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Tesla may be developing an App Store or at least thinking of building one for its vehicles. A Tesla App Store could bring Apple-like revenues to the company. The EV automaker already has a base for an App Store so it would probably be easy to develop one later on.
While answering a question about Tesla software and its monetization, Elon Musk mentioned that he was already thinking about what people would do inside an autonomous vehicle. Kirkhorn hinted that Tesla was experimenting with possible offerings once FSD was rolled out.
An institutional investor asked the following question: “What is your vision for software at Tesla? What opportunities do you see for monetizing the installed based other than via FSD?” In his answer, Elon Musk emphasized the importance of FSD.
“I think the upgrading of the fleet to full self-driving essentially with an over-the-air software update, it may go down as the biggest asset value increase in history as a step change…,” Musk said.
“So sort of overnight 1 million — depending on exactly when it happens and when it’s allowed in various regulatory jurisdictions, you would have like at least few million cars suddenly becoming five times more valuable or something like that. So I think five times higher utility, to go from like 12 hours a week of utility, something like that or — doesn’t mean hours — used 260 [Phonetic] something like that.”
Tesla's In-App Purchases Could Open The Door To Apple-level Revenues https://t.co/LW8MUF4Q4M pic.twitter.com/ccFI032Ffa
— Tesmanian.com (@Tesmanian_com) January 31, 2020
Tesla CEO said that compared to FSD, everything else would seem “pretty small.” However, he did under over what people would do once there were autonomous vehicles.
“Now when things do become full self-driving, so what do people are going to do in the car? Well, I guess they probably going to do productivity and entertainment of some kind, or maybe play games and do work. Well, that’s in the future. We’re already putting some games and stuff on the car just for fun,” he said.
Kirkhorn added that Tesla was already experimenting with other ways to monetize the company’s software but stressed that FSD would still be “the biggest opportunity in the near term…”
It’s happening now‼️
— Tesmanian.com (@Tesmanian_com) December 19, 2019
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He listed Tesla’s Premium Connectivity, Acceleration Boost, and rear-heated seats as an example of the company’s experimentation. “So these are things that we have and we’re continuing to get feedback from the field and other things that we can launch and will trickle those in with time,” Kirkhorn said.
Elon Musk provided a short answer to wrap up everything he and Kirkhorn said. “Yeah, but they’re all very tiny compared with like the step change to full self-driving depending upon how you calculate it is probably worth — at least $100,000 per car. So that’s a lot of software you have to sell, in the App Store or whatever,” he said.
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