17 ms·

Tesla FSD Timeline

312 points by cromulent 3y ago

munk-a 3y ago
Just give us like two years and we'll be there!
- tomw1808 3y ago
  extremely confident, 100%, can't speak for regulators though.
  - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
    > extremely confident There's also "this is quite deep" - it's usually not.
  - superduperer 3y ago
    [dead]
- robin_reala 3y ago
  We’re one year and eleven months on from the last update in the timeline, so I guess you’ll see it within a matter of weeks.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  the FSD burndown chart is an asymptote.
rafaelmn 3y ago
This feels like hearing all the talk about AI replacing developers and then actually building stuff with the best models available and seeing them fail to generate JSON function calls according to a simple JSON schema and just make shit up about what the parameters should look like.
- baz00 3y ago
  I think the hype is driven by a combination of naivety, religious thinking and hope. Personally my cynical perspective is I work with people that it could viably replace now and that's sad, not because it's good tech but the people are so fucking awful.
- kruxigt 3y ago
  [dead]
- oefrha 3y ago
  Except I’ve never heard anyone talking about AI replacing developers and selling a “full self-development” package for thousands of dollars at the same time.
  - simion314 3y ago
    >Except I’ve never heard anyone talking about AI replacing developers and selling a “full self-development” package for thousands of dollars at the same time. Some developers are complaining that we will be replaced, that somehow GPT4 can write good code. Similar artists, writers etc complain they will be replaced. I can't see an AI in the next 20 years that you ask it "Build me GTA6" and it will create it for you, code, art, text, voices. From my experience GPT is good for exploring, asking questions and getting sometimes inspiration from the answers, if the code you asked for what writen already by others and was trained on it then it will aproximate a good solution but it still does mistakes. Current AI it is just interpollating some response based on what he saw in training, if the real answer is not close enough to points in training then you get garbage. Add on top bad training data and it generates most of the time sub optimal code. For example it always generates JavaScript code using old syntax and using old DOM APIs. There is no logic with them, I asked an AI "is X legal in Javascript" and it answered No, it created an it created an answer that shows that was legal and working and rambled about why is not a good idea to use that. And I have many examples where the fcking long answers they give contradict themselves. Sorry for the long comment, I daily see this devs complaining about this, earlier I read comments where some web devs were sure in three years they will have no job.
notRobot 3y ago
There's also https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/ but neither seem to be updated frequently
- H8crilA 3y ago
  It's not updated because it "doesn't work" - no one who "believes in Elon" actually cares that he is bullshitting. Remember when Trump failed to build a wall, and somehow no one noticed? A nation with 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers failed to build a simple wall, a wall that was the hottest issue in a successful presidential campaign.
  - coolspot 3y ago
    According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, the Trump administration built 458 miles of border wall system, which consists of steel bollards, sensors, lights, cameras and parallel roads. However, only 52 miles of new primary border barriers were built where there were none before.
    - H8crilA 3y ago
      Exactly. Seriously underwhelming for just grandiose announcements, yet it doesn't matter.
mg 3y ago
What I would find really interesting: If someone drove the same route with every version of FSD and counted the interventions. That would give a nice chart over time from which one could see the progress. Is there anything online similar to this? Another way to look at it would be to look at the revenue that is generated via FSD. Buyers probably do some due dilligence what FSD offers. If the number of buyers goes up, that could be an indicator that FSD is getting better. But a quick Google search did not bring up much data about this published by Tesla. In their earnings report, there is a chart showing the cumulative miles driven with FSD. Not sure if one can draw conclusions from that. It seems very smoothed out and only goes back to 2021.
- xendipity 3y ago
  A YouTuber named DirtyTesla has done a series of drives over the years throughout his hometown where he's tracked the intervention and disengagement rates per mile. He often shows those numbers at the end of his videos.
  - mg 3y ago
    Is it the same route every time? If not, they might take harder and harder routes as FSD gets better. Making it look like there is less progress than there really is.
    - buro9 3y ago
      You just know that Tesla would tune the software for this specific route, if the value of the comparison number became meaningful. Just like you cannot trust benchmarks, Goodhart's law will kick in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        Their model architecture don't allow for individual route tuning.
infotogivenm 3y ago
Are they still all-in on “pure vision” self-driving? I thought they had pivoted back to lidar but can’t seem to find any sources for that.
- masklinn 3y ago
  The “tesla vision update” faq entry was last updated on October 5th, 2023, and as far as the way back machine surfaces the only changes were removing park assist from the list of disabled features, a few wording changes, and removing some of the more optimistic wording (e.g. “in the near future” around mentions of feature parity). So it seems like they’re still all in on pure vision. I don’t think the xruck has lidar either, only hits I get talk about a lidar-equipped prototype in early 2023.
- loueed 3y ago
  Pure Vision currently. The last we heard about LiDAR was the issue of combining Lidar Data with Vision in the NN. Which technology should take priority in the NN? For example LiDAR might recognise the shape of a sign but vision will know if its a stop sign or not. I'd be super interested to see if someone has successfully combined RGB data with LIDAR data.
  - Mashimo 3y ago
    What does NN stand for?
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Neural network
    - hprotagonist 3y ago
      neural network, i would imagine.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Neural network i guess
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
i mean, they are making progress towards that goal so i would just discount what Elon Musk says and focus on the progress.
retrac98 3y ago
It’s easy to be snarky about the BS promises, but the important thing is that progress is being made, however incrementally it comes.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  What’s snarky about pointing out an execs failed promises/lies?
- baz00 3y ago
  Is it though? I mean they replaced the computers, all the sensors and the entire strategy at least 2 times each and haven't managed to deliver anything viable. Edit: and another thread just popped up on HN with this https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tesla-autopilot-recall-2-million-cars-need-software-fix https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tesla-aut...
  - kbos87 3y ago
    Haven’t managed to deliver anything viable? There are millions of miles of FSD driving being logged every month. I use it all the time and it’s pretty damned good today. Recalls for Tesla just amount to OTA updates that regulators have asked for and they’ve agreed to implement.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  I don't know about you but I don't like being lied to.
- dtx1 3y ago
  Unless of course you are selling cars with a Full Self Driving Package for $12k that promises "Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention and will continuously improve All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot Autosteer on city streets Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control" In which case it's not a BS promise but fraud.
- bergen 3y ago
  But is it though?
dharma1 3y ago
turns out it's a hard problem - but there has been a lot of progress irrespective of Elon's optimistic timelines
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  "We can do this now" is not an optimistic timeline, it's a lie.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    Fraud. The word that defines this behavior is fraud. Because the lie is not just a lie, it has been used to mislead investors.
bergen 3y ago
Funniest thing is he said at one point that it is 12 months away, including automatic charging? Does such a thing work anywhere or is even attempted? I haven't seen a car that does not need a physical plug and someone getting out to do it.
- eurekin 3y ago
  Didn't even read anything... but hasn't FSD been 12 months away for ~ 5 years already?
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Back in 2014, it was “90% of your miles on auto” by the next year. In 2015 it was “a month away” from highways and simple roads, and 3 years away from full autonomy. In 2016 it was fully autonomous end-to-end cross-country (LA to Times Square) trip “by the end of the year”
- sf_rob 3y ago
