Tesla Is Selling the Journey

I thought I bought a Tesla because I was tired of the drive from Newark Airport to Harrisburg, which on paper is only about two hours and forty minutes, so not exactly crossing the Sahara, but when you have just got off a UK-to-US flight, your body clock thinks it is midnight, the road is dark, the modern LED headlights are trying to burn holes in your retinas, and you still have nearly three hours of motorway concentration ahead of you, it starts to feel less like a drive and more like an endurance event.

I had heard Stephen Bartlett talk a few times on The Diary of a CEO about his Teslas, and about them driving themselves, and he kept saying it in that way people do when they have experienced something that has quietly changed a baseline for them, once you’ve had it, you wouldn’t go back.

Eventually I thought, right, I need to go and see what this actually is.

So I tried one, and then, obviously, bought one, or more accurately my wife bought me one, which is a much better version of the story.

And in the weeks that followed, we both found ourselves marvelling at Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and before anyone gets excited, yes, technically, legally, practically, you are still the driver, you still have to be fully attentive and ready to take over immediately, it is driver assistance, it does not make the vehicle autonomous, it is not a chauffeur, it is not a magic carpet, but experientially, when you have lived with it, the difference is enormous. You still have to be fit to drive, it is no substitute for stopping when you are too tired to drive safely. Tesla’s driver guidance

The Newark-to-Harrisburg run, which used to feel like a long, heavy, mentally expensive journey, suddenly felt more like a twenty-minute trip to the shops, not because I was asleep, not because I had abdicated responsibility, but because the driving felt dramatically less demanding, the constant tiny corrections, the lane discipline, the speed management, the mental friction of the journey, all of that felt massively reduced. That is my experience of it, my responsibility to watch the road and be ready to intervene had not changed.

That alone would have been enough for me to think, this is life-changing.

But then something happened that made me realise I had probably been thinking about it too narrowly.

A couple of weeks later, the contractors who had been doing our basement saw the Tesla, and their main guy, practical, grounded, not some EV evangelist, not a tech bro, just a normal bloke who has spent his life building real things in the real world, said something like, so you’ve got a Tesla now?

I said yes, and explained why I’d bought it, the airport run, the night driving, the fatigue, the glare, all of that, and he was a little EV shy, in the way lots of sensible people are before they have lived with one, so I said, do you want a quick ride in it?

He said yes please.

As the car pulled itself out of the garage, he threw his hands in the air, genuinely surprised, and as it picked up a bit of momentum down the street I think he may even have screamed a little, which made me laugh, because at first it felt like the reaction you get when someone sees a clever trick, or a piece of future tech that has somehow arrived early.

Then, about two miles down the road, I looked across and saw a tear running down his face.

I said, are you okay?

And he said he just wanted to thank me for taking him in the car, because he never thought in his lifetime that he would see a car drive itself, let alone sit in one.

Then he explained the bit that changed the whole thing for me.

He and his wife were struggling to drive at night, long journeys were becoming too much, and that was starting to restrict some of their social choices, not because they had decided to become less social, not because they no longer wanted to go places, but because the friction of getting there was starting to close things down.

And in those two miles, he had realised they might be able to get some of that freedom back.

That was the moment it stopped being about electric cars for me, stopped being about cars at all really, because what he had seen was not a vehicle, it was the possibility of getting part of his life back.

He went and bought one that weekend.

And this is the bit I keep coming back to, because he did not go away and compare a Tesla lease with a BMW lease, he did not say, well, should I get an EV or stay with petrol, he did not behave like someone weighing up a competing automotive purchase, he behaved like someone who had discovered a new capability, and once the capability had landed, the cost of acquisition moved into a completely different mental bucket.

That is the gravity of it.

It stopped competing with another car, and started competing with staying home, missing dinners, avoiding night drives, relying on family, cutting short journeys, losing confidence, accepting that certain bits of life were just going to get smaller.

Once that happens, the economics are different.

You are not just selling horsepower, trim levels, range, finance packages or badges, you are selling the possibility of reduced fear, reduced fatigue, confidence, reach, independence, and the reopening of things people thought were starting to close.

And to be clear, that possibility still depends on someone being able to drive safely and supervise the system, it cannot compensate for eyesight or fatigue that makes them unsafe to drive, and Tesla warns that low light and poor visibility can reduce its performance. His reaction was hope, not a clinical test of what it could safely restore. Tesla’s system limitations

That is why the emotional story struck me so hard, because if Audi had that, some very serious German man would be standing in a beautifully lit tunnel explaining it to you in a voiceover before the logo arrived.

