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Tesla Ends Online Sales of $35,000 Model 3 (nytimes.com)
Tesla is changing up its retail strategy yet again, this time deciding to end online sales of the long-awaited $35,000 version of its Model 3 sedan (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The move comes just over a month after the company announced that the $35,000 version was finally coming to market. The New York Times reports: In a blog post late Thursday, Tesla said customers wanting the $35,000 version of the Model 3 would have to make the purchase by phone or in person at one of its stores. The cheapest Model 3s ordered online will now include Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system and a longer battery range, features that increase the price to $39,500. The blog post said Tesla was making the changes to "simplify vehicle choices and to make Autopilot more affordable." Such a configuration would previously have cost $40,500, it said.
A Tesla spokesman said the change would allow the company to produce one version of the Model 3 and use software to limit the battery range and turn off features such as heated seats for customers who wanted the $35,000 model. A longer range and additional features will be switched on in the $39,500 car, known as the Standard Plus model. Previously, Tesla planned to put a smaller battery pack in the basic model and a larger one in the Standard Plus, the spokesman said. Tesla's announcement also said it would begin leasing the Model 3, but would not offer customers the option to buy the cars after their leases expired, a departure from the typical industry practice and its own policy on other models. Tesla said it aimed to upgrade Model 3s returned after a lease to allow them to drive themselves, with no human at the wheel, and be deployed in a driverless taxi fleet. The company acknowledged that the technology for driverless taxis was still in development and would need to be approved by safety regulators before such a business could begin.
A Tesla spokesman said the change would allow the company to produce one version of the Model 3 and use software to limit the battery range and turn off features such as heated seats for customers who wanted the $35,000 model. A longer range and additional features will be switched on in the $39,500 car, known as the Standard Plus model. Previously, Tesla planned to put a smaller battery pack in the basic model and a larger one in the Standard Plus, the spokesman said. Tesla's announcement also said it would begin leasing the Model 3, but would not offer customers the option to buy the cars after their leases expired, a departure from the typical industry practice and its own policy on other models. Tesla said it aimed to upgrade Model 3s returned after a lease to allow them to drive themselves, with no human at the wheel, and be deployed in a driverless taxi fleet. The company acknowledged that the technology for driverless taxis was still in development and would need to be approved by safety regulators before such a business could begin.
Pray I don't alter it any further.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
So - the car still COSTS Tesla the same amount of money to make, they will just sell it to you for cheaper if you let them set a few bits in the firmware - thereby cutting their own margins. And now you have to buy in person at the stores they closed - then re-opened - so that consumers haven't a clue going on? C'mon Tesla, just come out and say it - you cannot sell a $35,000 car, and you have no intention to do so, and you're just playing games to get people to "move up" to the $40K version.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Tesla still dangling that $35k carrot out there I see.
Non-news until they actually start selling the car they promised at the price / performance they promised.
If you want to try and peddle an inferior version of your cars on me, remember there are more than plenty of ICE options still out there.
If your option is too expensive or of inferior quality / performance, it really makes my choice a rather easy one doesn't it ?
The car community likes to talk about Tesla having a huge cost advantage over rivals. Well...
Clearly they wouldn't make money on a $35K model 3, which has a 50 kWh pack.
If Tesla is truly at roughly $100/kWh, as everyone speculates, that means the pack costs them an even $5,000.
Assume they sold a model 3 with no pack at all. This means they would not be able to build and sell this car, without a pack and without the entire internal combustion engine system, for $30k.
Tesla very likely has a considerable cost advantage in batteries, but in the rest of the car, it looks like they're well behind in the production engineering and economies of scale race. Look at what you can buy from Honda for well under $30k, even with the full gasoline engine drivetrain intact.
Has anyone noticed that Panasonic is backing away from Tesla now too?
> remember there are more than plenty of ICE options still out there.
And if you want an American plug-in for under $35k, you can pick up a Volt today. As a bonus, it also has an engine you can choose to use instead of stopping to charge ten minutes before you reach your destination. Maybe that's why there are more Volts on the road than Model 3 or Model S. Ford has three plug-ins to choose from, including options under $35,000.
That's just American plug-ins. Last month, 100,000 plug-ins were made by Chinese companies. In the last three months, China has made more electric cars than Tesla has made in ten years. You've got the Nissan Leaf, Rimac produces the world's fastest production electric car, etc.
So the heating coils for the heated seats are there, just disabled in software? If the software can't be hacked, sounds like something a $5 fuse, switch, and wire would fix.
Razors and eyeglasses have proven to be market âoedisrupters.â Cars, not so much. Tesla is over and out, sooner rather than later.
It is harder to upsell over the Internet. When the web page keeps popping up "how about adding this great option for a low, low total of $45k", you just adblock it.
drive themselves, with no human at the wheel and who is liable? and no EULA can pin it on leaser or taxi hailed at least in criminal court.
and in civil court Tesla may have an hard time getting off with an 3rd party victim that had no EULA
Self driving cars are going to be a pipe dream. One accident with no one to blame and thats it.
