Elon Musk’s cheap Teslas are the wrong kind of cheap

This has not been a vintage year for Tesla product launches.

This Northern hemisphere summer, it launched a long-delayed robotaxi service that came with a free human. Now, it has unveiled two long-awaited cheaper electric vehicles that are most definitely not the game-changers once promised.

But are they enough to do the job? It depends on what that job is.

If the job is to turn around Tesla’s EV sales, these “standard” iterations of the Models Y and 3 aren’t likely to be up to the task. Yes, they are cheaper than the prior base models before subsidies. But the cuts of around $US5,000 ($7600) are less than the lost $US7,500 electric car tax credit for US consumers, and leaves them closer to $US40,000 than $US30,000.

More importantly, the price cuts aren’t a reflection of some game-changing manufacturing process. That plan was shoved aside in favour of boosting utilisation on Tesla’s existing assembly lines. Instead, Tesla’s famously spare interiors will get sparer in these versions, as a number of features are removed or downgraded: shorter range, fewer speakers and touchscreens, textile seats, manual steering, fewer colour choices and so on.

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There’s nothing wrong per se with a less whizz-bang trim on a vehicle aimed at enticing more customers. That’s especially so when the political party your chief executive backed has yanked away the tax credit buoying sales and rivals are releasing a range of competing EVs into a domestic market poised to shrink.

The US needs cheaper vehicles. But this is Tesla, pioneer of EVs, now releasing lower-content versions of models that debuted before the pandemic.

Contrast that with Ford Motor’s project to reimagine the EV assembly line for a brand-new $US30,000 truck — execution pending, of course — or China’s ongoing redefinition of what’s possible. Even Tesla’s nomenclature, “standard”, sounds half-hearted for the company that forced terms like “gigafactory” and “robotaxi” into the vernacular.