FRA: “As for HW3 owners who bought FSD, which basically turned out to be an interest free loan to Tesla for years, the automaker needs to offer free FSD transfer and a $10,000 discount on a car upgrade.
While this might sound like a lot”
It would add up to a lot of money for Tesla, but for customers? Some of these people paid $15.000 years ago for something that hasn’t been delivered, and now, they would be able to get $10,000 ‘back’, only if they commit to spending way more again, in the hope to eventually get what they bought years ago, or, more likely, in the hope of eventually being able to subscribe to get the features they already paid for years ago.
> Tesla needs to offer all HW3 owners a $5,000 loyalty discount, that goes on top of all other incentive program, when upgrading to a new car.
Is it just me, or does that seem backwards? If I purchased something with a specific feature, or promised future feature, and 5 years later it's still nowhere to be seen, I don't want a coupon for "my next purchase", why would I buy from the same place after they already lied to me before? The only acceptable solution would be to get back the extra money spent for that feature.
The time to address this productively was when “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving” were announced. Tesla and Musk have been misleading customers for a decade now, and the FTC and other regulatory agencies have done next to nothing about it. I’m not expecting a serious crackdown at this point, but I’m also constantly shocked at the folks who still buy into this fever dream.
The whole FSD promise was such a scam from the start (or self-delusion on Tesla’s part, if you want to be charitable) that it would be nice to see them feel real consequences from it.
They really should have just marketed the software "as-is" to whatever extent that is allowed by law. I guess they didn't because deployed automobile software is probably not allowed to be considered experimental.
Still, comms that framed it like: "This software purchase upgrades your car with state-of-the-art autonomy capabilities from our AI team, as we approach full self-driving" would have been more honest, still exciting to consumers, and avoided over-promising.
AI and focus on Self-Driving has been the biggest failure and blindspot for Tesla (Musk). So much of the strategy evolved around that, its a big reason why I pulled my investment. I invested because they were growing fast, had a pretty good product and had very high marin despite massive investment charging, service and verticial integration. And their next generation product should have been a reusable platform that could delvier a basic van, basic suv and basic pickup, all from the same assembly line. After that focus on a cheaper smaller electric car.
I thought it made a lot of sense to focus on a well functioning Level 2 System that they owned themselves. Make highway driving, start-stop traffic and such easy as possible. Make the car helpful and easy to use.
But then Tesla started focusing on making complex navigation and remote summening a feature when tons of basic stuff didn't work very well yet. For example, automated parking, 360 view, detection of features like shadows and such. Why not focus specifically on the actual dangrous problem looking around blind corners and installing a sensor suit that can help humans with the problem.
Promsing Full Self Driving with existing hardware and selling that when they had not proven that it could work was idioitc and I always felt like it was a liability. They should have been sued over this a while ago.
Initially Tesla messaging was save, nice software, fun to drive and green, and it then became half baked software, don't drive it and risky.
When it came out that Musk said they should build a cheaper next generation car, because Self-Driving would collapse the car market by 80% I knew the company had completely lost its way.
I would think the hw3 to hw4 retrofit would be easy. just swap out the FSD computer under the front and swap out the cameras. I'm sure they could make a kit that is compatible with the existing camera harnesses (if they are different). Also they would need to make a way to retrofit the bumper cam housing on older models.
If they offered this for sale for $8k including the FSD license for older hw3 teslas that don't have FSD it might offset some of the cost to bring up the people who already paid the $8k on HW3.
This is kinda a hilarious coincidence, because I just watched a podcast with Andrej Karpathy, the guy who was running their autopilot program back when the sage "fully autonomous in one year" predictions kicked of their 15+ year long run (and counting).
These days he's moved on to predicting 10 years for AGI and is, I shit you not, citing his 15 year track record of making accurate predictions (timestamped link below if you want have a laugh).
I feel like Tesla would have been significantly more competitive with the non-EV market if they had gone in a completely opposite direction with regard to fancy technology.
Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.
I've worked on cars long enough to realize I don't want a chip using a leading edge semiconductor node in my vehicle somewhere. I live in a pretty nasty climate. A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible. There's always something that starts to break once you cross into that 150F temperature level. I want semiconductors that were engineered to run in the basement of hell 24/7/365. 28nm and thicker sizes. I don't want 3nm gates in my car. There's no way these chips would last 10 years.
As far as Wall Street is concerned, none of this really matters.
Tesla stock (P/E over 250) is priced as if Telsa is the largest auto manufacturer, the biggest robotaxi company, the dominant robot producer and the leading AI service provider.
Meanhile; back in reality, none of this is even close to being true.
Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.
Somebody sued Tesla at a UK consumer court because FSD was advertised as delivering fully automatic driving soon. It was based on Consumer Rights Act, which states that goods must match their advertised description. Tesla ended up paying back the full purchase price + interest and legal fees in return for him dropping the case. It seems Tesla lawyers know they are in a bad position with this. The company has just promised way to much to early. Which was totally unnecessary imo. The car were pretty cool products and would have sold well if they just called it driver assist system or something similar.
Pity that BYD is banned in this country, thanks to Biden, and now Turnip.
But as for Musk, I always thought something was absolutely not right with him. I thought of him as a pandering populist with feudalistic tendencies. And I lost what little credibility with him back in 2015/6 with him screaming from Twitter about the flooded cave rescuer was a pedophile.
I also remember him launching the first starlink SATs, without any permission. Flooded the LEO with thousands of space junk. I'm just waiting for a Kessler syndrome event.
And come to find out, he also defrauded customers on FSD on teslas.
Basically, stay as far away as you can from anything musk. It will come toppling down. And when it does, all the devices will come with it. (Think of when IoT companies shut down, and equipment is now landfill)
Altman, Amodai and Musk seem to have no problem outright lying about the capabilities they have or the potential of what they're working on, in order to drum up hype. It sounds cool in the moment but it gets so old so fast. And with real costs in this case.
