I'm pretty sure they have sensors showing which seats are occupied too - if there isn't a passenger detected, you shouldn't be able to launch the games in the first place - nevermind having to click and confirm you're a passenger.
My Model 3 does not disable autopilot or enables any kind of warning even if you play games with the controller while driving... At least in Europe. Please note that I just tried this once for sake of science and Im not interested in putting lifes in risk
Tesla Model Y Driver. With FSD beta it will disable autopilot even if you stare too much on a screen. It also detects when you're on the phone. It's quite strict.
Thats why I specified I was in Europe... I think that here even the front camera is not providing any kind of video feed to the computers for "privacy reasons"
If the data from the camera is just used as a sensor (ie. to see if your staring at a phone) and then disable auto-pilot and no footage is stored I wouldn't see how that would be a privacy concern?
Europe tends to have stupid ideas about privacy. The simple transmission of video between the camera and the computer is considered a privacy violation by a lot of privacy hacks.
If that's really the case Europe should revisit their privacy rules immediately (preferably by more technically capable/visionary entities).
Claiming that on-device processing of driver's video feed without uploading/storing, for safety reasons, is a threat to privacy is outrageously unacceptable.
He does something that is so incredibly outrageous knowing it will get denied but in doing so, it pushes your mental anchor so far out, that it allows him to "meet in the middle" to get something approved that would not have been approved otherwise if he hadn't anchored you so far out.
Classic populist modus operadi. Push the pendulum to one extreme and move the perceived middle ground along. He does the same with goal posts and timelines. I have to give it to him so, he gets away with it for years now. And he ultimately delivers product, something most Musk-wannabes fail to do.
> And he ultimately delivers product, something most Musk-wannabes fail to do.
Where's are the solar roof? Battery swaps? And "coast-to-coast full self driving", $35,000 Model 3?
Do you think the personal assistant robot will ever be a delivered product?
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Musk has mastered the ability to make the public forget about his promises. He doesn't deliver on these promises at all. I think we're generally wising up to his game: Musk carefully SEO's his words and public image to make the internet itself forget about these claims.
Only people who actually rely upon their own personal memories (ie: the Battery Swap demo from 2013) can pull this information out. Otherwise, they're fogotten.
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In any case, this video-games while driving thing is just more of the 2016 claim of "coast to coast full self driving by 2018". He hasn't delivered upon the promise and needs to muck up the waters even more on the subject.
> [Elon] said that the coast-to-coast test is still on track to take place at the end of the year, and that all Tesla cars built since October 2016 would be updated. The plan, announced in a Ted Talk last month, is to “go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York with no controls touched in the entire journey.”
Solar roof was on a brewery in New England I recently patroned. You can buy it if you want to pay and wait for it.
Battery swaps were to fully capture California ZEV credits until Tesla could grow large enough to not rely on them. The market for Teslas has flourished without them, relying only on Fast DC chargers for consumer range anxiety.
Personal assistant robot is a cheap marketing effort to drive recruiting of talent.
Laugh and point fingers. The methods work, regardless of the feelings about them.
> Laugh and point fingers. The methods work, regardless of the feelings about them.
No. "Battery Swap" was a lie that was never delivered and frankly just stole money from California.
We all know that __lying__ works. The last few years have made it abundantly clear that the general population is far more accepting of these lies than I'm comfortable for.
I will accept some lies for desperately needed progress. And, as you mention, lying works. Where would we be without Tesla succeeding? Definitely not where we are today. Legacy automakers are still making half hearted efforts at electrifying transportation while Tesla increases production 100% YoY. Legacy auto would’ve made no effort without Tesla coming at them hard, versus the little bit of effort they show today.
Are you willing to sacrifice morally or ethically if the change needed to mitigate climate change is going to require some less than total honesty? Consider we, again, as you mention, live in a post truth world. One must adapt to the operating environment to increases chances of success.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells and probably more widespread PHEVs.
Which would have been a superior future than where we are today.
10-million cars with 200lbs of Li-ion batteries each would save more energy from our transportation network than 2-million cars with 1000lbs of Li-ion batteries each.
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At this point. Elon is incredibly anti-progress. He's switched into fighting against alternatives and is diminishing progress on legitimate strategies (both H2 and PHEVs) because he wants to hold onto his market advantage.
I mean, the whole two engines thing is true though right? If someone else can get the cost of H2 fuel cells down to a marketable level I'm sure Tesla would be very happy to fit them as optional range extenders to its next line up.
In the UK at least, most PHEVs sold are cynically avoiding a bunch of taxes and benefit in kind. Many of them are never plugged into a charger.
> If someone else can get the cost of H2 fuel cells down to a marketable level I'm sure Tesla would be very happy to fit them as optional range extenders to its next line up.
Hyundai Xcient for one is launching imminently.
China / Zhangjiakou is launching 600+ busses on Hydrogen for the 2022 Winter Games.
I am against PHEVs. When my parents recently went shopping for a new car, I tried to sell BEV. When I failed, I encouraged them to skip PHEV and just buy ICE.
PHEV are 2x the complexity and things to worry about and go wrong. You need to stop for gas AND plug in your car every day? You need to change your oil AND potentially replace your battery?
IMO PHEV exist because they are a compliance tool to meet green energy standards, but not generally a solid product. I see them vanishing very soon as BEV production capacity increases, and they will be a tiny footnote in the history of the automobile. In fact a salesmen directly told us that the PEV we were looking at (PEV XC90 I think?) was a joke, and we could just throw the plug in the trash when we got home and ignore that it existed.
Is a PHEV any more complicated than a regular hybrid car? You still have gas and electric motors, just a bigger battery pack in the PHEV. The Prius has proven that even with a gas motor, they can be super reliable. These cars are beaten and abused by taxi fleets and Uber drivers for over 20 years now, and they still hit over 300,000 miles reliably. The electric motor takes so much work off of the gas motor, the gas motor is still usually in really good condition after that many miles.
And if you buy the right PHEV, like as in, you buy the one that fits your commute, you probably don't have to gas up much at all. I know people with PHEVs and they love them. They rarely ever put gas in them, except for long trips. All their commuting is done on electric power. They work great. I don't really get what you are on about.
Maybe you are biased as a Tesla fan and Tesla driver. I mean, I'm not even sure why else you would have mentioned that. Maybe as a disclaimer that we will know your post is biased? The fact that you're a fan has nothing to do with the reliability or quality of a PHEV, and is totally irrelevant otherwise.
Fuel Cells are the scam. The cheapest way to make hydrogen fuel is through fracking. It's dirty under the top-level.
So it's "no emissions" but still relies on the planet-killing petroleum fuel chain.
If you think PHEVs are somehow constrained by EVs - you have no idea of the patent forests Toyota and others have built on hybrid tech. It's not the lithium that's stopping PHEVs.
Coal isn't the cheapest power anymore. Your information is out of date [1]. Electrolysis or solar hydrogen production still isn't even here, much less cheaper than fracking.
Forward looking statements are no different than a $39,900 Cybertruck.
They're correct as far as my discussion point is concerned. A possibility of the future, the benefits of being forward looking.
It may not exist, but the point of the statement is to be parity with Elon Musk's discussion style. Not to be on parity with the actual truth. That's the problem: Mr. Musk imagines the future and his discussions are apparently fine. But snap back to reality and suddenly everyone else (who is working on realistic numbers) is wrong.
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Electrolysis could exist, and it could be cheap. Much like how a $39000 Cybertruck could exist in enough numbers to warrant customers putting down reservation money on it.
Its the name of the game and you know it if you've followed how this discussion evolves. Yes, I feel icky using that kind of logic but its necessary in this age.
