Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-08/tesla-lawsuit-full-self-driving-technology-failure-not-fraud

by elorant • 4 years ago

197 368 4 years ago

MichaelZuo9• 4 years ago

It might be a plausible argument for stuff sold 6 years ago when the future was uncertain. But in 2022 I'm not seeing how it's plausible as an excuse. Considering it's still being sold and marketed as 'Full self driving'.

Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of. If at the very least due to the fact that a very commonly encountered condition, construction work, effectively requires an AGI to navigate.

Which would imply the best achievable self driving is around level 3 autonomy.

jakelazaroff• 4 years ago

Pretend you don’t know anything about the different levels. You’re just a random person looking to buy a car. What does “full self driving” sound like to you?

MichaelZuo9• 4 years ago

It would sound like it could handle all commonly occurring road conditions.

Such as rain, fog, snow, construction work, tunnels, bridges, downtown intersections, bike lanes, etc...

I wouldn't expect it to handle rare phenomena such as hurricanes, hail storms, a collapsed bridge, etc...

amelius3• 4 years ago

Depends if you read the fine print.

rootusrootus7• 4 years ago

The only time I touch the controls on the car is to input the address I want to be driven to.

derac2• 4 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but I offer a couple of counterarguments: A. Most people who bought this knew what it was, that it was unfinished, and they were funding the research (which is a public good to some extent) B. There should be some degree of burden on the customer to research what they are buying, especially with a claim as extraordinary as "Full Self-Driving"

ProAm• 4 years ago

Sounds like fraud.

CPLX2• 4 years ago

It means a car that can drive in a reasonably broad range set if expected traffic conditions and has no failure mode that is unsafe at any point.

It’s that second part that is the important one. If the car can’t drive in heavy snow or roadless areas or whatever that’s fine, as long as it’s able to recognize and avoid those situations in a graceful way, like refusing to engage with them and parking in a safe area, suggesting the trip be cancelled, that kind of thing.

The current approach of it works, but when it doesn’t it will say “just kidding take over for me now” while going 70mph towards the side of a truck is definitely not that.

hakre• 4 years ago

What does “full self driving” sound like to you?

Well, that I would be fully self driving the car? ^^

ncr100• 4 years ago

I feel our government should regulate this kind of speech more aggressively, to boost the safety of the public.

Announcing a capability, and importantly MUSK acting as a widely-recognized public figure like it's ready - shaming every other fledgling competitor, before it's ready, is amounting to GASLIGHTING.

A speculate this is what we should expect from the company-owner's notable, controversial personality type.

Immediately upon receiving "Full Self Driving Beta", in the 201x's, some Tesla drivers CRASHED because they turned ON the lane-keep-assist and then left the car to do the driving .. straight into the back of a stopped truck, or a split open lane-divider, and died.

To reiterate, this mis-leadership has resulted in death.

I suspect that CEO personality-type is a salient factor in whether a company should be allowed to operate. Should we stop this .. should we prevent actual Companies operating? Not just a group of hobbyists but tax-paying, licensed, employing companies. It is OUR government. We can stop this predictable travesty of gaslighting -> good-faith belief -> bad outcomes.

slg8• 4 years ago

Musk is a charlatan, but why do people act like it is common to buy $40k+ cars like picking up some gum in the checkout aisle? What the features name sounds like is not the only factor here. People don’t buys cars with that lack of thought. What the salespeople say, what the marketing material says, what the manual says, what the CEO says in public, what the feature feels like during a test drive should all matter more. This isn’t a defense of Tesla. I think it still leaves an argument for fraud, but we really need a better argument than the same “the name sounds misleading when you first hear it” argument that has been repeated for years now. If that was all it took, we all would have sued cellphone companies for their “unlimited plans”.

haliskerbas• 4 years ago

Will not crash into stationary objects, bicyclists, pedestrians, or the cars in front of me. Will not randomly halt the car either.

ncallaway• 4 years ago

Pretending I knew nothing about the levels “full self driving” sounds like it means I could safely nap in the back seat of the car while en route .

mch82• 4 years ago

To me, “full self driving” has always meant the car has a built-in cab driver so I can work while the car drives to my parents for dinner 6 hours away, then sleep while the car drives me home. I’m not sure how the phrase “full self-driving” could mean anything other than that.

Edit: When I pre-ordered a Model 3 Musk’s promise at that time was literally “press a button and your car will work as a taxi to earn money when you’re not using it”.

throw7• 4 years ago

I know what I want. I want to tell my car to go the the shop and get serviced, come back, and take me home after work. After a flight, have it pick up my inlaws at the baggage claim exit. etc...

wpietri6• 4 years ago

It sounds a lot like something Musk promised in 2019: "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes."

The most generous interpretation is that Musk is delusional and out of touch with his company and his technology. But I think it is more accurately described as bullshit ("speech intended to persuade without regard for truth") or a lie (making knowingly false statements).

I think the interesting question is whether that legally ends up being fraud in the context of a civil suit. Whatever was going on in Musk's head (deluded, reckless, or lying) it seems like Tesla as an entity should have known that the cars were not actually self driving and that customers could reasonably think they were getting self driving.

secretsatan4• 4 years ago

Basically, steering wheel is optional, it wasn’t going to happen, it’s been clear for years

6510• 4 years ago

Getting drunk every day.

JustSomeNobody• 4 years ago

Great, so we're back to "unlimited data" doesn't really mean "unlimited" but, just a large amount, but not really a large amount, because...

Words have meaning. Full self driving, to anyone who isn't a nerd who likes to pick shit apart, means the freaking car will drive all by itself as if a human were driving it, maybe even better.

bagels7• 4 years ago

It's pretty amazing how much money Musk's lies helped companies like Uber to waste on this stuff.

mannykannot• 4 years ago

I don't like how this whole thing has played out, but to be fair, I think fear of missing out over something that would, if successful, be an existential threat to Uber is probably a rational response.

jleyank• 4 years ago

What about non California weather? I imagine radar might handle fog, but driving rain as in Carolina or serious snow as in Canada?

bsagdiyev3• 4 years ago

The rain can be no joke here. I've had to stop driving and pull over for the first time in my life after moving to NC. The rain was too heavy to see more than 10 feet or so.

kennend33• 4 years ago

I've wondered the same thing about FSD in Canada.

Often we Canadians drive on roads where we cant see the lines due to snow/ice. We sort of form our own "lanes" based on where we think the lines SHOULD be.

How would a FSD Tesla handle a situation where everything is white?

Even Humans who are use to these conditions still fail: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/opp-responds-to-numerous-crashes-o...

angry_moose2• 4 years ago

Forget rain and snow, they can't even handle non-California roads yet.

I had the misfortune of taking a rental on narrow mountain roads and it actively attempted to kill us twice. While moving over to pass an oncoming car, the lane keeping feature decided we were too close to the shoulder and started steering us back into the oncoming car.

