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Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles prod

Kinda how Tesla advertises autopilot as a self driving car that's safer than human drivers? > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/

Judgmentality 9y ago
Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-fire-investigation https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...
- GW150914 9y ago
  I think if anything you’re overly conservative for thinking somone rather than many people need jail time for it. I would look up the line of people who made and supported the decision for that kind of fraudulent marketing and drag them all into court.
- earenndil 9y ago
  So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.
  - GW150914 9y ago
    If those people die because the car fails catastrophically, and predictably, rather than the usual reasons it would be news. This is not about 100% or “the perfect is the enemy of the good” or any bullshit Utopianism. This is about a company marketing a flawed product deceptively for money, while letting useful idiots cover their asses with dreams of level 5 automation that aren’t even close to the horizon.
  - Judgmentality 9y ago
    One person died from that accident. There are now at least 4 deaths where Tesla's autopilot was involved (most of the deaths in China don't get much publicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more). And the statistics do not back up your claim that Tesla is safer (despite their attempts to spin it that way).
    - Aqueous 9y ago
      This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-rates-by-40-government-finds-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this: In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406
        PersistentCough 9y ago
        I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.
  - rescripting 9y ago
    I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fine print you never read that says the safe-gun technology only works when you point the gun at a single person and doesn't work on crowds.)
    - Retric 9y ago
      Safer than human hardware does not imply safe. It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up. The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.
      - DennisP 9y ago
        But if you do happen to be an alert, cautious, and sober driver, it'd be unfortunate if Tesla's marketing led you to overly rely on Autopilot. Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.
        jacobush 9y ago
        Drunk, sleepy and reckless drives from an age bracket not normally buying premium sedans.
        heurist 9y ago
        Autopilot should not be accessible to drivers until their driving habits have been assessed and baselined. If autopilot is known to drive more safely than the individual human driver in environments X, Y, and Z then it should be made available in those environments, if not encouraged. That might not make an easy sell since a major value prop is inaccessible to many of the people who really want to use it, but it's the most reasonable, safest path. I also imagine that cars will learn from both human and each others' driving patterns over time, which (under effective guidance) should enable an enormous improvement in a relatively short period of time.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    > Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars false equivalency. you need at least compare per mile, at best by driver demographic since most tesla drivers are in the high income and maybe in the safety conscious bracket
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Many people also die when they fall from the stairs. But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you. Same if you push them down the stairs.
  - dghughes 9y ago
    Self-driving cars or Tesla autopilot?
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Jail, no? Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages. In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for. People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close. I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.
  - mrj 9y ago
    "That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time." Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.
    - sologoub 9y ago
      OP is probably referring to the fact that in wrongful death suits, society has put a very tangible financial number on the value of human life. This made it possible for corporations to make trade-off between profit and liability, giving the potential that someone could get enough profit to justify risking others’ lives. Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens. Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
      - 9y ago
- hacker11235 9y ago
  While I don't necessarily agree with how they've advertised it I think they are legally safe. All Model 3's DO have the HARDWARE to support full-self driving, even if the software is not there. And regarding the software, it has been shown to be about 40% safer than humans where it is used, which is what they've claimed.
  - stdgy 9y ago
    How do we know the hardware will adequately support full self-driving if it doesn't actually exist yet? That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.
    - tomp 9y ago
      Because humans can do driving with comparable (worse, actually) hardware. Superhuman reflexes mean that software with superhuman driving abilities can exist.
      - mhermher 9y ago
        Humans also have human brains, which are much more important to driving than eyes.
        hacker11235 9y ago
        This is the part that can be emulated in software. All you have to prove is that what ever platform/language you're using for the programming is Turing Complete, which is the case for almost all of the most popular languages.
