From $32 billion to criminal investigations: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire vanished overnight
Samuel Bankman-Fried’s poster in downtown San Francisco.
MacKenzie Sigalos | CNBC
The Kimchi Swap put Sam Bankman-Fried on the map.
The year was 2017, and the ex-Jane Street Capital quant trader noticed something funny when he looked at the page on CoinMarketCap.com listing the price of bitcoin on exchanges around the world. Today, that price is pretty much uniform across the exchanges, but back then, Bankman-Fried previously told CNBC that he would sometimes see a 60% difference in the value of the coin. His immediate instinct, he says, was to get in on the arbitrage trade — buying bitcoin on one exchange, selling it back on another exchange, and then earning a profit equivalent to the price spread.
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“That’s the lowest hanging fruit,” Bankman-Fried said in September.
The arbitrage opportunity was especially compelling in South Korea, where the exchange-listed price of bitcoin was significantly more than in other countries. It was dubbed the Kimchi Premium – a reference to the traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented cabbage.
After a month of personally dabbling in the market, Bankman-Fried launched his own trading house, Alameda Research (named after his hometown of Alameda, California, near San Francisco), to scale the opportunity and work on it full-time. Bankman-Fried said in an interview in September that the firm sometimes made as much as a million dollars a day.
Part of why SBF, as he’s also called, earned street cred for carrying out a relatively straightforward trading strategy had to do with the fact that it wasn’t the easiest thing to execute on crypto rails five years ago. Bitcoin arbitrage involved setting up connections to each one of the trading platforms, as well as building out other complicated infrastructure to abstract away a lot of the operational aspects of making the trade. Bankman-Fried’s Alameda became very good at that and the money rolled in.
From there, the SBF empire ballooned.
Alameda’s success spurred the launch of crypto exchange FTX in the spring of 2019. FTX’s success begat a $2 billion venture fund that seeded other crypto firms. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth grew to over $16 billion at its peak in March.
Bankman-Fried was suddenly the poster boy for crypto everywhere, and the FTX logo adorned everything from Formula 1 race cars to a Miami basketball arena. The 30-year-old went on an endless press tour, bragged about having a balance sheet that could one day buy Goldman Sachs, and became a fixture in Washington, where he was one of the Democratic party’s top donors, promising to sink $1 billion into U.S. political races (before later backtracking).
It was all a mirage.
As crypto prices tanked this year, Bankman-Fried bragged that he and his enterprise were immune. But in fact, the sector-wide wipeout hit his operation quite hard. Alameda borrowed money to invest in failing digital asset firms this spring and summer to keep the industry afloat, then reportedly siphoned off FTX customers’ deposits to stave off margin calls and meet immediate debt obligations. A Twitter fight with the CEO of rival exchange Binance pulled the mask off the scheme.
Alameda, FTX and a host of subsidiaries Bankman-Fried founded have filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware. He’s stepped down from his leadership roles and lost 94% of his personal wealth in a single day. It is unclear exactly where he is now, as his $40 million Bahamas penthouse is reportedly up for sale. The photos of his face plastered across FTX advertisements throughout downtown San Francisco serve as an unwelcome reminder of his rotting empire.
It was a steep fall from hero to villain. But there were a lot of signs.
Bankman-Fried told CNBC in September that one of his fundamental principles when it comes to playing the markets is working with incomplete information.
“When you can sort of start to quantify and map out what’s going on, but you know there are a lot of things you don’t know,” he said. “You know you’re being approximate, but you have to try to figure out what trade to do anyway.”
The following account is based on reporting from CNBC, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Piecing together bits and pieces from various news sources paints a picture of an investor who over-extended himself, frantically moved to cover his mistakes with questionable and perhaps illegal tactics, and surrounded himself with a tight cabal of advisors who could not or would not curb his worst impulses.
What went wrong in the last year
At some point in the last two years, according to reports, Alameda began borrowing money for various purposes, including to make venture investments.
Six months ago, a wave of titans in the crypto sector folded as depressed token prices sucked liquidity out of the market. First came the spectacular failure of a popular U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin project — the stablecoin known as terraUSD (or UST, for short) and its sister token luna — wiping out $60 billion. That collapse helped to bring down Three Arrows Capital, or 3AC, which was one of the industry’s most respected crypto hedge funds. Crypto brokers and lenders like Voyager Digital and Celsius had significant exposure to 3AC, so they fell right along with it in quick succession.