  They had a marketing demo of a robotic charger a few years ago, but nothing came of it. They also had the demo of full battery swaps before that, but they'd have to change their entire architecture for that to work.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Do people in spandex auits, I mwan Tesla Humanoid Robots, count as automatic?
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I know this is a joke, but I'd not be surprised if they settled for pinging another person at the charging station and asking them to plug/unplug the car. Either because hype makes them want to be nice, or if they get some $FINANCIAL_VALUE for doing it.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
wolpoli 3y ago
There hasn't been anything since May 2021. I wonder what happened.
cbeach 3y ago
Rather than doing what everyone else is doing (carping endlessly about Elon Musk), why not look at the actual progress of FSD. It's extremely impressive at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VWyaAzwMT0&ab_channel=AIDRIVR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VWyaAzwMT0&ab_channel=AIDRI...
- mgiannopoulos 3y ago
  But it’s fun to shit on Musk these days. Gets you “cool points” as well. Plus, no other car company has failed on delivering on their promises. /s
- OJFord 3y ago
  And also in fairness (though it is funny, and yes more drawn out than the early estimates, but every big project is delayed and overbudget, everyone knows that) it does start talking more about regulators, that Tesla's pretty happy with it, which strikes me as fair enough? That's not that much in their control, unless there was something specific regulators objected to or needed to see and Tesla was refusing/hadn't managed to.
jstummbillig 3y ago
I can see why what's going on here is problematic and, sure, why not poke holes into, well, everything, that seems fun. I do feel however that, as a society, we are unclear about our asks. Making claims about the future necessitates uncertainty. Would we rather only know about factuals? i.e. do not tell me about GPT-4 until the very fucking moment there is an API endpoint I can hit?
- martin_a 3y ago
  Having FSD in 12 month from now is/was probably _THE_ selling point for Teslas. I'd feel somewhat deceived if the CEO is repeating that over 9 years and not delivering.
  - jstummbillig 3y ago
    > Having FSD in 12 month from now is/was probably _THE_ selling point for Teslas. What are your data points? Is the lesson here, that we are good, as long as we make sure that bold claims are not easily falsifiable? Again, I am not sure what we are looking for. If we are interested in punishing people for making bold claims about the future, do we understand that that necessarily means, that we okay with learning less about the future? It's a eat your cake and have it moment. I understand that we can meet somewhere in the middle, but as a rule of thumb. It obviously a trade-off. What do we want more of?
- Mashimo 3y ago
  I don't understand the comparison. What did OpenAI sell/promise before the release?
- bryancoxwell 3y ago
  > Making claims about the future necessitates uncertainty. All the more reason to distrust someone following up their claims with things like “I’m certain of that.” (February 2019)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
z7 3y ago
Why can't Waymo's autonomous taxi service in San Francisco be considered FSD? There's the geographical limitation but it's operational and autonomous to an advanced degree.
- chairmanwow1 3y ago
  They also have teleoperators remotely to tale over.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    This seems to be an incredibly popular belief despite the fact that there's no evidence for it and it wouldn't make any sense. Waymo's remote support teams can reach into the driver's model of the world to fix things, for example maybe it mistook this stray traffic cone for actual roadworks - but they can't actually drive the car. If Waymo needs a human to drive the car, they send a human to physically sit in it and drive the car. They have a whole bunch of people for that role. If you were in a Waymo that drove somewhere and there wasn't anybody in the driving seat, that's not because some 10 year old was using a PS4 controller to steer it from Bangalore, that's the Waymo driver software.
    - simonw 3y ago
      Why is it unlikely that Waymo would have the equivalent of a remote control option for getting the car unstuck? That seems like both an obvious and an easy to implement solution to me, what am I missing?
      - yreg 3y ago
        It's easier to tell the computer instructions to get unstuck than driving with a lag. When the instructions are specific enough we could call it driving if you want, but it's not done with a steering wheel in real time.
      - foobazgt 3y ago
        What happens when you lose connection mid-maneuver, or there's congestion on the network causing high latency? The vehicle would have to be smart enough to execute all the tactical parts of driving anyway. Adding remote piloting just adds more failure cases and complexity.
pavlov 3y ago
Like a dummy I paid something around 7,500 euros for the so-called FSD package when the Model 3 arrived in Europe in early 2019. Five years later it still does practically nothing. The car can’t even do the bare minimum: it doesn’t recognize speed limits on most highways in Finland because it gets confused by round LED signs showing the limit (these are used because it’s different in winter and summer). It’s just embarrassing. A self-driving car should understand road signs that a five-year-old has no difficulty reading. I’m guessing it works better on some Californian roads that have been carefully hand-tuned by Tesla so they can show the Boss an illusion of progress. Personally I’m not going to buy another Tesla after this episode. Optimism is one thing, but this level of hype is actively dangerous because it gives people the wrong idea about the capabilities of something they rely on in traffic.
- ubercore 3y ago
  Our Tesla never knows what the real speed limit is in Norway either. Tunnels are especially bad.
  - flexd 3y ago
    Mine never knows either, and if I dare use the cruise control or autopilot on the highway near Oslo it phantom brakes by bridges and shadows randomly. Same bridge it was phantom braking when a friend had a Model X like 8 years ago, still not fixed even if probably thousands of Teslas drive there every day
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - jmpman 3y ago
    Mine has no idea about the speed limit in the school zone next to my house. Why? Because the speed limit changes based upon if school is in session. When is school in session??? You might be able to tell by looking at the school parking lot. You could open a web browser, navigate to the correct school districts web page, download the school year calendar in pdf form, and determine if today is a school day. Or you could do what my tesla does and lets me drive 10mph over the regular speed limit (as of about a year ago - maybe they’ve fix it)
supermatt 3y ago
How to build a trillion dollar company....
isoprophlex 3y ago
... and then, January 2022, he stops talking about FSD (according to the article, unsure when it was last updated) Either the lawyers finally got him to stop spouting bullshit, or he got bored. Either way, I wonder if we'll have FSD before fusion energy arrives :^)
thewildginger 3y ago
At what point is saying "it's two years away, trust me!" Not just naive optimism but false advertising or market manipulation? He publicly said this for like four years, and then he walks it all back. I just don't get it. Any other little person does this and they would be big time side by investors and shareholders, and yet people want to trip all over each other talking about how awesome he is. Reminds me of another cult of personality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith#Treasure_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith#T...
- valval 3y ago
  It never actually has to be a lie. Making predictions years into the future is impossible if variables are changing. He can make a perfectly truthful estimate of when the product will be ready as of today’s information, and then the information changes. It’s up to you as a consumer to either discredit the optimism or buy into it.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Or, you know, fraud. Reminds me of different cult of personality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
  - stevage 3y ago
    Reminds me more of Trump to be honest.
- ralfd 3y ago
  On the other hand: Because he is always wrong with his timelines it cant be security fraud because everyone knows (and ridicules him/memes it) that his timelines are wrong.
- xorcist 3y ago
  After those two years have passed, probably. But the claim was actually stronger than that. It was that it should earn back the money it cost by running an autonomous taxi service during night and office hours. That specific claim was a scam from day one. That was not even on the research stage, and probably never will be.
mnau 3y ago
Less than a year ago, there was a video of Tesla slo-mo crashing into a parked airplane. To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That was in 2022, so 7 years after start of development/announcement. I don't hold by breath. Edit: link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI
- pi-rat 3y ago
