Tesla News: Future Cars Could Include Insurance, Maintenance In Initial Price

Tesla wants to integrate insurance and maintenance into the price of future cars, the company said in a call Wednesday.

Tesla, revealed it has already started testing out the insurance-maintenance bundle with cars it has sold in Asia. Jon McNeill, the company’s president of global sales and services made the revelations during Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Tesla said it could offer the services by working with other insurance companies, and is also considering handling insurance in-house too.

“We’re actually currently doing that,” McNeill revealed in the call. “We’ve been doing it quietly, but in Asia in particular where we started this, now the majority of Tesla cars are sold with an insurance product that is customized to Tesla, that takes into account not only the Autopilot safety features but also the maintenance costs of the car. It’s our vision in the future that we’ll be able to offer a single price for the car, maintenance and insurance in a really compelling offering for the consumer. And we’re currently doing that today.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also weighed in on the insurance bundle.

“This is not to the exclusion of insurance providers,” Musk said, “but if we find that insurance providers are not matching the insurance proportionate to the risk of the car then if we need to we’ll insource it, but I think we’ll find that insurance partners do adjust rates proportionate to the risk of a Tesla.”

Tesla’s Q4 2016 Report

The company’s report on earnings for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2016 shows Tesla did not make a profit, but it did cut down on its losses.

Tesla had a loss of 69 cents a share, or $121.3 million, in the quarter ending Dec. 31. The figure is down from a $320.4 million loss in the same quarter last year.

The company also reported $522 million in capital expenditures in preparation for production of the upcoming Model 3 vehicle. Tesla is expected to start preparing for a full-scale commercial production of its Model 3 sedan this week, a previous report said.

Tesla also said it will deliver 47,000 to 50,000 Model S and Model X cars to consumers by the first half of this year, a growth of 61-71 percent compared to the production of the same cars in 2016. Last year, Tesla fell short of its goal of delivering 90,000 cars by offering only 76,300.