Tesla has lowered the price of its seven-seat, third-row option for its popular Model Y SUV to $3,000, down from $4,000 previously. The change is the latest among several recent price changes for Tesla as inventory reaches a new high.
The standard Model Y includes five seats, but buyers can upgrade to an option for seven seats. The two third-row seats aren’t large, but for families who often find themselves hauling lots of kids around, they can do in a pinch. The Model Y’s rear seats face forward, unlike the rear-facing seat option in the trunk of the original Model S.
The option was originally offered at $3,000 when it first came out, but that price rose to $4,000 earlier this year.
Now, amid a slew of other price cuts, Tesla has brought the price of the rear seats back down to $3,000.
Tesla has been adjusting prices on its cars all year long, starting with drastic cuts at the beginning of the year, followed by a slight increase, and then more drastic cuts, alongside additional incentives to try to spur demand.
That first round of cuts also included the price hike from $3,000 to $4,000 for the seven-seat option.
These price drops have mostly had the effect of reversing the large price hikes that happened over the course of the previous two years, and Tesla vehicles are now back down to about the same price they were before the era of COVID-19 supply chain issues, soaring EV demand, and economy-wide opportunistic price gouging.
This latest cut is not a particularly large one – it’s $1,000, so smaller in magnitude than several of the other cuts, and it only applies to one option, rather than to the base vehicle.
It could just be a matter of normalizing supply costs for the parts involved in the seven-seater, or some other transitory issue that cropped up in the past couple of months, but it certainly does add to the confusion of all these price changes lately, which seem to be happening on a weekly basis.
The cheapest seven-seat Model Y now sells for $53K in the US. The seven-seat option can’t be fitted on the cheapest Model Y Standard Range AWD, which starts at $47K, and can only be fitted on the Long Range model, which starts at $50K.