Last line immediately reminded of Star Citizen which was first announced in 2012 and people are still paying for the promises/hypes the company keeps making.

Unless it’s in the purchase agreement, the wording on “fsd” may skirt the ethically questionable but legally acceptable line.

If the “fsd” wording is present in the purchase agreement, then Tesla owners have a class action lawsuit.

>It would add up to a lot of money for Tesla, but for customers? Some of these people paid $15.000 years ago for something that hasn’t been delivered, and now, they would be able to get $10,000 ‘back’, only if they commit to spending way more again, in the hope to eventually get what they bought years ago, or, more likely, in the hope of eventually being able to subscribe to get the features they already paid for years ago.

Sounds like fraud.

Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again? The guy can't help himself but lie and make deliberately misleading half-truth (at best) statements in investor meetings and presentations. Textbook fraud.

An ethical steward of capital he is not. We've gone through 4+ US presidential administrations with him as the CEO, and not once has he been effectively taken to task let alone held accountable for his bullshit.

It’s a cult, in cults people don’t demand refunds from the messiah. IRL they ask what else I can contribute to the church to fix that because it mist be their fault that the prophesies didn’t come true. In the end it’s not a problem if parties choose not to make a problem if it.

In recent years the leader of a cult in Turkey known for being filthy rich died and when cult split the new factions summoned the believers to re-do their inauguration ritual, which involves money collecting, since the old one expired within the death of the leader. And they went and did that, because although its not the members that are rich they still benefit from being in the community and the business connections.

Tesla has a similar thing, they are on a mission and many make money from being part of the community as they collect referrals, make content and sell accessories. Even if not doing any of that they ysually have Tesla shares and even if that’s not the case they want to keep the value of their vehicle high. Also in comes with the emotional baggage of having told everyone how their tesla drives autonomously etc.

Yeah, sounds completely backwards, how could anyone accept that? "Yeah, sure, you lied to me about it before, but for my next purchase I'll get it slightly cheaper, sounds great"

The Star Citizen model.

$15k?! I've got a bridge they could buy for just $10k.

> the guy who was running their autopilot program back when the sage "fully autonomous in one year" predictions kicked of their 15+ year long run

To be fair, if I’m being paid $10 million/year, I’ll make any damn prediction my boss tells me to make

Every time Elon made an FSD prediction on stage live, you could see Andrej wincing in the background.

You could tell Andrej was going along with what hiss boss said, but didn't believe it himself.

I don't recall Andrej making "next year!" claims, it was always Elon. I found Andrej's talks from that time to be circumspect and precise in describing their ideas and approach, and not engaging in timeline speculation.

He doesn't say that at all on the video. He refers to his experience in the industry in regards to other people making predictions. To be clear, he knows that FSD predictions were too optimistic, and that's why he says that AGI will take a decade at least. Almost everyone else in the industry is predicting AGI "soon", i.e. in 1 or 2 years.

Do we know that Karpathy was the one making those predictions? Musk is absolutely notorious for throwing completely made up and detached-from-reality deadlines onto his teams, including making public obligations to such.

I watched the same video. Karpathy isn't predicting AGI in 10 years. He's saying we won't have AGI in less than 10 years -- contrary to what industry boosters are promising -- and that what we end up with won't be some sort of god-in-a-box.

Oh come on. How many of us have been an engineer on a project and had to watch an exec make promises we knew were not reality?

It also doesn’t necessarily mean he was a yes man. Often in these situations people spell out their confidence levels plainly and directly to such execs and it just bounces off.

I’m also seeing below people suggesting he could have publicly voiced his concerns, but that probably wasn’t even a legal option for multiple reasons.

So, tacking on the 15x multiplier from his Tesla FSD prediction: AGI in 150 years.

Yeah that actually sounds about right!

I mean this question in good faith, and with all due respect to Karpathy: is there any reason to give this guy any credence beyond his ability to teach about LLMs? The only interesting industry experience of his that I'm aware of is leading Tesla's AI division during the period where they decided on this disastrous and dangerous vision-only approach that has resulted in multiple deaths. That alone makes me think he's not only incompetent but unethical. Am I missing something?

