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Isn't this hackernews?? So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y" This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving car

Isn't this hackernews?? So many "but what if this and that and this..." & "and yeah let's see if it can handle X & Y" This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..." Don't we have to start somewhere?? Aren't there supposed to be a big user base here who understands that it's an evolutionary process - we build the plane before we build the rocket before we shoot people into space? Oviously the perfect self-driving car is still some way off, but I for one am thrilled this race is on!

Thrymr 10y ago
> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..." We don't know yet whether this is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars or the Newton of self-driving cars, a decade or more ahead of its time.
aerovistae 10y ago
I laughed out loud when I googled "tsla" after watching the video and the top headline in the news section of the google results was "Analyst doubts the new move by Tesla Motors." Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read: > However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.” It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market. These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla. You can't win.
- beambot 10y ago
  > Having the equipment ready and in action first... That seems to be Ms. Caldwell's point: Without the software or regulations in place, it's impossible to know if the "equipment is ready." I don't disagree with her on this one. (And I am long TSLA.)
  - aerovistae 10y ago
    The strategy Musk has clearly been using for a long time now with this is to put as much hardware and software into the field as possible, often even without the customers knowing it's there, and gathering vast amounts of data from it, and gradually forcing it into widespread availability and acceptance, all while letting the system learn and improve itself, which is a necessary step. He's doing what he does best: forcing a hard change on an established system. Autonomous driving not allowed? Well, we'll give them "Autopilot"-- make sure to keep your hands on the wheel! Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot! It just happens to have all the hardware needed to be fully autonomous, and Autopilot will "gradually gain new capabilities." Questionable? Sure. Best way to make an extremely hard industry transition? Almost definitely. It would be a chicken and egg problem if he didn't do this. Can't test the system extensively beyond the lab without regulations, can't have a system that doesn't meet regulations because it hasn't been tested enough yet. He's just sidestepping this dilemma.
    - beambot 10y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you. I like the move; I think it's smart. But saying it's an "autonomous car" because it has the sensors and computers just isn't so. When it gets the software, then it's an "autonomous car." To use GPs analogy to the iPhone1: If Apple had just shipped the hardware without iOS, it wouldn't have been the iPhone.
      - aerovistae 10y ago
        That I agree with, yes. But he always stretches the wording. It's his version of advertising, and frankly I prefer it over dancing hamsters.
      - 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago
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- artursapek 10y ago
  Nobody would be developing mass-market self-driving cars right now if not for Musk.
  - olentangy 10y ago
    That's ridiculous. My 2+ year old Mercedes self drives on the freeway quite nicely. They do require I keep my hands on the wheel, but other than that, it's doing the driving. Other manufacturers aren't simply responding to Elan.
    - sliken 10y ago
      I've read comparisons between the Mercedes and Tesla. It wasn't even close. Even through the comparison was with 2 versions ago of the hardware (the single camera) and at least one major software revision ago. Car and Drive has the details.
  - radiorental 10y ago
    dude, tesla isn't even on the list.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History
    - artursapek 10y ago
      It is on the list, and notice I said "mass market" vehicles. No other manufacturer, even today, has as many autonomous cars on the road as them. And the ones that do exist are not as advanced as Tesla's. These other car companies have had so much more time and resources, and they have not pushed the way Tesla has.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
        Because Tesla needs to make a lot of money, very quickly. The other makers are already big, and can afford to play it safe. Tesla has to keep risking everything in silly marketing tricks. They'll cool down in a few years (or disappear).
- vkou 10y ago
  > It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. It's probably because there is a substantial gap between what Musk spins, and reality. Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing. Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
  - drcross 10y ago
    >what Musk spins, and reality. The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning. When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.
    - vkou 10y ago
      I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks. Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
      - denzil_correa 10y ago
        > Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.
- woodpanel 10y ago
  > It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time. I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.
  - ddon 10y ago
    Could you provide couple links to videos of other cars driving like this and looking for parking without the owner :)
    - aerovistae 10y ago
      I too would like to see these videos.
      - woodpanel 10y ago
        It's not just self-driving cars. It's features like autonomous parking, lane-assitance, cruise control that automatically keeps the distance to the car in front of you and the like. Stuff like that has been repeatedly hailed by HN'ers as revolutionary when Tesla introduced it. Neglecting that other companies had those features for years. Whenever Tesla is the topic it's almost guaranteed every negative comment on HN will be downvoted (I just see that right now with my comment above. It's constantly gaining and losing me karma). Besides that, the self-driving Tesla isn't news. That is the joke here. It's a press release that gets frenzied on HN's #1 spot.
        lonewolf_ninja 10y ago
        True. In a way this is kind of analogous to how Apple 'fanboys'/users behave when new features are introduced in iPhones but have already been present in Android for many years prior to that.
- fitzroy 10y ago
  No surprise since Edmunds makes money off of everyone except Tesla (no advertising, no dealers, no comparison shopping that converts to lead gen). "How does Edmunds make money? Edmunds sells advertising to marketers who have contextually relevant messages for site visitors. Also, car-shoppers who visit Edmunds have the opportunity to request price quotes from dealers and providers of insurance, financing and extended warranties. Edmunds is paid by the automakers, dealers and other service providers for the lead referrals." http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html
  - Alupis 10y ago
    Or, how about Edmunds observes car resell values and is predicting whatever Tesla puts in cars today, will not maintain it's resell value (relative to other vehicles in it's class) tomorrow since this market aspect is going to move rapidly before it "gets it right". The resell value may be less than a comparable "normal" car, and there's the risk that some government regulation makes all the technology in a Tesla today obsolete or illegal to use in the future. (and I believe Tesla quietly killed their promise to artificially inflate resell values by footing the bill themselves a while back) Some people naturally won't care about resell value - of course, others will.
  - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
    My anecdote: I discovered Edmunds because of their review of first Tesla sedan. It was for me, a technically inclined but nevertheless technically naive reader, the best car review I've ever read.
- dschiptsov 10y ago
  Time to re-read Atlas Shrugged? Remember the complains about Colorado?) They will always say such things.
  - simplemath 10y ago
    Never is a good time to re-read Rand.
    - dschiptsov 10y ago
      Any argumentation?
      - sqeaky 10y ago
