How is that misleading? Genuinely feel like it’s saying the same exact thing you just stated, just the other end of the percent. 2% converted, therefore 98% chose to not convert (aka ditch)
And because it's worded so negatively. "Ditched" is strong language for an otherwise impressive conversion rate. It's silly. I'm not an explicit fan or hater of Tesla, but this headlines reads unnecessarily antagonistic.
I've had FSD for years, and, well, it is awful. I keep hoping it gets better, but it doesn't.
The best way I have to describe it is: Picture a timid new driver, then give them 10 cups of coffee and make them really nervous. Now make them adhere slavishly to a random assortment of rules, and not at all to others.
One of my biggest pet peeves is that my car will try really hard to stay on the right side of a narrow residential road, coming inches from parked cars when there is no oncoming traffic. I always takeover, because I just know somebody is going to open a door into me, or an animal or child will dart out from between cars.
It will often hesitate to merge or turn left, even when given ample opportunity. And then it will suddenly dart across traffic with no warning.
I bought it in 2017 with the car, and drove like a grandma for a month to be eligible for the initial FSD beta a year or two ago. It was a complete waste of time and money. My hope when buying it was that I could have my car drop off my then 11yo son at school and save me a commute. My son is now 18 and drives far better than the car ever will.
I have a friend who bought an X for $120k when it came out and recently sold it for $35k. So much for Elon’s promises of the cars increasing in value because “robotaxi”.
Yea the cult of personality (crumbled now but was more a thing 5-10 years back) resulted in a lot of people falling for marking FUD which sucks.
I've been in software dev way too long to buy that nonsense. As far as my expectations have been it's actually ahead of schedule. That kind of pessimism keeps me constantly happy with the rate of improvement. Lovely psychological trick I've played on myself.
> I could have my car drop off my then 11yo son at school and save me a commute. My son is now 18 and drives far better than the car ever will.
I completely forgot that stuff like this was supposed to be a huge new thing years ago. Sending your car to be a taxi while you're at work to bring in more income, picking people up..
> My hope when buying it was that I could have my car drop off my then 11yo son at school and save me a commute.
I’m always slightly amazed that people bought this. Like, everyone who worked in the space was saying “yeah, no” at the time, as far as I remember; it was really just the techno-optimists claiming this stuff.
I'm pretty surprised that there hasn't been some large-scale class action against Tesla, given Musk and his baseless FSD claims. I mean, it's kind of become a meme at this point: it was "2 years away" in 2017, it was "one year away" in 2019, it was "coming very soon" in 2022. And he literally said (on the investor calls) that full self driving was "coming later this year" literally in 2023 and just like last month in 2024.
Like, wtf? How is making these claims as an Officer of a public company remotely legal?
> It seems one of the potential stumbling blocks is mandatory arbitration unless you thought to opt-out very early.
It's actually so wild that the judge upheld arbitration[1]. I guess he's technically correct that it doesn't "waive a plaintiff's right to seek public injunctive relief" but it definitely makes it way more annoying.
It's not wild, it's the requirement of the statute: if an agreement says an issue goes to arbitration, the courts are required to send it to arbitration; there's no discretion allowed.
There's a bill before Congress that would make arbitration agreements unenforceable in class-action, employment, civil rights, and antitrust disputes, but it hasn't gone anywhere despite being introduced in the last 4 Congresses.
> It's not wild, it's the requirement of the statute: if an agreement says an issue goes to arbitration, the courts are required to send it to arbitration; there's no discretion allowed.
I'm not a lawyer, but there seems to definitely be some discretion allowed. In fact, the McGill rule is often cited as being a litmus test[1]. Honestly, in the Tesla case, and why I said it's wild, is because Tesla is still selling cars touting full self driving[2]. The injunction here would presumably bar Tesla from selling (or at least advertising) FSD in the interest of public good. In other words, I think the judge got it wrong.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so I might be misunderstanding something, but that's my take.
That's an SEC investigation and not a class action lawsuit. The latter usually tends to be much more punishing (specifically, where the class is the people that literally paid for FSD/Autopilot). The SEC will fine TSLA like $2M if anything at all (big whoop, and I doubt the criminal investigation will go anywhere).
