Autopilot lane keeping still not available over 6 months after delivery

[scott jones]

I agree with most of wko57s posts here.
And the reasons are very simple:
Certain autopilot features were supposed to be released by now and they are not.
As important: And this is NOT defensible... the website STILL portends the features are already available. It is written in the present tense and that is wrong if not an out right lie. And this comes from someone who no longer owns a Tesla

 

[woof]

One of the interesting parts of todays earning call (to me anyway) was that they have not recognized the revenue from Autopilot as it hasn't shipped. So from an accounting point of view Tesla doesn't have that money yet.

 

[Majerus]

One of the interesting parts of todays earning call (to me anyway) was that they have not recognized the revenue from Autopilot as it hasn't shipped. So from an accounting point of view Tesla doesn't have that money yet.

Dumb question , if multiple owners gave them money for it and they dont have it yet.. where is it. I assume they just dont report it on a balance sheet?

 

[Todd Burch]

The vast majority of customers are the latter. Are you suggesting that their opinions are not important because they don't "get it"? I ask this because it is the customers who will make or break this company, and they will do so based upon how they are treated by Tesla. So far it seems, 2015 has been off to a bad start judging by what I read here.

No, I was responding to Soolim's comment, specifically:

The sculpture seat challenge is not the big deal, remember the Next-Gen seat delays? They could always ship with the "standard" seats in the meantime, with an option for the sculpture seats as an expensive and delayed option, so I doubt the explanation given today on MX delay.

Basically, the suggestion that the seat is not a big deal and could not be causing production delays. With exactly zero information on the design of the seat, the statement has no merit.

 

[bollar]

Dumb question , if multiple owners gave them money for it and they dont have it yet.. where is it. I assume they just dont report it on a balance sheet?

It's sitting on the balance sheet as deferred revenue, presumably along with the revenue related to other anticipated future expenses such as service and warranty claims.

 

[Max*]

Yes, it is a tiny arc that appears around the speedometer display. Unless you are looking down, you may miss it

No. The arc turns red and the car beeps at you, just like the forward early collision warning. Ask me how I know.

 

[Majerus]

It's sitting on the balance sheet as deferred revenue, presumably along with the revenue related to other anticipated future expenses such as service and warranty claims.

Got ya, thanks for explaining

 

[breser]

Dumb question , if multiple owners gave them money for it and they dont have it yet.. where is it. I assume they just dont report it on a balance sheet?

It's deferred revenue. Tesla has to carry it as a liability on their balance sheet until it is realized (i.e. autopilot is fully delivered). What we don't know is how much of the Autopilot costs it has considered deferred revenue, I'd say 50% but that's based on having delivered 2 out of the 4 major bullet points. But some might value some of the bullet points more than others. This is more art than science.

As far as the actual funds. I think Tesla is free do whatever they want with the actual funds.

 

[NigelM]

It's deferred revenue. Tesla has to carry it as a liability on their balance sheet until it is realized (i.e. autopilot is fully delivered).
<snip>
As far as the actual funds. I think Tesla is free do whatever they want with the actual funds.

Correct. Simply put, deferred revenue is a liability and the money received is treated as an asset on the other side of the balance sheet; that money is free cash to the business.

 

[dsm363]

So there will be P85D owners who have their car a whole year before getting the Autopilot software installed on their cars. Yeah, I can understand people being upset about this!

That's assuming Tesla promised those features the day the first car was delivered which they didn't. No one who bought the car should have assumed getting the car in October would mean they'd have those features right away. Sure the debate is over what was meant by a few months and that will never be settled. It's definitely 'a few months' late no doubt but not a year late.

 

[gizmoboy]

I disagree. There are plenty of reasonable people here who fully agree with my views on this topic. Many have posted here in this very thread, and many I've spoken to privately.

I think you misunderstood me. I didn't mean to imply that no one agreed with you, just that there are also reasonable people who disagree with you regarding the obviousness that you "didn't get AutoPilot". Their perspective is that you have gotten part of it and more is on the way. Since there was no contractual deadline for full features and since the full feature set was known not to be available at launch, I think their perspective is that "a reasonable person would have known what they were getting into."

