Multiple other manufacturers have products that allow you to keep your hands off the wheel, and monitor your eyes. GM Supercruise and Ford’s Bluecruise, for one. FSD still requires you to keep your hands on the wheel, yes? I found autopilot nearly useless in my Model 3 because it was so bad at telling when you had your hands on the wheel. And such a feature is a far-cry from “Full Self-Driving”, in any case.
A friend of mine demoed his “FSD beta” to me in a quiet residential neighborhood this summer. Twice it tried to make a left turn in front of oncoming traffic and he had to slam on the brakes. Rather unimpressive.
I’m glad you find it worthwhile. However, I still characterize Tesla and Musk’s marketing of the feature as a scam. Today, everyone knows Musk is a bullshit artist and no one really expects FSD anytime soon. Four or five years ago, some people actually believed him. Tesla started charging for “Full Self-Driving Capability” in 2016. I know someone who paid for FSD when he purchased a Model S, never received any functionality from it whatsoever, and then traded the car back to Tesla after 4 years of ownership without any credit from the Tesla for the functionality they advertised, charged for, and never delivered. Tesla then, of course, resold his used car without any mention of FSD so that they could also upsell the new buyer on pre-purchasing the non-existent FSD feature. That’s a scam!
The body is still load-bearing. IIRC, they said the panels over the bed add ~25% to torsional rigidity and the door panels absorb most impact energy (and so don’t need internal reinforcement).
Yes, they are taking the die casting a step further… but they’re doing that with all of their vehicles. The only thing it has in common with the Y is that it’s not ladder frame or a pure unibody.
Let me just say something else - Musk is a genius and his companies have delivered incredible progress and innovation for humanity, and I think much of the credit for that is due to him personally.
That doesn’t change the fact that he’s also a bullshit artist and his claims and promises are not to be trusted.
These two aspects might be inseparable! Normal, well-adjusted, realistic and rational people probably don’t start multiple innovative hundred-billion-dollar companies and become the richest man in the world.
That doesn’t mean we should rationalize his bad behavior or come up with excuses for the bad decisions he makes.
It sucks that your friend never got any benefit, but FSD is a software feature. The hardware is identical across all cars. So Tesla can flip the switch on and off on cars that they resell depending on demand. And of course you can add it later on a car you buy without the feature.
Sure, no denying that, or that he made numerous promises about FSD that have not been fulfilled. But scam is a serious claim that’s usually reserved for cases where there’s no product at all, and generally no intention of ever delivering a product. What we have with FSD is partial functionality, but it does get better over time and works well enough to be useful. I’d easily take it over the current alternatives, which are too limited to be useful to me despite occasionally working hands-free.
BTW, easy tip to prevent the nagging–just grab the wheel with one hand at 8 o’clock and leave your arm’s weight on it. It uses a torque sensor and needs to sense that you’re applying force in one direction or another.
Yes, I know. I found this and the need to babysit exactly how much force I was applying - enough to be detected, not enough to disengage the system - more tiring than just driving the car.
My EQS (which doesn’t include any hands-free modes) has a capacitive sensor in the steering wheel, which is much better.
Well, you know, “the best part is no part” . They needed a torque sensor anyway, so why not use that.
I’m hoping they’ll get the interior camera working well enough to support hands-free driving. It still won’t be level 3–i.e., it’ll still require that you’re paying attention to the road–but not holding the wheel would be nice.
The off-road capabilities are there for the third owner, after the magic of depreciation has worked its magic. The same rule applies to Range Rovers, Mercedes G-class, and Raptors. We won’t really have a good idea of the Cybertruck’s real world (not YouTube stunt) off road capability for 10 years or so.
Musk has been making unrealistic promises that FSD is right around the corner for about 8 years, and using those unrealistic promises to sell pre-purchases of FSD by directly stating the price will go up if you wait for it to actually be achieved.
Tesla has no marketing department, so Musk’s high-profile public statements are what people relied on. Remember all his talk about robo-taxis? Remember his claim that a Tesla would drive across the country autonomously by 2017? Remember the video demonstration they staged? I remember even in 2018 (or whenever I bought my Model 3) wondering if I should pay $10k for FSD, because Musk was saying they were close and that the price would go up once they unveiled full FSD. It seemed very unlikely to me at the time that they were that close, but maybe Musk was really going to deliver and amaze everyone? I didn’t buy it, and good thing too, because it turned out Musk was a fucking liar.
