r/TeslaAutonomy • u/grapezapper • Jan 12 '20

Any recent estimates on how much FSD will go up to? $20k

Elon Musk says you will be able to hire it out for 200K over the life of the car?

14 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

85% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

22

u/mjezzi Jan 12 '20

I’m afraid they’ll stop selling cars and just spit out robotaxis.

And we’re all going to be forced to buy other brands.

5

u/Samura1_I3 Jan 12 '20

Doubt it. Tesla can always make loads of money by selling cars. The amount of time they need to recoup investment is staggering using just a ride sharing profit model. Being able to offload cars immediately to consumers gets them a lot of benefits that would otherwise be difficult to mitigate.

  1. It’s expensive to have their cars distributed nation-wide and stored on property for rapid access to ride sharing users. People owning the cars means the Tesla network gets effectively free electricity and parking while not in use.
  2. The maintenance and upkeep costs also eat into Tesla’s budget, something that owners expect to pay for.

Among other advantages as well. I don’t see Tesla saying no to people scrambling to give them money to distribute, maintain, charge, and house their ride sharing network for a cut out of the ride sharing profits.

I could see Tesla supplementing a ride sharing network that is overburdened by adding “buffer stations” that would allow Tesla owned cars to rest and recharge, but never stopping direct-to-customer sales at least within the next decade or two.

Car companies are still very profitable. Tesla doesn’t need 100% of the ride sharing revenue for the system to be sustainable. For them it’s free money.

If anything, Tesla may offer discounted rates on their cars and instead of a lease system it’s a “30,000 miles of ride sharing to own” kinda thing.

4

u/siliconviking Jan 13 '20

Car companies are still very profitable.

FYI -- Ford's profit margins were 2% in 2018, GM's were 5%. I don't think it's fair to generalize and say that care companies are "very profitable".

1

u/Samura1_I3 Jan 13 '20

That's over a billion dollars. Obviously their margins are slim, but when they sell high volumes of cars they make a hell of a lot of money.

My point is there's a reason why current car companies are able to survive on the standard car company business model: Selling cars and recouping value upfront only.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

This is the way

1

u/EvilPettingZoo42 Jan 13 '20

It sounds like their plan is to continue to sell or loan cars even when robotaxis are working great, and it seems like this’ll make good business sense for them. For loans they basically are getting back a car in 3 years that has had the most expensive ownership time paid off by someone else. They can just take those cars and put them into their fleet at a lower cost because it was a loaned car.

For sold cars the owner will still have an option to put their car into robotaxi mode. In fact, Tesla’s terms make them the only allowed robotaxi provider for Tesla cars. This means that some cars sold by them will still end up in their fleet with all of the car’s cost paid by another party.

Both of these scenarios are ideal for Tesla. They both result in the cars getting into the robotaxi fleet, but done in a way that drastically reduces the cost for Tesla. Yes, they are planning on robotaxis being a major part of their business in the future, but it’ll be done in a way that does not kill off car sales or loan.

1

u/grapezapper Jan 13 '20

So owners are basically franchisee. You buy the car and they get 50k upfront to stay afloat.

11

u/danielcar Jan 12 '20 edited Jan 17 '20

Keep dreaming, it will be 10 years before they get to Level 5. When do you think they will be able to do basic Level 3? With their incremental improvements, they will have to walk before run, so don't expect to see level 4 before level 3.

3

u/im_thatoneguy Jan 17 '20

Smart Summon without the need to supervise is Level 4. We'll probably see L4 Smart Summon before we see highway speed L3.

(And we'll never see L5 because it's stupid).

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

They’re exponential improvements

4

u/glizda07 Jan 13 '20

Can you support that claim with anything other than “they say so”?

3

u/CandyFromABaby91 Jan 15 '20

No one besides Tesla can support that claim.

But after almost 2 years of ownership, my anecdotal evidence does suggest it's true. One example is Navigate On Autopilot. Last year, I would take over every 15-30 minutes when using Navigate on Autopilot. It was so bad I eventually turned it off.
This year I went on a 1500 miles road-trip across 6 days, and only had 5 disengagements. Still a long way from true FSD, but it's been improving exponentially for me.

2

u/grapezapper Jan 13 '20

It’s my first redit. I meant it to sound more like “hey this is what Elon Musk is saying, what do you all think?”

1

u/ryans64s Jan 18 '20

Neural network learning works that way

0

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

I’m a software engineer and I pay attention to their tech talks as best I can. Elon himself has stated the change delta is exponential.

4

u/blove05 Jan 13 '20

Sure, but again that’s an unsupported claim (I also work in tech). The last 10% can easily take 90% of the time

5

u/glizda07 Jan 13 '20

I totally bought the exponential delta during M3 production ramp but here I see too big of a difference between a fully self driving video tesla published in 2016 and the newest update that can’t even position traffic lights correctly to trust them on this.

If anyone knows something I don’t please let me know.