Suffice it to say that if this were to go the legal route I'm reasonably confident I would not be on the losing side.

...an attitude shared by a very high percentage of people who willingly pursue legal action -- both on the winning and losing side.

We still don't have autopilot, a feature *demonstrated* before purchase and that is in the MVPA.

[Emphasis mine]. "AutoPilot" is not a feature. It's a suite of hardware devices (which you have 100% of) and a related suite of software features, some of which you have now and some of which you do not have now, but are purported to be in the works.

Your claim is, at best, that you do not have the full suite of features you were promised in the timeframe you believe you were legally promised to have them by.

I've been in software for 20-ish years. I've never had even a large software/hardware project go over timeline by anything close to "years" or even one year.

Then you are either very lucky, extraordinarily talented, or very forgetful.

If you've really been in software for 20 years, you know the stats on failed software projects.

 

[breser]

That's assuming Tesla promised those features the day the first car was delivered which they didn't. No one who bought the car should have assumed getting the car in October would mean they'd have those features right away. Sure the debate is over what was meant by a few months and that will never be settled. It's definitely 'a few months' late no doubt but not a year late.

Let's just be clear that person said there could be P85D owners who had their cars for a year before they get full autopilot in response to the statement that it might not be available until mid October.

No P85D owner will have had their car for a year come October 2015. P85D owners will reach a year of ownership without full autopilot in December 2015 and 85D owners will reach that point in February 2016.

Even if you ordered an S85 in reaction to the Autopilot announcement on October 9th, 2014 it's unlikely that you will have waited a year of ownership to receive full autopilot if it's delivered on or before October 15th, 2015. Simply because I don't believe anyone has received a new car within 6 days of ordering and there weren't inventory cars with Autopilot at that point.

So that leaves people who have received their car before October 15th, 2014 that might have owned the car for a year before full ownership. Of which none of them actually ordered Autopilot. They simply got lucky in getting autopilot sensors.

Of course if we get into November or December then it's possible for a year ownership delay for people who actually ordered Autopilot. But at this point saying some people may have ordered Autopilot, got their car and then waited a year before receiving the full features is hyperbole.

 

[Andyw2100]

I listened to part of today's call, then went out, came back, and had more than 15 pages of new posts in this thread to read through. I'm not going to attempt to comment on all the back and forth of this thread. Instead, I'm going to point out something Musk said on the call that I found significant, that I had not heard before, and that no one has yet mentioned in this thread.

Musk, in answering one of the questions about autopilot lane-keping, said something along the lines of lane-keeping working best when the Model S had a target car to follow, and not quite as well when the Model S was driving on its own, without a target car. (I'm restating this from memory, but that was the gist of it.)

I found that interesting. We've never heard that as a potential even temporary limitation of the lane-keeping autopilot. Thinking about it, and knowing what Musk said a week or two ago about the faint lines being an issue, it makes sense, but even so, I thought this was noteworthy.

 

[gizmoboy]

It's still amazing to me that all of this is still in the present tense on the website. Tesla has shown a willingness to change the website quickly and radically but something so fundamentally misleading has remained for months. I'm, frankly, more upset as a Tesla shareholder than as a P85D owner and driver.

Totally agree with this.

 

[Spidy]

People who don't make software often have no clue how much uncertainty exists when doing something new (even recreating something someone else does on different hardware).

There are a lot of possibilities around pressure or even overstating things, but no reason to believe anything but "there were unanticipated complications."

Software goes over-schedule all the time. All. The. Time.

And in the old triangle of date, scope, and quality (you can have any two), if scope isn't flexible and quality isn't flexible (and I would damn well hope it's not), then time is your only flexible dimension.

They've already played with scope once to give you TACC and Auto-High Beams.

it's possible that the code for auto-steer and self-park is too intertwined to tease out one and deliver it first.

