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Tesla To Unveil Its $35,000 Model 3 In March 2016
An anonymous reader with the news, as reported by Ars Technica, BGR, the WSJ, and more, that Tesla, in the course of the company's most recent earnings call, has announced plans to show off its much-anticipated Model 3 in March, 2016, and somewhat more tentative plans for actual availability; "late 2017" might be optimistic, but it's a start. You can listen to the whole earnings call here. Other bits gleaned from this call include a "late summer" planned delivery for the Model X SUV, and the fact that the PowerWall household battery is sold out until the middle of next year.
Maybe they need more factory capacity. I suggest adding 21% more to the Gigafactory...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What's this constant crap about a boutique car factory that doesn't even sell 5000 cars a month? Give em a break and some time away from the spotlight to get their act together. Geez, it is worse than the iphones.
Hmmm maybe because /. community is interested in tech and electric stuff? And if you want more "business oriented" news may I suggest Forbes's website?
Elok
I suspect that since the Tesla S is much closer to a true clean-sheet design than cars from existing automakers, it's going to have more nifty-factor. Granted, Tesla got some experience with their dealings with Lotus for the first car, but if I remember right, they were upfitting electric drivetrains into existing car bodies, not even building those car bodies. In that sense, if Tesla is successful, they'll be the first 100% electric upstart to truly compete against the large automakers without resorting to internal-combustion vehicles. Besides, the point in the Model 3 is to be a mid-line car, priced so that the middle class can afford it.
We're going to pay attention to this simply because my wife's fourteen year old car crossed 160,000 miles on it last month, and she'll probably seek to replace it around the time it hits 200,000 miles, so the timing is good. Get the first units out and into the real-world, let their bugs get worked out with the early adopters, then look at what a more stable version of the product looks like, cost-wise. Our main panel is fairly close to where she parks, so running some EMT along the ceiling and down the wall in front of the car to a subpanel or charging station wouldn't be any trouble either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because when something like this becomes more accessible to people, it will sell more than 5000 cars a month?
(I can haz DIY build-your-own-Tesla kit? Pretty please?)
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Come up with a Tesla motorcycle and a Tesla light pickup truck, and then we'll have a conversation. Especially a motorcycle.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Here's to hoping that they actually go into production:
http://www.eliomotors.com/
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Can't wait to see what this game-changer look like. If the car can live up to my expectation (including a drop in the price of battery pack), I'll certainly be more than interested.
And also think the success of this new model 3 will be necessary if Tesla ever want to enter the major league. With they business model of prepaid and get your car later (closely similar to how aircraft maker operate), Tesla depend on a huge cash entry to be able to multiply their assembly line and manufacture an decent number of car.
Elok
no it does not make sense. Because it's wrong. 39% comes from coal.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/...
| Please someone who understands the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics better than I, tell me how I am wrong.
Centralized generators run more efficient thermodynamic cycles than internal combustion engines which need to emit a widely varying power output over short time periods.
Centralized generators often run on hydroelectric and natural gas, which produce less emissions than coal or petroleum, and a few are solar, nuclear and wind-powered which have no emissions.
The end-to-end comparisons have been done with quantitative accuracy and show advantages to electric vehicles in many situations. You are hardly the first person to think of this consideration.
100% of gasoline powered cars rely on fossil fuels
~66% of electricity in the us is generated using fossil fuels, 39% is from coal
In some sense we are trading the smoke-plumes around, but keep in mind it is vastly more efficient to regulate and control the pollution out of one stack than one million different little stacks.
Ok, ok, I know Ford would sue the bejezus out of Tesla if they did it, but... I so hoped that after the Roadster ("Model R") and the Model S (...well...), the affordable car for the masses would be the Tesla Model T. Can they at least spell out "Three" on the nameplate, with a big capital "T"??? Please ?? :)
I think not...(*poof*)
Forget all those hydro-electric and natural gas power plants, those are just in you dreams! Solar too, there is NO SUCH THING as solar power. It's just a sci-fi fantasy from that shitty movie about the lady who rallies the good people against the evil solar power conglomerate!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
We're fixing one link in the chain. Just because the chain has multiple breaks doesn't mean we shouldn't start fixing any single one of them.
There is also one more benefit that you sort of touched on a little, but maybe could use some elaboration.
One gasoline-powered car runs on gasoline. You can bend the gasoline a little by putting something somewhat comparable like ethanol in it, but in the end, you can't stray far from the basic formulation, and that formulation is made not just from fossil fuels, but from one specific fossil fuel. Synthesizing gasoline from coal or natural gas is theoretically possible, but expensive and impractical barring a crisis.
