7 ms·

December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." January 2016: "In ~2 year

December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY" June 2016: "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem, I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year," Musk said. March 2017: "I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a tesla] is about two years" March 2018: "I think probably by end of next year [end of 2019] self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving and be at least 100% to 200% safer than a person." Nov 15, 2018: "Probably technically be able to [self deliver Teslas to customers doors] in about a year then its up to the regulators" Feb 19 2019: "We will be feature complete full self driving this year. The car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I'm certain of that. That is not a question mark. It will be essentially safe to fall asleep and wake up at their destination towards the end of next year" April 12th 2019: "I'd be shocked if not next year, at the latest that having the person, having human intervene will decrease safety. DECREASE! (in response to human supervision and adding driver monitoring system)" April 22nd 2019: "We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year." April 22nd 2019: “We will have more than one million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything." May 9th 2019: "We could have gamed an LA/NY Autopilot journey last year, but when we do it this year, everyone with Tesla Full Self-Driving will be able to do it too" Dec 1, 2020: “I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. But I think at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year.” - Elon’s just been repeating the same promise for the over half a decade now. Oldest trick in the book. Disclaimer: I drive a Model 3

ckastner 6y ago
You forgot the best quote, I think, from Autonomy Day in April 2019: “We will have more than one million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything."
- xvector 6y ago
  Ha, added, thanks!
extropy 6y ago
Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo. Elon operates by setting impossible goals and under delivering on them but still going faster than all the other players. Most FSD buyers are reasonably aware of the gamble they are taking. If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. Meanwhile they are trying hard to build the damn thing and my kudos for that.
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  >If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. The reality distortion field in action. "Hey no big deal they're straight up lying to consumers and putting their lives in danger!"
- ra7 6y ago
  > Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo. They are nowhere near Waymo, who is doing actually driverless rides for the public. Tesla's confidence level is still at "you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times".
  - mac01021 6y ago
    I have questions about Waymo's taxi service. I'm certain that they occasionally run into situations that require human intervention, or at least need to be prepared for such an eventuality (see examples below). In such scenarios, what happens? The passenger operates the car? A remote operator takes controls? The car refuses to move and becomes a hazard or causes congestion? For example, you come up to a 4-way intersection and a traffic cop there signals you to stop and says you can't go through because all the man-hole covers are off, but since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot of the corner gas station to get onto the other road. For another example, right after the st-patrick's day parade is over or right after the college town's team has just won the NCAA championship, the street is full of people and the car has to inch forward at a rate of half of a mile per hour and the pedestrians don't get out of the way until the car is about to touch them.
ghgdynb1 6y ago
I mean he was promising to land rockets and put men in space and launch a mass market electric vehicle for quite a bit before he did any of those. Loads of people called Elon a charlatan, but for them criticism came at virtually no cost, unless you account for the cost of not betting on him.
- xvector 6y ago
  I feel like developing an AGI to drive cars from monoscopic camera vision alone is a much harder task than any of those.
  - lumost 6y ago
    from an available information perspective. There have been prognostications that AGI would be available in the 2020s for some time now if Moore's law continued. When Spacex formed in '02 and Tesla in '03 many observers would have estimated that privately funded moon rockets, luxury electric cars, and mass produced solar panels would have been a bigger challenge.
    - computerex 6y ago
      Keep in mind that Tesla's approach for solving FSD still uses mathematics that's fundamentally half a century old and is by definition narrow AI, not AGI.
      - rafale 6y ago
        Exactly. Tackling AGI will require imo a significant breakthrough in the field of AI. Meanwhile, it's much more productive and practical to look into how we can instrument our cities to make self driving cars possible with today's technology.
      - visarga 6y ago
        > uses mathematics that's fundamentally half a century old I have news for you, the most common operations in AlphaGo, GPT-3 or any state of the art AI are: multiplication, addition, max, log, exp, sin, cos and random - all functions known for centuries. It's the architecture, data and the compute that are making the difference, not the math, and all three are recent accomplishments.
walrus01 6y ago
There's a lot of amazing real world technical accomplishments seen from SpaceX. They recently landed a 1st stage booster for the 9th time. There's been more than 50 successful landings now. The idea that you don't have to throw away 2/3rds of a rocket for every launch is a game changer. I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision. What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.
