Tesla Model 3 - V3.0

Has the Model 3 not been in the top 2 best selling saloons in Ireland for the last few years? Outselling all saloons by BMW, Audi, Merc, VW, Ford. Think was just the Octavia that sold more (in Ireland). Globally it was around 10th best selling car in the world, Y was 4th a d should do better as was barely launched in many markets last year

When you click the order button, you see a price and monthly payment at the bottom of he page. Click on the tab and this pops up with details and greyed out tabs, the left most option being cash. Select cash and see cash price. Other options also there.

not sure about other specific models, but I checked the beepbeep data a few weeks ago, and in Ireland (the only market that matters to us), the model 3 was the 36th best selling car in 2020, 35th in 2021, (around 600 registrations) and 26th in 2022.

In 2023, with 188 units registered and no apparent long delay, presumably it’ll drop back

I say another price cut isn't out of the question, for sure that's their key advantage over their competitors however, if they reduce too much, it'll piss off existing owners and destroy residual values (can damage brand over time). Therefore they need to strike a new balance, deliver product refreshes (e.g Project highland for M3, Juniper for MY) and add additional incentives (e.g. referrals etc.) rather than just reduce price alone. Tesla is not a company that abides by traditional automotive rules so hard to predict their next moves but expect them to be unconventional and surprising at times. They should also improve their customer and after sales support program, this would vastly improve their brand loyalty and overall consumer satisfaction. I still believe they offer the best bang for buck in the EV sector right now but there are many prospective customers that don't look beyond the traditional brands, this is the market segment Tesla need to tap in more. Lastly, they are now also breaking into newer markets/countries (e.g. Turkey, Thailand as of recently) so this is an areas they are expanding into.

Offline GPS units (including built-in car satnavs) usually have relatively little data to work with when constructing a route. Most simply rely on road speed limit data to calculate the fastest possible route between two points. This works well enough in some countries like the US where most stretches of road will have a specifically engineered speed limit for that particular stretch that will generally always be a safe and reasonable speed for an average driver to traverse that road in good conditions. In Ireland, though, rural roads outside built-up areas very rarely have engineered speed limits, aside from those few odd exceptions where the road conditions on some stretch of a more popular road are extraordinarily dangerous (or extraordinarily safe) enough to warrant its own unique limit. This means that as far as the GPS unit is concerned, when choosing between a 15km route on a nice smooth R road and a 12km route on a few barely-extant farm track L roads, the latter will appear to be theoretically faster, because both routes have the exact same speed limit (80km/h) and the latter route is shorter.

Now, the old online version of Google Maps many, many (many) moons ago used to exhibit a similar issue with route calculation here. However in recent years Google has been collecting massive amounts of location data from all us Android users out there and they've used that (in part) to significantly improve their Google Maps route-finding algorithms. Because of all that extra data, Google Maps can see that almost everyone who took, say, L6969, actually ended up going like 30-40km/h rather than the 80km/h speed limit, and therefore it "knows" that L6969 would be an objectively slower route than a longer adjacent route on an R road where its data shows most people maintaining a steady ~80km/h. As such, if you plot a route in the online Google Maps version, it will recommend taking that R road instead. I still see people complain about the issue with Google Maps from time to time, though, so I suspect that when Google Maps has no data service (e.g. when used in offline mode, or if it loses connectivity), it might not use the same algorithm because it no longer has access to Google's big data services, so it might fall back to the old speed limit method when constructing (or recalculating) routes. Either that or they're managing to find some glitch or some missing data on a particular route that leads even the advanced algorithm to incorrectly assume it's faster for some reason.

Nearly 60% Vrt on the price of a set of wheels 😂

Seems to be real, rumours that it's to go into production in Q3

Mad stuff…

Crazy. How long will this continue? Tesla's second-hand market is taking a beating.

Amazing news for prospective new electric car owners. I hope the price drops keep coming. At least now there's decent price parity between M3 and MY as it should be.

VRT increases as the price goes up, before an option :

after

So all LR M3 grant eligible now by the looks of it. I wonder if this is a better buy than the M3P now in the shorter term with the grant reducing- better protection from the “variable” Tesla pricing model 😁