I just heard about this NHTSA move, which news reporters are tagging with “recall” when the “fix” will be OTA. **
But, and this is a big BUT, the big brouhaha today on Twitter about $TSLA was Musk is going with Hardware 4.0 for FSD and it will include a new piece for radar. This was all before the NHTSA came out swinging in the news feeds. Current owners are incensed that earliest inquiries to Tesla about a free upgrade have gone unanswered. **
I don’t know if Musk is addressing this distraction/dissembling tactic, as I like so many other millions on Twitter have made #BlockMusk trend over the past two days. So, I find out about Musk through retweets by his fanbois who still think Ole Sparky walks on water. (Sarah Silverman tore him a new one last night on the Daily Show.)
Very touchy subject with longtime FSD boosters today:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported Thursday the Tesla Full Self-Driving software allows a vehicle to “exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash.” NHTSA said 362,758 Tesla vehicles could potentially be affected.
The agency wrote Thursday Tesla will release an “over-the-air” software update, free of charge on “certain 2016-2023 Model S, Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving Beta (FSD Beta) software or pending installation.”
Tesla disputes the agency’s analysis of the problem but will carry out the FSD fix, according to NHTSA documents.
I don’t see this as a big deal. Changing the software over the air should not be difficult. And lets hope he stops claiming Teslas are self driving. Maybe one day, but not yet.
I understand Tesla objected to calling it a recall. Recall does seem to be the wrong term in the case of an over the air software update.
We shall see how much damage is done. Lets hope not much.
It isn’t difficult. It’s trivial, at least once they have the changes to the software figured out.
Musk has never claimed Teslas are self-driving. In fact he, and Tesla, and the system every time you use it, say emphatically that is isn’t. It would take a real moron, with no awareness of their surroundings, to believe it is.
Exactly. That’s what Musk says. His sin is that he keeps saying it will be “soon”, often “this year”, and so far it hasn’t been. Not even a little. Year after year.
It would be nice if he’d just STFU about it since he has no credibility whatsoever regarding autonomy at this point.
Surely Tesla owners are savvy enough to not overly rely on the self driving feature–at least until the up date is installed.
I think that means keeping your eyes on the road and hands on the steering wheel. Otherwise they have not much reason to gripe.
Did they buy Tesla for its self driving feature? Does any competitor do it better? We still expect Tesla to be a leader in this field. When perfected, Tesla will be an early adopter.
$TSLA is still not sharing its number of disengagements per car using Level II Driver’s Assistance with the DMV of the state of California, where Tesla can no longer market it’s Level II as FSD or Autopilot (ICR).
Consumer Reports recently printed a list of best Level II providers and Tesla came in 7th. Ford’s Blue Cruise was rated No. 1 this year:
Down in the comments, someone says Tesla is locked into a 2025 deal with CATL which is why they are not taking part in this deal. Others claim its because Tesla is not 100% Chinese:
CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.), which accounted for 37.1% of global EV battery sales in 2022, is reportedly offering a deal on EV batteries for carmakers including NIO, Li Auto (Nasdaq: LI), Huawei, and Zeekr – what CATL considers “strategic clients.”
NIO signed a five-year strategic cooperation agreement with CATL on January 17.
Tesla – CATL’s largest customer – is not among CATL’s “strategic client” group, and Tesla has a gigafactory in Shanghai.
Also at issue is what the recall might mean for Tesla’s future if the fixes don’t work. After all, Musk said last year that whether Full Self-Driving succeeds or fails “is the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”
FSD is an option that Tesla sells for $15,000. In its current state, the technology is deemed by Tesla to be “beta” software, a term computer users might recognize as a warning label on a newly issued, not-ready-for-prime-time software program whose code might still be pocked with bugs. (Important to note: So-called Full Self Driving Teslas are incapable of fully driving themselves.)
According to NHTSA, the defects that plague FSD can cause a car to suddenly speed up and race through yellow lights, violate speed limits and continue driving straight ahead from turn-only traffic lanes. A search for “FSD” on YouTube will turn up evidence of many other software problems, including a tendency for cars with FSD engaged to cross double yellow lines into oncoming traffic.
Toyota isn’t sitting idly by in China where BYD’s least expensive model outsold all four of Tesla’s models for January 2023 in just a week.
Here, we have a Toyota EV model selling for less than $25,000.
Toyota is the latest automaker to drop prices by a significant amount on its electric vehicles in China, after Tesla started this trend early in the year.
The Japanese automaker has reduced the price of its bZ4X electric SUV in China by 30,000 RMB, which amounts to approximately $4,350 at the current exchange rate.
After the 15 percent price cut, the Toyota bZ4X now starts at 169,800 RMB ($24,660), making it way more affordable than in the US, where it carries a $42,000 starting MSRP. The price reduction has been operated simultaneously by the two joint ventures that sell the Toyota bZ4X – FAW-Toyota and GAC-Toyota.
The complaints of wait times are beginning to move front and center on Twitter again:
Elon Musk has some angry Tesla customers on his hands. On Wednesday, he tweeted that the carmaker was “happy” to let owners of competing electric vehicles use Tesla’s charging stations—where Tesla owners are often frustrated by wait times already.
