Franz & Lars Talk New Model 3 | Live
Hey everyone I’m France and this is Lars and we’re here in Hawthorne at the design studio standing in front of a all new model 3 and behind us we have you know some other top secret stuff but U maybe we’ll get to that another day we’re actually here to talk about the
Model 3 so we’re excited to see your questions and uh hopefully we can give you a little insight into you know some things beneath the skin and some technical stuff yeah under under the skin exactly this is a a first no it’s our second Tesla live stream so bear
With us the first one my my colleague Wes did straight from Baja this one’s got a little bit higher uh Wi-Fi signal so we should be okay but France I think this first one’s maybe for you or you could take it uh what is your favorite or most exciting change with the
Upgraded new model 3 well I think the the most exciting thing for me is we’ve taken a a great car and just made it a little bit better actually a lot better yeah a lot better um some of my favorite elements on the car are the front end
We’ve got a whole new front end going on here and um it’s just really a lot leaner the hood is new hood it’s down low obviously brand new lights we’ve simplified the front end even further and it just really gives the car a little bit more Sleek feel to it a
Little more mature as well uh the car has grown up a bit and this is a you know a pretty big contributor to the overall uh Aero efficiency Improvement that we’ve had on the car and then the rear of the car if we go back here one
Of my favorite features actually is how we’ve treated the tail lights and we’ve basically taken the tail lights and we’ve added them now to the deck lid and so now you don’t have that kind of really bad seam in the middle of the taillight it’s a Improvement in design
Of the original model 3 so it’s just a nice evolution of that but it feels more crisp more precise more modern and no part lines in it so super excited about that but the part lines and the finish up front it’s a big step up in quality
Yeah I mean the Fremont team’s been kicking butt for the last couple years and the one of the things I’m most excited about is how much higher the quality is not just in the fit and finish and the build quality but also the materials we’ll talk about later
Inside yeah I mean we took the chance to not just improve the design and the handling and the performance of the car but also to improve the overall quality um and I think you’ll see that when you see the car in person should you take another one this is probably you too you
Talked about it for a minute but how does the new exterior really improve aerodynamics yeah we talked about it just a second ago I think in the front end you know lowering the nose getting um the profile and the the plan curve of the front end just a little bit more
Efficient allows the air to flow up and around and over the car a little bit better and we also improved the the rear diffuser down right down at the bottom of the car and just you know a few millimeters here and there really makes a big Improvement uh in the way that you
Push this vehicle through the air and the way the air travels around it’ve got updated Wheels as well these are 19inch wheels shown here and the tires these little black pieces here they actually contribute quite a quite a bit to the overall um Arrow efficiency of the wheel
Itself it allows the the air to slip around the tire rather than getting caught up in um all the blades of it so what’s really cool about those from an engineering perspective is when when we think about Wheel and Tire design and aerodynamics it’s really like how can we
Get the air to go around like you said but when you get bigger and bigger Wheels it gets harder and harder to do because like the surface of the wheel comes out and when I think about those caps I think about it making the the air
Think the wheel is smaller and you know and then the air can go quicker around the outside well yeah like you said as the wheel gets bigger the profile of the tire gets smaller and what we’ve done is actually brought the overall profile back into kind of effectively what the
Wind sees as the tire profile so the tire profile from the wind perspective feels really thick but it’s actually and even nice big wheel even this little thing right here a lot of tires you know will swoop out here or they’ll or they’ll like dip in right at the corner
And tuck in under the wheel we have this coming straight back and it actually flips up just a half a millimeter or so and that keeps that air attached when you go around the corner also saves you from the curb it does save you from the
Curb just a little bit um let’s take another one since we’re talking about wheels and tires someone actually asked how does the new wheel and tire design increase overall range well there you go yeah we talked about that on the wheel side but on the tire side it’s even
Cooler these tires have a lower roll rolling resistance coefficient than any of the other tires we’ve ever put on model 3 but we did that without compromising uh lateral performance steering response and one of the ways we did that isn’t that the hardest thing though like combining you know rolling
Resistance and performance dude France you know me in tires like I could talk about them for days but like it is the most important thing on the car it’s the only thing that touches the ground and it has to do everything it has to be
Quiet it has to be comfortable it has to do Arrow but you’d think like performance goes one metric One Way rolling resistance the other way how did you do it I mean that’s a good question so specifically speaking those two aspects of a tire occur in different frequencies and so by changing the
