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Tesla Unveils Dual Motor and Performance Specs For Model 3
Rei writes: Yesterday evening, Elon Musk announced the pricing and specs for two of the Model 3's most in-demand options -- dual motor and performance versions. The base dual motor configuration adds an AC induction front motor to the current partial-PM reluctance rear motor for $5,000; in addition to AWD and allowing the car to drive with either motor out, this cuts the 0 to 60 mph acceleration time from 5.1 seconds to 4.5 seconds. The performance package is available as a bundle, including the long-range pack, premium interior, 20" wheels, carbon fiber spoiler, and a new black-and-white interior. The vehicle will cost $78,000; 0 to 60 mph times are further cut to 3.5 seconds and the top speed increases from 140 mph to 155 mph.
While these options have consistently polled as the most in-demand options not yet available, several still remain and are variously due late this year/early next year: cream interior, non-PUP, tow hitch, SR battery, and air suspension. EU-spec and China-spec are also due early next year. Production is currently over 3,500 per week, rumored to be 4,300 per week, and will be undergoing a shutdown from May 26-31 to raise production to the Q2 target of 5000-6000.
While these options have consistently polled as the most in-demand options not yet available, several still remain and are variously due late this year/early next year: cream interior, non-PUP, tow hitch, SR battery, and air suspension. EU-spec and China-spec are also due early next year. Production is currently over 3,500 per week, rumored to be 4,300 per week, and will be undergoing a shutdown from May 26-31 to raise production to the Q2 target of 5000-6000.
Huh. Just off the presses.
Tesla cuts Model 3 delivery delays for new orders in half as production ramp improves
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
$78k for the performance version of a $35k base car? Is Tesla an American company or a German one?
And still have to wait until 2019 for air suspension?
The $5k for dual-motor / AWD is expensive enough.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I guess we'll find out :) The nice thing about the Model 3 vs. S and X is that the new motor has no rotor overheating issues. You can drive it full out lap after lap (and a number of owners have done just that).
Now, it'll be interesting to see how the front motor behaves. Because they interestingly chose to add an induction motor in the front rather than a second PMSRM. At this point, we have no clue whether it's the same induction motor as in the S and X or a new design. And even if it's the same as the S and X, it's not clear that - only needing to deliver part of the vehicle's power needs - it would overheat. The software would obviously preferentially direct acceleration to the more efficient, no-thermal-limitations rear motor, only using the front when more power is needed than the rear can deliver.
I can't wait for the videos to start filtering in from the track. Even the current Model 3 looks like a blast on it (until you burn out the not-designed-for-track-duty brakes, that is!)
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Doesn't that also mean that the people for whom the federal tax credit would be the biggest relative benefit will be likely to miss actually getting the benefit, though?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It looks like Tesla is going to hit the US limit - deliberately - right at the start of Q3. This means that the full $7500 credit for buyers in Q3 and Q4; a half credit in Q1 and Q2; a quarter credit in Q3 and Q4; and then gone in 2020.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
The Model 3 with Long Range Battery and All Wheel Drive Dual Motor and the Performance versions are going from 12 to 18 months to just 6 to 9 months.
As for the least expensive version of the Model 3 with the Standard battery pack starting at $35,000 in the US, the timeline for new reservations is going from 12 to 18 months to just 6 to 12 months.
Seriously, a 6 to 12 month wait after ordering? Really? Rolls Royce can hand-build you a fully-bespoke car faster than that...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I would love ironic, mismatched sound packages for the car (affecting both driving sounds at the horn). Examples:
* Old carburated sports car
* Model T
* Diesel semi
* Galloping horse
* Bicycle with a card in its spokes
* Jetsons car
* Cruise ship
* Roomba
* Milleneum Falcon trying to go into hyperspace but failing
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Rolls-Royce doesn't have a waiting list of nearly half a million people.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Tesla doesn't have the fit-and-finish of Rolls Royce.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Tesla seems to take all the fun out of performance. It used to be able oil and gas and the small of exhaust coming out of two dual 2.5" exhaust pipes with a sound that made an indication of how fast it was. Now it's just a really quick golf cart.
