While the hundreds of thousands of people who put down deposits have apparently seen enough, the Tesla Model 3 prototypes unveiled a few weeks ago do not represent 100 percent of what we’ll see on the production car. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said there are still some things left to be revealed.
Many of those things likely pertain to the interior. The Model 3 prototypes had no instrumentation, save for one large landscape screen, which raised a few eyebrows. But what if that screen was just a placeholder for a comprehensive head-up display? Boy Genius Report believes that could be the case, mainly because of one recent Tesla hire.
The addition of Milan Kovac is an indication that Tesla is pursuing sophisticated HUD tech, the report claims. Kovac is the former principal engineer of Skully Systems, which developed a motorcycle helmet with an integrated HUD. Kovac also worked at Softkinetic, the Belgian company that developed gesture-control technology currently used in the BMW 7 Series.
Could a gesture-controlled HUD dashboard be the next piece of the Model 3 puzzle? A dashboard with essentially no physical instrumentation or switches would be an impressive technical achievement for any car, let alone one with a base price of $35,000. Whether this theory turns out to be true or not, we know the interior shown in the Model 3 prototypes is not what customers will get when production starts at the end of 2017.
Recent Elon Musk Twitter chatter indicates the Model 3 interior shown at the end of March isn’t the real one, says Jalopnik. In one tweet, Musk said the setup shown in the prototypes is “not the real steering system,” while in another he promised that the “real steering controls” will be “like a spaceship.” When asked flat out why the Model 3 appears to have display screen instead of a traditional gauge cluster, Musk said it will “make sense after part two” of the Model 3 reveal.
The Model 3 is one of the most anticipated new-car launches in recent memory, and Tesla wants to milk it for all it’s worth. Given Tesla’s past achievements, it’s not inconceivable that the Model 3 will get some kind of radical dashboard design. What’s still more surprising is that around 400,000 people were willing to put down $1,000 deposits having barely seen the car.