Photo: Jas Summers
Between Elon Musk showing us the car's design over a year ago and countless spottings of the release candidates on the streets of California, there's very little left that we don't know about the exterior of the Model 3.
Tesla's upcoming mass-market sedan has been described as a mini-Model S, and it definitely looks that way. Musk's company seems to be adopting the design uniformization that has made telling different models from the same manufacturer apart from a distance quite difficult. The Model 3 and Model S are sufficiently different not to fall into that trap, but brand identity elements are clearly there.
But despite this transparency regarding the EV's appearance, there was still one thing that had escaped all professional or amateur spy photographers who have pointed their cameras/phones in the direction of a Model 3: the inside of the charging port.
Why would you want to see a car's charging socket? you might ask, and it'd be a valid question. The thing that fueled the minds of those who can't wait for the Model 3 to come (an odd 400,000 of them being the reservation holders) was the size of the charging port's flap.
Compared to other Tesla models, this one was significantly larger, suggesting it might get a different connector. A picture published on Twitter by Jas Summers last Sunday (via Electrek) shows that not to be the case as the Model 3 that pulled up beside his 70D to recharge had no problem using the standard Supercharger connector with no adapter.
Tesla looks set to find itself in the enviable position of being the first manufacturer to put hundreds of thousands of EVs on the streets every year. With all the other carmakers at least two years behind, that leaves Tesla enough time to establish itself as the industry leader and, probably, force some of its solutions to the rest of the market, with charging being one of them.
That's probably the only reason why you should care about what's hiding underneath that vertically-opening charging point: it's because it might be the future.
But despite this transparency regarding the EV's appearance, there was still one thing that had escaped all professional or amateur spy photographers who have pointed their cameras/phones in the direction of a Model 3: the inside of the charging port.
Why would you want to see a car's charging socket? you might ask, and it'd be a valid question. The thing that fueled the minds of those who can't wait for the Model 3 to come (an odd 400,000 of them being the reservation holders) was the size of the charging port's flap.
Compared to other Tesla models, this one was significantly larger, suggesting it might get a different connector. A picture published on Twitter by Jas Summers last Sunday (via Electrek) shows that not to be the case as the Model 3 that pulled up beside his 70D to recharge had no problem using the standard Supercharger connector with no adapter.
Tesla looks set to find itself in the enviable position of being the first manufacturer to put hundreds of thousands of EVs on the streets every year. With all the other carmakers at least two years behind, that leaves Tesla enough time to establish itself as the industry leader and, probably, force some of its solutions to the rest of the market, with charging being one of them.
That's probably the only reason why you should care about what's hiding underneath that vertically-opening charging point: it's because it might be the future.
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