Because they also need money now, so they started leasing Model 3 and telling lessees that Tesla will be keeping the car after the lease expires.
They get money now and keep the car for use as a robo-taxi.
They get money now and keep the car for use as a robo-taxi.
- They were horribly late in delivering the car (and now claim they are going to have fully autonomous taxis by next year when they couldn't even deliver on a basic car on time)
- They can't make the $35k car they promised without losing money
- They have exhausted the market of people that will pay 50k for an electric car knowing the fuel savings will never make up for the premium so they have excess inventory
- They now are low on cash, high on inventory so they make up this moonshot story to get people to invest in them again. Simply saying they are doing standard leases would be too honest.
The day is going to come soon where the amount of people that believe the hype will dwindle and the debt will pile up even more where there is a liquidity crisis. It is essentially a legal pyramid scheme. I have to hand it to them though being able to convince a good amount of people that their leasing is actually ensuring a future supply of robo taxis is impressive. One day people will laugh at the outrageousness of that.
If Tesla was aiming to be the size of Porsche (not VAG) or Lamborghini it’d be something.
But the same “conversion” rates from young person wanting a dream car to old person affording dream car apply regardless of if it’s an EV or a ICE, because the limiting factor is money.
So “stealing” the kind of volume that Porsche and Lamborghini get from... daydreaming young people, isn’t worth anything in the long run if you’re talking about keeping up Tesla’s 40B dollar market cap
Reminds me a tiny tiny bit about rpis. They were said to be a little smaller and a little cheaper. But truth is, you have a lot more chance getting a rpi+options at 50$ than a 10$ rpi w.
That said, the momentum is so huge, it doesn't matter anymore.. maybe this will apply too ?
It's not "their plan," it's just an additional way to bring in cash. If the cars can't be robo-taxis in three years, they'll let lessees buy them out or sell the cars used.
And if they do reach fully self-driving first - and someone will have to lead the way and prove it enough for regulators to allow them on the roads - then they'll have everything else already in place to relatively speaking own/efficiently capture a large portion of the market.