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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.
I don't need this car because I can use the hyperloop in order to drive to work at the gigafactory in order to afford a journey to the mars colony!
That is the average price for a new car.
Today, Tesla had lines of 900 people in Denver CO waiting 5 hours to put a down payment on the car. It was like that at all their dealerships. This is hotter than an iPhone.
A large percentage of cars sit in the same price range. Most can't afford anywhere near $35,000 in a single payment, but if it's financed, lots of people can. 115,000 already have, according to Musk. It's a good looking car, and good step in the right direction. This one car isn't going to bring electric cars to the poor, but it will enable Tesla to do so in the future.
Thanks. Yeah Elon Musk called me up and said he'd write me a check for ONE MILLION dollars to run this story, because he said he really wanted the Slashdot AC's to hear about his new car, and because he said it wouldn't be covered anywhere else.
If it has 4 wheel drive and I can use it to haul a couch I might consider test driving one.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Dear person reading the above comment in the future,
Hahaha, yeah, there were really people that thought that way in 2016. The writing was on the wall, though.
Love,
2016
PS: Sorry we weren't timely with the whole 'carbon' thing.
Better yet, BizX has flipped /. and renamed it ./ and sold it to Monster (Dice's competitor?). A new CSS signifying a move to the 2.0 interwebs would have been nice, after all flippers are known to use some spit and polish.
We might do an April Fools joke, we might not. Some people might like that we do an April Fools joke, some people will bitch about it. Some people may like that we don't do an April Fools joke, and some people will bitch that we didn't. Only time will tell.
On a side note, I checked out your comment history and I agree with many of your suggestions.
I'll go there. Seriously, how many Americans can truly afford to buy a $35k car?
Don't know, but the average new price of a car is $33560 so with inflation to 2017 it's well... average? And I'm guessing there's somebody buying them so eventually there's cheaper second hand cars on the market. Of course it comes with the range limitations, but from the prices I've looked at tanking up a Tesla is cheaper than a gas guzzler, the value drop-off because of the aging battery is a bit unknown but overall I don't think it should have a higher total cost of ownership. It's not exactly a bargain either but he only needs mass market appeal, not mass market dominance.
I preordered one but that's mostly due to Norway's crazy high tax rates on ICE cars while EVs get a lot of benefits, but I'll see how much of that stays way until 2018, it might help that 2017 is an election year. If not, well it's a reservation so I can still cancel... but just to give you an idea, with our tax incentives the EV market share is about 15% and hybrids 22% and I think the Tesla 3 is a much better price/performance car than the current crop of Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, Renault Zoe and Tesla S that currently make up most of those 15%. It'll sell real well here.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is bases on my x-country trip in my brother's Model S:
With the 4WD option this car is really superb in the snow. The computer can adjust torque on all four wheels completely independently, and the low center of gravity make both acceleration and breaking solid.
Where a Tesla will get you is in the reduced battery capacity. Tesla operates their batteries at 72 +/- 1 deg. F. and it will use power from the battery to maintain that temperature. At some point it gets cold enough that waste energy from motors and battery discharge is not enough to keep the battery at operating temperature and at that point there is a noticeable drop in range. Cold weather also extends charging time because the battery needs to be warmed up before charging.
The spookiest part (from my perspective) is that you could park the car with enough charge to get to the next super charger, have the battery cool off, and end up short of charge. In general a 110 outlet is not enough to charge the car (a full charge at 110 would take 25 hours), but we did plug the car into 110 overnight to keep the system warm. People with engine block heaters will know how this works.
The visibility was decent. A large front windscreen is both a blessing and a curse in rain/ slush. The lane-assist is not a smart option when visibility is poor.
Depending on how and where you drive the car, the biggest issue will be a strong desire to keep the car plugged in when stopped in the cold.
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Basically, affordable 5 - 10 years later when it's good and used. It's no shock that Elon's idea of affordable is anything but. It's the complete disconnect rich people have with the rest of the world showing itself.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
While it looks real nice, but that means any damage to the windshield now means a more costly replacement. Is that really a sound engineering decision?
Plus, unless you are up north, there are many places where the summer sun will literally cook you in the car with the now very pronounced greenhouse effect. Having an option for a more conventional roof which helps to reflect sunlight make more sense.
Oliver.
And after these five years, I'd expect the range of the car to have dropped 20% or so.
