A truly affordable electric vehicle–that’s the dream, right? An EV that falls within the financial capabilities of your average consumer is the one that’s going to make the true departure from ICE possible–and that affordable EV might, might, come from Tesla, the original EV powerhouse.

A new piece from Electrek.co touches on both a September 2021 announcement from Elon Musk that a $25,000 EV would go into production in 2023 (and be fully autonomous)… and the subsequent January 2022 announcement that the aforementioned “Model 2” would not be seeing the light of day anytime soon, as the company had “too much on our plate.”

Now, however, the plate seems to be cleared and Musk seems ready to circle back to the so-called Model 2. In an investor call following Tesla’s Q3 2022 financial results, he had this to say about Tesla’s next generation of cheaper EVs:

“It’s the primary focus of our new vehicle development team, obviously. At this point, we are done with the engineering for Cybertrucks and for Semi. So, it’s obviously what we’re working on, the next-generation vehicle, which will be probably [sic] be about half the cost of the 3 and Y platform. It will be smaller, to be clear.”

Ideally, the new model will cut current production costs for the Model 3 (which currently starts at $47,000) by 50%–which would be a huge cost savings both for the manufacturer and the consumer.

Electrek guesses that the starting price for this smaller, more affordable Tesla will be between $25,000 and $30,000. But they make the very good point that even if the new car makes it to production and enters sales at that price point, it may very well not stay there:

“The Model 3 was supposed to start at $35,000, which it only briefly did and that was before the inflation crisis, and the Model S was supposed to start [at] $50,000, which it also briefly did but with a software-locked version that was quickly discontinued.”

So at the end of the day, as with other Tesla projects, we’ll have to just…wait and see.