Tesla has been promising an affordable mass-market EV for years. First it was a vague , then the , and most recently the . With the exception of the entry level Model 3's, Tesla doesn’t exactly seem eager to follow through on any of these budget-minded promises. Why not?

Back in 2009, the only Tesla car to be found on actual roads was the aptly-named (and, at the time, recently introduced) Roadster. A prototype of the Model S had been revealed, but the final version wouldn’t reach customers for another three years. The Models X, 3, and Y were but a glimmer in the eye of . Tesla was a tiny, niche automaker.

Yet, even in those early days, Elon Musk . In fact, he announced plans for a cheap car: A starting price of $30,000, and a starting year of 2016. , if the tides were rightand Mercury never entered retrograde.

In 2012, Musk and Tesla were about that $30,000 car. It was supposed to launch , alongside the production version of the Model X. 2013 rolled by, and didn’t stop.

, that entry-level sedan had gained a name: . With the announcement, its price point was bumped up to the famed $35,000 MSRP that grabbed so many headlines. Maybe Tesla was just accounting for inflation since that initial 2009 announcement, or maybe the cost of batteries hadn’t come down as far as Musk expected.

Surely, though, after all those years of talking about a budget model, the new car would actually exist at that price point. After the company took in , each with a $1,000 price tag, there’s no way it could turn around and barely offer the car everyone ordered. Right?

Oh.

Tesla’s record with promising budget models is a lot stronger than its record for actually delivering them. So when the company only to say , it’s hard to be disappointed. Rather, it feels more like a reassurance of something we knew all along — Tesla has no interest in selling a cheap car.