Fully Autonomous Full Self-Driving? Nope.

A month ago I wrote a post asking whether Tesla’s strategy was designed to delay. https://teslaarbitration.com/home-page-Tesla-Arbitration/is-teslas-strategy-designed-to-delay/ It turns out that the answer is yes.

If you try to order a Tesla with Full Self-Driving today, you can’t buy a car with “Full Self-Driving”, “Full Self-Driving (Unsupervised)” or “Full Self-Driving Capability”. (At least you get a Model S with a steering wheel instead of a video game controller.) You can only buy a car with “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)”. Let’s call it FSDS.

The car can drive “almost anywhere with minimal intervention.” However, and here’s where the liability issues are avoided, FSDS “[requires] active driver supervision and [does] not make the vehicle autonomous.” Oops. In one sentence, Tesla dashed the hopes and dreams of fanboys across the country. You know, the ones that believed the annual, if not quarterly, pronouncements that cars would be driving themselves next week/month/quarter/year/Mars mission? What do they do now that their supreme leader has cut out their legs like a MAGA-loving roofer who lost their immigrant workforce? My guess is fall back to “Musk plays chess in four dimensions. FSD will come back. That’s what the Robotaxi is all about.” We’ll get back to the Robotaxi in another post.

This was the plan all along. Tesla was, in my view, never going to let cars owned by individuals drive themselves. Period. End of discussion. It could not afford the liability. I would like to think that Tesla lawyers read my blog and said to themselves, “You know what, Dobin is right. We need to change the marketing.” But I doubt I have that kind of influence.

What I might have influenced is the way that Tesla responds from the Resolutions@tesla.com email address. It is far more extensive now than it was previously. It appears that it is no longer the black hole.

Back to FSDS. So now the question is what happens to all the purchasers of vehicles with HW3 and older? Or even HW4 on the day before the change? What happens to the buyer who bought the car with the hope and dream, instead of rock-solid evidence, that fully-autonomous driving was just around the corner? Those folks will not be getting fully-autonomous driving. Now they will get whatever Tesla decides will work with their existing hardware and they’ll like it. Unless, of course, they decide to pursue an arbitration against Tesla for the manner in which FSD was marketed.

What impact does this have on the clients I’m working with? I think it strengthens their position. It now puts an exclamation point on my position that autonomous driving, which was what was being marketed, will never be delivered to purchasers of Full Self-Driving Capability, regardless of how much they paid and what hardware they have.

Again, Tesla should do the right thing here. Tesla should refund people their money. Tesla won’t give up on FSD, however they choose to define it over the next ten years, because Elon Musk’s compensation is now tied to it. Since Tesla is willing to change the definition of FSD at its whim, one could argue that Musk will water down the FSD definition to the point where a car that can park itself will be deemed good enough. And then the toadies that are on the Tesla Board of Directors will happily award him a trillion dollars of Tesla stock.

Where does that leave Tesla FSD owners? If you live in California and bought a car with “FSD Capability” AND opted out of arbitration (or bought before the arbitration clause was in the contract), then you can participate in the class action. Otherwise, you’re SOL as far as the courts are concerned. You need to go to arbitration or you can take your claim to small claims court.

Because, honestly, I don’t see Tesla voluntarily undoing everything that they’ve done for the last ten years.