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The end of the quarter is approaching, so it’s time for more special offers and deals from Tesla. During the 2024 Tesla annual shareholder meeting earlier this year, a shareholder requested that the company again provide Tesla owners who have FSD the opportunity to transfer FSD to a new Tesla vehicle. CEO Elon Musk responded that they would provide this option one more time. So, this quarter, Tesla owners who have FSD have the opportunity to pass it on to a new Tesla without any extra charge.
However, it seems that isn’t stimulating enough sales by itself, so Tesla’s now offering a little cherry on top. New Tesla buyers can get a $1,000 discount if they use someone’s referral code. Tesla is extending that option to Tesla owners with FSD for the time being as well — if you take delivery of your car by September 30, you can also get $1,000 off the purchase price.
At the end of the last quarter, Tesla was also pushing out some end-of-quarter email offers to Tesla owners like myself. I took it as a concerning sign of weak demand. Tesla ended up beating Wall Street’s expectations for deliveries, and the company delivered more EVs than the quarter before. However, those sales numbers were still down year over year.
So, this time around, what do we make of these end-of-month offers? Personally, I still think Tesla is having consumer demand challenges. I don’t see why it would be offering $1,000 discounts on top of other incentives in the final weeks of the quarter if it wasn’t. Also, rather than hitting 50% growth, the company’s sales were down year over year in the whole first half of the year.
However, the degree to which the company is facing demand challenges is the matter. Do offers like this juice sales enough to basically deliver all the cars the company was hoping and expecting to sell? Or is Tesla running into a limit on what it can offer and how well those offers are stimulating sales?
I think it’s also notable that many Tesla shoppers, and especially many Tesla owners, know by now that there are better deals at the end of the quarter. This could lead to many buyers waiting until the end of the quarter to buy a car. If I was going to buy another Tesla, I’d definitely wait for the last couple of weeks of the quarter in order to get the best deal. Naturally, this can lead to a difficult, vicious cycle. If many people know to wait until the end of the quarter to buy, Tesla’s shipments can be a bit artificially anemic earlier in the quarter, and trying to rush all of its remaining vehicles out the door at the end of the quarter presents multiple challenges.
We’ll see soon what 3rd quarter delivery numbers (and production numbers) are. Perhaps even more interesting to me, though, is whether or not Tesla brings back this FSD transfer offer yet again in a future quarter, and what other offers Tesla comes up with at the end of the 4th quarter and next year. It seems certain that it will bring more goodies and discounts to the table in coming quarters as its vehicle inventory outnumbers natural consumer demand.
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