This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.
Maybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
> This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.
But, they're changing the meaning of FSD to FSD (Supervised). So that means they don't make any promises for unsupervised FSD in the future anymore. They'll of course say that they keep working on it and that stuff is progressing. But they don't have to deliver anymore. Just like they say to people getting into accidents that they should keep their arms on the wheel or else it's your own responsibility.
The lesson here is to wait for a chill SEC and friendly DOJ before you recant your fraudulent claims, because then they won’t be found to be fraudulent
This is clickbait from a publication that's had it out for Tesla for nearly a decade.
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
Feels like Musk should step down from the CEO role. The company hasn’t really delivered on its big promises: no real self-driving, Cybertruck turned into a flop, the affordable Tesla never materialized. Model S was revolutionary, but Model 3 is basically a cheaper version of that design, and in the last decade there hasn’t been a comparable breakthrough. Innovation seems stalled.
At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.
"Full Self Driving (Supervised)." In other words: you can take your mind off the road as long as you keep your mind on the road. Classic.
Tesla is kind of a joke in the FSD community these days. People working on this problem a lot longer than Musk's folk have been saying for years that their approach is fundamentally ignoring decades of research on the topic. Sounds like Tesla finally got the memo. I mostly feel sorry for their engineers (both the ones who bought the hype and thought they'd discover the secret sauce that a quarter-century-plus of full-time academic research couldn't find and the old salts who knew this was doomed but soldiered on anyway... but only so sorry, since I'm sure the checks kept clearing).
> In other words: you can take your mind off the road as long as you keep your mind on the road.
They literally did this with Summon. "Have your car come to you while dealing with a fussy child" - buried far further down the page in light grey, "pay full attention to the vehicle at all times" (you know, other than your "fussy child").
What I don't understand about this is that to my experience being driven around in friends teslas, its already there. It really seems like legalese vs technical capability. The damn thing can drive with no input and even find a parking spot and park itself. I mean where are we even moving the goalpost at this point? Because there's been some accidents its not valid? The question is how that compares to the accident rate of human drivers not that there should be an expectation of zero accidents ever.
They made tons of money on the Scam of the Decade™ from Oct 2016 (See their "Driver is just there for legal reasons" video) to Apr 2024 (when they officially changed it to Supervised FSD) and now its not even that.
One problem might be that American driving is not exactly... well great, is it? Roads are generally too straight and driving tests too soft. And for some weird reason, many US drivers seem to have a poor sense of situational awareness.
The result is it looks like many drivers are unaware of the benefits of defensive driving. Take that all into account and safe 'full self driving' may be tricky to achieve?
I strongly believe LIDAR is the way to go and that Elon's vision-only move was extremely "short-sighted" (heheh). There are many reasons but that drives it home for me multiple times a week is that my Tesla's wipers will randomly sweep the windshield for absolutely no reason.
This is because the vision system thinks there is something obstructing its view when in reality it is usually bright sunlight -- and sometimes, absolutely nothing that I can see.
The wipers are, of course, the most harmless way this goes wrong. The more dangerous type is when it phantom-brakes at highway speeds with no warning on a clear road and a clear day. I've had multiple other scary incidents of different types (swerving back and forth at exits is a fun one), but phantom braking is the one that happens quasi-regularly. Twice when another car was right behind me.
As an engineer, this tells me volumes about what's going on in the computer vision system, and it's pretty scary. Basically, the system detects patterns that are inferred as its vision being obstructed, and so it is programmed to brush away some (non-existent) debris. Like, it thinks there could be a physical object where there is none. If this was an LLM you would call it a hallucination.
But if it's hallucinating crud on a windshield, it can also hallucinate objects on the road. And it could be doing it every so often! So maybe there are filters to disregard unlikely objects as irrelevant, which act as guardrails against random braking. And those filters are pretty damn good -- I mean, the technology is impressive -- but they can probabistically fail, resulting in things that we've already seen, such as phantom-braking, or worse, driving through actual things.
This raises so many questions: What other things is it hallucinating? And how many hardcoded guardrails are in place against these edge cases? And what else can it hallucinate against which there are no guardrails yet?