Um, no. I own a vintage 2008 Tesla Roadster, and its range has dropped only about 10% over nearly 8 years. The battery chemistry and durability used by Tesla has only increased since then, so I the Model 3 will do substantially better even than that. Over five years, it might drop 5%. Possibly 10% at the outside, but not anywhere close to 20%.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Maybe I shouldn't troll people so much, though it's part of Slashdot's storied tradition. Thankfully, April 1 is a holiday dedicated to people like me. Recommending the elimination of logged-in users was in jest, by the way.
In all seriousness, people are going to bitch no matter what you do or don't do. Even when it comes to something like eliminating Devshare, I'm sure there are a few developers who aren't happy to see it gone. You did absolutely the right thing by nixing Devshare, and I don't think there's much ambiguity, but someone will still find a reason to bitch. I'm a meteorologist in Tornado Alley, and I have friends on TV. I've heard of people in one town getting hit by a tornado, and two weeks later when the TV station interrupts shows for a tornado somewhere else, people in that first town write hateful letters and forget that they needed that coverage two weeks ago. It happens, even when you absolutely do the right thing.
There are things where there's an obvious right or wrong like no deceptive advertising. There are things where maybe something's maybe not totally right or wrong, but it's still pretty clear -- like a site about FOSS releasing their source code with an FOSS license, or a site opposing censorship not censoring opinions. For the most part, they're pretty clear cut, and for the most part they're somewhat important.
When it comes to story selection, people are going to bitch no matter what. They did the same thing to Malda since the beginning of Slashdot. They'll bitch that some users get too many stories accepted, that you're promoting biases, or that you're running Slashvertisements; none of these are actually going on, of course. Aside from keeping the stories to news for nerds, stuff that matters, there's no right or wrong way to post stories. You're the editors and you get to tell us what you think is interesting and worth discussing. That's always how Slashdot has been, from when Malda founded it. We get our say by submitting stories and recommending them by voting in the Firehose. Everything else is up to you guys, and you don't have anything to apologize for.
I know you've read a hell of a lot of comments and emails from people. I know there probably aren't that many people working behind the scenes at Slashdot and there's a long list of stuff to do. I know you guys are working hard and appreciate it. It's probably a thankless job most of the time, but sincere thanks for keeping Slashdot running and trying to improve it.
Thanks. Yeah Elon Musk called me up and said he'd write me a check for ONE MILLION dollars to run this story, because he said he really wanted the Slashdot AC's to hear about his new car, and because he said it wouldn't be covered anywhere else.
I laughed... would read again +8 :)
"Safety is a big concern for Tesla so they've manufactured the Model 3 with a 5 star safety rating in every category."
They haven't manufactured it at all yet. And they hope to get a 5 star rating. They don't award the starts themselves, so they'll have to do their best and wait and see what happens like anyone else.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The love it in the Nordic countries. Seriously, it's huge over there.
Yep, tax gas cars enough and provide large enough EV incentives, and people will do that sort of thing...
Doesn't make it a rational market nor mean it will work elsewhere. :)
Sure, but if you're using it to commute and you have a decent commute, that $624 a month will be more like $424 a month with all the gas you're no longer buying. Lots of people have cars with payments in that range.
Maybe... But to save $200 per month, you need two things to happen...
1. Electricity has to be free... It isn't... it is cheaper than gas to be sure, but it isn't free...
But lets pretend it somehow is...
2. You'd have to drive more than 3,800 miles... a MONTH... to save $200 in gas...
Buy a Ford Fusion, spend half the price ($17,500 buys, after rebates, a nice Ford Fusion that carries 5 people), so end up with a payment of $310 a month.
Combined city/highway is 29 MPG. At $1.50 a gallon for gas, you're spending $1 for every 19.3 miles you drive.
If you average 12,000 miles a year (a reasonable number), that is 33 miles per day. So you're spending about $1.60 per day, or $48 per month in gas.
But keep in mind, if you don't drive at all for a week, go on vacation, get laid off, or change your driving, the payment remains.
Stop driving the Ford and the gas cost goes away.
Also, keep in mind that we assumed that wall power was free. The above numbers are worse in real life for the Tesla because:
1. Electricity isn't free
2. A home charger isn't free
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It is also worth noting that there are many lease programs on the Ford Fusion, I regularly see $199 a month lease deals with nothing due at signing. Just sign and drive.
Now you might say... "but, but, the Tesla isn't a Ford, it is fancy!" Maybe... but is it twice the money fancy? It is a box with 4 wheels that takes 5 people someplace.
They'll sell, but don't kid yourself, it is still expensive.
