Tesla Model 3 guide: the cheapest Tesla to date

A few weeks after Tesla Director of Global Communications Khobi Brooklyn confirmed that “Model 3 is on schedule” and that the company still plans to unveil the prototype in March, it’s now Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s turn to share his thoughts about the upcoming $35,000 sedan and he says he feels “pretty optimistic” about the vehicle.
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We are about two months away from the unveiling of the Model 3, Tesla’s upcoming mass market car, and we can hardly wait. In the meantime, we can only make educated guesses on what the car will look like, but renderings from amateur designers can also help us imagine it.

We gathered some of our favorite renderings and sketches below to try to figure out which ones could end up looking similar to the final product.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference last week about the release of the latest version of the company’s software for the Model S and X. The update added new and improved autonomous features to the automaker’s fleet.

During the press call, Musk reiterated that the current sensor suite the company is using to implement new autonomous features will not support full autonomous driving, but the CEO was extremely vague about the timing of the roll out for the new hardware suite that could enable fully self-driving cars.
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According to Tesla Senior Design Executive Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla first planned to unveil the Model 3, its upcoming mass market electric car, at the Detroit Auto Show 2015, but that deadline passed almost a year ago.

Last year, Tesla updated its timeline to March 2016 and EV enthusiasts are anxious to know if the automaker will stick to the new target. So far so good, a Tesla official confirmed today that the Model 3 is on track for a March unveiling.

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Stanford recently released the video of a talk between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and investor Steve Jurvetson. The discussion focused on Musk’s vision of the future and if you are an avid watcher of Musk’s interviews, you probably will not learn much from the hour-long video, but we still found a few interesting moments worth sharing.
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We received some questions about the renderings of the Model 3 floating around lately. There’s been confusion since some reports failed to specify that the renderings were from an independent artist unaffiliated with Tesla and some even called it a “leak”.
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A new source with connections at Tesla’s design group has informed me that late stage tweaking of the Model 3 is being done with an eye towards extreme minimization of wind resistance. The Model 3, which of course is the renamed Model E, is scheduled to be shown off for the first time publicly in March of 2016. The mass market Tesla is expected to be a smaller sedan/crossover platform that resembles the BMW 3 series in size. The range of the vehicle is expected to start at 200 miles and go up from there with various size batteries and drivetrains. The majority of Tesla employees are now working on this car.

What I’m hearing internally is that CEO Elon Musk is intensely driving the engineering designers to deliver a design with a drag coefficient lower than .20 which would make it the lowest of any mass production car in the world and close to extreme vehicles like GM’s EV1 and Volkswagen’s XL1 (pictured above), – both cars that have flat rear wheel covers…
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Tesla’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel was at the University of Nevada, Reno earlier this week to talk to students and announce a new internship program for the company’s Gigafactory. As part of its Gigafactory deal, Tesla is pumping $1 million into the University of Nevada’s Battery research program.

During his presentation, Straubel confirmed that after launching the Model X last month, Tesla now shifted its core focus on the anticipated next generation vehicle: the Model 3.
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<em>Musk with the Tesla Model S in Fremont on Oct. 1, 2011.</em>

In a radio interview today, Telsa CEO Elon Musk spoke about future demand for Tesla’s vehicles.

“I think the demand for the Model 3 is going to be very good,” said Musk today’s Marketplace report.

“As it is, we’ve got pretty good demand for the X and the S. And I think over time, the combined X and S demand is, you know, maybe a hundred thousand units per year, or maybe a bit more as we mature various markets,”

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Los Angeles kicked off the National Drive Electric Week with a big surprise for everyone: a Chevy Bolt prototype and a Nissan LEAF 2016 in display. Green Car Reports managed to get a few pictures of the event.
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I want to start by saying that I think the Bolt is a great initiative from GM and I am glad to see this major car manufacturer committing more seriously to pure electric vehicles. This article is not a hit piece on the Bolt, but rather a critic of the reporting around the vehicle. Recently some media have been implying that the Bolt might be a “Tesla killer” or more precisely that it is going after Tesla’s third generation vehicle currently in development, the Model 3. These claims are unfounded and derive from this bad habit of seeing all electric vehicles as one big car category.

No one in their right mind would see the Mercedes S-Class as a competitor to the Nissan Versa, for the same reasons, the Nissan Leaf is not meant to compete with the Tesla Model S. In both cases, one is a large luxury sedan and the other is a compact five-door hatchback. They don’t address the same markets regardless of both having drivetrains fueled by gasoline, in the cases of the Versa and the S-Class, and electricity for the Leaf and the Model S.
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Elon Musk has confirmed that the Model 3, Tesla’s first mass market vehicle, will not arrive with dual motor all wheel drive (AWD). He did say, however, during today’s annual shareholder meeting, that dual motors will be available as an option.

After the AWD Tesla Model S 70D replaced the Model S 60kWh to become Tesla’s entry level vehicle earlier this year, some assumed that perhaps Tesla would go the way of Subaru, making all future vehicles AWD. Unfortunately, to keep the price of the Model 3 down to Tesla’s projected $35,000 base price, Tesla will forgo the option for base model deliveries.