One electric-powered car runs on electricity. You can bend the "formulation" of electricity a number of ways (AC vs. DC; various frequencies, voltages, currents, phase counts) and interchange them pretty efficiently. The electricity itself can come from coal, several grades of oil, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, biomass, whatever. Effectively, an electric car runs on whatever is available.
For bonus points, an electric motor has torque where it counts: at the bottom of the curve. You need the torque to get the car moving, preferably before the motor has come up to speed. Electric motors will do that. ICEs, on the other hand, need you to temper your load by feathering the clutch, or using a torque converter or hybrid drive system.
Electric cars also have features in common with hybrids, to wit, regenerative braking and no idling.
www.wavefront-av.com
Literally five seconds on Google gets you here:
http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/612/are-electric-cars-as-environmentally-friendly-as-we-think-they-are
Yes. EVs are a lot--a LOT--more efficient than internal combustion vehicles.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
and you never import dirty power from quebec or the usa...
In what bizarre world you're living to think that Quebec's power is dirty? It's over 90% hydro electricity, you cannot really get more green than that.
Elok
The Tesla is a car which feels like it was teleported from 10 years in the future.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Their gross profit per car is about 28% (i.e. about $25,000 per car).
The company lost money because it is spending everything it makes on new factories (Gigafactory, etc.) and developing new models (X, 3).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Maybe because electric cars are a piece of revolutionary technology that we are all watching be developed right under our eyes. Many advancements these days require real specialized knowledge to fully appreciate. These guys are actually *shipping* cars. And the last barrier to mass adoptions has been price. A 35k electric car is within reach for probably half of the population. It's going to be a very disruptive technology. Everything from urban planning to electric grids will be affected. So yeah, we all want to know about this stuff and discuss it. Many of us will probably even *buy* this. Some ./ are in a financial position to own one of Tesla's existing production cars and talk about their experience. As I don't know anybody who owns one, I find that to be interesting.
If there is news about Toyota, then submit it to slashdot and maybe it will make the front page. If you want to know why we haven't seen anything about Toyota on the front page in a long time, just think about how long it has been since they released a car in the US that couldn't have been cross-marketed as a cure for insomnia.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They're investing a lot into infrastructure - charging stations, R&D, the giant battery factory - it's not surprising that they are losing money on paper right now.
It's obviously a gamble, but one they are hoping will pay off. They're still in the early stages.
When the iPhone first came out, it was revolutionary and we talked about it. Now, Apple is just a consumer electronics manufacturing company where their products last two to three years and then end up in the scrap heap. Electric cars are *huge*. They will reshape our lives and our environment. In some ways we will be better, in others worse. Transportation uses up *huge* amounts of our time and resources. It's one of the reasons that many people like to live and work in urban cores. But what if we had self-driving electric cars. Would be a disaster in terms of suburban sprawl. Electric cars don't pay fuel tax. So we will have to find another way to fund our infrastructure. At first they will reduce fossil fuel usage. But the lower cost will encourage more driving. Electric cars are part of some of the biggest issues facing our time. Mobile phones not so much anymore now that they are accessible to everybody. Electric cars may transform our lives as much as the original gasoline cars. I bet back then some people thought of cars as fancy toys for rich people too. Same thing with mobile phones only a decade ago. Tesla is now price-competitive with the entrenched players forcing them to react. That is if they deliver. But their track record so far is pretty good.
Some of us have spouses and kids and so we already have more than one car. Making one of them electric is just the sensible thing to do. Especially for things like the daily trip to the grocery store where ICEs are terribly inefficient. In my neighborhood, NEVs are already popular. A family with to adults and a young kid may have to gas cars and a NEV. We are talking now about one gas car and one Tesla instead. For about the same amount of money. In fact I bet most households already have more than one car. The only people from whom this *doesn't* make sense are those who are no longer living in their parents basement, but not yet married. Not sure if we can find anybody on ./ who meets that criteria, but if we can, their comments would probably be interesting.
By that logic nothing has happened in computers in the last 60 years. After all, there were computers 60 years ago.
In a way, so you have with a gasoline car.
Fuel has to be transported from the refinery to the depot, then distributed from depots to the stations. And then fuel has to be burned (a huge conversion loss).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
When computers went from being the size of a house to something that you can have in your house, the world changed dramatically. Right now, electric cars are going from something that has limited applicability to something with large-scale applicability.
They're a small, growing company hoping to release an entirely new manufactured line in just a couple years. It would be bizarre if they were making money on a quarterly basis under these circumstances. I imagine if they were content being nothing but a niche player, they could be turning a profit.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
But have they been actively developed during that time? Have they had the kind of development effort that the internal combustion engine has enjoyed?
