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.
