I've gone thru the transcript from the Tesla Q4 Q&A and pulled out all the relevant Model Y portions. Enjoy.
Elon Musk on New Products:
“In terms of the new products, with Model Y, we've completed ensuring of end design of Model Y, and the parts are - the tooling is going out for production Model Y. Three quarters of the Model Y is common with the Model 3, so it's a much lower CapEx per vehicle than Model 3. And the risk is also quite low.
This is in contrast to Model S versus Model X where the theory was - I think Model X, we just - it's sort of Model X to be like the sort of the Fabergé egg of cars. It's an incredible vehicle and probably one - probably nothing like it will ever be made again, and maybe it shouldn't. But it is a work of art. It's a special work of art.
But the commonality with the Model S is limited. It was only about maybe 30% in common with the Model S, whereas Model Y is, I think, 76% was what it got in common with the Model 3. And we're most likely going to put Model Y production right next to - in fact, as part of our main Gigafactory in Nevada.
So it will just be right there. Batteries and powertrains will come out and go straight into the vehicle. So that also reduces our risk of execution and reduces the cost of having to transfer parts from California to Nevada. It's not a for sure thing, but it's quite likely, and it's our default plan.
I would expect Model Y will probably be - the demand for Model Y will be maybe 50% higher than Model 3, could be even double. The - as I understand it, the midsized SUV segment is the - worldwide is the most popular type of vehicle. So we'll probably see a higher volume of Y than 3.”
Elon Musk on where Model Y will be produced:
"As I mentioned earlier, the Model Y, we think, most likely will be produced at Gigafactory, but that's - unless we encounter some obstacle - that's the default plan that we're proceeding towards. And it's fast, low risk and also low CapEx. In terms of the - I mean, probably there's like initial production of Model Y, very low volume, probably next year.
But then it always takes time to ramp up any production system, and that's difficult to predict the shape of that S-curve. So we feel confident in saying there will be production volume of Model Y by the end of next year, but in between beginning of next year with low volume, it always starts with very low growth exponentially - from beginning of last year to end of next year, it's difficult to break that ramp. So that's our expectation for Y."
Manufacturing Efficiency:
Deepak Ahuja, "The other aspect of this, Elon, which we've been doing extremely well, is capital efficiency. We have dramatically cut back on capital expense, and we are spending it in a very efficient manner. We talked about it in the letter on Model 3 and Gigafactory Shanghai. We talked about it for Model Y. There are just so many learnings that we are incorporating, and we just want to beat what we did with Model 3 and the kind of spending we had for the returns we got."
Elon Musk, "Absolutely. I mean, we're confident that our CapEx per unit of production for Shanghai factory and for Model Y will be less than half of what we did for Model 3. Internally, we think it might be a quarter but that's probably too good to believe, but it's definitely less than half."
And that's it. Sadly no confirmation of unveiling date, but the comments above seem to indicate that they hope to start production early next year and ramp thru 2020.
