Our lenders in particular came back and said, well, what we thought was about 10 million of positive equity as of today is about $10 million of negative equity. And how many Tesla's is a Japanese stock? Over 1200. Wow. And we were just a $20 million swing in equity overnight.
Yes. What's up, everyone? This is car dealership guy. You're listening to the car dealership guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode.
Scott Painter, founder and CEO of Autonomy, an electric vehicle subscription company that has created a way for people to get an electric car in a debt-free way. Prior to Autonomy, Scott founded a company called Fair, where he raised billions of dollars to pioneer used vehicle subscriptions. He also founded TrueCar, which he went on to take public as CEO and several other consumer focused companies in the auto sector.
Scott Painter是Autonomy公司的创始人兼首席执行官,该公司提供了一种无负债的方式,让人们拥有电动汽车订阅服务。在Autonomy之前,Scott创建了一家名为Fair的公司,他筹集了数十亿美元来开发二手车订阅服务。他还创立了TrueCar,并担任首席执行官将其上市,以及其他几家以汽车为重点的消费者公司。
In this conversation, we spoke about the time Elon Musk called Scott out of the blue, Scott's staggering prediction for electric cars, the time he lost $20 million overnight, how his company, Autonomy makes money, how the mobility landscape is going to change, and much more.
But before we get into the show, this episode is brought to you by full path. Wasted data is a serious issue in automotive, but data is the key to driving revenues, which means some dealers out there are just ignoring a goldmine that is staring them in the face. Let's face it. The dealerships are completely overrun with data silos. None of the data sources are integrated with each other, leaving the data as a jumbled mess instead of a clean set that could be turning into cash. Full path solves this by gathering, cleaning, and sorting your data into one platform so you can use it to speak to your customers' needs with killer AI-powered marketing campaigns. My friends over at Full Path are breaking barriers and I'm really excited to have them as a partner of the podcast. I believe in their product and more importantly, intermission to help dealers grow. The path can help you turn your data into dollars, find them at fullpath.com.
I think that much of what's happening right now in the auto industry is both interesting and misunderstood at the same time. I was asked by Elon at the end of 2018 as he was really beginning to ramp up production for the Model 3. He does this thing where he asks people around him thought exercise. The thought exercise he gave me was how could Tesla sell half the cars in the US? At the time, I said, you're talking about 8 million cars. I don't think you can make 8 million cars. He says, okay, we'll assume that we could. That's really been his personal focus. He just thinks about manufacturing square footage and how many cars can he make per minute. He's been on a tear to just build as much production capacity as possible.
I said, let me think about it. I'm going to write you a really thoughtful response and it all came down to if you want to sell half the cars in the US, you've got to be priced below the median price point, which is a super geeky but very right on the money answer. He said, I agree. What's the median price point?
I said, when I found a true car, we introduced transparency around what people paid for a car. This idea of transparency was about progressing everybody to the mean because in part, the person who paid the most for a car and the person who paid the least for a car varied by as much as about 30%. You could be buying the same exact configured car at the same dealership on the same day from the same salesperson. There is this massive disparity based on information asymmetry. When we introduced true car, those prices tended to narrow from 30% to 3% in about 90 days. That was a big source of friction between me and the auto industry.
I said, what's changed since we launched true car is the whole game was about price. Now, today, if you really think about how a car salesman sells a car, there's this methodology called the Four Square where you basically draw two lines on the page and you say, okay, it's going to be about the price of the car. It's going to be about the down payment or trade-in value of the car. How much money's in the deal? It's going to be about the interest rate. Then it's going to be about monthly payment. Ultimately, car salesman are trained. You can give the customer three of the Four Squares depending on how much they come to the deal knowing and what they don't know. At the end of the day, if you give up three of the Four Squares, you can still make your back end gross.
Today, where we are at, just for listeners, you're saying back end gross, the added ancillary products, the Juicy Margin additional stuff that gets sold with the car. It's all of those things combined. Back end gross is how much money are you making on this customer when you clear everything away? A dealer doesn't need to make all the money on the sale of the car. They can make their money on either the trade-in or the down payment or the interest rate and actually doing indirect auto financing or packing the deal with all of these things that you're talking about.
By thinking about how the game has changed, it really comes down to monthly payment. What we did at Fair, which was the first use vehicle leasing app and what we're doing at Autonomy, it's all about understanding the importance of monthly payment. My answer to him was, it's not about the price. It's about the monthly payment. He said, I agree, what is the monthly payment that we have to target? I said $500 a month. That was true at the time when we were speaking. Literally, a couple days later, they announced the Tesla Model 3 lease at $4.99 a month. That was the beginning of the scaling moment for the Model 3.
Today, if we look at what happened over 2022, Model 3 pricing crept up, Model Y pricing crept up almost 20 to 25%. What's fascinating is that because the use car market for these electric cars is also supply constrained and Tesla now has taken the policy, do not. The cars go to auction and keep those cars in your bloodstream, control the secondary and the tertiary market. It was a fact that up until November, a used Tesla was more expensive than a new Tesla. That is a phenomenon that most people, if they don't understand what I'm talking about, just have no concept that's happening to them.
That does not persist anymore for Tesla because when they decided to discount, they also did something else very important. In September of 2022, Tesla decided to just make as many cars as the factories could produce. They switched not just from building to order and having an average nine month wait list, but to building to inventory. They just said, make as many cars, forget the fact that we have been a build to order company from inception and we're going to now sell from inventory. A Model 3, for example, only has five paint colors, two battery combinations, long range and regular and then you've got two tire and wheel combinations. You've only got 20 permutations of Model 3 and he overproduced 40,000 cars in the third quarter.
What they did is went from a nine month wait to a five day wait. They basically just said, your car is available exactly the way you want it. What they did is they eliminated this dynamic where a customer who was looking for a new car would then say, I don't want to wait nine months. I'm going to go look for that car in the used car market. Because there were more people looking for a used car than there were used electric Tesla Model 3s, for example, the price was higher. In fact, it was about 18% higher. That is a super hard dynamic for most people to sort of get their head around.
You're working on a company now called Aponomy, which we'll get into shortly. Before we even start there, you're working on bringing subscription in a big way to the EV space. Explain how did you get here. You've had many different companies throughout the years. You've been a serial entrepreneur and you've been very focused in the consumer space. But just walk me through a brief rundown how you even got to this point.