  See, it figured out that the fastest route when summoned "from a home in L.A., to Times Square" is via the air. Smart car.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Given Elon's obsession with "it should see like a human does" i.e. only relying on vision and nothing else, I don't think FSD will ever be feasible and safe tbqh. This would be trivial to avoid if the car had an actual sense of distance other than comparing pixels.
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    I am glad that we have invented wheel before Elon, otherwise he would be pushing "it should move like human does"
- eschneider 3y ago
  > To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That turns out to be a harder problem than most people think, and it gets in the way of the 'driving' part. "Are we looking at some big, blank object or are we looking at the sky? It's probably the sky, so we'll just drop it from the model." Which is how Teslas drive into big trucks. :/
  - mnau 3y ago
    Even if visuals failed, Tesla has a sonar, radar and Tesla is moving at snail pace. Hell, my vacuum stops moving when it detects it crashed into something (likely torque required to move wheels is larger than expected). Edit: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why it happened. The result is a crash in a super simple environment and is (to me) quite indicative to the state of things. They are supposed to come up with solutions, not excuses (also, Elon hates lidar, but that is still on Tesla).
IAmGraydon 3y ago
It’s always been weird to me that it seems like it’s assumed that the world really wants FSD. It clearly has its benefits in freight transport via truck, as the value add there is clear. When it comes to personal transportation, however, where’s the value add? It seems like adoption would be fueled by personal preference, and in my experience people tend to want to retain control where there is an option to do so. It’s possible this is a solution searching for a problem.
- saberience 3y ago
  I have to disagree here, as someone with two elderly parents, one of whom has stopped driving due to eye sight issues, having FSD would be hugely impactful. There are many, many people out there who don’t drive or can’t drive for various reasons and FSD would enable them to be independent, get jobs, see friends and family. Not everyone lives in areas with decent public transport and with my parents, they live in a hilly area where walking to use public transport is at most very difficult and at worst impossible. Another example, I know a fairly young man who had started having seizures in his 30s and was disqualified from having a driving license, FSD would change his life. What about all the people who didn’t get a driving license for one reason or another? For me personally, while I can drive fine, I would much prefer to study or read or long car journeys and would love a car which is more like a moving living room, so I can sit and work at my laptop while the car takes me to my destination. I assure you there is a massive, massive market for the first company that really cracks this problem.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  FSD may not be the earth shattering feature that every consumer is looking for (although it would be a big differentiator). However, for taxis, trucks, any transport where an expensive human can be removed, it would be paradigm shifting. You know, like the EM Drive would have been if it had worked, or the room temperature super conductor, or cold fusion. It gets airplay because it’s easy to imagine all the cool things that would be possible if it were real. Like FLT. Musk said himself; Tesla is worth practically nothing without FSD. https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-driving-difference-between-tesla-worth-a-lot-or-nothing/#:~:text=Musk%20suggests%20that%20Tesla%20would,solve%20despite%20several%20missed%20timelines https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin.... Tesla is just another car company if these hopes and dreams aren’t true.
lawn 3y ago
It's truly amazing isn't it? How many lies these worshiped holier than thou people can get away with, and people still listen to what they say? And Musk is certainly not the only example. It's soon time for the presidential election again...
a_c 3y ago
Would be great if we have a service chronicling all the promises an individual made. I would use it personally as a commitment device
flohofwoe 3y ago
Apparently FSD is the nuclear fusion power of the car world. Except with a much more aggressive "timeline" (always only 2 years away instead of 15 years).
- mnau 3y ago
  They said in 20 years with current funding. Actual funding is 'fusion never' https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fu...
graycrow 3y ago
So what? It's a complex problem, and they're making progress. Why is it always only Tesla that has to be held accountable for all promises? Other companies often promise great things (with deadlines!), don't keep their promises, but for some strange reason no one cares.
- bigtex 3y ago
  https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-lyft-with-robotaxi-plan-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-...
- gl0wa 3y ago
  Maybe because people pay $$ for that promise.
bigtex 3y ago
Where is the robotaxi service I was promised by the end of 2019? https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-lyft-with-robotaxi-plan-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-...
3ds 3y ago
I hate it when people use acronyms without explaining them. Not everyone knows your niche three letter acronyms. Anyway: FSD = Full Self Driving
- acatton 3y ago
  You're lucky that it's "FSD" which has like 4 possible meaning. Sometimes it's acronyms with 12 different possible meaning, where 4 of them could apply to the given context...
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    >Sometimes it's acronyms with 12 different possible meaning, where 4 of them could apply to the given context... Like AC or IPC?
bjarneh 3y ago
I've had a Tesla Model S for quite some time now. It cannot reliably adjust the high beam / low beam nor the windshield wipers. Those problems seem a bit easier than full self driving.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  Model Y here. My automatic wipers are mostly okay except sometimes they seem to get obsessed with a tiny speck of bird crap they can't remove. High beam/low beam is a complete cluster f*ck: It gets fooled by highly-reflective road signs. So I adjust headlights manually, just like I have done over my entire driving career. The phantom braking is the biggest deal: The car slams on the brakes in the middle of major highways in good weather just because it's a hot day and the camera saw a mirage and the car thinks it's about to drive off a cliff. This means the cruise control ("autopilot") on the car isn't even as reliable as "dumb" cruise control on a 20-year-old car, so I rarely use it.
penjelly 3y ago
comments about "see the progress!" are insane, fsd was sold as a feature for 7-15k and in some vehicles it doesnt do anything of value. You cant grift people out of money with false promises and then deliver 15 years late without pissing people off, its simple. Speaking only of progress does a disservice to those killed/injured while fsd was engaged
vallode 3y ago
Is this meant to be convincing? If you slowly scroll down and read every tweet you will see a massive repetition of simplified statements and over-promising. "X is _only_ 2 years away" is not very interesting when it's mentioned several times a year... for 5 years.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I think that's the point: to show how much, for how long, and how consistently Tesla has been lying about this. These are not offhand comments made once or twice. Every single time FSD is talked about in public, Tesla releases a statement like this through Musk.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Tesla bagholders here on HN immediately flag any negative Tesla story that they see in order to censor it, so if you want your link to stick around it has to at least give the illusion of positivity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418282
api 3y ago
The problem with FSD is that it's one of those problems where it takes 5% of the effort to get 95% of the way there and the other 95% of the effort to get the remaining 5%. Problems like that are exactly the kind that lead to perpetual just around the corner predictions like this. We're almost there! We're almost there! FSD is almost a solved problem under ordinary predictable driving conditions, but when you're driving there's a long tail of unusual circumstances that you run into that blow the limits of these models. Humans are able to improvise because we have a huge mental model of the world we inhabit and our location within it, which FSD systems do not. They're just reacting to stimuli. Telsa went and made it even harder on themselves by abandoning LIDAR. One way to compensate for inferior intelligence is with superhuman senses, but they insisted that merely human-like senses like vision were "enough."
plaidfuji 3y ago
This really captures the essence of his naïveté, to me: > There are no fundamental challenges remaining. There are many small problems. And then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together. That is the fundamental problem, of all AI research. How many edge cases are there, and how many does it have to handle gracefully before it’s “good enough”? I think the tail is longer than people expect, and the changes that have to be made to address it are very fundamental. At the same time, I really want them to succeed, and I think FSD could be one of the most transformative tech advancements of the century, like the original invention of the automobile.
