Tesla Motors has previewed its Model 3, an Audi A4-sized pure-electric sporty sedan that will start at about $35,000, seat five adults, accelerate to 60 mph in less than 6 seconds, and go at least 215 miles on a charge.
Deliveries of the Model 3 aren’t expected to start until late 2017; yet the automaker opened its order banks this past week, with nearly 200,000 people putting a $1,000 pre-order deposit down on the Model 3 by the end of the week.
Out of those, a whopping 115,000 or so plunked their grand down on the table Thursday, prior to any official details about the car or even pictures.
Yet the Tesla Model 3, if it appears on the market in anything close to the “design prototype” form it revealed in Hawthorne, California, late this past week (and allowed a few of us a preview ride in), will be unlike any electric car ever produced.
Here are some reasons you might want to consider holding out for the Model 3—followed by some reasons to be a little skeptical.
Effectively less than $30k—for early birds. Considering the $7,500 federal tax credit that applies to the purchase of an electric car (until Tesla reaches 200,000 cumulative sales), that makes the Model 3 an especially strong bargain, at less than the average price of a new car.
A better range than anything else under $50k. Within the first year or two that the Model 3 is on the market, we should see other all-electric luxury models from Germany—like the Porsche Mission E—but none of those models will be quite as
Elon Musk plugs a Tesla Model S into a Supercharger (Image: deanslavnich on Twitter)
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Convenient, plentiful charging. Charging should be easy to find when you venture beyond the normal day-to-day commute, thanks to Tesla’s Supercharger network. With the announcement of the Model 3, Tesla says that it will have 7,200 superchargers (capable of restoring 80 percent of charge in less than 40 minutes) and 15,000 destination chargers that will charge any of these models up overnight or over the course of a day.
The toolkit for autonomous mode. Autopilot active-safety and autonomous-driving systems will be standard on every single Model 3; so if you think that switching to an electric car will involve other feature or safety compromises, it’s time to recalibrate.
A very space-efficient design. Tesla has already showcased the benefits of not having to design for an internal combustion engine (and all of its ancillaries) with the Model S and Model X. Now with the somewhat smaller Model 3, it seems like the dividends are even more pronounced. Yes, there’s space for five; and with two trunks (including the front “frunk” like the brand’s other models), there’s more totaly cargo space than any other model this size on the outside.
Resale value. Tesla’s cars, so far, have had phenomenally good resale value. This hasn’t at all been true of electric cars as a type of vehicle, but it’s held true across all the brand’s existing models.
But there are some concerns as well:
2015 Tesla Model S P85D door handle, captured from Consumer Reports video, May 2015
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It’s an entirely new car. Yes, when we say entirely new, we mean entirely new. The Model 3 has very little in common with the existing Model S sedan and Model X crossover, which share some common components with each other. The body structure of the Model 3 relies a little more on a mix of steels and aluminum, while those other models are mostly aluminum. Reliability has already been pockmarked; and it’s an entirely different engineering and quality task to produce such a model in the hundreds of thousands, as Tesla plans.