> May 8 (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors are examining whether Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers about its electric vehicles’ self-driving capabilities, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
And considering the share price has dropped and considering “Everything is Securities Fraud”* I am also baffled at the lack of completed or slow action.
Sometimes I think trying to drive with car sensors (cam, radar etc) instead of looking outside might be of help to develop less ugly self driving solutions...
My experience wasn't too different until v12. Until then the main value add was long trips on highways; it did a good job of keeping me from drifting lanes due to attention lapses and was good at dynamically adapting to highway traffic. As soon as conditions were sub-optimal though it was... bad. I live in a rural area which is obviously not it's happy path. It didn't know what to do with roads without a center lane marking. It didn't know how to handle a roundabout. It didn't know what to do with market areas where streets broaden (kept trying to lunge into a perceived non-existent right lane.
The last couple months have been much better. It's STILL not perfect (and it's pretty much imperative to simply ignore anything that Musk optimistically tosses out regarding capability) but it's a remarkable improvement.
It'll drive me from my home to my co-working space with the only intervention by me being to click a parking spot. The automated parallel parking actually works well now too.
My guess is we are 5-10 years out from it being a truly automatic experience in every way, but it's pretty good now. It's also nice that my car keeps improving (quicker lately) rather than being stuck with whatever nonsense it was deployed with.
I haven't, because even though I paid for FSD back in 2016, it is STILL not enabled on my car. About 18 months ago I finally got allowed into the beta for around 3 months, but then it went in for service (doing the storage device replacement), and everything got reset including the ability to use FSD, so I'm back on the beta list and have been for a year. I submitted a support request for it maybe a year ago, but it got deleted with no response.
While it was enabled, I'll say it was terrible at things like driving in the city, but it was actually pretty good at interstate driving.
Forget interest, I'm thinking convert it to stock at the price I'd have paid back in 2016, because basically they've used it as an investment. Seems fair.
Yes, I have and it's better but only marginally. I like my Tesla, of the EV's available, it was the winner. The sales model coupled with the route planning with RELIABLE charging stops sealed the deal, and other legacy car manufacturers are just so clueless when it comes to both.
But look, FSD is smoke and mirrors. v12 is marginally better, yes, but it still acts horribly. It can't merge well. It's jerky. Last night it tried to drive in a breakdown lane. It often misses on-ramps for highways around here.
Man, the auto wipers don't even work. That makes me the angriest - what would they pay for a rain sensor? Jeez.
Vision only may work with better cameras but seriously Elon put Ali Express $0.20 cameras in this thing.
Nobody seems to be talking about the fact that the AI behind self-driving is trained on real driver behavior...but real drivers are pretty terrible! The fact that your car hugs the right side of the road is because that's what real drivers do. And turning left?! OMG, how many times do you sit behind someone turning left at a traffic light, and they wait behind the white line for a break in traffic? This makes the turn as long and dangerous as possible. Sigh.
I know this is unpopular to say and people love to pile on, but I have been using it for the last few weeks and I am optimistic about it. I pay $100/month.
Right now, it works just about flawlessly on the freeway. If you turn it on when you are on the on-ramp, and turn it off when it delivers you to that first traffic light after you exit, it actually is maybe better than actually driving. It passes slower cars, it is way safer than I am at checking my blind spots. It uses the HOV lane at appropriate times. I enjoy letting it perform the chore of getting across 5 lanes of traffic in time for an exit much more than doing that myself.
For local driving, it is still not perfect enough. It WILL get you home safe... but it is more stressful having it drive than driving myself. It pauses awkwardly sometimes... it makes an occasional wrong turn. It handles traffic lights and stop signs reasonably well but overall it's like driving with someone who is just learning to drive. It's more stressful than I prefer my transportation to be.
That being said, I think in a couple of years it will stand as an incredible achievement. The driving behavior it exhibits is incredibly lifelike at times and it is really so close... like all engineering projects the last few percent is sometimes the hardest, but I can see it getting there.
Autopilot works better than FSD for me on the freeway. If I turn on FSD I get lots of phantom braking and pretty out of no where lane changes that I'd call pretty abrupt and dangerous. No where near worth 100 dollars a month.