Even if "steam reformation" (greenwashed name for hydrogen from fossil fuels) is no longer used, electrolysis of water still requires transporting water to a hydrogen plant, purifying it, electrolyzing it, and then compressing or liquefying the hydrogen for transport, and transporting the hydrogen to stations around the world.
I could see this being used for airplanes because there aren't very many airports (it's far better than avgas which contains lead, and it's probably better than jet fuel?). But there is basically nowhere outside the far far north where this could be anywhere close to being as good as electricity for cars. Even in Norway today, electric is far more popular than hydorgen.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells and probably more widespread PHEVs.
I am unconvinced by the case for hydrogen fuel cells or PHEVs.
10-million cars with 200lbs of Li-ion batteries each would save more energy from our transportation network than 2-million cars with 1000lbs of Li-ion batteries each.
The correct answer is the reduction of cars. Taking 10 million cars off the road and switching to public transit and higher density suburban and urban planning would save more energy in the long run.
Mr. Musk was pretty integral in his role of killing the California High Speed Rail project.
He created a fake solution, the Hyperloop, to steal hype away, and then never built the Hyperloop. Thereby killing the mass-transit solution of California.
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I stand by my assertion. Mr. Musk is no longer useful for the environmental cause. He is decidedly anti-progress at this point. A few years ago it was somewhat ambiguous, but now its clear.
I hope you're right and I wish the project the best. I'm no where near California, but I think rail (and high-speed rail in particular) is one of the most efficient means of transportation devised, and should be deployed and supported.
In any case, Mr. Musk has not been helpful to the cause at all.
Right. Madera to Bakersfield by 2035. This project is a joke and everyone knows it - choosing the route for political reasons, appointing politically connected sham contractors like Tutor Perini, declining the SNCF proposal to run this along I-5 instead, etc.
Texas will likely get its high-speed rail well before we do.
The current target, per the most recent business plan, is Merced to Bakersfield by the end of the decade, Silicon Valley to Central Valley (SF to Bakersfield) by 2031, and the Phase 1 system (SF to LA) by 2033. There is also work with Brightline West (the private developer of a Victorville to Las Vegas line) to jointly extend that line so that it interconnects with the Phase 1 system in Southern California, forming a combined SF-LA-LV system.
> Texas will likely get its high-speed rail well before we do.
Well, I mean, its a shorter and easier line with an earlier current planned operation date, with fewer bookend and station projects, so that wouldn’t be surprising, but they keep pushing out the construction start date while California keeps building, so I wouldn’t bet on it.
> Mr. Musk was pretty integral in his role of killing the California High Speed Rail project.
It’s not even approximately dead, so Musk having been integral in killing it doesn't seem to be either true or meaningful.
As for creating the false impression it was killed, that was mostly Newsome’s announcement shortly after taking office that described no substantive changes (it literally boiled down to “we’re going to keep building the parts we have funding to build, keep doing planning/EIRs/etc. on the rest, and not do construction on parts not currently funded until construction funding is secured”) but was widely misinterpreted, not Musk, that was responsible for that.
It was demonstrated, it’s just longer ranges plus fast charging made it irrelevant. The logistics issues of not owning a battery are also significant, you would either need to bake in a battery replacement charge to the service which is fine if replacing batteries where a regular thing, but batteries can last the lifetime of the vehicle.
And frankly the rest of the industry agrees battery swaps sound great but it was abandoned as unnecessary.
> "Battery Swap" was a lie that was never delivered
Sorry, but this can be disproved with a single Google search. They did have a battery swap station (between SF and LA), but there was minimal interest from customers.
> A Tesla spokesperson said the Harris Ranch facility is functional, but that battery swaps are only being done on a limited fleet of Tesla cars.
> “We are currently running the pilot with a small number of Model S,” said Tesla’s Khobi Brooklyn. “It’s open to a small number of Model S owners.”
> What is the point of a Tesla battery swap program that isn’t actually swapping batteries for Tesla owners?
> It could have something to do with California’s Air Resources Board and its complicated system of zero-emission vehicle credits.
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They opened a singular facility that operated at a loss for a few months, and then shut it down. With no intent on ever mass-producing this technology or dropping the costs down to be a long term sustainable solution.
They accomplished just enough to take the California tax credit, and then never spoke of it again.
Yeah, they invited a few people at first, then opened it to every Tesla owner in California, and basically nobody was interested. Supercharging was fast enough for most people, and it didn't make sense to scale out something that almost nobody was interested in.
Another notable change at that time was adding the underbody plate[1] for increased fire safety, which made the swap take longer than it otherwise would. These were offered free of charge to customers and there was very high uptake.
> then opened it to every Tesla owner in California
Nope. Never happened. 200 invitations to one location, and those invited needed to schedule an appointment to use them. Then the project was killed off.
Appointment-only service isn't what "battery swap" was about. It was supposed to be a service that was more convenient than gas stations or superchargers.
But we all know that swapping $15,000 batteries, roughly 1000lbs or more (aka: the weight of an engine lift) in 10 minutes was never really a viable business model.
> Another notable change at that time was adding the underbody plate[1] for increased fire safety
Oh thanks for reminding me of that. The plate that no longer exists on modern models, yet another broken promise of Mr. Musk.
You know, make a blogpost about how awesome Titanium is as a metal / shield, but SEO it away by a few years to make "Tesla Shield" in Google point you to floor mats. You know, to make the public forget about the entire "Shield" episode entirely and the whole controversy about exploding bottoms of Tesla cars.
California wrote an idiotic tax credit that gave +tax credits to vehicles that demonstrated a capacity to charge in under X minutes. Elon Musk shows off a battery swap demo on stage to "prove" it, and then grabbed the tax credit.
Then he threw away the battery swap demo and never talked about it again.
Its a combination of idiotic governance + a conman / liar at work. The government tax credit is a decent idea to spur innovation, but only if the government actually rewards money correctly. If it gives out money too freely, then the companies will just eat the government's face... they'll take the money but never actually develop the technology.
That's about 1/3 of the story of the battery swap experiment. Tesla put engineering behind making the battery easily removable in all Model S cars, but actual customers (like me) didn't want to use battery swaps. I'd rather supercharge.
That was only open to select members and required a reservation. It never was a viable model, or even open to public service.
And we all know that swapping $15,000 batteries out for free ain't a valid business model and never will be a valid business model. It was a project designed to maximize the California incentives and minimize the costs to Tesla for obtaining that money.
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I hope that the citizens of California learned their lesson. But even if they refuse to learn, I've learned very much from that episode.
Ah, don't get me wrong, I don't have a very high opinion of Elon. I think Tesla is over-valued as a simple car company and selling it as a tech company is borderline charlatan. And yes, he fails at a lot of, let's call them non-core, products. And usually misses timelines for core products. Anyone else trying this would be nailed to the wall, Elon pulls it off. That alone is quite a skill. With the effect that Tesla now is a viable car manufacturer, regardless of market cap.
Personally, I hate that approach to business. I don't even talk about the Solar City bail-out, his Tesla goes private tweet and all that. For some reason that really avoids me, it works...
> Anyone else trying this would be nailed to the wall, Elon pulls it off. That alone is quite a skill.
PT Barnum, Elon Musk, Edison.
More people pull it off than you'd think. Its an age old strategy of simply never admitting mistakes and hoping the American population ignores the mistakes.
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Its what we like to call a "conman", you know... people who are really good at "confidence games" (what "conman" stands for in short). You hit people with a lot of confidence, and people then give you money.
It works on small scales, it works on large scales. This isn't an attribute you should be praising. This is just how humans work, and people who abuse other humans with this tactic are immoral.
I wouldn't limit it on America, so. I'm not praising it, all things considered this behavior causes much more damage that it does, maybe, good. but even when it comes to conmen, there are bad ones, mediocre ones, good ones and really good ones. Musk absolutely is part of the latter group...
