7 ms·

Tesla on self-driving claims: failure to realize aspirational goal is not fraud

29 points by clouddrover 4y ago

sidibe 4y ago
Promotional video from 5 years ago still up at https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot: THE PERSON IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS If that's not technically fraud, it's at least fraud in spirit.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  I personally believe if tesla could cut the corner of a safety driver they would. I'd believe it 5 years ago and I'd believe it today. If it turns out that there was a human driver of that car I think it'd count as fraud but I mean all you have is a video of a demo. Where is the fraud there?
  - sidibe 4y ago
    The video suggests the car can drive itself without supervision, just those pesky laws are holding them back. We all know 5+ years later there is way more than "legal reasons" for the car not to drive itself without supervision. They used intentionally misleading stunts like this video to get people to shell out $10k dollars thinking the technology is imminent
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. w.r.t. the video though, I think it pretty clearly shows that the car can drive itself. What do you see in that video? Do you not think a Tesla of today couldn't be used to produce a similar video to that one 5 years ago? It's definitely pesky legal reasons as to why Tesla won't let you do more with self driving. You don't need an AI driver to T-bone another car. It's definitely a column A&B type situation. If some state passed a law giving manufactors immunity in the event of a collision involving self driving I 100% think Tesla would OTA update cars in that state.
      - sidibe 4y ago
        I don't doubt that on this take, it was driving itself successfully, or that they could reproduce the video today. But when you say the driver is only there for legal reasons you are implying that the car doesn't need supervision except to appease regulators. You are implying that the technology side of it is much more solved than it is.
      - pengaru 4y ago
        > In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. The video link is for Autopilot and you're talking about FSD... Last I checked Autopilot couldn't even avoid crashing into stopped emergency vehicles. So clearly the human isn't present purely for legal reasons, unless they mean the legal risks of causing an accident.
      - lozenge 4y ago
        How is a refund different from fraud? If you think they're entitled to a refund there must be some legal basis for it. If you accept payment on an order you can't fulfil that is fraud.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. Yes, refund is a remedy, fraud is one of the torts that arguably occurred which warrants the remedy.
  - sethd 4y ago
    The video was faked (at least partly): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilot-elon-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo... “The video did not provide a full picture of how the car operated during the filming,” “The route taken by the car had been charted ahead of time by software that created a three-dimensional digital map, a feature unavailable to drivers using the commercial version of Autopilot." “At one point during the filming of the video, the car crashed into a roadside barrier on Tesla property while using Autopilot and had to be repaired.”
- sorokod 4y ago
  Well yes, the LEGAL REASON is that the driver will be legally liable for any damage caused.
- leobg 4y ago
  I don’t get it. The person did not intervene on that specific drive. It would have been possible to film this with no driver on board. But they didn’t because it would have been illegal.
  - sidibe 4y ago
    The fact you think they wouldn't have needed a driver on board if not for the law proves how deceptive this is. Do you know how many takes this took? Neither do I, but it's very doubtful that they'd let the Tesla do this alone even with today's FSD even if it were legal. Their FSD is nowhere near ready for that.
    - leobg 4y ago
      I own a Tesla. I could close my eyes on the highway for tens of miles and would probably be ok. Same thing will be true for those in the FSD beta when driving city to city. But it would be a stupid thing to do.
      - sidibe 4y ago
        Agreed. Therefore the video from when FSD was even less reliable shouldn't have implied that supervision was only necessary for legal reasons.
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    > The person did not intervene on that specific drive. Unfortunately, that part is not true. It's one of the claims in the lawsuit [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910962
newaccount2021 4y ago
lostgame 4y ago
Isn’t selling a product based off those unmet claims fraud; though? :/ It’s not the failure to realize it, it’s that the product was sold with dates it was expected to be functional to x degree by. Tesla FSD may be one of the simplest examples of false advertising I can think of that’s still going.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > [1] In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Arguable Tesla believe the claims it was making. Certainly a lot of people who bought Teslas thought they did! I don't think consumers shouldn't have any recourse though. They should be given refunds but I don't think they should get any sort of multiplier/etc. (In general/for non-necessitates) If you give a merchant $x in exchange for Y and the merchant later realizes they can't give you Y I think it's totally fair to just give you back the $x. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Tesla should be punished for its misleading/fraudulent advertising...
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Arguable Tesla believe the claims it was making. It may have believed its claims about the future would be true, the problem (well, for fraud; for false advertising and implied warranty claims, that belief may not be material) is that it supported them with misleading/false representations of past & current facts within Tesla’s knowledge, like the conditions of the self-driving demo.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    It’s the promises of ‘full FSD in _ years’ that were regularly spouted out that I think breaks the whole thing. They - of course - never made any _-year goal - and - arguably - who knows if they honestly ever will. They charged a lot of people money to participate in an experiment to see if they could ever do it with the promise that they could do it soon enough that it would sell, only to gradually let the truth set in. Now people are rightfully pissed, that none of these promises that - to be fair, mostly Musk, made; have come to any sort of fruition, they’re tired of paying to be Guinea pigs; and they want the finished final product.
foxyv 4y ago
I have a bridge to sell you across the pacific ocean. So far it's only 100 feet long and may be technically a pier... But we aspire to reach Japan in the next few years. If you invest now you get a discount on tolls. Also, we expect to rent out restaurants along the long distance. Please ignore the fact that we have no idea how we're going to do all this. This just in, we're adding Hawaii as a stop! Ignore the fact that the bridge is still technically a pier down at the harbor and only 100 feet long. We've already got our first "Bridge Across The Pacific" at our first stop at the end of the pier.
