I went into a Tesla dealership nearly 10 years ago to take a look at the cars, and the salespeople were telling me - in no uncertain terms - that the cars were fully self-driving.
I knew that was complete nonsense, because I knew people who worked on Tesla's self-driving software, but that's how Tesla salespeople were selling the cars.
10 years ago Tesla didn't even have Autopilot. All they had as far as I can tell was lane departure warnings, speed alerts, manual cruise control, some sort of of automatic parking, and low speed summoning on private property.
Could the dealer have been referring to the automatic parking or the summoning?
Autopilot launched in 2014. "Full Self Driving" has been offered as an upgrade since 2016. Musk has been saying that fully autonomous driving is just around the corner (1-3 years away) since 2015.
He's been saying it was just around the corner for a long time, but it wasn't until 2020 that FSD they actually made it available to a limited number of customers in beta.
They were selling FSD as an option all the way back in 2016. They were telling customers that it would launch imminently.
The pattern here is constantly hyping self-driving as something that is basically ready, and at the dealership I went to, they went a step further and claimed full self-driving was already a reality.
I knew that was complete nonsense, because I knew people who worked on Tesla's self-driving software, but that's how Tesla salespeople were selling the cars.