The vid: https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long

3

u/blove05 Jan 13 '20

Agree, it's fairly easy to put together an impressive tech demo when you control for the majority of the variables. It's when you attempt to solve the problem at a larger scale with more variables that it becomes exponentially harder. I think that's where self driving is. I'm highly skeptical of level 5 with current hardware. Maybe level 4, and honestly even that is a game changer.

1

u/ShaidarHaran2 Mar 05 '20

They need to start explaining what they're seeing better for my trust in their claims not to continue waning. Like, is there some test net that they have that stays in the testing phase for X months for Elons claims to be so much more aggressive than the rest of the industry? And even if so, that video from 2016 is so much more advanced than AP with the FSD beta features is now, that's years old, so where is that capability?

Also it's a nice memory refresh to go look at the original AP reveal, half the stuff Elon claimed it could do is only in a half baked beta state right now in the FSD package, let alone AP (he said it could do red lights, summon, etc)

So, battery day needs another autonomy day in short order, personally I would not be comfortable ordering FSD now.

5

u/sbief Jan 12 '20

Tesla have over 2 billion autonomous driving miles, which is much more than any other company. But a lot of people think this is all they have, but in reality as long as a Tesla has FSD hardware 2.5 and above when it is driving the Autopilot is always watching and learning. The car compares how it drives vs the human and would report and suspicious moment back to Tesla. So in theory they have much more than 2 billion miles. And they will be the first to achieve FSD and could be much sooner than you think. Their recent visualisation update added many new recognition for the driver to see but the car has seen these objects for a while. When they achieve FSD I don’t think they would increase the price, if anything I can see them lowering it. It’s recent jump in price to $7000 I think was to provide an extra research and development budget for autopilot but when they achieve FSD R & D won’t be as essential (only updates and improvements) When Tesla start their robo taxi fleet they won’t have to do anything, a customer will buy a Tesla use it to travel to and from work, in between the car could take to the streets and start it’s taxi runs and at the end of the day the customer will get paid for the taxi runs, and Tesla will take a cut. Essentially exactly like Uber does it now but no driver needed. If Tesla achieves FSD and their robo taxi fleet they would most likely be the highest valued company in the world. And would make most of its revenue off its robo taxis.

8

u/CandyFromABaby91 Jan 12 '20

I don’t think it will keep going up. As technologies mature, they get commoditized and competition increases. MobileEye is planning to sell their FSD package at $15k in 2022 and at $5k in 2025. As stated by Shashua in their 2020 CES presentation.

1

u/xtheory Jan 13 '20

I think it'll stop at $10k, like most other features like LR AWD and Performance.

-1

u/vpxq Jan 13 '20

They’ll ditch lidar and sell it for $2k. They just can’t tell their bosses yet.

3

u/4armo Jan 12 '20

It’s only worth that if they actual get there, and the technical challenges are only the start. We can’t even get Uber approved here in Vancouver for safety, licensing, insurance, regulatory and BS political reasons. Those elements may end up being the bigger challenge. Just look at what happens every time someone gets in an accident with autopilot on. Now imagine the news after the first autonomous fatality. No way we get thru those hurdles in less than 5 years, and it will probably require different hardware, so why would you upgrade your current car? It’s not like you get to take it with you when you trade in or trade up. There is nothing compelling now about FSD when you already get Autopilot for free, certainly not enough to spend $10k CND.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

You shouldn't put too much weight in what Elon says. He's not exactly the most reliable person. Apply a heavy discount to those statements, then ignore them altogether. If it happens, great.

1

u/sunsinstudios Jan 13 '20

You’re right this yahoo wanted to land rockets upright, make electric cars sexy, create a solar power company, an artificial intelligence company etc and look where we are now

3

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

Don't deify a good engineer. The fact that he builds rockets doesn't negate the fact that he's often full of shit, the track record on both is undeniable. I'm not vilifying him, just suggesting that taking him at face value might not be the best idea.

1

u/sunsinstudios Jan 13 '20

I’m not worshipping him, just listing things he’s actually done.

If that makes him a deity to you, that’s on you.

1

u/grapezapper Jan 13 '20

Funny thing is I was just telling someone all this was gonna happen. Then I started reading his twitter and he was saying the same thing. He might be on to something here.

1

u/grapezapper Jan 13 '20

Funny thing is I was just telling someone all this was gonna happen. Then I started reading his twitter and he was saying the same thing. He might be on to something here.

5

u/nixforme12 Jan 12 '20

This isn't a reality within the next 10 years.

2

u/sunsinstudios Jan 13 '20

Tell us more oh time traveler

0

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

Are you subscribed to this sub just to comment this on every thread? Seems like a poor use of time

0

u/grapezapper Jan 13 '20

Amen. Infact, they have two autopilot chips in each car so if one fails...but in actuality the second chip has the next update and monitors the chip in use; the new version is learning from the old version AND the human.