Calling him a conman given what he has achieved with electric cars and rockets is absurd. That's coming from a place of envy or resentment.
Musk over-promises, and often, but what he delivers is impressive even if it doesn't meet his promises. Therefore he's no conman.
The more interesting question is whether the over-promising is necessary if you want to achieve something substantial. Politicians certainly seem to think so.
Well, he can be both. With his conman stunts he is buying time for hos companies to finally achieve something. Sad part is, since something is done, he could just work with realistic timelines. He doesn't, and this results in Tesla et al having an unfair advantage over competitors who are measured against Elon's BS promises.
Politicians are probably the worst group to measure against when it comes to honesty and decency.
I've seen every David Mamet movie and Musk is no conman by any fair definition.
Politics works like this:
1. Politician "shares a vision"
2. People buy into that vision by voting politician into office
3. Politician never achieves vision but makes progress towards it or fails to
The vision can be something like "everyone should be able to go to college," "a good job for every American," "no more homelessness," "healthcare for every American" and so on. Is this lying? In some sense, yes, but I would say we should judge politicans by how they change the world (for better or for worse) rather than whether they actually achieve their vision.
Is it possible to make progress towards some goal without an unrealistic ideal providing inspiration?
Its well known to work. We all know it works, and there are a myriad of examples throughout US history (and maybe even in other countries).
Just because it works doesn't mean its moral.
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Leverage your popularity, start fights in the public, get the common people low-key interested (but not interested enough to actually look at the facts, just interested enough to follow the fun stuff) and give them a show. Suddenly you get a ton of supporters.
Politicians, Lawyers, and yes, CEOs / Businessmen commonly do this. Call it whatever you want, its not something I think we should b glorifying as a society.
Whether this process is justifiable or moral is an interesting question. A second question is whether there's any alternative (I doubt it). One thing's for sure: the border between "vision" and "lie" is hard to figure out.
Over selling being necessary is a drag, & it exists in internal politics too. It's priced in, so giving someone a realistic schedule/budget causes two problems: they lower your expected range by thinking your realistic numbers are optimistic, & it breaks the lull that some project is going to save having to put in hard work still
A large portion of the users here are jealous of what he has achieved, and it's very obvious by the pile-on negativity any time an article with Musk in the text comes up.
You would have to be delusion to call him a con-man in 2021, but yet it is still happening. Oh well, as Taylor Swift famously wrote "haters gonna hate"
I think I have met someone jealous like you mentioned .
Within 2 hours of meeting them, Somehow the new austin gigafactory was brought up and they started to attack Musk to paint him as a failure. Just citing random tidbits and facts.
I didn’t really argue since I am not that invested nor do i think Musks needs me to defend his reputation lol.
Im not really on twitter or social media anymore except for occasional HN, so this took me by surprise but I guess this is more common than I thought.
The current base price of $39,490 is is 34,997$ in 2017 dollars when it was introduced. So not only where they selling at 35k for a while, in real terms they still are.
The website quotes $4300 in "gasoline savings". A number that's suspiciously higher than I remember before. I wonder if Tesla has been changing the calculation on their "gas savings" to match marketing needs.
In any case, "gasoline savings" is not an incentive.
That or gasoline is currently expensive, it’s up 60% over the last 18 months though closer to 50% from 5 years ago. https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
I find including the gas savings number a poor choice even if you see the real price well before buying the car. It simply varies to much both over time and based on driving habits for any general number to be very relevant, also nobody shows the impacts of say insurance costs on different car models.
Website only lists a subset of prices and they go back and forth on this over time.
It wasn’t until February 2019 that the $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range became available. Less than two months later, Tesla announced that the Standard Range model would no longer be available for order on its website, though buyers could still order it “off-menu,” either in a Tesla store or over the phone.
Only today, that isn’t a statement they will still sell you a Model 3 for that nominal price in 4 or 40 years. Rather it’s a statement they will sell you for that price right now.
He said they would sell at 35k and they did, briefly.
> So not only where they selling at 35k for a while, in real terms they still are.
And I’m just saying no, because if they want to say they are still selling a $35k car, it needs to be priced $35k today. Sure, they started with a $35k car, but it is no longer the case. I haven’t suddenly increased my car budget from $35k to $40k in the last 4 years, regardless of inflation, because inflation != income growth. I still want a $35k car, and the fact they said for so long they would have one, and then upped the price, is annoying because I would spend $35k on a car but not $40k, regardless today or 2017.
They aren’t advertising a 35k car today, but this feels like beating a dead horse so I will drop it.
inflation != income growth.
That’s a fair point, but it really means you have taken a pay cut over the last few years. Without inflation that same pay cut would have meant you couldn’t afford a 35k car, so blame whoever you’re working for not Tesla.
Though if it’s something other than a shitty employer then I apologize for the tone. My personal finances have also taken a hit.
Oh you’re totally correct here, that is definitely a pay cut against inflation - fortunately not the case for me, just expressing this opinion, thanks for your kindness there.
I am indeed beating the dead horse here, but I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really wish there was an even cheaper model, because $35k/$40k seems to be right at that point of pushing the budget of a budget car into luxury territory, and not truly giving consumers what they want, a base model. Sorry if I’m not being clear, a bit hard to explain.
But that’s not Tesla’s problem, just an issue of the economics of the industry at this point. Hoping we see that significant drop in cost as battery tech evolves.
Each discussion I have, my arguments grow stronger. I see what works and doesn't work, and prepare for the same discussion to happen say... 2 or 3 months from now. Everyone else forgets about the discussion, and I hold onto my strengthened arguments to hit them again.
It takes a few years, but over the long term, my arguments evolve into a stronger form, and people start to listen.
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I've learned that while the Internet's memory is long, people's individual memories are short. You have plenty of opportunities to improve your arguments over time.
Its no different from what Elon is doing here: leveraging the shortness of the typical person's memory to make his marketing tricks work.
Where are the electric cars from all the traditional manufacturers? Lucid and Rivian are starting to roll out production vehicles after years of failing to deliver more than vapour and promises.
Solar roof has been deployed and you can read any number of stories about failed certification (certain utilities are not interested in certifying connection of rooftop solar).
Battery swap was only ever a compliance technology which Tesla abandoned as soon as the regulatory requirements were removed.
That often results in the pendulum swinging in the other direction. Aka Trump would have had a much harder time after Bush than he did after Obama would have had a harder time after Clinton than he did after Bush etc.
I mean, it works, kind of scary when you modify the firmware of society and society actually goes along with your fake ideology when you personally believe something less extreme, but its nice when you can just leave.
There is absolutely nothing outrageous about this. There's nothing wrong with the passenger playing a game.
There are plenty of other distractions in the world, if you can't stop yourself from looking at a screen while driving, you shouldn't be driving in the first place. It's not the job of the car to stop you.
Imagine if Tesla made you a deal. We'll give you $1000/year if you let us display ads on your center console. Leaving aside how dystopian that would be, can you imagine that even remotely passing muster from a safety perspective?
Yes, drivers have lots of distractions. Some of which are unavoidable, some of which are generally considered acceptable (conversations that don't require taking hands off the wheel or eyes materially off the road), and some of which like texting which are totally on them. But that doesn't mean we should add more features that are just crying out to distract drivers further--especially given that every passenger absolutely has their own screen to play games or watch videos in their pockets.
But you do need to look at the screen while driving. It's the thing I like the least about my Model 3, since the screen isn't directly in the line of sight.
All the instrumentation of a traditional car are on the one Model 3 screen.
Want to know your speed? You need to look down and to the right (or left, depending on which side the driver sits). Getting too cold? You need to look down, carefully tap on the bottom edge of the screen, hope you hit the correct pixels to bump the temp up.
