Tesla is preparing to build a new electric car model in 2025, and it might be a banger.
According to Reuters, which cites four people familiar with the matter, Tesla has told suppliers it wants to start production of a new electric vehicle in June next yet.
UPDATE: Jan. 25, 2024, 11:58 a.m. EST Tesla CEO Elon Musk just confirmed most of this report during Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday. He called it a “next-generation, low-cost” car, and said that Tesla will achieve the lower price with a “revolutionary manufacturing system.”
His timeline is, however, a little less optimistic (and do note that Musk’s timelines are almost always overly optimistic) than what Reuters’ report suggested. “Our current schedule shows that we will start production towards the end of 2025, sometime in the second half,” he said.
The new car, codenamed Redwood, will be a compact crossover, some of the sources told Reuters. If true, this would likely make this new model an affordable, popular option among buyers. Tesla’s mid-sized SUV, the Model Y, is currently the company’s best-selling car.
According to the report, Tesla is looking to produce 10,000 units of this new model per week.
Tesla recently started selling a new model, the Cybertruck, after several years of delays. But that car is an unusually designed, pricy, massive pick-up, which will certainly never reach the volume of Tesla’s most popular models. The company also recently started selling a refreshed variant of its Model 3 compact sedan, and reports claim that a refreshed version of Model Y is due to arrive this year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in May that the company is working on two new models, though details were absent, save for a silhouette of one of the new cars. He did say that “both the design of the products and the manufacturing techniques are head and shoulders above anything else that is present in the industry.”
Musk previously mentioned a new model with a starting price of about $25,000; the company also plans to build a robotaxi, which is a car specifically designed to haul passengers autonomously.
