I think she genuinely believed in the technology, and thought they just needed more time. Like, she kept pressuring people to work on it, and there were some small advancements in the tech, just not good enough.
I think the worst thing they did was giving those device out to healthcare institutions, when they knew it was inaccurate.
I'm not defending her, she was clearly dangerously delusional, but I think it explains why she didn't behave like a classical con artist/scammer
Theranos’s faulty blood tests were used by a couple major insurance companies and at least one state-run medical provider. Over 1.5 million tests were run. I’m sure quite a few people died because they weren’t correctly diagnosed in time for treatment.
I absolutely agree with you, so we have an upper bound, Elon Musk is facing far less than 12 years in prison. Doesn't anyone want to help us out with a lower bound?
This is interesting context. I'd say a fine of $125,000 - because that is the lowest fine I can find in a brief DDG search of fines levied for materially misleading investors.
Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.
I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video.
What matters is:
(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims
(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.
(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation
If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.
Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...
Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.
> Weight-loss products accounted for 13 percent of the fraud claims submitted to the F.T.C. in 2011, the most recent data available. That is more than twice the number in any other category.
Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still can't.
I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.
The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.
Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.
And every human being is clearly an expert in honeywell flight automation and can rationally understand what it means. Wait, no, that's not correct at all and most people think planes basically fly themselves. They also don't seem to realize that "follow this carefully mapped and highly regulated GPS route" is a hundred miles away from "drive an arbitrary road route"
How much training does Tesla require you to complete before using FSD? I don’t think there’d be much criticism of autopilot if users were trained like pilots.
Agreed. It’s almost like they are assuming a future where people learn this in drivers ed. This is a job of the government to act asap, since they are in charge of deciding if someone can drive.
> When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.”
Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO
Though it may help legally, I'm surprised he still has people falling for the "tech genius" schtick when so much of his accomplishments are "trolls" that are apparently intentionally poorly made ruses.
Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel.
There's also the AJ defense for it - that at this point in time, there is a public expectation that no reasonable person should be stupid enough to actually believe such a tweet. Everyone knows that the man is just playing a media character.
> The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.
Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this.
Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may notice that those trusty journalists weren’t accurately representing the content of source material in their articles.
On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.
I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.
When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.
I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem to be taught the opposite.
As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better reading material than news articles covering them, especially court decisions.
A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
I'd agree with your characterization. But after downloading the PDF from your WeTransfer link, I was able to find a link on Google by searching for the quoted opening sentence of the deposition. Oddly, the resulting Google page has a header at the top that says something to the effect of "No results found", but then it has a link to the page that contains it.
I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers), and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting. And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the internet for free.
I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new.
Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food.
One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera).
This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured.
Don’t forget daily live performances by whatever band’s music is in the background of the ads! Otherwise it could possibly be construed as false advertising, after all.
>This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up some farcical point they tried making online and got called out on.
> Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
As someone who lives on a dirt road surrounded by airbnb's near a national park seeing lots of tourist traffic, I think you have an extremely flawed understanding of what "everyone knows" WRT their vehicle's capabilities.
Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.
McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.
I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.
Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.
And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.
> they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is
Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one knows they clearly do lie about how tall the food is.
I presume what you meant here is that they're not supposed to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the can and do. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
Perhaps McDonalds lies to you in your jurisdiction, but no, I have never seen an ad where they claim that their hamburgers are so-and-so many millimetres tall. I have seen plenty of claims from them about things like the uncooked weight of their burgers, and the fine print always clarifies that cooking reduces the weight.
Perhaps you could share with me the lies McDonalds has told you and everyone else about their food? I mean, sure, it sucks. But the video I linked to above explains exactly why and how the food in the ads looks better than the food they sell you.
It's truly bizarre that Musk stans are resorting to calling out McDs to try and defend Tesla's blatant fraud.
But I can tell you right now that McDs is not lying about what a BigMac can look like, because I have eaten a Bic Mac, and other McDs burgers, that looked just like they were from a commercial. Food has natural variability; how the final burger appears depends on the ingredients and the preparation, and some McDs locations like the ones near me do a better job of storing their buns and assembling their burgers than others.
> Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.
It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-driving representations.
Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense. It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths.
It's just taken time for the industry to respond.
I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
> It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next.
Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
While they were a dime a dozen in the bay area and a handful of wealthy urban markets, its been hugely outsold by the more expensive Model 3 and Y despite being on sale since 2011 and didn't sell anything close to Nissan's hopes for the model.
Leaf is a "city car" which is an euphemism for very short range and slow charging using a dying standard.
MG4 is the cheapest EV (£30K) sold outside of China that could reasonably compete with a Corolla. There isn't much else in the cheap bracket. e-Niro and ID.3 start at £35K.
I know it’s not a Corolla, but it might be the Corolla of the EVs.
It is inexpensive for an EV and seems to be a reliable and durable car.
I’m almost sad to hear it’s going to be discontinued but for myself, when the time comes, I’ll be taking a good look at whatever Nissan will be offering.
Leaf is one of the early EVs, and it lacks proper battery cooling. This has shortened life of its batteries. Expect all contemporary EVs to age better than Leaf.
Nissan Ariya is technically average, and rather pricy. It's technically comparable to ID.4, but 25% more expensive. Or for the same money you can get Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6, even in their higher trims, and they charge twice as fast.
> I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose
You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.
I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.
This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.
There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.
Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.
> they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete".
Always thought this was a pretty odd belief, because this, generally, is not how things work. It's very unusual for a company to sustain a monopoly on _innovation_; where it happens it's usually down to the market being too small to justify the investment to catch up by others.
Autopilot (not FSD) is glorified lane centering + traffic aware cruise control. Most cars have this nowadays. Tesla's is among the best but others are up there too. Out of spec reviews has compared these systems among many brands.
This Autopilot is pretty old Tesla technology, basically abandoned, to be replaced by their FSD stack which also handles cities.
FSD does way more than glorified lane centering. It legitimately drives the car through city streets. It doesn't do it reliably enough that you can just set it and forget it but it's still a legit accomplishment.
Isn't SuperCruise limited to a subset of highways still, though?
Super curious about Mercedes, though. If nothing else, they will take on liability and thus likely delve more deeply into some of the challenges around L3.
I seem to remember automated manufacturing was supposed to be his big thing. The other companies were bogged down with union labor and he saw an opportunity. Then the first gigafactory failed to fully automate the process and so he put all his chips on "cheap" autopilot that didn't require expensive vision hardware and could instead all run on video.
Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I suspect.
This never really made sense either -- labor is manufacturing's largest "avoidable" cost by far, so all manufacturers want to reduce the amount of labor to an absolute minimum. The machines Tesla were buying to automate their plants only existed because other auto manufacturers were already using them for the same purpose. Tesla thought they could extend their use to places where traditional manufacturers had decided against it -- for instance shaping/fitting body panels, but quickly learned why the GMs and Toyotas of the world had human input in those areas.
Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring margins. There are plenty of videos from even economy car assembly plants 15 years ago where robots did the entirety of the welding and humans were only involved for little bits of final assembly.
Pretty funny considering even people who don't pay attention to him (like myself) are seeing repeated patterns of him walking into areas he doesn't know and thinking he knows better than all the existing industry/insider knowledge.
Now i'm just trying to figure out of it's arrogance or ignorance at the root of his problems in this space.
It's almost like a system that selects only for the best marketers (the elevator pitch and pitch deck) is terrible at finding people with a grounded worldview and an understanding of the market.
On of the next big things will be the next GPS, internet and other services that Starlink will make possible. Who knows how long it will take but I get the notion that Tesla can fix a lot of their problems in a production cycle or two and still have killer features to set it apart.
What's interesting about that is that VW thinks that even if they improve their processes, it should still take VW about 50% longer than Tesla to manufacture their cars.
But then again VW has a lot higher consistency and less QC issues coming off their lines...
Tesla just wants to crack the whip on quarterly deliveries. God help you if you take delivery of a vehicle manufactured at the end of the quarter - you're going to spend a lot of time arguing at a Service Center for them to fix manufacturing defects.
I wonder if there's a correlation between that and "time on the line"...
At Battery investment day (a few years after Autonomy investor day) he said the opposite: that self driving wasn't worth much because competitors would follow in 2-4 years, and that their advantage was all about their new battery tech. The new Tesla-made batteries have come out now and are 20% worse energy density than Panasonic's.
