THEY LISTENED

THE NEW TESLA MODEL 3 HIGHLAND FIXES NEARLY EVERYTHING WE HATED ABOUT THE OLD CAR

Tesla doesn’t have a formal communications department, but it’s listening to its customers, to reviewers, to randos on X. The 2024 Model 3 demonstrates how the company paid attention, took the feedback, and went to work.

You can classify the new Model 3, known my its internal Highland code name, as a refresh. The battery and motors are untouched; more surprising, it hasn’t adopted the Model Y’s single-piece structural “gigacastings.” At a mechanical level, it’s mostly the same car.

You’re forgiven for thinking the same of the exterior, but Tesla says everything but the rear doors and rear fenders are new. The new nose is better resolved than before, looking more like a Tesla Roadster and less like Spider-Man’s mask. The foglights are gone, and cooling air flows through a single inlet. Out back, Tesla missed the memo on crab-claw taillights going out of style, but moving them onto the trunklid solves a panel-gap issue.

Despite all prior evidence, Tesla cares about panel gaps, and fixing them wasn’t just about shutting us up. Tighter gaps are better for aerodynamics, so not only does the new Model 3 look like it was built by a company that cares, but it also achieves the second-lowest drag coefficient of any Tesla, at a claimed 0.219, down from 0.225.

Better aero and increases in efficiency from updated software are the source of Tesla’s improved driving range claims. We say “claims” because at the time of publishing, official EPA ratings hadn’t been released. Tesla didn’t provide exact numbers, but we’re told to expect small improvements from the existing EPA-rated 272 miles for the rear-drive