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Should have happened sooner. I love my Model Y. It's the most fun car I've ever owned. It's also the most comfortable on long road trips and I can sleep in it i

Should have happened sooner. I love my Model Y. It's the most fun car I've ever owned. It's also the most comfortable on long road trips and I can sleep in it in climate-controlled comfort without generating a gas that could kill me. I leave the house every morning with a full tank and never have to stop at a gas station. And my cost per mile is 1/4 what it was with an ICE car. I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen. It's like what if somebody invented the world's greatest backpack? It's bigger on the inside than the outside, and it incorporates negative gravity so anything you put in it becomes 50 lbs lighter. And all that was true; it actually worked? But for an extra $10k, the company will add on the "anti-grizzly bear" feature which makes you invulnerable to grizzly bears while you're wearing the backpack. Except most of the people who buy the anti-grizzly bear feature end up getting eaten by grizzly bears. Whoops! Just quietly stop advertising the anti-grizzly bear feature and you'll still have a great product.

nzealand 4y ago
> It's also the most comfortable on long road trips and I can sleep in it in climate-controlled comfort without generating a gas that could kill me. Why are you sleeping in your car for long trips? :)
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I know you're kidding but it's a good question. I don't do it while the car is moving obviously. I like to camp in the car at RV spots at lakes, state parks, and other pleasant places while on a long road trip. Plug in the car, sleep in the back, and wake to a full charge.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Because hotels can be expensive, and when you want to bomb from one side of the country to the other driving 16 hours a day, it's just easier to sleep in the car. I've done it many times in a 20-year-old Jetta, very comfortably.
  - tmh88j 4y ago
    > Because hotels can be expensive Perhaps buying a $60k+ car isn't the best idea if that means you can't afford a hotel room occasionally.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      But my car cost less than $2000.
      - tmh88j 4y ago
        The context of the discussion is someone sleeping in their Model Y, not someone penny pinching to get by.
        frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand dollars on an electric car doesn't mean they should be willing to drop $200 a night on hotels for a week straight. My uncle bought a Tesla 3 (coincidentally, to replace his 20-year-old totalled Jetta) because he needs to drive several hours to the office a few times a month for 2-3 days at a time, and the silent climate control and flat trunk floor means he can cheaply and comfortably spend the night in his car rather than driving 3hr back home or renting a hotel room. It is also much cheaper to operate.
        tmh88j 4y ago
        > Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand dollars on an electric car doesn't mean they should be willing to drop $200 a night on hotels for a week straight. I disagree. In my opinion if you can't afford to do that a few times per year without financial concern then you have no business spending $60k+ on a car. Having to sleep in your expensive car just so you can afford a vacation is ridiculous. There are much cheaper alternatives that won't force you to sacrifice other aspects of your life, such as your $2000 car. I'm not even going to comment on your uncle's situation. Let's just say I would be working somewhere else if I had to resort to that.
rzimmerman 4y ago
I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the complaints about the name it’s exactly what is claimed. Auto park is bad. It doesn’t detect the spot half the time and it’s not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces where it would actually be useful. Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It’s often too timid to actually switch lanes if there’s traffic. I like the signal-to-lane-change. Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time) claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and don’t pay attention. Every year it’s another few months away. I doubt it’s actually possible with the hardware on the car at this point. Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. It’s glossing over the very important bits of “with the compute power in the car” and “within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques”. I have no doubt that autonomous driving is possible - it’s actively happening in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model Y can do what I paid for, and that’s unethical. This doesn’t need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.
- logifail 4y ago
  > But the software has stagnated [..] I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...) I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it. If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...
  - wpietri 4y ago
93po 4y ago
> I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen. Why can that never happen?
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Arbitrary limitations on the sensor suite because "we figured it out, humans only need cameras" are one reason. Tesla is not running in the same race as actual AV companies.
  - simondotau 4y ago
    All of the "actual AV companies" have only released curated marketing videos and/or restrict operation to curated geofenced areas. Meanwhile we've seen exactly one company's autonomy technology exposed to unsupervised and uncontrolled adversarial conditions across hundreds of wildly diverse cities in the USA. Whether you are impressed with their state of progress or not, there's nobody you can compare them to. Operators like Waymo do look plausible while operating within their tiny geofence. Driving pre-validated roads is impressive in its own way. Right now if you dropped a Waymo and Tesla FSD on an unsealed road in Michigan, one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. The point is, I agree that there could be many firms which are far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information in the public domain to say this with any confidence. Right now Tesla's is the only major system which can be assessed with critical objectively.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      > ...one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. If it was just one single trip, I was incapacitated and just needed to get home, then fine, level of human learner driver is good enough. But for everyday usage? No way, the risk is just too high.
    - andbberger 4y ago
      > one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. refusing to move is a feature not a bug. and human learners don't slam into a jersey barrier because there's some glare. why tesla bros continue to insist that they have a good vision stack while they can't even do contrast adaptation is beyond me. the dril tweet comes to mind
