11 ms·

Tesla FSD no longer offered for purchase

91 points by ado__dev 2y ago

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Tesla owners agree to binding arbitration when purchasing a vehicle, unless they opt out within a window of time in writing. This means consumers will need to engage their state attorney generals and federal regulators for the fraud perpetrated that Tesla is attempting to scrub with these changes: that Full Self Driving unsupervised/robotaxis are not coming as promised when the FSD package was sold by Tesla and purchased by consumers.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  > Tesla owners agree to binding arbitration when purchasing a vehicle Remember when the law made sense? Me neither.
peutetre 2y ago
> Previously, customers were offered the option to purchase “Full Self-Driving Capability,” They were offered a lie. Tesla still hasn't delivered what those customers paid for. > Let’s look at what else has changed on Tesla’s website on FSD before we dive into the wording changes. Another recent change on Tesla's website is to remove old blog posts, including a 2016 blog post in which Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver": https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-stating-all-cars-have-self-driving-hardware/ https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s... https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla... Tesla might now also outsource its AI work to xAI: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e22313 https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e... If indeed Tesla is "worth basically zero" without full self-driving: https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-driving-difference-between-tesla-worth-a-lot-or-nothing/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin... Then moving that work to xAI seems like a good way to turn Tesla into a private company without actually purchasing it.
- daghamm 2y ago
  Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD. This is something Tesla engineers learned the hard way. Things may change in the future as we make advances in computing and AI, but right now it is not possible.
  - mrich 2y ago
    So it's ok to sell a feature to customers if you only find out later it's not possible?
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      A more generous interpretation is that GP provides context and logical reasons behind the decision, not excuses for it.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      It's Elon Musk after all. His boldness and thinking he's exceptional is both the reason of his success and failures.
      - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
        To be fair I believe we all have this basic bias. For example, when I have a streak of failures, I approach another task with caution, even though it may be simple and normally I'd do it easily. And when I have several successes, I get overconfident and commit to hard tasks (and sometimes even complete them, by a combination of experience, luck, and other factors). Musk had some great successes and believes it is his inherent feature. (Or, at least, this is how he appears.) The good thing is that we, as humanity, benefit from his successes, but have also deal with his unfulfillable promises, not to mention occasional fits.
  - anonymousab 2y ago
    > Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD. Come on now. Elon was the one being pigheadedly stubborn about camera vision over LIDAR. There's really no reason to think this was a case where the engineers were insisting on a viable approach that unfortunately proved infeasible over time. They weren't going to be able to do it with the tech they put in the cars and damn near everyone knew it. We shouldn't think their engineers were uniquely blind to what everyone was saying when it's fairly clear that there was a top down push here.
anonzzzies 2y ago
So, Musk did repeat the FSD 'any moment' last earnings call and robotaxis using it this september (now) as well. And then they do this. That is why I found it very strange that anyone believes his recent Mars timelines; people I consider smart (PG for instance [0]) are awe struck by such an announcement while we all know that Elon is often decades off. Don't get me wrong, besides his political gibberish and twitter mess, at least he tries, but I don't know anymore if all the crazy things he says are to manipulate investors or if he really believes them. [0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1832638755523514701 https://x.com/paulg/status/1832638755523514701
- imtringued 2y ago
  Every manned Mars mission announced by Musk so far has assumed that astronauts will be staying on Mars for good and never return. Cheeky Reddit discussions arguing how reaching Mars is easier than the moon care more about saving some delta V than saving the lives of the astronauts that would embark on a suicide mission just to appease SpaceX investors. SpsceX has no plans to build a space station around Mars, meanwhile NASA wants to build a Mars gateway by rehearsing on the moon. SpaceX has not built any hardware or space suits that are necessary for long term survival on the martian surface. Those astronauts would arrive without any means for survival, stuck in their starship just as if they were stuck in a space station. Then there is the fact that at the current rate of progress, the mars schedule is faster than the moon/artemis schedule, implying that they don't care about the moon and are diverting resources away from it even though they have received money and a super tight deadline for it.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Remember when tesla was about to release full self driving cars "next year" and uber said they'd buy every single car tesla would produce aha That was like 10 years ago, and we still don't have anything even remotely close to self driving besides the few $$$ experimental cars driving the long straight roads of ever sunny california
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Have you tried it? it's not there but it's close. Even Ford's Blue Cruise is half way there.
torginus 2y ago
My guess is that they sold FSD for a lump sum while the tech was experimental. Now that they see the light at the end of the tunnel, they're planning to transition to a subscription model, and the cars that do have it will slowly fall out of circulation as they age, with many of them not having the right hardware for the real thing anyways. This is similar to what they did with supercharging.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  What software breakthroughs have they made that make you believe that FSD won't be 5 years away for the rest of time?
  - torginus 2y ago
    Not sure - but Waymo and a few Chinese vendors already have self-driving robotaxis in production. That, combined with the AI boom, tells me that building a self-driving car (even if geofenced and/or L3) is on the horizon. If that's the case, Tesla will probably figure this out as well.
    - Zenzero 2y ago
      I'm no expert, but anyone can look at the sensors placed on a Waymo compared to a Tesla and likely rightly assume Waymo doesn't have all of that extra stuff just for looks. I don't see how Tesla is even a serious contender.
      - fooker 2y ago
        The hypothesis was that LIDAR was a crutch, humans manage with just vision. Whether this is correct for delivering self driving cars, we will find out soon enough. Long term though, it definitely makes sense. We just don't know what the missing pieces of the puzzle are.
        seanhunter 2y ago
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
There are multiple matters being conflated together. 0. Tempering customer expectations from overpromising. 1. Investors' concerns about liabilities of advertising autonomous operation, potentially implicitly implying unsupervised. 2. Culpability of drivers when "supervised" (within visual sight) operation fails in a manner that's not immediately physically controllable. What if summon runs into a person or runs over a pet? 3. Potentially replacing "original FSD" with a lower tier substitute at the same price point, or as a subscription only. While I might jump to 3, 0 and 1 seem the most likely. 2 is still remains a big question mark.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bananapub 2y ago
how has Tesla got away with this fraud for so many years? they have never had a thing called "FSD" that existed, but they keep taking money from customers and also people keep dying, for years and years.
Ajedi32 2y ago
Title is wrong; they're still offering FSD for purchase, they just added "(Supervised)" to the name of the feature, which doesn't actually change anything since FSD has always required supervision (as the screenshot of the text of the old FSD purchase page clearly shows). This is just a slight change in wording, probably for legal reasons.

