Jason Hughes is also known as the Tesla Hacker. No one can accuse him of being a short seller or a FUDster, as any critic of the company’s actions is frequently classified. Despite that, he’ll probably hear that after publicly confronting Tesla to be upfront about its promises of Full Self-Driving hardware. He showed they date back from October 19, 2016.

Tesla Hacker Wants Company to Be Upfront About FSD Hardware Promises

Hughes went to Twitter to share a dispute he was having with the company. Elon Musk tweeted on October 22, 2021, that “early production cars will need camera upgrades, as well as FSD computer (all included in the price).” The Tesla Hacker wanted his cars to have the upgrade regardless of paying for FSD or not.

According to Hughes, he got into a “substantial back and forth” with the company about costs. He thinks there should be none considering that Tesla wrote on its blog on October 19, 2016, all cars would have “Full Self-Driving hardware.” On October 20, 2016, the company shared that blog post on Twitter, making the same promise.

As Hughes reasons, it was not for all car owners that paid for the FSD package, neither those that paid for future upgrades. It was for “all Teslas.” When the Tesla Hacker asked the company to stand up to its word, he heard “from the last person in the chain” that he should sue Tesla to get what it promised him and thousands of customers in the first place. And that’s probably what he will do.


Elon Musk and Tesla made that same promise again on Tesla Autonomy Day on April 22, 2019. That was when the company announced HW 3.0. This “supercomputer” would make all Teslas autonomous when the company had the stable release of its software. Since then, customers have received new vehicles with HW 2.5, and Tesla announced a new chip that will make cars autonomous (again), based on Project Dojo.

Hughes had to block many Tesla fans that argued he was wrong, probably in a disrespectful way. Including himself as a Tesla supporter, he said that they “should be the ones most offended when they do something dishonest and hold them to a reasonable standard. We should not defend and twist when they go against what's clear in B&W.”

In other words, if Tesla said all its cars made after October 19, 2016, would have “Full Self-Driving hardware,” that’s what the company should stand for. Musk said the upgrades that are now necessary are included in the price, possibly meaning that those who paid for FSD are the ones who should get them. What Hughes argues is that it should be included in the price paid for the cars in light of Tesla’s promises.


For a company whose CEO considered “autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem” in 2016, that would be the right thing to do. If the company was wrong to promise that, it should admit it and upgrade this hardware for free to all customers who believed it knew what it was talking about. It clearly didn’t, but now it wants to evade responsibility for having said so.

Hughes is a Tesla researcher. He wants the hardware to understand how it works, even if he is not willing to pay $10,000 for FSD. It is not up to Tesla to decide if the hardware would be useless in a car without the software or not. If it said all its cars would have it, they have to have it: simple as that.

That leads us to another reflection on Tesla’s attitude. The company is deploying FSD Beta to thousands of new customers every week based on the promise it made in 2019 that all cars made from that point on would have all the hardware necessary for Full Self-Driving. That was not true, as Project Dojo demonstrates.


That said, what is the point of releasing beta software to be used in cars that do not have the necessary hardware to achieve full self-driving? If these cars will only attain autonomous driving with Project Dojo chips, why expose so many people to software that can’t do its job without the proper hardware, which is yet to be developed?

Perhaps Tesla should just stop making promises it cannot keep. That creates future liability such as the one Hughes will ask courts to enforce. The problem is that stopping with the autonowashing would probably affect Tesla’s irrational market cap. If it is based on the technology Tesla claims to have, the company should just deliver it. It promised to do so in 2016, in 2019, and we’re waiting for the next time it will promise the same thing again.

Meanwhile, customers like Hughes will try to hold the company accountable for its pledges while being bashed by those who fear what that may cause to their investments in Tesla. For someone who defended the company so many times in the past, such as against the sudden unintended acceleration accusations, it must be a bitter feeling. As Hughes states in his Twitter bio, he wants Tesla to succeed, but in the right way.