'Tesla founder Elon Musk said the key to his electric automaker's value is whether it can achieve self-driving technology, adding that the firm would be "worth basically zero" without it.' (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-worth-basica...)
I guess it's a trope he trots out in different contexts.
As for batteries, you hear much the same content at a variety of different OEM "battery days", which usually get much less coverage on places like HN however.
Musk is a marketer. The keystone of any good Marketing is: "Sell What You Have." So it's Electrification. Then it's self driving. Then it's GigaPress. Then improved batteries. If Tesla ends up nailing level-5 autonomous driving, it'll be self driving again.
Steve Jobs was very good at this as well. Here's the all-new iPod! Video? Who'd want to watch video on such a small screen? Next year, the all new video iPod.
I hate defending Tesla/Musk, but the reason the new batteries have worse energy density is because they switched chemistries to much cheaper, longer-lived, and safer lithium-iron-phosphate batteries.
The downside to LFP batteries is that they are less energy dense than the old NMC chemistry, though modern LFP batteries now have the same energy density as NMC batteries from about 10-15 years ago (due to the fact that individual cells can be placed more closely together than in NMC batteries due to the lack of thermal runaway risks).
> Moreover, independent 4680 battery teardowns and chemistry analysis shows that Tesla is still using the regular 811 nickel-manganese-cobalt mixture for the cathodes and ordinary graphite anodes.
They also aren't using added-silicon anodes yet, which may explain why the energy density is so poor. I'm not sure if they are having trouble working on this, or if they are waiting on patents to expire.
> I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this
Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":
Musk in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years."
I don’t get why tesla can’t just do the thing that originally made them successful: build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.
Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just outcompete by doing things as they already were?
AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and customer satisfaction.
>build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.
From the perspective of an employee at another OEM, I’d say they already do that. They have several moats outside of autonomous gimmicks:
1) Charging network. Nobody comes close.
2) Infotainment software (combined with underlying architecture and in-house silicon). They have the best experience in the industry. Their architecture is streamlined unlike disjoint legacy OEM 15 ECU hell. The broad market doesn’t really understand how far ahead they are in terms of architecture. Any new OEM has a huge advantage of starting fresh.
3)Packaging and battery density. They have the best range. They have the best packaging (tons of trunk and frunk space), where as many other manufacturers end up with weird raised trunk floors and no frunks in their competitor products that also somehow get worse range.
So yeah, I think Musk definitely undersells their lead in these areas. With no redesigns of the main models yet, they really could have focused a lot of effort on improving quality, interior materials, etc, but they instead poured money into the quagmire of autonomy.
>It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost not additional money, mass or volume. So building something like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive. Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it can't really do road trips.
Taking a long road trip with multiple people in a subcompact "penalty box" car the size of a Honda Fit is kind of a miserable experience regardless of what kind of motor it uses. People mostly only do that when they have no other options.
Yes cars like the Honda Fit are only for people who cannot afford a nicer, bigger car. Very few people actually prefer them. Their advantages are low cost and high fuel economy, which are the biggest factors forthe bottom end of the market.
My wife and I owned a Fit for over ten years. We took many long roadtrips (i.e. 8+ hours in the car). For a couple with no kids, it's perfect, with a decent amount of cargo space, and great mileage.
Frankly, outside of North America, small cars are by far the norm rather than the exception. The American SUV or pickup are quite literally jokes in other parts of the world for how absurdly large they are.
> That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery.
Kind of, you can also change the other factors in the equation like that startup building 'Lightyear' with the light weight platform, aerodynamics and with PV panels [0]
Or the extreme aerodynamics of Aptera which in 3 days [1] claims to "showcase our production-intent design and announce our Launch Edition’s unique specifications and revolutionary capabilities in a livestream webinar."
I think the range problem is already solved by the 800V/250kW+ charging. A 20-minute break every 3 hours of driving is within reason, and it makes the range effectively infinite.
I know there are people with steel bladders who also need to tow a boat every day, through a desert, in the snow, uphill both ways, but for commuting and occasional road trips it's already pretty good. Just don't try this with Leaf and its previous-gen peers that are 5 times slower than the state of the art.
But the only 800v cars are the extreme upper end of the price scale even for EVs. I think currently it is only the Lucid Air and the Porsche Taycan, both extreme luxury even in the expensive EV segment. And the infrastructure for non-Teslas just isn't there. The state of charging infrastructure sans Tesla's Supercharger network is really, really bad in the US right now, to the point that major EV influencers are just straight up recommending not yet switching to an EV just because of this.
I'm talking 1/2 of the stations broken/bricked on average, another 1/4 not delivering at all or not delivering the promised (250kW+) output, so you're stuck with 50kW in the middle of nowhere and your 20 minute stop now takes you 2.5h with no amenities around.
Check the Out of Spec channel on Youtube for frequent updates on this type of stuff.
Oh, thanks for the correction, I knew I was forgetting someone. Yea, those 2 (same car I believe, just rebadged?) are supposed to be pretty awesome. And at low $40k entry level they're maybe not priced cheap, but cheap-ish in the EV world, especially for vehicles with 800v systems!
What does a Lucid get you over these? 1,000HP. Does anyone really need that? So why pay 4x the price?
> And at low $40k entry level they're maybe not priced cheap, but cheap-ish in the EV world
I mean we're talking EV cars here, and comparing with Tesla. The cheapest Model 3 you can get out the door is $47K. So they're "cheaper than EVERY Tesla".
Just imagine what you could do if you could just open the boot and swap out a few 10kg batteries at the fuel station. You'd still have 30KWh hidden around the chassis, but most people don't need >100mile range every day.
I think they initially had hopes that they would be able to make some disruptive innovations in auto manufacturing - but all the evidence suggests they went way over their skis as Teslas are notorious for having extremely poor fit and finish. The failure to deliver on self driving is in line with a history of failing to deliver. You can include the weird hype around the Tesla humanoid robot on this list too imo.
I think that was part of why FSD was such a core pitch from the beginning. IF Tesla had managed to crack that to the actual fullest it could have been the game changing thing to put them ahead. The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock. Too bad they hard committed to camera only sensing which is looking like a major mistake given how little headway they have against traditional car safety features.
If one takes a moment to think about the value of a private car participating in a public taxi fleet, the idea collapses completely. Public transit is difficult, so is a taxi fleet. A part is labour - drivers specifically - but equally large portions are maintenance, insurance and related things.
Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles to overcome.
There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent public transit. The value is largely in limited regions - north america being one.
True but that's still a huge market and if it were demonstrably safer than people driving you could work through the insurance and liability issues in fairly short order.
Also even European cities with great transport are often choked by cars and parking issues. London in particular seems to have issues with the volume of vehicles that could be at least partially helped by car share robo-taxis.
There were tons of potential issues but it still formed the ideological core propping up any semblance of rationality to Tesla's pre-crash stock price. IMO it's still way over valued but it's at least no longer larger than every other major car manufacturer combined.
>The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock.
Sounds miserable, I wouldn't want to get back to my car after work and find some passenger had ruined it in some way. Bodily fluids, smoking weed in it, leaving trash, the possibilities are endless!
I agree with your interpretation, but I don't think Tesla is discovering this. I think they've known that the electric car was a mere sustaining innovation, while a true self-driving car is disruptive. That's why they've tried to sell their electric cars as self-driving cars.
Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile" sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a disruptive product.
Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption. Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.
As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.
As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).
> Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry.
Can you expand on this?
When the iPhone came out there was literally nothing like it on the market. It genuinely redefined what could be done with a phone, and it doing so, completely changed the category.
Nothing that Tesla is doing rises to that level of disruption/innovation, at least as far as I can tell.
What, exactly, are they doing that brings you to this conclusion?
> But I guess only time will tell.
I find this so strange.
Tesla has been around for... let's see... 20 years. The S is over 10 years old now (production started in late 2010).
The iPhone came out in 2007. A blink of the eye later and the smartphone was ubiquitous.
You say "time will tell", but... how much more time, exactly?
There's a few things to unpack here. One is the perception of the iPhone. Eg here's a quote from PC Magazine I saved when it came out: "Poor business e2mail and PIM connectivity. Bad audio quality on phone calls. Tons of GSM buzz on nearby speakers. Virtual keyboard hard to type on. No phone functionality with iPod speaker docks. It’s the best portable media player ever. It’s possibly the most fun we’ve ever had with a handheld device. It browses the Web like a champ. But poor phone call performance and missing messaging options make us unwilling to recommend it as a phone." There are similar other criticisms. It was not part of the category of smartphones at the time as seen by the people using them.
