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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.
$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
All of Tesla's models are currently backordered, so any drop on S75D wouldn't be that meaningful. And S model production is interchangeable; their real limit is that the number of cells that Panasonic can provide is only enough for about 100k S+X vehicles per year, and they adjust their pricing and introduce new options on these vehicle lines at rate to maintain this (they could expand 18650 production, but neither Tesla nor Panasonic have interest in this, since they see the 2170s as the future). I do think you're right that demand for S75D will drop, and I can envision Tesla discontinuing it while sweetening up the 100s. Of course, that will only decrease the number of S+X vehicles that they can make per year, since more cells are needed for the 100 packs.
I feel pretty confident that they're eventually going to refresh S and X atop the Model Y platform. Since Y's platform is basically a stretched, upgraded 3, and a stretched pack means not only more capacity, but more power.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla doesn't have the fit-and-finish of Rolls Royce.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So the same proportional numbers give $62K income needed to afford the base $35K model, which is spot on. The performance model isn't designed to be affordable. It's designed to be profitable.
Of course, you know that, but you want to attack. Too bad your own facts show that the base Model 3 is affordable, just as promised. And that's without taking into account the reduced total cost of ownership for an electric car. And wait three years until you can buy one used for $20K that still drives just like new.
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.
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.
Looks like fourth quarter shipping will be largely base model 3. Third quarter will be residual first production orders. 2019 first quarter on, it would be premium AWD models coming into the mix. So we should see about 50,000 base model 3s this year.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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.
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.'"
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.
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.
Tesla's initial use of 18650 cells had nothing to do with any inherent advantages or disadvantages of that size; it was about the fact that the size was in high volume production because of its use in laptop computer batteries. If you slice open the removable battery from an older laptop you will probably find 18650 cells inside.
But the laptop computer business has changed. Thin and light designs now dominate the business; those have non-removable flat batteries inside, much like overgrown versions of the ones now found inside cell phones. Meanwhile, Tesla is shifting its car batteries to a larger size of cell to reduce manufacturing costs: fewer cells means fewer interconnects, less complexity in charge balancing hardware and software, and so forth. And now Tesla is a large enough buyer to get Panasonic to make a new size of cell to meet its needs, something that wasn't true back in the company's early days.
With both of these factors in play, the market for 18650 cells is declining. It would make sense for Panasonic to allow Tesla to shift some of its previously contracted orders to the new size, leaving Panasonic's existing capacity available to fill orders for the remaining legacy markets for 18650. If there is a need for such a renegotiation it would make sense for both companies, so Tesla should have no difficulty working out a new deal.
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.'"