91 points by ado__dev 2y ago

Tesla owners agree to binding arbitration when purchasing a vehicle, unless they opt out within a window of time in writing. This means consumers will need to engage their state attorney generals and federal regulators for the fraud perpetrated that Tesla is attempting to scrub with these changes: that Full Self Driving unsupervised/robotaxis are not coming as promised when the FSD package was sold by Tesla and purchased by consumers.

darby_nine 2y ago
> Tesla owners agree to binding arbitration when purchasing a vehicle Remember when the law made sense? Me neither.

peutetre 2y ago

> Previously, customers were offered the option to purchase “Full Self-Driving Capability,” They were offered a lie. Tesla still hasn't delivered what those customers paid for. > Let’s look at what else has changed on Tesla’s website on FSD before we dive into the wording changes. Another recent change on Tesla's website is to remove old blog posts, including a 2016 blog post in which Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver": https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-stating-all-cars-have-self-driving-hardware/ https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s... https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla... Tesla might now also outsource its AI work to xAI: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e22313 https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e... If indeed Tesla is "worth basically zero" without full self-driving: https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-driving-difference-between-tesla-worth-a-lot-or-nothing/ https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin... Then moving that work to xAI seems like a good way to turn Tesla into a private company without actually purchasing it.

daghamm 2y ago
Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD. This is something Tesla engineers learned the hard way. Things may change in the future as we make advances in computing and AI, but right now it is not possible.
- mrich 2y ago
  So it's ok to sell a feature to customers if you only find out later it's not possible?
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    A more generous interpretation is that GP provides context and logical reasons behind the decision, not excuses for it.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    It's Elon Musk after all. His boldness and thinking he's exceptional is both the reason of his success and failures.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
      To be fair I believe we all have this basic bias. For example, when I have a streak of failures, I approach another task with caution, even though it may be simple and normally I'd do it easily. And when I have several successes, I get overconfident and commit to hard tasks (and sometimes even complete them, by a combination of experience, luck, and other factors). Musk had some great successes and believes it is his inherent feature. (Or, at least, this is how he appears.) The good thing is that we, as humanity, benefit from his successes, but have also deal with his unfulfillable promises, not to mention occasional fits.
- anonymousab 2y ago
  > Some Teslas don't have the sensor hardware and the compute power to do road-safe FSD. Come on now. Elon was the one being pigheadedly stubborn about camera vision over LIDAR. There's really no reason to think this was a case where the engineers were insisting on a viable approach that unfortunately proved infeasible over time. They weren't going to be able to do it with the tech they put in the cars and damn near everyone knew it. We shouldn't think their engineers were uniquely blind to what everyone was saying when it's fairly clear that there was a top down push here.

