Tesla teases Tuesday event as focus shifts to affordable EVs

(Reuters) -Tesla on Sunday teased an October 7 event, as investors and analysts await a more affordable model to sustain sales momentum, sending shares of the company 2% higher in premarket trading. In a nine-second video posted on social media platform X, the Elon Musk-led automaker showed a vehicle with its headlights illuminated in a dark setting. The company hinted at an event scheduled for Tuesday in a separate video that had "10/7" at the end. Tesla has previously delayed rolling out a lower-cost version of the Model Y in the United States. The company said in June that it had made "first builds" of the vehicle, but would start selling it in the fourth quarter and ramp up output slower than planned. The stripped-down version is designed to be roughly 20% cheaper to produce than the refreshed Model Y and could scale to about 250,000 units a year in the U.S. by 2026, sources told Reuters earlier this year. The teaser follows Tesla’s record quarterly deliveries for the three months ended September, driven by a surge in EV purchases ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 U.S. EV tax credit on September 30. However, analysts expect sales to drop off in the coming months without the incentive. Wall Street expects Tesla's deliveries to jump next year to 1.85 million vehicles, with the cheaper model accounting for 155,610 units in 2026, according to Visible Alpha estimates. Tesla faces challenges from an aging model lineup. The company has not introduced a new mass-market vehicle in years, relying heavily on incremental updates to the Model 3 and Model Y to drive sales. Sales of its last major launch, the Cybertruck, have struggled, with Tesla offering thousands of dollars in discounts for vehicles in inventory in the past few months. A U.S. recall filing in March showed 46,096 Cybertrucks had been built between its introduction in November 2023 and early this year. (Reporting by Mrinmay Dey and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Jamie Freed and Mrigank Dhaniwala)

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