The big problem was that everyone was borrowing from one another, which only works when the price of all those crypto coins keeps going up. By June, bitcoin and ether had both tumbled by more than half for the year.
“Leverage is the source of every implosion in financial institutions, both traditional and crypto,” said Hart Lambur, a former Goldman Sachs government bond trader who provided liquidity in U.S. Treasuries for central banks, money managers and hedge funds.
“Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Long-Term Capital, Three Arrows Capital and now FTX all blew up due to bad leverage that got sniffed out and exploited by the market,” continued Lambur, who now works in decentralized finance.
As the dominoes fell, SBF jumped into the mix in June to try to bail out some of the failing crypto firms before it was too late, extending hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. In some cases, he made moves to try to buy these companies at fire-sale prices.
Amid the wave of bankruptcies, some of Alameda’s lenders asked for their money back. But Alameda didn’t have it, because it was no longer liquid. Bankman-Fried’s trading firm had parked the borrowed money in venture investments, a decision he told the Times was “probably not really worth it.”
To meet its debt obligations, FTX borrowed from customer deposits in FTX to quietly bail out Alameda, the Journal and the Times reported. The borrowing was in the billions. Bankman-Fried admitted the move in his interview with the Times, saying that Alameda had a large “margin position” on FTX, but he declined to disclose the exact amount.
“It was substantially larger than I had thought it was,” Bankman-Fried told the Times. “And in fact the downside risk was very significant.”
Reuters and the Journal both reported that the lifeline was around $10 billion, and Reuters reports that $1 billion to $2 billion of that emergency financing is now missing. Tapping customer funds without permission was a violation of FTX’s own terms and conditions. On Wall Street, it would be a clear violation of U.S. securities laws.
The two firms – one of the world’s biggest crypto brokers and one of the world’s biggest crypto buyers – were supposed to be separated by a firewall. But they were, in fact, quite cozy, at one point extending to a romantic relationship between Bankman-Fried and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, he acknowledged to the Times.
“FTX and Alameda had an extremely problematic relationship,” Castle Island Venture’s Nic Carter told CNBC. “Bankman-Fried operated both an exchange and a prop shop, which is super unorthodox and just not really allowed in actually regulated capital markets.”
The borrowing and lending scheme between the two firms was more convoluted than just using customer funds to make up for bad trading bets. FTX tried to paper over the hole by denoting assets in two crypto tokens that were essentially made up – FTT, a token created by FTX, and Serum, which was a token created and promoted by FTX and Alameda, according to financial filings reported by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine.
Firms make up crypto tokens all the time – indeed, it’s a big part of how the crypto boom of the last two years was financed – and they usually offer some sort of benefit to users, although their real value to most traders is simple speculation, that is, the hope that the price will rise. Owners of FTT were promised lower trading costs on FTX and the ability to earn interest and rewards like waived blockchain fees. While investors can profit when FTT and other coins increase in value, they’re largely unregulated and are particularly susceptible to market downturns.
These tokens were essentially proxies for what people believed Bankman-Fried’s exchange to be worth, since it controlled the vast majority of them. Investor confidence in FTX was reflected in the price of FTT.
The key point here is that FTX was reportedly siphoning off customer assets as collateral for loans, and then covering it with a token it made up and printed at will, drip-feeding only a fraction of its supply into the open market. The financial acrobatics between the two firms somewhat resembles the moves that sunk energy firm Enron almost two decades ago – in that case, Enron essentially hid losses by transferring underperforming assets to off-balance sheet subsidiaries, then created complicated financial instruments to obscure the moves.
As all this was happening, Bankman-Fried continued his press tour, lionized as one of the great young tech entrepreneurs of the age. It only began to unravel once Bankman-Fried got into a public spat with Binance, a rival exchange.
What went wrong in the last two weeks
The relationship between Binance and Bankman-Fried goes back almost to the beginning of his time in the industry. In 2019, Binance announced a strategic investment in FTX and said that as part of the deal it had taken “a long-term position in the FTX Token (FTT) to help enable sustainable growth of the FTX ecosystem.”
Flash forward a couple years to the summer of 2022. Bankman-Fried was pressing regulators to look into Binance and criticizing the exchange in public. It’s unclear exactly why – it could have been based on legitimate suspicions. Or it may simply have been because Binance was a major competitor to FTX, both as an exchange and as a potential buyer of other distressed crypto companies.
