Tesla Motors’ latest offering is the new Model 3, launched a few days ago to a crowd in rapture at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California and online to a worldwide audience estimated in the millions.
Tesla’s most important undertaking, the Model 3 is to be sold for US$35,000 and is designed to bring electric vehicles and autonomous driving to the masses. By the looks of it, and the interest it’s attracted so far, it just might succeed. The Model 3 is a sedan capable of seating five and driving approximately 345 kilometres on a single charge, with a 0-100 km/h time of less than six seconds on the base model.
At the time of going online, reservations for the Model 3 had topped 276,000 since the company began taking deposits on 31 March. The 276,000 reservations mean more than US$11.5 billion worth of orders, based on Elon Musk’s assessment that the average Model 3 would cost about US$42,000 with options. Last year, Tesla’s global revenues were about US$4 billion.