NEW YORK ¨C It¡¯s finally here: the Model 3, Tesla¡¯s $35,000 (?4 million) electric game-changer. A single black Model 3 rolled off the production line last Friday with a serial number all its own, kicking off a company-defining six months. The car will belong to Elon Musk, Tesla¡¯s CEO and co-founder, who shared images of it on Twitter over the weekend.
Tesla has already taken in roughly half a billion dollars in Model 3 deposits, at $1,000 apiece, and its proposed ramp-up schedule would have it rivaling well-established U.S. market peers like BMW and Mercedes by year end. The only thing standing between Tesla and being the world¡¯s first mass-market electric carmaker is proving it can build, deliver and service enormous numbers of these vehicles ¡ª without sacrificing quality.
The production acceleration will be slow at first. Tesla plans to hand over the keys to 30 cars at a launch celebration July 28. It then envisions building 100 cars ¡ª less than three a day ¡ª for the month of August, according to a series of Twitter posts by Musk last week. September will bring another 1,500 cars, and the ramp will build to a rate of 20,000 cars a month by December, Musk said.
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