Tesla’s Model S 60 has come and gone only to show up again as the “bargain” Tesla, even though it’s actually just a cheaper Model S 75 with a stingy computer.
Now, inside information suggests it’ll be going up in price even if you decided not to add the company’s cool new transparent roof. With the automaker seemingly hoping to squeeze every last buck out of its lineup, the top-flight versions of both of its models have now been propelled into the pricing stratosphere.
The value of the electric credits Tesla sells has hit a plateau, and with Elon Musk fuming over it, the company may just be looking for a way to make a quick buck without borrowing or holding a stock sale. Electrek broke the news on the price increase after consulting an inside source that had previously given them information on Tesla’s Powerwall charging station.
The everyman Model S 60 that this alleged $2,000 would be tacked onto is essentially the S 75 with a software-restricted battery set to only 60 kilowatt hours. Previously, you could purchase a Model S 75 for $74,500 or the same car with features removed for $66,000 and pay the difference of $8,500 to unlock the battery’s full potential.
There are two ways to look at this: Either consumers are getting a slightly less great deal on what is essentially a higher trim car, or they are being taxed for being too poor to buy the more expensive car from go.
Confusing pricing isn’t all Tesla is working on. The company announced the confirmation of its in-house glass technology group a few days ago, and those folks must be hard at work, given that the Model S design studio has added an full glass roof to the car. The website has it as a $1,500 option and bumped up the panoramic sunroof to $2,000 — $500 more than it used to be.
Having sat under the panoramic sunroof on partly cloudy day, I would urge anyone looking into an entirely glass roof to invest in some kind of retractable sunshade or get extra familiar with the climate function on your phone. Also, consider buying a floppy gardener’s hat to wear around while driving.
Tesla has also removed the P90D variant of the Model S and Model X lineup as of late Thursday evening. This leaves the P100D as the only performance option and the only one with the braggadocious “ludicrous mode.” It also leaves an Audi A5’s worth of pricing distance between the 100 kWh vehicles and the next highest trim.
The glass roof is available now, the P90D is never available again, and the price increase on the base Model S should arrive on November 22.
[Image: Tesla Motors]
One-trick pony but many blankets.
Tesla should drastically lower the prices of its products, because they still haven’t figured out how to make a car with a range and charge time similar to that of a petrol-powered car, and the prices are already at extortionate levels considering what you get for your money.
given the weight and range of the Model S, the battery holds the equivalent energy of 20 gallons of gas.
recharging the battery in the time roughly similar to filling the tank on a gas car would require several hundred kilowatts of mains power. notgonnahappen.com.
it ain’t Tesla, it’s physics and the real world.
In other words, the Tesla’s design is fundamentally flawed. Yet another reason to lower the prices.
It’s fundamentally flawed for usage patterns where 250 (and slowly growing)+ mile range essentially non stop, is a requirement. A large number of car usage scenarios do not fit that description.
In general, it’s not about BEV VS ICE. Or perhaps even FCV. But rather, the optimal (and changing) positions of the demarcation lines between them in the mix.
A gallon of gasoline contains around 33 kWh of energy, if we’re generous to Tesla and assumes that the IC engine has an efficiency of 40 percent that gives us 13 kWh of “useful energy” in a gallon of gas. The range topping Tesla has a 100 kWh power pack so I don’t quite buy the 20 gallon claim.
Your argument will start to make some sense when my petrol-powered car will fill itself up while parked in the garage without my needing to take a trip to a gas station.
Tesla has a waiting list on their cars. The conventional makers? Yeah.
Tesla can make a few ten thousands of cars a year. the “conventional” makers crank out hundreds of thousands a quarter.
Your comparison makes no sense whatsoever. No Tesla (or EV in general) will fill itself up in the garage at the same speed as a petrol-powered car at the gas station. The Tesla will therefore have to be out of service for a way longer time period than the petrol-powered car. And that’s what makes it such utter crap.
Yep, it’s all about down time. People like dal will champion EVs no end but they’ll also keep an ICE in the stable for when the EV is inert and something bad happens at home. ‘Cause they’re not dumb or poor.
@ Kenmore: (Per Below) The Sta-Bil is for my Kawasaki…
“The Sta-Bil is for my Kawasaki”
First street bike I ever rode was an RD350. Almost squirted right out from under me; those ’70s seats were *flat*.
“’70s seats were *flat*”
Good point – most of the sportbikes (just like cars) have the “raised rump” syndrome these days; probably due to the increased rear suspension travel.
“Sissy Bars” – sure don’t see them anymore.
@asdf: 39k miles in an EV and I haven’t had any charging issues. The garage charging time really doesn’t matter. If I needed to leave before the car had a chance to charge to a capacity to get me to my destination, there are at least 6 quick charge stations within an 8 to 10-mile radius of where I live. At the quick charge station, I’d only need to charge enough to get to my destination with a little padding. I’ve done it a couple of times with only a 10 to 12 minute charge.
In 39k miles of actually driving an EV, it’s been rare that I’ve had to concern myself with the level of charge, charging time, or range. I just go between workplaces and home and usually just plug in at my destinations. I make it without a problem. Almost every time I get in the car, it’s 100% charged. Yesterday, I ran some errands and made it back home without the charge level meter moving – which means I drove less than 8 miles. Today, I made a 50 mile round trip. There was a nearby charging station, but I didn’t plug in because of laziness. Made it back home without a problem. If there was a sudden emergency, I had more than double the range to make it to a quick charger. I just don’t have the problems you keep imagining.