- 908087 6y ago
  > but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Try telling his followers that without being immediately attacked, buried in downvotes, etc..
- wilg 6y ago
  > it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
  - JshWright 6y ago
    He says a lot of things... I think it's generally best to take most of what he says with a Falcon 9 fairing full of salt...
    - wilg 6y ago
      That's why I linked to a list of evidence about it.
lumost 6y ago
This is pretty common in ML projects, and a big reason why there aren't many major companies whose core product is based in a complex ML algorithm that isn't fully baked by the academic community first. In theory, if the approach to self-driving that Tesla is pursuing in any given year actually worked... then the release would be about two years away. In reality it hasn't been working well enough, and every year a new plan is drawn up to reach full autonomy in 2 years. This is also coincidentally slightly longer than the average tenure for an engineer/scientist, and as such the champions of a given strategy/approach will have departed the company before someone observes the strategy not panning out.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  As an ML researcher, I endorse this message. Casual readers may want to re-read what they wrote, because it's really true. Exploratory AI should be thought of as "potentially kills your company if it doesn't work and you gamble on it working." The ultimate truth is that you're outsourcing your thinking to ML researchers, much of the time. And as someone on the ground floor, let me tell you that we often don't have a clue how to achieve X any more than you do. We have ideas, testable theories, plans that may or may not work, and have a higher chance of success than random people. But it's still only a chance. I don't think a lot of companies have fully internalized that. If your company is based around the premise of exploratory AI, you are literally gambling. And it's not the type of gambling you can win in the long run with. It's closer to "put it all on black" than "let's take a principled approach to poker."
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    I hope as an ML researcher, you're sensitive to the ML/AI usage here. There are lots of ML algorithms that definitely work but none of involve claims of intelligence. So it's not just "exploratory AI" that you're talking about. It's "any AI", anything claiming to be "artificially intelligent" and fully replace a human in a key decision making position (but not "any ML" since ML encompasses much more boring stuff).
    - 6y ago
908087 6y ago
The world's most successful huckster, and being repeatedly proven wrong only seems to increase his success and cult following.
- ehvatum 6y ago
  Perhaps he’s an ambitious person with both great successes and great failures, and people admire that?
alisonkisk 6y ago
Why hasn't the SEC punished this CEO for 5 years of blatantly false statements about a public company?
- kleton 6y ago
  The SEC’s raison d’etre is to preserve shareholder value.
- wilg 6y ago
  Because none of the statements are false, they're "forward-looking statements".
- adwf 6y ago
  There's a big difference between promising tech in the future and saying that something is true now. This kind of marketing is a standard release of information in the form of opinion of the future, which shareholders can decide for themselves whether to believe it or not. When the SEC slapped him down previously it was because he conducted a release of information about "facts" - not opinion - that were supposedly true now (that he had a private buyer at $x price). This was deemed a market manipulation because it was presented as 100% true. Whereas self-driving cars in 2 years might be true and it's up to individual shareholders to do their own analysis.
- lovecg 6y ago
  It’s unreasonable to hold someone’s statements of opinion and future expectations to the same standard as statements of fact. Otherwise every single CEO would be guilty — they tend to be an optimistic bunch.
whatshisface 6y ago
It took three years to go from "in two years" to "next year." That's three solar years per Elon year. Starting at two years in 2015, that means we'll get it for real in... 2021!
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  He must have switched to Martian years prematurely.
CyanLite4 6y ago
To be fair... he has convinced millions of people to put up $10k towards FSD. He’s laughing all the way to the bank. And we are....well...we’re on HackerNews complaining about him on a Friday night.
- gotostatement 6y ago
  winning isn't on its own admirable, nor is complaining/criticizing on its own shameful. that's just the toxic ideology of "might makes right" that permeates our society
  - ihunter2839 6y ago
    While I entirely agree with the sentiment of this post, I often find myself wondering - how does one effectively combat this attitude without making a full circle? How is anything to be established in society without some sort of "might", so to speak? Just a thought that resonated with me when I read your comment.
    - gotostatement 6y ago
      interesting line of thinking. just to write it all out for clarity (not because I think you misunderstood): the might makes right that I was pointing at is an attitude of "winning is everything. winners are superior, no matter how arbitrary or unfair the game." the might makes right that you're pointing at is the fact that in the struggle to define laws and norms, there are winners and losers. I think it's just a question of values. there is no "neutrality" - there is always a fight between competing values, and everyone picks a side. the value that says "winning is everything, winners deserve everything, losers can die in a ditch" is a bad value to me.
- Invictus0 6y ago
  What's your point? That conning tons of people out of $10k is praiseworthy?
