During its Investor Day earlier this week, Tesla Inc. has officially confirmed the intention to cut production costs by half compared to the Model 3 and Model Y and launch a new EV priced at $20,000 or close.
To achieve this, the company intends to implement a brand-new approach to body molding. In the traditional approach, the car body is welded together from hundreds of stamped metal sheets using robots. This method has been around for several decades now without any major innovations introduced.
In contrast, Elon Musk’s company plans to manufacture a handful of large and complex metal parts and weld them together. The traction battery will reside under the floor and represent a part of the load-bearing structure. This will necessitate making some changes to the interior layout, such as mounting the front seats directly on top of the battery, for example.
The approach will shorten the time it takes to build one car body while also slashing costs. An EV like this may cost as low as $20,000 and mark the invasion of the affordable battery car market by Tesla, which had stuck to premium pricing so far.
Precious little is known about the company’s first wallet-friendly EV, aside from the unofficial reports that it may be called ‘Model 2’. Rumors say it also weighs around two-thirds of the Model 3 and has a battery pack only 75% as large.