Tesla Model Y: Tesla Fans on Twitter Fawn Over Elon Musk's Electric SUV

Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Model Y, his new mass market SUV, in a late night press event at the Tesla Design Studio on Thursday night, alongside the rest of the Tesla oeuvre.

The minute the livestream ended, a pre-order screen popped up and Twitter soon flooded with boasts from successful customers who were able to make their orders, despite the fact that the lowest priced, $39,000 variant isn’t said to ship until some time in the spring 2020, according to the announcement.

Several of the customers seemed a little puzzled, however, by the order complete page, which featured a hedgehog saying “haha yes” beneath the confirmation number (Musk also tweeted the same image yesterday in a teaser, along with the caption “S3XY”).

At least one Tesla customer was undaunted by the two year wait time for the $39,000 variant, who wrote that the time “will fly by.”

As you might expect from a crowd that waited up until around midnight to watch a car unveiling, most of the reactions were pretty effusive, but there were still a few skeptics, mainly about the Model X’s size. Is it really fair to call a car an SUV when it’s so close in size to the sedan-like Model 3? Some reporters took to referring to it as a “Small SUV.”

There was also a fair bit of light ribbing in the build-up to the event, which began “on Elon time” — i.e., about 20 minutes late — and featured a somewhat sentimental rundown of Tesla’s history: “There was a time when electric cars seemed very stupid,” Musk said during the presentation.

But in all fairness, the stakes for the Model Y couldn’t be higher. Musk’s company expects the Model Y to outsell both the Model 3 and the Model X combined. By about this time next year, Musk said at the unveiling, Tesla should have sold its millionth car, about double the 550,000 cars it has sold so far.