The early criticisms about Tesla's build quality and a lot of the arguments about a battery not being good enough seem to follow a similar argument. Is the original Model S as good as a top of the line gas car at the time? By most metrics used at the time, no. The criticisms in the peer comment by
lbsnake7 are similar - those are legacy metrics of a car. However it did find a customer base that valued what it offered, bad seats and poor panel gaps and all (just like the GSM buzz and non-replaceable battery).
As far as the timeline, the slowness has surprised me a bit but I think comes down to a couple of things. One is the turn over time of getting a new phone vs a new car. Cars are much slower. And another (which might be related) is the price point of cars being orders of magnitude larger than phones. And finally, it's taken a good while for Tesla to ramp - it's been supply constrained forever (although there might be signs of that shifting).
So you've provided your perspective on why you think the iPhone wasn't that disruptive at the time (though, given that, a year after its launch, numerous phone manufacturers announced their own smartphones, I think you're rewriting history a bit, but whatever, that's not actually the point of the conversation).
At the same time you've claimed Tesla will be the iPhone of the car world. You claimed "In this way [Tesla] is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry."
I'm asking why you believe that. Can you expand on that?
I've heard claims of vertical integration, but that hasn't proven to be a major differentiator, and in fact is turning out to be a liability (see: reliance on China).
I've heard claims of manufacturing automation, but that's turned out to largely be a failure.
I've heard claims about the synergy with Solar City and their battery development, but that's proven to be a very small moat, at best.
I've heard claims about the value of OTA updates for software, but that too hasn't been that disruptive, and now other manufacturers are doing the same.
I've heard claims about their abandonment of the dealership model, but that doesn't seem to have been much of a differentiator, and given their service reputation, seems to have become a liability.
Elon is selling the idea that FSD is the critical factor, but FSD is increasingly looking like an unattainable dream, at least with the hardware platform Tesla currently has in the market.
So what's your take? Why do you still think Tesla will be like "the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry"? What am I missing?
You've also explained why you think Tesla, at 20 years, hasn't yet had the disruptive effect on the market that you seem you be predicting, laying it at the feet of market structure and so forth.
But you haven't explained why you believe that will change, either.
It is the part just before you cut in my quote: "it's playing against a different set of customer values". That is how Christensen defines a new market disruption. That is not enough for a successful new market disruption, but is one of his key characteristic of one. So I believe the values people are finding in their purchase of a Tesla are radically different than those buying ICE vehicles.
I think that might have been true once but a) the futuristic/revolutionary reputation of Tesla has come down to earth through the trials of the Model 3 and the failure to deliver FSD, and b) Elon's antics, both during COVID and through 2022, appear to have put a sour taste in the mouths of people who bought Tesla's for the values they purportedly represented (sustainability, etc).
So honestly I don't believe this is the case anymore. I think, as more EV competition is entering the market from both new and established automakers, they're now just another EV that happens to have great brand recognition but an eroding brand reputation, a good charger network, average to below average quality, a very weak record on customer service, and a CEO that's just another crazy, out of touch billionaire.
The iPhone was seen as a niche device when it was introduced. It was both "too expensive" to be a mass market consumer device and lacked features that the enterprise demanded at the time. At the time, consumer phones were much cheaper, and smartphones were PDAs that made calls -- they were electronic Rolodexes.
"Kids don't want to play with a rolodex, they want MP3 players!"
What nobody expected is the power of: people just loving the device. Enterprise IT departments were approached by C-suite folks demanding to use the device. Consumers decided they did want to fork out big bucks for one, and carriers found a way to finance them.
I'm far from a Tesla fan myself, but one thing I found really cool are claims by friends who worked with Tesla is that they have a huge lead on mainstream car makers thanks to the fact they design and make a huge part of the cars and "stack" in-house. Rather than 80% of the car (and code) being built by 1st tier makers, packaged by 2nd tier and integrated by your 3rd tier provider, leading to very very slow iteration cycles. One friend even claimed they do continuous delivery on many parts of the hardware on a daily basis (meaning revisions are a frequent thing across the entire stack). I am not sure how much of this is true though.
> I'm far from a Tesla fan myself, but one thing I found really cool are claims by friends who worked with Tesla is that they have a huge lead on mainstream car makers thanks to the fact they design and make a huge part of the cars and "stack" in-house.
That might be true, but it's not clear at all that it's good.
Vertical integration carries risks because you now have to run your own end-to-end supply chain, which means you are also responsible for building diversification in that supply chain (as otherwise you end up with single points of failure), which is complex and expensive.
I've heard similar claims about how cool it is that Tesla doesn't have dealerships, but the downside is they also have absolutely horrendous service.
And this is ignoring the fact that how Tesla builds and sells their products is somewhat orthogonal to the question of product category disruption.
No one would've called Apple disruptive if they made yet-another-flip-phone but just built and sold it differently.
This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the more tech of all the car companies. They have the disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as much as possible. Historically car companies outsource everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is why they have all the quality problems.
> In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day.
As much as the iPhone killed off those companies, it grew the market for smartphones more.
There is no significantly growing market for cars like there was for "handheld
internet-connected personal computers". Every EV sale is effectively 1 less ICE sale - a 1:1 replacement in the market. Whatever market growth potential exists is in the very price sensitive developing world (South Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc), where EVs will show up en-masse last.
Now that practically every company is selling EVs, Tesla only has its brand to differentiate it, which was at one time significant but perhaps less so lately.
As I see it, their only meteoric growth opportunity (by eating into competitors' market share) would be if they released a $20K, 250+ mile range, 5 seater EV in the very near future - like what the VW Beetle did in its generation.
But that's hard to achieve in an EV (especially from a luxury brand used to high margins), since the majority of the cost of an EV is still in the battery, and that cost doesn't scale down much with a lower price tag.
You're a bit too late with that observation I think as Tesla is no longer the upstart.
> The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023. That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents dragging their feet to being in the top 10.
Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked out. They are here to stay.
> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.
Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
> you’re committing fraud.
Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.
> Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll have a couple people take X months to map it
No they won’t. That’s the entire point. It doesn’t scale from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by their search ads monopoly right now. They can’t pull in the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares alone.
> Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”
> so it's not like investors are deceived
Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I don’t really care: being a VC is risky. But these types of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes have HD mapping that won’t be collected universally (due to cost problems). How is that not deception in your mind?
You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with nothing to back it up.
> LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”
"We can do it" = closest thing to solved. No one can say without a doubt we can do it for the other parts.
> How is that not deception in your mind?
You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party. All the VCs have asked these questions and were given answers satisfactory enough to invest.
Here's a basic one they can tell investors: the top 10 cities for ride-sharing comprise 70% of the total market. It will cost $X to map and permanently have access to the vast majority of the market. We believe in addition, we can induce demand so this 70% of the market becomes a massive multiple of the current market.
If you're going to be this snarky, at least do some basic research.
>You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with nothing to back it up.
I literally work at an automotive OEM that maintains its own AV team and map infra. I have seen the balance sheets. It’s not going to scale.
Also, you make the inverse claim without evidence or any purported industry expertise. Where’s your evidence that Waymo can just walk into a new city without ballooning costs? If they can do it, why don’t they? That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
> You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party
Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”. You are illiterate if you don’t consider that product name tantamount to fraud if the car can’t drive itself.
Investors were clearly lied to. Once again, I don’t care about VC money. Part of the game to lose it.
An automotive OEM would probably have a hell of a time scaling a video streaming website or a search engine as well. Yet it scaled when a tech company did it.
> Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”.
When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.
You work at a company committing fraud with a dead end product that will never scale. You’re mad that I’m exposing your fraudulent demo tactics. Go tweak those hyper parameters one more time —- cross your fingers your model converges this decade before your funding gets pulled and your resume has a half-decade block filled with “I bought the hype, committed fraud, got caught, and failed.”
> this ranting would be a lot more relevant if you couldn't hail rides in our vehicles
Where? A narrow area in which you can create ultra-HD maps that are in no way indicative of the general case?
If you’re at Cruise, I can only grab a ride between 10 pm and 5:30 am (lol, lmao). If you’re at Waymo, your beta is still closed (though I have several invites from former colleagues) and you only serve a tiny fraction of realistic destinations in the city. Do you think this proves your point? Let me restate my position: you can’t scale to the general case. You never will. You will be stuck in Phoenix and specific part of SF forever. Your business will never be viable. Your vehicles will never be able to navigate roads without a prohibitively costly mapping effort in that region that doesn’t scale. Your valuation will continue to decline. What part of offering unsafe rides to friends and family right now changes that?
