Ahem. One buys a house before it’s built. Happens all the time. When one does that, one gets the (future) house at a discount. If the builder fails to deliver, there may be a lawsuit; otherwise, one gets a new, spiffy house considerably cheaper than trying to buy a built, ready-to-move-in place. I, like many others, am sitting in such a place right now. (And, in fact, one can ask for slight, zero-cost modifications: color of the house, carpets, paint, where the counters go, etc.. So there’s advantages to this approach.)
Tesla’s shtick is similar and doesn’t fash the courts. Elon and Tesla have said repeatedly that the closer they get to a non-Beta version of FSD, the more they’re going to charge for it. Got mine for $4k back in the day; others paid far less. The $12k-$15k they’re charging now will be a LOT less than the eventual price when (and if) Robotaxi releases.
The, “and if” is legitimate, though. It’s clear that this is a research project, in the sense that nobody’s ever built a location independent, city streets version of FSD before. Lots of different problems, from machine vision, to avoiding pedestrians, to actually working correctly in the presence of humans have to be solved. It’s taking longer than Elon or the other engineers and scientists at Tesla anticipated, especially as they’ve had to invent whole new technologies (like Dojo) to move things along.
But they clearly haven’t given up yet. So I think that you and your lawsuit ideas aren’t going to have much traction. Maybe in a year or three, if it grinds to a halt. But that’s not now.
