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How much could the recent Musk meltdown be related to FSD just not arriving? It seems like we have reached a point after many years of FSD being “next year” whe

by api 4y ago

How much could the recent Musk meltdown be related to FSD just not arriving? It seems like we have reached a point after many years of FSD being “next year” when it’s becoming clear that it’s further away than anyone thought. I’ve thought the difficulty was being vastly underestimated for a while. A reusable Lunar and Mars shuttle system is probably a lot easier than actual FSD.

kevingadd 4y ago
If only because you're probably doing two dozen moon missions a year TOPS - probably far less than that - but FSD needs to handle millions of trips flawlessly. But yeah, at some point he should have wised up and stopped saying that FSD was gonna be ready Any Day Now.
- api 4y ago
  The hard thing about FSD is related to the scale. It’s the long tail of situations it has to deal with, many of which require some kind of model or understanding of the world outside the car. It’s the worst sort of problem, one where 10% of the work gets you 90% of the way there and the other 90% of the work is needed to get you the other 10%. Problems like this are really bad for creating this mirage that you’ve almost got it when in reality you are far from the end.
  - ajross 4y ago
    I dinged you for this in a different comment too, but it's clearer here: you're doing exactly the conflation of "Full Self Driving" the product with "Full Autonomy" the concept that the linked law is trying to prevent! The former has value and people will buy it even if the latter can't be delivered in totality. Making Tesla rename their product does not mean their cars magically stop driving themselves, and especially does not mean that there isn't a market for people (that's me, hi!) who want cars that can drive themselves.
    - spookie 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but there's no other way to interpret "full self driving". It means, intuitively, that self driving has mastered all aspects of driving. It doesn't leave space for interpretation in which only specific parts of driving are possible. At least in my mind.
- dundarious 4y ago
  He went so far as to say that it was financially irresponsible to not buy a Tesla, as it was the only car that was fully hardware capable, and that had FSD software coming in about a year. We are very far from the touted fleets of Tesla robotaxis, independently-operated or otherwise.
  - recuter 4y ago
    He also went as far as saying the stock is too high. People just hear whatever they want to hear.
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Why is he so against short sellers and Bill Gates in particular?
ajross 4y ago
FWIW, as far as "will the car drive itself?", FSD is already here. Call a friend and get a ride. The beta lets people in relatively rapidly now, and there are hundreds of thousands of enabled cars on the roads. It's pretty amazing. Now, it's absolutely true that it's not at a 100% supervision-free level. It's still timid, it has trouble with lane selection in some areas and misses turns, etc... But for months and months intervention-free drives in my area have been the rule and not the exception. My car, for sure, drives me around. It's pretty amazing. But that's not regulatory approval, and coverage of the issue tends to conflate the two. So you have people like you who read this stuff, but don't get rides from friends, who think somehow it's a disaster and a failure. But it's an actual product people are buying and using. Add that to all the folks who have a vested interest[1] in Tesla failing, and... the discourse around this subject is pretty toxic. All I can say is, again, call a friend and get a ride. There's a lot of hate to push through, but the cars are amazing. [1] Because, to be fair, the CEO is an asshole burning Twitter to the ground as we write.
- jackmott 4y ago
  [dead]
- Retric 4y ago
  Other companies have cars one public streets without drivers. Calling what current Tesla’s do Full Sell Driving is so misleading it’s probably just fraud.
  - jaxn 4y ago
    Is there any consumer car that is anywhere close? My understanding is that no other car has things like automatic lan change and route following. Let alone stopping at stop signs / red lights etc.
    - spookie 4y ago
      That is not full self driving
    - 4y ago
birdyrooster 4y ago
FSD was never real. TSLA was the product the whole time. Just like solar roof and tesla semi and tesla bot… if it gets an idiot futurologist wet then it will lift the TSLA price. Schadenfreude, long over due comeuppance, etc, etc.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I think 6 or 7 years ago, many people thought we would at least have something like Waymo's self-driving taxis in Phoenix in several cities, more publicly available, really starting to change transportation. We're not too far behind on that estimate. My guess is in less than 3 years - Waymo will be publicly available in large parts of Phoenix and probably another major metro - and within 10 years most of the south west. But a lot of uninformed people thought we might have FSD everywhere by now. I think there's just less uninformed people now.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  My guess is Tesla won't have anything resembling FSD to cover the entire US within 15 years. Though Musk and Tesla fans have shown that FSD is subjective, and they seem to think they already have it now, so I guarantee in 15 years they'll be arguing even louder... If they change everything about their approach, and/or lease tech from Cruise or Waymo - then maybe they'll have something resembling FSD in large parts of the southwest. Predicting 5 years into the future is tough - 15 years is almost impossible. Anyway, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way now. Since FSD is so far behind Elon the marketing-hype-stock-pump-Charlatan / the louder voice in the room - now the mainstream idea is - we're never going to have FSD. This is ironic, since we basically already have it in a few large metros. It seems like the newspapers famously publishing that we might have manned space flight within 10,000,000 years - literally the day before the Wright brothers first flight... People thought the car would never catch on, because cities were designed for people and bikes and horses. The car was so useful, we redesigned cities. Self-driving will be the same way. Once it takes off in some places and the value is realized, cities will redesign to make it work more broadly. It might take a long time, but it will happen... Unless the nature of transit changes and individual vehicles are phased out for whatever reason first - though I don't see that happening without FSD busses / street cars.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Self driving isn’t nearly as evolutionary as going from horse to car, or boat to flight. We aren’t likely to redesign entire cities for self driving. We might see self driving only highway lanes with faster speeds but that’s all I’d envision over next few decades.
n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
>it’s further away than anyone thought I worked full time in a computer vision company (non-automotive) for several years prior to 2018. I joined an automotive company (not Tesla) in 2018 and very intentionally steered clear of the autonomous efforts going on there. Not because my skillset wasn’t best applied there, but because I didn’t believe the roadmaps the industry was laying out at the time. “Level 3 by next year, Level 4 by 2020, Level 5 by 2022” is what they were saying back then. I called bullshit (silently) and worked on viable software instead. Lots of people were doing the same. This isn’t surprising to a whole bunch of people that work in the non-automotive computer vision/ML space and realize how absurd it is to think the these models will converge any time soon.
KaiserPro 4y ago
> that it’s further away than anyone thought. No no, only musk was stupid enough to imply level 5 autonomy within x years. Everyone know how hard it is, realtime accurate position, machine perception of roads, & accurate prediction of cars/lorries/other are all very difficult problems. Then to hobble your team by saying "blah blah blah no lidars" because they are expensive and someone from the ML team convinced you that they could estimate depth reliably, was the clincher. Level 4/5 self driving is more of a matter of scale. if you have a 99.5% safe rating, then a lot of people over a country the size of the states are going to have a bad day.
- v0idzer0 4y ago
  Let’s not pretend Apple, Uber, Google and countless others weren’t spending billions trying to make this a reality. They didn’t burn that money because they were smart enough to know it wasn’t going to happen. Everyone thought it was imminent. Many still do.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
    Billions of dollars for Apple and Google are within the realm of no-nonsense moonshots given that their core business is very solid. Tesla had to use all their weapons including fraud, exagerations and lies because their core business is the worst business in the world: manufacturing automobiles. So they have essentially nothing to fall back on if FSD fails.
    - nullc 4y ago
      I'm still mystified that tesla isn't mired in lawsuits over this: Some tesla dealers were telling customers that within a few years their self driving tesla would earn back its purchase price from acting as a robotaxi.
      - foobiekr 4y ago
        The dealers were? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk
cinntaile 4y ago
When Andrej Karpathy left earlier this year you knew FSD wasn't happening anytime soon.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

