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.
And that’s all it may ever be.
Tesla calls the Model 3, which the company revealed last week, “our most affordable car yet.” At a starting price of $35,000, they’re not wrong, but affordability is relative. In their eagerness to see Elon Musk’s electric car empire overthrow the old, traditional combustion engine, Tesla supporters might overlook how the Model 3 makes the auto market more uncomfortable for those who can’t already afford whatever they want anyway.
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In fact, electric cars are exerting an under-discussed uncertainty on the car-buying market. The promise of cleaner, cheaper-operating electric vehicles—particularly at a price point that ordinary folk can afford—makes buying a traditional combustion or even a hybrid vehicle a riskier proposition than it was just a few years ago. Meanwhile, the conditions for electric vehicle adoption have become less favorable since the Model S was introduced. For one part, some states have significantly reduced the tax incentives that made more affordable electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf appealing, pushing typical buyers back toward cheaper combustion vehicles. And for another part, falling oil prices dropped the cost of gas to under $2 at the start of this year. As with the hybrids that came before them, electric vehicles never offered an appealing financial proposition as compared to combustion engine automobiles.
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Sure, would-be Model 3 speculators might be better off just investing their $1,000 in Tesla stock instead. But they might not! $1,000 invested in TSLA two years ago would only have net roughly $200 in profit if sold today. And besides, there is no truer expression of the merger of the automotive and tech industries than the automobile’s conversion into a financial instrument. The Model 3 might look like a car for the everyman, and someday it might become one. But for now it’s something else entirely: a kickstartery way to back Elon Musk, who may not be worth backing. Even if Musk manages to pull off a string of huge deliveries, his success would likely trigger investment from the major car companies, many of which have a massive capital advantage over Tesla. Maybe that’s why the company’s stock has barely moved for two years.
What do those signs facing the other direction say?So this is just someone trying to make a statement apparently, every workday.
Three-hundred and twenty five THOUSAND deposits.The Week that Electric Vehicles Went Mainstream
The Tesla Team April 7, 2016
A week ago, we started taking reservations for Model 3, and the excitement has been incredible. We’ve now received more than 325,000 reservations, which corresponds to about $14 billion in implied future sales, making this the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever. This interest has spread completely organically. Unlike other major product launches, we haven’t advertised or paid for any endorsements. Instead, this has been a true grassroots effort driven by the passion of the Tesla team that’s worked so hard to get to this point and our current and future customers who believe so strongly in what we are trying to achieve. Most importantly, we are all taking a huge step towards a better future by accelerating the transition to sustainable transportation.
We want to thank everyone who has shown their faith in Tesla and the mission of electric vehicles. We would write more, but we need to get back to increasing our Model 3 production plans!
They're going to try.On their original ramp, I bet if you put a reservation in today you'd get your car in 4 years. They've got to figure out how to cut that time down substantially.
Didn't read 9 posts up on this same page, did you?Reservations are now up to 325,000. DAMN
Nope, didn't read.Three-hundred and twenty five THOUSAND deposits.
I'm quite certain MOST of the Tesla fans will get over this choice. They're happy with other aspects/WOWs and let's be honest... most people aren't carrying chairs and big boxes of stuff frequently. After all, most people drive sedans.
Afterall, TVs are flat these days. So is Ikea furniture.
How big is the trunk opening in that? And I don't see any glass at all :thumbdown:While you guys bicker about something stupid like this trunk opening , Elon is out doing this.
Still not digging the front bumper but the rest of the car looks really good. Far more useful than the sedan. Really close to something that I would buy.photoshopped as a hatchback.. now it looks even MORE like a Mazda3
Keep it simple, stupid.
That's the mindset Tesla has adopted for the strikingly sparse interior of its Model 3 sedan, the electric vehicle that racked up a mind-blowing 325,000 advance orders within a week of its unveiling.
Bringing the EV to market by the end of 2017, hitting its $35,000 target base price and doing all this at volumes the automaker never has achieved? It sounds, well, problematic.
But helping Tesla's cause is the remarkably straightforward interior design. There's no instrument panel in front of the driver. No tangible buttons or remote knobs, levers or touchpads controlling any screens built into the dashboard.
Instead, a single touch screen, 15 inches wide, protrudes from the center console. It controls nearly every ancillary function not related to driving the car.
The Verge says the screen "looks like it could've been pulled off a Lenovo workstation pilfered from an office cubicle." Wired calls the interior "sleek and minimalist." Road & Track deems the whole setup "completely bizarre."
Reacting to the reaction, CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the unusual interior will "make sense" later on.
Whatever your take, the setup is crucial because it saves the company significant time and money in both the r&d and production phases of the Model 3.
"That's a huge part of it," said Ed Kim, vice president of industry analysis at AutoPacific. "The Model 3 is a car that even if you weren't accounting for the EV powertrain, it's pretty high-tech for $35,000," so it's important that Tesla look for every way it can save money and headaches.
The single screen also allows the company to build a single version of the car for right- and left-hand-drive markets, swapping only the steering wheel rather than a complicated instrument panel.
Time is of the essence for the Model 3. Musk insists deliveries will begin by the end of 2017. Many analysts expect deliveries in meaningful numbers won't happen until 2018 at the earliest. Barclays Capital says 2019 is more likely.
The Model 3 also has broad implications for Tesla since it moves the automaker out of the realm of niche luxury vehicles and into more mainstream offerings. It's part of Tesla's plan to build 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020, a feat that will pose a daunting challenge for an automaker unaccustomed to that kind of volume.
Despite the high stakes, Tesla isn't alone in its approach to simplifying its interiors.
Car companies are beginning to consolidate screens and computers inside their cars to save money, speed development and make it easier to deliver over-the-air software updates, said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Santa Clara, Calif., chipmaker Nvidia Corp., whose customers include Audi, BMW and Tesla.
He cited the "virtual cockpit" in the Audi TT and R8 sports cars, which use a single display behind the steering wheel to handle navigation, entertainment and phone calls alongside the speedometer and other traditional gauges.
"Automakers want to streamline development, cut costs and create a system that gets better over time," Shapiro said. "A single, centralized car computer that serves many functions and controls many aspects of the car can be updated much more easily than a highly distributed system."
Going from two screens and two computers down to one of each can free up funds for a bigger screen and faster computer. Such a system is more expensive than the ones used today, Shapiro said, but "it is certainly less expensive than two of them."
The rise of autonomous driving during the Model 3's lifetime also likely played a role in its interior design, Kim said, especially since Tesla's Autopilot hardware will be standard equipment.
"If you are not actively driving the car anymore, does everything need to be in the same place? Probably not."
Musk promises that Tesla will announce more details on the Model 3 closer to its production date, in part two of the car's unveiling. That news "takes things to another level" the CEO said in a March 30 tweet.
Four days later, Musk tweeted that the lack of dashboard or head-up display will "make sense" at that point.
This secondary debut will include a look at the Model 3's production steering wheel and system, which wasn't shown at the car's launch in March.
"It feels like a spaceship," the SpaceX founder said in another tweet.
“The Model 3, the car for which the company was really set up to build, exceeded all of our expectations, as far as the rate at which we received reservations. Something approaching 400,000 people have already put down … a thousand dollars to reserve this car.”