Mid Range Goes Higher: Days After Reveal, Tesla's Cheaper Model 3 Gets a Price Bump

Steph Willems
by Steph Willems

How quickly things change. In today’s era of standing still equates to certain death, but pricing isn’t normally the thing seeing the greatest change.

Not at Tesla. Less than a week after the automaker announced a new Mid Range Model 3 that splits the difference between the Long Range variant (now available only in dual-motor guise) and the still-unattainable $35,000 base sedan, the model’s price has undergone a refresh. Musk Math must be at work.

For rear-wheel drive, 260 miles of range, and a reduction in acceleration and top speed, Tesla customers were told last week they’d pay $45,000 before tax credits for the privilege — or way less than that after deleting the fuel and maintenance costs of a phantom vehicle they didn’t buy. (Tesla continues the bizarre and inaccurate practice of bundling anticipated savings into the MSRP. Pushback is growing.)

Sometime after dark on Tuesday night, Tesla’s Mid Range Model 3 shot up in price by a grand, coming in now at $46,000 or two grand more than the RWD Long Range model cost before its discontinuation. However, the dual-motor Long Range model saw a drop in price. That model now carries a price tag of $53,000, or $1,000 less than before.

All of this points to an attempt to maximize profit from the Model 3 line, just dAYSas last night’s announcement of a looming loss of trim configurations points to a need for greater production speed.

Later today, Tesla plans to release its third-quarter financials. It’s unusual timing, as the automaker typically waits longer to toss out numbers after the end of a fiscal quarter. Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised earlier this year that his company would end the quarter in a cash-positive position.

[Image: Tesla]

Steph Willems
Steph Willems

More by Steph Willems

Comments
Join the conversation
13 of 26 comments
  • Civicjohn Civicjohn on Oct 24, 2018

    Tesla blows it out of the water. Revenue $6.62BN, GAAP EPS $1.75 beats Wall St. by a mile. They just released the shareholder letter, that should be entertaining and I'll still be listening in this afternoon. The fan-men called it correctly regarding moving the call up to announce good news, we'll see what lies under the hood regarding the 10-Q filing, maybe they sold a boat-load of ZEV credits, maybe there is some other interesting nuggets that will may or may not be repeatable in Q4. However, if you're holding shares from Monday, you are digging the movement of the stock from approx. $250 to $320. A bit too volatile for me. Ford slammed it too, up 6.5% aftermarket. That 7% dividend will be good for a couple of more quarters.

    • See 8 previous
    • Mcs Mcs on Oct 25, 2018

      @SCE to AUX It's not just the fact that the new redesigned battery module for the $35k car has less cells, it's a new lower cost design that will be used across the Model 3 lineup. I'm curious to see if the lighter weight impacts the acceleration of the performance Model.

  • Civicjohn Civicjohn on Oct 24, 2018

    I’ve yet to see if homologation has taken place for EU sales, certainly not mentioned today. The EU held up Audi because of a software change. I can’t find it out anywhere. I’m sure there are plenty of sales to be had, but it takes a long time to ship them, and 5,000 $50k cars on a boat can rip up the free cash flow.

  • Lockstops Lockstops on Oct 25, 2018

    How can everyone not care that the whole company is clearly just winging it? Their product strategies are basically only: "lets make this car and then start selling it, I dunno at XXXX price for example, and then conquer the whole industry". Then everything else is an afterthought, from equipment levels to pricing to just about every single other aspect... Just winging it. And what's worse, all of this is revealed AFTER years of very bold, arrogant promises of EXACTLY what they're going to achieve and when. And now we know in reality they had no damn clue what they were doing, at what price they can do what, and how. It was all just an arrogant prick wanting to run his mouth, then using billions of investor money to gather 'some group' of professionals to see what they can maybe come up with. Musk maybe thought this was going to be easy, maybe he thought it isn't "But what the hell, what am I going to lose? It's not my billions...", but what is clear is that he had no clue what he was doing and had no concrete planning to base his claims on.

  • Hreardon Hreardon on Oct 25, 2018

    Anyone have any data as to whether Tesla stiffed paying suppliers in the quarter, like they've done in the past? They tend to defer supplier payments to gin numbers - did that happen this quarter?

Next