It's a question all Tesla customers should be asking, and not just for "FS"D:
Roadster deposits? Deposits opened in 2015. That's more than half a decade ago. The Roadster is still vapourware as far as anyone can tell. Barely gets mentioned anywhere except for the occasional outrageous Musk tweet lie "it will have rockets!".
Tesla Semi? Deposits opened a couple years ago and the design isn't even finalized. The line to produce these does not exist yet.
Tesla Cybertruck? At least the deposit is just $100, but this was a shift in interest-free capital raising by Tesla (volume instead of quantity). The design has not yet been completed, never mind the line - the pre-requisite line to produce the batteries this vehicle will use doesn't even exist yet.
Now imagine if you had put any of those deposits in an alternative investment. Roadster deposit holders could be millionaires just off not putting down a deposit and instead putting it on anything - including Tesla stock.
The stock is Tesla's real product. Everything else is something on the way to meeting the performance milestones so Musk can get hits bonuses, but the good news is he can help you get a bonus too since you could have bought shares.
All true. But you could argue that deposits for roadster or semi are made by people who have a lot of excess cash or are able to make their own due diligence on the subject. Neither can be said about the average Joe who shelled out 10 grand last year in expectation that his car will drive itself in a couple months.
Did anyone actually believe that you'd be able to rent out your Tesla for money? I know there are a lot of gullible people but that doesn't even pass the sniff test.
If you were making a deposit on a Roadster you were probably already a millionaire (initial deposit was 250k). Also, in an index fund doing 7-8% interest you couldn’t even double that 250k in 5 years. It’s not really fair to make that statement based on actual performance. Your other claims are accurate, but do people care? Tesla fans have shown a lot of patience and they have always delivered eventually. On everything but FSD.
The cable was never a product. It was basically R&D project.
Battery swap works fine on early Model S but they changed strategy very quickly after showing it off. It was only ever announced as a pilot program. It just doesn't make sense and they rather invested in Superchargers.
All cars after Model S were not announced to be able do do swapping.
Even on the Model S the added a shield under the car to protect the battery even if you drive big debris at high speed.
No idea. I only follow things at a high level. Wife likes her Model 3. Great performance and value for the price. She hasn’t tried autopilot once and we never paid for FSD. I don’t think the market really cares about FSD. Tesla is the first modern and new auto maker in decades to really see any significant cultural and market penetration. I’ll give Elon a pass, or rather Tesla a pass for Elon’s overhyping everything. What they have done and delivered is quite amazing to me.
Average returns are what you should base a decision like that on right? Looking back it’s easy. But you can’t assume outsize performance when making such a decision.
> Tesla fans have shown a lot of patience and they have always delivered eventually.
And a bunch of other things (many mentioned innthe post you respond to), that may or may not get delivered in the future, but factually have nor yet been delivered.
This is a great question to ask via arbitration or a class action (if you opted out of arbitration when you bought the vehicle). I also expect a securities fraud suit, as Tesla has been recognizing revenue in self selected milestones for FSD.
Disclosure: Tesla S/X owner (EAP, no FSD), party to the class action regarding S/X premature suspension failures.
> Deferred revenue activity related to the access to our Supercharger network, internet connectivity, Full Self Driving (“FSD”) features and over-the-air software updates on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantee amounted to $2.00 billion and $1.93 billion as of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively.
> Deferred revenue is equivalent to the total transaction price allocated to the performance obligations that are unsatisfied, or partially unsatisfied, as of the balance sheet date. Revenue recognized from the deferred revenue balance as of December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $79 million and $57 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Of the total deferred revenue on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantees as of March 31, 2021, we expect to recognize $1.21 billion of revenue in the next 12 months. The remaining balance will be recognized over the performance period which is generally the expected ownership life of the vehicle or the eight-year life of the vehicle.
Oh well. The lawsuits will be interesting to watch. I'm sorry for the people who have been fooled into purchasing FSD.
IMO they have less than 50% chance that they will actually get a car that drives itself without babysitting before 2025.
I think companies need to develop some products for intermediate stages between where we are now and FSD. Here are some ideas.
1. FSD in certain parking lots. Make deals with some major stores that tend to have big parking lots (such Walmart, Target, Home Depot) to map their parking lots and designate specific areas for rider drop off and for unattended parking. Special signage or road markings would be added to the parking lot to identify these areas and how to move between them.
You can drive to one of these lots, go to the drop off area, and get out of your car. The car then can drive itself to the designated parking area while you go in and shop. When you are done, you can summon it and it drives back to the drop off area to get you.
2. FSD on certain stretches of major freeways. E.g., I-10 between Santa Monica and near downtown Los Angeles, or I-5 from where 99 splits off south of Bakersfield up to where the 580 starts and then up that a ways.
3. A service where for a monthly subscription you get FSD or close to it but only on trips between specific points, such as between your home and office.
The way it would work is that you would drive the route several times and the car records it and uploads it to the company. They use that uploaded data to test their FSD software to see if it can handle that particular route, and tweak it as necessary to either handle places it was having trouble or to hard-code special rules.
If the car notices that something has changed and it isn't sure it can handle it, you have to go back to manual driving and the car uploads footage and sensor data and the company fixes it.
Each route would probably have a setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee.
