16 ms·
Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud
- wbsun 4y agoAs a software engineer, I simply can’t trust software to drive my car 65mph in highway traffic. I have a Model Y, but never bought the autopilot. Actually even if Tesla pays me $15k per year to ask me to use autopilot, I’d say no. It is not worth the risk of crashes. But it always surprised me when I see many software engineers here in Silicon Valley driving on freeways using autopilot while watching videos or napping on the driver’s seat. My coworker even let autopilot to fully drive along the cliff roads in Yosemite. What a big heart…
- pmcollins 4y ago[flagged]
- bobleeswagger 4y agoFull fraud.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoIt might be a plausible argument for stuff sold 6 years ago when the future was uncertain. But in 2022 I'm not seeing how it's plausible as an excuse. Considering it's still being sold and marketed as 'Full self driving'. Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of. If at the very least due to the fact that a very commonly encountered condition, construction work, effectively requires an AGI to navigate. Which would imply the best achievable self driving is around level 3 autonomy.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoPretend you don’t know anything about the different levels. You’re just a random person looking to buy a car. What does “full self driving” sound like to you?
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoGreat, so we're back to "unlimited data" doesn't really mean "unlimited" but, just a large amount, but not really a large amount, because... Words have meaning. Full self driving, to anyone who isn't a nerd who likes to pick shit apart, means the freaking car will drive all by itself as if a human were driving it, maybe even better.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoIt would sound like it could handle all commonly occurring road conditions. Such as rain, fog, snow, construction work, tunnels, bridges, downtown intersections, bike lanes, etc... I wouldn't expect it to handle rare phenomena such as hurricanes, hail storms, a collapsed bridge, etc...
- BoorishBears 4y agoTesla FSD can barely handle a balmy 70 degree day, so I think you'd be disappointed. I might biased because I work on actual self-driving efforts, but nothing at all about Tesla has ever indicated they were serious about solving self driving in any capacity. The day that Elon proclaimed they already had the sensor suite decided was the day that they openly admitted this was fraud.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoMy opinion doesn’t matter, but your last point resonates with me because this struck me as totally bizarre too. I don’t work in sensing let alone using AI with sensing data, but I’m around it a lot and my second-hand knowledge kind of set off some red flags. In remote sensing for landscape architecture, hydrography, and other similar fields (making sense of static things where no one is at risk of dying immediately, and humans review the data), the care and knowledge that goes into choosing sensor suites and processing the data properly is huge. Yet Tesla comes out saying “we’ve got some mediocre cameras and we’re gonna run with it!” Seriously? What? I get that it’s a lot of cameras but making sense of 3d space isn’t trivial at all. It’s so bizarre. Again, I know nothing, they know more than I do. The whole thing just doesn’t sit right.
- bagels 4y agoIt's pretty amazing how much money Musk's lies helped companies like Uber to waste on this stuff.
- mannykannot 4y agoI don't like how this whole thing has played out, but to be fair, I think fear of missing out over something that would, if successful, be an existential threat to Uber is probably a rational response.
- bagels 4y agoI don't completely disagree. They definitely have to be weighing the likelihood of that outcome, and Musk's statements probably made it seem more likely. That said, there are a lot of existential threats to companies that they should probably not be spending investor money on, such as asteroid defense.
- jleyank 4y agoWhat about non California weather? I imagine radar might handle fog, but driving rain as in Carolina or serious snow as in Canada?
- bsagdiyev 4y agoThe rain can be no joke here. I've had to stop driving and pull over for the first time in my life after moving to NC. The rain was too heavy to see more than 10 feet or so.
- Tempest1981 4y ago> The rain was too heavy to see more than 10 feet or so. Probably a hurricane. Did you see any cattle flying?
- bsagdiyev 4y agoNot hurricane season at the time. There's a clearly defined season for that weather. This is just a normal thunderstorm.
- ilyt 4y agoRain + city lights can make it hard to see even road markins in front. Technically self-driving car would theoretically have opportunity for advantage here (as it can just refer to maps) but practically it's super hard problem to solve.
- bsagdiyev 4y agoRain fade affects GPS does it not? Is the car relying on inertial navigation for a period? This rain is not something a camera and iffy GPS signal can keep you on the road. The intensity and amount of rain would definitely not let a camera see. Quick add: this was at 12PM (noon) on a countryish road. City lights had nothing to do here.