And why not just use LIDAR that can literally see around corners in 3D?
This and that. FUD this FUD that. Tesla have communicated clearly why "adding" LiDAR isn't an improvement for a system with goals as high as their are. Remember, no vision system yet is as good as humans are with vision, so obviously there's a lot to do with vision still.
Check this for a reference of how well Tesla's vision-only fares against the competition, where many have LiDAR. Keep it simple wins the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI
Whats the oddest thing about the wiper tech is that we've had the tech for automated wipers since at least the 70s. As a kid my neighbor's Cadillac had it.
tl;dr: you can use optics to determine if there's rain on a surface, from below, without having to use any fancy cameras or anything, just a light source and light sensor.
If you're into this sort of thing, you can buy these sensors and use them as a rain sensor, either as binary "yes its rained" or as a tipping bucket replacement: https://rainsensors.com
I rented a Tesla a while back and drove from the bay to the death valley. On clear roads with no hazards whatsoever, the car hit the brakes at highway speeds. It scared the bejeesus out of me! Completely off put by the auto drive and derailed plans to buy a Tesla.
"There are many reasons but that drives it home for me multiple times a week is that my Tesla's wipers will randomly sweep the windshield for absolutely no reason."
Self-starting wipers uses some kind of current/voltage measure on the windshield right - unrelated to self-driving? It's been around longer than Tesla - or are you just saying it's another random failure?
The around corners thing, when I saw demos of it seeing the vehicles the driver can't even see ... I wanted it for my non self driving car ... it's just too big of an advantage to skimp out on.
That's not "seeing around corners", that's just sensor placement and can also be done with cameras. Tesla's side cameras on the front are in a similar location.
>why not just use LIDAR that can literally see around corners in 3D?
LIDAR requires line-of-sight (LoS) hence cannot see around conner, but RADAR probably can.
It's interesting to note that the all time 2nd most popular post on Tesla is 9 years ago on its full self driving hardware (just 2nd after the controversial Cybertruck) [1].
>Elon's vision-only move was extremely "short-sighted"
Elon's vision was misguided because some of the technologists at the time including him seem to really truly believed that AGI is just around the corner (pun attended). Now most of the tech people gave up on AGI claim blaming on the blurry definition of AGI but for me the truly killer AGI application is always full autonomous level 5 driving with only human level sensor perceptions minus the LIDAR and RADAR. But the complexity of the goal is very complicated that I really truly believe it will not be achieved in foreseeable future.
[1] All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware (2016 - 1090 comments):
I don’t need self driving cars that can navigate alleys in Florence, Italy and also parkways in New England. Here is what we really need: put transponders into the roadway on freeways and use those for navigation and lane positioning. Then you would be responsible for getting onto the freeway and getting off the exit but can take a nap between. This would be something that would be do e by the DOT, supported by all car makers, and benefit everyone. LIDAR could be used for obstacle detection but not for navigation. And whoever figures out how to do the transponders and land a government contract and get at least one major car manufacturer on board would make bank.
We already have transponders on freeways. They’re technically passive reflectors, but they reflect a high proportion of incident EM waves, in the visible spectrum, and exist between lanes on every major road in the US. Also known as white paint.
Following roads and lane markers and signs and signals is the "easy" part of autonomous driving. You could do everything you say and it wouldn't result in something that is any better than the current state of the art. Dealing with others on the road is the main problem (weather comes in close second). Your solution solves nothing, I'm afraid.
83 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadMaybe they'll reach level 4 or higher automation, and will be able to claim full self driving, but like fusion power and post-singularity AI, it seems to be one of those things where the closer we get to it, the further away it is.
He said consumers, just buy the car and it will come with an updated. It didn't.
This is a scam, end of story.
7 years of it.
Delusionaly generous take. Perhaps even zealotry.
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
At this point, Tesla looks less like a disruptive startup and more like a large-cap company struggling to find its next act. Musk still runs it like a scrappy startup, but you can’t operate a trillion-dollar business with the same playbook. He’d probably be better off going back to building something new from scratch and letting someone else run Tesla like the large company it already is.
