Yesterday, Tesla unveiled its new Model 3, the biggest revision to its second-most popular car since its debut in 2017. If you missed the news, I wouldn’t blame you. Tesla “announced” the new Model 3 with silent updates to its website in Europe.
Tesla’s chaotic rollout of the new Model 3 gave me a new appreciation for Apple’s approach – particularly in the leadup to the iPhone 15 event happening just two weeks.
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Not every new product launch needs to have a dedicated launch event, but there are enough changes with the new Model 3 to have warranted one in this situation. The new Model 3 offers a number of key improvements over its predecessor: a visual refresh on the exterior and interior, improved efficiency for increased range, ventilated seats, and a whole bunch more.
Tesla’s launch strategy seemingly consisted of late-night updates to its websites in Europe, a select number of hands-on opportunities for the press, and nothing more. There was no official press release and very little communication from Tesla itself. (Tesla did eventually send out promo emails to customers in Europe.)
Just to emphasize this one more time: Tesla debuted its biggest update to one of its most popular cars at 10 p.m. on a random Thursday. Imagine if Apple did that for the iPhone. They also made significant price cuts to the Model S and Model X via silent updates to its website. Oh, and they dropped the price of Full-Self Driving.
You wouldn’t know any of that unless you specifically sought out the information. Thankfully, our friends over at Electrek were on the case pretty quickly. As I was following along with the “launch,” I found myself confused and unable to track down the answers to a ton of questions I had. I was using Google Translate to try and make sense of the details on Tesla’s Germany website.
Case in point: I sent my colleague Michael Potuck a text this morning asking him what he thought of the new Model 3. His response: “Oh, I missed that!”
One key thing that I imagine contributed to this scattershot approach is that the new Model 3 isn’t available in the United States – and there’s still no word on when that will change. But that also further highlights the confusing launch strategy: There are a ton of unanswered questions. Does Tesla even know the answer to that question?
I understand that new car announcements are different than new smartphone announcements. Tesla has a lot of existing Model 3 inventory it needs to sell through, and it can’t completely tank those sales by unveiling something new. Production of a new car is also significantly harder to ramp up than a smartphone (not that that’s stopped Tesla in the past, though).
Top comment by Les Inanchy
I would hope that people can put away their Apple hate, just as I would recommend people put away their Tesla hate as an apple product owner for almost 40 years and a Tesla owner since 2017, I’ve seen the presentations from both companies. Apples presentations are well written, and practiced. I thought TESLA could offer so much more if they spent more time providing information about new products instead of seeing Elon dance around on the stage. I think TESLA is missing so many opportunities to get important information about their product out to the public.
But even the rest of the auto industry is significantly better at launching new cars than Tesla. And these are legacy automakers that are notoriously stuck in the past in pretty much every regard.
Tesla famously doesn’t have a PR department, a strategy that Elon Musk also implemented at Twitter when he took over the social network last October. I can’t help but think a PR department – or at least someone working on PR – would significantly improve Tesla’s new product launch strategy.
All of this is to say: I have a newfound appreciation for Apple’s meticulous approach to product announcements. Even when they don’t hold a dedicated event, announcements are made with clear press releases published on its website, detailed product pages, and full tech specs. Apple’s far from perfect, but this is one area in which it’s revolutionized the industry.
Side note: A lot of smartphone makers are almost as bad as Tesla in this regard. Samsung’s website, for instance, is a hodgepodge of confusing products, and it’s not explicitly clear which phone is the newest.
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