Yeah, I think great entrepreneurs, great companies have to solve a problem. The problem that I've been focused on solving for my entire career is that I believe buying and owning a car should be amazing. It turns out that buying a car is one of the most high friction experiences that we all have to go through in modern life. It's not just the car. It's the car, the financing, the insurance. 90% of people do not pay cash for their car. They need a car loan or a car lease because the average automobile costs about a third of the average consumer's total net worth no matter where you live on planet Earth.
Optiote Finance is a super important part of the overall buyer's journey, if you will. I've been focused on trying to make that journey something that's easier using technology. I've done it now through over 15 companies in automotive. They've all had the same mission.
I'm sort of like that, what's the mission? What's the mission? I'm buying and owning a car easier using technology. Whether it was one of my first companies where we had this 1-800 car search and auto access where people were really looking to get automotive information, we were the first company to put an upfront price on a car on the internet. This was with carsdirect.com.
I was an ideal app CEO. We ended up raising a lot of money for that company, almost $600 million. This was sort of in the web van era, 98, 99. Then that really ushered in a transition for how people went to market and how dealers went to market. Dealers were still at that point using the classifieds. Now the classifieds have totally digitized with cars.com and auto trader. Those didn't exist at the time. We were sort of in that transitional moment where dealers were going to market digitally.
Then true car was about providing transparency by actually publishing what everybody else paid for their car. The whole concept was based on the fact that the freedom of information and that we could see registration data. It had about 90 days of latency. We could look back with perfect clarity and see all of the information about what people were paying for cars.
翻译:True Car旨在提供透明度,通过实际公布其他人为其购车所付的费用。整个概念基于信息自由,我们可以看到注册数据。它大约有90天的延迟。我们可以回顾以完美的清晰度看到所有有关人们购车支付的信息。
意思:True Car 的目的是通过公布其他人购车的真实花费来提供透明度。这个概念的基础是信息自由,即我们可以查看注册数据。该信息有约90天的延迟,我们可以回顾以完美的清晰度看到有关人们为购车所支付的所有信息。
It started with this concept that if we could provide transparency on a new car, which is a commodity, because every new car configured the same way, it should cost just as much as every other new car can figure the same way. We just started to understand that once you get to about 10% of the market reporting, you were statistically a high enough sample size to be very, very insightful, almost to the within $10 or $20 of what you should pay for a car.
The benefit of a true car was that somebody who was a first time car buyer, and I've got two little girls in my family. I've also got mother, sisters, so lots of females. I thought it was a sad state of affairs.
The 75% of women felt they needed to take a man with them to go buy a car. This idea that you could help a disadvantaged buyer, and there's plenty of disadvantaged buyers. You could be older. You could just be less informed. You could be financially impaired. All of those things bring people to the table with a fear, an anxiety of going into a car dealership and trying to negotiate for something where a car salesman just has a lot more information.
True car was really about making people feel empowered and giving them the tools they needed and car dealers didn't like it because they felt we were forcing transparency and publishing the magician's handbook and forcing everybody to the bottom. In reality, we sort of progressed everybody to the mean because we didn't just have dealers that resisted it.
We had some dealers that embraced it and used it as part of their sales process. They would introduce the true car report as a way of building trust and trust reduces friction and reduced friction reduces cost and creates more margin. There was good and bad. It was a very tough company to build and run as a CEO. I ultimately resigned from that.
Then fair was- Why did you resign? Why did you resign from true car? There was tremendous pressure we're a public company. I had in particular one dealer, Mike Jackson, who was running AutoNation at the time. Mike really felt that the amount of information we had was unfair to car dealers. He took us on in public.
Much of it was just a perception issue, but dealers, the industry resisted. We were at that very important moment where if we were going to have a marketplace, we had to play by the same rules with everybody. If somebody wasn't going to give us information, then they couldn't stay there. TrueCar also had a very interesting business model.
We did not force car dealers to pay us up front for advertising. They would give us access to all their information, put prices on cars and have to honor those prices. Then when somebody bought a car, they paid us $300, not $30 per lead.
So paper sale. Performance-based marketing. Yeah. Interesting. We had small- Why 300? What was the logic? Was it just the average cost per acquisition for a dealer or a wife or a hundred? According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the average car dealer was spending closer to $1,000 per car sold.
We felt $300 was really that sort of Goldilocks number. It turned out it was very true. A dealer paying $300 is clearly saving money over their traditional marketing. $300 is what we needed to be able to make it worth our while. When we started, we really got started as an affinity marketing channel.
We worked with USAA and Capital One. Those two organizations has members and customers who are much more brand loyal. When we would bring those customers to the car dealer, they would buy a very high percentage of the time. It was just about migrating deeper in the funnel and talking to a customer who was closer to making a buying decision. Checking price was what you tend to do before you make that buying decision.
I've been on this almost crusade-like journey to make owning a car easier. There was one step further. At Fair, we said, what if we owned the car? What if we made it so that you don't actually have to buy a car at all? It really started with this recognition that leasing is a completely big departure from traditional auto finance. If you think about the last 110 years of the auto business, we've pushed almost all the risk to the people who can least afford it. All the depreciation risk goes to the person who's financing or buying a car. If you look across the spectrum of credit scores, the average credit score in buying a car is about 10%.
I'm sorry, the average customer who's buying a car gets about a 10% loan and the average term is about six years. They're paying more money to the bank to borrow the money than they are for the car. We felt that we had enough insight in terms of information about what a car is worth to sort of take that risk more institutionally. At Fair, we became a balance sheet buyer of the car. It was focused on used cars. We had to raise a lot of money. We raised a couple billion dollars of debt and equity to launch the business. SoftBank was one of our partners. We had a number of big OEMs in there.
What we were doing was buying the car and then effectively renting it back to the customer in the form of a subscription, but what we've learned is that nine out of 10 people have no idea what a subscription is. Technically speaking, subscription. Why didn't Fair last? Why didn't it make it? I'm not looking to get into 100 different technical reasons, but conceptually, what was it that the thesis just not play out or what happened?