After pulling over, regaining my composure for a few minutes, and figuring out how to disable it; somehow it activated again on a different day and it happened again.

cameldrv3• 4 years ago

What do you mean? Waymo and Cruise have already deployed level 4 vehicles.

MichaelZuo9• 4 years ago

Can you link to the source claiming that?

rurp2• 4 years ago

If current Waymo counts as level 4 then we need sub-levels for them to have much meaning. They are a long way from supporting something like autonomous driving geofenced to all major US cities in all weather conditions. That big step up is still far behind true level 5, which can handle poorly maintained roads and all of the other weirdness one can encounter outside of major first world cities.

sidibe2• 4 years ago

I think 2016 it was already widely known by the industry it was going to be very difficult compared to what Tesla was saying, especially without the handicaps they imposed on themselves. No one with knowledge took Tesla's timeline seriously

Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of

I've always been pessimistic about FSD but I think it'd pretty hard to reconcile that quote with actual L4 deployments by Waymo and Cruise

umanwizard• 4 years ago

actual L4 deployments

In some of the cities with the easiest driving conditions in the world.

kaczordon2• 4 years ago

They also have remote operators standing by who jump in when the car gets confused tho…

paulcole• 4 years ago

Considering it's still being sold and marketed as 'Full self driving'.

The problem is that this isn’t what they do. They are extremely careful in their wording.

Go back through the archive.org backups of tesla.com/autopilot and watch how their wording changes.

Here’s what they say today:

Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.

Despite how you or any reasonable person reads it, Tesla can easily make the case that the cars (as sold today) do not have full-self driving available right now. The hardware in the cars does have the capability of allowing full self-driving at some nebulous point in the future (something that’s going to be very difficult to disprove).

The other thing the do is use Autopilot (capital A) as a branded feature that doesn’t mean anything like what autopilot (lowercase a) means to a reasonable person.

sudhirj2• 4 years ago

Saying you want to climb Mount Everest and not being able to get all the way to the top is failure, not fraud. The fact that Musk charged people to watch muddies the waters a bit, though.

qzw2• 4 years ago

How about charging $10k for the “Full summit of Everest Experience” when you’re still sitting at base camp? Is that fraud or just failure? Or maybe it’s ok because it’s beta?

rootusrootus7• 4 years ago

Or maybe it’s ok because it’s beta?

Definitely not. I sat down in my wife's new Model 3 to help her configure it to her liking, and I was surprised to see that autosteer is still listed as beta. Clearly the meaning of 'beta' has lost all meaningful definition.

philjohn2• 4 years ago

Putting up a doctored video demonstrating FSD to me seems like a massive fraud.

fbdab1035• 4 years ago

I am not familiar with the referenced video, but I thought Nikola [0] was in hot water (ie real legal trouble) for their video of an electric truck coasting down a hill.

[0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-...

SpicyLemonZest• 4 years ago

"Doctored" as a colloquial term covers a lot of things, some of which are massive frauds and some of which aren't. It's misleading for sure to have the car drive around a bunch and release only the best 3 minute segment. But as long as the car really was driving, I don't think it's fraud, any more than it's fraud for a restaurant to post only their most perfectly plated dishes to Instagram.

SCAQTony• 4 years ago

I would venture to say that attempting to climb Mount Everest and failing but saying you had indeed climbed Mount Everest would be a fraud. How many times did Elon Musk say he climbed "Mount Everest" or "we have a fully self driving car now" when Tesla didn't?

unyttigfjelltol• 4 years ago

More like, selling the Everest experience but failing to equip yourself with oxygen, climbing axes, etc., and not arranging for transport anywhere near the mountain. Instead, travelling to a idyllic mountain retreat 500 miles away. And then watching a video on a big screen of someone climbing.

Definitely a contrast between the sales pitch and reality.

joering26• 4 years ago

Many people successfully climbed Mount Everest so this is not apples to apples.

Musk said it is economically insane to buy any other car, because in the near future they will update your Tesla with newest self-driving software, and you will be able to make at least $30,000 a year by using your car as a self-driving taxi. With Tesla at price-tag of around $60,000, he was advertising a staggering 50% annual rate-of-return.

If you want to make a similar claim, it would be like he advertised getting to the Mars (something hasn't been done before) and make it so cheap you be able to sale tickets to other people at huge discount and make profit that way but only if you buy his non-existing technology now.

omgomgomgomg• 4 years ago

If they call it a failure, yet still sell it, then it becomes fraud, doesn't it?

ilyt5• 4 years ago

It's fine to sell failure if you mark it that. Just nobody sensible will buy it

But doing it after people bought in, well...

trident5000• 4 years ago

This header is misleading. Lawyers are making a legal point, not a prediction on the tech or where it stands and certainly not saying "its a failure". They don't even have the technical insight to make that assertion.

philjohn2• 4 years ago

Doctoring a video though ...

FeepingCreature• 4 years ago

They're also not saying it's "a failure", they're saying "failure to realize a goal is not fraud". There is a strong semantic difference between "we have failed to realize the goal (yet)" and "we have failed at realizing the goal (permanently)".

0xbadc0de5• 4 years ago

I've owned Tesla's since 2016. At no time did I base my purchases on what the cars might be able to do in the future, only what they can do right now. Nor did I see any compelling reason to donate $10k - $15k to their R&D effort. The cars were compelling enough on their own merits and remain so. The FSD fiasco really does a disservice to what is otherwise a revolutionary car company producing excellent automobiles.

joering26• 4 years ago

How is Tesla revolutionary? We had electric cars (on Moon!!) in 1969

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle

bagels7• 4 years ago

The Tesla is slightly more comfortable, convenient, and I don't have to commission a whole Apollo program to get one.

alsodumb2• 4 years ago

We had social media before Facebook/instagram era too. Heck we had electric cars before gasoline powered cars became a thing.

I think it’s obvious at this point that Tesla was the first to bring commercial electric vehicles in production at scale, and the first to make it compete with ICE vehicles for the masses - well beyond the niche who’ve been using an electric car since Leaf era.

blisterpeanuts• 4 years ago

Unlike the Apollo LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle), you don't need a spacesuit to drive a Tesla. Plus, I think a Tesla has more range.