What? Every car can automatically change lanes, automatically merge into traffic, automatically exit to an off-ramp, automatically go around a round-about, etc? I think there may be a language barrier here because most cars/trucks I see on the road cannot automatically do any of these things.
Yes to all of those. Adaptive cruise control. Lane change assist. Auto braking. Automatic exits. This stuff has been standard for many years now, and every major brand is touching L2/L3 autonomy. Manufacturers just don't market it as "autopilot" or "fully self driving", because that's not what it is.
Sorry - just bought a new Toyota RAV-4; it does not have auto-lane change, the ability to auto merge onto the highway, the ability to auto-stop at the stop-light, etc.
It does have adaptive cruise control and the ability to stay inside the lines, but it absolutely will not automatically change lanes or exit off the freeway.
Driving is an AGI-complete task. It literally requires presumptive modelling of other human beings in order to be safe. This bullshit "uh let's just navigate as if every other car is on rails" approach will never produce the safety claimed by FSD proponents.
I have Tesla FSD and I've started to use it more since v12 came out. It really does drive like a human and is impressively good. The only reason I don't use it all the time now is because every 15-60 seconds you need to nudge the steering wheel (or change volume or speed) so it knows you are paying attention. Elon said they are going to be removing that nudge in the coming weeks. Once they do that I'll be using it a lot more and it's going to be like having my own Waymo car to take me places.
Ironically when you are not paying attention, it is the least safe to disengage FSD. Ideally all drivers not paying attention would have FSD safety features auto engage to stop them from causing accidents.
The point the OP is making is that FSD allows you to stop paying attention. If you don’t even have to so much as hold the wheel it stands to reason your attention is more likely to drift.
What's the point of self driving if you have to babysit it?
Paying attention != nags. You can be staring into traffic and holding wheel and still not paying attention (which nags do help with). Nags when you are paying attention is super annoying tho.
Being on your phone, etc is completely different category. That is distracted driving.
Unfortunately this will be inevitable, and this one we can chock up to human biology.
The average person isn’t going to close their eyes and take a nap, but the average person will start spacing out, will start seeking their phone out to kill boredom, etc.
If you can't stop paying attention, what's the point? I don't see the advantage of having an untrustworthy driver assisting me. It's just a liability, or at least another responsibility.
The lying is bad enough to turn me away regardless of the performance. If you call something FULL. SELF. DRIVING. then explain that it is not in fact fully driving itself, I'm not interested in your product. FSD means I should be able to talk to my watch and have the car arrive to pick me up like I'm Michael Knight.
My jokey conspiracy theory is that humanity has had full self driving cars since the late 80s. "They" just let you think that you're really driving your car, but every move is actually made by the AI. It only diverges from your input when your input would have otherwise caused a crash. Meanwhile, you're so distracted by the narrowly avoided car crash that you don't notice that an AI took over.
However, you can't save everyone because then people would get suspicious. So "They" calculate social scores for everyone and people with a sufficiently low score don't get saved when they mess up.
The real punchline here, though, is exactly what you say:
> If you can't stop paying attention, what's the point?
Why would anyone actually want a full self driving car that you have to pay attention to all the time outside of a shadowy cabal from a half-baked conspiracy theory? I'm really not sure.
> The only reason I don't use it all the time now is because every 15-60 seconds you need to nudge the steering wheel (or change volume or speed) so it knows you are paying attention.
I often drive with my elbow on the top of the door, hand on the side of the wheel. The weight of my arm is enough that I frequently go many minutes without needing to nudge.
Otherwise, I agree. The nudging is so annoying that it's "more fun" to just drive.
Location: Norway. I haven't tried FSD, but I've used autopilot and cruise control. They don't inspire confidence, so I definitely wouldn't trust FSD, at least not currently.
When using autopilot on a single-lane road with a 60 km/h speed limit, it performed a phantom emergency brake because there was an oncoming car (which was driving normally in its own lane) on a curve. Maybe I shouldn't have used autopilot in that situation?
But what's even worse is the cruise control. It's a basic feature, yet Tesla's cruise control suddenly changed the speed limit to 30 km/h when passing through a tunnel with no signals and performed an emergency brake in an 80 km/h zone. This is incomprehensible.