- kennend3 4y agoI've wondered the same thing about FSD in Canada. Often we Canadians drive on roads where we cant see the lines due to snow/ice. We sort of form our own "lanes" based on where we think the lines SHOULD be. How would a FSD Tesla handle a situation where everything is white? Even Humans who are use to these conditions still fail: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/opp-responds-to-numerous-crashes-on-hwy-401-in-eastern-ontario-as-heavy-snow-hits-area-1.6160551 https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/opp-responds-to-numerous-crashes-o...
- cameldrv 4y agoWhat do you mean? Waymo and Cruise have already deployed level 4 vehicles.
- rurp 4y agoIf current Waymo counts as level 4 then we need sub-levels for them to have much meaning. They are a long way from supporting something like autonomous driving geofenced to all major US cities in all weather conditions. That big step up is still far behind true level 5, which can handle poorly maintained roads and all of the other weirdness one can encounter outside of major first world cities.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoCan you link to the source claiming that?
- ChadNauseam 4y agoWaymo offers a taxi service in SF where the cars have no driver. From https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/full-autonomy-waymo-driver-2652903723 https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/full-autonomy-waymo-driver-265... > The Waymo Driver operates at Level 4 autonomy, meaning, Waymo says, that “no human driver is needed in our defined operational conditions.” This, Waymo continues, represents “fully autonomous driving technology,” with the Waymo Driver being “fully independent from a human driver.”
- Shubham28 4y agohttps://spectrum.ieee.org/full-autonomy-waymo-driver#:~:text=The%20Waymo%20Driver%20operates%20at%20Level%204%20autonomy%2C%20meaning%2C%20Waymo%20says%2C%20that%20%E2%80%9Cno%20human%20driver%20is%20needed%20in%20our%20defined%20operational%20conditions.%E2%80%9D%20This%2C%20Waymo%20continues%2C%20represents%20%E2%80%9Cfully%20autonomous%20driving%20technology%2C%E2%80%9D%20with%20the%20Waymo%20Driver%20being%20%E2%80%9Cfully%20independent%20from%20a%20human%20driver.%E2%80%9D https://spectrum.ieee.org/full-autonomy-waymo-driver#:~:text...
- 4y ago
- sidibe 4y agoI think 2016 it was already widely known by the industry it was going to be very difficult compared to what Tesla was saying, especially without the handicaps they imposed on themselves. No one with knowledge took Tesla's timeline seriously > Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of I've always been pessimistic about FSD but I think it'd pretty hard to reconcile that quote with actual L4 deployments by Waymo and Cruise
- School-Cotton 4y ago> actual L4 deployments In some of the cities with the easiest driving conditions in the world.
- Shubham28 4y agoApart from SF, they have also started testing in LA.
- kaczordon 4y agoI wouldn’t call San Francisco easy…
- sidibe 4y agoYes. And that's L4 and it exists
- Dylan16807 4y agoAn easy city is still a city. Only the low end of L4 is being reached right now, but that's massively better than "far beyond what any near future technology is capable of".
- kaczordon 4y agoThey also have remote operators standing by who jump in when the car gets confused tho…
- sangnoir 4y ago
- paulcole 4y ago> Considering it's still being sold and marketed as 'Full self driving'. The problem is that this isn’t what they do. They are extremely careful in their wording. Go back through the archive.org backups of tesla.com/autopilot and watch how their wording changes. Here’s what they say today: > Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and full self-driving capabilities—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time. Despite how you or any reasonable person reads it, Tesla can easily make the case that the cars (as sold today) do not have full-self driving available right now. The hardware in the cars does have the capability of allowing full self-driving at some nebulous point in the future (something that’s going to be very difficult to disprove). The other thing the do is use Autopilot (capital A) as a branded feature that doesn’t mean anything like what autopilot (lowercase a) means to a reasonable person.
- sudhirj 4y agoSaying you want to climb Mount Everest and not being able to get all the way to the top is failure, not fraud. The fact that Musk charged people to watch muddies the waters a bit, though.
- qzw 4y agoHow about charging $10k for the “Full summit of Everest Experience” when you’re still sitting at base camp? Is that fraud or just failure? Or maybe it’s ok because it’s beta?
- rootusrootus 4y ago> Or maybe it’s ok because it’s beta? Definitely not. I sat down in my wife's new Model 3 to help her configure it to her liking, and I was surprised to see that autosteer is still listed as beta. Clearly the meaning of 'beta' has lost all meaningful definition.
- ben1040 4y ago> Clearly the meaning of 'beta' has lost all meaningful definition I think that ship sailed when Gmail kept a “beta” label for five years.
