Elon Musk teases two new electric vehicles, says Tesla is already building one

Image credits: Tesla

Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off two new electric vehicles on Tuesday at the automaker’s 2023 annual shareholder meeting. The billionaire executive even claimed that Tesla is already in the process of building a new product .

“I just want to emphasize that we are really building a new product,” Musk said. “We’re actually designing a new product. We’re not sitting on our hands here.”

Musk went on to say that there are two new products in the pipeline and that “both the product design and the manufacturing techniques are above anything else currently in the industry.”

As the CEO spoke, a rendered image of a vehicle silhouette appeared on the screen behind him, giving the audience a teaser of one of the vehicles. That vehicle may be the $25,000 hatchback that Musk mentioned in 2020 during the company’s battery day. He said that this meeting was not the place to make a new product announcement and that there would be a proper product launch eventually.

Musk wasn’t clear on stage what he meant by “building” the vehicle. It is likely that a prototype is being built, rather than a volume production vehicle.

Screenshot from the Tesla Investor Day 2023 presentation showing two new vehicles. Image Credit: Tesla/Screenshot

Tesla previously showed off two new models at its Investor Day in March, showing a photo with the entire Tesla lineup and two car outlines unveiled. One of the vehicles appeared to be about the size of a van and the other about the size of a sedan or hatchback. Both are expected to be more affordable vehicles that sell at much higher volumes.

“Elon’s guess is that we will probably do more than 5 million units per year of these two models combined,” Musk said.

During Investor Day, Tesla also confirmed plans to build a gigafactory in Mexico, which is where many have speculated production of the hatchback, commonly known as the “Model 2” by Tesla fans, will be built.

It has been speculated that the second vehicle Musk teased will be the robotaxi he has referred to in the past. An audience member asked Musk for an update on Teslas being used for ride-sharing, and Musk replied that ride-sharing “isn’t really going to be relevant in the self-driving world.”

The executive went on to say that Tesla is getting close to achieving full self-driving, something Musk has claimed several times over the past few years.

During the shareholder meeting, Tesla also announced that former CTO JB Straubel will return to the automaker’s board and that the company aims to test some traditional advertising methods to promote new features.