- A lack of panoramic glass roof and rear screen help cut costs
- Chinese automotive blogger snapped the disguised vehicles
- Cheaper Model Y is expected to go on sale in China later this year
Elon Musk let the cat out of the bag when he revealed that the company was readying a cheaper alternative to the Model Y during Tesla’s quarterly earnings call, putting an end to the rumors that the company was working on a standalone ‘affordable’ Tesla.
Instead, the upcoming, simplified Model Y was touted to hold back on some of the additional niceties in pursuit of a cheaper sticker price.
It appears that a popular Chinese blogger, dubbed Garage 42, has photographed some of the first budget Model Ys, with images and videos surfacing on Chinese social media site Weibo.
Although heavily disguised under black cloth, the images show that these cars lack the large panoramic sunroof that makes the current generation Model Y feel so bright and airy. There’s also a lack of infotainment display for rear passengers and the mammoth, full-width LED light bar has been removed from the front and rear.
Currently, the cheapest Model Y in China starts at 250,000 yuan (around $34,750) but it is facing increasingly stiff competition from home-grown talent, with the Xiaomi SU7 and YU7 proving runaway sales successes.
Car News China also points out that Xpeng, Li Auto, and Nio are all readying keenly-priced Model Y rivals in China for the second half of this year, which will continue to eat into potential Tesla sales.
It is not known whether this trimmed-down Model Y will be sold in other markets in this form, but Tesla’s sales are suffering on a global scale, so we’d expect to see a Model Y slot in somewhere between the current cheapest Model Y and the most expensive Model 3.
Tesla doubles-down on autonomous driving
Despite stripping back the Model Y in an attempt to boost sales, Elon Musk announced that Tesla recently signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung, which will see the Korean tech giant provide chip technology for upcoming generations of Tesla’s hardware array.
With the latest cars running Tesla’s Hardware 4 (or HW4, for short), this deal will ensure the company has the latest and fastest chipset when its vehicles move to HW6 – seeing as HW5 is already contractually covered by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
With each new generation of semiconductor, Software Defined Vehicles (SDV) become more intelligent and more capable, boasting the sort of processing power required for advanced levels of autonomous driving.
However, the news has irked many long-standing Tesla owners, as Elon Musk promised back in 2016 that even on version 2 of its hardware, all vehicles would be capable of full unsupervised self-driving – something the brand has yet to crack.
There have been multiple attempts by owners to demand refunds for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems over false advertising claims, which cost up to $15,000 on top of a car’s list price at points.
Tesla continues to promise more from its FSD systems, recently stating that “unsupervised” versions will come later this year. But with the company still investing so heavily in the next generation of computing, it has a number of critics skeptical about the true capabilities of Tesla’s technology.
