In an earnings call Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk “let the cat out of the bag”: The new, more affordable electric vehicle the company has been touting for over a year, and that has been singled out as the one thing that could pull Tesla out of its sales rut, wasn’t new at all. It was just the Model Y.
Not only that, the stripped-down version of Tesla’s bestselling vehicle is already in development, and will go into volume production in the second half of 2025, the company said in a letter to shareholders. During the call, Musk said it is meant to appeal to customers who want to buy a Tesla, but can’t afford one.
“The desire to buy the car is very high, just people don’t have enough money in their bank account to buy it,” he said. “Literally, that is the issue.”
“The desire to buy the car is very high, just people don’t have enough money in their bank account to buy it.”
The rumor that the affordable EV would just be a bare-bones Model Y has been circulating ever since Musk canceled a previous model that was to be built on an entirely new platform. The so-called “Model 2” was meant to be Musk’s long-promised “$25,o00 EV” that at one point was presented with having a Cybertruck-inspired design. Musk reportedly canceled the new model in favor of building the steering wheel-less Cybercab, which was introduced last year and is expected to go into production in 2026.
So now that the rumors have been confirmed and we know that the new EV is just a cheaper Model Y, how will Tesla go about doing that? I could have called up a bunch of experts and done the standard next-day follow, but I didn’t want to go that route. Instead, I went into our comment section, which unsurprisingly had a lot of good ideas. It makes sense that our readers — many of whom are Verge subscribers, love y’all — had some of the best suggestions for how Tesla could strip some of the more premium features out of a vehicle that already feels pretty bare-bones to most. After all, Verge readers are some of the smartest people in the world.
“Chris K.” had some good ideas about how to strip some of the more premium features out of the Model Y, like replacing the leather interior with fabric seats, installing mechanical seat adjusters and door latches, plastic hub caps, or removing the interior mood lighting. He also suggested a lower-quality speaker array and cheaper exterior lighting that doesn’t use matrix headlights or light bars. Lastly, he would get rid of the HEPA filter and remove the rear seat display that arrived with the 2024 face-lift of the Model Y.
“Readercat2” thought Tesla could take a page from the recently revealed Slate Truck by removing the infotainment screen altogether and just make people use their own phone as the display. This seems incredibly unlikely, as Tesla’s software is fairly central to the ownership experience.
Image: Tesla
“Hc91” thought Tesla could reduce the number of cameras on the vehicle. That left us wondering how Tesla will square its ambitions to make fully autonomous vehicles with one that is designed to come in at a much lower price point. Could they remove the computer that powers Autopilot and Full Self-Driving? What about external sensors? The Model Y currently sports eight cameras; if Tesla removes some of them, will FSD still work? (Not that it works flawlessly with eight cameras.) The trade-offs could get pretty steep if Tesla starts down that road.
The best place to shave costs is the battery, which typically is the most expensive component in an EV. Tesla’s cheapest EVs already utilize low-cost lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistries, nearly all of which are supplied by Chinese battery manufacturers. The company recently started production on its own LFP cells at its factory in Nevada, so it stands to reason that the new, cheaper Model Y is likely to use these batteries.
But overwhelmingly our commenters were perplexed by the idea of a stripped-down Model Y, considering many of them already consider the EV to be pretty bare-bones already. “The thing’s going to be literally a skateboard on wheels if he keeps cutting it back,” a commenter called “BeeksElectric” wrote. “I don’t see how he can make any significant price cuts on a product he already has had trouble keeping at the $35,000 base price point he advertised it at in the first place. Couple that with the killing of the EV credit and Tesla could eat it hard if Slate, GM, and VW can actually execute well on the cheap small EVs they have been talking about developing.”
