He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.
Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.
Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/
It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.
rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.
People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.
That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.
FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.
This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.
It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.
This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."
That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.
I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?
I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.
If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.
It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.
This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.
> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.
In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.
On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.
What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.
Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.
It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.
While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.
It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.
He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.
It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.
It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.
That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.
Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.
And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.
Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.
literally every single competitor will do it because they don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg
Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.
I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.
David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn’t work for Tesla, and Tesla didn’t know about him until one of his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and Tesla went along with it, I’m not sure what to tell you.[1]
Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone has gone thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What information would need to exist to convince you of this?
I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD" (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every time its made some kind of moving violation including nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.
I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware needed for FSD a decade ago, for real this time.
I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its really there. This time it won't even run people over, and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of the time.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.
I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).
It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.
Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.
FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".
Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]
It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.
I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.
The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.
You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.
He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.
Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.
I guess that’s the point, FSD is not available. What you buy is lvl 4/5 available is lvl 2+.
I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.
One upgrade is more economical than two, but I would be annoyed for sure as well.
The definition of what “Tesla FSD is has changed over time. Earlier buyers were promised more, so they have a stronger case on that basis as well.
Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/
It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.
Maybe Elon can argue that no reasonable person would have taken his FSD promises seriously.
rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.
People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.
A while back, Tesla gave me free FSD for a month and so I tried it out. It drove me to work just fine, and I was impressed.
Then, on the way home it drove me home on the wrong side of the street and I had to take over. Such a silly mistake.
Similar to what you said; from there on out, it was more trouble than it's worth because you can't let your guard down.
That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as well keep the money and drive the car.
FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.
This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.
It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.
This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years. "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so much better. FSD on the current version is totally working for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version? Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to have working FSD in the next version, bro."
That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.
what do you think it is train drivers do?
Doing their absolute best with the steering wheel not to go off those pencil-thin tracks?
Should Tesla pay people to use Autopilot?
Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough attention
I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?
I’m guessing that predicting the failure modes of a computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern recognition of what it needs to react to.
If you’re driving, your brain can automatically prioritize the importance of things that you see. But since a computer fails in different ways than a human, you lose all automatic prioritization
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
Because constantly switching between full attention and degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring that staying on full attention continuously.
It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's drunk.
It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own driving behavior.
This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate, if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.
> People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho
It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.
In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.
On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.
What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.
Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.
Weird. Works great in cities for me. It’s been more than fancy cruise control for awhile.
It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.
https://www.faistgroup.com/site/assets/files/1657/j3016-leve...
While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.
This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy part of the task, while making the hard part harder.
It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn them off when I'm navigating situations that require high levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a crowded parking garage.
He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.
It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.
It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.
Which is why you put a sticker over it.
It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.
That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.
I've driven from Dallas to Houston barely having to touch the wheel or pedals the whole way. I don't own a Tesla.
Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation.
Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.
Highest end mercedes?
No. Their L3 was a scam, never sold and not actually planned to be sold anymore.
So, the same as Tesla's L3.
Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have also done most of that trip hands-free.
And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to the system.
Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the stop and go traffic.
Which ones are better today?
A used toyota corolla with comma 4
Ones that don't actively try and drive in front of trains in attempt to kill their operators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
literally every single competitor will do it because they don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg
Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.
1. https://www.tesla.com/customer-stories/cross-country-trip-fu...
I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie there.
David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn’t work for Tesla, and Tesla didn’t know about him until one of his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and Tesla went along with it, I’m not sure what to tell you.[1]
1. https://x.com/DavidMoss/status/2010608939751047484
I don't know who David Moss is, I have no reason to trust him. His tweets I can see are practically nothing but Tesla and Grok shill posts.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that someone has gone thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What information would need to exist to convince you of this?
More than a random Twitter feed and a news post from a company which is known to spread lies, that's for sure.
Ok, try it yourself with a new HW4 and you will see.
I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD" (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every time its made some kind of moving violation including nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.
I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware needed for FSD a decade ago, for real this time.
I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its really there. This time it won't even run people over, and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of the time.
Personally I try and avoid systems that drive people in front of trains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.
he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time
I thought the diver was supposed to keep hands on the wheel in case consuming hits wrong.
That's why Tesla fans buy those weighted gizmos to fool the computer into thinking they're still holding the steering wheel.
not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.
I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend endangered
You experienced Time in a Flatcircle
I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).
It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.
Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.
FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".
Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]
It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.
1. https://electrek.co/2019/05/17/tesla-nerfs-autopilot-europe-...
I'm one of these unlucky owners. I can't believe I'll ever get anything.
After paying the full cost and being stuck on old software that had a promise of having the hardware required for it
Same here. I would totally be fine if HW3 FSD was reduced to $50 a month, but charging the same $100 as HW4 is insulting at this point.
this is funny because roadstar is no longer coming ever and they paid even more deposit there.
I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.
Telsa appears to be doing crime. The EU does have clas action lawsuits. I expect one way or another Elon will have to issue refunds.
Australia is also launching a class action.
I think the government is going to have to get involved for FSD from any manufacturer to actually take place.
The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.
You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.
There is something uncanny about the way you've phrased your comment, as if to suggest nothing about what Tesla did was wrong.