- Slartie 3y ago
  That's not the fundamental problem of all AI research. That's the fundamental problem of all software engineering! Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. And you can't cheat yourself around it. We managed to cheat ourselves around growing complexity in subsystems by isolating them more and more, which allowed us to tackle the complexity with more people working in parallel. But that just further increases the integration complexity, where we don't know a way to effectively scale our approaches to deal with it. The only way we know is "cutting corners": creating a system that's just working well in 99% of cases - leave the small problems of the remaining 1% unsolved, hence there's nothing to integrate for those. Works well enough for production use in a lot of situations. Doesn't work at all when it comes to Level 5 autonomous driving. And that's what Elon either doesn't understand or actively ignores.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    >Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. 100% This, which should be very obvious to anyone working at a FAANG tier company. There are no shortage of ideas, technical documents, prototypes working locally. However to get a product to production that integrates (even in a paved path) is most often the most complex task.
- agnosticmantis 3y ago
calderknight 3y ago
This doesn't mean very much to me without an explanation of what the actual progress has been. For example, has level 4 autonomy been achieved?
- Mashimo 3y ago
  I think Mercedes is the only one who has level 3 on the road. And only in certain areas on certain roads. It's all very limited. level 4 will probably take some time.
  - calderknight 3y ago
    So he said in 2021 that >FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021 Even though they hadn't achieved level 3 or 4? And still haven't two years later?
    - Mashimo 3y ago
      I just searched a bit and it seems waymo is considered level 4. You just can't buy the cars as consumers. And from a consumer point of view, Tesla pilot is more capable than the one from mercedes. But legally you can take the hands and eyes of the road on the Mercedes.
dna_polymerase 3y ago
I think Elon inspired a lot of great things. Undeniably he brought back the Space craze, he gave the automotive industry enough of a push to finally invest in something different from ICE tech or their pipe dream of hydrogen cars. But things like FSD really ruin all those achievements for me. I'd still be impressed if he said: "this is hard, we're working on it, we do incremental roll-outs and once we're there, we're there".
meindnoch 3y ago
I don't see the problem. Elon is just innovating at such high velocity, that relativistic time dilation kicks in.
unfunco 3y ago
13 December 2023: Tesla recalls two million cars over autopilot defect. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67693935 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67693935
stevage 3y ago
I'd like to see a visualisation of this where each point has an arrow to the time the prediction is for. Is he always saying 2 years?
layer8 3y ago
There’s a good chance we may get fusion power first.
j45 3y ago
This is a nice timeline animation. I have heard that the previous driving automation on a Tesla while not as advanced was generally solid for what it does and might be still a plus for those vehicles.
andreygrehov 3y ago
Holy smokes! I wanted to build the exact same website about COVID (the reason i decided not to is because of the "downvotes" - people don't like seeing something uncomfortable).
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Engineers would be laughing and pointing and jeering if such failure to deliver expectations consistently came from the Head of engineering Instead, for some unknown reason, because Musk says it, millions of people just believe it. People are wild.
fmajid 3y ago
I have a Tesla Model 3, but I never believed in FSD vaporware so I didn't buy it, and even if they had delivered, I would not entrust it with my life. That doesn't make Tesla's misrepresentations bordering on fraud (on the wrong side of the border) OK, but some basic critical thinking would not have been amiss here.
csours 3y ago
What I love about Tesla fans is that they will describe in detail how the first decision is the right one, and then the next decision is a better one. That's not necessarily wrong, but it makes it hard to talk about balancing engineering concerns.
zackify 3y ago
I got FSD in 2019. It’s actually worse today than it was then. It nudged you constantly, phantom brakes more, I’ve used it so much less and it sucks we can’t get refunds. Also, automatic wipers straight up, stopped working. Do not come on when it’s raining hard anymore.
cs702 3y ago
Vaporware: yes. Entrepreneurial overconfidence and overoptimism: yes. Fraud: no. Tesla has been investing aggressively for nearly a decade to develop FSD.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  When you make promises and don't keep them while taking people's money on the back of those promises, that's fraud. When you do it for almost 10 years, that's almost 10 years of fraud.
baggachipz 3y ago
Yeah. I've had my Model 3 for 5 years now (great car) and bought the FSD package. It's nowhere to be found and I want my damn money back for the FSD package. It'll never come to fruition during my ownership of the car, so I just pissed that money away. This wasn't some kickstarter, it's something they actively sold just like other features or packages.
hwc 3y ago
I would like to see Mr Musk removed from decision-making positions at Tesla and SpaceX. He is making both companies, which have much to be proud of, look bad. If he wants to kill Twitter, that's fine by me. I prefer a more decentralized internet anyway.
- 93po 3y ago
  I’ll be sure to forward your wishes to the board
robertlagrant 3y ago
> By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging. Ironically, just being able to leave your car in a parking space to charge when ready, then re-park, would be so useful.
asylteltine 3y ago
Elon musk is a rich kid grifter who has never started his own company. Maybe spacex counts but it only survives off government grants. He never founded anything. He never created anything. He is an antisemitic pathological liar who is a net negative on humanity.
claar 3y ago
I absolutely love the full self-driving in my Model Y. I use it every day and still chuckle to myself all the time about how crazy it is that I'm in a car that can autonomously drive all over town. I understand all the complaints in the comments section about Elon over promising and wishing FSD were perfect by now, but I can't believe there aren't more positive comments too. When I show my friends the FSD and acceleration of my Tesla, Santa mode, "emissions" mode, etc, they are always amazed, as am I. I'm living in the future and loving it.
- nunez 3y ago
  Same; I use FSD Beta all the damn time and it's amazing. Sometimes it does wild shit, but most times it beats driving hands down.
- 93po 3y ago
  People are incapable of nuance when they’ve been given enough propaganda to dislike someone. You see it all the time with political figures and people saying Trump is literally worse than Hitler
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  > When I show my friends the FSD and acceleration of my Tesla, Santa mode, "emissions" mode, etc, they are always amazed, as am I. I'm living in the future and loving it. Yes, when you show off something you spent a decent amount on and think is amazing and that you love, your friends will also indicate a positive reaction to it. Welcome to social dynamics 101.
highfrequency 3y ago
Interestingly, if you read the new Musk biography from Isaacson, Musk’s approach of committing to an overaggressive deadline, rallying all his workers to stay up until 3am on the shop floor and generally yelling at them like a military commander actually worked remarkably well again and again at Tesla and SpaceX. They accomplished business goals that no one thought was possible, continually pulling rabbits out of a hat. However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.
- 93po 3y ago
  His method of deletion and challenging requirements works well for manufacturing. It would appear to me that the same doesn’t work for software nearly as well.
  - spiffistan 3y ago
    It probably does work for certain kinds of software, but groundbreaking research breakthroughs not so much.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I think a bigger factor is the job market. Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? There just weren't really many other places for people who wanted to work on those cool problems to go to work. So Musk had the leverage to push them really hard. But software? Not so much! Programmers can work pretty much anywhere. Even for a cool project like driverless cars there's quite a lot of companies trying to do it. And how many of the driverless car programmers specifically want to work on driverless cars? They'd probably be cool with other AI projects, of which there are a gazillion.
29athrowaway 3y ago
At least they are trying. On the other hand, what are you doing?
sethd 3y ago
It will be a travesty of justice if fraud charges are never filed.
pengaru 3y ago
Lots of buyers remorse (rightfully) on display in this thread

