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Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies

395 points by jmsflknr 4y ago

foxandmouse 4y ago
I think Elons greatest accomplishment was convincing people he's Woz and not Jobs.
- breakpointalpha 4y ago
  Please, show a little respect for Jobs here. /s
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  A better comparison might be "I think Elon's greatest accomplishment was convincing people he was Tesla and not Edison."
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being far easier than production up a lot.
johnohara 4y ago
Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a better criteria for discussing fraud. C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
- curiousDog 4y ago
  that's the definition of a strawman.
banku_brougham 4y ago
Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is far below the Theranos level.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  Not in market value...
- nkozyra 4y ago
  "Less fraud than Theranos" probably isn't the accolade you hang on the mantle.
- mrbombastic 4y ago
  Lol is this how low our standards have sunk?
- sho_hn 4y ago
  "Well, it's less bad than Theranos" --Tesla in Review, 2023
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  > below the Theranos level Isn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet? How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents? "Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a damningly weak defense (imo).
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    The only unique thing about the Theranos fraud is it seem Holmes didn't make an overt moves to profit off the inflated valuation of the company.
    - spoiler 4y ago
      I think she genuinely believed in the technology, and thought they just needed more time. Like, she kept pressuring people to work on it, and there were some small advancements in the tech, just not good enough. I think the worst thing they did was giving those device out to healthcare institutions, when they knew it was inaccurate. I'm not defending her, she was clearly dangerously delusional, but I think it explains why she didn't behave like a classical con artist/scammer
valine 4y ago
Just drove my model 3 yesterday and it stopped for stoplights and made turns on its own. Everything in that video exists now and shipped to customers.
- alphabetting 4y ago
  "The driver is just there for legal reasons" That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that does not exist now
- cma 4y ago
  The video says the only reason a driver is there is legal reasons: obviously not true unless you are a psychopath and would send it out on its own.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks. That honestly sounds like the description is "unpredictable and dangerous".
- leesec 4y ago
  Don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is true lol
lnsru 4y ago
Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.
- spoiler 4y ago
  I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
- sho_hn 4y ago
  There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video. What matters is: (a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims (b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc. (c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to. Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ... (Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)
  - lnsru 4y ago
    Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.
woah 4y ago
> When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO
- nkozyra 4y ago
  We need to somehow get "just trolling" as a legal loophole in our justice system.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
    I don’t know whether you’re being coy but this is rumored to be his strategy.
    - DoctorOW 4y ago
      Though it may help legally, I'm surprised he still has people falling for the "tech genius" schtick when so much of his accomplishments are "trolls" that are apparently intentionally poorly made ruses.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    So a more extreme version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery ?
- pawelduda 4y ago
  Or that time he went to SNL and yelled "TOOOO THE MOOOON" about Dogecoin and his fans accidentally bought the top. What a troll haha!
- stouset 4y ago
  Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel. (/s)
dqpb 4y ago
Does teslas AI maintain a world model? Videos I've seen of path flicker suggest it reinterprets the worlds at every frame.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  I saw a video that there is some sort of state and "memory", so i don't think that's the case. If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did the AI training.
- redox99 4y ago
  It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.
somenameforme 4y ago
Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this. Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  They don't want you to click away.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  > Why do so many news articles do this? Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
  - dpifke 4y ago
    If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
    - 93po 4y ago
      They don't want to host a document with very little engagement. They want to serve articles that are short and lead to more page views.
    - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
      But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles. That would be bad (for the media company).
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Musk currently looks set to lose the “funding secured” civil suit. I’d expect this to follow shortly after. Is there a public accounting of Musk’s balance sheet? His fondness for margin loans is documented, after all.
pengaru 4y ago
I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new. Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
- david-gpu 4y ago
  Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes are matte.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food. One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera). This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
  - curiousllama 4y ago
    New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured. I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.
floatinglotus 4y ago
Musk used smoke and mirrors to promote something that wasn’t real? I’m shocked. SHOCKED.
squokko 4y ago
It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-driving representations.
Octokiddie 4y ago
Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense. It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths. It's just taken time for the industry to respond. I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market. Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
- prottog 4y ago
