This is all written in terms of future capabilities of the system that it doesn’t have today, but that’s extremely unclear to many people who buy Tesla’s.
Tesla represents that the current cars they are selling will achieve these functions with a software update to be delivered at some future date. I do not personally believe that to be true.
To be clear, Tesla is representing that a car you can buy today will one day drive itself. It would be very hard to represent that a car sold today will someday magically develop fusion capabilities. Again, I don’t happen to believe that current Tesla models will achieve what is stated in the marketing copy.
What Tesla is saying is even weaker than that. They're not saying they'll ever provide such software. They're really just selling you a car with the claim, "its hardware is sufficient for self-driving; now all you need to add is the software." Or to put it another way, "if we ever release self-driving software, it'll work on your car" (or otherwise presumably they'd shoulder the cost for being wrong about this guarantee).
That's still more than they could say for fusion drives, but it doesn't imply they will ever provide you with any self-driving software. Just that they believe it's possible to write such software.
Well, there’s nothing in their marketing copy that says that any of this is in doubt - it’s all in terms of what the car will do, not what it might do someday. This is all associated with Tesla’s $10k “full self driving” package that they are selling today with the promise of future capabilities.
Put another way, there are a lot of people who are going to be really pissed when they realize that their car will never do those things, and they paid $10k for practically nothing (ok, technically they get autopilot and the ability for the car to stop at red lights today).
> Well, there’s nothing in their marketing copy that says that any of this is in doubt
I think this bit is meant to cover their rear: "The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions."
Translation: we don't/can't actually guarantee this will ever happen, and if it does, it may depend on where you're located.