As an interesting aside, the LRV had non-rechargeable batteries (two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries with a capacity of 121 amp-hr, according to Nasa).

throwaway17772• 4 years ago

Yeah excellent aside from the subpar build quality and horrible service. The ev tech is the main part of a Tesla that was revolutionary. Unfortunately this is all irrelevant to the self driving fraud perspective and the multitudes who bought cars or more important stock in the company based on future prospects that Tesla advertised.

meling• 4 years ago

Agree with this and I also haven’t paid for FSD. Except at some point Tesla offered FSD along with a computer upgrade for about $1500. I took the deal. But I didn’t pay for FSD when I switched to Model Y. Interestingly, I’ve been able to turn on the FSD even though I didn’t pay for it.

qzw2• 4 years ago

You know, where Theranos went wrong was not selling some other thing and then tack on their “Full blood test in just one drop” thing as an add-on. Oh and making sure it’s labeled beta. That’s very important.

joering26• 4 years ago

Milton from Nikola would be better example in my opinion. You had him rolling a truck down the hill to show it works despite at the time it was still technology in development (company is still doing progress now). It still shocks me he is going to prison for that as a fraud when it was just a commercial. I don't know if you know - but classical trick in advertising food is using cigarette smoke instead of hot steam to show hot fresh food. Obviously steam would cover camera's lens and render image useless. Also most close-up food commercials have food made from rubbery guee, and not actual food because it shines better and "stays" fresh for longer than an hour when you want to do multiple shots for hours. How come McDonalds management is not facing prison like Milton is? Its because everyone knows commercial of a product does not equal to the same exact product you will pick up off the shelf and eat. Nobody at McDonald is going to jail because you attempted to sell people plastic guee covered with cigarette smell.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

No, McDonald’s execs don’t go to prison because they can actually deliver the product they advertise.

Between the statements “Here’s a burger you can eat it” and “here’s a truck look at it go”, only one is a lie.

alsodumb2• 4 years ago

You make it seem like the commercial was the only evidence used to prove that he committed fraud. He made statements, both in media and in legal documents, that proved in the court that he commit fraud.

notahacker2• 4 years ago

I suspect that if McDonalds' management were only pretending that they were opening new burger franchises to dupe investors and they'd managed to raise billions in funding by pretending a single mockup restaurant with a rubber burger and some city stock footage was a restaurant chain, they would be quite likely to serve jail time. But McDonalds is, in fact, entirely capable of making and selling burgers. Nikola is not capable of making and selling functioning hydrogen fuel cell powered cars, despite lying about already having that capability seven years ago when their stock soared.

Doesn't matter what consumers know about authenticity of advertising imagery, it matters that McDonalds investors aren't being lied to about the existence of the Big Mac and Nikola One investors were being lied to about the existence of the Nikola One's propulsion system. Which is why "other companies that aren't amongst history's biggest pump and dump scams also get creative with product images" was never going to be a viable legal defence for Milton.

mrtksn3• 4 years ago

If you look at the track record of Musk, you can see that he promises something futuristic and delivers something conventional but with improvements that's still desirable.

Haven't Holmes imitated Jobs but Musk, today she could have been a success story. She should have still promised all your tests from a single drop of blood and keep claiming that it's coming next year and deliver classical machines but with greatly improved usability, integration with the modern hospital management system and fart jokes. They even had a prototype that worked some of the time for some of the test, sell it at an outrageous price and warn the users that all the tests should be repeated on a traditional machine because this is a beta device.

Also She shouldn't have relied on people from the establishment for PR, she should have partnered with popular-science YouTubers. Just send them a machine to play with, they wouldn't know if the machine is any good - they will be grateful for having access to such a device and make it the cool way of testing your blood.

tenpies• 4 years ago

I think where we can all agree that Musk is a genius is in seeing where billions of public funds are going to flow, and then positioning himself to be in a position to profit.

That was a key difference between Theranos and Tesla/SolarCity.

Imagine if Elizabeth Holmes had gotten just a bit luckier with timing and had been around when the COVID pandemic occurred. Not only would she have launched a highly-futuristic COIVD test, but also received billions of funding with nearly no oversight. She almost certainly would have negotiated to receive proactive immunity from the government, like the vaccine manufacturers did.

watwut2• 4 years ago

Or he just does not delivers. It is not like there would be shortage of projects that fell down entirely.

perardi• 4 years ago

Well fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed.

Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.

chillbill• 4 years ago

People have attributed a lot of overinflated image to Musk and his effects and skills over the years, regarding Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies of his.

They still are doing so about this Twitter thing. It’s all a nothing burger.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

It must take a lot of time and attention to manage Elon. Perhaps Tesla will succeed a bit more while he is distracted.

justapassenger• 4 years ago

Tesla can. But TSLA won’t, and Elon spent last 10 years making sure that their stock market value and success as a company are deeply interconnected.

coolbreezetft223• 4 years ago

At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy.

Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also seem to be climate change / green energy skeptics, not convinced they will be gobbling up Teslas at quite the same rate as my demographic would.

gitfan863• 4 years ago

It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network.

The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option.

And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.

Mistletoe• 4 years ago

I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. It’s a shame, we loved our last Tesla but I can’t stand the thought of being associated with him. We were supposed to pick it up the week he made those tweets.

I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most of my life, I loved how economical it was to drive an electric car, I love technology, and I could afford a Tesla. I don’t know what his new demographic is but I don’t think they even can buy a Tesla or will. I wish him lots of luck. Based on my experiences in a small town, his new demographic buys dually trucks listening to alt right propaganda and lives check to check working in the oilfield. Or is on a very fixed income and is retired and stays at home afraid, watching Fox News, with their last car in the driveway, a 1997 Oldsmobile or Buick.

mandeepj• 4 years ago

I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then

For the same reason, I call him now - eww-Lawn!

w0m• 4 years ago

Seriously True. I bought my 3 in 2019; and my biggest hesitancy at the time was Musk being (insane) and tanking the company preventing me from keeping the car on the road long enough/resale value.

Today? I do <3 my car, but I'd likely not touch new one with a 10 foot pole; especially as a new customer and there actually being other EV Options available. It's distressing because Tesla does (mostly) what I want in a daily driver well.

wpietri6• 4 years ago

At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy.

I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at?

He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills.

Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck.

That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions."

So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...

[2] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-mu...

[4] https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

gumboza4• 4 years ago

He does run a cult.

My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion.

This is exactly cult behaviour.

I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK.

I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front.

Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.

treeman792• 4 years ago

Of course your option has nothing to do with him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter.

Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.

kenjackson• 4 years ago

You're lucky. My family (father, sister, etc) have pretty much fully outfitted themselves in Teslas, but hate Musk. They could stand him enough before, but now they are ready to move on to Lucid or anyone else really. I'm glad I never pulled the trigger -- Musk just always came across as extra creepy too me.

natch• 4 years ago

So instead you bought a car from a company run by people who are afraid to ever travel to the United States because they know they may be subject to personal prosecution for Dieselgate, which they so far evaded.

I mean I agree he’s super obnoxious, but if making car purchase decisions based on the virtue of company leadership, I would have called it a tie and bought the better car instead.

dotancohen2• 4 years ago

What is with this Cult of Elon? I really don't care who the CEO is, I love my Model 3. It costs me literally one sixth the cost per kilometer than my previous Nissan was costing, when comparing the cost of electricity and gas. And that's before considering that I haven't had to change the oil or do any other scheduled maintenance in the 35000 or so KM I've put on it.