        Apparently, it is very detached from reality. I cannot judge for myself having not read them yet. The only people who suggest them are people who I do not respect (rich assholes or people who think they should be rich assholes) or people I not do not know mixed with people insulting them.
        dschiptsov 10y ago
        OK, I will try, given that I am mere a poor asshole. The classic literature (and Atlas without any doubt belongs to so called modern classic) much like classical music, is a complex and highly artificial phenomena. The word for referring to a piece of art is artifact. In the case of classical music there is absolutely no objective criteria to judge symphonies. It is possible to compare the pieces of music, and lots of pseudo-intellectual assholes do it for living, but it will be nothing but a joggling with a metaphorical jargon. Nevertheless, one almost always could distinguish some fragments from this or that piece of classical music which he likes for some not very articulable reasons. Bach, arguably, composed most of such sources of a beautiful fragments, Mozart is the second, etc. These notions could be applied to literature. Like a symphony, a big novel, even a small poem, cannot be judged by a single criteria, but some parts of it we might find delightful and beautiful. The question, as it is in the case of classic music, is who is the reader (or listener). In case of Atlas Shrugged, there are too many to count arguably beautiful parts (majoring in physics and philosophy is one of them), fragments or even passages, which appeals to the mind of modestly educated reader. The best personages she created were, ironically, not the central, heroic and positive, but all the crooks and weaklings, mediocrities and minor idiots. This, perhaps, is why Rand is hated so much. As a student of philosophy, Rand got most of the philosophic and economic aspects right. Indeed, her Hegelian professor is a true masterpiece, her bureaucrats are convincing, James Taggard is remarkable. Her main characters are overloaded with virtues.) Certain naivety of the plot - the miraculous alloy and especially the perpetuum mobile, for which the book has been criticized so often by idiots, actually are mere nuances. The real story is about focus and persistence, accepting the challenges, adapting and evolving and never giving up - all the postulates of a sound moral philosophy, which goes back to ancient Greeks. No one takes the plot of Atlas seriously. She is also right that the motivations which drive us should be simple and pure (the Greeks, again), should be grounded in our human nature (shaped by evolution, constrained by biology) not in some abstract nonsense, dogmas, fleeting fashions, or even social norms. Rigid social norms are always reflect the ugliness of urban societies. While her main characters are rather angular and clumsy, the driving forces behind them are clearly recognizable and proper. Let's not blame Rand for this angularity. I could do it for hours, but I think you got the idea. Good literature requires a "good" reader to be able to appreciate what is behind the words in a sentence.
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  If we're continuing the iPhone metaphor from the GP, note that Apple is almost always late to a market segment. When the iPhone was released, Windows CE had owned the smartphone segment for years. The iPod was hardly the first hard drive mp3 player. Apple Watch wasn't the first smart watch. Etc etc etc. Apple makes good products, not innovative ones. It is not at all unthinkable that someone else will release a better self driving car after Tesla, and win marketshare.
  - woodpanel 10y ago
    Continuing that path I'd say: Tesla gets software right. Way better than what I've seen in other cars. But what stops that iPhone metaphor for me is Design, Materials and Finish. Apple Products look and feel like luxury. Where as Tesla only achieves that on the software side - and in your pocket.
    - jkchu 10y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if most people disagreed with your notion that Tesla cars do not look luxurious.
      - StRoy 10y ago
        They only look luxurious from the exterior, the interior is really pitiful for the price when compared to a samely priced car from, say, BMW.
      - roel_v 10y ago
        At the risk of sounding like a nationalistic asshole, Teslas look very American - i.e., a mix of cheap and tacky. Put a 5 series bmw next to it - two different leagues really. I want to root for Tesla, and I'd buy one if I could park it somewhere where I could charge it, but I don't think they're doing great in the looks department, especially not to Europeans.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    The iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard, allowing for a much more functional screen in a convenient form factor, right? I recall it seeming like a non-trivial difference at the time, and clearly a game-changing one.
- cpwright 10y ago
  > Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market. So I think it might be from an investment standpoint; just think of Tivo they made the DVR, but once others saw what they were doing there are plenty of other DVR choices and Tivo didn't win the category. Tesla might be forging ahead and blazing the trail for others, who will actually capitalize on it. I think that the Tesla brand is sexy enough that they'll maintain their niche (as Tivo has to some extent), I'm not sure if that will translate into investment returns.
  - ssharp 10y ago
    Tivo lost because cable/sat went digital and it made a lot more sense to integrate the DVR into the digital receiver than it did to have a separate box that required using a CableCARD. I'm pretty sure most people don't even know what a CableCARD is. When Tivo was a simple as plugging in the analog coax signal from your cable or antenna, it made a lot of sense. But once the signal from the cable company needed digital decoding, it hurt them, despite Tivo having a better UI.
  - spyspy 10y ago
    It's not a horrible comparison, but the barriers to entry between an electric car (+entire charging network) are much higher than a DVR. First mover advantage digs a bigger moat.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      The stakes are higher and the margins are smaller. First mover advantage either digs a deeper moat or a trap for yourself. (Vercingetorix vs. Julius Caesar at Alesia.)
    - taeric 10y ago
      Meh. The advantage you will want in the vehicle space is who is the "most mover." Production pipelines will be a huge asset for big players.
    - mycall 10y ago
- dghughes 10y ago
  >It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. I see the opposite Musk seems to be the new Steve Jobs people are crazy over him and seem to think he can do no wrong.
  - boznz 10y ago
    He does do wrong, but they are minor annoyances to the things he does right.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  Very grateful to misunderstandings like this. It had caused Tesla and several tech stocks to be severely undervalued in the market. At 40$, I knew Tesla was worth 140$. And sure enough it started to go up suddenly mostly because of media coverage. Traditional car investors look at certain tried and proven market indicators to judge stocks. When new tech comes along, they don't know what to think. So they think here and there like in this case. The real value in bringing self driving tech here is to provide cool features to the buyer, not necessarily bring the stock of the company up. If investors do not know how how to place value on this, I only shrug.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  I look at Tesla as the exception to a lot of rules. I agree with you here-- launching hardware which not only is a value add to users but also Tesla data teams, is so far ahead that this seemed like a dumb comment. That said, if some company had manufactured bluetooth hardware last year way in advance of the release and full spec, I would argue that it was a pretty bad move. Clearly this is not a perfect analogy, but it should illustrate that this can seem counter intuitive. Building in the cost of beta tech that doesnt fully work and is not legal is a huge gamble. I just wouldn't personally bet against tesla and for the reasons i outlined; it is likely the right call
irq11 10y ago
This is an area where it's easy to be too credulous. If you want "iPhone 1 of self-driving cars", Google has been tooling around in them for a while now. They do a great job under ideal conditions, on a sunny day. The future already happened! It simply isn't enough to post a video of a car driving in light traffic on a beautiful, California afternoon. That isn't what makes the problem hard. Mess up with your video-based system in the dark, or in bad weather, or...lots of people will die. This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release. (Which, not incidentally, is why they haven't released anything other than a video.)