Tesla FSD Timeline

312 points by cromulent 3y ago

munk-a 3y ago

Just give us like two years and we'll be there!

tomw1808 3y ago
extremely confident, 100%, can't speak for regulators though.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  > extremely confident There's also "this is quite deep" - it's usually not.
- superduperer 3y ago
  [dead]
robin_reala 3y ago
We’re one year and eleven months on from the last update in the timeline, so I guess you’ll see it within a matter of weeks.
gonzo41 3y ago
the FSD burndown chart is an asymptote.

rafaelmn 3y ago

This feels like hearing all the talk about AI replacing developers and then actually building stuff with the best models available and seeing them fail to generate JSON function calls according to a simple JSON schema and just make shit up about what the parameters should look like.

baz00 3y ago
I think the hype is driven by a combination of naivety, religious thinking and hope. Personally my cynical perspective is I work with people that it could viably replace now and that's sad, not because it's good tech but the people are so fucking awful.
kruxigt 3y ago
[dead]
oefrha 3y ago
Except I’ve never heard anyone talking about AI replacing developers and selling a “full self-development” package for thousands of dollars at the same time.
- simion314 3y ago
  >Except I’ve never heard anyone talking about AI replacing developers and selling a “full self-development” package for thousands of dollars at the same time. Some developers are complaining that we will be replaced, that somehow GPT4 can write good code. Similar artists, writers etc complain they will be replaced. I can't see an AI in the next 20 years that you ask it "Build me GTA6" and it will create it for you, code, art, text, voices. From my experience GPT is good for exploring, asking questions and getting sometimes inspiration from the answers, if the code you asked for what writen already by others and was trained on it then it will aproximate a good solution but it still does mistakes. Current AI it is just interpollating some response based on what he saw in training, if the real answer is not close enough to points in training then you get garbage. Add on top bad training data and it generates most of the time sub optimal code. For example it always generates JavaScript code using old syntax and using old DOM APIs. There is no logic with them, I asked an AI "is X legal in Javascript" and it answered No, it created an it created an answer that shows that was legal and working and rambled about why is not a good idea to use that. And I have many examples where the fcking long answers they give contradict themselves. Sorry for the long comment, I daily see this devs complaining about this, earlier I read comments where some web devs were sure in three years they will have no job.

notRobot 3y ago

There's also https://elonmusk.today/ https://elonmusk.today/ but neither seem to be updated frequently

H8crilA 3y ago
It's not updated because it "doesn't work" - no one who "believes in Elon" actually cares that he is bullshitting. Remember when Trump failed to build a wall, and somehow no one noticed? A nation with 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers failed to build a simple wall, a wall that was the hottest issue in a successful presidential campaign.
- coolspot 3y ago
  According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, the Trump administration built 458 miles of border wall system, which consists of steel bollards, sensors, lights, cameras and parallel roads. However, only 52 miles of new primary border barriers were built where there were none before.
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    Exactly. Seriously underwhelming for just grandiose announcements, yet it doesn't matter.

mg 3y ago

What I would find really interesting: If someone drove the same route with every version of FSD and counted the interventions. That would give a nice chart over time from which one could see the progress. Is there anything online similar to this? Another way to look at it would be to look at the revenue that is generated via FSD. Buyers probably do some due dilligence what FSD offers. If the number of buyers goes up, that could be an indicator that FSD is getting better. But a quick Google search did not bring up much data about this published by Tesla. In their earnings report, there is a chart showing the cumulative miles driven with FSD. Not sure if one can draw conclusions from that. It seems very smoothed out and only goes back to 2021.

xendipity 3y ago
A YouTuber named DirtyTesla has done a series of drives over the years throughout his hometown where he's tracked the intervention and disengagement rates per mile. He often shows those numbers at the end of his videos.
- mg 3y ago
  Is it the same route every time? If not, they might take harder and harder routes as FSD gets better. Making it look like there is less progress than there really is.
  - buro9 3y ago
    You just know that Tesla would tune the software for this specific route, if the value of the comparison number became meaningful. Just like you cannot trust benchmarks, Goodhart's law will kick in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Their model architecture don't allow for individual route tuning.

infotogivenm 3y ago

Are they still all-in on “pure vision” self-driving? I thought they had pivoted back to lidar but can’t seem to find any sources for that.

masklinn 3y ago
The “tesla vision update” faq entry was last updated on October 5th, 2023, and as far as the way back machine surfaces the only changes were removing park assist from the list of disabled features, a few wording changes, and removing some of the more optimistic wording (e.g. “in the near future” around mentions of feature parity). So it seems like they’re still all in on pure vision. I don’t think the xruck has lidar either, only hits I get talk about a lidar-equipped prototype in early 2023.
loueed 3y ago
Pure Vision currently. The last we heard about LiDAR was the issue of combining Lidar Data with Vision in the NN. Which technology should take priority in the NN? For example LiDAR might recognise the shape of a sign but vision will know if its a stop sign or not. I'd be super interested to see if someone has successfully combined RGB data with LIDAR data.
- Mashimo 3y ago
  What does NN stand for?
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Neural network
  - hprotagonist 3y ago
    neural network, i would imagine.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Neural network i guess

strikelaserclaw 3y ago

i mean, they are making progress towards that goal so i would just discount what Elon Musk says and focus on the progress.

retrac98 3y ago

It’s easy to be snarky about the BS promises, but the important thing is that progress is being made, however incrementally it comes.

madeofpalk 3y ago
What’s snarky about pointing out an execs failed promises/lies?
baz00 3y ago
Is it though? I mean they replaced the computers, all the sensors and the entire strategy at least 2 times each and haven't managed to deliver anything viable. Edit: and another thread just popped up on HN with this https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tesla-autopilot-recall-2-million-cars-need-software-fix https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tesla-aut...
- kbos87 3y ago
  Haven’t managed to deliver anything viable? There are millions of miles of FSD driving being logged every month. I use it all the time and it’s pretty damned good today. Recalls for Tesla just amount to OTA updates that regulators have asked for and they’ve agreed to implement.
cinntaile 3y ago
I don't know about you but I don't like being lied to.
dtx1 3y ago
Unless of course you are selling cars with a Full Self Driving Package for $12k that promises "Your car will be able to drive itself almost anywhere with minimal driver intervention and will continuously improve All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot Autosteer on city streets Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control" In which case it's not a BS promise but fraud.
bergen 3y ago
But is it though?

dharma1 3y ago

turns out it's a hard problem - but there has been a lot of progress irrespective of Elon's optimistic timelines

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
"We can do this now" is not an optimistic timeline, it's a lie.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Fraud. The word that defines this behavior is fraud. Because the lie is not just a lie, it has been used to mislead investors.

bergen 3y ago

Funniest thing is he said at one point that it is 12 months away, including automatic charging? Does such a thing work anywhere or is even attempted? I haven't seen a car that does not need a physical plug and someone getting out to do it.

eurekin 3y ago
Didn't even read anything... but hasn't FSD been 12 months away for ~ 5 years already?
- masklinn 3y ago
  Back in 2014, it was “90% of your miles on auto” by the next year. In 2015 it was “a month away” from highways and simple roads, and 3 years away from full autonomy. In 2016 it was fully autonomous end-to-end cross-country (LA to Times Square) trip “by the end of the year”
sf_rob 3y ago
They had a marketing demo of a robotic charger a few years ago, but nothing came of it. They also had the demo of full battery swaps before that, but they'd have to change their entire architecture for that to work.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Do people in spandex auits, I mwan Tesla Humanoid Robots, count as automatic?
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I know this is a joke, but I'd not be surprised if they settled for pinging another person at the charging station and asking them to plug/unplug the car. Either because hype makes them want to be nice, or if they get some $FINANCIAL_VALUE for doing it.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago

wolpoli 3y ago

There hasn't been anything since May 2021. I wonder what happened.

