Tesla stock price is down, deliveries missed expectations last quarter, and significant price drop — in China. Those are the major concerns swirling around the electric car manufacturer as investors took to Twitter to complain about the slash in prices overseas. However, there is a significant difference between the EV market in China compared to most other regions worldwide, especially North America.
Tesla dominates the market almost everywhere, except China. Unlike the dinosaurs in the North American automotive sector, Chinese car manufacturers have been developing and producing electric vehicles for a long time. While Tesla has had countries like the United States and Canada all to themselves for buyers wanting an electric vehicle, it’s not so easy in China. Telsa has to convince consumers to try something other than the BYD Song Plus or the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV.
Tesla has Competition in China
BYD started up in China in 2003, and by 2008 it was building the best-selling hybrid cars in the country. In 2009, several years after the carmaker achieved the top sales in the country. BYD was then converted to a fully electric vehicle, making it much easier for buyers to adapt to EVs while sticking with the brand they already trusted.
Then there is the horrendously ugly and ridiculously cheap Wuling Hongguang Mini EV. At a starting point of $4,500, anyone can hope no one sees them in this EV. The automaker hit the China market hard starting in 2020 and has not surpassed 500,000 deliveries.
Tesla’s main competitors have two particularly important advantages, BYD has brand loyalty, and Wuling Hongguang Mini EV is cheap. Therefore, it only makes sense that Tesla is aggressive. The Model 3 is now the cheapest it has ever been in China, and the Model Y has become much more affordable.
Tesla Cuts Prices
The company already dropped prices a few months ago, and now it's dropping them again. A RWD Model 3 is now $33,500 USD, when it was nearly $39,000; the same car in the United States goes for about $47,000. The RWD Model Y (not available in North America) is now $37,800 USD, down from about $42,000.
Following the announcement in China, Tesla has followed with reducing the prices in several other regions as well. The prices of the Model 3 and Model Y have been reduced in Australia, with price reductions in the 2-4% range, depending on the model.
In addition to China and Australia, Japan is also seeing the price of the Model Y reduced by up to 10%.
While these prices may be tough to swallow for someone in North America, consider that Tesla constantly changes prices to match what the market will pay. This practice has removed the slimy car salesman tactics that plagued the industry for decades. So, while it may seem unfair, Tesla owners must understand that the company doing well in all markets worldwide is vital to its survival as more competition emerges.
It's also possible that we'll see some price reductions in the U.S. as well. With the EV tax credit going into effect this January, Tesla aims to allow as many models to qualify as possible.
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As the holiday season kicks off, it’s time to turn our attention to our Christmas list of items we’d love to see in Tesla’s annual Holiday update—a tradition that brings some of the most exciting software features of the year. From game-changing additions to fun surprises, the Holiday update has become the most anticipated update each year.
This year’s update promises to be no exception, with Blind Spot Monitoring While Parked already leaking in an employee release earlier this month.
So, grab your hot cocoa and cozy up—it’s time to see what Tesla might have in store for the most wonderful time of the year.
Smart Voice Assistant
Tesla’s current system is a list of voice commands that, while useful, leaves a lot to be desired when compared to modern voice assistants such as Google Assistant and even Alexa. However, a smart voice assistant based on an LLM that uses AI like xAI’s Grok could be coming this season. Elon previously confirmed that Grok would make its way into Tesla vehicles—and what better time than the Holiday season?
Hi-Fi Audio & Dolby Surround Support
Previously, we saw a bug where Apple Music began showing as HiFi for certain tracks in July. We assumed that Tesla would eventually support lossless Hi-Fi audio streaming, but so far, TIDAL remains the only streaming option with high-quality streaming.
Bringing Dolby Atmos support to Tesla vehicles would make even better use of Tesla’s jaw-dropping soundstages. Dolby Atmos delivers an immersive, 360-degree music experience, making it feel like the sound is coming from all around you. This would be the perfect Holiday update feature to make those bells truly jingle.
Tesla has been on a roll with adding music streaming services over the last couple of years. Tesla most recently launched Amazon Music and YouTube Music support. While the biggest players have now been incorporated into Teslas, many users would still love to see Pandora added to the mix.
Adding additional music services means that more users subscribe to Tesla’s Premium Connectivity package, so expect this one to be added as well.
SiriusXM Streaming
While SiriusXM is already available in the Model S and Model X through a satellite receiver, SiriusXM may soon be available to a lot more users. We previously reported on SiriusXM mistakenly publishing a web post revealing a web streaming version of SiriusXM for Teslas, and it has been a few months since then. It's a quick update and seems to have already been partially implemented, given SiriusXM’s website. We could expect this wishlist item to be real, and hopefully soon.
Prime Video
While video streaming integration is much less important than music streaming, it still serves its purpose, especially in vehicles with a rear screen, where videos can be watched while the vehicle is in motion. With Tesla’s addition of Amazon Music this summer, we expect Tesla to add Amazon Prime Video as well.
