Comment on Tesla will sue you for $50,000 if you try to resell your Cybertruck in the first year
cheesebag@lemmy.world 10 months agoTicket scalpers are blowing up because of collusion by Ticketmaster. Tickets are also a virtual product. Surely we can be clever enough to limit the sale of physical goods the size of cars
gian@lemmy.grys.it 10 months ago
How ? But even if you succeed, what is stopping me from buying 1 cybertruck at X and resell it at 3X the next day ? And other people to do the same ? We all buy 1 car after all.
I think that here there will not be a Ticketmaster scenario, but more a scenario where a number of Musk haters will buy a cybertruck to resell it at a premium to a number of Musk fanboys just because.
So limiting the sale of it to 1 per person don’t really solve anything.
cheesebag@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Interesting questions; let’s see:
Nothing should stop you from doing that, or at least trying. You are one person with one car, so there will be other stock available at a lower price for others to buy if they want. The problem of scalping becomes an issue when one person can buy a large portion of the product & artificially control the supply. If everyone decides to buy 1 and then resell higher, nothing is stopping consumers from also buying their 1 and getting lower prices from the manufacturer.
Cybertrucks are a large ($50k) investment, and as a physical good that’s also regulated through the DMV, they are a lot more work to resell. So in this scenario you think there is such a large number of Mush haters with both the disposable income & free time for resale that they eat up a significant portion of supply. AND that there is such a large amount of consumers with disposable income & desire for a truck that they would support such a resale market. If that ever becomes a reality then… Good for Tesla? Those"haters" would be significantly contributing to Tesla’s profit.
Also, here is an academic paper that looks at the effectiveness of US anti-scalping laws on ticket sales, and it concludes future policies should focus on acquisition, not resale.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 10 months ago
Or when a high enough number of people buy each one a small number of the few items available in a low supply to resell them. True, the item should be some sort of “status symbol” or necessary item for this scenario to work out. I’ ve seen it in more menial situations where just a couple of people scalped on a low supply needed items (at least until production has gone to capacity).
The cybertruck situation is different from the ticket situation, you cannot produce 50000 cybertruck and then sell them, you need the space to store them, and the production needs to go to capacity so it will start low anyway. That’s because it could be vulnerable to scalping, at the beginning you have a small number of items so you need a small number of people that are willing to try to buy to resell.
Since I am talking about haters and fanboys, I would not bet that they would act rationally. I would not exclude that there are people that hate Musk so much to pull out these kind of stunts to other people that love Musk so much to be the perfect target.
cheesebag@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hmm, one thing I’m not understanding is that in these scenarios it sounds like every truck made is going to a scalper, and the issue is that even with one per person, the number of scalpers equals the number of cars. But why would they get dibs? A lucky scalper can’t get first dibs and buy out the whole stock before others get a chance, because it’s 1 per person. The real question is what is the portion of scalpers vs long-term owners.
Let me know if you have better numbers, but this article from back in January suggested 10k cybertrucks to be filled in 2023. Let’s say there are 10k potential scalpers, and 1M potential long-term buyers. That doesn’t mean the 10k trucks will get scalped by the 10k scalpers, it means we would expect 100 to be (again, individually) scalped, and the other 9,900 trucks to go to long term buyers. Additionally, since those scalpers only have 1, they will be competing against each other on resale price.
I think that’s an ok assumption, but the question is more about the number of people who would act so outrageously. It seems very odd to me that there would be so many people who hate Mush and are ok dropping $50k and have the bandwidth to resell, in such numbers that they significantly match or outnumber long-term buyers.