Tesla announces plans for a $25K vehicle

Tesla announced that it expects to debut an affordable, autonomous electric vehicle in three years' time during its inaugural Battery Day event.

"We're confident that long term we can design and manufacture a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle," CEO Elon Musk said to the drive-in audience of stockholders, many of whom honked upon hearing the news. "This has always been our dream from the beginning of the company."

This model will be enabled by a new "tabless" battery that the company announced it will begin producing in-house for its cost benefits and energy improvements. Musk and other Tesla executives said this new battery product will eventually halve the company's cost per kilowatt-hour, the unit of energy commonly used to measure the capacity of electric vehicle battery packs.

Tesla did not say where this new vehicle will be produced. However, earlier in the Battery Day event, Musk touted the benefits of the company's new and forthcoming factories, including Giga Texas, which is currently under construction in Southeast Travis County.

"For Giga Texas in Austin, even if we had exactly the same (vehicle) classes in California, it would still be advantageous to do it there because it's roughly two-thirds of the way across the U.S.," he said. "So in terms of delivering cars to the central U.S. and the East coast, it's just faster, costs less, and it fundamentally improves our economics."

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