Tesla’s Unexpected New Lifestyle Product Costs $350

Tesla’s latest release isn’t a new electric car or a robot — it’s a limited-edition, $350 pickleball paddle called the Tesla Plaid.

Tesla introduced the paddle on Friday, announcing that it had partnered with paddle maker Selkirk on a premium product designed to improve durability and swing speed.

Popular Science notes that a high-end pickleball paddle is usually priced at under $150, making Tesla’s offering expensive by that standard. Despite the high price tag, the paddle sold out in under three hours, a Selkirk spokesperson told Business Insider, and was out of stock at the time of writing. Tesla will release more paddles next week, per the product page on its site.

Related: Tesla CEO Elon Musk Shows Up at All-Hands Meeting to Reassure Employees ‘The Future Is Incredibly Bright’

The paddle is built from carbon fiber with a foam core and is marketed as engineered for high-performance play rather than just a logo slapped onto an existing design. Selkirk’s research and development head, Tom Barnes, described the project as a “true engineering collaboration,” stating in a press release that Tesla’s design team and Selkirk spent over a year exchanging data, tweaking geometry and stress-testing prototypes before finalizing the product.

“This wasn’t simply a branding exercise,” Barnes said in the press release.

Paddle up, humanhttps://t.co/cbVmUlNH19 pic.twitter.com/U01XZJQV18

— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) December 12, 2025

The idea for a Tesla pickleball paddle emerged after Barnes met Tesla engineers at the 2023 USA Pickleball National Championships. Selkirk executives later visited Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory, met Tesla’s global director of product design and pickleball player Javier Verdura and began the design process, per Business Insider.

The pickleball paddle is Tesla’s first attempt at traditional sports equipment, but it isn’t the automaker’s first lifestyle product. Tesla offers home and apparel products, like backpacks for $185, salt and pepper shakers for $65 and an electric quadbike for children for $1,600.

Related: Tesla Approves Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Pay. Here’s What He Has to Do to Get It.

The timing of the pickleball paddle launch reflects the rise of pickleball, a sport blending elements of tennis, badminton and ping-pong. A report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association notes that an estimated 19.8 million Americans played pickleball in 2024, a 45.8% rise from the previous year and a 311% increase since 2021.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also a proponent of the sport. In 2023, he wrote in an X post that pickleball is “probably going to crush tennis. Way more convenient.”

The $350 pickleball paddle is a far cry from the much pricier electric vehicles Tesla sells. At the time of writing, the starting price for a Tesla Model 3 was $36,990, while a Model Y starts at $39,990.

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Tesla’s latest release isn’t a new electric car or a robot — it’s a limited-edition, $350 pickleball paddle called the Tesla Plaid.

Tesla introduced the paddle on Friday, announcing that it had partnered with paddle maker Selkirk on a premium product designed to improve durability and swing speed.