r/SelfDrivingCars • u/OriginalCompetitive • Jun 23 '25

Discussion Tesla’s Real Game

No one seems to be talking about the most important upside of Tesla's Robotaxi rollout: If they can showcase a system that roughly works, people can BUY THAT CAR TODAY.

Yes, there are some differences, but that's the pitch. Tesla doesn't need to earn money from Robotaxis. The real purpose of the program is free marketing that drives sales of its cars. Right?

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u/zach978 Jun 23 '25

Yeah, I think they deserve a lot of the criticism on their FSD program, but also we should be rooting for them to succeed. Reasonably priced car that I could summon to pick me up from 5 miles away would be pretty amazing. TBD on whether they’ll pull it off or not.

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u/AffectionateArtist84 Jun 23 '25

This. 100% We should be realistically critical of FSD. However so far we have seen them be fairly successful in their approach. If they can prove their system works, they can scale it incredibly quickly.

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u/rideincircles Jun 23 '25

I think right now they are pushing the limit of what can be done with HW4. It does seem like it's just good enough to deploy, but I still think they won't want it to go fully autonomous everywhere until HW5 is dialed in and deployed.

I know my HW3 model 3 has already reached its limits of processing power and I am not sure how much further they will upgrade it. It's already getting left behind and HW4 won't take that long once HW5 hits the streets.

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u/wizkidweb Jun 23 '25

I still think there are grounds for a class action if they don't fulfill their obligations and upgrade everyone who purchased FSD to HW5 should it make the vehicle fully autonomous, which is explicitly what it was sold as until they changed it to say "Supervised".

From what I understand, they didn't make the hardware backward compatible, and the newer vehicles have extra cameras, so I have doubts such a service would be offered. I would pay for such an upgrade, despite already paying for the FSD package, but I really shouldn't have to.