Tesla teases new compact SUV ‘Model Y’

US based electric car maker Tesla has revealed a teaser of its upcoming all electric compact SUV, Model Y, during the company’s shareholder press conference in Mountain View, California on Tuesday, giving even further confidence to the shareholders on the electric car maker.

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla had said, “I’m really excited about Model Y. We’re aiming for that to hit the roads in 2019 approximately.” He had also confirmed that the Model Y will be based on an all new platform instead of using the same chassis as that of the similarly sized Model 3 compact sedan. The new compact SUV will be built at a new production plant, he had added.

“There’s no way we could do Model Y at Fremont, so it’s going to have to be somewhere else,” Musk said. “We practically had a riot the other day for parking,” he added. 

While talking about the other SUV built by the company, Elon Musk had said that the Model Y’s bigger brother, the Model X was more like a “Faberge Egg” with respect to the complexity and configurations the company had to undergo while building it. He had even regretted that the Model X should not have been based on the Model S sedan making the development more complex and costlier to Tesla.

“I think we really made a mistake in trying to derive the design for the Model X from the Model S platform,” Musk said. “It would have been better just design an SUV the way an SUV should be designed, design a sedan the way a sedan should be designed, otherwise you’re just trying to shoehorn something in that doesn’t make sense.”

While not much information was shared during the shareholders meet regarding the Model Y, Tesla might do a formal announcement about the compact SUV soon by September.