Tesla Quietly Drops 'Full Self-Driving' Option As It Adds $45,000 Model 3 (arstechnica.com) 101
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Elon Musk took to Twitter on Thursday evening to inform his followers of a new addition to the Model 3 lineup. This is not the long-awaited $35,000 version, however; the mid-range Model 3 starts at $45,000. Musk also revealed that the Model 3 ordering process has been simplified and now has fewer options. One that's missing -- from all new Tesla orders, not just the Model 3 -- is the controversial "full self-driving" option. The reason? It was "causing too much confusion," Musk tweeted. The mid-range Model 3s will be rear-wheel drive only, prompting some to wonder if the company was using software to limit battery capacity on existing RWD inventory in order to get it out of the door. But Tesla says it's able to build these slightly cheaper cars by using the same battery pack as the more expensive, longer-range cars but with fewer cells inside (so no future software upgrades can increase their range at a later date). While Tesla is promoting the car as costing as little as $30,700 by factoring in "gas savings" and all federal and local tax incentives, it did also announce last week that any new Tesla delivered after October 15th might not ship before the beginning of next year. As Ars Technica notes, "Any new Tesla delivered after January 1st 2019 (but before July 1st 2019) is only eligible for a $3,750 IRS credit."
Too much confusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too much confusion? (Score:5, Funny)
Elon is correct, it was pulled because of too much confusion. The autopilot kept getting too confused by white colored objects and pedestrians.
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Re:Too much confusion? (Score:5, Informative)
It was an option, it was never "pushed", and it was in no way shape or form "almost fatal for the entire company". Furthermore, contrary to bad reporting (including this article), you can still get FSD. What you can't do anymore is preorder it for a $2k discount; you can only add it in your Tesla account for the full $5k.
As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
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They Prunella probably realised that the upgrades they need to add to the cars are going to cost more than 2k.
Plus the date keeps getting pushed back, and people are going to be pissed off when they have waited 5 years for a beta and hardware upgrade after having pre-paid.
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They Prunella probably realised that the upgrades they need to add to the cars are going to cost more than 2k.
Plus the date keeps getting pushed back,
The latter is a real problem, but I suspect that more than the price of the hardware, the elimination of the discount is about having enough money to pay for the R&D phase they were in at the time.
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Re: Too much confusion? (Score:3)
Except for every product that has had an option to pre-order, ever.
You are not a lawyer or law enforcement officer. Don't act like you know things you clearly do not.
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Deliveries of items ordered delayed past the original stated date must be refunded, or at least you must seek the approval of every customer who pre-ordered to allow the order to stand.
Tesla allows you to cancel your order at any time.
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Who else allows pre-orders of products which will never exist? I mean other than dodgy kickstarter projects.
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They stopped pre-orders for two reasons.
1. They will have to upgrade every car that buys it. They are currently on V2.5 of their autopilot hardware but have already said that V3 is coming. Everyone who pre-ordered gets a free upgrade. When you factor in labour and hardware, loan vehicle, the fact that thousands of people will be queuing up for it then the $3,000 they are charging probably doesn't even cover their costs.
2. They don't know when it will be available and are worried about lawsuits. The current
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You Vulgaris seem to be a little confused. The hardware upgrade might cost more than $2k, but the $2k was the discount over the "add it later" price, which is $5k. So the cost is $3,000, all of which can ostensibly be used to pay for the replacement AP hardware, because that's the only difference. I would be surprised if the AP computer were really that expensive.
The FSD package was offered at a
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Sorry, I typed on my phone and screwed up. I did mean $3k. I think that won't be enough for the upgrades they will need, particularly when they realize they need to add lidar and self-cleaning capability for the cameras. Wouldn't want your Tesla to get stuck 2000 miles away because it picked up some dirt from a passing truck.
I expect the charge port will be upgraded too, to help it plug in automatically. The snake thing they showed off was totally impractical.
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Yeah, I figured that you were typing on a phone, what with the plant reference in the first sentence. :-)
I don't think they need LIDAR, necessarily. LIDAR just reduces the complexity of the image recog
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I think they vastly underestimated the processing power needed for their vision system. Even with stereo vision you really need temporal spacing to do decent depth perception. At the moment their neural nets only consider one image at a time and the hardware is barely powerful enough for that.