I'm a 2018 model year owner who also paid for FSD. The current FSD is not "fine" or "FSD" at all. It requires constant monitoring because one out of every 50-100 decisions will be problematic. Even the highway driving (autopilot), which was great initially, has recently degraded in quality: now it's much harder to get it to consistently stay in one lane or choose the speed I want to go.

Tesla knows the current FSD isn't fine; if it was, they wouldn't be upgrading the hardware to handle bigger models. So there's nothing surprising about expecting Tesla to deliver the same hardware to people who already paid them for the product they're still trying to deliver. If you're satisfied not receiving the full product you paid for, that's fine, of course. Heck, you're free to write Tesla a donation check. But Tesla should deliver the product (or a refund) to those who aren't.

99% is not good enough. Not even close.

Are you saying that for every ~1.5h of driving there is a minute where the car could go full an hero on you?

> They charge you comparable price for way less functionality.

BYD's comparable offering is generally free/included in the car's price.

Separately, I can't believe we are still discussing a product called "Full Self Driving" that is not "full self driving." Paying big companies to lie to us is not a recipe for building a better world.

> and it works perfect 99% of the time

Ha ha, you're not really selling it for me.

It can be best in the market and still not what was promised.

Tesla has gained part of their stock valuation and customer base over the years by promising Level 5 FSD. As in, you can sleep while the car drives you to work, or the car can go make money for you as a Robotaxi on the Tesla Network when you aren't using it.

They haven't delivered those things which they have been promising to customers since 2016.

here in the uk, I paid and we don't even have FSD yet

Article clearly mentions multiple lawsuits in multiple countries, by what common sense one guy's experience unrelated to fake promises made by company will balance the article.

> Why should I be upset ?

You shouldn't. If you're happy, enjoy it and move on. Others being upset doesn't negate your right to be happy. Just as your experience doesn't negate someone being upset about feeling they were lied to.

> I live in New York , I use fsd almost daily for 5+ years . In this very busy setup 0 accidents . Which is rare even for an experienced human driver

FSD was sold as Waymo. Unsupervised. Tesla is unable to match that capability on its newest hardware so far.

You do realize that even a Ponzi scheme has satisfied customers?

That balances nothing

> I knew the company had completely lost its way.

For me, the biggest signal was when Tesla was suddenly all-in on BTC, and promised to build their own full node.

It made no sense.

but the whole self driving shtick is what gave it the insane valuation, isn't it?

"we're general motors, but better" is not the same as "we'll have self driving taxis that make money to our customers while they sleep".

Musk's 2018 Pay Package had a lot of market cap-based targets[0].

[0] https://www.equilar.com/elon-musk-2018-tesla-pay-package-ana...

Can you please enlighten those of us who are watching from a distance?

People get the cause and effect of fancy EVs backwards.

To build an EV you have to spend $10-$20k on the battery pack that goes into it. They're getting cheaper, but that is a gradual process.

So your Toyota Camry / Honda Accord EV competitor is going to need to be priced starting at $40k to have a chance of breaking even.

How do you get people to stomach $40k for a base Honda Accord but Electric? You add things that cost very little but make the car feel more premium. Power seats, big screens, LED interior lights, glass roof, a processor that can play video games, cameras and autonomy features, etc. don't cost that much in the big scheme of things. Some of them, like screens instead of physical controls, might even save money in production and assembly costs.

So you add ~$3k worth of "premium" features to the car, price it at $45k, and now the buyer feels like they are getting something worth the money.

Making the car kind of ugly does not get the sales though. Many people that buy new cars cannot afford them. They need the car to be sexy looking in order to boost their pride so they can convince themselves they "deserve" this 8 year financial obligation.

I would absolutely go for a 2002 electric Acura Integra though...

> Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train

Exactly. The minimalist interior is super unappealing to me. I want something that's not all based on one screen. It's not just bad from a usability perspective but also seems risky if there are any issues with the screen (climate controls are very important for visibility certain times of the year)

People say that, but then they look at their real options and discover they could buy the bare bones model - or for a similar price they can get a several year old model with all the luxury items. They rarely buy those basic models because even though they don't need the luxury they want at least one and so the used car with everything is what they buy.

