One of the biggest mysteries to me is why clear, ongoing communication to owners about current AP2 development status, exactly what to expect and when, and so on is nonexistent.
It is clear that there are knowledgeable people on the top and this just makes it even more confounding.
A lot of bad experiences, sour taste, and customer angst can be relieved with simple, honest, ongoing communication. And you don't even need an MBA to know that.
Given all that, the lack of communication augurs more concern because knowing all that why are they afraid to speak?
[/tinfoil time]
But really! Can anyone suggest a cogent answer without belittling the question and attacking the desire for basic decent communication ?
Caveat: what I am saying below only applies to software development and not necessarily other aspects that may require communication (like hardware development, design, and marketing, which may follow a different development cycle).
Giving an honest public predictive timetable for software updates with specific predicted features is rarely a good idea (a regular release cycle without specific predicted features is another story). If you ask a software engineer to give their
honest estimate of how long it will take to develop something, it will often take 2-3x as long. Nowadays, some engineers learn to pad their estimates, but sometimes even that is not enough.
The nature of software development is that there is almost always unforeseen bugs and issues (even without feature creep adding to the burden). And because they are unforeseen, time estimates easily become invalid. Some features also run into problems that can not be fixed in a reasonable amount of time and need to be dropped.
Most likely with such a timetable, you set multiple false expectations and when those expectations are not met (either a deadline or feature), then that leads to massive disappointment for the consumer (multiple broken promises rather than just a general one).
Another thing to understand is that Tesla is operating under the model that the car continually improves, so there is really no specified "end" point in which the software is deemed its final release. That means releases of features deemed "acceptable" in quality (which is subjective) can be released just to get features into consumer hands, and further refined in future updates.
As the company matures and if the uncertainty becomes an issue in terms of sales, I can see them move to a regular release cycle (similar to car model years or mobile OS releases), for example annual major release, quarterly sub-release, etc. This lets people know for certain when a major update will be released, but not what features would be included.
Elon is mostly the one giving out time estimates, but the nature of how he releases them (buried on twitter and earnings calls) makes them softer estimates. Elon's current estimate for AP2 development is high speed autosteer in 2 weeks to a month:
Software Update Brings Autopark To Tesla's Equipped With Enhanced Autopilot
