“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
Oh, so it turns out that “genius billionaires” only exist in comic books?
Nobody could have seen that one coming!
He and Trump deserve each other.
I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.
His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.
More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.
Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.
I would like them to try to go to Mars this coming January. I am sure with enough fuel one of Elons rockets can get it moving in the right direction, they can wing everything else as they go.
I don’t think he would go submarine diving, it would be more in-character for him to try and fail a moon vacation.
Over Promise under deliver
First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn’t do it either.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.
Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it’s either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you’re in traffic because you know it’ll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don’t. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I’m watching it close. It can’t navigate city streets, but neither can FSD…
TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it’s bad and getting worse, not better. I can’t believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that’s why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better.
It’s almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.
Buckle up folks, we’re going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.
Since the first time I heard about FSD I’ve been wondering why Tesla (or others) doesn’t set up a system where drivers opt-in (no opt-in by default) to sending anonymized driving data to help train the model. The vast majority of the time, it’s probably modeling OK driving. At least no accidents. But the shitty driving and accidents are also useful as data about what to avoid.
Maybe they’re already doing this? But then I wonder why their FSD is getting shittier rather than improving. One would think with more driving data, good and bad examples, would only help.
I would be shocked to discover they’re not already doing this.
That’s what they do except for the opt in part.
Not enough paid humans sorting between which data is examples of good behaviour and which data is examples of bad behaviour. Not saying that is what is happening as we don’t even know if there is data, but that would be the weakness in that plan when run the way it would be run if instituted by elon.
It works well on freeways. I still don’t use it much on city streets except for the occasional shits and giggles. It has issues on non-divided highways and refuses to drive at my set speed limit.
I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
I agree. VWs’ drive assists are absolutely stellar. It’s just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that’s essentially it. It’s not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don’t seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a “zone” with margins left and right.
So if you are on the inside of your “zone” and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don’t really trust it with high speed turns.I absolutely love my adaptive cruise control, I use it all the time. I have a hybrid and it does a much better job of keeping the engine from kicking in than I do. Thankfully with Honda I can use it everywhere not just highways. It’s been my absolute favorite “new” thing to have in a car!
I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it’s not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.
Though they can induce another type of driver fatigue - it makes driving boring as heck as you don’t need to do anything. I can’t use line keep myself as it just makes me really tired and I’ll risk falling asleep.
That’s totally fair. I think it depends on the person and what they have going on that day. I remember, or rather do not remember, getting to work in my last car because my brain did the driving task while I was lost in thought. When I’m using lane keep, I feel like I’m hyper aware of what the cars around me are doing and what road changes are coming that I need to manually adjust for. I could see that getting very boring late at night or on empty highways though. Everyone is different and that’s just another element of the equation that the car doesn’t account for.
My wife’s hybrid Rav4 has it and loves it. I wish my Prius had it. I’m glad Toyota apparently knows how to do it right.
GM’s Super Cruise is absolutely great. It only works on highways though. I recently drove for 5 hours through three states without touching the gas, brake, or steering wheel once. Except the little nub on the steering wheel to adjust the set speed.
Sounds like it’d be nice if you had real control over the car’s software, and you could roll it back.
This… also makes me a little more weary driving around Teslas in traffic.
Some of us Tesla drivers refuse to use any of their bullshit auto-driving software (I don’t even use lane assist anymore) because of bad experiences so hopefully most of them are just driving normally. Which I do admit may not spark much confidence given how terrible some drivers are.
Fully agree. The sort of good news for driving around them is that most of my frustrations come from it being overly cautious and almost getting rear-ended because it decided to stop for a green light or some other odd decision. It’s rare to have it interact poorly with someone that is driving predictably. Like, cut it off without a signal and you have introduced something has not already accounted for. Driving alongside it on the highway, it sees you and knows where you are. But people are unpredictable and it only takes one mistake.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.
Sounds like it still drives like a teenager!
Which of course is terrible since it should be improving over time.
I guess he’s talking about other upgrades like radar sensors and all the stuff that people told him from the get go.
they changed it so it’s either full self driving all the time or not
No they didn’t…you can still activate regular adaptive cruise control without any of the FSD nonsense.
Yes, I said that…
So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD.
No you don’t need a second profile for that, you can just pull down once on the right stalk to enable regular adaptive CC with lane keep instead of twice for FSD. This second profile requirement is complete nonsense.
The “pull once for FSD” that removes the regular adaptive CC is a voluntary option in the settings, you can just disable that. If you have that enabled and don’t like it, that’s your fault not theirs.
Is there a reason you are so defensive?
I just find misinformation really annoying. Like, There’s loads of reasons to hate on Tesla and Elon Musk, there is no need to make up stuff that isn’t true, it just takes away from the actual lies and issues and drown out valid criticism.