by api 4y ago

kevingadd 4y ago

If only because you're probably doing two dozen moon missions a year TOPS - probably far less than that - but FSD needs to handle millions of trips flawlessly. But yeah, at some point he should have wised up and stopped saying that FSD was gonna be ready Any Day Now.

api 4y ago
The hard thing about FSD is related to the scale. It’s the long tail of situations it has to deal with, many of which require some kind of model or understanding of the world outside the car. It’s the worst sort of problem, one where 10% of the work gets you 90% of the way there and the other 90% of the work is needed to get you the other 10%. Problems like this are really bad for creating this mirage that you’ve almost got it when in reality you are far from the end.
- ajross 4y ago
  I dinged you for this in a different comment too, but it's clearer here: you're doing exactly the conflation of "Full Self Driving" the product with "Full Autonomy" the concept that the linked law is trying to prevent! The former has value and people will buy it even if the latter can't be delivered in totality. Making Tesla rename their product does not mean their cars magically stop driving themselves, and especially does not mean that there isn't a market for people (that's me, hi!) who want cars that can drive themselves.
  - spookie 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but there's no other way to interpret "full self driving". It means, intuitively, that self driving has mastered all aspects of driving. It doesn't leave space for interpretation in which only specific parts of driving are possible. At least in my mind.
dundarious 4y ago
He went so far as to say that it was financially irresponsible to not buy a Tesla, as it was the only car that was fully hardware capable, and that had FSD software coming in about a year. We are very far from the touted fleets of Tesla robotaxis, independently-operated or otherwise.
- recuter 4y ago
  He also went as far as saying the stock is too high. People just hear whatever they want to hear.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Why is he so against short sellers and Bill Gates in particular?

ajross 4y ago

FWIW, as far as "will the car drive itself?", FSD is already here. Call a friend and get a ride. The beta lets people in relatively rapidly now, and there are hundreds of thousands of enabled cars on the roads. It's pretty amazing. Now, it's absolutely true that it's not at a 100% supervision-free level. It's still timid, it has trouble with lane selection in some areas and misses turns, etc... But for months and months intervention-free drives in my area have been the rule and not the exception. My car, for sure, drives me around. It's pretty amazing. But that's not regulatory approval, and coverage of the issue tends to conflate the two. So you have people like you who read this stuff, but don't get rides from friends, who think somehow it's a disaster and a failure. But it's an actual product people are buying and using. Add that to all the folks who have a vested interest[1] in Tesla failing, and... the discourse around this subject is pretty toxic. All I can say is, again, call a friend and get a ride. There's a lot of hate to push through, but the cars are amazing. [1] Because, to be fair, the CEO is an asshole burning Twitter to the ground as we write.

jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
Retric 4y ago
Other companies have cars one public streets without drivers. Calling what current Tesla’s do Full Sell Driving is so misleading it’s probably just fraud.
- jaxn 4y ago
  Is there any consumer car that is anywhere close? My understanding is that no other car has things like automatic lan change and route following. Let alone stopping at stop signs / red lights etc.
  - spookie 4y ago
    That is not full self driving
  - 4y ago

birdyrooster 4y ago

FSD was never real. TSLA was the product the whole time. Just like solar roof and tesla semi and tesla bot… if it gets an idiot futurologist wet then it will lift the TSLA price. Schadenfreude, long over due comeuppance, etc, etc.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

I think 6 or 7 years ago, many people thought we would at least have something like Waymo's self-driving taxis in Phoenix in several cities, more publicly available, really starting to change transportation. We're not too far behind on that estimate. My guess is in less than 3 years - Waymo will be publicly available in large parts of Phoenix and probably another major metro - and within 10 years most of the south west. But a lot of uninformed people thought we might have FSD everywhere by now. I think there's just less uninformed people now.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
My guess is Tesla won't have anything resembling FSD to cover the entire US within 15 years. Though Musk and Tesla fans have shown that FSD is subjective, and they seem to think they already have it now, so I guarantee in 15 years they'll be arguing even louder... If they change everything about their approach, and/or lease tech from Cruise or Waymo - then maybe they'll have something resembling FSD in large parts of the southwest. Predicting 5 years into the future is tough - 15 years is almost impossible. Anyway, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way now. Since FSD is so far behind Elon the marketing-hype-stock-pump-Charlatan / the louder voice in the room - now the mainstream idea is - we're never going to have FSD. This is ironic, since we basically already have it in a few large metros. It seems like the newspapers famously publishing that we might have manned space flight within 10,000,000 years - literally the day before the Wright brothers first flight... People thought the car would never catch on, because cities were designed for people and bikes and horses. The car was so useful, we redesigned cities. Self-driving will be the same way. Once it takes off in some places and the value is realized, cities will redesign to make it work more broadly. It might take a long time, but it will happen... Unless the nature of transit changes and individual vehicles are phased out for whatever reason first - though I don't see that happening without FSD busses / street cars.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Self driving isn’t nearly as evolutionary as going from horse to car, or boat to flight. We aren’t likely to redesign entire cities for self driving. We might see self driving only highway lanes with faster speeds but that’s all I’d envision over next few decades.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago

>it’s further away than anyone thought I worked full time in a computer vision company (non-automotive) for several years prior to 2018. I joined an automotive company (not Tesla) in 2018 and very intentionally steered clear of the autonomous efforts going on there. Not because my skillset wasn’t best applied there, but because I didn’t believe the roadmaps the industry was laying out at the time. “Level 3 by next year, Level 4 by 2020, Level 5 by 2022” is what they were saying back then. I called bullshit (silently) and worked on viable software instead. Lots of people were doing the same. This isn’t surprising to a whole bunch of people that work in the non-automotive computer vision/ML space and realize how absurd it is to think the these models will converge any time soon.

KaiserPro 4y ago

> that it’s further away than anyone thought. No no, only musk was stupid enough to imply level 5 autonomy within x years. Everyone know how hard it is, realtime accurate position, machine perception of roads, & accurate prediction of cars/lorries/other are all very difficult problems. Then to hobble your team by saying "blah blah blah no lidars" because they are expensive and someone from the ML team convinced you that they could estimate depth reliably, was the clincher. Level 4/5 self driving is more of a matter of scale. if you have a 99.5% safe rating, then a lot of people over a country the size of the states are going to have a bad day.

v0idzer0 4y ago
Let’s not pretend Apple, Uber, Google and countless others weren’t spending billions trying to make this a reality. They didn’t burn that money because they were smart enough to know it wasn’t going to happen. Everyone thought it was imminent. Many still do.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  Billions of dollars for Apple and Google are within the realm of no-nonsense moonshots given that their core business is very solid. Tesla had to use all their weapons including fraud, exagerations and lies because their core business is the worst business in the world: manufacturing automobiles. So they have essentially nothing to fall back on if FSD fails.
  - nullc 4y ago
    I'm still mystified that tesla isn't mired in lawsuits over this: Some tesla dealers were telling customers that within a few years their self driving tesla would earn back its purchase price from acting as a robotaxi.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      The dealers were? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cFTlx68itk

cinntaile 4y ago

When Andrej Karpathy left earlier this year you knew FSD wasn't happening anytime soon.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]