        mhermher 9y ago
        So can I run Crysis on my TI calculator? I'm sure whatever platform/language is running on it is Turing Complete. I think you missed the point that the brain is also hardware.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Musk's statements, and Tesla in general, have gone to cultivating an impression that Tesla almost has self-driving. An impression that, okay, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that you can act like it is for most of the time. This impression is far enough from the truth that it's fundamentally dishonest, particularly when the response from Tesla after incidents amounts to "the driver is completely at fault here, we don't need to change anything" (in other words, their marketing says it's basically self-driving, their legal defense says self-driving is only at your own risk). In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.
- nojvek 9y ago
  US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising. Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR. The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens
ChuckMcM 9y ago
That is a much better example. With the twist that believing it can get you killed.
Rjevski 9y ago
Hardware. That’s the keyword, and it might very well be true. Tesla doesn’t claim their software is capable of full self-driving yet and in fact the system will scream at you and stop the car if you take your hands off the steering wheel for too long.
- lordnacho 9y ago
  And when the software is self-driving, it's safe to use the car in the way we all want? Who's to know if there isn't a third key component necessary for that, behind yet another technical term?
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  It's deliberately deceptive, and I'm real tired of tech people tripping over each other to defend it. Technically correct? Sure. But deliberately phrased to obscure the fact that this is a hypothetical future capability that the product does not possess today. And please spare me your "well actually, the showroom attendants will clarify exactly what it means" -- they are framing this in a misleading way to generate public interest.
  - myared 9y ago
    Who is being deceived? Non-Tesla owners? Or are you suggesting that there are Tesla owners who are (a) sitting in their driveway wondering why their car isn't driving them to work or (b) returning their cars upon finding out many of the features on the Autopilot page require regulatory approval?
    - GW150914 9y ago
      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-driver-motorway-m1-nottingham-a8326911.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-... Tesla driver caught turning on autopilot and leaving driver’s seat on motorway Culprit admits he knew what he had done was ‘silly’ but that the car was capable of something ‘amazing’
  - kmonsen 9y ago
djhworld 9y ago
Unfortunately people take that marketing literally https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-driver-motorway-m1-nottingham-a8326911.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-...
delinka 9y ago
But it’s technically correct: the hardware is present. The software isn’t there yet, that’s true. So is this a “lie by omission”? Reading the whole page, there’s this quote: “It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available.” What else needs to be said? At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will the software catch up?” And I’ll concede that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t think like that. Should Tesla update the site with statements to confirm the negative cases? e.g. “Our software can’t yet do X, Y, Z, etc”
- c22 9y ago
  Since we have yet to build a system that is capable of "full self-driving ... at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" I'm not even sure they can make the claim that their existing hardware supports this. They might have high hopes, but there's no way to know what combination of hardware and software will be necessary until the problem is actually solved.
- lifeformed 9y ago
  I don't even think a lot of people would even consider the software side when reading that sentence. To the layperson, "Full self-driving hardware on all cars" sounds exactly like "These cars are self-driving".
- rifung 9y ago
  I would argue even if something is technically correct but deliberately misleading companies should get in trouble for it. Nobody has time or energy to learn about every single thing they may buy. Also, how can we even know the hardware is sufficient unless said software exists and shows that what we think is possible is indeed possible?
- wang_li 9y ago
  Until tesla can provide a real world demonstration of an existing vehicle running at L5 automation after only a software upgrade, it's unproven whether the hardware required is present or not. At some point, they will have to provide said demo or they will be facing a class action lawsuit that will bankrupt the company.
mpweiher 9y ago
"...have the hardware needed for...". Nothing about the full capability. So no actual claim about the capability, just that the hardware is in place. Still a bit deceptive, to me. Reminds me of "...electroplated in 16 carat gold...".
phkahler 9y ago
