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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

#551

Post by mannykannot »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #132
stetrain wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think the name "Autopilot" is the least troublesome part of the marketing. Other car makers call their systems CoPilot, ProPilot, SuperCruise, whatever and I think the name matters less than the communication and details of using the system. The main Autopilot marketing page shows a video of a Tesla driving itself, says the Driver is there for legal purposes only, and provides no other disclaimers about th…

> The main Autopilot marketing page shows a video of a Tesla driving itself, says the Driver is there for legal purposes only This alone feels like lawsuit-bait. I'm surprised it took this long for the courts to get involved.

The courts will not get involved until someone initiates a legal action. Putting a stop to it before it gets that far is up to legislators and regulators.

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

#552

Post by buran77 »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #540
buran77 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit cynical, "single-digit number" of people died simply because they believed the marketing. Ultimately it is their fault for taking the marketing over common sense and legal requirements but you can't handwave it away because "not enough people died". You can't blame a government for intervening to make sure more people don't fall for this kind of deceptive advertising tactics. No car manufacturer today of…

> died simply because they believed the marketing That's really not true. Those are people who consciously chose to ignore numerous warnings presented, both in the marketing (where the exact phrase "requires conscious human attention" is used), and also the warnings of the car itself where it says all the time things like "keep the eyes on the road", "need to stay alert", warnings every 10 seconds, audio signals, tur…

> but you have to take into account how many people die in other cars in general

I do and I see a completely different topic. What's your point? That people die in accidents? Sure. That companies should be allowed to mislead even if this leads to deaths? Those deaths in "other cars" are not because the manufacturer mislead the consumer. And if they do they'll probably get the same treatment since there are laws against false advertising. It's done all the time [0]. The end result of all those practices is that the consumer is deliberately mislead into getting the wrong impression even without explicitly lying. There's nothing special about Tesla's case in this context.

> This is just blatantly false. No they don't.

> Why would you even make such a claim that is so easy to check

I checked and quoted from the Tesla website literally 5 cm above on your screen [1]. Feel free to point me to any other manufacturer who describes their technology like that. Or to any other 150.000 E car with advanced self driving tech whose driver attention detector can be tricked with an orange because the manufacturer refuses to implement proper systems based on cameras or capacitive sensors. Or to any manufacturer whose driver assists caused deaths.

This isn't about technology failing. It's about intentionally proliferating an image of that technology that makes it look more capable than it actually is. Tesla's marketing material consistently makes people paint a false impression of the system. That in itself is a good enough reason to label it deceptive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23843007

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

#553

Post by mannykannot »

natch wrote: post #453
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main Autopilot marketing page shows a video of a Tesla driving itself, says the Driver is there for legal purposes only This alone feels like lawsuit-bait. I'm surprised it took this long for the courts to get involved.

Feels like, yes, if you go by what the commenter you are replying to said. But read the page for yourself before deciding. It is not as the commenter described.

If you are claiming that the comment is deceptive, you should point out why we should regard it as such.

My objection to this statement is that it is one side of a deeply inconsistent, two-faced message from Tesla. Specifically, the two faces are "it can drive itself - the driver is only there for legal reasons" and "the driver must be attentive and ready to respond to any errors immediately, and is responsible for whatever happens if he does not respond in time."

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

#554

Post by buran77 »

emn13 wrote: post #548
buran77 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly not sure how to interpret your comment but I'll try to respond. The fault is not with the AP. That's just a computer doing what it was programmed to do. It's with how the system is presented by the people selling it. The marketing is intentionally deceptive for profit and people died for believing it. And Germany didn't ban the system, they banned the deception. If Wells Fargo or Comcast did the same pi…

I think the parent poster is trying to make the point that it's unreasonable to ask people to pay attention. In any case the fault is most certainly not merely marketing, it's a fundamental design flaw. You cannot expect people to maintain constant attention when that attention almost never leads to anything; people simply aren't capable of that. That's also why similarly "boring" tasks are so failure prone (e.g. htt…

> In any case the fault is most certainly not merely marketing, it's a fundamental design flaw.

I was actually referring to the ruling. The court did not take issue with the autopilot system, just with the way it's marketed.

For the rest of your comment I agree and I implied something along the same lines. Tesla should have built a system that works to compensate for human failings, not take advantage of them to sell more.

New roads are built to be more wavy to keep the drivers more engaged, some traffic light systems that are synchronized as a "green wave" are sometimes stunted to not create this automation of running through lights (especially true of public transport vehicles where lights sync to the vehicle, except when an emergency vehicle is coming), etc.

Tesla should have installed an advanced driver attention monitoring system even before turning on the AP and they should have set very, very clear expectations from the system. In reality they did the opposite with people ending up believing that the AP can handle driving by itself so they can "disconnect", but the attention monitoring being completely unfit for the purpose of making sure the human is "connected".

