After a highly anticipated multi-step reservation process starting with Tesla and SpaceX employees, followed by in-store reservations, which created long queues at Tesla’s retail locations, and finally online reservations just an hour before the unveiling, Tesla finally launched the Model 3 – its first mass market electric vehicle.
CEO Elon Musk has been updating the public on the number of reservations the company is accumulating and here’s a quick timeline of those updates:
You can read our post summarizing everything new we learned at the Model 3 event here and our exclusive leaked specs of the unannounced higher-end version of the Model 3 here.
Below you will find the timeline with each update in chronological order with the most recent update on top and a comprehensive graph of the total reservation as updated by Tesla and Musk in the first 50 hours:
07/04/16 – 7am PT – 10am ET: Tesla sent out a blog post confirming that they received ocer 325,000 Model 3 reservations during the first week
[tweet https://twitter.com/TeslaMotors/status/718081181187645440 align=’center’]
03/04/16 – 2pm PT – 5pm ET: On Sunday, Tesla’s CEO confirmed via Twitter that the automaker had 276,000 by the end of Saturday:
276k Model 3 orders by end of Sat
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2016
02/04/16 – 3pm PT – 6pm ET: On Saturday afternoon, Musk confirmed that Tesla had over 250,000 Model 3 reservation as of 7am PT this morning:
253k as of 7am this morning
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2016
01/04/16 – 10pm PT – 1am ET: Musk updated the number again in the evening to 232,000 Model 3 reservations.
01/04/16 – 1pm PT – 4pm ET: Just over an hour later, Musk updated the number of reservation via Twitter again – now to 198,000 reservations:
Thought it would slow way down today, but Model 3 order count is now at 198k. Recommend ordering soon, as the wait time is growing rapidly.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016
01/04/16 – 12pm PT – 3pm ET: Elon Musk updates the number of reservation via Twitter to 180,000 after 24 hours of reservations:
Model 3 orders at 180,000 in 24 hours. Selling price w avg option mix prob $42k, so ~$7.5B in a day. Future of electric cars looking bright!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016
31/03/16 – 11pm PT – 2am ET: Tesla kept a count of incoming reservations on a screen at the Model 3 event. Toward the end of the evening, Tesla had around 150,000 reservations.
31/03/16 – 9pm PT – 12am ET: After the end of his presentation, Elon Musk announced that Tesla already accumulated over 115,000 Model 3 reservations with deposits – those reservations were mostly sight-unseen.
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Did you see Elon confirming fully autonomous driving in the twitter comments? ElonMusk: “@BValvsRacing It will make sense after part 2 of the Model 3 unveil”
QC, that’s a bit of a stretch — you’re inferring totally autonomous driving just from one sentence.
There could just as easily be a windshield HUD, or Android Auto that turns any phone into a speedometer, or some other feature — which would be incredibly cheaper and not require any special/insane regulatory approval.
Agreed. While I think it’s a safe bet it will support autonomous driving, I suspect he was implying some kind of HUD. Something to make the interior more sci-fi.
Brace yourselves, a huge EMT – Elon Musk Tweetstorm™ is happening right now.
Poor car company CEO’s who have to look at this and say what the hell!! Here is this upstart company already took a large chunk out of everyone’s large sedan market and now gets likely 300k orders by tomorrow morning, what will they do?
There has never been 3 yrs of mass production cars ordered in advance, many before it was even seen. How do they compete with that?
With it, the Bolt, Leaf driving down lithium battery prices both the auto and energy industries are in for a complete change.
It’s really too bad that 166,000 of them will not get the federal rebate. There are only 200,000 available per manufacturer and seeing Tesla sold about 90,000 units since the program began, so there are only around 110,000 left for them. Another thing; if this car has the same options rubric as the X & S models then this car will more likely be $50k by the time everything is said and done. Not bad, but not cheap enough for the masses. Also, I hope their quality doesn’t fall off like a rock once they start to scale production. Needless to say, I don’t see them producing that many cars in the next year. A lot of these people are not going to see their vehicles to model year ’18 or ’19.
Reservations are worldwide. Tax credit cap is US unit only and it phases out. Most eligible people in the US that have already reserved will have access.
Considering all the preorders I think a very large number will go with a base model. Sure, none of us on this site will, but many people will be happy with a base model.
There’s something you don’t realize about the tax credit. After a manufacturer sells 200,000 cars *in the US* — non-US cars don’t count — every car sold for the rest of the calendar quarter *and* the next calendar quarter still receives the tax credit. THEN it starts to be reduced.
So Tesla has a large incentive to produce a whole lot of US cars at once.
Placing my reservation on the 11th (one day after closing date for CC, so can use the float.)