Not to mention the issues with noisy brakes, distorted sound effects.
However, I don't want to switch to another car. I've driven Polestar 2, Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Nio ET5T, and none surpass Tesla. The only cars that make me consider switching are Lucid and Taycan, but they are in a different price range.
With Norway soon stopping the sale of all gasoline cars, Tesla is almost the only choice. I just hope they can improve on these basic issues.
> When using autopilot on a single-lane road with a 60 km/h speed limit, it performed a phantom emergency brake because there was an oncoming car (which was driving normally in its own lane) on a curve. Maybe I shouldn't have used autopilot in that situation?
I would never use Autopilot with oncoming cars. FSD is fine with oncoming cars, though.
No, it's not just optimistic. Optimistic means you say - we are working on it, it's 3-5 years away, but we think we can make it.
Tesla and Musk, spent the past 10 years saying that many things they work on are <1 year away. For any sane person, that timeframe implies the product is ready, already tested and it's just a matter of figuring out the details.
I've recently spoke with somebody who absolutely believed Tesla is going to automate all their US manufacturing and fire all the workers, thanks to Optimus, beginning next year !
After the trial, customers would have to pay $200 (or $100 now?) a month for the privilege, right? So most customers didn't think $2400 or $1200 a year for this feature was compelling.
After owning a Model 3 for five years, I somehow just got invited to a 30-day FSD trial yesterday. So today was day one for me. I intervened about 6 times, but none of them were critical like for a potential collision. Just a lack of trust that it was doing the right thing at the right time (speed, signaling, courtesy, hesitation, etc).
I got to test it and actually it wasn't that bad. Did several short trips and it navigated them reasonably well, but under increased scrutiny from me.
The problem is even 99.99% good is not 100% good and for something that has your life in its hands, it has to be 100%. Arguably a human driver is not 100% either, but at least they understand the world around them on a fundamental level, plus they have a pretty dramatic forcing-function ('do not die') that instills confidence. An AI has nothing to lose and this makes a 99% safe AI system less trustworthy than a 80% safe human driver.
I tried it and it was laughably bad. The auto park was worse than it was years ago, leaving me a foot out from the curb in an easy spot. Trying to use the self driving on city streets resulted in it stuttering and stopping immediately. The only thing that worked decently was highway driving, which it does without the self driving package anyway.
Given its performance I wouldn't dare trust it with any of my daily driving even if it was free.
I would expect those people to more accurately predict how I would feel about it compared to people that got excited about a press release and bought it up front.
Yeah, I would suspect this is more inline with a limited-time free trial conversion campaign.
Basically Tesla gave out a free FSD trial to every Tesla owner, and per this report, 2% of them actually signed up for the feature and are paying Tesla either the one-time or monthly fee.
I'm not sure about other "free-to-paid conversion" marketing campaigns, but 2% actually seems like a good conversion rate.
It is lol 2% conversion on a 8k+$ product, from a 0 effort 30 day trial rollout seems solid. I'd imagine they will keep doing them on major releases live v13 or whatever maybe for the new smart summon even
The problem is, in the context of Tesla, this is still a massive failure.
At Tesla's market cap, as in, "worth" more than the rest of the auto industry, any conversion rate less than about 90% is a huge failure. They have been pushing self driving for a decade now, with billions of dollars worth of investment and some of the best engineers for this in the field, and all they have to show for it is a 2% conversion rate on people who have already self identified as being willing to pay more for a new, unpolished product.
Consider how much other companies have advanced in self driving in the same time, or how much better solar panels got, or the massive improvements and developments Space X had in the same time frame. Meanwhile, FSD has barely increased in value in the same time frame, and is no longer a unique selling point, but a competitor in a busy market.
Tesla needed to be revolutionary. They needed world changing improvements, huge step changes in functionality. They needed something that every single human being desperately needed, even taking it's faults into account. Instead they've only really made incremental improvements over ten years and lost any tech lead they might have previously had. They've failed.
It literally doesn't even matter if Tesla cars are better than any other car on the market. To justify their valuation, they needed something magical.