Compound of the tire we can actually achieve grip which actually occurs at a pretty low frequency or versus rolling resistance being low at a high frequency and to do that we look at the What’s called the damping curve which is the tan Delta of it and basically we shift
The curve through the compound to increase grip while decreasing rolling resistance and that’s a lot in compounding the other thing we did pretty impressive is we lowered the top speed and know people like oh blow why did you do that you took away 15 miles per hour well we know from our data
People don’t drive that fast right but what it allowed us to do was reduce the number of ply overlays in the belt on the shoulder area of the tire because you know when tire is rolling and spinning at high speed it’s got to like hold all that in by reducing that speed
We’re able to take out one ply which again reduces the energy the tire is using to to to get down the road super cool stuff going Onre we talk a lot about how we have F1 engineers in Arrow I just want to point out our lead Tire designers
Also an F1 engineer that is true I mean Lars mentioned that right in our studio that on the other side of the wall we have a lot of um former F1 Engineers working together with our designers to just help us with the aerodynamics and improve the overall efficiency and
Efficiency is know what equates to better overall like livability of the product you can go farther on the charge Etc let’s take another one yeah yeah let’s see what we got I’m on the uh so what has changed in the exterior design of the model 3 re Drive I think you
Talked a little bit about that I think we talked about that but um can hit it again you know I think the front end we’ve got new faes in the front new headlights new tail lights um a new hood as well and again that just leads to um
You know a little bit more of a mature looking front end the car looks sleeker you know one of the original ideas of the model 3 was just to be like 5% smaller and much more affordable than our other great car the model S super
Great car and so this kind of brings it even more into that vein of feeling like a you know smaller more attainable um but equally mature and proficient vehicle um than the model S well one of the things you always get me on since the day I started working here was this
Air to Tire Gap and the side to side Gap true and all those stance it’s all about St St man and all those Tire improvements we talked about we’re also actually able to reduce that tire gap which not only helped efficiency but makes it look a lot cooler I agree and
Again The Stance of the car is is you know just improve the car just sits better when you see it from the front or from the rear just has this great kind of um you know feeling on the road and you get the muscular proportion of the
Front fenders and the rear fenders over the tires it just feels really tight and taut see another one yes trying to keep it going um what are your top priorities when designing such a vehicle and why to me is that you ah why don’t you take
This um for me it’s always a bit starts with safety I mean I think I’ve talked about it from time to time but we think about safety and every step of the design um and and that that relates even all the way back to when you’re designing it when we talk about
Pedestrian protection or how how the crumple zones work in the front but once off become off safety for me it’s customer happiness you know and I think one thing we do great here at Tesla that not everyone does is we listen like we really listen to what people have to say
Not just in the design but on the inside you know we made it quieter we made it more efficient we we improve the ride Comfort without sacrificing the handling and those were all feedback from the our customers you know that and that didn’t make the car look worse actually we were
Able to make the car look better all new all new interior um which the premiumness really yeah we up the premium we we and you know we are packaging in all those things that make you safe as an occupant the airbags everywhere in the car um the restraint
Systems and they don’t feel like they’re encumbering you or making the car worse they we really I think we do a good job working together our teams really do a good job making that all work um of course the other thing is the best accident is no accident true and this is
Coming now with our fourth version of our autopilot system higher resolution cameras um but what that also means is our active safety systems are even better than they were before um which is pretty cool should we keep going yeah let’s go next one what are some of the
Active safety features of the car well there we go look at that I I honestly didn’t know that was the next one um so they all come standard this is one of the questions here do they come standard um or customers need to pay for them we believe safety comes first and that
Means all of our cars get every safety feature we can think of that means Lane keeping Side Collision assist automatic emergency braking back in December we launched Cross trffic emergency braking so when you get those features with a Tesla you’re really getting something more than what what other people have um
You know a lot of people like to say well my car has automatic emergency braking but all automatic emergency braking is not the same with our awesome autopilot system and with the camera that we use we can actually see farther left and right and stop more cross traffic events than most other people