  > It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market. I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next. Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    It does feel like they're pretty comfortable selling expensive cars for now while others are expanding info the cheaper segments.
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    I don’t own an EV but wouldn’t the closest one to that be the Nissan Leaf? I see them all around me and the marked for used ones, all the way back to 2012 models seems to be strong.
    - giobox 4y ago
n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
I told you so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018 > This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
- brookst 4y ago
  Ah, the old binary tree con: https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other. You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill). You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
  - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud. Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
    - hahaxdxd123 4y ago
      Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving. > you’re committing fraud. Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
At what point does this fraud count as lying to shareholders?
jchw 4y ago
Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue. What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example. And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering. It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
  - jchw 4y ago
    > Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light? Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not what I said.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.
londons_explore 4y ago
The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run". In my view, none of those things make the video staged... As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try. Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.
- acdha 4y ago
  What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on. (Corrected sloppy math, see below)
  - ericpauley 4y ago
    Nit: 10^4 (10E3, 10E5 would conventionally be 10*10^5 or 1,000,000)
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      Exactly, and for that matter, why not just write 1E5?
      - acdha 4y ago
        Just writing without an editor - the main point I was thinking was that it was quite a significant upcharge. It’d be one thing if they had a, shall we say, optimistic video about future vehicles but selling something for that much money that implies it is a lot closer to available.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
europeanguy 4y ago
[flagged]
- ilyt 4y ago
  I'd hope his scams fold down quicker than "decades"
  - europeanguy 4y ago
    For sure, but I'm still gonna be talking about it.
enragedcacti 4y ago
Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is building. https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712 https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712
- vigneshv_psg 4y ago
  fwiw, it seems like it's a common thing to avoid answering vague/overly broad questions like this in a deposition. see here:https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/this_quote_is_from_a_deposition_of_ashok/j4q672d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th... it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy". https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposition-Uber-vs-Waymo https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...
kyleyeats 4y ago
Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time? Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  > Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time? If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.
  - kyleyeats 4y ago
    That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
    - FireBeyond 4y ago
      And for a long time, and still now, a lot of the verbiage around FSD implies that "Availability of FSD depends on regulatory approval" which makes it sound like regulatory approval is holding Tesla back from giving this to you. Ironically, there's actual very little "regulatory approval" required if things work. So it requires very little regulatory approval and a whole hell of a lot of "actually make it work".
- sidibe 4y ago
  Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
- yreg 4y ago
  There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.
alfor 4y ago
In a video from 2016 in an lawsuit about a crash in 2018 in which the driver was repeatedly told by the car to pay attention. The driver knew about how this part of the road was incorrectly recognized by the software yet didn’t pay attention. You get sue for the life you didn’t save and get almost zero merits for the ones you did.
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus. Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
  - alfor 4y ago
    How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy? What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death? The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US. If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play. If the law isn’t good, change the law.
    - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
      >How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy? I don’t. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just because you speculate about some non-existent alien technology that would make it safe if it existed? Why? > If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play. So if NHTSA doesn’t force their hand then they have no obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know it to be unsafe? I’m very glad that countless engineers at Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others didn’t have that mindset.
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jefftk 4y ago
The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot software director) confirmed: * They collected extra data along this particular route. * They made multiple test runs and picked the best. Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying". This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-of-the-iphone/ https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o... If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
- NN88 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jefftk 4y ago
    huh?
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.
NN88 4y ago
Elizabeth Holmes has a lawyer she can recommend
nblgbg 4y ago
Interesting bits ... >>To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto Remember they don't have the 3d maps, so they used a completely different car with different hardware to showcase it ! >>But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed >>When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said. Is it legal to falsify the claims ?
- Zigurd 4y ago