- philjohn 4y agoPutting up a doctored video demonstrating FSD to me seems like a massive fraud.
- fbdab103 4y agoI am not familiar with the referenced video, but I thought Nikola [0] was in hot water (ie real legal trouble) for their video of an electric truck coasting down a hill. [0] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-company-admits-it-faked-fuel-cell-semi-truck-demo https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/315151-electric-vehicle-...
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
- omgomgomgomg 4y agoIf they call it a failure, yet still sell it, then it becomes fraud, doesn't it?
- ilyt 4y agoIt's fine to sell failure if you mark it that. Just nobody sensible will buy it But doing it after people bought in, well...
- trident5000 4y agoThis header is misleading. Lawyers are making a legal point, not a prediction on the tech or where it stands and certainly not saying "its a failure". They don't even have the technical insight to make that assertion.
- philjohn 4y agoDoctoring a video though ...
- trident5000 4y ago
- FeepingCreature 4y agoThey're also not saying it's "a failure", they're saying "failure to realize a goal is not fraud". There is a strong semantic difference between "we have failed to realize the goal (yet)" and "we have failed at realizing the goal (permanently)".
- 0xbadc0de5 4y agoI've owned Tesla's since 2016. At no time did I base my purchases on what the cars might be able to do in the future, only what they can do right now. Nor did I see any compelling reason to donate $10k - $15k to their R&D effort. The cars were compelling enough on their own merits and remain so. The FSD fiasco really does a disservice to what is otherwise a revolutionary car company producing excellent automobiles.
- joering2 4y agoHow is Tesla revolutionary? We had electric cars (on Moon!!) in 1969 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle
- bagels 4y agoThe Tesla is slightly more comfortable, convenient, and I don't have to commission a whole Apollo program to get one.
- joering2 4y agoThat's all true, however... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revolutionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revolutionary
- bagels 4y agoPrior to Tesla, there was not really any mass market electric car and charging network. Seems revolutionary, since all the other manufacturers are following the lead to make their own electric cars now.
- alsodumb 4y agoWe had social media before Facebook/instagram era too. Heck we had electric cars before gasoline powered cars became a thing. I think it’s obvious at this point that Tesla was the first to bring commercial electric vehicles in production at scale, and the first to make it compete with ICE vehicles for the masses - well beyond the niche who’ve been using an electric car since Leaf era.
- qzw 4y agoYou know, where Theranos went wrong was not selling some other thing and then tack on their “Full blood test in just one drop” thing as an add-on. Oh and making sure it’s labeled beta. That’s very important.
- joering2 4y agoMilton from Nikola would be better example in my opinion. You had him rolling a truck down the hill to show it works despite at the time it was still technology in development (company is still doing progress now). It still shocks me he is going to prison for that as a fraud when it was just a commercial. I don't know if you know - but classical trick in advertising food is using cigarette smoke instead of hot steam to show hot fresh food. Obviously steam would cover camera's lens and render image useless. Also most close-up food commercials have food made from rubbery guee, and not actual food because it shines better and "stays" fresh for longer than an hour when you want to do multiple shots for hours. How come McDonalds management is not facing prison like Milton is? Its because everyone knows commercial of a product does not equal to the same exact product you will pick up off the shelf and eat. Nobody at McDonald is going to jail because you attempted to sell people plastic guee covered with cigarette smell.
- kube-system 4y agoNo, McDonald’s execs don’t go to prison because they can actually deliver the product they advertise. Between the statements “Here’s a burger you can eat it” and “here’s a truck look at it go”, only one is a lie.
- joering2 4y agoOnly lie here is that their commercial said "here is a truck look at it go". Have you ever even watched it before commenting??
- kube-system 4y agoThose are scare quotes in my comment, not literal quotes. I’ll rephrase it plainly: difference between the situations is a misrepresentation of material fact.
- perardi 4y agoWell fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed. Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.
- ncr100 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chillbill 4y agoPeople have attributed a lot of overinflated image to Musk and his effects and skills over the years, regarding Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies of his. They still are doing so about this Twitter thing. It’s all a nothing burger.
- jeffbee 4y agoIt must take a lot of time and attention to manage Elon. Perhaps Tesla will succeed a bit more while he is distracted.
- justapassenger 4y agoTesla can. But TSLA won’t, and Elon spent last 10 years making sure that their stock market value and success as a company are deeply interconnected.
- coolbreezetft22 4y agoAt this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also seem to be climate change / green energy skeptics, not convinced they will be gobbling up Teslas at quite the same rate as my demographic would.
