Tesla cuts price of self driving system, three EV models | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

NEW YORK — Tesla knocked roughly a third off the price of its “Full Self Driving” system — which can’t drive itself and so drivers must remain alert and be ready to intervene — from $12,000 to $8,000, according to the company website.

Tesla Chief Executive Officer and billionaire Elon Musk promised in 2019 that there would be a fleet of robotaxis on the road in 2020, but the promise has yet to materialize, and the system still has to be supervised by humans.

The cuts, which occurred on Saturday, follow Tesla’s moves to knock $2,000 off the prices of three of its five models in the United States late Friday. That’s the latest evidence of the challenges facing the electric vehicle maker.

Tesla reduced the prices of the Model Y, a small SUV which is Tesla’s most popular model and the top-selling electric vehicle in the United States, and also of the Models X and S, its older and more expensive models. Prices for the Model 3 sedan and the Cybertruck stayed the same.

The price reduction came the day after Tesla’s stock dropped below $150 per share, wiping out all gains made over the past year. The Austin, Texas, company’s stock price has dropped about 40% so far this year amid falling sales and increased competition. Discounted sticker prices are a way to try to entice more car buyers.

Also, on Monday, Tesla Inc. moved to reduce the number of employees in a newly formed marketing team as part of announced company-wide layoffs, reversing course from a traditional advertising push that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk greenlighted less than a year ago.

The company’s “growth content” team in the U.S., a group of about 40 employees run by senior manager Alex Ingram and reporting to Jorge Milburn, was eliminated in the ongoing job cuts, according to people familiar with the matter. Ingram and Milburn were part of the reduction, the people said. The company still has a smaller marketing group in Europe, one person said.

There were also significant job eliminations in Tesla’s design studio and staff located in Hawthorne, Calif., said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Tesla and Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment on the job cuts.

The cuts signal a pullback from Tesla’s nascent advertising initiative. The automaker had long eschewed television, radio, print or online ads — and had built a formidable brand largely through word-of-mouth — before Musk said last year that Tesla would “try a little advertising and see how it goes.” Ingram started building the growth team about four months ago.

Investors have increasingly called on Musk to focus more on marketing as global electric vehicle sales growth has slowed and more competitors have entered the market. Tesla’s embrace of advertising has also broadly coincided with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which he’s renamed X. The social-media platform has sought to stem a sharp decline in ad revenue under the new owner, driven by major brands’ unease over content moderation and Musk’s own sometimes-controversial posts.

The upheaval in Tesla’s growth team underscores the broad reach of the company’s largest-ever job cuts, which Musk said last week would affect more than 10% of the global workforce. Bloomberg has reported that the figure could be closer to 20% in some divisions, potentially pushing the total number of layoffs beyond 20,000.

Tesla’s shares fell $5.00, or 3.4%, to close Monday at $142.05 in New York.

Information for this article was contributed by The Associated Press and by Ed Ludlow of Bloomberg News (WPNS).