  The part about the 3D map is particularly interesting. ELon Musk has made strong claims that machine vision, without LIDAR, radar, or acoustic ranging, is enough for FSD. In fact it can't even auto-park reliably. Every AV project other than Tesla (and maybe geohotz's AV thing?) uses other types of sensors, especially LIDAR, and 3D mapping. If it turns out that 3D maps and LIDAR are necessary to achieve L3 and higher, not only are Tesla cars not equipped to ever be AVs, the data Tesla has collected from their cars is much less valuable for developing and operating AVs.
leesec 4y ago
Any Elon or Tesla related topic on hackernews is such a cesspool these days. Any support of him even with actual true statements is downvoted. Somehow the technologist board has become the least friendly to actual technological innovation. Any statements like the one I just made will get countered with attacks on his person. He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Maybe he's an asshole too, but no one get's the same level of scrutiny. How about this article from 2018 suggesting GM will have a wheelless car in 2019? https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-self-driving-car-launch-2019/ https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-self-driving-car-launc... Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By making himself a very prominent public individual and the face of Tesla, he's inextricably tied to the brand. No one knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many that's transferring to Tesla as well.
- willio58 4y ago
  > He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line all the way back to his father who bankrolled him? It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.
  - leesec 4y ago
    >Responsible in what sense? In the sense that without him the innovation would not exist or become mainstream. Don't be fooled into thinking he only has cash to offer. John Carmack himself has stated that he thinks Elon is in his wheelhouse in terms of engineering. >Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Tesla was a concept car at the time, not a mass production vehicle with no intentions of ever making millions of cars, if you don't see why they are different I don't know how to help you. The production is at least as hard as the innovation.
orwin 4y ago
This isn't that bad compared to Elon speeches. I still wonder how him lying about robotaxi in 2019, the whole 2 minutes speech he gave that prompted the rapid increase in share price, is any different from Elisabeth Holmes speech about Theranos blood recognition. Except that Holmes did not sell any Theranos share. I must be missing something, because it seems like I'm the only one perturbed by this.
paradygm 4y ago
If the title of the article was instead, "Tesla video promoting self-driving was scripted, engineer testifies," this article is probably mostly ignored. Take a loaded term like "scripted," which some interpret as "faked," and here we are. Of course the video was staged, the engineers were asked to make a video showing it's capabilities. The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  > The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything. Or Tesla's video that says "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself"?
GrumpyNl 4y ago
Everything looks better in commercials, i bet you have never eaten a hamburger as is advertised.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised that FSD was so advanced it would make you money[1] by driving your car for Uber when you're not using it. That's almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your cancer. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-175619668.html https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-1756196...
sorokod 4y ago
"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system," The video https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-tesla-cars https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
choeger 4y ago
Now the real question will be: Will we see a leap as we did in language models if we just wait for the computing capacity to grow enough?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
I imagine Elluswamy's career at Tesla is over. What a dilemma, either lie in a deposition or get fired.
- danans 4y ago
  I don't think a company can fire you for not perjuring yourself in the company's defense. That would invite even bigger legal liability on them.
xyst 4y ago
If TSLA needs a bailout in the future, I say we just let it fail. This company is just fucking terrible. It has turned me off from EVs completely. From the terrible build quality to multiple failed deliveries, it's just not worth it anymore.
boeingUH60 4y ago
Huh…Is this the new Nikola Motors? The difference between Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) and Elon Musk is that the latter tends to deliver something resembling what he promised even though he lies and exaggerates a lot. Trevor Milton couldn’t even make a car! If he had done that, he’ll be rolling in his hundreds of millions of cash from stock sales thanks to hype and occasional lies instead of waiting to go to federal prison.
seanhunter 4y ago
There is a detailed breakdown by Thunderf00t of how the "Tesla Bot" video was clearly also staged here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
I see parallels to Nikola's "Nikola One" video, where they claimed that their truck was driving along using its newfangled zero-emission engines, but in reality it was just rolling downhill in a totally staged video. Nikola's CEO was recently convicted of fraud, and that incident featured very prominently in his indictment...
- buran77 4y ago
  I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment ever surviving. Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone still realistically believed in it or him. In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time. It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact that they sold trucks didn't help with this.
GGO 4y ago
This is not surprising. I expect more shenanigans like this from Elon to come to light over next couple of years.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Whoops, that was an aspirational demo!
ben_w 4y ago
That explains why so many of the subsequent youtube reviews of the tech years later still aren't that great. I guess I'd assumed it was mild cherry picking rather than outright disingenuous. I'm sad about this. (I'm also reminded, thanks to chatting with friends over the weekend, of Grolsch adverts in the UK about 20 years ago: "Stop, it's not ready yet!")
ultrahax 4y ago
Tesla owner here ( 2019 Model 3P, including paying for the "full self driving" ). I wish Tesla hadn't gone whole-hog after full self driving, and had just concentrated on making a Better Car.
vicentwu 4y ago
The video is a kine of misleading, which should told you that the driving in the video was a vision of the future rather than a capability it already had or would soon have.
pauljurczak 4y ago
"The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons" - sure, to assume legal responsibility when "autopilot" crashes into something or someone.