Why does a car need to be kept in a garage?
In a city, so it's not stolen, and so it lasts longer. In the country, so it lasts longer and so you don't have to traipse through the wilderness before entering your vehicle.
You don't have to garage vehicles, but it's really much much better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(I can haz DIY build-your-own-Tesla kit? Pretty please?)
Start with a bicycle or go-kart and work your way up. People have certainly done it. Get yourself a bunch of reclaimed laptop cells, build a pressure welder, and go to town on 'em. The powertrain (that is, motor and controller) can reasonably be sourced from eBay, or acquired via surplus.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just wondering, since I've been waiting for this model to finally come out, now that I've switched to 100 percent green power and bought four solar panels through Seattle City Light.
Be great to know if it can cope with the winters in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, BC, and Alberta.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No. It wasn't. I had various smartphones for years before the iPhone came out. It didn't even have apps (at first). You fell for Apple's marketing, which wasn't remotely true.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Amazon doesn't survive due to selling "zero emissions" credits that it gets from the Californian government to other manufacturers. I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
No, I ask because I was one of the first beta testers of GPS units, and when I would go into mountains and park all day to go skiing they would freeze and take 2-3 days to reboot. When I was in the CAF Army we had similar problems operating in the Rockies and in Northern BC and the Yukon - a lot of stuff doesn't work well when it gets wicked cold. Like -20 C or below. At -40 C (also -40 F) a lot of stuff just stops working.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Apple turned a niche product into a mass-market good. That's a hard thing to do. You may argue that I fell for Apple marketing (I tried to buy an iPhone when they were announced, but they wouldn't let me pre-order one so I got a Blackberry instead). But what's less relevant is that people like my dad who never even had a mobile phone went out and bought the iPhone. Were the technology advances massive? No but they were non-zero. Now, if you don't have a smart phone people look at you funny. So it was a huge inflection point for adoption.
No, Amazon survives by evading paying sales tax. The difference, of course, is that Amazon actively evades collecting sales tax. Although Tesla takes advantage of the ZEV tax credits, they didn't lobby for them. California originally *required* all car companies to sell a certain % of zero-emission vehicles. A tax credit was provided to make it easy and encourage technology development. None of the exting car manufacturers could achieve that goal. Tesla rose to the challenge. So the law achieved exactly it's purpose. Whether that was a good idea or not is up for debate, but the California legislature set out to create a subsidy that would encourage ZEV sales and the law achieved its purpose. I don't see how we can fault anybody for that. I remember years ago people complaining that they couldn't buy California PZEVs if they didn't live in California. Duh!
The 3 will be a market changer for the low-end of electric vehicles. If they hit $35K with 200+ mile range, it means all the other electric vehicles in that range, such as the Nissan Leaf, will also have to hit 200+ miles or drop below $25K.
Right now there are a number of cars with 80-100 mile ranges in the $30K-$35K range. They won't be able to compete with the 3 without some major improvements.
This also will shake up the used market. Right now 80%+ of Leafs are leased, so about the time the Model 3 comes online all the Leafs on the road today will be for sale. That's a lot of cars, all with 80-mile-ish ranges. Now if new cars at $35K have over double the range, the price of the used cars will be much lower. So if a 80-mile range is sufficient (perhaps for your second or third car in the family), then you'll be able to go electric at a fairly reasonable price in two or three years.
I think the long-term impact will be that most people who have a good place to charge their cars at home will consider electric cars after the Model 3 has had a couple of years to shake up the market. I would guess in five years it will be typical for families with more than one car to have at least one electric, and in ten years the majority of new cars will be electric.
Are you shitting me? I have never had an iPhone, but I was supporting Palms and Blackberries when the iPhone came out. The first time I played with iOS, I could see they had nailed it. It was a way better interface than any other "smart" phone out there at the time.
I would rather have my Moto X than my wife's iPhone 5s, but I would never deny that when it came out, iOS was a game changer. Hell, it's the reason I even have a nice touchscreen android phone rather than a Blackberry-by-Google like they had initially planned...
Yes, if you make several 200+ mile trips per year, it will still make sense to own a gasoline car...
But keep in mind that, first of all, many people don't regularly travel that far, especially people who live in large urban centers. If you only go that far a couple of times a year, renting or borrowing a friend's car is perfectly acceptable.
Also keep in mind that it's already very common for families to own more than one car. If both a husband and wife work and they have kids who are old enough to drive, it's very likely they have two, three, or even four cars, and you really only need one of your cars to be capable of long-range trips.