I was a skeptic on FSD from 2016, along with Elon's unrealistic announcements about timeframes. But the latest v12 releases in the last month have made substantial progress, far beyond where it was even a year ago. I've gone from being a skeptic who had FSD disabled to someone who drives on FSD in heavy traffic every day and it feels like it has finally turned a corner after eight years.
I'm not sure how or what Yipitdata measured (and I can't find a link to their data), but if was the older releases it makes perfect sense that very few people would buy it.
I’m so sad over the state of self-driving cars. Waymo appears to be the clear winner, but you’ll never own the tech for yourself.
So you’ve got Tesla, which sells a stupidly priced ADAS system with or without a subscription that drives like a teenager.
Comma, great price, but insists they’re solving self-driving cars and their engineering team scoffs at object detection and the unit basically can’t turn at intersections anymore.
And Waymo. Great passenger experience, highly tuned longitudinal comfort, industry leading perception and sensor tech. But you can only use them as a taxi.
And we should strive to reduce a world where car ownership is a thing. The world would be a much better place if we didn't eat up so much damn space/resources/economic output for personal cars.
I think it’s just nudging the wheel that is going away. Attention detection via camera is still in effect for FSD. And it won’t start FSD without being able to see you.
Can you elaborate on what it detects as attentive vs inattentive for enabling FSD besides wheel nudge? What are the worst case inattentive behaviors that are allowed?
the NHTSA will shut that down real fast as they're currently investigating them over their last recall which was supposed to crack down on driver monitoring.
It's just not worth $8k to me. My Model Y is underwater on its loan because of all of Tesla's price drops. My Model 3 would require a hardware upgrade, and I don't think I'll keep it long enough to justify the upgrade. I really liked the FSD trial, (even though it was very glitchy,) but I'm just not spending more money on a car that's underwater on its loan.
Even though FSD was glitchy, (entered a road without stopping, nearly got into an accident trying to take an exit,) I really enjoyed FSD. Specifically, I really enjoyed it on the freeway. I just don't see it as something that's worth an eye-watering amount of money, especially on a car that's underwater, or a car that I'll probably replace in 3-4 years.
I really wish Tesla offered a deep discount on FSD as goodwill for those of us who bought the Model Y right before they dropped the price. It's really hard to justify spending that kind of money after the car's value dropped so quickly.
$8k might be what Tesla needs to charge to break even, but as anyone involved in business knows, what something is worth is what someone is willing to pay, not what it costs to make.
I would have agreed up until version 12 but I literally use it now to do almost all of my driving. I just got back from a trip where I rented a regular car and I didn’t realize how much I actually hate going back to micromanaging the car. It’s just so much more relaxing letting the car do the work and just supervising. I think for a lot of people $100 / month is just not affordable for a relatively small convenience at this point. Like another commenter points out the value prop isn’t really there if you’re still liable for everything it does. But I have driven maybe ~1,000 FSD V12 miles at this point (with maybe a handful of minor interventions) and I am 100% convinced that robotaxis are a lot closer than people realize.
* Tesla absorbs all legal consequences of any accident while using their self-driving technology
* The driver doesn't have to sit in the driver seat continually monitoring the situation, i.e. driving - but in a really weird way
Which is to say, Tesla does not have self-driving tech and they're not going to have self-driving tech at any time in the near future. If I have to continue sitting in the driver seat and continue driving/not-driving and be responsible for anything the car does, then the hell with it. That's not self-driving and I wouldn't pay for that either. Especially the insane prices they're charging. Nope. Not gonna happen.
> The driver doesn't have to sit in the driver seat continually monitoring the situation
This is imo the biggest problems that forces users from not buying the tech. I used the beta, and not only did I have to basically pay attention, but at times, when I was already paying attention, Tesla would ask me to apply pressure on the steering to the point where self driving disengaged and I had to take quick actions. On top of that, just driving around my neighborhood, it failed miserably. It couldn't park itself when the entire curb was empty and I stopped in a non ideal spot. It would often incorrectly identify parked cars on curved streets and brake. A couple of times it almost ran over pedestrians at a stop sign, mostly because it accelerates too much on turns at a stop sign. It absolutely refuses to drive faster than the speed limits, going 25 on two lane main streets where everyone expects you to go 40.
