Until recently, Elon Musk was thought to be the only important person at Tesla who had a habit of overpromising and underdelivering. His outspoken personality and sometimes flamboyant appearance helped the executive become an international sensation. Everyone who reported to him was expected to be a responsible professional who understood the risks of overdoing things. Unfortunately, Tesla's corporate culture seems to revolve around deceiving customers into thinking they own future-proof computers on wheels.
For some time now we have been saying that Tesla Fully autonomous driving promises are often unrealistic or seem too good to be true. However, we also learned early on that Elon Musk has a unique way of talking to customers, employees, and business partners about Tesla's initiatives in futuristic realms like self-driving cars or Waymo's robotaxis.
But now Tesla is actively taking steps to hide its promise to give nearly all of its customers access to software and hardware (basically, a computer) that can transform their battery-powered vehicles into driverless vehicles.
The world's most valuable automaker has removed a major official blog post titled, “All Tesla cars currently in production are equipped with hardware for fully autonomous driving.” The page is still cached by most major search engines. However, if you click on it, you will be taken directly to the blog's home page. In fact, all posts published before January 18, 2019 have been hidden or deleted.
Fortunately, initiatives like the Wayback Machine archive parts of the internet for us to consult and ensure that retrospective insights are always perfect.
Photo: Wayback Machine
Lessons from history
Here's what Tesla said eight years ago: “We are thrilled to announce that, starting today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including the Model 3, will be equipped with the hardware necessary for full self-driving with a level of safety substantially superior to that of a human driver.”
The same blog post reminded customers and potential investors that 12 ultrasonic sensors (USS) round out the eight-camera suite. Those sensors were removed from the Model 3 and Model Y in 2021, and from the Model S and Model X in 2022.
Customers who had USS on their EVs saw the part become unusable after a couple of over-the-air updates. They were forced to deal with the new system with just a camera, even in situations where USS might have come in handy. It took Tesla months to find a usable view for parking assist, for example. Oddly enough, it also refused to add a front bumper camera to EVs that didn’t have USS. Thankfully, the Cybertruck has one.
But 2016 was a crazy year for Tesla and its dream of selling driverless cars. While it's baffling that a car company would spend years trying to find customers willing to let a computer replace them at some point, the FSD The description of that year's capabilities is even more intriguing.
Photo: Tesla
Tesla was telling FSD buyers that their car would be able to drive itself wherever the driver directed it to go. “If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or simply home if there’s nothing on the calendar.”
The FSD's own description promised people willing to spend $3,000 that their electric vehicles would be “finding the optimal path” and even navigate city streets without road markings or handles “highways heavily trafficked with cars moving at high speed.”
To be fair, the same page warned potential FSD buyers that such features would only work after “thorough software validation” and government approval.
Full of hope and good humor
But Tesla was adamant that robotaxis would soon hit the road, because it had warned its customers against using FSD to generate profits.
As of this writing, the Full Self-Driving (Supervised) solution, not yet in beta, is not yet capable of taking customers (who may have paid up to $15,000 for the software suite) on fully autonomous trips, as Google’s Waymo is doing in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and parts of Phoenix.
However, Tesla's biggest “liability” when it comes to FSD promises is its CEO himself. In 2017, he suggested that it would be about two years before Tesla would allow owners to take a nap during their commute. At the time, the brand was also planning to show the world a Tesla Electric vehicle driving alone from coast to coast. This has yet to happen.
Photo: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
Elon Musk was a Twitter enthusiast even before he bought the social media platform and transformed it into X. In 2019, he said that all products from the now Texas-based automaker “Cars produced since October 2016 are equipped with the necessary hardware for FSD or are easily upgradeable.”
Since 2020, the eccentric Elon Musk has been adamant about the success of Fully Self-Driving. He has stated on multiple occasions that solving autonomy would be the difference between a trillion-dollar value or nothing for Tesla.
But it wasn't just Elon Musk who confirmed or promised all sorts of self-driving capabilities. Ashok Elluswamy, a robotics engineer who is Tesla's director of Autopilot, said in 2022 that “Every Tesla built in recent years has the hardware needed to make the car drive itself.” Just a year later, the automaker began shipping cars equipped with Hardware 4, an updated version of the computer that was supposed to turn all Teslas into reliable robotaxis at the push of a button (or more than one).
The debate over whether Hardware 3-equipped vehicles would still benefit from full FSD updates began when Elon Musk publicly admitted that it had become more complicated for his company's engineers to deliver Hardware 4 updates to Hardware 3-equipped EVs.
Photo: @greentheonly via Twitter
On August 21, 2024, Tesla rolled out a refreshed version of FSD (12.5. 1.4) to its fleet of electric vehicles running Hardware 3, but Ashok Elluswamy himself admitted that the update needed to be adapted to older cars. “We were able to achieve similar performance to the AI4 12.5 version with a relatively smaller model for AI3 (i.e. Hardware 3)” the expert explained.
Now, owners of Teslas equipped with Hardware 3 are wondering if they will be left behind as FSD slowly but surely evolves into a system that learns from humans and assimilates that information to (sometimes in the future) make all the right driving decisions while on public roads.
The future of mobility does not include everyone, it seems
This saga over the promise that every Tesla produced since October 19, 2016, would be capable of becoming autonomous at some point without requiring additional hardware upgrades began after a die-hard fan of the company claimed on the website formerly known as Twitter that “neither Tesla nor Elon Musk ever 'promised' to do this” provide paying customers with EVs that can run SAE J3016 Level 5 fully autonomous driving software. In essence, they were referring to the highest level of automation possible. A car with SAE Level 5 capability doesn’t need the driver to pay attention to anything or even a steering wheel, for that matter.
Ultimately, if you are now thinking that I am somehow against Elon Musk or Tesla for whatever reason you can imagine, I would like you to check out my reasoning as to why the Tesla CEO was completely entitled to his payout. Keep in mind that the article was published when many people were actively arguing that he should not have received so much money in the form of stock options.
Publicly traded companies and large corporations with a global presence, like Tesla, need to be held accountable more often. Otherwise, we risk “going with the flow” and waking up to another 2008-like scenario, this time limited to the automotive world only.
The big question is: Should Tesla reimburse the cost of FSD to owners of vehicles equipped with Hardware 3? Hardware 5 (or AI 5, as Elon Musk calls it) is just around the corner.
When you want your car returned, tap Summon on your phone. It will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2016
The 2016 ad copy is crazy… photo.twitter.com/AZkkpGS8ba
— I love my TSLA (@MyTsla) August 24, 2024
All cars produced since October 2016 have the necessary hardware for FSD or are trivially upgradeable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2019
I understand your need to deflect and attack me personally instead of addressing the fact that neither @Tesla nor @elonmusk I never “promised” you anything like that. Stop spreading misinformation about @Teslaand start reading the documents you sign before making major purchases.
— Yaman Tasdivar (@ValueAnalyst1) August 20, 2024
