Tesla Model 3 - V3.0

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’d argue that Tesla has done very little over the years to convince us that they care less about their customers once you’ve paid your money :) they’ll need to improve as the cars age and the 2nd hand market evolves.

the recent price cuts and crash in residuals creates huge uncertainty.

The issue with price cuts is that it sets an expectation that there might be another.

in the case of project highland, or even the ID3, mid life refreshes usually kill the sales of the current version

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.

As somebody who sees no value in new cars, long may it continue

Hard to know. You'd imagine the performance models would always have that extra desirability among a particular market.

You tempted by one of the perf models in inventory? Did you have one from the firesale that time?

Yes apparently mainly due to the wheels. There still may be a slight premium as the rear motor is rated a bit higher than the LR.

Of course if you use the performance on tap, economy will suffer!

No, just brand new