Get a grip, folks.
Elon isn’t lying. He’s just wrong. And then does things on the basis of thinking he’s right, even though he’s wrong.
He might have been wrong the first time he said it but he’s been saying it for over 5 years now. And he’s handed $10K or so per car every time someone takes him at his word, and a large number of people do add it to their cars. So he’s fairly richly rewarded for being “wrong”. Even the thickest of us eventually get the message that FSD isn’t close. Then remember those videos of the car going from place to place without any driver intervention. Those videos were later found to be faked. Faked videos define a point at which the stench of lies became unmistakeable.
So suppose this was just some sort of an ongoing mind bogglingly colossal optimistic error on his part, would it not make sense to allow the FSD to be transferred to a new Tesla when the original purchaser replaced his car? After all the buyer paid for it and didn’t get it. Nope, Musk/Tesla would like you to buy It again, thank you very much. Oh, and now it’s $12,000.
This man’s other company can put a missile in space and return two boosters side by side to two landing pads. Accuracy isn’t the problem. So if it isn’t accuracy, it’s honesty.
That said, I love my car. The traffic aware cruise control and automatic steering on divided highways is great. It’s about all the FSD I’m likely to use. I don’t need it to drive downtown, to navigate construction areas, nor to wait for and then execute left turns across traffic. I wouldn’t trust the beta software to do that reliably anyway.
One Tesla slammed into a parked fire engine at high speed. The story here wasn’t that the car totaled itself when it failed to avoid the fire engine, it’s that the driver only suffered a foot/ankle injury. Teslas protect people in devastating crashes. Not every time, mind you, but a lot of them. It’s an amazing car.
So the FSD is a lie, currently anyway. But the car Is no less amazing. The amazing car is saddled with an unfortunate lie. The lie says nothing about the car, it only says something about the man and the company.
On a separate note, we just bought an upper trim level Kia Telluride. It has Kia’s version of traffic aware cruise control. It will auto steer on divided highways. So basically the Kia provides me the same function to me as the Tesla’s auto drive software.
What will happen is that FSD will eventually arrive, and shortly thereafter all new cars will have it. It will be better and safer than what we have now, random human drivers, sometimes distracted, often bored, 6% of whom are currently thought chemically impaired.
What you get when you buy the $12K FSD package from Tesla is the promise that you’ll be first on the list and will get it a few years before the rest of the new car buying public. So it’s that promise that you are really buying, and not the “6 months away” or “within a year”. Those time estimates are somewhere between blind optimism and purposeful deceit.
So you can choose what to believe. The bottom line is that FSD isn’t here yet and may well not arrive before you sell your car. It may not be on your next car either but it might be on the one after that. And the following car will probably have it, and by then it’ll be free.