That's where LIDAR really helps. The processing power needed to get the depth and motion information is vastly reduced.
As for charging, I don't know what they can do really... They won't want to put something in the gr
Re:Too much confusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally (apart from noting that Slashdot hasn't bothered to report on Tesla's land purchase, hiring spree, and capital raise in China for the Shanghai Gigafactory): The $45k price includes PUP, which was from the very beginning announced as $5k. That slots the base price of the MR in at $40k (vs.the SR at $35k and the LR at $45k). PUP is, of course, non-optional at present, but they're steadily working their way down through the list.
I do however fully expect the same people who previously were shouting "WHERE ARE THE CHEAPER MODEL 3S???" to now start shouting "SEE, DEMAND FOR MODEL 3S HAS COLLAPSED", because of course, no scenario will ever make them happy, even when Tesla takes steps in the direction that they've been demanding.
The reason for this change is obvious, and the introduction of smaller battery pack Model 3s this fall had been a big topic of speculation on the Tesla forums. The reason is that Tesla's main limiting factor is no longer Fremont, or pack production at Giga, but rather the Panasonic cell lines at Giga. While Panasonic is accelerating their construction of three new cell lines (adding to the 10 that already exist; these are also supposed to be a new generation of faster lines), they are the holdup. By producing smaller pack vehicles, Tesla can produce about 20% more of them. This also means about 20% more customers get the full tax credit. They make it very tempting for people who were waiting on the SR to upgrade to the MR.
I, of course, don't like them stretching out the US market; I'd selfishly rather that they come straight to Europe where they haven't even started touching the demand for heavily optioned out vehicles ;) But it's understandable, given the tax credit situation. That said, IMHO, I don't expect that situation to last. I either expected it to be repealed or reformulated (there are bills in congress to do both of those things). I think there's very few people in either party who are happy with the US credit as it stands, as it's increasingly going to be working against US companies (Tesla first, then GM, then Nissan and Ford; three of the four closest to expiry are US manufacturers).
One last note is that their margin target for Q4 is 20%. With a 50:50 mix of MR:LR and a $2k manufacturing cost difference, and reasonable ASP assumptions, that means Tesla expects about 0% margin on an unoptioned MR, about 10% at the MR's ASP, and about 30% at the LR's ASP.
Re: Too much confusion? (Score:2)
Panasonic is building a gigafactory in China? I thought they already had a lot of production there.
Re: Too much confusion? (Score:4, Informative)
Giga = Gigafactory 1 = The factory in Sparks, Nevada. The one they're building in Shanghai is Giga 3, and they haven't even broken ground yet (hiring for construction and the signing ceremony was only in this past week). It has not been confirmed that Panasonic will be involved, but it's strongly suspected, as they've expressed interest.
Panasonic does already have a lot of production in Sparks - combined with their 18650 supply it makes up over half of the world's total EV battery capacity, in terms of kWh per year. But it's not enough. Tesla's been having to rob cells that were allocated toward Powerwalls and Powerpacks just to be able to do 5k vehicles per week.
If you want to know who's going to be producing - and thus selling - EVs, just follow the batteries.
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Autopilot is still available. The full-self-driving option was buying vaporware.
They've taken away the vaporware option until it actually exists.
If you think they aren't still working on it, then you aren't very smart.
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Reservations are fully refundable. The $2,5k deposit when you lock in config when it goes into production is not.
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It is, of course, still offered (see above). As always, news coverage of Tesla is terrible. What Tesla removed is the $2k discount for buying it early. You can only buy it at full price ($5k) via your Tesla account.
It never had a timeline. And everyone who purchased it knew that. Some people are more optimistic than others about its timeline. I personally am not in that category.
