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Tesla has been kept alive only because they are scared to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel. They have very low confidence in the system to allow

• hef19898 3y ago
  Tesla cannot abandon FSD, if they did Musk, and by extension (and due to all kinds of financial connetctions and dependencies) all his other companies would be in very serious trouble.
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Not at all, Tesla has enough cash on hand to pay everyone out a few billion if there was a judgement wrt FSD. They outran the liability with the brand and sales.
    • te_chris 3y ago
      The comment you're replying to is not talking about court-enforced liabilities. If the pull out of FSD they're basically Mercedes with a 5 year lead on manufacturing. That is categorically not a trillion dollar company and the house of cards leveraged against Tesla stock crumbles.
      • toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Nah, there is still enough collective delusion in the brand to keep the stock somewhat propped up vs legacy auto’s slow death. BYD and Tesla are crushing it comparatively and have the supply chain to keep ramping. No one else is selling meaningful volume at this time. Mercedes is certainly not the future in any meaningful way.
      • karolist 3y ago
        5 year lead on manufacturing vs Mercedes? Are panel gaps and technicians swapping USDM headlights to EUDM on cargo ships transporting their cars to Europe a 5 year lead now?
        • fooker 3y ago
          You realize you can take this confidence and bet against TSLA right? If you're right it'll be a relatively great payday for you.
          • mehlmao 3y ago
            Gamestop proved to me that the market can remain irrational much longer than I can remain solvent.
          • dom96 3y ago
            Many are shorting Tesla and continue to lose money because of the markets idiocy. If I were a billionaire I would short it, but as it stands I cannot risk losing money just because of stupid prolonged hype.
            • fooker 3y ago
              Have you ever been wrong about something or was it always attributed to someone else's idiocy?
          • karolist 3y ago
            I'm not betting against anything, my money is going to real estate me and my family will live in, not WSB gambles. Also, betting against hordes or Tesla fanboys does not seem rational at all, doesn't mean the product is any good or has a bright future still.
        • te_chris 3y ago
          They’re definitely ahead in EV process. I don’t like them or Musk, but that’s undeniable. Whether that leads to a better finish is debatable.
      • nradov 3y ago
        I don't understand what you mean. Mercedes-Benz is currently ahead of Tesla on autonomous driving. They have a working SAE Level 3 system already. It is currently very limited but will expand over time. https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a45326503/mercedes-benz-drive-pilot-review/ https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a45326503/mercedes-benz...
        • GreedClarifies 3y ago
          lol
        • jdewerd 3y ago
          DRIVE PILOT is ready to chauffeur you under conditions that help ensure a secure ride. Conditions include: Clear lane markings on approved freeways Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH Daytime lighting and clear weather Driver visible by camera located above driver's display There is no construction zone present. and from the manual: The distance [to the vehicle in front] is neither too small nor too large How is this remotely comparable to FSD? Drive Pilot is less technologically ambitious than the 1995 CMU No Hands Across America vehicle, which happened 28 years ago. Polishing it enough to accept liability is cool, but there is no technology path from follow-the-leader to general purpose self-driving.
          • nradov 3y ago
            Mercedes Drive Pilot is aimed at a different use case than Tesla FSD so it's difficult to make a direct comparison, but independent reviews generally indicate the Mercedes system is superior. Tesla doesn't have a viable technology path to general purpose SAE Level 4+ autonomous driving either, so I don't see any difference there. https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-mercedes-drivepilot-causes-a-crash/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
    • peteradio 3y ago
      Stock would take a nose-dive.
  • dmix 3y ago
    Why is everyone so overly dramatic about this stuff. I remember when FSD was announced on HN everyone knew it'd be way longer and he was just pumping it up cuz that's how he is. It wasn't some big surprise. Now everyone is acting like it's do or die, as if everyone bought Tesla's just so they won't have to ever touch a steering wheel at some point in the future. Only 19% opted for it and plenty of those are probably wealthy people who can afford novelties and all that matters at the end of the day is if you're competitive with the alternative options on the market (holistically not just feature to feature). Ultimately it's still just a car people bought instead of a BMW or whatever. They're not making car purchasing decisions comparing it to some beta project only running via taxis in silicon valley and some random small cities.
    • homefree 3y ago
      HN is just generally awful on this topic and not worth commenting in imo. Tesla is very well positioned even if they did zero on FSD (which they won't). The Model Y was the best selling car on earth across all categories (including ICE and EVs!) - not sure what more you could want for car company success.
