Electric car maker Tesla provides first look at cheaper Model 3 sedan
Electric automaker Tesla has produced its first Model 3 sedan, a highly anticipated car because it carries a relatively low sticker price.
Chief executive officer Elon Musk late on Sunday tweeted pictures of the car, which will cost $35,000 and can travel 215 miles on a single electric charge.
A $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles would lower the cost to $27,500.
The new model comes after a bad week for Tesla’s stock price. Shares fell roughly 14% after Musk tweeted that deliveries of the company’s other two models—the Model S sedan and Model X SUV—were at the lowend of the company’s projections in the first half of this year.
Musk also said the company would make 20,000 Model 3s in December, below previous estimates.
Musk earlier had said Tesla would make 10,000 Model 3s per week by December.
Musk also has said the Palo Alto, California-based company will hold a party to hand over the first 30 Model 3s to customers on July 28.
Tesla expects to produce 100 cars in August and more than 1,500 in September this year, Musk had tweeted earlier.
While second-quarter deliveries rose 53% from a year ago, they still were about 12% below firstquarter deliveries.
Tesla said in a statement that second-quarter production was hampered by a severe shortfall of battery packs.
Production averaged 40% less than demand until early June, the company said.
In a bid to strengthen its position in India’s hyper-competitive telecom industry, market leader Bharti Airtel Ltd on Monday said it will invest as much as ₹2,000 crore over three years for its digital innovation programme Project Next.
As part of the programme, Airtel will allow postpaid customers to carry forward the unused part of their monthly data quota to the next billing cycle and provide accident protection for smartphones.
Project Next, Bharti Airtel’s managing director and CEO of India and South Asia Gopal Vittal said, is the “first step towards transforming Airtel into a truly digital service provider and experience for our customers that is simple, transparent and is interactive”.
Vittal did not disclose specific details of where this investments will be made, citing “competitive reasons”.
Bharti Airtel’s move to improve its services comes at a time when its 20-year-old dominance of the telecom industry is being threatened by Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd and the proposed merger of the country’s second largest operator Vodafone India Ltd and No. 3 Idea Cellular Ltd, part of a consolidation triggered by Jio’s launch in September with an array of free services.
Jio’s impact has been such that aggregate revenues of Indian telcos fell for the first time since 2008-09 to ₹1.88 lakh crore in 2016-17 from ₹1.93 lakh crore the previous year, according to brokerage CLSA.
On Monday, Bharti Airtel’s shares rose 5.39% to ₹405.40 on BSE, outpacing the benchmark Sensex’s 1.13% gain.
“At Airtel, everything that we do starts with our customers and we are obsessed about delivering a great experience to them. We look at the customer journey holistically and have identified 17 moments of truth. At each of these moments, our aspiration is to eliminate customer frustration and make the experience better via digital innovation,” Vittal said.