Tesla has weakened its real unsupervised self-driving promises on new cars in the online configurator.
Tesla’s self-driving promises are well-documented. CEO Elon Musk is quoted promising “level 5” self-driving on all cars produced since 2016.
He even said that a software update would come to enable all Tesla vehicles to be part of a “robotaxi fleet” by the end of every year for the last 5 years. The CEO went as far as claiming that this would make Tesla vehicles “appreciating assets” as the automaker would increase the price of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) software package as it gets better – leading to a true self-driving system that would start generating revenue from the robotaxi service.
Not only has Tesla yet to reach robotaxi-level self-driving, but the first part of that statement also wasn’t true as Tesla ended up slashing the price of the FSD package from $15,000 to $12,000 and more recently to now $8,000, which helped crashed the value of used Tesla vehicles.
Tesla used to sell the FSD package with the name “Full Self-Driving Capability” – implying real “unsupervised” self-driving:
That’s obviously on top of the CEO’s many promises regarding the system.
Now, Tesla’s online configurator mentions only ‘Full Self-Driving Supervised’ when selecting the FSD option:
This would imply that buyers are simply buying ‘Full Self-Driving (Supervised)’ rather than ‘Full Self-Driving’ with a future unsupervised version.
The only hope in the product description is that Tesla mentions that the “currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
“Currently” would imply that in the future, it won’t require driver attention and make the vehicle autonomous, but it is certainly weaker language.
Tesla first started to use this new “supervised” language earlier this year to move away from calling the software releases “beta”, but it used to still promise “Full Self-Driving Capability” without the mention of supervision in the configurator when ordering the package.
Electrek’s Take
For Tesla owners from 2016 until now, I think that it’s clear that the automaker promised unsupervised self-driving on all cars.
Going forward, I think that might be a bit more difficult to prove based on this language.
Interestingly, this is coming right before Tesla is planning to unveil its ‘Robotaxi’, a new vehicle designed for self-driving. Many have claimed that current Tesla vehicles would never be able of true self-driving due to some bling spots in the camera arrays and a lack of hardware redundancy.
I am not saying that this will be the case, but I also think it’s not impossible that Tesla will abandon its promises regarding its consumer vehicle lineup and shift its efforts to a new dedicated self-driving platform: the new Robotaxi.
Of course, it would find itself with a giant liability.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.