Rumor: Tesla Model 3 Standard Interior Options Leaked

February 18th, 2019 by Kyle Field

Trevor over at the Tesla Model 3 Owners Club cut loose with an inside scoop on what the Standard Range Model 3 with the non-premium interior might look like.

For starters, the standard interior will not have the premium sound system. This alone used to be a $3,000 upgrade on the Model S/X, so that represents a large chunk of the $5,000 price tag of the Premium interior upgrade package.

Building on that, Trevor believes that the lower cost interior will do away with the faux leather and swap in some cloth (aka textile) fabric. Personally, I would have preferred cloth seats, but many folks out there do like the faux leather interior option.

Moving on down the line, the glass roof is still a bit of a mystery. The glass roof was one of the big features I was personally excited about with the premium interior and Tesla’s plans to do away with it are a bit murky at present. The rumor mill says that Tesla plans to keep the glass roof and will simply slap a layer of an opaque film to the underside of the glass, followed by a headliner.

That sounds like a solution that adds expense, rather than lowering costs, so the only logical conclusion is that it must be a different type of glass that saves them money compared to the UV/IR-blocking glass that comes with the glass roof. The rear pane of glass does pose a challenge, as it spans the distance from just behind the driver all the way back to the trunk lid.

I’ll give this rumor a 50% chance of being accurate. It seems likely that they could have a hybrid solution for the rear pane of glass with some sort of opaque film, while the front pane of glass yields to a traditional metal roof panel. We’ll see.

In the center console, the phone dock will reportedly go away and Trevor notes that the covers might go away, which could mean that the car reverts back to a very low tray. This would be in line with what the original Tesla Model S came with but was something that Tesla moved away from fairly early on.

Aftermarket companies like EV Annex and the like quickly came in to fill the gap with their own versions of the center console to meet the needs of customers. Actually, EV Annex was formed after Roger Pressman created that console for his own early Model S and then discovered a lot of demand from other owners for the same.

The rear of the console will lose the USB charging ports, which were indicated very early on as part of the premium offering.

Fully adjustable power seats give way to power lift seats that use a traditional manual adjustment for the forward and backward movement. To cut costs, the rear seats will lose their ability to keep your posterior toasty as Tesla will reportedly remove the rear seat heaters.

The standard interior package is also rumored to do away with the puddle lights in the doors that light up the ground when you open the door, and will also ditch the auto-folding mirrors. That will transform the auto-folding robot mirrors to a more standard power window setup, which is still pretty nice.

We still don’t know if the standard interior will be available in the higher-end builds of the car, but it stands to reason that Tesla would only offer the standard interior on the lower trims of the vehicle as a way of luring more buyers in to trade up to a more expensive configuration.











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