24 ms·

Tesla faces U.S. criminal probe over self-driving claims

452 points by brandall10 4y ago

VagueMag 4y ago
> The Justice Department’s Autopilot probe is far from recommending any action partly because it is competing with two other DOJ investigations involving Tesla one of the sources said. Investigators still have much work to do and no decision on charges is imminent this source said. This is definitely a thing that happens. If you are ever doing crimes, just be sure to commit a whole bunch of them so the DOJ has to move more slowly. It's a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing.
- leroman 4y ago
  I propose to call this kind of attack LAPA ("Legal Analysis Paralysis Attack")
  - VagueMag 4y ago
    I think it's "No One Wants To Be the Pin That Pricks the Overinflated Tesla Stock Bubble" paralysis.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Watching Trump do the same, I've taken to calling it the Montgomery Burns Defense (canonically known as Three Stooges Syndrome in the Simpsons episode, apparently)
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  And do it openly and in public.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >And do it openly and in public. And make sure the figures involved are not below 9 digits. That way, when you get your two year (6 months with good behavior) white collar slap on the wrist, your French Chateau will still be waiting, and you can laugh at the guy who's doing a decade for bouncing a $200 check on the way out.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It's a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing. It’s actually a 5th Amendment (double-jeopardy) thing; prosecuting a subset of crimes from a single course of conduct may preclude prosecuting others depending on their relationship, so it becomes important to fully investigate before prosecution.
  - lazide 4y ago
    In this case I suspect it’s also a ‘Elon musk has too many lawyers and is acquiring a company that “buys ink by the barrel”’ problem too. Everyone involved is going to be very careful to not end up personally targeted or liable, and that nothing done could be twisted to make themselves or the administration look like idiots. It’s a big part of why ‘the rich don’t have consequences’, as is the current fashion to say - they can defend themselves against all but the most careful prosecutions, and can afford to hire people to make sure their asses are covered (if they think to do so). As to if Elon actually did cover his ass here is yet to be determined. I think he probably didn’t sufficiently, but can muddy the waters enough to not go to prison, and would just have to shell out some money in a decade or so to fines or civil suits. Only time will tell!
    - nverno 4y ago
      They're investigating a company not an individual. The article really gives no information about which individuals might be liable.
      - lazide 4y ago
        Of course! We all know who 'runs' those companies, who is the prominent face of those companies, who has repeatedly made very public (and often dubiously factual) pronouncements about the exact technologies and products at the center of the investigation, who has all their net worth tied up in these companies, who has been an outspoken critic of various government agencies (and relatively politically active), and also happens to be very publicly buying a hot button social media platform right now. Completely unrelated to Mr. Musk, I'm sure.
- cal5k 4y ago
  Musk is an outspoken critic of the current administration. Given what we've seen from the Justice Department over the last few years, does it not seem highly likely that this is politically-motivated?
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Or the current administration is trying to have regulators and prosecutors start to go after malfeasance and Musk is criticizing the administration because he’s got a lot that he can be prosecuted for. Isn’t it fun how wild, unsubstantiated, paranoid speculation can cut both ways?
  - VagueMag 4y ago
    Musk has actually been treated with an incredibly light touch given the number of people who have been maimed and killed by Teslas running Autopilot. If this Administration was truly antagonistic to Musk, there are dozens of things they could be doing to create problems for him and his companies. They're not.
woeirua 4y ago
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Tesla the electric car company is doing great. Tesla the FSD tech unicorn, is going to end in tears. I will not be surprised at all when some of the engineers on the AI team go to jail over this. Why the engineers? Because the executives almost always are able to afford high powered lawyers to avoid any serious consequences.
- dheera 4y ago
  Really, it's the shareholders that should go to jail over this for threatening to short Tesla stock if they don't deliver at every quarterly earnings. They are the ultimate root cause of Tesla's behavior around FSD. If shareholders collectively promise and agree to hold Tesla stock and upvote it for a 5-10 year period it would give Tesla the space and time they need to develop FSD safely. As long as they're at the mercy of ruthless quarterly free market capitalism, safety will go to shit. Same thing with Boeing.
  - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    And upvote it? Wtf are you talking about
    - dheera 4y ago
      Shareholders upvote and downvote stocks with their bid/ask prices.
      - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
        That's a real weird way of putting it.
  - woeirua 4y ago
    You can't be serious. The shareholders demand returns, but the EV side of the company already has been successful enough to keep them placated. No one forced Musk to go out there and repeatedly claim that Telsa's would be able to be used as robotaxis, or that you'd be able to drive across country with no hands. He's still out there making these outlandish claims! At some point, the music is going to stop.
perihelions 4y ago
- "The Justice Department’s Autopilot probe is far from recommending any action partly because it is competing with two other DOJ investigations involving Tesla, one of the sources said. Investigators still have much work to do and no decision on charges is imminent, this source said." - "The Justice Department may also face challenges in building its case, said the sources, because of Tesla’s warnings about overreliance on Autopilot." How often do criminal defendants get to read the internal deliberations of their prosecuting office, and before they're even charged? What a dysfunctional mess. This leak was unethical, unlawful, and unworthy of the gravitas of an office whose work puts people in prison.
- tptacek 4y ago
  If I search the NYT from 1990 to 2010 for "DOJ" "charges imminent", I get >2000 results. There's nothing happening with respect to Tesla here that doesn't happen all the time. DOJ is a big organization; it has 100,000 employees. We just notice this stuff when it intersects people and companies we have a rooting interest (one way or the other) in.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  > How often do criminal defendants get to read the internal deliberations of their prosecuting office, and before they're even charged? There's really no reason this info should be secret. If you can provide extra info to persuade them not to charge you, then all the better - time saved for both parties.
- deleted 4y ago
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- maxbond 4y ago
  It's entirely possible DOJ decided this was a good time to leak this information. For instance, just spitballing, they might be saying, "hey, we're going to bring charges, but not for a while, and we want to tell investors ahead of time so that the news causes less volatility, and the volatility will be better isolated to just Tesla." No real way to know from the outside, unless they bring charges against a leaker.
treis 4y ago
I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement. Never made the connection of Fraud => Someone driving negligent as a result => Negligent Homicide/Manslaughter but it seems solid and somewhat obvious once stated.
- Symmetry 4y ago
  I've generally always considered level 2 or 3 autonomy to be a recipe for disaster, humans can't be expected to remain alert and respond quickly when they aren't doing anything. But at the same time the way Tesla autopilot woks is congruent to autopilots on boats or airplanes. Those won't avoid other vehicles and are usually perfectly happy to let you crash into shoals or mountains.
  - ht85 4y ago
    Taking human nature into account has driven so much progress in terms of road safety. Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.
    - kylecordes 4y ago
      The usual FSD complaint is that Tesla has been offering it for years, at ascending prices, without any date-certain of delivering it (just tweets predicting it), without refunding it when not delivered after X years. I can easily imagine an eventual class-action suit requiring some % of refund all the way back to the first car purchased with someday-FSD (!). If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play. The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)
      - CoastalCoder 4y ago
ramesh31 4y ago
Autopilot is a fantastic, world leading technology. But the marketing of it was (and continues to be) nothing short of criminally negligent. There are over a dozen confirmed deaths at this point, directly attributable to the outright lies spewed by Elon and co. regarding its' capabilities. We were able to ban lawn darts in the 80s because of a few isolated incidents. But the state of affairs we are in now is only possible due to the absurd level of regulatory capture we've reached in this country. I don't expect anything to change at this point.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  I wouldn’t even call it regulatory capture. More of a conflict of interest by lawmakers holding specific company stock. No lobbying needed
- concordDance 4y ago
  > There are over a dozen confirmed deaths at this point, directly attributable to the outright lies spewed by Elon and co. regarding its' capabilities. Got a link to a list? The few cases I've investigated turned out either not to have it enabled or were cases of serious negligence on behalf of the driver. Also, they get a user manual they need to read/click through before they're allowed to use the autopilot.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >Got a link to a list? There's been 10 just this year: https://fortune.com/2022/10/19/tesla-cars-involved-in-10-of-the-11-new-crash-deaths-linked-to-automated-tech-vehicles/ https://fortune.com/2022/10/19/tesla-cars-involved-in-10-of-...
    - concordDance 4y ago