395 points by jmsflknr 4y ago

foxandmouse 4y ago

I think Elons greatest accomplishment was convincing people he's Woz and not Jobs.

breakpointalpha 4y ago
Please, show a little respect for Jobs here. /s
CamperBob2 4y ago
A better comparison might be "I think Elon's greatest accomplishment was convincing people he was Tesla and not Edison."
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being far easier than production up a lot.

johnohara 4y ago

Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a better criteria for discussing fraud. C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?

curiousDog 4y ago
that's the definition of a strawman.

banku_brougham 4y ago

Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is far below the Theranos level.

NicoJuicy 4y ago
Not in market value...
nkozyra 4y ago
"Less fraud than Theranos" probably isn't the accolade you hang on the mantle.
mrbombastic 4y ago
Lol is this how low our standards have sunk?
sho_hn 4y ago
"Well, it's less bad than Theranos" --Tesla in Review, 2023
WaxProlix 4y ago
> below the Theranos level Isn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet? How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents? "Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a damningly weak defense (imo).
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  The only unique thing about the Theranos fraud is it seem Holmes didn't make an overt moves to profit off the inflated valuation of the company.
  - spoiler 4y ago
    I think she genuinely believed in the technology, and thought they just needed more time. Like, she kept pressuring people to work on it, and there were some small advancements in the tech, just not good enough. I think the worst thing they did was giving those device out to healthcare institutions, when they knew it was inaccurate. I'm not defending her, she was clearly dangerously delusional, but I think it explains why she didn't behave like a classical con artist/scammer

valine 4y ago

Just drove my model 3 yesterday and it stopped for stoplights and made turns on its own. Everything in that video exists now and shipped to customers.

alphabetting 4y ago
"The driver is just there for legal reasons" That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that does not exist now
cma 4y ago
The video says the only reason a driver is there is legal reasons: obviously not true unless you are a psychopath and would send it out on its own.
Analemma_ 4y ago
Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks. That honestly sounds like the description is "unpredictable and dangerous".
leesec 4y ago
Don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is true lol

lnsru 4y ago

Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.

spoiler 4y ago
I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
sho_hn 4y ago
There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video. What matters is: (a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims (b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc. (c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to. Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ... (Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)
- lnsru 4y ago
  Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.

woah 4y ago

> When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO

nkozyra 4y ago
We need to somehow get "just trolling" as a legal loophole in our justice system.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
  I don’t know whether you’re being coy but this is rumored to be his strategy.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    Though it may help legally, I'm surprised he still has people falling for the "tech genius" schtick when so much of his accomplishments are "trolls" that are apparently intentionally poorly made ruses.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  So a more extreme version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery ?
pawelduda 4y ago
Or that time he went to SNL and yelled "TOOOO THE MOOOON" about Dogecoin and his fans accidentally bought the top. What a troll haha!
stouset 4y ago
Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel. (/s)

dqpb 4y ago

Does teslas AI maintain a world model? Videos I've seen of path flicker suggest it reinterprets the worlds at every frame.

NicoJuicy 4y ago
I saw a video that there is some sort of state and "memory", so i don't think that's the case. If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did the AI training.
redox99 4y ago
It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.

somenameforme 4y ago

Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this. Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
They don't want you to click away.
n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
> Why do so many news articles do this? Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
- dpifke 4y ago
  If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
  - 93po 4y ago
    They don't want to host a document with very little engagement. They want to serve articles that are short and lead to more page views.
  - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles. That would be bad (for the media company).

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

Musk currently looks set to lose the “funding secured” civil suit. I’d expect this to follow shortly after. Is there a public accounting of Musk’s balance sheet? His fondness for margin loans is documented, after all.

pengaru 4y ago

I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new. Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.

david-gpu 4y ago
Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes are matte.
- pengaru 4y ago
  No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food. One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
woodruffw 4y ago
I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera). This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured. I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.

floatinglotus 4y ago

Musk used smoke and mirrors to promote something that wasn’t real? I’m shocked. SHOCKED.

squokko 4y ago

It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-driving representations.