  - IncRnd 6y ago
mxcrossb 6y ago
It’s interesting, a couple years ago I remember there was some debate about upgrading the public transport in Seattle(?), and I saw some comments saying maybe we need to hold off in case a full autopilot car infrastructure might emerge as a cheaper alternative. I think we’re all a lot more grounded at this point...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  > full autopilot car infrastructure Not sure what this phrase means to you exactly, but it may not be the worst idea-- the only way I see a mass rollout of automated vehicles any time soon at this point is on dedicated roads/lanes with roadside sensors to assist. Anything else is gambling with human lives.
ra7 6y ago
I wonder if Musk is intentionally bullshitting or if he completely underestimates the problem space because he's confident of delivering big things (SpaceX, electric cars). The folks at Waymo/Google, some of the smartest people in the industry, admit to how hard of a problem this is and set realistic expectations. For instance, Waymo (and every SDC company except Tesla) say Level 5 autonomy is impossible and they are strictly targeting Level 4. But here is Musk who says "Level 5 will be coming next year" every year. I feel like there is a serious lack of humility at Tesla (or maybe it's just Musk).
- mmmmmbop 6y ago
  Recently I asked myself that same question and came up with a satisfying theory. Part of Tesla's business model is selling $10k FSD packages based on a promise that they will eventually deliver full self-driving. If, at any point in the future, any evidence surfaces showing Musk or other senior leadership at Tesla did not have confidence in their ability to actually deliver FSD, this would amount to large-scale fraud and may result in a class-action lawsuit. On the other hand, if in all communication, internal and external, Tesla leadership projects confidence in their ability to deliver FSD, but then "unforeseeable circumstances" prevent them from actually delivering it, then it's not a scam, but just an unlucky turn of events. At the very worst, Telsa might have to partly reimburse their customers, but most likely they can keep the money. So it does not really matter what Musk believes deep down. It's probably easier to do his job if he consciously makes himself believe that he can deliver.
  - clouddrover 6y ago
    > If, at any point in the future, any evidence surfaces showing Musk or other senior leadership at Tesla did not have confidence in their ability to actually deliver FSD Tesla recently said that "Full Self Driving" is not capable of autonomous driving. They tell the regulator one thing and tell their customers another: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-full-self-driving-beta-will-always-be-a-level-2-system-emails https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful... https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo...
klyrs 6y ago
Oooh, that reminds me... it's been 3 years since my very gullible cousin called me an idiot for not believing that FSD would be here in 5 years. Two more years to wait for that 'toldyaso'. Shame that I didn't put money on it.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  I was a fan of Tesla cars in 2016, didn’t know much about them or Musk but heard that they were fast, safe, looked good, and solved the problem of EV charging with the super charger network. Went to look at the stock price to see if I should buy some and almost fell out of my chair. Around the same time they were promising a solar roof that looked better than a normal roof and cost less, which sounded way too good to be true, and also the $35,000 model 3, which would be under 30k with the tax credit, also very difficult to believe. The final straw was the promises of full self driving, which clearly was a much harder problem than they were claiming and potentially impossible with their chosen tech stack. The more you look at this company the crazier the story gets, and now it’s worth more than the top few automakers in the world combined. Ed Niedermeyer’s “Ludicrous” chronicles the story without the breathless media coverage that usually follows Musk. It’s incredible what the Musk empire has become, but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. https://www.amazon.com/Ludicrous-Unvarnished-Story-Tesla-Motors/dp/1948836122 https://www.amazon.com/Ludicrous-Unvarnished-Story-Tesla-Mot...
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Elon Musk's "two years from now" (or even "later this year") is everyone else's "in five to ten years." His 2 being everyone else's 5 is also appropriate given that he describes their level 2 autonomy as level 5.
kwdc 6y ago
Don't make predictions or estimates when you're happy. Marketers are usually overly happy, especially when in the act of estimating. This makes it hard for them to resist being overly generous with their predictions.
rafale 6y ago
FSD is as hard to solve as general intelligence. I don't get why they bother going down this rabbit hole with sub-GI AI technology. While waiting for an AI breakthrough, we should look into instrumenting our cities. That's how planes and drones can navigate, approach and even land. Sure, cities are more complex, but instrumentation can automate the routes. And it's a great infrastructure undertaking the like of which we haven't has in decades.
- coddle-hark 6y ago
  I think it’s wrong to say that FSD requires AGI since driving is a specialised skill. I do agree though that there’s so much that can be done right now without waiting for some magical future tech. Inner cities without cars can be solved with public transportation. De-urbanisation can be achieved with a combination of remote work, cashier-less shops and a well-run postal system. We don’t need to wait to do these things, they’re achievable now.
oblio 6y ago
Soon, we'll have practical plastic recycling, practical fusion reactors and widespread secure C codebases :-)

