- Tesla plans to launch more affordable electric car models in early 2025, aiming for a turnaround after a disappointing 2024.
During an earnings call today, Elon Musk’s Tesla promised to roll out more affordable electric car models in the first half of 2025. While the EV giant had a disappointing financial performance in 2024, it aims to make a turnaround this year. Alongside the upcoming EVs, Tesla stated that it will make advancements in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology. The company further announced that it had reached a new milestone of reducing the average manufacturing cost to below $35,000 (approximately ₹30.30 lakh) per vehicle.
In 2024, Tesla’s global sales fell for the first time in more than a decade, and the drop was reflected in company profitability. The fourth-quarter revenue amounted to $25.707 billion, considerably behind Wall Street’s expectations of $27.2 billion. Additionally, fourth-quarter net income fell by 71 per cent to $2.3 billion.
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2024 marked a decline in profitability for the EV manufacturer. Net income for the year fell to $8.4 billion, a 23 per cent decline from 2023 and a steeper 40 per cent drop from the company’s record $14.1 billion profit in 2022. The company further lost its title as the biggest manufacturer of pure EVs earlier this year, with BYD surpassing in total deliveries in 2024.
New year, new models:
Tesla is now gearing up to send out a volley of headlines which can make or break the 2025 financial year. It is set to launch a series of “more affordable” models in the first half of the year. Although Tesla has been floating the idea around for a while, precise details regarding these new models remain as out of reach as ever. It has been rumoured that the new models will be built as stripped-down iterations of the existing Model Y or Model 3 EVs, but Tesla’s own statements seem to refute that.
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The EV maker has said that these new models will incorporate parts of its next-gen platform as well as those from its current platforms. It added that the upcoming EVs will be manufactured on the same production lines as its current model range. This parts-bin approach is expected to help reduce costs, and Tesla says it will aid production volume growth while requiring less capital investment. Tesla has however admitted that the anticipated reduction in production costs may not be as much as previously expected, owing to complications in integrating new procedures while using existing tech.
To this end, these new, more affordable models may potentially take the shape and form of the recently-rumoured Model Q. While there are nearly no confirmed details, pricing is expected to hover around the $30,000 (approximately ₹25.97 lakh) mark, which will be more affordable than Tesla’s existing lineup.
Full-Self Driving 2025:
The earnings call further revealed Elon Musk’s plans with Full-Self Driving. The company CEO announced that Tesla will begin a paid and unsupervised FSD service in Austin, Texas. Musk is aiming to take this to other US cities by the end of 2025, but he needs to prove the system’s level of safety in Texas first. Whether his vehicles are safer in self-driving mode or not, Musk claimed that several carmakers have reached out to Tesla to license its FSD system. It is still unclear whether the cars used in the FSD service will be owned by customers or operated by Tesla itself, and there are virtually no details regarding the pricing. As with all promises made by the billionaire CEO, it remains to be seen whether these come to fruition.
Check out Upcoming EV Cars in India.
First Published Date: 30 Jan 2025, 11:25 AM IST
