So they are filing a document with SEC, it has a"Risks" section. They mention as a risk that the full self-driving might never work. I'm surprised if they had never mentioned that risk before, but the article seems to suggest that.
This is a great question to ask via arbitration or a class action (if you opted out of arbitration when you bought the vehicle). I also expect a securities fraud suit, as Tesla has been recognizing revenue in self selected milestones for FSD.
Disclosure: Tesla S/X owner (EAP, no FSD), party to the class action regarding S/X premature suspension failures.
> Deferred revenue activity related to the access to our Supercharger network, internet connectivity, Full Self Driving (“FSD”) features and over-the-air software updates on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantee amounted to $2.00 billion and $1.93 billion as of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively.
> Deferred revenue is equivalent to the total transaction price allocated to the performance obligations that are unsatisfied, or partially unsatisfied, as of the balance sheet date. Revenue recognized from the deferred revenue balance as of December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $79 million and $57 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Of the total deferred revenue on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantees as of March 31, 2021, we expect to recognize $1.21 billion of revenue in the next 12 months. The remaining balance will be recognized over the performance period which is generally the expected ownership life of the vehicle or the eight-year life of the vehicle.
Oh well. The lawsuits will be interesting to watch. I'm sorry for the people who have been fooled into purchasing FSD.
IMO they have less than 50% chance that they will actually get a car that drives itself without babysitting before 2025.
Harsh but I have to say is there a car company with the kind of hype and fanboyism of Tesla?
I understand 5 years ago when Tesla was doing things nobody else was doing but electric cars are mainstream now. If I had the money I'd be buying a Volvo Polestar.
Jeep. I know so many people who love their Jeeps despite them largely being garbage. To me, Jeep is like Harley Davidson; they look great until they start to fall apart.
Most car companies inspire wild enthusiasm and hype. It represents a huge purchase for the majority of Americans, hence they have pretty extreme buy-in for their decisions
Like many technologies, FSD is a long hard road of complex technological development; alas, customers think it should work perfectly out of the box right now to meet lofty flippant expectations.
Your $10k got you the hardware needed to self-drive to some degree, with improvements trickling in indefinitely. Can it drive you from here to there with very little (and decreasing) intervention? What did you actually expect (serious question)?
>Your $10k got you the hardware needed to self-drive to some degree
Don't all new Teslas come with the hardware and the self-driving is a software upgrade? My impression was that the purchase basically locked in a price. I could be wrong on this.
I'll be all-in on self-driving when I can use it to go to the bar and come home, until then it's mostly just an interesting technological exercise.
At this point, I'm probably more interested in improving highway assistive systems.
But, yes, there are many use cases that go by the wayside if you don't have reliable door-to-door driving without human input.
There are questions about both whether the current sensor package is sufficient and even bigger questions about whether an upgrade to FSD happens in the life of the vehicle. (My money would be on not.)
I don't think they know enough yet to construct ASICs and decide on consumer-priced sensors. Hellaciously interesting problem though, I wish I were working on it.
I think a lot of people saw it like a very, very, very expensive Kickstarter. They paid $10k to help make it happen. As is often the case with Kickstarters, it didn't match the hype.
It's not purely speculative. Just hopped on their site to check, these are the features they say you get immediately today:
* Navigate on Autopilot
* Auto Lane Change
* Autopark
* Summon
* Full Self-Driving Computer
* Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
When Cadillac's Super Cruise option is $2,500, $10K is still a huge premium, but it doesn't look like you can get those features independent of the FSD package from Tesla.
That’s a lie. None of these features actually work. It’s all total bullshit, intended to stave off the inevitable FSD lawsuits. They have pulled off one of the most brazen growth hacks ever. As someone who fell for it, I hope some justice is coming eventually, but I’m not holding my breath
$7k (x 2) at the time, reason was to help Tesla survive. Was not expecting anything else for my money in the next few years.
Nowadays Tesla’s survival seems more assured, so if I did it today, it would no longer be for that reason.
Some people pay for it thinking that it will be much more expensive later.
I question this thinking though, because once it’s possible, it will be a table stakes feature we take for granted on every car, which means it shouldn’t add a huge bump to the price. But maybe I’m thinking about it wrong.
> $7k (x 2) at the time, reason was to help Tesla survive.
Man there is something truly remarkable about Musk that he successfully convinced some people to, in effect, treat Tesla, a for-profit company, as a charity and to donate to them thousands of dollars with no expectation of anything in return.
Any other company would just raise money from investors, whether those be institution or from main street via the stock or bond markets.
But Tesla just sold folks a dream and they bought it, allowing Tesla to generate cashflow without Musk having to worry about pesky shareholders or dilution or even delivering a working product.
I suspect that phenomenon will be studied in business school for years to come.
