Tesla is communicating to customers who have ordered now-discontinued variants of vehicles that it will not honor retroactive pricing of the Full Self-Driving suite to when they reserved their vehicle.
In February, Teslarati reported that Tesla would not produce the Model Y Long Range Rear-Wheel-Drive variant. CEO Elon Musk later stated that the reason was that Tesla has “too much product complexity already.” However, Tesla had originally planned to honor the price of the FSD suite when customers had reserved their vehicles. For example, if the FSD suite was priced at $7,000 at the time of the reservation, Tesla would only charge the customer $7,000, despite its current $10,000 price tag. This was confirmed by Tesla employees in February.
Tesla officially eliminated the Model Y Long Range RWD earlier this month, finally communicating to reservation holders that it had no plans to produce the vehicle. Tesla advised Model Y LR RWD reservation holders to revise their orders by choosing a vehicle that it currently produces and pay the additional price, as Tesla’s vehicle prices have increased since then.
“We’re contacting you regarding your Model Y order [VIN] placed on March 15, 2019. We’d like to help you update your configuration, as we do not build the configuration you originally selected. We’re excited to support you through the process and deliver your reconfigured Model Y at your earliest convenience,” Tesla wrote in an email on December 8th to one Model Y reservation holder, who agreed to pay the additional cost of the vehicle but requested a retroactive FSD pricing as a small discount for having to choose a new vehicle over two-and-a-half years after placing the order.
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“I tried to update the design, but the price jumped $20,000! And full-self-driving is now $10K, when I first reserved it, it was less than half that price. Can TESLA honor my original price for FSD since I’m an early adopter?” the reservation holder asked.
However, the reservation holder, who asked to remain anonymous, was told by Tesla staff that the company would not be honoring any old pricing.
“Thank you for your note. We will not be honoring any previous pricing. Once you update your configuration it will update to the current pricing,” a Tesla employee told the reservation holder in an emailed statement.
Tesla did not immediately respond for comment.
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