No, it's sort of like marrying the wrong woman, I think. We brought in SoftBank as an investor. SoftBank is an interesting organization. They invested $380 million in the company through the Vision Fund, which is just a tremendous amount of capital. Their only interest was seeing if this could be a disruption. At the end of the day, SoftBank's objective investing in Fair was they wanted to provide cars into the rideshare business. They had a very broad bet globally on ridesharing. Not only were they big investors in Uber, but also Ola, Didi, Grab. From the world, almost a $50 billion investment in rideshare.
The rideshare equation is really not just drivers. It's drivers plus cars meeting customers and generating gross revenue from the Fair revenue, not Fair FAIR, but Fair FARE from the actual rider. As good as those economics are, drivers are the biggest expense in that equation. They wanted to make sure that the drivers who wanted to think of it as a side hustle and get out there on the road had a car that they could use because as they were scaling these businesses, they found that this concept of just using drivers who had cars wasn't going to scale enough. They wanted to open up the supply side because as excited as everybody was about rideshare, nobody knew how big it could be because it was always supply and stream.
They came to us with this idea. They loved the idea that you didn't have to borrow money, you didn't have to buy the car. It seemed like a perfect product for their cohort of possible drivers. It turns out that no matter how you slice it, the low-end Uber driver is somebody who's got basically minimum wage income otherwise and they are in the 500 FICO range. So it's a very deep subprime credit cohort and the other fact is they drive the wheels off the car.
And so if you are basically owning the car and giving it to an Uber driver, you have to be prepared for that car to depreciate very heavily. And to get into that business, we bought Uber's Exchange Leasing business in 2018. We started advertising heavily and we grew the business from a brand that nobody knew to almost 100,000 cars out on the road in under 800 days. So by almost any measure, it was one of the fastest growing companies in history in terms of top line and in terms of actual monthly subscription revenue, it got to as high as $50 million a month in that first two-year period.
So there's a lot of how long did the average customer keep a car? It turned out to be about 16 to 18 months. So one of the things we didn't know when we launched the business is if you let customers go month to month empirically, how long do they keep the car?
And it turns out that Uber drivers had a different sort of behavior. They actually, people with bad credit aren't bad people, they just can't do a thing consistently over a long period of time. What we started to realize about the Uber driver population is they in particular needed the car from week to week, not month to month, but everybody else, which we were really building the business for, wanted month to month and they stayed for 16 to 18 months.
The Uber drivers were willing to pay us almost $300 a week to have a car. And if you think about the sort of dynamics of generating somewhere in excess of $1,200 a month from an Uber driver who's making minimum wage, that's $8,000 a year, sort of a magic trick. But we did not launch fair to be a ride share supply system. That's what more what SoftBank wanted out of us.
But that business developed a fleet of vehicles, almost a billion-dollar fleet of cars. They were 10 to $12,000 cars on average, we were buying used cars. What I would tell you about that business, it ultimately got taken over by SoftBank where they bought all of our debt at $0.00 on the dollar. They wanted to own that fleet. We had a lot of positive equity.
So we had $1 billion fleet of cars and only about a half a billion dollars of debt. One of the problems with a subscription business though is if it's out in the field, you can't recall those cars very easily. And so they wanted to disincentivize people to stay with it and literally two weeks before the pandemic, they went ahead and removed the insurance from all the cars. About 50,000 cars came home right into going into lockdown and the auctions were closed down as well. So a fleet of cars that was generating $50 million of revenue became a much smaller fleet of cars that was generating 10x less revenue.
So it really killed the business. And as they were sitting on these cars and the lockdown started to loosen up in their infinite wisdom, they decided to sell the fleet of cars to recoup some of the value that we trapped.
So let me understand it. So you bring in SoftBank, right? This big investor and what? You lose control, total control of the company or what happens at this point? It's interesting. There's three sort of narratives around control and a startup.
You've got the shareholder vote. I had a superclass of voting stocks, so I actually owned the shareholder vote. They do have some protections. There's also the CEO job. I was the CEO and then you have the board and I controlled the board. I had five or seven seats. So you would think that I had the trifecta of power and control in that company.
And in many ways I did, except for I did not understand how important capital is and or how capital could be used as a weapon. So as we got into the fall of 2019, this is after Uber went public. We were good news, bad news. We were growing very quickly, but we were providing over $100 million worth of cars on top of everything else to Uber every month.
So I needed a lot of capital because when you go borrow money to raise a balance sheet to be able to buy those cars, it's about 10% of the value of the car has to come from equity. 90% comes from debt. We did not have a hard time raising the debt, believe it or not, but as SoftBank recognized that we needed more capital, they gave us a lot less than we needed. And then they went ahead and bought all of our debt.
And in buying our debt, they controlled the capital stack. They controlled the equity side of the business with about a third of the vote, but I still had power there. And then they also ended up controlling the debt side of the business. And they became effectively the senior secured lender in arch as we go into the pandemic.
Everybody asked for forbearance with lenders because nothing was moving and nobody could pay those bills. That became the beginning of the end for us with SoftBank. They had total control over the business. Ultimately, what they used the fleet for was to force the liquidation of cars to be able to pay themselves back first because debt gets paid before equity.
I read something that you guys were going to buy a Walmart or a Kmart or something. What's that story about? Well, the business of supporting drivers and growing as fast as we were also meant that we had to be able to buy cars directly from consumers because consumers are the lowest cost market to buy cars.
So you've got really directly from trade-ins, then you've got wholesale, then you've got the retail market, and then you've got the advertising market where customers are hoping to get a lot more for their car. We knew that if we could buy cars from consumers on a trade-in basis, that that would be the lowest source.
So we needed to create a reconditioning muscle, very much like what Carvona did. In fact, I would argue that Carvona's core competency has always been the reconditioning of vehicles, and that is really their throttle in the business. They've been able to recondition cars and then distribute them more virtually. So we needed a footprint, and so we had rented a former Walmart store. It had enough footprint up in the Bay Area where we would then buy cars, recondition them locally, and then put them back into the market.
You know, I'm thinking you've gone through so many different companies' ventures. It's inspiring you to keep going. I clearly see you live in a nice house in sunny California. What gets Scott Painter up in the morning and says, I want to start another subscription focused company. What is that for you? Well, I really have this existential angst about solving the problem, and I know it's solvable. This is not what Elon's doing with rockets. I mean, this is just blocking and tackling its business building.
