Comment by acdha
3 years ago
The clear implication is that you should buy one because it can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.
3 years ago
The clear implication is that you should buy one because it can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.
There's no reason to apply such an implication. This was a tech demo! No one ever claimed that was something production cars could currently do at the time, nor would that make any sense, as the cars clearly did not do that at the time.
An article from the time clearly interprets it as a tech demo: https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/watch-tesla-new-full-self-dri...
Reading that article, I see lots of things which do not sound like “this worked once on a single known course”. They’re taking orders, talking about unattended cross country trips, and claiming the driver is only there for legal reasons — all of which makes it sound a lot more mature than it is.
Nonetheless, there is no claim that any current product does this, just discussion of potential future features.
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> No one ever claimed that was something production cars could currently do at the time
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." Tesla's website, at the time, and until now.
No, it was very clear that it cannot do that for you at that time. The only implication was that it will do it soon, which didn't happen.
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." makes it sound like that’s almost ready, as does taking expensive advanced payments on a device which has a relatively short service life. That’s a big up charge for a feature many buyers will never be able use as long as they own their Teslas.
Even now, they say “The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat”. Again, that’s fine if you’re showing a tech preview but when you start taking preorders on consumable product you really should be very clear that what people get for all of that money is nowhere near the demo.
Almost ready or not, it doesn't make it sound like the product can do it right now if you purchase it.
Whether it's FSD, Cyberpunk or a Kickstarter campaign, preorders should cary the same expectations — if what you are buying doesn't exist yet, the seller cannot possibly guarantee they will be able to make what they 'promised'.
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