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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

In fairness I know people with "FSD" who went into it well aware that it's not really FSD and they still like it. That said, the marketing is clearly fraudulent.

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FSD has enabled a ton of sales for Tesla and is arguably one of the biggest factors they were valued over a trillion dollars at one point.

This has always confused me. I knew FSD wasn't feasible, I knew Tesla was selling a lie. I also knew it was an incredible investment opportunity. I passed on it because I envisioned a bunch of lawsuits destroying the company.

Obviously, I was clearly wrong. While the stock is way down from peak it's clearly been an amazing investment for those that invested early. 2020/1/10 $31.88, 2021/11/30 $381.59 (peak I think) and around 122.81 at close Friday.

Normally, I can look back at an investment in mistake and the issues are obvious in hindsight. With Tesla, I still have no idea why the company still hasn't succumb to lawsuits.

The lies worked in the short term, but Tesla's on the hook now for a lot of free hardware upgrades:

https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...

That won't be helping the stock price going forward.

Those updates will be cheaper than the 15k price. And for those who already opted in, it‘s a small expense to pay for the upgrade. Tesla can easily afford it.

It would have been even cheaper to simply not lie about the capability in the first place.

A lot of people knowingly buy into ponzi schemes too.

You can not buy into all of a manufacturer's marketing puffery and still like a product on balance.

Puffery has specific meaning here and making objective statements doesn’t qualify.

You can’t call a 3’ log 5’ and say it’s just puffery.

You can call a 1.5" by 3.5" plank a 2x4

Tesla calls it FSD, not "Nominal FSD".

To nitpick your metaphor further: A 2x4 plank starts off as 2" by 4", and it is shaved down to 1.5 x 3.5 side to straighten it out. A Tesla "FSD" car has never been in its life fully self driving.

I don’t think Tesla can round up from 0 and say you can make money with a self driving Taxi service.

Im one of those people, I have it and love testing it out, but I know it's not FSD, I really do get the big deal about the name. Anyone who buys it thinking it's really FSD is an idiot.

The difference between me and apparently everyone else in this forum is I do think TSLA will build a video model that is L4/L5 in the next few years. I live in a rural america and majority of my drives do not require interventions.

Why are they idiots? Because they believed the marketing messages that Tesla put out?

pretty much yes. If you live in 2022 and believe any marketing, you're not firing on all cylinders.

Musk said that by 2020 there would be a million robotaxis on the road. To say that anyone who bought it thinking that FSD wasn’t real is a very, very stupid statement.

Before I spend $10K+ on something, I do more research than listening to the claims of some CEO who has a history of being "optimistic" about timelines at a minimum.

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