10 ms·

Tesla stopped reporting its Autopilot safety numbers online. Why?

108 points by gamblor956 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Because all of their self driving stuff is falling apart since they dropped Lidar.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  Never never had lidar.
- WoahNoun 4y ago
  It was Mobileye who dropped Tesla because Tesla was making claims Mobileye was uncomfortable with. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobileye-for-pushing-the-envelope-in-terms-of-safety/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile...
  - tzm 4y ago
    Regarding autopilot from 6 years ago? Please. Fast forward, Telsa has built their own neural chip and vision system that surpasses Mobileye in production and scale. And their new HW3 chip can do 144 TOPS. Let's get real, Tesla out innovated Mobileye with their own closed loop vision system at production scale.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      [citation needed]
    - WoahNoun 4y ago
      The 2016 mobileye summon feature worked. The current tesla smart summon feature is still in beta.
- tzm 4y ago
  They've never had lidar and no.. self driving isn't "falling apart". You have no idea what you're talking about.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    You're right. Things have to exist before they can be considered to fall apart.
- sliken 4y ago
  They dropped radar, not lidar. But apparently are bringing back a new and improved version with higher range and resolution. Last I heard it was supposed to ship in cars produced in Jan. They already filed the related FCC paperwork.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    What happens to people who received cars without radar? Do they get retrofitted, or just keep using "full self driving" and hope for the best?
    - sliken 4y ago
      Dunno, mine had the Radar, I think it was disabled for awhile, and no idea what happens to my old radar when the new higher resolution radar becomes the standard.
gamblor956 4y ago
"Ogan, using NHTSA crash numbers, Tesla’s previous reports, sales numbers and other records, concluded that the number of reported Tesla crashes on U.S. roads has grown far faster than Tesla’s sales growth. The average monthly growth in new Teslas since NHTSA issued its standing order was 6%, he figures, while comparable crash stats rose 21%." "The Tesla Autopilot crash numbers are far higher than those of similar driver-assistance systems from General Motors and Ford. Tesla has reported 516 crashes from July 2021 through November 2022, while Ford reported seven and GM two. To be sure, Tesla has far more vehicles equipped with driver-assist systems than the competition — an estimated 1 million, Ogan said, about 10 times as many as Ford. All else equal, that would imply Tesla ought to have a NHTSA-reported crash total of 70 since last summer to be comparable with Ford’s rate. Instead, Tesla reported 516 crashes."
- habibur 4y ago
  > Tesla crashes on U.S. roads has grown far faster than Tesla’s sales growth A fairer comparison would have been [ total number of reported crashes ] / [ total number of cars on road ]. Comparing it with sales growth will show poor performance for older brands which have a lot of cars on the road vs newer brands that are just release cars now.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Really needs to be number of crashes / miles driven. I suspect the real difference is that Tesla drivers cede far more autonomy to the car than other drivers. When you look up from your book and see that you are 20 feet from a collision at 65mph, it's too late to do anything about it.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      I wonder why they would do such a thing? Perhaps dropping $10k or more on something called “full self driving” makes said drivers believe that the car can fully self drive by itself?
      - 4y ago
maxdo 4y ago
Current autopilot is basically in maintenance mode for at least 2-3 years. They are probably preparing to switch to a single stack fsb beta 11 as it was announced. Could be the reason.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
As a robotics engineer (though I don’t work on AI systems) I was bullish on Tesla’s architecture for a long time. I’ve watched all their presentations. Their hydra network. Their massive custom AI chip. I really thought they had a chance at making it all work. But the long tail is killing them. They’re walking back their claims for fully autonomous operation. Andrej Karpathy (their AI lead) left. Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed). It feels like the company is all promises and no delivery now. Many have been saying this for years, but I really thought they were going to pull it off. Now I’m beginning to feel that they’re not organized appropriately to do it. You just can’t have a single guy who is all ego running a project as complex as this and find success. I think of how they must be doing things at Waymo or Cruise and they’re going to have a team of competent people in charge who don’t make rash decisions on major architectural issues. And given the scope of this problem I’m really starting to believe that’s what’s needed to make this work. There’s just no silver bullet. I’m really questioning what led me to believe in all this in the first place.
- tleilaxu 4y ago
  > But the long tail is killing them. I imagine their engineers have said they’re “90% finished” once or twice in the last few years… Always a red flag!
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. So saying you are 90% done yet being far off is truthful, in a sense.
    - bagels 4y ago
