Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

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bbreve about 4 hours ago 79 commentsRead Article on electrek.co

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Discussion (79 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wjnc•about 3 hours ago

He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.

Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.

LunicLynx•about 1 hour ago

I guess that’s the point, FSD is not available. What you buy is lvl 4/5 available is lvl 2+.

I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.

One upgrade is more economical than two, but I would be annoyed for sure as well.

nerdsniper•30 minutes ago

The definition of what “Tesla FSD is has changed over time. Earlier buyers were promised more, so they have a stronger case on that basis as well.

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/

It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.

codechicago277•about 1 hour ago

Maybe Elon can argue that no reasonable person would have taken his FSD promises seriously.

mlmonkey•18 minutes ago

> 3,000 owners from 29 countries signed up — representing over €6 million in FSD purchases.

The math doesn't work out. It should be \euro 20,000,000 in FSD purchases, no?

alHqn•about 2 hours ago

It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.

rubiquity•about 2 hours ago

I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).

Flatcircle•about 2 hours ago

rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.

People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

hazelnut•about 2 hours ago

Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.

not_a_bot_4sho•about 2 hours ago

A while back, Tesla gave me free FSD for a month and so I tried it out. It drove me to work just fine, and I was impressed.

Then, on the way home it drove me home on the wrong side of the street and I had to take over. Such a silly mistake.

Similar to what you said; from there on out, it was more trouble than it's worth because you can't let your guard down.

gwbas1c•about 1 hour ago

That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.

FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.

elictronic•about 1 hour ago

This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.

It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.

ryandrake•about 1 hour ago

This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."

twothreeone•about 2 hours ago

That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.

6510•about 2 hours ago

what do you think it is train drivers do?

wofo•about 2 hours ago

Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough attention

iamjake648•about 1 hour ago

I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?

californical•about 1 hour ago

I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.

If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization

lateforwork•about 1 hour ago

Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!

whiplash451•about 1 hour ago

Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.

rented_mule•about 1 hour ago

It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own driving behavior.

jerlam•37 minutes ago

It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.

burnte•about 1 hour ago

This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.

ImPostingOnHN•17 minutes ago

I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish for a second or two.

A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't expect of a normal car.

As other posters have pointed out, it's like running an LLM with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`: I wouldn't `rm -rf /` my computer (or in the case of tesla, my life), but an AI might.

wookmaster•about 1 hour ago

Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.

kube-system•about 2 hours ago

It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.

https://www.faistgroup.com/site/assets/files/1657/j3016-leve...

While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.

marssaxman•39 minutes ago

This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy part of the task, while making the hard part harder.

kube-system•36 minutes ago

It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.

darth_avocado•about 1 hour ago

> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.

coffeemug•38 minutes ago

In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.

On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.

What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.

Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.

zwily•42 minutes ago

Weird. Works great in cities for me. It’s been more than fancy cruise control for awhile.

shrubble•13 minutes ago

I'm literally ready to pay cash for a Tesla, once they make one that doesn't have a steering wheel at all.

If I can't go to sleep lying down on the seat as a sole occupant, it's not yet self driving.

freeAgent•about 2 hours ago

He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.

satvikpendem•about 2 hours ago

It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.

aojdwhsd•about 2 hours ago

It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.

andrewinardeer•38 minutes ago

Which is why you put a sticker over it.

morder•about 2 hours ago

It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.

ggreer•about 2 hours ago

That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.

vel0city•about 2 hours ago

I've driven from Dallas to Houston barely having to touch the wheel or pedals the whole way. I don't own a Tesla.

Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation.

satvikpendem•about 2 hours ago

Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.

realo•about 1 hour ago

Highest end mercedes?

vel0city•about 2 hours ago

Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.

And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.

Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.

ggreer•about 2 hours ago

Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.

1. https://www.tesla.com/customer-stories/cross-country-trip-fu...

vel0city•about 2 hours ago

I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.

4fterd4rk•about 2 hours ago

You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.

reaperducer•about 1 hour ago

he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time

I thought the diver was supposed to keep hands on the wheel in case consuming hits wrong.

That's why Tesla fans buy those weighted gizmos to fool the computer into thinking they're still holding the steering wheel.

iknowstuff•about 1 hour ago

not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.

miltonlost•about 2 hours ago

I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend endangered

brcmthrowaway•about 2 hours ago

You experienced Time in a Flatcircle

vostrocity•about 2 hours ago

Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.

ggreer•about 2 hours ago

FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".

Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]

It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.

1. https://electrek.co/2019/05/17/tesla-nerfs-autopilot-europe-...

kingleopold•about 2 hours ago

this is funny because roadstar is no longer coming ever and they paid even more deposit there.

zackify•about 2 hours ago

I'm one of these unlucky owners. I can't believe I'll ever get anything.

After paying the full cost and being stuck on old software that had a promise of having the hardware required for it

iamjake648•about 1 hour ago

Same here. I would totally be fine if HW3 FSD was reduced to $50 a month, but charging the same $100 as HW4 is insulting at this point.

skywhopper•about 1 hour ago

I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.

josefritzishere•about 2 hours ago

Telsa appears to be doing crime. The EU does have clas action lawsuits. I expect one way or another Elon will have to issue refunds.

a10c•about 2 hours ago

Australia is also launching a class action.

daft_pink•about 2 hours ago

I think the government is going to have to get involved for FSD from any manufacturer to actually take place.

dmix•37 minutes ago

The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.

You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.

acron0•35 minutes ago

There is something uncanny about the way you've phrased your comment, as if to suggest nothing about what Tesla did was wrong.

dmix•24 minutes ago

I was responding to the HN headline which doesn't clarify the context in which FSD is not available because I know people don't read articles. He could and should try to sue Tesla for the $6k refund which the article already says he's trying to do.