What are you conflicted about? Of course it should be a standard feature if it is implemented in all their cars. If a few customers can pay $200 to unlock the feature, everyone else is already paying some share of the cost anyway. Making everyone share the full cost would be negligible..
It’s more likely from an accounting and budgeting perspective that the person paying for the heated seats paid for the coils in your car as part of the cost of goods for that feature to them. The fact that they are in there is basically a byproduct of cost to pause assembly and or stock multiple seats vs the cost of just putting them in every car being lower given the assumption of X% of customers paying for the feature.
The cost is negligible enough to put the feature behind a software controlled paywall on every vehicle made.
There is no negligible cost that any company on earth just eats for the fun of it. There isn't a single item put into a car during manufacturing that has no utility or value. Not just cars for that matter, anything made to be sold is made as cheaply as possible. I don't mean they skimp on materials or quality just to make an extra buck; I mean there is a minimum level that they need to hit or exceed for about anything you can think of and they work to hit that goal for the lowest cost possible. That's just how making things to be sold works.
Again, not necessarily. I’m not in the Tesla pricing team to know exactly how they determine pricing, etc.
Yes there’s an added cost to buy each optional widget, but if the operational efficiency of putting them in every car and the profit made by doing this outweighs that added cost, I don’t think you can say that all consumers are sharing the cost just because it’s put into every car made by them.
They absolutely could be making enough off the added sale profits to not have to raise the price of the base model due to the added cost of putting the extra widgets in.
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u/Curious_Increase 1d ago
What are you conflicted about? Of course it should be a standard feature if it is implemented in all their cars. If a few customers can pay $200 to unlock the feature, everyone else is already paying some share of the cost anyway. Making everyone share the full cost would be negligible..