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Today Tesla announced their first quarter 2015 results and during the conference call discussing the results, Elon Musk confirmed Tesla plans to unveil their third generation vehicle, the Model 3, in March 2016.

Tesla already revealed their plan on starting the production of the Model 3 in 2017, but today Elon Musk said that he sees “late 2017” as more realistic.

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In a corporate world often teeming with bland political correctness, Elon Musk, whether you love him or hate him, is a breath of fresh air. Not afraid to call it like he sees it, whenever Musk delivers a talk or sits down for an interview — or even a Reddit AMA — it’s always a good idea to listen closely.

Most recently, Musk on Tuesday spoke at the Automotive News World Congress event in Detroit where the Tesla CEO touched on a wide array of topics.

Of particular interest were Musk’s comments on the highly anticipated Model 3. Though a few years away, the Model 3 remains Tesla’s big bet to bring electric cars into the mainstream. Moreover, the potential success of the Model 3 is the big bet that multitudes of investors are banking on.

According to Musk, the Model 3 remains on track for a 2017 release and the company remains optimistic that it will be able to sell approximately 500,000 vehicles (of all models) per year by 2020. Looking even beyond that, Musk relayed that the company has plans to up production to “at least a few million a year” by 2025.

The Detroit Free Press reports:

Silicon Valley automaker Tesla Motors will be making “a few million cars” by 2025, enigmatic CEO Elon Musk said in Detroit today.

That would make the company about the size of BMW today.

That’s an ambitious goal, to be sure, but Musk didn’t get to where he is today by thinking small.

Of course, a key, if not the most important, variable in the Model 3 equation will be cost. If Tesla really wants the Model 3 to be a mainstream hit, it will have to be priced much lower than the premium, yet still wildly successful, Model S.

On that note, Musk earlier today said that the Model 3 will be priced at around $35,000 without any tax credits. If Tesla is, in fact, able to reach that pricepoint thanks to economies of scale via the in-progress Gigafactory, the Model 3 would be well positioned to have a discernible and sweeping impact on the auto industry. What’s more, by the time 2017 rolls around, Tesla’s network of superchargers will be even more ubiquitous and the positive word-of-mouth praise surrounding the Tesla brand will be even stronger. Note that the average price of a new car in 2013 checked in at about $32,000, thus making the Model 3 an attainable purchase for many.

While we still don’t have a clue as to what the Model 3 will look like, Musk noted in a recent Reddit AMA that it “won’t look like other cars.” Meanwhile, Tesla lead designer Franz von Holzhausen has said that it’s the coolest thing he’s ever worked on. Intriguing, to say the least.

Musk also added that the Model 3 “will be way different from any other car on the road”, albeit in a way “that’s really useful and just doesn’t feel like a weird-mobile.”

On a related note, Musk also touched on the potential for Tesla to work with franchise dealers, something the company has avoided like the plague for years. Arguably, for Tesla to truly have a mainstream hit with the Model 3, it will need to rely on franchises due to logistics alone.

Reuters reports:

… Musk said he was open to partnerships with retailers to sell Tesla vehicles, but not until after the company no longer has production bottlenecks.

“Before considering taking on franchised dealers, we also have to establish (more of) our own stores,” he said. Musk said “we will consider” franchising “if we find the right partner.” He did not elaborate, but said Tesla “is not actively seeking any partnerships” with other manufacturers “because our focus is so heavily on improving our production” in Fremont.

With the Model 3 hopefully just two years away, the next big item on Tesla’s radar is the impending launch of the Model X. Though already delayed, Musk reiterated that the vehicle is on target for a Summer 2015 launch.

In case you missed it, Elon Musk sat down for an interview with GQ Magazine last week where the Tesla CEO commented on a random smattering of interesting tidbits.

While much of the interview treads on familiar ground, such as Tesla opening up their patents and Musk’s general thoughts on the state of the car industry, there are a few nuggets worth highlighting.

For instance, Musk talks briefly about development of the Tesla Model S P85D:

This is a halo car for Tesla. We didn’t do it from the beginning because it adds complexity, and we already had enough fish to fry just making a car that worked. But it was always something we expected to do. We wanted to position it as the fastest in order to change the public mindset. It had to be something dramatic. And getting those few extra 10ths of a second was hard.

As for consumer interest in Tesla’s highest-end model, it appears that the problem is supply more so than demand, certainly an enviable problem to have. Speaking to that, Musk notes that “demand for the P85D is off the charts.”

With respect to the highly anticipated Model 3, Musk noted that Tesla is hoping to get the sticker price down to just half that of the Model S, a goal which precipitated development of the gargantuan Gigafactory in Nevada.

We need the Gigafactory because there currently isn’t enough battery cell capacity for a high-volume, pure electric car at any price. The Model 3 is 20% smaller than the Model S, so the battery pack can be just 80% of the size, but we’re aiming for a 50% price reduction from the S, so we need the factory to make it affordable.

Musk is certainly a colorful personality, and the interview is well worth checking out in its entirety. Again, you won’t find too much new information to digest, but the story provides a good background of Tesla’s goals and Musk’s strategy to bring said goals to fruition.