> You're already behind on which cities are being mapped by the way.
Funded by investors or search ads, not ride fares. And in a $200k vehicle that will never be economically viable. Your resume will be embarrassing in a few years if you stick around. Do yourself a favor and get out before you go to zero.
First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.
Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.
Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
> for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.
When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.
> When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud
Right. Just like Steve Jobs holding an iPhone that crashed before the keynote is fraud.
Fraud is saying it's driving itself when a human is driving.
> If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud.
This is so utterly nonsensical I don't even know where to start. Driving scenarios are not fungible. Navigating around a stopped car in downtown SF is not the same as being able to navigate around a stopped car in Mumbai rush hour, or navigating around a stopped car in the middle of a California wildfire with 0 visibility and a fire roaring 10 feet away.
So when a video shows that the vehicle can handle a given situation and the vehicle handles it on video, the implication is not "we've now solved every variation of this situation to ever exist", the implication is "we were able to handle the situation you just witnessed".
I thought it ended at you not understanding EVs, but it's even worse: you don't even know what "fraud" means, and you clearly don't understand how bleeding edge technology is presented. That mentality is definitely more at home in the fossilized environment of an automotive OEM, but it must certainly be interesting to watch all that "fraud" translate into hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads and open betas with real riders... sour grapes much?
"The vehicle 'handles it' using technology, equipment, input and data that is not now, and will not, be used in your vehicle in any way shape or form. In fact our CEO will spend countless hours mocking our competitors for using it and strongly implying that we did no such thing."
Apple planned for the iPhone to do all those things. Tesla has never planned for their cars to do those things, and to "advertise" what their cars could and would do, they used a car that was not and is not one that you or I could ever acquire.
I am not talking about Tesla there, read before commenting.
I specifically call out Tesla as being completely fraudulent (and we're literally replying to their director of Autopilot say the same). They are not even in the same game as actual AV companies when our sensor stacks are worth more than the entire vehicle they claim as "FSD"
I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked, if not outright faked.
In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.
One difference is Tesla runs on all roads basically (subject to weather view on cameras). It's gm super cruise and google that only work on road that have been imaged. It does seem that super cruise and google waymo is ahead of tesla. Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem, random roads and conditions. I think that tesla won't succeed very soon, and as the "pre-scan the road" groups get better and better tesla's approach will be seen as unacceptable risky. I have only driven the new versions a few time, it was interesting to see all the things they could see but it just wasn't safe. Waymo has their weird stuff but did seem much safer in theory. But who knows if there is a hole, like happened in Arizona to that poor woman who got run over in the night while crossing the dark road.
Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a better criteria for discussing fraud.
C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue.
What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.
Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it a pass on the bad things it's done.
It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.
You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic shift into the automotive industry.
Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.
The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
> I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.
Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.
The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try.
Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.
What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on.
Just writing without an editor - the main point I was thinking was that it was quite a significant upcharge. It’d be one thing if they had a, shall we say, optimistic video about future vehicles but selling something for that much money that implies it is a lot closer to available.
The clear implication is that you should buy one because it can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.
There's no reason to apply such an implication. This was a tech demo! No one ever claimed that was something production cars could currently do at the time, nor would that make any sense, as the cars clearly did not do that at the time.
Reading that article, I see lots of things which do not sound like “this worked once on a single known course”. They’re taking orders, talking about unattended cross country trips, and claiming the driver is only there for legal reasons — all of which makes it sound a lot more mature than it is.
If someone says, "Buy a Tesla, now with Full Self Driving! Here's a demo!" <insert demo>, then you're going to very reasonably assume that the demo is supposed to be of the current Full Self Driving feature, not of any future feature, and of a typical, if slightly polished-up, usage of that feature.
The kind of absurdly nitpicky legalistic weasel-wording you're trying to do wouldn't even fly in most American courts, let alone in the court of public opinion.
I don't know what to tell you, man. There was no "current Full Self Driving" feature at the time, in 2016. That option literally had no features until 2019 when some stuff began getting enabled via software update.
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." makes it sound like that’s almost ready, as does taking expensive advanced payments on a device which has a relatively short service life. That’s a big up charge for a feature many buyers will never be able use as long as they own their Teslas.
Even now, they say “The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat”. Again, that’s fine if you’re showing a tech preview but when you start taking preorders on consumable product you really should be very clear that what people get for all of that money is nowhere near the demo.
Almost ready or not, it doesn't make it sound like the product can do it right now if you purchase it.
Whether it's FSD, Cyberpunk or a Kickstarter campaign, preorders should cary the same expectations — if what you are buying doesn't exist yet, the seller cannot possibly guarantee they will be able to make what they 'promised'.
I would definitely support some rules like that for pre-orders: once you start accepting money you have to be very up-front about the state of the product and test results. If that’s too much, do conventional R&D and tell people they can buy it when it’s ready.
Agreed. It could be also regulated the way e.g. investment ads are, so you always have to explain that this is not a finished product and that it may be different on release or in fact never be finished.
I won't defend Tesla here, but I think e.g. the gaming world is often unfair to game studios and game developers when a game is launched and is different from what was presented on some conference before. Scope changes, priorities change, playtesting changes the original plans, resources are limited. It's normal. When the end product is different it doesn't mean the developers lied when they originally presented it.
Were the other companies putting that the driver is only there for legal reasons at the front of the video and selling the product for thousands of dollars with promises it would work as depicted imminently?
There is a world of difference between the demos other companies were showing and this.
> A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that claim.
Weren't they saying they weren't going to use HD mapping at that point, that their cars just pick up the lay of the land and deal with anything, making their approach way more scalable than competitors?
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
"Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly misleading.
It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing it correctly identifying golden retrievers.
They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.
>"planned, organized, or arranged in advance (often of an event or situation intended to seem otherwise)." - Oxford English Dictionary
Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"
The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"
Yeah, this coverage (as is so common with this company) seems a bit off. This wasn't a product in 2016, it was a technology demonstration. How many tech giants have stood on stage demoing products that barely worked, with an army of engineers on site to get it right before the reveal?
As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for this industry for every manufacturer except Tesla.
Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise. No, it's not done. But it's great.
This is exactly the kind of unserious flamery I was talking about. And it's simply out of control on this site. Get a ride, is all I can say. It may not be as fun as yelling about it on the internet, but you'll get a much better idea of the capabilities of this technology, and probably have a ton of fun while you do.
> That accident was caused by an inattentive driver, full stop.
No, you've been musked. It was Tesla's software that brought the car to a full stop, full stop. It's funny how Tesla wants to claim credit for X million miles without crashes under software control, except for that last mile where there's a problem. That one belongs to the driver.
> Even an FSDb equipped Tesla isn’t autonomous,
So.. you agree that Tesla's video promoting full self-driving was staged. And you agree with Tesla that they have failed to deliver full self-driving:
Sarcastically, a 2000 lb robot could be programmed to drive in a random walk pattern quite cheaply: film it for many days and use the section of the recording where it has the fewest collisions as the promo video!
> The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being far easier than production up a lot.
Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is building.
it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".
Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?
Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.
That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
And for a long time, and still now, a lot of the verbiage around FSD implies that "Availability of FSD depends on regulatory approval" which makes it sound like regulatory approval is holding Tesla back from giving this to you. Ironically, there's actual very little "regulatory approval" required if things work. So it requires very little regulatory approval and a whole hell of a lot of "actually make it work".
Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.
A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus.
Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?
What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death?
The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US.
If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
>How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?
I don’t. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just because you speculate about some non-existent alien technology that would make it safe if it existed? Why?
> If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
So if NHTSA doesn’t force their hand then they have no obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know it to be unsafe? I’m very glad that countless engineers at Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others didn’t have that mindset.
>How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?
Honestly that isn't the question here and also not society's problem. If Tesla can't make the business model work, that is a Tesla problem.
Plenty of other companies are making great progress on autonomous vehicles without passing a non-working system off as something that "drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot". It is more expensive that way and requires more upfront costs, but thems the breaks.
>If the law isn’t good, change the law.
This thread is literally about a deposition in a court case. It might not require any change of law. It might not be a criminal trial, but civil cases can be just as effective at getting bad actors and their faulty products out of the market.
You assume "bad actor" I think it’s a good actor that is going to save a lot of lives.