It isn't hard to make crank cars, but it will cost you a million dollars (likely 10, but lets go with 1 million) to build all the needed jigs to make them, so if there are only 1000 people who buy crank windows that means the cost of cranks is $1000/car. You can skip the jigs, but now the cost to manually make the cranks is $400/car, meanwhile because everyone else wants electric windows the cost per car is about $100. Those costs are why an option-free car would have to cost more than a luxury model.

> Give me a boring ass 90s control layout with the electric drive train and I'm much more interested. Make the car kind of ugly too. On purpose. I don't need a GPU farm inside my car. I'm not running a robotic taxi company. I just want to go get some groceries.

People say there is a huge market for this, but I really doubt it. Yes, there is a market for old school, but it is a pretty small niche where investments in more expensive analog tech (compared to digital anyways) just isn't worth it.

Check out Slate:

https://www.slate.auto/en

https://images.ctfassets.net/20dhmw20vttc/3FXvexNHHbtaijk1Ur...

Worried about infotainment and AI processors? It doesn't even have a radio. See those things on the door cards by your knees? They interface with an advanced window regulator and associated torque-sensing motion control system that uses evaporative liquid cooling to prevent failure due to overheating.

You could buy three for the price of a Tesla.

Back when those decisions were made, I bet they thought full automation was right around the corner and robotic taxis would make more sense than individual vehicle ownership.

I think they're caught flat footed because here we are a decade later and the consumer's opinion still matters.

The problem was they needed to pretend be a technology company (with FSD, and now robots) to juice the stock price/earnings multiple. If they were simply a car maker with EV motors, the stock would have a much lower multiple.

> A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible.

AIUI, the car can run its cooling/AC system to keep itself cool, even when powered off. I'd imagine that this is actually a bigger concern for the battery's health and safety, not the chips. You're not supposed to let a battery get that hot.

The one reason which made Teslas growth possible was that it was seen as a technologically superior car company. Great software is part of that.

There were actually many companies which tried small basic "urban" electric vehicles. You never heard of them.

Customers will not care about the cars people on here want. Customers want highly integrated software. Law makers are also demanding increasing software complexity.

>A car sitting in a Texas parking lot in July will get to temperatures that the engineers probably didn't think possible.

Toyota, Ford and VW have proving grounds in Arizona, because engineers know that cars get very hot. This is part of standard vehicles testing.

Maybe this is the next PPI/dieselgate/car finance campaign? "Did you buy a Tesla between 2015 and 2025? You could be owed £1000s"

UK small claims court is really effective. I've often wondered if any of the various PayPal problems cases have made it to there.

Thankfully, there are actually laws about this sort of stuff! So companies don't (necessarily/always) just get away with "you shouldn't have listened to us, this is your own fault."

Maybe that applies to people who believe something he says today, but a decade ago Musk's history as a grifter wasn't nearly as apparent. And like the other reply says "you got tricked and it's your fault" doesn't apply to false advertising or fraud laws.

In some markets, it means having to spend more or purchasing a worse car. Tesla offers some very good value cars, and 0% interest rate for 3 years. It almost makes you want to forget about the CEO.

I have a 2025 Model 3 and feel the same way. I’ve used FSD a ton in Southern California and it’s fantastic.

People just want to raise their pitchforks at Elon/Telsa without actually evaluating the product.

I have a model 3 and have tried FSD several times (Tesla regularly offers free one-month trials), and I've only found it to work well for long highway inter-city drives. I'm generally an early adopter and was eager to try it. It did _not_ work well for urban driving -- at least not in our city -- it acted like a new, nervous driver. I felt uncomfortable the entire time. I convinced my wife to try it for a day and she hated it and will never touch it again.

