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When will the Model Y be unveiled?

When will the Model Y be unveiled?

  • 2016

    Votes: 6 2.9%
  • 2017

    Votes: 79 38.3%
  • 2018

    Votes: 121 58.7%

  • Total voters
    206
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Huh. No 12V system - or at least no 12V battery?

I'm not sure how that possible to do safely. If something causes the HV contactors to open, isolating the main pack, how do you recover the car?

J1772 requires the car to take action before receiving mains power, so just plugging it in doesn't seem viable - unless Tesla can get enough energy off of the pilot signal safely to run the computer enough to command the EVSE and unlock AC power?

Hyundai is doing this with the Ioniq EV, it has no 12V battery. They use a small section of the traction battery to provide an always-on 12V source with no DC/DC converter required. The 12V section bootstraps the electronics to allow the main HV Contactors to close on car startup.
 
Hyundai is doing this with the Ioniq EV, it has no 12V battery. They use a small section of the traction battery to provide an always-on 12V source with no DC/DC converter required. The 12V section bootstraps the electronics to allow the main HV Contactors to close on car startup.

From everything I've read, it's a separate 12V battery - just with lithium chemistry and physically located within the main pack enclosure.
 
I listened thru the live call and transcribed the Model Y relevant sections myself- though I did remove repeating words for clarity. It all boils down to 3 quotes from the call. Please let me know if anyone spots anything incorrect.

When commenting on production efficiencies (@ 18:00):

Where things will really be a step change I think beyond any other auto manufacturer will be the Model Y factory... and this is both a function of designing the product to be easy to manufacture and easy to automate as well as designing the factory itself. Model Y will be... there'll be nothing close to it, I think."

On reaching 1 million cars by 2020 (@ 26:00):

I think we need to come out with the Model Y sometime in 2020, or aspirationaly late 2019. And then I think 1 million units is quite likely. Combined... maybe more.

On whether the Model Y is the same platform as the Model 3 (@37:00)

It will be, yeah... different platform. I think we'll give an example: the wiring harness on Model S is about 3km in length. The wiring harness on Model 3 is 1.5km in length. The wiring harness on Model Y will be 100m. Really wiring harness is basically a flex harness with a high data rate bus so you can put everything on a higher data rate bus that isn't a CAN bus where the data is massively constrained. And we'll also make changes to the vestigial voltage so not everything's 12V which is really a pretty absurd number, really, it's wrong for everything.
 
Hyundai is doing this with the Ioniq EV, it has no 12V battery. They use a small section of the traction battery to provide an always-on 12V source with no DC/DC converter required. The 12V section bootstraps the electronics to allow the main HV Contactors to close on car startup.
That's a sure-fire way to throw your main pack wildly out of balance. I could see a small DC-DC converter inside the pack to power standby loads and the contactors. Probably less likely to fail than a constantly cycled separate 12V inside the traction pack housing (regardless of its chemistry).
 
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That's a sure-fire way to through your main pack wildly out of balance. I could see a small DC-DC converter inside the pack to power standby loads and the contactors. Probably less likely to fail than a constantly cycled separate 12V inside the traction pack housing (regardless of its chemistry).

That was proposed on another thread, and seems like it might have possibilities.

You'd have to have very good, crash-proof isolation between the 12V and high voltage on both positive and negative, and you'd have to come up with a way to give the first responders a safety loop to disable the converter safely, but neither seems like an insurmountable problem, and you would neatly eliminate a bunch of weight and complexity and some failure modes.
 
Hey Everyone, just for the record- here's the Model Y relevant parts of the recent Shareholder's Meeting.

Elon talking generally on Future Products:

And then Model Y, I am really excited about Model Y. It’s – there has been some criticism, like we should sort of derive from the Model 3 platform. But I think actually we made a mistake in trying to derive the Model X from the Model S platform. It would have been better to just design an SUV the way an SUV should be designed. Design a sedan, the way a sedan should be designed. Otherwise, you would just try to shoe horn something that doesn’t make sense. Also there are a number of I think really major manufacturing improvements that can be done that allow us to build the car in a way that a car has never been built before. The capital expenditures I think will be substantially less. I am confident that we could drop the CapEx by a factor of two between Model 3 and Model Y, which I think is a really big deal and accelerates its readiness despite the new technologies. So we are aiming for that to hit the roads in 2019 approximately. And probably the demand for Model Y will exceed the demand for Model 3.

