Tesla moving Full Self-Driving to a monthly subscription
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
To be fair it's appended with "(Supervised)".
Message on head-up display: "Your FSD subscription has expired. Do you want to purchase a new one ? [ ]Remind me later. [X]Yes. "
And then stuck in an infinite loop, because, for some reason, it cannot complete the transaction.
Clearly they'll be doing half of buying, and not the other half.
Whatever it takes to extract more money from you.
Not how competition and commoditisation works.
Which doesn’t work for a commodity. If self-driving fails to commoditise, you’re right. It currently looks like it’s going to be commoditises, with every car-industrial cluster having a couple options for manufacturers.
If in two years time Tesla decides they are going to charge a subscription for self driving to work on cars sold before they decided to make it a subscription what do people who have those cars do? They can sell the car (hopefully), give up self driving, or pay up.
There are not that many manufacturers. Maybe few enough for pricing to be oligopolistic rather than perfect.
They may all adopt a subscription model which will let them sell cars cheaper. Maybe even at a loss - in much the same way that smart TVs are sold as a loss because of the value of the income generated by data collection. Most people do not understand the true cost of ongoing subscriptions so its quite likely to win if cars to cheap as a result.
Currently, no. All evidence points to it as a feature approaching fungibility once it’s good enough and plentiful.
Like, tires aren’t perfectly fungible. But functionally, they’re close to it.
No dashboard, later no turn signals, no drive stalk, defrost on touchscreen, now car is becoming subscription-based...
Some of my (extended) neighbors are members of a family that live near each other. One sister bought a Tesla. The brother who lived down the block laughed at her because politics. Despite that, within a year he had bought one as well. Their parents test drove it a few times and were critical about how it drove weird. But now, after about 9 months, their father mentioned in passing that he ordered one. Another brother mentioned that he would sell his Maxus for a Tesla if he could afford to.
Until recently, one had a Chevy, one a Hyundai, one a Maxus and one an ancient Subaru.
I have never seen such buy-in with any other brand, and that is despite the toxicity of the Tesla CEO. I wouldn't be so quick to write them off.
Thus, if you drive in the U.S., you're both stupid and irresponsible if you utilize any "FSD" system while you're behind the wheel. Note that this legally distinct from "autonomous self-driving" like Waymo.
I have zero doubt we'll eventually get there, but it's going to be quite some time (over a decade?) for real FSD to be ubiquitous enough for the requisite traffic law changes and for this stuff to have gone through enough legal challenges in the various state courts.