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Comment by acover | Hacker News Reader

How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question. Is it because Tesla is a large company and should have self funded it?

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Any Kickstarter is obliged to be very explicit about the risks. They're required to have a section in the pitch dedicated to what might go wrong, and Kickstarter itself has text everywhere reminding you that rewards are not guaranteed. Tesla, on the other hand, never acknowledges the very real possibility that your extremely expensive vehicle never sees full self driving.

The sale page is pretty explicit about what you’re buying and has this note:

> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.

Also, at this point, my experience with the FSD package in my 2020 Model 3 is that it is not misleading to call it a “FSD beta”: in specific predictable situations it has problems with maneuvers but, over the last month or so, it’s continuously gotten better at making full trips without disengaging.

Somehow we got used to companies selling products named "Definitely Does Thing [X]!" and then adding fine print that says "this product absolutely does not do thing [X]." I think it would be much better if we stopped accepting that practice.

The stuff above this says exactly what the FSD package is. All this fine print is adding is that you will get new features as they are released. In 12/2022 this is a very good description of what the package does (and, IMO, it undersells the capability: autosteer on city streets works really well for me with the new FSD package)

> Full Self-Driving Capability $15,000

> All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot

> Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control

> Coming Soon

> Autosteer on city streets

Again, to repeat my point (which I didn't think was very confusing), the things described in the small-point text are all fine. But they cannot in any reasonable world be summarized by the product name "Full Self Driving." Insofar as California is encouraging Tesla to name their products more accurately, that seems like an absolute good.

This point holds even if I don't go into the fact that both autosteer/autopilot (phantom braking problems) and FSD-beta (requires active driver control, disengagements every < 1 mile) are both kind of a mess. Or that the claims from Musk regarding capabilities and timing have been completely inaccurate.

> they cannot in any reasonable world be summarized by the product name "Full Self Driving."

I think it’s fine to name a placeholder for a feature that’s in development according to the final state. Especially if the feature gives you access to the most recent developments towards that feature.

As for the other stuff, the FUD online about FSD is completely inconsistent with my daily experience of using it. It’s by no means perfect, but it does a good job for my normal driving around SoCal

This note makes it very obvious that customer's evaluation of the expected timeline might impact their purchase decision. In my non-expert opinion Tesla puts itself on notice that any false statements that might impact that evaluation would be fraudulent. If my opinion matches the legal consensus, then the doctored video would be such a false statement.

> How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question.

The average kickstarter funds actually producing the project, and does not literally endanger the funder and everyone else during that period.

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