- fbdab103 4y agoIf only Madoff had tried this trick. He did not commit fraud against investors - he had really hoped to make them that much money, but he failed to do it.
- rootusrootus 4y agoI think SBF is about to demonstrate for the world whether that strategy works.
- sn41 4y agoHey, as long as you're embarrassed, it should be fine. /s
- reiichiroh 4y agoBut Elon told me it was only six months away
- superkuh 4y agoI welcome the public's acknowledgement that self-driving vehicles are completely infeasible for even the medium term future. It's just unfortunate that the trigger for this change seems not to be anything about snow, or the inability to replicate human flocking on buried/unmarked roads during winter, etc, but instead more about the current political fallout from Musk's take-over of Twitter.
- BoorishBears 4y agoThis is a weird amount of hubris for someone who either doesn't understand the goals of current work on self-driving cars or is just clueless about the field. Tesla's attempts at self-driving capture absolutely nothing besides... Tesla's attempts at self-driving. There are companies with realistic sensor stacks, not artificially imposing restrictions so they can pre-sell their results, actually focused on self-driving. A true L5 vehicle is an impossibility because that'd mean handling the frozen tundra equally as well as rush hour in Mumbai, or a wildfire in California. And laypeople tend to really lean into that... But for a realistic definition of L5, "feasibility" is low bar already proven by major players except Tesla. So to say "completely infeasible" kind of kills credibility of everything following it.
- superkuh 4y agoDismissing "snow" as something that happens only in "the frozen tundra" is fairly provincial. You'd be surprised by how much of the USA (and other industrialized countries) have roads and road edges mostly obscured by snow for weeks at a time multiple times throughout winter. There's a reason almost all autonomous driving tests are done in places like Arizona. And the ones done in winter settings tend to be absolute positioning based (ground penetrating radar maps, etc) or non-human vision modalities which don't actually match how human drivers flock.
- BoorishBears 4y ago> Dismissing "snow" as something that happens only in "the frozen tundra" is fairly provincial. Who did that? My comment certainly didn't by any reading of it. > You'd be surprised by how much of the USA (and other industrialized countries) have roads and road edges mostly obscured by snow for weeks at a time multiple times throughout winter Again, maybe you would, but I'm not. > There's a reason almost all autonomous driving tests are done in places like Arizona Yes, because they have good weather. It turns out that compartmentalizing a problem as large as autonomous vehicles is a smart idea. It's not like you can't work on participation just because the local weather is nice. Regardless of climate we use things like rain and temp chambers, and there are AVs in places with bad weather, but that's not where service gets launched because again, compartmentation is a good thing. I guess all that is to say, no one in the AV field is unaware that bad weather is a thing, and yet we're still in the problem space. > non-human vision modalities which don't actually match how human drivers flock Is this supposed to be a gotcha or did you not realize AV companies are not about blindly to replicate human vision in the AV field? You'll find Tesla is the only company silly enough to imply nonsense like that.
- jackmott 4y ago
- dathinab 4y agoIf you advertise a problem as already solved and just needs fine tuning and sell stuff based on it and continue with the lie even after there are clear signals of it likely failing then I don't think then it's a failure _AND_ fraud. The fraudulent part is making absurd promised anyone with understanding of the topic knows you probably won't be able to keep. It is the part where you continue to push sells through this technology when it has shown to have problems. Being optimistic is grate, but lying is still lying and ignoring facts is still ignoring facts.
- kkfx 4y agoTwo notes: - selling something as a commercial product, claiming it can do something that actually can not is not failure, is fraud. Failure is selling something stating it's an experiment "use at your own risk, the price is low because of that"; - try seeing our kind of "piloting automation": in air and see it's FAR EASIER, we are in liquid environment without constant very near constraints. A ship travel from A to B, sure it need to take care of eventual other ships, floating obstacles etc, but in the mean they are FAR LESS than "other cars on the road" and far away, no ships normally travel as near as a car with another. Similarly for planes where there is even a third dimension of limited movement freedom. Long story short: - ALL modern companies sell experimental cheap crap sold as finished high-quality product because the private research model IS A FAILURE, we need PUBLIC RESEARCH for public development where the private sector pick things to implement and sell BUT do not drive the research; - ALL efforts to mimic something old with new tech is doomed to fail. Computers as featured-typewriters was an idiocy, similar try mimicking the physical office desk on a computer (see for instance old General Magic UI) and so on. People DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE and that's why keeping the old paradigm in the new tech spread well commercially and ultimately fails creating big disasters, that's why we need culture, witch means PUBLIC schools, universities, open to anyone for free, but we need to change to make evolution happen. We can't get FSD for cars, we can get for flying cars. We can't get flying cars we all dream since decades in modern cities built for cars on roads and so on. The public do the research for the sake of humanity not single cohort profits, spread the new knowledge via public schools, institutions, private sector push such change in the society and the market create the equilibrium.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoRecently I've read lidar is in again, is this correct?