- aws_ls 10y ago
  This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. I myself paid several customers a penalty/reimbursement, when because of our website, they suffered. And I am sure there are websites/apps which are more critical. Second: You are assuming, they have done a half-assed job and hurrying to release. If you look at the earlier thread[1], several people have explained, how Tesla has 100s of millions of kms of their customers driving footage, using which they have trained the AI/ML algos. So I won't be surprised if these cars can do well enough in the dark. Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of self driving cars, recently has taken a turn to self driven cars just using cameras and AI. In his own words[2] he says, that we humans also just have our two eyes, so cameras should do the job well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfEFnYxej8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfEFnYxej8 (Audio is bad for upto 20 minutes, then its Okay) Edits: 100s of millions of kms of their customer can't --> can
  - vkou 10y ago
    > First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. The impact of that, terrifying as it may be, is still significantly less then the impact of a self-driving-but-buggy vehicle into the side of a semi.
fnbr 10y ago
> Isn't this hackernews?? This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- lost_name 10y ago
  Just for fun, have a look at the comments about the iPod announcement: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50... There's always people with something to say.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    In all fairness, the initial iPods were nothing to write home about and, as I recall, iTunes didn't even run on anything except Macs--then a rather niche hardware platform. Of course, iPods improved relative to the competition but it was really the iTunes store and Apple's ability to fundamentally change how music was sold that really had the impact.
    - Bud 10y ago
      This sounds like the perspective of someone who didn't actually use early iPods and definitely didn't use Sony Discmans and Walkmans and other predecessors. Because folks who actually used all that stuff know that the iPod was a quantum leap, even in its first few generations. 5GB of storage, MUCH better battery life than any competing device of any kind, and FireWire 400 felt fast enough back then that it was like actually being on fire.
      - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
        Indeed. I had a walkman in the 80's. I still remember not being able to walk too quickly with my discman. As soon as the ipod came out, I bought one for my girlfriend as a birthday present. She has never used any other system for listening to or acquiring music since. It obviously switched to the smart-phone, but still...
jsingleton 10y ago
MVPs are of course great and I think this will be huge, but this is a safety critical piece of kit. There is a big difference between having your phone crash and having your car (literally) crash, into something solid.
psyc 10y ago
Randos casually dismissing the brilliant and highly accomplished? That's exactly Hacker News, in 2016.
freehunter 10y ago
Yeah but the first-gem iPhone couldn't kill people. A poorly-built car easily can. I like Tesla, just pointing out why people are right to demand they get it at least as good as humans before pushing it to market.
- waqf 10y ago
  > the first-gem iPhone couldn't kill people Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.* *Joke; in fact Israeli security services invented it in the '90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash). Also there aren't reported fatalities from Note 7 explosions.
  - AlexandrB 10y ago
    > Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology. This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D
    - gruturo 10y ago
      > This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D To be fair, Apple got there first, although I doubt they're proud of it, and probably they were not the absolute first. A very small number of iPhone 4 (or was it 4S?) had defective batteries which caught fire. What Samsung can claim an absolute first for, though, is providing replacements which are just as dangerous.
- spectrum1234 10y ago
  It also couldn't save people's' lives...
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Yes self driving cars could save lives, if they're working properly. That's literally what we're talking about. If they're working as good a humans, good. If they're working better, they're saving lives. If they turn into oncoming traffic like the Tesla did in the video, they can kill people. A first-gen iPhone couldn't save people, but a first gen auto-driving car can certainly kill a lot of people if the software isn't working right.
grecy 10y ago
Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays. What I find really interesting about Tesla (and SpaceX and HyperLoop) criticism is that people think it will fail for what it doesn't do, instead of focusing on what it does do. What they don't realize is that all products in history that got hugely successful didn't do a ton of stuff initially. They just did some things really well. Early washing machines were noisy as hell and got unbalanced all the time. But who cares? they washed clothes and everyone wanted one. Early TVs were massive things with fussy screens and only in B&W. The first iPhone was extremely slow and only had EDGE. But rather than focus on what all of those things don't do, you only need to realize they do something really well, and that's why they are a huge success. Even if the Tesla can't drive itself too well in heavy snow, or if the range is crap in really, really cold weather - WHO CARES? There are still tens of millions of people on earth that will lap them up because of the list of things they do so well. Products don't fail or succeed because of what they don't do. They fail or succeed because of what they do do.
- planteen 10y ago
  I agree this attitude is common on HN. But is it really a recent development? Engineers are skeptical by nature. I feel like engineers are especially skeptical of marketing and "idea" people.
  - mturmon 10y ago
    It is not a recent development. Sometimes an early attitude correction can divert the still-growing thread into more constructive comments.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays. I see things differently. Anyone who criticized Theranos was met with the same reaction, "Everyone on HN is so negative!" But the questions were valid. Look what happened. The same thing is occurring with Tesla. Yes, there is fantastic work being done, but many people here can't separate marketing from the real world. It's shocking, frankly.
jazzyk 10y ago
>That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 With iPhone 1, people's lives were not at stake.
Angostura 10y ago
> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! ... and if you look back at the launch of the iPhone you'll find the response is roughly the same. A healthy degree of scepticism.
mstolpm 10y ago
My opinion might not be popular here, but when I studied computer science, there was a big discussion about the ethical aspects of our job. Especially, I had the opportunity to speak with Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum [1] a couple of times, who always remembered me that users don't know what we as programmers, technicians and scientists know about the limitations of a solution. So we have the duty to ensure that our solutions don't harm and don't fuel unreasonable expectations. From the Wikipedia article [1] about Joseph Weizenbaum: "His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom." So, asking "but what if ..." in a responsible way should always be a big part of any innovation. Just shouting "hey, we are hackers, lets innovate and be open" isn't always responsible. As a bonus, there's a great archive [2] about Joseph Weizenbaum with audio and film clips for anyone interested. Most of the site and the documents are in german unfortunately, but some transcripts are available in english as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum [2] http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html
- tim333 10y ago
  Yeah but there are ~1.25m road deaths per year. The bigger ethical risk is not innovating quickly enough.
jdietrich 10y ago
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." — CmdrTaco
hacker_9 10y ago
