Tesla owners are angry after paying full price before Elon Musk instituted big discounts. A YouTuber started a petition for free FSD or Supercharging.
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- Tesla owners are angry after missing out on a deal that could have saved them up to $13,000.
- A YouTuber started a petition asking Tesla to offer owners who missed the price cuts free FSD.
- The Change.org petition has been signed by nearly 4,000 people in a week.
After thousands of Tesla owners missed out on massive price cuts, a YouTuber has started a petition to help them out.
The petition calls for Tesla to give away a yearlong trial of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software or free Supercharging miles to people that bought Teslas in the fourth quarter of 2022 and missed out on as much as $13,000 in savings.
Dennis Wang — who runs DennisCW, a YouTube channel that focuses on Tesla — created the petition on Change.org on January 17, and it has already garnered nearly 4,000 signatures, with many signees claiming to have bought Teslas late last year, before the discount.
The YouTuber, who bought a used Model X in September, said he would be "livid" if he had bought a new Tesla ahead of the price cuts, which reduced the price of the Model Y by as much as $13,000 and the Model 3 by as much as $9,000. Elon Musk's company delivered about 388,131 Model 3 and Model Y cars in the US during the fourth quarter of 2022.
"I started the petition because I believe Tesla did an injustice," Wang told Insider. "It's kind of insane to just drop the price overnight like that."
The YouTuber said he got the idea from a tweet from Ross Gerber, an investment manager and Tesla shareholder, who tweeted that a free six-month trial of FSD "would be helpful with optics."
Tesla currently offers FSD for a $15,000 one-time fee or as a $199 monthly subscription. The beta software enables the electric car to automatically change lanes, enter and exit highways, recognize stop signs and traffic lights, and park, but it still requires a licensed driver to monitor the system at all times.
"It kind of goes two-fold: Those people would feel like they got some value — they got Full Self-Driving and they could try it — and at the same time it could raise adoption," Wang said in a YouTube video about the petition, adding that Tesla owners that have begun "bad-mouthing Tesla" could become fans again.
While Wang believes that an FSD trial is the best option, free charging is also an option and something the company has done in the past. In December, Tesla offered customers who took deliveries by the end of the year 10,000 miles of free charging via Tesla's faster Supercharging stations.
Wang told Insider that numerous disgruntled Tesla customers have reached out since he launched the petition, and some had even made donations to Change.org in order to help advertise the petition.
"Tesla should do the right thing to keep their customers happy," one person who signed the petition wrote on the website. "We are loyal to the brand but feel cheated."
Tesla owners have been expressing their displeasure with the carmaker for weeks. Some people who claim to be Tesla owners have taken to social media to voice their anger with the electric-car maker.
Tesla does appear to have given some a price reduction to some buyers who ordered ahead of the price cuts but had yet to receive their cars. One buyer told Insider he got a $12,000 reduction after asking Tesla to adjust his order's cost.
Do you own a Tesla or have insight to share? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work email at gkay@insider.com