But the media/government is going to use every accident to punish Tesla and slow them down, costing way more lives.
Remember the media is paid largely by all the other auto maker and Tesla spend zero in publicity, making it enemy no.1 of the media. The same is true of the current government that is heavily financed by United Auto Worker.
There is alway a tradeoff of progress and safety. 46 000 people die in car accident each year in the US I hope that this also count in the balance, not only the one who ignore all the advices while using autopilot.
The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot software director) confirmed:
* They collected extra data along this particular route.
* They made multiple test runs and picked the best.
Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying".
This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash.https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.
I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.
I wonder if we're disagreeing on what they thought the odds of an embarrassing incident were or whether those odds would have been acceptable to them?
The video is 3:44, and I think doesn't have any bits cut out. I'm guessing that after running the route many times for practice and giving it extra data they could have gotten down to about odds of somewhere around 1:10k. And I think they would have accepted those odds.
(I would definitely not accept those odds, and would not want to ride in or near a car made by people who would. I'm glad that the law prevented them from doing runs without a safety driver at that stage. And I don't think they're anywhere near ready to do that today either.)
> I'm guessing that after running the route many times for practice
Why practice? They did the run until it worked well for the video. It wasn't a demo with a live non-Tesla audience. In this case not working 9/10 times is good enough rather than 1/10000
There is no reason to think it was better than today's FSD even with those "crutches" (as I believe Elon himself refers to them when talking about other SDC companies), and the chance unsupervised FSD does something horribly wrong in a public way on real streets even in 3.4 miles is far higher than 10000:1 today. After all the car did hit a barrier during the making of this video. I doubt they spent much effort improving the odds when they had infinite takes.
Looking around I see something like 6mi per disengagement [1] which, yes, is unacceptably high. The video is probably about 2mi, which naively would give 1:3. But disengagements have a large amount of precaution, so this isn't an accident rate. And some accidents wouldn't be ones they'd need to be public about, like the one in testing which only came out years later.
Q. And isn't it true that during the various
attempts to generate the video, there were instances
in which the person sitting in the seat had to intervene?
A. Yes.
> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch
A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills you.
You at least had control over the decision to use FSD (bad already, given human driver psychology) and then not pay attention to be able to intervene in a split second (which is ambitious to begin with especially over periods longer than a few seconds).
Below [0] is a link to a comment I recently made about a very dangerous incident I myself experienced with only a much more mundane "lane assist", on a German autobahn, while fully engaged and in control. Imagine I had had something like FSD and had required even a split second longer to get control of the car back... it would probably have been too late by then. I don't think it's a good idea to think well, I can just disable assistants, or FSD, unless conditions are perfect. Some day you will forget.
Problem is, now it's years later, the product has been in the hands of consumers for a while now, and yet it still doesn't work. People are pissed off, people are getting hurt, and yet he continues to insist on calling it "Full Self Driving" when it is very far from that. If the government can't do anything to protect consumers for whatever reason, then the consumers must take it to the courts and to the media relentlessly until the knowledge of what FSD really is becomes a part of the zeitgeist. Much value and many lives will be destroyed needlessly because of one snake oil salesman holding a whole bunch of money.
If you read the actual fraud charges [1] it does list the demo video, but along with very clear lies like saying it "fully functions and works" at an unveiling for the Nikola One or "Nikola is producing [hydrogen] well below $4 a kilogram" when the charge says In fact, Nikola has never produced any hydrogen at any price, nor at the time could it have produced hydrogen for below $4 per kilogram. To the contrary, Nikola has never obtained a permit to produce hydrogen or installed the equipment necessary to produce hydrogen. At the time that MILTON was claiming that Nikola was producing hydrogen for less than $4 per kilogram, it was in fact purchasing hydrogen from a supplier for $16 per kilogram.
(Something can also be fraud without being a lie.)
A person seeing it would reasonably conclude that the claim wasn't specific to this exact situation, which makes this misleading, but not technically lying.
It is a lie by omission, some facts are so important to a statement that eliding them is lying. You can't just say that the driver wasn't necessary when he had to intervene in your other tests, it is like saying that the safety net for your line dancer isn't needed even though he would have fallen and died many times over without it. Such lies kills people.
I didn't watch that trial closely because the fraud seemed so obvious and the company was still a fledgling (?)
The Musk / Tesla fraud also seems extremely obvious, but even tho Musk has haters, he's made a bunch more people tons of money, I would expect him to have much better lawyers, etc.
These are not similar cases at all. Any competent engineer can work through the iPhone bugs and fix them. That's well-trodden ground, the sort of thing thousands of engineers do each day. Fixing a self-driving neural network is a research topic. Even years later it's not a fully solved problem, and that should have been clear in 2016.
And of course they fixed them before the public release of the product (or shortly after).
Teslas FSD is released for years (which they call beta for marketing / libility) and is still missing a lot of features (including the ability to work without human oversight) and being quite buggy on others.
> This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
> And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
I mean... they haven't launched Full Self Driving. You can (for money) get a beta that requires you to remain in control of the car and often makes mistakes. But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
> But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
Today, after ~7 more years of development? Can it do them consistently or "80% of the time it works every time"? Because that's the problem, the bar for an autonomous driving system to be useful is high.
Below that bar you either have just a set of driver assists that have no claim at real autonomy, and have existed for (relatively) cheap for years, or you have the the "Goldilocks zone" of dangerous tech, smart enough to coax you into handing over the control but too dumb to be actually capable of taking over.
It's hard for some to see this point of view unfortunately, no matter how you try it. Elon has been intentionally skirting and blurring the line between lying and marketing for a while now.
They sold FSD as something coming soon. I considered buying a car with it in 2019. Had I bought that car, it would likely have hit the end of its 10 year lifespan before FSD ships. Assuming that Tesla ever ships FSD for a ten year old vehicle.
Not just coming soon. In 2019 Musk claimed it would be financially insane not to buy a Tesla because by 2020 it would become a robo taxi earning you tens of thousands a year.
They have launched Full Self Driving - it's being sold to general public, it's being advertised to general public, and it's being used by general public as a product; the legalese fine-print disclaimer about 'beta' doesn't change that.
But not in the sense of the video’s claim, that you do not have to interact with the vehicle. The beta is a driver assist system you must carefully monitor and intervene, the final product is autonomous.
FYI, Tesla does not sell anything called “Full Self Driving.” That people think they do is a product of their [probably intentionally misleading] marketing. Tesla sells “Full Self Driving Capability.”
Just like I have the capability of running a marathon. I just haven’t done it. And I probably won’t…
Do you actually have capability to run marathon? You know you would finish before time runs out and you know your body would not be able to complete it? Untrained people can't and get injury, get sick or just can't continue.
Full Self-Driving Capability is not capable of full self-driving.
(An honest name might be “Full Self-Driving Aspirational Future Upgradeability with Limited Self-Driving Capability”, but that probably wouldn't sell as well since it would set realistic expectations.)
I have FSD and it is a joke. It is so bad I don’t know where to begin. This software has no place on a public road. All it’s good for is tech demos. They are going to kill people who were fooled into thinking FSD actually works.
Did you read the actual deposition? The linked article is not clear on the exact details, I don't think it's possible to come to any conclusions from the article alone.
The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)
I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way worse.)
> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch.
In a past life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I did a lot of demos on behalf of Microsoft that were precisely scripted. And, even then, NT4 BSOD'd on me in front of a packed auditorium once.
That's why one of the key skills of a corporate public face in IT is stand-up comedy. They didn't see the flawless ISS crash containment they were promised, but at least they had some great laughs.
Funny now that the devil isn't that much of a baddie anymore.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadIsn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet? How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents?
"Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a damningly weak defense (imo).
I think the worst thing they did was giving those device out to healthcare institutions, when they knew it was inaccurate.
I'm not defending her, she was clearly dangerously delusional, but I think it explains why she didn't behave like a classical con artist/scammer
Mr. SBF from FTX would like to have a word with you.
The missing comma before "and fraud" is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
I think your punctuation is doing you a disservice.
/s
The problem is that neither delivered those things to the particular qualities promised.
That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that does not exist now
That honestly sounds like the description is "unpredictable and dangerous".
What matters is:
(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims
(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.
(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation
If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.
Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...
(Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)
> Weight-loss products accounted for 13 percent of the fraud claims submitted to the F.T.C. in 2011, the most recent data available. That is more than twice the number in any other category.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/us-charges-4-com...
