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Elon Musk references a “revolutionary” late 2025 production start for EV brand’s new low-cost small car and SUV

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has outlined a 2025 production start for the all-electric car-maker’s upcoming “next-generation low-cost vehicle”, and confirmed the new model will initially be produced at Giga Texas before being outsourced to other plants around the world.

Musk made the announcement overnight during an investor’s earnings call and said the manufacturing processes set to be employed for Tesla’s new entry-level model/s will be revolutionary and head and shoulders above any other vehicle production on the planet.

Tesla is reportedly working on compact crossover EV codenamed “Redwood” with production set to start in June 2025, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The company is said to have sent requests for quotes for the new model to suppliers last year, predicting a weekly production volume of 10,000 vehicles.

Elon Musk has confirmed that a “next-generation low-cost” Tesla EV is in the works and is “optimistic” that it’ll arrive in the second half of 2025, he said in an earnings call yesterday. He also promised “a revolutionary manufacturing system” for the vehicle that’s far more advanced than any others in the world by a “significant margin.”

An article yesterday from Reuters indicated that the new vehicle would be a small crossover codenamed “Redwood.” Tesla reportedly sent requests to suppliers for quotes, predicting a weekly production volume of 10,000 vehicles. Musk previously stated that the automaker is working on two new EV models that could sell up to 5 million per year, combined.

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Tesla has confirmed a new Model 3 Performance configuration is coming, but the big questions of when it is and what changes it will have remain up in the air.

Early in 2024, Tesla removed the Performance configuration from the Model 3’s list of available trims. It was the most expensive of the three Model 3 offerings, but it still qualified for the EV Tax Credit.

With the rollout of the new Model 3 ‘Highland’ globally, Tesla has not yet finalized a Performance version of the vehicle. Currently, it only offers two variants: the Rear-Wheel-Drive and Long Range.

A research team led by Lynden Archer, professor and dean of Cornell Engineering, has developed a new lithium battery that can charge in as little as five minutes. This could help address anxiety associated with the charging time of electric vehicles (EVs) and increase their adoption.

In their bid to reduce emissions from transportation, countries worldwide are looking to electrify various modes of transport. Road-based transport such as cars, buses, and trucks have led this transformation, aiming to even ban the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars in the next decade.

With technological advances, the fastest commercial charger can charge up an EV in no less than 30 minutes. While this might be a major improvement over the 8-hour charge cycles of a typical home-based charger, it still needs to be improved for large-scale adoption of EVs.

It’s the first time an all-electric car topped the yearly global car sales charts. We’re talking combustion-powered, hybrid, and all-electric.

The Rail Bus, a pioneering mode of transportation originating in Zhuzhou, China, is a groundbreaking discovery. Introduced by the Chinese manufacturer CRRC, this self-driving vehicle, resembling a train but without tracks, completed its inaugural journey in 2017. The Rail Bus seeks to revolutionise traditional concepts of buses, trains, and trams. The design of the Rail Bus was presented to the public in June 2023, and remarkably, within a span of fewer than five months, CRRC initiated testing on October 30, 2017. Covering a 3-kilometer route with stops at four stations in Zhuzhou, this marked a significant milestone in transportation evolution.

“Our current schedule shows that we will start production towards the end of 2025,” he said during an earnings call. “But there’s…a tremendous amount of new revolutionary manufacturing technology here.”

That tech will initially be put to the test at Tesla’s Giga Texas plant in Austin. “We’ll follow that up with other locations around the world. Probably the factory we’ll build in Mexico will be second, and then we’ll be looking to identify a third location, perhaps by the end of this year or early next outside of North America,” Musk said.

“That will be a challenging production ramp,” he added. “We’ll be sleeping on the line practically. In fact, not practically. We will be.”

Researchers at Cornell University have made a battery breakthrough they say could assuage these concerns. The researchers created a lithium battery that can charge in under five minutes, while still delivering a stable performance through repeated “charging and discharging” cycles.

Lithium-ion batteries have been popular for electric vehicles because they’re lightweight, energy efficient, and have a long life. How long those batteries take to charge depends on their size and what sort of charger they’re plugged into. Fast chargers can charge an EV in as little as 30 minutes, while “level 1” chargers often found in residential homes could take more than 40 hours. (There have been charger developments too; a company called Gravity says its chargers take just five minutes on vehicles with a 200-mile range, though some EVs aren’t designed to handle these chargers’ power.)

For all of a lithium-ion battery’s benefits, it also comes with downsides, including the time it takes to charge and issues handling a large surge of current. The researchers instead found that a metal called indium, often used for touchscreens and solar panels, helps with fast charging and storage in batteries. Their battery uses indium anodes (lithium-ion battery anodes typically use graphite coated on copper foil).

As Pedro Pacheco of Gartner, another consultancy, points out, Chinese firms are also managed differently. They are less risk averse and move faster than foreign firms, quickly updating tech and introducing new models to keep customers interested. Treating new cars like consumer-tech products, such as smartphones, extends to ditching duds quickly. Li Auto now ceases production of new models in a matter of months if they do not sell well.

EV startups such as Li Auto, NIO and Xpeng were all founded by tech billionaires who, like Tesla’s Elon Musk, regard their firms as tech companies that happen to make cars. In fact, lots of Chinese tech firms are getting involved in the car industry. Whereas Apple has mulled such a venture long and indecisively, Xiaomi, a big Chinese smartphone-maker, unveiled its first vehicle in December (a fancy and expensive saloon). It plans to make cheaper models in future with the immodest goal of becoming one of the world’s top five carmakers in 15–20 years. Huawei, a telecoms firm, and Baidu, a search engine, have also teamed up with car firms to make vehicles.