Tesla, the electric vehicle (EV) company, plans to build cheaper EVs at a faster rate. Did we hear mass production of electric cars?
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, says the company’s engineering team is now focused on building the next-generation electric car platform. Tesla has been considering making electric cars more accessible for a while now. In 2020, Musk expressed his desire to make a Tesla model for US$25.000 (R458,000), noting how this had been his dream since founding Tesla.
If only we had more electricity in the world. With South Africa’s load-shedding problems, and some first-world countries also getting a taste of blackouts, who knows how ‘affordable’ electric cars will be by the time they become available at an affordable price?
Seems cool, but when?
Without giving too much away, Musk says his team’s primary focus had moved from Semi and Cybertrucks to working on the “next-generation vehicle’. Musk didn’t say when exactly we can expect the cars in the market. He did say “next-generation”, maybe that’s a clue?
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“At this point, we’ve done the engineering for Cybertrucks and for Semi. So, it’s obviously against what we’re working on, which is the next-generation vehicle, which will be probably about the cost of 3 and Y platform (sic). It will be smaller, to be clear,” said Musk during a Q&A session at Tesla’s quarterly financial results event this week.
“But it will, I think, certainly exceed the production of all our other vehicles combined. I mean, obviously, we’re going to take everything we learned from S, X, 3, Y, Cybertruck and Semi into that platform,” added Musk.
Musk says they plan to produce the more affordable car at half the price of the Model 3 – Tesla’s cheapest model. The entry-level Model 3 goes for just under $50,000 (R920,000).