Critical, time sensitive, alerts also appear on the screen. As do totally useless alerts. What are those warning sounds for? Look down at the screen. It's telling you that you're about to drift out of your lane and should correct yourself. Warning sounds again. Look down at the screen. Neat. It's telling me my premium connectivity trial has expired as I'm merging onto a busy freeway during rush hour.
Traditional car UIs aren't designed on a whim. Physical controls are designed to be usable without looking at them. Critical information is visible without needing to look away from the road.
I love the car. I hate the screen. I hate that fanboys see it as "advanced", when I suspect it was used because it's a lot cheaper to build a software UI than a physical one.
I don't get this. What's so incredibly outrageous about enabling a game to be played while driving? Why on earth would Elon give two hoots wether or not his games are being played while driving? I think tesla just decided that disabling the game feature while the car is in motion is not necessary because why can't the passenger play. There's nothing outrageous about Tersla not nannying the driver. Anyway, there are infinite ways a driver can distract himself just using the touchscreen alone.
I'm quite happy as a passenger to play some games in tesla while on a road trip.
Tesla's multi media center is a vision of phone-less experience in the car. I can see every day people swiping their phones, doing shopping while driving. In fact every 3rd 4th traffic light "sleeping" driver is due to the phone. How tesla games are that different from having a phone? Tesla at least doing some measures to prevent this. The order of problem of a phone with Tesla screen is not even comparable. And yes, FSD beta detects when you're on the phone.
Does any car manufacture or phone manufacture ( AppleCar android auto doing something to stop this )?
Then use your phone as a passenger. I have trouble seeing visual distractions unrelated to driving like games, videos, or books on the console as anything other than an "attractive nuisance."
Luckily you're not my driver :) They split the screen no issues with that, with me driving or my partner. If you don't like it don't use it.
large amount of cars mount phones in the car, with all the notifications, phone calls etc.. It's far, far bigger problem compares to a game that make sense only on a highway few times a year.
My personal issue with this idea is that cars - presently, are driven by humans, and while we can look to the future, the present necessitates that we design by these standards.
Cars are methods of transportation (and even though I'm a car enthusiast, who enjoys driving) they should be driver focused. The center screen in a Tesla is where _all_ the information is available for the driver. There are no secondary gauges or other driver-specific controls or displays. The car, presently, should be oriented for the driver to pay the most attention to the vehicle, the road, and their surroundings.
If there's a display behind the driver, or solely on the passenger side of the vehicle out of sight and reach of the driver, then it can be presumed to operate for the passengers of the vehicle.
It doesn't matter. It's a totally unnecessary distraction for the driver. And, yes, there are other non driving-related distractions--both their phone and things like music (which has existed in some form forever)--but that's not a reason to add another. The passenger can use whatever entertainment they want that doesn't distract the driver. This is an absolutely stupid idea.
> The center screen in a Tesla is where _all_ the information is available for the driver. There are no secondary gauges or other driver-specific controls or displays.
That's not true for the S & X FYI, they have an instrument cluster.
> The car, presently, should be oriented for the driver to pay the most attention to the vehicle, the road, and their surroundings.
Games don't cover the psudo instrument cluster on the single-screen vehicles.
Even if they don't cover the instrument cluster or the pseudo cluster, the screen is the main interface for the driver. Even though the passenger may interact with the display, the mandatory functions of the car and even required secondary functions are built into the display and thus it would result in a primary usecase for the driver.
Drivers don't need more distracting nonsense in their main line-of-sight.
My main response was towards the 3 & Y, but the S & X still use the center display for secondary functions with the driver.
Surely if someone is killed (either the occupant or another driver or bystander) and the accident could be blamed on some kind of driver error or carelessness, or could have been avoided if the driver was more attentive.
Then if the driver was playing a game there would be a good legal case that they were distracted by it and Tesla could be deemed at least party responsible by providing that game in the front of the car - at least enough to be sued by the families for huge sums.
If the Feds clamp down on this, but not on FSD, then we'll know for sure that we have meme regulators. One of these is marginally worse than having access to a modern smartphone. The other literally drives the car, and has proven repeatedly that it is incapable of performing anywhere near the level required to avoid accidents in the real-world.
It doesn't need to be perfect but it needs to be a lot better than the "average" driver which includes intoxicated, fatigued, young, old, etc. drivers in all sorts of weather with many older vehicles with fewer safety systems and possible maintenance issues.
Clearly something that will have to be addressed legally.
Outside of (to a certain degree) drugs (and tobacco, which is regulated and known to be harmful) there are very few consumer-facing products which used and maintained properly just randomly kill people sometimes--and we shrug our shoulders and say "stuff happens."
> I'd love to see all cars being on FSD and communicating with each other around, dropping deaths (and even minor accidents) to virtually zero though.
That sounds like a world that'll be great as long as you're in a car, and terrible if you're a pedestrian or cyclist. Kind of like the world we've got now, except with even more victim blaming.
It can make everything safer for everyone, both cars and pedestrians. If all cars redundantly detect everything around them, including approaching other vehicles _and_ pedestrians, and relay that data to other nearby vehicles, why would it be a nightmare for pedestrians?
"Can" is the operative word there, I think. I don't think that this is how it has to be, just how it will be.
Cars communicating with one another means that they will prioritise QoS for one another, and pedestrian safety will be, as ever it has been, an afterthought—at least as long as there's more penalty for damaging a person's car than for injuring the person themselves.
So people are only allowed to live or visit places with sufficient density that you're in cycling distance of a train station? (And heaven help you if you can't cycle for some reason.)
Even in countries with good train service and lots of cycling, this certainly isn't the case today. Good luck locking everyone up into urban areas.
The only reason why we were able to live the car oriented lifestyle we have is because we decided to subsidize and build roads for mass market cars. This doesn't preclude the existence of streetcar suburbs with walkable neighborhoods, and it isn't so bad once you realize that cars generate a whole lot of noise, especially the faster they run.
Long distance journey can be facilitated by interurban rails and railroads.
This is true of surface streets: on freeways, even the older “Autopilot” is pretty good: I’ve driven on-ramp to off-ramp like 60 miles without a disengagement.
I've driving a lot farther than 60 miles without disengaging. Many thousands of miles without ever once panic braking for a shadow.
Even average drivers die about once every 100 million miles. AP is so far from that it isn't fair to try and compare. And that's just average drivers, which includes drunks, tired people, 16 year olds, weather-related accidents, etc. Put AP or FSD up against a normal, sober driver in decent weather and there's probably five or six orders of magnitude difference in competency.
> It would be cool to decide on a framework where FSD is tested/approved to be not perfect but better than the average human
Just watch the YouTube videos from beta drivers (which are cherrypicked to be most flattering to Tesla). The number of disengagements in 20 minutes of continuous driving is disheartening.
> It would be cool to decide on a framework where FSD is tested/approved to be not perfect but better than the average human
Even if this was true, there is still the problem that the failure mode of a ML is even less predictable than that of a average human. I.e. only the most intoxicated humans are likely to drive their cars into white walls, but that may happen any day with computer vision on the most well-maintained car, and you may never know what confused it. Or a traffic sign can be defaced in a way that is obviously detectable for a human (up to the point maintenance does not even consider to clean it), but confuses a car in a deadly way.
I.e. even if humans fail, at least they fail in ways that are relatable to us humans. The ways "FSD" fail are incomprehensible and exasperating.
In my country you are not allowed to physically interact with a smartphome while driving. The cars entertainment system is not off limits, yet. This will be a problem.
on the other hand, while driving with a passenger my android auto wont let them interact with the system without a "safety pause" every 2 seconds, making it virtually impossible to, for example, change the music or update the navigation. i thought google was famous for hiring people with IQs above 100? or did a lawyer add this feature? or is it pure safetyism? sadly all 3 options seem credible
You know what would be cool? If you could use driving mechanisms as the game controller, like those arcade racing machines but in a real car. Imagine playing Forza or Mario Kart in your Tesla. Given that it’s all electric, this should be doable, right?