If you can't trust it 100% for urban driving, then FSD provides almost no benefit over more basic adaptive cruise control, early collision detection and lane departure warnings, etc. You still have to sit there and focus on the ride. The idea that I can now sit in the backseat and catch a nap or do some work or whatever, is still sci-fi at this point.

That's hilarious.

The only sane offer would be to give me my money back. They know how much I gave them, now give it back since you didn't deliver and I no longer have the car. Isn't it enough that I gave them an interest-free loan for all those years?

> why would I buy from the same place after they already lied to me before?

You are smarter than the repeat Tesla buyer.

Nowhere to be seen if your head is in the sand. There are robotaxi pilot programs running in two cities, FSD 14 is actively rolling out to customers, and my car drove me to work this morning on v13. I don't see any lies

Has it occured to you that maybe the reason Elon Musk is universally unliked is because he's unlikable?

Someone people deserve to be hated. Elon is one of those people. From a business perspective and a human perspective.

From a business and politics perspective, he's a con man. He stole your money. Mine too, with DOGE.

That's what happens when you promise again and again and don't deliver.

Elon Musk is a very dishonest, misogynistic, neo-nazi grifter.

In Europe you should probably not do a class action - you should just sue Tesla, directly. They do things differently over there. In Germany (which is what I know) the lawyer and court costs are a fixed percentage of the amount of money you want refunded, the loser pays for all of that in the end, and deliberately misleading advertising is illegal.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. You should consult one.

> and avoided over-promising

Stonk is the product and is literally built on over-promising.

How? You still have exactly what you bought. You even got new features as OTA updates for free. What other car would not be as-bought after purchace?

Well, you did buy a smart fridge with wheels, not sure what anyone expects when doing such purchase decision.

According to the article, it seems like Tesla didn't land in hot water until they started to push the same scam outside of the US (article is mostly about Australia I think), but seems like regulators might be getting some balls to do the same in the US soon as far as I can tell.

Fool me once, fool me n times...

AIUI "Autopilot" and "Full Self Driving" were always just SAE Level 2, although arguably a more full-featured implementation of that SAE level than other automakers. Which means you must pay attention to the road at all times (i.e. you're still very much driving!) and the car provides enhanced cruise control and lane following.

You should edit your post and add the sarcastic tag :) It is really good when I read it that way :)

It’s sad we had to get to paragraph three to understand it was parody.

> the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort.

I don't think you have to go to conspiracy theories to explain it. The fact that Wall Street has always been highly suggestible, fad-driven, and has a strong herd mentality is sufficient. Combine that with sunk cost fallacies and this is exactly the sort of behavior I'd expect.

> Logic simply cannot explain it --- so the fallback is a conspiracy of some sort. One that Wall Street must have a stake in.

... Wait, is your contention that every time the markets price something incorrectly, there must be a conspiracy? Tesla is a meme stock, one of hundreds, albeit the biggest. There's no need for a conspiracy; the markets are just actually not all that great at pricing, especially where there's significant retail involvement.

I came here to say something similar, no matter how bad the numbers, no matter how bad the cars, no matter bad the press, there will be absolutely no consequences for any of it.

We live in bizarre times. The older I get, the more I wonder why I try do things "properly" and honestly. I guess it's just a preference.

The bad sci-fi story is that the Oligarch will get away with it, will die of old age peacefully while having scammed millions of people along the way and the average person foots the bill. No happy ending.

What do you mean by "without any permission"? Any sort of orbital launch in any country is subject to government permission.

> I'm just waiting for a Kessler syndrome event.

That will thankfully never happen. LEO is a range, and Star-link is near the bottom of that range. Their satellites have a 5 year lifetime, because that's when the fuel needed to re-adjust their orbit runs out, and atmospheric drag pulls them down. A Kessler syndrome event in that orbital plane would resolve itself within a decade at most.

> Pity that BYD is banned in this country

BYD makes unreliably good EV's for the price. From a consumer perceptive it's a big loss. But i understand why we restrict their import if we want to keep that industry around ourselves (In particular lithium battery production). There is some truth to china using it as a leverage. That being said... the approach Biden and especially Trump took to supposedly help the local industry is ... a bit crude.