And what’s even cooler is we’re continuing to look at the data as it comes in so if we find a hole in our system we update it we improve it when you buy someone else’s car whatever you get is what you get yeah all right I’ll
Get the next one okay is it is the true that the battery pack is built to enhance the safety features in the car well I would say yes is a simple answer but the reality is the battery is an integral part of the structure of the
Car we all know it’s sitting now low right here it’s really between the rocker here and the floor um it it helps us really with the backup structure of our safety systems you know it provides a stiff like object as well as transferring energy through the battery
Pack to absorb all of those frontal crash energies but it also makes it stiffer in torsion yeah what what what is that torsional rigidity what why is that important so yeah it’s good question I talk about that a lot but when you’re in a car and you sort of
Want it to respond it’s about how the load transfer is from that initial steering response on the outside wheel all the way through the car to the back and if you can imagine it as like a series of individual things attached together the stiffer they’re attached
You know if you had a really big piece of Steel that response from the front to the rear ax would be super quick on the other hand if you twisted a piece of paper it would take a long time for that back and it might never happen and so
That torsional rigidity not only makes the car feel you know more responsive but it also adds this sort of solid you know kind of luxury feeling to the car that you get a lot of thuing and and you know when you’re hitting impacts and stuff so it’s a critical thing we always
Look at and I mean you feel it when you drive this car this car just feels really solid it’s quiet it just feels really stiff feels like the body doesn’t have to do any work because the suspension suspensions doing all the work yeah um cool going on on this we
Got another question can you explain the platform safety architecture so we’re talking a little bit about that I think you know when I think about safety at Tesla I think that it comes first in our design the best accidents no accident and then we’ve been talking about this
Data driven approach I think more over than that like we have an architecture that that allows for like a really with the battery as we were describing a really you know isolated rigid occupant cabin and then all of our energy during an accident is absorbed up here in the
Front and then we we also protect you from the side the door structure on the new model 3 is actually a result of our field data and um trying to improve side impact by by uh you know looking at accidents that occurred in the field and realizing that you know one thing we
Can’t stop too often is somebody hitting you right and so we really wanted to improve that it’s really got a great door structure for that so I mean it’s really all about protecting the occupant and I think it goes you know goes all over the car France does a good job
Helping us with that you know you wouldn’t know by looking at this that it’s got a massive crumple Zone and it’s even got like 120 mm of Extrusion in the side in the side of the battery pack there just to absorb energy again it’s important to know that you’re inherently
Safe it’s a lowest probability of injury in any cars in a Tesla so why would you put your kids anything else right so my family drives but you know I think it’s a lot of the the effort from the team to get to a greatl looking car that is also
The safest car yeah I mean I think people bribe products because they you know they want them to look good and I think that you know they also want them to be safe and so we want to make both of those things happen that’s like your priority and my priority yeah another
Question we put our families in them too yeah exactly all right let’s keep going will it qualify for the tax credit in the near future well I guess I can be a Salesman for a minute Uh current model 3 starts at $ 38990 um we can we actually have a lease that
Price that starts about 329 per month and that when you lease a car we now have in uh that credit of $7,500 um that is incentive that’s distributed over that payment so you’re getting money back every time you’re paying it so it does qualify at that
Base price um and really like you know that’s something we’re always working on is trying to work within the countries we work in not just the us but in China and Europe and making them locally to really try and promote the economy and and you know qualify for whatever incen
Those regions are offering yeah and and we listened to you guys the customers and you we took it to heart and we tried to make the Interior Space just much more premium so I think even at this price point we’re getting an incredibly you know premium vehicle with ultra
Suede and new textiles and just you know updated seats um it’s it’s all new interior and it’s uh take kind of takes the theme of the original model 3 and just improves on that and I mean I think this all speaks to the next question we
Got which is why is it important that these cars are as affordable as possible it’s the mission yeah our mission exactly I mean we came here fron 15 16 years ago me a year behind you and like the mission has always been to democratize the EV how do we get more of
These cars into people like use hands and really just like I think the first thing you have to do is make a great car make a great car make it affordable that’s it two things really so um this one’s a really detailed question you should take it I’ll read it and you go