That's what I was originally thinking of as the minimum viable product in my DARPA Grand Challenge days. Mostly for rental cars at airports. If you'd booked a rental car, one would arrive at the terminal ready for use, and you'd get in and drive away manually. For airport departure, you'd leave the vehicle at the terminal, and it would slowly drive itself back to the rental lot.
No need to go faster than 20 MPH, and you could put markers and sensors in the roads if necessary.
There's been too little done with slow-speed automatic driving. Google made their little bubble car, but dropped that product. There are some fully automated shuttle buses, but that's a tiny business. About 25 companies are in that business, but other than Baidu, few have any deployments beyond test scale.
> They use that uploaded data to test their FSD software to see if it can handle that particular route, and tweak it as necessary to either handle places it was having trouble or to hard-code special rules.
This is an approach that is doomed to fail, because trying to hardcode the particulars of a specific route will converge to working pretty well until the moment something completely unexpected happens which needs human-level AI to be able to handle in the moment.
This is why level 5 autopilot isn't really going to happen without the invention of real AI, which is debatable whether that'll ever be achieved. Most certainly not in any of the timeframes Musk keeps promising.
Betting that it'd work and increase the value of your car. And Musk is still selling that it'll work really soon now (of course, he also said it'd drive across the country by itself by 2018):
Harsh but I have to say is there a car company with the kind of hype and fanboyism of Tesla?
I understand 5 years ago when Tesla was doing things nobody else was doing but electric cars are mainstream now. If I had the money I'd be buying a Volvo Polestar.
Jeep. I know so many people who love their Jeeps despite them largely being garbage. To me, Jeep is like Harley Davidson; they look great until they start to fall apart.
Most car companies inspire wild enthusiasm and hype. It represents a huge purchase for the majority of Americans, hence they have pretty extreme buy-in for their decisions
I think a lot of people saw it like a very, very, very expensive Kickstarter. They paid $10k to help make it happen. As is often the case with Kickstarters, it didn't match the hype.
It's not purely speculative. Just hopped on their site to check, these are the features they say you get immediately today:
* Navigate on Autopilot
* Auto Lane Change
* Autopark
* Summon
* Full Self-Driving Computer
* Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
When Cadillac's Super Cruise option is $2,500, $10K is still a huge premium, but it doesn't look like you can get those features independent of the FSD package from Tesla.
That’s a lie. None of these features actually work. It’s all total bullshit, intended to stave off the inevitable FSD lawsuits. They have pulled off one of the most brazen growth hacks ever. As someone who fell for it, I hope some justice is coming eventually, but I’m not holding my breath
$7k (x 2) at the time, reason was to help Tesla survive. Was not expecting anything else for my money in the next few years.
Nowadays Tesla’s survival seems more assured, so if I did it today, it would no longer be for that reason.
Some people pay for it thinking that it will be much more expensive later.
I question this thinking though, because once it’s possible, it will be a table stakes feature we take for granted on every car, which means it shouldn’t add a huge bump to the price. But maybe I’m thinking about it wrong.
> $7k (x 2) at the time, reason was to help Tesla survive.
Man there is something truly remarkable about Musk that he successfully convinced some people to, in effect, treat Tesla, a for-profit company, as a charity and to donate to them thousands of dollars with no expectation of anything in return.
Any other company would just raise money from investors, whether those be institution or from main street via the stock or bond markets.
But Tesla just sold folks a dream and they bought it, allowing Tesla to generate cashflow without Musk having to worry about pesky shareholders or dilution or even delivering a working product.
I suspect that phenomenon will be studied in business school for years to come.
Yeah, Musk is the second richest man on the planet, but somehow he's also always begging for cash. Reminds me of a former massively wealth president of ours who begged donors to fund his campaign. Two peas in a pod.
I wanted long freeway rides and driving in stop and go traffic to be less painful. I wanted to be able to watch my $10k in February 2021 turn into something really cool within a year.
Honestly, I think I’m safer with auto steer on. I’ve had the car hit the brakes when someone turns across my lane and I felt it was too conservative, but then I started wondering if I was too aggressive.
I wanted to watch my Model Y get smarter as OTA updates came in.
Like many technologies, FSD is a long hard road of complex technological development; alas, customers think it should work perfectly out of the box right now to meet lofty flippant expectations.
Your $10k got you the hardware needed to self-drive to some degree, with improvements trickling in indefinitely. Can it drive you from here to there with very little (and decreasing) intervention? What did you actually expect (serious question)?
>Your $10k got you the hardware needed to self-drive to some degree
Don't all new Teslas come with the hardware and the self-driving is a software upgrade? My impression was that the purchase basically locked in a price. I could be wrong on this.
I'll be all-in on self-driving when I can use it to go to the bar and come home, until then it's mostly just an interesting technological exercise.
At this point, I'm probably more interested in improving highway assistive systems.
But, yes, there are many use cases that go by the wayside if you don't have reliable door-to-door driving without human input.
There are questions about both whether the current sensor package is sufficient and even bigger questions about whether an upgrade to FSD happens in the life of the vehicle. (My money would be on not.)
I don't think they know enough yet to construct ASICs and decide on consumer-priced sensors. Hellaciously interesting problem though, I wish I were working on it.