cbeach 3y ago

Rather than doing what everyone else is doing (carping endlessly about Elon Musk), why not look at the actual progress of FSD. It's extremely impressive at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VWyaAzwMT0&ab_channel=AIDRIVR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VWyaAzwMT0&ab_channel=AIDRI...

mgiannopoulos 3y ago
But it’s fun to shit on Musk these days. Gets you “cool points” as well. Plus, no other car company has failed on delivering on their promises. /s
OJFord 3y ago
And also in fairness (though it is funny, and yes more drawn out than the early estimates, but every big project is delayed and overbudget, everyone knows that) it does start talking more about regulators, that Tesla's pretty happy with it, which strikes me as fair enough? That's not that much in their control, unless there was something specific regulators objected to or needed to see and Tesla was refusing/hadn't managed to.

jstummbillig 3y ago

I can see why what's going on here is problematic and, sure, why not poke holes into, well, everything, that seems fun. I do feel however that, as a society, we are unclear about our asks. Making claims about the future necessitates uncertainty. Would we rather only know about factuals? i.e. do not tell me about GPT-4 until the very fucking moment there is an API endpoint I can hit?

martin_a 3y ago
Having FSD in 12 month from now is/was probably _THE_ selling point for Teslas. I'd feel somewhat deceived if the CEO is repeating that over 9 years and not delivering.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  > Having FSD in 12 month from now is/was probably _THE_ selling point for Teslas. What are your data points? Is the lesson here, that we are good, as long as we make sure that bold claims are not easily falsifiable? Again, I am not sure what we are looking for. If we are interested in punishing people for making bold claims about the future, do we understand that that necessarily means, that we okay with learning less about the future? It's a eat your cake and have it moment. I understand that we can meet somewhere in the middle, but as a rule of thumb. It obviously a trade-off. What do we want more of?
Mashimo 3y ago
I don't understand the comparison. What did OpenAI sell/promise before the release?
bryancoxwell 3y ago
> Making claims about the future necessitates uncertainty. All the more reason to distrust someone following up their claims with things like “I’m certain of that.” (February 2019)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

z7 3y ago

Why can't Waymo's autonomous taxi service in San Francisco be considered FSD? There's the geographical limitation but it's operational and autonomous to an advanced degree.

chairmanwow1 3y ago
They also have teleoperators remotely to tale over.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  This seems to be an incredibly popular belief despite the fact that there's no evidence for it and it wouldn't make any sense. Waymo's remote support teams can reach into the driver's model of the world to fix things, for example maybe it mistook this stray traffic cone for actual roadworks - but they can't actually drive the car. If Waymo needs a human to drive the car, they send a human to physically sit in it and drive the car. They have a whole bunch of people for that role. If you were in a Waymo that drove somewhere and there wasn't anybody in the driving seat, that's not because some 10 year old was using a PS4 controller to steer it from Bangalore, that's the Waymo driver software.
  - simonw 3y ago
    Why is it unlikely that Waymo would have the equivalent of a remote control option for getting the car unstuck? That seems like both an obvious and an easy to implement solution to me, what am I missing?
    - yreg 3y ago
      It's easier to tell the computer instructions to get unstuck than driving with a lag. When the instructions are specific enough we could call it driving if you want, but it's not done with a steering wheel in real time.
    - foobazgt 3y ago
      What happens when you lose connection mid-maneuver, or there's congestion on the network causing high latency? The vehicle would have to be smart enough to execute all the tactical parts of driving anyway. Adding remote piloting just adds more failure cases and complexity.

pavlov 3y ago

Like a dummy I paid something around 7,500 euros for the so-called FSD package when the Model 3 arrived in Europe in early 2019. Five years later it still does practically nothing. The car can’t even do the bare minimum: it doesn’t recognize speed limits on most highways in Finland because it gets confused by round LED signs showing the limit (these are used because it’s different in winter and summer). It’s just embarrassing. A self-driving car should understand road signs that a five-year-old has no difficulty reading. I’m guessing it works better on some Californian roads that have been carefully hand-tuned by Tesla so they can show the Boss an illusion of progress. Personally I’m not going to buy another Tesla after this episode. Optimism is one thing, but this level of hype is actively dangerous because it gives people the wrong idea about the capabilities of something they rely on in traffic.

ubercore 3y ago
Our Tesla never knows what the real speed limit is in Norway either. Tunnels are especially bad.
- flexd 3y ago
  Mine never knows either, and if I dare use the cruise control or autopilot on the highway near Oslo it phantom brakes by bridges and shadows randomly. Same bridge it was phantom braking when a friend had a Model X like 8 years ago, still not fixed even if probably thousands of Teslas drive there every day
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jmpman 3y ago
  Mine has no idea about the speed limit in the school zone next to my house. Why? Because the speed limit changes based upon if school is in session. When is school in session??? You might be able to tell by looking at the school parking lot. You could open a web browser, navigate to the correct school districts web page, download the school year calendar in pdf form, and determine if today is a school day. Or you could do what my tesla does and lets me drive 10mph over the regular speed limit (as of about a year ago - maybe they’ve fix it)

supermatt 3y ago

How to build a trillion dollar company....

isoprophlex 3y ago

... and then, January 2022, he stops talking about FSD (according to the article, unsure when it was last updated) Either the lawyers finally got him to stop spouting bullshit, or he got bored. Either way, I wonder if we'll have FSD before fusion energy arrives :^)

thewildginger 3y ago

At what point is saying "it's two years away, trust me!" Not just naive optimism but false advertising or market manipulation? He publicly said this for like four years, and then he walks it all back. I just don't get it. Any other little person does this and they would be big time side by investors and shareholders, and yet people want to trip all over each other talking about how awesome he is. Reminds me of another cult of personality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith#Treasure_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith#T...

valval 3y ago
It never actually has to be a lie. Making predictions years into the future is impossible if variables are changing. He can make a perfectly truthful estimate of when the product will be ready as of today’s information, and then the information changes. It’s up to you as a consumer to either discredit the optimism or buy into it.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
Or, you know, fraud. Reminds me of different cult of personality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos
- stevage 3y ago
  Reminds me more of Trump to be honest.
ralfd 3y ago
On the other hand: Because he is always wrong with his timelines it cant be security fraud because everyone knows (and ridicules him/memes it) that his timelines are wrong.
xorcist 3y ago
After those two years have passed, probably. But the claim was actually stronger than that. It was that it should earn back the money it cost by running an autonomous taxi service during night and office hours. That specific claim was a scam from day one. That was not even on the research stage, and probably never will be.

mnau 3y ago

Less than a year ago, there was a video of Tesla slo-mo crashing into a parked airplane. To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That was in 2022, so 7 years after start of development/announcement. I don't hold by breath. Edit: link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI

pi-rat 3y ago
See, it figured out that the fastest route when summoned "from a home in L.A., to Times Square" is via the air. Smart car.
hnbad 3y ago
Given Elon's obsession with "it should see like a human does" i.e. only relying on vision and nothing else, I don't think FSD will ever be feasible and safe tbqh. This would be trivial to avoid if the car had an actual sense of distance other than comparing pixels.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  I am glad that we have invented wheel before Elon, otherwise he would be pushing "it should move like human does"
eschneider 3y ago
> To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That turns out to be a harder problem than most people think, and it gets in the way of the 'driving' part. "Are we looking at some big, blank object or are we looking at the sky? It's probably the sky, so we'll just drop it from the model." Which is how Teslas drive into big trucks. :/
- mnau 3y ago
  Even if visuals failed, Tesla has a sonar, radar and Tesla is moving at snail pace. Hell, my vacuum stops moving when it detects it crashed into something (likely torque required to move wheels is larger than expected). Edit: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why it happened. The result is a crash in a super simple environment and is (to me) quite indicative to the state of things. They are supposed to come up with solutions, not excuses (also, Elon hates lidar, but that is still on Tesla).