I have ICE backup, but haven’t needed them and they will be replaced by EVs at some point. The Pratt & Whitney powered backup will still do long distance duty. 200 miles is pretty much my limit for road trips in a car.
The Porsche Mission E is coming. It has 300+ mile range and it’s 800vdc charging system charges it in 15 minutes. The range is pretty much what my last ICE daily driver was giving me. With 300+ miles of range, public charging stops will be rare. Based on my last two years of EV driving, it would be zero. If 15 minutes for a 300-mile range car is too slow for you, SAE is working on a 1000vdc charging system that might knock that time down to 12 minutes. Going from my personal experience, a full charge from near empty is rare, so the charging times might be lower than 10 minutes
Sure, EVs aren’t for everyone. However, they’re perfect for a lot of us. The technology will keep getting better and cheaper and gain more market share in time.
There’s this thing called “sleep” that most people need.
Most electric cars will charge fully during the time when people are “sleeping.”
No need to be out of service the rest of the time.
I’d rather have a car that charges when I sleep, and not have to worry about gas stations, than have to find time to stop at a gas station once a week.
That reminds me that I have to top off the gas in the Volt for the winter – 4 gallons oughta do it.
Don’t ferget yer Sta-Bil!
So exactly how much should Tesla lower its prices?
Tesla is very transparent and very aggressive about setting the minimum price point to whatever will let them sell every car they have capacity to build at any given moment.
Incidentally, that’s also what the Big 3 do with incentives on pickups. Move the metal!
Tesla’s price hikes are still beat by Nissan, whose flagship GT-R model has risen from $70K for 2009 to $102K for 2016.
Propelled into the pricing stratosphere? Yeah, wait till we get the pricing on the Mission E.
I couldn’t care less that Tesla raises its prices. But I find it almost hypocritical of CEO Elon Musk to criticize other automakers for not selling electric cars while not being able to do so profitably itself. Musk need not stand up on a soap box. It’s far more effective to shut up and show profits. If he did that, overnight, major automakers would transition to selling EV’s. These companies aren’t run by idiots as Musk often insinuates.
it’s the Silicon Valley mindset. “You’re all stupid. We can write apps and suck money out of investors at Y Combinator so get out of the way and we’ll show you how everything is done.” my group has some fresh-out-of-college new hires, and one is out of Stanford. Guess which one has come in with the “everyone here is stupid, all of this stuff sucks, I’m going to re-do it” attitude.
Well I have no problem with progress…but it actually needs to be progress. In a market economy, companies have to post profits eventually. Tesla is more than 10 years old and has no profits in sight.
It really does indicate the size of his ego that he starts not one, not two, but three companies in extremely high risk, technology/engineering sectors. I could be wrong but I feel like men of past generations would have committed to one big idea or company and worked it until it succeeded.
You don’t have to be profitable until the banks and VCs stop giving you money.
tnk,
Musk has been very clear that he is focused on growth rather than profit. People who invest in his ventures realize this (they can’t be excused if they don’t).
It’s a variation on the Amazon strategy. They lost money for 10 years, people kept claiming that “any day now the traditional vendors like B&N could copy what they do and shut them down.” Now they dominate online commerce, fulfillment, cloud computing, and quite a few other fields that nobody expected them to even participate in.
Not saying it will work-out the same for Tesla, but that’s the strategy: invest massively, grow fast, create new markets instead of fighting incumbents head-on.
“It’s a variation on the Amazon strategy.”
It really isn’t, on so many levels.
Tesla is a manufacturing company in a low-margin industry, which sells goods at a loss because nobody will pay prices that are high enough to cover the costs — as it turns out, the EV fans like cars with big battery packs if someone is willing to hand them out for less than what they cost to make. It has nothing to do with Amazon at all.
tnk479,
Great rant, except that Tesla was profitable in Q3.
So what will you say when Tesla has a Q4 loss and it becomes apparent that Q3’s profit was due to a one-time event, just like the other time that it turned a profit?
I’m confused by what I just read. It might be the 11 beers I have already drank…….
This is called “pricing at what the market will bear”.
Every smart company in every industry does it. Just look at Microsoft, your local pizza shop, or lawn care services.
Tesla changes prices quickly, but they’re also making room for new products. Eventually the Model 3 will have to fit in at the bottom.
If Tesla was putting a 20% smaller battery in the S60 I’d be fine with that, but just blocking that much range in a S75 battery to me is obnoxious. It’s like ordering a steak shown on the menu as one of the specials of the day and being told you can only eat four fifths of it because that’s the “special”.
Also, if it gets that uncomfortable under that panoramic roof, then Tesla’s glass technology is woefully deficient. The roof of my Scion tC was all glass but 10 years ago Toyota knew how to coat it so that solar heating was never an issue.
Is this any different from how BMW has put the same engine in the 320 and 328, with very minor differences?
Except the 320 and 328 run different parts that cost the company money, just like the difference in a honda and an acura v6, unlocking the teslas full potential doesnt cost them anything, while manufacturing different parts does cost money
The difference between a 320i and a 328i is almost entirely software, just like the Tesla.
But I don’t find what either BMW is doing or what Tesla is doing to be objectionable. In my line of work, Enterprise Storage, there is a long tradition of licensing by capacity. You buy a big storage array and it is fully populated, but you only pay for what you decide to actually use. If you want the added storage later, you pay relatively more for it than if you had paid upfront.
It’s the Silicon Valley model – you buy a laptop with lots of unrealized capability, and you have to buy software to unlock the functionality of what’s already there.
It long predates Silicon Valley – IBM has been doing this sort of thing practically since they invented the mainframe computer.
How much will Chicago Cubs tickets cost next season?