What is with all these meta posts on HN recently by people who think they understand HN, and then need to tell everyone that they are not fitting into their idea of HN? And why are you comparing iPhones to self driving cars? That's like comparing paper airplanes to commercial airliners. Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted.
- duderific 10y ago
  > Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted. Are you not simultaneously advocating and decrying the exact same activity?
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    That's funny, but it's not quite accurate. There's a difference between a) saying that certain viewpoints don't belong here, and b) saying that comments which say that certain viewpoints don't belong here don't belong here. It's like there are three positions: 1. Certain viewpoints or comments should not be allowed. 2. Everything should be allowed except comments which say that certain things shouldn't be allowed (i.e. tolerant of everything except intolerance). 3. Everything should be allowed. #1 is intolerant, #2 is an attempt at enforced tolerance (which is necessarily intolerant in itself), and #3 is actual tolerance. It seems to me that the real problem is that meta discussions are frowned upon on HN, but there is no designated place to have them instead. So whenever someone starts one, they face the risk of censure-by-downvote.
    - ilostmykeys 10y ago
      You're thinking too hard.
DocTomoe 10y ago
> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..." Differently from mobile phones, cars actually have the capacity to go horribly, horribly wrong. This is not something to have a "let's fix it in public beta" Approach on.
saiya-jin 10y ago
yes and no... if cellphone is imperfect, at most it can cause inconvenience (let's ignore Note 7 topic for now), if car's driving is imperfect, it can easily kill not so low amount of people we are geeks, many happy to be early adopters (aka testers), but try to explain this to average middle class joe who sees this and thinks it's already there in point of perfection, no mistake possible. I just hope for Tesla that they delivered an outstanding technology that will just work, too much at stake with it. For now, respect to engineering team behind this!
tw04 10y ago
A buggy iPhone results in a frustrated user. A buggy self driving car results in a dead user, and possibly dead innocents. Not the best analogy...
ulfw 10y ago
The iPhone couldn't kill people just because it had issues left and right due to the software not being quite yet up to par. A cellphone isn't a car. There is a reason why people expect a LOT more perfection when it comes to trusting your life to a machine.
blhack 10y ago
Step 1) Get Haters Step 2) Get paid
tvural 10y ago
The difference between this and the Iphone 1 is that the technology is not there yet for fully autonomous cars, and it's unclear you can get there just by trying really hard and spending lots of money. Fully self-driving cars wouldn't just have to stay in their lane on the freeway, they would have to make the decisions during edge-case driving situations that a human would. That means knowing to slow down when a ball rolls across the road, reading people's hand signals, responding correctly when a police car tries to stop traffic on the freeway, etc. I'm not sure how you even begin to handle cases like that. Our driving situation was designed for humans, so you would have to make the algorithm "think like a human" and understand all our wierd idiosyncrasies. So far, machine learning has had very little luck with trying to similate human decision-making. What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.
obastani 10y ago
It's not at all the same -- self-driving cars can risk the lives not only of the passengers, but of innocent bystanders. Several commenters have pointed out problems such as rain, snow, darkness, etc., but there are more fundamental problems. For example, self-driving cars based on machine learning may be susceptible to adversarial attacks that cause the car to behave unpredictably [1,2]. How will self-driving cars know how to react when things go wrong, e.g., the stop light is broken? What about construction? I'm not saying humans react perfectly in these situations, but self-driving cars are rule-based, and have zero ability to adapt to unanticipated situations. I'm not arguing that Tesla shouldn't push forward. However, I believe that so far, Tesla has demonstrated a lack of concern for user safety. Companies like Google, Mercedes-Benz, etc. have tech at least as good as Tesla's, but have been much more cautious about deploying it. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04435 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04435 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199
- koreyb 10y ago
  Autopilot v1 has already proven itself to be 2.5x safer (and climbing) than the average non-autopilot driver. 1 death in 230 million miles (so far) with Autopilot v1 vs 1 death per 90 million miles for non-autopilot.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    I'm fully supportive of self-driving vehicles, but arguments like this don't do the "pro-selfdriving" any favors. "Autopilot v1" miles are also largely on freeways and conditions favorable to the driving-assist features. The 1 in 90 million is comparing to all cars and not just other cars with driving-assist. I don't think many people would argue that driving-assist is more dangerous than without. The 1 in 90 million is across far more driving conditions, many of which are more dangerous than what the Tesla Autopilot is driving in. The comparison between the two isn't really a fair comparison and, in my opinion, is dishonest. E: In addition, picking any random model car may yield similar statistics. "Car accidents involving a Honda Civic per mile driven" is probably a lot higher than "Car accidents involving a Pontiac Firebird per mile driven". Because there are more Civics on the road... Firebirds may be in fewer accidents, but my money is on the Civic being a safer car.
Symmetry 10y ago
It's sort of like startups. 90% of potential world-shaking innovations fail but pretty much everything that changed the world looked risky at one time. It's important to be sensitive to both sides of the coin.
elchief 10y ago
I'm fairly convinced there are astro-turfers from the Big 3 on here for every Tesla article
mwfunk 10y ago
Speaking for myself, I really want self-driving cars to happen in my lifetime but I've become incredibly wary of the credulous attitudes seen in media hype, among the general population, and within the tech community amongst people who don't understand how hard (and possibly intractable) some of these problems are. If self-driving cars don't happen in my lifetime, it will be because companies piggybacked on the media hype too readily and shipped dangerously misleading technology to consumers before it's ready. A few CNN incidents later, et voila, no one's talking about self-driving cars anymore. The whole thing can grind to a halt just like that. Every overly enthusiastic, precocious CS undergrad who posts in forums about how incredibly inevitable self-driving cars are, and how it's basically a solved problem and a done deal, are helping to set up self-driving cars for failure by encouraging overly optimistic expectations. For people who care deeply about the technology, the possibility of a company like Tesla putting something out there before it's ready and potentially causing CNN incidents can be more alarming than no one putting anything out there at all. Maybe some people are being too negative and nitpicky, or maybe not, but I think that's where the negative attitudes come from. It's from people who want self-driving cars to succeed.
mark-r 10y ago
If we've learned anything about AI learning systems, it's that they require as much training data as possible. By putting the hardware in the cars now, Tesla can start gathering that training data on a scale that nobody else can dream of. Anybody who can't see that as a huge competitive advantage isn't well informed.
natmaster 10y ago
And in this case, it's even more important than just being the first from a market perspective. Being first here allows Tesla to acquire a ton of data for their ML to churn on. Data is the monopoly that makes tech companies like Facebook so valuable today. Facebook open sources most of their infrastructure, and anyone can copy their designs because they're fully public.
madaxe_again 10y ago
Yes, this is HN. What, you're expecting people to be enthusiastic and positive?! This is HN.
wcummings 10y ago
>This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! This says it all. Cars aren't phones. Cars can easily fucking kill people.