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As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
Don't we have Kickstarter for that? In any case, take what Google is doing in a tiny, easy, dry and sunny geofenced 3D-mapped corner of Phoenix and extrapolate how long it is until your average Tesla customer can have a self-driving car they can practically use in their neighborhood in most normal weather, for a fraction of the cost of Waymo's sensor package. I feel like they're selling where Waymo hopes to be in ten years, so they're not only have to leapfrog past Waymo they'd have to leapfrog again way ah
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Don't we have Kickstarter for that? In any case, take what Google is doing in a tiny, easy, dry and sunny geofenced 3D-mapped corner of Phoenix and extrapolate how long it is until your average Tesla customer can have a self-driving car they can practically use in their neighborhood in most normal weather, for a fraction of the cost of Waymo's sensor package. I feel like they're selling where Waymo hopes to be in ten years, so they're not only have to leapfrog past Waymo they'd have to leapfrog again way ahead if any of those Tesla customers are going to get it delivered before their cars turn to rust. But as long as people don't care about being stuck on the infinite back burner waiting for that $35k Model 3 that they'll maybe eventually sell some day...
Telsa has the advantage of have sensor data from hundreds of thousands of cars under a variety of road & weather conditions and through several generations of hardware.
The issue is whether they have the software & skillset to turn all that data into useful reliable autonomy. At this point I'd say they're still a long way from the end goal.
However the new Autopilot firmware v9 is a big step forward even if the most desired features were held back - and no one knows how long it'll be before those feat
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Oh look it's Slashdot's resident Tesla pumper. Maybe you could sell us why Saint Elon is selling people a technology that doesn't exist.
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Re:Too much confusion? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, lets get a few things strait. Autopilot and Full Self Driving are two completely different products Tesla sells.
Autopilot: Is available today, you can pay for it still, and it will work just as advertised. It is getting better and better with software updates (lane merging is smoother since 9.0, it detects objects around you more accurately, and will soon have "Drive on Nav" which will enable the Tesla to move between freeway to freeway intersections, weave through traffic to get around slow drivers, and find your Freeway exit.
Autopilot (for those of you who have never been in a cockpit), is a perfectly valid name for what the technology does, almost too perfect. Why?
1. Like autopilot, the actual pilot is required to be at the controls and aware 100% of the time. Pilots do this. They do not turn on autopilot on a 12 hour flight and go to schmooze with the hot flight attendants.
2. Like autopilot, its primary use is major causeways for the majority of the trip, not all of the trip. Sure. Autopilots could handle takeoff and landing, but pilots do this manually. Just like Tesla. Tesla say to use Autopilot on freeways. Tesla Autopilot doesn't handle stop signs and red lights yet, so surface driving (like when a plane taxis around the airport and takes off) is specifically in the hands of the pilot. See the similarities?
3. Like autopilot, it can help you avoid impacts. It isn't perfect, and can warn the pilot of impending crashes ("Pull up!", "Terrain").
Full Self Driving: This is a separate and independent feature of making the Autopilot handle self recharges (through equipped Supercharging stations), allowing it to handle itself on the vast majority of roads (including surface streets), and ultimately allowing someone to call their car to them from across the country with no driver required. This is the product Tesla took out of their "new car ordering" system, but allows you to add later (just as those who purchased a Tesla without the FSD option were and are still able to do.
Just thought I would clear all that up :)
Do you fly much? (Score:2)
Do you have to fly much, perhaps for business?
If so, I'll just leave these statements alone and let you think these things if you want to:
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1. They do not turn on autopilot on a 12 hour flight and go to schmooze with the hot flight attendants.
2. takeoff and landing, but pilots do this manually. Just like Tesla.
3. Like autopilot, it can help you avoid impacts... warn the pilot of impending crashes ("Pull up!", "Terrain").
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no, it was not just a naming problem, that's silly (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a flawed design from inception to execution. The idea that people "wouldn't drive, but would be ready to take over from a computer in an instant when they 'sensed' that it wasn't functioning safely" IS RETARDED, PERIOD.
In no way is that a naming problem.
Re: no, it was not just a naming problem, that's s (Score:2)
The idea that people who have fallen out of the practice of even normal driving will be able to alert-up and be ready to maneuver through a driving emergency is so far gone that it's amazing it can exist as hype.
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No. You're confusing EAP and FSD. EAP exists, is usable, and is a driver assist, not full self driving. FSD is in development, cannot be activated by users, and is what it says on the tin - full self driving, not a driver assist.
