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

latimes.com

331–340 of 394 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Level 4 means full autonomy over all normal driving conditions. Waymo does not handle complex construction sites like a normal human driver would, a fact verifiable by many thousands of people. It does not have level 4 autonomy. Looks like the article got backlash too because the editor inserted an editor's note in quite large font right in the middle of the article clarifying it.

Level 4 means full autonomy within certain predefined conditions. In Cruise's case, this might be, "Only in certain parts of San Francisco at night." This qualifies for Level 4.

What's stopping someone from predefining it to mean "Only within a specific parking lot"? And then claiming they achieved Level 4?

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

#332

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?

It sounds a lot like something Musk promised in 2019: "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes." The most generous interpretation is that Musk is delusional and out of touch with his company and his technology. But I think it is more accurately described as bullshit ("speech intended to persuade without regard for tru…

> The most generous interpretation is that Musk is delusional and out of touch with his company and his technology.

I'm not sure I'd describe that as a generous interpretation, but there is other evidence that he's just wildly optimistic/over-confident. E.g., he still pours significant investment/effort into his project to colonize Mars, even after describing falcon wing doors as "engineering hubris"

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

#333

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…

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?

Basically, steering wheel is optional, it wasn’t going to happen, it’s been clear for years

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how the phrase “full self-driving” could mean anything other than that. There is some room to argue about the conditions under which the car can drive itself. If the car couldn't handle a high-grade, winding mountain road with an inch of snow on the ground and yet more coming down, I don't think too many people would be fussed is a "full self-driving" car said "uh, no" (especially as a good fraction of…

Humans often drive in conditions were it's unsafe -- icy roads, dense fog, heavy rain, strong winds. We take the risk, and most times it's okay, except for the occasional pile-up on the highway. But I don't think a "full self-driving" car refusing to drive in those conditions would be a deal breaker. I'd prefer it if autonomous vehicles were more conservative and just refused to drive in unsafe conditions.

Well then, call it, self driving under perfect conditions but not as a star modifier

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

#335

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?

It would sound like it could handle all commonly occurring road conditions. Such as rain, fog, snow, construction work, tunnels, bridges, downtown intersections, bike lanes, etc... I wouldn't expect it to handle rare phenomena such as hurricanes, hail storms, a collapsed bridge, etc...

Why not? Do you expect legal immunity?

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disen…

> Engineering is about solving part of the problem first, then iterating.

And fraud is about selling solutions to parts of the problems you haven’t yet solved. While there are engineering criticisms of Tesla FSD, that’s not the issue here, so presenting definitions of engineering is a non-sequitur.

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

#337
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel our government should regulate this kind of speech more aggressively, to boost the safety of the public. The messaging by Tesla has been misleading, yes. There have been many other examples of couching date-slippage and over-promises with phrases like "no promises but Cybertruck|FSD|Model 3|Rockets|AI|Robotics|Neural-Link|End-Of-The-World should be here in two years." Announcing a capability, and importantly M…

I’m not against regulation but I’m not sure it’s needed here either. In the case of misleading statements and marketing causing death, that seems like something that a lawsuit would handle, not regulation. In the case of false marketing misleading investors, we would see investor lawsuits for that if the stock price suffered as a result. Right now, what damages would you show for musks lies? Instead of new regulation…

Regulation often happens after companies have mislead people, it’s more a chicken egg scenario, do we let disasters happen to legislate against or do we have the foreknowledge to see the disaster happening and stop it?

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

#338
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have been honest Well, that's also the thing - internal docs and interviews have shown that Musk was well aware that "FSD will be here, this year", year after year, was not ever going to be true.

I must have missed that memo. Do you have a reliable source for this?

"“Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ. Tesla is at Level 2 currently,” the California DMV said in the memo about its March 9th conference call with Tesla representatives, including the director of Autopilot software CJ Moore... In an earnings call in January, Musk told investors that he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year.”

"“Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year”, the document showed.

Sources: https://www.businessinsider.in/business/auto/news/a-leaked-m... | https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how the phrase “full self-driving” could mean anything other than that. There is some room to argue about the conditions under which the car can drive itself. If the car couldn't handle a high-grade, winding mountain road with an inch of snow on the ground and yet more coming down, I don't think too many people would be fussed is a "full self-driving" car said "uh, no" (especially as a good fraction of…

Humans often drive in conditions were it's unsafe -- icy roads, dense fog, heavy rain, strong winds. We take the risk, and most times it's okay, except for the occasional pile-up on the highway. But I don't think a "full self-driving" car refusing to drive in those conditions would be a deal breaker. I'd prefer it if autonomous vehicles were more conservative and just refused to drive in unsafe conditions.

Right. But you then end in a sport where driver barely does any driving 99% of the time but the 1% they do need to drive, they are out of any practice for normal driving, let alone in hard conditions.

We already had problems back when people started coming back from mandatory WFH and accident rate spiked, this would be essentially similar or worse, a bunch of drivers that might do 10k miles a year but drive 500 of them and have extremely rusty normal driving skill, let alone driving in bad conditions.

It would be essentially like letting your kid drive your car only in blizzard and pouring rain...

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

#340
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.

Well, it's a bit more PITA to get your ass to station with all the baggage, then also possibly changeover to another line. But yeah, to the airplane it's an altenative.
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