HW3 owner. Car drives really good on FSD as for 5 years old car , it’s not even close to anything that was on the market , I still receive updates .
Any short trip or long trip when I’m lazy I simply turn it on, and it works perfect 99% of the time. Both highway and local roads.
When I’m in the gym and it’s raining or snowing , I press the button and car actually comes to me. It used to be broken now they fixed it. It recently also start to park itself after fsd route is over. How awesome is that for a 5 years old car ??
Why should I be upset ? Do I want free hardware ? Sure . Is $7k I paid a fair price ? Yeah .
go check modern offering from any other company . They charge you comparable price for way less functionality. In the world where bmw tries to charge you every month for heated seats , I think it’s a fair price.
Oh yeah , I live in New York , I use fsd almost daily for 5+ years . In this very busy setup 0 accidents . Which is rare even for an experienced human driver.
"If you are a HW3 owner and still think that Tesla is going to retrofit your up to 10-years-old car with a computer that is going to make self-driving, you are being delusional."
I think this is the target market. Delusional people.
40 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 72.7 ms ] threadWhile this might sound like a lot”
It would add up to a lot of money for Tesla, but for customers? Some of these people paid $15.000 years ago for something that hasn’t been delivered, and now, they would be able to get $10,000 ‘back’, only if they commit to spending way more again, in the hope to eventually get what they bought years ago, or, more likely, in the hope of eventually being able to subscribe to get the features they already paid for years ago.
There is a good choice of EVs from various manufacturers.
Is it just me, or does that seem backwards? If I purchased something with a specific feature, or promised future feature, and 5 years later it's still nowhere to be seen, I don't want a coupon for "my next purchase", why would I buy from the same place after they already lied to me before? The only acceptable solution would be to get back the extra money spent for that feature.
No I’d say it’s pretty clear
or something similar.
I can't imagine that they made it easy enough for someone to take them to court for non-delivery of FSD, which we knew wasn't going to be possible.
Still, comms that framed it like: "This software purchase upgrades your car with state-of-the-art autonomy capabilities from our AI team, as we approach full self-driving" would have been more honest, still exciting to consumers, and avoided over-promising.
I thought it made a lot of sense to focus on a well functioning Level 2 System that they owned themselves. Make highway driving, start-stop traffic and such easy as possible. Make the car helpful and easy to use.
But then Tesla started focusing on making complex navigation and remote summening a feature when tons of basic stuff didn't work very well yet. For example, automated parking, 360 view, detection of features like shadows and such. Why not focus specifically on the actual dangrous problem looking around blind corners and installing a sensor suit that can help humans with the problem.
Promsing Full Self Driving with existing hardware and selling that when they had not proven that it could work was idioitc and I always felt like it was a liability. They should have been sued over this a while ago.
Initially Tesla messaging was save, nice software, fun to drive and green, and it then became half baked software, don't drive it and risky.
When it came out that Musk said they should build a cheaper next generation car, because Self-Driving would collapse the car market by 80% I knew the company had completely lost its way.
If they offered this for sale for $8k including the FSD license for older hw3 teslas that don't have FSD it might offset some of the cost to bring up the people who already paid the $8k on HW3.
These days he's moved on to predicting 10 years for AGI and is, I shit you not, citing his 15 year track record of making accurate predictions (timestamped link below if you want have a laugh).
https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?si=3PyVM476W6k3n-DR&t=181
Tesla has shown time and time again to be hostile to its own customers in a variety of ways.
Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.
I've worked on cars long enough to realize I don't want a chip using a leading edge semiconductor node in my vehicle somewhere. I live in a pretty nasty climate. A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible. There's always something that starts to break once you cross into that 150F temperature level. I want semiconductors that were engineered to run in the basement of hell 24/7/365. 28nm and thicker sizes. I don't want 3nm gates in my car. There's no way these chips would last 10 years.
Tesla stock (P/E over 250) is priced as if Telsa is the largest auto manufacturer, the biggest robotaxi company, the dominant robot producer and the leading AI service provider.
Meanhile; back in reality, none of this is even close to being true.
Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.
But as for Musk, I always thought something was absolutely not right with him. I thought of him as a pandering populist with feudalistic tendencies. And I lost what little credibility with him back in 2015/6 with him screaming from Twitter about the flooded cave rescuer was a pedophile.
I also remember him launching the first starlink SATs, without any permission. Flooded the LEO with thousands of space junk. I'm just waiting for a Kessler syndrome event.
And come to find out, he also defrauded customers on FSD on teslas.
Basically, stay as far away as you can from anything musk. It will come toppling down. And when it does, all the devices will come with it. (Think of when IoT companies shut down, and equipment is now landfill)
HW3 owner. Car drives really good on FSD as for 5 years old car , it’s not even close to anything that was on the market , I still receive updates .
Any short trip or long trip when I’m lazy I simply turn it on, and it works perfect 99% of the time. Both highway and local roads.
When I’m in the gym and it’s raining or snowing , I press the button and car actually comes to me. It used to be broken now they fixed it. It recently also start to park itself after fsd route is over. How awesome is that for a 5 years old car ??
Why should I be upset ? Do I want free hardware ? Sure . Is $7k I paid a fair price ? Yeah . go check modern offering from any other company . They charge you comparable price for way less functionality. In the world where bmw tries to charge you every month for heated seats , I think it’s a fair price.
Oh yeah , I live in New York , I use fsd almost daily for 5+ years . In this very busy setup 0 accidents . Which is rare even for an experienced human driver.
Are you saying that for every ~1.5h of driving there is a minute where the car could go full an hero on you?
I think this is the target market. Delusional people.