Tesla cleaned up the blog segment of its website, removing all posts prior to 2019. This includes the article titled “All Tesla cars produced now have fully autonomous hardware,” which was originally published on October 19, 2016.
The day before yesterday, Tesla’s online page contained a backlog of blog posts dating back to the company’s early days. This includes featured posts like “Tesla Motors’ Secret Master Plan (Right Between You and Me),” and one that I really enjoy employing. to the basics of electric vehicle efficiency, “Roadster Efficiency and Range”.
All of these items are missing at this time. They can be discovered on archive. org, but anything older than 2019 appears to have been removed from Tesla’s servers.
It’s a shame, because a giant component of Tesla’s story can be noted through those blog posts. Even if the knowledge is still available, it is more complicated when you have to search for it off-site.
But the most attractive article that is missing is the one discussed above: “All Tesla cars produced now have fully autonomous hardware. “
Tesla first made this ambitious in 2016, leading buyers to believe that autonomy was just around the corner and that no hardware upgrade would be mandatory to achieve it. This remained on the online page until yesterday, giving Tesla’s tacit endorsement to the concept that existing Tesla cars are still under the same promise: if you buy a Tesla now, it will eventually be able to drive itself.
Tesla has been talking about autonomous driving for years, promoting varying degrees of motive power aids under the “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving” logo. Cars have gone through iterations of capabilities, with other software and hardware upgrades, to achieve higher levels of range.
So far, none of these formulas are truly autonomous and capable of driving themselves without the supervision of a human driver. Tesla now calls his formula “FSD (Supervised)” to make it clear that cars are not yet self-driving.
These required hardware upgrades have been persistent with FSD.
Tesla offered free upgrades to newer hardware to owners who purchased FSD, but when it began offering its FSD subscription service, it began charging owners $1,500 for hardware they had already purchased. When we talk about it, Tesla reduced the price to $1,000, which is still $1,000 more than what owners have to pay for the hardware they’ve already paid for. Tesla and its self-proclaimed “absolutist of loose speech” CEO, Elon Musk, responded to Electrek for our report on this topic.
The factor has also been raised in court, with some owners managing to download the paid upgrade they are entitled to or a full refund of their prices in the Small Claims Court. Other cases are pending in the court system, alleging that Tesla engaged in ad fraud with its FSD allegations.
I was reluctant to order a Cybertruck because the first orders required purchasing FSD. The approximately 25,000 Cybertrucks sold required the $10,000 FSD option. No wonder the Cybertruck FSD software has not been released yet. For over 8 months of production, we have had no FSD or even hubcaps. The fact is that 25,000 x $10,000 = $250 million! It amazes me that there is rarely a demand for graceful action against the millions of Teslas that were sold with the promise of FSD. I’m in the camp with Electrek, progress has been slow and the finishing touches may not be done with existing hardware. I still love my Tesla, but I’m disappointed by FSD’s lies. Politicians can lie, but I believe that when companies lie and make money from their lies, they get sued.
As Tesla moves toward new hardware iterations, it remains an open question which cars will benefit from the upgrades they’ve already paid for, if those upgrades prove necessary for FSD to work. The cost of those upgrades can be significant, but given that every single Tesla owner who purchased a vehicle between 2016 and today expected to have all the hardware for FSD, it would be fair for Tesla to supply the hardware it claimed. the structure and sale of said automobiles.
For now, all we know is that the blog post disappeared, along with all the others before 2019. Tesla has made statements updating its promise that all Tesla cars produced since October 2016 will be supplied with self-driving hardware, either to verify that I still do or to say that the company has changed its brain about cars in the future.
We’d reach out for official comment, but Tesla doesn’t have anyone to reach out to – so, good luck figuring out what it is you’re buying.
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Jameson has been driving cars since 2009 and writing about them and blank energy for electrek. co since 2016.
You can contact him at jamie@electrek. co