IAmGraydon 3y ago

It’s always been weird to me that it seems like it’s assumed that the world really wants FSD. It clearly has its benefits in freight transport via truck, as the value add there is clear. When it comes to personal transportation, however, where’s the value add? It seems like adoption would be fueled by personal preference, and in my experience people tend to want to retain control where there is an option to do so. It’s possible this is a solution searching for a problem.

saberience 3y ago
I have to disagree here, as someone with two elderly parents, one of whom has stopped driving due to eye sight issues, having FSD would be hugely impactful. There are many, many people out there who don’t drive or can’t drive for various reasons and FSD would enable them to be independent, get jobs, see friends and family. Not everyone lives in areas with decent public transport and with my parents, they live in a hilly area where walking to use public transport is at most very difficult and at worst impossible. Another example, I know a fairly young man who had started having seizures in his 30s and was disqualified from having a driving license, FSD would change his life. What about all the people who didn’t get a driving license for one reason or another? For me personally, while I can drive fine, I would much prefer to study or read or long car journeys and would love a car which is more like a moving living room, so I can sit and work at my laptop while the car takes me to my destination. I assure you there is a massive, massive market for the first company that really cracks this problem.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
FSD may not be the earth shattering feature that every consumer is looking for (although it would be a big differentiator). However, for taxis, trucks, any transport where an expensive human can be removed, it would be paradigm shifting. You know, like the EM Drive would have been if it had worked, or the room temperature super conductor, or cold fusion. It gets airplay because it’s easy to imagine all the cool things that would be possible if it were real. Like FLT. Musk said himself; Tesla is worth practically nothing without FSD. https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-driving-difference-between-tesla-worth-a-lot-or-nothing/#:~:text=Musk%20suggests%20that%20Tesla%20would,solve%20despite%20several%20missed%20timelines https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin.... Tesla is just another car company if these hopes and dreams aren’t true.

lawn 3y ago

It's truly amazing isn't it? How many lies these worshiped holier than thou people can get away with, and people still listen to what they say? And Musk is certainly not the only example. It's soon time for the presidential election again...

a_c 3y ago

Would be great if we have a service chronicling all the promises an individual made. I would use it personally as a commitment device

flohofwoe 3y ago

Apparently FSD is the nuclear fusion power of the car world. Except with a much more aggressive "timeline" (always only 2 years away instead of 15 years).

mnau 3y ago
They said in 20 years with current funding. Actual funding is 'fusion never' https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fu...

graycrow 3y ago

So what? It's a complex problem, and they're making progress. Why is it always only Tesla that has to be held accountable for all promises? Other companies often promise great things (with deadlines!), don't keep their promises, but for some strange reason no one cares.

bigtex 3y ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-lyft-with-robotaxi-plan-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-...
gl0wa 3y ago
Maybe because people pay $$ for that promise.

bigtex 3y ago

Where is the robotaxi service I was promised by the end of 2019? https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-lyft-with-robotaxi-plan-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-takes-direct-aim-uber-...

3ds 3y ago

I hate it when people use acronyms without explaining them. Not everyone knows your niche three letter acronyms. Anyway: FSD = Full Self Driving

acatton 3y ago
You're lucky that it's "FSD" which has like 4 possible meaning. Sometimes it's acronyms with 12 different possible meaning, where 4 of them could apply to the given context...
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >Sometimes it's acronyms with 12 different possible meaning, where 4 of them could apply to the given context... Like AC or IPC?

bjarneh 3y ago

I've had a Tesla Model S for quite some time now. It cannot reliably adjust the high beam / low beam nor the windshield wipers. Those problems seem a bit easier than full self driving.

dreamcompiler 3y ago
Model Y here. My automatic wipers are mostly okay except sometimes they seem to get obsessed with a tiny speck of bird crap they can't remove. High beam/low beam is a complete cluster f*ck: It gets fooled by highly-reflective road signs. So I adjust headlights manually, just like I have done over my entire driving career. The phantom braking is the biggest deal: The car slams on the brakes in the middle of major highways in good weather just because it's a hot day and the camera saw a mirage and the car thinks it's about to drive off a cliff. This means the cruise control ("autopilot") on the car isn't even as reliable as "dumb" cruise control on a 20-year-old car, so I rarely use it.

penjelly 3y ago

comments about "see the progress!" are insane, fsd was sold as a feature for 7-15k and in some vehicles it doesnt do anything of value. You cant grift people out of money with false promises and then deliver 15 years late without pissing people off, its simple. Speaking only of progress does a disservice to those killed/injured while fsd was engaged

vallode 3y ago

Is this meant to be convincing? If you slowly scroll down and read every tweet you will see a massive repetition of simplified statements and over-promising. "X is _only_ 2 years away" is not very interesting when it's mentioned several times a year... for 5 years.

tsimionescu 3y ago
I think that's the point: to show how much, for how long, and how consistently Tesla has been lying about this. These are not offhand comments made once or twice. Every single time FSD is talked about in public, Tesla releases a statement like this through Musk.
kibwen 3y ago
Tesla bagholders here on HN immediately flag any negative Tesla story that they see in order to censor it, so if you want your link to stick around it has to at least give the illusion of positivity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418282

api 3y ago

The problem with FSD is that it's one of those problems where it takes 5% of the effort to get 95% of the way there and the other 95% of the effort to get the remaining 5%. Problems like that are exactly the kind that lead to perpetual just around the corner predictions like this. We're almost there! We're almost there! FSD is almost a solved problem under ordinary predictable driving conditions, but when you're driving there's a long tail of unusual circumstances that you run into that blow the limits of these models. Humans are able to improvise because we have a huge mental model of the world we inhabit and our location within it, which FSD systems do not. They're just reacting to stimuli. Telsa went and made it even harder on themselves by abandoning LIDAR. One way to compensate for inferior intelligence is with superhuman senses, but they insisted that merely human-like senses like vision were "enough."

plaidfuji 3y ago

This really captures the essence of his naïveté, to me: > There are no fundamental challenges remaining. There are many small problems. And then there's the challenge of solving all those small problems and putting the whole system together. That is the fundamental problem, of all AI research. How many edge cases are there, and how many does it have to handle gracefully before it’s “good enough”? I think the tail is longer than people expect, and the changes that have to be made to address it are very fundamental. At the same time, I really want them to succeed, and I think FSD could be one of the most transformative tech advancements of the century, like the original invention of the automobile.