And it's not just the price. My kids who previously couldn't stand long drives now want to go places, at first because of the glass roof but now because they love when I sqeeze them into the seatback with the throttle. It's car number 15 for me, and the best of any of them by far. Who cares about the CEO? I don't even know who the CEO of Nissan was when I had that, or Ford when I had that, or Renault when I had that.

fnordpiglet6• 4 years ago

Fired.

slg8• 4 years ago

Good thing that this publicly traded company hasn’t loaned out employees to other unrelated businesses which happen to be owned by their CEO. I’d that happened, I would worry about the distraction being more widespread than just the CEO.

electrondood4• 4 years ago

Employees at Musk companies have the freedom to moonlight, or even transfer entirely.

Tesla benefits from SpaceX materials engineering, for example. Tesla now effectively has access to a massive comms/PR engine, with far more reach than traditional advertising, without paying gatekeepers.

Ford spends $2B a year on advertising. Elon can reply directly to Tesla owners.

demarq2• 4 years ago

responsibly developed and marketed

It is not being developed It has been irresponsibly marketed as this is the entire premise of the class action.

It sounds like he is laser focused on impressive promises to lure investments into his money making empire.

alexcosan• 4 years ago

I'm very confident the whole comment by OP is of sarcastic nature

option• 4 years ago

his duty as CEO is to deliver value for shareholders. He has been doing OK so far ;)

watwut2• 4 years ago

I am genuinely convinced Tesla is better off when Musk is focusing on something else instead of managing it.

Tesla need Musks public charizma, his money, his connections and him bullying everyone who stands in a way. Sure, especially his ability to convince public about dreams is super key aspect. But, his management style and the way he runs things seems to be something company needs to protect itself from.

fbdab1035• 4 years ago

If only Madoff had tried this trick. He did not commit fraud against investors - he had really hoped to make them that much money, but he failed to do it.

rootusrootus7• 4 years ago

I think SBF is about to demonstrate for the world whether that strategy works.

sn41• 4 years ago

Hey, as long as you're embarrassed, it should be fine. /s

bobleeswagger• 4 years ago

Full fraud.

reiichiroh• 4 years ago

But Elon told me it was only six months away

superkuh4• 4 years ago

I welcome the public's acknowledgement that self-driving vehicles are completely infeasible for even the medium term future. It's just unfortunate that the trigger for this change seems not to be anything about snow, or the inability to replicate human flocking on buried/unmarked roads during winter, etc, but instead more about the current political fallout from Musk's take-over of Twitter.

BoorishBears8• 4 years ago

This is a weird amount of hubris for someone who either doesn't understand the goals of current work on self-driving cars or is just clueless about the field.

Tesla's attempts at self-driving capture absolutely nothing besides... Tesla's attempts at self-driving.

There are companies with realistic sensor stacks, not artificially imposing restrictions so they can pre-sell their results, actually focused on self-driving.

A true L5 vehicle is an impossibility because that'd mean handling the frozen tundra equally as well as rush hour in Mumbai, or a wildfire in California. And laypeople tend to really lean into that...

But for a realistic definition of L5, "feasibility" is low bar already proven by major players except Tesla. So to say "completely infeasible" kind of kills credibility of everything following it.

superkuh4• 4 years ago

Dismissing "snow" as something that happens only in "the frozen tundra" is fairly provincial. You'd be surprised by how much of the USA (and other industrialized countries) have roads and road edges mostly obscured by snow for weeks at a time multiple times throughout winter. There's a reason almost all autonomous driving tests are done in places like Arizona. And the ones done in winter settings tend to be absolute positioning based (ground penetrating radar maps, etc) or non-human vision modalities which don't actually match how human drivers flock.

ethanbond• 4 years ago

Tesla has been getting dragged for years for this stuff? It’d be way weirder if Man Does Bad Thing #2 should actually quiet Man Does Bad Thing #1.

He made himself the star, decided to be the villain, and reaps the reward of said villainy. Yes, everything is tainted by everything.

giantrobot2• 4 years ago

Musk's Twitter takeover is just an added layer of bullshit on top of the FSD lies. People have paid thousands of dollars for a "feature" that will run them into center dividers, trains, and children but disengage a fraction of a second before impact so it can't be blamed. Tesla also requires NDAs be signed to uphold service agreements and fights tooth and nail to keep FSD's failures out of the news. Meanwhile Musk is over promising the feature and saying it'll be done in a few months and it's the future of the company.

So you'd think if it was so important it would be his primary focus during his supposed 22 hours a day of work.

People can see the problems with FSD and then look over and Musk bought a fucking social media network to go play edgelord troll on. So it's a legitimate topic of discussion because the public is to believe FSD will be ready Real Soon Now™ and is super serial important yet it's obviously not the focus of the huckster that's been continually lying about it.

SpelingBeeChamp2• 4 years ago

NDAs for service agreements? What do you mean?

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Self-driving vehicles seem only feasible under one condition: you have isolated roads that allow no other motorized vehicles, no pedestrians, no bicycles, etc. In that case, a robust computerized system with built-in failsafes seems almost entirely plausible (although hacking-related takeover is definitely an issue).

Part of this is just legal issues - i.e. our legal system will hold human drivers responsible for fatal car accidents, via civil suits and/or criminal prosecution, but corporations are largely protected from liability (excluding special cases like Ford Pinto gas tanks etc.).

With self-driving cars, the corporation will always be held directly responsible, even if the relative safety risk is lower. It's similar to airplane disasters for that reason (i.e. airplanes are relatively much safer than personal vehicles, statistically speaking).

dathinab• 4 years ago

If you advertise a problem as already solved and just needs fine tuning and sell stuff based on it and continue with the lie even after there are clear signals of it likely failing then I don't think then it's a failure _AND_ fraud.

The fraudulent part is making absurd promised anyone with understanding of the topic knows you probably won't be able to keep. It is the part where you continue to push sells through this technology when it has shown to have problems.

Being optimistic is grate, but lying is still lying and ignoring facts is still ignoring facts.

kkfx• 4 years ago

Two notes:

- selling something as a commercial product, claiming it can do something that actually can not is not failure, is fraud. Failure is selling something stating it's an experiment "use at your own risk, the price is low because of that";

- try seeing our kind of "piloting automation": in air and see it's FAR EASIER, we are in liquid environment without constant very near constraints. A ship travel from A to B, sure it need to take care of eventual other ships, floating obstacles etc, but in the mean they are FAR LESS than "other cars on the road" and far away, no ships normally travel as near as a car with another. Similarly for planes where there is even a third dimension of limited movement freedom.

