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.
Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That explains things.
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...
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.
Genuine question because as mentioned I don't use the product (nor do I care enough to rabbit hole).
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.
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.
And like you said other targets are quite something as well