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Five Things to Know About Tesla – s Model Y, Greentech Media

five Things to Know About Tesla’s Model Y

Some thoughts on Elon Musk’s grand vision, hedges, lessons learned and capital costs.

Photo Credit: Autocar

Some thoughts on Elon Musk’s grand vision, hedges, lessons learned and capital costs.

Tesla has yet to produce its very anticipated Model three to its very first customers, and already the electric-car maker is taunting plans to put another vehicle on the road. That would be the Model Y.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has talked a bit in the past about a crossover SUV electrical car similar to the Model three — with the potential title Model Y — the details are still sparse. In the company`s most latest earnings call in early May, Musk threw out a duo of fresh tidbits about the Model Y to investors and the media and began talking about the car as a definite product.

The car could «aspirationally» be out in 2019, or more likely in 2020, and would play an significant role in helping Tesla manufacture one million cars by 2020, said Musk. However, the much thicker shocker is that the Model Y won`t necessarily be built on the Model three platform, said Musk.

The Model Y`s factory will be different than (or an upgrade to) the Model Three`s, and Musk characterized the Model Y factory as «a genuine step switch» in terms of auto manufacturing. In contrast, he described the Model S` automated manufacturing in slightly less hyped terms as «very likely as swift, or a bit swifter than the fastest production line in the world.»

Despite the fact that this information was collective almost as a tangential aside during the company’s latest earnings call, it seems unusual and potentially telling in the world of Tesla and Musk`s auto manufacturing strategy. Here are five things that could be happening with the Model Y.

1) Musk`s reach goals: Musk`s rules of marketing and product development have always included at least a few of these types of blue-sky products planned for some vague time down the road. These tend to have the combined effect of stoking media interest, pushing employees and boosting the stock. Other examples are the Tesla automated bus and the Tesla truck.

It also just seems to be the way Musk thinks — in broad, sweeping, visionary terms. When he commenced leading the company, he had his Master Plan that laid out everything from the cars in the lineup to solar panels and grid batteries. More recently, Musk unveiled his Master Plan, Part Deux, which discusses automated and collective vehicles. Musk needs to see the endgame to figure out the chess moves to get there.

Now with the development work on the Model three getting closer to being ended, it makes sense that Musk — also Tesla`s Chief Product Officer — would embark to turn his attention to what`s coming next, like Model Y.

Two) A hedge against the Model Trio?: It seems telling that Musk has already determined that the Model Y would not be built on the Model three platform. That raises the question of what issues are coming up with the Model three design and manufacturing that would make Tesla want to budge away from it and toward another architecture.

Is the production prototyping falling brief in terms of automation, speed and low cost? Tesla has determined to skip the traditional auto industry treatment of making beta cars, and instead it’s moving straight to «early release candidates.» The company doesn`t have a entire lot of time to iterate on the Model three design and production in order to get it out before the end of the year.

Musk has said previously that the Model three manufacturing line would be like an alien dreadnought, but that at the embark, it would be like «version 0.Five» of an alien dreadnought. Is Model three manufacturing the version 0.Five of the alien dreadnought, while Model Y manufacturing is the later version?

Trio) Lessons learned from the Model X: Tesla has gone to good lengths to admit its hubris and learn from the lessons of designing the Model X to have too much complexity. The «over-engineering» of the Model X was one of Tesla`s largest fights in the past duo of years.

But perhaps Tesla has also learned from developing the Model X that it doesn`t make sense for the company to build cars meant for different purposes and with different attributes on similar platforms. The Model X was meant to be built on the Model S platform, but by the time the Model X got to regular production, it looked far different than the Model S. That was something that wasn`t planned and which Musk said he hadn`t expected.

Four) Capital costs to remain high after Model Three?: If Tesla is abandoning the strategy of sharing platforms inbetween cars, does that mean its capital costs for each car are going to be as high as the Model Three’s? Tesla has been spending massive amounts of money investing in the Model Three, and the Gigafactory, with an eye toward profitability sometime after the Model three comes out.

If the company is making each car and production line that much more advanced, it will need to proceed its high spending on R&D. Will shareholders reach a point where enough is enough?

Five) Help with those manufacturing targets: Musk`s mention of the Model Y in terms of reaching one million cars by 2020, could be seen as way that Tesla is getting ready to hedge on its ultra-aggressive manufacturing goals. Musk has said that Tesla will produce over 500,000 cars per year, mostly Model 3s, by 2018.

If the Model Y emerges as a candidate in either two thousand nineteen or 2020, the Model Y could be a way for Tesla to attempt to meet any shortfall in the Model Trio. Most people expect that Tesla will produce many more cars in two thousand eighteen than it is manufacturing in 2017, but most don`t expect the company to hit such an extreme ramp-up within the next year.

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