Who can forget the massive fraud?
How big was the lie? It couldn’t have been any bigger.
Tesla spent a year testing the new hardware, and Musk said the company’s goal is to do “a demonstration drive of full autonomy from LA to New York by the end of next year.”
A year of testing! Done. All problems solved. Obviously. Elon Musk promised 2017 would be the last year drivers needed to touch their wheel.
For some reason the initial news release posted by Tesla has just been taken down.
But nobody forgets, right?
As some pundits have put it, the whole thing is a lie.
In 2016, Musk announced that all Tesla vehicles built going forward have “all the hardware to enable self-driving”. At one point, he even specified “level 5 self-driving”, which is the highest level and means capable of driving anywhere, anytime, under any condition.
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Last year, Musk went as far as claiming that FSD will get better on HW3 first as Tesla’s “focus needs to be on getting FSD on HW3 working super well and provided internationally”. He went as fas as claiming that FSD performance on “HW4 will lag at least 6 months behind HW3” because of this.
Tesla quickly reversed this strategy. With the release of FSD v12.5, Tesla deployed the software first to the newer HW4 vehicle, and Musk said that Tesla would need more time to optimize the code to work on the older HW3.
As we previously reported, this signaled that Telsa is getting closer to reaching the limits of HW3 while FSD v12.5 is nowhere near ready for the unsupervised self-driving capability that Tesla has been promising to those HW3 owners since 2016.
What a giant mess. Perhaps the worst car maker in history, a total fraud.
Tesla has offered free upgrades to newer hardware to owners who purchased FSD, but when it started offering its FSD subscription service, it started charging owners $1,500 for hardware they already bought. After we reported on this, Tesla reduced the price to $1,000 – which is still $1,000 more than owners should have to pay for hardware they already paid for. Tesla, and its self-described “free speech absolutist” CEO Elon Musk, both retaliated against Electrek for our report on this matter.