[nxtfari]

My guess is Tesla is desperately in need of Q1 revenue and they want people to scarcity buy FSD lifetime @ $8K. Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense. They’re saying FSD and basic Autopilot will go behind subscription and that subscription prices are expected to go up. Basically laying out that they’re planning to lock you into a subscription and then price gouge. It’s so transparent that I think the point isn’t actually the gouge but to make that threat move lifetime FSD sales.

[scottyah]

1. There's a CA lawsuit against the FSD name, Tesla has to fix it by Feb 14th (the last day FSD is being sold). I wonder if it'll just be a rebrand for the new service. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/news-releases/d...

2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.

3. Some consumers were sold that they would get hardware upgrades for FSD. I'm pretty sure Tesla would like to minimize that, and I expect incentives for those people to purchase new vehicle without FSD.

4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.

I honestly don't think they want a lot of people with lifetime FSD, it's disappearing without a lot of news.

[gruez]

>2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.

That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...

[piva00]

1/12th of that is still US$ 83 billion. Think it's still quite a big incentive to try to juice up the metric.

[mgiannopoulos]

10 million FSD subscriptions is a really big number to achieve.

[palata]

> 2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.

That explains things.

[bagacrap]

The subscription model seems to profit off of inertia/inaction/forgetfulness/laziness.

There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.

Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.

[blastro]

Rocket Money is an app designed for millennials to hand over their important banking information to Rocket Mortgage in exchange for "help cancelling subscriptions".

[bagacrap]

It's always seemed to me to be targeted at people too young/poor to buy a house. What does rocket mortgage want with random people's financial statements? Of course when you actually do take out a mortgage you find that you're forced to give up an absolutely shocking amount of personal info (usually via very insecure feeling channels). So if you are offering mortgages you don't have to do all that extra work/advertise so much on tv to get data.

Genuine question because as mentioned I don't use the product (nor do I care enough to rabbit hole).

[nxtfari]

Good context, thank you. I think this changes my view, you’re more likely right.

[johnnyanmac]

4. The details are pretty straightforward. Continual passive income is more reliable than the boom bust cycles that is buying cars. The latter requires you finding more and more customers. The former is extracting more money from an assumedly commuted customer.

In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.

In other words: you will own nothing and like it.

[lotsofpulp]

> 4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.

Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?

[CuriouslyC]

A lot of entrepreneurs hate the saasification of everything, and don't want to create sub services. They tow the line because investors LOVE subs and will look at you like you're insane if you disagree.

[dredmorbius]

NB, toe the line.

<https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/to...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line>

[jaggederest]

The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.

Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations

[CuriouslyC]

There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.

I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.

[jaggederest]

Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.

[palata]

> Every person I know wants a subscription, too.

You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.

[rlpb]

> I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription.

There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.

[lotsofpulp]

I meant everyone wants to have a recurring income. After all, we have a recurring need to feed and house ourselves.

[palata]

Sure, but when you buy a spoon, you expect to own the spoon. You don't pay 1$/month/spoon, do you?

[lotsofpulp]

That is neither here nor there. I was making a tongue in cheek comment that companies wanting recurring revenue is not notable, because everyone wants recurring revenue. The only thing limiting it before was lack of technical ability.

[Marsymars]

> You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.

If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.

Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.

Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.

[morgoo]

Just don't think about the long term economic effects of rent-seeking

[lotsofpulp]

With all the top heavy population age histograms around the world, the rent seeking is built into all the economies to provide benefits until it becomes too top heavy and revolution occurs.

[BeetleB]

> Otherwise the strategy doesn’t make any sense.

The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.

People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.

[AwGeezeRick]

Comma/OpenPilot is actually amazing. One of my cars is a Tesla Model 3 Performance 2025 and I love it, FSD on HW4 is great. Super fast.

I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.

[nxtfari]

I’m a fan of what Comma is working on, but to say it’s about as good as FSD (!!) would be a big misunderstanding of both products. Comma is L2 assist: basically in a lane it will keep the lane, and if a car stops ahead it will stop. It’s equivalent to Tesla standard Autopilot, but FSD is an L3 bordering on L4 system. It navigates traffic lights, intersections, indicating, merging, etc none of which Comma can do. Still good product though.

[rootusrootus]

My guess is they made FSD subscriptions a requirement for Elon's big compensation package.

[kotaKat]

10 million active subscriptions. It’s one of the lower targets to meet.

[nixass]

They haven't even sold that many cars yet. I have trouble believing they would come to 10M active subscribers in next two decades.

And like you said other targets are quite something as well

[thefourthchime]

Tesla is going to stop selling FSD outright on Feb 14th. It will be subscription only.

[nunez]

Only in this radically pro-business administration would brazenly anti-consumer behavior like this be acceptable.