      • misiti3780 3y ago
        HN has a lot of people that hate Elon Musk because they disagree with his politics. It's clear to anyone that is on here every day since his twitter became popular. If you look back, 10 years ago HN loved him (see convo about first time 2 falcon 9s landed), but now that he is the richest man in the world the tides have turned.
        • DonHopkins 3y ago
          You say that like there's something wrong with disagreeing with anti semitism. Of COURSE people disagree with his politics. You'd have to be fucked in the head not to. HN isn't Stormfront, you know. His behavior changed and new facts arrived since he used to be popular, so reasonable people changed their minds about him, and unreasonable racists are now his new biggest fans. The reason people hate him is not that he's the richest man in the world, it's that he's a bigot. I'm stunned that I need to explain that to you. Is it actually news to you? If so, welcome out from under your rock. Or are you just pretending not to know, in order to troll?
  • jdewerd 3y ago
    Why would they want to abandon FSD? I look up videos whenever these threads come out and over the last few years it seems to have made astonishing progress. 2 million miles per day of FSD driving is impressive. The resulting training data from every corner of the USA is a bonkers advantage.
    • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      Only if you think this is actually a model training problem.
      • jdewerd 3y ago
        Their existing system is pretty strong evidence that it was in fact a model training problem -- do you mean to say that you think training will stall out before it gets to the point of being viable?
        • cmeacham98 3y ago
          I'll admit that I am by no means an expert and might be completely wrong, but yes, I believe that model training cannot fully solve driverless vehicles. All models that we train today have edge cases where the model produces wildly inaccurate output. As far as I'm aware, nobody yet has managed to squeeze this problem out. ChatGPT is still an overall useful tool with the occasional hallucination. Those types of edge cases in software driving a car are unacceptable.
          • misiti3780 3y ago
            I agree, but i think it's getting close to be much safer than humans driving on highways.
          • jankyxenon 3y ago
            Right, said another way, is driving a completely deterministic activity or does it sometimes require general intelligence. If it's not completely deterministic, then you might need a human in the loop.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    If they don't think it's achievable, the smart move at this point is to shrink the team down to just a few people and claim to still be working on it, while pushing incremental improvements every few months while telling customers and investors that 'its coming'. Any other move causes a precipitous drop in stock price as investors see that they won't be taking over the entire transportation industry. Oh wait, thats exactly what we see.
  • bigtex 3y ago
    Correct, FSD is baked into the future success of Tesla. It is the hype engine that has helped keep the company alive all these years. However you notice they are starting to pull back from all there promises of robotaxi's and now Musk is calling it "supervised" FSD.
• tshirthoodie 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • CydeWeys 3y ago
    Because, despite the phony name, it's not actually self-driving. It's merely a driver assist. And when it's only a driver assist, there's always someone sitting in the driver's seat (who may or may not be paying attention) that you can pin any crash on.
• dangus 3y ago
  This is a big dramatization of the Tesla situation. No consumer vehicle has a driverless system that tolerates inattention, they are merely driving aids. Nobody on the consumer market is claiming to be anywhere near level 5 fully autonomous driving. Tesla’s full self driving system is the only one on the consumer market that will drive on city streets for you in the form of beta software. Yes, it’s going to make you touch the wheel and prove you are alert. Which competitor doesn’t? Yes, it’s a beta that isn’t done. Yes, it will disengage at some point. Are there any other car makers with software that is further along? A Waymo driverless cab has a roof rack and all four corners of the vehicle covered with equipment that might cost up to five figures to produce and install. It isn’t a consumer product. The whole reason consumer automakers like Tesla don’t want to bother with that equipment is that it isn’t something that will ever make financial sense. Consumer personal vehicles are cost control exercises where every dollar and cent counts. When you buy a base model Tacoma and it has an 8” screen instead of a 12” screen, that’s a change that saved Toyota $5-10 at most, and that $5 or $10 matters. Your comment makes it sound like Tesla is in some kind of financial or competitive danger because of its autopilot/FSD feature, but I think that just isn’t true from a dollars and cents standpoint. If anything Tesla’s strategy has much higher profit margin potential due to its reliance on consumer grade equipment.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    > that $5 or $10 matters. That matters, but what almost surely matters more is providing a differentiation among the trim levels to justify the four-figure difference in prices.