Slartie 3y ago
That's not the fundamental problem of all AI research. That's the fundamental problem of all software engineering! Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. And you can't cheat yourself around it. We managed to cheat ourselves around growing complexity in subsystems by isolating them more and more, which allowed us to tackle the complexity with more people working in parallel. But that just further increases the integration complexity, where we don't know a way to effectively scale our approaches to deal with it. The only way we know is "cutting corners": creating a system that's just working well in 99% of cases - leave the small problems of the remaining 1% unsolved, hence there's nothing to integrate for those. Works well enough for production use in a lot of situations. Doesn't work at all when it comes to Level 5 autonomous driving. And that's what Elon either doesn't understand or actively ignores.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  >Especially integration complexity is todays' biggest complexity in any significantly complex product. 100% This, which should be very obvious to anyone working at a FAANG tier company. There are no shortage of ideas, technical documents, prototypes working locally. However to get a product to production that integrates (even in a paved path) is most often the most complex task.
agnosticmantis 3y ago

calderknight 3y ago

This doesn't mean very much to me without an explanation of what the actual progress has been. For example, has level 4 autonomy been achieved?

Mashimo 3y ago
I think Mercedes is the only one who has level 3 on the road. And only in certain areas on certain roads. It's all very limited. level 4 will probably take some time.
- calderknight 3y ago
  So he said in 2021 that >FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021 Even though they hadn't achieved level 3 or 4? And still haven't two years later?
  - Mashimo 3y ago
    I just searched a bit and it seems waymo is considered level 4. You just can't buy the cars as consumers. And from a consumer point of view, Tesla pilot is more capable than the one from mercedes. But legally you can take the hands and eyes of the road on the Mercedes.

dna_polymerase 3y ago

I think Elon inspired a lot of great things. Undeniably he brought back the Space craze, he gave the automotive industry enough of a push to finally invest in something different from ICE tech or their pipe dream of hydrogen cars. But things like FSD really ruin all those achievements for me. I'd still be impressed if he said: "this is hard, we're working on it, we do incremental roll-outs and once we're there, we're there".

meindnoch 3y ago

I don't see the problem. Elon is just innovating at such high velocity, that relativistic time dilation kicks in.

unfunco 3y ago

13 December 2023: Tesla recalls two million cars over autopilot defect. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67693935 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67693935

stevage 3y ago

I'd like to see a visualisation of this where each point has an arrow to the time the prediction is for. Is he always saying 2 years?

layer8 3y ago

There’s a good chance we may get fusion power first.

j45 3y ago

This is a nice timeline animation. I have heard that the previous driving automation on a Tesla while not as advanced was generally solid for what it does and might be still a plus for those vehicles.

andreygrehov 3y ago

Holy smokes! I wanted to build the exact same website about COVID (the reason i decided not to is because of the "downvotes" - people don't like seeing something uncomfortable).

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Engineers would be laughing and pointing and jeering if such failure to deliver expectations consistently came from the Head of engineering Instead, for some unknown reason, because Musk says it, millions of people just believe it. People are wild.

fmajid 3y ago

I have a Tesla Model 3, but I never believed in FSD vaporware so I didn't buy it, and even if they had delivered, I would not entrust it with my life. That doesn't make Tesla's misrepresentations bordering on fraud (on the wrong side of the border) OK, but some basic critical thinking would not have been amiss here.

csours 3y ago

What I love about Tesla fans is that they will describe in detail how the first decision is the right one, and then the next decision is a better one. That's not necessarily wrong, but it makes it hard to talk about balancing engineering concerns.

zackify 3y ago

I got FSD in 2019. It’s actually worse today than it was then. It nudged you constantly, phantom brakes more, I’ve used it so much less and it sucks we can’t get refunds. Also, automatic wipers straight up, stopped working. Do not come on when it’s raining hard anymore.

cs702 3y ago

Vaporware: yes. Entrepreneurial overconfidence and overoptimism: yes. Fraud: no. Tesla has been investing aggressively for nearly a decade to develop FSD.

ryanklee 3y ago
When you make promises and don't keep them while taking people's money on the back of those promises, that's fraud. When you do it for almost 10 years, that's almost 10 years of fraud.

baggachipz 3y ago

Yeah. I've had my Model 3 for 5 years now (great car) and bought the FSD package. It's nowhere to be found and I want my damn money back for the FSD package. It'll never come to fruition during my ownership of the car, so I just pissed that money away. This wasn't some kickstarter, it's something they actively sold just like other features or packages.

hwc 3y ago

I would like to see Mr Musk removed from decision-making positions at Tesla and SpaceX. He is making both companies, which have much to be proud of, look bad. If he wants to kill Twitter, that's fine by me. I prefer a more decentralized internet anyway.

93po 3y ago
I’ll be sure to forward your wishes to the board

robertlagrant 3y ago

> By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging. Ironically, just being able to leave your car in a parking space to charge when ready, then re-park, would be so useful.

asylteltine 3y ago

Elon musk is a rich kid grifter who has never started his own company. Maybe spacex counts but it only survives off government grants. He never founded anything. He never created anything. He is an antisemitic pathological liar who is a net negative on humanity.

claar 3y ago

I absolutely love the full self-driving in my Model Y. I use it every day and still chuckle to myself all the time about how crazy it is that I'm in a car that can autonomously drive all over town. I understand all the complaints in the comments section about Elon over promising and wishing FSD were perfect by now, but I can't believe there aren't more positive comments too. When I show my friends the FSD and acceleration of my Tesla, Santa mode, "emissions" mode, etc, they are always amazed, as am I. I'm living in the future and loving it.

nunez 3y ago
Same; I use FSD Beta all the damn time and it's amazing. Sometimes it does wild shit, but most times it beats driving hands down.
93po 3y ago
People are incapable of nuance when they’ve been given enough propaganda to dislike someone. You see it all the time with political figures and people saying Trump is literally worse than Hitler
ahahahahah 3y ago
> When I show my friends the FSD and acceleration of my Tesla, Santa mode, "emissions" mode, etc, they are always amazed, as am I. I'm living in the future and loving it. Yes, when you show off something you spent a decent amount on and think is amazing and that you love, your friends will also indicate a positive reaction to it. Welcome to social dynamics 101.

highfrequency 3y ago

Interestingly, if you read the new Musk biography from Isaacson, Musk’s approach of committing to an overaggressive deadline, rallying all his workers to stay up until 3am on the shop floor and generally yelling at them like a military commander actually worked remarkably well again and again at Tesla and SpaceX. They accomplished business goals that no one thought was possible, continually pulling rabbits out of a hat. However, the evidence suggests that this approach does not work for a research problem like developing self-driving cars. It seems that you can’t just yell at software engineers and make them stay awake all night until they make an AI research breakthrough. The difference with SpaceX/Tesla was that the hurdles were fundamentally manufacturing and efficiency problems (after all, we made it to the moon in 1969 - and in both cases Musk had a basically working prototype very early on), not problems of science research.

93po 3y ago
His method of deletion and challenging requirements works well for manufacturing. It would appear to me that the same doesn’t work for software nearly as well.
- spiffistan 3y ago
  It probably does work for certain kinds of software, but groundbreaking research breakthroughs not so much.
IshKebab 3y ago
I think a bigger factor is the job market. Where's an aspiring rocket scientist going to go if they don't get a job for SpaceX? Or an electric car designer (back when Tesla started at least)? There just weren't really many other places for people who wanted to work on those cool problems to go to work. So Musk had the leverage to push them really hard. But software? Not so much! Programmers can work pretty much anywhere. Even for a cool project like driverless cars there's quite a lot of companies trying to do it. And how many of the driverless car programmers specifically want to work on driverless cars? They'd probably be cool with other AI projects, of which there are a gazillion.

29athrowaway 3y ago

At least they are trying. On the other hand, what are you doing?

sethd 3y ago

It will be a travesty of justice if fraud charges are never filed.

pengaru 3y ago

Lots of buyers remorse (rightfully) on display in this thread