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I’m fascinated by the pre-order hype surrounding Tesla’s latest car, the Model 3.

Model 3 design sketches pic.twitter.com/P5ucOBRUZ7

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2016

With a little help from Skitch, let’s turn this scenario into a math problem.

Throw that image on the screen and ask students:

• How many orders in 24 hours?
• What info would help you figure that out?

Ideally, after making some predictions (and writing them down!) students make a request for average price per vehicle, and you deliver:

 

When they’re ready for the reveal…

Model 3 orders at 180,000 in 24 hours. Selling price w avg option mix prob $42k, so ~$7.5B in a day. Future of electric cars looking bright!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

Sequel #1

Let’s see what else we can do with this…

Definitely going to need to rethink production planning…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016

Now 232k orders

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2016

253k as of 7am this morning

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2016

276k Model 3 orders by end of Sat

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2016

Pre orders began on Thursday, March 31. Tesla promised a numbers update on Wednesday, April 6. How many pre orders do you think will have been placed by then?

• Make a prediction.
• Use math to find a more accurate answer.
• Explain your thinking.

I’ll drop an update here once we know the answer.

Update!

Over 325k cars or ~$14B in preorders in first week. Only 5% ordered max of two, suggesting low levels of speculation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 7, 2016

Sequel #2

Tesla aims to sell 500,000 cars per year by 2020. Consider this comment from CEO Elon Musk:

Based on the information in the comment above:

• Do you think Tesla will meet its 2020 goal?
• What sort of year-over-year percentage growth will this require?
• If you think they’ll miss the mark… by how much?
• If you think they’ll surpass the target… by how much?

Invitation

Drop an answer to one of the questions above in the comments below. Or, share another idea or two for how this Model 3 craze could play out in a math classroom.