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I'll show you the D next week – billionaire space baron Elon Musk

Sly tweet sends tongues a-wagging

Elon Musk has been having some fun on Twitter: he posted a cryptic teaser about something new that will emerge from Tesla on October 9 at the firm's design studio in Hawthorne, California.

So now the interwebs are all aflutter about what Musk's D is, and what that something else could be. Naturally some of this speculation has tended towards the smutty

The something else is most likely to be the Tesla X, Musk's long-planned electric SUV aimed at taking some of the market for large cars that Americans love so much. The X has been coming for some time but a launch at the end of this year or next will fit in nicely with Musk's release schedule.

After the X will come the Tesla III, the firm's planned "cheap" electric car with a $35,000 price tag that Musk hopes will bring electric transportation to the masses, or at least those with cash to burn who can't afford the Tesla S sedan.

But that still leaves Musk's D, and no one is quite sure what that is. If this hack was a betting man then he'd put money on D standing for Driver; an automatic driving system similar to that pioneered by Google in its fleet of autonomous vehicles.

In an interview with CNN Money, Musk said he wants Tesla to be a leader in autonomous vehicles. The company has been testing out a system that could be ready next year, and he claims it would enable 90 per cent of the average drive to be carried out by the car with no human control.

Such a system would be relatively easy to put in place he claimed, saying all you'd need would be a radar system, cameras with image recognition, and long-range ultrasonics. He declined to say how much this would all cost, or if it could be fitted retroactively to existing models.

Having this in place by next year would be an astoundingly ambitious schedule, but Musk has never been one to do things by halves – and he does love his predictions.

We shall have to wait and see for a week until the mystery is cleared up. In the meantime Musk hasn't said any more, other to insist he had no idea that talking about his D would generate so much innuendo.

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