NEW YORK – All signs point to a new low-cost Tesla in 2025. CEO Elon Musk and Tesla executives made it clear this week that a new, low-cost vehicle — or vehicles — is in the works and coming in the first half of 2025.
“So, regarding the vehicle business, we are still on track to deliver our affordable models starting in the first half of 2025,” Musk said during the third quarter earnings conference call this past week.
Other executives chimed in too. “We’re working on cheaper models to come out,” said Ashok Elluswamy, Director, Autopilot Software at Tesla, during the call. And he added that “teams” are working “to get the factories ready today to try and make that happen.”
One of the reasons it has taken Tesla so long to bring out a lower-priced car is that extracting cost is very hard. “The amount of work required to make a lower-cost car is insanely high,” Musk said. “But it is harder to get 20% of the cost out of a car than it is to design the car and build an entire factory in the first place,” he said.
Price:
And the price? While Musk did not reference the 2025 affordable vehicle explicitly, it appears to be tied inextricably to autonomy — which was the main theme of the earnings call — and to the Cybercab, which is due in 2026.
“With incentives, sub-$30K is a key threshold,” Musk said in reference to the Cybercab. That car will “cost on the order of — cost roughly $25K, so it is a $25K car. And you can — you will be able to buy one exclusively if you want. It just won’t have steering wheels and pedals,” Musk said.
One outstanding question: Is the 2025 affordable Tesla the progenitor of the Cybercab? Or a stripped down Model 3? Based on what Musk and executives are saying, signs point to something closer to the Cybercab.
“So, I think we’ve made very clear that the future is autonomous,” Musk said during the call. And he repeated variations of that theme throughout the call. “We’re currently making on the order of 35,000 autonomous vehicles a week. Compare that to, say, Waymo’s entire fleet, it’s less than — they have less than 1,000 cars,” Musk said, referring to the autonomous driving technology company owned by Alphabet.
Different look?
“A Cybercab looks different. A Cybertruck looks different, but Model Y and Model 3 are — look, they’re good-looking cars but look fairly normal,” Musk said. He seems to be hinting that whatever comes next, whether it be a Cybercab or something else, will “look different.”
And building it will also be different. “It’s especially not just a revolution in vehicle design but a revolution in vehicle manufacturing that is also coming with the Cybercab,” he said.
This article was published in Forbes
