I don't necc agree with you on this. First, the free data was a selling point and makes people excited about their Tesla. We all know, the best salespeople are current owners. So make those users super happy with lifetime charging, lifetime data and streaming and you culture an enthusiastic sales staff at little expense.
Great- but has nothing to do with what I wrote.
The money left on the table are the majority of buyers who purchased
after they stopped offering lifetime free data.
Those folks were told explicitly, up front, they'd be required to pay for data after X amount of time.
Which has come and gone and Tesla still hasn't figured out how to bill them for it but is still providing the service at cost to Tesla.
Even worse by virtue of not figuring out how to do basic billing for an existing service they also make
upset customers buying SR and SR+ cars who can't get data services at all.
I am no expert, but I know you can buy cellular data in bulk. My guess is Tesla owns a "cellular company" which resells the data to themselves in great quantities.
Nope.
AT&T provides the connectivity.
I can buy a data-only plan on an MVNO for $20/mo for 5 GB of data. Let's just presume this is a 100% markup and actual cost is $10/mo. We're talking, rounded, an actual cost to Tesla of $100/yr per vehicle with free data.
Tesla has roughly 700,000 cars on the road today (they're targeting close to 900k by end of year) That's 70 million dollars. A year. That it's costing them to give it away free if your guesses at #s are correct. And that # will get another 50-100 million dollars, per year, higher going forward.
That's a
lot of money for a company that has rarely even managed to turn a profit.
FWIW most other car companies that offer data plans in cars charge more than $100/year for it- and nobody seems to mind.
But then those companies have competent accounting and billing departments- Tesla not so much.