Octokiddie 4y ago

Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense. It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths. It's just taken time for the industry to respond. I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market. Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.

prottog 4y ago
> It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market. I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next. Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
- solarkraft 4y ago
  It does feel like they're pretty comfortable selling expensive cars for now while others are expanding info the cheaper segments.
- Swenrekcah 4y ago
  I don’t own an EV but wouldn’t the closest one to that be the Nissan Leaf? I see them all around me and the marked for used ones, all the way back to 2012 models seems to be strong.
  - giobox 4y ago

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago

I told you so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018 > This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.

brookst 4y ago
Ah, the old binary tree con: https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html
hahaxdxd123 4y ago
You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other. You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill). You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
- n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
  It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud. Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
  - hahaxdxd123 4y ago
    Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving. > you’re committing fraud. Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

At what point does this fraud count as lying to shareholders?

jchw 4y ago

Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue. What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example. And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering. It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.

itsoktocry 4y ago
>It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
- jchw 4y ago
  > Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light? Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not what I said.
rsynnott 4y ago
Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.

londons_explore 4y ago

The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run". In my view, none of those things make the video staged... As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try. Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.

acdha 4y ago
What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on. (Corrected sloppy math, see below)
- ericpauley 4y ago
  Nit: 10^4 (10E3, 10E5 would conventionally be 10*10^5 or 1,000,000)
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Exactly, and for that matter, why not just write 1E5?
    - acdha 4y ago
      Just writing without an editor - the main point I was thinking was that it was quite a significant upcharge. It’d be one thing if they had a, shall we say, optimistic video about future vehicles but selling something for that much money that implies it is a lot closer to available.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

europeanguy 4y ago

[flagged]

ilyt 4y ago
I'd hope his scams fold down quicker than "decades"
- europeanguy 4y ago
  For sure, but I'm still gonna be talking about it.

enragedcacti 4y ago

Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is building. https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712 https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712

vigneshv_psg 4y ago
fwiw, it seems like it's a common thing to avoid answering vague/overly broad questions like this in a deposition. see here:https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/this_quote_is_from_a_deposition_of_ashok/j4q672d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th... it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy". https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposition-Uber-vs-Waymo https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...

kyleyeats 4y ago

Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time? Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
> Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time? If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.
- kyleyeats 4y ago
  That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    And for a long time, and still now, a lot of the verbiage around FSD implies that "Availability of FSD depends on regulatory approval" which makes it sound like regulatory approval is holding Tesla back from giving this to you. Ironically, there's actual very little "regulatory approval" required if things work. So it requires very little regulatory approval and a whole hell of a lot of "actually make it work".
sidibe 4y ago
Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
yreg 4y ago
There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.

alfor 4y ago

In a video from 2016 in an lawsuit about a crash in 2018 in which the driver was repeatedly told by the car to pay attention. The driver knew about how this part of the road was incorrectly recognized by the software yet didn’t pay attention. You get sue for the life you didn’t save and get almost zero merits for the ones you did.

n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus. Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
- alfor 4y ago
  How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy? What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death? The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US. If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play. If the law isn’t good, change the law.
  - n0tth3dro1ds 4y ago
    >How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy? I don’t. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just because you speculate about some non-existent alien technology that would make it safe if it existed? Why? > If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play. So if NHTSA doesn’t force their hand then they have no obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know it to be unsafe? I’m very glad that countless engineers at Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others didn’t have that mindset.

deleted 4y ago

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jefftk 4y ago

The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot software director) confirmed: * They collected extra data along this particular route. * They made multiple test runs and picked the best. Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying". This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-of-the-iphone/ https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o... If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".

NN88 4y ago
[flagged]
- jefftk 4y ago
  huh?
enragedcacti 4y ago
I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.

NN88 4y ago

Elizabeth Holmes has a lawyer she can recommend

nblgbg 4y ago

Interesting bits ... >>To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto Remember they don't have the 3d maps, so they used a completely different car with different hardware to showcase it ! >>But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed >>When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said. Is it legal to falsify the claims ?

Zigurd 4y ago
The part about the 3D map is particularly interesting. ELon Musk has made strong claims that machine vision, without LIDAR, radar, or acoustic ranging, is enough for FSD. In fact it can't even auto-park reliably. Every AV project other than Tesla (and maybe geohotz's AV thing?) uses other types of sensors, especially LIDAR, and 3D mapping. If it turns out that 3D maps and LIDAR are necessary to achieve L3 and higher, not only are Tesla cars not equipped to ever be AVs, the data Tesla has collected from their cars is much less valuable for developing and operating AVs.

leesec 4y ago

Any Elon or Tesla related topic on hackernews is such a cesspool these days. Any support of him even with actual true statements is downvoted. Somehow the technologist board has become the least friendly to actual technological innovation. Any statements like the one I just made will get countered with attacks on his person. He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Maybe he's an asshole too, but no one get's the same level of scrutiny. How about this article from 2018 suggesting GM will have a wheelless car in 2019? https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-self-driving-car-launch-2019/ https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-self-driving-car-launc... Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd

