Tesla is talking with other carmakers to license FSD. This is huge as Tesla could say make half or more of the FSD profit by allowing other carmakers to license. Tesla could $10,000 on profit off of cars that someone else makes and sells out of the total $15000 price.
Will this be like all the North American car companies choosing to use Tesla’s supercharging network? Will all of the car companies choose to license FSD after the first company chooses to use FSD. Tesla having FSD on all North American cars or global cars over $50,000 per vehicle would be say 10% of 40 million vehicles per year. 4 million vehicles at $2400 per year subscription would be almost $10 billion per year.
Tesla is building out its Dojo AI supercomputer. Tesla will spend over a $1 billion each year on Dojo over each of the next few years.
Tesla will allow the transfer of FSD to another vehicle.
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It’s not a bad idea. Pretty much all PCs would be Macintosh’s had Apple not insisted on doing all its own manufacturing. DOS machines would be as rare as CP/M ones, although Linux would likely still be around.
Of course we know that the price of FSD won’t stay at $15,000. It will likely rise to something closer to $50,000 when it is full Tesla Network RoboTaxi capable and regulation permits. That just reflects the money every Tesla with FSD could earn – so if Tesla didn’t price FSD that high, it would just be leaving that money on the table and “scalpers” would take it.
Licensing would let the OEM participate in the RoboTaxi sales boom. Tesla would likely capture most of the price collected for FSD though.
Sharing the tech freely by licensing would help Tesla scale production/sales faster, greatly increase its profits, be a better PR/political stance.
It would make more sense for them to run an Uber-like network and collect revenue per mile. That way they get a large number of cars in the network. If they charge $50K per, they won’t have near as many cars. Having lots of cars in the network is critical because otherwise, users have long waits and don’t want to use your network.
Another benefit specifically for FSD is that the more cars running it, the more training data they have so the faster it improves.
There is no future (inflation excluded) where FSD will cost $50,000.