Musk muscles into SUV market with sevenseater electric
HAWTHORNE: Tesla unveiled a new electric SUV this week that the carmaker hopes will win over consumers looking for an electric alternative in the most popular segment of the car market.
Cheers from a hangarpacked crowd of Tesla customers, employees and members of the media welcomed a blue Model Y as it rolled out on to a stage next to the carmaker’s other models.
‘‘It has the functionality of an SUV, but it will ride like a sports car,’’ chief executive Elon Musk told the crowd. ‘‘This thing will be really tight on corners and we expect it will be the safest midsize SUV in the world by far.’’
The Model Y seats seven and has a panoramic glass roof and a 38cm touchscreen interface for accessing the car’s controls.
The allelectric, midsize SUV will start at $US39,000 ($NZ57,000) in the US for the standard range version, which the company said can go 370km on a single charge. The longrange model, which starts at $US47,000 ($NZ68,000), has a range of up to 480km on a single charge — less range than the Tesla Model 3.
A dualmotor, allwheeldrive version of the Model Y starts at $US51,000 while the performance version of the car, which boasts acceleration of 0100kmh in as little as 3.5sec and a top speed of up to 240kmh, starts at $US60,000.
The Model Y may be Tesla’s most important product yet as it attempts to expand into the mainstream and generate enough cash to repay massive debts that threaten to topple the Palo Alto, California, company.
Tesla got a huge boost towards ensuring its survival with the 2017 debut of its Model 3 sedan, but an SUV could have even more mass appeal, given how popular SUVs have become.
The US market share for SUVs, crossovers, vans and pickup trucks stood at 69% in January, up from 48.5% a decade ago.
The Model Y’s main competition in this stillnascent market is likely to be the MercedesBenz EQC, and to a lesser extent, the Jaguar IPace, according to the research firm LMC Automotive.
‘‘This could be Tesla’s most profitable vehicle, with the giant asterisk that the company doesn’t do some of the dumb things it has in the past,’’ said Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey.
Many of Tesla’s past follies have been tied to Musk’s penchants for making grandiose promises that the company hasn’t been able to keep in terms of production, delivery and execution.
Production of the Model 3 quickly fell behind schedule as Tesla struggled to come up with adequate manufacturing capacity and it took much longer than anticipated to lower the sedan’s starting price to the $US35,000 level that Musk had been promoting. Instead, the lowest priced version of the Model 3 had been selling for $US43,000 until a couple weeks ago when Tesla reached the promised price point by laying off thousands of workers and imposing other costcutting measures.
Overseeing the rampup of the Model 3’s production nearly drove Musk to exhaustion last year, a factor that may have contributed to a mystifying pattern of behaviour that included tweeting about having lined up the financing for a potential buyout of Tesla. That misleading statement jeopardised his job and resulted in a $US40 million settlement with sharemarket regulators.
Tesla expects to deliver the performance, long range, rearwheel drive and dualmotor, allwheel drive versions of the Model Y in the northern autumn of 2020. The standard version of the Model Y is expected to roll out in the northern spring of 2021. — AP