Usually, when a vehicle manufacturer sets a price for a vehicle, that price stays the same for the whole of the model year. Then the next model year comes out, the manufacturer changes a couple of things and bumps the price slightly by what it thinks the market will bear. It makes sense, right?
Well, Tesla isn't like that. It's constantly changing the price of its models, and according to a report published Thursday by Electrek, both the Model 3 and Model Y are getting their prices increased yet again. For those of you playing at home, this latest bump of $500 means that the Model 3 is now $2,000 more expensive to buy than it was in February of this year.
The cheapest Model 3 that you can order right now will cost you $38,990, while the Model Y now starts at $50,990. Both of those prices leave out any local, state or other incentives and Tesla's "fuel savings" calculations that the website somewhat deceptively shows by default.
So why are the prices fluctuating so much? Well, the answer to that is that nobody knows, and Tesla isn't saying. It could have to do with a lot of things, such as the price of raw materials, or maybe Tesla is just testing the market.
Is this a good time to buy a Tesla, then? That's hard to say. Tesla has been known to spontaneously drop the price of its vehicles, usually toward the end of a quarter when it wants to juice up its numbers a little. Still, if you have your heart set on a Model 3 or Model Y, any possible price change isn't likely to make or break a deal. Just make sure you don't buy into the hype that your new car is actually self-driving because it's not -- no matter what Elon Musk says.
We would typically ask a company for comment on something like this, but since Tesla doesn't have a PR department anymore, we instead chose to write our questions on slips of paper, which we then tied to the legs of pigeons that we then released from a rooftop. We'll let you know if we hear back.
