According to sources, Tesla is offering a three-month free self-driving (FSD) package as an unprecedented incentive for the end of the quarter.
Over the years, Tesla has come up with several incentives to encourage buyers to take off by the end of a quarter to increase its earnings.
This term is unprecedented.
As we have reported over the past few weeks, Tesla aims to deliver a record number of vehicles this quarter to achieve 500,000 deliveries by 2020 – a long-term goal for the automaker.
To reach the milestone, Tesla must deliver more than 181,000 vehicles this quarter. That is more than 40,000 vehicles above the last quarterly delivery record, which was achieved just last quarter.
The carmaker offered the usual free Supercharging as an advantage to encourage people to deliver, but now we are told that Tesla is offering a new advantage that it has not offered before.
Sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla has authorized staff to offer a three-month free self-driving package (FSD) to people who can receive delivery by the end of the year.
Here are the features that new buyers will have access to for three months:
- Navigate on Autopilot: Automatically drive from the freeway ramp to the exit, including interchanges and slowing down passing cars.
- Auto Lane Change: automatic lane changes while driving on the highway.
- Autopark: both parallel and perpendicular spaces.
- Call: your parked car will find you everywhere in a parking lot. Really.
- Traffic light and stop sign control: auxiliary stop at traffic controlled intersections.
Tesla is selling this package for $ 10,000, with the true value the promise to enable true self-management capability in the future through software updates.
Recently, we reported on Elon Musk who wrote in an email to employees that Tesla sees a big demand, but the automaker needs to quickly increase production to meet expectations.
Last weekend, Musk told employees that Tesla could still reach the milestone of 500,000 cars in 2020, but they will have to ‘do everything’ with just a few days left in the year.
Electrek’s Take
As we reported earlier, some people think at first glance that Tesla is sending mixed messages.
Elon says demand is strong, but now Tesla is adding more incentives to deliver more vehicles.
The key word here is ‘deliver’. Tesla does see strong demand indeed, but is trying to give buyers incentives to deliver their cars by the end of the year.
Unlike other car manufacturers, Tesla owns the entire distribution system, and this has a huge impact on the car manufacturer’s finances, as it cannot recognize the revenue before vehicles are delivered, and has spent the money beforehand to make the vehicles. .
As a result, Tesla is pushing hard every quarter to reduce its inventory and deliver as many vehicles as possible by the end of the quarter.
So, even if Tesla has the orders in place, it is sometimes difficult to set up deliveries to buyers due to availability, trade-in period or whatever other reasons.
These persistent crazy issues at the end of the quarter do not help improve quality, but Tesla hopes it can stabilize things by shortening transit times as soon as it produces production in Europe and the second factory in the US, Tesla Gigafactory Texas, establish.
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