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Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

latimes.com

91–100 of 394 posts

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#91
post #58

Tesla's lawyers state: "mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud" They intentionally neglect to acknowledge musk's many specific claims that involved specific timelines, as opposed to the nebulous long term aspirations they allude to.

Claims about what will happen in the future and on what timeline are obviously speculative and best guesses at best. No reasonable person would interpret them any other way.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#92
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you can use it like a taxi service and send a non-driving human as a passenger. Or no passenger and just send it to an address to retrieve or deliver a package.

My ultimate dream is to be able to more or less avoid flying. Hop in my car at 11pm, punch in address, pull out the lay-flat seat, go to sleep, wake-up 7-8 hours away. If I make it a day trip, I can do the entire thing in reverse never having had to pay for a hotel. Living on the coast, I would still have to resort to flying, but there are many places I would enjoy that are reachable in an eight hour drive.

You can do this in practically every EU country, not to mention Asia (I don't know about other parts of the globe) via trains. I don't get why it has to be a car. It's just that the US has zero infrastructure for both inter city as well as intra city public transport outside of like 4 cities.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#93

FSD beta is fairly good, certainly better than the standard Autopilot. It's definitely not perfect, but so far for basic driving from point A to B it seems to work well. I can only see the tech improving as it gathers more data and feedback. It's a ML training data problem at this point, no?

With about a million edge cases, yeah.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#94
post #19

Well fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed. Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or somet…

> responsibly developed and marketed

It is not being developed It has been irresponsibly marketed as this is the entire premise of the class action.

It sounds like he is laser focused on impressive promises to lure investments into his money making empire.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#95
post #3

Saying you want to climb Mount Everest and not being able to get all the way to the top is failure, not fraud. The fact that Musk charged people to watch muddies the waters a bit, though.

I would venture to say that attempting to climb Mount Everest and failing but saying you had indeed climbed Mount Everest would be a fraud. How many times did Elon Musk say he climbed "Mount Everest" or "we have a fully self driving car now" when Tesla didn't?

More like, selling the Everest experience but failing to equip yourself with oxygen, climbing axes, etc., and not arranging for transport anywhere near the mountain. Instead, travelling to a idyllic mountain retreat 500 miles away. And then watching a video on a big screen of someone climbing.

Definitely a contrast between the sales pitch and reality.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#96
post #19

Well fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed. Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or somet…

At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also se…

It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network.

The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option.

And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#97
I’m been on the fsd beta for a long time now and I have to say it’s remarkably improved over the last year. If it continues to improve at this rate for another year it’s going to be pretty useful. I use it to drive around seattle (which is a difficult driving place with randomly followed infrastructure standards and randomly driving drivers and randomly parked cars) and it used to be a death defying gripping of the steering wheel and grabbing it out of bone headed moves while everyone looks at me askance to a relatively chill experience. Yesterday I needed to take it in for some fender work (my wife isn’t the best driver and I got fsd as a donation to self driving research in the off chance it’ll let her someday delegate driving to the car, but since that hasn’t happened yet I have periodic body work that needs to be done as she pachinkos through the streets). The Tesla service center is in an industrial area in an insane interchange part of I5 with crazy off ramps and strange turns. I always get lost. I let fsd drive door to door and it did it flawlessly. That surprised me, but after each update it’s been getting considerably better.

It still has flaws - it widens it’s place in the lane on every on-ramp which is annoying and weird road conditions can confuse it about what to do next. It sometimes doesn’t anticipate well the turn signals of someone changing lanes leading to people flipping me off for not giving them space. But all in all, given the state of adaptive cruise control 10 years ago, this is a remarkable achievement to put in a consumer grade vehicle.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#98
post #74

It might be a plausible argument for stuff sold 6 years ago when the future was uncertain. But in 2022 I'm not seeing how it's plausible as an excuse. Considering it's still being sold and marketed as 'Full self driving'. Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of. If at the very least due to the fact that a very commonly encountered condition, construction work, effecti…

I think 2016 it was already widely known by the industry it was going to be very difficult compared to what Tesla was saying, especially without the handicaps they imposed on themselves. No one with knowledge took Tesla's timeline seriously > Clearly even level 4 autonomy is far beyond what any near future technology is capable of I've always been pessimistic about FSD but I think it'd pretty hard to reconcile that q…

> actual L4 deployments

In some of the cities with the easiest driving conditions in the world.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#99

FSD beta is fairly good, certainly better than the standard Autopilot. It's definitely not perfect, but so far for basic driving from point A to B it seems to work well. I can only see the tech improving as it gathers more data and feedback. It's a ML training data problem at this point, no?

FSD beta shows that Tesla is not working on self-driving.

They've frozen their sensor suite in place because Elon wanted to be able to pre-sell FSD.

The class of mistakes it makes demonstrate that Tesla is *willfully* marching into the local maxima problem: They're taking an approach that improves their actual product, AP, while sacrificing any hope of actually solving FSD.

Full-self driving and what autopilot actually does take two completely different approaches. AP needs to be able to gracefully handle control to a non-trained layman. Current L3/L4 vehicles that rely on a driver have trained operators ready to takeover while the vehicle thinks everything is fine, and they need to aggressively make decisions like no-go, while AP never no-gos.

For people who are in the self-driving field and are familiar with the approaches to perception and decision making (which I hope more of which will chime in here), FSD beta makes mistakes that are kind of like someone saying their robot can now feed you steak, and the robot starts by grasping the sharp end of a knife and cutting the steak with the handle. Sure you might make some progress getting mashed steak into your mouth, but the robot is cutting off its hand to do it. It's not going to result in much steak in your belly unless the robot's approach is completely reworked.

Re: Tesla calls self-driving technology 'failure,' not fraud

#100
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ultimate dream is to be able to more or less avoid flying. Hop in my car at 11pm, punch in address, pull out the lay-flat seat, go to sleep, wake-up 7-8 hours away. If I make it a day trip, I can do the entire thing in reverse never having had to pay for a hotel. Living on the coast, I would still have to resort to flying, but there are many places I would enjoy that are reachable in an eight hour drive.

You can do this in practically every EU country, not to mention Asia (I don't know about other parts of the globe) via trains. I don't get why it has to be a car. It's just that the US has zero infrastructure for both inter city as well as intra city public transport outside of like 4 cities.

I am an American, so lacking the ability to reverse 80 years of public policy decisions, I want the sleeper-car-car.
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