Can’t wait for the supporters to come out and gas light buyers instead: "uh, well of course they couldn’t. He didn’t lie you just don’t understand tech…!
I work in IT and people that think like that can fuck themselves. “What do you mean Meta lied by selling your data to a company you didn’t know about. Maybe you should just have never trusted Meta.”
Stupid fucking boot lickers.
To be fair to Meta, they did tell you they might do that. They didn’t lie. They just told you in the find print of an already convoluted and arcane legal document that they know most people would never read, fewer would understand, and no one could do anything to change.
So unlike Tesla, where they did lie about FSD’s capabilities, and that is at best false advertising but probably actually fraud, Meta at least had a thin veneer of plausible deniability against accusations of being liars when they sold your data to unknown third-parties because they did tell you about it, you just needed a law degree to understand what they were telling you.
salesmanship
You mean false advertisement
Nah a judge determined it was just " puffery " and obviously he didn’t really mean self driving
Right. Good salespeople listen to customers, not try to sell them something they a) don’t need or b) won’t work as advertised.
Worse than that. Fraud. He’s scammed people out of millions.
Or just fraud
It’s pure grift.
Still no LiDAR.
It’s got something way better: LieAr
“Trust me, you just need to buy more compute for your car. We’ll figure out reliable driving by sight someday.”
I’m happily using all the sensors my car offers, even if I’m pretty ok with driving by eyesight. Better sensors that can easily see through fog/rain/snow/whatever? Hell yeah, give them to me.
Elon Musks make engineering orders of magnitude more difficult. Those poor Tesla neoslaves
They were on the path of self driving cars till Musk pulled the plug on the LiDAR and opted for cameras (cost less). He is directly responsible for why autopilot isn’t so auto.
We’ll fix that, the car will be driving fully autonomously 2018, promise!
I personally don’t think it’s a matter of more sensory input. Whilst Lidar wouldn’t be a bad thing, autonomous cars are just a problem current technology can’t solve.
Have you seen Waymo?
It is to some degree. Lots of other new cars have lane keeping assist and automatic braking, BLIS, adaptive cruise control etc, and so on with more capable sensors and can for the most part drive without input from the driver better than the Tesla models with ultrasonic sensors or simply cameras. In fact the ones that rely solely on cameras absolutely do reportedly perform worse in testing. Musk was insistent that they could cheap out on the types of sensors used in order to make more profit and it shows. I don’t think it’s that tech cannot handle self driving currently. I think that it’s a numbers game where the firms attempting it want to do it as cheaply as possible while promising the moon and stars which they can’t deliver on a cheap budget. Vehicles like Ford’s (Blue Cruise) use all kinds of sensors including radar and GPS to allow for handsfree (not self driving) and it does work. The proofs of concept are out there in the world, but the costs to go from something like that to fill self driving just doesn’t make it feasible for the average car manufacturer.
The vehicles with a higher automated driving rating than Tesla use a more diverse range of sensory inputs. While it may not make fully autonomous driving, it very clearly would have made Tesla closer to it based on the fact that cars that use things like lidar in addition to cameras surpassed Tesla’s rating many years ago.
I think there needs be car 2 car ( or even car 2 human f.e. in smartphones and wearables ) introduced before self driving cars is capable to exist. Of course until real AI is introduced. We’re nowhere near the human capable ai
Put glue on your accelerator.
It is. The machine learning algorithm has maxed out its parameters because Elon decided to get rid of redundancy. The machine learning algorithm had to invent new algorithms to do what redundancy would have easily done in far fewer lines of code. They are out of compute power BECAUSE they decided to cheap out and removed redundancy.
Surprised if he is truly capable of even this level of self reflection.
Billionaires also fall into the Gartner hype cycle. And convincing a billionaire there’s an opportunity to automate workers out of a job is a quick way to get an injection of cash.
It’s going to be generations before we are actually able to automate most labor. But long, long before that AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
How would this play out? The shareholders pay off the current CEO to implement an AI-CEO and step aside?
I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.
McKinsey, Deloitte & co will provide that service.
Maybe. Or companies that are AI ran will outcompete the existing ones.
But how does an AI come to run a company in the first place? A CEO has to be replaced by an AI. What does that process look like in the first place?
My Leaf can handle itself on the highway and it’s the perfect amount of self driving that I want. I also didn’t need to pay half the price of the leaf for the privilege.
Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY
You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.
Good. I don’t trust them dern robuts.
No, there won’t be endless series of recalls and free upgrades for everyone until they finally achieve it as promised, somewhere between 2050 and 3050…
You have to live with it as it is.
Forever? No. Only for as long as you live.