I think entrepreneurs over time develop a core competency at a thing. I certainly am not going to be exposed to much of the early stage things that plague most CEOs or founders. I can get a client running pretty quickly. I can raise money. I've got a reputation. I've been able to turn investments into returns consistently. And so I think that that has given me a lot of credibility to go back into this space. And I'm 54 now. I've had well over 16 companies in the auto space all I think focused on this same mission. I'm a little bit frustrated that it has taken as long as it has.
I think the whole concept of being a visionary is that you have a vision for something that people don't otherwise see. And unfortunately, the problem with pioneering new stuff is that they often fail because customers aren't ready. I think timing is everything. Whether you look at Google or Uber or any of these really disruptive businesses, they were in the right place at the right time in terms of people's change in behavior. And I think that people are changing right now because of the electric car transformation in a very, very big way.
And what you're trying to do, do you really believe that? Or is that like a California thing? Do you really think that electric cars is having a societal change? Like, why do you think that? And I'm not saying I don't do or don't. I want to understand your perspective.
Why you think that? In order for us to do what we do, we have to believe a couple of things. I fundamentally do believe that we're all going to be driving an electric car. And I see that based on a number of different vectors, whether it's regulation, whether it's the will of the auto industry, which the incumbents for a long time resisted flipping over and saying we're going to build electric. They did everything to resist it. Now, just about everybody except Toyota has said they're all in on electric. Not just I'm going to build one or two, you've got literally hundreds of models scheduled for the next 18 to 24 months.
So I do believe that the industry, in part because of Tesla's success, right? They looked at Tesla and said, how did this guy come in here and just eat our lunch and create a trillion dollar enterprise value thing? And they are really studying that. I just got back from a conference with McKinsey where literally everything is about what did Elon do and what can we do and what won't we do and why? And I think it's just fascinating to see how Elon really wanted to force everybody to build electric cars so that we could save the planet and that we could create a sustainable future.
And I would say largely he has succeeded. If you're not building an electric car and building a business that is focused on electric, you're just not going to make it. There are way too many flywheels inside of what he's done, whether it's modular manufacturing, whether it's direct distribution, whether it's a completely electric sort of ground up system. Cars are going to become software with wheels versus hardware that has a very specific application.
I heard a really amazing sort of analogy this week where they say what Tesla has done is sort of like the iPhone versus the old Motorola flip phone. Everyone else is saying we're going to take Tesla on but we're going to not change our hardware architects here. We're going to still push people the Motorola flip phone and see how it goes. I think that the reality is that it's not just about understanding that we're all going to drive electric and that all this legislation and all of these incentives that are pretty historic, the inflation reduction act is really just the tip of the iceberg. People just don't understand on a state by state basis how many additional incentives, rebates and other things that are available to them. If you make below $75,000 a year in household income, you can actually qualify in California for another $9,500.
So what happens when that goes away? That's the biggest can't last forever, right? Well, let's start with the inflation reduction act. Those are 20 year tax credits. I don't think they're going away. It is designed to really help in that transition.
I do believe that at some point it theoretically normalizes but you've got 300 plus million cars on American roads and only 3 million of them are electric. So there is a massive imbalance between new and used and electric versus non-electric. I think theoretically we'll find equilibrium but historically in the US we make somewhere between 14 and 18 million cars a year on the new car side. We sell another 50 million used cars. If you just think about that dynamic, even if 100% of new cars were made as electric cars, you wouldn't reach equilibrium in the car park which is 300 plus million cars for another 20 years. So there is going to be this great transformation.
I do think it's going to sort of come in waves. I think that there is still lingering resistance by the car business. They don't really want to do this because in part internal combustion engines and the infrastructure that supports producing internal combustion vehicles is sort of at that point in the arc where they're now making massive amounts of profit. These factories and all of these things have been amortized over 30 years and they're writing that sweet spot for profit.
So take forward a General Motors or any of these incumbent car makers for example. They're losing tremendous amounts of money in their electric car side of the business and making massive amounts of money in their ice side of the car business. It's not very easy to say, I'm just going to stop making ice cars. It's where almost all of their throttle comes from in terms of profitability. And so I think that there's a serious innovator's dilemma here. I mean, I think car manufacturers, I do think that's a great point.
I mean, you see how much money forward is losing on EVs being in their position and trying to make this transition. It's obviously extremely difficult when you have. I think Farley in particular though, has done a number of very provocative things. He said to car dealers, you know, we're going to do everything different with electric cars. It's almost as though he said, we should split off the electric car business as a totally separate division. Allow Ford as a main, you know, sort of the mothership to just be a disciplined profitable business and then come over here to the electric car business, do what Elon's done, break all the rules, be greenfield, think from the ground up. That's not so easily done. I don't think that anybody has necessarily gotten that right, but it is hard what he's done just from a product point of view. And it's not easy for incumbents. It is a true innovator's dilemma. They don't want to tip over their apple cart to get over to the other side.
So give us an intro to autonomy. I want to dive deeper into autonomy and also just tell us here, give us the high level. How much funding, how big is the company right now? Where are you guys servicing? Yeah.
So first of all, I think that, you know, your question about electric really is the beginning of autonomy. What we learned in doing fair is that we had a product market fit that was profound. I mean, fair went from nobody knew what we were and nobody really understood what a subscription was to having 4 million app installs in 800 days. Those 4 million app installs resulted in a fleet of cars that was nearly 100,000 in total in under two years.
What I think really inspired my partner and I to say, you know, post soft bank, what do we believe? If you believe that we're going to be driving electric, the question was, what are the real big risks in the subscription business? Because you're basically taking the risk away from the consumer and you're financing a fleet of cars based on a sort of a particular point of view that you understand how that car is going to depreciate. It doesn't even matter if the car depreciates aggressively or not. As long as you get it right, the biggest cost in putting a car on the road is depreciation and interest expense. That's true of whether a customer is financing it with their own money or we're financing it more as an institutionally oriented thing.