Whatever the reason, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, soon saw his chance to strike.
On Nov. 2, CoinDesk reported a leaked balance sheet showing that a significant amount of Alameda’s assets were held in FTX’s illiquid FTT token. It raised questions both about the trading firm’s solvency, as well as FTX’s financials.
Zhao took to Twitter on Sunday, Nov. 6, saying that Binance had about $2.1 billion worth of FTT and BUSD, its own stablecoin.
Then he dropped the bomb:
“Due to recent revelations that have came to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books,” he said.
Investors raced to pull money out of FTX. On Nov. 6, according to Bankman-Fried, the exchange had roughly $5 billion of withdrawals, “the largest by a huge margin.” On an average day, net inflows had been in the tens of millions of dollars.
The speed of the withdrawals underscores how the largely unregulated crypto market is often operating in an information vacuum, meaning that traders react fast when new facts come to light.
“Crypto players are reacting quicker to news and rumor, which in turn builds up a liquidity crisis much faster than one would have seen in traditional finance,” said Fabian Astic, head of decentralized finance and digital assets for Moody’s Investors Service.
“The opacity of the market operations often leads to panic reactions that, in turn, spark a liquidity crunch. The developments with Celsius, Three Arrows, Voyager, and FTX show how easy it is for crypto investors to lose confidence, prompting them to withdraw large sums and causing a near-death crisis for these firms,” continued Astic.
As the FTT token plunged in value in tandem with the mass withdrawals, SBF quietly sought investors to cover the multibillion-dollar hole from the money that had been withdrawn by Alameda. That value may have been as high as $10 billion, according to multiple reports. They all declined, and in a move of desperation, SBF turned to CZ.
In a public tweet on Nov. 8, CZ said Binance agreed to buy the company, though the deal had a key term: non-binding. The sudden public revelation that FTX was in need of a bailout caused FTT’s value to plunge off a cliff.
The next day, CZ claimed he did due diligence and didn’t like what he saw, essentially sealing FTX’s demise. Bankman-Fried speculated to the Times that CZ never intended to buy it in the first place.
On Friday, Nov. 11, FTX and Alameda both filed for bankruptcy. FTX, which was valued at $32 billion in a financing round earlier this year, has frozen trading and customer assets and is seeking to discharge its creditors in bankruptcy court. Bankman-Fried is no longer the boss at either firm.
A new bankruptcy filing posted on Tuesday shows that FTX may have more than one million creditors. It plans to file a list of the 50 largest ones this week.
Lawyers for the exchange wrote that FTX has been in contact with “dozens” of regulators in the U.S. and overseas in the last 72 hours, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SEC and Department of Justice are reportedly investigating FTX for civil and criminal violations of securities laws. Financial regulators in the Bahamas are also reportedly looking at the possibility of criminal misconduct.
CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill December 8, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
Binance is now poised to claim absolute dominance over the industry.
“Binance clearly comes out stronger from all of this,” said William Quigley, co-founder of the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin tether. “CZ claims Binance has no debt, and doesn’t use its BNB token as collateral. Both of those are good practices in the highly volatile crypto markets.”
Quigley added that more institutional trading and custody will likely shift to Binance.
“The cryptocurrency industry’s entire ethos is founded on disintermediation and decentralization, so Binance’s ever-growing dominance raises reasonable fears over how further centralization will affect the average trader,” said Clara Medalie, director of research at data firm Kaiko.
“FTX’s collapse benefits no one, not even Binance, which will now face growing questions over its monopoly of market activity,” Medalie told CNBC, speculating that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of market participants affected by the fall of FTX and Alameda.
“Each entity has numerous twisted and over-lapping financial ties to projects throughout the industry that now stand to lose support or go under themselves,” she said.
In the meantime, though, Binance took a bath on the collapse of the FTT token, which CZ says the firm held after Bankman-Fried asked for a bailout.
“Full disclosure,” CZ tweeted last Sunday.
“Binance never shorted FTT. We still have a bag of as we stopped selling FTT after SBF called me. Very expensive call.”
– CNBC’s Ari Levy, Kate Rooney and Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
The world’s third-largest auto group is going all-in to lead the shift to electrification. With plans to pour a record over $16.6 billion into advancing new tech and EVs in South Korea, Hyundai is laying the groundwork for the future. Can the new investment help it surpass Volkswagen or Toyota in global sales?