      That's not the list I've asked for. Those are deaths in car crashes that involved Teslas that were using automated systems. This does not mean the Tesla was at fault (could be other driver or Tesla driver) or that autopilot was involved (the cruise control counts as an automated system) and certainly doesn't mean that system misunderstandings caused by marketing were the cause. I'm fairly sure the grandparent just didn't consider what the sentence constructed was actually saying and was just expressing a dislike of automated car marketing. Unfortunately, people often believe unsourced comments on hackernews to be literally true rather than sentimentally true.
hellomyguys 4y ago
Honestly surprised any of this made it past the legal department at Tesla. Any company I've worked at has always been super careful and conservative with the language you use to describe anything.
- izzydata 4y ago
  You can't sell lies if you only tell the truth.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    Sadly a misperception. Modern masters deceive you with the truth - carefully selected facts, but true. Or close enough for legal purposes.
- tptacek 4y ago
  This is Tesla, a company that managed to randomly announce that it intended to take itself private, on Twitter.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    And probably included a pot joke.
  - tenpies 4y ago
    "managed to randomly announce" is a very odd way of saying "the CEO committed securities fraud because bankruptcy was imminent and his entire net worth was sunk into the company".
    - concordDance 4y ago
      Eh? Did they actually issue more stock soon afterwards at a higher-than-before valuation? Got a cite?
      - tptacek 4y ago
DarkmSparks 4y ago
While I understand the motivations for the investigation, and fully agree its an investigation worth conducting. I dont think it actually has merit, at least not in the terms framed by the article. In most circumstances it "probably is better than a human driver", not all circumstances, and not proven (hence probably). But if LM can push the F35 as the best jet ever while it racks up a wreckage count to make the 737 Max jealous, claims made by Tesla arent even in the same ballpark.... It would be a real shame if we lose any chance of full self driving over a misunderstanding about the system being "not perfected yet"
- bigmattystyles 4y ago
  I know it's on top of mind when I'm commuting in my F35. /s Comparing a military jet which operation requires thousands of hours of training just to get off the ground compared to a mass produced vehicle is not a valid comparison, at least in my mind. Plus what LM pushes to its stockholders is definitely not as comprehensive as the Pentagon gets.
  - DarkmSparks 4y ago
    They promised full autonomy for the F35 And supersonic flight. Its just its been held up by the small detail that the airframe keeps making huge holes in the ground every few weeks.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > It would be a real shame if we lose any chance of full self driving over a misunderstanding about the system being "not perfected yet" We can still have self driving cars, but they should be developed within a culture that values safety. Tesla is not such a culture. We know this because after the first accident that resulted in decapitation, Tesla collectively shrugged and made the problem worse by removing sensors, which predictably resulted in a second decapitation. They collectively shrugged after that one as well, and again made the problem worse by removing more sensors. Tesla does not value safety, and their YOLO attitude toward driverless cars, in which the general public is forced to participate in their beta test whether we like it or not, is holding the driverless car industry back. They are not friends of the cause, and the sooner they are prevented from running beta tests on the general public (which have caused deaths), the sooner the industry as a whole can move forward. Reckless engineering by Tesla will not result in a net gain in safety for everyone. Safety is hard even when done intentionally, it won't be achieved as a second order effect of Tesla's "move fast and break things" ethos.
wilg 4y ago
I don't understand why Elon claiming that the cars will be able to drive themselves in the future could be considered any kind of crime? I don't think Tesla has ever said "hey you can get in the car today and it is fully autonomous". They've just said that's what they will do in the future. They've also shown and talked about products in-development. You might think they are full of shit about whether it will ever be delivered, which is a fair argument, but that's much different than lying about the actual product in people's hands.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  They allowed you to buy the "car can drive itself" capability and never fully delivered. It's not like this was just a promise, it was something you could pay for years ago.
  - wilg 4y ago
    Yeah, but that isn't a crime. You can pre-order things. They still claim they will deliver it. Seems like maybe you could do a class-action or something to get your money back, but not argue that actually it was reasonable to believe you already had it and therefore are not liable for a crash or whatever.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      IANAL but I think you could call it fraud if you never had any intention of delivering. E.g. if I kickstart a perpetual motion machine and then move to the Bahamas with the funds. What's ironic is that despite his image as a genius no one ever holds Elon to account for his failure to accurately predict the state/progress of his own technology. He's either not as smart as people think or he's knowingly lying, but I think you have to pick one.
      - wilg 4y ago
        Seems like since they are delivering things, albeit slowly, and spending tons of money developing it, that it would be hard to make that stick.
honeybadger1 4y ago
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Are you aware of how many government grants and tax benefits Tesla/SpaceX have collected[1]? They're as much "government money sifting leeches" as the rest. [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    First, SpaceX isn't getting (measurable) "grants". They are winning bids. Second, SpaceX takes far less money on comparable bids than legacy launchers. They simply charge less. That's why they win. Last, they actually deliver, unlike Boeing. Look at Starliner vs Crew Dragon. They are delivering incredible value for your tax dollars.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    That article is from 2015, firstly, and second if you actually look into what the subsidies are for, they're almost all for things that any manufacturer can access and are not Tesla specific. Are you against any subsidizing of green technologies? Here's a break down for you: https://electrek.co/2015/06/02/complete-breakdown-of-the-4-9-billion-in-government-support-the-la-times-claims-elon-musks-companies-are-receiving/ https://electrek.co/2015/06/02/complete-breakdown-of-the-4-9... N.B.: Only $20M went to SpaceX and it was local government doing it.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Everything Tesla/SpaceX has done has been: 1)Light years above the competition 2)Done with less employees and less money 3)Completed in a timespan that makes companies like We're discussing Tesla's self driving system. It's certainly not light years above the competition, as it doesn't even use state of the art sensors for safety like LiDAR, which has predictably resulted in multiple Teslas killing their drivers. Maybe they've built what they have with fewer employees and less money, but I don't think that's a win given the deaths. They probably should have used more money and employees to prevent that kind of thing. As for completing it in a timespan, I mean... they're nowhere near done and have been saying for years it'll be ready any day now, yet are still happily accepting money for their promises. That's pretty much the point of all this.
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alfor 4y ago
What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? What if they actually saved lives? There is plenty of video evidence of that: https://youtu.be/hF96jQ0SY8w https://youtu.be/hF96jQ0SY8w Would we try to stop it? A lot of companies would like to stop it, that’s for sure. There no doubt that a computer will match a human, than exceed its capability, 24x7, never tired, never distracted. For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure or random comment in a tweet a few years ago. Of course this comment is going to be heavily downvote like everything positive about Tesla here. I wonder why?
- shadowpho 4y ago
  >What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? And what if they are not? Furthermore to me the issue is not safety vs not-safety, but the advertisement is clearly misleading at least >For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure... Maybe we should hold the company to make sure the product brochure is truthful. Because if people trust the brochure they might die over it.
  - alfor 4y ago
    Maybe. On their site: https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." It’s clear they are working toward full self driving but it’s not there yet. "The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."
- mikestew 4y ago
  What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? And what if a frog had wings? Why, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops! I wonder why? Probably not what you're thinking, but I'd guess a lot of "what if..." with a single, carefully-selected video to back the hypotheticals.
club_tropical 4y ago
- concinds 4y ago
  The Biden admin has clearly signalled that it resents Musk personally due to his political views, but this probe was launched last year, and is completely unrelated to that.
  - club_tropical 4y ago
    No. Probes are easy to launch; all strategically important companies, people, and even local authorities have a list of associated ”probes” either active & simmering (like Tesla) or pending with the probable cause for launching a probe in a database somewhere. Usually, it will result in some sort of cost-of-doing-business fine or not be prioritized at all. Then, occasionally, someone gets uppity and the simmering pot gets the gas turned up.
    - concinds 4y ago
      I do point out here that the timing of this leak (which clearly came from the DoJ itself) is very suspect, given that it could have depressed Tesla's stock price, and it came right before Musk is expected to need to sell a little more $TSLA to finance the Twitter deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354143
coding123 4y ago
I've said this in the past but instead of the government just allowing auto-updates and what not, the AI needs to pass a driving test. Each version must be certified by some test. No, not the same test a human driver goes through. Something super rigourous that involves semis tipping over, bridges falling from above, babies crawling in the road, dogs, deer, rain, smoke, hail, snow, elephants, downed power lines. Maybe even a 10 year old kid running in front. Something that all of the companies would go through, administered by the government (not waymo).