      Is this a Zeno's paradox, where you can never actually finish?
      - dieselgate 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pcurve 4y ago
In a nutshell, the article says adjusting for sales volume, Tesla auto pilot crashes numbers are far higher than the ones from Ford. "...Tesla ought to have a NHTSA-reported crash total of 70 since last summer to be comparable with Ford’s rate. Instead, Tesla reported 516 crashes."
- onos 4y ago
  I wonder if Tesla drivers simply use autopilot more than ford’s do.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    I'd wager yes, based on the promises Tesla has made about the feature compared to how Ford talks about theirs.
  - nixass 4y ago
    Probably they do because of false advertising
    - gzer0 4y ago
      Curious to know where you see this false advertising? When you go to purchase Autopilot on the Tesla website [0], it says in the first sentence: "The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." On Ford's website regarding their Blue Cruise[1]: "Blue Cruise allows you to operate your vehicle hands-free while being monitored by a driver-facing camera to make sure you're keeping your eyes on the road." If anything, Ford seems to be more bold and brazen with their approach here. [0] https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview [1] https://www.ford.com/technology/driver-assist-technology/#bluecruise https://www.ford.com/technology/driver-assist-technology/#bl...
      - maximinus_thrax 4y ago
        Mixed signals https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot "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." "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat."
tonyfader 4y ago
because it doesn't work, nor ever will...
matmatmatmat 4y ago
This isn't really here or there, but I've recently been going through the deeplearning.ai course by Andrew Ng and friends, and at the end of each week, there is an interview with a luminary in deep learning. A couple of weeks ago it was Andrej Karpathy. I got about three sentences in when I realized this guy is really, really smart. The way he spoke about neural nets and the problems he was working on suggested to me a deep and nuanced understanding, and a way of thinking that always tries to expand that depth and breadth. Anyway, I figure if a guy like that couldn't make it work after so many years, even with a team that surely has other strong players, then it's just out of reach for the time being, with the hardware they're constrained to. It's even possible that deep neural nets will just never be able to do FSD at a level that will gain broad acceptance and some new architecture will be necessary.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  > I got about three sentences in when I realized this guy is really, really smart. The way he spoke about … As a non-expert, how would you be able to judge? ChatGPT also sounds really smart while giving brutally false answers.
  - matmatmatmat 4y ago
    Well, if you'd permit not getting into details, I'm not exactly a total non-expert.
- manmal 4y ago
  Ah, why so gloomy. Solving this probably comes down to 1) sensors, and 2) computational power available in a car. The sensors used in Teslas were a joke last time I looked (low res, bad low light performance, not enough cameras probably), certainly we can do better? And Moore‘s law is still alive in a way, allowing stunning progress like demonstrated in Chat-GPT. Ever-growing car batteries will also allow for way more power draw for computing. I expect vast improvements in the next few years. Maybe we can get from „drives like a drunk teenager“ to „drives like an overly cautious grandparent“ at least.
  - 4y ago
gamegoblin 4y ago
I'm kind of coming around to the idea that Comma AI's approach of full end-to-end is the right one. Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, etc all take real world data and load it into a virtual representation, then do planning inside virtual space, then execute that plan in the real world. It seems like this is just really clunky and doesn't handle weird edges very well. Comma AI's thesis is that creating this big virtual world to do planning in is both a waste of time and compute, and also a worse driving experience. They just take a ton of human data, and essentially say "given this situation, what would a human do?". I.e. it's a neural network that takes in the last few frames of video, and outputs steering + accelerator + brake commands, with no intermediate virtual space representation. A huge advantage of this approach is it scales really well. Human data in, model out. They are maybe a year behind Tesla FSD in terms of capability with a tiny team of ~15 or so, and they are gaining ground. Tesla could probably improve their system by adopting a similar end-to-end approach, but I think this may not be easy to do for organizational/corporate political reasons. They have several hundred engineers working on all of the various bits of their FSD stack who are all incentivized to defend their turf.
- birken 4y ago
  As a Comma owner (2 Commas in fact), I feel like Comma's main innovation is only releasing features (on the main branch at least) that they feel are quite battle tested, and at the same time not being afraid to lean into the fact that Comma is somewhat limited and isn't full FSD. My Commas are bulletproof at doing what I expect them to do, and they don't do what I don't expect them to do. And from my perspective as a driver, it's incredibly, incredibly useful. When driving is easy and mundane I can trust that Comma can handle it (and Comma will tell me if it can't), and when driving is hard then I don't expect Comma to do handle every complex situation (though it does do a good job most of the time). They don't overpromise, and they deliver what they promise. I'm not convinced this method will get to FSB, but I from my perspective I don't think that is necessary. I genuinely believe if every car on the road only had Comma's capabilities and no more, that would on its own reduce highway accidents by like 50%. I really wish some car manufacturers would lean into this and work with Comma on making a first-hand integration. I would 100% buy any type of car from any manufacturer if it had first-hand Comma support.