ckastner 6y ago

You forgot the best quote, I think, from Autonomy Day in April 2019: “We will have more than one million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything."

xvector 6y ago
Ha, added, thanks!

extropy 6y ago

Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo. Elon operates by setting impossible goals and under delivering on them but still going faster than all the other players. Most FSD buyers are reasonably aware of the gamble they are taking. If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. Meanwhile they are trying hard to build the damn thing and my kudos for that.

xkeysc0re 6y ago
>If Tesla turns out to not be capable of deliver FSD, it's a straightforward class action to refund everyone. The reality distortion field in action. "Hey no big deal they're straight up lying to consumers and putting their lives in danger!"
ra7 6y ago
> Still they are at the forefront in the field. IMO in the same ballpark as Waymo. They are nowhere near Waymo, who is doing actually driverless rides for the public. Tesla's confidence level is still at "you need to keep your hands on the wheel at all times".
- mac01021 6y ago
  I have questions about Waymo's taxi service. I'm certain that they occasionally run into situations that require human intervention, or at least need to be prepared for such an eventuality (see examples below). In such scenarios, what happens? The passenger operates the car? A remote operator takes controls? The car refuses to move and becomes a hazard or causes congestion? For example, you come up to a 4-way intersection and a traffic cop there signals you to stop and says you can't go through because all the man-hole covers are off, but since you want to turn left you can go through the parking lot of the corner gas station to get onto the other road. For another example, right after the st-patrick's day parade is over or right after the college town's team has just won the NCAA championship, the street is full of people and the car has to inch forward at a rate of half of a mile per hour and the pedestrians don't get out of the way until the car is about to touch them.

ghgdynb1 6y ago

I mean he was promising to land rockets and put men in space and launch a mass market electric vehicle for quite a bit before he did any of those. Loads of people called Elon a charlatan, but for them criticism came at virtually no cost, unless you account for the cost of not betting on him.

xvector 6y ago
I feel like developing an AGI to drive cars from monoscopic camera vision alone is a much harder task than any of those.
- lumost 6y ago
  from an available information perspective. There have been prognostications that AGI would be available in the 2020s for some time now if Moore's law continued. When Spacex formed in '02 and Tesla in '03 many observers would have estimated that privately funded moon rockets, luxury electric cars, and mass produced solar panels would have been a bigger challenge.
  - computerex 6y ago
    Keep in mind that Tesla's approach for solving FSD still uses mathematics that's fundamentally half a century old and is by definition narrow AI, not AGI.
    - rafale 6y ago
      Exactly. Tackling AGI will require imo a significant breakthrough in the field of AI. Meanwhile, it's much more productive and practical to look into how we can instrument our cities to make self driving cars possible with today's technology.
    - visarga 6y ago
      > uses mathematics that's fundamentally half a century old I have news for you, the most common operations in AlphaGo, GPT-3 or any state of the art AI are: multiplication, addition, max, log, exp, sin, cos and random - all functions known for centuries. It's the architecture, data and the compute that are making the difference, not the math, and all three are recent accomplishments.

walrus01 6y ago

There's a lot of amazing real world technical accomplishments seen from SpaceX. They recently landed a 1st stage booster for the 9th time. There's been more than 50 successful landings now. The idea that you don't have to throw away 2/3rds of a rocket for every launch is a game changer. I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision. What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.

