also plenty that was pitched as groundbreaking which is, in fact, par for the course in modern industry. Take the 3D simulation of production processes, a computer model that supply chain chief Karn Budhiraj said "not many companies or teams" can make—essentially when they mock up part of the factory digitally before building it. Back when I was an industrials reporter in Germany in 2015, the engineering company Siemens would pitch me stories about exactly that, calling it "the Digital Twin." It's a pretty standard manufacturing tool. Same with some of the modular manufacturing techniques Tesla showed off, and Volkswagen pioneered a decade ago. Perhaps the greater surprise was that Tesla has managed to boast solid margins even without adopting some of these approaches from the get-go. Don't get me wrong: None of this is necessarily a bad thing. Musk knows his audience, who are retail investors. That's likely why his execs felt the need to explain the difference between a tier-one supplier (which supplies Tesla directly) and a tier-two supplier (which supplies the tier-one supplier). A typical car company would have just used the jargon and moved on, and might well have been the worse for it, given how they struggle to attract those same retail investors. Besides, repackaging general consensus about how to reduce dependence on fossil fuels in a way that's easily comprehensible to a general audience has real merit. For investors, the adoption of technology used by the rest of the industry points to something else they should appreciate: that Tesla has absolutely become a grown-up car company. You'd hope so, with a $600 billion market capitalization. The "production hell" Musk referred to when ramping up the Model 3 might be avoidable when Tesla ramps up future vehicles. And the upshot—reducing production costs by 50%—offers scope both for Tesla to cut prices and boost or sustain those juicy profit margins. The company will need them to fund the $150 billion it plans to spend on expansion. Sure, there was widespread disappointment among fans about the lack of news on any models—something that rivals trot out at a far more regular cadence. But maybe it's not the worst thing for investors if Tesla becomes more like its competitors. —Alex Webb, correspondent for Bloomberg Quicktake | 
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