X Integration
While you can pop open X pretty quickly in the web browser and have a fairly OK browsing experience, it's clear the site is designed for use with a mouse, not your fingers. A dedicated X app would definitely be easier for fans of the platform. Don’t forget to follow us on X or your favorite network (we’re “NotATeslaApp” on just about all of them, including Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky).
Productivity Apps
Zoom is the highlight of Tesla’s productivity apps—and it’s also the only one. With YouTube Music recently arriving, we could see Google Hangouts, Google Meet, and even Microsoft Teams making inroads as productivity applications to have in your Tesla. However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Tesla App Store
While a suite of productivity apps would be a nice addition, it’s likely not a practical solution for Tesla. With so many available services, it would be a challenge to integrate each one individually.
Elon Musk once hinted at the possibility of an App Store for Tesla vehicles, where developers could create apps specifically designed for Teslas. However, we haven’t seen this come to fruition yet. So, the question remains: Is Tesla still working on an App Store, or is the expectation that users will rely on tablets and computers in their cars?
If Tesla does plan to launch an App Store, they would need to find a way to leverage existing platforms instead of building each app from scratch. One possibility is running Android apps through an emulation layer, allowing access to a wide array of apps from the Google Play Store, such as video streaming, video conferencing, and messaging platforms like Discord and Slack.
Another approach, similar to what Tesla already does with video streaming services, could involve using web-based versions of apps. While many services offer web versions, not all perform as well or provide the same functionality as native apps.
Both solutions are feasible, but we have to consider: What does Tesla gain by allowing users to run any existing apps on the car’s screen instead of using a separate device? While such apps could be useful, we believe Tesla will likely focus on integrating them where it makes sense—like music services—where a custom implementation improves the user experience and keeps the user interface consistent between services. For most other apps, users will probably continue to rely on their phones and other nearby devices.
Steam Games on AMD Vehicles
Tesla previously removed games from its vehicles, as it removed the dedicated gaming GPU in favor of AMD’s all-purpose APU. However, the all-purpose APU can hold its own while gaming, and in fact, the 45-watt 4-core Ryzen chip is fairly beefy. It could definitely hold its own against the mobile Steam Deck, especially since that also uses an AMD-based platform.
Using Valve’s Proton Compatibility Layer would allow AMD Teslas to game, and game pretty well!
This is our third wishlist in our series of features we’d love to be included in this year’s Holiday update. It shouldn’t be too long before we find out exactly what’s in it, but for now, keep those requests coming!
According to a recently published article by Bloomberg, the Trump administration intends to introduce a federal framework for autonomous vehicles. According to members of the administrative transition team, this new framework will be part of the Transportation Department’s list of priorities.
This places Tesla in a good position to begin working towards establishing and expanding its Robotaxi network and getting production, validation, and approval of the Cybercab off the ground.
Legal Limits
Today’s laws have fairly strict requirements for any vehicle that travels on the road—it needs to have steering wheels, pedals, mirrors, and plenty of driver-awareness or driver-assistance safety features. None of these are needed on a Robotaxi, and Tesla’s Cybercab also has none of these items. Instead, with no pedals and no steering wheel, it takes passengers from origin to destination with minimal user input.
The framework for autonomous vehicles could be spearheaded by former Uber executive Emil Michael, who could potentially take on the Transportation Department under the new administration. Uber previously worked on their autonomy program and is potentially a direct competitor to Tesla’s Robotaxi network.
The current regulation, in addition to having stringent hardware requirements, caps the number of autonomous vehicles a single company can operate at 2,500 units per year. This could drastically limit how Tesla’s Robotaxi network functions, especially since it doesn’t need additional high-resolution mapping to work in a specific location. FSD is extremely adaptable and learns on the fly.
Rather than deploying just a couple thousand units a year, Tesla needs to be able to deploy tens of thousands - the more units on the road, the faster they can collect data and iterate, especially with the recent deployment of their new Cortex Supercomputer.
State Laws
There’s one more obstacle to the mass deployment of autonomous vehicles—state regulations. Every state has its own set of regulations, and even with federal guidance and regulations becoming less limiting and more open, every state can choose to establish exactly how much autonomy it wants.
Tesla and other companies like Waymo, which are pursuing autonomous transportation, will have to navigate a regulatory maze to get their vehicles approved at a state-by-state level.
Tesla has already taken steps to get its Robotaxi network off the ground in Palo Alto, an affluent city that has been struggling to provide affordable transportation for its residents. With looser federal regulations, Elon’s timeline of deployments in Texas and California by late 2025 may move even sooner.
This is definitely a framework to watch — with Tesla’s stock up 8% this morning on the news, unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi could be coming quicker than anyone expects.
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