Opinion: FSD, Why you should not buy it.

[SlimJim]

Kind of elitist, no?

fsd is not a must have item like a desk or chair.
it is a luxury item like a rolex.
if you want it and you can pay for it, you buy it.
if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

 

[tvad]

fsd is not a must have item like a desk or chair.
it is a luxury item like a rolex.
if you want it and you can pay for it, you buy it.
if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

Good point.

There’s an important difference between a Rolex watch and Tesla FSD.

The Rolex works. Perpetually.

 

[rdcisneros3]

if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

I disagree. Maybe some people could comfortably afford it but just don't want to pay the money for something that's not complete and may never be.

Also, I'm not sure if anyone actually "needs" FSD in its current state.

 

[holmgang]

fsd is not a must have item like a desk or chair.
it is a luxury item like a rolex.
if you want it and you can pay for it, you buy it.
if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

Functionally, the Rolex tells time and tells time well. They're tested and certified to attest to that fact.

Socially, Rolexes can signal some virtue. I don't see people buying FSD to flout their having it.

The only similarity about them is that both can be and are purchased on debt. But that obviates your point about affordability.

 

[jfinephilly]

fsd is not a must have item like a desk or chair.
it is a luxury item like a rolex.
if you want it and you can pay for it, you buy it.
if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

Or you are just trying to be somewhat fiscally responsible and are performing a cost benefit analysis before making a purchase. Rich people make stupid financial decisions too.

It also seems silly to conflate an heirloom piece of jewelry that actually requires wealth to purchase and semi-functional bit of software that really won’t break the bank for most interested in a Tesla.

Like I said, elitist.

 

[daniel]

fsd is not a must have item like a desk or chair.
it is a luxury item like a rolex.
if you want it and you can pay for it, you buy it.
if you have to ask if you should or not, then either you don't need it or your budget doesn't allow it comfortably enough.

I believe this is a fallacy. It's like the old "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it." It's glib nonsense. Maybe you've got a million dollars to spend on an emerald necklace for your paramour. You go to Tiffany's and see a very nice one. But you don't know whether it costs one million or ten million. You have to ask. This does not mean you cannot afford it; it just means you don't know whether or not it fits into your budget.

In the case of FSD, there are many unknowns: When will there actually be something there? What will it do? Will it work everywhere you'd have been able to drive yourself, or will there be a lot of areas it cannot handle? How often will you have to intervene? Will today's car ever be able to reach L5? With so many unknowns, it makes sense for a person to ask advice. There are people who can afford it, but there's always an opportunity cost: "Should I buy FSD or take my family to Hawai'i? My daughter would love to see the whales but my son would complain the whole way. If FSD becomes a reality, I could work an additional 250 hours a year while my car drives the kids to school and soccer practice and on that we could take that vacation."* So many unknowns.

Yes, it makes sense to ask for advice if you don't have strong opinions already.

* Hypothetical person asking. I already live in Hawai'i. It's whale soup out there right now. Anybody reading this, if you're on Maui or coming to Maui, PM me and I'll tell you how you can come paddling with one of the canoe clubs and see whales, while they're here, which is more or less another month. Or come paddling any time of year. Or you could buy FSD instead and hope they actually make it happen before your car wears out.

 

[Kevy Baby]

Brake-checking someone behind when TACC dramatically drops from 90mph to 50mph because the mapping engine suddenly has no speed-limit data is not safe. Or reliable.

So a rare and extreme case deems it unsafe (which your example isn't)? Also, reliability does not require 100% accuracy.

Your straw man argument fails here.

 

[holmgang]

So a rare and extreme case deems it unsafe (which your example isn't)? Also, reliability does not require 100% accuracy.

Your straw man argument fails here.

So rare and extreme there are multiple threads plastered here about its behavior....

....and erratic sudden braking from highway speeds aren't unsafe? If you did this on a driving test, you'd never be licensed.

I'd suggest you're not clear what a straw man is, but that would constitute ad hominem....

 

[SlimJim]

I believe this is a fallacy. It's like the old "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it." It's glib nonsense. Maybe you've got a million dollars to spend on an emerald necklace for your paramour. You go to Tiffany's and see a very nice one. But you don't know whether it costs one million or ten million. You have to ask. This does not mean you cannot afford it; it just means you don't know whether or not it fits into your budget.

