Source? Yes I’m at the higher end but you seem to have just made this claim up.
Tesla made ~180k vehicles from 2012-2016. It’s a pretty conservative guess to think that half of them are still out there with free supercharging. 90k vehicles isn’t insignificant.
I guess all we can say for certain is that Tesla felt it was worth specifically targeting these owners with a $5,000 incentive, and that there was enough upside in it for them to do so.
Tesla is going to make tens of $Billions when they open the SC network to non-Tesla EV's. And $5000 toward trade-ins is a drop in the bucket.
So again, I stand by my statement that LUSC's just don't make up enough volume.
That is, unless it just comes down to greed over culture.
Elon built this company by embracing the culture and maximizing the company's exposure to that culture.
They aren't the most well made on the market. Early on, they weren't even that convenient to own. But for those who wanted one anyway, Tesla embraced them, and for the most part, took care of them.
But now that the company has grown, they're starting to change their decision making away from the culture/owners, and more toward the bottom line of investors. Typical of publicly traded companies. Not a surprise.
The charging network has continued to grow because it's profitable. But infrastructure issues from company growth, and lack of investment in adding Service Centers, just to name a couple, wreak of short-sightedness, which is disappointing given the impression of the "vision" that Elon has, but he's stretched sooooo thin right now I doubt any non-investor topics even threaten to approach his bandwidth.
I've gotten off-topic. Back to LUSC vehicles, I'd say we're both guesstimating our figures.
Not every Tesla sold 2012-2016 had LUSC. Would be nice the know that number.
And would be nice to know how many of those haven't been traded directly with Tesla, because don't forget, any that were traded back to Tesla, if resold, weren't given LUSC.
I have mine because I bought used through another dealership that took it as a trade. And the LUSC is transferrable.
That's where they could get rid of these LUSC. Remove the transferability. Seems pretty easy since new owners have to set up their own Tesla profile through the app. They can simply announce that LUSC's are no longer transferrable. It'll make them collector's items!