When you pay for FSD part of a lease, then return the car before any part of FSD was ever released to the public (and thus available to you), Tesla refuses to refund. Outright, bald faced fraud.
For me, that would be Star Citizen and Animusic 3.
Both were through Kickstarter, so I knew up front that there was some risk.
(Although, at least with Star Citizen, I suspect there's a reasonable argument that I'm owed a refund. IMHO Chris Roberts hasn't acted in good faith with our transaction.)
Fair point, and I’ve certainly wasted a couple of hundred bucks on games that didn’t ship. But even I am smart enougn not to pay to own a non-existent option for a car I am renting.
This isn't what's happening. Anyone who subscribes to FSD has access to current capability features. Like most software services, there are no refunds for software purchased during a billing period.
I lease a Tesla Model S and my app currently advertises all of this for "Full Self-Driving Capability": "Navigate on Autopilot", "Auto Lane Change", "Autopark", "Summon", "Smart Summon", "Traffic light and stop sign Sign Control", "Coming Soon: Autosteer on city streets" for a $15,000 upgrade.
There's a separate $6,000 "Enhanced Autopilot" upgrade option that covers the first five features ("Navigate on Autopilot" ... "Smart Summon").
That's all the detail I get. I presume that at least auto park and summon are unlocked immediately, because those worked on my previous leased Model S without being in a beta. The the first feature "Navigate on Autopilot", which is in both options, sounds like has to be an over-sell. How that doesn't imply autosteering is beyond me.
I was reading through the comments on the electrek.co post and was struck by this particular comment:
>"I paid $3K US, well before the FSD cost skyrocketed. While taking a cross-country drive in my 2018 Model 3 last August through October, with multiple terrifying phantom braking and autosteer (avoiding nonexistent objects in the roadway) incidents, I tried to get my beta removed, but was told it is not possible. “Just turn it off on your screen”, but that completely removed autopilot and adaptive cruise, so I found all I could do was turn off one action, but phantom braking and autosteer failures continued."
Can anyone confirm if this is still the case? Is there any kind of warning Tesla gives when ordering this package that it's impossible to remove once enabled? What would be the technical reason it couldn't be disabled once enabled? This seems awful.
FSD was offered as an upgrade to EA(Enhanced Autopilot) in 2016.[1] The driver in the comment explained that he has a 2018 model and he was discussing his experience with FSD on a road trip that occurred in August through October of this year.
>"Enhanced Autopilot(EA) was announced later in 2016 as an extra-cost option that used a new hardware suite developed by Tesla; the key distinguishing feature for EA, "Navigate on Autopilot", which uses the new hardware suite to guide the vehicle on controlled-access roads, from on-ramp to off-ramp, was delayed until 2018. At the same time that EA was introduced, Tesla also offered Full Self-Driving(FSD) as an upgrade option to EA in 2016, which would extend machine-guided driving capabilities to local roads.[21] FSD beta testing started in October 2020."[1]
I wonder how this breaks down by state. Obviously driving from Miami to Orlando (or all the way to Tallahassee) is a different drive than driving in the cities of New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Austin or whatever densely populated city there is. I wonder if that influences decisions. Maybe consumers are saying "I've read so many weird headlines about FSD and its flaws, my typical daily drive is so complex, let me not even bother trying."
To me it seems like an incredible number of purchases. $1-3 billion on vaporware depending on pricing distribution. Interventions per mile seem to be 4 orders of magnitude worse than the big players in the space (though they limit operating area).
FSD has dramatically improved over the last three to four months. I would be interested in seeing the trend on that metric with autopilot. For my own experience I’ve found my interventions on local street driving has reduced to zero or a small number per session (which is an easier metric for me to mentally track than per mile, which is subject to highway and straightaway driving skewing down - local street driving is insanely complex, especially in an urban area and doubly so in a randomly planned urban area like seattle)
I think it's more that your perception of FSD has improved over the last 3 or 4 months.
As a non-Tesla driver forced to drive alongside many Teslas on my regular commute (I drive past Hawthorne, i.e., SpaceX), my experience is that FSD/AP has actually gotten worse. Phantom breaking, extreme tailgating, veering across double-yellow lines, right turns that narrowly miss pedestrians...
My coworker has a Tesla and he refuses to engage AP or FSD anymore. He had multiple interventions/disengagements during every drive (in his words: every few miles) and the last one involved his Tesla veering into the opposite lane because it mistook a drainage groove in the road for a lane marker.
My perception is based on my ability to successfully navigate in complex situations without intervention much more than before. As a user of the product that’s my primary concern. If it’s merely perception then it’s the perception I’m optimizing for, so great.
It’s improved based on a heuristic for you based on whatever area you tend to drive in. (Maybe interventions is reported by the car after a session, but it’s still a small sample size.)
At the end of the day, you still don’t have the feature you paid for, you’ve paid to be part of a (very risky) beta test. I don’t think that’s how most people buying FSD planned on this going.
I paid to fund research into autonomous driving, because I believe human steering of cars is a huge public health problem. I generally find FSD with highway driving level attention to be safer overall because it’s pervasively aware. I can’t maintain 360 degree awareness 100% of the time no matter how hard I try, but the car does. I keep my attention on the big dangers and monitor it’s performance closely and that’s enough to improve my overall driving safety. My goal was never press a button and take a nap - although that would be cool. My goal was to crowd fund research into methods to make driving assistance more complete and accessible to everyone. I have been satisfied with the progress, even if teslas research doesn’t pan out into what they advertised as their aspiration. Research rarely does. But I believe they’ve materially advanced the state of the art, have created broad awareness, and have driving investment in other R&D efforts in both established car makers, new entrants, tech companies, and labs, etc. Solving traffic safety will be akin to curing cancer, so I feel well rewarded for my donation. Plus, whether you want to accept my metric, my metric is the one that matters to me, and it was I who spent the money for it. (I would note again that per driving session accounts for most traffic accidents better than per mile as highway driving accumulates miles faster than local driving and has significantly less accidents, and all sessions start and end with local driving).