Long story short:

- ALL modern companies sell experimental cheap crap sold as finished high-quality product because the private research model IS A FAILURE, we need PUBLIC RESEARCH for public development where the private sector pick things to implement and sell BUT do not drive the research;

- ALL efforts to mimic something old with new tech is doomed to fail. Computers as featured-typewriters was an idiocy, similar try mimicking the physical office desk on a computer (see for instance old General Magic UI) and so on. People DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE and that's why keeping the old paradigm in the new tech spread well commercially and ultimately fails creating big disasters, that's why we need culture, witch means PUBLIC schools, universities, open to anyone for free, but we need to change to make evolution happen. We can't get FSD for cars, we can get for flying cars. We can't get flying cars we all dream since decades in modern cities built for cars on roads and so on. The public do the research for the sake of humanity not single cohort profits, spread the new knowledge via public schools, institutions, private sector push such change in the society and the market create the equilibrium.

KingOfCoders2• 4 years ago

Recently I've read lidar is in again, is this correct?

cypress66• 4 years ago

bhauer2• 4 years ago

Tesla never used lidar. They did use a low-resolution radar and dropped it because they felt it was holding back their vision-based development. At the time, Musk commented that radar was not useful unless it were higher resolution.

There have been credible rumors of an upcoming addition of high-resolution radar to the Tesla sensor suite, consistent with Musk's earlier remarks.

KingOfCoders2• 4 years ago

Thanks, I have not enough of a clue here.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Did it even fail, though? AIUI, they never claimed more than SAE Level 2, meaning that the driver must maintain full control at all times...

M4v3R• 4 years ago

It’s literally in the name - “Full Self-Driving”. They’ve been marketing this for years (probably still do).

vletal• 4 years ago

What?! The 2016 full-self driving video where Tesla drove from home to office was a fraud?!

I thought Musk got spoiled under the influence of his success. He might have been a bad apple all along. :(

throwaway17772• 4 years ago

The part that’s fraud is not whether it worked or not. The fraud is how it was marketed to the user.

ttul• 4 years ago

Who would have thought that a camera-only system would struggle to succeed where systems that leverage $20,000 LIDAR sensors and racks of specialized machine learning hardware have met with only limited success?

judge2020• 4 years ago

The problem is making decisions based on the correct road behavior - not often do they have a problem with actual detection, even in typical/regular rain.

cal5k• 4 years ago

This whole thread smacks of this type of cynicism - apparently a lot of tech people now really, really hate Elon Musk.

Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints. By sticking to one sensor type that contains all of the information theoretically necessary to make decisions they've simplified the problem.

They bet pretty big on this approach... including by making their own silicon. I don't know how anyone could really believe that they're not earnestly pursuing eventual "Full Self-Driving" capability, even though they may still be far from that goal.

What they've achieved thus far is really impressive. That took a LOT of work.

giantrobot2• 4 years ago

Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints.

That's a bullshit justification. Going to camera-only and trying to overcome that limitation with "AI" was hubris. All of the competition working on FSD realized cars need more and more varied sensors, not fewer. Humans use a variety of sensors between primary perception and proprioception to drive vehicles.

The biggest problem with camera-only is the system needs to recognize objects to understand them as road hazards. Humans don't need to recognize a thing in the road to think "don't hit that thing". It doesn't matter is an object in the road is a crumpled newspaper, a cinder block, or a cinder block covered in a newspaper, you avoid it all the same. Vision augmented with radar and LiDAR can help just say "that's a thing in the way" more reliably than vision alone. Glints from the setting Sun or windows aren't going to cause radar to think some solid object is no longer a solid object. A bad angle or odd shadow won't cause LiDAR not be able to pull an object from the background.

shrimpx• 4 years ago

This whole thread smacks of this type of cynicism

Both Musk stans and Musk haters go wrong when they conflate his companies with his persona. Tesla is obviously a highly innovative company, and will likely be Muskless at some point, and probably better for it. Then they can make more reasonable claims about FSD and not be under multiple investigations, including a criminal probe by the DOJ for misleading customers.

newaccount744• 4 years ago

That interview was a load of bullshit to justify the decision to stick with cameras.

The only reason why they picked cameras is because they are cheap, and they can put them in vehicles now, and promise they will be self-driving in the future.

Tesla saw that there is a huge demand for self-driving vehicles, so they decided to sell them, even though they don't have them. I wouldn't call that "earnest".

Veserv3• 4 years ago

Andrej Karpathy designed a system that is literally 1000x worse in miles between disengagements than the systems deployed by Waymo and Cruise. It reached that level more slowly than just about every other company in the space and is improving more slowly than other companies that are already tens to hundreds of times further ahead. For crying out loud, they have not even figured out “Do Not Enter” signs, school bus stop signs, and not running into children and strollers yet after literal years of development. His opinion on the subject relative to the real experts, who do use more thorough sensor suites, is worthless.

That Andrej Karpathy admits that they hamstrung themselves by focusing on BoM, development costs, and production logistics when they have received payment for and are currently shipping a defective safety-critical product demonstrates either their total reckless disregard for all established safety process or total ignorance. Neither of which is acceptable when doing regular engineering, let alone safety-critical engineering.

bagels7• 4 years ago

Tesla's lawyers state: "mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud"

They intentionally neglect to acknowledge musk's many specific claims that involved specific timelines, as opposed to the nebulous long term aspirations they allude to.

epgui7• 4 years ago

Claims about what will happen in the future and on what timeline are obviously speculative and best guesses at best. No reasonable person would interpret them any other way.

detaro2• 4 years ago

A reasonable person might come to the conclusion that they weren't "best guesses" though, but instead knowingly misrepresenting the situation.

bagels7• 4 years ago

"If you give me $10,000 today, tomorrow I will deliver your car" ... Three years later: "I'll deliver your car tomorrow"

joenathanone• 4 years ago

If FSD had been described as "a long-term, aspirational goal" I never would have purchased it, and I think many others would feel the same way.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

Is failure to meet a specific timeline any different?

cloudking• 4 years ago

FSD beta is fairly good, certainly better than the standard Autopilot. It's definitely not perfect, but so far for basic driving from point A to B it seems to work well. I can only see the tech improving as it gathers more data and feedback. It's a ML training data problem at this point, no?

mjhay• 4 years ago

Real FSD, where it is not necessary to have a human ready to take the controls at any time, isn't something you can just get more training data for. It's just that current ML methods aren't up for the task. Basically, it turns out you need to have something that can think, and ML is nowhere near that.

BoorishBears8• 4 years ago

That is what no one at all wants.

Tesla seems to be taking the big ball of ML approach, and that relies on a model that can practically think, and that in turn means you're essentially waiting on AGI. Which is ridiculous.