Ahead all right we’re curious about the battery details in the upgraded model 3 between performance rear wheel drive long range are we looking at 217s lfps 4680 I mean this is really a question for you I think but um I’ll go that’s fine I’ll take it uh well we have all
Different kinds of uh batteries in our pack in our vehicles across the globe our standard Range model 3s come with lfp lithium iron phosphate batteries that means you can charge all the way up we do that because you know at that lower price point um we want to make
Sure that you can use the the full range of the battery every day it’s up to 272 miles now and I think that one thing that’s important is you know in the rest of the world people when this came car came out like oh the range went up 10%
Yeah in the US it only went up well in the case of rear whe Drive nothing in the case of dual motor just a few miles but at Tesla we focused on real real R World range right and if you look at our Fleet efficiency like which we monitor
The fleet efficiency of this car is actually 10% more um there were some changes in the EPA testing protocol that they’re really trying and I appreciate it they’re really trying to make real world range on the sticker match better and better um and so our sticker ranges
Didn’t go up as much as the other regions but the actual efficiency is 10% more so that Delta between that number and what you get is going to be less in this car than it ever was before I think it’s important to to to note that you know we have an incredible supercharging
Network too so you know I think there’s there’s almost nowhere in the United States where you can’t reach a supercharger definitely not um especially with 272 miles range so um I think as you know we continue to expand our Network then you know ultimately range becomes less of a thing you’re
Never going to be stranded actually with our you know amazing UI we always guide you to a supercharger before you ever get stranded anyways so I don’t know about you but since I’ve driven a Tesla I get like an hour back out of my life
Because you know you don’t have to go to the gas station once a week you’ll spend 100 bucks so it’s it’s kind of nice um let’s keep going oh let me ask this one okay how will the battery last over time we get this question quite a bit are
There any warranties that are included as standard so our warranty is 8 years and 100,000 miles whichever comes first and we’ve been doing that for a long time now um and we do that because the battery is really designed to Outlast the car when we started the Tesla we
Were like okay well people you know you don’t want to maintain your cars you want to deal with it and the battery is one of the things we thought about um of course you know all lithium ion batteries at some point lose some little bit of range over time but we work to
Minimize that by monitoring the temperature of the battery and make sure when you’re charging you’re keeping it at a nice constant temperature and I mean if you look at the the stats like from external you know third party people they always say our batteries perform the best over life of the car
They’re not losing like 30% range they’re losing like single digits maybe 10% over you know those eight years it’s pretty good yeah it’s amazing okay let’s keep going um are there any elements of the car that can help with the range well we talked about a lot of these
Already we did we covered it I think the Aero efficiency you know I think a CD of0 219 29 like lowest um efficiency so lowest overall drag ex right so CDA drag is drag times area model S is technically Slicker right 206 but it’s a little bit bigger right so it has a
Little bit more D CDA is a little bit bigger yeah um but so that’s one one element and you know another element we talked about was the wheels I think that’s a actually a big contributor as well so um yeah and then just you know continuing to um you know innovate in
The battery space yeah and just put improvements back into the cells I mean when we put energy into the cells we’re doing that constantly I mean the other thing we work on a lot is low power consumption I think drew our buddy the uh committed to next month or this month
I guess coming up with a 40% reduction in in Sentry mode over time and I think really low voltage and consumption overall is something we focus on at a granular level so I mean if you’re driving and what can do you know like you know it’s really about how you drive
I think the Le the people that don’t realize that the biggest effect on Range is like how fast you want to hit the that’s accelerator pedal you know uses more power when you’re accelerating so if you trying to be a little gentle I mean it’s hard not to do in this car
It’s hard not to do it’s like it’s and it’s quieter so you just want to go faster but yeah you got to you know you can keep you can keep it I mean that’s another actually element it doesn’t have to do with range but it’s something you
Know about the overall feel of the car it’s incredibly quiet inside the car wind noise is down so even though the wind is passing over it’s not making a lot of you want to get inside and talk about a little bit I guess we could yeah
Sure I’ll go around this way yeah and I think you know talking about the interior a little bit more you can see that it’s uh all new there’s you know we we we’ve added a lot of improvements we have a center console now with clu compartments we’ve got ambient lighting
