Industry dynamics

Tesla China exec says employees buy cars at same price as customers, but get free FSD

Publishtime:1970-01-01 08:00:00 Views:30

Tesla FSD is priced at RMB 64,000 (about $10,000) in China.

After Tesla CEO Elon Musk said there are no discounts on vehicles the company sells to car rental company Herz Global Holdings, a top Tesla China official said there are no discounts even for employee purchases.

Herz, which is just four months out of Chapter 11, announced a major investment in the EV rental fleet Monday, including an initial order for 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022.

"Cars sold to Hertz have no discount. Same price as to consumers," Musk said, a comment that was posted on his Weibo account.

A Weibo user who reposted Musk's comment said he had heard that Tesla employees could get the Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature for free.

Grace Tao, Tesla's vice president of external affairs, confirmed in a retweet of the user's message, saying that Tesla employees can purchase cars for the same price as consumers, but can enable the FSD feature for free.

For vehicles sold in China, Tesla offers a free version of Autopilot software with basic L2 assisted driving capabilities, including lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control.

Users who want more advanced features including summoning and auto-parking will need to purchase a software upgrade.

Tesla currently offers Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) in China at a price of RMB 32,000 ($4,970), and the FSD software package is available at a price of RMB 64,000.

It's worth noting that the free version of Autopilot offers assisted driving capabilities that are good enough for most consumers, while EAP and FSD are expensive but bring limited incremental value at this stage, and even Tesla salespeople don't recommend them for purchase.

Previous data show that the percentage of Tesla owners choosing to buy FSD was very low.

Data released by Twitter user @TroyTeslike on September 1 showed that in a survey of over 17,000 Tesla owners, the FSD take rate was only 11 percent globally.