Tesla CEO Elon Musk surprised people earlier this year when he said that Model Y, Tesla’s upcoming small SUV, will be built on a new platform for production in “late 2019 to 2020”.
That was a change from their previous plan to build the vehicle on the Model 3 platform in order to bring it to market faster.
Now Musk said that he walked back on his latest announcement and Tesla will go back to its original plan in order to bring the car to market sooner.
When talking about the new Model Y platform earlier this year, he said that Tesla will get rid of the 12-volt battery architecture. It means no more lead-acid battery and a different way to power in-car electronics. Musk says that they will reduce the overall wiring significantly and simplify the production process.
Less wiring harness means easier automation in the production process and Musk plans a completely different – more automated – production line for the Model Y. He said that the Model 3 production lines will be comparable to the best lines in the industry while the Model Y line will be “something else”.
Update: Musk said today that they would still aim to change the wiring harness architecture with a carryover from Model 3.
Instead, the Model Y will share more components with the Model 3, which is just now entering production.
The CEO corrected his previous statement during a conference call with analysts today.
Musk said that following his new architecture announcement, the top management team talk him down from the idea or “walked him back from the cliff of insanity” as he said.
He added that it would make sense to try to bring the vehicle to market faster since SUV is the fastest growing vehicle segment and Tesla should aim to release a more affordable all-electric vehicle in it.
Unfortunately, Musk didn’t update the timeline, but it could come quite soon since the timeline for the new architecture was “late 2019 to 2020” and now it should be sooner.
In June, Tesla released the first Model Y teaser – pictured above. It didn’t show much, but Musk previously said that it would feature similar ‘Falcon Wing’ doors as seen on Model X.
Last year, we asked our readers if they would want Falcon Wings on their Model Y and out of the 5,480 Electrek readers who took the poll, 58% said that they didn’t want the more complexed door system.We expect to learn more about the upcoming all-electric SUV soon.
We expect to learn more about the upcoming all-electric SUV soon.
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