Elon Musk Announces $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Electric Car

Elon Musk has officially unveiled the Tesla Model 3 electric car at the company's facility in Hawthorne, California. The Model 3 is being dubbed as a "mass market affordable car." The base-model Model 3 will be able to travel 0-60MPH in less than 6 seconds, with "versions of the Model 3 that go much faster." In terms of range, it features an EPA range of at least 215 miles per charge. All Model 3's will come standard with autopilot hardware and autopilot safety features. The Model 3 will also fit five adults comfortably, thanks largely in part to the large, rear piece of glass on the roof area. You'll find front and rear trunks, offering more cargo capacity than any cargo gas car with the same external dimensions. Safety is a big concern for Tesla so they've manufactured the Model 3 with a 5 star safety rating in every category. The Model 3 starts at $35,000 with a release date scheduled for 2017. Tesla will take your preorder now for a $1,000 down payment.

Comments

Re:"Affordable"

[BitZtream]

99% of America can't afford $600/month.

Average != Affordable

~$75k a year to afford this car. $75k for a household is not "rich" in my book.

Rich? No, but still in the top 1% of the country. You have absolutely no idea how much money the 'common man' in America makes. 15% of our population lives in 'poverty' which is something like 13k/year income. The AVERAGE American income is about 51k/year ... but the median household income per year si closer to 30k. The 1% skew the numbers for everyone else because the gap is so ridiculously large.

The average household income for families with MASTERS DEGREES ... is 78k/year. If you go by the median, you know, the one that matters, you need a freaking Doctorate to make $78k/year. I can vouch for that, my wife is in fact a vet, she made about 70k a year until she got yet another 4 year degree to get lab animal certified.

You need a doctorate to buy an affordable car? I don't fucking think so.

This car isn't affordable in the sense that Musk is trying to pretend it is. Joe Sixpack isn't buying a Model 3.

The rest of the 1%, like those of us here on slashdot (hint, if you've ever bought a north face jacket new (you trendy bastards) then you're more than likely WELL into the 1% range even if you're too ignorant to realize that), can afford a Model 3, but that doesn't make it affordable, just makes it cheaper than the last model.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

$75k is good fucking money unless you live in some retarded city that costs way to fucking much to live in. It does not count as affordable if you need to make $75k/year to fit into a magazines model of what you need to make.

Re: "mass market affordable car"

[rgbatduke]

Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years.

Hmmm, somewhere in there one has to do some arithmetic. 1 Gallon of Gasoline = 33 kW-hours and will drive a Toyota Prius 50 miles on a good day traveling slightly downhill (I know this for a fact as I own two). Most "normal" subcompact cars it will move no more than 30 miles. A Tesla model S sports measurements of 90 to 100 MPGe (34 to 38 kW-hr/100 miles). A largish household solar panel system might be 5 kW peak capacity (enough to provide order of 24 kW-hr in 24 hours with average-ish insolation). This system might cost $25K to $35K installed.

You will note that if one diverted 100% of the output of a solar collection system that cost almost as much as the car itself into charging the car's battery, one would accrue energy in its battery at "rate" of roughly 60 miles (range) per day. If one is running a household that consumes most of that, the overcapacity is all you can accumulate. 10% overcapacity would give you 6 miles per day. To drive an average of 20 miles a day (ballpark average driving for commuters) you'd need at least 30% overcapacity on a system of this general scale, which would cost an additional $10K to install. $10K would buy 5000 gallons of gasoline at current prices, more like 6000 or 7000 gallons if one is honest and adds in the cost of money amortized over the driving period. In my Prius, at 45 miles/gallon sustained, 6000 x 45 = 270,000 miles, which is ballpark the total expected range of a car over its entire lifetime. The models of the Prius that are comparable in interior size and comfort and that get this average mileage are currently around $24,000.

So, one can buy a Tesla 3 at $35K for the car and either buy $10K worth of solar panels to be able to drive 20 miles round trip per day with no additional expenditure plus pay for the money borrowed to install the solar for an additional $5K for a total cost of $50K for roughly 250,000 total miles driven OR I can buy a Toyota Prius for $25K and pay for gas out of pocket for the lifetime of the car, in which case I'll pay around $35K total for the same 250,000 miles and can use the leftover money to pay for hookers and cocaine. (Or I can buy any one of a number of cars that cost less than $20K but get around 30 mpg, pay roughly $17K for gasoline to reach 250,000 miles, and come in close to the Prius, or I can pay far less than any of these for a car used for a year or so and come in even lower than any of these estimates but not have a shiny new car to impress the hookers with).

If I do NOT have an extra 7 or 8 kW-hr generating capacity and buy the Tesla, then of course I have to pay for electricity the hard way. This will make the cost of driving one mile on a Tesla at (say) 36 kW-hr/100 miles highly variable, depending on how much your state inflates the cost of electricity. In Hawaii, electricity is awesomely expensive. In about half of the US, it is more than $0.16 kwh and the cost per mile on a Tesla will be roughly 6 cents. But it is also highly variable -- in NC it is closer to $0.10 per kwh and the cost per mile is more like 4 cents. For comparison (although gas prices and gas taxes are also highly variable) in NC at current prices a Prius costs just over 4 cents per mile in gasoline to drive and is close to a wash with a Tesla. In Virginia next door, gas taxes are lower and the Prius matches or even wins a bit relative to the Tesla. California and New England have very high electrical prices and the Tesla loses ground. But in California in particular, gasoline prices are inflated to almost 50% higher than they are in NC and close to the way electricity prices are inflated, so they come in close to a wash again. But one can fill a Prius in roughly 2 minutes at a gas pump anywhere across the country, where "filling" a car that requires 80 odd kWh of electricity to fully charge does not, not, not take 2 minutes, and in fact cannot be done at all in 99% of the countryside where one might want to drive.

Personally, I do