- aeternum 4y ago
  Is this the california highspeed rail project?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    No, because the example is asking for voluntary investment, not forcing people to pay in Via taxes. A better example would be running a Twitter poll if foxyv should have to invest in the pier project.
  - foxyv 4y ago
    California HSR would be if I had built pylons without a deck as far as Hawaii and subsequently been sued by all the ships that crashed into it.
  - tanseydavid 4y ago
    <golf-clap> Well played!!!
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  This is a very poor framing. The following things are both true: 1) Tesla's technical achievement with the degree of self driving they've already shown is very impressive 2) It absolutely is not ready for regulatory approval and production use. Tesla's software is NOT a 100 foot pier. Is it 30% of the distance across the pacific ocean? Is it 80% but the last 20% is deep choppy waters? Who knows. Videos of self-driving show the driver intervening about, what, less than 1% of the time? Or maybe 5% of the "decisions"? Now, the standard for autonomous driving is probably in the .0001% of the time, and a lot of that would be winter/weather related and good error handling (just stop the car or recognize an area is a difficult area and pre-warn the driver). It is amazing how much a CEO doing annoying tweets morphs the objectivity of people on a site that is ostensibly about engineering and rational thought. How many other companies have shown concept cars of EVs and "when we have self driving" cars with no steering wheels and people seated around a table in a car? Hell, look at this: https://electrek.co/2022/11/28/stellantis-relaunches-lancia-electric-marque-teases-ev-design/ https://electrek.co/2022/11/28/stellantis-relaunches-lancia-... It doesn't have wheels! It doesn't even appear to be touching the ground! And it's the lead image for one of the biggest foot-dragging idiots 15 years after the reality of a production EV trying to say "hey we'll be good at EVs now that literally every carmaker is way ahead of us" and also "please don't fire me as CEO". THAT is a 100 foot pier. You want fraud? The last 50 years of petroleum + ICE car companies in lockstep to ignore carbon emissions. So what were Tesla people buying with "full self driving"? Parlor tricks to impress other people with, and nothing more. Was it oversold? Yeah, but so is everything else in marketing. I would say full self driving was only slightly more oversold than the IoT smarthome (hey, you know all that stuff that lasts 30 years that you replaced with IoT stuff two years ago? Yeah we don't want to support the software anymore). Full Self Driving is LESS hyped that virtually all crypto. A couple more steps past crypto, and you get to Theranos.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
I skimmed the actual legal filing [+]. The TLDR; is that the Tesla repeatedly portrays the technology as (1) better than it actually is (2) closer than it actually is to being fully ready. The basis of relief is violation of implied warranties and false advertising. I think its going to be interesting if this case actually proceeds forward. [+] https://www.classaction.org/media/matsko-v-tesla-inc-et-al.pdf https://www.classaction.org/media/matsko-v-tesla-inc-et-al.p...
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > The video begins with the following message: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.” In reality, Tesla employees made the video would later reveal that the car in the video had significant assistance from commercial mapping software not available to Tesla customers, and that the car still performed poorly and even ran into a fence during filming. With the assistance of a large team of Tesla engineers, the car had to run the same route over and over again before Tesla got acceptable video that appeared to show a car capable of driving itself Ok, I revise my take. That looks like fraud.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    > and that the car still performed poorly and even ran into a fence during filming Well, at least they didn't have to push in down a hill to gather enough speed to reach the fence.
sschueller 4y ago
Was Theranos' goal to do all these blood test with just a few drops of blood just and a failed realization of an aspirational goal? I don't think so and I would claim that FSD is as impossible as doing what Theranos claimed they could do.
- nunez 4y ago
  The difference is that Theranos's tech _never_ worked whereas there is a lot of positive movement in the FSD solution. I've had several near-zero intervention drives so far. The problem here is defining what "full" means and debating what "full" _should_ mean. Worst case is that Tesla refunds a lot of people's money, FSD gets a name change, and shareholders will find a way of dethroning Elon.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    > The problem here is defining what "full" means and debating what "full" _should_ mean. Exactly. Do you mean "we can get rid of the drivers and save on labor expenses" or do you mean "We can upsell this feature to make driving easier". A lot of investors, for example Uber investors, were promised the former. That's the fraud angle. But there are a lot of satisfied car owners who are enjoying the latter right now.
  - sschueller 4y ago
    Elon promised robotaxies years ago and that they would make 30k a year paying for the car eventually. He even said it would be financially insane not to buy a Tesla. This was so long ago those people probably don't even have their Tesla's anymore. Are they going to get refunded?
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Eh? I mean, theranos’s tech was useless, but it was arguably a lot closer to existent than Tesla’s magic intelligent cars. Theranos’s magic box did something, it just did it so poorly that the results weren’t usable. Some Theranos-y devices have since been built successfully by competent companies (particularly small automated PCR systems)
sethd 4y ago
I've heard claims that Electrek acts as a bit of a PR tool for Tesla/Musk. I don't believe I've seen any hard proof, but I'm a bit more convinced after reading this article.
dragonwriter 4y ago
Selling aspirational claims as fact is fraud, though.
nunez 4y ago
I love the progress that FSD has seen so far, but given that Elon (and specifically him) have consistently said that FSD would be out and fully working "next year" for several years now, calling it a "long-term aspirational goal" implies that he was straight-up lying. This is pretty damning. I predict this will be settled out of court with a truckload of hush money, like all of these are.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Full Self Driving program which does not drive itself is not aspirational goal, it is deceptive marketing at least. Like McDonald's offering Free Cheeseburger for 2,99USD
mountainriver 4y ago
Everything is oversold in marketing, Tesla has made absolutely incredible progress in this area, I’m fine with some froth if it boosts innovation