It's not just them. A lot of people think that because NNs can do object identification that self driving cars are almost here. It's similar to thinking that word recognition and pattern matching are going to give us conversational AI. Things like that are prerequisites for AI, but they are hardly the whole thing. Companies are spending billions on this stuff and I hope they're just hedging in case it pans out rather than planning their future around it.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  Many people seem to think the arrival of fully autonomous cars is right around the corner; when I say that it will likely take at least 10 years, but probably more like 20, until there will be significant numbers of those on the road they are very surprised. I admit I recently upped that number from "5-10 years minimum" after seeing the media reaction to recent driver-assist systems related accidents — it became clear to me that the old adage "the autonomous car does not need to be perfect, it only needs to be better than an {average, good, skilled} human driver" is simply wrong, because autonomous car brand X will be regarded - and judged - as if all X cars are one driver. Thus, these cars actually need to be much better than humans in essentially any traffic situation, because it simply won't be acceptable for "autonomous cars of brand X" to kill a few thousand people each year in every country. People would equate this to a single human driver mowing down thousands. This effect is not necessarily bad, I don't have the inside information, but it's likely (or at least probable) that manufacturers invested in this technology observed the same and drew a similar conclusion. The question now is whether the car makers make autonomous cars that good, or invest into massive PR campaigning to change public perception towards "each autonomous car is like an individual driver and it doesn't need to do much better than that". We've seen the latter before. Jaywalking and avenues are just two examples.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    Well Jaywalking is only illegal in 10 countries. So PR campaigns won't be enough for that. The benefits of self driving cars as so massive that it will trump anything like that - but we are still a long way away from practical self driving cars.
martimarkov 9y ago
Are you for real? Statistics prove that Tesla is right on this. I’m not saying human life has no value, and I do empathise with the people who lost someone due to a Tesla crash, but we can see what is the percentage. It IS lower compared to human error, and yes that includes DUI and every other time it was a human error. Tesla is safer for the community based on the statistical data. Also it is safer than a human driving. I’m not saying it will never crash just that it will crash less than a human. Maybe another way to compare it would be to an autopilot in airplanes. Sometimes it fails so we might as well be angry at the airline companies if they advertise it. But a pilot would make more mistakes than the autopilot with the current workload. Side note: if you are going to downvote you can comment on why. Negative feedback is very useful and helps build better argumentative skills.
- rohit2412 9y ago
  > It IS lower compared to human error, What is lower and compared to what? I am tired of this vague misleading statements by Elon musk, Tesla and their supporters. They claimed Autopilot + driver is 40% safer than a driver alone. And that includes Automatic emergency braking. Is it a surprise that AEB reduces accidents? Why is that used as proof that Tesla's software is FSD. FSD implies that the car is capable of driving without a driver. Is Autopilot alone safer than a driver? There is no proof of that But what you should compare is Autopilot alone compared with a driver assisted by Autopilot. So, is Autopilot better than Driver+Autopilot? I can assure you its not, the driver still adds value.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - mkirklions 9y ago
    Its crazy how reasonable ycombinator is compared to reddit. Reddit is dominated by tesla's marketing team. Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting. Here you get a real discussion regarding Elon's outlandish promises.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  >It IS lower compared to human error One of the big issues here is the concept of "human error", as though a statistical average is some sort of monolith that can be applied to all humans. The truth is that many people lack the basic skills and attributes needed to drive safely (concentration, attention to detail, the ability to multitask effectively). This is true even before factoring the millions of elderly people who are unable to tie their own shoes or operate a self-checkout kiosk who are out on the road making things more dangerous for everyone (including themselves). Performing virtually any task better than "the average human" is a very, very low bar to hurdle. The question is, what standard should we be using to determine who (or what, in the case of self-driving cars) should be allowed to pilot a multi-ton vehicle on public streets? The truth is that we favor convenience over safety (and I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing - just that it is an often ignored fact) in many facets of society, and in order to have an intelligent debate about self-driving cars we ought to recognize and acknowledge this fact.
reaperducer 9y ago
"Self-driving" is not the same as "Never going to crash." People just assume that if a computer does something, it's going to be perfect. It isn't. Most humans can't even "self-walk" without occasionally stumbling and falling. Does that make human locomotion dangerous and false?
air7 9y ago
Claiming that the hardware is ready and we're just waiting on the software is at best a vacuous claim and worse, a fraudulent one. I can hammer two web-cams onto a rotating plank and claim that's "full self-driving capability". Just look at the eyes in my head! Now I just need to iron out some kinks in the software...
deleted 9y ago
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Judgmentality 9y ago