That's before you take into account superchargers; if your trip is taking you along a highway that has a supercharger, it doesn't matter, anyway. You can take a break to stretch your legs and have a snack for a few minutes while you charge your car.
I don't know the exact statistics, but I, at least, would be perfectly capable of selling my old car and living only with an electric car that has a 200 mi range.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I would buy an affordable tesla just to avoid dealing with car dealerships.
There's no need to synthesize gasoline, when bacteria will make Butanol for you. It's a 1:1 replacement for gasoline.
And why would we want to do that? Butanol has some advantages but the feedstocks are the same as for ethanol and has the same ultimate problem of little/no net energy gain. You burn a bunch of fuel farming feedstock so you can make butanol/ethanol/etc which provides no more fuel at the end of the day than if you had simply burned gasoline/diesel without all the extra work. You still have the pollution problems, you haven't closed the carbon cycle and you've spent a lot of money for no actual energy gain at the end of the day.
I've got nothing against bio fuels but I have seen very little in that industry that is anything more than a subsidy to the farming industry at the end of the day.
Amazon doesn't survive due to selling "zero emissions" credits that it gets from the Californian government to other manufacturers. I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.
Tesla doesn't make a profit because it reinvests everything into R&D and the capital equipment it needs to scale. It would be a bad sign if they did make a profit, as it would mean that they don't have any ideas on where to spend money on growth.
As long as the answer to that is "Fossil Fuels" (and particularly, coal), then we are doing nothing but trading one smoke-plume for another.
In some cases that is technically true, but it's an overgeneralization that overlooks several fundamental differences:
1) Fungibility. By offloading power generation from the vehicle, we've decoupled the use of power from its source, meaning that we can swap in different types or sources of power. So, if you have solar or geothermal power at home, you can use that to charge your car. Or you can make use of an industrial-scale source such as hydroelectric or nuclear. You're no longer locked to a particular type or source of fuel.
2) Efficiency. Contrary to your claims, in cases where you're relying on a grid that's powered by fossil fuel, the efficiency is still higher with centralized power than with per-vehicle ICEs, even after taking into account the losses for transmission (both in power on the grid and in moving gas from one place to another). Industrial-scale ECE steam turbines running off of coal are typically upwards of 40% efficient, whereas gas-powered ICEs in typical cars get to about 35% efficiency at their best. And again, there's nothing locking you into using the grid to power your car, so as the grid becomes increasingly decentralized with renewable sources being used at each home, these cars are able to take advantage of those changes.
3) Safety and convenience. By removing the ICE from the car, we've removed a gigantic hunk of metal that generally doesn't crumple very well during a crash. It's freed up all of that room to use as additional storage space and as a massive crumple zone in case of a crash. Plus, though lithium ion batteries can release a lot of energy when punctured, they're still nowhere close to how dangerous gasoline can be when a tank gets punctured.
4) Economic. Reducing the number of moving parts in the vehicle by orders of magnitude results in lower maintenance costs and less downtime. Additionally, as far as costs go, gasoline is far less competitive than power from the grid or from a home-based source.
5) Redundancy/Reliability. We no longer have a single point of failure in the supply chain. Previously, an inability to acquire a single resource had the ability to impact an entire nation almost immediately. Now, an inability to acquire a single resource would simply mean shifting to a different one.
All of which is to say, a shift towards EVs brings about a number of benefits, only some of which I've detailed here. Fuel cells, at least as they are today, really don't do much for us, since we'd just be trading one resource for another, when what we really need to be doing is trading one resource for any while also making the vehicles themselves better.
Plus, we haven't talked about the energy required to built batteries, nor the energy required to recycle them after they die in about 5 years.
Tesla's been selling electric cars for 5 years. You would think they would notice.
Not only that, but Tesla warranties their batteries for 8 years unlimited miles. I guess they're going to lose a lot of money when all those batteries go bad in 5 years of use.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Parent should be modded informative, not Troll.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
When Toyota or BMW makes a nice electric sedan that can outrace Porcshe 911, than we'll give Tesla a break :)
Says a guy that keeps his car in a garage.
Types a guy who doesn't know how to create a complete sentence. I mostly have kept my cars outside. And that's why I've had one stolen, in SF.
Maybe try parking near where you are going, you know, the same general area that a garage would be in.
I have to walk through a certain amount of mud to get to the nearest convenient place to park, because I'm using my carport as a work space and I don't park there. Says the guy who lives in the country and knows what that's like, apartment boy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You need to learn to read financial reports. Tesla indeed makes a unit profit on their cars even without the government incentives. They are just spending a ton developing two new cars (X,3) and building one of the largest factories ever built.