At some point, its more stressful for the driver on self driving than driving yourself.
I'm highly suspicious of such a claim. So you're saying that in a 25mph zone, a cop will pull you for doing 25mph because you're holding up people that wish to exceed the speed limit? Not in any U. S. state that I've lived in.
You can be if you’re impeding the flow of traffic. It is one of those iykyk rules of the road. Ideally, you need to be in speed limit + 5 to not get a ticket. But, if everyone else is going faster and you suddenly are the one driving slower, you’re not only blocking the traffic, but also creating unsafe driving conditions. In cases like that, you’re supposed to go the lane speed. In my case, it’s a 2 lane major street that funnels most traffic within the city, but unfortunately the limits set on the street are 25, like rest of the city. The standard practice on this particular street is to go at least 30 and stay in the right lane if you’re not willing to go beyond 30. Tesla not only drives 25 max, but also sometimes insists on driving in the left lane.
“unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation”
If somehow you got a ticket for this, you’d just say it was necessary for safe operation, after all, why else would there be a speed limit in the first place?
I think this is pretty common all around the world.
But the again, you raise a fair point. I don't know what course of action an autonomous vehicle is supposed to take here. If anything, in HCI, you want consistent actions to be taken, for users to reward you with a higher level of trust.
I agree with your bullet points but one thing to keep in mind regarding the second one is that it is currently a legal requirement to have a human driver ready to take over at all times (which is to say that the legislator thinks that there is no real, safe full self-driving capability yet).
Waymo may have a specific license to operate their service in very limited areas but for vehicles sold to the public the situation is as I described pretty much globally as far as I know.
The FSD I experienced last month was (to paraphrase someone else) like sitting in the passenger seat with a new teenage driver, ready to grab the wheel at any moment.
It's wrong too often to be convenient. I'm not paying $25/week for more work as a driver.
Anecdotally I have been using one of the newer versions (12.3.6) and it seems to have improved significantly, however still does "strange" things like unnecessary lane changes or slowing down unnaturally to speed limits (which no driver in LA does). Autopark works well for the most part but takes twice as long as if I were just park the vehicle myself.
Elon claims the next version (12.4 / 12.5) will be milestone improvements in terms of miles per disengagement, but only time will tell.
Not surprised. I tried it and immediately disabled it as it pulled me over a double yellow divider lane into oncoming traffic and I had to take control. And then it slowed extremely aggressively from a 35 to 25 speed change that almost certainly would have caused a driver behind me to rear end or at least be very annoyed (thankfully, there was none), and it was just unpleasant to experience as a driver and passenger. I did not feel confident using it any more after that.
I‘m wondering how this (final?) barrier is supposed to be overcome: no matter how absolutely perfect the technology might one day become, how are we going to bridge the gap between “manufacturers cannot legally build a system that deliberately breaks the law” and “actual traffic in the real world only works if sometimes, drivers do not adhere to the law perfectly”?
Not entirely convinced the point was to convert the customers to the 8k price today. Seems like the data gained during the demo is the most valuable part long term. They can rinse and repeat offering a demo, gaining data, releasing a new version. As it gets better conversions will increase. All while moving toward their long term goal of fully autonomous driving.
FSD doesn't seem to talk to the on-car navigation system.
When navigation tells you to "keep left", FSD happily changed lane to the right.
It makes more sense to just use FSD as a Lane Keep Assistant System on highway, with occasional surprises like switching to a faster lane mostly automated.
If you are converting 2% of customers to the one thing which makes your company not worthless (according to it's largest owner and controller), then that might actually be bad.
Tesla won't win a price dumping competition on the mechanical engineering and manufacturing quality for their cars.
A few years ago they were far ahead, simply because they were the only ones.
Right now most major car corporations have something competing with them. To be honest if I was buying an electric car tomorrow, for the price of a Tesla, I wouldn't be buying a Tesla.
Yes, so what would you buy that is better in a similar price range.
It’s a serious question. I own a few years old Tesla but I wouldn’t buy another one until Musk is out, but everything else seems worse or a lot more expensive.
