In a tweet over the weekend, Elon Musk announced plans to push FSD beta software to a new group of 100000 customers By unlocking a large number of deferred revenue, Tesla's profit outlook in the second quarter of 2022 is also becoming brighter. It is reported that the FSD beta software version 10.12.2 has brought a smoother cross route control experience, especially in the long left section, and can run on roads lacking preset map data.
Obviously, Tesla is still trying to approach the plan of "mass production" of its autonomous fleet in 2024.
Zachary kirkhorn, chief financial officer of Tesla, explained that after receiving the FSD payment, the company immediately recognized about 50% of the current quarter's revenue, while the rest was regarded as deferred revenue.
With Tesla's introduction of FSD beta software to a new batch of 100000 customers, a large part of this deferred revenue has also been recognized, which has boosted the revenue forecast of the electric vehicle giant in the upcoming fiscal quarter of 2022 Q2.
To be conservative, Tesla is expected to recognize about $300million in deferred revenue - provided that the company receives at least $3000 from each customer eligible for FSD activation.
Even so, affected by many factors, it is still very difficult for the outside world to accurately estimate this part of income. First, Tesla priced the FSD function of autopilot ADAS at $8000 in 2016.
Since january2022, the one-time payment price of this function is $12000. In addition, customers can pay $199 a month to subscribe to experience FSD.
These factors confuse the exact number of payments and subscriptions and the recognition time of deferred revenue. What's more, Tesla can take the initiative to update the pushed quantity and the incremental effect to recognize deferred revenue through Ota.
As of march31,2022, Tesla had deferred income of $1594million on its balance sheet. In February, 2022, the company announced that it would recognize deferred income of $962million this year (lower than the previous estimate of $1.39 billion).
However, according to the latest tweets of Elon Musk, Tesla is still expected to give more moderate revenue data in Q2 2022.