When Tesla sells someone a car for $50k, what do you think is the value of the data on how often they charge it? $20? Surely it can never be a significant revenue stream.
It's not just charging data obviously, it's all the car usage data. Where you go, how fast, with who... And yes, after a few years, the value of that data is worth more than the original profit they made selling the car itself. Its also recurring revenue, they don't even need to sell you a new car to keep making money.
Margins on hardware are so slim, it doesn't take much surveillance to double or triple the profit a manufacturer makes over the lifespan of an object. You thought IoT was about customer convenience? It's not science fiction. Smart Televisions already report on what you're watching, in real-time. https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/insights/
Where you go can not be inferred from the charging sessions. You can kinda infer the speed, by looking at the state of charger between two sessions. You can't infer with whom you're travelling.
Honestly, people always overinflate the usefulness of "data".
Ford will track your entire drive, how you used your car, even the radio station that was playing. All of this data is uploaded when you take your car in for servicing if you do not have a connected car.
OnStar recently (2-3 years ago now?) started feeding 100gbps of telematics data on every single GM car back to GM in an effort to determine better pricing on used cars. Data includes every sensor change on the car and even details from the onboard wireless entertainment system (your wifi device)
These are projects I have worked on. They have an overabundance of data on you and 99% of you fit the model of usefulness
We're telling you this is a multibillion dollar business that's transforming the world around you. You may choose to ignore or downplay it, but it won't change the facts. Even If you're paying for something you may not be the primary customer anymore since there's more money to be made from tracking you than from selling you stuff.
Also, Ford and GM do not do service. A lot of the detailed car information can really help with service and maintenance. But dealers actually don't want that to improve systematically and Ford doesn't gain enough from it.
Tesla makes all that dealer profit themselves and can systematically improve service and make a huge profit from off warranty vehicles. This is a huge revenue stream Tesla is only just starting to get. Something people often miss when they look at future profitability.
Ford and GM make huge amounts of money from part supply fro off warranty cars. Tesla will do even better because they will do the service, not just the parts.
Well they’ll have data on non-Tesla users now too. The current market leader in the US has about 17% share, so even if Tesla eventually becomes the biggest auto maker, you’d still expect at least 75% of cars to not be made by them. They now have charging data on those 75%.
More profitable than the data though will be selling the charges. The rates they’re charging at Tesla Superchargers are far in excess of what they’re paying for the electricity.
GM is scrapping Android Auto and Apple Carplay, building it's own native operating system to get access to that customer data that Google and Apple won't share with them.
To be fair, GM expects $20 billion to $25 billion a year in revenue by 2030. Who knows how much customer data is worth but they seem to think it's worth the expense.
That is an interesting question. If Tesla has a network of cars collecting real world data that can be used to train ML I suspect it might be more than $20 per Tesla in the future (they can sell models to other manufacturers). Maybe not right now but more a future thing.
