When customers start shopping for Tesla self-driving cars, they may soon have the option to purchase lifetime insurance. They will also have the opportunity to buy a maintenance package.
This could mean that while the vehicles drive themselves, their owners also never need to pay for coverage or repairs.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is so confident in the self driving vehicle safety features that they are being bundled with lifetime insurance and maintenance packages for customers. Vehicle owners would buy them at the time of purchase and would no longer need to pay monthly insurance premiums of cover any unexpected costs for repairs.
Tesla execs released this news during an earnings call when they described a whole new way of pricing and buying their vehicles. Jonathan McNeill, the company’s president of global sales and service explained that “We’ve been doing it quietly.” He added that “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.”
This new lifetime insurance for Tesla self driving cars is not free, but is built into the purchase price.
Therefore, the cost of the car will be increased in order to include the lifetime auto insurance coverage and maintenance package. This provides customers with a new way of buying a vehicle without having to purchase separate car insurance for which they must make a monthly premium payment.
This could be appealing for consumers in a number of ways. For instance, the cost of their vehicle coverage and unexpected repairs is all included at the beginning so when the car is paid off, so are all those added benefits. That said, many customers will also appreciate the fact that the cost of owning the vehicle over time is much more predictable.
According to the company the self-driving function of Tesla vehicles makes them much safer and even traditional auto insurance premiums for them will likely fall in the future, when compared to the cost of insuring a non-autonomous car. Still, the lifetime insurance will take the guesswork out of obtaining coverage for a driver.