Tesla has now officially increased the price of its Full Self-Driving package to $10,000 in the US.
That’s quite a price for a model that most closely resembles a Kickstarter campaign.
In a Kickstarter campaign, companies ask customers to purchase a product before it is fully completed or in production.
They basically ask customers to help pay for the development of the product and in exchange, they will be the first to get it and at a lower cost than the anticipated retail price if it ever makes it to production.
That’s fairly close to what Tesla is doing with its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package.
Tesla is selling the software package to customers with the promise of later delivering a system that will fully able to drive the vehicle by itself, and it claims that it will keep increasing the price in the future.
Now, Tesla has already delivered some features under the package, but it wasn’t always the case. Most of the features already delivered used to be under Tesla’s previous Enhanced Autopilot package, but Tesla later moved them to the FSD package.
In order to boost the take rate for the package, Tesla has been announcing price increases and encourage buyers to take advantage of lower prices.
In July, the price of increased by $1,000 to $8,000, and last week, CEO Elon Musk announced a price increase of $2,000 that was supposed to come Monday.
He later delayed it a bit, but it has now come into effect, according to Tesla’s website:
For now, the price increase for the FSD package is only in the US.
Musk has linked the price increase to the limited release of what he has been calling “Full Self-Driving Beta” to some owners in the US.
Electrek’s Take
It’s certainly a strange Kickstarter-like approach for such an important product, but it looks like it is working.
Even Electrek’s Seth Weintraub who has been skeptical about Tesla’s ability to deliver a truly self-driving system pulled the trigger this week — just in case Tesla actually delivers the system and he can avoid the price increase.
Personally, I fell for Tesla’s “self-driving kickstarter” almost two years ago, and I am still hopeful that Tesla will deliver a full self-driving system in roughly two years.
However, I don’t like the most recent price increase. Musk previously said that the price increases would be linked to new features and capabilities being released under the package, and I don’t think this limited beta release should count as that.
I like what we are seeing from the beta so far, but I feel like Tesla should have waited until the more polished wider release, which is supposed to come in December.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
