Rent or buy upgrade ... two ideas for the pricing (I much prefer the rental model below):
Buy Upgrade Bundling
They might bundle upgrades: 75 + Assisted Driving + Full Self Driving for $12,750. That would make it "look" inexpensive: only $2,750 for the extra 10.2kWh from a "60" (62.4kWh usable) to a "75" (72.6kWh usable), or $275 per kWh, which is almost as low as their quoted $250/kWh PowerPack large installation price, but of course being held over the fire pit for the Self Driving at $10,000; alternatively, it could make a $7,000 upgrade for that 10.2kWh also come with only a $5,750 upgrade price on both Driver Assistance & Full Self Driving, which is
under the price of upgrading to Driver Assistance. But, I bet that wouldn't get many takers: $12,750 is still a lot of money.
They could bundle other things that "seem" nice but aren't really deal breakers: Fast Charging (72 amps rather than 48 amps) + range upgrade for just the price of the range upgrade and $1,000 off on any Driver Assistance & Self Driving upgrades, so $15,000 instead of $18,900 if you get everything. That's still a huge amount of money.
They could do a tiered discount: 20% more off for every additional less expensive item:
$7000 0% discount for Range (unlocking 100% +10.2kWh charging)
$6000 20% discount for Assistance
$4000 40% discount for Full Self Driving
$1900 60% discount for 72 amp charging
Thus, to get all 4 would be $14,960. Still seems like a lot.
Perhaps the discount could be 25% off for each additional lower priced item:
7000 * 100% + 6000 * 75% + 4000 * 50% + 1900 * 25% = $13,975. Pretty big chunk of money.
Skip the range upgrade:
6000 * 100% + 4000 * 75% + 1900 * 50% = $9,950.
No, that still seems like a lot of money.
Maybe just a flat rate of $12,000 for the whole bundle? That would be $6,900 off the rack rate of $18,900. It might not get many people jumping.
Leasing Upgrades
I thought of another way to do it: feature rentals/leases (even subscriptions). Each item would lease differently because of their nature:
- Range upgrade is only used a few times per year on long trips, so renting for a day (or 500 miles) wouldn't get Tesla the full value. The minimum lease time for this range upgrade feature would be much closer to 100 days or let's say 5,000 miles, in order to catch people who want to pay this way and not lose the money from them only getting it when they need it. Assume 50,000 miles for buying full price. So, that breaks it up into ten chunks. You could lease the feature whenever you want for ($7000/10)*interest, so let's say 110%: $770 per 5,000 mile chunk as soon as you send in the payment from the touch screen or MyTesla (extending a current rental by 5,000 miles if you already had it). Once you've paid $7,700 leasing, you get it permanently, no more to pay, and that (and banked leases) carries over to next owner.
- Driver Assistance Features: These are nice on most commutes. Let's assume most Tesla drivers are part time, and commute half time, so that's 25% of the month, or 4 days per week including a holiday. So, to make certain it isn't rented only on "weeks when they commute", the feature could be, let's say, half of the period which would ensnare you 100% of the time, or a fortnight. So, if you rent the Assistance Features package (normally $6,000 upgrade), it would run for 14 days from the second you turn it on (extending a current one by 14 days if you already have it). Let's once again say 50,000 miles for $6,000, so assuming 50K = 4 years (!), or 104 fortnights. That would be $57 per fortnight, and with some interest, let's call it $60 per fortnight. It's basically $30/week if you look at it like that, but the minimum time period would be a fortnight so Tesla could make enough money. All you would have to do is read a few articles on TMC about people who didn't pay the $60 who crashed and realize it's worth it. When you're not working, you save the $130/month you'd otherwise spend on the feature. Ditto on carry-overs to next owner.
- Self Driving. I ditto everything I said for Driver Assistance Features. Since it's about 1% of the full upgrade cost, then it would be $100/fortnight for Driver Assistance + Self Driving, or $40/fortnight for just Self Driving if you already have Driver Assistance. Ditto on carry-overs to next owner.
- When Tesla Network (Uber-Like self driving taxi) starts up, you can have an option to also build toward the fully-paid-for status of both assistance and self driving features by having the Tesla Network reimbursement take out a % for the feature, pay-as-you-go, also at a rate of about full reimbursement within 50,000 miles. This would also add to the amount paid that you might have elected to pay for yourself per fortnight, so both would build toward full ownership of the feature.
- 72 Amp Charging: It's $1,900 to upgrade. Let's once again think of it in terms of when you would need it. Since you would have to catch people who barely need this and would get it on the cheap incrementally, let's extend this to a whole year, or 12,500, divide 50,000 by 12,500 to get 25%, so $500 to have it for 12,500 miles. Since I don't think this feature needs to be bought by everyone, and it's not a huge butter for Tesla, they can afford to charge less for the leasing of it, and allow smaller leasing chunks. So, I'll actually break it up similar to the Range Upgrade, at 5,000 miles, so that would be $1,900 / 10 = $190, so let's call it $200 lease per 5,000 miles, but once again, since it's relatively low profit, they could really make out by only charging $100 per 2,500 miles. If you bought it 22 times, you'd have it paid for the life of the vehicle. Why bother get it at all, you say? It can be a checkmark "add on" for the 5,000 mile $770 extended range, and Tesla could make $970 for the bundle for the full 5,000 miles, for camping trips and other trips. You'd also use just it (for $100 for 2,500 miles) when you have a lot of overtime and errands and you just need to have peace of mind. You're coming home late, getting up early, have plenty of overtime money, and just don't need the hassles of slower charging, so spend about $50/week in a week when you're making $300/week extra to have peace of mind. Pretty quickly, you whittle away those "amount to fully upgrade" on this feature, and within 2 years with a few overtime seasons, you might be looking at only $500 or so to "buy out the rest of the feature" and Tesla gets $2,200 instead of $1,900 for the upgrade.
I think leasing the features would be a better way to get revenue on them, but the numbers would have to be designed well to catch the money and make it financially worthwhile to those who wish to get it by getting them right at that time-period cusp between long enough to eliminate occasional users getting it for almost no money and it being too expensive for regular users to pay for.