The reason I like what we're focused on with electric and autonomy is an electric only subscription business that gives people access to an electric vehicle without having to buy the car or borrow money. What we're doing with electric is based on the fact that we think we're going to be driving electric. We think that companies like Tesla are going to produce enough of these cars. Everybody's making this shift. We know we study when things are all coming to market. It's happening again a little bit more slowly than when anybody thinks, but it is coming.
I think that there are these historic incentives, rebates, credits that we can sort of use to bring down the cap cost or selling price of the car.
我认为,有这些历史激励、回扣、抵扣可以用来降低车辆的上限成本或销售价格。
There's a lot of headwinds and there's a lot of tailwinds to this business, but the EV only focus is based on the fact that we think, and this is very simply, that there is going to be a shortage of late model electric cars in the used car market for at least a decade or more. Tell me more.
The theory here is that until there are as many used electric cars as there are used ice vehicles, that market will be out of equilibrium. If consumers on the new car side are more dominantly preferring an electric car, that persists into the used car argument as well. It just is at a lower price point.
The average new car in America today is approaching $50,000. The average used car in America today is approaching $30,000. Obviously, we've had a lot of volatility in that market over the last couple of years in sort of Black Swan events, but we just don't think there's going to be enough electric cars for the people who can't afford a brand new one. They're going to shift their focus to the electric car market.
For us, that's where we get liquidity on the car. If we're financing the car from the time we buy it to the time we sell it, it's important to understand how a subscription business works. We intend to own these cars for up to eight years. That car is going to see two, three, five subscribers over that period of time.
Unlike a rental car company, we don't want to have a large fleet of cars out in the world. We want to have a very focused fleet of cars that are being utilized. We don't have a utilization curve like a rental car company would if we own the cars because it's out there working. In many ways, we look like a mobility REIT.
We borrow money. We buy a fleet of cars. Those cars generate revenue. The average car we're buying today is a $50,000 car. The Tesla Model 3 is the dominant vehicle in our fleet. We chose Tesla to launch in January of 2022 simply because they're the only at scale mass production electric car that was available.
So, you're buying, you're sourcing all your vehicles brand new from Tesla. Today we are. The idea, though, is to be sourcing vehicles from everybody who's making an electric car. We do have some bare minimums, for example.
One of the things that we love about electric cars is that they all tend to be 5G connected cars. From a fleet and asset management point of view, knowing where your cars are is a game changer. At Fair, we had nearly 100,000 cars. These were 8 to 10, $12,000 cars. We only had GPS on some of them. We couldn't tell you. Oh, I know. We sold a lot of cars for Fair, so I know very well.
So that was probably one of the real pioneering blank sort of blind spots in that business. We had all these cars and traditionally fleet leasing companies or large lessors and lenders don't require that they know exactly where the car is at all times. With Autonomy, I can actually with a simple UI look and see where the entire fleet is, how it's being driven, where those cars are. If we need to collect those cars. It's a much different thing than with a loan or a lease because we own the car.
Give me the simple stuff. How much am I paying per month? What's the deal over here? How do I do this? How quickly can I get it done? So back to the comment that I made to Elon. I think affordability is everything. I don't think that consumers necessarily in mass act on I want to drive that brand or that car. I think they act. I agree with that. They act rationally with their wallet. I think affordability is that key pivot point. To what I said to Elon, in November of 2018, the average car payment was at about $500. You got to be below that if you want to sell half the cars. Today, the average monthly payment on a car payment is about $650. No matter what you're doing. Even higher than that.
Even higher. It's supposed to get $700 on a new car. There's a couple of things that are really interesting about the new car side of things with the new car. You've got to get a 720 FICO in order to get into a new car lease. It means that everybody who doesn't have a 720 FICO, which is about 70% of the market, is not really eligible for a traditional new car lease. Those customers are going to go and look for a loan. One of the real headwinds for lending today, and you see, and I've seen it on your Twitter feed, lenders are going out of business or pulling their business aligns altogether for indirect lending because interest rates are so volatile and so high, you're going to see exactly what we did in 2009. It doesn't make any sense to get a car loan.
Let's talk about if you wanted to get a Model 3, a Tesla Model 3, that car has gone through a wild ride as it relates to price point over the last year. It started at $42,000 in mid-2021 and rose over the course of 2021 into late 2022. It's almost $50,000. This affordability thing means that if you wanted to go out and get a Tesla Model 3, even if you're borrowing $40,000, you got to think about when you buy a car, you got to pay tax on that car. It's about 10%. You're really borrowing $44,000. Most loans come with a down payment requirement of 5% to 10%. You're coming out of pocket to get into a car loan, usually about $8,000 to $10,000, and you're spending $1,200 a month at a 10% interest rate on a $40,000 total car. The affordability of a Model 3, even with all of Tesla's discounts, is still out of reach for somebody getting a traditional car loan with near prime or not prime credit.
Again, going back to that monthly car payment, what is the average? It means that that sub $650, $700 a month car payment is eligible if you have really good credit, but only through a traditional lease. Tesla has always wanted to offer shorter terms. They went from a three-year lease. They also introduced now the two-year lease. Those leases are all heavily subsidized. If you look at the matrix of how Tesla has priced, it really tells you a story about how disciplined they are about delivering affordability. They have basically said, we will take a higher residual risk depending on those terms in the lease to be able to get people into that car. It's very, very telling when you back-solve all the numbers that Tesla has basically said, the most important thing is that our cars are affordable right now, going into a period of high interest rates and austerity, and they do that through their leases.
What we've seen is that for our business, if subscriptions are nothing more than an open ended lease, so it's a full-service lease where we bundle the car with title registration. We also have the customer pay tax monthly. We do not have to pay tax when we buy the car on the front end. That's about a 10% arbitrage for us on just the CapEx that we have to expend. We then can bundle the car with roadside assistance maintenance so the customer doesn't have to worry about tires, brakes, windshield wipers, which are really all part of the traditional ownership experience.
What happens if—I would imagine investors and yourself, everyone has asked you this question, but what happens if Tesla introduces their own subscription? Does that crush your business? What happens? I've been trying to tell Elon to get into subscriptions for years. By the way, Elon is a friend of the pod, so he's listening. I think it just makes too much sense.