AlexandrB 4y ago
> Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By making himself a very prominent public individual and the face of Tesla, he's inextricably tied to the brand. No one knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many that's transferring to Tesla as well.
willio58 4y ago
> He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line all the way back to his father who bankrolled him? It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.
- leesec 4y ago
  >Responsible in what sense? In the sense that without him the innovation would not exist or become mainstream. Don't be fooled into thinking he only has cash to offer. John Carmack himself has stated that he thinks Elon is in his wheelhouse in terms of engineering. >Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Tesla was a concept car at the time, not a mass production vehicle with no intentions of ever making millions of cars, if you don't see why they are different I don't know how to help you. The production is at least as hard as the innovation.

orwin 4y ago

This isn't that bad compared to Elon speeches. I still wonder how him lying about robotaxi in 2019, the whole 2 minutes speech he gave that prompted the rapid increase in share price, is any different from Elisabeth Holmes speech about Theranos blood recognition. Except that Holmes did not sell any Theranos share. I must be missing something, because it seems like I'm the only one perturbed by this.

paradygm 4y ago

If the title of the article was instead, "Tesla video promoting self-driving was scripted, engineer testifies," this article is probably mostly ignored. Take a loaded term like "scripted," which some interpret as "faked," and here we are. Of course the video was staged, the engineers were asked to make a video showing it's capabilities. The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.

FireBeyond 4y ago
> The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything. Or Tesla's video that says "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself"?

GrumpyNl 4y ago

Everything looks better in commercials, i bet you have never eaten a hamburger as is advertised.

AlexandrB 4y ago
There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised that FSD was so advanced it would make you money[1] by driving your car for Uber when you're not using it. That's almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your cancer. [1] https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-175619668.html https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-1756196...

sorokod 4y ago

"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system," The video https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-tesla-cars https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...

choeger 4y ago

Now the real question will be: Will we see a leap as we did in language models if we just wait for the computing capacity to grow enough?

deleted 4y ago

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KKKKkkkk1 4y ago

I imagine Elluswamy's career at Tesla is over. What a dilemma, either lie in a deposition or get fired.

danans 4y ago
I don't think a company can fire you for not perjuring yourself in the company's defense. That would invite even bigger legal liability on them.

xyst 4y ago

If TSLA needs a bailout in the future, I say we just let it fail. This company is just fucking terrible. It has turned me off from EVs completely. From the terrible build quality to multiple failed deliveries, it's just not worth it anymore.

boeingUH60 4y ago

Huh…Is this the new Nikola Motors? The difference between Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) and Elon Musk is that the latter tends to deliver something resembling what he promised even though he lies and exaggerates a lot. Trevor Milton couldn’t even make a car! If he had done that, he’ll be rolling in his hundreds of millions of cash from stock sales thanks to hype and occasional lies instead of waiting to go to federal prison.

seanhunter 4y ago

There is a detailed breakdown by Thunderf00t of how the "Tesla Bot" video was clearly also staged here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

I see parallels to Nikola's "Nikola One" video, where they claimed that their truck was driving along using its newfangled zero-emission engines, but in reality it was just rolling downhill in a totally staged video. Nikola's CEO was recently convicted of fraud, and that incident featured very prominently in his indictment...

buran77 4y ago
I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment ever surviving. Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone still realistically believed in it or him. In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time. It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact that they sold trucks didn't help with this.

GGO 4y ago

This is not surprising. I expect more shenanigans like this from Elon to come to light over next couple of years.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

Whoops, that was an aspirational demo!

ben_w 4y ago

That explains why so many of the subsequent youtube reviews of the tech years later still aren't that great. I guess I'd assumed it was mild cherry picking rather than outright disingenuous. I'm sad about this. (I'm also reminded, thanks to chatting with friends over the weekend, of Grolsch adverts in the UK about 20 years ago: "Stop, it's not ready yet!")

ultrahax 4y ago

Tesla owner here ( 2019 Model 3P, including paying for the "full self driving" ). I wish Tesla hadn't gone whole-hog after full self driving, and had just concentrated on making a Better Car.

vicentwu 4y ago

The video is a kine of misleading, which should told you that the driving in the video was a vision of the future rather than a capability it already had or would soon have.

pauljurczak 4y ago

"The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons" - sure, to assume legal responsibility when "autopilot" crashes into something or someone.