Am I extreme in feeling someone should go to jail for that? It was bad enough when they were originally advertising it, but now that they're defending it even after people died...ugh. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot-fire-investigation https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17172178/tesla-model-x-cr...

GW150914 9y ago
I think if anything you’re overly conservative for thinking somone rather than many people need jail time for it. I would look up the line of people who made and supported the decision for that kind of fraudulent marketing and drag them all into court.
earenndil 9y ago
So...one person died? Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars? It's never possible to get 100% accuracy.
- GW150914 9y ago
  If those people die because the car fails catastrophically, and predictably, rather than the usual reasons it would be news. This is not about 100% or “the perfect is the enemy of the good” or any bullshit Utopianism. This is about a company marketing a flawed product deceptively for money, while letting useful idiots cover their asses with dreams of level 5 automation that aren’t even close to the horizon.
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  One person died from that accident. There are now at least 4 deaths where Tesla's autopilot was involved (most of the deaths in China don't get much publicity, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are more). And the statistics do not back up your claim that Tesla is safer (despite their attempts to spin it that way).
  - Aqueous 9y ago
    This seems to contradict your assertion: http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-rates-by-40-government-finds-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-autopilot-cuts-crash-ra...
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      No, the NHTSA report says nothing about how Tesla's autopilot compares to human driving. Here are two comments I made last week about this: In that study there are two buckets, one which is total Tesla miles in TACC-enabled cars and then after the update total Tesla miles in cars with TACC + Autosteer and they calculated on airbag deployments. Human driven miles are going to dominate both of those buckets and there's a reason the NHTSA report makes zero claims about Tesla's safety relative to human drivers. It's totally outside the scope of the study. Then add in that some researchers who are skeptical of the methodology and have been asking for the raw data from NHTSA/Tesla have yet to receive it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932350 Autosteer, however, is relatively unique to Tesla. That’s what makes singling out Autosteer as the source of a 40 percent drop so curious. Forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking were introduced just months before the introduction of Autosteer in October 2015. A previous IIHS study shows that both the collision warning and auto emergency braking can deliver a similar reduction in crashes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932406
      - PersistentCough 9y ago
        I'm not sure what "safer" means. Not sure what posting your insistence in other threads has to do with this. 10x or 100x the number of deaths would be small price to pay to get everyone in autonomous vehicles. It's air travel, all over again and there's a price to pay.
- rescripting 9y ago
  I hand you a gun and say "you can point this gun at anyone, pull the trigger, and it wont harm them." You point the gun at a crowd, pull the trigger, it goes off and kills someone. Who do you blame? No one is saying guns, or cars, aren't dangerous. However this kind of false advertising leads people to use cars in dangerous ways while believing they are safe because they've been lied to. (Side note, there is some fine print you never read that says the safe-gun technology only works when you point the gun at a single person and doesn't work on crowds.)
  - Retric 9y ago
    Safer than human hardware does not imply safe. It means this will kill people but fewer people than humans would and they have actual data that backs this assertion up. The benchmark is not an alert, cautious, and sober driver because that's often not how actual people drive. So right now it's often safer to drive other times it really is safer to use autopilot, net result fewer people die.
    - DennisP 9y ago
      But if you do happen to be an alert, cautious, and sober driver, it'd be unfortunate if Tesla's marketing led you to overly rely on Autopilot. Ideally Tesla's marketing would say it's safer than drunk, sleepy, and reckless drivers, though it might not sell as many Autopilots.
      - jacobush 9y ago
        Drunk, sleepy and reckless drives from an age bracket not normally buying premium sedans.
      - heurist 9y ago
        Autopilot should not be accessible to drivers until their driving habits have been assessed and baselined. If autopilot is known to drive more safely than the individual human driver in environments X, Y, and Z then it should be made available in those environments, if not encouraged. That might not make an easy sell since a major value prop is inaccessible to many of the people who really want to use it, but it's the most reasonable, safest path. I also imagine that cars will learn from both human and each others' driving patterns over time, which (under effective guidance) should enable an enormous improvement in a relatively short period of time.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  > Do you know how many people die in normal, non-self-driving cars false equivalency. you need at least compare per mile, at best by driver demographic since most tesla drivers are in the high income and maybe in the safety conscious bracket