- 4y ago
postmeta 4y ago
LA Times reporter Russ Mitchell's entire career is mostly clickbait Tesla articles
- pbreit 4y ago
  He and Hiltzik really have it in for Elon.
thepasswordis 4y ago
I wish that on these discussion, we could also see a report from commentors about how much time they have spent behind the wheel of a Tesla on autopilot. It is truly, truly depressing reading these threads.
rkagerer 4y ago
...he said that “solving” FSD is “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero." Why? As a consumer, I would be thrilled with an affordable vehicle with a powerful and reliable electric drivetrain, top-of-class range, comfortable features and sensible UI, and flawless fit-and-finish. That should be what the company strives for in the medium term. Stop the fixation on tech that's a decade+ out and magnet for lawsuits and penalties from regulators. Make the best made-for-human vehicles out there, and become the most successful auto manufacturer. Keep working on moonshots but treat them as such.
- nunez 4y ago
  Because once you have a platform for making affordable EVs, making EVs alone is a race to the bottom. Same thing as smartphones. They need moats in other highly-valuable areas to keep that share price high.
- twiceaday 4y ago
  Yes. Nonsense line. EVs and self-driving are orthogonal concepts. The only reason to combine them is to make a cute story for gullible buyers of Tesla cars and Tesla stock. If you assume that he knows that we know that, then he is simply pumping confidence in their ability to do self-driving. "We are all definitely drinking the cool-aid here, folks!"
- Oletros 4y ago
  > I would be thrilled with an affordable vehicle with a powerful and reliable electric drivetrain, top-of-class range, comfortable features and sensible UI, and flawless fit-and-finish. But Tesla is not affordable, and doesn't have flawless fit-and-finish
nunez 4y ago
I was a HUGE shill for Tesla's vision (no pun intended) of full self-driving. However, between the (IMO) extremely short-sighted decision of removing ultrasonics to cut costs ahead of Vision replacing them, Elon's ridiculous antics over at Twitter, unjustifiable price increases of both their hard product and FSD, and, most importantly, FSD Beta being downright dangerous to operate, my faith in Tesla solving autonomy has all but evaporated. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that Tesla is doing funny accounting with their Autopilot crash data. I'm starting to think that the feds will drop the hammer hard on their autonomy pursuits in light of this and will force them to: - Change the product name to something less misleading (While I'm okay with ambitious product names like this, SO SO SO MANY people are not), and - Honor customers wanting a refund (and I bet there is a long line of people that want one) I've sold all of my shares in Tesla (admittedly, I didn't have many) and have not only cancelled my interest in another Tesla but have considered trading in our Model 3 for another EV despite a smaller charging network multiple times this year. (To me, there's no point in owning a Tesla if their supercharging network will be forced open to everyone and their path to autonomy is infeasible.) I've been using FSD Beta in our Model 3 this past year. It has gotten a lot better throughout that time frame, but it is very far from safe to use, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for anyone but the faint of heart. When it works, it works really nicely. Beta has smartly routed around construction and does a good enough job of navigating around other cars and predicting their behaviors. Unfortunately, when it doesn't work, it REALLY doesn't work. Even in the most recent release that dropped this month, Beta has attempted to run red lights and drive on wrong sides of the road, has missed or made wrong turns a surprising number of times, and done some of what I can only call "generally extremely wild shit" (like super sudden stopping and sharp turns without telling you why). It usually picks lanes correctly, but will just as often pick lanes that will take you to the wrong place or straight up don't make any sense. It also LOVES switching lanes at the very very last minute, usually right before a turn onto another road, which is confusing for everyone. It's actually gotten worse in situations previous versions excelled in. I even turned it off completely at one point because it was about to miss a turn that it nailed several times before, in broad daylight, with no other traffic around, for no reason. Recently, I've been thinking about GM, Ford and Waymo's approach to autonomy (LiDAR for object measurement and detection and pre-mapping as many roads as possible). If Google Maps could map over 80% of America's roads within two or three years, then assuming that mapping can be done "at the edge" (i.e. with regional mapping vehicles), what's stopping these companies from doing the same thing? Furthermore, if mapping and equipping cars with LiDAR scales well, then what worth is there in trying for a vision-only approach?
tmpburning 4y ago
[flagged]