The big solve that subscriptions deliver is getting a car loan is a gnarly process. Not only are lenders going out of business because interest rates are so volatile and they can't make money, the inherent problem between a lender and a customer who borrows money as the customer is entering into a fixed rate contract. They borrow money at an X% interest rate over a long period of time, but if the lender is pulling down capital, they live in a floating rate world. You can never reconcile a floating rate source of capital with a fixed rate outflow of capital. This is what led to the collapse at SBB. It is a huge problem.
What we've had to do, and this really hit us very hard at the end of last year, we had nearly a $100 million fleet of cars and Tesla dropped our prices. The day prior to Tesla dropping their prices, by the way, a used Tesla Model 3 that was two to three years old was selling for 20% more than a new one. A $49,000 MSRP brand new, 2022 Model 3, $49,000, a 2019 Model 3 with 50,000 miles, $57,000. I think that the big hit for us was the day that the discount occurred, they also stopped selling, billed to order. They sold from inventory. Those two things combined meant that when a customer who was thinking about getting a car didn't want to wait nine months, all of a sudden could get a car in five days, didn't go think about buying a used one.
All of the demand for used Model 3s was completely directed onto new ones. Those used Model 3s came down in price. Everybody in the car business started, this didn't just affect us, it affected lots of dealers across the country, smelling these cars. They took a bath on Model 3s. But our lenders in particular came back and said, well, what we thought was about 10 million of positive equity as of today is about $10 million of negative equity. How many Tesla is a Japanese stock? Over 1200. Wow. So we just took a $20 million swing in equity overnight. Yes.
And we're a young company. I think company building starts with you raise your seed round and then you have a formal A round and you get some traction, some momentum, you start to see the business begin to build. At 1200 cars, we're the second largest Tesla fleet out there. And our goal is to get to 100,000 cars inside of four or five years. So I think that in 100,000 cars in a market where you are selling 55 or 60 million total cars is not a very big percentage. It is not a winner take all market. We can be a very big business.
The economics of our business are that we buy a $50,000 car. We generate about 25% of the cap cost of the car in year one subscription revenue. And our revenue comes from not just monthly payments, but we also charge a start fee, which is very much akin to a tax tax.
I can't explain that to me like I'm a third grader for a second. Okay. So it's a $100,000 car. What do you generate in year one? We're generating about $12,500 in year one. And that's a combination of monthly payments, which are on average between $400 and $600 a month and a start fee, a start fee in a lease. I always loved how you branded that a start fee. I always loved that. Even at fair, it's a really good way to brand that.
Well, it is a true fee, right? I mean, it's not technically a cap cost reduction or a down payment. And so we needed to give it a name that was a reflection of what it really is. Makes sense. But in a traditional lease, if you have a $300 lease payment, you have a $3,000 cap cost reduction. And your total out the door price in a lease is misunderstood by most because everybody starting with Tesla has an order fee. They have an acquisition fee, a disposition fee. They have all sorts of fees. It's confusing. It's actual drive off costs. And they're nobody's really forced to be super transparent about these fees.
But at the end of the day, if you want to get into a Tesla Model 3 lease, you're going to be at drive off looking at $6,000 to $7,000. Almost nobody understands that because Tesla says our cap cost reduction is $4,500. You can also go in there and slide her around and get your cap cost reduction to zero. There is no way to get a Tesla Model 3 in a lease from Tesla with zero drive off. And no matter what you do, if you floor your cap cost reduction to zero, you're going to much higher monthly payment and you're still going to be a couple grand out of pocket to get that car. You know, idle license registry.
So going back to the economics, right? How much are you making on an average customer? We see about a 20% contribution margin. So this is actually a profitable business, but that's to offset for the risk that we take in owning the car, right? And what's that 20% in actual dollar figures? What is that? You've got a $50,000 cap cost that we're putting out in the form of debt. We see about a 25% gross revenue off of that number. And then we have a 20% contribution margin off of that. So we see about $2,000 a year or about $200 a month in contribution coming back to us. When you amortize the start fee and the monthly.
And how what's the break even point for a customer? Like how long do they need to keep that subscription for you to be profitable on a unit basis? Well, again, we don't think of customers as a fixed term. So because we are a subscription business, we don't mind churn. If a customer brings back a car, that car goes right into another contract. We've got a wait list of customers. And so we do not want to have cars sitting idle. The only time a car sits idle for us is if it's on its way into the fleet and getting prepped and ready for activation on the way out of the fleet and getting sold or in some kind of a reconditioning mode, about 4% of our fleet at any given time is idle in that way. They're on the shoulder. They're an asset that we own, but they're not generating revenue for us.
But because we have this wait list function, wait lists are not something that the car business has really seen a lot of over its history. Wait lists have really emerged with electric cars. And a lot of what I'm doing on Twitter, for example, is sort of mansplaining what's going on with product market fit and wait list because companies like Rivian and these are all great companies, they got great product, but they are going to be relegated to being niche manufacturers. They're not going to achieve scale because they don't give a shit about affordability.
They do not qualify for any of these tax incentives or rebates or credits. They are well above sort of that sort of middle line of what people think people should pay for a car. They're not worried about affordability. They've got good fan clubs. And if you talk to any one of these founders, they're all very comfortable in the knowledge that they've got these big wait lists. They're like, no, I can't make enough cars. And my point to them, all of them is they're in the wrong business. They should not be manufacturing and retailing a car because that is a one and done mentality.
The two narrative they need to have is better asset utilization over time. And they should be generating revenue from every car they ever make, not the cars that they make. So I think that this sort of revenue for life notion started with a guy named Jim Sewell in Dallas, Texas, a car dealer who just basically said, never, ever lose your customer because the hardest thing in the car business to get is a new customer every time. And I think that Rivian's done, for example, just a phenomenal job of creating a brand following.
They've got a cool product. It's priced ridiculously high. They're not going to get to sort of scale in a mass market way at those price points. And the same thing with Lucid. And unfortunately, Fiskar, I think is going to be in the same box because Fiskar came out with a $35,000 ocean that they ultimately decided to make only the $70,000 version of. I think what's going to happen to their wait list of customers is it's going to evaporate as they get closer to pulling the trigger and saying, we're ready to go to market.