Or not. None of us know anything about the inner workings at Tesla.

But if they are looking for a senior software executive with plenty of entrepreneurial experience shipping code, my profile is right here.

Then you of all people should know that it was a bad idea to demo Autopilot the way they did at that time. They should never had said this will soon/few months be available if they weren't at a stage where they were past all those possible complications, so basically have a finished product. And if they do the demo at the stage they were back then they should just have said we hope that in the future we can implement that in our cars (probably would not have been great for sales, so having the demo later would be better)

I understand why you feel wronged, but there's nothing you can do to make it come faster than it will come, and it will come when they get it done.

Still doesn't mean you cant get any monetary compensation, a extended warranty or something else.

The only way to address this argument is to blame the victim (did you explicitly confirm that this was available now? If not, you took a gamble, and it has yet to pay off).

I've already said I don't want to do that, but it seems like you've never seen a technology demo before. These things are always done, and if you know anything about them, they're almost always canned demos cobbling together a certain non-edge-case scenario that the engineers hope will work and the CEO says damn well better work. They are very seldom finished product, and as the old saying goes, there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. You think you're just about there and then it turns out you're not. That one last bug opens up a whole can of worms, and years later you're still not there. This is far from unheard of in technology circles.

This characteristic of technology demos is widely documented. It's the rare demo that is a fully-baked product.

Sure, but how many of those demos state such release times and even go so far and have new cars now roll out with the hardware and the software will soon follow.

I actually watched a lot of the Mercedes Autonomous driving videos on youtube and not a single one states when it will be available. They have specific video that present what new cars have and then that's all how those cars come off the line.

These two videos clearly demo their new technology, but make no claims whatsoever when exactly it will be available. You also won't find a feature called intelligence drive anywhere on the configuration page of the S-Class.
Mercedes-Benz TV: Autonomous long-distance drive. - YouTube
Mercedes Benz S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE California 2014 - YouTube

In contrast to the presentation what's actually available, where right away it states the exact name of the feature (which is another issue with Tesla where Autopilot isn't even a real feature, but the name of a group of features. We always say Autopilot, but everyone basically talks about lane keeping with automatic steering).
Mercedes-Benz S-Class | DISTRONIC PLUS with Steering Assist - YouTube

 

[gizmoboy]

I'm fine with dissenting opinions. Everyone is welcome to their opinions even if they don't agree with mine. I do find it interesting, though, that the majority of dissenting opinions on this thread seem to be from non-owners entirely or from non-post-autopilot-announcement owners.

The implicit assumption here is that no one can empathize with your situation and disagree with you (unless they have an ulterior motive).

As for the ones who are in the same boat and are of differing opinion, I've been honestly curious as to why, personally. At least for the investor-non-owners the reason for dissent is obvious and really has little weight on the matter and that should be reflected.

So anyone with a differing opinion can therefore be explained away and discounted?

My problem is when the line is crossed and people start pushing that I'm in the wrong for my opinion or start presuming how I feel on a matter or how I should act based on their opposing opinions. That I have an issue with.

Wouldn't anyone who disagrees with you, by definition, believe that you are "wrong for [your] opinion?"

Not once will you find me attacking anyone over an opposing opinion. I'll certainly strike back when attacked, however, because the "you should have known better" type posts get really old.

I can understand why you may be tired of hearing them. I can imagine that they are similarly tired of people complaining that they were totally blindsided by this and were inescapably hoodwinked by Tesla.

Both sides feel that they are in the right.

I can see legitimate elements in both sides of the argument.

Since I personally have held off from buying an S until the features I care about are definitely ready, I naturally am somewhat more in agreement with the "you should have known better" side, but I totally agree that more due diligence was required to "know better" than everyone may have been prepared to undertake.

 

[Soolim]

No, I was responding to Soolim's comment, specifically:

Basically, the suggestion that the seat is not a big deal and could not be causing production delays. With exactly zero information on the design of the seat, the statement has no merit.