108 points by gamblor956 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Because all of their self driving stuff is falling apart since they dropped Lidar.

dawnerd 4y ago
Never never had lidar.
WoahNoun 4y ago
It was Mobileye who dropped Tesla because Tesla was making claims Mobileye was uncomfortable with. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobileye-for-pushing-the-envelope-in-terms-of-safety/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile...
- tzm 4y ago
  Regarding autopilot from 6 years ago? Please. Fast forward, Telsa has built their own neural chip and vision system that surpasses Mobileye in production and scale. And their new HW3 chip can do 144 TOPS. Let's get real, Tesla out innovated Mobileye with their own closed loop vision system at production scale.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    [citation needed]
  - WoahNoun 4y ago
    The 2016 mobileye summon feature worked. The current tesla smart summon feature is still in beta.
tzm 4y ago
They've never had lidar and no.. self driving isn't "falling apart". You have no idea what you're talking about.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  You're right. Things have to exist before they can be considered to fall apart.
sliken 4y ago
They dropped radar, not lidar. But apparently are bringing back a new and improved version with higher range and resolution. Last I heard it was supposed to ship in cars produced in Jan. They already filed the related FCC paperwork.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  What happens to people who received cars without radar? Do they get retrofitted, or just keep using "full self driving" and hope for the best?
  - sliken 4y ago
    Dunno, mine had the Radar, I think it was disabled for awhile, and no idea what happens to my old radar when the new higher resolution radar becomes the standard.

gamblor956 4y ago

"Ogan, using NHTSA crash numbers, Tesla’s previous reports, sales numbers and other records, concluded that the number of reported Tesla crashes on U.S. roads has grown far faster than Tesla’s sales growth. The average monthly growth in new Teslas since NHTSA issued its standing order was 6%, he figures, while comparable crash stats rose 21%." "The Tesla Autopilot crash numbers are far higher than those of similar driver-assistance systems from General Motors and Ford. Tesla has reported 516 crashes from July 2021 through November 2022, while Ford reported seven and GM two. To be sure, Tesla has far more vehicles equipped with driver-assist systems than the competition — an estimated 1 million, Ogan said, about 10 times as many as Ford. All else equal, that would imply Tesla ought to have a NHTSA-reported crash total of 70 since last summer to be comparable with Ford’s rate. Instead, Tesla reported 516 crashes."

