We may have reached a tipping point.
After a frenzied week watching orders for its Model 3 soar, Tesla declared Thursday that electric cars have gone mainstream.
The electric car manufacturer has received more than 325,000 pre-orders for its first affordably priced sedan. At an average cost of $42,000 apiece after various options are priced in, that comes to nearly $14 billion in sales.
Tesla claimed that eye-popping total makes this "the single biggest one-week launch of any product ever."
"Most importantly," the company added, "we are all taking a huge step towards a better future by accelerating the transition to sustainable transportation."
"We want to thank everyone who has shown their faith in Tesla and the mission of electric vehicles. We would write more, but we need to get back to increasing our Model 3 production plans!"
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had offered a similar thought on Twitter last Friday, just after the Model 3 was released, when orders stood at around 200,000.
Definitely going to need to rethink production planning...
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016
For perspective on just how much of a production increase that may be, Autoblog notes that Tesla delivered a total of just 50,000 vehicles in 2015.
“The pent-up demand is something that surprised me," DBL Partners Managing Director Nancy Pfund, whose venture capital firm invested in Tesla a decade ago, told The Huffington Post on Monday. "I knew it was big, but I had no idea how much of a market we were tapping into with the Model 3.”
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