If Elon Musk had his way, today's vehicles would no longer have side view mirrors. That, however, would require just as much effort as getting a rocket into space.
Despite Tesla's efforts to actually get certain laws changed so that Musk's Model X could use cameras instead of side view mirrors, regulatory bodies denied his company's moves.
That may change, nonetheless, if Musk's electric vehicle for the masses takes off like one of his Space X rockets. The Tesla Model 3 is to be the "everyman" electric vehicle with a rumored entry price of just $35,000.
With the Model 3 added to Tesla's lineup of cars, the company intends to sell 500,000 electric vehicles by 2020. By then, there might be enough of Tesla's cars on American roads that the government might just finally give in to Musk's request to once and for all eject side view mirrors from modern day car design.
But that might not be all Elon Musk intends to change about modern car design.
"It won't look like other cars," Musk once said over a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread from a few months ago. Safe to say, we should expect the unexpected.
What we do know, nonetheless, is that the Model 3 will have more character to it compared to the Model S. Rather, it will be "more expressive" with a more "couture" design according to Tesla's Chief Designer, Franz von Holzhausen.
The latest news making the rounds reveals that Elon Musk is driving Tesla engineers to push vehicular design physics even further.
"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 XL," sources have revealed.
If Tesla can pull off a drool-worthy design in the Model 3 (much unlike GM's and Volkswagen's models) at a favorable price point and still deliver on the technological goods, then we sure do hope Elon Musk can finally get those side view mirrors replaced with cameras, too.
Photo: Maurizio Pesce | Flickr