A lot of the Tesla games DO use the steering wheel. Centipede, for one.
I can never bring myself to play them because I feel like I would look like an imbecile sitting in the car furiously turning the wheel while the car is parked.
It has the opposite problem. They intentionally don't disable steering while using the wheel to control the video game. The result is that your tires get ground down with a pile of black rubber dust on your driveway. I don't let the kids use the steering wheel for fear of destroying the tires.
I would be surprised if it is possible to disconnect the steering from the mechanical steering mechanism.
Why should that be teslas problem? It's up to the driver to follow the rules of the road. Unless the games themselves encourage dangerous driving, this is nothing more then a potential distraction. It's the manufacters job to make sure their cars don't get in the way of safe driving, it's entirely the drivers responsibility not to distract himself. The regulator must trust the driver to be responsible.
2. Isn't the intention to allow passengers to use the screen?
3. Idiots who don't pay attention to the road already don't pay attention to the road. They are text messaging, checking notifications, putting on makeup, playing candy crush on their phone, watching netflix on their phone, scrolling twitter, reading email, looking for podcasts and on and on.
> 2. Isn't the intention to allow passengers to use the screen?
If it were a separate screen in front of the passenger, this would be a good argument. But since it is the screen the driver is supposed to look at for driving-related information...
If, while driving, the car gets into a wreck and it is found that the driver was playing video games while driving, then the car maker should be held at least partially liable.
On the other hand, if the driver decided to install their own game system so that they can drive and game at the same time - that would make it solely the driver's responsibility.
If you're fiddling with the radio dial or anything else and not looking at the road should the car maker also be held accountable? No.
Adults should be held accountable for their actions. It's not hard to pay attention to the road.
- edit -
To below, please don't quote out of context and put words into my mouth.
Answer the question whether or not a manufacturer should be held accountable if a driver is fiddling with the radio dial and strikes another car or pedestrian.
Maybe it's just HN, but everyone seems to want an authoritarian lawsuit-happy nanny-state these days. Sad times.
> Adults should be held accountable for their actions.
Great, we agree! Tesla and its managers and owners should be held liable then for adding distractions. Because humans are not being rational computers, but biological beings that very much react to incentives. Also see "dark patterns" and "marketing", all the many ways to trick human brains often into doing things against their own rational interest (like spending money they don't have for things they don't need).
That only the final person doing something is 100% responsible for all their actions only works for humans with no history and living in an isolation chamber.
I know that that could raise the made-up counter-argument "nobody is accountable for their actions", but acknowledging what is does not prevent society from judging actions. You can do both, judge individual actions but also recognize that incentives and the bigger picture matters. You can punish individual actions such as murderer (random example) and still do something to lower the rate at which they occur.
So anyone getting distracted sure can be held accountable - but we can also do something in advance that the number of such cases is lowered.
One can adjust a radio before they start driving. After that, there are volume controls and other physical controls available for adjustments without taking one's eyes off the road.
Videogames on the other hand require the driver's complete attention while the car is still moving.
If a manufacturer installs video games for the driver to be able to play while they're driving, then yes, they should be held liable for any accidents caused due to playing video games while driving.
You don't need a "nanny state" law to specifically outlaw something to find someone liable. Existing laws are sufficient and a civil lawsuit will do plenty of damage. I bet if someone dies because of distracted driving due to playing a Tesla videogame, a software update will roll out the very next day.
The video game isn't for the driver, it's for the passenger.
One can play the video game before they start driving.
One could also fiddle with the radio knob while they are driving and kill someone.
Just as one could play a video game on their phone or this screen while they are driving and kill someone.
The common denominator is the person not paying attention to the road, punish that person.
If I watch porn while driving and kill someone I don't expect people to blame the porn industry for their enticing addictive content, I expect them to blame me.
Personal responsibility, don't be a child, be an adult and take responsibility for your actions.
But Elon bad, so we're having this very very stupid conversation.
exactly what is the logic behind your comparison with smartphones? AFAIK, they are not a giant screen bolted to the centre of your car.
Playing games on a system that's integral to the car is a benefit for passengers how exactly?
Laws exist to protect said idiots from themselves and others from them. The existence of idiots and bad behaviour does not mean that you further enable dangerous behaviour.
Ease of access actually has a huge effect on how likely someone will reach for it.
Taking out the phone, mounting it to the dash, unlocking the screen, etc. vs tapping a few times on the big touchscreen already there are different levels of effort.
If you're on a diet, you're less likely to eat cookies if you have to go down the street to the store than if they're already in your cupboard.
Doesn't mean you're being oppressed by some cookie-proof bubble.
Games being played on the screen in front of the driver is not a good idea, it’s just another distraction with motion and blinking lights that even the most disciplined driver can’t ignore.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadMy Model 3 does not disable autopilot or enables any kind of warning even if you play games with the controller while driving... At least in Europe. Please note that I just tried this once for sake of science and Im not interested in putting lifes in risk
Claiming that on-device processing of driver's video feed without uploading/storing, for safety reasons, is a threat to privacy is outrageously unacceptable.
He does something that is so incredibly outrageous knowing it will get denied but in doing so, it pushes your mental anchor so far out, that it allows him to "meet in the middle" to get something approved that would not have been approved otherwise if he hadn't anchored you so far out.
Where's are the solar roof? Battery swaps? And "coast-to-coast full self driving", $35,000 Model 3?
Do you think the personal assistant robot will ever be a delivered product?
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Musk has mastered the ability to make the public forget about his promises. He doesn't deliver on these promises at all. I think we're generally wising up to his game: Musk carefully SEO's his words and public image to make the internet itself forget about these claims.
Only people who actually rely upon their own personal memories (ie: the Battery Swap demo from 2013) can pull this information out. Otherwise, they're fogotten.
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In any case, this video-games while driving thing is just more of the 2016 claim of "coast to coast full self driving by 2018". He hasn't delivered upon the promise and needs to muck up the waters even more on the subject.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-teslas-autonomous-car-will-dr...
> [Elon] said that the coast-to-coast test is still on track to take place at the end of the year, and that all Tesla cars built since October 2016 would be updated. The plan, announced in a Ted Talk last month, is to “go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York with no controls touched in the entire journey.”
Battery swaps were to fully capture California ZEV credits until Tesla could grow large enough to not rely on them. The market for Teslas has flourished without them, relying only on Fast DC chargers for consumer range anxiety.
Personal assistant robot is a cheap marketing effort to drive recruiting of talent.
Laugh and point fingers. The methods work, regardless of the feelings about them.
No. "Battery Swap" was a lie that was never delivered and frankly just stole money from California.
We all know that __lying__ works. The last few years have made it abundantly clear that the general population is far more accepting of these lies than I'm comfortable for.
So I'm going to keep pointing them out.
Are you willing to sacrifice morally or ethically if the change needed to mitigate climate change is going to require some less than total honesty? Consider we, again, as you mention, live in a post truth world. One must adapt to the operating environment to increases chances of success.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells and probably more widespread PHEVs.
Which would have been a superior future than where we are today.
10-million cars with 200lbs of Li-ion batteries each would save more energy from our transportation network than 2-million cars with 1000lbs of Li-ion batteries each.
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At this point. Elon is incredibly anti-progress. He's switched into fighting against alternatives and is diminishing progress on legitimate strategies (both H2 and PHEVs) because he wants to hold onto his market advantage.
I can’t imagine how the success of Tesla has possibly not had the effect of speeding up legacy manufacturers to create PHEVs.
Tesla led the way to get all this electrical car infrastructure out in the world that everybody else can take advantage of.