- cypress66 4y agoNo
- bhauer 4y agoTesla never used lidar. They did use a low-resolution radar and dropped it because they felt it was holding back their vision-based development. At the time, Musk commented that radar was not useful unless it were higher resolution. There have been credible rumors of an upcoming addition of high-resolution radar to the Tesla sensor suite, consistent with Musk's earlier remarks.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoThanks, I have not enough of a clue here.
- zozbot234 4y agoDid it even fail, though? AIUI, they never claimed more than SAE Level 2, meaning that the driver must maintain full control at all times...
- M4v3R 4y agoIt’s literally in the name - “Full Self-Driving”. They’ve been marketing this for years (probably still do).
- vletal 4y agoWhat?! The 2016 full-self driving video where Tesla drove from home to office was a fraud?! I thought Musk got spoiled under the influence of his success. He might have been a bad apple all along. :(
- throwaway1777 4y agoThe part that’s fraud is not whether it worked or not. The fraud is how it was marketed to the user.
- ttul 4y agoWho would have thought that a camera-only system would struggle to succeed where systems that leverage $20,000 LIDAR sensors and racks of specialized machine learning hardware have met with only limited success?
- judge2020 4y agoThe problem is making decisions based on the correct road behavior - not often do they have a problem with actual detection, even in typical/regular rain.
- cal5k 4y agoThis whole thread smacks of this type of cynicism - apparently a lot of tech people now really, really hate Elon Musk. Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints. By sticking to one sensor type that contains all of the information theoretically necessary to make decisions they've simplified the problem. They bet pretty big on this approach... including by making their own silicon. I don't know how anyone could really believe that they're not earnestly pursuing eventual "Full Self-Driving" capability, even though they may still be far from that goal. What they've achieved thus far is really impressive. That took a LOT of work.
- giantrobot 4y ago> Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints. That's a bullshit justification. Going to camera-only and trying to overcome that limitation with "AI" was hubris. All of the competition working on FSD realized cars need more and more varied sensors, not fewer. Humans use a variety of sensors between primary perception and proprioception to drive vehicles. The biggest problem with camera-only is the system needs to recognize objects to understand them as road hazards. Humans don't need to recognize a thing in the road to think "don't hit that thing". It doesn't matter is an object in the road is a crumpled newspaper, a cinder block, or a cinder block covered in a newspaper, you avoid it all the same. Vision augmented with radar and LiDAR can help just say "that's a thing in the way" more reliably than vision alone. Glints from the setting Sun or windows aren't going to cause radar to think some solid object is no longer a solid object. A bad angle or odd shadow won't cause LiDAR not be able to pull an object from the background.
- bagels 4y agoTesla's lawyers state: "mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud" They intentionally neglect to acknowledge musk's many specific claims that involved specific timelines, as opposed to the nebulous long term aspirations they allude to.
- epgui 4y agoClaims about what will happen in the future and on what timeline are obviously speculative and best guesses at best. No reasonable person would interpret them any other way.
- detaro 4y agoA reasonable person might come to the conclusion that they weren't "best guesses" though, but instead knowingly misrepresenting the situation.
- epgui 4y agoBut that would just be failing to assume good faith from the onset, which is a problem on its own (especially if we’re trying to interpret legal stuff).
- detaro 4y agoWe're talking about this years later, looking at years of context, that's hardly "failing to assume good faith from the onset".
- epgui 4y agoI’m not sure what you mean exactly. If you’re suggesting that repeated failure to meet ambitious target deadlines is more indicative of bad faith than a single failure to do so, well… I don’t think it works like that. The bar for abandoning the presumption of good faith, and the principle of charitable interpretation, is very high.
- cloudking 4y agoFSD beta is fairly good, certainly better than the standard Autopilot. It's definitely not perfect, but so far for basic driving from point A to B it seems to work well. I can only see the tech improving as it gathers more data and feedback. It's a ML training data problem at this point, no?