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Meanwhile, 30,000 people a year will continue to die in car crashes while you strangle the entire industry in red tape. But, hey, at least you're "doing something."
  - m463 4y ago
    Honestly, I agree. It's sort of like "tax what you want less of" except with regulation
    - andbberger 4y ago
      except that "tax" is paid for with the lives of innocent pedestrians
  - bottlepalm 4y ago
    If every car had Autopilot right now there would be a massive reduction in deaths. All the bad drivers, texting drivers, drunk drivers, and road rage drivers - given the option to take a break and watch some Netflix. Regardless of how imperfect FSD is, they are much much worse.
    - GaylordTuring 4y ago
      I fully agree. Everyday on my commute I see tons of people who are on their phones, and I’ve stoped counting the amount of unsafe overtakes and tailgating that I experience. I would take all the cars being driven by FSD any day of the week!
mlindner 4y ago
This is after last week Reuters claimed that Elon Musk was under a federal investigation, which the White House later denied. (Almost no one reported the denial.) I'd wait for more information before jumping to conclusions. Between the regular pro-Russian reporting and this and other issues I've found Reuters to be a highly unreliable source recently. They're very hit and miss. Important also to look at the stock market. There's zero blip on the stock ticker from this news, which means that basically no one who owns decent amounts of TSLA stock care about this. Which generally means that they know something that's not in this article.
- therouwboat 4y ago
  "WILMINGTON, Del., Oct 13 (Reuters) - Elon Musk is being investigated by federal authorities over his conduct in his $44 billion takeover deal for Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), the social media company said in a court filing released on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigations, it did not say what the exact focus of the probes was and which federal authorities are conducting them." They are reporting what the court filing said, what are they supposed to do?
  - mlindner 4y ago
    > They are reporting what the court filing said, what are they supposed to do? Maybe put a modicum of effort into verifying comments put forward by an antagonist in a court case? Lawyers regularly lie or twist the truth in an attempt to push their case forward.
    - pvg 4y ago
      They source is clearly identified - they're reporting on a court case which involves, you know, reporting what the parties say in court.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > which the White House later denied I don't think the White House denied that Elon Musk was under investigation. It would be...completely inappropriate for the White House to comment on specific investigations from the FBI or DOJ. Rather, the White House denied that there was a national security review of Elon Musk's projects. That's important, but very distinct from a denial that there are no investigations of Elon Musk. It's also a subject matter that is much more appropriate for the White House to comment on.
wnevets 4y ago
I was told FSD cars was only 5 years away roughly 12 years ago.
- smnrchrds 4y ago
  Any day now, everyone will be playing Half-Life 3 on their Linux desktop during their commute in self-driving cars. /s
  - jra_samba 4y ago
    A Tesla is a Linux desktop, of course. :-).
    - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
      I thought they were running VxWorks under the hood? Or is that SpaceX?
      - KiwiJohnno 4y ago
        Both Tesla and SpaceX vehicles run on Linux.
        DoingIsLearning 4y ago
        Somwthing like Wind River linux? Or their own flavour of linux?
    - devoutsalsa 4y ago
      I thought it was a mobile device.
- threeseed 4y ago
  There are robo-taxis from Cruise and Waymo running today. They aren't perfect and there are plenty of manual fail safes but they are there.
sidibe 4y ago
I'll know when Tesla is actually taking these probes seriously when they finally take off the laughably deceptive video from https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot. Tldw it is a video that says the driver is only there for legal reasons, and it took them many takes to make the video. That's been there for many many years and any time this topic comes up I check it and yup, still there.
outlace 4y ago
A bit tangential but I just got a Tesla Model 3 and paid $6,000 extra for “enhanced autopilot” buying into all the marketing about it, and its one of the biggest regrets of my life and makes me unable to appreciate an otherwise great car. I just feel sick about it. The enhanced autopilot is buggy and doesn’t save me any effort. The summon and auto park don’t really work. I think it’s a scam. Other than that it’s a great car.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  "Other than that it’s a great car." Please update this review in a few years. CIO was late to work, again, today because the Tesla no go. One thing after another. It's kind of ridiculous.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Your life is pretty damn good then, all things considered.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    This is why I never have a good life. I can't give up my right to complain..
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Yeah, total humble brag
    - paulcole 4y ago
      I think that’s what makes it so funny. It’s not a humblebrag at all. The guy is being so earnest that the silly feature he spent $6,000 extra on top of his fancy car is one of his ”life’s biggest regrets.”
- tristanb 4y ago
  Interesting - we have it on our first car, love it, and just paid for it a second time on our second car. We regularly make 3-5hr trips with it driving. Maybe something is wrong with yours?
CloudRecondite 4y ago
They should probably get a head start on the Tesla Bot investigation as well
hnburnsy 4y ago
>the people familiar with the inquiry said >the sources said >they said. >one of the sources said >this source said These articles with no named sources are so tiring. This one didn't even bother to tell us why the sources are anonymous. Hard news and serious journalism is dead and buried. Did this reporter even have to leave their figurative basement to write this story?
- rsynnott 4y ago
  If reporters name their sources on stories like this, then suddenly they don't have sources anymore, and the media becomes, well, pretty much a system to regurgitate press releases. Like, this is how it has always worked.
cbeach 4y ago
What is the government’s minimum standard for a car autopilot to be sold as an “autopilot”? Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible. How could the government come up with benchmark standards for car autopilots when Tesla (and others) are actively inventing the technology? How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners? How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D? How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech?
- deleted 4y ago
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- everforward 4y ago
  > What is the government’s minimum standard for a car autopilot to be sold as an “autopilot”? California seems to be using the Society of Automotive Engineer's standard here, per the forms for applying for an AV license. > Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible. Air autopilots aren't really comparable. First and foremost, pilots require far more rigorous training than drivers, and are unlikely to be wholly unaware of the limitations of autopilot. It's also almost unanimously agreed that air autopilot is safer than manual flying under some conditions. There's some debate over how heavily it should be used, but I can't find anyone saying it shouldn't be used at all. > How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners? Tesla would pay employees, who are well-versed in the risks, to monitor the vehicles while they drive. The same thing that other self-driving companies do. > How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D? Probably very little. Tesla is the only one selling to consumers, so they're really the only one in the space that could be at risk from this lawsuit. > How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech? I won't discount it as a possibility, but Musk has had a lot of detractors for a long time. It was bound to happen at some point; you can only overpromise and underdeliver for so long before people start to notice.
nixass 4y ago
Will they finally be forced to name it adaptive cruise control, as it should've been from beginning?
- twblalock 4y ago
  It's not adaptive cruise control. Teslas already have adaptive cruise control, for free, on every model. The FSD feature also steers the car.
  - m463 4y ago
    I think without autopilot/fsd you just get dumb cruise control. There is no follow distance. If it slows down for cars it might be emergency collision avoidance that does it.
    - spsoto 4y ago
      Autosteer and adaptive cruise control (honoring following distance) are standard in Basic Autopilot.
StillBored 4y ago
So, much of this sounds like a question of just how much you can lie in your marketing material if you then take it all back in the click-through. I'm curious how many times people have been refunded for the enhanced autopilot claiming a bait and switch. They believed the marketing materials purchased the car, and then discovered when they get it "hey not really". But, I'm guessing what will hang them, is the question over whether people actually believed the warnings were real or just CYA, and then promptly treated it like a full "better than human" AI.
postmeta 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
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Melatonic 4y ago
I met someone recently who told me they SLEPT on their way to work in their Tesla. On purpose. They bought the car specifically because they had a very long 2.5 hour commute. The marketing for this stuff is absolutely liable and as much as I like what Tesla has done for electric cars in general we are one big, massive accident away from this all absolutely blowing up.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > I met someone recently who told me they SLEPT on their way to work in their Tesla. On purpose. They bought the car specifically because they had a very long 2.5 hour commute. Think about that. If someone can literally sleep while the car is driving itself, and it doesn't crash, then the self-driving feature actually works really well. I mean, try doing that in a Chevy.
  - Veserv 4y ago