"Icky ICE Engine". "Now you have two engines with twice the malfunctions". "I don't like oil changes". Etc. etc. They're incredibly anti-PHEV.
Neither Elon nor his gang of supporters are very good for PHEVs. And on stage, Elon still derides them as a strategy.
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Look: Elon / Tesla are right now arguing __against__ government incentives for PHEVs and EVs.
His politics have flipped. He's no longer a supporter of incentives for this industry.
In the UK at least, most PHEVs sold are cynically avoiding a bunch of taxes and benefit in kind. Many of them are never plugged into a charger.
Hyundai Xcient for one is launching imminently.
China / Zhangjiakou is launching 600+ busses on Hydrogen for the 2022 Winter Games.
Toyota Mirai existed for __years__.
I am against PHEVs. When my parents recently went shopping for a new car, I tried to sell BEV. When I failed, I encouraged them to skip PHEV and just buy ICE.
PHEV are 2x the complexity and things to worry about and go wrong. You need to stop for gas AND plug in your car every day? You need to change your oil AND potentially replace your battery?
IMO PHEV exist because they are a compliance tool to meet green energy standards, but not generally a solid product. I see them vanishing very soon as BEV production capacity increases, and they will be a tiny footnote in the history of the automobile. In fact a salesmen directly told us that the PEV we were looking at (PEV XC90 I think?) was a joke, and we could just throw the plug in the trash when we got home and ignore that it existed.
And if you buy the right PHEV, like as in, you buy the one that fits your commute, you probably don't have to gas up much at all. I know people with PHEVs and they love them. They rarely ever put gas in them, except for long trips. All their commuting is done on electric power. They work great. I don't really get what you are on about.
Maybe you are biased as a Tesla fan and Tesla driver. I mean, I'm not even sure why else you would have mentioned that. Maybe as a disclaimer that we will know your post is biased? The fact that you're a fan has nothing to do with the reliability or quality of a PHEV, and is totally irrelevant otherwise.
Having an engine run at one singular RPM / Torque band is much easier than ICE, which commonly needs to deliver power from ~1500 RPM to 6000 RPM.
So it's "no emissions" but still relies on the planet-killing petroleum fuel chain.
If you think PHEVs are somehow constrained by EVs - you have no idea of the patent forests Toyota and others have built on hybrid tech. It's not the lithium that's stopping PHEVs.
In any case, widespread electrolysis of Hydrogen is well researched and well on its way to being achieved: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-el...
There was a good article or two on some systems developed that were direct from solar-power into hydrogen, skipping the inefficient electricity steps.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/renewables-cheapest-e...
They're correct as far as my discussion point is concerned. A possibility of the future, the benefits of being forward looking.
It may not exist, but the point of the statement is to be parity with Elon Musk's discussion style. Not to be on parity with the actual truth. That's the problem: Mr. Musk imagines the future and his discussions are apparently fine. But snap back to reality and suddenly everyone else (who is working on realistic numbers) is wrong.
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Electrolysis could exist, and it could be cheap. Much like how a $39000 Cybertruck could exist in enough numbers to warrant customers putting down reservation money on it.
Its the name of the game and you know it if you've followed how this discussion evolves. Yes, I feel icky using that kind of logic but its necessary in this age.
I could see this being used for airplanes because there aren't very many airports (it's far better than avgas which contains lead, and it's probably better than jet fuel?). But there is basically nowhere outside the far far north where this could be anywhere close to being as good as electricity for cars. Even in Norway today, electric is far more popular than hydorgen.
I am unconvinced by the case for hydrogen fuel cells or PHEVs.
10-million cars with 200lbs of Li-ion batteries each would save more energy from our transportation network than 2-million cars with 1000lbs of Li-ion batteries each.
The correct answer is the reduction of cars. Taking 10 million cars off the road and switching to public transit and higher density suburban and urban planning would save more energy in the long run.
At this point. Elon is incredibly anti-progress.
The best car is no car.
He created a fake solution, the Hyperloop, to steal hype away, and then never built the Hyperloop. Thereby killing the mass-transit solution of California.
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I stand by my assertion. Mr. Musk is no longer useful for the environmental cause. He is decidedly anti-progress at this point. A few years ago it was somewhat ambiguous, but now its clear.
Except it's still actively being built.
In any case, Mr. Musk has not been helpful to the cause at all.
> I hope you're right
If I’m not, the California High Speed Rail Authority is doing some next-level gaslighting.
https://buildhsr.com/
Texas will likely get its high-speed rail well before we do.
The current target, per the most recent business plan, is Merced to Bakersfield by the end of the decade, Silicon Valley to Central Valley (SF to Bakersfield) by 2031, and the Phase 1 system (SF to LA) by 2033. There is also work with Brightline West (the private developer of a Victorville to Las Vegas line) to jointly extend that line so that it interconnects with the Phase 1 system in Southern California, forming a combined SF-LA-LV system.
> Texas will likely get its high-speed rail well before we do.
Well, I mean, its a shorter and easier line with an earlier current planned operation date, with fewer bookend and station projects, so that wouldn’t be surprising, but they keep pushing out the construction start date while California keeps building, so I wouldn’t bet on it.
It’s not even approximately dead, so Musk having been integral in killing it doesn't seem to be either true or meaningful.
As for creating the false impression it was killed, that was mostly Newsome’s announcement shortly after taking office that described no substantive changes (it literally boiled down to “we’re going to keep building the parts we have funding to build, keep doing planning/EIRs/etc. on the rest, and not do construction on parts not currently funded until construction funding is secured”) but was widely misinterpreted, not Musk, that was responsible for that.
And frankly the rest of the industry agrees battery swaps sound great but it was abandoned as unnecessary.
Sorry, but this can be disproved with a single Google search. They did have a battery swap station (between SF and LA), but there was minimal interest from customers.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog...
> A Tesla spokesperson said the Harris Ranch facility is functional, but that battery swaps are only being done on a limited fleet of Tesla cars.
> “We are currently running the pilot with a small number of Model S,” said Tesla’s Khobi Brooklyn. “It’s open to a small number of Model S owners.”
> What is the point of a Tesla battery swap program that isn’t actually swapping batteries for Tesla owners?
> It could have something to do with California’s Air Resources Board and its complicated system of zero-emission vehicle credits.
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They opened a singular facility that operated at a loss for a few months, and then shut it down. With no intent on ever mass-producing this technology or dropping the costs down to be a long term sustainable solution.
They accomplished just enough to take the California tax credit, and then never spoke of it again.
Another notable change at that time was adding the underbody plate[1] for increased fire safety, which made the swap take longer than it otherwise would. These were offered free of charge to customers and there was very high uptake.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-adds-titanium-underbody-shi...
Nope. Never happened. 200 invitations to one location, and those invited needed to schedule an appointment to use them. Then the project was killed off.
Appointment-only service isn't what "battery swap" was about. It was supposed to be a service that was more convenient than gas stations or superchargers.
But we all know that swapping $15,000 batteries, roughly 1000lbs or more (aka: the weight of an engine lift) in 10 minutes was never really a viable business model.
> Another notable change at that time was adding the underbody plate[1] for increased fire safety
Oh thanks for reminding me of that. The plate that no longer exists on modern models, yet another broken promise of Mr. Musk.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/ppqqwg/15yr_o...
You know, make a blogpost about how awesome Titanium is as a metal / shield, but SEO it away by a few years to make "Tesla Shield" in Google point you to floor mats. You know, to make the public forget about the entire "Shield" episode entirely and the whole controversy about exploding bottoms of Tesla cars.
Then he threw away the battery swap demo and never talked about it again.
Its a combination of idiotic governance + a conman / liar at work. The government tax credit is a decent idea to spur innovation, but only if the government actually rewards money correctly. If it gives out money too freely, then the companies will just eat the government's face... they'll take the money but never actually develop the technology.
p.s. can you stop name-calling?
