FSD improving your reservation position.

[Tinker71]

I have a theory that adding/having FSD will improve your place in line. Think about it. Another $7/8 k revenue per vehicle with out adding significant cost would make the shareholders happy. My understanding this that the hardware is installed on all vehicles and it is a software switch to activate. I ordered a dual motor in late July with the full self driving add. Personally I am neutral on the tech, call me a control freak but I would like to summon my vehicle, help me avoid blind spots and heaven forbid falling asleep at the wheel.

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[CyberMoose]

I wouldn't call you a control freak at all for those reasons, quite the opposite, if you are trusting your car to drive to you, avoid collisions and be able to stop the car safely for you if you fall asleep. A control freak would never use smart summon, probably question if the safety system avoid something and would not want the car driving itself.

Also I think something that would take priority over a full self drive chip would be their transportation logistics. Sure, they could just send the exact same amount of cars to the same locations and give the FSD customers their vehicles first but I don't really see that happening for a couple of reasons. For one, it's kind of ignoring whatever system they would already have in place for delivering their other cars on demand, it wouldn't be hard to switch it, but I just personally don't think that would happen. Second, we don't know how many people will recieve their Cybertruck and immediately pay for FSD on a credit card for points, since that is a common practise as well.

Also if they are just interested in increasing their profits for each quarter to make their shareholders happy, would they just sneak in a bunch of people that started reserving after the price increase in the FSD? if you sneak in 100 people, that's an extra $100,000 that comes out right away. Something that Tesla has done is work very hard to push out vehicles before the end of their fiscal year, every company wants to look good at the end of their year. The different between giving priority to people who are paying more and just working harder to push out vehicles is when you deliver the more expensive cars first, you are taking from the next years, whereas if you push out cars faster and don't give priority, as long as you don't run out of orders to fulfill when the new year starts, you haven't lost anything for that year.

 

[Luke42]

I have a theory that adding/having FSD will improve your place in line. Think about it. Another $7/8 k revenue per vehicle with out adding significant cost would make the shareholders happy. My understanding this that the hardware is installed on all vehicles and it is a software switch to activate. I ordered a dual motor in late July with the full self driving add. Personally I am neutral on the tech, call me a control freak but I would like to summon my vehicle, help me avoid blind spots and heaven forbid falling asleep at the wheel.

There is every business reason for Tesla to sell the most expensive cars first.

This allows them to avoid leaving money on the table by selling the vehicles closer to what the buyer is willing to pay -- rather then selling closer to a middle price that more buyers would agree to.

It makes sense to harvest the money from the most profitable customers first, both because you want to lock in thst higher price and get the money now, and because the people who will pay more may be buying novelty/exclusivity.

It makes sense to sell the most expensive cars first because it lets you pay off the debts you incurred to build the factory faster, and/or it gives you time to figure out how to streamline manufacturing and cut costs so that less expensive (and more popular) units can make more profit, too. This is especially important with the kind of compressed timelines Tesla favors.

I could write pages of MBAish theoretical ramblings on each of the above points. But there's no controversy: a company in Tesla's situation has every incentive encouraging them to sell the most expensive cars first.

Also, that's what they've done with previous models, within the constraints of what they can produce/deliver/support.

 

[EVCanuck]

Just imagine that the price of FSD is 25k when first Cybertrucks are delivered to customers, then Tesla will have the incentive of the quite the opposite. So no, I think Tesla will honor the proper reservation sequence.

 

[CyberMoose]

Just imagine that the price of FSD is 25k when first Cybertrucks are delivered to customers, then Tesla will have the incentive of the quite the opposite. So no, I think Tesla will honor the proper reservation sequence.

I could not possibly see FSD being 25k by late 2021 unless they can somehow manage full Level 3 capabilities on at least highways. Tesla has been slowing increasing the price of FSD while they upgrade it and if their rewrite is as good as Elon claims, which I think would be in the ballpark of level 2 everywhere and navigate on autopilot on city some streets, then I could see them doing a bigger price increase than normal. As for huge price increases, I think they will need a big step like level 3 on highways, level 4 parking and level 4 smart summon.

But it's hard to say how much it'll cost at each major upgrade. I completely believe that FSD should cost as much as a brand new luxury car when it's full Level 5, at least until other FSD systems can match Tesla for price competition because that's when driving as the world knows it will be changed, at least in countries with delevoped traffic systems.