Its one of those futurey things that sounds easy, but ends up being really fucking hard without sometimes killing people.
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I had similar fears, though Tesla's Autopilot hasn't haven't been sunk yet even after multiple people have been killed. It's an audacious strategy they've appeared to adopt... by doing it piecemeal and insisting the driver needs to be paying attention at all times, they can hide from blame while using people to beta test.
I still think there's going to be a moral panic over it at some point, but that said, I think worse case scenario will be a delay. All it takes is one country to legalize it, then before long they'll experiment with declaring certain cities as driverless-only. The advantages will quickly become apparent--not just the convenience of not having to drive yourself and the massively improved safety, but also the reduced commutes as the cars are fine-tuned to time themselves perfectly with traffic lights (which will at some point be removed entirely, of course.) Taxis get cheap, long work commutes are no longer a chore...
Basically, it's going to be way too awesome to ignore and the resistance in other countries will fall away. Specifically, I think both Japan and China would be much less likely to overreact to self-driving car accidents. And in the case of the latter, the government obviously isn't as beholden to public opinion... "sometimes killing people" isn't as much of a hurdle for them.
(I have very similar theories about other areas that involve possible outcries and regulatory resistance, particularly human genetic engineering. Though that one could be much less visible.)
More Volts on the road than Teslas?
In 2018, 18306 Volts were sold vs. 139782 Model 3s
In the first three months of 2019, 2520 Volts vs 22425 Model 3s
Even just the Model S or Model X outsell the Volt, in number of cars sold, while being a LOT more expensive.
https://insideevs.com/monthly-...
My truck has been paid off for half a decade.
Still wrong.
136k Volts sold over 9 years. 250k+ Teslas sold in the US alone, confirmed by the phasing-out of the EV tax credit.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Their contract with Tesla ended not too long ago and Tesla just purchased a battery company who has patents on next-generation battery tech.
Lots of seat of the pants changes and decisions that quickly get pulled back, as of late. Of course, the pundits are coming out of the woodwork, declaring this indicates Tesla really is on its death-bed and about to fail, etc.
I suspect some of thing happens in other businesses all the time, but nobody notices -- because when it's a more mundane product like a can of soup or a new pair of pliers, there aren't all the eyes on it.
In any case, I think THIS change isn't a big deal. I agree that most sensible car buyers are going to opt to pay the $39,500 for this "Standard Plus" configuration of the Model 3 if they could afford the $35K for the base model. I mean, why wouldn't you when you don't even get the autopilot features Teslas are noted for if you go for the absolute cheapest one? Longer battery life and some extras like heated seats enabled too? You're going to do a lot better at resale time than you will trying to get someone to buy your used Model 3 base edition.
There was recently a YouTube video I watched where a CEO in the auto industry did some "best guess" cost estimates on what Tesla was really spending to build its vehicles.
His belief was that the $35K Model 3 was probably at or near a "break even" point, IF it was built in the USA. The big differentiator would be if Tesla opted to build it in China instead, where he estimated it could then sell at $35K while still making at least a 15-20% profit margin.
I suspect that's the issue with selling a base Model 3 right now; at $35,000 - Tesla isn't making anything on the car. They probably JUST barely achieved break-even at that cost, right now, so it doesn't benefit them to sell the cars at that price EXCEPT for the hope they'll make some profit down the road, as people pay Tesla to enable the disabled features on it.
With them in kind of a cash crunch as of late, it's not that appealing to produce vehicles that only potentially make them a future $5,000 or $8,000 profit. So yeah, they'll sell it to you if you ask for it specifically -- but they don't want to really market it to people or make it easy to get one configured that way.
Tesla is bringing the sleazy car sales game into the modern era. What do expect from a company run by a tech guy in the age of the ubiquitous TOS? The arrangement and even the product you purchased are subject to change at any time.
Are you purposely conflating things to try to mislead readers, or did you just have a brain fart?
There are millions of Chevys out there. A hundred times as many Chevrolet as Model 3, but that's not what we're talking about.
The top three American made plug-in cars are:
Volt
Model S
Model 3
Worldwide, BMW produces thousands i8 cars each month, and all of these are a joke to BYD, who makes more electric vehicles than Chevy, Tesla, and BMW combined.
if you're going to sell in any appreciable volume, the costs "wasted" in production vastly outweigh
How do you know the costs "vasty outweigh"?
In fact, doesn't it seem like the costs of having two different kinds of batteries in an assembly line, along with needing to stock spare batteries of both types for years, along with the manufacturing costs of multiple kinds of batteries instead of just one all add up to a pretty significant cost - especially when you are talking about something as large as a whole-car battery?
The extra "cost" is merely a few pounds of battery material. Why is that so unthinkable? The side advantage of that is that the battery life of the lower-range cars will be improved because even as battery performance deteriorates somewhat over time, that is made up for by the unused capacity that is software limited. So it makes a ton of sense all around, especially since Tesla in manufacturing their own batteries...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley