It's happening - albeit a little later than originally planned.
On Wednesday, Tesla had its quarterly earnings call for Q3 2024, with the financials looking healthy: Revenue and earnings went up year over year (8% and 17%, respectively, with Tesla's energy generation and storage business performing exceptionally well (a 52% increase). The company's profitability increased, making up for quarterly deliveries which, at 470,000, were slightly lower than expected.
But after the somewhat disappointing 'We, Robot" event, in which Tesla showed us a robotaxi, robovan and a robot which won't hit the market for years, the big question was: When is the company launching that cheaper car it promised a while ago?
The short answer is: We don't really know what is being launched. But we do know a bit more about when it's being launched.
"Preparations remain underway for our offering of new vehicles — including more affordable models — which we will begin launching in the first half of 2025," the company said in its earnings report.
While this is vague — we don't know how many new models are coming, and which one of them will come first — it gives hope that the company will launch a more affordable Tesla (perhaps the rumored Model 2) fairly soon.
Tesla did provide a little more info about this during the call. "As Elon and Vaibhav both said, it’s our plan to meet that in the first half of next year. Our mission has always been to lower the cost of our vehicles to increase the adoption of sustainable energy and transport. Part of that is lowering the cost for current vehicles," a company rep said, before CEO Elon Musk jumped in and started talking about the Robotaxi (CyberCab) which he says will cost "30k" "with incentive."
When asked for more clarity on when, exactly, Tesla plans to launch the "$25,000 non-robotaxi regular car model," Musk went into a rant about the future being all about "autonomous electric vehicles," before saying that "having a regular 25K model is pointless."
"It would be silly. Like it would be completely at odds with what we believe," he said.
It sure appears he was talking about the Robotaxi, as he reiterated: "What we designed is optimized for autonomy. It will cost on the order of — cost roughly 25K, so it is a 25K car. And you can — you will be able to buy one exclusively if you want. So, it just won't have steering wheels and pedals."
(Do note that Elon is contradicting himself by saying the CyberCab (Robotaxi) will cost $25,000 after claiming it will cost $30,000 with incentives (so, roughly $37,000) just minutes ago).
All of this makes it incredibly unclear as to what, actually, is being launched in the "first half of 2025," given that the Tesla is planning to launch the Robotaxi "before 2027" but no sooner than 2026. Will the current models get cheaper? Will there be a "more affordable" new Tesla that costs more than $25,000 but still less than the cheapest Model 3, which costs $42,490 before incentives? Will it just be some sort of a trimmed down variant of the Model 3 or Model Y? We'll have to wait and see.
