Tesla has confirmed its latest bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners will not get the Autosteer feature they paid for.
Instead, they will get a year of ‘Supervised Full Self-Driving’.
When Tesla started delivering the Cybertruck in late 2023, the software was incomplete, especially regarding its Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) features like ‘Supervised (FSD) Full Self-Driving’, which was included in the price of all early Cybertrucks.
It took Tesla almost a year to start releasing its FSD on the Cybertruck.
After Tesla stopped making new Cybertruck Foundation Series, which are fully loaded with all options, buyers started to have the option of buying the $8,000 FSD package or keeping only the Autopilot package, which is included in the price.
Autopilot’s two main features are Traffic Aware Cruise Control and Autosteer. The first is self-explanatory, while Autosteer is Tesla’s name for active lane keeping.
The vast majority of Tesla vehicle owners don’t buy the FSD package.
As of now, 16 months after Tesla started delivering the Cybertruck, the automaker has yet to deliver Autosteer on the electric pickup truck.
Today, Tesla started reaching out to Cybertruck owners to let them know that it won’t make Autosteer available for Cybertruck owners who haven’t bought FSD:
“As we improve our Autopilot technology, our feature sets will change. Accordingly, Autosteer will not be available for Cybertruck outside of Full Self-Driving (Supervised).“
Instead, Tesla offers a year of free FSD trial to Cybertruck owners.
More details in the article.
My favorite part is how they’re now saying both "full self-driving’ and “supervised”.
Archive link: https://archive.is/1w64R
Bait and switch is literally promosing something and fhen replacing it with something else, which is what happened here. It doesn’t imply any cleverness and has extremely negative connotations.
Cultural difference perhaps? I’ve always known it to be more specific, still roughly that but usually the replacement item is visually very similar and the victim accepts it after previously being shown a similar but non-shitty version. Like those black friday TVs you get in the US that look just like the brand name ones people expect them to be but are actually shittier electronics shoved into the same casings. The switch is meant to happen before purchase.
Those companies would get in legal trouble in the US if they admitted to doing it intentionally by calling it a bait and switch. They hide behind legal shenanigans like putting ‘limited supplies’ in fine print.
Everybody hates being on the receiving end of bait and switch. Nobody thinks it is clever except the person committing fraud, and they hate it when someone does it to them.