    No. Humans average something like 250,000 miles per insurance-worthy event. Even if we assumed a average speed of 80 mph, which is absurdly high, that is ~3,000 hours between accidents. That system would need to make the interaction-less roundtrip commute 600 times, 2.5 work years, without even a single minor accident for the unassisted system to even be comparable to the average driver.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Why are you comparing it to a human driver? Compare it to other self-driving cars and you’ll see that it is actually one of the better systems on the market.
      - wewtyflakes 4y ago
        Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?
8bitsrule 4y ago
Because the number of variables, an experienced human driver has to be ready to make decisions that they can't specifically train for. What AI can reach that deep? I once had a few seconds to choose between 1) a multi-vehicle collision at 60mph with oncoming vehicles in both lanes that had a steep up-hillside to their right (one was a gasoline tanker), and 2) getting my vehicle stopped on a two-foot shoulder with a long steep 45-degree down-hillside next to it (no guard rail). I would NOT have wanted computer assistance, thanks anyway.
- jaimex2 4y ago
  Any. You're describing the trolley problem which is silly. The car should be traveling at a speed where it can break and stay in its lane to avoid any at fault accident. Nothing more, nothing less.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    You're describing a utopia where outcomes are perfectly predictable, which is silly. "And roads should be without any defect, weather should never happen, pedestrians and other drivers should always behave rationally, and black ice is not legally allowed to exist."
    - 8bitsrule 4y ago
      Exactly. The real world that real people have to drive in is far, far more complex than these sloppy machines could ever know. The map is not the territory.
  - tim333 4y ago
    I was going to say, the vast majority of weird near crash situations can be dealt with by slowing/stopping. That is probably not so hard to program in and not so different from what humans do.
    - 8bitsrule 4y ago
      As of a few years back, the 'FSD' Tesla had failed to detect several parked police cars, a parked firetruck, a moving semi pulling in front of it, and a concrete lane divider, all of which it struck without slowing down at all. At least two dead operators.
Ptchd 4y ago
Probably better off with https://comma.ai https://comma.ai
joshribakoff 4y ago
When I bought FSD it stated clearly it depended on technological and regulatory advances, so I’m not sure I get the argument that I was a victim of fraud. Also, I haven’t seen it mentioned here, but the tech does exist and currently you have to demonstrate “safe” (according to their heuristics) driving to get access. I have access, and it more or less does the things they promised, far from perfect (in fact it makes lots of mistakes where I take over for safety), but I fail to see how they promised perfection. My interpretation of the “full” in full self driving was that it handles the full list of maneuvers they enumerated like obeying traffic control and making turns, which it does do today.
- m463 4y ago
  actually the part where people have to "demonstrate" driving is what really bothers me. You should NOT have to beg permission. This is normalizing a dystopian future, which tesla is also doubling down on with their car insurance
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pengaru 4y ago
  The probe's not limited to FSD claims, from TFA: > The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    I wonder how that compares to the number of accidents where BMW’s driver assistance was activated. BMW seems to be actively trying to kill me by steering into every construction marker it sees.
deleted 4y ago
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postmeta 4y ago
"hands free driving" should probably investigate https://www.gmc.com/connectivity-technology/super-cruise https://www.gmc.com/connectivity-technology/super-cruise
dirkg 4y ago
Musk/Tesla have been selling alpha quality at best and vaporware in reality FSD for a long time. Its never ever going to work as claimed. Its crap software that endangers other people on the road and routinely kills people and all they needed to do is add a stupid disclaimer and the magic 'beta'. Every few months Musk will lie that its 'done' and out at the end of the year, with outlandish nonsense claims like his robotaxi in 2016/17, his most recent one that you wont need a human driver. Its a massive scam and fraud thats made them trillions, and its amazing they haven't been sued for it.
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  Idk it works pretty well for me. I have FSD on like 90% of the time at least. Total game changer.
ok_dad 4y ago
I, as a software engineer, will never trust an autonomous vehicle that is not on rails. Even then, it better be a slow-ass train so I can jump off with minor injuries if anything goes awry. I might trust a fully-open-sourced vehicle, produced in a manner which the software and hardware design and implementation are fully verified as error-free versus a simple-to-understand open-source model. That will never happen, though.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I am not an engineer, but I feel the same way about payment systems. It is all so fragile when you peek behind the scenes that it is hard to justify using anything, but most basic services.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    How do you think banks work?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      What kind of banks? Or do you mean bank as a generic name for a financial institution? Works as a function of payments? How it is intended to function vs how it actually works? It seems like a very easy question, but it is admittedly hard for me to answer without some additional way to parse it. Could you narrow it down a little?
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        My point is that the IT infrastructure that run payments in actual banks are mostly terrible.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  It's totally fine to have lines you won't cross, but as you say literally none of this is going to happen. Autonomous vehicles aren't on rails and error-free isn't a thing. I'm also not sure how a fully open source stack would help to alleviate your safety concerns. Current vehicle stacks are impossible for a single individual to meaningfully review, however motivated. These are incredibly complicated distributed systems with dozens of processors running multiple operating systems and frameworks on top of those before you even get to application code. The safety requirements alone consume thousands of pages.
firefoxkekw 4y ago
Not so long ago, Andrej Karpathy, the ex-Director of AI at Tesla left the company. I ask myself a couple of questions, if Tesla was to release in the near future, some game changer technology in the self-driving space and I was the face behind it, would I leave the company so other person could take the merit? Would I leave the company because I think they are going to push something that I consider dangerous to the public and I don't want to be the scapegoat?
sircastor 4y ago
Back during the summer, and friend of mine’s son was killed in an accident involving a Tesla on autopilot. I can’t help but feel like the oversell of Autopilot’s capabilities is just Elon Musk feeding his own ego.
user3939382 4y ago
My jaded view is that companies this size routinely commit criminal acts but enforcement is the selective result of political relationships in DC. There’s obviously some spat going on between Musk and the Biden administration that the public has limited insight into. Suddenly Biden’s DOJ is going after Musk… too much of a coincidence for me.
- tim333 4y ago
  Musk has been fairly open on the spat. Basically Biden is funded by the unions and promotes unionised car companies like Ford/GM over Tesla. I doubt the DOJ thing is part of it.
ghufran_syed 4y ago
My commute is 80 miles each way - I would have left that job long ago if I didn't have "autopilot" reducing the mental effort of the drive.YMMV
concinds 4y ago
I haven't seen anyone note the timing of this: Musk is buying Twitter today or tomorrow, and he'll likely need to sell more Tesla stock unless he can get additional financing. This news will obviously depress Tesla stock. The timing is hardly inconspicuous.
causi 4y ago
AEB, lane departure warning, blind spot detection, parking assist I all understand. I understand the "wink wink, nudge nudge" reasons to buy systems like autopilot, blue cruise, toyota lane tracing, etc. What I don't get is the by-the-books reasons to buy it. What the hell value are you getting out of autopilot if you're actually keeping your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road? I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm asking why the hell you're paying thousands of dollars to do it.
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  I totally agree! Either the car drives itself or I drive. There's no need to let a car take the wheel if you have to baby-sit it all the time, intervening when it runs off the road. It's dangerous and lulls drivers into thinking the car can drive itself.
  - causi 4y ago
    Right. Give me "highway mode" where all the car has to do is stay in the lane and not hit the car in front me, and not hassle me about watching the road or touching the wheel so I can watch a youtube video during my thirty minute interstate ride to work. It's going to be a long damn time before I trust a car to do anything more complicated than that by itself.
- cheeze 4y ago
  I can't wait for the day that a car _can_ drive better than a human. I see it as a safety thing. We're obviously nowhere near that but one can dream of safer roads...
  - causi 4y ago
    I'm not. It'll be the end of car ownership. Why would any manufacturer sell me a car when they could add it to their autonomous taxi fleet instead?
UltraViolence 4y ago
IMHO this is long overdue! Many people have died who relied on their Tesla's to drive them to work (sometimes even taking a nap while it drove). And Tesla's claim that "Full Self Driving" is merely a phrase that doesn't describe the capabilities of its software is weak and criminally deceitful. Tesla needs to be held accountable for this.
stockerta 4y ago
I just doesn't get it, how it is legal to beta test self driving cars on public roads?
- tim333 4y ago
  Claim it's a driver assist system like cruise control. Whether that's moral or desirable it another debate.
dncornholio 4y ago
What bothers me is that Tesla is putting up the blame to the drivers not using it as instructed. This bothers me so deeply. People can and will fail to follow instructions. You have to design around this. If you don't have failsafe mechanisms, don't ship. Tesla's not taking enough responsibility.