yucky 4y ago
> Should have happened sooner. Which tells you everything you need to know about California's government.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  What, that they are #1 in understanding the self-driving technological landscape? They remain more responsive than the other 49 states.
  - yucky 4y ago
    Their timing tells you what you need to know. This isn't new information, their decision is motivated by something other than a new set of facts on self driving vehicles. So they were wrong, and they stayed wrong (for money) long after they knew they were wrong. And now that it's convenient they've reversed course. Sounds like the other 49 states was right to be cautious.
    - dagmx 4y ago
      This is illogical. You can’t simultaneously criticize California for taking so long to do this, while praising other states for being more cautious by not doing it. You’re also ascribing some laterite motive that you fail to provide a description of.
      - yucky 4y ago
        [flagged]
Zigurd 4y ago
The idea of FSD is, obviously from the effect of hyping it, enormously attractive. It can't happen now. But in the 1990s, speech recognition that would enable me to dictate this comment in a relatively noisy space was science fiction. Now that we have orders of magnitude more computing power, and much better microphones and associated noise rejection technology, you can blithely dictate messages with reliability that was previously a dream. Thing is to go from being unable to distinguish pencil from cancel to today's almost magical speech recognition, took 25 years. That might be the same interval it takes to go from mowing down motorcyclists to delivering all the safety and productivity potential of level 5 autonomy.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Someone commented on the Waymo thread that insiders believe they already have FSD, but the cost doesn’t work.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    Two things about that: if by FSD you mean level 5 autonomy, waymo is not level 5. It is a robotaxi. Fully autonomous in that role. But the definition of level five includes driving in situations where you don't have any prior data. Outside the map.
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Fair but I’d imagine 90%+ of taxi/uber rides are inside cities. Really hoping that they bring the cost down. I’m a way it seems like Musk was half right - the cost for these just doesn’t work (according to the comment).
wpietri 4y ago
> I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen. There's a good argument that Tesla wouldn't exist today without the hype. The enormous positive public image mad Tesla's cost of capital extremely low, and ditto its cost of marketing. Tesla needed a lot of both to get to break-even. Musk himself has talked repeatedly about coming close to bankruptcy. It's reasonable to believe that less hype would have meant less capital and fewer sales, nudging them at some point over into bankruptcy.
- bumby 4y ago
  There’s a tipping point where the hype becomes excessive or even fraudulent. The ends justifying the means doesn’t absolve a business of needing to conduct themselves ethically.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Oh, yeah, I think Tesla's well past the point of fraud. Musk promised "1 million robotaxis by end of the year", and that year was 2020. I don't think the end justifies the means at all here.
    - cedws 4y ago
      Elon Musk wants to be Steve Jobs so badly but the reality distortion field isn't working.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And buying Twitter really put him in front of all of the people all of the time.
- adrr 4y ago
  Fake it to you make it. FSD will never come on the current hardware.
Lendal 4y ago
It's almost as if someone invented an amazing new technology that really works, then some VC came along, bought it out, (er, I mean invested!) ran the original inventors out of town and bolted on some unasked-for snake oil. Now, you can still buy the still-awesome product (mostly made in America too) but you have to take all the VC crap along with it. Welcome to America!
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  This is typical engineer fairy tale thinking: that “inventing” v0.01 defines all other versions and nothing else is needed even if v0.01 didn’t get sold. And all other versions have ton of work in them. And seasoned with the big bad wolf, oops investor, buying everything at gun point. Edit: of course this is downvoted lol, hate Musk all you want ( I do but because he is pro CCP) but reality can’t be denied
novok 4y ago
It's because he knows that those things are relative commodities, and in 5 or 10 years the rest of the industry will eventually catch up in every single way. Hyundai and ford are pretty much %80 of the way there already.
- gregoriol 4y ago
  Could be, but Apple could serve as a good example of staying ahead even as others are catching up.
- myko 4y ago
  > n 5 or 10 years the rest of the industry will eventually catch up in every single way. Seems to have already happened? Mercedes EQS/EQB, BMW i4/i7/iX, Polestar, Ioniq All seem better than the comparable Tesla vehicles. Though Tesla does have better features for sitting at chargers, and obviously the super charger network which is a huge thing for anyone taking longer trips.
  - novok 4y ago
    I did a test drive of a bunch of EVs, and Hyundai makes the Ioniq which I was referencing. I found that the ford mustang EV and Ioniq had about a %20 worse driving experience than a several year old tesla model 3 LR, and tesla did have a bunch of things that were better. But that also came from being years ahead in making EVs and having a more refined product and driving experience as a result. Driving all the v1 EVs made me realize that they were close, and in a few years they'll probably catch up to tesla on the driving experience. Will they be able to make nice software like tesla will? I'm not so sure. Mercedes and BMW sell their EVs even more expensive than tesla in many ways too, so their price category is different. Also cars after a certain point are way more commodity, they wont be able to differentiate like apple does with their products nearly as much. And that supercharger network advantage will go way in 5 to 10 years too.
thefounder 4y ago
Tesla's evaluation is closely related to its FSD promise. Not to mention it already sold future "fsd" options. If FSD is out then you have just a dumb car. How do you justify your evaluation(i.e worth the entire auto industry EV or ICE)?
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  Maybe you don't? Maybe you learn to live with an accurate valuation based on the company's record of innovation in batteries, motors, and castings? Not to mention heat pumps, aerodynamics, nearly flawless worldwide charging infrastructure, etc? Is it really better to have a hyperinflated valuation based on vaporware that risks falling off a cliff when people get tired of the lies?