908087 6y ago
> but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Try telling his followers that without being immediately attacked, buried in downvotes, etc..
wilg 6y ago
> it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- JshWright 6y ago
  He says a lot of things... I think it's generally best to take most of what he says with a Falcon 9 fairing full of salt...
  - wilg 6y ago
    That's why I linked to a list of evidence about it.

lumost 6y ago

This is pretty common in ML projects, and a big reason why there aren't many major companies whose core product is based in a complex ML algorithm that isn't fully baked by the academic community first. In theory, if the approach to self-driving that Tesla is pursuing in any given year actually worked... then the release would be about two years away. In reality it hasn't been working well enough, and every year a new plan is drawn up to reach full autonomy in 2 years. This is also coincidentally slightly longer than the average tenure for an engineer/scientist, and as such the champions of a given strategy/approach will have departed the company before someone observes the strategy not panning out.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
As an ML researcher, I endorse this message. Casual readers may want to re-read what they wrote, because it's really true. Exploratory AI should be thought of as "potentially kills your company if it doesn't work and you gamble on it working." The ultimate truth is that you're outsourcing your thinking to ML researchers, much of the time. And as someone on the ground floor, let me tell you that we often don't have a clue how to achieve X any more than you do. We have ideas, testable theories, plans that may or may not work, and have a higher chance of success than random people. But it's still only a chance. I don't think a lot of companies have fully internalized that. If your company is based around the premise of exploratory AI, you are literally gambling. And it's not the type of gambling you can win in the long run with. It's closer to "put it all on black" than "let's take a principled approach to poker."
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  I hope as an ML researcher, you're sensitive to the ML/AI usage here. There are lots of ML algorithms that definitely work but none of involve claims of intelligence. So it's not just "exploratory AI" that you're talking about. It's "any AI", anything claiming to be "artificially intelligent" and fully replace a human in a key decision making position (but not "any ML" since ML encompasses much more boring stuff).
  - 6y ago

908087 6y ago

The world's most successful huckster, and being repeatedly proven wrong only seems to increase his success and cult following.

ehvatum 6y ago
Perhaps he’s an ambitious person with both great successes and great failures, and people admire that?

alisonkisk 6y ago

Why hasn't the SEC punished this CEO for 5 years of blatantly false statements about a public company?

kleton 6y ago
The SEC’s raison d’etre is to preserve shareholder value.
wilg 6y ago
Because none of the statements are false, they're "forward-looking statements".
adwf 6y ago
There's a big difference between promising tech in the future and saying that something is true now. This kind of marketing is a standard release of information in the form of opinion of the future, which shareholders can decide for themselves whether to believe it or not. When the SEC slapped him down previously it was because he conducted a release of information about "facts" - not opinion - that were supposedly true now (that he had a private buyer at $x price). This was deemed a market manipulation because it was presented as 100% true. Whereas self-driving cars in 2 years might be true and it's up to individual shareholders to do their own analysis.
lovecg 6y ago
It’s unreasonable to hold someone’s statements of opinion and future expectations to the same standard as statements of fact. Otherwise every single CEO would be guilty — they tend to be an optimistic bunch.

whatshisface 6y ago

It took three years to go from "in two years" to "next year." That's three solar years per Elon year. Starting at two years in 2015, that means we'll get it for real in... 2021!

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
He must have switched to Martian years prematurely.

CyanLite4 6y ago

To be fair... he has convinced millions of people to put up $10k towards FSD. He’s laughing all the way to the bank. And we are....well...we’re on HackerNews complaining about him on a Friday night.

gotostatement 6y ago
winning isn't on its own admirable, nor is complaining/criticizing on its own shameful. that's just the toxic ideology of "might makes right" that permeates our society
- ihunter2839 6y ago
  While I entirely agree with the sentiment of this post, I often find myself wondering - how does one effectively combat this attitude without making a full circle? How is anything to be established in society without some sort of "might", so to speak? Just a thought that resonated with me when I read your comment.
  - gotostatement 6y ago
    interesting line of thinking. just to write it all out for clarity (not because I think you misunderstood): the might makes right that I was pointing at is an attitude of "winning is everything. winners are superior, no matter how arbitrary or unfair the game." the might makes right that you're pointing at is the fact that in the struggle to define laws and norms, there are winners and losers. I think it's just a question of values. there is no "neutrality" - there is always a fight between competing values, and everyone picks a side. the value that says "winning is everything, winners deserve everything, losers can die in a ditch" is a bad value to me.
Invictus0 6y ago
What's your point? That conning tons of people out of $10k is praiseworthy?
- IncRnd 6y ago

mxcrossb 6y ago

It’s interesting, a couple years ago I remember there was some debate about upgrading the public transport in Seattle(?), and I saw some comments saying maybe we need to hold off in case a full autopilot car infrastructure might emerge as a cheaper alternative. I think we’re all a lot more grounded at this point...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slfnflctd 6y ago
> full autopilot car infrastructure Not sure what this phrase means to you exactly, but it may not be the worst idea-- the only way I see a mass rollout of automated vehicles any time soon at this point is on dedicated roads/lanes with roadside sensors to assist. Anything else is gambling with human lives.