- mjhay 4y agoReal FSD, where it is not necessary to have a human ready to take the controls at any time, isn't something you can just get more training data for. It's just that current ML methods aren't up for the task. Basically, it turns out you need to have something that can think, and ML is nowhere near that.
- BoorishBears 4y agoThat is what no one at all wants. Tesla seems to be taking the big ball of ML approach, and that relies on a model that can practically think, and that in turn means you're essentially waiting on AGI. Which is ridiculous. Instead you break down the problem that is driving. Throw pieces of ML at specific problems, like traffic light classifiers, but have a much more structured approach to the high level decisions that are made. The benefit of this is that you gain clear introspection into why your vehicle is making the decisions it makes, and a direct way to influence them other than "throw in more data and hope next time it makes the right decision!" The latter is how you kill people, and it's what Tesla has been doing so far. - Hint for other readers: Please read the comment if you want to write a reply to it. Literally nothing was said about people wanting a car you can just get into, but of course the first reply didn't make it 2 sentences in before jumping to completely orthogonal conclusions to anything that was even remotely implied in this comment. It just gets exhausting to have a conversation about a topic like this if you have to repeat every point 10 times over.
- danaris 4y ago"No one at all" wants a car where you can just get in, input the address, then ignore the wheel and what's going on outside until you get there? I think many, many people would beg to differ.
- toss1 4y ago>>Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology may be a failure, Tesla lawyers admit — but it’s not a fraud. But it IS a fraud when you state or imply that it is usable with capabilities X, Y, and Z, and it actually is not. Merely calling it "Full Self Driving" is a very clear statement that the damn thing will drive itself, and do so fully. 1st DDG Definition: Full: "2. Complete in every particular." So, if is supposed to drive itself. Moreover, Tesla & Musk claim this capability is complete in every particular, as in it does it itself, not requiring me to add any capability. This FSD claim has been going on since like 2014, with "autopilot Hardware 2.0" shipping when Barack Obama was still president [0]. Yet we still have nothing resembling actual "Full Self Driving" - which would be get in the car, tell it where to go, and get there without touching any controls or worrying about errors. It'd be one thing if it was promised last year and it was not quite here yet. But this is closer to a decade and FSD is NOWHERE CLOSE to this capability. This is one of the biggest vaporware scams ever. [0] https://insideevs.com/news/443886/tesla-autopilot-evolution-history-ultimate-guide/ https://insideevs.com/news/443886/tesla-autopilot-evolution-...
- bagels 4y agoTesla used to market this as "Full self driving hardware" on their website. They conveniently did not mention that you would also need the software, which still does not exist.
- eternalban 4y ago- But what really sets this product apart from others is its long-term, aspirational goals! - You mean features? - The problem with features is that they can also turn out to be bugs. Our innovation here was to do away with features. - To get rid of bugs? - That rights, to get rid of bugs: what sets aspirational goals apart from mere product features. - But .. - Product features can also turn out to be downright frauds. "This product features x" when it doesn't. Now that is fraud. But "this product aspires to x" and jeez, it fails to reach its goals. We're all human after all.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tibbydudeza 4y agoA refund or credit of 15K for everybody who ordered it - simple.
- epgui 4y agoThe failure to understand the context of the quote is palpable in both the article and comments. This is a standard legal argument used as a defence against allegations of fraud, and it’s not a judgment of how successful (or not) the product is. The only thing it means is “notwithstanding whether we’ve achieved our goals, we have been honest and well-intentioned”.
- FireBeyond 4y ago> we have been honest Well, that's also the thing - internal docs and interviews have shown that Musk was well aware that "FSD will be here, this year", year after year, was not ever going to be true.
- epgui 4y agoI must have missed that memo. Do you have a reliable source for this?
- FireBeyond 4y ago"“Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ. Tesla is at Level 2 currently,” the California DMV said in the memo about its March 9th conference call with Tesla representatives, including the director of Autopilot software CJ Moore... In an earnings call in January, Musk told investors that he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year.” "“Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year”, the document showed. Sources: https://www.businessinsider.in/business/auto/news/a-leaked-memo-from-tesla-reportedly-shows-that-its-fully-self-driving-car-is-still-far-from-being-a-reality/articleshow/82477131.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/business/auto/news/a-leaked-m... | https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-autopilot-dmv-fsd-exaggeration https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
- electrondood 4y agoThank you. People here are just reacting to the headline and general dislike of Musk.
