With ~3 million Teslas sold worldwide, 285K FSD was much fewer than I had thought. As someone currently not interested in buying a Tesla, I assumed most of the people in its target market are attracted to the FSD claims (reputationally, consumer-facing self-driving seems to be where Tesla is perceived to be the outright leader) and are able to afford it at its FOMO buy-now pricing.

A lot of Tesla drivers aren't "car people" but they're excited by the tech in the car besides FSD. I have zero interest in FSD and would never have gotten a BMW or Mercedes but still got a Tesla. I was ok with a Nissan before Tesla because premium ICE cars were just cars with added bells and whistles + marketing. If I had to get a new EV that isn't Tesla it would be a Rivian, Ford, or KIA because they all offer something unique that isn't just a retrofitted faux-premium ICE car. I don't care about leather seats or wooden accents or impressing anyone. For regular car folks who aren't into luxury Teslas introduce you to a whole new way of interacting and interfacing with your car such as the app control, sentry mode streaming, at-home charging, driver profiles, full touch UI, etc. Plus it smokes cars that try to block you from merging. Tesla delivered something that all of the MBAs combined from the other legacy car companies couldn't.

It's so funny, and this is not a criticism at all, how big the divide in the two market segments are. I'm basically the polar opposite of you. I don't want a lot of technology in my car, I don't want big touch screens, apps, automatic software updates or any of that. I want a car that feels nice (not to impress anyone, but because I'm sitting my butt in that seat for potentially hours every day, touching the controls thousands of times, etc. and the cheapness of the Tesla materials is very noticeable to me in that context) and just happens to have an electric drivetrain. Unfortunately most of the manufacturers think it's better to try to be "innovative" by turning the car into an android phone on wheels instead of letting it be enough to innovate with the source of power. I'm fine with that stuff existing. Obviously people (including you) want it, and that's great. But I wish there were more options for people who don't want that.

Isn't that the Porsche? I get that the price makes that not an option for most (including me).

Also maybe I'm just proving your point by saying that there is one option.

I’m in a similar boat. I just want something as disconnected from what I do day to day as possible.

I write code. I notice bugs. I don’t want an in dash embedded device with a poorly designed ui/x.

I want something I can wrench on and when it breaks I can debug and fix.

Currently in a 2015 wrangler. Auto trans, manual locks, manual windows, $90 marine radio with shit bluetooth.

I’d get a cassette deck if I could bluetooth to it.

Point being, where I am, the car is what I need and can deal with my roads and winters and doesn’t have an OTA updated dash-to-drivetrain link that can decide at any time heated seats or cruise control is 30 bucks a month.

FSD take rate has always been quite low, even when it was available for a much lower price than today.

I think FSD was not available in many countries outside the US at least initially, due to regulations.

Correct. FSD is not available in EU.

Only in the US do we prop up a rich man buy allowing him to sell vaporware.

My hypothesis is that most people won't buy it because most people would rather drive themselves, especially if you're paying $15k for that privilege, and that many people don't know that you can subscribe to FSD on a monthly basis (though there are upsells within the MCU to drive consumption there).

This was a much more lucrative proposition as a $2k add-on, I think.

It's going to be more complicated than that. They will absolutely try to mitigate by downselling to Enhanced Autopilot, which gets more usage (I think). Depending on when you purchased FSD, that will yield somewhere between a $0 and $9,000 refund.

However, the Enhanced Autopilot option was removed in 2019 and came back last year. I think this was done to juice the sales count. If the DoJ agrees, then Tesla might have to honor EAP's 2019 purchase price. This would make the minimum refund something like $3500.

Either way, this would be a blow to Tesla and will definitely worsen the layoffening.