All signs point to a new low-cost Tesla in 2025.

CEO Elon Musk and Tesla executives made it clear this week that one or more new low-cost vehicles are in the works and will arrive in the first half of 2025.

“So as it relates to the automotive sector, we are still on track to deliver our affordable models starting in the first half of 2025,” Musk said during the third-quarter earnings conference call last week.

Other leaders also weighed in. “We are working on cheaper models,” Ashok Elluswamy, director of autopilot software at Tesla, said on the call. And he added that the “teams” are working “to get the factories ready today to try to achieve this.”

They work there

One of the reasons it took Tesla so long to release a cheaper car is that extracting costs is very difficult. “The amount of work it takes to make a car cheaply is incredibly high,” Musk said. “But it’s harder to get 20 percent of the cost of a car than it is to design the car and build an entire factory,” he said.

Price:

And the price? Although Musk didn’t explicitly reference the affordable vehicle of 2025, it appears to be inextricably linked to autonomy – which was the main theme of the earnings call – and the Cybercab, which is expected to be released in 2026.

“With incentives, less than $30,000 is a key threshold,” Musk said in reference to Cybercab. This car “will cost in the order of – will cost around $25,000, so it’s a $25,000 car.” And you can: you can buy one exclusively if you want. So it just won’t have a steering wheel or pedals,” Musk said.

An outstanding question: is the affordable Tesla of 2025 the ancestor of the Cybercab? Or a lighter Model 3? From what Musk and executives are saying, the signs point to something closer to the Cybercab.

“So I think we’ve made it very clear that the future is autonomous,” Musk said on the call. And he repeated variations on that theme throughout the call. “We currently produce around 35,000 autonomous vehicles per week. Compare this to, say, Waymo For their entire fleet, it’s less than – they have less than 1,000 cars,” Musk said.

A different look?

“A Cybercab is different. A Cybertruck looks different, but the Model Y and Model 3 are – look, they’re nice cars but they look pretty normal,” Musk said. He seems to be implying that whatever happens next, whether it’s a Cybercab or otherwise, will “look different.”

And its construction will also be different. “This is not just a revolutionary vehicle design, but a revolution in vehicle manufacturing that also comes with the Cybercab,” he said.