Sure, you can guess at motives behind two among countless thousands of business decisions. Or you can observe progress of the FSD Beta software released to customers.
I've had access to FSD Beta since like the very first version. It hasn't made any significant progress to be honest. It still does the dumbest most unsafe things at the absolute worst time. In super ideal conditions it may be ok, but for the most part, I don't even try to use it anymore.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but your assertion is wildly divergent from the experience of many dozens of people who have documented their experiences in full on YouTube. It would be interesting to hear why you think your opinion is correct and theirs isn't. I'd be genuinely appreciative of any thoughts you have.
I'm not saying anyones opinion is incorrect. FSD may work better in some places and worse in others. But I live in Las Vegas. We have wide roads, both highways and regular roads well maintained, great weather, and other elements that would make you think FSD would work great.
In my experience, it does lane keeping great and going in a straight line, slowing down for traffic. But that's about it. Making turns, the overall jank is unbearable in person (it doesn't come off as bad on video, but as a driver or passenger, getting constantly tossed around is not fun), and also just the unpredictability of the system makes it unusable for anything more than a parlor trick.
You're free to have your own opinion or listen to whoever you want, but I can tell you my experience has been consistently terrible and hasn't improved by any meaningful amount over the last 18 months.
Please tell me how I can observe that progress when they have stopped doing any kind of objective public reporting. What are the metrics you deem relevant to track, since not reporting safety data is just a random business decision in your mind?
A count of all-cause disengagements is not "safety data", nor is it "objective public reporting". Much like LoC it can be a signal of progress early on but these days it's ambiguous noise given that many disengagements occur because of reasons other than safety, such as spotting a good place to park moments before reaching a destination. But even where a disengagement is safety related, the data can be confounded — especially given that there has been a rather dramatic uptick in assertiveness in recent releases, revealing further edge cases masked by prior conservativeness.
It's funny, because it reminds me of provisional drivers in my home city of Sydney, Australia. Drivers with less than 1 year of road experience must show a red [P] plate on their vehicle. Drivers with between 1 and 3 years of road experience must show a green [P] plate. This is interesting to me because I consistently find that red [P] drivers are mostly conservative and green [P] drivers are mostly overconfident to the point of dangerous.
Some might say we shouldn't allow people with between 1 and 3 years of road experience to drive on our roads.
Yes disengagements can be noise, but there are significant differences between manufacturers, and Tesla's numbers were not competitive, and then they stopped reporting them, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. It is not a perfect metric, but it is a metric. You never did tell me what metric you are using to judge Tesla's progress. Since you clearly believe they are making progress, maybe you could tell me the reason why you think that.