If Mercedes had it, it would be called something like Intelligent Freedom Plus, and they would have a retired architect driving through the Alps while his wife smiled at him like he had personally solved ageing.

When I first started thinking about this, my question was why Tesla did not seem to be making that the biggest possible reason to buy a car. Tesla does advertise and tell independence stories, so my question is how fully it is activating that message. I wondered whether it might be deliberately avoiding maximum car demand because the bigger prize lay elsewhere. That remains a hypothesis, but the argument has moved on. Tesla’s independence story, Tesla’s description of its marketing

Because once you understand that the thing people want is the journey, the freedom, the ability to say yes, you have to ask why they need to buy the whole machine to get it.

The contractor bought a car because that was how he could buy the capability he had just experienced, but imagine the same emotional transaction without the vehicle purchase, without finding somewhere to park it, without insuring it, maintaining it, financing it and watching it spend most of its life waiting for you to need it again.

You want to see your friends, you want to get to the airport, you want to visit your grandchildren, and the thing you buy is getting there.

That is a much bigger change than making a better electric car.

And it is already more than a slide in a presentation. Tesla is offering Cybercab rides in limited parts of Austin, alongside Model Y in its Robotaxi operation, a service built around access to transport rather than ownership of the vehicle. Wider availability and profitable economics at scale still need to be demonstrated, but the business-model change is being attempted in the real world. Tesla’s Cybercab service, Tesla’s Robotaxi service

There is an important distinction here, because the autonomy levels are about responsibility and operating conditions, not simply a league table of how many clever manoeuvres a car can do. Consumer FSD remains supervised Level 2 assistance, a Level 3 system allows the driver to stop continuously supervising in specified conditions while remaining available to take over when requested, and Cybercab is Level 4 within a defined operating domain. None of that means unrestricted Level 5 driving everywhere, and it does not turn my own Tesla into a driverless car. Tesla’s consumer classification, Cybercab’s operating limits, pages 6 and 11, Mercedes’ Level 3 example

The economics are what could make that change spread. On Tesla’s July 2025 earnings call, Musk floated the possibility of operating costs falling below thirty cents a mile, perhaps towards twenty-five cents, over time. That is an operating-cost ambition, not a twenty-five-cent passenger fare, today’s fares are quoted in the app and can change. The price paid by the passenger still has to support the actual business, including getting cars to people, downtime and whatever costs sit outside a headline estimate. Tesla’s July 2025 earnings call, Tesla’s current fare guidance

But if fares come down far enough, and a car reliably arrives when you need it, the comparison changes completely. You stop comparing a Tesla lease with a BMW lease and start comparing the cost of your journeys with depreciation, finance, insurance, maintenance and parking, all the money tied up in owning the means of transport rather than buying the transport itself.

My bet is that, if those conditions come together over the next few years, owning a car could start to look economically irrational for a lot of people, particularly the second car a household keeps for the occasions when everybody needs to be somewhere different. That will depend on actual fares, availability and how people live, but the question is no longer simply which car gives you the best deal.

It becomes, why am I buying, storing and maintaining an entire machine to solve a problem I might be able to buy by the journey?

That is where the old automotive competition starts to look rather different.

A normal car company spends its life convincing people that this year’s version of the thing is meaningfully better than last year’s version of the thing, more range, nicer lights, another screen, an award for the cup holders and ambient lighting, all the familiar theatre around the sacred machine.

But if the customer is buying the journey, the question becomes whether the transport arrives when they need it, gets them where they want to go and costs an amount that makes sense. The dashboard has rather less work to do.

The danger for the incumbents, as I see it, is that they spend years chasing the Tesla of five years ago, while Tesla is trying to change what it sells. You finally build the electric car you thought you needed to compete with, and the conversation has moved to an operating service, software and a vehicle designed together around a different commercial outcome.

That does not mean every rival is helpless, it means they have to decide which parts of that system to build, which to buy and where partnerships give them a realistic route. Matching the car and matching the business model are different jobs.

Then you look at what Tesla is trying to put underneath it all.

It already designs its own AI inference chips, develops its neural networks and driving software, integrates cameras and computers into vehicles and deploys updates into a fleet that gives it real-world feedback. Tesla’s displayed counter is now past 15 billion miles driven with FSD (Supervised), and selected clips can help its learning process, although that mileage is not a count of retained training video. Tesla’s AI work, FSD mileage, Tesla’s data policy

Terafab takes the ambition further into making the chips themselves. Tesla’s first-quarter update described a partnership with SpaceX covering logic, memory and advanced packaging, beginning with a Tesla-owned research fab at Giga Texas. Intel joined in April, and SpaceX’s August update described the research fab’s groundbreaking and the announcement of a larger site. The fabrication capacity is still being developed, this is a joint project, not an operating factory already supplying everything Tesla needs. Tesla’s first-quarter update, page 8, Terafab partnership filing, SpaceX’s August update

But look at the direction, the chip design, the AI, the vehicle, the service, the feedback into the next version, and the attempt to bring more fabrication into that chain. To me, the potential advantage is being able to improve those pieces together, rather than waiting for every part of the answer to arrive from a different supplier.

