Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has problematized Los Angeles traffic, rewarded a man for using his Model S to save another person's life, and opened up a Gigafactory for the production of the Model 3, but he has also left everyone hanging about when the company's latest electric vehicle will be released.
Musk is still a good guy, so on Feb. 22 he made up for the repeated delays of the Model 3 launch by giving everyone a nice preview of what the newest electric vehicle could be like.
Model 3 design sketches pic.twitter.com/P5ucOBRUZ7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2016
The first batch of Model 3 cars that will be released will, of course, go to Tesla and SpaceX employees who were able to reserve the vehicle three weeks earlier than everyone else and, when all of those reservations are taken care of, the company will begin mass production of the electric vehicle.
Tesla is no stranger to missed production and delivery goals but Musk assured Tesla shareholders that things are going at a steady pace. In a shareholder letter, the company announced that the initial production of the Model 3 will begin in July, to be followed by mass production in September.
Tesla also shared its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles a week by the fourth quarter of 2017 and will increase to 10,000 a week by 2018. It is a very ambitious goal but with Tesla's current Gigafactory and plans to construct more Gigafactories, the company's missed goals could be a thing of the past.
"To support accelerating vehicle deliveries and maintain our industry-leading customer satisfaction, we are expanding our retail, Supercharger, and service functions," Tesla added.
What Model 3 Will Be Like
Musk spoke at a conference call with analysts on Feb. 22 and gave some details on what differentiates the Model 3 from the Model S and Model X.
The first thing to note is that the Model 3 will not have Falcon Wing doors or self-presenting door handles. It will also only be equipped with one screen, unlike its predecessors that have two screens each. Model 3 also only has 1.5 kilometers' (1,640 yards) worth of wiring whereas both the Model X and Model S have 3 kilometers (3,280 yards) of wiring in its system.
Those whittled-down specs, however, do not make the Model 3 half a car when compared to its predecessors because Tesla merely focused on simplifying the "manufacturability" of the Model 3.
"A lot of the bells and whistles that are present on an S and X are not present on a Model 3 [...] It is going to be a very compelling car, but it's a simpler design and we also understand manufacturing a lot better than we did in the past," Musk told the analysts.
Let us just hope Tesla doesn't postpone the big reveal once again.