habibur 4y ago
> Tesla crashes on U.S. roads has grown far faster than Tesla’s sales growth A fairer comparison would have been [ total number of reported crashes ] / [ total number of cars on road ]. Comparing it with sales growth will show poor performance for older brands which have a lot of cars on the road vs newer brands that are just release cars now.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Really needs to be number of crashes / miles driven. I suspect the real difference is that Tesla drivers cede far more autonomy to the car than other drivers. When you look up from your book and see that you are 20 feet from a collision at 65mph, it's too late to do anything about it.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    I wonder why they would do such a thing? Perhaps dropping $10k or more on something called “full self driving” makes said drivers believe that the car can fully self drive by itself?
    - 4y ago

maxdo 4y ago

Current autopilot is basically in maintenance mode for at least 2-3 years. They are probably preparing to switch to a single stack fsb beta 11 as it was announced. Could be the reason.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

As a robotics engineer (though I don’t work on AI systems) I was bullish on Tesla’s architecture for a long time. I’ve watched all their presentations. Their hydra network. Their massive custom AI chip. I really thought they had a chance at making it all work. But the long tail is killing them. They’re walking back their claims for fully autonomous operation. Andrej Karpathy (their AI lead) left. Musk is distracted and showing that he doesn’t have all the technical chops we thought he did (if reports from inside twitter are to be believed). It feels like the company is all promises and no delivery now. Many have been saying this for years, but I really thought they were going to pull it off. Now I’m beginning to feel that they’re not organized appropriately to do it. You just can’t have a single guy who is all ego running a project as complex as this and find success. I think of how they must be doing things at Waymo or Cruise and they’re going to have a team of competent people in charge who don’t make rash decisions on major architectural issues. And given the scope of this problem I’m really starting to believe that’s what’s needed to make this work. There’s just no silver bullet. I’m really questioning what led me to believe in all this in the first place.

tleilaxu 4y ago
> But the long tail is killing them. I imagine their engineers have said they’re “90% finished” once or twice in the last few years… Always a red flag!
- galleywest200 4y ago
  To be fair the last 10% of any project is generally 90% of the work. So saying you are 90% done yet being far off is truthful, in a sense.
  - bagels 4y ago
    Is this a Zeno's paradox, where you can never actually finish?
    - dieselgate 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pcurve 4y ago

In a nutshell, the article says adjusting for sales volume, Tesla auto pilot crashes numbers are far higher than the ones from Ford. "...Tesla ought to have a NHTSA-reported crash total of 70 since last summer to be comparable with Ford’s rate. Instead, Tesla reported 516 crashes."

onos 4y ago
I wonder if Tesla drivers simply use autopilot more than ford’s do.
- etchalon 4y ago
  I'd wager yes, based on the promises Tesla has made about the feature compared to how Ford talks about theirs.
- nixass 4y ago
  Probably they do because of false advertising
  - gzer0 4y ago
    Curious to know where you see this false advertising? When you go to purchase Autopilot on the Tesla website [0], it says in the first sentence: "The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." On Ford's website regarding their Blue Cruise[1]: "Blue Cruise allows you to operate your vehicle hands-free while being monitored by a driver-facing camera to make sure you're keeping your eyes on the road." If anything, Ford seems to be more bold and brazen with their approach here. [0] https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#overview [1] https://www.ford.com/technology/driver-assist-technology/#bluecruise https://www.ford.com/technology/driver-assist-technology/#bl...
    - maximinus_thrax 4y ago
      Mixed signals https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot "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." "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat."

tonyfader 4y ago

because it doesn't work, nor ever will...