It’s clear that he and/or the company must have known throughout most of this period that they were actually not anywhere close to delivering what he’s been promising. They’re asking people to pay money today for a capability that does not exist, by making unrealistic promises about how soon it will be delivered and using aggressive sales tactics to pressure people into not just waiting for them to actually deliver before paying. That’s a scam.
If they were making these claims without actually accepting money in advance and/or threatening with price increases if you wait - I would feel differently.
The thing about this that confuses me about the “exoskeleton” as a feature is that it equals a unibody in my mind. The remaining benefit of a body-on-frame truck vs a unibody is that if you do screw up and bend some part of the body severely, the unibody is pretty much trash. With a body-on-frame truck, you’re generally fine if you bend it up. You don’t even really have to fix the body as long as it doesn’t interfere with vehicle mechanically (e.g., interferes with the movement of the tires). Even if you royally screw up and bend the frame, that can be fixed.
Specifically, this would apply to off-roading where you’re more likely to bend the truck. But it’s not exclusive to it. I’ve rolled a 65 F100 and drove it home afterward. It drove just fine, other than not having a windshield anymore.
Yeah, if your feature can’t even do what it’s name says and there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to it doing so, I can’t imagine another way to describe it.
No he didn’t. The v1 Autopilot hardware (not FSD) only first shipped in 2014 and they weren’t making any FSD promises back then. The earliest FSD prediction Musk made was 2018, and even that was hedged. The first statement that could be called a promise was for the end of 2019, but even that wasn’t for a full-blown FSD system (i.e., Level 5).
gets to show one’s “mental laziness”, implicitly projecting ones surroundings onto others … seems you live in FL where you don’t get a lot of mountains, whereas I am in the Andes …
having said that, the only thing higher then the Andes and wetter than a swamp is human incompetence behind the steering wheel
to a certain degree, “save” offroading is like a waterproof watch … it is …until it no longer is … (and you carry your front bumper in the bed of your pickup)
one could easily argue the case of a scam … what does the “F” in FSD stand for?
I found a surprising number of people (notorious: Land Rover users here) who believe that they have a “better 4x4xfar” and running with us simple folk (using old Suzuki Samurai or beat up Toy-trucks) to show off their new toys - often to friends and members of the other sex … just to find out that 80% of off-roading is driver and 20% is truck … quite often dinging their Discovery a bit in the process … those are the people you never see again …
having said that, things might have changed a bit - I drive a Honda Fit now … which is still quite capable off-road into my driveway on a rainy day
There’s some confusion here, and I blame Musk for it. When most of us hear “autopilot”, we imagine a car driving itself all the way from point A to Point B. But what Elon was bragging about wasn’t an autopilot capability, it was Autopilot, the Tesla advanced cruise capability. It’s a stupid name but it was available in 2014 so it might be Elon’s only prediction that came true on time.
It’s hard not to see that confusion as intentional, when he says something like “90% of your miles could be on auto”…. Which is clearly not the brand name. Certainly, my notional confusion there was shared with everybody but Teslarati.
Meanwhile, I traded notes with my insurance agent:
I spoke with [insurance company] regarding the Cybertruck and it is insurable in MA. I’m not sure what the price would be until you have a vin number available for me to quote. I would imagine it would be on the higher side. We don’t have much information available yet since they just came out. My husband has also been looking at one.
The last bit did make me laugh, but my insurer is plain vanilla, so it looks insurable.
Ok, but that was true. Someone that drove mostly highway miles (or roads with few enough stops) could easily have had 90% of them on 2015-era Autopilot. Is your complaint that people think that airplane pilots can take a nap or go take a leak while the plane is on autopilot (they can’t)?
If I drive 50 miles on the highway and need to change lanes 5 times, and once correct the car from following an exit in error, does that count as 95% of the miles on Autopilot because each lane change only takes a few hundred yards?
I suspect you are calculating the percentage in one way, while most people would use a different definition.
Well, that would be 98%, since a few hundred yards x5 is less than a mile. Regardless, I think if the claim is only 90% autonomy, then a handful of interventions are reasonable. I’m not going to nitpick on what the exact threshold should be, except that obviously constant interventions wouldn’t count, but I’d think averaging once per 10 miles probably counts.
. They needed a torque sensor anyway, so why not use that.