All signs point to a new low-cost Tesla arriving in 2025.
CEO Elon Musk and Tesla executives revealed this week that a new low-cost car(s) is in development and will be released in the first half of 2025.
“So in terms of our auto business, we’re still on track to offer affordable models starting in the first half of 2025,” Musk said on last week’s third-quarter earnings conference call.
Other executives also spoke out. “We are working towards launching a cheaper model,” Ashok Elswamy, Tesla’s director of Autopilot software, said on a conference call. He added that the “team” is “readying the factory today to make that happen.”
they are working on it
Part of the reason it took Tesla so long to launch a low-cost car is that costs are so hard to extract. “The amount of work required to make a low-cost car is enormous,” Musk said. “But it’s harder to get 20% of the cost out of a car than it is to design a car from scratch and build an entire factory,” he says.
price:
And what’s the price? Musk didn’t explicitly mention affordable cars in 2025, but it appears to be closely tied to autonomous driving, which was a major theme in the earnings call, and the CyberCab, which is scheduled to go on sale in 2026.
“With incentives, $30,000 or less is the key criteria,” Musk said of the CyberCab. The car costs “roughly around $25,000. So it’s a $25,000 car.” If you want, you can just buy one. So it just doesn’t have a steering wheel and pedals,” Musk said.
There is one unanswered question. Will 2025’s affordable Tesla be the ancestor of the CyberCab, or a stripped-down Model 3? Musk and executives say the signs point to something similar to CyberCab.
“So I think it’s become very clear that the future is autonomous,” Musk said during the conference call. And he repeated variations on that theme during the call. “We currently produce 35,000 self-driving cars every week. If you compare that to the entire fleet of, say, Waymo, we have less than 1,000 cars.” Mr. Musk said.
Does it look different?
“The CyberCab looks different. The Cybertruck looks different, but the Model Y and Model 3 are good-looking cars, but they look pretty ordinary,” Musk said. He seems to be hinting that whatever comes next, whether CyberCab or something else, “looks different.”
And building it is also different. “The CyberCab in particular is not just a revolution in vehicle design, but also a revolution in vehicle manufacturing,” he said.