Tesla to reveal Model S Plaid on June 3

By BLOOMBERG | 27 May 2021


SAN FRANCISCO: Tesla will show off the Model S Plaid, its quickest electric vehicle to date, at a June 3 delivery event for customers at the company’s factory in Fremont, California. There aren’t many details yet.

Tesla typically hosts one or two splashy events each year. They serve a triple purpose for the electric-car maker: keep customers excited and plunking down deposits on products, assure investors that the future is bright, and generate an avalanche of media coverage. On May 20, Elon Musk tweeted about the event, proclaiming that the “fastest production car ever” will be able to go from 0 to 100kph in under 2 seconds.

This playbook looks familiar. In 2019, Tesla hosted an “Autonomy Day” in April, then unveiled the Cybertruck that November — the shattered-glass during the demo gone awry was viral gold. Last year, Musk hosted a socially distant “Battery Day” in September.

The story line for 2021, as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic, is more muddled.

Tesla is expanding globally, building new factories in Austin and Berlin. Customers still are waiting for the Semi and the Cybertruck, which are dependent on new and larger battery cells that the carmaker is producing in-house and also buying from long-time battery supplier Panasonic.

“It appears as though we are above 12, probably not more than 18 months away from volume production of 4680,” Musk cautioned during Tesla’s last earnings call. So it doesn’t sound like we are likely to see either truck produced in significant volumes any time this year.

The second quarter has been rough for Tesla shareholders. Federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, launched investigations into a fatal crash in Texas in April and another in California this month.

Musk has been busy tweeting about Bitcoin, and Tesla’s solar customers are grumbling — and suing — about price hikes for the Solar Roof. Tesla shares, which had an incredible run in 2020, are down more than 30% from their peak in late January.

Tesla didn’t make any new Model S or X cars in the first quarter and faced unspecified delays.

“The Model S and X are really niche,” Musk said in October 2019. “They’re very expensive, made in low volumes. To be totally frank, we’re continuing to make them more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re really of minor importance to the future.”

Tesla is already known for high-performance, long-range vehicles and sees range as being a key part of converting people from internal-combustion engine cars to electric. While the Model S may indeed be of minor importance to the future, the Plaid event seems to be an important one for the quarter.

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