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 — 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 — less than three a day — 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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