Meh, speed limits and traffic do that. Sure, it's fun accelerating 0-55 mph faster than everything else but when you got a car that could do 155 mph you've barely tasted it. I'll admit I didn't really understand why anyone would go to a track to drive a car before I got a sports car, like can't you just drive it? Turns out driving on public roads is really just a tease, you can hear the roar but then you have to muzzle it if you want to keep your license.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have a classic Chevy with a 454. I didn't have to drive it fast, it was just fun standing behind it while it was idling.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Mr. Musk might realize that the vast majority of folks aren't going to spend nearly $80k on a vehicle that does nothing but depreciate the instant you drive it off the lot. When his vehicles can financially compete with an ICE flavor, we'll talk about it. Until then, no.
Applying the typical 20/4/10 rule of thumb on an $80k car:
20% Down Payment: $16k
Finance Length: $64k for four years @ ~3% = ~$1400 / month
Gross Income Required for 10% rule: > $140,000 / year*
* > because I'm not taking interest and insurance amounts into account.
US Median Income 2015-2016: $57-59k. Relevant because his Model 3 is supposed to
be the affordable model for the masses.
If he doesn't realize it sooner rather than later, his little car project may implode.
It's hilarious just how out of touch with reality the super rich really are . . . . . . :|
And? Toyota didn't build their first large factory over the past year and a half. Toyota's production levels are the results of decades of investment.
(It's also worth mentioning, as a lesser point, that Toyota's average vehicle sale price isn't $45k)
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
For new orders. And what part of moved forward did you not understand? Even a delay would mean "back to the earlier schedule".
Sort of reminds me of the situation with the Model 3 production in general. The whole thing was heavily moved forward to an extremely aggressive schedule, then fell back to its original schedule, and you get people hyperventilating about the storm in a teacup.
They're not "new high-margin options"; they're options that have been announced from the beginning, and more to the point, they're the two options that were the reason for most deferred orders. More people wanted dual motor and performance than wanted SR or non-PUP. And furthermore, these options have nothing to do with the battery pack, which was - until recently - the most bottlenecked part. So why on Earth shouldn't they make them available?
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
And? Toyota didn't build their first large factory over the past year and a half.
Neither did Tesla. They bought a fully-functional factory from Toyota and GM. And you would think after 10 years of "production" that Tesla would have a better idea about how to do it...
(It's also worth mentioning, as a lesser point, that Toyota's average vehicle sale price isn't $45k)
Yep! The average Toyota is closer to half that amount. And yet, Toyota consistently makes a profit whereas Tesla consistently loses money. I guess if you want to gamble the value of a warranty/support on a $50K+ vehicle on a company that doesn't know how to make a profit, you have quite a bit of money to fritter away!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It was not a "fully functional factory", it's been entirely retooled for Tesla's vehicles. And greatly expanded as well. And furthermore, Tesla has been scaling up by orders of magnitude, at one of the fastest rates of any automaker in history. Talking about "10 years ago" when they were handmaking Roadsters on bodies sent over from Lotus is pretty meaningless relative to what they're doing today.
I love how you proudly state that, as though it somehow contributes to your point, rather than pointing out that their revenue per vehicle is half of Tesla's.
Wow, a company that is not pouring everything it gets and then some into expansion is paying dividends? You don't say!
Hey, the 10-year-old "Tesla Deathwatch" called, they want you to write a column for them.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
The goal in 2014 was 500k per year by 2020. They should hit that in early 2019. That was still the goal in August 2015, although they were talking that they might be able to exceed it. First deliveries - not 5k per week, but first-off-the-line - were to be "late 2017". So rather than "by the end of July" for the first delivery, it was to be "by the end of December", six months later.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
What part of "it's been entire retooled for Tesla's vehicles and greatly expanded" was difficult for you?
You're totally right. Tesla should have made Pontiac Vibes.
And now we loop back to the beginning where I point out that this production rate is the result of decades of capex, not something that Toyota did a week from last Tuesday.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
"Premium" interior (in any color I want as long as it is black) that gives me open pore wood trim and two more USB ports? For 5K? If any ICE car dealer pushed that option I would laugh at him so derisively he would cringe. Here I forked over the cash for obviously over priced profit center knowingly and willingly. That is my bit for the 35K for the masses.
AWD at 78K is outrageous in some sense. Electric dual motor AWD is so much simpler than the transfer case, locking differential, dual drive axle ICE AWD trans. ICE AWD is just 3 or 4 K more, and they make a good profit on that. Electric is just one more motor and all the rest is software. It should not cost more than 600$, and it would sell for 1000$ more in normal circumstances, if there are enough electric cars on the market giving competitive pressure. But... as it stands now, Tesla can bundle it with mauve interior and pink wheels and a unicorn hood ornament and price it at 78K. And there are lots of people willing pay. I see it as a good thing. Make as much profit as possible, amortize the factory, pay off the fixed costs, so that some day we can have a really affordable electric car for the people.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And by the way, just so you know, Toyota sold off a large chunk of the equipment at NUMMI:
And transferred most of the rest:
Tesla bought the small amount that was left over at the plant, about $15m worth (which is almost nothing in the automotive industry).
