Tesla Restores Autopilot Prices After Last Week's "Mistake"
As part of Tesla’s reversal of its sales and pricing strategy announced on Sunday, the automaker is also again changing Autopilot prices, which are coming ‘back to normal’ on Monday, says CEO Elon Musk.
Tesla’s recent price changes were controversial but none more than those relating to its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving packages because the automaker changed pricing on software updates that it never delivered.
The automaker also presented the offering to buyers as costing less if they order the software before delivery, but after price changes last month, they would have saved thousands of dollars if they would have waited for features they never got.
On Monday, Musk said that the prices are going to ‘revert back to normal’
"They will go back to normal along with a 3% increase of prices across the board (except for the base $35,000 Model 3) following the partial reversal of the new online-only retail strategy," Musk wrote on Twitter.
He also admitted that it was a mistake to drop those prices in the first place.
Musk said that owners who bought the Full Self-Driving Package before the price decrease will still get access to the Early Access Program.
All Full Self-Driving Package buyers will also get the upcoming Autopilot Hardware 3.0 computer upgrade.
With his behavior, Musk created another great incentive for owners to buy the packages right now before they become more expensive next week.
Responding to U.S. regulator's complaint
Meanwhile, Musk shot back against U.S. securities regulators on Monday, arguing in a filing that his recent tweet about the electric vehicle maker’s production volume did not violate his fraud settlement and he cannot be held in contempt.
Musk’s “single, immaterial” tweet to his more than 24 million Twitter followers claiming the electric vehicle-maker would produce around 500,000 cars in 2019 also complied with company’s communication policy for senior executives, a condition of the settlement, lawyers for the Tesla chief wrote in a filing in federal court in Manhattan.
Musk corrected his tweet four hours later to say that the “annualized production rate” at year-end 2019 would probably be about 500,000, with deliveries expected to be about 400,000.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had asked the court to hold Musk in contempt, saying his Feb. 19 tweet violated a September fraud settlement barring him from sharing material information about Tesla on social media without the company’s pre-approval.
In December, Musk said in a “60 Minutes” interview that: “I do not have respect for the SEC.”
“This contempt action, following Musk’s sincerely-held criticism of the SEC on 60 Minutes, also reflects concerning and unprecedented overreach on the part of the SEC,” the filing said.
In the filing, Musk’s lawyers said his tweet was a “proud and optimistic restatement of publicly disclosed information.”
A settlement between Musk, Tesla and the SEC resolved an SEC lawsuit over claims Musk made on Twitter in August that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 per share. The SEC called those tweets “false and misleading” and a go-private deal never materialized.
As part of that settlement, Musk stepped down as the company’s chairman and he and Tesla agreed to pay $20 million each in fines.