Elon on Manufacturing efficiencies, and trying to mitigate against slowdowns caused by suppliers for any number of reasons:

So one of the things I want to do with Model Y is also just simplify the supply chain so that we are not inheriting force majeure risk from earth. Because earth is big and is something – if something bad happens on earth at any given point in time. So I stopped inheriting force majeure risk from all of earth. You can help – you can solve this by buffering parts. But if parts aren’t made to begin with, you can’t buffer them, so yes.

Elon on where the Model Y will be manufactured:

Are you expecting a new plant to be built for the Model Y, yes, we are. I think the existing Gigafactory will probably supply the bat – will in fact, will supply the battery pack and drivetrains and motor and power electronics for the Model Y. But the Model Y vehicle plant will be a new plant, essentially a new Gigafactory that we are going to figure out the exact location of. But there is just no room at Fremont. We are bursting at the seams. I will say like, if you ask me like what’s their number one complaint, it’s parking. It’s like okay, we like practically had a riot the other day for parking. And I am like, sorry guys. What happens, we had a bunch of contractors come on site to install equipment for the Model 3 and we haven’t counted on the fact that there will be 500 extra people that showed up to install massive amounts of equipment, okay. Well, probably the parking lot was full. So therefore, it’s like a conservation of mass, conservation of volume as there is 500 people who can’t park. Anyway, it’s crazy how much parking lot is bringing about. So we are bursting at the seams at Fremont. So there is no way we could do Model Y at Fremont, it’s going to have to be somewhere else. And I think Fremont is just going to be focused on obviously S and X and then ramping up Model 3. I think we even have to transfer some of the things we do at Fremont to the Gigafactory just to allow for Model 3 expansion.
 
So here are the specific Model Y pull-quotes from yesterday's earning's call. I've eliminated the "umms" and "ahhs" and some of the repetition, but left the statements intact. Call time's included in case anyone wants to go back and listen themselves.

First one, which came unprompted from Elon after talking about how he's never been more optimistic about the company.

[21:50] - One thing I wanted to correct. I think in a prior call… or in public I had said, that Model Y or our compact SUV which is called Model Y, may or may not be, would be a totally new architecture. Well, upon the council of my executive team, “thank you guys”, who wheeled me back from the cliffs of insanity, much appreciated… The Model Y will in fact be using substantial carryover from Model 3 in order to bring it to market faster. So that will really accelerate our ability to get Model Y to market faster. Because fundamentally if people prefer a sedan [or] an SUV and… in fact the SUV market is larger, the biggest single product segment I believe in the world. So I like to thank my executive team from stopping me from being a fool. And yes, the Model Y will have relatively low technical and production risk as a result. I still think we want to do the crazy thing in the future, but we want wait to do that until after the compact SUV.

Response to a followup question on whether the wiring harness improvements mention in June would still be in the Y.

[1:05:45] - We’re going to aim for maximum carryover, but that’s one of the things we would include. We would aim to switch out the 1.5 km of wiring harness for a redundant flex circuit that’s more in the order of 100 meters or so. And we’d aim to do that both for the Y, if it’s called the Y…. and the 3 as well.


That's it. But a couple of big things. First, backtracking on the new platform in order to get the vehicle into production sooner. Second, two distinct mentions on the possibility that the Model Y may or may not be called the Model Y.

I'm also finding it increasingly curious that Elon has talked repeated about production targets for the Model Y, but still is being dead silent on a timeframe for first unveiling. It was a long time before the Model 3 unveiling that Elon started talking about approximate timeframes for what ended up bing the March 31 "Model 3 Part 1" event.
 
My guess is that this is his (and the executive board's) way of saying that falcon wing doors and other bells and whistles need to be omitted from the mass produced compact SUV. Maybe there will be a "crazy thing in the future" as he says. But I'm seeing a puffed up Model 3 as the next release and I think it's a good call.
 
I think the question we need to be asking is what has Tesla learned from the announcement/reservation process for the Model 3? As production starts, they have half a million reservations they need to work there way thru, meaning that they have to actively anti-sell the Model 3 until production can catch up with demand- which realistically isn't going to happen until sometime in 2019 or 2020.

If they do the same thing with the Model Y, let's say next March after Model 3's have been on the road for 6-8 months, then I'm pretty certain that the reservations for the Model Y could be double the 3. The secret will be out. Is there any way to mitigate this, or is it inevitable that will end up with a 700 or 800 thousand person waiting list for the Model Y.

I'm glad that I took out a 4 year lease on my A3 e-tron, cause I'll be surprised if I don't see my Model Y until Spring of 2021 when that least is up.