While it’s still battling production woes with the Model 3, Tesla is already looking ahead to the Model Y compact SUV.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on this week’s Q4 earnings call that capital investments for the Model Y will ramp up in the second half of 2018. He said the company still hopes to begin production in 2020 and will announce a production location within the next six months.
The Model Y hopes to avoid the manufacturing problems of the Model 3. It will be built on the same platform and hopefully Tesla will have perfected the Model 3 production before the Model Y hits the assembly line.
“We are going to make some capital investments towards the end of this year related to Model Y,” Musk said on the earnings call. “I don’t want to jump the gun on those, but I think we’ve got a good plan. I’m pretty excited about how we’re designing Model Y. It’s really taking a lot of lessons learned from Model 3 and saying how do we design something to be easy to manufacture instead of how to manufacture or difficult, really.”