Hyundai Motor Group, including Kia, announced on Thursday that it will “make the largest annual investment in its history in Korea this year.”
In 2025, Hyundai plans to invest KRW 24.3 trillion, or over $16.6 billion, in its home market. This is up 19% from the previous record of KRW 20.4 trillion (about $14 billion) set in 2024.
Hyundai said the reason behind the record investment “is because it believes that continuous and stable investment is essential to overcome the crisis and secure future growth engines.” A big part of the crisis Hyundai is referring to started last month.
After President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and was later impeached on December 14, South Korea plunged into a political crisis. Korean buyers are hesitant to make big purchases, which has slowed demand.
Hyundai’s global sales slipped nearly 2% in 2024. Although sales outside of Korea were roughly flat, domestic sales were down 7.5%.
To boost growth in 2025, the auto giant is pouring resources to accelerate the development of new tech, EVs, and software.
Hyundai is doubling down on new EVs and tech
Hyundai said its focus this year is “on new business areas such as development of next-generation products, securing key new technologies, and accelerating electrification and SDV.”
The company will invest KRW 11.5 trillion ($7.9 billion) into R&D “to secure key future capabilities such as improving product competitiveness, electrification, SDV, hydrogen products, and development of original technologies.”
Another KRW 12 trillion ($8.2 billion) will be used to ramp up domestic EV production and improve manufacturing. Hyundai plans to continue making large-scale investments to build EV-only facilities in 2025.
Last year, Kia began production at its new Gwangmyeong EVO Plant, where it builds the new EV3. Later this year, Kia will start mass production of its PBV electric vans.
Hyundai will open its dedicated EV plant in Ulsan in the first half of 2026. The company plans to mass produce EVs, starting with an ultra-large electric SUV.
In the US, its most important market, Hyundai just opened its new $7.6 billion EV plant in Georgia. The first vehicle to roll off the assembly line was the upgraded 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5, which now has more range, better style, and a NACS port for charging at Tesla Superchargers.
Hyundai will begin building its first three-row electric SUV, the IONIQ 9, in Georgia in Q1 2025. The larger electric SUV will be available in the US and Korea in the first half of 2025.
With several Hyundai Motor, including Kia and Genesis, EVs now eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit, can Hyundai gain an advantage over the competition?
Hyundai is also the first company to sell its vehicles on Amazon in the US. The new 2025 IONIQ 5, IONIQ 6, and Kona Electric can now be purchased directly on Amazon’s website.
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Last month, I had the chance to visit Los Angeles and attend Micromobility America, a yearly industry tradeshow focusing on e-bikes, e-scooters, and other small-format vehicles. To get around the city for a few days, I borrowed a VMAX VX2 Extreme from VMAX’s Los Angeles distribution center and it made all the difference in navigating a city that is notoriously hard to get around.
My regular readers and viewers will know I’m an e-bike first guy, but that I won’t say “no” to any form of micromobility. I’ve ridden almost everything, so you can bet that I count electric scooters in my stable, too, even if it’s predominantly comprised of e-bikes. And I must say that there’s something nice about being able to stash your scooter in the trunk of an Uber or under a train seat when necessary.
While in LA, I was excited to finally get a chance to review a VMAX scooter, since I’ve followed the company’s US expansion with interest over the last year or so. As a Swiss-based company, VMAX first found success in Europe before expanding into the US with larger and more powerful models.
The company let me borrow a VX2 Extreme electric scooter, which is a 25 mph (40 km/h) scooter that is surprisingly powerful. It doesn’t look much bigger than a dirt-cheap GoTrax or similar budget scooter, yet it is much faster and more powerful—to the tune of 1,600W of peak power.
You can see how it rides in my video review below, or keep reading for the whole story.
VMAX VX2 Extreme Video Review
Becoming a scooter guy in LA
LA is notorious for being difficult to navigate, and even if you have a car, that doesn’t mean you’ll be getting anywhere quickly. Depending on who you ask, the public transportation system is either a trainwreck or somewhat decent, though no one will tell you LA has well-developed public transit.
That’s why I knew I wanted to be able to rely as much as possible on my own independent transportation while in the city, and a scooter made sense. With the VMAX’s 25 mph top speed, I could keep up with most city traffic, yet I could still easily stow it to fit in the trunk of a rideshare car or stash it in my hotel room without drawing much notice from the front desk.
