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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

The self driving stuff is (in my view) all a red herring. There is no mass market call for it, it's not going to drive further growth. The only thing it may do is help maintain their position in the higher end of the market.

They should have brought out another lower cost, smaller car by now. Why haven't they built a commercial van? Why is there no family MPV? The investment in FSD is ultimately a distraction that wastes resources and slows growth.

One day FSD will be a reality, but that shouldn't be their primary goal.

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> There is no mass market call for it

Without any working product available on the market, I don't think potential customers know what they're missing. Having a truly working self-driving feature would be like having a 24 hour private chauffeur. It would dramatically change where people live, where they work, and how they take vacation. I'd probably by weekend home 10 hours away if I could fall asleep in the car on Friday and wake up there Saturday morning.

Sure, but it's been clear for some time now that that's not coming any time soon.

A few years ago, when progress toward self-driving seemed to be, well, progressing at a decent pace, I was very excited to see a self-driving future.

Now? I'm not realistically sure if I'll live to see one, and I'm only forty.

We keep seeing problems day after day with Tesla’s horrible implementation. It’s actually gotten worse in the past few years.

If L4+ self-driving is coming soon, I would doubt that Tesla is the one that finally nails it.

> It would dramatically change where people live, where they work, and how they take vacation.

Sure, the street car revolution changed where people lived and where they worked and ultimately how cities were designed. But it has been a 100 years, and the public transit technology has gone through multiple iterations (including fully automatic [i.e. self-driving] systems and sleeper train cars). I honestly don’t see how self driving cars will change anything that public transit hasn’t changed already.

> The self driving stuff is (in my view) all a red herring.

I agree, but for another reason...

There isn't much copyrightable or patentable in the self driving world. If someone makes a self driving car which is good enough to drive unsupervised, then it'll only be a year till all other manufacturers can do the same.

Being first won't buy them much.

Real actual full self-driving would transform the auto industry and society. There is no "call" for it in the same way there was no call for air travel before the Wright brothers.

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