I fully understand now. I see that, look, you're basically saying, hey, I'm offering one, two types of car, whatever it is, like the specific model. And so because of that, I just never have a car sitting idle, which was, I would assume a big issue that Faire had when it came to asset utilization and efficiency, because boom, that car comes back, gets put into the hands of another person, the car continues earning money and everyone's happy and you have profitable unit economics. That doesn't mean that we don't want to have a buffet of cars, right? We want to have a lot of choice. We think consumers are.
But we want to have a wait list for every single car that we have. Yeah, I would assume. Going into the Memorial Day holiday, we launched a partnership with American Express. American Express went out to their card holders in the five states that we operate and they offered them an opportunity to get $1,000 back for the first thousand that they spend with autonomy. Subscribe to our car. So this went out to 20 million card holders. It was a passive campaign, meaning the card holder had to find it in their member benefit area. It wasn't an email blast.
That happened sort of mid month, but we took a thousand reservations for eight different cars. Many of these cars we know are coming. We don't have them yet. So the Chevy Silverado, the Ford Mach-E, the entire Mercedes EQ lineup. But are these real reservations? How much does someone have to put down? Or what's the commitment here? Yeah.
So all we need for really sort of that early signal and I'm going to apply the same sort of reservation attrition math to what we do. But what we needed was an early signal of is their interest. So we need a name, contact information, phone number. And then they go ahead and make a reservation and tell us exactly what kind of car they want and what market. Once we do that, then we push those customers into installing the app. Once they install the app, that's where we get their driver's license and their credit card. They set up their account.
So for us, a thousand reservations in five days is sort of an astounding avalanche of interest at the highest level. One level higher, which is how many people even go into the member benefit area and say they want to be eligible for this promotion. So we've got about 25,000 out of the 20 million that happened to do that in the first five days. Now we have to go back and find out how that funnel sort of shapes up. But it is about getting people closer and closer to an actual transaction. But I do think it's a valid demand signal for what percentage of our sort of upper funnel wanted to Tesla Model 3, for example. And it was about 40%. Not everybody though. We had a lot of customers from that American Express cohort who wanted to drive a Rivian event fast.
So one second, who is the perfect customer for an autonomy subscription? And you know, it's interesting because fair, you were doing used cars, I sold cars through fair. You know, we did it on our dealership and I can only imagine it's a completely different type of customer than who you're focusing on with autonomy, especially you're telling me, you know, you promoted to AMEX card holders. It feels like two different dimensions.
It is. So, you know, partly because of the soft bank investment and the focus on rideshare, we started slipping very much to the subprime low FICO market, right? And I think that is in large part what sort of led fair to just a very tough day, right? Where if you were working only in that market, you're going to see a lot of delinquencies and defaults. Even though it's not credit and we're not lending you money, people take off with the car. We had people sleeping.
Whereas with a, you know, $50,000 on average electric car, you're just talking to a different cohort of customer, but there's a really big reason why we've chosen the credit card companies to focus because we navigate a thing called RegM. RegM is the federal law that governs leasing disclosures. And leasing disclosures are pretty gnarly. If you are a RegM lessor, you have to comply with not only the law that says you're going to have to disclose the cap cost of the car, the money factor, the residual forecast, you have to calculate all of those things to the penny and then put them into a certain type of form.
It is intentionally a very high hurdle, high friction experience. And historically leasing was only really done for the tax arbitrage. But the big value proposition of a lease is that you pay less money because you're only financing depreciation, not the entire cap cost of the car. The downside is you don't own the car. But in most cases, this is a depreciating asset. This is not like a piece of property that appreciates. In fact, almost no new cars appreciate in value. The way that we think about owning electric cars, we think they will depreciate more slowly than their internal combustion engine counterpart.
So it's a good asset to own generally. But I think that navigating RegM was a big, big sticking point to making this thing totally digital. So because we are not a fixed term financial contract of greater than four months, we're not lending you money. We do not have to disclose interest rate. We do not have to disclose money factor. We don't have to calculate it. We don't have to share with you the cap cost of the car because we're not selling you a car because we're not selling you a car and because we're not lending you money, the whole thing can happen on your phone. You can sign for a subscription with your finger on your phone. All you need is a credit card and a driver's license.
It is a higher cohort of customer just based on the price point alone. But this is uniquely something you can pay for on your credit card. You cannot pay for a car lease or a car loan with your credit card. So because you can put this on your credit card, it is natural for us to market into large credit card audiences.
And so it's not just AMEX. We've got three other national credit card providers that will be launching staggered over the course of the next 12 months. But these are what we've definitely seen with the AMEX promotion, for example, is that it is the perfect market for us because almost everybody who went ahead and reserved a car when they gave us their credit card is qualified just based on FICO alone. We're not marketing into a gene pool of people who are credit challenged.
We're marketing into specifically a gene pool of folks who have by definition good credit, good FICO's and are good payers. I mean, I think it's genius. Look, I think about this from a business perspective, I say, what were challenges with fair? And you mentioned skewing subprime. And then I say, okay, how do we solve that? Well, clearly, if you go if you go prime, that's one way to solve it. How can you go prime? You can go prime by attracting a better customer and with an electric vehicle.
Oh, and by the way, that better customer has an American Express makes total sense. Yeah, and I think that what we're going to learn and not just with AMEX and with all these other credit card partners is that this just becomes about removing as much confusion and friction as possible. You can get your entire automotive expense because when you get a subscription, you're not just getting the car. We're handling the car, the financing, tax, title, registration, maintenance, repair. You don't have to worry about any of those things.
So when you really look head to head, what are the true costs of automotive vehicle ownership? It's not just what's my monthly payment. Only half of what we spend on mobility actually goes to the car itself. For years, I've been playing this game with folks where you can pretty much guess what people drive based on their monthly car payment. And we spend in general somewhere between 12 and 13% of our gross income on mobility. And the mobility includes the car, title, tax, and registration, insurance, maintenance, repair, and either fuel or charging. Those expenses are true no matter how you look at it.
And we're putting people into generally high interest debt where they have to go finance that. It's absolutely inefficient. We no longer think, for example, that we're competing with car loans. Car loans cost twice or three times as much as a subscription. So what we're seeing in this implosion- So where are you taking a market share from?