Meanwhile, some Tesla owners are still fuming about the price cuts made last month to certain models, whether because they had recently paid the previous higher price or because they will now get less for their used Tesla.
Government incentives played a role in Tesla deciding to open its charging stations. The White House announced on Wednesday that Tesla will for the first time open part of its network “to non-Tesla EVs, making at least 7,500 chargers available for all EVs by the end of 2024.” The Biden administration said its “actions on EVs have spurred network operators to accelerate the buildout of coast-to-coast EV charging networks.”
I wrote it in my column Monday; it happened Thursday: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla (TSLA) had agreed to recall 362,735 vehicles replaced with its full-self-driving beta technology. Tesla will fix these with an over-the-air software upgrade, but that is irrelevant. Tesla’s FSD has been one of the “Big Tech” epic fails of our generation.
Elon Musk first promised in October 2016, a Tesla – the Model S at the time – would drive itself coast-to-coast by the end of 2017. He then doubled down in February 2018, and was quoted a saying that within a half year, Tesla cars would be able to autonomously drive themselves coast-to-coast. OK, so even if you give him a little leeway, that leaves 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 as full years in which no Tesla has driven itself coast-to-coast. Of course we are in 2023 now … and … the pendulum just swung the other way.
I won’t use all my column space with data from the NHTSA report on “FSD Beta,” but The Verge has a good summation as follows:
Tesla has been collecting revenue from the add-on FSD feature since 2016, and over those years Musk has continued to promise that truly full self-driving was right around the corner without delivering on it.
The revenue is substantial. In its most recent financial filings, Tesla said cumulative FSD orders total more than 400,000. “These are big, big numbers; we’re talking billions,” said Francine McKenna, a lecturer at the Wharton School of business and producer of the Substack accounting newsletter the Dig.
She figures Tesla has pulled in at least $4 billion in cash on FSD over the last eight years. The company recognized more than $400 million of that in last year’s fourth quarter, she said, which enabled the company to beat analysts’ earnings estimates and boost the price of its recent flailing stock.
Conveniently missing from this article is the announcment last week that Tesla was again suspending Shanghai production for another 2-weeks. An article I saw on Twitter said this was the third time in two-three months that China has suspended manufacturing for two weeks, but as Bloomberg is reporting only part of the Shanghai plant is shut down now.
Price increases and decreases are generally the best indicators of Tesla’s demand in any given market. Despite the fact that Tesla claims it is simply trying to reduce prices, the automaker tries to sell its electric vehicles for the most it can based on demand.
In the case of China, it’s extremely important to track since it is by far the biggest EV market in the world.
The price increases are small, but they should help Tesla’s gross margins recover in Q2, which is when most of those new orders are expected to be delivered.
The revamp comes as Tesla faces increased competition in the world’s biggest electric-vehicle market. Model 3 sales in China have been declining, with about 125,000 of the sedans sold in 2022, a drop of 17% from the previous year. With local rivals like BYD Co. and Nio Inc. introducing cars to contend with Tesla’s, the company has resorted to price cuts on its China-built models to lift sales.
Still, orders for made-in-China Teslas have started to flatten since the start of this month after an initial frenzy following the price cuts, one of the people said.
More than half of the 1.37 million EVs that Tesla built globally last year were made at its Shanghai factory, where cars first rolled off production lines in December 2019. After several upgrades, the facility — Tesla’s first outside the US — has the capacity to produce about one million vehicles a year, more than double its original plan of 450,000.
This is a bunch of gibberish written by Russ Mitchell, who has been writing gibberish regarding Tesla for many years now. You can be sure that if Russ Mitchell writes it, it isn’t true.
Um, the fixes can’t “not work” in any real sense because they’re a few trivial changes. And what Musk said was that everybody would have autonomous vehicles at some point, and that clearly Tesla would be worthless as a company if everybody except for Tesla had it, so Tesla would have to have it. Of course his statement was hyperbole, but trust Russ Mitchell to take it out of context and spin it wildly.
It’s funny, because these are all things that human drivers do, quite often. All that actually matters is whether (in Tesla’s case) the car+human (which is what Level 2 autonomy is) drives safely. So far, all the actual statistics show that Tesla’s FSD (including FSD Beta for local streets) is relatively safe. And when there are failures, they are human failures.
The entire “recall” is based on nothing significant. And, to put a bow on it, it’s actually a “voluntary” recall, meaning Tesla agreed to do something if NHTSA would get off its back.
And here we have one of the few legitimate complaints about Elon Musk’s technology adventures at Tesla – he has been wrong in predicting the future of a software product.
Me, I’m not happy about this either. My three vehicles with FSD Beta still aren’t anywhere close to being autonomous, which I expected they would be by now. If I were buying a Tesla today, there’s no way I would shell out $15K for it. Well, actually I would probably spend the $6K for “Enhanced Auto Pilot” which is basically the features that actually work now, but the additional $9K is a no. See Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability | Tesla Support for details on what’s what.