Yeah, Musk is the second richest man on the planet, but somehow he's also always begging for cash. Reminds me of a former massively wealth president of ours who begged donors to fund his campaign. Two peas in a pod.
I wanted long freeway rides and driving in stop and go traffic to be less painful. I wanted to be able to watch my $10k in February 2021 turn into something really cool within a year.
Honestly, I think I’m safer with auto steer on. I’ve had the car hit the brakes when someone turns across my lane and I felt it was too conservative, but then I started wondering if I was too aggressive.
I wanted to watch my Model Y get smarter as OTA updates came in.
It's a question all Tesla customers should be asking, and not just for "FS"D:
Roadster deposits? Deposits opened in 2015. That's more than half a decade ago. The Roadster is still vapourware as far as anyone can tell. Barely gets mentioned anywhere except for the occasional outrageous Musk tweet lie "it will have rockets!".
Tesla Semi? Deposits opened a couple years ago and the design isn't even finalized. The line to produce these does not exist yet.
Tesla Cybertruck? At least the deposit is just $100, but this was a shift in interest-free capital raising by Tesla (volume instead of quantity). The design has not yet been completed, never mind the line - the pre-requisite line to produce the batteries this vehicle will use doesn't even exist yet.
Now imagine if you had put any of those deposits in an alternative investment. Roadster deposit holders could be millionaires just off not putting down a deposit and instead putting it on anything - including Tesla stock.
The stock is Tesla's real product. Everything else is something on the way to meeting the performance milestones so Musk can get hits bonuses, but the good news is he can help you get a bonus too since you could have bought shares.
If you were making a deposit on a Roadster you were probably already a millionaire (initial deposit was 250k). Also, in an index fund doing 7-8% interest you couldn’t even double that 250k in 5 years. It’s not really fair to make that statement based on actual performance. Your other claims are accurate, but do people care? Tesla fans have shown a lot of patience and they have always delivered eventually. On everything but FSD.
No idea. I only follow things at a high level. Wife likes her Model 3. Great performance and value for the price. She hasn’t tried autopilot once and we never paid for FSD. I don’t think the market really cares about FSD. Tesla is the first modern and new auto maker in decades to really see any significant cultural and market penetration. I’ll give Elon a pass, or rather Tesla a pass for Elon’s overhyping everything. What they have done and delivered is quite amazing to me.
The cable was never a product. It was basically R&D project.
Battery swap works fine on early Model S but they changed strategy very quickly after showing it off. It was only ever announced as a pilot program. It just doesn't make sense and they rather invested in Superchargers.
All cars after Model S were not announced to be able do do swapping.
Even on the Model S the added a shield under the car to protect the battery even if you drive big debris at high speed.
> Tesla fans have shown a lot of patience and they have always delivered eventually.
And a bunch of other things (many mentioned innthe post you respond to), that may or may not get delivered in the future, but factually have nor yet been delivered.
Average returns are what you should base a decision like that on right? Looking back it’s easy. But you can’t assume outsize performance when making such a decision.
All true. But you could argue that deposits for roadster or semi are made by people who have a lot of excess cash or are able to make their own due diligence on the subject. Neither can be said about the average Joe who shelled out 10 grand last year in expectation that his car will drive itself in a couple months.
Did anyone actually believe that you'd be able to rent out your Tesla for money? I know there are a lot of gullible people but that doesn't even pass the sniff test.
I think companies need to develop some products for intermediate stages between where we are now and FSD. Here are some ideas.
1. FSD in certain parking lots. Make deals with some major stores that tend to have big parking lots (such Walmart, Target, Home Depot) to map their parking lots and designate specific areas for rider drop off and for unattended parking. Special signage or road markings would be added to the parking lot to identify these areas and how to move between them.
You can drive to one of these lots, go to the drop off area, and get out of your car. The car then can drive itself to the designated parking area while you go in and shop. When you are done, you can summon it and it drives back to the drop off area to get you.
2. FSD on certain stretches of major freeways. E.g., I-10 between Santa Monica and near downtown Los Angeles, or I-5 from where 99 splits off south of Bakersfield up to where the 580 starts and then up that a ways.
3. A service where for a monthly subscription you get FSD or close to it but only on trips between specific points, such as between your home and office.
The way it would work is that you would drive the route several times and the car records it and uploads it to the company. They use that uploaded data to test their FSD software to see if it can handle that particular route, and tweak it as necessary to either handle places it was having trouble or to hard-code special rules.
If the car notices that something has changed and it isn't sure it can handle it, you have to go back to manual driving and the car uploads footage and sensor data and the company fixes it.
Each route would probably have a setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee.
That's what I was originally thinking of as the minimum viable product in my DARPA Grand Challenge days. Mostly for rental cars at airports. If you'd booked a rental car, one would arrive at the terminal ready for use, and you'd get in and drive away manually. For airport departure, you'd leave the vehicle at the terminal, and it would slowly drive itself back to the rental lot.