- coldtea 9y ago
  Many people also die when they fall from the stairs. But if you build faulty staircases that make people slip, they can still put you in jail or sue you. Same if you push them down the stairs.
- dghughes 9y ago
  Self-driving cars or Tesla autopilot?
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Jail, no? Financial ruin for the company that was willing to put that BS below it's letterhead? Yeah, sure, in proportion with the harm caused. That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time. A death or three shouldn't cripple a big company like Tesla unless they were playing so fast and loose that there's significant punitive damages. In a large company like Tesla it shouldn't be marketing's job to restrain itself. That's not safe at that scale. There should be someone or a group who's job it is to prevent marketing from getting ahead of reality just like it's security's job to spend all day playing whack-a-mole with the stupid ideas devs (especially the web ones) dream up. Efficiently mediating conflicting interests like that is what the corporate control structure is for. People using your product in accordance with your marketing should be considered almost the same as in accordance with your documentation. While "people dying while using the product in accordance with TFM" is not treated as strict liability it's pushing awfully close. I see it as a simple case of the company owning up to its actions. It failed to manage itself properly, marketing got ahead of reality. You screw up and someone gets hurt then you pay up.
- mrj 9y ago
  "That said, human life isn't sacred. It and everything else gets trades for dollars all the time." Wow. Uhm, slavery is illegal if you haven't heard. We made it illegal because life is sacred.
  - sologoub 9y ago
    OP is probably referring to the fact that in wrongful death suits, society has put a very tangible financial number on the value of human life. This made it possible for corporations to make trade-off between profit and liability, giving the potential that someone could get enough profit to justify risking others’ lives. Punitive damages go part way to help prevent this, but not far enough to guarantee that it never happens. Had the society truly believed life to be sacred, I suspect we’d have very different business practices and penalties that are not limited to financial ruin.
    - 9y ago
hacker11235 9y ago
While I don't necessarily agree with how they've advertised it I think they are legally safe. All Model 3's DO have the HARDWARE to support full-self driving, even if the software is not there. And regarding the software, it has been shown to be about 40% safer than humans where it is used, which is what they've claimed.
- stdgy 9y ago
  How do we know the hardware will adequately support full self-driving if it doesn't actually exist yet? That seems overly optimistic, if not an outright fabrication.
  - tomp 9y ago
    Because humans can do driving with comparable (worse, actually) hardware. Superhuman reflexes mean that software with superhuman driving abilities can exist.
    - mhermher 9y ago
      Humans also have human brains, which are much more important to driving than eyes.
      - hacker11235 9y ago
        This is the part that can be emulated in software. All you have to prove is that what ever platform/language you're using for the programming is Turing Complete, which is the case for almost all of the most popular languages.
        mhermher 9y ago
        So can I run Crysis on my TI calculator? I'm sure whatever platform/language is running on it is Turing Complete. I think you missed the point that the brain is also hardware.
jcranmer 9y ago
Musk's statements, and Tesla in general, have gone to cultivating an impression that Tesla almost has self-driving. An impression that, okay, it's not perfect, but it's good enough that you can act like it is for most of the time. This impression is far enough from the truth that it's fundamentally dishonest, particularly when the response from Tesla after incidents amounts to "the driver is completely at fault here, we don't need to change anything" (in other words, their marketing says it's basically self-driving, their legal defense says self-driving is only at your own risk). In the moralistic sense, yes, Tesla needs to be reprimanded for its actions. However, lying in this manner is often well-protected by law, if you manage to include enough legalese disclaimers somewhere, and I suspect Tesla has enough lawyers to make sure that legalese is sufficient to disclaim all liability.
nojvek 9y ago
US advertising laws are very lax, just like data collection laws. You can getaway with saying a lot of shit in the name of advertising. Deaths caused by Uber and Tesla hold little repercussions for them other than bad PR. The US govt celebrates removing regulations which benefit its corporations at the cost of its citizens