Tesla is kind of a joke in the FSD community these days. People working on this problem a lot longer than Musk's folk have been saying for years that their approach is fundamentally ignoring decades of research on the topic. Sounds like Tesla finally got the memo. I mostly feel sorry for their engineers (both the ones who bought the hype and thought they'd discover the secret sauce that a quarter-century-plus of full-time academic research couldn't find and the old salts who knew this was doomed but soldiered on anyway... but only so sorry, since I'm sure the checks kept clearing).
They literally did this with Summon. "Have your car come to you while dealing with a fussy child" - buried far further down the page in light grey, "pay full attention to the vehicle at all times" (you know, other than your "fussy child").
Tesla’s autonomous driving claims might be coming to an end [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133607
The result is it looks like many drivers are unaware of the benefits of defensive driving. Take that all into account and safe 'full self driving' may be tricky to achieve?
This is because the vision system thinks there is something obstructing its view when in reality it is usually bright sunlight -- and sometimes, absolutely nothing that I can see.
The wipers are, of course, the most harmless way this goes wrong. The more dangerous type is when it phantom-brakes at highway speeds with no warning on a clear road and a clear day. I've had multiple other scary incidents of different types (swerving back and forth at exits is a fun one), but phantom braking is the one that happens quasi-regularly. Twice when another car was right behind me.
As an engineer, this tells me volumes about what's going on in the computer vision system, and it's pretty scary. Basically, the system detects patterns that are inferred as its vision being obstructed, and so it is programmed to brush away some (non-existent) debris. Like, it thinks there could be a physical object where there is none. If this was an LLM you would call it a hallucination.
But if it's hallucinating crud on a windshield, it can also hallucinate objects on the road. And it could be doing it every so often! So maybe there are filters to disregard unlikely objects as irrelevant, which act as guardrails against random braking. And those filters are pretty damn good -- I mean, the technology is impressive -- but they can probabistically fail, resulting in things that we've already seen, such as phantom-braking, or worse, driving through actual things.
This raises so many questions: What other things is it hallucinating? And how many hardcoded guardrails are in place against these edge cases? And what else can it hallucinate against which there are no guardrails yet?
And why not just use LIDAR that can literally see around corners in 3D?
Check this for a reference of how well Tesla's vision-only fares against the competition, where many have LiDAR. Keep it simple wins the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xumyEf-WRI
tl;dr: you can use optics to determine if there's rain on a surface, from below, without having to use any fancy cameras or anything, just a light source and light sensor.
If you're into this sort of thing, you can buy these sensors and use them as a rain sensor, either as binary "yes its rained" or as a tipping bucket replacement: https://rainsensors.com
I rented a Tesla a while back and drove from the bay to the death valley. On clear roads with no hazards whatsoever, the car hit the brakes at highway speeds. It scared the bejeesus out of me! Completely off put by the auto drive and derailed plans to buy a Tesla.
The filters introduce the problem of incorrectly deleting something that really is there.
Careful. HN takes a dim view of puns.
Self-starting wipers uses some kind of current/voltage measure on the windshield right - unrelated to self-driving? It's been around longer than Tesla - or are you just saying it's another random failure?
LIDAR requires line-of-sight (LoS) hence cannot see around conner, but RADAR probably can.
It's interesting to note that the all time 2nd most popular post on Tesla is 9 years ago on its full self driving hardware (just 2nd after the controversial Cybertruck) [1].
>Elon's vision-only move was extremely "short-sighted"
Elon's vision was misguided because some of the technologists at the time including him seem to really truly believed that AGI is just around the corner (pun attended). Now most of the tech people gave up on AGI claim blaming on the blurry definition of AGI but for me the truly killer AGI application is always full autonomous level 5 driving with only human level sensor perceptions minus the LIDAR and RADAR. But the complexity of the goal is very complicated that I really truly believe it will not be achieved in foreseeable future.
[1] All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware (2016 - 1090 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12748863
For as long as we can’t understand AI systems as well as we understand normal code, first principles thinking is out of reach.
It may be possible to get FSD another way but Elon’s edge is gone here.