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

latimes.com

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

#171

Post by notahacker »

joering2 wrote: post #47
qzw wrote: post #17

You know, where Theranos went wrong was not selling some other thing and then tack on their “Full blood test in just one drop” thing as an add-on. Oh and making sure it’s labeled beta . That’s very important.

Milton from Nikola would be better example in my opinion. You had him rolling a truck down the hill to show it works despite at the time it was still technology in development (company is still doing progress now). It still shocks me he is going to prison for that as a fraud when it was just a commercial. I don't know if you know - but classical trick in advertising food is using cigarette smoke instead of hot steam…

I suspect that if McDonalds' management were only pretending that they were opening new burger franchises to dupe investors and they'd managed to raise billions in funding by pretending a single mockup restaurant with a rubber burger and some city stock footage was a restaurant chain, they would be quite likely to serve jail time. But McDonalds is, in fact, entirely capable of making and selling burgers. Nikola is not capable of making and selling functioning hydrogen fuel cell powered cars, despite lying about already having that capability seven years ago when their stock soared.

Doesn't matter what consumers know about authenticity of advertising imagery, it matters that McDonalds investors aren't being lied to about the existence of the Big Mac and Nikola One investors were being lied to about the existence of the Nikola One's propulsion system. Which is why "other companies that aren't amongst history's biggest pump and dump scams also get creative with product images" was never going to be a viable legal defence for Milton.

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

#172

Post by nerdix »

Mistletoe wrote: post #105
coolbreezetft22 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. It’s a shame, we loved our last Tesla but I can’t stand the thought of being associated with him. We were supposed to pick it up the week he made those tweets. I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most…

From what I've seen there are quite a lot of Tesla drivers in major southern suburbs.

Southern suburbs tend to be fairly conservative. Maybe not quite as Trump loving as rural areas. But conservative nonetheless and likely not turned off by Elon's recent emergence as a right wing political figure.

Also, if you read enough /r/elonmusk you'll see that a lot of people have bought into Elon's schtick that he's actually just a centrist (apparently centrists love DeSantis)

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

#173

Post by georgeecollins »

wpietri wrote: post #148
coolbreezetft22 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy. I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at? He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But th…

I am not an Elon fan or anything, but I don't think you can say the jury is out on Tesla. Tesla is the first successful new car company manufacturing in the US in more than fifty years. It changed people's perception of electric cars and changed the car market. Even if it has a ton of troubles going forward it will be a very valuable company. I think you have to give him his due for that.

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

#174

Post by sidibe »

School-Cotton wrote: post #98
sidibe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. And that's L4 and it exists

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

#175

Post by dangerwill »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #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 s…

Seattle's road infrastructure is bafflingly bad and confusing for drivers. But it always seems wrong to me to assume that we shouldn't improve the infrastructure and make it more safe vs putting half baked self driving out in the real world to overcome it. I understand they want more data to feed into their ML datasets and the idea is that that will improve things over time, but we are sacrificing some number of lives for this data without knowing if a convergence point will actually be reached. And what you say at the end has lead me to actively avoid Teslas when I can, they make the road more unsafe for me while they are learning, not just their own drivers.

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

#176

Post by electrondood »

rootusrootus wrote: post #18
jakelazaroff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretend you don’t know anything about the different levels. You’re just a random person looking to buy a car. What does “full self driving” sound like to you?

The only time I touch the controls on the car is to input the address I want to be driven to.

This is already happening with regularity, at least in California.

Engineering is about solving part of the problem first, then iterating. If you look at what they've accomplished only in the last year with FSD, I find it highly unlikely that 0-disengagement drives don't become the norm by the end of 2023.

Currently, 90+% of drives have 0 safety-critical disengagements, and 50+% have no human-discomfort-related disengagements.

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

#177

Post by csours »

sidcool wrote: post #117

The argument is being taken out of context. Not saying that FSD is flawless. But Tesla isn't calling it a failure. They are saying it's not yet achieved. And it's a perfectly sane legal argument. Again, this does not mean Tesla is right here, just that the title is a misrepresentation of their argument.

Theranos isn't a failure, they just haven't achieved their goal yet.

You can read this any way you want. I do think that Theranos (or another company) may eventually achieve part of the vision of Theranos. Same for FSD.

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

#178

Post by detaro »

epgui wrote: post #166
detaro wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reasonable person might come to the conclusion that they weren't "best guesses" though, but instead knowingly misrepresenting the situation.

But that would just be failing to assume good faith from the onset, which is a problem on its own (especially if we’re trying to interpret legal stuff).

We're talking about this years later, looking at years of context, that's hardly "failing to assume good faith from the onset".

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

#179

Post by bagels »

mannykannot wrote: post #45
bagels wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty amazing how much money Musk's lies helped companies like Uber to waste on this stuff.

I don't like how this whole thing has played out, but to be fair, I think fear of missing out over something that would, if successful, be an existential threat to Uber is probably a rational response.

I don't completely disagree. They definitely have to be weighing the likelihood of that outcome, and Musk's statements probably made it seem more likely. That said, there are a lot of existential threats to companies that they should probably not be spending investor money on, such as asteroid defense.

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

#180

Post by seltzered_ »

gumboza wrote: post #165
coolbreezetft22 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He does run a cult. My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing…

Ugh, Sorry to hear youre going through this. Unwinding an entrenchment is hard, wonder if theres a support group or something for those deep in techno-optimism.

For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat).

A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .

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