Elon Musk has shut down a report that Tesla is scrapping its ‘$25,000 Model 2’ electric car in favor of its ‘Robotaxi’.
For the past few years, Tesla has been developing a next-generation vehicle platform that is going to enable the launch of two new vehicles: a smaller and cheaper vehicle, sometimes referred to as ‘Model 2’, and a dedicated self-driving vehicle, which Musk calls “Robotaxi”.
Now, Reuters reports that Tesla has scrapped plans for the former:
Tesla has canceled the long-promised inexpensive car that investors have been counting on to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages seen by Reuters.
Musk quickly denied the report – saying that “Reuters is lying”:
However, Musk did respond to a post, seemingly in agreement, suggesting that Tesla might have shifted focus on the “Robotaxi” rather than the “$25,000 car”.
The Reuters report did note that Tesla “will continue developing self-driving robotaxis on the same small-vehicle platform.”
Musk previously said that Tesla plans to unveil its next-gen electric vehicles toward the end of the year and launch production toward the end of 2025.
Tesla is currently building its new production systems for the next-generation at its Gigafactory Texas facility in Austin.
Electrek’s Take
From a strategic standpoint, this made no sense to me. Tesla 100% needs a cheaper vehicle in order to expand its volumes.
I didn’t believe the report after it first came out, especially since I’ve seen a lot of real issues with Reuters’s Tesla reporting in the past. We even caught them sneakily back editing a post to make it look like Elon lied about calling out their reporting. I wrote a thread about it:
That said, it does sound like there’s something to the report, with at least Tesla prioritizing the robotaxi over the cheaper vehicle based on Elon’s follow-up reaction to the suggestion.
I know it’s not a reason for bad reporting, but if Tesla had a PR department, it could avoid issues like that.