matmatmatmat 4y ago

This isn't really here or there, but I've recently been going through the deeplearning.ai course by Andrew Ng and friends, and at the end of each week, there is an interview with a luminary in deep learning. A couple of weeks ago it was Andrej Karpathy. I got about three sentences in when I realized this guy is really, really smart. The way he spoke about neural nets and the problems he was working on suggested to me a deep and nuanced understanding, and a way of thinking that always tries to expand that depth and breadth. Anyway, I figure if a guy like that couldn't make it work after so many years, even with a team that surely has other strong players, then it's just out of reach for the time being, with the hardware they're constrained to. It's even possible that deep neural nets will just never be able to do FSD at a level that will gain broad acceptance and some new architecture will be necessary.

noizejoy 4y ago
> I got about three sentences in when I realized this guy is really, really smart. The way he spoke about … As a non-expert, how would you be able to judge? ChatGPT also sounds really smart while giving brutally false answers.
- matmatmatmat 4y ago
  Well, if you'd permit not getting into details, I'm not exactly a total non-expert.
manmal 4y ago
Ah, why so gloomy. Solving this probably comes down to 1) sensors, and 2) computational power available in a car. The sensors used in Teslas were a joke last time I looked (low res, bad low light performance, not enough cameras probably), certainly we can do better? And Moore‘s law is still alive in a way, allowing stunning progress like demonstrated in Chat-GPT. Ever-growing car batteries will also allow for way more power draw for computing. I expect vast improvements in the next few years. Maybe we can get from „drives like a drunk teenager“ to „drives like an overly cautious grandparent“ at least.
- 4y ago

gamegoblin 4y ago

I'm kind of coming around to the idea that Comma AI's approach of full end-to-end is the right one. Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, etc all take real world data and load it into a virtual representation, then do planning inside virtual space, then execute that plan in the real world. It seems like this is just really clunky and doesn't handle weird edges very well. Comma AI's thesis is that creating this big virtual world to do planning in is both a waste of time and compute, and also a worse driving experience. They just take a ton of human data, and essentially say "given this situation, what would a human do?". I.e. it's a neural network that takes in the last few frames of video, and outputs steering + accelerator + brake commands, with no intermediate virtual space representation. A huge advantage of this approach is it scales really well. Human data in, model out. They are maybe a year behind Tesla FSD in terms of capability with a tiny team of ~15 or so, and they are gaining ground. Tesla could probably improve their system by adopting a similar end-to-end approach, but I think this may not be easy to do for organizational/corporate political reasons. They have several hundred engineers working on all of the various bits of their FSD stack who are all incentivized to defend their turf.

birken 4y ago
As a Comma owner (2 Commas in fact), I feel like Comma's main innovation is only releasing features (on the main branch at least) that they feel are quite battle tested, and at the same time not being afraid to lean into the fact that Comma is somewhat limited and isn't full FSD. My Commas are bulletproof at doing what I expect them to do, and they don't do what I don't expect them to do. And from my perspective as a driver, it's incredibly, incredibly useful. When driving is easy and mundane I can trust that Comma can handle it (and Comma will tell me if it can't), and when driving is hard then I don't expect Comma to do handle every complex situation (though it does do a good job most of the time). They don't overpromise, and they deliver what they promise. I'm not convinced this method will get to FSB, but I from my perspective I don't think that is necessary. I genuinely believe if every car on the road only had Comma's capabilities and no more, that would on its own reduce highway accidents by like 50%. I really wish some car manufacturers would lean into this and work with Comma on making a first-hand integration. I would 100% buy any type of car from any manufacturer if it had first-hand Comma support.
4y ago

postmeta 4y ago

LA Times reporter Russ Mitchell's entire career is mostly clickbait Tesla articles

pbreit 4y ago
He and Hiltzik really have it in for Elon.

thepasswordis 4y ago

I wish that on these discussion, we could also see a report from commentors about how much time they have spent behind the wheel of a Tesla on autopilot. It is truly, truly depressing reading these threads.