Thrymr 10y ago

> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..." We don't know yet whether this is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars or the Newton of self-driving cars, a decade or more ahead of its time.

aerovistae 10y ago

I laughed out loud when I googled "tsla" after watching the video and the top headline in the news section of the google results was "Analyst doubts the new move by Tesla Motors." Clicking on the article for humor's value, I continued to read: > However, Edmunds.com, Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell questions the value of purchasing a self-driving car before regulations catch up. Caldwell said that, meanwhile, competitors could introduce better solutions, potentially making Tesla’s hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.” It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market. These same people have written that Tesla will be left in the dust as its competitors beat it to the market because it can't keep up with their manufacturing, and thus being first to market is only an advantage if you're not Tesla. You can't win.

beambot 10y ago
> Having the equipment ready and in action first... That seems to be Ms. Caldwell's point: Without the software or regulations in place, it's impossible to know if the "equipment is ready." I don't disagree with her on this one. (And I am long TSLA.)
- aerovistae 10y ago
  The strategy Musk has clearly been using for a long time now with this is to put as much hardware and software into the field as possible, often even without the customers knowing it's there, and gathering vast amounts of data from it, and gradually forcing it into widespread availability and acceptance, all while letting the system learn and improve itself, which is a necessary step. He's doing what he does best: forcing a hard change on an established system. Autonomous driving not allowed? Well, we'll give them "Autopilot"-- make sure to keep your hands on the wheel! Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot! It just happens to have all the hardware needed to be fully autonomous, and Autopilot will "gradually gain new capabilities." Questionable? Sure. Best way to make an extremely hard industry transition? Almost definitely. It would be a chicken and egg problem if he didn't do this. Can't test the system extensively beyond the lab without regulations, can't have a system that doesn't meet regulations because it hasn't been tested enough yet. He's just sidestepping this dilemma.
  - beambot 10y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you. I like the move; I think it's smart. But saying it's an "autonomous car" because it has the sensors and computers just isn't so. When it gets the software, then it's an "autonomous car." To use GPs analogy to the iPhone1: If Apple had just shipped the hardware without iOS, it wouldn't have been the iPhone.
    - aerovistae 10y ago
      That I agree with, yes. But he always stretches the wording. It's his version of advertising, and frankly I prefer it over dancing hamsters.
    - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
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artursapek 10y ago
Nobody would be developing mass-market self-driving cars right now if not for Musk.
- olentangy 10y ago
  That's ridiculous. My 2+ year old Mercedes self drives on the freeway quite nicely. They do require I keep my hands on the wheel, but other than that, it's doing the driving. Other manufacturers aren't simply responding to Elan.
  - sliken 10y ago
    I've read comparisons between the Mercedes and Tesla. It wasn't even close. Even through the comparison was with 2 versions ago of the hardware (the single camera) and at least one major software revision ago. Car and Drive has the details.
- radiorental 10y ago
  dude, tesla isn't even on the list.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History
  - artursapek 10y ago
    It is on the list, and notice I said "mass market" vehicles. No other manufacturer, even today, has as many autonomous cars on the road as them. And the ones that do exist are not as advanced as Tesla's. These other car companies have had so much more time and resources, and they have not pushed the way Tesla has.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      Because Tesla needs to make a lot of money, very quickly. The other makers are already big, and can afford to play it safe. Tesla has to keep risking everything in silly marketing tricks. They'll cool down in a few years (or disappear).
vkou 10y ago
> It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. It's probably because there is a substantial gap between what Musk spins, and reality. Take Tesla 3 pre-orders, for instance. Tesla spins 400,000 pre-orders for a car that you might not receive in the next three years as the most amazing innovation in automobile manufacturing. Historically, there have been a few other companies that had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, where you would end up waiting years for your car to be built and delivered to you. Their names were Lada, Volga, etc. Soviet auto companies had the exact same problem Tesla has - inability to meet demand.
- drcross 10y ago
  >what Musk spins, and reality. The reality is that they are the first serious electric car company. A tiny enterprise that took on the old Detroit giants and is winning. When you see people putting down hard earned cash for something three years into the future, they are not being tricked, they are investing in disruption. He's such a terrible orator you couldn't describe him as a charlatan. It's his actions and people's wallets speak the loudest.
  - vkou 10y ago
    I'm not at all implying that the money will go poof. What I do mean is that inability to meet demand is actually an incredibly serious problem for a car manufacturer - one that's more closely associated with failing Soviet enterprises, regardless of spin to the contrary. Having three years of cars in your backlog isn't winning. Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Meanwhile, Detroit produces more cars then that in two weeks. Tesla might win eventually, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
    - denzil_correa 10y ago
      > Waiting three years for your car to arrive isn't revolutionary. Context : No other car manufacturer will have a comparable EV on the road in the next 3 years. I will take what Tesla gives me.
woodpanel 10y ago
> It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time. I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.
- ddon 10y ago
  Could you provide couple links to videos of other cars driving like this and looking for parking without the owner :)
  - aerovistae 10y ago
    I too would like to see these videos.
    - woodpanel 10y ago
      It's not just self-driving cars. It's features like autonomous parking, lane-assitance, cruise control that automatically keeps the distance to the car in front of you and the like. Stuff like that has been repeatedly hailed by HN'ers as revolutionary when Tesla introduced it. Neglecting that other companies had those features for years. Whenever Tesla is the topic it's almost guaranteed every negative comment on HN will be downvoted (I just see that right now with my comment above. It's constantly gaining and losing me karma). Besides that, the self-driving Tesla isn't news. That is the joke here. It's a press release that gets frenzied on HN's #1 spot.
      - lonewolf_ninja 10y ago
        True. In a way this is kind of analogous to how Apple 'fanboys'/users behave when new features are introduced in iPhones but have already been present in Android for many years prior to that.
fitzroy 10y ago
No surprise since Edmunds makes money off of everyone except Tesla (no advertising, no dealers, no comparison shopping that converts to lead gen). "How does Edmunds make money? Edmunds sells advertising to marketers who have contextually relevant messages for site visitors. Also, car-shoppers who visit Edmunds have the opportunity to request price quotes from dealers and providers of insurance, financing and extended warranties. Edmunds is paid by the automakers, dealers and other service providers for the lead referrals." http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html http://www.edmunds.com/about/faqs.html
- Alupis 10y ago
  Or, how about Edmunds observes car resell values and is predicting whatever Tesla puts in cars today, will not maintain it's resell value (relative to other vehicles in it's class) tomorrow since this market aspect is going to move rapidly before it "gets it right". The resell value may be less than a comparable "normal" car, and there's the risk that some government regulation makes all the technology in a Tesla today obsolete or illegal to use in the future. (and I believe Tesla quietly killed their promise to artificially inflate resell values by footing the bill themselves a while back) Some people naturally won't care about resell value - of course, others will.
- DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  My anecdote: I discovered Edmunds because of their review of first Tesla sedan. It was for me, a technically inclined but nevertheless technically naive reader, the best car review I've ever read.
dschiptsov 10y ago
Time to re-read Atlas Shrugged? Remember the complains about Colorado?) They will always say such things.
- simplemath 10y ago
  Never is a good time to re-read Rand.
  - dschiptsov 10y ago
    Any argumentation?
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      Apparently, it is very detached from reality. I cannot judge for myself having not read them yet. The only people who suggest them are people who I do not respect (rich assholes or people who think they should be rich assholes) or people I not do not know mixed with people insulting them.
      - dschiptsov 10y ago
        OK, I will try, given that I am mere a poor asshole. The classic literature (and Atlas without any doubt belongs to so called modern classic) much like classical music, is a complex and highly artificial phenomena. The word for referring to a piece of art is artifact. In the case of classical music there is absolutely no objective criteria to judge symphonies. It is possible to compare the pieces of music, and lots of pseudo-intellectual assholes do it for living, but it will be nothing but a joggling with a metaphorical jargon. Nevertheless, one almost always could distinguish some fragments from this or that piece of classical music which he likes for some not very articulable reasons. Bach, arguably, composed most of such sources of a beautiful fragments, Mozart is the second, etc. These notions could be applied to literature. Like a symphony, a big novel, even a small poem, cannot be judged by a single criteria, but some parts of it we might find delightful and beautiful. The question, as it is in the case of classic music, is who is the reader (or listener). In case of Atlas Shrugged, there are too many to count arguably beautiful parts (majoring in physics and philosophy is one of them), fragments or even passages, which appeals to the mind of modestly educated reader. The best personages she created were, ironically, not the central, heroic and positive, but all the crooks and weaklings, mediocrities and minor idiots. This, perhaps, is why Rand is hated so much. As a student of philosophy, Rand got most of the philosophic and economic aspects right. Indeed, her Hegelian professor is a true masterpiece, her bureaucrats are convincing, James Taggard is remarkable. Her main characters are overloaded with virtues.) Certain naivety of the plot - the miraculous alloy and especially the perpetuum mobile, for which the book has been criticized so often by idiots, actually are mere nuances. The real story is about focus and persistence, accepting the challenges, adapting and evolving and never giving up - all the postulates of a sound moral philosophy, which goes back to ancient Greeks. No one takes the plot of Atlas seriously. She is also right that the motivations which drive us should be simple and pure (the Greeks, again), should be grounded in our human nature (shaped by evolution, constrained by biology) not in some abstract nonsense, dogmas, fleeting fashions, or even social norms. Rigid social norms are always reflect the ugliness of urban societies. While her main characters are rather angular and clumsy, the driving forces behind them are clearly recognizable and proper. Let's not blame Rand for this angularity. I could do it for hours, but I think you got the idea. Good literature requires a "good" reader to be able to appreciate what is behind the words in a sentence.
sbierwagen 10y ago
If we're continuing the iPhone metaphor from the GP, note that Apple is almost always late to a market segment. When the iPhone was released, Windows CE had owned the smartphone segment for years. The iPod was hardly the first hard drive mp3 player. Apple Watch wasn't the first smart watch. Etc etc etc. Apple makes good products, not innovative ones. It is not at all unthinkable that someone else will release a better self driving car after Tesla, and win marketshare.
- woodpanel 10y ago
  Continuing that path I'd say: Tesla gets software right. Way better than what I've seen in other cars. But what stops that iPhone metaphor for me is Design, Materials and Finish. Apple Products look and feel like luxury. Where as Tesla only achieves that on the software side - and in your pocket.
  - jkchu 10y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if most people disagreed with your notion that Tesla cars do not look luxurious.
    - StRoy 10y ago
      They only look luxurious from the exterior, the interior is really pitiful for the price when compared to a samely priced car from, say, BMW.
    - roel_v 10y ago
      At the risk of sounding like a nationalistic asshole, Teslas look very American - i.e., a mix of cheap and tacky. Put a 5 series bmw next to it - two different leagues really. I want to root for Tesla, and I'd buy one if I could park it somewhere where I could charge it, but I don't think they're doing great in the looks department, especially not to Europeans.
- tempestn 10y ago
  The iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard, allowing for a much more functional screen in a convenient form factor, right? I recall it seeming like a non-trivial difference at the time, and clearly a game-changing one.
cpwright 10y ago
> Having the equipment ready and in action first is somehow a disadvantage by this argument, and now you're better off being later to market. So I think it might be from an investment standpoint; just think of Tivo they made the DVR, but once others saw what they were doing there are plenty of other DVR choices and Tivo didn't win the category. Tesla might be forging ahead and blazing the trail for others, who will actually capitalize on it. I think that the Tesla brand is sexy enough that they'll maintain their niche (as Tivo has to some extent), I'm not sure if that will translate into investment returns.
- ssharp 10y ago
  Tivo lost because cable/sat went digital and it made a lot more sense to integrate the DVR into the digital receiver than it did to have a separate box that required using a CableCARD. I'm pretty sure most people don't even know what a CableCARD is. When Tivo was a simple as plugging in the analog coax signal from your cable or antenna, it made a lot of sense. But once the signal from the cable company needed digital decoding, it hurt them, despite Tivo having a better UI.
- spyspy 10y ago
  It's not a horrible comparison, but the barriers to entry between an electric car (+entire charging network) are much higher than a DVR. First mover advantage digs a bigger moat.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    The stakes are higher and the margins are smaller. First mover advantage either digs a deeper moat or a trap for yourself. (Vercingetorix vs. Julius Caesar at Alesia.)
  - taeric 10y ago
    Meh. The advantage you will want in the vehicle space is who is the "most mover." Production pipelines will be a huge asset for big players.
  - mycall 10y ago
dghughes 10y ago
>It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down. I see the opposite Musk seems to be the new Steve Jobs people are crazy over him and seem to think he can do no wrong.
- boznz 10y ago
  He does do wrong, but they are minor annoyances to the things he does right.
nashashmi 10y ago
Very grateful to misunderstandings like this. It had caused Tesla and several tech stocks to be severely undervalued in the market. At 40$, I knew Tesla was worth 140$. And sure enough it started to go up suddenly mostly because of media coverage. Traditional car investors look at certain tried and proven market indicators to judge stocks. When new tech comes along, they don't know what to think. So they think here and there like in this case. The real value in bringing self driving tech here is to provide cool features to the buyer, not necessarily bring the stock of the company up. If investors do not know how how to place value on this, I only shrug.
vonklaus 10y ago
I look at Tesla as the exception to a lot of rules. I agree with you here-- launching hardware which not only is a value add to users but also Tesla data teams, is so far ahead that this seemed like a dumb comment. That said, if some company had manufactured bluetooth hardware last year way in advance of the release and full spec, I would argue that it was a pretty bad move. Clearly this is not a perfect analogy, but it should illustrate that this can seem counter intuitive. Building in the cost of beta tech that doesnt fully work and is not legal is a huge gamble. I just wouldn't personally bet against tesla and for the reasons i outlined; it is likely the right call

