Tesla needs to come clean about HW3 before the word 'fraud' comes out

I think we all know that HW3 cars can't do self driving. Elon knew this from the beginning. The idea has always been -- implicitly -- that when they solve FSD Tesla will have so much money they can just upgrade the old cars with new hardware. It just turns out that solving FSD is orders of magnitude more difficult than Elon anticipated. Despite many rewrites of the FSD stack Tesla still has a long way to go. Unyielding optimism is a double edged sword. You'll try things other people won't dare to. Incredible rewards when you prove the naysayers wrong but you face harsh criticism when you fail at things others won't even try.

HW3 owner, tesla allows me to do a transfer to a new car, my car is getting into 5 y.o. zone. I'll probably follow the path of transfer.

I Just came from 30h+ driving long weekend. FSD did 25h+ of that driving. It's definitely a value even in its current form, probably not as expensive as Tesla charges thought.

The article says "Making a mistake is not a fraud. If Tesla really thought that it could deliver unsupervised self-driving to vehicles equipped with HW3 and, at one point, it figured out that it couldn’t, it’s not fraud even though it used that as a selling point for millions of vehicles for years."

Does that mean I can claim I made a mistake if I do something wrong and get caught?

key bit:

> ... if Tesla knows that it can’t deliver unsupervised self-driving on HW3, it needs to let owners know right now and stop selling the software package to HW3 owners without a clear plan to make things right. Otherwise, this quickly becomes fraudulent.

>Let’s be honest. Tech is rarely supported with software updates after 5-7 years. Tesla Hardware 3 is entering that zone. It is becoming obsolete and normally, it wouldn’t be a problem, but Tesla sold a Full Self-Driving capability package for up to $15,000 based on this hardware that it never delivered.

>At the minimum, it will have to reimburse that, but owners can even argue that they bought the car because Elon Musk told them it would become self-driving over time and become an “appreciating asset.”

>This could quickly become a very large liability for Tesla, and the way it handles it is also important.

This is such a weird thing to be upset about. Musk announced this hardware was ready for full self driving in 2016. So anyone who bought this now has an 8 year old car that still doesn't self-drive. The author is all upset that this 8 year old car may never get the FSD turned on but how is really worse than owning the car for the last 8 years. If I had to pick something to be annoyed about it would be that they still haven't delivered full self driving in a period of time that most people would consider the full length of time they expected to own the car!

It's also just a really weird attitude, that this will turn out to be a massive liability and that they'll need to think about retrofits. The truth is simple: They didn't sell that many of these cars, of those they did sell, the majority won't have bought the self driving package for the exorbitant price and most owners will have upgraded to a newer model anyway. So what's the plan? They'll do nothing, they won't admit it won't happen they'll just say they'll get to it one day, continue to offer relatively small incentives to upgrade away from these cars anyway. What are you going to do? Sue them. Good luck. You have literally shown that over the last 8 years he can just wave his arms and say "Well we'll get to it one day" and you believe he's fulfilled his obligations, so he'll continue doing that.

Why would anyone spend 15k based on a promise?

> According to most experts, Tesla needs a ~1,000x increase in miles between disengagement to deliver on its unsupervised self-driving promises.

So they need 122,000 miles between disengagement? Really? That's a rather crazy standard.

... or wait until all HW3 models are recycled. Is this a viable strategy? Sell a feature that never arrives and the owner puts the product in the trash and never has used/accessed that feature? This was announced 2016.

Electrek, as a publication outlet, has basically lost all credibility and has been in a downward spiral for the last few years. I would take any of their reporting on Tesla with a heavy grain of salt.