No need to go faster than 20 MPH, and you could put markers and sensors in the roads if necessary.
There's been too little done with slow-speed automatic driving. Google made their little bubble car, but dropped that product. There are some fully automated shuttle buses, but that's a tiny business. About 25 companies are in that business, but other than Baidu, few have any deployments beyond test scale.
> They use that uploaded data to test their FSD software to see if it can handle that particular route, and tweak it as necessary to either handle places it was having trouble or to hard-code special rules.
This is an approach that is doomed to fail, because trying to hardcode the particulars of a specific route will converge to working pretty well until the moment something completely unexpected happens which needs human-level AI to be able to handle in the moment.
This is why level 5 autopilot isn't really going to happen without the invention of real AI, which is debatable whether that'll ever be achieved. Most certainly not in any of the timeframes Musk keeps promising.
Betting that it'd work and increase the value of your car. And Musk is still selling that it'll work really soon now (of course, he also said it'd drive across the country by itself by 2018):
Car companies whose name is not Tesla have generally been pretty realistic in my experience because they're pretty much fine with continuing down the path of improving assistive systems (and incrementally developing EVs). They're fine with not having FSD so long as others don't.
With the somewhat exception of Waymo (which I don't really understand although it's probably related to internal incentives) the companies making the more outrageous claims are mostly companies who see FSD as a secret sauce that's essential to their business.
This is indeed newly listed as a risk factor in connection with FSD features. Items from the previous 10k where about competition and regulation:
- "For example, Model 3 and Model Y face competition from existing and future automobile manufacturers in the extremely competitive entry-level premium sedan and compact SUV markets, including BMW, Ford, Lexus, Mercedes, Volkswagen Group and Volvo. A significant and growing number of established and new automobile manufacturers, as well as other companies, have entered or are reported to have plans to enter the alternative fuel vehicle market, including hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles, as well as the market for self-driving technology and other vehicle applications and software platforms." [1]
- "In particular, we offer in our vehicles Autopilot and FSD features that today assist drivers with certain tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel, but which currently require drivers to remain engaged. We are continuing to develop our FSD technology with the goal of achieving full self-driving capability in the future. There is a variety of international, federal and state regulations that may apply to self-driving vehicles, which include many existing vehicle standards that were not originally intended to apply to vehicles that may not have a driver. Such regulations continue to rapidly change, which increases the likelihood of a patchwork of complex or conflicting regulations, or may delay products or restrict self-driving features and availability, which could adversely affect our business.
" [1]
While some of it was almost certainly hucksterism, I think it's also true that a lot of people saw the rapid pace of advance (mostly because of ML computer vision) and just couldn't imagine that the remaining kinks wouldn't be worked out sooner rather than later.
And young urbanites in particular so wanted to believe in a world where they wouldn't need to own a car and would effectively have a personal driver to whisk them around and run errands for them.
Go back a few years and many here were incredulous if anyone suggested we might be looking at decades to have full door-to-door self-driving.
I think in a recent CES talk Mobileye CEO mentioned that Googles models for speech recognition hit a wall after a certain level of expontial improvement. It is not clear that the required robustness and accuracy can be solved with Deep Learning and cameras alone (Not this year or next anyways). I cannot find the exact quote but the talk in itself is very interesting. [1] He is very bullish on vision but says Tesla is making a huge gamble by betting the house on Deep Learning alone. They seem to be far ahead of Tesla in terms of developing a safe and viable FSD solution with the necessary redundancy.
There's a comment in the last chapter of Russell and Norvig's AI textbook to effect of "We've made steady progress, right up to the top of the tree."
There is certainly a school of thought that we'll need to tap into interdisciplinary fields like cognitive science to continue making real advances. It certainly feels as a consumer that things like voice assistants, ML transcription, computer vision systems are not that different than they were a few years ago.
Yes. The advances in Deep Learning are very impressive and are already proving useful. Still there seem to be no real breakthroughs in actual intelligence, reasoning or something that resembles consciousness.
A lot of money and smarts has gone into studying cognitive processes and neurophysiology over <shudder> the past five decades. (I first took an Intro to Brain Science course in 1976.)
It's actually longer than that. Interesting bit of trivia is that the 1956 MIT IEEE conference that is usually dated as the origin of cognitive science as a field, though the term wasn't coined until later, was just a few months after McCarthy's Dartmouth workshop that's usually considered the origin of AI.
I dipped into a recent MIT class on video last year. As far as I can tell, some pretty basic things--like how do children learn--are as imperfectly understood now as they were in the late 70s.
mobileye previous CEO made a video a few years ago about the theoretical limits to level5,
explaining exactly why the number of edge cases made a training approach like neural network impractical.
I hope that everybody will one day give this guy some
credits, after the storm he must have faced when elon musk dropped mobileeye stating they didn't move fast enough, and claiming level5 was just around the corner.
