Elon Musk just made a surprising announcement about Tesla’s next car

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a surprise announcement during Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call.

Musk said Tesla will no longer use an entirely different vehicle architecture to build the Model Y, the compact SUV due to hit the market by 2020. Tesla will instead borrow from the Model 3’s platform.

That should make Model Y production a lot easier in the future.

“Upon the council of my executive team to reel me back from the cliffs of insanity, the Model Y will, in fact, be using substantial carry over from Model 3 in order to bring it to market faster,” Musk said.

Musk said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call that Tesla will use a different vehicle platform from the Model 3 to build the Model Y.

That could have been a potentially disastrous move.

Major automakers use a single “vehicle architecture” to assemble a family of cars, allowing for more efficient and less costly production. General Motors, for example, uses the same architecture for Chevys, Buicks, GMCs, and Cadillacs.

Before the first-quarter earnings call, many assumed Tesla would rely on the Model 3’s vehicle platform to build future Tesla vehicles, the first being the Model Y.

Considering Tesla’s past production challenges, it follows suits that Tesla would want to streamline things as much as possible.

Musk made it very clear on the earnings call that his executive team advised him to change course.

“I have to thank my executive team from stopping me from being a fool,” Musk said. “Model Y will have relatively low technical and production risk as a result.”