In the case of FSD, there are many unknowns: When will there actually be something there? What will it do? Will it work everywhere you'd have been able to drive yourself, or will there be a lot of areas it cannot handle? How often will you have to intervene? Will today's car ever be able to reach L5? With so many unknowns, it makes sense for a person to ask advice. There are people who can afford it, but there's always an opportunity cost: "Should I buy FSD or take my family to Hawai'i? My daughter would love to see the whales but my son would complain the whole way. If FSD becomes a reality, I could work an additional 250 hours a year while my car drives the kids to school and soccer practice and on that we could take that vacation."* So many unknowns.

Yes, it makes sense to ask for advice if you don't have strong opinions already.

* Hypothetical person asking. I already live in Hawai'i. It's whale soup out there right now. Anybody reading this, if you're on Maui or coming to Maui, PM me and I'll tell you how you can come paddling with one of the canoe clubs and see whales, while they're here, which is more or less another month. Or come paddling any time of year. Or you could buy FSD instead and hope they actually make it happen before your car wears out.

The price is known. $7000.
other than that there are unknowns that no one can answer.
asking on this forum is pointless.
even elon musk doesn't know.
yet hundreds of thousands of people purchased fsd.
if you have to ask if he should or not, it is worse than asking if i should buy a rolex.
rolex will keep going up in value and you will get your money back at least.
in the case of fsd, unless you cannot drive, you really don't need it.
it is a fun toy at best.

 

[holmgang]

rolex will keep going up in value and you will get your money back at least.

if that was the case, rolex should keep all their stock and mark the magical gains in their books.

 

[jfinephilly]

if that was the case, rolex should keep all their stock and mark the magical gains in their books.

Accounting doesn’t work like that, but I get the point.

 

[daniel]

The price is known. $7000.
other than that there are unknowns that no one can answer.
asking on this forum is pointless.
even elon musk doesn't know.
yet hundreds of thousands of people purchased fsd.
if you have to ask if he should or not, it is worse than asking if i should buy a rolex.
rolex will keep going up in value and you will get your money back at least.
in the case of fsd, unless you cannot drive, you really don't need it.
it is a fun toy at best.

There is just so much wrong with the above:

Many people are paying for FSD, many others are not. There is nothing wrong with asking people for their opinions and thoughts before making up your mind. There are reasons to buy it, and reasons not to. It is not a simple matter of "If you must ask, you don't need it." Obviously, nobody needs FSD. Nobody needs a Tesla. A five-year-old Civic or Corolla is much cheaper transportation over the life of the car. So the questions a buyer must ask him- or herself are, "What is the likelihood that FSD will provide value?" "How does it fit in my budget?" "Is there something else I'd rather spend the money on?" "How well will it work if it does materialize?" "If I pay for FSD on my car now, will I actually get it as soon as it becomes available, or will I have to wait for hardware upgrades while later buyers are enjoying autonomy?" And many others.

I've answered these questions for myself, but it is glib and unhelpful to act as though others may not need to ponder these things and may want to ask others for their thoughts.

As for the future value of a Rolex, that is as unknowable as the future value of real estate. Before 2008 the general opinion was that real estate always goes up, and past experience supported that. Few people wear a wrist watch any more. As the generation that depended on wrist watches dies off, the value of Rolexes could very well collapse. The value of a Rolex has nothing to do with its ability too keep time, because your cell phone gets its time from the cell company that gets it from the Naval observatory. A Rolex is jewelry, and fashions in jewelry change.

 

[clydeiii]

I like I'm sure most of you consider myself a techy. I love new technology which is a big reason, albeit not the only one, that I bought a Tesla. However, I am also a business person so when I see Full Self Driving offered for $7000 I am first excited, then my business side kicks in. My thoughts are as follows:

1. FSD is not ready and really doesn't give you much for $7000 as of this writing.
2. All Tesla cars produced since around Q2 2019 have the same FSD hardware.
3. You can upgrade to FSD later via a software update.

Now Tesla and skeptics will tell you that the price of FSD is going to rise as it improves.

Nah. Here's a much better reason to pay $7,000: you are signaling to Tesla that this feature is important to you. That is reason enough to buy it. If you want your car to drive itself, you should purchase the future you want, and you should do that today.

 

[daniel]

Nah. Here's a much better reason to pay $7,000: you are signaling to Tesla that this feature is important to you. That is reason enough to buy it. If you want your car to drive itself, you should purchase the future you want, and you should do that today.