That wraps around so it’s really kind of taken the idea of this wraparound cockpit um we’ve upgraded everything the steering wheel actually one thing you may notice is that we removed the stocks again talking about efficiency and taking um Parts away that are not necessarily required we put indicators
Right on in the same way that you would indicate with the stock they’re on the steering wheel um and just improved UI this car comes with an amazing user interface I think that’s just like something that we don’t talk enough about but there’s so much packed into
That one screen um whether it’s you have like almost infinite um music and podcast get whatever ability and super high quality there’s 17 speakers in this car yeah in the dual motor 17 speakers it’s actually more than we went out with it used to be
14 in the base vehicle we also added two low power Subs so you get went from seven speakers and no subs or woofers I should say not really Subs but low low uh two nine speakers and two woofers so I mean I think that’s another thing our
Sound quality like if you’re an audio file buy this car yeah absolutely or at least go test drive one and sit in it and like hear it it is amazing I think even just when you sit in it and you close the door and you can just hear
This thud when you’re sitting inside of it it just feels solid and then when you’re actually driving wind noises down you got you guys did a lot of work on the glass too right impr glass is all acoustic we have you know this question actually saw kind of go to this I just
Saw it pop up you know are there any like looks the same what looks the same as the old model 3 but actually is not so we got a lot of questions about like did you use Giga castings and and all this stuff and and like we didn’t be
Really because we wanted to come to Market and we had a lot of cacks invested in the body lines we got to go quick to change them over you know and I think you know underneath we still changed a lot you know from an nvh perspective any area that was a little
Bit weak we added a stiffener or we changed the bracket so that it was more stiff we added you know more baffles and things to absorb noise we added the course the frequency selective damping I’ve been talking about which is super cool basically has a bypass valve in it
Then on low frequencies like the pressure builds up so much that valve won’t open but in high frequencies it allows flow to throw through really adds comfort those things you can’t see right that’s that’s just cool you know benefits you get in the car that weren’t
There and those are the things I always you know when we’re down here we talk about doing too because both you and I like our teams we really care about the whole product yeah it’s not just like what does it look like so um anything
You want to add to that one or no I I mean I think that’s great maybe one more question yeah I think we got a time for one or two more um oh rear drive being a rear wheel drive vehicle how is the traction um this is a question I get a
Lot um actually and you know I I think that there’s a misnomer about rear wheel drive and traction especially in the snow um one of the things that helps us out in and I think that comes from a few things you know in ic engines the weight was up
Front and the motor was and drive Wheels were in the or the drive Wheels were in the back so you didn’t have a lot of load on that our cars are pretty close to 50/50 um so we do have a lot of Mass on the rear to give it traction and Mass
On load too right Mass down low so you’re not like tipping and sliding and moving all over but the other thing is um you know traction is really just a function of slip like how much is the wheel slipping and on you know snow and
Low me and things like that it can slip a lot but with our motors which can react in like 10 milliseconds we can control that slip you know 100 times a second in a ice vehicle you have to like build torque send it through the drive
System let the shafts wind up can take a quarter second so even if you sense slip you’re not be able to respond very quickly and you can see that I think we’ve posted videos of this before but you can climb up a hill on a rear wheel
Drive in the snow no problem yeah as long as you have the right tires right exactly okay um and I just this one I just kind of answered how does the model 3 Real Drive perform in the snow and rain so I’m going to skip that one and
Go to next one I think we got time for maybe two more um we talk inside you maybe this one’s for eup frons we talked a little bit about the ambient lighting but why did you decide to do that what inspired you to go with it well I think
The thing that we wanted to just really uh improve on was the overall cabin Ambiance and I think you know we had this theme of really the the cockpit kind of surrounding you and we just wanted to enhance that with with lighting which actually you can
Configure on the screen with just a a button so any color whatever your preference is um it could be yours so you can really change the mood of the Interior um as your mood changes if that’s how you roll um but I think it was just you know really about elevating the overall
Experience I think it adds to the premiumness inside all the other materials exactly and I think that combines with what lar said the the textile um you know the improved um air blade system for air delivery the HVAC system which is kind of a magical experience it’s it’s invisible and you
Know we incorporated that with seat venting now too exactly so our HVAC is all like integrated together and it’s all auto the seat fence is really cool for me too I was so heated and cooled seats right in an allnew seat design which is actually more comfortable and
