There's an entirely new auto market being opened up by FSD.
My wife and I moved into a retirement community last year, and we were joined by my brother and his wife. Our homes are almost next door to each other. Being longtime Tesla owners, we joined the EV group that meets once a month and shares information. I offered to talk about my experience with FSD, and they were excited to hear about it. So I prepared some slides and videos, freely purloined from the great material on X.
The results were pretty astounding. The average monthly meetup usually had, perhaps, a couple of dozen people. Instead, the meeting notice talking about FSD drew a packed house of perhaps a hundred people, and we had to turn people away as the room was full.
Well, that was last quarter's meeting. This quarter's meeting was held last week, to a significantly expanded group. And what did we hear? We heard about a couple that had stopped driving, their car sitting parked because they felt too unsure of themselves to drive. After my presentation, they traded in their vehicle for a Tesla with FSD, and now they are at about 97.5% on FSD and feel that they have been liberated. When I asked "why only 97.5%," they explained that the car lost its way in their underground parking garage (they live in the apartment section of the community). I explained that they could drop a pin on their actual parking spot rather than the address, and that may solve their problem.
What struck me even more than the people who bought new Teslas after the presentation was how many seniors talked about their own FSD experience, and how many of them were achieving mid- to high-90% FSD driving. There was uniform enthusiasm for the product and for what it meant for them in their senior years.
That matters in what is rapidly becoming an aging population.