nzealand 4y ago

> It's also the most comfortable on long road trips and I can sleep in it in climate-controlled comfort without generating a gas that could kill me. Why are you sleeping in your car for long trips? :)

dreamcompiler 4y ago
I know you're kidding but it's a good question. I don't do it while the car is moving obviously. I like to camp in the car at RV spots at lakes, state parks, and other pleasant places while on a long road trip. Plug in the car, sleep in the back, and wake to a full charge.
frosted-flakes 4y ago
Because hotels can be expensive, and when you want to bomb from one side of the country to the other driving 16 hours a day, it's just easier to sleep in the car. I've done it many times in a 20-year-old Jetta, very comfortably.
- tmh88j 4y ago
  > Because hotels can be expensive Perhaps buying a $60k+ car isn't the best idea if that means you can't afford a hotel room occasionally.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    But my car cost less than $2000.
    - tmh88j 4y ago
      The context of the discussion is someone sleeping in their Model Y, not someone penny pinching to get by.
      - frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand dollars on an electric car doesn't mean they should be willing to drop $200 a night on hotels for a week straight. My uncle bought a Tesla 3 (coincidentally, to replace his 20-year-old totalled Jetta) because he needs to drive several hours to the office a few times a month for 2-3 days at a time, and the silent climate control and flat trunk floor means he can cheaply and comfortably spend the night in his car rather than driving 3hr back home or renting a hotel room. It is also much cheaper to operate.
        tmh88j 4y ago
        > Just because someone spent a few tens of thousand dollars on an electric car doesn't mean they should be willing to drop $200 a night on hotels for a week straight. I disagree. In my opinion if you can't afford to do that a few times per year without financial concern then you have no business spending $60k+ on a car. Having to sleep in your expensive car just so you can afford a vacation is ridiculous. There are much cheaper alternatives that won't force you to sacrifice other aspects of your life, such as your $2000 car. I'm not even going to comment on your uncle's situation. Let's just say I would be working somewhere else if I had to resort to that.

