[gmueckl]

Is Tesla getting into legal mess if they need to add sensors to make self driving work when they already sold that feature to car owners? Would that imply that they need to retrofit already sold cars with upgraded sensor packages?

[_ea1k]

Yes, and this is already turning out to be a problem for them. They've acknowledged that HW3 is not sufficient, and will be on the hook for those who bought the FSD package with those cars.

That isn't the end of the world, but it'd turn into a much bigger problem if they also had to add additional sensors and body modifications to support those sensors.

[idiotsecant]

Solution: just never implement FSD.

[_ea1k]

For a long time, I honestly thought their solution might be something like this. Either that or they could ship more advanced hardware for 3-5 years before updating the software, so that most vehicles would have the new hardware.

[Ancapistani]

My understanding is that they went the opposite direction - their cars used to have lidar, but don’t anymore.

Worse, they turned them off for the older vehicles with a software update.

[_ea1k]

They never had lidar. They had a very low resolution radar that was used for AP, and some pretty terrible ultrasonic sensors with massive blind spots.

[ndsipa_pomu]

IIRC Musk specifically said that the cars had sufficient hardware for FSD mode and advertised them as such. Tesla would have to retrofit the LIDAR sensor or pay money back to their customers if they rolled out FSD with LIDAR.