1/ Now that the election has been called and voter fraud dismissed, it’s time to search for other frauds. Let’s look at $TSLA Full Self Drive. About 3 weeks ago, Tesla released its Beta version to a limited audience of Tesla influencers.

2/ The influencers were supposed to flood social media with praise and testimonial videos. Instead, FSD performance was so bad that every video contained errors, many requiring driver intervention.

3/ Excuses were made. “Remember, this is only Beta”. “I’m teaching it to drive down this street”. But the reality clear to everyone was that Tesla’s Beta FSD is anything but Full Self Drive.

4/ Beta release – what does that mean? It means that the software is a candidate for production release. It means 100% of the specification has been implemented. It means only clean-ups remain.

5/ So how is it possible that FSD performs so poorly after all the hype? Certainly, there’s an element of time pressure to fulfill the Robotaxi proclamation. And similar pressure from Waymo’s competition.

6/ But timelines have never carried much weight at Tesla. What’s different this time? Why release Beta FSD when it’s clearly not ready for production?

7/ The answer is that this is as good as FSD gets. This is the best that Tesla can do with the resources (hardware and software) available. There’s no breakthrough on the horizon.

8/ There’s really no choice but to pronounce “feature complete” and book the deferred revenue.

9/ For $TSLA fans, the FSD release is disappointing. For $TSLAQ skeptics, the FSD release is worse than imagined. For Elon, the FSD release is capitulation.

10/ Hat tip to so many who have provided FSD commentary/analysis, especially @Tweetermeyer and @GretaMusk