The long-awaited, much-anticipated Tesla Model 3 has officially arrived, and judging by early reviews (including ours) Elon Musk's $35,000 sedan delivers on a decade of hype, complete with unique tech touches and all the pep and performance the world expects from a Tesla.
So if you’re thinking, “Time to finally write the check and go all-in on Elon's electric,” you're likely also wondering, "When can I get mine?" The quick answer: not for a while.
Thanks to massive pent-up demand for this long-range and (relatively) low-cost electric, if you place a reservation right now, you’re looking at mid to late 2018 for delivery. And even if you threw your $1,000 deposit at Tesla the day the car was revealed in March 2016, to get your name near the front of the line it’ll still be a few months yet.
After all, Tesla has to successfully ramp up its production line. Then it has to work through the backlog of half a million reservations it had booked as of last week.
The good news is that, if you just cannot wait that long, there are a few ways to bump your order up in the line. Based on past Tesla prognostications and its just-launched “delivery estimator,” which offers a due date within a three month-ish window for your particular order, you can see some of the factors Tesla is using to allocate cars.
Your best bet is also the hardest to pull off: Work for Elon Musk. The first Model 3 deliveries are going to Tesla and SpaceX employees who made reservations. That’s not just special treatment, it’s a smart move for Tesla. The early cars off the line are almost guaranteed to have some bugs. Staff are more likely to be forgiving and better able to bring their cars in for service and repair.
Easier, but more expensive: Buy a Model S or Model X, or already have one in your garage. Previous owners jump ahead in the queue, as a thank you for their loyalty.
More complicated, and probably more expensive: relocate. Tesla will hand over Model 3 keycards (no keys here) with geographic filters of a sort. Deliveries will start in the US, then other left-hand drive countries. Right-hand drivers in places like the UK and Australia will have to wait until 2019.
OK, none of that’s super helpful. More practically, you can be flexible about the spec of your car—and how much you're willing to spend.
To keep things simple on the production line, Tesla is only building the long-range (310 miles) version of the Model 3 to start, and only with the top-spec upgrades, including a glass roof and better sound system. That bumps the price up to $49,000, but these models should ship to nonemployees in October.
The more basic 220-mile-range car will follow by November, for that promised $35,000 starting price. Sometime this fall Tesla also plans to introduce options like a white interior, instead of the standard black. The popular all-wheel-drive version, which uses two motors, one in the front and one in the back, will follow in the spring of 2018. There’s no word yet on a performance model, but it’s a safe bet that Tesla will make one eventually, and it will come at a price premium.
All of which is to say, if you want your car sooner rather than later, get the long-range version, spring for the fancy features, skip the white interior, and make do with rear-wheel-drive.
Celebrating the launch of the Model 3 last week, Musk took pains to thank potential buyers for their patience and described the path to production as an S curve. If you plot the number of brand new cars produced on the Y axis of a graph and time on the X axis, the result isn’t a straight line. Production starts very slowly because engineers are still finding and fixing bugs. Once most problems are figured out, output shoots up almost exponentially, before finally flattening off and chugging along at a steady pace.
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Musk says this pattern makes it impossible to give completely accurate predictions, as a small move along the time axis can mean a large leap in production or hardly any change at all. "Welcome to production hell," Musk told his employees at the launch, expecting at least six months of problems, issues, and stress before things settle down.
The good news is that every day you wait to see your Model 3 park itself in your driveway is another day Tesla has to find and kill bugs, and hopefully deliver you the car you've really been waiting for.