rzimmerman 4y ago

I also love my Model Y. It’s by far the best car I’ve ever owned or driven. But the software has stagnated in favor of “FSD” beta releases. Autopilot on freeways is great. I use it all the time and it works. I wish Tesla would focus on getting that to a level 3-type system - something where I can take my hands off the wheel and just be ready to take over after 10-15 seconds. It feels close enough that it could be done. But despite the complaints about the name it’s exactly what is claimed. Auto park is bad. It doesn’t detect the spot half the time and it’s not great at actually parking. Especially on tight spaces where it would actually be useful. Navigate on autopilot is underwhelming. It’s often too timid to actually switch lanes if there’s traffic. I like the signal-to-lane-change. Full self driving is a boondoggle and absolutely false advertising at this point. Put all the disclaimers on it you want, but I paid for something that (the language at the time) claimed would get me from point A to point B while I relax and don’t pay attention. Every year it’s another few months away. I doubt it’s actually possible with the hardware on the car at this point. Elon’s claim of “humans drive with eyes so a car can drive with cameras” is naive. It’s glossing over the very important bits of “with the compute power in the car” and “within the limits of moser CV/ML techniques”. I have no doubt that autonomous driving is possible - it’s actively happening in San Francisco roads with Cruise/Waymo. But I doubt my Model Y can do what I paid for, and that’s unethical. This doesn’t need a law, it should be enforced by the FTC or by a lawsuit. It seems like someone scoring some cheap points.

logifail 4y ago
> But the software has stagnated [..] I've only owned ICE vehicles (lifetime total: 3, 2 of which are parked outside right now), and have only ever rented ICE vehicles (lifetime total: several hundred, the latest of which is in the long-stay at London Heathrow right now...) I'm unable to get my head around talk of a vehicle's software "stagnating"? AFAIK none of the vehicles I've ever driven had OTA updates, and from the driver's PoV they weren't the worse for it. If you're hoping to convince current ICE drivers to upgrade to EV, then talking about shipping rapid software updates probably isn't going to work...
- wpietri 4y ago

93po 4y ago

> I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen. Why can that never happen?

BoorishBears 4y ago
Arbitrary limitations on the sensor suite because "we figured it out, humans only need cameras" are one reason. Tesla is not running in the same race as actual AV companies.
- simondotau 4y ago
  All of the "actual AV companies" have only released curated marketing videos and/or restrict operation to curated geofenced areas. Meanwhile we've seen exactly one company's autonomy technology exposed to unsupervised and uncontrolled adversarial conditions across hundreds of wildly diverse cities in the USA. Whether you are impressed with their state of progress or not, there's nobody you can compare them to. Operators like Waymo do look plausible while operating within their tiny geofence. Driving pre-validated roads is impressive in its own way. Right now if you dropped a Waymo and Tesla FSD on an unsealed road in Michigan, one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. The point is, I agree that there could be many firms which are far ahead of Tesla, but there isn't enough information in the public domain to say this with any confidence. Right now Tesla's is the only major system which can be assessed with critical objectively.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    > ...one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. If it was just one single trip, I was incapacitated and just needed to get home, then fine, level of human learner driver is good enough. But for everyday usage? No way, the risk is just too high.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    > one of them will drive at least as well as a human learner driver and the other will probably refuse to move. refusing to move is a feature not a bug. and human learners don't slam into a jersey barrier because there's some glare. why tesla bros continue to insist that they have a good vision stack while they can't even do contrast adaptation is beyond me. the dril tweet comes to mind

yucky 4y ago

> Should have happened sooner. Which tells you everything you need to know about California's government.

sangnoir 4y ago
What, that they are #1 in understanding the self-driving technological landscape? They remain more responsive than the other 49 states.
- yucky 4y ago
  Their timing tells you what you need to know. This isn't new information, their decision is motivated by something other than a new set of facts on self driving vehicles. So they were wrong, and they stayed wrong (for money) long after they knew they were wrong. And now that it's convenient they've reversed course. Sounds like the other 49 states was right to be cautious.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    This is illogical. You can’t simultaneously criticize California for taking so long to do this, while praising other states for being more cautious by not doing it. You’re also ascribing some laterite motive that you fail to provide a description of.
    - yucky 4y ago
      [flagged]

Zigurd 4y ago

The idea of FSD is, obviously from the effect of hyping it, enormously attractive. It can't happen now. But in the 1990s, speech recognition that would enable me to dictate this comment in a relatively noisy space was science fiction. Now that we have orders of magnitude more computing power, and much better microphones and associated noise rejection technology, you can blithely dictate messages with reliability that was previously a dream. Thing is to go from being unable to distinguish pencil from cancel to today's almost magical speech recognition, took 25 years. That might be the same interval it takes to go from mowing down motorcyclists to delivering all the safety and productivity potential of level 5 autonomy.

