bradtem
Robocar consultant
At the time there was no "Autopilot" there was only "Enhanced Autopilot." It did not come with the car. I think most people bought it -- AP (as it was usually called) was one of the premier features of a Tesla back then.In order to pay that "$2,000" for FSD, you would have had to have bought enhanced autopilot, for $5,000. Your actual cost to get FSD was $5,000 + $2,000 ($7,000). I find it very misleading when people say "I paid 2k for FSD" because it doesnt talk about what they had to buy as a pre requisite.
I paid the same thing you apparently did, which was 5k for EAP and then 2k for FSD during a 3-4 week firesale in Late march / Early april of 2019, but I dont tell people I paid 2k for FSD. I tell them I paid 7k for it, and the normal price back then was 8k (5k for EAP and 3k for FSD).
That is, unless you paid 2k for FSD with no purchase of EAP back then?
Later Tesla created a sub-system called Autopilot and included it with the car price, without some features that had been in the previous AP. FSD became the only way to get those features, and the pre-purchase of self-driving.
So both views are correct. Back then EAP was the only thing you could buy, and FSD was for a short time a $2K add-on. (Only for a few weeks.) At $2K it was a better deal as it included getting HW3 eventually. From one view, I bought EAP and added FSD. From another view I bought the only AP you could get, and added FSD. In truth, for a long time FSD added very little to EAP that one would want, so really you were paying for the future feature which still is not in production.