As far as I understand Mobileye dropped Tesla because of their reckless marketing. Also they are heavily using cameras but additional sensors for redundancy.
Solving the 50% case of self driving is something any talented hobbyist can do. Solving for 70% is something that a few companies with billions of dollars will be able to do. Solving for 90% is something that a few companies with billions of dollars of investment may be able to do. Solving for 100% is something that at present no entity on the planet can do. Claiming that you can is disqualifying, it turns you from a 'possible' into a 'must fail' because you lack the realistic constraints required to participate.
Tesla - unfortunately - falls squarely in the latter category, they have set themselves up for failure.
Tesla is claiming it is literally around the corner and lets people pay 10kUSD for the privilege. I think this is the difficult part as non-technical people might take the claims at face value.
Yeah, Tesla are acting like clowns. I was just wondering if the statement really meant anything as formulated, because it is qualified with 'at present'.
If some other company succeeds next week, it wasn't wrong, because the statement is about right now. And so on for any time in the future.
If it happens next week I'll be happy to retract it. If it happens in the next decade I'll be amazed. If it happens in the next century I'd still call it a very impressive accomplishment (only I won't be around to do so).
My prediction is we get to L4 (bounded limited access roads and weather conditions) soon-ish which is a huge win for both convenience and safety. Getting over the "uncanny valley" is a challenge but seems doable. And pretty much punt on dense urban driving as a commercial research project.
Imho, dense urban driving should be solved similar to limited access roads and parking lots with a a combination of pedestrian super blocks (such that Barcelona has). Deprioritize vehicles in urban settings and segregate them from other (more squishy) users. If you can’t AI solve for edge cases, build infrastructure to avoid them.
And that is complicated by the fact that, all else being equal, people are generally willing to pay a lot more money for a house in pedestrian-friendly areas. I have friends in Houston, TX and it’s true even there.
If you had a free hand and could design a city with no-pedestrian auto sewer zones and no-FSD-vehicle pedestrian-friendly zones, you are basically going to create the stereotype that FSD is for poor people.
I'm not sure that is true in general. I live an hour outside a city and wouldn't trade a (certainly smaller) place in the city for the same amount of money.
Yes, but that is the point: Tesla claims that they are within striking distance of that goal, to the point that they ask people to pay for it today. Which is - not to put too fine a point on it - a fraudulent claim.
I doubt you ever see 100% if only because there will always be factors outside of a vehicle's control that maybe a newer version could mitigate better. But certainly the bar is very high (and should be).
I think solving 100% is possible but unlikely as I believe it would require two things that I doubt will happen in the next 50+ years:
All cars to universally communicate with each other.
The roads themselves to have sensors relaying information to the cars.
I’m skeptical car sensors alone will ever be able to accomplish the end goal they’re seeking, especially in the face of potential bad actors intentionally trying to break them. The only way I see that changing is with some unexpected monumental leap in technology. Like a 10000x increase in storage and compute power.
Also, any solution requiring the roads to be better and in tip-top condition is a nonstarter. It is really not that hard to find reports of a rich-world jurisdiction where the roads are potholed and the paint is barely visible, and we expect the authorities to change their lack of maintenance all of a sudden?
It is already technically feasible to have cheap mass produced RFID dust directly mixed into the tar/concrete pavement and programmed to supply navigation/road condition information. They don't even need sensors, the cars using the road could update the data instead.
The cynic in me could imagine how the road will inform the car where the potholes are, car will automatically avoid them and the road maintenance can be further postponed.
The amount of additional money in any road budget for this is $0. Are Tesla and Waymo et al supposed to fund this out of pocket? Because otherwise it's not happening.
RFID is not capable of serving ads on its own. They're basically just wireless barcodes.
In any case, privately funded anything for roads only works on very heavily traveled roads where there's enough traffic to justify trying to reach out to potential customers that way. Your quiet suburban street, mountain road, or rural interstate is not going to generate enough traffic to pay for itself, so it won't happen. And billboards and roadside advertising are not even legal in all 50 states of the US, let alone other countries.
They are mixed in when laying the road, so they are firmly embedded in the material. Car that detects a pothole will save the information into remaining chips around it.
So the car is detecting the pothole itself? What's the point then? Cars could potentially do this now without any rfid-in-the-road silliness. What problem is this solving?
Hacker News was full of people somehow assuming progress there would advance linearly, and plainly telling so ("look how much progress we've made in the last 5 years"). Or comparing the problem of autonomous self driving to much, much more solvable problems (plane autopilots: mostly flying straight lines in a featureless void).
Though to be fair, there were also always people in the comments who realized the immense complexity of the problem, suspecting that fully autonomous driving might need either massive infrastructure changes (bringing those cars closer to something akin of an autonomous train), or generalized AI.