  • ra7 3y ago
    It doesn't matter what other consumer vehicles or Waymo offers, or their financial state (which wasn't point of my comment). Tesla is the one who has continuously promised they'd be L5 and have robotaxis "by end of the year" for years now. When questioned on their own promises, you can't turn around and say "It's a beta; no other car maker is further along". Of course, it's a successful business already because many consumers believed Tesla's (false) promises. If that's your bar, then very well. But they still haven't met their original stated goal and it doesn't look like they're going to anytime soon.
• idopmstuff 3y ago
  > they still haven’t clocked a single driverless mile. This seems maybe technically true but extremely misleading. There is of course always a driver in the car, but they have absolutely clocked many miles with a driver in the car not needing to intervene.
  • Waterluvian 3y ago
    I think what's interesting is how many end-to-end trips, or at least meaningfully distinct segments (eg. the highway portion, the city portion, etc.) driven without any intervention. And how repeatable that is. You could start me in goal for the Leafs and I bet I could clock many hours of scoreless game time in a season.
  • JAlexoid 3y ago
    As someone with a Tesla FSD beta - the "not needing to intervene" is a little bit of a stretch. I would describe it as a system for rapid reaction and lane assist. It's very... very poor at self driving, outside of an empty interstate.
    • idopmstuff 3y ago
      Very much depends where you are. It can handle most of CA well in my experience (and from a lot of videos posted on Twitter).
  • nrki 3y ago
    "Technically true" == true "Always a driver in the car" != driverless You often see waymos cruising around sans driver. That's real driverless.
    • andsoitis 3y ago
      > You often see waymos cruising around sans driver. That's real driverless. Very cool. Where? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it anywhere in LA.
      • 3y ago
• londons_explore 3y ago
  To be honest, I'm surprised quite how poorly teslas FSD performs. They have plenty of funding, plenty of smart minds, orders of magnitude more training data than anyone... Sure, they have hobbled themselves with lack of LIDAR - but it seems that planning and decision making is the stumbling block for most systems, not object recognition. But still, I think there must be some poor management or a lot of bad luck in that team not to see more success.
  • alsodumb 3y ago
    They have a relatively small team when compared to Waymo, at least at the research/state-of-the-art level. Don't quote me on this but just look at the the difference between autopilot team size vs Waymo employees size who have a PhD in a related area. It'd at least 10x more ay Waymo, probably even more. Hardware and HD maps makes a lot of difference too. Planning and decision making always becomes easier when you have a perfect estimate of the environment and good predictions of other agents behaviors. Intent matters a lot more than just recognition/detection in this setting. To be fair I'd say Autopilot team is doing pretty good for the team of their size. They are no where close to Waymo, that's super clear, but if they focused all of their stack on making driver assistive tech rather than trying to push towards FSD they'd probably be better off.
    • Alex3917 3y ago
      > They have a relatively small team when compared to Waymo, at least at the research/state-of-the-art level. Sure, but in every independent test, Tesla's smart driving capabilities get completely trounced by Subaru EyeSight. Does Subaru also have vastly more PhD researchers than Tesla?
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        It looks like of the features both systems have, Subaru EyeSight performs better... But Tesla FSD has vastly more abilities (some of which it performs well at, some middling, and some poor).
      • 3y ago
• FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Tesla has been kept alive only because they are scared to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel. They have very low confidence in the system to allow for driver inattention, let alone completely remove the driver. Numerous software “rewrites” over the years with many buzzwords attached, and they still haven’t clocked a single driverless mile. That is quite backwards. When they first launched, the steering wheel checks were every fifteen minutes. They reduced it to five minutes, and slowly had to be dragged kicking and screaming due to threats from the NHTSA to get to where it is now. Even now, most of their attitude to it has been very nudge nudge wink wink, "yeah, they make us tell you to pay attention but you don't have to" (until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course).
  • ra7 3y ago
    > until you do get in a collision, and they throw you under the bus, of course You made my point for me. It's less about steering wheel checks and more about taking liability. They can remove the driver and take liability only if they are confident in their system. They are not.
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      Not really. They don't care about the liability until they have to. That's why they didn't care about steering wheel checks either. Tesla were not scared to "even let drivers take their hands off the wheel". It was the NHTSA who said "No, actually, you need to be", and started forcing their hand to actually implementing the checks (or rather with a reasonable interval).