Tesla's third car, after the Model S sedan and the soon-to-arrive Model X SUV, is slated to hit in 2017 and be a mass-market electric vehicle priced around $35,000.

(Yes, you could count the Roadster, but that wasn't fully an in-house Tesla product.)

We haven't yet seen any designs for the Model 3, which is expected to push Tesla over the top and enable the company to make good on the growth projections suggested by its $32-billion market cap.

We got a little more insight on Monday about that the Model 3 will actually be.

Car news magazine reports that at a conference in Washington, "Tesla Motors Chief Technical Officer JB Straubel revealed that the electric automaker wants the Model 3 to be a family of vehicles, with both sedan and crossover variants."

So there you have it. The Model 3 won't be just one car — it will be two!

This makes a lot of sense, given that a few years ago, it would have made sense to sell the Model 3 as a small sedan — but the world has changed and now consumers are demanding small crossovers, a segment that has been booming. Tesla is just making sure that it doesn't paint itself into any future corners with what will be its most important vehicle.

Tesla shares closed up slightly on Monday, at $250.