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
"They chose to change how it was being used; turns out, they should have just adapted the existing production lines"
The Model has a lot of aluminum which required a lot of new equipment.
When Ford converted its two main plants that make the F-150 to aluminum, they did a complete teardown & re-fit of both sites.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Yes. More to the point, if you had actually read the Wikipedia article you linked, you would have learned that. They sold off or transferred all but $15M of equipment from the facility.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
The initially adevertised 35K trim was never shipped. Now Tesla is trying to get people to buy a 57K Model3, at least at the Colorado Cherry Creek dealer I visited last week.
So I guess Toyota ripped everything down and trashed the joint before they sold it to Tesla?
Well this is the standard practice when transferring commercial property so yeah...(not the trashing part, but stripping down)
BTW - the Nissan Leaf does the interior thing right, unlike the airy-fairy edgy Model 3. Nice big buttons for gloved hands to be able to use. Small, dash-mounted, well-protected LCD. Important info on a screen in front of the driver
I have a classic Chevy with a 454 (...) fun standing behind it
I don't get it, what's fun about an asthma attack? :-P
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Electric cars (and bikes) just confirm what I always knew.
Nobody's actually interested in the speed, or the acceleration. What they want to do is make a noise and be loud and "sound" cool.
Seriously, Harley Davidson could make an electric motorbike that out-accelerates all their other models (they are actually doing that). All the bike enthusiasts I talk to laugh at that idea - they don't even mention "range" or "battery life" (I think they have a hard time saying "battery" to be honest, if it's not full of some environment-destroying fuel, they can't play Mad Max). They just think the idea of something near-silent is counter to why they buy the bike.
They don't really admit that, but that's all it's ever been about. Not "Hey, I have the faster car". Not "I love the speed". Nope.. .it's how I can get everyone's attention and who's looking at me?
The cars are the same. Line up a dozen sports cars and nobody will look at the electric model. Even though it will out-accelerate the $200,000 supercar (and let's be honest, any race where you're just at top-speed all the time is boring... an electric car would win in a drag-race, in a rally, on a track, etc.).
Look at the motor-sports and electric cars don't really figure. Even the "electric formula one" kind of things get zero attention. But hey, put regenerative braking into something and use that to boost the performance, that's okay because it makes a lot of noise still.
Racing is literally about "who can be noisiest, messiest, cause the most disruption, and nearly trash their car" not "who wins".
For years, consumer cars have gotten faster and faster, but nobody really notices or thinks it matters, because they've also become quieter and quieter. Everyone drives what would have been a Formula One car back in the sixties, but now those kinds of cars are "granny cars", because they don't make lots of noise.
Sorry, but all those "car enthusiasts" that I know spend more time polishing and waxing, and bolting on ridiculous addons to their car than they ever do tweaking performance. Hey, unless you get a modchip that makes the car noisier and smokier...
So your contention is that if you aren't instantly Toyota, you may as well close your doors and give up?
BMW and Mercedes apparently never got that memo, and they're doing just fine.
Don't be a god damn idiot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
the manufacturing of the batteries for a Tesla produce a shit ton of CO2, so driving a battery-based electric car will do nothing for climate change.
The argument that X is not a carbon-free process because various elements in the mining and manufacturing chain of X use carbon is almost as stupid as the cow-fart argument.
As we go through the long process of wringing the carbon out of industrial processes, the total carbon it takes to do X decreases. Eventually there will be electric large mining trucks, taking that element out of every manufactured process that starts with mining.
Nice non sequitur. And beyond that, I doubt you've ever even seen a Model 3. Or talked to anyone who owns one.
Anyone who keeps up with the automotive press knows that the Model 3 fit-and-finish has been very poor to date. Tesla is working out their manufacturing processes, and it's not surprising that they've having problems. Let's not pretend they're not having them. Every teardown of the vehicle so far has quantified their panel gaps as being far below average consistency, for example.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the manufacturing of the batteries for a Tesla produce a shit ton of CO2, so driving a battery-based electric car will do nothing for climate change.
