Tesla unveiled a new, cheaper version of its Model 3 sedan — but it still isn’t priced like the affordable, mass-market car that the company originally promised.
Chief Executive Elon Musk late Thursday tweeted out a link to an order page for a “mid range” Model 3 at a cost of $45,000 — still a whopping $10,000 more than what Musk had signaled when he first disclosed plans for the Model 3 in 2016.
According to Tesla’s website, the rear-wheel-drive model has a “mid range” battery that lasts 260 miles — 50 miles less than the “long range” battery in the more expensive Model 3s, which start at $54,000.
Tesla buyers who opt for the new, shorter-range version can use tax breaks to get closer to the originally promised $35,000 price. But they’re poised to shrink soon. Those include a $7,500 federal subsidy for electric vehicles delivered on or before Dec. 31, which gets cut in half on Jan. 1.
That, in turn, will force Tesla buyers to rely more on state subsidies. The Model 3 state rebate is $2,500 in California and $5,000 in Connecticut.
In New York, the $2,000 subsidy would get the price for the new Model 3 to $35,500 for buyers who meet the Dec. 31 deadline. With the shrinkage of the federal subsidy the next day, the Model 3’s 2019 New York price tag rises to $39,250.
The new Model 3 has a delivery window of six to 10 weeks, Tesla said.
Despite all those caveats, Musk followed up his order page tweet with another tweet on Thursday night arguing that the “true cost of ownership is closer to $31k after gas savings.”
Tesla, meanwhile, also has eliminated the option for buyers to pay an extra $3,000 for a “full self-driving” feature in their cars that isn’t yet ready, but which has been available for order for the past two years.
Musk tweeted that Tesla removed the option because “it was causing too much confusion.”
Adding the mid-priced version of the Model 3 appears to be a strategic way to lure possible buyers who had been waiting for the lower-priced version. It is not clear how many of the more than 400,000 reservations for the Model 3 are for the base models.
Tesla shares were down 2.9 percent in midday trades Friday afternoon, at $256.31.
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