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German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

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Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#241

Post by Alupis »

jacquesm wrote: post #221
brabel wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's an idiot in the sense that Trump is an idiot. Made billions (sure, not started from scratch, but they still made billions more than you and me), says stupid things all the time but they still can get away with it and win (the presidency, the most valued car company in the word, whatever it is they want).

Trump started out with 100's of millions. Musk started off significantly lower on the ladder.

I thought the narrative was a $1 million dollar loan from his father? Do you have a source for "100's of millions"?

Sure, a $1 million dollar loan from family is pretty generous, and an amazing starting place - certainly not a "from nothing" tale. However, it's not outlandish money for a business loan to a top-rated business school graduate with extensive industry experience either.

I'd also wager if you gave most people $1 million dollars, they would not turn it into billions within their lifetime.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#242

Post by tsimionescu »

dkonofalski wrote: post #57
ojnabieoot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla goofed from the beginning by calling tech like "Autosteer" and "Traffic Assisted Cruise Control" under the moniker "Autopilot" I am not accusing you specifically of using weak language, but let's call a spade a spade: it's not a "goof," it's a dangerous and deceptive business practice. It's one that Elon Musk is directly responsible for and directly encouraged with misleading statements where he deliberately…

I don't think it's dangerous, necessarily, unless you ignore people's personal responsibility in the situation as well. As currently designed, "Autopilot" requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel, provide rotational counter-weight on it, and you have to agree to safety and attention disclaimers before you can even enable the features. Yes, there are absolutely misconceptions that may happen with the gene…

> As an example, someone posted a link as a comment to the OP stating that Elon has been marketing Teslas as FSD when, in reality, the blog post in question just says that every Tesla has the hardware that makes it capable of it and that's absolutely true.

Actually, that is an utter lie, as there isn't any hardware and/or software in the world right now that is capable of "Fully Self-Driving". Sure, in limited conditions, many of these cars can drive on their own and not immediately hit the first tree or child they can find. But the current track record, especially for Tesla, is not much greater than that. And there is no hardware that could drive a car in heavy rain or snow. Hell, the sensors we have would just not work in some of the real driving conditions that people care about.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#243

Post by lazyjones »

Aunche wrote: post #236
lazyjones wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason people are seriously contemplating buying full electric cars today instead of the bullshit BMW produced is because Iron Man convinced enough people that electric cars will simultaneously fly to mars and cure world hunger. Is this supposed to be ironic or do you actually believe this drivel? Drive a modern EV and try again. Most Tesla owners will never go back to a noisy, smelly, crappy, slow ICE.

Have you driven a modern ICE? I rented a new Honda Accord this weekend. Besides the Model 3's crazy acceleration, and automatic lane changing, I think the Accord matches or exceeds a Model 3 in every single way, and it's roughly half the price. This isn't to say Teslas aren't impressive, but I do think they're overhyped.

> Besides the Model 3's crazy acceleration, and automatic lane changing, I think the Accord matches or exceeds a Model 3 in every single way

Except noise, pollution, complexity/maintenance cost, OTA updates, large touchscreen navigation that gets updated continuously, having to visit gas stations etc. etc.

ICE is just obsolete technology. Half the performance at 10 times the noise and infinitely more pollution.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#244

Post by adamjcook »

Robotbeat wrote: post #220
nemothekid wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I'm saying Tesla is successful because of Elon's hype. They are not "forgiving" his misgivings, they fully believe Elon will solve world hunger and invent FTL space travel. If you ask anyone who's bought into Tesla, they will tell you the "Auto Pilot on airplanes" lie, but they also believe Elon will deliver on Level 5 Autonomous driving. No cares about electric cars, they care about the guy's company who is usin…

I want to address this because in spite of Elon (whether punching down with Twitter or COVIDiocy, etc) burning up a lot of the goodwill he had accumulated in the past, these things remain: The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible. Fast charging, large-battery electric cars that are fas…

> The reason people think Elon may do level 5 autonomy is because his companies have accomplished several things that industry experts said were either infeasible or impossible.

That is all well and good, but what is at issue here and in many of these comments is the deceptive/dangerous marketing around Tesla's current offerings and, implicitly, the potential dangers it presents to the public roadways.

There is no progress if said "progress" is achieved unethically at any stage of its development.

I think we all, deep down, know this to be true.

I think Musk does not believe in that or marginalizes it (to cynically achieve business objectives) given some of his public statements and actions (snubbing the NTSB during the Mountain View investigation, taking his own hands off the wheel for a considerable period of time during an early 60 Minutes interview, several questionable statements on Twitter, glossing over the hundreds of abuses on YouTube and other social media platforms) with respect to Tesla - particularly in the past year or so.

Furthermore, let us consider that developing a highly desirable electric vehicle and the technical bar to clear to achieve that pales in comparison technologically to what Musk and Tesla are promising in Level 5 autonomous driving several times (wrongly) in the past and in the near future. Level 5 Autonomy presents several unpredictable engineering unknowns that may require similarly unpredictable breakthroughs while the development of say, the Model 3, was an iterative improvement upon what was already available in the market at the time - impressive improvement though it may be.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#245

Post by pbasista »

dlivingston wrote: post #149
kabes wrote: post #76

Not a lot of companies can get away with selling $6000 packages on which they'll never be able to deliver.

