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Tesla's $35k Model 3 Sedan to Start Production in 2 Years
- chambo622 11y ago> "Tesla’s $35,000 Model 3 Sedan Goes into Production, Preorders Next March" Yikes, very misleading title - the Model X is currently going into production, not the Model 3.
- somerandomone 11y agoYeah, >Model 3, our smaller and lower cost sedan will start production in about 2 years. -- Elon Musk
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- stdgy 11y agoThis title is horrendous. It's missing the most important piece of information, which is '...Production in 2 Years...'.
- grandalf 11y agoJust enough advance notice to help would-be buyers time their leasing and trade-in behavior.
- patrickaljord 11y agoLooks like a great car but not sure it belongs to the future. I think the future is mostly in rented car services à la Uber/Lyft, most people live in big cities where the cost of owning a car is getting closer to just taking a cab, not to mention the hassle. And this will accelerate once self driving cars become more common. So yeah, buying cars especially $35k ones doesn't seem like a business I'd invest in but I may be totally wrong here. The battery part of it is great though.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago"Listen To Elon Musk’s Awkward Silence After A Question About Tesla’s Self-Driving Fleet" http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/06/listen-to-elon-musks-awkward-silence-after-a-question-about-teslas-self-driving-fleet/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/06/listen-to-elon-musks-awkwar... TL;DR Based on Elon's response, they're considering released an Uber competitor with their own self-driving electric cars. EDIT: Uber has an app and drivers. Tesla is going to have enough manufacturing capacity to build 100K cars/year. Numbers I've found indicate that 90-95% of the time, cars are in a garage or parked. That's a lot of idle capacity society doesn't need out there. What does that mean? Tesla doesn't need to churn out enough cars to replace existing cars being sold; they just need enough that can replace current miles traveled by people.
- patrickaljord 11y agoGoogle is still light years ahead, also, self-driving cars are expected to drastically reduce the number of cars being sold as they will be used much more efficiently and now one will own a car, at least when self-driving cars will be a majority which admittedly won't be for another 15 to 20 years.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Google is still light years ahead Google also had a gentleman's deal with Elon to buy Tesla and allow him to continue operating it if they were unable to get their financing together. They have shared goals (electric transportation, reduced/eliminated mobility fatalities). > self-driving cars are expected to drastically reduce the number of cars being sold as they will be used much more efficiently and now one will own a car Agree completely. Google is excellent at software. Tesla is excellent at hardware. > at least when self-driving cars will be a majority which admittedly won't be for another 15 to 20 years. Google's head of their self-driving vehicle team has committed to general availability of their self-driving cars in 4 years
- secabeen 11y agoWith pre-orders to open in March!
- Animats 11y ago"Pre-orders". This isn't a Kickstarter. Why should customers finance a billion-dollar business? Tesla can borrow at better rates than individuals.
- MHordecki 11y agoIt's not about financing, it's about getting priority delivery.
- forgetsusername 11y ago>it's about getting priority delivery. A car seems like the sort of investment that I appreciate the bugs being worked out of first. Lining up to pre-order one seems odd.
- Shengbo 11y agoWouldn't they just get the same core software package the S and the X have?
- NeutronBoy 11y agoWell, in the same way that all Android or Apple smartphones have the same core software package - doesn't stop individual variants having bugs.
- DasIch 11y agoThey are cars not computers. The hardware is significantly more complex and more prone to failure in ways a software patch won't fix.
- chrismcb 11y agoI would argue that a car with fewer than one hundred thousand moving parts is less complex than many pieces if software out there. I can't say whether they are more or less prone to failure, but they can be fixable.
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- xacaxulu 11y agoI was sort of hoping the brand would stay in the elite space and not make an everyman's car. A 35k electric car is cool, but I like the wow factor that Tesla currently has. Like saying "I bought a Porsche" and it turns out to be a Boxster, not a 911. EDIT: I'm not saying this is a bad strategy for Tesla - it's great for them, I'm saying it makes it less valuable to me, one lone consumer since a Tesla will become less and less of a status symbol. That's it.
- gt565k 11y agoI'm positive a 35k electric car made by tesla will not disappoint. 35k is quite a bit of money
- webXL 11y agoEspecially when much less of that money is going into a battery.