anonzzzies 2y ago

So, Musk did repeat the FSD 'any moment' last earnings call and robotaxis using it this september (now) as well. And then they do this. That is why I found it very strange that anyone believes his recent Mars timelines; people I consider smart (PG for instance [0]) are awe struck by such an announcement while we all know that Elon is often decades off. Don't get me wrong, besides his political gibberish and twitter mess, at least he tries, but I don't know anymore if all the crazy things he says are to manipulate investors or if he really believes them. [0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1832638755523514701 https://x.com/paulg/status/1832638755523514701

imtringued 2y ago
Every manned Mars mission announced by Musk so far has assumed that astronauts will be staying on Mars for good and never return. Cheeky Reddit discussions arguing how reaching Mars is easier than the moon care more about saving some delta V than saving the lives of the astronauts that would embark on a suicide mission just to appease SpaceX investors. SpsceX has no plans to build a space station around Mars, meanwhile NASA wants to build a Mars gateway by rehearsing on the moon. SpaceX has not built any hardware or space suits that are necessary for long term survival on the martian surface. Those astronauts would arrive without any means for survival, stuck in their starship just as if they were stuck in a space station. Then there is the fact that at the current rate of progress, the mars schedule is faster than the moon/artemis schedule, implying that they don't care about the moon and are diverting resources away from it even though they have received money and a super tight deadline for it.
lm28469 2y ago
Remember when tesla was about to release full self driving cars "next year" and uber said they'd buy every single car tesla would produce aha That was like 10 years ago, and we still don't have anything even remotely close to self driving besides the few $$$ experimental cars driving the long straight roads of ever sunny california
- fragmede 2y ago
  Have you tried it? it's not there but it's close. Even Ford's Blue Cruise is half way there.

torginus 2y ago

My guess is that they sold FSD for a lump sum while the tech was experimental. Now that they see the light at the end of the tunnel, they're planning to transition to a subscription model, and the cars that do have it will slowly fall out of circulation as they age, with many of them not having the right hardware for the real thing anyways. This is similar to what they did with supercharging.

mrkeen 2y ago
What software breakthroughs have they made that make you believe that FSD won't be 5 years away for the rest of time?
- torginus 2y ago
  Not sure - but Waymo and a few Chinese vendors already have self-driving robotaxis in production. That, combined with the AI boom, tells me that building a self-driving car (even if geofenced and/or L3) is on the horizon. If that's the case, Tesla will probably figure this out as well.
  - Zenzero 2y ago
    I'm no expert, but anyone can look at the sensors placed on a Waymo compared to a Tesla and likely rightly assume Waymo doesn't have all of that extra stuff just for looks. I don't see how Tesla is even a serious contender.
    - fooker 2y ago
      The hypothesis was that LIDAR was a crutch, humans manage with just vision. Whether this is correct for delivering self driving cars, we will find out soon enough. Long term though, it definitely makes sense. We just don't know what the missing pieces of the puzzle are.
      - seanhunter 2y ago

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

There are multiple matters being conflated together. 0. Tempering customer expectations from overpromising. 1. Investors' concerns about liabilities of advertising autonomous operation, potentially implicitly implying unsupervised. 2. Culpability of drivers when "supervised" (within visual sight) operation fails in a manner that's not immediately physically controllable. What if summon runs into a person or runs over a pet? 3. Potentially replacing "original FSD" with a lower tier substitute at the same price point, or as a subscription only. While I might jump to 3, 0 and 1 seem the most likely. 2 is still remains a big question mark.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bananapub 2y ago

how has Tesla got away with this fraud for so many years? they have never had a thing called "FSD" that existed, but they keep taking money from customers and also people keep dying, for years and years.

Ajedi32 2y ago

Title is wrong; they're still offering FSD for purchase, they just added "(Supervised)" to the name of the feature, which doesn't actually change anything since FSD has always required supervision (as the screenshot of the text of the old FSD purchase page clearly shows). This is just a slight change in wording, probably for legal reasons.