Tesla Motors already has 198,000 orders for their new Model 3 sedan, just 24 hours after the electric-vehicle maker opened reservations for their lowest priced model. According to Tesla boss Elon Musk, the average price of each vehicle sold (including options) was US$42,000, or about $7,000 more than the Model 3 base price.
“Future of electric cars looking bright!,” Musk wrote on Twitter, after calculating that the reservation haul could mean about $7.5 billion in revenue.
Tesla started taking reservations for the model on Thursday morning. By the beginning of last night’s unveiling of the vehicle at its Southern California plant, Tesla said it’d racked up 115,000 reservations, each of which requires a $1,000 refundable deposit. That number was north of 133,000 by the time Musk’s presentation was done.
Luckily for the 133,000 people who pre-ordered the car without knowing anything about it, the Model 3 starts at around $35,000 and will have 346km (215mi) of range on a single charge. Musk even claimed that the base Model 3 will go from 0-100km/h (60mph) in less than 6 seconds, and we hold high hopes that there’ll also be one or more high performance models, like the Model S line-up. Musk also added that the Model 3 can fit a 7′ long surfboard inside.
Musk and Tesla are aiming to release the Model 3 sometime next year, although only time will tell if this time frame is realistic or not. There’s also the question of how long it is going to take Tesla to build the nearly 200,000 pre-ordered vehicles, with Musk tweeting that he’s “definitely going to need to rethink production planning…”