Tesla Model 3. A car which doesn't need an introduction anymore.
The first pictures were leaked in 2016, but in the following years, it remained shrouded in mystery.
It also became the car people were looking forward to. That's not a weird thing, considering the thousands of orders.
No matter how you put it, it's still not available in Europe.
You can get it in the USA though. I recently was in San Francisco and they're on every corner.
We've got the chance to walk around it in Europe today, though.
One of the big questions is how the rear would look like. The Model S and Model X are some sort hatchbacks, liftbacks really,
Those hinges are over there, but because the Model 3 has a huge, single piece of glass,
so you can't put the hinges over there. So how did they solve that problem?
Well, the Model 3 is a saloon car. And not just any regular saloon,
like you're used to. It's a saloon with a big tailgate which goes all the way here.
That means the opening is rather small, but a very big luggage space.
It's got a double floor as well, where you can put your loading cable or other stuff.
But there's more, because there's another luggage space.
And that's at the front, a Frunk as it's called in Tesla-terms. It's not huge, but it makes sure that the total luggage space...
is 542 litres. For Tesla-drivers, a loading space like this is nothing special,
but since Audi has introduced the e-tron, it's not natural that there's a luggage space at the front.
Let's move to the rear seat. The seating is good, but my knees are a little high.
That means the floor is rather high, but there's enough legroom.
There's enough headroom as well, but if I touch the ceiling with my head, it leaves stains,
because it's still glass, which still creates a special atmosphere.
In the interior, everything's different in the Model 3. Even if you're used to a Model S,
it looks entirely new. That's mostly because of this 15-inch screen.
It looks like something you can move around, but it isn't. It's perfectly stuck.
The rest of the dashboard is empty. There doesn't seem to be anything.
Not even vents. You've got a strip of wood and a big, black screen.
But, there are vents. Let's start with those, because they're in the screen.
Actually, everything's controlled by the screen, except for the automatic gearbox, the indicators and these two buttons.
I'll get to those in a while. The vents then.
You'll open the menu by pressing this button. That isn't new, we've seen it in other cars before as well,
Then you've got a button here, which controls the flow of air. The vents are over here,
or actually, it's one big vent across the width of the car. That also means you can divide them any way you want.
Now you've got two segments, one on the right and one on the left,
and you can divide them by pressing this button, which means you've got four individually adjustable segments.
Adjusting the vents is done in a remarkable way as well. You can't control the air flow with some sort of panel,
but there's a second flow of air coming from here, which pushes the primary air flow up when you adjust it.
Like I already mentioned, Tesla does everything differently,
Let's scroll through the screen. If you press 'Auto', you've got the menu 'Quick Controls'.
There you can control the lights, the hood, the tailgate,
but when we get to the two buttons on the steering wheel... They have different functions, depending on the mode you're in.
They could be volume buttons, like in every other car, but they could be used to adjust the steering wheel as well.
By scrolling up and down or left and right, so in this case, because I've selected the menu,
the steering wheel now moves up, and by scrolling from left to right, it moves towards or away from me.
If I close that menu again and I move to 'Mirrors', the same buttons are used to adjust the side view mirrors.
In this case the right one, because that's the one selected. The same goes for the left mirror.
With that, Tesla has made sure you can use those two buttons for a lot of functions,
which actually need a physical button.
A very smart move from Tesla. This is the way you open the glove compartment.
Literally everything is in that screen.
Then, the rest of the interior. In the middle, we've got an armrest and some cupholders,
It's an American car after all. Then we've got these two panels, which you can open.
It's pretty spacious actually. You can see how far my hand fits.
There's a second one here, and it's meant for charging your phone. It's not an induction charger,
but Tesla has thought of something clever. You've got two USB-ports in which you can plug a loading
and put it through here, which means they end up here. That way, you can charge your phone, put it in there,
and you can close it up, so it's hidden.
If you open it, you can even reach it as well. Very creative.
As you can see on the screen, there's a huge roadtrip programmed in the satnav.
That's supposed to be like that, and it's possible in every Tesla.
Especially with the Model 3. There aren't any WLTP-cycle numbers known yet,
but according to the American way of measuring, this version of the Model 3 with the biggest battery,
can do 500 km on a single charge. Then there's Tesla's supercharger-network if that's not enough.
It's expected that the first people who've ordered a Model 3 are able to collect it in early 2019.