> Go back a few years and many here were incredulous if anyone suggested we might be looking at decades to have full door-to-door self-driving.
As someone who has done this kind of push-back here, I can confirm - this place was highly incredulous of, if not downright hostile, to people with experience in AI who were explaining all these were false promises.
Anyone who actually did robotics knew just how much of a pipe dream this is, how slow progress is, and how solving the easy 50% is worth nothing because the real world gets superlinearly difficult. ML made a great jump, but it only solved parts of the problems we needed solving, and so far failed to introduce a bridge to those other parts. But you try telling people, and they won't listen, and now I understand the curse of Cassandra. :)
But I'm reserving special bile for those CEOs and Directors of Research who knew full well that we don't know how to make this stuff, and that most of it is an open research problem that's decades away from productizing - and yet they marketed it anyway, as if it was a done product that's ready to go, and took customers' and investors' money for something that experts knew was very, very, very clearly vaporware.
I'm not an expert in the area but I listen to experts like John Leonard, Rodney Brooks, and Missy Cummings who don't have a vested interest and I draw conclusions.
Trust me. I'd love to have FSD--although it's not without its problems--but I just don't see it in the near future whatever delusional software developers may think.
I know why companies like Uber presented themselves as they did. I'm genuinely curious whether Waymo thought they were closer than they were, drank too much of their own Kool-aid, or just lied.
Rod Brooks is a great example, he's someone who has done more in robotics, across a range of paradigms, than maybe anyone else in the world - and who has been very candid in his criticisms of promises around full self driving.
But it doesn't matter, people choose to believe marketing hucksters instead. :(
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time".[1][2] — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
It sees difficult for anyone who was in the ML computer vision or self driving vehicle field to have made those predictions, which make it all the more problematic that Tesla still decided too, despite having all the information at hand.
Meanwhile Mobileye is quietly crushing it. Below videos show apparently unedited driving for 40+ minutes in heavy traffic in Israel and Germany. Of course this is marketing material so to be taken with a grain of salt but it looks like they are really for ahead in real world driving / decision making. Also the perception layer looks way more stable than the current FSD Beta (I think 8.1).
Indeed, one of the more impressive performances to date. But: if half of the cars would drive like this (all over the road, splitting lanes, not merging efficiently, deciding late and braking harder than necessary through lack of anticipation) then it would become a pretty big mess on the road.
Still, those are bugs that can likely be ironed out, at least they didn't pick an easy track to pretend the tech is better than it really is.
Driving in Jerusalem is a nightmare for humans too, the first video was really impressive.
It’s a shame they didn’t add road sign detection to the overlay it’s harder to judge some of the situations especially around right of way since in Israel right of way is for traffic incoming from the right unless there is a sign that tells you to yield so some of the more dodgy situations involved drivers not yielding correctly.
Overall they do seem to be currently quietly leading the pack and most importantly they are delivering an evolutionary progression as far as assistive driving goes.
Also it’s quite interesting that Mobileye seems to be one of the only few if not the only one that is not relying on deep learning to brute force this problem.
Which is think would be the deciding factor here since it reduces the demand on the hardware and results in a subset of more efficient algorithms which in theory can be formally verified and individually tweaked.
George Hotz from Comma has discussed this in interviews + podcasts, and has said that FSD is further away than the hype makes it seem. It's why he knew Comma had a shot at assisted driving against Tesla, and this just proves he's right in that regard.
Question for legal-minded folks: at what point is a class action likely to succeed, if ever? Are they basically safe for as long as they keep incrementally shipping level 2 assistance features and calling them “FSD”? That seems to be the strategy for now.
I see one's reaction to Tesla, Musk, "AI" and all the FSD hype as a kind of real-world IQ test. No way in hell anybody should be hired for a responsible, technical role if they paid Musk for FSD.
I really don't get your comment. LIDAR of the type used by Waymo simply isn't possible to be put into a standard car of the price of a Model 3 or even Model S.
So these cars would simply have been delivered without that hardware.
Some limited types of lidar are only now starting to make their way into cars, but those are not near the required resolution.
Even if you assume magically they could have done that, even with LIDAR nobody has solved self-driving yet. So what are you base your assumption on that they would be further along?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadDisclosure: Tesla S/X owner (EAP, no FSD), party to the class action regarding S/X premature suspension failures.
Edit. I've found it: https://seekingalpha.com/filing/5494291
> Deferred revenue activity related to the access to our Supercharger network, internet connectivity, Full Self Driving (“FSD”) features and over-the-air software updates on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantee amounted to $2.00 billion and $1.93 billion as of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively.
