Cheaper electric cars: Tesla reveals its plan
The company boss used his own social network to make the announcement The Master Plan 3, the path to a fully sustainable energy future for the Earth, will be presented on March 1.
Master Plan 3, the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth will be presented on March 1.
The future is bright! pic.twitter.com/11ug0LRlbD - Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2023
Earlier, he had told shareholders that the next stage of his plan would be "essentially scale-up". This is likely to involve the supply and production of electric batteries. The plan is also likely to focus on construction techniques. It will make it easier and cheaper for Tesla to build electric vehicles.
This could extend to a fully structural battery, although this may still be insufficient for a model that the manufacturer wants to sell for less than €30,000 ! Tesla ends 2022 without delivering either the Cybertruck nor the Roadster sports car. The company is already focusing on developing a smaller, less expensive model that could play a bigger role in the adoption of electric vehicles.
A broader market targeted by the American manufacturer
Tesla has often topped the sales charts, surpassing 1 million models sold by 2022. Now, Elon Musk seems to have decided that the time has come to push for greater accessibility. He told analysts: "We've done the engineering for the Cybertruck and the Semi [Tesla's truck], so you can guess what we're working on, which is the next-generation vehicle that will be about half the cost of the Model 3 and Y platform. It will be smaller, to be fair, but I think it will soon exceed the production of all our other vehicles combined.".
Halving the cost of construction doesn't necessarily mean that the Tesla Model 2 could cost half as much as a Model 3. The vehicle's price could start from €25,00 - €30,000. This would open up a new market, giving the company a rival like BYD. The Chinese brand also intends to invade the market for low-cost electric vehicles on the Old Continent.
Also read → BYD: the Chinese brand ready to conquer Europe
The American boss said that this cheaper, smaller electric vehicle is now the priority for Tesla's engineers. " We don't want to talk about exact launch dates," he said.he declared. The Tesla Model 2 is the main objective of the new vehicle development team. "We're going to integrate everything we've learned from the Model S, X, 3 and Y" he continued.
This is a reference to the Tesla Model Ywhose naked construction costs much less than that of the Model 3. Tesla has used improved processes to eliminate huge amounts of complexity, with a new pair of larger stamped components in its body alone doing the work of 171 separate parts in the Model 3, for example. This saves over 1,600 welds during manufacturing. The company has already used lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, which are cheaper to produce than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC).
Elon Musk believes that Tesla can break through the three-million-car milestone it recently reached and extend it to more than 100 million vehicles on the road by the end of the decade. To get there, he says, the company will need "about a dozen factories", and while the original factory in California "is running out of space", most facilities would be capable of making up to two million cars a year. A smaller, more affordable model is almost certainly a key factor in this ambition. So we can look forward to seeing it on the roads by 2025.