My trip started with visiting VMAX’s distribution center in downtown LA, which had me taking a 30-minute walk that was both refreshing and a great reminder of how slow it is to get around a massive metropolitan area on foot alone. Don’t get me wrong – I love walking and I also use jogging as my primary form of exercise. But a pair of shoes just isn’t a very fast or efficient transportation method in a big city.
After getting to tour VMAX’s large warehouse and see how they fulfill customer orders from all over the US (as well as get a look at several different models they offer), the team let me borrow a VX2 Extreme and sent me on my way. My next stop was an event down in Costa Mesa near Irvine, which Google Maps told me would be a 43-mile (69 km) journey from Downtown LA, and which just so happened to be the exact range of the longest range version of the VX2 Extreme scooter (it comes with three battery options of between 28-43 miles of range depending which battery size you choose).
However, those range ratings are rarely at the scooter’s maximum speed and power level, which I intended to be rocking for most of the trip. But Google Maps suggested to me that it would be an easy train ride instead, with just a couple miles of scooting to and from the train station on either end. Awesome!
I scooted on over to the train station and arrived just in time… to miss the train by two minutes. No worries, back home there’s a train every 10 minutes or so. I checked the train schedule and to my horror, the next train wasn’t scheduled for more than two hours from now. Thanks, LA.
I didn’t have that kind of time – I’ve got a micromobility conference to get to! So I had to swallow my pride and order an Uber. Fortunately the scooter folded up and fit easily in the trunk along with my travel backpack and my camera backpack. That’s not something I can normally do on my e-bikes!
Forty-something miles later, I was in Costa Mesa with time to spare, which I spent happily burned by scooting around. It was my first chance to spend more than a couple of rushed minutes riding the scooter more pleasurably to get a real feel for it. The VX2 Extreme doesn’t have suspension but still felt quite good on the city streets, even when hopping the occasional curb or speed bump.
The build is obviously quite robust, without giving me the rickety feeling I get on cheaper quality scooters. And the power is surprisingly potent. When I put the scooter in its highest power setting, known as Beast Mode, I would often accidentally wheelie it while starting, since I tend to keep my rear foot on the board and push off with my front foot. Those wheelies were fun, but I decided to mostly scoot around in one notch below the highest power mode, as that felt more reasonable for everyday riding. But it’s nice to know you’ve got more power than you need, instead of merely maxing it out 100% of the time.
As the winter sun set quickly, it gave me my first chance to check out the lighting and turn signals on the scooter. Those turn signals are actually quite bright during the day, lighting up the handlebar ends up high for better visibility, as well as motorcycle-style turn signals down low on the rear of the scooter. The rear turn signals are flexibly mounted, meaning they can bend and bounce back into position instead of breaking when they inevitably hit something.
The turn signals were weirdly impressive. You can see in the image above how the lower ones light up the road and the upper ones are quite visible by sticking out to the sides on the handlebar ends.
Normally, I deride most e-bike and e-scooter turn signals because they’re typically diminutive and unclear, mostly serving as a flashing light so close to the vehicle’s centerline that they don’t achieve their goal of actually indicating direction. But VMAX has done a great job with these, as they’re both attention-grabbing and clearly indicate that you’re about to turn—which is important when quickly riding around cars at night.
I also found the speed of the scooter to be both a blessing and a curse. I forgot that LA weather isn’t always “Santa Monica in June”, and I was absolutely freezing in my hoodie – the only garment with long sleeves that I had packed.
Flying fast at 25 mph down wide Costa Mesa roads wasn’t helping, with that airstream cooling me even further. I had to decide between going faster to get to dinner sooner at the risk of turning into an icicle along the way or slowing down to cut the windchill. Unfortunately, the battery was so large that I couldn’t use the efficiency argument to encourage me to slow down, so I just continued bombing it down to the Balboa Peninsula at 25 mph, meeting up with friends to offer freezing cold handshakes and high-fives. Dinner was great, but the ride back was even colder. I thought I might go slower climbing the hills on the way back from the coast, but the dang thing zipped up the hills fast enough to keep my fingers feeling like they were encased in ice. But hey, at least the fast speed meant I could shorten the trip as much as possible!
The next day, I scooted to the show in the morning and found that the fairgrounds where it was hosted were closed off at most entrances. I guess they do this to limit how cars can enter (and ensure everyone gets charged to park), but I was an elitist with my own right-sized transportation and not about to let things like traffic control stop me!