29 points by clouddrover 4y ago

Promotional video from 5 years ago still up at https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot: THE PERSON IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS If that's not technically fraud, it's at least fraud in spirit.

lesuorac 4y ago
I personally believe if tesla could cut the corner of a safety driver they would. I'd believe it 5 years ago and I'd believe it today. If it turns out that there was a human driver of that car I think it'd count as fraud but I mean all you have is a video of a demo. Where is the fraud there?
- sidibe 4y ago
  The video suggests the car can drive itself without supervision, just those pesky laws are holding them back. We all know 5+ years later there is way more than "legal reasons" for the car not to drive itself without supervision. They used intentionally misleading stunts like this video to get people to shell out $10k dollars thinking the technology is imminent
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. w.r.t. the video though, I think it pretty clearly shows that the car can drive itself. What do you see in that video? Do you not think a Tesla of today couldn't be used to produce a similar video to that one 5 years ago? It's definitely pesky legal reasons as to why Tesla won't let you do more with self driving. You don't need an AI driver to T-bone another car. It's definitely a column A&B type situation. If some state passed a law giving manufactors immunity in the event of a collision involving self driving I 100% think Tesla would OTA update cars in that state.
    - sidibe 4y ago
      I don't doubt that on this take, it was driving itself successfully, or that they could reproduce the video today. But when you say the driver is only there for legal reasons you are implying that the car doesn't need supervision except to appease regulators. You are implying that the technology side of it is much more solved than it is.
    - pengaru 4y ago
      > In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. The video link is for Autopilot and you're talking about FSD... Last I checked Autopilot couldn't even avoid crashing into stopped emergency vehicles. So clearly the human isn't present purely for legal reasons, unless they mean the legal risks of causing an accident.
    - lozenge 4y ago
      How is a refund different from fraud? If you think they're entitled to a refund there must be some legal basis for it. If you accept payment on an order you can't fulfil that is fraud.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > In general, I think Tesla FSD buyers have a strong argument for a refund in that they never got what they purchased. But a refund is different from fraud. Yes, refund is a remedy, fraud is one of the torts that arguably occurred which warrants the remedy.
- sethd 4y ago
  The video was faked (at least partly): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilot-elon-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/technology/tesla-autopilo... “The video did not provide a full picture of how the car operated during the filming,” “The route taken by the car had been charted ahead of time by software that created a three-dimensional digital map, a feature unavailable to drivers using the commercial version of Autopilot." “At one point during the filming of the video, the car crashed into a roadside barrier on Tesla property while using Autopilot and had to be repaired.”
sorokod 4y ago
Well yes, the LEGAL REASON is that the driver will be legally liable for any damage caused.
leobg 4y ago
I don’t get it. The person did not intervene on that specific drive. It would have been possible to film this with no driver on board. But they didn’t because it would have been illegal.
- sidibe 4y ago
  The fact you think they wouldn't have needed a driver on board if not for the law proves how deceptive this is. Do you know how many takes this took? Neither do I, but it's very doubtful that they'd let the Tesla do this alone even with today's FSD even if it were legal. Their FSD is nowhere near ready for that.
  - leobg 4y ago
    I own a Tesla. I could close my eyes on the highway for tens of miles and would probably be ok. Same thing will be true for those in the FSD beta when driving city to city. But it would be a stupid thing to do.
    - sidibe 4y ago
      Agreed. Therefore the video from when FSD was even less reliable shouldn't have implied that supervision was only necessary for legal reasons.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > The person did not intervene on that specific drive. Unfortunately, that part is not true. It's one of the claims in the lawsuit [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910962

