Except I’ve seen at least a couple of threads here where Tesla appears to have removed software in 3rd party sales.
There are other stories like this one but as a dealer I wanted to share a unique, negative experience I'm having. My very small dealership purchased a 2018 Tesla Model 3 at Manheim auto auction recently. The vehicle was advertised showing FSD in the images included during the sale. I verified...
teslamotorsclub.com
Indeed, and these stories break down into several categories:
(A) The dealer represented the option as present when it was not (either accidentally or fraudulently).
(B) The dealer and/or buyer saw "Full Self-Driving Computer" on the dash display and interpreted this to mean the car had the FSD option.
(C) The dealer and/or buyer saw "FSD" or similar on the prior owners bill of sale (which they somehow obtained).
(D) The car did indeed have the FSD option present, but it was not mentioned on the bill of sale from Tesla (more below).
In all these cases, we are talking about cars the dealer/seller obtained
from Tesla for resale. Cars that have not passed through Tesla's hands have not been subject to any of these issues (certainly none that have been reported on this forum that I can find).
In case A, we are just dealing with a dealer who is over-selling, uninformed, or lying (perish the thought). Case B is a common confusion between the car having hardware
capable of FSD but not having the FSD
option. This has come up a number of times here, and comes down to misunderstandings by dealers/buyers. Sadly this is
caveat emptor.
Case C is the that seems to show up often here, though I'm not clear how sellers get hold of original sale documents (we're talking the original owner before the car was passed back to Tesla). In this case the assumption being made is that the car has not been altered/updated/refitted between the original sale and the resale, which is often not true for
any brand of car (Lexus, for example, regularly re-tweak used cars features before resale). I dont think
any buyer should rely on the original bill-of-sale, you should get documents from the dealer stating what you are buying, not assume anything based on older paperwork.
Case D is the bad one, and
is clearly Tesla's fault. This seems to happen when Tesla de-option the car before selling it on, but the software update has not been pushed to the car before it is handed over to the dealer. In this case, some time after the car is purchased (with the option), the option disappears (on the next software update), leaving a very unhappy customer.
Case D
is clearly Tesla's responsibility. I'm sure technically they could point to the documentation supplied to the dealer, but this is the "vanishing hardware" analogy that makes people mad (rightly so). But in fact, I can only find 2 cases where this was reported on this forum, and in both cases Tesla made good and enabled the option after some to-and-fro with the customer. Also, its been some time since I have seen this happen, so its possible Tesla have sorted out the business processes that allowed this to happen in the first place (as they should).
The problem, to my mind, is that these different cases get muddled up .. people
like to claim every time this happens its case D, but in most cases it turns out to be otherwise .. often its case A or B, which really aren't Tesla's fault at all.