The average price for a new car in 2013 was $31,252. That's below 35k, and it should be pointed out that this is the average price PAID for a new car- not sticker prices or whatever.
So yea, lots of people can buy 35,000 dollar cars. One thing I can't find is the MEDIAN price paid- cars are probably on some bell curve, but it has a long tail. If your neighbor drops 100k on a GTR, that's going to push the average up. Even if the median is a decent bit lower, you still end up with plenty of Americans that can pay 35k for a new car- especially an electric one.
the cheapest you can get gas right now is more than $1.80/gallon. Most places in the US it's more than $2/gallon, so why did you use $1.50 for your calculations?
Yes, but that "average" includes a million pickup trucks, most of which are sold well over that average.
The "average" price of a F-150 these days is in the mid $40's, with higher end models near $60K.
I'm sorry, am I supposed to not understand how averages work, just because you live in Texas? I know y'all try to fuck up everyone else's textbooks, but the reason 35k is called an average is because some vehicles sell for more, and others sell for less. In particular, commercial vehicles damn well better cost more than average given the amount of tax writeoffs we're throwing at them. I'd sure hope they're providing more utility than a Nissan Versa. The least a lifted F-whatever with a gun rack and hay guard and brush guard and duallies and smokestack can do is haul a few hundred pounds of oilfield crap from the defunct jobsite.
Yes, but I'm paying $1.50 a gallon, so who cares?
The real problem is the lack of a SUV, that thing is WAY too small to be useful, at least in Texas.
Yeah, we all know how impressed Texans are with themselves and their obsession with size. While ignoring the SUV Tesla just released last year.
We know, it's too expensive for y'all. And by the way, you're dangerously close to "obviously troll" territory when you tout gas prices that have been in effect for, like, a month or two, and are far from a historical or recent average.
So yeah, anyone complaining about the price of this car will get laughed in the face by not only Anonymous Coward above, but also by me.
I'm one of the 115,000 who put down a £1000 reservation for this space capsule.
Take a look at interior, the pictures here and tell me that's not something to die for.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
You realize there's this thing called "renewable energy"? It can come from the wind, the sun, or from water currents, so you don't have to burn up anything. Quite amazing, I know.
As an EV driver myself (Leaf), what you have to remember is that the reduced range is recovered when the batteries warm up again. How much they warm up depends on what kind of driving you do, of course.
I've noticed that the battery charge display in the Leaf is not quite linear either, and maybe the Tesla is the same. From 100% it drops faster than when you get down to 50% or 20%.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
That's the fundamental truth of a consumer society and it doesn't just apply to powering vehicles. Almost everything you buy will involve dubious if not downright unethical environmental or societal practices. They're just all hidden from view so as not to concern you.
And I admit to being just as guilty of being oblivious.
With "Nobody" you mean the about 33% electric energy, that comes from renewables for instance in Germany, the 80% in Austria and Switzerland and the 90% in Norway?
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/...
Side note, if you're for Electric Vehicles, don't listen to Clinton and don't vote for her.
She has already gotten $4.5 million from oil and gas companies, and that is the "known" amounts that had to be reported.
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Note: This doesn't mean anyone on the Republican side would be better, you should probably vote for Bernie Sanders.
You realize that almost nobody's energy comes from those sources? You realize that the process of making things like solar panel produces a lot of pollution in itself?
First sentence is simply false, unless your definition of "almost nobody's" covers everything under 100%.
Second sentence means nothing unless you define "a lot of pollution"; taking into account you're comparing means of energy production to replace mining and burning coal, so your "lot of pollution" would have to be a pretty ridiculously massive LOT to even reach comparable orders of magnitude.
not bad for the launch of a single car from a small manufacturer in the time scale though.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
being socially aware seems to be an anathema as well. I never see an references to pollution with arguments against EV, its always price and range.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
A lot of electricity now is produced from natural gas which is much cleaner than gasoline.
Yep, tax gas cars enough and provide large enough EV incentives, and people will do that sort of thing...
Doesn't make it a rational market nor mean it will work elsewhere. :)
Purely "rational" / "homo economicus" behaviour is very far away in the mobility market even without EVs:
- Passenger trains are (often) subsidized directly and indirectly by not having to pay full cost for using rails, stations etc.
- Cars are subsidized indirectly by building roads, but taxed directly with sales tax and (often) extra vehicle tax or import tax
- Gasoline is taxed with sales tax and other taxes, but subsidized indirectly by military interventions / protecting shipping lanes
So let's see what your rational mobility decision is in a country without a functioning government to 'distort' the market. My bet is going to be on walking, especially walking away :).
