Connect with us

Published

on

A drivers uses a Tesla Supercharging station in Corte Madera, California, US, on Thursday, March 2, 2023.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla cut prices on its two most expensive models in the U.S., the Model S and Model X, in a renewed bid to stoke demand for its cars with aggressive discounts.

The Tesla Model S now starts at $89,990, according to Tesla’s website, down around 5% from where they were priced previously. The Model X, meanwhile, starts at $99,990, which marks a 9% reduction.

For the high-end “Plaid” versions of the Model S and Model X, car buyers can now expect to pay $109,990. That’s down 4% for the Model S Plaid, and 8% for the Model X Plaid.

Tesla shares were up around 0.6% in U.S. premarket trading Monday.

It follows a series of aggressive discounts from the company in recent months. In January, Tesla reduced prices of its new cars by as much as 20%, making the vehicles more affordable and likely eligible for federal tax credits in the U.S.

The latest price reduction is likely unrelated to EV tax credits introduced in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, as they remain above the $55,000 threshold to qualify for up to $7,500 toward purchasing new vehicles.

Requisite's Bryn Talkington says don't add to Tesla position

The pace and frequency of Tesla’s price adjustments goes beyond what established automakers have attempted in the industry, where the base price of a vehicle in inventory is still referred to as a “sticker price.”

EV price war

This has ignited a price war among carmakers competing to lower their prices in a bid to lure in more customers and drive sales. After Tesla’s January price reductions, Ford slashed prices on its electric Mustang Mach-E crossover by up to 8%.

Musk has shifted Tesla’s focus of late to bringing prices down to spur demand for its products.

On the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, he said Tesla was seeing orders almost doubling the rate of production. “These price changes really make a difference for the average consumer,” Musk said at the time.

EV arms race

“The price cuts Tesla has already implemented globally has catalyzed demand by 30% out of the gates as this latest price cut is another smart move,” Dan Ives, managing director of equities at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC via email.

“This is an EV arms race playing out and Tesla has the margins to make price cuts and still be well above other automakers. In this economic cloudiness Tesla needs to rip the band-aid off and cut prices and the Street will like this.”

To make discounts of those proportions, Tesla will need to match them with production cost reductions. It’s a goal the company has been pushing hard to achieve, with efforts to cut down on certain spending in its supply chain already underway.

Last week, a Tesla executive said the company was developing an EV motor that can be built without rare earth metals — which are critical to the motors used in electric vehicles — citing the need to lower costs and environmental risks that accompany the mining of these minerals.

Continue Reading

Technology

Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

Published

on

By

Tesla faces U.S. auto safety probe over faulty crash reporting

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Elon Musk‘s Tesla is facing a federal probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after the U.S. auto safety agency found that the company was not reporting crashes as required.

According to documents posted to NHTSA’s website on Thursday, the agency’s Office of Defects Investigation had “identified numerous incident reports” from Tesla concerning crashes that had “occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports” to the agency.

The delayed reports were likely “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been fixed,” according to NHTSA’s explanation for the probe.

Automakers must report on collisions that occurred on publicly accessible roads in the U.S. that involved the use of either partially or fully automated driving systems in their cars within five days of the companies becoming aware of any crash.

The agency will now conduct an “audit query” to figure out if Tesla is in compliance with its reporting requirements, and to “evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them.”

NHTSA will also investigate whether Tesla neglected to report any prior relevant collisions, and whether its reports submitted to the safety regulator “include all of the required and available data.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Tesla stock was little changed Thursday.

The company sells electric vehicles equipped with a standard Autopilot system, or premium Full Self-Driving Supervised option, which is also known as FSD, in the U.S. Both require a driver at the wheel ready to steer or brake at any time.

A site that tracks Tesla-involved collisions drawing on news reports, police records and federal data, TeslaDeaths.com, has found at least 59 fatalities resulting from crashes where Tesla Autopilot or FSD were a factor.

The new NHTSA probe comes as Musk, Tesla’s CEO, is trying to persuade investors that the company can become a global leader in autonomous vehicles, and that its self-driving systems are safe enough to operate fleets of robotaxis on public roads in the U.S.

A manned Tesla Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas in June, and the company is running another manned car service in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Riders can book trips via the company’s Tesla Robotaxi app.

Tesla has not begun driverless ride-hailing operations that would make it directly comparable to Alphabet-owned Waymo, or Baidu’s Apollo Go and other autonomous vehicle competitors yet.

The company is facing a sales and profit decline, due, in part, to a consumer backlash against Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work to re-elect President Donald Trump, and his work leading the Department of Government Efficiency to slash federal spending and its workforce.

Still, many Wall Street analysts and shareholders remain optimistic about Musk’s vision.

“We think it is a positive that Tesla has begun robotaxi operations which puts it on the path to addressing a large market (we estimate that the US robotaxi market will be $7 bn in 2030 as discussed in our recent AV deep dive report),” Goldman Sachs autos industry analysts wrote in a note Wednesday.

Musk and Tesla have not given investors a sense of what they expect in terms of Robotaxi-related revenue or the technical performance of vehicles in its rideshare fleet, so a “debate on the pace of robotaxi growth will continue,” the research note said.

Continue Reading

Technology

Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

Published

on

By

Apple TV+ hikes subscription for third time in three years

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Apple is taking a cue from some of its competitors.

The technology giant’s Apple TV+ monthly subscription is now $12.99, starting Thursday in the U.S. and other countries.

Apple said the new price will hit current subscribers 30 days after their next renewal date. The annual subscription price will not change.

For new subscribers, the $12.99 monthly price begins after a seven-day trial period.

The change marks Apple’s first price hike for its streaming service since 2023. At the time, Apple lifted its monthly price to about $9.99 from $6.99. The company raised the price in 2022 from $4.99.

Read more CNBC tech news

Apple TV+ is one of the company’s most popular services, but Apple does not release viewership numbers. A report from The Information earlier this year said the streaming service is losing more than $1 billion annually as subscriptions rocketed toward 45 million, citing people familiar with the matter.

Apple isn’t the only streaming company hiking prices this year to either fund new content or reap returns on their investments. Earlier this year, both Netflix and NBCUniversal’s Peacock boosted prices. Music streaming platform Spotify also raised prices in multiple markets.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its streaming service to Android phones in a move that could open the company to more people worldwide.

The company is fresh off the release of its highest-grossing theatrical film, “F1: The Movie.”

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

Continue Reading

Technology

Trump’s Nvidia and Intel meddling is a ‘scattershot method of crony capitalism’: Walter Isaacson

Published

on

By

Trump's Nvidia and Intel meddling is a 'scattershot method of crony capitalism': Walter Isaacson

U.S. government's push for Intel stake is a scattershot method of crony capitalism: Walter Isaacson

President Donald Trump‘s dealings with Intel and Nvidia amount to a “scattershot method of crony capitalism,” Walter Isaacson said Thursday.

“That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The Tulane University professor, widely known for his recent Elon Musk biography, argued that this method won’t succeed in reviving American manufacturing.

Isaacson’s comments come as the Trump administration wades further into influencing the way companies operate in the U.S.

The White House is pushing for a stake in embattled chipmaker Intel after Trump called CEO Lip-Bu Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and said he should resign.

Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there.

Isaacson said he’s always been “dubious” of public-private partnerships. He highlighted Trump’s push for Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its namesake soda as another example of “crony capitalism.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Continue Reading

Trending