$25,000 Tesla in three years, says Elon Musk (video)
The Tesla CEO sat down for a tech talk, not on his new couch but inside the Fremont factory. When asked about production, he ventured into economies of scale and made a rather astonishing announcement: Tesla may build a 25,000-dollar electric car in three years.
Given they are working “very hard,” the Tesla boss added. The conversation had revolved around the competitiveness of the market prior to the announcement. Numbers retrieved by the show suggest, that one of the cars most often traded in for a Model 3 is a Toyota Prius, that starts at $25,000.
The interview supports recent claims of Elon Musk who had made the affordable Model 3 a priority on Twitter. At the moment though, any Tesla Model 3 available on the configurator calls for 49,000 dollars at least and not the initially promised $35,000.
A new design for the battery module is to change that and bring Tesla closer to delivering a mass market ready electric vehicle. And indeed, in the interview Musk points out that only technical advances will eventually enable you to make a product affordable, aside of scale.
He also pointed to Tesla having to make more than one product, think the Model Y and Semi electric truck. In that line, the next generation “Roadster is kind of like dessert,” says Musk, out there to “show that an electric car can be faster than a gasoline car in any way.”
When asked if they could fulfil the “ludicrous” Roadster spec of 1.9 seconds, 200 kWh battery and 1,000 kilometre range with today’s technology, the Tesla boss quickly did the maths. Basically, the battery would be double the number of modules or two 100 kWh packs. Still, this would lead to an 80 percent increase in volume in the packs and so they will likely have to tweak the cells further.
Elon Musk then quickly moved on saying, “one of the constraints for us is hiring enough people” to pack all those battery packs for all upcoming and existing Tesla electric cars. You can watch the full interview below.
After the first interview with Marques Brownlee, now another video has surfaced with a tour of the Fremont factory:
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