For Elon Musk and Tesla, today is the day. The long-awaited, highly-anticipated, and exhaustively-hyped Tesla Model 3 will finally roll into the garages of a handful of lucky owners and begin shipping to the hundreds of thousands of people who pre-ordered it months ago.
Musk will personally deliver the first Tesla Model 3s in a live event on Friday night at Tesla’s Fremont facility, which has kicked into another gear in the past few months to start producing the company’s affordable electric car en masse. The entire event will be livestreamed on Tesla.com, starting at 11:45 p.m. Eastern, or 8:45 p.m. Pacific. Musk has said the first 30 Model 3s — excluding the first one that’s all his — will go out to paying customers on Friday night. Most of those lucky few will be Tesla employees or board members, who usually slide right to the front of the line, but after that, the cars will start going out to the public.
Musk shared some scenes from preparation for the big event on Instagram on Friday.
The Model 3 has traveled a long road, pardon the expression, to get to this point. Musk announced the car in a similar bombastic ceremony over a year ago.
Musk immediately set an “impossible” goal for the car’s production date, which, despite some massive obstacles and most people’s expectations, he actually hit. The Model 3 began production in July of this year, and for most of the middle of 2017, prototype photos and paparazzi or fan shots of the production model set the internet ablaze several times a week. Now, all of that hype should come together on Friday night. Just pour your favorite beverage and check Tesla.com at around 11:45 tonight (or 8:45 on the west coast) to see it all go down.