The Full Self Driving package is actually quite good. With the exception of going “hands free”, this is an accurate video on the current state of FSD: https://youtu.be/tlThdr3O5Qo

This is merely a demonstration of what it is capable of in ideal conditions.

Perhaps the driving engine was manually pre-trained for this particular stretch of road. Maybe what we see in the video is one successful run out of 100s that have been tried. We do not know the details. In my opinion it is reasonable to assume that it was a publicity stunt. Maybe if you try the same thing on a neighboring road two hours later, it would fail 95% of the time.

So far, the customers cannot use this level of autonomy. We can only speculate why but I believe that if it was usable in real world scenarios, Tesla would have enabled it. Since Tesla does not enable it and instead focuses on low hanging fruits like stopping on red lights, it appears that the technology is not ready yet. I think that is the main issue with Tesla's advertising about it. Not the name they use for it.

I can imagine that $8000 option of "full self driving" sells better than $8000 option of "restricted driving assistance limited to ideal weather and traffic conditions hopefully available in a few years", for instance. But at the same time I believe that using misleading product names or descriptions in order to increase the product's perceived value should not be tolerated.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#246

Post by billfor »

empath75 wrote: post #224
billfor wrote: post #95

I wonder how many people complaining about Tesla's marketing actually have a Tesla. The car clearly makes you acknowledge that the driver is responsible before using any Autopilot/FSD capability, and if you bought the car with the expectation that it didn't , you have a return period to get your money back in full. It doesn't matter if they said it would take you to the moon and back. If you test drive or buy it and…

It sounds like you don't believe in the concept of false advertising at all. Telling the truth after you buy the thing doesn't absolve you of the initial fraud. To my mind it exacerbates it, because it demonstrates that you know that your advertising is fraudulent.

I think some of the comments here are specific to the German market, and others are more general. My original comment was "in general" and not specific to the German market.

False advertising may be wrong, but it might not always be criminal. Is "Fat Free" really fat free....? If we held politicians to the same standard there would be a lot more of them in jail.

Ceveat Emptor, but at least Tesla does let you return it, minus the inconvenience, which you might deserve for not reading up on it before (I did when I bought mine and knew exactly what Autopilot "meant").

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#247

Post by rtkwe »

kp98 wrote: post #214
rtkwe wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because companies like Tesla keep claiming it's just around the bend...

and politicians that need a useful lie to leverage ie Yang stating all the driving jobs will be gone in 5 years lol

Trucking jobs are a little more vulnerable because theoretically highway driving to a depot or drop off is easier than city driving. Or there's an older idea of making convoy trucks where multiple semis follow one human piloted truck.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#248

Post by DenisM »

dkonofalski wrote: post #3

I agree with this wholeheartedly, even as a Tesla owner. Tesla goofed from the beginning by calling tech like "Autosteer" and "Traffic Assisted Cruise Control" under the moniker "Autopilot" while shifting everything above that to "Full Self-Driving". They should have called it "CoPilot" since that infers that you're still the driver in charge of controlling the vehicle and it would have had exactly the same reception…

In aviation the auto-pilot is a relatively dumb machine that must be supervised, whereas a co-pilot is a human that could be trusted with full operations of the aircraft.

I find it rather droll that the common use of the words completely inverted the original meaning.

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#249

Post by nemothekid »

lazyjones wrote: post #197
nemothekid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is one part car company, one part battery company, and 5 parts marketing hype. The only reason people are seriously contemplating buying full electric cars today instead of the bullshit BMW produced is because Iron Man convinced enough people that electric cars will simultaneously fly to mars and cure world hunger. The stock reflects this. In other words, there is no Tesla without Elon's meme machine. The grave…

> The only reason people are seriously contemplating buying full electric cars today instead of the bullshit BMW produced is because Iron Man convinced enough people that electric cars will simultaneously fly to mars and cure world hunger. Is this supposed to be ironic or do you actually believe this drivel? Drive a modern EV and try again. Most Tesla owners will never go back to a noisy, smelly, crappy, slow ICE.

It's supposed to be ironic - if Tesla were "only better cars", then people wouldn't bend over backwards to give Elon every benefit of the doubt. A "nicer car" doesn't get you to the point where people worship your just born baby on Twitter. Teslas are amazing cars. However, Tesla is valued so much more than just delivering a better horse, and I don't think they could have scaled up as quickly had they not been financed by memes (I don't want to downplay Tesla's amazing execution up until this point, they have taken the opportunity they got and delivered, they could have easily squandered under the weight of Elon's promises).

Re: German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving

#250

Post by jacquesm »

Alupis wrote: post #241
jacquesm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump started out with 100's of millions. Musk started off significantly lower on the ladder.

I thought the narrative was a $1 million dollar loan from his father? Do you have a source for "100's of millions"? Sure, a $1 million dollar loan from family is pretty generous, and an amazing starting place - certainly not a "from nothing" tale. However, it's not outlandish money for a business loan to a top-rated business school graduate with extensive industry experience either. I'd also wager if you gave most pe…

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/d...
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