Tesla is working on new EV platform with lower cost

Last night’s earnings call from Tesla caused all sorts of ripples through the industry. Its shares are still nearly 6% down in the pre-market but there was a lot of good news and interesting announcements made during the call.

Elon Musk himself spoke of the next generation EV platform that the engineering team is already working on. Sometimes it’s hard to follow what’s the next big thing with Tesla, afterall Musk was promising a sub $25,000 electric car to be available by 2023 only to admit later that cheap cars weren’t in Tesla’s plans anymore and the company would focus on self-driving software and hardware instead.

Not so long ago, Musk again said that Tesla wasn’t focusing on cheaper cars and it was diverting its resources to the development of Optimus, the humanoid robot, and to ramping up the production of Model Y.

All that is clearly in the past now and yesterday Elon confirmed that the engineering team is in fact hard at work on the next generation EV platform. The new electric car, according to Musk, will be “probably about half the cost of the 3 and Y platform.” And just to hammer the message in, the CEO of Tesla finished off by saying that the new car will be smaller.

With the Cybertruck and Semi out of the way and ready for production, the engineering team is finally free to focus on developing new cars and new platforms, as long as they don’t get called away for some new, amazing venture in the shape of a robot or another flame thrower.

The cheapest Tesla Model 3 starts at $47,000 in the US and Tesla and its CEO are convinced they can develop another electric car that will cost half to manufacture and that will take half as much of the company's resources - space and labor.

Providing the company stays on track, it is good news. Tesla is notorious by now with changing plans, introducing new ideas and products. Or maybe, the company actually started to notice competitors going after the low-end of the market and wants the piece of the pie for itself? A little bit of greed as motivation seems to work wonders. At the same time it could just be another carrot Musk is dangling in front of investors to keep the share prices up while he’s offloading his portfolio to buy Twitter. Time, as always, will tell.

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