Apparently there is some new ground breaking model coming out but not yet, but don't let that hold back your wallet's! Tesla will gladly take your money, up to $1000 dollars American.
Only other info is the 3 will have at least 200 miles range and cost $35000. That's all I can find in the handful of articles I found so far. No pics, not even spy shots in camp, apparently nothing will be built until 2017. Mean while GM gladly built preproduction examples of its new inexpensive EV called the "bolt" and there were many gratuitous camp clad spy shots of the first of the line with production beginning this fall. It was said to be priced at $37000 base and 200 miles range.
So any one else know any thing? see any thing I missed? What do you guys think? Are the days of affordable (working man's affordable) EV's here?
The Tesla project has few firm details precisely because it is not built yet, two years is a very long time in the automotive industry. They design new cars from scratch in as little as 9 months, you can't do that with an engine but electric vehicles bypass that problem in large part. This is also why recalls are common.
An affordable for the middle class electric car is basically here, sure, but its still double what most people can pay for a car, and with the limitations that involves concerning heater and AC use and performance anywhere not flat, and Tesla still can't actually buy enough lithium to feed its giant new battery plant, which is integral to this whole concept so production of the Model 3 will probably be hamstrung for years to come. But yeah, progress.
Fact is though unless Tesla can solve its supply chain problems it doesn't matter what they can design or offer, because they need lithium by the tens of thousands of tons per year and the sources able to offer this are very limited and not readily expanding. They have so far failed to negotiate a useful deal with Bolivia which has by far the largest readily accessible supply, and are resorting to some marginal mines in the US to expand production in the interim. I'm not joking to say Tesla is trying to buy half the world production of lithium right now for its new factory, and well, turns out a lot of other companies are also trying to build bulk lithium batteries, and some of them have a lot more money and political clout, largely via the Chinese government. So it remains to be seen what will really happen. Tesla will be able to build the model 3, but maybe not by the hundreds of thousands like they wish.
its not like this is a new problem either, its existed since Tesla started as a car company. If anyone wants to help, make sure you recycle your laptop and cell phone batteries somewhere legitimate. We're throwing the stuff away almost as fast as we can dig it up.
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— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Well as for a recycling lithium batteries, where? I've never seen a recycling effort for batteries in general and this town is 1-200 thousand strong and growing.if there were a place I have many old phone's.
The reveal itself is supposed to start (Elon likes to be late for his own press events, I'm told) in 10 minutes as of now. We'll at least have a visual of what the car looks like and some more details in that time.
lordroel wrote:One news broadcaster said in my country, the entire line standing to pick out the new Tesla will most likely be all the people who want a Tesla.
Considering they had 115,000 pre-orders before the event, and 180,000 within 90 minutes of it ending, that broadcaster is probably a moron.
There was detailed analysis of this all over both the automotive and IT press, just like every other tiny thing that Tesla does. The company is definitely following the Amazon model of market share before profitability, funded by numerous rounds of VC and now share offerings, plus plenty of press releases and PR stunts to maintain news coverage. Seems to be working so far, but delivered volumes are still quite limited; even the SUV model won't be available until late this year despite its big reveal event taking place over four years ago.
The Model 3 is supposed to be much easier to produce, which is why they're predicting 200k per year by 2020. The X (SUV) basically just had everything go wrong with it at once. That's why Tesla was so antsy about making sure the M3 was done right.
Sea Skimmer wrote:The Tesla project has few firm details precisely because it is not built yet, two years is a very long time in the automotive industry. They design new cars from scratch in as little as 9 months, you can't do that with an engine but electric vehicles bypass that problem in large part. This is also why recalls are common.
An affordable for the middle class electric car is basically here, sure, but its still double what most people can pay for a car, and with the limitations that involves concerning heater and AC use and performance anywhere not flat, and Tesla still can't actually buy enough lithium to feed its giant new battery plant, which is integral to this whole concept so production of the Model 3 will probably be hamstrung for years to come. But yeah, progress.
Fact is though unless Tesla can solve its supply chain problems it doesn't matter what they can design or offer, because they need lithium by the tens of thousands of tons per year and the sources able to offer this are very limited and not readily expanding. They have so far failed to negotiate a useful deal with Bolivia which has by far the largest readily accessible supply, and are resorting to some marginal mines in the US to expand production in the interim. I'm not joking to say Tesla is trying to buy half the world production of lithium right now for its new factory, and well, turns out a lot of other companies are also trying to build bulk lithium batteries, and some of them have a lot more money and political clout, largely via the Chinese government. So it remains to be seen what will really happen. Tesla will be able to build the model 3, but maybe not by the hundreds of thousands like they wish.
its not like this is a new problem either, its existed since Tesla started as a car company. If anyone wants to help, make sure you recycle your laptop and cell phone batteries somewhere legitimate. We're throwing the stuff away almost as fast as we can dig it up.
So considering the rarity of lithium (and the weight the batteries still have) how much of a future do electronic cars really have?
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FTeik wrote:So considering the rarity of lithium (and the weight the batteries still have) how much of a future do electronic cars really have?
Lithium isn't even the biggest problem, Li-on cells require significant amounts of cobalt which is a very tight market, mainly mined in the DRC and refined in China. Nickel is less precarious but still a problematic commodity market that experiences 100% annual price swings. It probably won't prevent Tesla from becoming profitable and successful by selling 500K vehicles/year (e.g. a quarter what Mercedes and Audi sell each). But replacing total global sales of ~80M vehicles does not look viable to me with current extraction methods, known reserves and battery chemistry. Of course all these things are subject to change.