kranke155 4y ago
Someone commented on the Waymo thread that insiders believe they already have FSD, but the cost doesn’t work.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Two things about that: if by FSD you mean level 5 autonomy, waymo is not level 5. It is a robotaxi. Fully autonomous in that role. But the definition of level five includes driving in situations where you don't have any prior data. Outside the map.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    Fair but I’d imagine 90%+ of taxi/uber rides are inside cities. Really hoping that they bring the cost down. I’m a way it seems like Musk was half right - the cost for these just doesn’t work (according to the comment).

wpietri 4y ago

> I just wish Tesla would focus on this stuff without hyping an AI feature that can never happen. There's a good argument that Tesla wouldn't exist today without the hype. The enormous positive public image mad Tesla's cost of capital extremely low, and ditto its cost of marketing. Tesla needed a lot of both to get to break-even. Musk himself has talked repeatedly about coming close to bankruptcy. It's reasonable to believe that less hype would have meant less capital and fewer sales, nudging them at some point over into bankruptcy.

bumby 4y ago
There’s a tipping point where the hype becomes excessive or even fraudulent. The ends justifying the means doesn’t absolve a business of needing to conduct themselves ethically.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Oh, yeah, I think Tesla's well past the point of fraud. Musk promised "1 million robotaxis by end of the year", and that year was 2020. I don't think the end justifies the means at all here.
  - cedws 4y ago
    Elon Musk wants to be Steve Jobs so badly but the reality distortion field isn't working.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And buying Twitter really put him in front of all of the people all of the time.
adrr 4y ago
Fake it to you make it. FSD will never come on the current hardware.

Lendal 4y ago

It's almost as if someone invented an amazing new technology that really works, then some VC came along, bought it out, (er, I mean invested!) ran the original inventors out of town and bolted on some unasked-for snake oil. Now, you can still buy the still-awesome product (mostly made in America too) but you have to take all the VC crap along with it. Welcome to America!

cscurmudgeon 4y ago
This is typical engineer fairy tale thinking: that “inventing” v0.01 defines all other versions and nothing else is needed even if v0.01 didn’t get sold. And all other versions have ton of work in them. And seasoned with the big bad wolf, oops investor, buying everything at gun point. Edit: of course this is downvoted lol, hate Musk all you want ( I do but because he is pro CCP) but reality can’t be denied

novok 4y ago

It's because he knows that those things are relative commodities, and in 5 or 10 years the rest of the industry will eventually catch up in every single way. Hyundai and ford are pretty much %80 of the way there already.

gregoriol 4y ago
Could be, but Apple could serve as a good example of staying ahead even as others are catching up.
myko 4y ago
> n 5 or 10 years the rest of the industry will eventually catch up in every single way. Seems to have already happened? Mercedes EQS/EQB, BMW i4/i7/iX, Polestar, Ioniq All seem better than the comparable Tesla vehicles. Though Tesla does have better features for sitting at chargers, and obviously the super charger network which is a huge thing for anyone taking longer trips.
- novok 4y ago
  I did a test drive of a bunch of EVs, and Hyundai makes the Ioniq which I was referencing. I found that the ford mustang EV and Ioniq had about a %20 worse driving experience than a several year old tesla model 3 LR, and tesla did have a bunch of things that were better. But that also came from being years ahead in making EVs and having a more refined product and driving experience as a result. Driving all the v1 EVs made me realize that they were close, and in a few years they'll probably catch up to tesla on the driving experience. Will they be able to make nice software like tesla will? I'm not so sure. Mercedes and BMW sell their EVs even more expensive than tesla in many ways too, so their price category is different. Also cars after a certain point are way more commodity, they wont be able to differentiate like apple does with their products nearly as much. And that supercharger network advantage will go way in 5 to 10 years too.

thefounder 4y ago

Tesla's evaluation is closely related to its FSD promise. Not to mention it already sold future "fsd" options. If FSD is out then you have just a dumb car. How do you justify your evaluation(i.e worth the entire auto industry EV or ICE)?

dreamcompiler 4y ago
Maybe you don't? Maybe you learn to live with an accurate valuation based on the company's record of innovation in batteries, motors, and castings? Not to mention heat pumps, aerodynamics, nearly flawless worldwide charging infrastructure, etc? Is it really better to have a hyperinflated valuation based on vaporware that risks falling off a cliff when people get tired of the lies?