Tesla critics are everywhere, and it’s easy to ignore the keyboard warriors – but it’s not so easy to ignore the experts.
Jason Hughes is the owner of 057 Technology, a firm that specializes in Tesla drive motors and controllers – which means he understands these cars inside and out. Over the years, he’s become a reputable source of information in the Tesla world – and now, he’s telling people to avoid Full Self Driving.
Hughes has called Tesla’s Full Self Driving (“FSD”) product a “blatant cash grab scam,” citing the fact that it now costs $15,000 for Tesla owners to apply for the program. And, yes, we do mean “apply.” As in: those paying for it have no idea if they will ever be allowed to use it. That’s because you have to pay for your FSD subscription first, and then you’ll need to meet and maintain a strict minimum “Safety Score” over a certain period of time (at least one week) before Tesla gives you access to the software you paid for.
They should give _immediate_ no-strings-attached opt-in access to the whatever the latest FSD software to _EVERYONE_ who's paid for it. No "strikes", no "scores", no other BS games.
— Jason Hughes (@wk057) September 5, 2022
You pay them for the product, they should give you the product.
How is this difficult?!?
Remarkably, that’s only one of the objections the Hughes made in his Twitter thread about it. He also called it ludicrous that Tesla had increased, “the price of a product you can’t even actually get when you pay for it multiple times (literally 5x the original cost now).”
Gustavo Henrique Ruffo, over at AutoEvolution, sums up the history of the FSD fiasco quite nicely. “Tesla has sold the software since October 2016, when the company said that all cars sold from that point on would be ready to become robotaxis,” he explains. “Elon Musk promised the same thing on April 22, 2019, at Tesla Autonomy Day. According to the Tesla CEO, all its EVs made from that day on would have a computer called HW 3.0 instead of the previous one, HW 2.5.”
Hughes’ frustration about what he called the “BS games” being played by Tesla in regards to FSD continued to build in a series of tweets, ultimately culminating in the following gem:
Cool from a programmer/developer aspect. Neat gimmick overall. But zero practical application as-is, and that's highly unlikely to change any time in the near future or for any vehicle that's already built.
— Jason Hughes (@wk057) September 5, 2022
Bottom line: Save your $. Don't buy FSD.
In the world of customer reviews, it doesn’t get much more rock-solid than, “don’t buy.” But, hey – he’s just one guy, and there are any number of “one guys” out there who get it wrong now and then, right?
Right! So, feel free to ignore this video of a self-driving Tesla crashing into a stationary airplane and watch this other video where a pair of video bloggers testing FSD in San Francisco traffic (where it’s, supposedly, “the best,” due to a higher number of driven miles in the area) and have to quickly intervene to prevent the car from driving over a cyclist.
Bonus points for catching the guys ask each other if they’re, “gonna have to cut that” footage to save face with Tesla. (Which, PS: it looks like it was definitely going to hit him.)
Self-driving Tesla Podcast | Whole Mars
SOURCE | IMAGES: FINDMYELECTRIC; 057 TECHNOLOGIES, VIA AUTOEVOLUTION.