- bananapub 4y ago> In its defense, Tesla lawyers said that “mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud.” absolutely spectacular work from the lawyers
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI’m been on the fsd beta for a long time now and I have to say it’s remarkably improved over the last year. If it continues to improve at this rate for another year it’s going to be pretty useful. I use it to drive around seattle (which is a difficult driving place with randomly followed infrastructure standards and randomly driving drivers and randomly parked cars) and it used to be a death defying gripping of the steering wheel and grabbing it out of bone headed moves while everyone looks at me askance to a relatively chill experience. Yesterday I needed to take it in for some fender work (my wife isn’t the best driver and I got fsd as a donation to self driving research in the off chance it’ll let her someday delegate driving to the car, but since that hasn’t happened yet I have periodic body work that needs to be done as she pachinkos through the streets). The Tesla service center is in an industrial area in an insane interchange part of I5 with crazy off ramps and strange turns. I always get lost. I let fsd drive door to door and it did it flawlessly. That surprised me, but after each update it’s been getting considerably better. It still has flaws - it widens it’s place in the lane on every on-ramp which is annoying and weird road conditions can confuse it about what to do next. It sometimes doesn’t anticipate well the turn signals of someone changing lanes leading to people flipping me off for not giving them space. But all in all, given the state of adaptive cruise control 10 years ago, this is a remarkable achievement to put in a consumer grade vehicle.
- ghaff 4y agoI was in one a couple months ago. My friend likes it but was also clear that you have to pay attention to what it's doing because it makes regular mistakes.
- lawn 4y agoThat you're surprised that it managed drive door to door is telling. And not in the positive way you want to make it seem.
- snek_case 4y agoIt's very different from the approach taken by Waymo and Cruise. Tesla's FSD uses vision only, and it's available everywhere in the US and Canada. The fact that it can complete most drives successfully (~90% of the time) without intervention in any city in the US or Canada is pretty impressive IMO. The parent poster is right, I've been watching the progress and it's gotten probably 20 to 50 times more reliable in the last year.
- nostrademons 4y agoI view self-driving cars (along with drones, ubiquitous encryption, and distributed manufacturing) as "post-WW3 technologies". The same way that atomic energy, computers, jet engines, and interstate highways were "post-WW2 technologies". These are things that could be done with current technology, but the current state of infrastructure & societal organization makes them uneconomical, and no single private firm has the market power needed to force through the social changes needed to drive adoption. However, they give a huge advantage to one side in wartime, where you are deliberately trying to kill people rather than avoid killing people. That gives the side who uses them the ability to win the war, which then gives them the political power to force through the societal & infrastructure changes needed for mass adoption. The war also gives the general populace widespread exposure to the new technologies, which makes them less scary to the winning side and drives political support for rearranging society to benefit from them (they still remain scary to the losing side, but they'll be dead). We're at peace now, which makes self-driving cars kind of a non-starter. But that's not guaranteed to hold forever, even in the near future, nor is it even true in many places of the globe (witness Russia/Ukraine). It also may not be the point - remember that self-driving cars initially came out of a DARPA grant. A lot of the technical problems with self-driving cars are easier to solve with widespread infrastructure changes. For example, you solve construction by mandating that construction diversions use smart traffic cones with a small transmitter that coordinates with the other cones in the area to signal which lane has priority, and then broadcasts that to oncoming self-driving cars. You solve pedestrians by having a proper street/road split [1], where pedestrians are banned from roads and cars are banned from streets. Heck, you can make the whole problem a lot simpler just by banning non-self-driving cars from roads. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/10/30/the-stroad
- idlewords 4y agoIf large infrastructure changes are in the mix, then the self-driving problem is trivially solved using a pair of metal guide rails. They also greatly increase the cargo capacity of the vehicle, a win-win.
- nostrademons 4y ago
- cma 4y agoHe said at the semi unveiling in 2017 that they could already do autonomous truck convoys. No they couldn't. That's fraud.
- sidcool 4y agoThe argument is being taken out of context. Not saying that FSD is flawless. But Tesla isn't calling it a failure. They are saying it's not yet achieved. And it's a perfectly sane legal argument. Again, this does not mean Tesla is right here, just that the title is a misrepresentation of their argument.
- crote 4y agoHow long should they be given to deliver? FSD was first sold 6 years ago. The FSD hardware has a warranty of 4 years. The average car lasts about 11 years. Tesla no longer guarantees the functionality of the hardware, yet has failed to deliver the software. They are inching towards failing to deliver during the car's economic lifespan. Legally, would it be acceptable for them to deliver in 2032, when the first cars sold with FSD have long been scrapped?