It is not legal to do so when it materially misrepresents your product.
The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.
Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.
Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO
(/s)
This part is even worse.
If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did the AI training.
Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
That would be bad (for the media company).
I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.
When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.
A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
The deposition is from June 2022 btw.
The full deposition is embedded on this page: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559294/tesla-autopilot-...
A direct link to download the deposition is here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23574198/elluswamy-de...
Is there a public accounting of Musk’s balance sheet? His fondness for margin loans is documented, after all.
Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.
Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up some farcical point they tried making online and got called out on.
As someone who lives on a dirt road surrounded by airbnb's near a national park seeing lots of tourist traffic, I think you have an extremely flawed understanding of what "everyone knows" WRT their vehicle's capabilities.
I mean heck just look at what happened to Nikola. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...
Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.
McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xnjBoJHzE
I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.
Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.
And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.
Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one knows they clearly do lie about how tall the food is.
I presume what you meant here is that they're not supposed to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the can and do. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
Perhaps you could share with me the lies McDonalds has told you and everyone else about their food? I mean, sure, it sucks. But the video I linked to above explains exactly why and how the food in the ads looks better than the food they sell you.
Other than that, where are the lies?
But I can tell you right now that McDs is not lying about what a BigMac can look like, because I have eaten a Bic Mac, and other McDs burgers, that looked just like they were from a commercial. Food has natural variability; how the final burger appears depends on the ingredients and the preparation, and some McDs locations like the ones near me do a better job of storing their buns and assembling their burgers than others.
McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8
It's just taken time for the industry to respond.
I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next.
Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
I see them all around me and the marked for used ones, all the way back to 2012 models seems to be strong.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40613694/nissan-leaf-bein...
While they were a dime a dozen in the bay area and a handful of wealthy urban markets, its been hugely outsold by the more expensive Model 3 and Y despite being on sale since 2011 and didn't sell anything close to Nissan's hopes for the model.
MG4 is the cheapest EV (£30K) sold outside of China that could reasonably compete with a Corolla. There isn't much else in the cheap bracket. e-Niro and ID.3 start at £35K.
It is inexpensive for an EV and seems to be a reliable and durable car.
I’m almost sad to hear it’s going to be discontinued but for myself, when the time comes, I’ll be taking a good look at whatever Nissan will be offering.
Nissan Ariya is technically average, and rather pricy. It's technically comparable to ID.4, but 25% more expensive. Or for the same money you can get Ioniq 5 or Kia EV6, even in their higher trims, and they charge twice as fast.
You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.
I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.
This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.
There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.
Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.
Always thought this was a pretty odd belief, because this, generally, is not how things work. It's very unusual for a company to sustain a monopoly on _innovation_; where it happens it's usually down to the market being too small to justify the investment to catch up by others.
This Autopilot is pretty old Tesla technology, basically abandoned, to be replaced by their FSD stack which also handles cities.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/test-driving-gm-ford-and-tes...
Mercedes-Benz is about to launch true level 3 autonomous driving technology, but it's not quite available for purchase yet.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/mercedes-benz-gets-approval-to...
Super curious about Mercedes, though. If nothing else, they will take on liability and thus likely delve more deeply into some of the challenges around L3.
Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I suspect.
Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring margins. There are plenty of videos from even economy car assembly plants 15 years ago where robots did the entirety of the welding and humans were only involved for little bits of final assembly.
Now i'm just trying to figure out of it's arrogance or ignorance at the root of his problems in this space.
Unless of course you've bought into your own marketing and think yourself a disruptive genius.
To me this is just a wonderful object lesson in the naivete of so many SV "disruptors" who fail to understand Chesterton's Fence.
But then again VW has a lot higher consistency and less QC issues coming off their lines...
Tesla just wants to crack the whip on quarterly deliveries. God help you if you take delivery of a vehicle manufactured at the end of the quarter - you're going to spend a lot of time arguing at a Service Center for them to fix manufacturing defects.
I wonder if there's a correlation between that and "time on the line"...
I guess it's a trope he trots out in different contexts.
As for batteries, you hear much the same content at a variety of different OEM "battery days", which usually get much less coverage on places like HN however.
Steve Jobs was very good at this as well. Here's the all-new iPod! Video? Who'd want to watch video on such a small screen? Next year, the all new video iPod.
The downside to LFP batteries is that they are less energy dense than the old NMC chemistry, though modern LFP batteries now have the same energy density as NMC batteries from about 10-15 years ago (due to the fact that individual cells can be placed more closely together than in NMC batteries due to the lack of thermal runaway risks).
> Moreover, independent 4680 battery teardowns and chemistry analysis shows that Tesla is still using the regular 811 nickel-manganese-cobalt mixture for the cathodes and ordinary graphite anodes.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-Tesla-4680-battery-teard...
They also aren't using added-silicon anodes yet, which may explain why the energy density is so poor. I'm not sure if they are having trouble working on this, or if they are waiting on patents to expire.
Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":
https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...
2022: "Our focus is on solving the problem."
Musk in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years."
Apparently it got unsolved along the way.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-elon-musk-says-autonomou...
Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just outcompete by doing things as they already were?
AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and customer satisfaction.
From the perspective of an employee at another OEM, I’d say they already do that. They have several moats outside of autonomous gimmicks:
1) Charging network. Nobody comes close. 2) Infotainment software (combined with underlying architecture and in-house silicon). They have the best experience in the industry. Their architecture is streamlined unlike disjoint legacy OEM 15 ECU hell. The broad market doesn’t really understand how far ahead they are in terms of architecture. Any new OEM has a huge advantage of starting fresh. 3)Packaging and battery density. They have the best range. They have the best packaging (tons of trunk and frunk space), where as many other manufacturers end up with weird raised trunk floors and no frunks in their competitor products that also somehow get worse range.
So yeah, I think Musk definitely undersells their lead in these areas. With no redesigns of the main models yet, they really could have focused a lot of effort on improving quality, interior materials, etc, but they instead poured money into the quagmire of autonomy.
That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost not additional money, mass or volume. So building something like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive. Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it can't really do road trips.
My wife and I owned a Fit for over ten years. We took many long roadtrips (i.e. 8+ hours in the car). For a couple with no kids, it's perfect, with a decent amount of cargo space, and great mileage.
Frankly, outside of North America, small cars are by far the norm rather than the exception. The American SUV or pickup are quite literally jokes in other parts of the world for how absurdly large they are.
Kind of, you can also change the other factors in the equation like that startup building 'Lightyear' with the light weight platform, aerodynamics and with PV panels [0]
[0] https://lightyear.one/lightyear-2
[1] https://aptera.us/meet-delta/
I know there are people with steel bladders who also need to tow a boat every day, through a desert, in the snow, uphill both ways, but for commuting and occasional road trips it's already pretty good. Just don't try this with Leaf and its previous-gen peers that are 5 times slower than the state of the art.
I'm talking 1/2 of the stations broken/bricked on average, another 1/4 not delivering at all or not delivering the promised (250kW+) output, so you're stuck with 50kW in the middle of nowhere and your 20 minute stop now takes you 2.5h with no amenities around.
Check the Out of Spec channel on Youtube for frequent updates on this type of stuff.
What does a Lucid get you over these? 1,000HP. Does anyone really need that? So why pay 4x the price?
I mean we're talking EV cars here, and comparing with Tesla. The cheapest Model 3 you can get out the door is $47K. So they're "cheaper than EVERY Tesla".
Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles to overcome.
There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent public transit. The value is largely in limited regions - north america being one.
Also even European cities with great transport are often choked by cars and parking issues. London in particular seems to have issues with the volume of vehicles that could be at least partially helped by car share robo-taxis.
There were tons of potential issues but it still formed the ideological core propping up any semblance of rationality to Tesla's pre-crash stock price. IMO it's still way over valued but it's at least no longer larger than every other major car manufacturer combined.
Sounds miserable, I wouldn't want to get back to my car after work and find some passenger had ruined it in some way. Bodily fluids, smoking weed in it, leaving trash, the possibilities are endless!
If you can print cash with your Robotaxi, why would Tesla ever sell you one? Just build your army of Robotaxis and make your billions that way.
Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile" sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a disruptive product.
As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.
As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).
Can you expand on this?
When the iPhone came out there was literally nothing like it on the market. It genuinely redefined what could be done with a phone, and it doing so, completely changed the category.
Nothing that Tesla is doing rises to that level of disruption/innovation, at least as far as I can tell.