newaccount2021 4y ago

lostgame 4y ago

Isn’t selling a product based off those unmet claims fraud; though? :/ It’s not the failure to realize it, it’s that the product was sold with dates it was expected to be functional to x degree by. Tesla FSD may be one of the simplest examples of false advertising I can think of that’s still going.

lesuorac 4y ago
> [1] In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Arguable Tesla believe the claims it was making. Certainly a lot of people who bought Teslas thought they did! I don't think consumers shouldn't have any recourse though. They should be given refunds but I don't think they should get any sort of multiplier/etc. (In general/for non-necessitates) If you give a merchant $x in exchange for Y and the merchant later realizes they can't give you Y I think it's totally fair to just give you back the $x. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
- freejazz 4y ago
  Tesla should be punished for its misleading/fraudulent advertising...
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Arguable Tesla believe the claims it was making. It may have believed its claims about the future would be true, the problem (well, for fraud; for false advertising and implied warranty claims, that belief may not be material) is that it supported them with misleading/false representations of past & current facts within Tesla’s knowledge, like the conditions of the self-driving demo.
- lostgame 4y ago
  It’s the promises of ‘full FSD in _ years’ that were regularly spouted out that I think breaks the whole thing. They - of course - never made any _-year goal - and - arguably - who knows if they honestly ever will. They charged a lot of people money to participate in an experiment to see if they could ever do it with the promise that they could do it soon enough that it would sell, only to gradually let the truth set in. Now people are rightfully pissed, that none of these promises that - to be fair, mostly Musk, made; have come to any sort of fruition, they’re tired of paying to be Guinea pigs; and they want the finished final product.

foxyv 4y ago

I have a bridge to sell you across the pacific ocean. So far it's only 100 feet long and may be technically a pier... But we aspire to reach Japan in the next few years. If you invest now you get a discount on tolls. Also, we expect to rent out restaurants along the long distance. Please ignore the fact that we have no idea how we're going to do all this. This just in, we're adding Hawaii as a stop! Ignore the fact that the bridge is still technically a pier down at the harbor and only 100 feet long. We've already got our first "Bridge Across The Pacific" at our first stop at the end of the pier.