Tesla is going to do this if they possibly can. Elon Musk is fully committed to it. It's not necessary to give them an interest-free $7,000 loan just to cast one vote in favor of it. I'd give them a $25,000 loan to help then finance the project, but if I help finance the project I want my share of the proceeds. Either float a bond issue and pay me interest, or issue stock in the FSD project so that I own my little piece of it when it succeeds.

 

[clydeiii]

Tesla is going to do this if they possibly can. Elon Musk is fully committed to it. It's not necessary to give them an interest-free $7,000 loan just to cast one vote in favor of it. I'd give them a $25,000 loan to help then finance the project, but if I help finance the project I want my share of the proceeds. Either float a bond issue and pay me interest, or issue stock in the FSD project so that I own my little piece of it when it succeeds.

Yes, possibly. But telling them it's worth 7,000 to you before it even exists helps them better understand the demand for this product.

 

[daniel]

Yes, possibly. But telling them it's worth 7,000 to you before it even exists helps them better understand the demand for this product.

I think they understand the demand for the product very well. And not a lot of people can afford to give a $7,000 interest-free loan.

I am a big fan of Tesla and I admire Elon Musk. I bought a Tesla Roadster in 2011 and drove it as my daily car for seven years. Then I sold it and bought my Model 3. I own stock in Tesla and I own Solar Bonds, originally from Solar City and now they are effectively Tesla bonds. I've put a lot of money into Tesla, both in cars and in investments. I believe in this company. I support this company.

But I'm not giving them an interest-free $7,000 loan just to tell them I want FSD. I would have bought FSD when I bought my car if the conditions had been:

1. The money pays 5% annual interest until my car gets full autonomy (which is the "FSD" they were promising at the time) and

2. My money is refunded in full if my car is taken out of service for any reason or FSD is developed but for any reason my car cannot be upgraded to have FSD within six months of its initial release to customers.

I think this would have been reasonable for a feature that does not yet exist, and whose requirements are still not known. Musk said my car had all the needed hardware. It didn't, and they are having a lot of trouble upgrading the HW2.5 cars that paid for FSD, and still have not figured out how to upgrade the HW2.0 cars. Now Musk says this time the cars have all the needed hardware, but the re-write means there's no way to know what hardware will be needed. Nobody else in the industry but Tesla thinks it can be done without lidar.

You should buy FSD if you believe you will get features that are worth that much to you and are willing to take the chance that you might be wrong. Not because giving Tesla free money will encourage them to do something they are already fully committed to doing anyway.

 

[Kevy Baby]

Why does everyone keep talking like it is a non-existent product? It is there and it exists. It is certainly not feature complete, but MANY elements are there and work well (and some not-so-well).

Okay, so the first letter of the acronym is not accurate: it is not FULL Self Driving, but it is a whole lot of self driving (but WLoSD just doesn't have the same ring to it).

It sounds like some are never going to be happy until it is level 5 with zero errors.

 

[TLLMRRJ]

Accounting doesn’t work like that, but I get the point.

It did for Enron, but that didn't end well.

 

[daniel]

Why does everyone keep talking like it is a non-existent product? It is there and it exists. It is certainly not feature complete, but MANY elements are there and work well (and some not-so-well).

Okay, so the first letter of the acronym is not accurate: it is not FULL Self Driving, but it is a whole lot of self driving (but WLoSD just doesn't have the same ring to it).

It sounds like some are never going to be happy until it is level 5 with zero errors.

The product we are talking about is a car that can drive itself without a driver present. This is what Musk promised me if I paid for "FSD" when I bought my car in 2018.

You are talking about EAP, a separate product, which can drive the car in limited situations, with a fully attentive driver ready to take over at an instant's notice. I paid for EAP when I bought my car and it works exactly as promised. It even works better now than it did back then, due to OTA updates.

Currently, the option Tesla sold under the name of "FSD" does not exist.

And even the greatly-reduced description of "features" that require constant supervision does not exist. None of those features exist yet. With the new rewrite, it looks as though FSD will have nothing EAP does not have for another year at least.

Unfortunately for car buyers, Tesla is no longer selling EAP. You have to pay for FSD if you want the full EAP package. But FSD does not exist. You just get EAP and a promise of more features, maybe in a year, maybe later.

 

[jfinephilly]

It did for Enron, but that didn't end well.

Haha and literally caused accounting to change