452 points by brandall10 4y ago

> The Justice Department’s Autopilot probe is far from recommending any action partly because it is competing with two other DOJ investigations involving Tesla one of the sources said. Investigators still have much work to do and no decision on charges is imminent this source said. This is definitely a thing that happens. If you are ever doing crimes, just be sure to commit a whole bunch of them so the DOJ has to move more slowly. It's a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing.

leroman 4y ago
I propose to call this kind of attack LAPA ("Legal Analysis Paralysis Attack")
- VagueMag 4y ago
  I think it's "No One Wants To Be the Pin That Pricks the Overinflated Tesla Stock Bubble" paralysis.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Watching Trump do the same, I've taken to calling it the Montgomery Burns Defense (canonically known as Three Stooges Syndrome in the Simpsons episode, apparently)
8ytecoder 4y ago
And do it openly and in public.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >And do it openly and in public. And make sure the figures involved are not below 9 digits. That way, when you get your two year (6 months with good behavior) white collar slap on the wrist, your French Chateau will still be waiting, and you can laugh at the guy who's doing a decade for bouncing a $200 check on the way out.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> It's a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing. It’s actually a 5th Amendment (double-jeopardy) thing; prosecuting a subset of crimes from a single course of conduct may preclude prosecuting others depending on their relationship, so it becomes important to fully investigate before prosecution.
- lazide 4y ago
  In this case I suspect it’s also a ‘Elon musk has too many lawyers and is acquiring a company that “buys ink by the barrel”’ problem too. Everyone involved is going to be very careful to not end up personally targeted or liable, and that nothing done could be twisted to make themselves or the administration look like idiots. It’s a big part of why ‘the rich don’t have consequences’, as is the current fashion to say - they can defend themselves against all but the most careful prosecutions, and can afford to hire people to make sure their asses are covered (if they think to do so). As to if Elon actually did cover his ass here is yet to be determined. I think he probably didn’t sufficiently, but can muddy the waters enough to not go to prison, and would just have to shell out some money in a decade or so to fines or civil suits. Only time will tell!
  - nverno 4y ago
    They're investigating a company not an individual. The article really gives no information about which individuals might be liable.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Of course! We all know who 'runs' those companies, who is the prominent face of those companies, who has repeatedly made very public (and often dubiously factual) pronouncements about the exact technologies and products at the center of the investigation, who has all their net worth tied up in these companies, who has been an outspoken critic of various government agencies (and relatively politically active), and also happens to be very publicly buying a hot button social media platform right now. Completely unrelated to Mr. Musk, I'm sure.
cal5k 4y ago
Musk is an outspoken critic of the current administration. Given what we've seen from the Justice Department over the last few years, does it not seem highly likely that this is politically-motivated?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Or the current administration is trying to have regulators and prosecutors start to go after malfeasance and Musk is criticizing the administration because he’s got a lot that he can be prosecuted for. Isn’t it fun how wild, unsubstantiated, paranoid speculation can cut both ways?
- VagueMag 4y ago
  Musk has actually been treated with an incredibly light touch given the number of people who have been maimed and killed by Teslas running Autopilot. If this Administration was truly antagonistic to Musk, there are dozens of things they could be doing to create problems for him and his companies. They're not.

woeirua 4y ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Tesla the electric car company is doing great. Tesla the FSD tech unicorn, is going to end in tears. I will not be surprised at all when some of the engineers on the AI team go to jail over this. Why the engineers? Because the executives almost always are able to afford high powered lawyers to avoid any serious consequences.

dheera 4y ago
Really, it's the shareholders that should go to jail over this for threatening to short Tesla stock if they don't deliver at every quarterly earnings. They are the ultimate root cause of Tesla's behavior around FSD. If shareholders collectively promise and agree to hold Tesla stock and upvote it for a 5-10 year period it would give Tesla the space and time they need to develop FSD safely. As long as they're at the mercy of ruthless quarterly free market capitalism, safety will go to shit. Same thing with Boeing.
- DontchaKnowit 4y ago
  And upvote it? Wtf are you talking about
  - dheera 4y ago
    Shareholders upvote and downvote stocks with their bid/ask prices.
    - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
      That's a real weird way of putting it.
- woeirua 4y ago
  You can't be serious. The shareholders demand returns, but the EV side of the company already has been successful enough to keep them placated. No one forced Musk to go out there and repeatedly claim that Telsa's would be able to be used as robotaxis, or that you'd be able to drive across country with no hands. He's still out there making these outlandish claims! At some point, the music is going to stop.

perihelions 4y ago

- "The Justice Department’s Autopilot probe is far from recommending any action partly because it is competing with two other DOJ investigations involving Tesla, one of the sources said. Investigators still have much work to do and no decision on charges is imminent, this source said." - "The Justice Department may also face challenges in building its case, said the sources, because of Tesla’s warnings about overreliance on Autopilot." How often do criminal defendants get to read the internal deliberations of their prosecuting office, and before they're even charged? What a dysfunctional mess. This leak was unethical, unlawful, and unworthy of the gravitas of an office whose work puts people in prison.

tptacek 4y ago
If I search the NYT from 1990 to 2010 for "DOJ" "charges imminent", I get >2000 results. There's nothing happening with respect to Tesla here that doesn't happen all the time. DOJ is a big organization; it has 100,000 employees. We just notice this stuff when it intersects people and companies we have a rooting interest (one way or the other) in.
londons_explore 4y ago
> How often do criminal defendants get to read the internal deliberations of their prosecuting office, and before they're even charged? There's really no reason this info should be secret. If you can provide extra info to persuade them not to charge you, then all the better - time saved for both parties.
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maxbond 4y ago
It's entirely possible DOJ decided this was a good time to leak this information. For instance, just spitballing, they might be saying, "hey, we're going to bring charges, but not for a while, and we want to tell investors ahead of time so that the news causes less volatility, and the volatility will be better isolated to just Tesla." No real way to know from the outside, unless they bring charges against a leaker.

treis 4y ago

I always thought the Autopilot name and the claims about having all the equipment for FSD were basically fraudulent and Tesla would be liable for false advertisement. Never made the connection of Fraud => Someone driving negligent as a result => Negligent Homicide/Manslaughter but it seems solid and somewhat obvious once stated.

Symmetry 4y ago
I've generally always considered level 2 or 3 autonomy to be a recipe for disaster, humans can't be expected to remain alert and respond quickly when they aren't doing anything. But at the same time the way Tesla autopilot woks is congruent to autopilots on boats or airplanes. Those won't avoid other vehicles and are usually perfectly happy to let you crash into shoals or mountains.
- ht85 4y ago
  Taking human nature into account has driven so much progress in terms of road safety. Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.
  - kylecordes 4y ago
    The usual FSD complaint is that Tesla has been offering it for years, at ascending prices, without any date-certain of delivering it (just tweets predicting it), without refunding it when not delivered after X years. I can easily imagine an eventual class-action suit requiring some % of refund all the way back to the first car purchased with someday-FSD (!). If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play. The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)
    - CoastalCoder 4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago

Autopilot is a fantastic, world leading technology. But the marketing of it was (and continues to be) nothing short of criminally negligent. There are over a dozen confirmed deaths at this point, directly attributable to the outright lies spewed by Elon and co. regarding its' capabilities. We were able to ban lawn darts in the 80s because of a few isolated incidents. But the state of affairs we are in now is only possible due to the absurd level of regulatory capture we've reached in this country. I don't expect anything to change at this point.

adam_arthur 4y ago
I wouldn’t even call it regulatory capture. More of a conflict of interest by lawmakers holding specific company stock. No lobbying needed
concordDance 4y ago
> There are over a dozen confirmed deaths at this point, directly attributable to the outright lies spewed by Elon and co. regarding its' capabilities. Got a link to a list? The few cases I've investigated turned out either not to have it enabled or were cases of serious negligence on behalf of the driver. Also, they get a user manual they need to read/click through before they're allowed to use the autopilot.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Got a link to a list? There's been 10 just this year: https://fortune.com/2022/10/19/tesla-cars-involved-in-10-of-the-11-new-crash-deaths-linked-to-automated-tech-vehicles/ https://fortune.com/2022/10/19/tesla-cars-involved-in-10-of-...
  - concordDance 4y ago
    That's not the list I've asked for. Those are deaths in car crashes that involved Teslas that were using automated systems. This does not mean the Tesla was at fault (could be other driver or Tesla driver) or that autopilot was involved (the cruise control counts as an automated system) and certainly doesn't mean that system misunderstandings caused by marketing were the cause. I'm fairly sure the grandparent just didn't consider what the sentence constructed was actually saying and was just expressing a dislike of automated car marketing. Unfortunately, people often believe unsourced comments on hackernews to be literally true rather than sentimentally true.