> Deferred revenue is equivalent to the total transaction price allocated to the performance obligations that are unsatisfied, or partially unsatisfied, as of the balance sheet date. Revenue recognized from the deferred revenue balance as of December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $79 million and $57 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Of the total deferred revenue on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantees as of March 31, 2021, we expect to recognize $1.21 billion of revenue in the next 12 months. The remaining balance will be recognized over the performance period which is generally the expected ownership life of the vehicle or the eight-year life of the vehicle.
Oh well. The lawsuits will be interesting to watch. I'm sorry for the people who have been fooled into purchasing FSD.
IMO they have less than 50% chance that they will actually get a car that drives itself without babysitting before 2025.
I understand 5 years ago when Tesla was doing things nobody else was doing but electric cars are mainstream now. If I had the money I'd be buying a Volvo Polestar.
You need to drink the Kool-aid pretty hard in order to buy hypercars like the LaFerrari but there's not really anything on the scale of Tesla.
The pickup truck people are very brand loyal and don't forget the buy American crowd.
You just see a lot of Tesla stuff because there is a cross section of tech people who like Tesla because it is marketed like a phone instead of a car.
Your $10k got you the hardware needed to self-drive to some degree, with improvements trickling in indefinitely. Can it drive you from here to there with very little (and decreasing) intervention? What did you actually expect (serious question)?
Don't all new Teslas come with the hardware and the self-driving is a software upgrade? My impression was that the purchase basically locked in a price. I could be wrong on this.
I'll be all-in on self-driving when I can use it to go to the bar and come home, until then it's mostly just an interesting technological exercise.
But, yes, there are many use cases that go by the wayside if you don't have reliable door-to-door driving without human input.
There are questions about both whether the current sensor package is sufficient and even bigger questions about whether an upgrade to FSD happens in the life of the vehicle. (My money would be on not.)
I don't think they know enough yet to construct ASICs and decide on consumer-priced sensors. Hellaciously interesting problem though, I wish I were working on it.
I buy the FSD to help move us in that direction. I’m actually happy with their progress so far and I recognize they have a loooooong way to go.
They are making great progress as is the industry as a whole both in electrics and driving Capabilities.
* Navigate on Autopilot
* Auto Lane Change
* Autopark
* Summon
* Full Self-Driving Computer
* Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
When Cadillac's Super Cruise option is $2,500, $10K is still a huge premium, but it doesn't look like you can get those features independent of the FSD package from Tesla.
$7k (x 2) at the time, reason was to help Tesla survive. Was not expecting anything else for my money in the next few years.
Nowadays Tesla’s survival seems more assured, so if I did it today, it would no longer be for that reason.
Some people pay for it thinking that it will be much more expensive later.
I question this thinking though, because once it’s possible, it will be a table stakes feature we take for granted on every car, which means it shouldn’t add a huge bump to the price. But maybe I’m thinking about it wrong.
Man there is something truly remarkable about Musk that he successfully convinced some people to, in effect, treat Tesla, a for-profit company, as a charity and to donate to them thousands of dollars with no expectation of anything in return.
Any other company would just raise money from investors, whether those be institution or from main street via the stock or bond markets.
But Tesla just sold folks a dream and they bought it, allowing Tesla to generate cashflow without Musk having to worry about pesky shareholders or dilution or even delivering a working product.
I suspect that phenomenon will be studied in business school for years to come.
Honestly, I think I’m safer with auto steer on. I’ve had the car hit the brakes when someone turns across my lane and I felt it was too conservative, but then I started wondering if I was too aggressive.
I wanted to watch my Model Y get smarter as OTA updates came in.
Roadster deposits? Deposits opened in 2015. That's more than half a decade ago. The Roadster is still vapourware as far as anyone can tell. Barely gets mentioned anywhere except for the occasional outrageous Musk tweet lie "it will have rockets!".
Tesla Semi? Deposits opened a couple years ago and the design isn't even finalized. The line to produce these does not exist yet.
Tesla Cybertruck? At least the deposit is just $100, but this was a shift in interest-free capital raising by Tesla (volume instead of quantity). The design has not yet been completed, never mind the line - the pre-requisite line to produce the batteries this vehicle will use doesn't even exist yet.
Now imagine if you had put any of those deposits in an alternative investment. Roadster deposit holders could be millionaires just off not putting down a deposit and instead putting it on anything - including Tesla stock.
The stock is Tesla's real product. Everything else is something on the way to meeting the performance milestones so Musk can get hits bonuses, but the good news is he can help you get a bonus too since you could have bought shares.
What happened to the battery swaps and tentacle porn charging cable?
Battery swap works fine on early Model S but they changed strategy very quickly after showing it off. It was only ever announced as a pilot program. It just doesn't make sense and they rather invested in Superchargers.
All cars after Model S were not announced to be able do do swapping.
Even on the Model S the added a shield under the car to protect the battery even if you drive big debris at high speed.
Seems like these are kind pedantic examples.
And a bunch of other things (many mentioned innthe post you respond to), that may or may not get delivered in the future, but factually have nor yet been delivered.