I think it's two things. We're taking market share from traditional leasing. But I think what we're doing is expanding the aperture to include a non-prime customer. Because almost all traditional OEM leases are focused on that prime customer with a 720 or better FICO. So we're just expanding access to a lower cohort of customers because everybody can afford a car. They can afford a different car payment.
But we're very, very focused on studying the OEM car lease programs that are out there. And in the case of Tesla, that requires just constant analysis of what they're doing. They change things almost every single day. But we're pretty much, I think, as nimble and studying things the same way. We now have a price point where you can get a car from us for $3.90 a month. And that $3.90 a month payment does require that you do some things that are a little bit different. We have an 18-month constraint on term.
Because the monthly contribution margin at $3.90 a month is so small. And we have a start fee that would be higher than we like, but it's still lower than Tesla. So we want to be able to say with absolute accuracy that we're the cheapest and easiest way to get access to an electric car. And to make that a true statement, we've got to be constantly sort of measuring that, right?
What car do you own? Or what car do you drive? Or do you subscribe? I've got three autonomy Tesla Model 3s. Two Model 3s and one Model Y in my family. I've been a Tesla driver almost from the very beginning. I got my first Roadster in 2009. I was one of the first here in LA. So I was a founder series car. And I've had every vintage of the Model S as it's come through.
What did you do with that Roadster? Do you still have it? I've been bricked it three times. It was really frustrating because the early Roadster did not have some of the sort of technology in it to tell you when it needed to charge. And if I put the car away for a month or two and the car lost its charge, I had to go and replace the entire battery array.
So I tell me, you know, let's just zoom out for a second, right? Five to 10 years. What changes in the mobility landscape? Like realistically, what do you think this it looks like? I'm not even going 20 years out. I want to do just five to 10 years, given how much change we've seen in the last five years alone.
Well, I think given how precise we can be about pricing and residual value forecasting today, I think that we're going to see the fleetification of electric cars. I don't think people are going to need to own them. You know, not only are we cheaper and easier. I think one of the big reasons why people are trying us is because they're a little bit hesitant about investing in the technology that's so new. They don't understand how range anxiety is going to affect them. They don't understand if charging is going to be a new pattern that they don't like or do like.
But there's a whole bunch of reasons why not committing to a car for a long period of time makes sense, especially as you're transferring from ICE to electric overall. So we've got a lot of curious users that are seeing if this is what they want over time. I do believe that nobody's going to really need to own a car, but especially an electric car. I believe these are going to be institutionally owned and managed. I think you're going to be able to pay for access for what you want when you want it. I do believe the end of typical ownership for cars is on the horizon.
No matter how you use these cars, cars are a depreciating statement. Look, I've got four kids. The idea of telling one of my kids, getting into the workforce, go out and borrow a soul crushing amount of money to buy access to mobility. Three out of four Americans need a car to get to work. The argument that we're not going to have cars in our lives or that we don't need ownership, I've been very, very vocal about, and I remember when Logan and the guys at Lyft were getting started and the rise of ride sharing, I just said, this isn't going to slow down vehicle purchases at all.
And in fact, that was proven to be true. Ride sharing increased the size of the market in almost every respect because mobility became a thing that was more accessible. But I do think it's the end of drunk driving if you want to think about it that way. But I don't think the end of ownership, and I just think ownership is going to be changing. I don't think you're going to have to go into debt to buy a car. I don't think we're going to have to take the people who can least afford to pay the higher interest rate, the people who are younger in life and getting started, and put all of that cost on them.
I believe that you're going to have access to what you need when you want it. And you'll be able to drive a new one if you want. All of our cars that autonomy started out as new cars were not a rental car fleet. We do not want you getting into the car and saying, well, this isn't new. Many of our customers who are getting cars that have 10,000, 20,000 miles think they're brand new cars. Our whole goal is to make sure that the car is fresh and like new every time you get in it. And we're going to deflate that car once it becomes viewed as a used car.
I do have one more question before we wrap it up. You started out as next car. You rebranded to autonomy. Tell me about that. Yeah. So we started out as next car because it was a good name that was available. And we were always thinking about, if you think about a longer- That's a good founder story. So my core competency has been about creating brands that have a lower customer acquisition cost. And whether it was carsdirect.com or TrueCar or Fair, these are clarion brands that really did lower the cost of acquisition, created trust through information.
And really a big part of our arbitrage has always been have a brand that people trust that they can go to without a lot of resistance. Autonomy really reflected where we think people were at coming out of the pandemic. It was synonym for freedom. But it was really an exercise of could we own it? So we were able to buy autonomy, which had been formerly operated by Hewlett Packard as a software division. How did you do that? I knew a former board member at Hewlett Packard. And they had sold that software division to a company in the UK called Microfocus. They had global trademarks. We ended up buying not just the domain name, autonomy.com, but we bought 24 country subdomains. We bought the 1-800 number. So we basically have at this point a global brand we can build that we own completely. It was just a couple million dollars.
But I'm more proud of what we've done with the autonomy brand than almost anything else I've built. I think it's a brand that will help us to transfer trust and give people the ability to come in and feel good about what we're doing.
But I do believe that the end of ownership is here. I think that cars still symbolize freedom. I've got a 16 year old who's just got his autonomy car. It's his avatar. It's his ticket to freedom. It's all the same things that a car was to me when I was 16. Incredible. But he doesn't need to own it. I love it.
And Scott, where can the audience learn more about you, learn more about autonomy? Give us the plug. Yeah, I think first of all, autonomy.com. 1-800-ATONOMY. And you have that too. You have 1-800-ATONOMY. Of course.
But I'm getting obviously a lot more vocal and a lot more active on Twitter. I'm going to continue to do that. I think there's just a lot of things that we have a deep understanding of. It's not just me, but also my partner, George Bauer, who was at Mercedes, BMW, and Tesla. So there's just a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of perspective that we have. And so we'll be pretty vocal about that.
I think Twitter is sort of the perfect place to be provocative. So a lot of the things we see out there, everybody's got a point of view. We're going to step into that debate.
Dude, this was awesome. Thanks so much, Scott. And sure, we'll talk soon. Great. Thank you so much for having me.
兄弟,这太棒了。非常感谢你,Scott。当然,我们很快就会聊天。太好了。非常感谢你的款待。
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