hellomyguys 4y ago

Honestly surprised any of this made it past the legal department at Tesla. Any company I've worked at has always been super careful and conservative with the language you use to describe anything.

izzydata 4y ago
You can't sell lies if you only tell the truth.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  Sadly a misperception. Modern masters deceive you with the truth - carefully selected facts, but true. Or close enough for legal purposes.
tptacek 4y ago
This is Tesla, a company that managed to randomly announce that it intended to take itself private, on Twitter.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  And probably included a pot joke.
- tenpies 4y ago
  "managed to randomly announce" is a very odd way of saying "the CEO committed securities fraud because bankruptcy was imminent and his entire net worth was sunk into the company".
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Eh? Did they actually issue more stock soon afterwards at a higher-than-before valuation? Got a cite?
    - tptacek 4y ago

DarkmSparks 4y ago

While I understand the motivations for the investigation, and fully agree its an investigation worth conducting. I dont think it actually has merit, at least not in the terms framed by the article. In most circumstances it "probably is better than a human driver", not all circumstances, and not proven (hence probably). But if LM can push the F35 as the best jet ever while it racks up a wreckage count to make the 737 Max jealous, claims made by Tesla arent even in the same ballpark.... It would be a real shame if we lose any chance of full self driving over a misunderstanding about the system being "not perfected yet"

bigmattystyles 4y ago
I know it's on top of mind when I'm commuting in my F35. /s Comparing a military jet which operation requires thousands of hours of training just to get off the ground compared to a mass produced vehicle is not a valid comparison, at least in my mind. Plus what LM pushes to its stockholders is definitely not as comprehensive as the Pentagon gets.
- DarkmSparks 4y ago
  They promised full autonomy for the F35 And supersonic flight. Its just its been held up by the small detail that the airframe keeps making huge holes in the ground every few weeks.
ModernMech 4y ago
> It would be a real shame if we lose any chance of full self driving over a misunderstanding about the system being "not perfected yet" We can still have self driving cars, but they should be developed within a culture that values safety. Tesla is not such a culture. We know this because after the first accident that resulted in decapitation, Tesla collectively shrugged and made the problem worse by removing sensors, which predictably resulted in a second decapitation. They collectively shrugged after that one as well, and again made the problem worse by removing more sensors. Tesla does not value safety, and their YOLO attitude toward driverless cars, in which the general public is forced to participate in their beta test whether we like it or not, is holding the driverless car industry back. They are not friends of the cause, and the sooner they are prevented from running beta tests on the general public (which have caused deaths), the sooner the industry as a whole can move forward. Reckless engineering by Tesla will not result in a net gain in safety for everyone. Safety is hard even when done intentionally, it won't be achieved as a second order effect of Tesla's "move fast and break things" ethos.

wilg 4y ago

I don't understand why Elon claiming that the cars will be able to drive themselves in the future could be considered any kind of crime? I don't think Tesla has ever said "hey you can get in the car today and it is fully autonomous". They've just said that's what they will do in the future. They've also shown and talked about products in-development. You might think they are full of shit about whether it will ever be delivered, which is a fair argument, but that's much different than lying about the actual product in people's hands.

AlexandrB 4y ago
They allowed you to buy the "car can drive itself" capability and never fully delivered. It's not like this was just a promise, it was something you could pay for years ago.
- wilg 4y ago
  Yeah, but that isn't a crime. You can pre-order things. They still claim they will deliver it. Seems like maybe you could do a class-action or something to get your money back, but not argue that actually it was reasonable to believe you already had it and therefore are not liable for a crash or whatever.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    IANAL but I think you could call it fraud if you never had any intention of delivering. E.g. if I kickstart a perpetual motion machine and then move to the Bahamas with the funds. What's ironic is that despite his image as a genius no one ever holds Elon to account for his failure to accurately predict the state/progress of his own technology. He's either not as smart as people think or he's knowingly lying, but I think you have to pick one.
    - wilg 4y ago
      Seems like since they are delivering things, albeit slowly, and spending tons of money developing it, that it would be hard to make that stick.

honeybadger1 4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago
Are you aware of how many government grants and tax benefits Tesla/SpaceX have collected[1]? They're as much "government money sifting leeches" as the rest. [1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  First, SpaceX isn't getting (measurable) "grants". They are winning bids. Second, SpaceX takes far less money on comparable bids than legacy launchers. They simply charge less. That's why they win. Last, they actually deliver, unlike Boeing. Look at Starliner vs Crew Dragon. They are delivering incredible value for your tax dollars.
- mlindner 4y ago
  That article is from 2015, firstly, and second if you actually look into what the subsidies are for, they're almost all for things that any manufacturer can access and are not Tesla specific. Are you against any subsidizing of green technologies? Here's a break down for you: https://electrek.co/2015/06/02/complete-breakdown-of-the-4-9-billion-in-government-support-the-la-times-claims-elon-musks-companies-are-receiving/ https://electrek.co/2015/06/02/complete-breakdown-of-the-4-9... N.B.: Only $20M went to SpaceX and it was local government doing it.
deleted 4y ago
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ModernMech 4y ago
> Everything Tesla/SpaceX has done has been: 1)Light years above the competition 2)Done with less employees and less money 3)Completed in a timespan that makes companies like We're discussing Tesla's self driving system. It's certainly not light years above the competition, as it doesn't even use state of the art sensors for safety like LiDAR, which has predictably resulted in multiple Teslas killing their drivers. Maybe they've built what they have with fewer employees and less money, but I don't think that's a win given the deaths. They probably should have used more money and employees to prevent that kind of thing. As for completing it in a timespan, I mean... they're nowhere near done and have been saying for years it'll be ready any day now, yet are still happily accepting money for their promises. That's pretty much the point of all this.

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alfor 4y ago

What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? What if they actually saved lives? There is plenty of video evidence of that: https://youtu.be/hF96jQ0SY8w https://youtu.be/hF96jQ0SY8w Would we try to stop it? A lot of companies would like to stop it, that’s for sure. There no doubt that a computer will match a human, than exceed its capability, 24x7, never tired, never distracted. For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure or random comment in a tweet a few years ago. Of course this comment is going to be heavily downvote like everything positive about Tesla here. I wonder why?

shadowpho 4y ago
>What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? And what if they are not? Furthermore to me the issue is not safety vs not-safety, but the advertisement is clearly misleading at least >For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure... Maybe we should hold the company to make sure the product brochure is truthful. Because if people trust the brochure they might die over it.
- alfor 4y ago
  Maybe. On their site: https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." It’s clear they are working toward full self driving but it’s not there yet. "The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."
mikestew 4y ago
What if Tesla are safer than a regular driver? And what if a frog had wings? Why, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops! I wonder why? Probably not what you're thinking, but I'd guess a lot of "what if..." with a single, carefully-selected video to back the hypotheticals.

club_tropical 4y ago

concinds 4y ago
The Biden admin has clearly signalled that it resents Musk personally due to his political views, but this probe was launched last year, and is completely unrelated to that.
- club_tropical 4y ago
  No. Probes are easy to launch; all strategically important companies, people, and even local authorities have a list of associated ”probes” either active & simmering (like Tesla) or pending with the probable cause for launching a probe in a database somewhere. Usually, it will result in some sort of cost-of-doing-business fine or not be prioritized at all. Then, occasionally, someone gets uppity and the simmering pot gets the gas turned up.
  - concinds 4y ago
    I do point out here that the timing of this leak (which clearly came from the DoJ itself) is very suspect, given that it could have depressed Tesla's stock price, and it came right before Musk is expected to need to sell a little more $TSLA to finance the Twitter deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354143

coding123 4y ago

I've said this in the past but instead of the government just allowing auto-updates and what not, the AI needs to pass a driving test. Each version must be certified by some test. No, not the same test a human driver goes through. Something super rigourous that involves semis tipping over, bridges falling from above, babies crawling in the road, dogs, deer, rain, smoke, hail, snow, elephants, downed power lines. Maybe even a 10 year old kid running in front. Something that all of the companies would go through, administered by the government (not waymo).

