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Sir Richard Branson has teased a possible rivalry with Tesla, suggesting that Virgin could be working on electric vehicles for consumers.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg , the billionaire spoke about how Virgin already has ‘teams of people working on electric cars’.
Importantly, he added: “So you never know – you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business. We will see what happens.”
Virgin is no stranger to electric motor engineering; the Virgin Racing Engineering division has already developed cars that compete in the electric vehicle racing series Formula E.
Considering Virgin is already well under way with development for racing-tier electric cars, it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to see the company scaling the tech to a consumer level.
Tesla’s growing popularity is a sure sign that there’s big money in the future electric vehicle market. Virgin making an early play in the sector could make it easy to capitalise on the trend later on.
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Branson also outed his admiration for Tesla’s vehicles, stating: “Tesla is as sexy as any other car on the road today.”
It’s worth noting that Branson’s Virgin empire currently consists of over 400 companies, so he’s not exactly fearful of new business ventures.
Virgin also currently competes with Tesla in the space industry; Virgin Galactic is eyeing up consumer-facing space exploration, facing off against Telsa CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX.