The cheapest Tesla will appear in 2023 and it may not have a steering wheel

Elon Musk held a general meeting of Tesla employees this week, where he outlined the prospects for the most affordable and smallest model, focused mainly on China and Europe.

In early 2000, Elon Musk announced an electric compact hatchback for China (we used his official sketch as an input picture), and in the autumn of the same year he announced that a similar model would be registered at the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin, that is, there would also be a European version. Since then, no significant information about the compact novelty has been received from the company, and today's news on the topic was not received from the Tesla press service, which has been gone for a year, but from anonymous sources who were present at the meeting.

So, Electrek magazine, citing one of the company's employees, reported that Musk planned to start producing a compact model for 2023 and hinted that it might not have a steering wheel and pedals, that is, it would be a SAE level 5 drone. You should not take such a stuffing seriously, because with Elon Musk's promises and predictions, to put it mildly, everything is not very good, as evidenced by the numerous postponements of the launch of the announced new products.

Back in 2019, Musk promised a full autopilot by the end of 2020, when a photo of the Tesla interior without a steering wheel flew around the media. Of course, there is no full autopilot yet and is not expected, although Tesla continues to beta test the Full Self-Driving (FSD) program, the development of which Musk spoke about last month at the Tesla AI Day event.

From a technical point of view, FSD can already be called a level 4 autopilot, but from a legal point of view, it is still a level 2 autopilot, that is, the driver must constantly monitor the road and be ready to take control at any time. Even once commercial distribution begins, the FSD (a $10,000 option, by the way) will remain a Level 2 autopilot. Years and even decades may pass before the legalization of the third and subsequent levels, so the chances that the younger Tesla model will become a level 5 drone are close to zero.

Musk said the compact electric car will start at $25,000 and that it won't be called the Model 2, as the press dubbed it. What exactly it will be called is still unknown.

Adjustments to the release schedules of other new products continue: Musk said that the Cybertruck pickup truck was postponed until the end of 2022 due to the revolutionary design and related technological difficulties, and mass production will begin at best in 2023. Meanwhile, at the premiere of Cybertruck in 2019, it was said that the production pickup will appear at the end of 2021.

The second generation Tesla Roadster sports car (the company's main long-term construction, introduced in 2017) has been delayed until at least 2023.

And Tesla, it turns out, has not abandoned the project of an unmanned passenger shuttle, which was originally developed for The Boring Company car subway (also the brainchild of Elon Musk). Now it is positioned as a multifunctional van, designed, among other things, for the transportation of people with disabilities: the air suspension will allow the body to be lowered to the ground or sidewalk so that you can drive into it in a wheelchair. The launch date for the van has yet to be announced.