In a new note to his management team, as he is being challenged by his own workforce, VW CEO Herbert Diess explained why the German automaker needs to be more like Tesla.Surprisingly, a lot of it has to do with manufacturing – something that Elon Musk said would become Tesla’s main advantage.


As we reported yesterday, Diess is currently facing a vote of no-confidence under review by a board committee after VW’s worker council took offense to him saying that the company could face job losses if it falls behind in the transition to electric vehicles.

Yesterday, we reported on Diess cancelling his US trip in order to address the situation.

He said that he understands that some are frustrated by his constant comparison to Tesla, but he sees a need to emulate them in many ways.

Now, Electrek has obtained a speech that he gave to his management in which he describes, in detail, why he sees Tesla as VW’s main competitor.

Interestingly, Diess seems to have some important information about Tesla’s expected production efficiency at Gigafactory Berlin:


Tesla has long been appreciated for the software, range, and acceleration of its cars but has had problems with quality. The production was ridiculed. But our main competitor is learning fast. The quality is getting better, the customer feedback more positive. And in Brandenburg, Tesla wants to build half a million cars with 7,000 people – direct and indirect. And with an impressive productivity: expected 90 units per hour in one line, 10 hours per car.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long said that manufacturing will become the automaker’s main advantage.

Despite Tesla producing more electric vehicles than any other company, the notion has been ridiculed because the volume is still much lower than most other automakers, and quality hasn’t been on par with other premium automakers.

But things have improved over the years, and now Tesla can produce electric cars at an annual rate of 1 million units, with quality continuing to improve.

Diess appears to be aware of the details of Tesla’s planned output at Gigafactory Berlin, and he is particularly impressed with 10 hours of production per car.

In comparison, Diess says that VW is at over 30 hours at Zwickau, and it is currently aiming to bring this down to 20 hours, which would still be twice as much time as Tesla.

Here’s the relevant part of the speech from Herbert Diess:


“Today, Tesla sets the standards here. They build the car around the software. Updates are already part of everyday life for Tesla customers.

We now come every 12 weeks with automatic updates for our ID. family – a big step for Volkswagen!
Congratulations to the team of Thomas Ulbrich and CARIAD for this milestone!

Tesla has long been appreciated for the software, range, and acceleration of its cars but has had problems with quality. The production was ridiculed. But our main competitor is learning fast. The quality is getting better, the customer feedback more positive.

And in Brandenburg, Tesla wants to build half a million cars with 7,000 people – direct and indirect. And with an impressive productivity: expected 90 units per hour in one line, 10 hours per car.

In Zwickau, we are at over 30 hours, we want to achieve 20 hours next year – we
originally started with a project target of 16 hours.

I don’t need to mention here what all this means on the stock market. Tesla has unlimited access to money and resources due to its high valuation. These numbers are what drive me to point out this new competition and not turn a blind eye.

Even if I stop talking about Elon Musk, he’s here to stay, revolutionizing our industry and quickly becoming more competitive.

The Tesla Model 3 was the best-selling car in Europe in September, ahead of the Golf. And this despite the fact that Tesla does not even build in Europe yet. Tesla only imports so far.

Only those who understand and have an eye on the competition can win. Tesla is the benchmark today, and other strong startups have entered our market from China.“

https://electrek.co/2021/11/08/tesla...-output-china/
Tesla’s numbers in China are out today, and the automaker has managed to maintain its impressive output with over 54,000 electric vehicles last month.

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/renaul...ic-2022-review
that experience with the Zoe has been particularly useful when it comes to weight saving across myriad components, resulting in a kerb weight for our 60kWh model of 1,624kg – 188kg less than the equivalent ID.3 with a 58kWh battery
It certainly gives the car a bit of GTI attitude, but on our test on damp French roads, it also led to plenty of wheelspin like turbocharged Renaults of old. Renault engineers say that will be sorted for production cars, when we should actually get a 0-62mph figure, too – currently they’re saying ‘up to 7.4 seconds’. It feels faster than that.
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