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Tesla Model 3 prototype revealed - On-sale in late 2017 with a 215-mile minimum range and a base price of $35,000

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#1 · (Edited)
Will add press release and official photos when they're available on the website



via The Verge
After ten years of waiting, Tesla has revealed the Model 3, the vehicle that CEO Elon Musk hopes will take the electric car to the masses.

At the unveiling of the Model 3 this evening at the company's design studio in Hawthorne, California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will deliver at least 215 miles of range beginning at just $35,000 — that's a bold claim, and an important one for Tesla to meet. Musk is "fairly confident" that deliveries will begin by the end of 2017, and "you will not be able to buy a better car for $35,000, even with no options."

The base car will do 0-60MPH in less than 6 seconds, with versions that go "much faster." Range will be at least 215 miles, but Tesla hopes to exceed those numbers in the final car. All Model 3 cars will include support for Tesla's high-speed Supercharging network. "It's about going where you want to go," says Musk. By the end of 2017, when the Model 3 launches, Tesla says it will have a total of 7,200 Superchargers, double the number available today.

Autopilot hardware is standard, and all safety features will be active automatically. Five adults will fit comfortably — "comfortably is the important part here," says Musk.

The front to rear roof area — from the windshield all the way to the trunk — will be one continuous piece of glass. And, just like the Model S, it will have front and rear trunks for storage. "More cargo capacity than any gasoline car of the same external dimensions," says Musk. You can even fit a 7-foot long surfboard on the inside.

The two current Tesla vehicles, the Model S and Model X, are both extremely expensive. Even with tax incentives, both cars easily push $100,000. In order for Tesla to sell ten times as many cars as it does now, it needs a much cheaper automobile. That's the Model 3. It's the future of the company.

But don't expect to get your hands on one any time soon. The Model 3 isn't expected to begin production until late 2017, more than 18 months from now. Tesla will happily take your preorder for a modest $1,000 down payment. Tesla plans to more than double the size of its dealership and service network by the end of next year, to sell and take care of all these new cars.

For comparison, the biggest direct competitor for the Model 3 is the Chevy Bolt. GM says that car will have an electric range greater than 200 miles and a price, after tax incentives, of around $30,000.

But today is all about the Model 3, the pinnacle of the Tesla Motors master plan. Elon Musk laid it all out in a blog post ten years ago:

Build sports car - The Tesla Roadster
Use that money to build an affordable car - The Model S
Use that money to build an even more affordable car - The Model 3

At the announcement of the Model 3 this evening, Elon Musk even thanked Model S and Model X purchasers for funding the development of the car. The Model 3 is the culmination of a decade's worth of work. Elon Musk is betting billions on it, and it needs to deliver. The future of Tesla Motors, quite literally, rides on its success.





 
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#90 ·
The steering wheel looks a bit..I don't know..flimsy? It's just sort of..there...

In any case, wow :thumbup: I can't wait to start seeing these on the roads, and I really hope they adopted LED headlights too. Why the Model S wasn't full LED from the beginning (and still isn't) I won't know I guess...

Man oh man, this thing just brought us into the 21st century finally. :thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::beer::beer::beer:
 
#96 ·
This really is the game changer Elon wanted it to be. No grill up front makes it incredibly definable and recognizable. Also makes us uncomfortable which means its doing its job setting the trend. Short overhangs, long wheelbase AND a long greenhouse make for class leading packaging. Again the proportions make us uncomfortable in a good way. That interior, if they carry it off, seals the deal. Setting the standard for cars that will drive themselves but also creating a simple environment defining the electric driving experience by removing all extraneous elements. This is the new axiom: Driving at its purest with no noise or extra inputs needed. Not for everyone but I can see the joy in it. I expected the car to be good and, although its not perfect for me(No Hatch!) it still exceeded my expectation.:)
 
#99 ·
via Road & Track
Ahead of tonight's Tesla Model 3 launch event in Hawthorn, California, CEO Elon Musk hinted that we wouldn't get to see quite everything in store for the all-new, $35,000 electric sedan. Sadly, nobody was allowed to drive the two running Model 3 prototypes at the event. But I got to take a short ride in the back seat of what turned out to be a dual-motor, big-battery, high performance Model 3 variant. Here's my back-seat driving impressions.

