Leaked Design?

Tesla may have just accidentally leaked what its upcoming $25,000 car will look like.

In a new corporate video, the automaker showed off early sketches for a number of electric car designs that may — or may not — hint at the design of the company’s upcoming budget hatchback, Electrek reports.

he low-tier option was first announced by CEO Elon Musk back in 2020.

“Tesla will make a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous,” he said during the company’s Battery Day event in 2020. The next year, Musk promised that commercial production of the car would kick off in 2023.

As with everything to do with Musk and his EV company, we have to take that type of claim with a huge grain of salt.

The company has blown through countless of Musk’s overly ambitious timelines in the past, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if customers will have to wait several more years before they see a new design.

Tesla Hatchback

However, as Electrek points out, Tesla already started taking design submissions for a smaller car that would be built in China, releasing an early drawing of a sleek, wedge-shaped hatchback at the time.

Now, the company has released a new corporate video celebrating its new engineering headquarters in California. Eleven minutes and 38 seconds into the video, a table covered in sketches is easily visible.

As Electrek speculates, a white hatchback design, with a sloping, aerodynamic roofline and a much shorter wheelbase than Tesla’s other vehicles just might be a glimpse of the future.

Keep Dreaming

To be clear, that’s just a theory. Early sketches buried in a corporate video are far from a guarantee that Tesla is actually working on a cheaper hatchback, let alone what it will end up looking like. Another galaxy-brain possibility: Tesla might have included the sketch in the video as a very soft launch of the concept.

And that’s not to mention the company’s struggles to keep its prices low. In 2023, a $25,000 price point is a seriously aggressive target for Tesla, considering its current cheapest offering is the Model 3, which starts at well over $40,000.

But if the company does pull off a much smaller hatchback in the future, it could end up being a huge hit for Tesla — particularly in China, where smaller vehicles are the norm.

READ MORE: Did Tesla just leak the design of its new electric compact car? [Electrek]

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