aeternum 4y ago
Is this the california highspeed rail project?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  No, because the example is asking for voluntary investment, not forcing people to pay in Via taxes. A better example would be running a Twitter poll if foxyv should have to invest in the pier project.
- foxyv 4y ago
  California HSR would be if I had built pylons without a deck as far as Hawaii and subsequently been sued by all the ships that crashed into it.
- tanseydavid 4y ago
  <golf-clap> Well played!!!
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
This is a very poor framing. The following things are both true: 1) Tesla's technical achievement with the degree of self driving they've already shown is very impressive 2) It absolutely is not ready for regulatory approval and production use. Tesla's software is NOT a 100 foot pier. Is it 30% of the distance across the pacific ocean? Is it 80% but the last 20% is deep choppy waters? Who knows. Videos of self-driving show the driver intervening about, what, less than 1% of the time? Or maybe 5% of the "decisions"? Now, the standard for autonomous driving is probably in the .0001% of the time, and a lot of that would be winter/weather related and good error handling (just stop the car or recognize an area is a difficult area and pre-warn the driver). It is amazing how much a CEO doing annoying tweets morphs the objectivity of people on a site that is ostensibly about engineering and rational thought. How many other companies have shown concept cars of EVs and "when we have self driving" cars with no steering wheels and people seated around a table in a car? Hell, look at this: https://electrek.co/2022/11/28/stellantis-relaunches-lancia-electric-marque-teases-ev-design/ https://electrek.co/2022/11/28/stellantis-relaunches-lancia-... It doesn't have wheels! It doesn't even appear to be touching the ground! And it's the lead image for one of the biggest foot-dragging idiots 15 years after the reality of a production EV trying to say "hey we'll be good at EVs now that literally every carmaker is way ahead of us" and also "please don't fire me as CEO". THAT is a 100 foot pier. You want fraud? The last 50 years of petroleum + ICE car companies in lockstep to ignore carbon emissions. So what were Tesla people buying with "full self driving"? Parlor tricks to impress other people with, and nothing more. Was it oversold? Yeah, but so is everything else in marketing. I would say full self driving was only slightly more oversold than the IoT smarthome (hey, you know all that stuff that lasts 30 years that you replaced with IoT stuff two years ago? Yeah we don't want to support the software anymore). Full Self Driving is LESS hyped that virtually all crypto. A couple more steps past crypto, and you get to Theranos.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

I skimmed the actual legal filing [+]. The TLDR; is that the Tesla repeatedly portrays the technology as (1) better than it actually is (2) closer than it actually is to being fully ready. The basis of relief is violation of implied warranties and false advertising. I think its going to be interesting if this case actually proceeds forward. [+] https://www.classaction.org/media/matsko-v-tesla-inc-et-al.pdf https://www.classaction.org/media/matsko-v-tesla-inc-et-al.p...

lesuorac 4y ago
> The video begins with the following message: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.” In reality, Tesla employees made the video would later reveal that the car in the video had significant assistance from commercial mapping software not available to Tesla customers, and that the car still performed poorly and even ran into a fence during filming. With the assistance of a large team of Tesla engineers, the car had to run the same route over and over again before Tesla got acceptable video that appeared to show a car capable of driving itself Ok, I revise my take. That looks like fraud.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  > and that the car still performed poorly and even ran into a fence during filming Well, at least they didn't have to push in down a hill to gather enough speed to reach the fence.

sschueller 4y ago

Was Theranos' goal to do all these blood test with just a few drops of blood just and a failed realization of an aspirational goal? I don't think so and I would claim that FSD is as impossible as doing what Theranos claimed they could do.

nunez 4y ago
The difference is that Theranos's tech _never_ worked whereas there is a lot of positive movement in the FSD solution. I've had several near-zero intervention drives so far. The problem here is defining what "full" means and debating what "full" _should_ mean. Worst case is that Tesla refunds a lot of people's money, FSD gets a name change, and shareholders will find a way of dethroning Elon.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  > The problem here is defining what "full" means and debating what "full" _should_ mean. Exactly. Do you mean "we can get rid of the drivers and save on labor expenses" or do you mean "We can upsell this feature to make driving easier". A lot of investors, for example Uber investors, were promised the former. That's the fraud angle. But there are a lot of satisfied car owners who are enjoying the latter right now.
- sschueller 4y ago
  Elon promised robotaxies years ago and that they would make 30k a year paying for the car eventually. He even said it would be financially insane not to buy a Tesla. This was so long ago those people probably don't even have their Tesla's anymore. Are they going to get refunded?
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Eh? I mean, theranos’s tech was useless, but it was arguably a lot closer to existent than Tesla’s magic intelligent cars. Theranos’s magic box did something, it just did it so poorly that the results weren’t usable. Some Theranos-y devices have since been built successfully by competent companies (particularly small automated PCR systems)

sethd 4y ago

I've heard claims that Electrek acts as a bit of a PR tool for Tesla/Musk. I don't believe I've seen any hard proof, but I'm a bit more convinced after reading this article.

dragonwriter 4y ago

Selling aspirational claims as fact is fraud, though.

nunez 4y ago

I love the progress that FSD has seen so far, but given that Elon (and specifically him) have consistently said that FSD would be out and fully working "next year" for several years now, calling it a "long-term aspirational goal" implies that he was straight-up lying. This is pretty damning. I predict this will be settled out of court with a truckload of hush money, like all of these are.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Full Self Driving program which does not drive itself is not aspirational goal, it is deceptive marketing at least. Like McDonald's offering Free Cheeseburger for 2,99USD

mountainriver 4y ago

Everything is oversold in marketing, Tesla has made absolutely incredible progress in this area, I’m fine with some froth if it boosts innovation