Instead you break down the problem that is driving. Throw pieces of ML at specific problems, like traffic light classifiers, but have a much more structured approach to the high level decisions that are made.

The benefit of this is that you gain clear introspection into why your vehicle is making the decisions it makes, and a direct way to influence them other than "throw in more data and hope next time it makes the right decision!"

The latter is how you kill people, and it's what Tesla has been doing so far.

Hint for other readers: Please read the comment if you want to write a reply to it.

Literally nothing was said about people wanting a car you can just get into, but of course the first reply didn't make it 2 sentences in before jumping to completely orthogonal conclusions to anything that was even remotely implied in this comment.

It just gets exhausting to have a conversation about a topic like this if you have to repeat every point 10 times over.

ProjectArcturis• 4 years ago

With about a million edge cases, yeah.

BoorishBears8• 4 years ago

FSD beta shows that Tesla is not working on self-driving.

They've frozen their sensor suite in place because Elon wanted to be able to pre-sell FSD.

The class of mistakes it makes demonstrate that Tesla is *willfully* marching into the local maxima problem: They're taking an approach that improves their actual product, AP, while sacrificing any hope of actually solving FSD.

Full-self driving and what autopilot actually does take two completely different approaches. AP needs to be able to gracefully handle control to a non-trained layman. Current L3/L4 vehicles that rely on a driver have trained operators ready to takeover while the vehicle thinks everything is fine, and they need to aggressively make decisions like no-go, while AP never no-gos.

For people who are in the self-driving field and are familiar with the approaches to perception and decision making (which I hope more of which will chime in here), FSD beta makes mistakes that are kind of like someone saying their robot can now feed you steak, and the robot starts by grasping the sharp end of a knife and cutting the steak with the handle. Sure you might make some progress getting mashed steak into your mouth, but the robot is cutting off its hand to do it. It's not going to result in much steak in your belly unless the robot's approach is completely reworked.

holmesworcester3• 4 years ago

It's shockingly good and definitely worth 20% of the value of a car, for me. Two main reasons:

1. Your body doesn't feel tired after driving, because besides the effort of a hand resting on the bottom of the wheel, your body can be completely relaxed the vast majority of the time.

2. When FSD is on, you can completely stop paying attention to navigation-related decisions. You still have to pay attention to driving and intervene sometimes (most interventions are just a tap on the gas to give the car the confidence to go, because it's biased to caution) but every decision about when and where to turn is completely taken care of for you. This frees up a lot of mental overhead when you're in totally unfamiliar territory, including overhead that, without FSD, would pull your attention away from driving, making you less safe.

I didn't get the magic of #2 until I used it on an unfamiliar drive home in New England backroads with lots of turns and realized I was paying attention to the road and my conversation with my partner, and none at all to where we were going. Then we were home.

The one non-ideal thing about FSD Beta right now is that it's really easy to lose it for an arbitrarily long period of time.

What happens is it's fairly easy to have your hand on the wheel on a straight stretch of highway and still get the nag. And there's a small but non-zero false negative rate when you wiggle the wheel to satisfy the nag but your wiggle is insufficient. And because it becomes so habitual and because the car beeps at you for other reasons too, there's a fairly high rate (at least for me) of wiggling to satisfy the nag and failing to notice that you didn't wiggle enough.

The odds are small but after months of long drives it's pretty easy to accumulate the 5 "strikes" that trigger loss of FSD Beta without violating the intent of the nag, i.e. taking your eyes off the wheel or the road.

holmesworcester3• 4 years ago

I'll also say that all of this value will probably be completely unapparent to someone who tries FSD Beta for the first time or infrequently, because like ChatGPT, FSD Beta is not a human-replacing AI that always gives you the right answer. It's a tool you learn to use, by building up a mental model of it over time.

The first time you use FSD Beta will be a lot more like the first time you drove a car in actual traffic, or the first time you drove with a student driver. You'll feel safe enough to keep doing it but it will be very unsettling.

But over time as your model builds of how it behaves, it becomes a tool you'll want to turn on in a growing number of situations. And you'll miss it.

The value will also be much less apparent to someone who does short (<1 hour) drives on familiar roads.

newaccount744• 4 years ago

I am a bit annoyed that people think "resting the hand on the bottom of the wheel" is enough.

Why can't people hold the wheel properly, with two hands, in ten-to-two (or quarter-to-three) position? If something unexpected happens, you can react much faster.

toss1• 4 years ago

>Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology may be a failure, Tesla lawyers admit — but it’s not a fraud.

But it IS a fraud when you state or imply that it is usable with capabilities X, Y, and Z, and it actually is not.

Merely calling it "Full Self Driving" is a very clear statement that the damn thing will drive itself, and do so fully.

1st DDG Definition: Full: "2. Complete in every particular."

So, if is supposed to drive itself. Moreover, Tesla & Musk claim this capability is complete in every particular, as in it does it itself, not requiring me to add any capability.

This FSD claim has been going on since like 2014, with "autopilot Hardware 2.0" shipping when Barack Obama was still president [0].

Yet we still have nothing resembling actual "Full Self Driving" - which would be get in the car, tell it where to go, and get there without touching any controls or worrying about errors.

It'd be one thing if it was promised last year and it was not quite here yet.

But this is closer to a decade and FSD is NOWHERE CLOSE to this capability. This is one of the biggest vaporware scams ever.

[0] https://insideevs.com/news/443886/tesla-autopilot-evolution-...

bagels7• 4 years ago

Tesla used to market this as "Full self driving hardware" on their website. They conveniently did not mention that you would also need the software, which still does not exist.

eternalban• 4 years ago

- But what really sets this product apart from others is its long-term, aspirational goals!

- You mean features?

- The problem with features is that they can also turn out to be bugs. Our innovation here was to do away with features.

- To get rid of bugs?

- That rights, to get rid of bugs: what sets aspirational goals apart from mere product features.

- But ..

- Product features can also turn out to be downright frauds. "This product features x" when it doesn't. Now that is fraud. But "this product aspires to x" and jeez, it fails to reach its goals. We're all human after all.

tibbydudeza• 4 years ago

A refund or credit of 15K for everybody who ordered it - simple.

epgui7• 4 years ago

The failure to understand the context of the quote is palpable in both the article and comments.

This is a standard legal argument used as a defence against allegations of fraud, and it’s not a judgment of how successful (or not) the product is. The only thing it means is “notwithstanding whether we’ve achieved our goals, we have been honest and well-intentioned”.