rkagerer 4y ago

...he said that “solving” FSD is “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero." Why? As a consumer, I would be thrilled with an affordable vehicle with a powerful and reliable electric drivetrain, top-of-class range, comfortable features and sensible UI, and flawless fit-and-finish. That should be what the company strives for in the medium term. Stop the fixation on tech that's a decade+ out and magnet for lawsuits and penalties from regulators. Make the best made-for-human vehicles out there, and become the most successful auto manufacturer. Keep working on moonshots but treat them as such.

nunez 4y ago
Because once you have a platform for making affordable EVs, making EVs alone is a race to the bottom. Same thing as smartphones. They need moats in other highly-valuable areas to keep that share price high.
twiceaday 4y ago
Yes. Nonsense line. EVs and self-driving are orthogonal concepts. The only reason to combine them is to make a cute story for gullible buyers of Tesla cars and Tesla stock. If you assume that he knows that we know that, then he is simply pumping confidence in their ability to do self-driving. "We are all definitely drinking the cool-aid here, folks!"
Oletros 4y ago
> I would be thrilled with an affordable vehicle with a powerful and reliable electric drivetrain, top-of-class range, comfortable features and sensible UI, and flawless fit-and-finish. But Tesla is not affordable, and doesn't have flawless fit-and-finish

nunez 4y ago

I was a HUGE shill for Tesla's vision (no pun intended) of full self-driving. However, between the (IMO) extremely short-sighted decision of removing ultrasonics to cut costs ahead of Vision replacing them, Elon's ridiculous antics over at Twitter, unjustifiable price increases of both their hard product and FSD, and, most importantly, FSD Beta being downright dangerous to operate, my faith in Tesla solving autonomy has all but evaporated. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that Tesla is doing funny accounting with their Autopilot crash data. I'm starting to think that the feds will drop the hammer hard on their autonomy pursuits in light of this and will force them to: - Change the product name to something less misleading (While I'm okay with ambitious product names like this, SO SO SO MANY people are not), and - Honor customers wanting a refund (and I bet there is a long line of people that want one) I've sold all of my shares in Tesla (admittedly, I didn't have many) and have not only cancelled my interest in another Tesla but have considered trading in our Model 3 for another EV despite a smaller charging network multiple times this year. (To me, there's no point in owning a Tesla if their supercharging network will be forced open to everyone and their path to autonomy is infeasible.) I've been using FSD Beta in our Model 3 this past year. It has gotten a lot better throughout that time frame, but it is very far from safe to use, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for anyone but the faint of heart. When it works, it works really nicely. Beta has smartly routed around construction and does a good enough job of navigating around other cars and predicting their behaviors. Unfortunately, when it doesn't work, it REALLY doesn't work. Even in the most recent release that dropped this month, Beta has attempted to run red lights and drive on wrong sides of the road, has missed or made wrong turns a surprising number of times, and done some of what I can only call "generally extremely wild shit" (like super sudden stopping and sharp turns without telling you why). It usually picks lanes correctly, but will just as often pick lanes that will take you to the wrong place or straight up don't make any sense. It also LOVES switching lanes at the very very last minute, usually right before a turn onto another road, which is confusing for everyone. It's actually gotten worse in situations previous versions excelled in. I even turned it off completely at one point because it was about to miss a turn that it nailed several times before, in broad daylight, with no other traffic around, for no reason. Recently, I've been thinking about GM, Ford and Waymo's approach to autonomy (LiDAR for object measurement and detection and pre-mapping as many roads as possible). If Google Maps could map over 80% of America's roads within two or three years, then assuming that mapping can be done "at the edge" (i.e. with regional mapping vehicles), what's stopping these companies from doing the same thing? Furthermore, if mapping and equipping cars with LiDAR scales well, then what worth is there in trying for a vision-only approach?

tmpburning 4y ago

[flagged]