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• Tesla has brought back the seven-seater version for the Model Y in the United States.
• The option costs $2,500 and is only available for a single trim of the electric crossover.
• This is not the same car as the Chinese-spec Model Y L, and people didn’t hold back online.

Tesla has reintroduced the seven-seater version of the Model Y crossover in the United States, which is now the cheapest three-row model in the company’s American lineup. That said, it’s not exactly what we–or the internet–were expecting.

In short, this is not the same car as the China-only Model Y L, which has six seats and an additional seven inches of wheelbase compared to the standard model. That car is just three inches shorter than the Model X, and it has a somewhat usable third row, as our man Kevin Williams found out in China last year.

Instead, Tesla decided to simply put an extra pair of seats in the trunk of the regular U.S.-spec Model Y, making said seats unusable if you happen to be older than five. It’s the same move that Tesla made with the pre-facelift Model Y, and that didn’t last very long.

Multiple Tesla fans didn’t hold back and replied to the company’s post on X that announced the launch of the new Model Y version. “Pointless without the bigger Y L wheelbase,” one user said. “No one wants this version; they want the Model Y L. You’re literally wasting your time,” said another person. 

The seven-seat option is now available for $2,500 only in the United States and only if you go for the Premium All-Wheel Drive trim, which starts from $48,990. That brings the total bill to $53,130 after factoring in the destination and order fees. 

This is not the only change that Tesla made to the Model Y stateside, though. The company silently updated its online configurator a couple of hours ago, and it now shows that the electric crossover comes with matte black exterior badging on all trims, whereas previous builds had chrome.

What’s more, all Premium and Performance models now come standard with a black grey headliner instead of a grey one. The Premium version’s front touchscreen is now a 16-inch display, up from the previously available 15.4-inch screen and the same as the Performance, but Tesla’s website says that only the Performance gets a quad-HD resolution. Meanwhile, the Standard trim is still stuck with a 15.4-inch screen and a gray headliner that covers up the panoramic glass roof.

With this update, Tesla applied some of the features found on the Performance trim to the less expensive versions of the Model Y, which is great, but vehicle-to-load (V2L) is still reserved for the $59,000 Performance trim, and even then, it can only output 2.4 kilowatts through an adapter that plugs into the charging port.

V2L is one of the biggest selling points of an EV, allowing owners to export energy from the high-voltage battery to power tools and appliances, but Tesla has been very slow to implement the feature in its cars, despite it still being the industry leader in the U.S.