Re:No one is as confused as your FUD, REI-cheerlea (Score:4, Informative)
Gotcha. The system that Consumer Reports rated as the most capable driver assist system on the market and easiest to use is, quote, "a flawed feature" causing "cars [to] pile up".
CR did mark other systems (namely, SuperCruise) as better than EAP in three categories, which were all different variants of "how much it nags you". SuperCruise was so limited that they couldn't even turn it on on their test track (they apparently liked this). Indeed, your living room couch would have rated better than EAP in this regard. But in terms of both capability and ease of use, they found EAP was the best system on the market.
This matches up with the IIHS results, which found that Model 3 was the only vehicle that they tested which never crossed the lines on any of their curve or hill tests and never required manual intervention to avoid a collision in their real-world test. It also had the gentlest braking profile, starting braking before others did. It didn't get perfect marks, mind you - it had several false negative events in the real-world, and in one of their track tests (not real world) it only reduced the severity of impact with their mockup rather than preventing it. But overall its performance was class-leading.
Note that neither CR nor IIHS were using the latest version of EAP (V9), which was a huge upgrade. All cameras enabled now, camera-agnostic processing, full resolution rather than half resolution, and 400% more processing power utilized.
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Autopilot: 1,2 billion miles driven as of June.
Supercruise: "hundreds of thousands of miles" driven as of January.
Gee....
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And... how many accidents do you think Tesla's system PREVENTED? Let's be honest... most of the people who use Tesla autopilot wouldn't exactly be the world's most attentive drivers WITHOUT it, either. Even IF they were going through the motions and pretending to pay marginally more attention, we're talking about a group that's generally oblivious to anything that doesn't capture their immediate interest, tends to daydream a lot, and are almost the textbook case-study poster-children for highway hypnosis.
Le
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The real issue was that the name was a poor choice. People put far too much confidence in it. Maybe that was going to happen no matter what since people are lazy, stupid fools, but the name probably exacerbated this greatly. Call it “Driver Assist” or something like that. It’s not supposed to drive you around or be flawless, but to react to a dangerous situation before you can when it’s capable of that.
You obviously never read the feature description for Full Self Driving feature (FSD) described here. It was not a poor choice of a name, it was actually named very accurately for what it was supposed to. Here are some quotes of the said description which appeared when ordering it:
"All you will need to do is get in and tell the car where to go."
"Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and r
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Full self-driving != Enhanced Autopilot.
Enhanced Autopilot is still and option, and drives millions of miles without issue.
Re: Too much confusion? (Score:2)
Yes, congratulations dumbass, you've just discovered that every elecronic system in existence has some limitations. Pretty soon you might even figure out that the computer thingy you bought isn't actually powered by magic smoke.
Every driver assist system in existence has problems with stationary vehicles under some circumstances:
https://www.wired.com/story/te... [wired.com]
Re: Too much confusion? (Score:2)
Yes, moron, this is exactly why the adults here keep reminding morons like you that we rely on technology every day which has the potential to kill us. You think brakes never fail? Bolts never shear? Roofs never collapse? Aircraft computers never malfunction? Bridges never fall? Traffic lights never go out? GPS guidance never gives false directions?
You're surrounded by technology which could fail at any moment and kill you, but you either don't give it a second thought, or you understand the potentia
Re: Too much confusion? (Score:2)
Irony.
No, jackass, the original claim was that it can drive for millions of miles without an issue. That's not the same as having no issues. It has now driven well over a billon miles. The data so far shows that after the autopilot feature became available accidents were reduced anywhere between 13 and 40 percent, depending on which numbers you go with. Even if you want to be a complete fucking pessimist and dismiss those numbers out of hand, we know for a fact that accidents haven't INCREASED. So yes,
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There are autonomous Waymo vehicles on the road today - people take them on a regular basis. The question isn't if 'autonomous driving will happen'. The question is really how quickly it will become pervasive, and that is partially dependent on how well autonomous vehicles will perform in 'challenging' cities like New York and Boston and not only in places like Phoenix.
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Yes, we always love to hear the views of people who want to "que a law suit".
