People are going crazy over Tesla for all the right reasons, but the only problem is that Tesla cars are super expensive. A few years ago, the company announced its most affordable car, the Model 3 and the features had some people thinking it was a joke. Rumors about the car even said that it could have ice melting solar roof, or maybe even the Panasonic’s solar roof technology for powering the car. The anticipation for the car went pretty high as the company received over 325,000 preorders in just a week. After a really long wait, the company has finally announced that the Tesla Model 3 is entering production on Friday.
While all the previous high-end Tesla cars were meant fur the luxury buyers, the Tesla Model 3 is priced at $35,000 aiming to reach the mainstream market. The price is half as much as the Model S which costs $70,000 without any extras added.
The Model 3 sedan will be delivered to the first 30 customers as soon as July 28 just as Elon Musk had promised. The only question is whether Tesla will be able to produce the car in the insane numbers that it was ordered? 400,000 preorders have been booked with $1,000 deposits for the Tesla vehicle, and we are looking at the company’s highly automated production lines for the purpose.
The company has promised only 100 units for August, but the number will rise to 1,500 is September and then 20,000 in December. Tesla plans to manufacture as many as 500,000 units by 2018 and go as high as a million by 2020. Pretty ambitious eh? But that will be made possible only by minimizing the human involvement in the process as Musk said, “You can’t have people in the production line itself, otherwise you drop to people speed.”
Knowing the crazy self-imposed Tesla deadlines and ideas, most of which have been met with success, we can not say that the idea of expanding the production facility to the said numbers is impossible, and knowing Musk, it might just happen right before our eyes, leaving us in wonder. The well established, century-old companies like Ford do produce over 500,000 vehicles a year, but those facilities have been developed over long years, unlike Tesla, which only entered the car market barely a decade ago.
We shall just keep our fingers crossed and wait for the best to happen. After all, who does not want to see the classy Tesla all around saving the environment one bit at a time.
Source: MIT Technology Review
