The lazy question about a price on software nobody sells yet is whether it is too high. Nobody can answer that one. The question with a public answer is what the fee is a price of, and freight publishes that number every year.
Morgan Stanley's freight analyst Andrew Percoco put Tesla Semi autonomy software at $12,000 to $18,000 per truck per month on 11 September, from a subscription of $0.85 to $1.00 a mile across 18,000 miles a month, and reiterated Equalweight at a $400 target while adding $20 to his bull case to reach $840.
$1.028 a mile is what a driver costs, and the fee takes almost all of it
The American Transportation Research Institute's 2026 cost survey, out on 22 July from 178,091 tractors and 14.08 billion miles of 2025 operations, puts driver wages at $0.818 a mile and benefits at $0.210 — $1.028 together, the first year driver pay cleared a dollar a mile. All-in cost to run a Class 8 truck was $2.336.
Percoco's low end is 82.7% of that driver line and his high end is 97.3% of it. A fleet swapping a driver for the subscription at $1.00 a mile keeps $0.028 a mile of the change, 1.2% of its all-in cost; at $0.85 it keeps $0.178, or 7.6%.
The note's own 20% saving never needed the driver line
That reads as a trap until you run the rest of the note, where two levers reach Percoco's ~20% net fleet saving without touching labour.
Start with the miles. 18,000 a month is 216,000 a year, against the 85,991 ATRI measured as the average truck's year — 2.5 times the utilisation, the autonomy assumption sitting inside the fee before any rate is quoted. Truck and trailer payments run $0.40 a mile at 86,000 miles and insurance $0.11; the same annual dollars over 216,000 miles fall to $0.159 and $0.044 — $0.307 a mile, 13.1% of the all-in, from utilisation alone.
Energy supplies most of the remainder. Mone Transport measured 1.64 kWh a mile over 4,700 Texas miles in March, about 15 cents at that state's commercial rate against ATRI's 48 cents of diesel — one operator's depot-charged best case, but another 14% if it holds.
So the labour line is the one part of the saving the note does not hand to the fleet, and the subscription is priced at 83% to 97% of it.
$0.85 × 18,000 is $15,300, so the $12,000 low end is not from these inputs
Multiply the stated rate by the stated miles and the range is $15,300 to $18,000. The published low end sits $3,300 below the bottom of its own derivation.
Reaching $12,000 needs one of the two inputs to move: 14,118 miles a month at $0.85, or $0.667 a mile at 18,000. We have not read the note, only accounts of it, which print range and derivation together. Either a lower utilisation case sits in the research and the rewrites dropped it, or the two were written against different assumptions. Anyone quoting $12,000 quotes a figure with no published basis.
The $17bn is the top of the fee range wearing a round number
Percoco's 2040 scenario: 82,000 Semis on the road, 13.5% of the autonomous addressable market, $17bn of software revenue, about $7.5bn of incremental EBIT. Run the fleet count against the fee:
82,000 Semis x the monthly fee x 12 months - R40 arithmetic
| Fee per truck per month | 2040 software revenue |
|---|---|
| $12,000, the stated low end | $11.81bn |
| $15,000, the midpoint | $14.76bn |
| $17,276, implied by the headline | $17.00bn |
| $18,000, the stated high end | $17.71bn |
The 82,000-truck 2040 fleet, the 13.5% share of the autonomous addressable market and the $17bn software revenue are Morgan Stanley's scenario. Every row here is that fleet count multiplied by a monthly fee and by twelve, which is R40 arithmetic, not a figure the firm published. The third row inverts it: $17bn divided by 82,000 and by twelve is $17,276 a month. Nothing in this table is a forecast of Tesla's revenue - it tests which point of the published fee range the published headline corresponds to.
82,000 × $18,000 × 12 = $17.71bn. The headline implies $17,276 a month, 96% of the way to the top of a range whose bottom is the part that does not reconcile.
Nevada's Semi line is built for 50,000 trucks a year, so 82,000 on the road by 2040 is 1.64 years of nameplate output; what binds the scenario is a 13.5% share of a market that does not exist yet, not the factory, which already dwarfs the order book.
Tesla has never quoted a Semi software price
No per-mile or per-month Semi tariff appears in any Tesla disclosure. On the 22 July call Elon Musk put self-driving Semi at "probably around the end of this year or early next year" and said it was "taking a bit of a backseat for the next six months or so".
Tesla's only published autonomy price is consumer Full Self-Driving at $99 a month — $18,000 is 182 times it. Electrek obtained a $290,000 customer quote for the 500-mile Semi in February; at $18,000 a month the software runs $216,000 a year, 74% of the truck, annually.
Tesla opens the Semi factory to invited guests on 24 September. A published price would settle which end of Percoco's range is real. Until one exists, $17bn is a top-of-range figure circulating as a central one.
Every Morgan Stanley figure here — rating, targets, per-mile rate, fee range, addressable market, fleet saving and the whole 2040 scenario — is as Investing.com reported the 11 September note; the note itself was not available to us, and Seeking Alpha carried the same figures that morning. Cost-per-mile lines are the American Transportation Research Institute's 2026 update, a survey of 2025 diesel operations rather than an autonomous duty cycle. The energy figure is one operator's measured run, reported in March. The Semi price is Electrek's February reporting, the 24 September event is Tesla's own invitation reported in August, and Musk's words are Tesla's call. Every multiplication and share is ours.
