Honestly, I really like the fun factor of it all but do feel that there are elements of the car and the ownership experience that could be much better. Case in point...I took it through a car wash for the first time last night and the weather stripping on the driver's side window failed and the interior got drenched. They'll be fixing that on Monday. That simply shouldn't happen on a $60k car.
The full self driving feature has made a lot of strides recently with the new release but there have been a lot of empty promises and missed goals in regard to that. The company has been basically making people pay to be beta testers, they should have offered it to the test group for free until it's perfected.
Tesla has this cool feature where once everything in the entire car is adjusted to your liking then your driver profile is loaded to the cloud and every Tesla you drive from that point forward adjusts everything to you automatically. I think the $12k (soon to be $15k) full self driving feature should be attached to your profile and follow you into any future Tesla you drive or own. It''d be well worth it then. I, personally, wouldn't pay for it now but can see how it would be useful as I get older.
I feel like the outcry over the self driving thing is a lot of hype and FUD. I think far more people cause accidents driving like idiots than some AI driving. I do think it is a miss that they charge so much for it as a feature. Like you said, when you are spending that much on a car, you should get some of that stuff thrown in and the quality should be top notch!
Throughout these past few years, especially, I've noticed a lot of FUD being slung at Tesla. I think this is rooted in Big Oil launching smear campaigns. Until they can reposition themselves to profit off of EVs they're a huge threat to their bottom line. I can only shake my head at some of the ignorance and propaganda people believe and perpetuate on social media about electric vehicles.
According to the data, Tesla's version of full self driving (Tesla Vision) is already 5x safer than a human driver alone. That's set to get exponentially better this fall with the new release in September. Other brands are catching up to that as well only they are using a combo of Lidar and cameras.
So far the experience has been pretty painless for getting the weather stripping fixed. I got an appointment within a few days, set everything up through the app, and everything is covered under warranty. I really hope this is the last thing that needs to be fixed. After all, we buy cars for transportation and to save us time not to have to get fixed every few weeks and cost us time.
I had a feeling the numbers were something like that. I am not surprised that it is probably a smear campaign by big oil. It makes me think of that movie Chain Reaction with Keanau. That is good that the warranty process has been pretty painless. I know that event he fastest of our reaction times are pretty slow compared to computers, so I am more than willing to embrace self driving.