CamperBob2 4y ago
Meanwhile, 30,000 people a year will continue to die in car crashes while you strangle the entire industry in red tape. But, hey, at least you're "doing something."
- m463 4y ago
  Honestly, I agree. It's sort of like "tax what you want less of" except with regulation
  - andbberger 4y ago
    except that "tax" is paid for with the lives of innocent pedestrians
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  If every car had Autopilot right now there would be a massive reduction in deaths. All the bad drivers, texting drivers, drunk drivers, and road rage drivers - given the option to take a break and watch some Netflix. Regardless of how imperfect FSD is, they are much much worse.
  - GaylordTuring 4y ago
    I fully agree. Everyday on my commute I see tons of people who are on their phones, and I’ve stoped counting the amount of unsafe overtakes and tailgating that I experience. I would take all the cars being driven by FSD any day of the week!

mlindner 4y ago

This is after last week Reuters claimed that Elon Musk was under a federal investigation, which the White House later denied. (Almost no one reported the denial.) I'd wait for more information before jumping to conclusions. Between the regular pro-Russian reporting and this and other issues I've found Reuters to be a highly unreliable source recently. They're very hit and miss. Important also to look at the stock market. There's zero blip on the stock ticker from this news, which means that basically no one who owns decent amounts of TSLA stock care about this. Which generally means that they know something that's not in this article.

therouwboat 4y ago
"WILMINGTON, Del., Oct 13 (Reuters) - Elon Musk is being investigated by federal authorities over his conduct in his $44 billion takeover deal for Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), the social media company said in a court filing released on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigations, it did not say what the exact focus of the probes was and which federal authorities are conducting them." They are reporting what the court filing said, what are they supposed to do?
- mlindner 4y ago
  > They are reporting what the court filing said, what are they supposed to do? Maybe put a modicum of effort into verifying comments put forward by an antagonist in a court case? Lawyers regularly lie or twist the truth in an attempt to push their case forward.
  - pvg 4y ago
    They source is clearly identified - they're reporting on a court case which involves, you know, reporting what the parties say in court.
ncallaway 4y ago
> which the White House later denied I don't think the White House denied that Elon Musk was under investigation. It would be...completely inappropriate for the White House to comment on specific investigations from the FBI or DOJ. Rather, the White House denied that there was a national security review of Elon Musk's projects. That's important, but very distinct from a denial that there are no investigations of Elon Musk. It's also a subject matter that is much more appropriate for the White House to comment on.

wnevets 4y ago

I was told FSD cars was only 5 years away roughly 12 years ago.

smnrchrds 4y ago
Any day now, everyone will be playing Half-Life 3 on their Linux desktop during their commute in self-driving cars. /s
- jra_samba 4y ago
  A Tesla is a Linux desktop, of course. :-).
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    I thought they were running VxWorks under the hood? Or is that SpaceX?
    - KiwiJohnno 4y ago
      Both Tesla and SpaceX vehicles run on Linux.
      - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
        Somwthing like Wind River linux? Or their own flavour of linux?
  - devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I thought it was a mobile device.
threeseed 4y ago
There are robo-taxis from Cruise and Waymo running today. They aren't perfect and there are plenty of manual fail safes but they are there.

sidibe 4y ago

I'll know when Tesla is actually taking these probes seriously when they finally take off the laughably deceptive video from https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot. Tldw it is a video that says the driver is only there for legal reasons, and it took them many takes to make the video. That's been there for many many years and any time this topic comes up I check it and yup, still there.

outlace 4y ago

A bit tangential but I just got a Tesla Model 3 and paid $6,000 extra for “enhanced autopilot” buying into all the marketing about it, and its one of the biggest regrets of my life and makes me unable to appreciate an otherwise great car. I just feel sick about it. The enhanced autopilot is buggy and doesn’t save me any effort. The summon and auto park don’t really work. I think it’s a scam. Other than that it’s a great car.

datavirtue 4y ago
"Other than that it’s a great car." Please update this review in a few years. CIO was late to work, again, today because the Tesla no go. One thing after another. It's kind of ridiculous.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Your life is pretty damn good then, all things considered.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  This is why I never have a good life. I can't give up my right to complain..
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Yeah, total humble brag
  - paulcole 4y ago
    I think that’s what makes it so funny. It’s not a humblebrag at all. The guy is being so earnest that the silly feature he spent $6,000 extra on top of his fancy car is one of his ”life’s biggest regrets.”
tristanb 4y ago
Interesting - we have it on our first car, love it, and just paid for it a second time on our second car. We regularly make 3-5hr trips with it driving. Maybe something is wrong with yours?

CloudRecondite 4y ago

They should probably get a head start on the Tesla Bot investigation as well

hnburnsy 4y ago

>the people familiar with the inquiry said >the sources said >they said. >one of the sources said >this source said These articles with no named sources are so tiring. This one didn't even bother to tell us why the sources are anonymous. Hard news and serious journalism is dead and buried. Did this reporter even have to leave their figurative basement to write this story?

rsynnott 4y ago
If reporters name their sources on stories like this, then suddenly they don't have sources anymore, and the media becomes, well, pretty much a system to regurgitate press releases. Like, this is how it has always worked.

cbeach 4y ago

What is the government’s minimum standard for a car autopilot to be sold as an “autopilot”? Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible. How could the government come up with benchmark standards for car autopilots when Tesla (and others) are actively inventing the technology? How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners? How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D? How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech?

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everforward 4y ago
> What is the government’s minimum standard for a car autopilot to be sold as an “autopilot”? California seems to be using the Society of Automotive Engineer's standard here, per the forms for applying for an AV license. > Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible. Air autopilots aren't really comparable. First and foremost, pilots require far more rigorous training than drivers, and are unlikely to be wholly unaware of the limitations of autopilot. It's also almost unanimously agreed that air autopilot is safer than manual flying under some conditions. There's some debate over how heavily it should be used, but I can't find anyone saying it shouldn't be used at all. > How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners? Tesla would pay employees, who are well-versed in the risks, to monitor the vehicles while they drive. The same thing that other self-driving companies do. > How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D? Probably very little. Tesla is the only one selling to consumers, so they're really the only one in the space that could be at risk from this lawsuit. > How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech? I won't discount it as a possibility, but Musk has had a lot of detractors for a long time. It was bound to happen at some point; you can only overpromise and underdeliver for so long before people start to notice.

nixass 4y ago

Will they finally be forced to name it adaptive cruise control, as it should've been from beginning?

twblalock 4y ago
It's not adaptive cruise control. Teslas already have adaptive cruise control, for free, on every model. The FSD feature also steers the car.
- m463 4y ago
  I think without autopilot/fsd you just get dumb cruise control. There is no follow distance. If it slows down for cars it might be emergency collision avoidance that does it.
  - spsoto 4y ago
    Autosteer and adaptive cruise control (honoring following distance) are standard in Basic Autopilot.

StillBored 4y ago

So, much of this sounds like a question of just how much you can lie in your marketing material if you then take it all back in the click-through. I'm curious how many times people have been refunded for the enhanced autopilot claiming a bait and switch. They believed the marketing materials purchased the car, and then discovered when they get it "hey not really". But, I'm guessing what will hang them, is the question over whether people actually believed the warnings were real or just CYA, and then promptly treated it like a full "better than human" AI.

postmeta 4y ago

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Melatonic 4y ago

I met someone recently who told me they SLEPT on their way to work in their Tesla. On purpose. They bought the car specifically because they had a very long 2.5 hour commute. The marketing for this stuff is absolutely liable and as much as I like what Tesla has done for electric cars in general we are one big, massive accident away from this all absolutely blowing up.

twblalock 4y ago
> I met someone recently who told me they SLEPT on their way to work in their Tesla. On purpose. They bought the car specifically because they had a very long 2.5 hour commute. Think about that. If someone can literally sleep while the car is driving itself, and it doesn't crash, then the self-driving feature actually works really well. I mean, try doing that in a Chevy.
- Veserv 4y ago
  No. Humans average something like 250,000 miles per insurance-worthy event. Even if we assumed a average speed of 80 mph, which is absurdly high, that is ~3,000 hours between accidents. That system would need to make the interaction-less roundtrip commute 600 times, 2.5 work years, without even a single minor accident for the unassisted system to even be comparable to the average driver.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Why are you comparing it to a human driver? Compare it to other self-driving cars and you’ll see that it is actually one of the better systems on the market.
    - wewtyflakes 4y ago
      Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?

