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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

I've owned 3 teslas. On each of them I have chosen not to pre-pay $10,000 CAD in order to get access to FSD when it is available. 2 of those cars I owned and sold before FSD was even available.

I would not have had the ability to take that license with me to the new car I purchased. I'm surprised this practice hasn't been investigated by any state justice or commerce dept (I'm not sure which it should be in the US?) as many consumers were sold something that was never provided.

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> I'm surprised this practice hasn't been investigated by any state justice or commerce dept ...

I'm not sure there's a way to regulate consumer stupidity. People are conned into losing money everyday, not all of those cons are crimes.

Many types of fraud only exist because people are "stupid". They're still illegal.

All customers are stupid relative to the manufacturer/retailer because they're not privy to internal company information regarding the product they're buying. That's why consumer protection laws exist.

I agree.

However, consumers putting down $10,000 for a promised feature with no firm deadline and severe restrictions on the said feature's portability are in a league of their own when it comes to stupidity.

Or, perhaps they are more akin to an Investor ..

Consumer stupidity is one of the key elements of many frauds.

That sounds like a cleptocracy IMHO

Seems like the license might not even transfer with the car to a new owner[1]. Feels like a really expensive Kickstarter.

[1] https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/does-full-self-driving-f...

Might not? It absolutely does not.

So the FDS feature is tied to the car, rather than your personal account with Tesla? In that case, is it possible to transfer the deposit for FSD to the new Tesla owner? If so then presumably you could choose to reflect that in the price you choose to sell the car.

Tesla has been removing the features upon resale. So these features are really just a license you purchase to use while you own the car.

It's actually worse than that. The FSD is tied to your account and the car, i.e. if you sell the car to a new owner they will have to purchase FSD separately and if you buy a new Tesla you cannot transfer FSD from the old car to the new one.

That's not really true. If you sell your Tesla with FSD beta directly to me, I'll keep the FSD beta. If you trade it in to Tesla, then they might decide to remove the package and resell the car without it but I don't see how that would be your concern.

yes. It is probably one of the worst values in the entire automotive industry.

They always have this "buy now, the price will go up later!" but I had to ask myself: how much can the price go up? It's not going to be a $20,000 feature any time soon. I figured I was risking a couple thousand dollars that I would need to pay to upgrade later.

If Tesla eventually solves FSD (which is not a given) they might stop selling the ad-on package altogether and just charge a per mile subscription instead.

Then all of these old Teslas with FSD for life will become rare, similar to the Teslas witch unlimited free supercharging.

There really is a sucker born every minute.

While true, on a much smaller scale I experienced the same benefit from being grandfathered in to the old Blink for Home security cameras. I have full service for free for life, as opposed to $10/month. A giant online stink was raised to keep Amazon to Blink's word after the acquisition, but it worked.

Yes, but in that case you've actually bought a service that already exists, not vaporware that will never exist.

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