And we all know that swapping $15,000 batteries out for free ain't a valid business model and never will be a valid business model. It was a project designed to maximize the California incentives and minimize the costs to Tesla for obtaining that money.
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I hope that the citizens of California learned their lesson. But even if they refuse to learn, I've learned very much from that episode.
Personally, I hate that approach to business. I don't even talk about the Solar City bail-out, his Tesla goes private tweet and all that. For some reason that really avoids me, it works...
PT Barnum, Elon Musk, Edison.
More people pull it off than you'd think. Its an age old strategy of simply never admitting mistakes and hoping the American population ignores the mistakes.
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Its what we like to call a "conman", you know... people who are really good at "confidence games" (what "conman" stands for in short). You hit people with a lot of confidence, and people then give you money.
It works on small scales, it works on large scales. This isn't an attribute you should be praising. This is just how humans work, and people who abuse other humans with this tactic are immoral.
Musk over-promises, and often, but what he delivers is impressive even if it doesn't meet his promises. Therefore he's no conman.
The more interesting question is whether the over-promising is necessary if you want to achieve something substantial. Politicians certainly seem to think so.
Politicians are probably the worst group to measure against when it comes to honesty and decency.
Politics works like this:
1. Politician "shares a vision"
2. People buy into that vision by voting politician into office
3. Politician never achieves vision but makes progress towards it or fails to
The vision can be something like "everyone should be able to go to college," "a good job for every American," "no more homelessness," "healthcare for every American" and so on. Is this lying? In some sense, yes, but I would say we should judge politicans by how they change the world (for better or for worse) rather than whether they actually achieve their vision.
Is it possible to make progress towards some goal without an unrealistic ideal providing inspiration?
Its well known to work. We all know it works, and there are a myriad of examples throughout US history (and maybe even in other countries).
Just because it works doesn't mean its moral.
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Leverage your popularity, start fights in the public, get the common people low-key interested (but not interested enough to actually look at the facts, just interested enough to follow the fun stuff) and give them a show. Suddenly you get a ton of supporters.
Politicians, Lawyers, and yes, CEOs / Businessmen commonly do this. Call it whatever you want, its not something I think we should b glorifying as a society.
Pedo-Scuba Diver, COVID19 denial to keep the Fremont factory open, $39,990 Cybertruck, SEC flaunting / breaking of rules, etc. etc.
You would have to be delusion to call him a con-man in 2021, but yet it is still happening. Oh well, as Taylor Swift famously wrote "haters gonna hate"
I didn’t really argue since I am not that invested nor do i think Musks needs me to defend his reputation lol.
Im not really on twitter or social media anymore except for occasional HN, so this took me by surprise but I guess this is more common than I thought.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I'm seeing $44990 as the base price right now.
There's no $35k Model 3, not in 2021 dollars, not in 2017 dollars. Not in inflation-adjusted dollars. Not available at all in any capacity.
In any case, "gasoline savings" is not an incentive.
I find including the gas savings number a poor choice even if you see the real price well before buying the car. It simply varies to much both over time and based on driving habits for any general number to be very relevant, also nobody shows the impacts of say insurance costs on different car models.
https://www.valuewalk.com/2016/02/tesla-model-3-price-consum...
No it wasn't. People thought theyd get $27500 cars after the incentive.
It wasn’t until February 2019 that the $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range became available. Less than two months later, Tesla announced that the Standard Range model would no longer be available for order on its website, though buyers could still order it “off-menu,” either in a Tesla store or over the phone.
https://www.carfax.com/blog/cheapest-tesla
Which is kind of messed up IMO, but that’s different from saying it’s never sold.
He said they would sell at 35k and they did, briefly.
> So not only where they selling at 35k for a while, in real terms they still are.
And I’m just saying no, because if they want to say they are still selling a $35k car, it needs to be priced $35k today. Sure, they started with a $35k car, but it is no longer the case. I haven’t suddenly increased my car budget from $35k to $40k in the last 4 years, regardless of inflation, because inflation != income growth. I still want a $35k car, and the fact they said for so long they would have one, and then upped the price, is annoying because I would spend $35k on a car but not $40k, regardless today or 2017.
They aren’t advertising a 35k car today, but this feels like beating a dead horse so I will drop it.
inflation != income growth.
That’s a fair point, but it really means you have taken a pay cut over the last few years. Without inflation that same pay cut would have meant you couldn’t afford a 35k car, so blame whoever you’re working for not Tesla.
Though if it’s something other than a shitty employer then I apologize for the tone. My personal finances have also taken a hit.
I am indeed beating the dead horse here, but I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really wish there was an even cheaper model, because $35k/$40k seems to be right at that point of pushing the budget of a budget car into luxury territory, and not truly giving consumers what they want, a base model. Sorry if I’m not being clear, a bit hard to explain.
But that’s not Tesla’s problem, just an issue of the economics of the industry at this point. Hoping we see that significant drop in cost as battery tech evolves.
“I love the car but…”
It takes a few years, but over the long term, my arguments evolve into a stronger form, and people start to listen.
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I've learned that while the Internet's memory is long, people's individual memories are short. You have plenty of opportunities to improve your arguments over time.
Its no different from what Elon is doing here: leveraging the shortness of the typical person's memory to make his marketing tricks work.
Solar roof has been deployed and you can read any number of stories about failed certification (certain utilities are not interested in certifying connection of rooftop solar).
Battery swap was only ever a compliance technology which Tesla abandoned as soon as the regulatory requirements were removed.
There are plenty of other distractions in the world, if you can't stop yourself from looking at a screen while driving, you shouldn't be driving in the first place. It's not the job of the car to stop you.
Yes, drivers have lots of distractions. Some of which are unavoidable, some of which are generally considered acceptable (conversations that don't require taking hands off the wheel or eyes materially off the road), and some of which like texting which are totally on them. But that doesn't mean we should add more features that are just crying out to distract drivers further--especially given that every passenger absolutely has their own screen to play games or watch videos in their pockets.
I'm saying the driver shouldn't be looking at the screen anyway, it's for the passenger. So why exactly is the car locking it out?
All the instrumentation of a traditional car are on the one Model 3 screen.
Want to know your speed? You need to look down and to the right (or left, depending on which side the driver sits). Getting too cold? You need to look down, carefully tap on the bottom edge of the screen, hope you hit the correct pixels to bump the temp up.
Critical, time sensitive, alerts also appear on the screen. As do totally useless alerts. What are those warning sounds for? Look down at the screen. It's telling you that you're about to drift out of your lane and should correct yourself. Warning sounds again. Look down at the screen. Neat. It's telling me my premium connectivity trial has expired as I'm merging onto a busy freeway during rush hour.
Traditional car UIs aren't designed on a whim. Physical controls are designed to be usable without looking at them. Critical information is visible without needing to look away from the road.
I love the car. I hate the screen. I hate that fanboys see it as "advanced", when I suspect it was used because it's a lot cheaper to build a software UI than a physical one.
In that case the problem is not the games, it's putting driver controls there that is the problem.
Seems to happen on all Tesla related news, people get so worked up about him.
Does any car manufacture or phone manufacture ( AppleCar android auto doing something to stop this )?
large amount of cars mount phones in the car, with all the notifications, phone calls etc.. It's far, far bigger problem compares to a game that make sense only on a highway few times a year.
Cars are methods of transportation (and even though I'm a car enthusiast, who enjoys driving) they should be driver focused. The center screen in a Tesla is where _all_ the information is available for the driver. There are no secondary gauges or other driver-specific controls or displays. The car, presently, should be oriented for the driver to pay the most attention to the vehicle, the road, and their surroundings.