Every Tesla has a gimmick. The Model S introduced dual-motor all-wheel drive and Insane and later Ludicrous modes. The Model X has those ridiculous doors and the world's largest single-pane windshield.

The Model 3's hallmark is a huge waterfall glass roof. Over the front two seats is a standard panoramic sunroof; the rear passengers are treated to a huge rear windshield that reaches all the way up to become a huge skylight. A piece of glass this big has got to be expensive—particularly given the Model 3's starting price of $35,000.

Regardless, all that glass makes for a very airy passenger compartment. It also frees up a ton of headroom, since the only thing between you and the outside world is a sheet of glass. At six-foot-one, I had a good four inches of headroom seated in the back seat and plenty of leg room, though foot space was slightly cramped. If you're afraid that glass could be detrimental to crash safety, Musk assures us the Model 3 will get five-star ratings in every crash test category, though actual crash testing is a long way off.

The dashboard is completely bizarre. There's no instrument panel in front of the driver, and aside from the standard control stalks on the steering column, not a single button or physical control anywhere on the dashboard. Instead, a single, giant, landscape-oriented touchscreen hovers a few inches proud of the dashboard. Everything is displayed there—including the speedometer, in the top-left corner closest to the driver, which seems like it would take a lot of getting used to.

How'd it drive? My wheelman wouldn't give any details about our car's drivetrain, other than to reveal that it was a dual-motor all-wheel-drive setup. Rumor has it a top-of-the-line Model 3 could get an 80kWh battery, providing enough juice for Ludicrous-mode all-wheel-drive launches and 0-60 in under four seconds.

I don't know if that's the drivetrain I sampled. But from the back seat, on a short stretch of road closed off for the Tesla event, the Model 3 launched with ferocious grip and absolutely zero drama. It wasn't quite the chest-collapsing wallop of a Model S P90D in Ludicrous mode, but without a stopwatch, I'd say the Model 3 I rode in zipped from a dead stop to 75 mph a bit quicker than a Subaru WRX STI—silently.

Sadly, there was no place to get a good impression of the Model 3's steady-state handling or lateral grip, but our driver zig-zagged through a handful of quick slalom maneuvers. The Model 3 stayed nearly flat, with plenty of grip. Credit Tesla's low-slung platform, which puts the mass of the batteries (and in this case, the dual motors) as low as possible in the package.

We can't wait to get behind the steering wheel for ourselves. Musk says that will happen sometime in late 2017—and this time, he swears there will be no delays.
via Auto Express
We take one of the world’s first rides in the all-new Tesla Model 3 electric compact exec car

Following the launch of the new Tesla Model 3, we took the briefest of rides with Doug Field, Tesla's Vice President of Engineering, at the wheel. Doug was kind enough to floor the accelerator pedal during our quick jaunt, and the Model 3 leapt to an indicated 60mph in what felt like around four and a half seconds, with the torquey, jet-like acceleration typical of electric cars.

Doug told us we were riding in one of the dual-motor all-wheel-drive cars, which offers better traction and performance than the basic rear-drive car. An impromptu slalom showed that body lean was well controlled - no surprise with the battery and motor mounted so low - but until we get our own hands on the wheel, we'll have to reserve judgment on the Model 3’s handling.

Once our internal organs had returned themselves to their native positions, we took in the Model 3's interior, which is so simple as to be nearly stark. The cabin is dominated by a large touchscreen; it's mounted horizontally rather than vertically as in other Teslas, giving the appearance that someone has left a laptop on the dashboard.

Speed and gear selection are displayed in the upper corner of the screen, with a strip of climate controls at the bottom and the rest of the video real estate split between the map display and stereo controls. Unlike other Tesla models, that's it for instrumentation—in fact, that's it for anything. Aside from a small squared-off steering wheel, the dash is nothing more than an unadorned strip of black and white, with a center console bisecting the front bucket seats. It's the kind of interior we expect to see in a concept car, but Doug told us we were looking at something very close to the production version.