And if Tesla eventually proves and secures approval for unsupervised operation on eligible customer cars, software could distribute that capability without waiting for the whole fleet to be replaced. That is a conditional possibility, a newer hardware badge today is not a promise that a particular car will become driverless through an update.

Manufacturing tells another part of the same story, because a company can tell you anything at a launch event, transformation, acceleration, future, ecosystem, all the usual PowerPoint confetti, but where it puts its factories, its tooling, its people and its capital is usually closer to the truth.

Model 3 and Model Y are still the bread-and-butter business, together they made up roughly 98% of Tesla’s third-quarter deliveries in 2026. This is not a company that has stopped caring about car volume. Tesla’s third-quarter deliveries

In fact, Tesla’s global deliveries over the first nine months of 2026 were up 8.8% against the same period a year earlier, while Mercedes-Benz Cars’ total sales fell 7%. Tesla’s third quarter on its own was down 2.1%, and Mercedes’ battery-electric sales grew 40% over the nine months, so the picture has wrinkles, and those figures cannot tell us how much of Tesla’s growth came from FSD. Mercedes-Benz’s nine-month results

But Model S and Model X were a different part of the business, the halo cars, the proof that electric vehicles could be desirable, fast and technologically serious, the cars that made people stop thinking of EVs as milk floats for people with hemp shoes and start thinking, hang on, this thing is embarrassing supercars at the lights.

In a traditional car company, you would expect anniversary editions, heritage films, some bloke in a leather jacket talking about the spirit of innovation, and probably a £140,000 version with a special badge and some stitching named after a racetrack.

Tesla moved on.

In its July 2026 update, it said the S and X production lines at Fremont had been decommissioned and first-generation Optimus lines were being installed, with production anticipated later in the year and initial robots intended for training-data collection and development. That is a reported conversion and a plan, not proof of robot production at scale, but factory floor space is not theory, it is not branding, it is not vibes, it is commitment. Tesla’s second-quarter update, pages 3 and 6

Retiring particular models can make perfectly ordinary commercial sense, but keeping the core-volume cars while putting robots into former halo-model space is still a choice about where the company thinks the next opportunity lives.

That is the broader point I was reaching for with the original demand question, there is more than one way to win, and maximising the number of privately owned cars you sell does not have to be the final measure of success.

The car can generate cash, deploy the software and build experience, while the company tries to create other businesses from what it learns. Transport as a service is one expression of that, robotics another, and they each have to earn their place in the real world.

Which brings us to the valuation argument, because this is where the difference in what people think they are buying becomes almost absurdly visible.

Take Volkswagen Group, with Audi already included, in 2025 it generated €321.9 billion in revenue, and at the end of that year the group’s equity market value was €52.4 billion. A year’s revenue was more than six times the value the market put on the company, or, the other way round, it was valued at about 0.16 times annual revenue. Volkswagen’s revenue, Volkswagen’s year-end value

Tesla generated $94.8 billion in revenue in 2025, and its year-end market value was about $1.5 trillion, nearly sixteen times annual revenue. Same year, the same calculation in each company’s own currency, and the relationship is turned on its head, Volkswagen’s revenue dwarfs its market value, Tesla’s market value dwarfs its revenue. Tesla’s annual report, Tesla’s historical value and revenue multiple

That does not prove the market is right or guarantee that the future earnings turn up. My reading is that, rightly or wrongly, a great deal of value is being put on a future beyond the cars Tesla currently sells, and the journey business is one way to understand what that future might mean.

Which brings me back to the man in the passenger seat.

One minute he was looking at a car, two miles later he was looking at the possibility of a larger life.

The important part of that moment was never the badge, or the battery, or whether the dashboard was nicer than the Audi, it was what he thought he might be able to do again.

Today, for him and for me, the route into that experience was buying a car. If dependable autonomous transport becomes widely available at a price that makes sense, the same human need could be met by buying a journey instead.

The destination has not changed, seeing the people you love, getting where you need to go, being able to say yes to things without the journey closing the conversation down before it has even started.

That is what makes this bigger than an argument about electric cars.

Tesla may still sell plenty of cars, but it is starting to sell the journey too.

And what people are really buying is the possibility of a larger life.