irq11 10y ago

This is an area where it's easy to be too credulous. If you want "iPhone 1 of self-driving cars", Google has been tooling around in them for a while now. They do a great job under ideal conditions, on a sunny day. The future already happened! It simply isn't enough to post a video of a car driving in light traffic on a beautiful, California afternoon. That isn't what makes the problem hard. Mess up with your video-based system in the dark, or in bad weather, or...lots of people will die. This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release. (Which, not incidentally, is why they haven't released anything other than a video.)

aws_ls 10y ago
This isn't web development. You don't risk lives with your beta release First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. I myself paid several customers a penalty/reimbursement, when because of our website, they suffered. And I am sure there are websites/apps which are more critical. Second: You are assuming, they have done a half-assed job and hurrying to release. If you look at the earlier thread[1], several people have explained, how Tesla has 100s of millions of kms of their customers driving footage, using which they have trained the AI/ML algos. So I won't be surprised if these cars can do well enough in the dark. Sebastian Thrun, one of the pioneers of self driving cars, recently has taken a turn to self driven cars just using cameras and AI. In his own words[2] he says, that we humans also just have our two eyes, so cameras should do the job well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfEFnYxej8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfEFnYxej8 (Audio is bad for upto 20 minutes, then its Okay) Edits: 100s of millions of kms of their customer can't --> can
- vkou 10y ago
  > First: Why do you always need to assume web dev is stupid. Or less impactful. Imagine a bank website showing 10,000 <your currency> less in your account. The impact of that, terrifying as it may be, is still significantly less then the impact of a self-driving-but-buggy vehicle into the side of a semi.

fnbr 10y ago

> Isn't this hackernews?? This level of negativity is typical for HN. Look at what happened when dhouston announced Dropbox- the second comment was about how any Linux user can trivially replace it for themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

lost_name 10y ago
Just for fun, have a look at the comments about the iPod announcement: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50... There's always people with something to say.
- ghaff 10y ago
  In all fairness, the initial iPods were nothing to write home about and, as I recall, iTunes didn't even run on anything except Macs--then a rather niche hardware platform. Of course, iPods improved relative to the competition but it was really the iTunes store and Apple's ability to fundamentally change how music was sold that really had the impact.
  - Bud 10y ago
    This sounds like the perspective of someone who didn't actually use early iPods and definitely didn't use Sony Discmans and Walkmans and other predecessors. Because folks who actually used all that stuff know that the iPod was a quantum leap, even in its first few generations. 5GB of storage, MUCH better battery life than any competing device of any kind, and FireWire 400 felt fast enough back then that it was like actually being on fire.
    - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
      Indeed. I had a walkman in the 80's. I still remember not being able to walk too quickly with my discman. As soon as the ipod came out, I bought one for my girlfriend as a birthday present. She has never used any other system for listening to or acquiring music since. It obviously switched to the smart-phone, but still...

jsingleton 10y ago

MVPs are of course great and I think this will be huge, but this is a safety critical piece of kit. There is a big difference between having your phone crash and having your car (literally) crash, into something solid.

psyc 10y ago

Randos casually dismissing the brilliant and highly accomplished? That's exactly Hacker News, in 2016.

freehunter 10y ago

Yeah but the first-gem iPhone couldn't kill people. A poorly-built car easily can. I like Tesla, just pointing out why people are right to demand they get it at least as good as humans before pushing it to market.

waqf 10y ago
> the first-gem iPhone couldn't kill people Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.* *Joke; in fact Israeli security services invented it in the '90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash). Also there aren't reported fatalities from Note 7 explosions.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  > Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology. This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D
  - gruturo 10y ago
    > This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D To be fair, Apple got there first, although I doubt they're proud of it, and probably they were not the absolute first. A very small number of iPhone 4 (or was it 4S?) had defective batteries which caught fire. What Samsung can claim an absolute first for, though, is providing replacements which are just as dangerous.
spectrum1234 10y ago
It also couldn't save people's' lives...
- freehunter 10y ago
  Yes self driving cars could save lives, if they're working properly. That's literally what we're talking about. If they're working as good a humans, good. If they're working better, they're saving lives. If they turn into oncoming traffic like the Tesla did in the video, they can kill people. A first-gen iPhone couldn't save people, but a first gen auto-driving car can certainly kill a lot of people if the software isn't working right.

grecy 10y ago

Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays. What I find really interesting about Tesla (and SpaceX and HyperLoop) criticism is that people think it will fail for what it doesn't do, instead of focusing on what it does do. What they don't realize is that all products in history that got hugely successful didn't do a ton of stuff initially. They just did some things really well. Early washing machines were noisy as hell and got unbalanced all the time. But who cares? they washed clothes and everyone wanted one. Early TVs were massive things with fussy screens and only in B&W. The first iPhone was extremely slow and only had EDGE. But rather than focus on what all of those things don't do, you only need to realize they do something really well, and that's why they are a huge success. Even if the Tesla can't drive itself too well in heavy snow, or if the range is crap in really, really cold weather - WHO CARES? There are still tens of millions of people on earth that will lap them up because of the list of things they do so well. Products don't fail or succeed because of what they don't do. They fail or succeed because of what they do do.

planteen 10y ago
I agree this attitude is common on HN. But is it really a recent development? Engineers are skeptical by nature. I feel like engineers are especially skeptical of marketing and "idea" people.
- mturmon 10y ago
  It is not a recent development. Sometimes an early attitude correction can divert the still-growing thread into more constructive comments.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>Unfortunately this is really common on HN nowadays. I see things differently. Anyone who criticized Theranos was met with the same reaction, "Everyone on HN is so negative!" But the questions were valid. Look what happened. The same thing is occurring with Tesla. Yes, there is fantastic work being done, but many people here can't separate marketing from the real world. It's shocking, frankly.

jazzyk 10y ago

>That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 With iPhone 1, people's lives were not at stake.

Angostura 10y ago

> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! ... and if you look back at the launch of the iPhone you'll find the response is roughly the same. A healthy degree of scepticism.

mstolpm 10y ago

My opinion might not be popular here, but when I studied computer science, there was a big discussion about the ethical aspects of our job. Especially, I had the opportunity to speak with Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum [1] a couple of times, who always remembered me that users don't know what we as programmers, technicians and scientists know about the limitations of a solution. So we have the duty to ensure that our solutions don't harm and don't fuel unreasonable expectations. From the Wikipedia article [1] about Joseph Weizenbaum: "His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom." So, asking "but what if ..." in a responsible way should always be a big part of any innovation. Just shouting "hey, we are hackers, lets innovate and be open" isn't always responsible. As a bonus, there's a great archive [2] about Joseph Weizenbaum with audio and film clips for anyone interested. Most of the site and the documents are in german unfortunately, but some transcripts are available in english as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum [2] http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html http://www.ilmarefilm.org/archive/weizenbaum_archiv.html

tim333 10y ago
Yeah but there are ~1.25m road deaths per year. The bigger ethical risk is not innovating quickly enough.

jdietrich 10y ago

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." — CmdrTaco

hacker_9 10y ago

What is with all these meta posts on HN recently by people who think they understand HN, and then need to tell everyone that they are not fitting into their idea of HN? And why are you comparing iPhones to self driving cars? That's like comparing paper airplanes to commercial airliners. Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted.

duderific 10y ago
> Honestly posts like these should be automod deleted. Are you not simultaneously advocating and decrying the exact same activity?
- alphapapa 10y ago
  That's funny, but it's not quite accurate. There's a difference between a) saying that certain viewpoints don't belong here, and b) saying that comments which say that certain viewpoints don't belong here don't belong here. It's like there are three positions: 1. Certain viewpoints or comments should not be allowed. 2. Everything should be allowed except comments which say that certain things shouldn't be allowed (i.e. tolerant of everything except intolerance). 3. Everything should be allowed. #1 is intolerant, #2 is an attempt at enforced tolerance (which is necessarily intolerant in itself), and #3 is actual tolerance. It seems to me that the real problem is that meta discussions are frowned upon on HN, but there is no designated place to have them instead. So whenever someone starts one, they face the risk of censure-by-downvote.
  - ilostmykeys 10y ago
    You're thinking too hard.

