Tesla has spent nearly a decade promising fully autonomous cars and collecting billions in the process without delivering.
In 2016, it claimed every vehicle rolling off the line would one day be capable of unsupervised self-driving.
Elon Musk has made the same prediction nearly every year since 2018. Customers paid up to $15,000 for FSD, with the understanding that software updates would eventually make them unnecessary behind the wheel.
Almost ten years later, none of that has materialized. Tesla has confirmed that cars built between 2016 and 2023 don’t even have the hardware to handle true autonomy.
Musk has floated hardware upgrade ideas, but there’s no concrete plan to implement them. Meanwhile, Tesla quietly changed FSD.
The package no longer promises unsupervised driving; it now offers “advanced driving assistance,” requiring constant supervision. Buyers were sold a dream they will likely never get.
Contrast that with Apple. The company reportedly spent over $10 billion on Project Titan, its autonomous vehicle project, before deciding to stop.
Also: The iPhone just became the world’s largest AI platform, and Elon Musk is furious he can’t compete
Apple didn’t overpromise, didn’t sell a future that couldn’t exist yet. It made the hard, painful choice to cut a project rather than risk undermining trust.
Tesla, meanwhile, continues to monetize FSD subscriptions. Its latest CEO compensation package could hand Musk hundreds of billions in stock if certain FSD milestones are met.
But the definition of FSD in that plan is intentionally vague: it now only needs to be “capable of performing transportation tasks that provide autonomous or similar functionality.”
That describes exactly what Tesla already offers, hands-on driver assistance, not the fully autonomous system buyers were promised.
This is way beyond a marketing misstep. It’s a potential regulatory and legal minefield. Customers spent thousands expecting autonomy.
Tesla’s board is effectively paying the CEO to deliver something that may never exist. Apple, by contrast, shows that restraint, knowing when to kill a project, is part of building long-term credibility.
Vision without accountability is dangerous. Tesla is chasing hype; Apple bets on reality. One continues selling dreams; the other, even when it hurts, delivers products consumers can actually rely on.
Elon Musk sold a Tesla FSD dream Apple would never promise—do you think buyers were misled? Comment below.
Featured image: Tesla
