Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Sohcahtoa82 1410 days ago
Buying FSD now is really just buying a promise that FSD will be delivered in the future.

Whether Tesla will actually achieve FSD is debatable. Personally, I think they will. Yes, even with vision-only. It's going to be several more years, but I think they'll get there eventually.

But what do you call it when you're selling that feature to customers today?

2 comments

Especially if it’s tied to the vehicle. How many people who paid for FSD originally will have sold their car or had it reach the end of its service life by the time anything like the original promise is delivered?
who cares what they call it. if you buy a software package thinking it's fsd in 2022 with zero research, it's on you. i feel like half the downvoters in this chain are fighting the good fight for .00001% of tesla owners, who happen to be some of the dumbest consumers on planet earth.
Do you think all Tesla buyers are skilled software engineers or ML researchers? I guarantee you that a lot of people believed Tesla’s and especially Elon’s claims that this was right around the corner, and don’t have the appropriate experience to understand that there are multiple fundamental improvements needed before this will actually deliver. I know multiple people who are quite smart but didn’t have the experience to understand that it’s not like, say, buying a game at launch expecting it to be patched in a few months but more like a bunch of people doing Ph.D-level research which likely won’t ship in the life of their car.
how do you need a PhD to google "Tesla FSD" on youtube and watch some videos. Your claim is ridiculous.
Keep going: you do that, and you find a Tesla fanboy’s reaction saying the problems are overblown and will be fixed soon with a software update. Who’s right?

Being able to answer that confidently requires some understanding of the problem domain which not everyone has. This is especially true for these big claims where people might think that a large company wouldn’t rationally make claims like this which would expose them to liability unless it really was almost done, not realizing the degree to which Elon will in fact take that risk just to cast himself as the hero of a 90s sci-fi novel’s back story.

> Being able to answer that confidently requires some understanding of the problem domain which not everyone has

Not really.

All it really takes is a brief look at history to determine that Elon Musk has been saying FSD is less than 6 months away for well over 5 years. Some basic pattern matching skill should instill the idea that FSD is not actually coming anytime soon, and that it's all marketing bullshit.

> if you buy a software package thinking it's fsd in 2022 with zero research, it's on you.

I want to agree with you on this, but Tesla is very much bordering on false advertising.