Elon Musk‘s Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) is facing a significant challenge in the uptake of its Full Self-Driving technology, with only 2% of free trial users opting for the subscription. This has raised concerns about the future of the technology.
What Happened: Gary Black of Future Fund took to social media platform X, to express his concerns about the low subscription rate of Tesla’s FSD service.
He cited data from Yipit, a credit card data provider, which showed that only 2% of the Tesla owners who received a free 30-day trial of the FSD service actually subscribed to it after the trial period ended. This figure is significantly lower than the 6% Black had assumed in his Tesla model.
Black also noted that the sample size was relatively small, only 3,500 users out of 1.8 million trials, and might not be representative of the entire Tesla owner population. He suggested that Tesla needs to understand whether the low subscription rate is due to the perceived low value added by the FSD service or the $99/month subscription fee.
Black wrote, “Some bulls ...