Tesla Insurance does not now and likely never will move the needle in any significant way for TSLA... it is a nice to have for customers ... and represents a distraction from the real goals of AI and energy .... in fact the state by state effort would be better spent on FSD and autonomy .....
we can stop this now and agree to disagree...
and of course any company can be wiped in BS event but likelihood of financial firm being wiped out is much greater ...
Certainly if you were to imagine that Tesla will not innovate in insurance products your objections would be valid.
However, the use of future conditional tense is intentional for I think those views are contrary to reality.
Tesla developments in both insurance and other financial products are being developed to lower adoption costs and reduce objections to adoption. All their efforts are now roughly where the original Roadster was in terms of maturity. Within a couple of years they'll be at Model S equivalency, followed by increasingly major innovation.
Tesla is not in Financial Services of any type just to make money. They are doing so to ease the transition to sustainable energy though improvement of the adoption process itself.
A bit of ancient US history is highly relevant:
In 1919 the tiny General Motors could not compete directly with the giant Ford. So, they founded a thing called General Motors Acceptance Corporation that financed dealers, their inventory and the end consumers fo their products. Suddenly they had dealers everywhere who could have inventory and customers who could pay in installments. It worked. Ford took until 1956 to follow GM's then insurmountable lead.
In 1932 US families could not afford the new electric refrigerators and the other electrical appliances General Electric made. Electricity was rapidly being extended even in semi-rural areas. So General Electric Contracts Corporation was formed to support dealers and consumers of GE products. At the time very few banks would entertain such loans.
Fast forward to 2021. Now solar roofs, solar panels and battery storage, electric vehicles too are often more expense to insure, more expensive to finance and lease than are other consventional products. Now, however, there are huge data advantages in optimizing such products and designing them to reduce risks and costs. That is what Tesla is doing.
In 100 years the goals have remained similar but the needed techniques have mostly not been materially improved. Tesla is doing that.
FWIW, it is not accidental that both of those pioneers needed many decades to eventually forget what their business was. GE Capital became a giant tax dodge. GMAC decided to dominate sub-prime mortgages. Both pretty well blew up spectacularly. Oddly, perhaps, the basic business of both continued to thrive updated for modern product finance. Forgetting the mission destroyed their integrity.
Tesla has a long way to go in innovation and product design before they make those old mistakes.
So long as they keep to their mission they are quite likely to thrive for decades. In the meantime just think about how happy those securitization pool buyers are to have a higher than typical yield on lower than typical risk. That will change in a year or so when TSLA securities are upgraded a bit more.