I prefer not to reply to AC, I'll just add here that with ZEV your choice of upstream can be away from the usual war zones in and around oil producing countries.
No, it means there are no cross supports and none of the traditional sound dampening material in the roof, just one sheet of solid glass (or something glass like) so there is a thinner, lighter roof. Taking out those cross supports gives a very surprising feeling of a lot more space.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
With "Nobody" you mean the about 33% electric energy, that comes from renewables for instance in Germany, the 80% in Austria and Switzerland and the 90% in Norway?
You don't have to go that far. You got neighbour in the north where ~96% of all energy produced come from hydro power and ~99% come from renewable source
Elok
the power they used to charge their cars came from sources that did. All they did was move the pollution upstream. Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
In the not too distant future, people will look back at this period in time and wonder how it was possible for people to consider it perfectly normal and acceptable that thousands of individual engines were burning fuel and exhausting toxic fumes in the middle of our cities. When I walk past my daughters' school on a foggy november morning and smell the dreadful stench of car engines, I can't wait for all that pollution to be moved "upstream" to our solar panels.
Even if the energy is created in an old fashioned fossil fuel burning plant, that's still way better than doing it in the middle of a city. And the plants can use all sorts of filters and scrubbers so they're cleaner than the combination of all those individual car engines that are only relatively clean in lab conditions but go way over the limits when you push the gas pedal down. Emission limits for power plants continuously go down and are frequently monitored.
But that's assuming we keep using fossil fuel for electricity. In reality, many European countries now produce the majority of their electricity using renewable sources. Or, at the very least, with natural gas which pollutes a lot less.
And even if you forget about all that, at least make a fair comparison: don't just compare the fuel burnt to generate electricity with the fuel burnt by cars without taking into account the cost of producing that latter fuel. When you have filled up your gas tank, you have already used about the same amount of energy as what's needed for an electric car to travel the same distance, and you haven't even started burning your fuel yet. Oil has to be pumped up, refined, and transported to gas stations. Have you ever seen a refinery? It uses enormous amounts of energy and is not exactly clean. If you add that to your comparison, combustion engines don't even come close to ZEV cars anymore.
We have solar panels and we're producing more than we need. Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years. In my street, half the houses have solar panels. That's an average street with young families, not a rich neighborhood. Even now that the subsidies have run out, people are still installing them because it takes less than 10 years to recoup the investment and they last about 20 years.
Meanwhile, given the massive interest in solar panels, new technologies are being discovered all the time yielding cleaner production methods with less toxic materials. All of that while at the same time the oil industry is investing in fracking and other extremely polluting methods.
How can you seriously say that we need to continue to burn fuel?
I've had a few years with our Tesla. I have no remorse and will by another one when the 8 year extended warrantee expires.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I would say electric cars are more of a status symbol for people who want to pretend they are better than you.
Or people who really like high acceleration and don't need long-range capability. My friends who drive them don't show the attitude you're complaining about.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
E85 is a fool's game. There's far less energy density in E85 than gasoline. You actually end up paying more per mile.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
yeah, beacause oil production doesn't destroy millions of hectares of habitat: http://extremeenergy.org/files...
Well, yes. By our very nature humans negatively impact the environment just by existing. Our stone age ancestors were damaging the environment by chopping down trees. You'll pretty much NEVER be able to live without some negative environmental impact (whether that's "polluting" or not is another issue - hydro, wind turbines, solar, etc primarily impact the environment in different ways than polluting).
HOWEVER think of it in terms of overall impact. "Miles per unit of pollution" if you will. If your electric car is still polluting by just "moving it upstream", but the overall level of pollution per distance travelled is 1/10th of what a gasoline based car would do, then that's still a great improvement.
Too many times people get so wrapped up in the idea that if you want completely and 100% solve a problem, then you shouldn't do anything about it. That's simply not a good attitude - particularly for problems CAN'T be 100% solved.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Doesn't make it a rational market
Neither does making gas available for cheap and forcing your pollution to others. Still, it's the logic used in most of the world.
Because people don't buy a new car every year, and cars don't just magically go away after the first year. There are cars on the road that are 10+ years old that are still being resold. A new car can only be bought new once. A used car can be bought and sold multiple times.
It's fucking EASY to sell more used cars than new ones. It's like you people are willfully fucking stupid.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
One million? Pfah.