I think it completely depends on where you live and what you want. Here in Germany the Teslas are quite expensive when compared with e.g. VWs and are about on par with BMWs I can't imagine any circumstances where I would buy a Tesla.
I think what you should do is try to figure out what kind of car you want and what you want to do with it. The likelihood that you won't find anything that fits seems quite small, since most of the world's largest automakers are trying to make cars exactly for people like you.
Teslas are still quite cheap - VW's also historically have had problems with infotainment. The ones which are good (ID.7, BMW i4) are also more expensive - although arguably they are much better cars than Tesla in most areas.
But, if I would look for an electric car in Tesla segment I would look into Hyundai Ionic 5/6 or Kia EV6 - they are in general great cars, which have proper service networks and will be around for years, what sets them apart from a chinese tesla-killer du jour.
I live in Norway, where an VW ID3 is the price of a Model 3 and an ID4 the price of a Model Y. I drove an ID4 for about a week and it's a worse car in almost every ways, except the turning radius and the sound of the closing doors in my humble opinion.
BMW is completely in another price range once you put back the equipment that comes standard from the cheapest Tesla.
I mentioned the brands as price comparison. My point is that there are actually many, many other brands you can pick from, depending on what kind of car you want.
Yes the market is quite developed now. But none of those other brands seem to sell better alternatives of the best selling Teslas. They have some advantages there and there, but when you drive the car and compared everything I'm still waiting for some good alternative.
The people I know who didn't buy a Tesla but something similar, before the CEO turned out to be a nazi sympathiser, they mostly bought other brands due to their brand loyalty or aversion to change.
Well, then you would be happy to know that the title misrepresents it. It was 2% of a sample of 3500 people who got the trial. Not 2% of all customers.
Given how big the population in their dataset is, it's quite representative. Moreover, with such a low turnover percentage, it wouldn't get much bigger.
Right...as far as I can tell, the free trial cost Tesla basically zero. They might have converted 50,000 people if the 2% rate is about right, which if they paid the $8k each that's $400M. And then all the training data you got from all the drivers that got it for free.
Yep i have FSD and while i never found it to be "bad" it was annoying at times and best on highways, now i basically use it every time i go anywhere, cant wait for the wheel nag to go away in 12.4 (or 12.5 i forget)
The real world experiences here are a good basis for predicting that the development emphasis on making a robotaxi later this year will be a dumpster fire. It's hard to believe it wasn't taken for self parody when Elon announced it on an earnings call.
Just going from sitting in the driver's seat to sitting in the back seat would require that, by now, FSD would have to be reliably comfortable and the only issue with not using it would be price.
There are safer-than-Uber, but still not flawless, robotaxis in limited areas. We know what it takes to get there. We also know it has to be done with great care and a huge amount of preparation. It isn't cheap or fast.
After driving a model Y for 6 months now, I really really dislike it. It’s easily worse driving experience that my old 10yo Corolla.
But, after trying the FSD for 30, I was pretty impressed. You do have to pay attention but it’s usually easy to see where it will get confused and you may need to intervene.
The reason I didn’t buy it is not because it’s not good, but it’s because of the cost. $8k is a lot of money.
I mean it was a beta, now it's out of beta because its full rollout but supervised, hopefully data gets to the point they can remove the supervision and bump the autonomy rating once things get to better than human accident ratings.
I'd imagine their going to do something like FSD with Full Autonomy requires Tesla Insurance to optimize their overall cost in the event of accidents that will happen (just like with even the best of human drivers)
Except according to Elon Musk on X "It's way higher than 2%. Please"
Before you retort with "Musk lies", this is a very specific claim and not a prediction, and would land him in legal trouble as said by an CEO of a public company.
As always anything touching Tesla in the media is extremely biased, like this headline.
More biased than this post? You can easily pull from dozens of examples of Musk breaking the law with a tweet, including some where a court actually found he violated the law, and still nothing happened.
> Before you retort with "Musk lies", this is a very specific claim and not a prediction
Musk has spent years making very specific claims about full self-driving that turned out to be lies: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
In 2016 Tesla claimed that "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":
Before you retort with "Musk lies", this is a very specific claim and not a prediction, and would land him in legal trouble as said by an CEO of a public company.