If there's a display behind the driver, or solely on the passenger side of the vehicle out of sight and reach of the driver, then it can be presumed to operate for the passengers of the vehicle.
That's not true for the S & X FYI, they have an instrument cluster.
> The car, presently, should be oriented for the driver to pay the most attention to the vehicle, the road, and their surroundings.
Games don't cover the psudo instrument cluster on the single-screen vehicles.
Drivers don't need more distracting nonsense in their main line-of-sight.
My main response was towards the 3 & Y, but the S & X still use the center display for secondary functions with the driver.
Humans, as well. 38,000 dead and 4,400,000 injured every year in the US due to car accidents.
It would be cool to decide on a framework where FSD is tested/approved to be not perfect but better than the average human
Found the Tesla fanboy.
Your numbers include drivers aged 15-25, the most dangerous driving group.
Yet, Elon compares the Tesla autopilot driving demographic (age 24-35) to the teenager-biased number. It makes Tesla look good.
I'd love to see all cars being on FSD and communicating with each other around, dropping deaths (and even minor accidents) to virtually zero though.
Outside of (to a certain degree) drugs (and tobacco, which is regulated and known to be harmful) there are very few consumer-facing products which used and maintained properly just randomly kill people sometimes--and we shrug our shoulders and say "stuff happens."
That sounds like a world that'll be great as long as you're in a car, and terrible if you're a pedestrian or cyclist. Kind of like the world we've got now, except with even more victim blaming.
Cars communicating with one another means that they will prioritise QoS for one another, and pedestrian safety will be, as ever it has been, an afterthought—at least as long as there's more penalty for damaging a person's car than for injuring the person themselves.
FSD exists only because we built our entire society around cars.
Even in countries with good train service and lots of cycling, this certainly isn't the case today. Good luck locking everyone up into urban areas.
Long distance journey can be facilitated by interurban rails and railroads.
Regards from Germany.
I'm bullish on self-driving in general, but Tesla's misrepresentation of their self-driving capability has always been just shy of "fraud".
Even average drivers die about once every 100 million miles. AP is so far from that it isn't fair to try and compare. And that's just average drivers, which includes drunks, tired people, 16 year olds, weather-related accidents, etc. Put AP or FSD up against a normal, sober driver in decent weather and there's probably five or six orders of magnitude difference in competency.
to quote wikipedias statistic from 2012:
congrats on your 60 miles i guess... only 295 857 928 more miles until your car performs as well as an average human from 2012.To match a human, it needs to go half a million miles without an accident, and 100 million miles without a fatality.
Only it wasn't in a tesla, it was in a reasonably recent ICE toyota with adaptive cruise control and lane keeping.
So what was your point about FSD again?
Just watch the YouTube videos from beta drivers (which are cherrypicked to be most flattering to Tesla). The number of disengagements in 20 minutes of continuous driving is disheartening.
Most cars are permanently disengaged.
Yes. A society that valued both human life and evidence would ban cars entirely.
... hopefully have the sense to evaluate things based on both costs and benefits, and maybe even beyond just the first-order ones.
Even if this was true, there is still the problem that the failure mode of a ML is even less predictable than that of a average human. I.e. only the most intoxicated humans are likely to drive their cars into white walls, but that may happen any day with computer vision on the most well-maintained car, and you may never know what confused it. Or a traffic sign can be defaced in a way that is obviously detectable for a human (up to the point maintenance does not even consider to clean it), but confuses a car in a deadly way.
I.e. even if humans fail, at least they fail in ways that are relatable to us humans. The ways "FSD" fail are incomprehensible and exasperating.
This irritated me so much I use a separate GPS.
I'll greatly prefer it if my car did not try to control my behavior. I'm quite capable of deciding for myself what to do.
https://youtu.be/zqG6AAZ5JvA?t=84
I can never bring myself to play them because I feel like I would look like an imbecile sitting in the car furiously turning the wheel while the car is parked.
I would be surprised if it is possible to disconnect the steering from the mechanical steering mechanism.
2. Isn't the intention to allow passengers to use the screen?
3. Idiots who don't pay attention to the road already don't pay attention to the road. They are text messaging, checking notifications, putting on makeup, playing candy crush on their phone, watching netflix on their phone, scrolling twitter, reading email, looking for podcasts and on and on.
If it were a separate screen in front of the passenger, this would be a good argument. But since it is the screen the driver is supposed to look at for driving-related information...
You should be looking at your instrument cluster, not the middle screen for essential driving related information.
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I stand corrected, there is no instrument cluster (only aftermarket ones I mistook for stock).
So does this split the screen or take over the whole screen? If it splits it, I'm still okay with it, if it's the whole screen I'm not.
On the other hand, if the driver decided to install their own game system so that they can drive and game at the same time - that would make it solely the driver's responsibility.
Adults should be held accountable for their actions. It's not hard to pay attention to the road.
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To below, please don't quote out of context and put words into my mouth.
Answer the question whether or not a manufacturer should be held accountable if a driver is fiddling with the radio dial and strikes another car or pedestrian.
Maybe it's just HN, but everyone seems to want an authoritarian lawsuit-happy nanny-state these days. Sad times.
Great, we agree! Tesla and its managers and owners should be held liable then for adding distractions. Because humans are not being rational computers, but biological beings that very much react to incentives. Also see "dark patterns" and "marketing", all the many ways to trick human brains often into doing things against their own rational interest (like spending money they don't have for things they don't need).
That only the final person doing something is 100% responsible for all their actions only works for humans with no history and living in an isolation chamber.
I know that that could raise the made-up counter-argument "nobody is accountable for their actions", but acknowledging what is does not prevent society from judging actions. You can do both, judge individual actions but also recognize that incentives and the bigger picture matters. You can punish individual actions such as murderer (random example) and still do something to lower the rate at which they occur.
So anyone getting distracted sure can be held accountable - but we can also do something in advance that the number of such cases is lowered.
Videogames on the other hand require the driver's complete attention while the car is still moving.
If a manufacturer installs video games for the driver to be able to play while they're driving, then yes, they should be held liable for any accidents caused due to playing video games while driving.
You don't need a "nanny state" law to specifically outlaw something to find someone liable. Existing laws are sufficient and a civil lawsuit will do plenty of damage. I bet if someone dies because of distracted driving due to playing a Tesla videogame, a software update will roll out the very next day.
One can play the video game before they start driving.
One could also fiddle with the radio knob while they are driving and kill someone.
Just as one could play a video game on their phone or this screen while they are driving and kill someone.
The common denominator is the person not paying attention to the road, punish that person.
If I watch porn while driving and kill someone I don't expect people to blame the porn industry for their enticing addictive content, I expect them to blame me.
Personal responsibility, don't be a child, be an adult and take responsibility for your actions.
But Elon bad, so we're having this very very stupid conversation.
But Elon cheap, so we're having this stupid conversation.
Playing games on a system that's integral to the car is a benefit for passengers how exactly?
Laws exist to protect said idiots from themselves and others from them. The existence of idiots and bad behaviour does not mean that you further enable dangerous behaviour.
How about we all just live in a bubble? That'll solve everything.
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Reaching for a cookie and violating your diet is not the same as forgetting to look at the fricken road.
Either way though, it's your personal responsibility. You can't sue the cookie company because you're a fat ass.
Taking out the phone, mounting it to the dash, unlocking the screen, etc. vs tapping a few times on the big touchscreen already there are different levels of effort.
If you're on a diet, you're less likely to eat cookies if you have to go down the street to the store than if they're already in your cupboard.
Doesn't mean you're being oppressed by some cookie-proof bubble.
I hope many people in this thread aren't driving.
Are you going to accuse pilots of being bad at their jobs when they can't fly a plane while a laser is pointed in their eyes?
man the 80s were a dark time
The book needs to be thrown at Tesla.