Tesla CEO Elon Musk has finally said the quiet part out loud: he's worried that the vast majority of Tesla vehicles currently on the road won't be able to actually drive themselves after all, even if buyers paid extra for hardware that he claimed at the time would allow them to do just that.narrator: there was no free upgrade, which didn't matter as the upgrade didn't provide FSD either.
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Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.
The good news is that existing customers who shelled out $8,000 for the Full Self-Driving package would get an upgrade "for free," Musk promised during the call. "And we have designed the system to be upgradable, so it’s really just sort of switch out the computer thing — the cameras are capable."
I know I'm pessimistic about the technology generally, but my pessismism isn't required to understand that Elon's "camera only" (no LiDAR) approach can't possibly work.
(ht reader R)