- csours 4y agoTheranos isn't a failure, they just haven't achieved their goal yet. You can read this any way you want. I do think that Theranos (or another company) may eventually achieve part of the vision of Theranos. Same for FSD.
- leobg 4y agoI love these analogies. Like those people who didn’t buy Amazon stock in 2014 because they remembered WebVan. It’s internet. It’s shopping. They speak of the future. Hence it is exactly the same. If GPT reasoned like this, you’d snicker about how it “just pretends to be intelligent”, would you not? :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PointyFluff 4y ago
- PointyFluff 4y ago
- Animats 4y agoTesla's legal argument is not that it isn't fraud. It's that the Tesla purchase contract removes consumer rights and requires binding arbitration.
- thordenmark 4y agoTesla cars are sold on the value as they are now. The potential features of the future are only an interesting possibility. It's not that different from any hardware/software on the market. Sure, Photoshop might have full self-driving AI that magically makes images for you someday (and Adobe does promise some big things), but people buy Photoshop for what it can do right now.
- pcurve 4y ago"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has several investigations open, including a probe into why Teslas seem to disproportionately crash into emergency vehicles parked on the roadside. The agency has set no public timeline for a determination." I wonder if this is the case of the U.S regulators turning their blind eyes to the problem as to not jeopardize Tesla's standing in the global EV market, much the same way FAA dragged its feet on grounding 737 MAX. I'm still baffled as to how there has been no meaningful punitive action taken against Musk for all the false claims he has made over the years.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoI'd guess that the 'free market' should apply punitive action by losing them customers, but that relies on customers having (or even wanting) accurate information. I guess they get round some of the issues by having the autopilot transfer control to the driver just before crashing and can then pin the blame on them.
- 11thEarlOfMar 4y agoI'll buy the Full Self-Driving Driving software if and when my insurance comopany offers a discount for doing so. Otherwise, the car is fantastic to drive without it. I could not care less about his antics.
- lambda 4y agoAdvertising and selling a feature that you don't have sure seems like fraud to me. If it's "the feature is nearly ready but just needs some polish" there's an argument to be made that maybe you were just being a bit too hopeful. But "years and lots of fundamental research away, and we're not even sure what sensor systems were going to rely on", that's just fraud. You're looking for early stage investors, not customer preorders, at that point.
- blinding-streak 4y agohttps://archive.ph/vhpOO https://archive.ph/vhpOO
- Blue111 4y agoThe failure was only to name it Full self-driving while it wasn't... easy failure to avoid...
- lajosbacs 4y agoAs a former Tesla owner (one year ago), their claims are just ridiculous. How can Tesla talk about FSD, when they cannot resolve even simple cruise control on a street that is not a highway with a separator. More like FFS than FSD
- maldev 4y agoTesla is a sham of a company. Not only the self driving stuff, but he's also building up his company to be like a giant, faceless tech company with customer support. Last week I was about to accept delivery of a Model S Plaid, I was on hold for an hour and 10 minutes with sales to even reach anyone, after hours of trying to find a number. I walked into the Porsche dealership and they pretty much were ready to bring out babes in bikini's and give me scotch. I know alot of people dislike Tesla due to their CEO, but the actual company is a giant fuckup and it's like talking to a faceless human. In the mercede's dealership? They all drive mercede's, in the Honda dealership, they drive honda's. In the Tesla dealership? They drive super cheap, shitty cars, since they're effectively minimum, wage employees.
- lcnmrn 4y agoWhy can't we have DriveGPT?
- mikespb87 4y ago"eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" robots can't follow this simple rule therefore it's a failure
- rurp 4y ago> “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not driving anything. The car is driving itself.” > Tesla workers later revealed that the video was fabricated, done in multiple takes, with the driving system’s failures removed, including a crash into a fence. The video remains on Tesla’s website. Hah, despite all of the Tesla news I somehow missed that this video was a fake and that the car crashed into a fence while filming.
- Zigurd 4y agoA large factor in the valuation of Tesla is the notion that Tesla is not "just" a car maker. There used to be a good case for that: Tesla, by necessity, led the way in a more integrated electronics architecture for EV controls and infotainment. Self-driving looked promising. Breaking the dealer model in the US was very attractive to anyone who had a bad experience with car salesmen. But, in the end, everyone puts their trousers on one leg at a time. Car OEM valuations will probably be higher than in the ICE age, and probably lower than $TSLA is today.
- amelius 4y agoAdvertising always had a fraudulent side to it, by not telling the whole story or showing an idealized version of products, but Musk is taking it to a whole new level.