Tesla Teases New Model Y Compact SUV

Tesla dropped the first teaser of its upcoming all-electric compact SUV, the Model Y during the company’s shareholder press conference in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday.

“I’m really excited about Model Y,” Musk said, according to Inverse. “We’re aiming for that to hit the roads in 2019 approximately.”
At the conference, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reiterated plans to base the Model Y on a new platform instead of using the architecture of the similarly sized Model 3 compact sedan, and that the brand will build the SUV at a new production plant.

“There’s no way we could do Model Y at Fremont, so it’s going to have to be somewhere else,” Musk said. “We practically had a riot the other day for parking,” he added.

Regarding the company’s SUVs, Musk talked about the Model Y’s bigger brother, the Model X, revealing that it was like a “Faberge Egg” – not in shape, but in regards to its complexity and excessive configurations as Techcrunch reported. He also said that Tesla shouldn’t have based the X on the Model S sedan.

“I think we really made a mistake in trying to derive the design for the Model X from the Model S platform,” Musk said. “It would have been better just design an SUV the way an SUV should be designed, design a sedan the way a sedan should be designed, otherwise you’re just trying to shoehorn something in that doesn’t make sense.”

While no further information was shared about the Model Y, Musk hinted that more might be announced during this September’s unveiling of the Tesla semi-truck.

“There’s a few other things I haven’t mentioned here,” he said. “I really recommend showing up for the semi-truck unveiling, maybe there’s a little more than we’re saying here.”