What, exactly, are they doing that brings you to this conclusion?
> But I guess only time will tell.
I find this so strange.
Tesla has been around for... let's see... 20 years. The S is over 10 years old now (production started in late 2010).
The iPhone came out in 2007. A blink of the eye later and the smartphone was ubiquitous.
You say "time will tell", but... how much more time, exactly?
The early criticisms about Tesla's build quality and a lot of the arguments about a battery not being good enough seem to follow a similar argument. Is the original Model S as good as a top of the line gas car at the time? By most metrics used at the time, no. The criticisms in the peer comment by lbsnake7 are similar - those are legacy metrics of a car. However it did find a customer base that valued what it offered, bad seats and poor panel gaps and all (just like the GSM buzz and non-replaceable battery).
As far as the timeline, the slowness has surprised me a bit but I think comes down to a couple of things. One is the turn over time of getting a new phone vs a new car. Cars are much slower. And another (which might be related) is the price point of cars being orders of magnitude larger than phones. And finally, it's taken a good while for Tesla to ramp - it's been supply constrained forever (although there might be signs of that shifting).
At the same time you've claimed Tesla will be the iPhone of the car world. You claimed "In this way [Tesla] is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry."
I'm asking why you believe that. Can you expand on that?
I've heard claims of vertical integration, but that hasn't proven to be a major differentiator, and in fact is turning out to be a liability (see: reliance on China).
I've heard claims of manufacturing automation, but that's turned out to largely be a failure.
I've heard claims about the synergy with Solar City and their battery development, but that's proven to be a very small moat, at best.
I've heard claims about the value of OTA updates for software, but that too hasn't been that disruptive, and now other manufacturers are doing the same.
I've heard claims about their abandonment of the dealership model, but that doesn't seem to have been much of a differentiator, and given their service reputation, seems to have become a liability.
Elon is selling the idea that FSD is the critical factor, but FSD is increasingly looking like an unattainable dream, at least with the hardware platform Tesla currently has in the market.
So what's your take? Why do you still think Tesla will be like "the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry"? What am I missing?
You've also explained why you think Tesla, at 20 years, hasn't yet had the disruptive effect on the market that you seem you be predicting, laying it at the feet of market structure and so forth.
But you haven't explained why you believe that will change, either.
So honestly I don't believe this is the case anymore. I think, as more EV competition is entering the market from both new and established automakers, they're now just another EV that happens to have great brand recognition but an eroding brand reputation, a good charger network, average to below average quality, a very weak record on customer service, and a CEO that's just another crazy, out of touch billionaire.
What nobody expected is the power of: people just loving the device. Enterprise IT departments were approached by C-suite folks demanding to use the device. Consumers decided they did want to fork out big bucks for one, and carriers found a way to finance them.
That might be true, but it's not clear at all that it's good.
Vertical integration carries risks because you now have to run your own end-to-end supply chain, which means you are also responsible for building diversification in that supply chain (as otherwise you end up with single points of failure), which is complex and expensive.
I've heard similar claims about how cool it is that Tesla doesn't have dealerships, but the downside is they also have absolutely horrendous service.
And this is ignoring the fact that how Tesla builds and sells their products is somewhat orthogonal to the question of product category disruption.
No one would've called Apple disruptive if they made yet-another-flip-phone but just built and sold it differently.
As much as the iPhone killed off those companies, it grew the market for smartphones more.
There is no significantly growing market for cars like there was for "handheld internet-connected personal computers". Every EV sale is effectively 1 less ICE sale - a 1:1 replacement in the market. Whatever market growth potential exists is in the very price sensitive developing world (South Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc), where EVs will show up en-masse last.
Now that practically every company is selling EVs, Tesla only has its brand to differentiate it, which was at one time significant but perhaps less so lately.
As I see it, their only meteoric growth opportunity (by eating into competitors' market share) would be if they released a $20K, 250+ mile range, 5 seater EV in the very near future - like what the VW Beetle did in its generation.
But that's hard to achieve in an EV (especially from a luxury brand used to high margins), since the majority of the cost of an EV is still in the battery, and that cost doesn't scale down much with a lower price tag.
> The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023. That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents dragging their feet to being in the top 10.
Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked out. They are here to stay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018
> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill).
You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
> you’re committing fraud.
Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars. They are selling only the rides which they have the ability to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like investors are deceived.
No they won’t. That’s the entire point. It doesn’t scale from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by their search ads monopoly right now. They can’t pull in the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares alone.
> Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”
> so it's not like investors are deceived
Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I don’t really care: being a VC is risky. But these types of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes have HD mapping that won’t be collected universally (due to cost problems). How is that not deception in your mind?
> LOL! Not even close to true. “We can do it” != “we can do it without burning billions of dollars per year”
"We can do it" = closest thing to solved. No one can say without a doubt we can do it for the other parts.
> How is that not deception in your mind?
You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party. All the VCs have asked these questions and were given answers satisfactory enough to invest.
Here's a basic one they can tell investors: the top 10 cities for ride-sharing comprise 70% of the total market. It will cost $X to map and permanently have access to the vast majority of the market. We believe in addition, we can induce demand so this 70% of the market becomes a massive multiple of the current market.
If you're going to be this snarky, at least do some basic research.
I literally work at an automotive OEM that maintains its own AV team and map infra. I have seen the balance sheets. It’s not going to scale.
Also, you make the inverse claim without evidence or any purported industry expertise. Where’s your evidence that Waymo can just walk into a new city without ballooning costs? If they can do it, why don’t they? That which has been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
> You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party
Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”. You are illiterate if you don’t consider that product name tantamount to fraud if the car can’t drive itself.
Investors were clearly lied to. Once again, I don’t care about VC money. Part of the game to lose it.
An automotive OEM would probably have a hell of a time scaling a video streaming website or a search engine as well. Yet it scaled when a tech company did it.
> Tesla owners bought a product called “Full Self-Driving”.
Can you point out where I used the word "Tesla"?
https://medium.com/cruise/hd-maps-self-driving-cars-b6444720...
https://blog.waymo.com/2019/09/building-maps-for-self-drivin...
https://zoox.com/journal/putting-our-robots-on-the-map/
When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.
You are a moron and I seem to have struck a nerve. Hello, salty Tesla owner or engineer.
Meanwhile working at an automotive OEM speaks to your qualifications on the subject about as much as being a mechanic at a car dealer: it doesn't.
The only person who sounds like they've had a nerve struck is the one who immediately devolved into name calling the moment they were called out.
I think we're seeing what happens when FOMO meets "missed out". It'd just be more humorous if you weren't projecting your anger onto me.
Where? A narrow area in which you can create ultra-HD maps that are in no way indicative of the general case?
If you’re at Cruise, I can only grab a ride between 10 pm and 5:30 am (lol, lmao). If you’re at Waymo, your beta is still closed (though I have several invites from former colleagues) and you only serve a tiny fraction of realistic destinations in the city. Do you think this proves your point? Let me restate my position: you can’t scale to the general case. You never will. You will be stuck in Phoenix and specific part of SF forever. Your business will never be viable. Your vehicles will never be able to navigate roads without a prohibitively costly mapping effort in that region that doesn’t scale. Your valuation will continue to decline. What part of offering unsafe rides to friends and family right now changes that?
You're already behind on which cities are being mapped by the way.
Funded by investors or search ads, not ride fares. And in a $200k vehicle that will never be economically viable. Your resume will be embarrassing in a few years if you stick around. Do yourself a favor and get out before you go to zero.
First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.
Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.
Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.
When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.
Right. Just like Steve Jobs holding an iPhone that crashed before the keynote is fraud.
Fraud is saying it's driving itself when a human is driving.
> If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud.
This is so utterly nonsensical I don't even know where to start. Driving scenarios are not fungible. Navigating around a stopped car in downtown SF is not the same as being able to navigate around a stopped car in Mumbai rush hour, or navigating around a stopped car in the middle of a California wildfire with 0 visibility and a fire roaring 10 feet away.
So when a video shows that the vehicle can handle a given situation and the vehicle handles it on video, the implication is not "we've now solved every variation of this situation to ever exist", the implication is "we were able to handle the situation you just witnessed".
I thought it ended at you not understanding EVs, but it's even worse: you don't even know what "fraud" means, and you clearly don't understand how bleeding edge technology is presented. That mentality is definitely more at home in the fossilized environment of an automotive OEM, but it must certainly be interesting to watch all that "fraud" translate into hundreds of thousands of miles on public roads and open betas with real riders... sour grapes much?
