I'm not defending the FSD name. Personally I think the name is stupid.
I'm not defending the price. Personally I wouldn't pay for it.
For the record, I don't own a Tesla vehicle. I don't know anyone who owns a Tesla vehicle. I don't own TSLA stock (or any other individual stock or derivatives). I've never driven a Tesla vehicle or even sat inside any Tesla vehicle.
I think the number of comments in this thread where people confuse Autopilot with FSD is reason enough to at least rebrand the names of the two distinctly different features.
But no one publishes detailed data. Every time I hear anti Tesla/Elon chatter, Tesla is always being held to a higher standard than other companies.
FSD naming, nvidia call their Chauffeur, which is way more misleading to me. You have Blue Cruise which means nothing. Audi don’t call theirs anything and just talk about the features which I think is your preference. I don’t believe anyone has bought a Tesla not understanding exactly what FSD does and don’t do, are people being misled?
The name FSD intimates an SAE Level 5 experience. It’s not partial self-driving or any other sort, but full. If there was any name to suggest it, this would be it.
Imagine going to an emergency department with chest pains/trouble breathing/thunderclap headache, and the triage nurse saying “oooooh yeaaaaah, I know emergency is in our name but we don’t really deal with that, you’re on your own”.
Things that are critical to life-or-limb should be appropriately named without the use of weasel words or asterisks.
people come out of the woodwork to rage about FSD but openAI, which is actually a sinister and evil company, gets the occasional snide remark about their name which is much more dishonest than FSD. at least tesla claims that they aspire to make FSD an accurate name but openai is a straight up lie.
> Being "pretty clear" in the fine print doesn't help when your product is called "Full Self Driving".
The likely chose the FSD branding with good intentions. Tesla just had some over-optimistic projections of what it will be in the near future and they weren't the only ones being optimistic in 2015-2016 when it launched (you can find plenty of Youtube interviews from other car companies at the time projecting <=2025).
The plan was to always call it in "beta" and an early ~$2-10k(?) investment for the future offering that wasn't yet ready.
The only problem is when those projections turned out to be heavily optimistic after ~2-3yrs in they should have rebranded it... but chose to stick with it for whatever reason.
Tesla has so many versions of "FSD" or Full Self Driving because they keep shifting the post for what exactly is Full Self Driving.
What even is FSD compared to SD, where did the need to tack on "Full" come from? And I bet it's because of them calling their lane assist cruise "Autopilot" which implies self driving.
Not clutching at straws. Using a direct comparison to a competing car company on marketing terms. If we are okay with companies calling features whatever they want. Then FSD is fine. If we aren’t, then let’s get the outrage train going on the entire car industry.
Yes, I very much agree with that. ‘FSD Capability’ in its functional form doesn’t exist yet, people are buying it in advance to access beta autopilot enhancements which are then problematically referred to as ‘FSD’ colloquially. It would be more informative for Tesla to clarify these or change the naming convention... but it’s a convenient hype angle, probably why they keep this naming setup.
The issue seems to be when people think that these limited beta enhancements of autopilot are FSD, when in fact, nobody has FSD yet. Tesla doesn’t do marketing in a traditional sense so I don’t think it’s a marketing failure but considering the dangers of confusing this FSD sentiment it should be clarified abundantly when signing up, signing waivers, something like that...
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