The Tesla Model 3 set a car reservation record before anyone had driven one
In 1955 the Citroën DS gathered 80,000 deposits over ten days at the Paris show. The Tesla Model 3 took 232,000 reservations in two. A week after its March 2016 unveiling the tally passed 325,000, more than triple the number of Model S sedans Tesla had sold by then.
Elon Musk had talked about an affordable Tesla as early as 2006, aiming at a $30,000 price. The project ran under the codename BlueStar, and its name went through several guises: Model III on one slide, three horizontal bars in the first logo, until Adidas objected that the bars looked like its stripes and a plain numeral took over. Musk had hoped the line-up would spell SEX, but Ford owned Model E, so it became S3X. Design chief Franz von Holzhausen pitched it as a rival to the Audi A4 and BMW 3 Series.
Deposits of $1,000 opened on 31 March 2016, with existing owners served ahead of the public. Tesla then pulled its 500,000-car target forward two years and raised $2 billion in new shares to pay for it. Experts doubted the plan, and the result was the bottleneck-ridden stretch Tesla dubbed production hell. It finally hit 5,000 cars in a week at the start of July 2018.
The car itself dropped the front grille, since electric motors need little cooling, and swept almost every control onto one 15.4-inch central screen, a choice critics admired for its interface but faulted for burying simple functions in menus. Its drag coefficient of 0.225 undercut even the slippery Model S. A 2023 refresh, codenamed Highland, trimmed that to 0.219 and added about 10 per cent more range, though its stalkless steering wheel drew a safety complaint from Edmunds.
Sales justified the fuss. The Model 3 led global plug-in sales from 2018 to 2020, overtook the Nissan Leaf as the best-selling plug-in ever in early 2020, and in June 2021 became the first electric car to pass one million sales worldwide. Its crossover sibling, the Model Y, then claimed the top spot.
Source: Tesla Model 3