You didn’t buy “crowdfunded yada yada”. You bought a product called “full self driving”.
You did end up paying for Tesla to figure out how to build the product that didn’t exist when sold. (all of which should’ve become a useable product “next year” by the way)
The fact you’re ok with that doesn’t mean everyone else is. It doesn’t mean it was marketed ethically.
I’m not even saying you were swindled. I think teslas seem like nice cars. You’re just making the wrong argument.
They sold everyone a snickers. Just because you’re happy to have nougat and a little Carmel doesn’t change the fact you’re missing peanuts and chocolate.
> especially in an urban area and doubly so in a randomly planned urban area like seattle
Seattle is a wonderful planned city with very predictable roads, and very safe drivers.
I want to see how a tesla navigated Boston. That’s a city that wasn’t planned, has much more aggressive drivers, and inclement weather much more often.
Yes I have. It’s mostly a north/south grid everywhere, broken up a bit by neighborhood (eg belltown is different than Queen Anne). Some of the smaller neighborhoods (Mt Baker, near university, etc) aren’t great grids but you shouldn’t need to traverse them unless you live in it.
It varies a bit by neighborhood, but for the most part Avenues run north/south and streets run east west. Makes it very easy to navigate. Much of the city also uses numbered names, for avenues. If you’re trying to get to 22nd ave and you’re on 17th, you know you need to travel west - along a street (any street) and you should reach it.
On a larger level, the city planners have done a great job wrt gradual density increases in the city, and consistent up zoning along transit corridors. They’ve done a good job at promoting biking and alternative transit by building out a useful set of bike paths (if imperfect). I think the link expansions missed the mark, cost too much, and will take too long to build, but that doesn’t impact driving experience. I think the city should have dumped a ton of street cars (like in SLU and cap hill) across the city instead.
Boston, by comparison, is based on animal trails, and the grid is not consistent within a neighborhood, and is non existent across neighborhoods. The street names give you almost no insight into where you’re going.
Oh and as far as drivers go, Boston drivers are way way more aggressive. I won’t claim they’re worse at driving or break more laws, but they’re used to way more traffic, and they’re way more aggressive.
I bought it, but I bought it as a donation towards funding R&D in the space of autonomous driving. I’ve found FSD useless outside of highway driving, which adaptive cruise control does ok at. That has however changed in the last year and the FSD has improved dramatically over months to the point I can reasonably navigate door to door in a hostile and negligently adversarial driving environment like seattle without fear of imminent death. If I were evaluating it on “what could I have materially attained for the price of FSD” I don’t think I got a good deal. But again, I didn’t spend the money with that in mind. I bought it with the idea that $3b in consumer crowd funding of FSD will materially advance the end of human intermediated driving - which I think is akin to curing cancer.
I marvel that there are people who thought donating to the richest man in the world (or one of the richest men at the time) would result in something other than him just taking your money.
It's a backwards-looking explanation though in this instance, and so subject to explanations and recollections which frame the purchaser as not having been fooled but rather <something more noble>.
Not to say I live inside parent's head or anything of that sort, and they could be accurately remembering their intention and expectations at the time, but if I had to bet?
Elon Musk doesn’t receive all revenues from Tesla, nor does he personally own it. Money spent on a Tesla primarily goes into operating expenses. Money earned by Elon primarily comes from shareholders bidding up the value of his equity.
Also, typically in any company revenue and PNL is attributed to the feature accumulating it and investment follows. It seems like a fairly rational bet.
I think it heavily depends on when they bought it given the increase in pricing.
I bought it at $7k, knowing full well that I’d never likely see true FSD, but the features it added were worth it to me like navigation on autopilot, and lane changes on the highway. We figured that just those two were enough to spring for it, given we commuted a lot and did road trips a lot. So it was nice to have it take over every once in a while.
At $7k, it was pricey but not very out of line with other car companies upgrade packages.
I think the ROI really depends therefore on what price point it was got at (someone who got it at $3k probably likes it a lot more than someone who spent 10k), and what they were expecting out of it.
I think true FSD is a smoke and mirrors trick that Tesla will not achieve with their current sensor loadout.
Tesla started offering on Oct. 19, 2016 a "Full self-driving capability" option package requiring a $5,000 Enhanced Autopilot feature as well as a $3,000 Full Self-Driving Capability feature [0]. The "FSD" package now costs over $15,000. Moreover, the "FSD" option cannot always be transferred to the buyer when you sell the car [1].
According to this article, 285,000 people have purchased it.
Yet "Full Self-Driving" is nowhere near delivering anything like it's promise, many say it is not worth the price [2], and this failure is currently under several federal investigations.
It's been 2263 days since the "FSD" introduction. That amounts to 125.9 FSD sales per day, or about 12.5/ hour (in 10 hour work days), or one sale every 4.8 minutes.
P. T. Barnum is credited with saying: "There's a sucker born every minute"
Tesla is doing an excellent job of validating* P. T. Barnum's claim.
[*] while one sale per 4.8 minutes is greater than 1/min, we do need to consider that most suckers cannot afford, and are not in the market for, a premium car such as a Tesla.
Well this is quite an interesting take. I don’t buy a screw driver because I enjoy turning screws. In fact, I’ve invested significantly more money to buy a battery powered version that does the turning of the screws for me.
Well it would seem that for a lot of people, the convenience of having a car to take them exactly where they want to go, exactly when they want to go there outweighs the benefit of not having to drive when using public transit.
