Tesla last November ended an unusual policy that prohibited U.S. leasing customers from buying their cars at lease-end.
The policy started in 2019, when Tesla announced that customers could lease its mass-market Model 3 sedans but would have to return them, at the end of the lease, for use in Tesla’s planned “robotaxi” network.
“Next year, for sure,” he added, “we’ll have over 1 million robotaxis on the road.”
None of that would prove true. Despite repeated promises, the robotaxis never came. Tesla instead found an unusually lucrative way to make money by flipping many of the off-lease cars to new buyers, according to four people familiar with Tesla’s retail operations.
Rather than storing the used cars – a fast-depreciating asset – Tesla started adding features to them through software upgrades. It then sold the vehicles to new customers who would pay thousands more than lease-end buyers would have, the people said.
Wait- do you think that Tesla taking back leased cars and selling them as new is less important than adding new features via a software update?
You know that scene in Matilda when her dad shows her all the shady shit he does to sell junk cars, like rewinding the odometers and glueing the bumpers on? This is literally the 21st century version of that.
If you buy a car that doesn’t have all the “modern features” you want, that’s on you, even if those features can simply be enabled via software. But it’s literally fraud to advertise a car as new when it was previously leased out.
Well…
One is a hypothetical that isn’t happening…
And one is really happening.
Just like, in general, I tend to care about real things more than something someone made up to make me angry at someone else
But looking around these days, I see more and more people disagreeing with me.
And it’s depressing, so I tend to just block people now. Have a nice life tho.
You must have missed this part:
THEY LITERALLY ARE DOING THAT.
Yes, clearly everyone else is wrong.
…
The buyers are new
As in they were not the lease holders.
They are not buying cars that they think are new.
But that’s definitely enough, if you want others to help you understand things in the future, my last piece of advice is to be civil when someone tries.
They’re taking up their time to help you