Reports from China in February this year highlighted that Tesla was aiming to bring the indicator stalk back into the refreshed Model 3 sedan in the latter parts of 2025.
Then in August, the company introduced the feature to include the indicator stalk in the Chinese market, as is found on the current generation Model Y.
Now, Tesla appears to be offering it in Australia, with a price tag of $850 to owners of the Model 3 sedan which came without the stalk. This was shared by EV enthusiast and YouTuber, Zappedau on X.
Tesla labels this as “Model 3 Turn Signal Stalk Retrofit” on its online store in Australia and states it as “Out of Stock”, hinting that it’ll be available soon.
It’s described on Tesla’s website as: “Retrofit your Model 3 steering wheel with a traditional turn signal stalk.”
This retrofit will be offered for cars manufactured in 2024 and 2025. This means that it could be available to over 22,000 vehicles sold since the beginning of 2024.
Tesla was one of the first brands to remove many physical buttons from its cars and with the launch of the refreshed Model 3 back in the second half of 2023.
At that time, some believed that it went too far when Tesla decided to remove indicator stalks from the steering wheel as well.
Then in early 2025, Tesla unveiled the refreshed Model Y where it did keep an indicator stalk, even though many thought that the stalk was gone from future mainstream Tesla vehicles.
This feedback was also noted by Tesla’s engineering team. In that interview with Jay Leno, Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering, Lars Moravy shared why Tesla bought the stalk back: “We always say at Tesla, if you aren’t deleting so much that you have to put something back, you haven’t deleted enough. Well, maybe we deleted too much.”
For the over 22,000 current generation Model 3 in Australia, the indicators are operated by buttons on the steering wheel. This for many owners of the vehicle, has been a preference due to the stalk-less design offering a less cluttered steering wheel.
Some owners have also reported that it can be difficult to cancel the indicator signal if leaving roundabouts but in our experience, it doesn’t take long to get used to the indicators with that setup.
With retrofit around the corner, it would be interesting to see how many owners fork out the $850 or decide to stick to the current less-cluttered setup.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.
