Comment by acdha
3 years ago
"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'.
I would definitely support some rules like that for pre-orders: once you start accepting money you have to be very up-front about the state of the product and test results. If that’s too much, do conventional R&D and tell people they can buy it when it’s ready.
Agreed. It could be also regulated the way e.g. investment ads are, so you always have to explain that this is not a finished product and that it may be different on release or in fact never be finished.
I won't defend Tesla here, but I think e.g. the gaming world is often unfair to game studios and game developers when a game is launched and is different from what was presented on some conference before. Scope changes, priorities change, playtesting changes the original plans, resources are limited. It's normal. When the end product is different it doesn't mean the developers lied when they originally presented it.
imho.