I guess you missed the news that Elon said their FSD training was no longer compute constrained which means they need more data to make the best use of their existing multi-billion dollar servers and all the new ones that are on the way.
1) As you say, "Elon said" they were no longer compute constrained.
2) Elon is a known liar. See "All US cars getting FSD trial this week." See "Cybertruck can tow 911 over quarter mile faster than 911." See "funding secured." "All cars have all HW needed for FSD." "That guy is a pedo" "Maps for self driving are a very bad idea" Etc.
So, why trust Elon on statement #1, when there is a much larger set of statements from Elon that are easily proven false? Dismissing Elon's "this week" statement and then turning around and using his own statements to explain why "this week" wasn't marketing hype is peak dissonance.
Let's also not forget that Elon has specifically said that Tesla is "worth basically zero" without FSD, and that Elon is specifically paid when the stock hits specific short term goals, he's not paid on long term performance. Elon is a master market manipulator, and does everything to manage stock price, because that's how he gets paid. He has massive reasons to hype FSD progress, and history shows he has no issue making massive mis-statements that benefit him and his companies' short term prospects.
So it's perfectly logical to decide that the sudden push to bring FSD into the spotlight in April 2024 right before very bad quarter results was more about money than it was about technical readiness. Because for sure we know one thing, which is that Tesla was NOT technically ready to do what Elon said, which is put FSD on every US car two weeks ago. But yeah, I'm sure all the other things Elon says is true, and he's highly informed on Tesla's technical capabilities and progress.
And with big tech companies it is almost always all about the data, especially when they give you things for free.
Right, which is why FSD is $12K and they are only giving a one month trial to 50% of the owners.
The other hilarious irony is that if you think giving a month of FSD away will massively increase the data they get, it means that almost nobody up to this point has been subscribing to FSD. They've been selling FSD for 80 months now. One month of 50% of the cars having it should not dramatically help data collection unless only a few percent of cars have it otherwise. Wouldn't they be much, much better off to have a $3K fire sale on FSD and get lots more cars permanently set up with FSD instead of half the cars for 4 weeks? Wouldn't they be able to collect massive amounts of data even on normal AP or hand driving? Wouldn't they be better off spreading out the time exposure of the fleet instead of collecting all their data in one specific month?
This is not the move of a company that values data more than the actual income the sales of the product provide and the bump the hype gives to the stock.
It's for getting more data input for system development. It is mind boggling, for even just this month, how much data is going into the system. I am happy to be a part of this.
How much data has your car been uploading after every drive?