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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that his company's "mass market sedan", the Model 3, can be pre-ordered in March 2016 for $35,000. The cars will not be available until 2017 at the earliest. From CNBC:
What's taking so long, you ask? Right now, the batteries that would power the Model 3 would cost about as much as the car is slated to. Tesla is building an enormous lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Nevada to make its own batteries for far less money — the "Gigafactory" mentioned in Musk's tweet.
Not much more can be revealed about the Model 3 except that, as Musk mentioned cryptically during a Q&A session on Reddit, "It won't look like other cars." What does that mean, exactly? We'll find out in March.
In the meantime, you can order yourself a new Model X — if you have the cash. The entry level model will cost around $5,000 more than a Model S with the same options, Musk wrote in yet another tweet — though you can easily spend well into the six figure range for the "Signature" high-end series.
Tesla customers will begin receiving their Model X "all-electric SUVs" beginning on Sept. 29.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bryan on Friday September 04 2015, @04:44PM
As an owner of a Nissan Leaf for the last two years, I can attest that battery life under extreme conditions (below freezing in the winter and triple digits in the summer) will indeed affect the car's range. However, the difference isn't really that much as the speed and aggressiveness of your driving matters far more than environmental factors. The Leaf does have a small radiator with a coolant loop and will maintain the battery pack at a reasonable temperature. One nice side effect on cold winter days is that the interior cabin gets warm almost immediately by using the same heat pump as the AC (previous models used a resistive heating element) on summer days - no waiting for a combustion engine to warm up first.
Although, again, the temperature isn't very important due to the car automatically maintaining the battery pack at an ideal temperature, the charge time of electric vehicles does need to be accounted for. The uninitiated simply don't realize that it takes 18+ hours to channel 75 miles worth of electricity into your car using a standard 120v outlet. I have both the 120v and the 240v chargers, with the 240v being a bit more than twice as fast, but I can understand how some will not want to rewire their garage and only use the 120v charger.
Identical to an ICE car.