ra7 6y ago

I wonder if Musk is intentionally bullshitting or if he completely underestimates the problem space because he's confident of delivering big things (SpaceX, electric cars). The folks at Waymo/Google, some of the smartest people in the industry, admit to how hard of a problem this is and set realistic expectations. For instance, Waymo (and every SDC company except Tesla) say Level 5 autonomy is impossible and they are strictly targeting Level 4. But here is Musk who says "Level 5 will be coming next year" every year. I feel like there is a serious lack of humility at Tesla (or maybe it's just Musk).

mmmmmbop 6y ago
Recently I asked myself that same question and came up with a satisfying theory. Part of Tesla's business model is selling $10k FSD packages based on a promise that they will eventually deliver full self-driving. If, at any point in the future, any evidence surfaces showing Musk or other senior leadership at Tesla did not have confidence in their ability to actually deliver FSD, this would amount to large-scale fraud and may result in a class-action lawsuit. On the other hand, if in all communication, internal and external, Tesla leadership projects confidence in their ability to deliver FSD, but then "unforeseeable circumstances" prevent them from actually delivering it, then it's not a scam, but just an unlucky turn of events. At the very worst, Telsa might have to partly reimburse their customers, but most likely they can keep the money. So it does not really matter what Musk believes deep down. It's probably easier to do his job if he consciously makes himself believe that he can deliver.
- clouddrover 6y ago
  > If, at any point in the future, any evidence surfaces showing Musk or other senior leadership at Tesla did not have confidence in their ability to actually deliver FSD Tesla recently said that "Full Self Driving" is not capable of autonomous driving. They tell the regulator one thing and tell their customers another: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-full-self-driving-beta-will-always-be-a-level-2-system-emails https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39647/tesla-admits-current-ful... https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-california-self-driving/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo...

klyrs 6y ago

Oooh, that reminds me... it's been 3 years since my very gullible cousin called me an idiot for not believing that FSD would be here in 5 years. Two more years to wait for that 'toldyaso'. Shame that I didn't put money on it.

camjohnson26 6y ago
I was a fan of Tesla cars in 2016, didn’t know much about them or Musk but heard that they were fast, safe, looked good, and solved the problem of EV charging with the super charger network. Went to look at the stock price to see if I should buy some and almost fell out of my chair. Around the same time they were promising a solar roof that looked better than a normal roof and cost less, which sounded way too good to be true, and also the $35,000 model 3, which would be under 30k with the tax credit, also very difficult to believe. The final straw was the promises of full self driving, which clearly was a much harder problem than they were claiming and potentially impossible with their chosen tech stack. The more you look at this company the crazier the story gets, and now it’s worth more than the top few automakers in the world combined. Ed Niedermeyer’s “Ludicrous” chronicles the story without the breathless media coverage that usually follows Musk. It’s incredible what the Musk empire has become, but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. https://www.amazon.com/Ludicrous-Unvarnished-Story-Tesla-Motors/dp/1948836122 https://www.amazon.com/Ludicrous-Unvarnished-Story-Tesla-Mot...

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

Elon Musk's "two years from now" (or even "later this year") is everyone else's "in five to ten years." His 2 being everyone else's 5 is also appropriate given that he describes their level 2 autonomy as level 5.

kwdc 6y ago

Don't make predictions or estimates when you're happy. Marketers are usually overly happy, especially when in the act of estimating. This makes it hard for them to resist being overly generous with their predictions.

rafale 6y ago

FSD is as hard to solve as general intelligence. I don't get why they bother going down this rabbit hole with sub-GI AI technology. While waiting for an AI breakthrough, we should look into instrumenting our cities. That's how planes and drones can navigate, approach and even land. Sure, cities are more complex, but instrumentation can automate the routes. And it's a great infrastructure undertaking the like of which we haven't has in decades.

coddle-hark 6y ago
I think it’s wrong to say that FSD requires AGI since driving is a specialised skill. I do agree though that there’s so much that can be done right now without waiting for some magical future tech. Inner cities without cars can be solved with public transportation. De-urbanisation can be achieved with a combination of remote work, cashier-less shops and a well-run postal system. We don’t need to wait to do these things, they’re achievable now.

oblio 6y ago

Soon, we'll have practical plastic recycling, practical fusion reactors and widespread secure C codebases :-)