Some scooting across the weeds and carrying the 45 lb (21 kg) scooter over a couple barricades later, I was in! I’m not saying you should ride in places you aren’t allowed, but just that there’s an advantage to being able to take creative routes when the vehicle you drive weighs as much as your leg.
I locked up at a bike rack and made it to the show in record time, taking full advantage of the fact that micromobility vehicles often allow you to chart your own path.
That was how I got around for next two days, putting around 30 miles (50 km) on the scooter. I charged it each night at my hotel, but I never used more than 30% of the battery, so I’m not sure I really needed to charge it all.
Ultimately, the VMAX VX2 Extreme scooter proved to be an ideal way to navigate the city. I took it on many rides, both for my morning and evening commute, as well as to meet up with friends and simply scooting around for pleasure. It always offered me more than I needed, both in terms of power and range, and felt comfortable while doing it. The 10″ tubeless pneumatic tires have enough squish to give me some comfort on rougher patches and are large enough diameter to handle all the sidewalk cracks and minor potholes I threw at them.
Basically, I was pretty darn happy with it. Of course you pay more for such a well-built scooter from a Swiss company, to the tune of $899, but it seems quite fair to me. It’s a long range and incredibly powerful scooter that hides in a surprisingly portable package, easy enough for me to toss in a vehicle or carry over a chain barricade. And with the extra features like safety lighting with turn signals, the 1,600W of peak power, the easily readable 4″ color TFT screen, the weather-sealed drum brakes combined with electric motor braking, and the stable folding design, the scooter treated me better than well for my three days riding it around central and southern LA.
VMAX has other even more affordable models starting from around $400, but I’d say the VX2 Extreme is a great Goldilocks option that offers more power and range than most people need in a portable package at a fair price.
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Tesla is about to release a design refresh for Model Y, its most popular model, and it raises an important question: can it reignite Tesla’s growth?
Fortunately, we have a good recent comparison since Tesla refreshed the Model 3 last year.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model so we have to rely on third-party data to track Model 3 sales.
There are varying estimates, but most of them are putting Tesla Model 3 sales between 500,000 and 530,000 units in 2023 prior to the refresh.
In 2024, estimates are putting sales at roughly the same.
Tesla delivery analyst TroyTeslike has data pointing to 520,000 Model 3 deliveries in 2024. The production changeover has certainly affected sales in the first of the year, but it looks like production and deliveries peaked in Q3 as Troy has Model 3 at the same volume of about 149,000 units in Q3 and Q4.
As with all other Tesla models, the peaked delivery volumes were also achieved with record incentives and discounts in Q4.
Can Model Y refresh be different?
Model 3 refresh didn’t help the program that much. It is virtually doing the same delivery volumes it was last year, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the same will happen with Model Y.
A lot of that depends on the refresh itself.
Earlier today, we had our best look at the refresh so far, and it is similar to the Model 3 refresh in the sense that it features new headlights and taillights, although different ones than Model 3, including light bars, as well as a more aggressive front-end.
The level of exterior changes is similar to the Model 3 refresh in terms that it is significant but not massively different either.
Tesla didn’t go into too many details about “under the hood” changes with the Model 3 refresh, but it did feature an improved suspension, a quieter cabin, and a slight increase in efficiency.
We can expect similar improvements to the Model Y.
There were some changes that people saw as negative, with the main one being the new steering wheel. Model Y is still the only vehicle in Tesla’s lineup that doesn’t have a stalkless steering wheel with force touch turn signals and a gear selector on the center display.
Considering all other Tesla vehicles went that way, this is expected to change with the Model Y refresh. Personally, I didn’t have any problem adapting to the new turn signals when driving the new Model 3 and Cybertruck, but I do admit that the gear selector is annoying.
I know many Tesla fans refused to get a Tesla vehicle with steering wheel stalks.
Electrek’s Take
Based on the information we have right now, I would expect the Model Y refresh to have a similar impact as the Model 3 refresh, but we could get a surprise.
Obviously, if there were significant improvements to the range, that would make a big difference, but I would only expect small incremental improvements at best.
A bigger surprise would be Tesla bringing something like the steer-by-wire and a 48-volt architecture from Cybertruck to Model Y. You have to try it to appreciate it, but the steer-by-wire on Cybertruck is super fun.
The design update looks good, but I thought the Model 3 redesign was even sharper, and it didn’t have much of an impact. I think new features or more efficiency/range would be the most significant difference makers.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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