Other customers got similar responses. And customers like Starr became more alarmed when the blog post announcing the early access program offer disappeared from Tesla’s website.
“I feel the way Charlie Brown felt every time he tried to kick the football and got it snatched away,” Starr told Ars in a Monday phone interview. “Maybe I’m just a chump. I keep trying to get that football.”
So what was going on? When I asked Tesla for comment, a spokeswoman told me that the blog post “reflected out-of-date pricing, so it was taken down to avoid customer confusion.” However, she stressed, “we are continuing to honor the commitments we made to our customers at that time, and we will be sharing early access to new features with applicable customers soon.”
When I shared this statement with Starr, he was skeptical that anything would change.
“They never come right out and say, specifically, what customers will be getting early access and when,” he wrote in an email. “It makes me wonder why? Like with the phrase Full Self Driving, Tesla wants us to project our hopes and dreams onto their words. But what they actually deliver may fall far short of our assumptions.”
Elon Musk: “Many decisions per unit time”
The frustrating experience of full self-driving customers like Starr provides a useful lens for thinking about Elon Musk’s unorthodox decision-making philosophy, which Musk explained in a revealing comment to the Wall Street Journal last year. It’s a quote I’ve featured in a couple of previous pieces.
Mr. Musk said his actions and rapid decision-making can be misunderstood as erratic behavior. “It is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate,” he said last weekend in a series of emails with The Wall Street Journal, “because obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.”
This approach makes a certain amount of sense when you’re running a startup fighting for survival. But Tesla’s mercurial treatment of full self-driving customers illustrates how Musk’s approach can be counterproductive when it’s practiced by the CEO of a large company.