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This weekend, Tesla began offering its long-awaited full range subscription package for $ 199 / month. Along with the package, Tesla is offering a $ 1,500 hardware upgrade for first-time owners who have older hardware that isn’t capable of performing fully autonomous driving tasks.
The problem is, Tesla had already told these same owners that their cars have been capable of performing fully autonomous driving tasks, and does not allow those owners to take advantage of the new subscription system without paying again for a hardware upgrade they have already paid for.
All Tesla are currently equipped with “basic autopilot,” a list of driver assistance and safety features. These include automatic lane keeping, traffic sensitive cruise control and other standard safety features such as emergency brake assist. These can help reduce stress, especially from highway driving, and improve vehicle safety.
The “Full Self-Driving” package goes a step further and adds other driver assistance features that allow the car to make more decisions on its own. These include:
- Navigate on autopilot
- Automatic lane change
- Automatic parking and invocation
- Control of traffic lights and stop signs
Ultimately, this package will offer full autonomy, but the software is not there yet and still requires the driver’s attention at all times.
Tesla’s Complete Self-Drive Package can be purchased for $ 10,000 up front, or $ 199 / month with the new subscription program. It has cost less in the past, but as Tesla has rolled out more and more capacity through software updates, the price has been steadily increasing.
Since 2016, Tesla has declared that all Tesla cars have fully autonomous driving Equipment built-in, but the software is what costs the extra money. At the time of going to press, Tesla’s blog where they announced this is still live on their website. In case it breaks, we took a screenshot of the blog content for posterity:
Owners who purchased Tesla vehicles between late 2016 and mid-2019 were sold a bill of goods capable of driving fully autonomously with the hardware included in the vehicle. They were told that no further hardware upgrades would be necessary.
Since that post, Tesla has discovered that their previous computers, designated Hardware 2.0 and 2.5, were not quite up to the task of fully autonomous driving. They therefore designed their own chip, alternatively described as “Hardware 3.0” or “FSD computer”, which was more efficient. Cars built since mid-2019 have this new hardware included.
As part of this hardware change, Tesla said all owners of the old hardware can upgrade to the new hardware for free, as long as they’ve paid for full self-driving. Tesla has a blog describing the process of upgrading your computer to FSD Computer / Hardware 3.0.
Everything was fine – owners who would use the FSD computer got a hardware upgrade with their purchase of the software, and owners without Full Self-Driving lacked nothing since they didn’t have the software anyway.
But now the long-awaited subscription program offers a lower barrier to entry. Tesla owners with cars from late 2016 to mid-2019 may want to give the software a try and see what it can do, especially since it has improved since they bought their car. Maybe they don’t know if they’ll like spending $ 10,000 enough, maybe they don’t think they’ll have the car long enough to make it worth it, for a number of reasons. .
But to get that subscription, Tesla requires those owners to pay $ 1,500 up front for the hardware upgrade that was previously offered free to all full self-drive buyers. Remember this is an upgrade that all Tesla owners since late 2016 already paid by purchasing a vehicle that Tesla said included complete self-driving equipment. Here is the notice that appears in the Tesla app for former car owners who want to use the new subscription:
As this information has crept into the Tesla forums and word-of-mouth, many owners are showing their anger with Tesla over the changes. We have received several tips and messages, and read many angry comments about this change, some even calling for legal action.
Taking Electek
This is not the first time that Tesla has broken a promise made to its first customers.
Tesla told early customers that prices will gradually increase for full autonomous driving capability and lock in their price now before it goes up. Then, before all of the full self-drive features were actually rolled out, Tesla pulled a bait and a switch and slashed the price, although the software had never yet been delivered at that point. Some might say it’s like buying a product that then went down in price, but the difference is that early buyers here did not gain any benefit from owning the software in the beginning, as the software was not doing anything at the time.
Tesla also recently broke a promise with Tesla Solar Roof customers, raising the prices of contracts already signed after chaining those first customers for a year or more on Solar Roof availability.
This sort of thing seems to happen a lot with Tesla. In fact, even before the aforementioned events, many early Model 3 owners purchased their vehicles with fully autonomous driving, even though the software hasn’t done anything yet, as they believed it would force Tesla to upgrade their computers. for free if they later find out that the hardware is not performing well enough. So, this kind of behavior is common enough at Tesla that many owners anticipated it years in advance.
But despite that, the company has loyal customers because they make a great product and because they really move the industry forward. Tesla has been a major cause of the shift to electric vehicles, which is necessary if we are to avoid the worst effects of the climate emergency we are all facing right now. They innovate a lot and the rest of the industry is finally starting to run to catch up.
But the same pace of fast and loose innovation leads to many basic mistakes like this. Someone in the company should have remembered that this promise was made and should have noted that it would be unethical and unwise to charge your first loyal customers $ 1,500 for a product they have already bought. But that employee probably quit working at Tesla some time ago because the company overloads everyone, resulting in high turnover and little institutional memory, even for things that are. still on site.
Tesla has had some slacking off from owners and the media as the company is a “startup” in a tough industry and is trying to dramatically change that industry and do a reasonable job.
However, Tesla was founded in 2003, 18 years ago. It’s a huge company with over 70,000 employees, around $ 10 billion in revenue per quarter, and it’s even part of the S&P 500. It’s no longer a “startup”. He doesn’t use that excuse when he does stupid things like that. He needs to grow up and stop lying to his clients. And we’re sick of having to say that.
There’s a simple fix here: waive the $ 1,500 fee for hardware that owners have already paid for. We hope this change will happen quickly.
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