"Elon, forget about fighting in Zuckerberg's house, when are you going to broadcast the FSD V12 beta on X?" Compared with the "about the fight" farce of billionaires, netizens seem to be more concerned about the progress of Tesla FSD landing.
FSD (Full Self-Drive) has become one of the pronoun of autonomous driving, and has been given high hopes to subvert traditional driving habits. At present, FSD is in the Beta stage, and the official scale push will see the release of the V12 version at the end of the year, and this version has not yet fallen to the ground, some people can not wait to transfer the FSD that has been purchased to the next Tesla.
Last week, Tesla implemented the "FSD limited time transfer policy (old owners who have purchased FSD can inherit the FSD function to the new car for free when they buy a new car in the third quarter)", at the same time, Tesla stirred the market with the frequency of three days of price cuts, and even news this week said that the upcoming new Model 3 will be reduced to less than 200,000 yuan.
The intention to maintain FSD holdings and catalyze sales is clear.
Tesla's price-for-volume strategy did work in the first half of the year, but it also brought the side effect of a record low gross margin, it is worth noting that Tesla's sales in July fell 31.4% from the previous month, which is the lowest level this year. Obviously, the support of the above strategy is weakening, and this round of price cuts is undoubtedly a loss of gross profit.
Just as Tesla has planned its business model for the next 4-5 years (including software and hardware integration functions, etc.) in advance when doing corporate strategy, is there another meaning behind stimulating sales?
When the earnings report was released last month, Tesla's money-making logic of "extremely cost-effective hardware + high gross profit software" became clearer.
Musk firmly believes that FSD will bring a 5-10 times increase in Tesla's future valuation and will become the main source of the company's future profits. This week, the new Model3 in order to reduce the price, may cancel all radar, focus on pure visual intelligent driving.
From this point of view, behind the price reduction to stimulate sales, it is very likely to accelerate FSD penetration and gradually align with the future business model.
From the perspective of FSD price trend, it has risen nearly 8 times since 2015, especially one year after the FSD subscription service was launched in 2021, and its price quickly increased by 2 times as the function was upgraded. At present, FSD China pricing 64,000 yuan, Tesla can only sell FSD to obtain a low - and medium-price car profits, indeed in line with its software to make money planning.
However, FSD penetration has not risen as fast as the selling price. As can be seen from a report from Huaxi Securities in June, sales in the North American market have increased by more than 8 times in 7 years, but the FSD penetration rate is still judged to be between 10% and 20% (although there has been a peak during the period, but eventually fell back to this range).
As a direct result, FSD still lacks enough target users. As we all know, Tesla relies on "shadow mode" to collect a large amount of real driving data of production models, and the lack of target users also means that it cannot obtain enough driving data.
According to the FSD service purchase page on Tesla's official website, "the activation and use of FSD features will require billions of miles of mileage demonstration."
As of July, Tesla's FSD has 35 million test miles, and the FSD Beta has been used by more than 400,000 drivers and has driven about 306 million kilometers, both of which are far from the activation requirements.
A major role of sales catalysis is to open the consumer incremental market for FSD, which helps the large-scale accumulation of data to feed the FSD progression.
Previously, Musk said that he would promote complete driverless driving by taxi, generating "almost unlimited" demand, and in order to achieve this goal, sufficient data accumulation and testing in the early stage is the only way.
Given that Musk will see the driverless ChatGPT moment by the end of the year, and the value of self-driving taxis will account for more than two-thirds of Tesla's enterprise value by 2027, FSD deployment is bound to accelerate.