Tesla increases price of Full Self-Driving in move to make its cars ’appreciating assets’

Today, Tesla increased the price of its Full Self-Driving package in an attempt to make its cars ‘appreciating assets’, as previously announced by Elon Musk.

Last month, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla vehicles are now ‘appreciating assets’ due to their self-driving capability.

He aims for Tesla vehicles to become revenue-generating assets for their owners, but if the price doesn’t increase, the value would still depreciate since new buyers could still buy the vehicles for the MSRP.

Now Musk confirmed that Tesla plans to “substantially” increase the price of the Full Self-Driving option over time:

“Please note that the price of the Tesla Full Self-Driving option will increase substantially over time.”

He confirmed that it is what he meant by Tesla vehicles becoming  ‘appreciating assets’:

Yes

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2019

At first, he said that it will increase by “something like” $3,000, which would put the price of the package to around $8,000.

Today, it increased from $5,000 to $6,000:

Musk said that people who are “unable to order by May 10” can still get the old price, but it’s not clear what he means by that.

The price change comes after Tesla made a series of price changes to its Autopilot and Self-Driving packages earlier this year.

Electrek’s Take

To be fair, it doesn’t really make the vehicle an appreciating asset for most owners since it is still less expensive than it was earlier this year after this $1,000 increase.

But it’s an extremely complicated situation to even understand in the first place because on top of changing the price of both options, Tesla also transferred some features of the Autopilot packages into the Full Self-Driving package.

Later, it even made the base Autopilot package standard on most cars.

Either way, it looks like Tesla would need to increase the price of the Full Self-Driving package by a lot more than that in order to turn its cars into appreciating assets.

It will be interesting to follow the price in the next few months as Tesla works on the new Full Self-Driving features.