There is a real difference: An ordinary person would be expected to understand that the name "Miracle Whip" is not meant to imply an event involving divine intervention to alter the course of natural events.
Ok...
An ordinary person could be expected to understand that "Full Self-Driving" meant that the car did all the driving itself.
They really couldn't though, today- if they actually
read what they are buying on the page where they select to purchase the option.
And indeed, at the time I bought my Model 3 (with EAP but without FSD) Tesla promised that if I paid for FSD my car would, at some unspecified time in the future, do all the driving itself any time I wanted it to and any place I might otherwise have driven it.
That's not entirely true.
It IS true that prior to March 2019 they made a much more expansive promise. And I'd expect anyone who bought before then to hold them to it- or expect some compensation eventually. But this no longer is relevant to anyone who has purchased FSD in over a year now since it's now an entirely different offering, with specifics given during the purchase process.
But even the older FSD didn't promise QUITE the L5 experience you suggest- it was clearly promising an L4 experience.
Specifically it promised enabling full self driving in "almost all circumstances"
That's L4. self-driving in all operational domains.
Vs L5 which is self driving in
all circumstances.
The folks at Tesla seemed to believe they could achieve this, so they were not lying, strictly speaking. But at some point they recognized that a car that does all the driving itself would be further into the future than the cars built today could be expected to last, and rather than admitting this openly and compensating people who had paid for the promise of a car that does all the driving itself, they just quietly changed their promotional material to a much more modest set of features, which still do not exist.
This, also, is only partly true.
The first 90% is essentially what I said a while ago about why they changed the FSD offering- though it was in a bit more generous context, specifically that:
By making this change, they limit their financial liability if they CAN'T make L4 work. Only the pre-march-2019 buyers are owed essentially a full or near full refund. Anybody after that they can probably hit the much lower target, or at least owe a VASTLY smaller refund since they'll have delivered nearly all the features even if not the last one.
Which brings us to the last 10% of this paragraph of yours that is entirely incorrect.
New FSD promises 7 specific things.
6 of them
exist and have already been delivered
Only 1 left. Formerly automatic driving on city streets- and now in V3 of FSD since about a month ago- "autosteer on city streets"
To use the term "Full Self-Driving" now is frankly dishonest.
It would be if they were still making the 2016-Feb 2019 promise about it.
But now they're promising 7 things, 6 of which exist and are being delivered today (to US cars anyway- the rest have 5/7 currently)
And they still hope to get #7 done- though it may never rise above an L2 feature.
And the purchase process tells you all that.
That kind of thing is common enough in marketing, but still dishonest and I'd have expected better from Tesla.
These are the same folks who for years have used two different measuring standards for their Performance and Non-Performance cars in order to make the gap between them (and thus the value in paying more for P) appear larger than it actually is.
That's something
nobody else in the car industry is dishonest enough to do- and they've done it since at least the P85 Model S well before the 3 was even being sold.
And still do it today.
And by any reasonable ethical standard, Tesla should offer a refund to people who paid for "FSD" while they were still promising a car that would do all the driving itself. Let the buyers decide whether they want to stay on the "FSD" track to receive whatever features Tesla can achieve, or get a refund and a downgrade to EAP or AP or (if physically possible) no autonomous features. It's the right thing to do. And I say this as someone unaffected by it because I never believed that real FSD would be available during the time I expected to own the car.
Well, there's ethics, and there's the law.
Tesla, officially, still believes it'll get to what they promised the original FSD buyers. As long as they have a good faith belief in that they can hang on to the money (though not recognize it as revenue until they deliver on the promise).
We lack sufficient insight into the companies internal discussions to know if they "really" still think they can get there with the current sensor suite- maybe they still do and the FSD description change was for accounting and legal-insurance reasons just in case they turn out wrong.-- or maybe they don't believe anymore and it's an outright CYA because if/when they admitted they can't do it they know it'll be a huge hit to the company (and not just in refunds- but buyers and stock price too)
EAP is still a bit shy of what was promised but I'm totally satisfied with it.
To my knowledge, with the delivery of enhanced summon, EAP delivered every single feature it promised to deliver.
What do you think they didn't?
