Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with the automotive website Edmunds.com, put it this way: ‘This has to be a first for the automotive industry: lines of people waiting to place an order for a auto that won’t be available for over a year’.
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The company pre-orders for the supercharged sedan hit 198,000.
While Tesla must compete with other electric cars like the Chevy Volt, the company has turned the lack of electric vehicle infrastructure into a competitive advantage: providing free charges at Supercharging stations.
The car’s starting price is $35,000, but Musk said that the average selling price so far is $42,000, since the cars can be loaded up with options.
On Thursday, Musk revealed the first details behind the Model 3.
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“Definitely going to need to rethink production planning”, a surprised CEO Elon Musk said on his Twitter feed. It also has Tesla’s suite of semi-autonomous driving features, including automatic lane changing and lane keeping. In the next 18 months, that number could be multiplied many times and while that is great news in terms of establishing demand, the company’s production line has become all the more important. Punters were camping outside local dealerships to get their order in as soon as possible, and this is despite Australian prices not being announced yet. It doesn’t have the longest range-per-charge or the fastest zero-to-60 time, but there’s one thing about the Model 3 that has some people in a tizzy: the price. At $35,000 for the base spec model, it isn’t cheap, but it seems there is strong demand for the vehicle. Tesla stock was at $241.77 at the close of Friday trading, good for an increase of $12, or 5.22 percent from the previous day’s closing. Elon Musk confirmed that Model 3, the most affordable model in Tesla’s line-up, will come to India too along with the Supercharger network. The Model 3 is a critical part of the money-losing automaker’s plan to increase sales from around 85,000 this year to 500,000 by 2020.