More comfortable in the rear so rear and the ambient light goes all the way back too it’s just a really premium I think a lot of people have commented that I’m going to geek out on the seats for a second a lot of people make ventilated
Seats at Tesla we design our own seats in housee fron has a team back there that stitches up the patterns like nobody else does this but what allowed us to do on the vents was like we actually created a tighter seal and more flow through the foam with mu mesh and
Everything so our seats While most like ventilated seats can barely just keep you at the temperature that you sit down in ours actually Wick temperature away from you when you sit on them you actually feel yourself getting cooler and that’s integrated into the pretty quickly yeah pretty quickly too yeah
Almost twice as fast as most most uh um companies do so that’s a pretty cool feature and and I really like this integrated with the HVAC and so like if you’re putting the AC on it knows you want it it cools you down and we’re trying to uh really make it like the
Least amount of input that you could have yeah low low user input equals just better overall experience super cool all right let’s see I think we got time for maybe two more one more um this one’s kind of cool we haven’t even talked about the rear yeah but it says can the
Rear seat passengers use Bluetooth headphones to watch content on the screen once you hop back there and one thing you can you can see in the back back is that we’ve added a 8 in touchcreen for the back so now customers in the rear can control their own
Climate they can watch movies my kids love it because they get to watch movies um or or Netflix or YouTube videos or whatever and you can put the headphones on it works and now they can connect via Bluetooth and they don’t bother me which is great um they can watch all their
Crazy stuff um and so it’s just a great uh overall experience and gives the rear seat a little bit more premium feel a little bit more a and control like uh o over what’s happening in the back yeah it really makes the family Sedan like more of a
Family thing you know one of the things our customers complained about was the second row experience in the model 3 and like we wanted to make it better beyond that we also changed the seats to be more comfortable increase the incline so you feel a little bit more relaxed add a
Little more bolstering on the bottom to support the hips it’s like you just all the little things all those little things but they still fold flat and so you can still load a bunch of stuff through the rear trunk um and and get you know a really functional vehicle as
Well it’s a lot of space it’s a ton of space I love this car I mean it’s our second chance at it but I think we did it a lot better all right um well I think this last one we may be already talked about can you highlight some of
The updated features in the interior we’ve been talking about that for a little bit um I guess one thing I’ll add you know we talked about the the cabin quietness but we actually added some ceiling in the doors um increased our secondary seal stiffness change these buckets and everything so that the
Ceiling is actually much better at high speed um Germany actually talked about that from time to time yeah again I think you really will we we we can talk about it but if you go and do a test drive in this car you’ll you’ll notice how quiet it is doesn’t feel like any
Other car at this price point for sure I mean like I’ve been in the car industry for a long time now over 20 20 some years and at this price point like there’s not a better car out there and with the tax credits and stuff it gets
Really low you know leaste stuff it’s really really a great car to buy or now we’re starting to sound like sales I mean I think yeah yeah exactly but you know I think what we did was we created a really beautiful um car that is just packed with just
Amazing engineering Feats that just makes an overall great Driving Experience great ownership experience I mean and all these things just come with it it’s not like you’re buying packages on packages you don’t buy the tech package or the audio package you get the sound system it comes with it so I mean
Go out there test drive one you know um it’s worth checking it out this this car in our Ultra red we also have another new color called stealth gray and then um we have you know different color Interiors as well so come check it out I
Think it’s worth a drive um I’m pretty sure you’ll be blown away yeah I mean this last question we’ve been answering the whole time but we’re guys are telling us we’re almost out of time so we’re going to sign off but we really appreciate everyone we’ll try and do
This more often have a fun time talking to FR hope you learned a little bit about it I did every time I talk to you I learn something new thanks everyone have a great day thanks
Tesla Chief Designer and our VP of Vehicle Engineering (Franz & Lars) answer community questions live about what makes the new Model 3 even better.
Model 3 – https://www.tesla.com/model3
Chapters:
0:00 – Introduction
0:40 – Favorite upgrades to Model 3
2:23 – Exterior aerodynamics
6:27 – Exterior design changes
7:47 – Top design priorities
9:16 – Active safety features
10:10 – Battery structure
11:41 – Safety platform architecture
14:28 – Affordability is Tesla’s mission
14:57 – Battery details
16:56 – Battery longevity
17:50 – Range enhancements
19:23 – Redesigned interior
21:09 – There’s more than meets the eye
22:14 – Tesla RWD in snow
23:32 – Interior ambient lighting
25:47 – 2nd row display entertainment
27:09 – Extra interior enhancements
27:30 – Final thoughts