I mean, Tesla’s still better than Möller, but...
Funny how the sentiment is shifting to "no one actually believe this, do they?"
Many have been warning that FSD will not happen in the lifetime of these tesla's but people want to believe and they believe everything Elon promises.
In a way selling FSD using FOMO that when it becomes available it will cost x times more is a brilliant yet devious tactic.
1. FSD in certain parking lots. Make deals with some major stores that tend to have big parking lots (such Walmart, Target, Home Depot) to map their parking lots and designate specific areas for rider drop off and for unattended parking. Special signage or road markings would be added to the parking lot to identify these areas and how to move between them.
You can drive to one of these lots, go to the drop off area, and get out of your car. The car then can drive itself to the designated parking area while you go in and shop. When you are done, you can summon it and it drives back to the drop off area to get you.
2. FSD on certain stretches of major freeways. E.g., I-10 between Santa Monica and near downtown Los Angeles, or I-5 from where 99 splits off south of Bakersfield up to where the 580 starts and then up that a ways.
3. A service where for a monthly subscription you get FSD or close to it but only on trips between specific points, such as between your home and office.
The way it would work is that you would drive the route several times and the car records it and uploads it to the company. They use that uploaded data to test their FSD software to see if it can handle that particular route, and tweak it as necessary to either handle places it was having trouble or to hard-code special rules.
If the car notices that something has changed and it isn't sure it can handle it, you have to go back to manual driving and the car uploads footage and sensor data and the company fixes it.
Each route would probably have a setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee.
That's what I was originally thinking of as the minimum viable product in my DARPA Grand Challenge days. Mostly for rental cars at airports. If you'd booked a rental car, one would arrive at the terminal ready for use, and you'd get in and drive away manually. For airport departure, you'd leave the vehicle at the terminal, and it would slowly drive itself back to the rental lot.
No need to go faster than 20 MPH, and you could put markers and sensors in the roads if necessary.
There's been too little done with slow-speed automatic driving. Google made their little bubble car, but dropped that product. There are some fully automated shuttle buses, but that's a tiny business. About 25 companies are in that business, but other than Baidu, few have any deployments beyond test scale.
This is an approach that is doomed to fail, because trying to hardcode the particulars of a specific route will converge to working pretty well until the moment something completely unexpected happens which needs human-level AI to be able to handle in the moment.
This is why level 5 autopilot isn't really going to happen without the invention of real AI, which is debatable whether that'll ever be achieved. Most certainly not in any of the timeframes Musk keeps promising.
2020 Q4 Earnings call, 27th Jan 2021 (according to https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/01/27/te...)
Musk: So -- and this is -- basically I'm highly confident the car will drive itself for the reliability in excess of a human this year. [...]
<later>
Director of Investor Relations: [...] The next question is, why are you confident Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy in 2021? [...]
Musk: I guess, I'm confident based on my understanding of the technical roadmap and the progress that we're making between each beta iteration.
More seriously, can you still ask for your money back? This whole business of selling something that doesn’t exist and may never exist is pretty odd.
As an example, Honda doesn't seem to make too many over-hyped promises [0].
[0]: https://www.honda.co.jp/news/2021/4210304-legend.html
With the somewhat exception of Waymo (which I don't really understand although it's probably related to internal incentives) the companies making the more outrageous claims are mostly companies who see FSD as a secret sauce that's essential to their business.
- "For example, Model 3 and Model Y face competition from existing and future automobile manufacturers in the extremely competitive entry-level premium sedan and compact SUV markets, including BMW, Ford, Lexus, Mercedes, Volkswagen Group and Volvo. A significant and growing number of established and new automobile manufacturers, as well as other companies, have entered or are reported to have plans to enter the alternative fuel vehicle market, including hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles, as well as the market for self-driving technology and other vehicle applications and software platforms." [1]
- "In particular, we offer in our vehicles Autopilot and FSD features that today assist drivers with certain tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel, but which currently require drivers to remain engaged. We are continuing to develop our FSD technology with the goal of achieving full self-driving capability in the future. There is a variety of international, federal and state regulations that may apply to self-driving vehicles, which include many existing vehicle standards that were not originally intended to apply to vehicles that may not have a driver. Such regulations continue to rapidly change, which increases the likelihood of a patchwork of complex or conflicting regulations, or may delay products or restrict self-driving features and availability, which could adversely affect our business. " [1]
1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data//1318605/00015645902...
And young urbanites in particular so wanted to believe in a world where they wouldn't need to own a car and would effectively have a personal driver to whisk them around and run errands for them.
Go back a few years and many here were incredulous if anyone suggested we might be looking at decades to have full door-to-door self-driving.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4BXxPvHi60
There is certainly a school of thought that we'll need to tap into interdisciplinary fields like cognitive science to continue making real advances. It certainly feels as a consumer that things like voice assistants, ML transcription, computer vision systems are not that different than they were a few years ago.