DocTomoe 10y ago

> This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! That's akin to saying Apple should have waited to release their phone until iPhone 7 "because of this & that & this..." Differently from mobile phones, cars actually have the capacity to go horribly, horribly wrong. This is not something to have a "let's fix it in public beta" Approach on.

saiya-jin 10y ago

yes and no... if cellphone is imperfect, at most it can cause inconvenience (let's ignore Note 7 topic for now), if car's driving is imperfect, it can easily kill not so low amount of people we are geeks, many happy to be early adopters (aka testers), but try to explain this to average middle class joe who sees this and thinks it's already there in point of perfection, no mistake possible. I just hope for Tesla that they delivered an outstanding technology that will just work, too much at stake with it. For now, respect to engineering team behind this!

tw04 10y ago

A buggy iPhone results in a frustrated user. A buggy self driving car results in a dead user, and possibly dead innocents. Not the best analogy...

ulfw 10y ago

The iPhone couldn't kill people just because it had issues left and right due to the software not being quite yet up to par. A cellphone isn't a car. There is a reason why people expect a LOT more perfection when it comes to trusting your life to a machine.

blhack 10y ago

Step 1) Get Haters Step 2) Get paid

tvural 10y ago

The difference between this and the Iphone 1 is that the technology is not there yet for fully autonomous cars, and it's unclear you can get there just by trying really hard and spending lots of money. Fully self-driving cars wouldn't just have to stay in their lane on the freeway, they would have to make the decisions during edge-case driving situations that a human would. That means knowing to slow down when a ball rolls across the road, reading people's hand signals, responding correctly when a police car tries to stop traffic on the freeway, etc. I'm not sure how you even begin to handle cases like that. Our driving situation was designed for humans, so you would have to make the algorithm "think like a human" and understand all our wierd idiosyncrasies. So far, machine learning has had very little luck with trying to similate human decision-making. What Tesla has done so far with "autopilot" is a big deal, but releasing a "video of a car driving itself" is the classic marketing trick with machine learning, where you cherry pick aituations in which your system does well, and most people don't second guess it.

obastani 10y ago

It's not at all the same -- self-driving cars can risk the lives not only of the passengers, but of innocent bystanders. Several commenters have pointed out problems such as rain, snow, darkness, etc., but there are more fundamental problems. For example, self-driving cars based on machine learning may be susceptible to adversarial attacks that cause the car to behave unpredictably [1,2]. How will self-driving cars know how to react when things go wrong, e.g., the stop light is broken? What about construction? I'm not saying humans react perfectly in these situations, but self-driving cars are rule-based, and have zero ability to adapt to unanticipated situations. I'm not arguing that Tesla shouldn't push forward. However, I believe that so far, Tesla has demonstrated a lack of concern for user safety. Companies like Google, Mercedes-Benz, etc. have tech at least as good as Tesla's, but have been much more cautious about deploying it. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04435 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04435 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199

koreyb 10y ago
Autopilot v1 has already proven itself to be 2.5x safer (and climbing) than the average non-autopilot driver. 1 death in 230 million miles (so far) with Autopilot v1 vs 1 death per 90 million miles for non-autopilot.
- Nadya 10y ago
  I'm fully supportive of self-driving vehicles, but arguments like this don't do the "pro-selfdriving" any favors. "Autopilot v1" miles are also largely on freeways and conditions favorable to the driving-assist features. The 1 in 90 million is comparing to all cars and not just other cars with driving-assist. I don't think many people would argue that driving-assist is more dangerous than without. The 1 in 90 million is across far more driving conditions, many of which are more dangerous than what the Tesla Autopilot is driving in. The comparison between the two isn't really a fair comparison and, in my opinion, is dishonest. E: In addition, picking any random model car may yield similar statistics. "Car accidents involving a Honda Civic per mile driven" is probably a lot higher than "Car accidents involving a Pontiac Firebird per mile driven". Because there are more Civics on the road... Firebirds may be in fewer accidents, but my money is on the Civic being a safer car.

Symmetry 10y ago

It's sort of like startups. 90% of potential world-shaking innovations fail but pretty much everything that changed the world looked risky at one time. It's important to be sensitive to both sides of the coin.

elchief 10y ago

I'm fairly convinced there are astro-turfers from the Big 3 on here for every Tesla article

mwfunk 10y ago

Speaking for myself, I really want self-driving cars to happen in my lifetime but I've become incredibly wary of the credulous attitudes seen in media hype, among the general population, and within the tech community amongst people who don't understand how hard (and possibly intractable) some of these problems are. If self-driving cars don't happen in my lifetime, it will be because companies piggybacked on the media hype too readily and shipped dangerously misleading technology to consumers before it's ready. A few CNN incidents later, et voila, no one's talking about self-driving cars anymore. The whole thing can grind to a halt just like that. Every overly enthusiastic, precocious CS undergrad who posts in forums about how incredibly inevitable self-driving cars are, and how it's basically a solved problem and a done deal, are helping to set up self-driving cars for failure by encouraging overly optimistic expectations. For people who care deeply about the technology, the possibility of a company like Tesla putting something out there before it's ready and potentially causing CNN incidents can be more alarming than no one putting anything out there at all. Maybe some people are being too negative and nitpicky, or maybe not, but I think that's where the negative attitudes come from. It's from people who want self-driving cars to succeed.

mark-r 10y ago

If we've learned anything about AI learning systems, it's that they require as much training data as possible. By putting the hardware in the cars now, Tesla can start gathering that training data on a scale that nobody else can dream of. Anybody who can't see that as a huge competitive advantage isn't well informed.

natmaster 10y ago

And in this case, it's even more important than just being the first from a market perspective. Being first here allows Tesla to acquire a ton of data for their ML to churn on. Data is the monopoly that makes tech companies like Facebook so valuable today. Facebook open sources most of their infrastructure, and anyone can copy their designs because they're fully public.

madaxe_again 10y ago

Yes, this is HN. What, you're expecting people to be enthusiastic and positive?! This is HN.

wcummings 10y ago

>This is the iPhone 1 of self-driving cars! This says it all. Cars aren't phones. Cars can easily fucking kill people.