ChuckMcM 9y ago

That is a much better example. With the twist that believing it can get you killed.

Rjevski 9y ago

Hardware. That’s the keyword, and it might very well be true. Tesla doesn’t claim their software is capable of full self-driving yet and in fact the system will scream at you and stop the car if you take your hands off the steering wheel for too long.

lordnacho 9y ago
And when the software is self-driving, it's safe to use the car in the way we all want? Who's to know if there isn't a third key component necessary for that, behind yet another technical term?
ghostly_s 9y ago
It's deliberately deceptive, and I'm real tired of tech people tripping over each other to defend it. Technically correct? Sure. But deliberately phrased to obscure the fact that this is a hypothetical future capability that the product does not possess today. And please spare me your "well actually, the showroom attendants will clarify exactly what it means" -- they are framing this in a misleading way to generate public interest.
- myared 9y ago
  Who is being deceived? Non-Tesla owners? Or are you suggesting that there are Tesla owners who are (a) sitting in their driveway wondering why their car isn't driving them to work or (b) returning their cars upon finding out many of the features on the Autopilot page require regulatory approval?
  - GW150914 9y ago
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-driver-motorway-m1-nottingham-a8326911.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-... Tesla driver caught turning on autopilot and leaving driver’s seat on motorway Culprit admits he knew what he had done was ‘silly’ but that the car was capable of something ‘amazing’
- kmonsen 9y ago

djhworld 9y ago

Unfortunately people take that marketing literally https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-driver-motorway-m1-nottingham-a8326911.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tesla-autopilot-...

delinka 9y ago

But it’s technically correct: the hardware is present. The software isn’t there yet, that’s true. So is this a “lie by omission”? Reading the whole page, there’s this quote: “It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available.” What else needs to be said? At some point, critical thinking is required to navigate the world. The customer should ask “and when will the software catch up?” And I’ll concede that the overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t think like that. Should Tesla update the site with statements to confirm the negative cases? e.g. “Our software can’t yet do X, Y, Z, etc”

c22 9y ago
Since we have yet to build a system that is capable of "full self-driving ... at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" I'm not even sure they can make the claim that their existing hardware supports this. They might have high hopes, but there's no way to know what combination of hardware and software will be necessary until the problem is actually solved.
lifeformed 9y ago
I don't even think a lot of people would even consider the software side when reading that sentence. To the layperson, "Full self-driving hardware on all cars" sounds exactly like "These cars are self-driving".
rifung 9y ago
I would argue even if something is technically correct but deliberately misleading companies should get in trouble for it. Nobody has time or energy to learn about every single thing they may buy. Also, how can we even know the hardware is sufficient unless said software exists and shows that what we think is possible is indeed possible?
wang_li 9y ago
Until tesla can provide a real world demonstration of an existing vehicle running at L5 automation after only a software upgrade, it's unproven whether the hardware required is present or not. At some point, they will have to provide said demo or they will be facing a class action lawsuit that will bankrupt the company.

mpweiher 9y ago

"...have the hardware needed for...". Nothing about the full capability. So no actual claim about the capability, just that the hardware is in place. Still a bit deceptive, to me. Reminds me of "...electroplated in 16 carat gold...".

phkahler 9y ago

It's not just them. A lot of people think that because NNs can do object identification that self driving cars are almost here. It's similar to thinking that word recognition and pattern matching are going to give us conversational AI. Things like that are prerequisites for AI, but they are hardly the whole thing. Companies are spending billions on this stuff and I hope they're just hedging in case it pans out rather than planning their future around it.