8bitsrule 4y ago

Because the number of variables, an experienced human driver has to be ready to make decisions that they can't specifically train for. What AI can reach that deep? I once had a few seconds to choose between 1) a multi-vehicle collision at 60mph with oncoming vehicles in both lanes that had a steep up-hillside to their right (one was a gasoline tanker), and 2) getting my vehicle stopped on a two-foot shoulder with a long steep 45-degree down-hillside next to it (no guard rail). I would NOT have wanted computer assistance, thanks anyway.

jaimex2 4y ago
Any. You're describing the trolley problem which is silly. The car should be traveling at a speed where it can break and stay in its lane to avoid any at fault accident. Nothing more, nothing less.
- akira2501 4y ago
  You're describing a utopia where outcomes are perfectly predictable, which is silly. "And roads should be without any defect, weather should never happen, pedestrians and other drivers should always behave rationally, and black ice is not legally allowed to exist."
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    Exactly. The real world that real people have to drive in is far, far more complex than these sloppy machines could ever know. The map is not the territory.
- tim333 4y ago
  I was going to say, the vast majority of weird near crash situations can be dealt with by slowing/stopping. That is probably not so hard to program in and not so different from what humans do.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    As of a few years back, the 'FSD' Tesla had failed to detect several parked police cars, a parked firetruck, a moving semi pulling in front of it, and a concrete lane divider, all of which it struck without slowing down at all. At least two dead operators.

Ptchd 4y ago

Probably better off with https://comma.ai https://comma.ai

joshribakoff 4y ago

When I bought FSD it stated clearly it depended on technological and regulatory advances, so I’m not sure I get the argument that I was a victim of fraud. Also, I haven’t seen it mentioned here, but the tech does exist and currently you have to demonstrate “safe” (according to their heuristics) driving to get access. I have access, and it more or less does the things they promised, far from perfect (in fact it makes lots of mistakes where I take over for safety), but I fail to see how they promised perfection. My interpretation of the “full” in full self driving was that it handles the full list of maneuvers they enumerated like obeying traffic control and making turns, which it does do today.

m463 4y ago
actually the part where people have to "demonstrate" driving is what really bothers me. You should NOT have to beg permission. This is normalizing a dystopian future, which tesla is also doubling down on with their car insurance
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pengaru 4y ago
The probe's not limited to FSD claims, from TFA: > The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  I wonder how that compares to the number of accidents where BMW’s driver assistance was activated. BMW seems to be actively trying to kill me by steering into every construction marker it sees.

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postmeta 4y ago

"hands free driving" should probably investigate https://www.gmc.com/connectivity-technology/super-cruise https://www.gmc.com/connectivity-technology/super-cruise

dirkg 4y ago

Musk/Tesla have been selling alpha quality at best and vaporware in reality FSD for a long time. Its never ever going to work as claimed. Its crap software that endangers other people on the road and routinely kills people and all they needed to do is add a stupid disclaimer and the magic 'beta'. Every few months Musk will lie that its 'done' and out at the end of the year, with outlandish nonsense claims like his robotaxi in 2016/17, his most recent one that you wont need a human driver. Its a massive scam and fraud thats made them trillions, and its amazing they haven't been sued for it.

bottlepalm 4y ago
Idk it works pretty well for me. I have FSD on like 90% of the time at least. Total game changer.

ok_dad 4y ago

I, as a software engineer, will never trust an autonomous vehicle that is not on rails. Even then, it better be a slow-ass train so I can jump off with minor injuries if anything goes awry. I might trust a fully-open-sourced vehicle, produced in a manner which the software and hardware design and implementation are fully verified as error-free versus a simple-to-understand open-source model. That will never happen, though.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I am not an engineer, but I feel the same way about payment systems. It is all so fragile when you peek behind the scenes that it is hard to justify using anything, but most basic services.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  How do you think banks work?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    What kind of banks? Or do you mean bank as a generic name for a financial institution? Works as a function of payments? How it is intended to function vs how it actually works? It seems like a very easy question, but it is admittedly hard for me to answer without some additional way to parse it. Could you narrow it down a little?
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      My point is that the IT infrastructure that run payments in actual banks are mostly terrible.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
It's totally fine to have lines you won't cross, but as you say literally none of this is going to happen. Autonomous vehicles aren't on rails and error-free isn't a thing. I'm also not sure how a fully open source stack would help to alleviate your safety concerns. Current vehicle stacks are impossible for a single individual to meaningfully review, however motivated. These are incredibly complicated distributed systems with dozens of processors running multiple operating systems and frameworks on top of those before you even get to application code. The safety requirements alone consume thousands of pages.

firefoxkekw 4y ago

Not so long ago, Andrej Karpathy, the ex-Director of AI at Tesla left the company. I ask myself a couple of questions, if Tesla was to release in the near future, some game changer technology in the self-driving space and I was the face behind it, would I leave the company so other person could take the merit? Would I leave the company because I think they are going to push something that I consider dangerous to the public and I don't want to be the scapegoat?

sircastor 4y ago

Back during the summer, and friend of mine’s son was killed in an accident involving a Tesla on autopilot. I can’t help but feel like the oversell of Autopilot’s capabilities is just Elon Musk feeding his own ego.

user3939382 4y ago

My jaded view is that companies this size routinely commit criminal acts but enforcement is the selective result of political relationships in DC. There’s obviously some spat going on between Musk and the Biden administration that the public has limited insight into. Suddenly Biden’s DOJ is going after Musk… too much of a coincidence for me.

tim333 4y ago
Musk has been fairly open on the spat. Basically Biden is funded by the unions and promotes unionised car companies like Ford/GM over Tesla. I doubt the DOJ thing is part of it.

ghufran_syed 4y ago

My commute is 80 miles each way - I would have left that job long ago if I didn't have "autopilot" reducing the mental effort of the drive.YMMV

concinds 4y ago

I haven't seen anyone note the timing of this: Musk is buying Twitter today or tomorrow, and he'll likely need to sell more Tesla stock unless he can get additional financing. This news will obviously depress Tesla stock. The timing is hardly inconspicuous.

causi 4y ago

AEB, lane departure warning, blind spot detection, parking assist I all understand. I understand the "wink wink, nudge nudge" reasons to buy systems like autopilot, blue cruise, toyota lane tracing, etc. What I don't get is the by-the-books reasons to buy it. What the hell value are you getting out of autopilot if you're actually keeping your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road? I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm asking why the hell you're paying thousands of dollars to do it.

UltraViolence 4y ago
I totally agree! Either the car drives itself or I drive. There's no need to let a car take the wheel if you have to baby-sit it all the time, intervening when it runs off the road. It's dangerous and lulls drivers into thinking the car can drive itself.
- causi 4y ago
  Right. Give me "highway mode" where all the car has to do is stay in the lane and not hit the car in front me, and not hassle me about watching the road or touching the wheel so I can watch a youtube video during my thirty minute interstate ride to work. It's going to be a long damn time before I trust a car to do anything more complicated than that by itself.
cheeze 4y ago
I can't wait for the day that a car _can_ drive better than a human. I see it as a safety thing. We're obviously nowhere near that but one can dream of safer roads...
- causi 4y ago
  I'm not. It'll be the end of car ownership. Why would any manufacturer sell me a car when they could add it to their autonomous taxi fleet instead?

UltraViolence 4y ago

IMHO this is long overdue! Many people have died who relied on their Tesla's to drive them to work (sometimes even taking a nap while it drove). And Tesla's claim that "Full Self Driving" is merely a phrase that doesn't describe the capabilities of its software is weak and criminally deceitful. Tesla needs to be held accountable for this.

stockerta 4y ago

I just doesn't get it, how it is legal to beta test self driving cars on public roads?

tim333 4y ago
Claim it's a driver assist system like cruise control. Whether that's moral or desirable it another debate.

dncornholio 4y ago

What bothers me is that Tesla is putting up the blame to the drivers not using it as instructed. This bothers me so deeply. People can and will fail to follow instructions. You have to design around this. If you don't have failsafe mechanisms, don't ship. Tesla's not taking enough responsibility.