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TSLA closed at $260 today - get out while you can!
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In the past week and a half, Tesla has gone up 4% while NASDAQ has gone down 4%
Should have put your money in TSLA.
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In this month, Tesla has gone down 12% while NASDAQ is down 7%.
Should have put your money in a NASDAQ index fund.
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Thank you for demonstrating my point about cherry picking stock start and stop points.
One enters into a long position with an exit horizon based on their thesis. My exit horizon doesn't even begin to open until after the Q4 report. Until then, all this is noise.
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If you don't cherry pick, and look at the market over years, Tesla is way behind the market. And that's despite being propped up by millennial retail investors and accounting fraud.
Time machine (Score:3)
"any new Tesla delivered after October 15th might not ship before the beginning of next year."
To all those doubters as to Musk's genius he's only gone and invented a time machine, shipping cars weeks after they get delivered.
Re:blind item at CDAN (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I always get my news from "CrazyDaysAndNights.net". It's almost as good as "www.geocities.comm.cz:8081/~globalpatriot/TeslaTruthNews"
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Yes, I always get my news from "CrazyDaysAndNights.net". It's almost as good as "www.geocities.comm.cz:8081/~globalpatriot/TeslaTruthNews"
Funny thing is, this person was the first to call out that Weinstein was finally going to get busted for being a serial rapist and that Solena Gomez has a substance abuse issue. The guy has true cred. Especially compared to you. The cock gobbling you did to cover for Elon's 420 tweets and the Saudis coming to his rescue are still worth reading over for a chuckle. Have you ever been right about anything?
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Credit where it's due, back in February he nailed the fact that the SEC had an investigation open:
http://www.crazydaysandnights.... [crazydaysandnights.net]
Doesn't look like the girlfriend thing panned out though.
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Credit where it's due, back in February he nailed the fact that the SEC had an investigation open:
Wait, he knew in February that the SEC was investigating a statement that was made 6 months later? That dude isn't a journalist, he's a fucking Time Lord.
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They were under investigation long before the 420 tweet, and the denial in the Q2 call was legal needle-threading to avoid disclosure to investors:
"The action by the S.E.C. is solely related to events surrounding Mr. Musk’s comments on Twitter. But regulators had been investigating Tesla even before the tweet, and are more broadly examining whether Tesla misled investors about its production goals."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... [nytimes.com]
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Until it's coming from a reputable source, and I certainly don't mean SeekingAlpha, it's shortsville FUD.
Most likely, this is about repricing the full-self-driving option to be more realistic about what it will take, now that they have to replace the computer to get it done.
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The California incentive is $2,5k.
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Re: ... That's not how cost savings work... (Score:2)
Let's say both the EV and ICE car costs $35k upfront and use the same numbers before ($0.15c/mile ICE, $0.01/mile EV). At the 50,000 mile mark it's fair to say that you're saving $7,000, but that means that cost coming out of your pocket is $35,500 instead of $42,500. It's not fair to say that your out of pocket cost for an EV is $28,000 as it implies that you're somehow generating revenue driving an EV that is not present in an ICE.
Nobody is saying any of that. They're simply saying that the price of the car is X, the savings over a given time period are Y, and therefore if you factor in the savings then the effective price over that time period are X-Y. There's nothing unusual about that; I'm not sure why you're so confused about it.
It's the same math as if you're thinking about buying, say, solar panels. The panel costs X, the monthly savings will be Y, therefore the effective cost of the panel after number of months N will be X-
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FSD option gone (Score:3)
The removal of FSD is probably a mix of a number of factors:
I don't see Tesla worrying about the last factor much--not because it isn't an issue, but because it's just not how the company operates. The real issue is probably that they are expecting the hardware upgrade to cost $5000, and the FSD package was only $3000. They were probably seeing a significant uptick in FSD orders after they announced the hardware upgrades would probably cost $5K for people who hadn't ordered it.
I would also note that the FSD option has gone away for the Model S/X purchasers, too, though the reporting has focused on the Model 3.
Just another fraud (Score:1)
So many different interests will feel screwed when Tesla implodes. I fear the biggest fallout will be the damage done to the true environmentally sustain