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

#555

Post by SuoDuanDao »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #501
natch wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no other disclaimers about the limitations No other disclaimers? Are we reading the same page you linked? The title of the page clearly says “Future of Driving” “Autopilot today and full self-driving capabilities in the future...“ The page then goes on to define what Autopilot is and concludes with this: “Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

Why is that so difficult for people on HN to find? I have read that page once, built an understanding based on that - and then watched youtube videos with the exact operation of the Autopilot, and talked to owners of it - and my understanding did not change, it was exactly the same as the one I received on the Tesla's own page... Am I speaking better English than these people or what? Why can't they just read the web…

I suspect it's a need to be the smartest person in the room. A lot of people are long Tesla, a lot of the same people are optimistic by temperament, taking a pessimistic view is an easy way to stand by your reality-filter and look smart if you turn out right.

Then the filter does its job and makes them blind to the kind of things you've pointed out. The only way for this to change is people to get skin in the game so that it hurts when their theses are proven wrong. I wonder how many of the people alleging fraud are actually short TSLA.

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

#556

Post by itsoktocry »

bluGill wrote: post #324
itsoktocry wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, the demand over Teslas meant they almost did not feel any demand impact because of Covid, while Toyota saw a 30% demand drop. Tesla doesn't even define what a "delivery" is (remember factory-gated?), nor do I believe any numbers that come out of China, so I'm skeptical that they weren't affected by Covid-19. Personally, I think they "delivered" a number to ensure the stock analysts are appeased. If demand…

I believe tesla's numbers. When you have a backlog of sales a few cancled orders just changes the queue. Toyota didn't have that. Tesla also had customers in industry least affected (engineers and other upper class) who didn't need to adjust their life as much as waiters did.

I believe they "delivered" 90k vehicles too, by whatever definition they choose as "delivered".

I mentioned "factory-gated" in the OP because back when the metric of choice was cars "produced", Tesla had a quarter in which it claimed to have "produced" a certain number of "factory-gated" cars, and touted that number. It turned out, some of these cars were not complete. Some didn't even have seats. So exaggerating relevant metrics isn't new for Tesla (or other companies for that matter).

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

#557

Post by Shivetya »

stetrain wrote: post #54
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…

Actually I think the name "Autopilot" is the least troublesome part of the marketing. Other car makers call their systems CoPilot, ProPilot, SuperCruise, whatever and I think the name matters less than the communication and details of using the system. The main Autopilot marketing page shows a video of a Tesla driving itself, says the Driver is there for legal purposes only, and provides no other disclaimers about th…

Considering they now allow use of the interior camera during events there is no reason they cannot expand on that for insuring the driver is paying attention

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

#558

Post by MereInterest »

buran77 wrote: post #538
MereInterest wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (their fault, I understand) Humans are horrendous at maintaining constant attention to a task that only requires sporadic attention. If there is a human in the control loop, then it needs to take into account human limitations. Therefore, I'd be very hesitant to assign these as being the fault of the passenger who happens to be sitting in a driver seat.

I am honestly not sure how to interpret your comment but I'll try to respond. The fault is not with the AP. That's just a computer doing what it was programmed to do. It's with how the system is presented by the people selling it. The marketing is intentionally deceptive for profit and people died for believing it. And Germany didn't ban the system, they banned the deception. If Wells Fargo or Comcast did the same pi…

Overall, I agree with the decision, that Tesla did falsely advertise by overstating what their autopilot could do. The point I was attempting to make was that that was not the only issue wrong. Specifically, the "their fault" in the GP's parenthetical I took to be referring to the safety driver, implying that the crashes were the fault of the human in the car not paying sufficient attention. I disagree with that statement, as paying high levels of attention to tasks that require zero attention the majority of the time is fundamentally not something that humans can do.

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

#559

Post by fluffything »

maxharris wrote: post #345

If you actually believe that Tesla will fail to deliver full self-driving in the coming years, I have two questions. 1. have you watched this entire technical presentation made by Andrej Karpathy, Senior Director of AI at Tesla? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx7BXih7zx8 2. if you understand what you've seen in that video, why do you think Tesla will fail?

1. Yes

2. Some company will succeed at L5 FSD, eventually. Just because it can be done does not mean that Tesla will do it. Tesla has been selling Vaporware for a decade, and they are investing a lot of resources in trying to get FSD to work with the hardware they sold customers 5 years ago to save face, while right now we don't know, and many do not believe, that such hardware suffices. Companies that have not tied themselves to such promises are much more flexible from a technology point-of-view to make quicker progress.

For all we know, next year somebody could ship a smaller, better, and cheaper lidar systems, that might give every manufacturer willing to use them a huge advantage over Tesla. Tesla would be in a very tight spot to incorporate such technology into their existing customer base.

I don't think we will see L5 in the next 10-20 years and a lot of things can happen in such a time-frame technology wise.

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

#560

Post by abenga »

jedberg wrote: post #447
Piskvorrr wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people driving into things is considered to be a problem, not an insignificant quirk that's almost unworthy of mention.

In 2017, the last year we have data for, 10,230 accidents hit a stationary object, representing 30% of all fatal crashes. Tesla has had a total of 5 fatal crashes in its history, and only one of them was hitting a stationary object (20%). So objectively Tesla is doing better than humans.

How many miles driven (which is a probably more correct measure of exposure) are represented in the two cases?
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