It's actually longer than that. Interesting bit of trivia is that the 1956 MIT IEEE conference that is usually dated as the origin of cognitive science as a field, though the term wasn't coined until later, was just a few months after McCarthy's Dartmouth workshop that's usually considered the origin of AI.
I dipped into a recent MIT class on video last year. As far as I can tell, some pretty basic things--like how do children learn--are as imperfectly understood now as they were in the late 70s.
It sure is a good excuse for a bunch of rolling surveillance though.
I hope that everybody will one day give this guy some credits, after the storm he must have faced when elon musk dropped mobileeye stating they didn't move fast enough, and claiming level5 was just around the corner.
This is the logistic curve.
Tesla - unfortunately - falls squarely in the latter category, they have set themselves up for failure.
Isn't this tautologically true right up until it isn't?
If some other company succeeds next week, it wasn't wrong, because the statement is about right now. And so on for any time in the future.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/9/18300797...
If you had a free hand and could design a city with no-pedestrian auto sewer zones and no-FSD-vehicle pedestrian-friendly zones, you are basically going to create the stereotype that FSD is for poor people.
I'm a little surprised the Michigan or Texas DAs haven't filed anything.
All cars to universally communicate with each other.
The roads themselves to have sensors relaying information to the cars.
I’m skeptical car sensors alone will ever be able to accomplish the end goal they’re seeking, especially in the face of potential bad actors intentionally trying to break them. The only way I see that changing is with some unexpected monumental leap in technology. Like a 10000x increase in storage and compute power.
The cynic in me could imagine how the road will inform the car where the potholes are, car will automatically avoid them and the road maintenance can be further postponed.
In any case, privately funded anything for roads only works on very heavily traveled roads where there's enough traffic to justify trying to reach out to potential customers that way. Your quiet suburban street, mountain road, or rural interstate is not going to generate enough traffic to pay for itself, so it won't happen. And billboards and roadside advertising are not even legal in all 50 states of the US, let alone other countries.
Sounds like there are so many ways this could be abused/vandalized/not work.
Though to be fair, there were also always people in the comments who realized the immense complexity of the problem, suspecting that fully autonomous driving might need either massive infrastructure changes (bringing those cars closer to something akin of an autonomous train), or generalized AI.
As someone who has done this kind of push-back here, I can confirm - this place was highly incredulous of, if not downright hostile, to people with experience in AI who were explaining all these were false promises.
Anyone who actually did robotics knew just how much of a pipe dream this is, how slow progress is, and how solving the easy 50% is worth nothing because the real world gets superlinearly difficult. ML made a great jump, but it only solved parts of the problems we needed solving, and so far failed to introduce a bridge to those other parts. But you try telling people, and they won't listen, and now I understand the curse of Cassandra. :)
But I'm reserving special bile for those CEOs and Directors of Research who knew full well that we don't know how to make this stuff, and that most of it is an open research problem that's decades away from productizing - and yet they marketed it anyway, as if it was a done product that's ready to go, and took customers' and investors' money for something that experts knew was very, very, very clearly vaporware.
Trust me. I'd love to have FSD--although it's not without its problems--but I just don't see it in the near future whatever delusional software developers may think.
I know why companies like Uber presented themselves as they did. I'm genuinely curious whether Waymo thought they were closer than they were, drank too much of their own Kool-aid, or just lied.
But it doesn't matter, people choose to believe marketing hucksters instead. :(
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time".[1][2] — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety–ninety_rule
The real world is fractal edge cases.
(rimshot)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJD5R_yQ9aw
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1qNdHPyHu4
Still, those are bugs that can likely be ironed out, at least they didn't pick an easy track to pretend the tech is better than it really is.
It’s a shame they didn’t add road sign detection to the overlay it’s harder to judge some of the situations especially around right of way since in Israel right of way is for traffic incoming from the right unless there is a sign that tells you to yield so some of the more dodgy situations involved drivers not yielding correctly.
Overall they do seem to be currently quietly leading the pack and most importantly they are delivering an evolutionary progression as far as assistive driving goes.
Also it’s quite interesting that Mobileye seems to be one of the only few if not the only one that is not relying on deep learning to brute force this problem.
Which is think would be the deciding factor here since it reduces the demand on the hardware and results in a subset of more efficient algorithms which in theory can be formally verified and individually tweaked.
I really don't get your comment. LIDAR of the type used by Waymo simply isn't possible to be put into a standard car of the price of a Model 3 or even Model S.
So these cars would simply have been delivered without that hardware.
Some limited types of lidar are only now starting to make their way into cars, but those are not near the required resolution.
Even if you assume magically they could have done that, even with LIDAR nobody has solved self-driving yet. So what are you base your assumption on that they would be further along?