I am not a production designer, so no knowledge about seat design. But should a less than perfect, but usable and safe, center row middle seat delay the reveal of MX? An armchair speculator speculates that the MX problem is more than just the sculpture seat. It is probably more related to the AP.

 

[bonnie]

I listened to part of today's call, then went out, came back, and had more than 15 pages of new posts in this thread to read through. I'm not going to attempt to comment on all the back and forth of this thread. Instead, I'm going to point out something Musk said on the call that I found significant, that I had not heard before, and that no one has yet mentioned in this thread.

Musk, in answering one of the questions about autopilot lane-keping, said something along the lines of lane-keeping working best when the Model S had a target car to follow, and not quite as well when the Model S was driving on its own, without a target car. (I'm restating this from memory, but that was the gist of it.)

I found that interesting. We've never heard that as a potential even temporary limitation of the lane-keeping autopilot. Thinking about it, and knowing what Musk said a week or two ago about the faint lines being an issue, it makes sense, but even so, I thought this was noteworthy.

Yep, I heard that, too. (And bravo to you for what is likely to be a futile attempt at refocusing this thread. ) I thought at the time that it was a really nice piece of transparency & spoke to some of the challenges they've been facing. Which also fit with his assertion that the software would get better with time, after release. (though from reading this thread, I suspect there are some that won't accept that, either...)

 

[Max*]

What would Tesla need to do to make it right for you, OP? Buy back your car?

 

[gizmoboy]

Then you of all people should know that it was a bad idea to demo Autopilot the way they did at that time. They should never had said this will soon/few months be available if they weren't at a stage where they were past all those possible complications, so basically have a finished product. And if they do the demo at the stage they were back then they should just have said we hope that in the future we can implement that in our cars (probably would not have been great for sales, so having the demo later would be better)

When I watched the video, I went and looked at their site, and I understood it for what it was. I admit, however, that from the video alone, I was under the impression that they were announcing completed features.

As soon as I understood what they had done (typical technology preview), I got that I wouldn't be buying one yet, because those features were compelling to me (and they're still pre-release). I do believe they'll get there, but I made a deliberate decision not to buy "on the come" so I wouldn't be tempted to feel salty about it.

To loop around to your point: I don't believe that they shouldn't have had the demo. I personally don't do technology previews like this in my company for exactly the reasons we are macerating here, but I understand why they are done (the difference between Google I/O and Apple's new product announcements comes to mind). But I understand why they are done, and personally, I feel like they are always a defensive maneuver.

Still doesn't mean you cant get any monetary compensation, a extended warranty or something else.

You're right. And if people squeal long and loud enough, they may well get some concessions. That tends to make the others who didn't squeal feel a bit resentful, and the company burns resources dealing with this, but it's probably fair to suggest they're reaping what they've sown.

I actually watched a lot of the Mercedes Autonomous driving videos on youtube and not a single one states when it will be available. They have specific video that present what new cars have and then that's all how those cars come off the line.

These two videos clearly demo their new technology, but make no claims whatsoever when exactly it will be available. You also won't find a feature called intelligence drive anywhere on the configuration page of the S-Class.
Mercedes-Benz TV: Autonomous long-distance drive. - YouTube
Mercedes Benz S 500 INTELLIGENT DRIVE California 2014 - YouTube

In contrast to the presentation what's actually available, where right away it states the exact name of the feature (which is another issue with Tesla where Autopilot isn't even a real feature, but the name of a group of features. We always say Autopilot, but everyone basically talks about lane keeping with automatic steering).
Mercedes-Benz S-Class | DISTRONIC PLUS with Steering Assist - YouTube

I think this is also apples-to-oranges.

In my mind, Tesla is a tech company acting like a car manufacturer, and Benz is a car manufacturer, period.

What Tesla did is no surprise for many tech companies, and is far less common for car companies (not a motorhead myself, but it seems like the concept cars are more along the lines of that -- but no one expects to ever be able to buy such a concept car; they just expect to get pieces of it reflected in future models).