blattimwind 9y ago
Many people seem to think the arrival of fully autonomous cars is right around the corner; when I say that it will likely take at least 10 years, but probably more like 20, until there will be significant numbers of those on the road they are very surprised. I admit I recently upped that number from "5-10 years minimum" after seeing the media reaction to recent driver-assist systems related accidents — it became clear to me that the old adage "the autonomous car does not need to be perfect, it only needs to be better than an {average, good, skilled} human driver" is simply wrong, because autonomous car brand X will be regarded - and judged - as if all X cars are one driver. Thus, these cars actually need to be much better than humans in essentially any traffic situation, because it simply won't be acceptable for "autonomous cars of brand X" to kill a few thousand people each year in every country. People would equate this to a single human driver mowing down thousands. This effect is not necessarily bad, I don't have the inside information, but it's likely (or at least probable) that manufacturers invested in this technology observed the same and drew a similar conclusion. The question now is whether the car makers make autonomous cars that good, or invest into massive PR campaigning to change public perception towards "each autonomous car is like an individual driver and it doesn't need to do much better than that". We've seen the latter before. Jaywalking and avenues are just two examples.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  Well Jaywalking is only illegal in 10 countries. So PR campaigns won't be enough for that. The benefits of self driving cars as so massive that it will trump anything like that - but we are still a long way away from practical self driving cars.

martimarkov 9y ago

Are you for real? Statistics prove that Tesla is right on this. I’m not saying human life has no value, and I do empathise with the people who lost someone due to a Tesla crash, but we can see what is the percentage. It IS lower compared to human error, and yes that includes DUI and every other time it was a human error. Tesla is safer for the community based on the statistical data. Also it is safer than a human driving. I’m not saying it will never crash just that it will crash less than a human. Maybe another way to compare it would be to an autopilot in airplanes. Sometimes it fails so we might as well be angry at the airline companies if they advertise it. But a pilot would make more mistakes than the autopilot with the current workload. Side note: if you are going to downvote you can comment on why. Negative feedback is very useful and helps build better argumentative skills.

rohit2412 9y ago
> It IS lower compared to human error, What is lower and compared to what? I am tired of this vague misleading statements by Elon musk, Tesla and their supporters. They claimed Autopilot + driver is 40% safer than a driver alone. And that includes Automatic emergency braking. Is it a surprise that AEB reduces accidents? Why is that used as proof that Tesla's software is FSD. FSD implies that the car is capable of driving without a driver. Is Autopilot alone safer than a driver? There is no proof of that But what you should compare is Autopilot alone compared with a driver assisted by Autopilot. So, is Autopilot better than Driver+Autopilot? I can assure you its not, the driver still adds value.
- deleted 9y ago
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- mkirklions 9y ago
  Its crazy how reasonable ycombinator is compared to reddit. Reddit is dominated by tesla's marketing team. Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting. Here you get a real discussion regarding Elon's outlandish promises.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
>It IS lower compared to human error One of the big issues here is the concept of "human error", as though a statistical average is some sort of monolith that can be applied to all humans. The truth is that many people lack the basic skills and attributes needed to drive safely (concentration, attention to detail, the ability to multitask effectively). This is true even before factoring the millions of elderly people who are unable to tie their own shoes or operate a self-checkout kiosk who are out on the road making things more dangerous for everyone (including themselves). Performing virtually any task better than "the average human" is a very, very low bar to hurdle. The question is, what standard should we be using to determine who (or what, in the case of self-driving cars) should be allowed to pilot a multi-ton vehicle on public streets? The truth is that we favor convenience over safety (and I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing - just that it is an often ignored fact) in many facets of society, and in order to have an intelligent debate about self-driving cars we ought to recognize and acknowledge this fact.

reaperducer 9y ago

"Self-driving" is not the same as "Never going to crash." People just assume that if a computer does something, it's going to be perfect. It isn't. Most humans can't even "self-walk" without occasionally stumbling and falling. Does that make human locomotion dangerous and false?

air7 9y ago

Claiming that the hardware is ready and we're just waiting on the software is at best a vacuous claim and worse, a fraudulent one. I can hammer two web-cams onto a rotating plank and claim that's "full self-driving capability". Just look at the eyes in my head! Now I just need to iron out some kinks in the software...

deleted 9y ago

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