Apple planned for the iPhone to do all those things. Tesla has never planned for their cars to do those things, and to "advertise" what their cars could and would do, they used a car that was not and is not one that you or I could ever acquire.
I specifically call out Tesla as being completely fraudulent (and we're literally replying to their director of Autopilot say the same). They are not even in the same game as actual AV companies when our sensor stacks are worth more than the entire vehicle they claim as "FSD"
In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.
C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not what I said.
It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.
Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.
The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.
Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.
In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try.
Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.
(Corrected sloppy math, see below)
An article from the time clearly interprets it as a tech demo: https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/watch-tesla-new-full-self-dri...
If someone says, "Buy a Tesla, now with Full Self Driving! Here's a demo!" <insert demo>, then you're going to very reasonably assume that the demo is supposed to be of the current Full Self Driving feature, not of any future feature, and of a typical, if slightly polished-up, usage of that feature.
The kind of absurdly nitpicky legalistic weasel-wording you're trying to do wouldn't even fly in most American courts, let alone in the court of public opinion.
Edit: Here is the blog post the video was embedded in: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." Tesla's website, at the time, and until now.
Even now, they say “The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat”. Again, that’s fine if you’re showing a tech preview but when you start taking preorders on consumable product you really should be very clear that what people get for all of that money is nowhere near the demo.
Whether it's FSD, Cyberpunk or a Kickstarter campaign, preorders should cary the same expectations — if what you are buying doesn't exist yet, the seller cannot possibly guarantee they will be able to make what they 'promised'.
I won't defend Tesla here, but I think e.g. the gaming world is often unfair to game studios and game developers when a game is launched and is different from what was presented on some conference before. Scope changes, priorities change, playtesting changes the original plans, resources are limited. It's normal. When the end product is different it doesn't mean the developers lied when they originally presented it.
imho.
There is a world of difference between the demos other companies were showing and this.
> A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that claim.
But the product demo was instead mapped?
"Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly misleading.
It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing it correctly identifying golden retrievers.
They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.
Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"
The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"
As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for this industry for every manufacturer except Tesla.
Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise. No, it's not done. But it's great.
It's not just great, it's hardcore:
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
Woo! FSD! FSD!
Even an FSDb equipped Tesla isn’t autonomous, and the car in question didn’t even have that.
No, you've been musked. It was Tesla's software that brought the car to a full stop, full stop. It's funny how Tesla wants to claim credit for X million miles without crashes under software control, except for that last mile where there's a problem. That one belongs to the driver.
> Even an FSDb equipped Tesla isn’t autonomous,
So.. you agree that Tesla's video promoting full self-driving was staged. And you agree with Tesla that they have failed to deliver full self-driving:
https://electrek.co/2022/12/07/tesla-self-driving-claims-fai...
> the car in question didn’t even have that.
Sure it did. Your beliefs are not matching the realities. You might want to read the article. Here's another article:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/17/business/tesla-8-car-cras...
Sorry internet troll, but no, I haven’t. You’re the one stupid enough to take Musk at his word, not I.
> you agree that Tesla's video promoting full self-driving was staged.
Of course I do. Any sane person would also agree.
> Sure it did.
Read it again. Then apply logical thought to it and not “yeah, here’s a link that I can parrot around like an idiot!”
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
Fanboy detected.
And you don’t see them doing all the carnival barking line Tesla does
https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712
it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".
https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...
Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.
If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.
The driver knew about how this part of the road was incorrectly recognized by the software yet didn’t pay attention.
You get sue for the life you didn’t save and get almost zero merits for the ones you did.
Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death?
The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US. If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
If the law isn’t good, change the law.
I don’t. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just because you speculate about some non-existent alien technology that would make it safe if it existed? Why?
> If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
So if NHTSA doesn’t force their hand then they have no obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know it to be unsafe? I’m very glad that countless engineers at Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others didn’t have that mindset.
Honestly that isn't the question here and also not society's problem. If Tesla can't make the business model work, that is a Tesla problem.
Plenty of other companies are making great progress on autonomous vehicles without passing a non-working system off as something that "drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot". It is more expensive that way and requires more upfront costs, but thems the breaks.
>If the law isn’t good, change the law.
This thread is literally about a deposition in a court case. It might not require any change of law. It might not be a criminal trial, but civil cases can be just as effective at getting bad actors and their faulty products out of the market.
There is alway a tradeoff of progress and safety. 46 000 people die in car accident each year in the US I hope that this also count in the balance, not only the one who ignore all the advices while using autopilot.
* They collected extra data along this particular route.
* They made multiple test runs and picked the best.
Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying".
This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
I interpret lying as reclining your body in a horizontal position.
The video is 3:44, and I think doesn't have any bits cut out. I'm guessing that after running the route many times for practice and giving it extra data they could have gotten down to about odds of somewhere around 1:10k. And I think they would have accepted those odds.
(I would definitely not accept those odds, and would not want to ride in or near a car made by people who would. I'm glad that the law prevented them from doing runs without a safety driver at that stage. And I don't think they're anywhere near ready to do that today either.)
Why practice? They did the run until it worked well for the video. It wasn't a demo with a live non-Tesla audience. In this case not working 9/10 times is good enough rather than 1/10000
The odds I'm talking about are not "it doesn't work as well as the video" but instead "things go horribly wrong in a public way".
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-driving-data-...
Why say the exact same thing twice? I think its clear Tesla wanted to make a stronger claim than "he happened to not do anything this particular time"
A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills you.
Or worse - others.
You at least had control over the decision to use FSD (bad already, given human driver psychology) and then not pay attention to be able to intervene in a split second (which is ambitious to begin with especially over periods longer than a few seconds).
Below [0] is a link to a comment I recently made about a very dangerous incident I myself experienced with only a much more mundane "lane assist", on a German autobahn, while fully engaged and in control. Imagine I had had something like FSD and had required even a split second longer to get control of the car back... it would probably have been too late by then. I don't think it's a good idea to think well, I can just disable assistants, or FSD, unless conditions are perfect. Some day you will forget.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986939
He was found guilty of fraud, and will be sentences soon, facing up to 25 years in jail.
(Something can also be fraud without being a lie.)
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-nikola-corporati...
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself."
Not in any way that any other Tesla on the road could drive itself, with HD maps and custom tuned firmware for that route.
(I still think it's bad, and am not a Tesla fan)
The Musk / Tesla fraud also seems extremely obvious, but even tho Musk has haters, he's made a bunch more people tons of money, I would expect him to have much better lawyers, etc.
Teslas FSD is released for years (which they call beta for marketing / libility) and is still missing a lot of features (including the ability to work without human oversight) and being quite buggy on others.
This was my thought, isn't this stand operating procedure for pretty much all companies? How is this news?
And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
I mean... they haven't launched Full Self Driving. You can (for money) get a beta that requires you to remain in control of the car and often makes mistakes. But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
Today, after ~7 more years of development? Can it do them consistently or "80% of the time it works every time"? Because that's the problem, the bar for an autonomous driving system to be useful is high.
Below that bar you either have just a set of driver assists that have no claim at real autonomy, and have existed for (relatively) cheap for years, or you have the the "Goldilocks zone" of dangerous tech, smart enough to coax you into handing over the control but too dumb to be actually capable of taking over.
Just like I have the capability of running a marathon. I just haven’t done it. And I probably won’t…
(An honest name might be “Full Self-Driving Aspirational Future Upgradeability with Limited Self-Driving Capability”, but that probably wouldn't sell as well since it would set realistic expectations.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zhr6fHmCJ6k&feature=shares
However if a car crashes you can put multiple life’s in danger, isn’t it?
The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)
I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way worse.)
Except Tesla kept on with the lie for years. Tesla has already copped to false advertising around "full self-driving":
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...
Now Tesla doesn't want to be done for fraud so their current spin is that they have failed at full self-driving but "failure is not fraud":
https://electrek.co/2022/12/07/tesla-self-driving-claims-fai...
It's not helping Tesla's case that they took money from customers for an "aspiration". Tesla should do the right thing and refund everyone's money.
In a past life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I did a lot of demos on behalf of Microsoft that were precisely scripted. And, even then, NT4 BSOD'd on me in front of a packed auditorium once.
That's why one of the key skills of a corporate public face in IT is stand-up comedy. They didn't see the flawless ISS crash containment they were promised, but at least they had some great laughs.
Funny now that the devil isn't that much of a baddie anymore.