Did Tesla just leak the design of its new electric compact car?

Tesla might have leaked design drawings of its upcoming new electric compact car as part of a new corporate video.

At Tesla Battery Day in 2020, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be making a $25,000 electric car.

The CEO commented in the announcement:

Tesla will make a compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that is also fully autonomous.

He made it clear that this new price point is achieved through Tesla’s new battery cell and battery manufacturing effort, which could reduce battery costs by over 50%.

The $25,000 Tesla electric car, which is often referred to as the “Tesla Model 2,” has been likened to a new electric hatchback that Tesla has been planning to produce at Gigafactory Shanghai in China and export globally.

In 2020, Tesla announced plans to establish a new R&D center in China to build “a Chinese-style” electric car.

Tesla started taking design submissions for its Chinese-made small electric car that summer and started hiring for the program shortly afterward.

At the time, the automaker also released this early design drawing of a small electric hatchback. It led many to think that it was the design direction and form factor that Tesla is going for in the upcoming electric vehicle:

As Tesla is about to reveal its next-generation vehicle platform at its upcoming Investor Day next week, there are a lot of rumors about the automaker potentially unveiling the first vehicle on this new platform, which could be this cheaper electric hatchback.

Now the rumors are ramping up because people on social media spotted new design drawings as part of a corporate video released by Tesla for the opening of its new engineering headquarters yesterday.

In the video, we see the drawing shown above, and next to it there are two other design drawings that can be directly linked to existing Tesla vehicles:

Those drawings appear to be of a more compact vehicle from Tesla, which is leading some Tesla fans to believe it could be the $25,000 car that Musk talked about before.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.

Electrek’s Take

Personally, I’m not convinced by the blue design drawing. It could be a Model 3. I’ve seen design drawings from Tesla for existing vehicles where they look shorter and have only two doors.

We recently covered that with the Cybertruck.

But the white one is more interesting. It looks more like a hatchback, and the fact that it is on top of the previously released design drawing could be an indicator.