You Guys are missing the point. Sure a lot of people may want FSD.
But people who want it can’t necessarily afford it.
the people who want it and can afford to spend 100k on a car is super small. Even if 100 thousand people can and want to buy fsd, that isn’t enough to sustain a business.
Looking at just Senior citizens there are more than 54 million of them.
Now obviously they're not all going to run out to buy a $70K to $100K autonomous car, but quite a few of them will. More importantly other groups will buy them to allow the senior citizens to have more independence. For something like transportation the cost of the car is small compared to hiring a driver, and all the liability that comes with that.
Another group of people are power couples. Why argue about who has to take the kid to school/practice/etc when the car can do it?
A truly autonomous car is literally giving people freedom, and freedom has a lot of value.
Freedom to tell people their wrong on the internet while riding your car to the coast
Freedom to sleep while your car is taking you to the coast
Freedom from having to park your car in the city. It just goes and parks itself in some specialized parking for self-driving cars. Maybe some vertical stackup.
There is nothing more valuable to humans than time itself. Time behind the wheel is time you could better spend doing other things.
I don't think they're going to be demand limited. Instead they're going to be limited by the vehicle offering not matching up with what people want. With autonomous cars what people want out of a cars interior is going to be quite different.
I think we're looking at this the wrong way though. FSD won't happen overnight, and instead its going to scale towards it. It's going to be a slow process. Where each step of the FSD pricing will reflect take rates. Tesla has a really low cost FSD package (the cost to them)where they can price things to demand pretty well without losing money.
As soon as they start subscription pricing I think the pricing is going to be reflective of the demand. I don't think it will start out at $550 (what $40K would work out to assuming 72 months), but will be much lower at around $150 a month.
If/when Tesla turns on L4/L5 that is when the demand will likely peak up so I expect much higher monthly pricing at that point. That would translate into much higher resale values on cars with FSD. I don't expect that to happen though because I don't believe HW3 is capable of truly autonomous driving.
So for the near future the only autonomous vehicles I expect to see are going to be insanely expensive fleet vehicles like Waymo has.