FireBeyond2• 4 years ago

we have been honest

Well, that's also the thing - internal docs and interviews have shown that Musk was well aware that "FSD will be here, this year", year after year, was not ever going to be true.

epgui7• 4 years ago

I must have missed that memo. Do you have a reliable source for this?

electrondood4• 4 years ago

Thank you. People here are just reacting to the headline and general dislike of Musk.

bhauer2• 4 years ago

It's really as bad as Reddit in here. I would expect better from a technical audience.

bananapub• 4 years ago

In its defense, Tesla lawyers said that “mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud.”

absolutely spectacular work from the lawyers

fnordpiglet6• 4 years ago

I’m been on the fsd beta for a long time now and I have to say it’s remarkably improved over the last year. If it continues to improve at this rate for another year it’s going to be pretty useful. I use it to drive around seattle (which is a difficult driving place with randomly followed infrastructure standards and randomly driving drivers and randomly parked cars) and it used to be a death defying gripping of the steering wheel and grabbing it out of bone headed moves while everyone looks at me askance to a relatively chill experience. Yesterday I needed to take it in for some fender work (my wife isn’t the best driver and I got fsd as a donation to self driving research in the off chance it’ll let her someday delegate driving to the car, but since that hasn’t happened yet I have periodic body work that needs to be done as she pachinkos through the streets). The Tesla service center is in an industrial area in an insane interchange part of I5 with crazy off ramps and strange turns. I always get lost. I let fsd drive door to door and it did it flawlessly. That surprised me, but after each update it’s been getting considerably better.

It still has flaws - it widens it’s place in the lane on every on-ramp which is annoying and weird road conditions can confuse it about what to do next. It sometimes doesn’t anticipate well the turn signals of someone changing lanes leading to people flipping me off for not giving them space. But all in all, given the state of adaptive cruise control 10 years ago, this is a remarkable achievement to put in a consumer grade vehicle.

lawn2• 4 years ago

That you're surprised that it managed drive door to door is telling. And not in the positive way you want to make it seem.

snek_case• 4 years ago

It's very different from the approach taken by Waymo and Cruise. Tesla's FSD uses vision only, and it's available everywhere in the US and Canada. The fact that it can complete most drives successfully (~90% of the time) without intervention in any city in the US or Canada is pretty impressive IMO.

The parent poster is right, I've been watching the progress and it's gotten probably 20 to 50 times more reliable in the last year.

holmesworcester3• 4 years ago

OP is talking about being surprised by steady progress to a major human achievement, one that could save a million lives for starters, but also one that in its mature state (where robots can visually interpret and navigate 3d space) unlocks even more labor saving automation than cars, busses, and trains put together.

It has the dark side of military uses, sure, but given how developed our tools for blind destruction already are, robots that can see the world will make a much bigger dent on the positive side.

Progress on this is genuinely exciting and people should let themselves feel that even if they don't like Elon Musk.

fnordpiglet6• 4 years ago

The fact you’re not surprised that a car can drive itself is telling. And not in the positive way you want to make it seem.

It’s magic man. You’re jaded, and have set the goal posts too far and likely increasingly far.

WRT delivery timing, who amongst us had delivered a complex R&D heavy software project on time? I’m not an Elon fan boy but I respect he laid out a vision and worked to execute on it. That he didn’t hit the mark with 100% fidelity doesn’t seem like an issue to me.

ghaff3• 4 years ago

I was in one a couple months ago. My friend likes it but was also clear that you have to pay attention to what it's doing because it makes regular mistakes.

manicennui• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but your wife should lose her license if she is truly that bad, and she should be required to take further training to get it back.

MontyCarloHall• 4 years ago

I wonder what her insurance rate is, and why it’s not so astronomically high that it causes her to reconsider her driving habits.

HDThoreaun• 4 years ago

Right, like driving isn't a single player experience. You are also a danger to everyone else...

fnordpiglet6• 4 years ago

Well, she’s never actually hit anyone. Just walls when she’s backing out of a spot.

dangerwill• 4 years ago

Seattle's road infrastructure is bafflingly bad and confusing for drivers. But it always seems wrong to me to assume that we shouldn't improve the infrastructure and make it more safe vs putting half baked self driving out in the real world to overcome it. I understand they want more data to feed into their ML datasets and the idea is that that will improve things over time, but we are sacrificing some number of lives for this data without knowing if a convergence point will actually be reached. And what you say at the end has lead me to actively avoid Teslas when I can, they make the road more unsafe for me while they are learning, not just their own drivers.

fnordpiglet6• 4 years ago

I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.

jerrytsai• 4 years ago

It's unlikely that the rate of improvement, however you estimate it, will continue at the same rate. This is a Pareto effect, with marginal gains ever more difficult to obtain.

And the edge cases FSD can handle will be impaired by the sensors they do (not) install. While they make a good point that sensor fusion can impair comprehension, the removal of radar makes it hard to avoid the edge cases most calamitous.

redox992• 4 years ago

I actually expect a nice boost of progress as the occupancy network is improved and used more by other parts of the software stack.

And I expect a fairly significant improvement when they release the HW4 hardware upgrade. Better cameras, and more processing are such "free" (as in effort, not money of course lol) improvements to their error rates. I'm surprised they got this far with their current hardware. If you've ever done real time computer vision, you know how hard it is to maintain decent performance (fps and latency) even on fairly beefy GPUs.

redox992• 4 years ago

Yep. After the last few updates, I went from a non-believer (you need LIDAR, vision only autonomy is at least a decade away and tesla fucked up going this route) to actually believing in 2 or 3 years we'll have a very nice and useful level 3 from Tesla, and that vision only is the right approach (because I want this to be affordable, not some tech only robotaxis have).

And I think by 2027 we'll have level 4 vision only.

pellucide• 4 years ago

I got fsd as a donation to self driving research in the off chance .

That's likely the reason majority bought FSD

nostrademons2• 4 years ago

I view self-driving cars (along with drones, ubiquitous encryption, and distributed manufacturing) as "post-WW3 technologies". The same way that atomic energy, computers, jet engines, and interstate highways were "post-WW2 technologies". These are things that could be done with current technology, but the current state of infrastructure & societal organization makes them uneconomical, and no single private firm has the market power needed to force through the social changes needed to drive adoption. However, they give a huge advantage to one side in wartime, where you are deliberately trying to kill people rather than avoid killing people. That gives the side who uses them the ability to win the war, which then gives them the political power to force through the societal & infrastructure changes needed for mass adoption. The war also gives the general populace widespread exposure to the new technologies, which makes them less scary to the winning side and drives political support for rearranging society to benefit from them (they still remain scary to the losing side, but they'll be dead).

We're at peace now, which makes self-driving cars kind of a non-starter. But that's not guaranteed to hold forever, even in the near future, nor is it even true in many places of the globe (witness Russia/Ukraine). It also may not be the point - remember that self-driving cars initially came out of a DARPA grant.

