Model 3-as-a-Service… Hmmm, why not?

Last Friday, an excited Praveen walked into the Venus room and asked us, “How about people subscribe to Tesla’s Model 3?”

Some of us were clueless, some of us were taken aback, but mostly, Krish understood the question in no time and decided to go with it.

“Seriously? Name-dropping Tesla? People would see through that”

“That’s alright”

“But what if we get sued?”

“Well, at least we get to see Elon Musk”.

By the time we zeroed in on the idea, Tesla’s Model 3 was trending and was among the most written news in media. Tesla already witnessed pre-orders of upto $115K. More on that here.

So, we did our first pilot on Preethi and she seemed sceptical, yet excited. Akash and Kirthika got on to readying a beautiful content for the page, Praveen deftly designed the page, Aditya and Anusha prepared to push out the page, and I annoyed everyone playing the devil’s advocate. Dint want a PR disaster out of this. ;)

By evening we released www.chargebee.com/tesla.

The announcement was about using Model 3 on a subscription basis. Why buy one when you can subscribe one? At a reasonable $500 / month, the deal is as good as it could get.

Isn’t it beautiful?

We had over 55 odd signups to this and a lot of them even found the idea of the partnership interesting without signing up.

Only to find that this was a prank.

But it got me wondering. Model 3 in a subscription model… Hmmm, why not?

Model 3 is announced to hit the roads in 2018. That’s a good 2 years away.

With over 115K people registering on April 1st, to 276K orders as of Saturday, the craze was unheard of.

The last time people queued outside a store overnight to pre-order their favourite brand was during the launch of an Apple product.

Now here’s the challenging part.

In 2006, Musk, in his company blog post, shared his master plan -

The master plan is:

Build sports car

Use that money to build an affordable car

Use that money to build an even more affordable car

While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

Yup, it stayed well between him and us. And the eager world.

A decade later, Model 3 is here. Still, part of his master plan. The final step that he described during its unveiling at California.

The challenge? It’s two years away, for starters. Chances of production delays, design glitches, a history its recent losses add on to the ‘things-that-can-go-wrong’ list. A lot has been written over the last two days about potential obstacles in timely delivery of these mass-market electric cars to its customers here and here. And, of course, here.

And he says so himself.

Obviously, there is absolutely no doubt on why these cars will sell. In fact they should sell. There’s a certain type of elegance and beauty to these cars. And of course, Go Green, Tesla!

They are disrupting the landscape of the transportation industry. Just like SaaS is changing the software industry.

Going back to our prank. How about Model 3-as-a-Service? Let’s take a moment to shift away from the idea of ‘selling’ Model 3, for a second.

Here’s why I feel it will work -

• Requesting a Model 3 (or for that matter, any Tesla car, that suits your desires and expectations), as and when you need them, rather than buying them, is probably how consumer behaviour may change. Uber and Ola have proved that this model works well over the last five years. People prefer affordable transportation as much as luxury.
• With autonomous cars being touted as the future of mobility, owning a car would become less preferable. Well, at least the parking problem will be solved!
• You enjoy the same comfort and luxury, show off the same brand to your buddies AND you get to pick your choice of car depending on your mood
• Go Green!

Think of all the possibilities… The subscription business model has been working well across different verticals. Why should transportation be any different? In fact, Model 3 could work out cheaper and be wildly successful if it gets opted for a subscription business model. Imagine a title that reads “one Tesla each day”.

I love Tesla. I love how Elon Musk is changing the face of transportation as we know it. And like all of its fans, I wouldn’t want love to see this take off successfully.

Feel free to drop in your comments and thoughts. Or reach out to [email protected]