Tesla Revokes 2016 Promise of Self-Driving for All Vehicles

TapTechNews August 25th news, Tesla had promised in 2016 that all vehicles sold since then would be equipped with self-driving functions. However, with the continuous development of technology, Tesla found that there were huge challenges to achieving this goal. Now, the company seems to have revoked this promise.

Tesla has deleted the blog post released in 2016, which promised to equip all vehicles with advanced self-driving functions. But TapTechNews noticed that the blog can still be accessed through the Internet Archive (WaybackMachine).

Some people pointed out that Tesla may therefore face a refund obligation of up to 380 billion US dollars. However, after in-depth analysis, it is found that the liability due to this policy change may not be that great.

Only a few vehicles equipped with the third-generation hardware (HW3) have subscribed to Tesla's FSD software. In fact, Tesla currently has only about 3 billion US dollars of unrealized revenue related to HW3. Therefore, this policy change may not have a significant impact on Tesla's overall financial situation.

For Tesla, the greater threat is that some vehicle owners equipped with HW3 may sue Tesla to claim compensation for the potential income lost due to the inability to realize the self-driving function.

In addition, the court may force Tesla to upgrade all HW3 vehicles to HW4 hardware. After all, there has been a precedent before. In 2022, the court once forced Tesla to upgrade a HW2 vehicle of a Washington state resident to HW3 for free on the grounds that Tesla had made a clear promise in 2016.