Tesla’s next-gen electric cars, including the long-awaited “$25,000 model”, are coming in 2025, according to a new report based on sources from the automaker’s supply chain.
With a plan to build 20 million vehicles per year by the end of the decade, Tesla is going to need to expand its vehicle lineup quickly. It needs not only new vehicles in the lineup but also cheaper vehicles.
For a few years now, Tesla has been teasing two “next-generation” electric vehicles: a smaller and cheaper electric car, commonly referred to as the “$25,000 Tesla model”; and a new “dedicated robotaxi,” a vehicle designed from the ground up for autonomous driving without any pedals or steering wheel.
We learned from Elon Musk’s approved biography that the new vehicles will be futuristic-looking and ‘Cybertruck-like’.
The biggest question has been the timing. It’s in fact that number one upvoted question asked by Tesla shareholders for the upcoming earnings call today.
Now, Reuters claims to already have the answer. The publication released a new report today claiming to have supply chain sources that were told Tesla aims for their new cheaper model o come in “mid-2025”:
Tesla (TSLA) has told suppliers it wants to start production of a new mass market electric vehicle codenamed “Redwood” in mid-2025, according to four people familiar with the matter, with two of them describing the model as a compact crossover.
According to the report, Tesla has been talking to suppliers about a production of 10,000 vehicles per week, which adds up to an annualized rate of 500,000 vehicles.
It’s important to note that Tesla often aims for a vehicle production of roughly 85% of what it tells suppliers. Though in this case, Tesla has signaled that it would be aiming for a much higher global production of its next-gen vehicles in the millions of units, but that would come once the production has reached several of its factories.
The automaker has previously confirmed that its first two next-generation vehicles will first be built at Gigafactory Texas.
Electrek’s Take
We always take Reuters reports on Tesla with a grain of salt because they have been both wrong several times and have also been purposely misleading their readers with their Tesla reporting in the past.
With that said, 2025 is a very likely timeline for the next-gen vehicles.
I am interested in seeing if Tesla will answer the top question from shareholders today as it generally doesn’t make product announcements on earnings calls. Maybe this report is going to force it to? I don’t know.