Elon Musk has been talking a big game about the Tesla Model 3 for nearly a year now. Last July, the founder and CEO described the as-yet-unreleased car, which starts at $35,000, as the company’s cheapest vehicle in his “master plan” for Tesla. “The first Model 3 factory machine should be thought of as version 0.5, with version 1.0 probably in 2018,” Musk wrote. Early Monday morning, Musk tweeted two photos of the first Model 3 unit.
Musk himself is the proud owner of the newest Tesla. Venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis originally purchased the rights to the first Model 3, but later gave those rights to Musk as a birthday present when he turned 46.
Tesla is expected to ramp up production of the Model 3 over the next year or two, producing 5,000 units of the vehicle per week by the end of 2017, and 10,000 per week by 2018, Fortune reports. Which means Musk’s plan to stock the road with cars that make money for their owners while their owners aren’t in them — the idea is that when you’re not driving your Tesla, another person could summon the car to drive to them, autonomously, and pay you for a ride in your car — is still a ways away.