A lot of the technical problems with self-driving cars are easier to solve with widespread infrastructure changes. For example, you solve construction by mandating that construction diversions use smart traffic cones with a small transmitter that coordinates with the other cones in the area to signal which lane has priority, and then broadcasts that to oncoming self-driving cars. You solve pedestrians by having a proper street/road split [1], where pedestrians are banned from roads and cars are banned from streets. Heck, you can make the whole problem a lot simpler just by banning non-self-driving cars from roads.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad

idlewords• 4 years ago

If large infrastructure changes are in the mix, then the self-driving problem is trivially solved using a pair of metal guide rails. They also greatly increase the cargo capacity of the vehicle, a win-win.

nostrademons2• 4 years ago

There's still a product requirement missing there, which is the ability to get to lots of different places.

I think there's a lot of economic logic in a vehicle that can navigate easily constructed roads - without any smart devices embedded in them - and yet still needs metaphorical guiderails for the exceptions like construction zones and downtown populated areas. That still keeps road construction cheap (just asphalt and paint!) but gets you 100% of the way to where you want to be. If you add rails you need to lay them everywhere that a road is now, and you need switches at each intersection.

cma• 4 years ago

He said at the semi unveiling in 2017 that they could already do autonomous truck convoys. No they couldn't. That's fraud.

sidcool• 4 years ago

The argument is being taken out of context. Not saying that FSD is flawless. But Tesla isn't calling it a failure. They are saying it's not yet achieved. And it's a perfectly sane legal argument. Again, this does not mean Tesla is right here, just that the title is a misrepresentation of their argument.

crote2• 4 years ago

How long should they be given to deliver?

FSD was first sold 6 years ago. The FSD hardware has a warranty of 4 years. The average car lasts about 11 years.

Tesla no longer guarantees the functionality of the hardware, yet has failed to deliver the software. They are inching towards failing to deliver during the car's economic lifespan. Legally, would it be acceptable for them to deliver in 2032, when the first cars sold with FSD have long been scrapped?

csours• 4 years ago

Theranos isn't a failure, they just haven't achieved their goal yet.

You can read this any way you want. I do think that Theranos (or another company) may eventually achieve part of the vision of Theranos. Same for FSD.

leobg4• 4 years ago

I love these analogies. Like those people who didn’t buy Amazon stock in 2014 because they remembered WebVan. It’s internet. It’s shopping. They speak of the future. Hence it is exactly the same.

If GPT reasoned like this, you’d snicker about how it “just pretends to be intelligent”, would you not? :)

Animats• 4 years ago

Tesla's legal argument is not that it isn't fraud. It's that the Tesla purchase contract removes consumer rights and requires binding arbitration.

thordenmark• 4 years ago

Tesla cars are sold on the value as they are now. The potential features of the future are only an interesting possibility. It's not that different from any hardware/software on the market. Sure, Photoshop might have full self-driving AI that magically makes images for you someday (and Adobe does promise some big things), but people buy Photoshop for what it can do right now.

pcurve• 4 years ago

"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has several investigations open, including a probe into why Teslas seem to disproportionately crash into emergency vehicles parked on the roadside. The agency has set no public timeline for a determination."

I wonder if this is the case of the U.S regulators turning their blind eyes to the problem as to not jeopardize Tesla's standing in the global EV market, much the same way FAA dragged its feet on grounding 737 MAX.

I'm still baffled as to how there has been no meaningful punitive action taken against Musk for all the false claims he has made over the years.

ndsipa_pomu• 4 years ago

I'd guess that the 'free market' should apply punitive action by losing them customers, but that relies on customers having (or even wanting) accurate information. I guess they get round some of the issues by having the autopilot transfer control to the driver just before crashing and can then pin the blame on them.

11thEarlOfMar• 4 years ago

I'll buy the Full Self-Driving Driving software if and when my insurance comopany offers a discount for doing so.

Otherwise, the car is fantastic to drive without it. I could not care less about his antics.

lambda• 4 years ago

Advertising and selling a feature that you don't have sure seems like fraud to me.

If it's "the feature is nearly ready but just needs some polish" there's an argument to be made that maybe you were just being a bit too hopeful. But "years and lots of fundamental research away, and we're not even sure what sensor systems were going to rely on", that's just fraud. You're looking for early stage investors, not customer preorders, at that point.

blinding-streak• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/vhpOO

Blue111• 4 years ago

The failure was only to name it Full self-driving while it wasn't... easy failure to avoid...

lajosbacs• 4 years ago

As a former Tesla owner (one year ago), their claims are just ridiculous. How can Tesla talk about FSD, when they cannot resolve even simple cruise control on a street that is not a highway with a separator. More like FFS than FSD

maldev• 4 years ago

Tesla is a sham of a company. Not only the self driving stuff, but he's also building up his company to be like a giant, faceless tech company with customer support. Last week I was about to accept delivery of a Model S Plaid, I was on hold for an hour and 10 minutes with sales to even reach anyone, after hours of trying to find a number. I walked into the Porsche dealership and they pretty much were ready to bring out babes in bikini's and give me scotch. I know alot of people dislike Tesla due to their CEO, but the actual company is a giant fuckup and it's like talking to a faceless human.

In the mercede's dealership? They all drive mercede's, in the Honda dealership, they drive honda's. In the Tesla dealership? They drive super cheap, shitty cars, since they're effectively minimum, wage employees.

lcnmrn• 4 years ago

Why can't we have DriveGPT?

mikespb87• 4 years ago

"eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth"

robots can't follow this simple rule

therefore it's a failure

rurp2• 4 years ago

“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.”
Tesla workers later revealed that the video was fabricated, done in multiple takes, with the driving system’s failures removed, including a crash into a fence. The video remains on Tesla’s website.

Hah, despite all of the Tesla news I somehow missed that this video was a fake and that the car crashed into a fence while filming.

Zigurd• 4 years ago

A large factor in the valuation of Tesla is the notion that Tesla is not "just" a car maker. There used to be a good case for that: Tesla, by necessity, led the way in a more integrated electronics architecture for EV controls and infotainment. Self-driving looked promising. Breaking the dealer model in the US was very attractive to anyone who had a bad experience with car salesmen.

But, in the end, everyone puts their trousers on one leg at a time. Car OEM valuations will probably be higher than in the ICE age, and probably lower than $TSLA is today.

amelius3• 4 years ago

Advertising always had a fraudulent side to it, by not telling the whole story or showing an idealized version of products, but Musk is taking it to a whole new level.

wbsun• 4 years ago

As a software engineer, I simply can’t trust software to drive my car 65mph in highway traffic. I have a Model Y, but never bought the autopilot. Actually even if Tesla pays me $15k per year to ask me to use autopilot, I’d say no. It is not worth the risk of crashes. But it always surprised me when I see many software engineers here in Silicon Valley driving on freeways using autopilot while watching videos or napping on the driver’s seat. My coworker even let autopilot to fully drive along the cliff roads in Yosemite. What a big heart…

Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

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