Elon Musk says Tesla will ‘someday’ produce ‘tremendous environment friendly residence HVAC’ with HEPA filtering – TechCrunch

Elon Musk previously touted the “bio-weapon defense mode” of Tesla’s vehicles, which should provide excellent air quality in the car even under catastrophic conditions, thanks in part to the highly efficient HEPA air filtration. Now, Musk has said on Twitter that he hopes one day to offer similar air filtration along with home HVAC systems.

While Tesla is primarily an automaker, it is already active in the home power and power generation space thanks to the acquisition of SolarCity, current production of solar rooftop products, and the development of Tesla batteries to store electricity from green sources at home. While it didn’t seem to take steps to break into other parts of housing or infrastructure, HVAC systems would actually be a logical extension of its business as they make up a significant part of a home’s total energy consumption. depending on its heating and cooling sources.

We will one day make a super efficient home air conditioner with Hepa filters

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 11, 2020

Increasing HVAC efficiency at home would have the added benefit of making Tesla’s other household energy products more appealing to consumers, as it would likely help achieve true off-grid (or almost off-grid) self-sufficiency.

As for the company’s HEPA filtering, Tesla takes bioweapons defense mode very seriously, despite the funny name. A 2016 blog post detailed what went into the system design and tested data to support claims of a HEPA filter that is “ten times more efficient than standard automotive filters.” While Tesla doesn’t cite wildfires in this post, it lists “California highways during rush hour, smelly swamps, cow pastures in the Central Valley of California, and big cities in China” in terms of the challenges it wanted to handle.

Many experts predict that the wildfires that are currently devastating large swaths of the US west coast will only get worse if environmental conditions continue to suffer from the effects of climate change. Given this, and given Tesla’s larger business goals of offering a range of products that neutralize or reduce the environmental impact of its customers, more efficient and effective household HVAC products don’t seem that far outside of their operational expertise.