Unlike the Model X, the Model 3's windscreen doesn't extend into the roofline; instead, they've saved that treatment for the rear window, which extends clear up to the car's B-pillars. A large sunroof over the front seats completes the illusion of a nearly-all-glass roof. The glass roof also improves rear-seat headroom, while the front seats have been pushed forward for more legroom. The six-footers riding behind us said that legroom was acceptable and headroom surprisingly generous.

Our quick test-drive left us eager for more, and we're looking forward to putting a Model 3 to the test when it arrives later this year.
 
#102 ·


via Autoblog
By tomorrow, there will be 850 stories just like this one on the Internet. I don't care. I got to ride in the Tesla Model 3 tonight, and that's worth sharing.

The opportunity presented itself at the unveiling of the $35,000 Model 3 at the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, California. There were about 850 people invited, including our friends Gisli Gislason and Who Killed The Electric Car? director Chris Paine. Everyone there, it seemed, wanted to hop into the Model 3 for a ride, so everything was kept short and on some sort of schedule. Tesla wasn't letting anyone but the paid drivers behind the wheel, so we all made due with our three minutes as passengers in the world's current It car.

How hot is the Model 3 right now? Well, initial response to the design has been overwhelmingly positive and Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced from the stage at the end of his 25-minute presentation that there had already been 115,000 pre-orders. An hour later, after my test ride, there were over 133,000 and new ones were coming in at roughly one per second. That means that, as of this writing, Tesla made $133 million in $1,000 pre-orders in one day. As we said before the unveiling, interest in this car was high. I think we underestimated.

But back to our review of our 180 seconds in the car. This was not a base model, so the one quick burst of speed that I got to experience is not going to be the norm for buyers who fork over $35,000 for the base model. Details about which options will be available and how much they'll cost were all absent from the night's proceedings. As you can hear in the video above, the driver said we were in a dual-motor prototype, so we were treated to a bit higher performance than the 0-60 in less than six seconds that Musk quoted for the base model. The driver also said that the 3 will be available as AWD, but when it's not operating in AWD mode, the 3 is RWD.

Tesla's impressive vertical touchscreen from the Model S and X has been transformed into a horizontal screen that dominates the dashboard in the 3. I only saw the navigation map screen with some music details on the right side. It looked impressive and functional, just like the screens in Tesla's other models, but I didn't get to interact with it at all.

I want to experience the 3 in daylight, to see if the giant glass top is a good idea. When I drove the Model X recently, I was glad that it had an aftermarket tint on the giant glass canopy above the front seats, because sometimes you just want a bit of protection from the sun. To have basically the entire roof be made of glass, well, I'm not sure that's ideal. Maybe this is a way for Tesla to sell more branded hats. At night, though, and on cloudy days, glass this big just screams spaciousness, and it's amazing. Luckily, the 3's all-glass top is an option, and not one I'd choose.

Of course, since all of the cars on hand tonight were early prototypes, who knows what details will change by the time the Model 3 goes on sale at the end of 2017. But, well, this is what it was like to ride in a Model 3 tonight. Get ready for 850 more versions of this story tomorrow and, soon, at least 133,000 more. And then even more. Tesla wants to bring electric drive to the masses. Tonight was a big step in that direction.
 
#105 ·
I really, really dig it. Now, if I could only justify buying one. I only drive an average of ten days a month so I don't need to spend that much money on any car. I also rent so I'm not putting in wiring for charging and there is nowhere to charge at work. I really hope this thing sells like hotcakes.
 
#107 ·
Finally, a family car with proper sized windows. I really hope this will kick off a new trend. :thumbup:
 
#121 ·
I was waiting for you to bring this up. :laugh::beer:

Speaking of the greenhouse... I'm betting there is some or a lot of structural components in there. It looks very large on that car... as if it was a direct pull from the S. That's a good thing for MFG (i.e. Saving cost).
 
#111 ·
Should be interesting how GM stock will do this morning. I mean for the same price as the Bolt, you could get the Model 3, albeit with no options. But the Model 3 is still nicely equipped in base form.

First you have the panache of owning a Tesla, looks like it'll perform better than the Bolt and you'll have access to the vast Supercharger network.
 
#120 ·
Oh alright I'll preorder tomorrow. The Prius will be 7 years old by the time my order would start being built.

Now I just need a Tesla van to replace my FTC :D
 
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