Tesla Looks Set to Lose Battle for Delivering the EU Its Electric Hatchback

One of those three models is a staple of the European automotive industry, another is an affordable small car made by Renault's Romanian budget brand, Dacia, while the third is the latest iteration in Peugeot's successful "200" model line ripping the fruits of the recent vein of inspiration shown by the company's design team. They're not necessarily a very homogenous bunch, but they do have one thing in common: their body style.

Of the top five best-sellers in Europe, only the Tesla Model Y stands out as anything other than a hatchback. For all the talk we hear about SUVs and crossovers taking over the world, it seems the Europeans still like their tiny cars with the shortest possible rear overhangs. Maybe it's the narrow roads, the crammed cities with small and few between parking spaces, or the reluctance to pay too much money on a larger vehicle; whatever the cause, you still can't go amiss with a hatchback on the European market.

Well, you can if you make a crappy one. It's not like they can't tell a good car from a bad one over there. Take the Dacia Sandero, for example: while it does fall into the budget category, it still offers good build quality, plenty of on-board tech, a reasonable engine selection, and, particularly lately, quite an attractive exterior and interior design. Buy one, and you won't feel like you're missing out on too much compared to other brands, except maybe for the prestige of certain badges.

If Tesla could turn the Model 3 into a hatchback, and it's a big "if," particularly at this point, it would essentially have the first spot in the European sales chart guaranteed for years to come. It already did it with the Y, which is bigger, more expensive, and, I would argue, objectively uglier. The only reason it's doing so well compared to the Model 3, I would suspect, is because the EU has never been a great market for sedans. Also, if you squinted really hard and you were a bit visually impaired too, you could mistake the Y for a hatchback - definitely more so than the Model 3.

The thing with hatchbacks is that they're in no great demand anywhere else in the world. Even though we can't call Tesla a small company anymore, it still classifies as very young compared to most of its competitors, which makes coming up with a new model a crucial decision that mandates careful planning. Get it wrong and talks of bankruptcy may be a bit too much, but it would definitely spell serious trouble for the EV maker, potentially canceling a lot of the progress made in more recent years.

The Cybertruck is a prime example, and, judging by Musk's comments during the recent earnings call, it sounds as though the electric pickup truck has the potential to act both as a heavy weight around the company's neck, as well as a trampoline to propel it to the next level. It all comes down to ironing out early production issues and making sure the roughly one million reservation holders (you'll hear that number quoted anywhere between one and two million) won't have to wait much longer to get their vehicles.

Tesla undoubtedly weighed the pros and cons of making a hatchback by now. This far, the decision has been made against expanding its range in that direction as it focused on the more lucrative North American and Chinese markets. The proof is in the vehicle choice: it kicked things off with a sedan that doubled as a muscle car, continued with the global favorite, an SUV, made a more accessible sedan to lower the financial entry point into the Tesla family, and then, inflated said sedan into a bloated crossover that has somehow become its most successful product. In the meantime, it also kind of made a semi, it teased a sports car in the forgotten Roadster, and, after a lot of postponing, it is about to start deliveries of the Cybertruck, the wedge-shaped all-electric pickup truck.

There was, however, one key announcement made by Tesla's CEO and frontman, the equally famous and infamous Elon Musk, which is relevant to this discussion. I'm obviously talking about the sub-$25,000 EV, this elusive unicorn that no other Western car company has managed to deliver so far, local government subsidies aside. The only one to do it is Dacia with the Spring, but even they are cheating a bit since the car is based on the Renault Kwid, a cheap model made for the Asian market, and is assembled in China.

The info surrounding the budget Tesla is non-existent, and that's because it is nothing more than a distant plan at the moment as the company's entire pool of resources is currently diverged toward increasing the manufacturing rate of the Cybertruck. Only when that gets close to reaching its target of 250k units should we expect to hear more about the $25.000 model.

What we can say with complete certainty is that while this upcoming EV, touted to wear the Model 2 moniker, will very likely feature a hatchback body style, it will most definitely not be a two-volume version of the Model 3. In other words, if the European market was hoping for a car anything like the renderings on this page (courtesy of Sugarchow), it will be sorely disappointed.

Well, at least as far as Tesla is concerned. However, the more I look at these pictures, the more Mazda3 and Honda CR-Z vibes I get, so perhaps the Old Continent will get its sexy electric hatchback after all, just from a different manufacturer.

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