- paulsutter 11y agoThe fundamental strategy of Tesla is to start with high end cars while costs are high, drive down costs through volume, and gradually get to the point that low cost cars are possible. That's why they built the Gigafactory, they want to drive volumes. This is in stark contrast with the electric cars attempted by the traditional car companies. They would build an ugly and expensive econobox. Starting out elite, and gradually growing the market worked great for Facebook. First they were Harvard only, then Ivy League, then gradually all colleges. Existing users didn't like the changes, but if Facebook had stayed elite they wouldnt be worth $250B.
- DasIch 11y agoTesla produces high end cars but as a brand it isn't and might never be considered elite in the way traditional car companies are. To focus purely on that space seems like an unnecessary risk, if you can expand.
- grandalf 11y agoIt's interesting that a $35K price point even makes sense for a car that could conceivably be designed to last 400K miles.
- Vik1ng 11y ago400 miles? Even Tesla's Model S doesn't go anyway close to that under normal driving conditions. Model 3 will get 200+ miles, at best maybe around 250 for the top model. Edit: Yeah missed the k. Never heard that one brought up. Also doubt Tesla's will last much longer.
- mikestew 11y agoI think you missed the "K" at the end of the "400" in the post you replied to. The part I'm wondering about is why the Tesla could "conceivably" go 400K. A modern diesel could go 400K, but a Tesla will suffer the same problems the diesel would with rotting body panels and interior, and a whole host of problems not related to the drivetrain.
- ericb 11y agoI have no idea what makes a diesel die. Can you give me details on diesel death and what the other problems not related to the drivetrain that one would expect are.
- mikestew 11y ago> I have no idea what makes a diesel die. Mechanical wear, the rings don't seal as well against the cylinder walls as they used to. Valves don't sit in their seats as tightly as when new. And so on. As for other problems, I already listed a few. Think of the niggly things your last old car had. A Tesla, diesel, or any other car is not immune to those problems.
- rebootthesystem 11y agoWell, this is a tried-and-true technique used to damage competition. I have personally been the subject of such attacks in a prior tech business when our product started to threaten that of one particular multinational. What did they do? They had sales people go to every single dealer to communicate they were going to show a next-generation product at the next major trade-show. This was six months away. What happened? Anyone who was on the fence and could wait, decided to wait. We had a major order (about $2.5 million in product) go on what I call "soft hold" because of this. Soft hold is when your customer waffles around instead of pulling the trigger. They want to hedge their bet, so they keep you in the loop and dangle a big order while they think it through or wait for an alternative. It is hard to say how much money we lost through such a simple technique. Hardware products are very different from software. You have to preload supply pipelines and fill warehouses with components, assemblies and finished product. Your purchasing has to be predictive (a nice to way to say "you have to get good at reading crystal balls"). In some cases you have to make purchasing decisions 10, 12 or 16 weeks before you can ship any product. As a small company with just a dozen people or so the tsunami they created really hurt us financially. This multinational's marketing budget in our niche was probably larger than our annual revenue. Which meant they could play all kinds of games. Our product was very good but heavily funded FUD and dirty tactics served to delay revenue and cause financial damage. Six months later they brought this "next generation" product to the main industry trade show. Of course, people trusted a well-known brand. And they placed orders. Our orders tanked. Some got cancelled. We lost tons of money. We survived, but it was very rough. We knew their product wasn't good but customers didn't want to believe this. Delivery timeline was something like six months. Which meant we were denied sales and revenue for at least a year. As product started to ship and now customers started to use it in the wild the reviews came in: The product was crap. Not good. Not usable. Overpriced. Not worth it. In other words, exactly what we told our customers a year earlier. The problem at that point we had suffered so much financial damage that we simply could not spin things back up. And, to boot, this was at a time when money had dried up, which means there was no way to find a loan or an investor to get us healthy again to make a run for the market. The end result was that this company played the market masterfully with a bullshit product, future promises and bad delivery yet succeeded to destroy it's main competitor. I think it was another year before they actually delivered a product people wanted. We were done. They won. Lesson learned. I can't say with any degree of certainty Tesla is playing a similar game but announcing something that is two years away with a reservation date just a few months from now sure brings back painful memories. Cars are a displacement market. This means that when someone buys a car that buyer is, generally speaking, no-longer in the market for another car. Whoever sold them that car effectively displaced that opportunity away from any other seller. Promising something two years away and locking people in with a deposit is most-definitely a displacement move of the first order. That person will not buy another car and will wait two years to get their pre-order. Which means Tesla pre-displaces, BMW, Toyota, Audi and anyone else who might have a $35K-ish car in two years. Brilliant, if you can pull it of. Slimy? Sure. Business is war.