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Tesla Is Pushing to Meet Its Sales Target, Yet Raises the Base Price for Model S

Tesla is coming off a very good third-quarter, but it still needed to deliver around 25,000 cars by the end of the year to reach its goal, so it's not holiday time in Palo Alto just yet.
Tesla Model S 1 photo
Photo: Tesla Motors
As good as its cars are, Elon Musk's company isn't going just to sit idly and expect people to flock to its stores, money waving in their hands. Especially not with the Model 3 just around the corner, a car that will definitely steal a few clients from the larger but older Model S.

Well, while other carmakers try to entice potential clients with rebates, Tesla takes a somewhat different approach. Actually, it's quite the opposite. In an email message sent to its user database, the company announced that starting November 22, the price for the base Model S version, the Model S 60, is going to go up by $2,000.

Quoting an unnamed source, Electrek says that the November 22 deadline is explainable by the fact that it's the last day anyone can order a non-inventory Model S and still take delivery before 2017 starts. In other words, if you want a Model S 60 and would also like to have $2,000 more to spend on Christmas, you'd better hurry with the order.

The same mail reminds its recipients of the change in Supercharger policy. In case you missed it, Tesla's proprietary charging network will not be free of charge anymore for people who order their cars after December 31, 2016, and/or take delivery of them after April 1, 2017. Including that piece of information provides another incentive for acting quickly on that purchase decision.

But it also makes the whole price bump even weirder. In our piece announcing the discontinuation of the free, unlimited access to Superchargers, we said that to make this fair, the price of a new Tesla Model S or X should go down after January 1, 2017, since Musk has always claimed the Supercharging cost to be embedded into the price of the vehicle.

And what does Tesla do? It bumps the entry price for the Model S. Sure, that's a move related to the future introduction of the Model 3 by which Tesla is trying to differentiate between the two, but it comes at a very awkward moment. But it looks like Tesla can do whatever it wants at the moment and get away with it, so expect the sales target to be met.
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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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