Tesla FSD no longer offered for purchase

> Previously, customers were offered the option to purchase “Full Self-Driving Capability,”

They were offered a lie. Tesla still hasn't delivered what those customers paid for.

> Let’s look at what else has changed on Tesla’s website on FSD before we dive into the wording changes.

Another recent change on Tesla's website is to remove old blog posts, including a 2016 blog post in which Tesla claimed "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":

https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla...

Tesla might now also outsource its AI work to xAI:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e...

If indeed Tesla is "worth basically zero" without full self-driving:

https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...

Then moving that work to xAI seems like a good way to turn Tesla into a private company without actually purchasing it.

Tesla owners agree to binding arbitration when purchasing a vehicle, unless they opt out within a window of time in writing. This means consumers will need to engage their state attorney generals and federal regulators for the fraud perpetrated that Tesla is attempting to scrub with these changes: that Full Self Driving unsupervised/robotaxis are not coming as promised when the FSD package was sold by Tesla and purchased by consumers.

There are multiple matters being conflated together.

0. Tempering customer expectations from overpromising.

1. Investors' concerns about liabilities of advertising autonomous operation, potentially implicitly implying unsupervised.

2. Culpability of drivers when "supervised" (within visual sight) operation fails in a manner that's not immediately physically controllable. What if summon runs into a person or runs over a pet?

3. Potentially replacing "original FSD" with a lower tier substitute at the same price point, or as a subscription only.

While I might jump to 3, 0 and 1 seem the most likely. 2 is still remains a big question mark.

My guess is that they sold FSD for a lump sum while the tech was experimental.

Now that they see the light at the end of the tunnel, they're planning to transition to a subscription model, and the cars that do have it will slowly fall out of circulation as they age, with many of them not having the right hardware for the real thing anyways.

This is similar to what they did with supercharging.

So, Musk did repeat the FSD 'any moment' last earnings call and robotaxis using it this september (now) as well. And then they do this. That is why I found it very strange that anyone believes his recent Mars timelines; people I consider smart (PG for instance [0]) are awe struck by such an announcement while we all know that Elon is often decades off. Don't get me wrong, besides his political gibberish and twitter mess, at least he tries, but I don't know anymore if all the crazy things he says are to manipulate investors or if he really believes them.

[0] https://x.com/paulg/status/1832638755523514701

Title is wrong; they're still offering FSD for purchase, they just added "(Supervised)" to the name of the feature, which doesn't actually change anything since FSD has always required supervision (as the screenshot of the text of the old FSD purchase page clearly shows). This is just a slight change in wording, probably for legal reasons.

how has Tesla got away with this fraud for so many years?

they have never had a thing called "FSD" that existed, but they keep taking money from customers and also people keep dying, for years and years.