The argument that X is not a carbon-free process because various elements in the mining and manufacturing chain of X use carbon is almost as stupid as the cow-fart argument.
I agree with you, but only because I think we should be doing something to reduce cow farts. They actually are a significant GHG. And you do have to reduce the carbon release in every step of the process. With that said, only about 1/3 of the lifetime energy consumption of the average ICE-based automobile occurs during production, at the high end, so it's hardly the most significant factor.
As we go through the long process of wringing the carbon out of industrial processes, the total carbon it takes to do X decreases. Eventually there will be electric large mining trucks, taking that element out of every manufactured process that starts with mining.
Yes, obviously we should do both things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What makes the cow-fart argument stupid is that all the carbon that comes out of cows recently (during the lifetime of this animal. and mostly in the last year) came out of the air, through feed, to go into the cows. None of it comes from the fossil sources that are adding new carbon to the environment. Therefore if all the cows vanished today, the amount of GHG in the atmosphere would not change.
Why guess when you can read your own link?
A model 3 made it 3 laps at Laguna Seca before the brakes were gone that's ~ 9 miles the Nurburgring is over 12. You can't keep the batteries or brakes cool enough to do a proper lap that long.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
You don't even understand the argument, you're not qualified to call it stupid. Cow farts are a problem not because of co2 but because of methane.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tesla seems to take all the fun out of performance. It used to be able oil and gas and the small of exhaust coming out of two dual 2.5" exhaust pipes with a sound that made an indication of how fast it was. Now it's just a really quick golf cart.
I'm sorry about your penis.
No. It's $35k without the credit; $27,5k if it gets a full credit. LR is $44k without the credit, $36,5k with a full credit. LR + PUP is $49k without the credit, $41,5k with a full credit.
Where I am it works in just the opposite manner. All cars have a massive VAT (for example, a BMW 3-series' VAT will be around 40%). EVs don't have to pay it. We also have huge gas prices (in US dollars figures they're now over $8/gal).
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Well it hasn't because in order to post a time you need to do a lap, at full chat the batteries in a Model 3 cant last the 3.1 miles of track.
Do you have a reference for that or are you just a "hater"? I haven't seen any Model 3 times for the Nurburgring but here's an article (complete with video) about a Model 3 doing 9 laps at full speed around Laguna Seca. Laguna Seca is 2.2 miles so that's around 20 miles at full bore on a road course without the car limiting the power, is there a reason to believe that it couldn't do that on the Nurburgring?
Enigma
The model 3 had brake issues from the 3rd lap on, when brakes get hot they boil the fluid so you have to pump them in order to stop. 10k in brake upgrades certainly would help but then it's not stock, an m3 which Musk has a burning desire to out perform can go to a track day fully stock and do just fine going 10 seconds faster around Laguna Seca then the model 3. The model 3 is a great car but pretending it's a good track day car discredits all its remarkable features.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Electric cars do not yet make financial sense in the US, though if you include the tax benefits they are getting close. Especially the lower priced models like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and someday the base version of the Model 3. The purchase price is higher, but recharging is cheaper than gasoline and maintenance costs are lower. Oil prices continue to rise and the cost of making lithium-ion batteries continues to fall. Eventually the lines will cross and full-electric cars will be cost-effective even without tax subsidies.
Meanwhile, some Americans continue to buy them. Not to save money, but to help improve the environment or for the superior driving experience.
And BTW your claim about "every teardown" is wrong. You mean "Every teardown by one Randy Munrone". Ingineerix, Jack Rickard, and Evannex disagree.,
You mean Sandy Munro? You know those guys have chops, right? They're not amateurs. Also, I don't know if you took the time to actually watch the entire interview, but he gave Tesla credit for numerous things that he thought they did extremely well — better, in fact, than literally anyone else. The electronics leap immediately to mind.
Besides that though, there are plenty of other media references as well, not to mention the owners complaining all over the official forums. Please don't pretend like Tesla isn't having quality control problems. They absolutely are, and there's no credibly denying it. When you get in to this kind of money, it's not cute to have problems like that. It's not an especially huge amount of money to spend for a product that does what it does, but it is enough money where it's disappointing for it to have that kind of flaw. If we didn't care about style, we'd all drive identical-looking vehicles which were based on the intersection of crash safety and aerodynamics.
It would be less embarrassing if this were Tesla's first car, but it isn't...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"