Tesla has made a major change to their Full Self-Driving price overnight. The monthly cost for their software upgrade in the US and Canada has been slashed to US$99 and CAD$99 respectively, a significant change that has the potential to shake up the way we think about autonomous driving technology.
Recently Tesla offered a 1-month free trial to Tesla owners in the US and Canada, and on the back end of that month, is clearly attempting to retain a larger number of customers with a new, lower price for the subscription.
An outright purchase of Tesla’s FSD suite costs a significant US$12,000, which will secure a total cost for the software, but the new lower monthly subscription price means you’d need to subscribe for 121 months, or 10 years to be in front.
Given most owners don’t hold their cars for anywhere near that length of time, it’s likely this change will reduce the outright purchases of the software, but at a lower price point, open a much larger potential market.
Tesla hasn’t shared the most recent numbers of FSD take rates. We can expect with such a dramatic change (a 50% reduction), that number will soar. With more than 2 Million FSD-capable cars on the road, and the V12 software showing impressive results, it’s possible we see the number of FSD customers expand from the last publicly shared figure of 400,000 beta testers, to double or triple that figure.
The advantage of a subscription for the customer is the flexibility in month-to-month flexibility. The downside of this is that you will be exposed to any future price changes in the subscription pricing.
The Australian Perspective
While the price drop currently applies to the US and Canadian markets, it raises an important question: could we see a similar move in Australia? As FSD (Supervised) reaches maturity in US and Canada, we should expect to see it expanded internationally, and hopefully Australia is near the top of that list.
Australia’s outright purchase price for FSD is A$10,100, cheap compared to the US$12,000 price tag, the equivalent of A$18,500.
If Tesla were to roll out a similarly priced FSD subscription here, it’s likely we’ll see a higher than A$99 per month price tag, particularly given you’ll need to add 10% GST to that figure and it’ll be up to Tesla if they eat the exchange rate difference or not.
One thing is for sure; the future of autonomous driving just got a whole lot more interesting.
Image courtesy of Black Tesla.
Surely Tesla will need to retrain FSD for the different signage, road rules and RHD in Australia. I wonder how much manual work this will take and how much Tesla has automated the learning process.
It’s hard to find exact numbers, but I believe there’s about 100,000 Telsas registered in Australia. In USA, there’s about 2 million Teslas sold since 2018/HW3. And judging by the FSD price cuts they need all the data they can get. Australia might be in trouble if this is the case.