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

latimes.com

211–220 of 394 posts

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

#211
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that this publicly traded company hasn’t loaned out employees to other unrelated businesses which happen to be owned by their CEO. I’d that happened, I would worry about the distraction being more widespread than just the CEO.

Employees at Musk companies have the freedom to moonlight, or even transfer entirely. Tesla benefits from SpaceX materials engineering, for example. Tesla now effectively has access to a massive comms/PR engine, with far more reach than traditional advertising, without paying gatekeepers. Ford spends $2B a year on advertising. Elon can reply directly to Tesla owners.

The issues are the mixing of company and personal funds.

If you're an investor in Tesla and Musk pulls 50 engineers from the Autopilot team to come work at Twitter [1]. How exactly are you benefitting from that? Autopilot development just pauses for the team to go work on blue check implementations?

1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...

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

#212
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about non California weather? I imagine radar might handle fog, but driving rain as in Carolina or serious snow as in Canada?

Forget rain and snow, they can't even handle non-California roads yet. I had the misfortune of taking a rental on narrow mountain roads and it actively attempted to kill us twice. While moving over to pass an oncoming car, the lane keeping feature decided we were too close to the shoulder and started steering us back into the oncoming car. After pulling over, regaining my composure for a few minutes, and figuring out…

> somehow it activated again on a different day and it happened again.

I dont have a tesla but my car has things like "lane assist" and most of these safety features can be turned off, but the default state is "ON" and this is reset once the car is turned off/on again.

Oddly enough, what it calls "advanced cruse control" defaults to OFF on my car and must be turned on any time you want to use it?

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

#213
post #137
post #53

Who would have thought that a camera-only system would struggle to succeed where systems that leverage $20,000 LIDAR sensors and racks of specialized machine learning hardware have met with only limited success?

This whole thread smacks of this type of cynicism - apparently a lot of tech people now really, really hate Elon Musk. Andrej Karpathy addressed this point in his recent Lex Fridman interview - more sensors aren't necessarily better, and for each sensor you introduce a whole host of supply chain issues and physical constraints. By sticking to one sensor type that contains all of the information theoretically necessar…

> This whole thread smacks of this type of cynicism

Both Musk stans and Musk haters go wrong when they conflate his companies with his persona. Tesla is obviously a highly innovative company, and will likely be Muskless at some point, and probably better for it. Then they can make more reasonable claims about FSD and not be under multiple investigations, including a criminal probe by the DOJ for misleading customers.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. Sorry to be so blunt, but I find this level of online political attachment to be completely deranged. Either it's a good car or not.

It seems that 5% or more of the country views everything through a binary lens of "Is this something my media and political group will be upset about or not" so if you are a Republican/Fox News person you feel that you should buy a "MyPillow" when buying a pillow. and if you are part of the Democrat/NYT group buying a "MyPillow" is a bad thing. To your point, this is crazy because both sides probably buy the exact sa…

puts Adam Curtis hat on

Ever since Madison Avenue taught the postwar consumerist middle class to consider purchases as buying into aspirational lifestyles, tying it into personal identity, the same process has shifted from simply patronizing businesses all of the way to political choices. Thus, charismatic and attention-seeking CEOs no longer sell their businesses simply no the basis of the quality of their goods or services, but buying into entire constructs of Zizek voice ideology. Thus, perhaps paradoxically, consumer individuals, craving belonging, are buying their way into tribes of like-minded individuals with similar convictions.

In short, don't blame the country themselves; these businesses and their management are pushing politicizing as a tactic to sell, sell, sell. As we in tech know, everything is ads.

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

#215

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…

This is extremely sad and I hope you and your father can try therapy together or separately, but the fundamental issue is not Tesla or the car. Those are the symptoms. Best of luck.

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

#216
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

There is a heavy mix of liberal and conservatives in the south. Classic big city vs everyone else dynamic.

Had a group of BLM protestors positing live on twitter how they where coming up to where I live to burn down neighborhoods.

I’m surrounded by gun fanatics. If police hadn’t blocked mass transit and highways it would have been a blood bath.

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

#217

I welcome the public's acknowledgement that self-driving vehicles are completely infeasible for even the medium term future. It's just unfortunate that the trigger for this change seems not to be anything about snow, or the inability to replicate human flocking on buried/unmarked roads during winter, etc, but instead more about the current political fallout from Musk's take-over of Twitter.

Self-driving vehicles seem only feasible under one condition: you have isolated roads that allow no other motorized vehicles, no pedestrians, no bicycles, etc. In that case, a robust computerized system with built-in failsafes seems almost entirely plausible (although hacking-related takeover is definitely an issue).

Part of this is just legal issues - i.e. our legal system will hold human drivers responsible for fatal car accidents, via civil suits and/or criminal prosecution, but corporations are largely protected from liability (excluding special cases like Ford Pinto gas tanks etc.).

With self-driving cars, the corporation will always be held directly responsible, even if the relative safety risk is lower. It's similar to airplane disasters for that reason (i.e. airplanes are relatively much safer than personal vehicles, statistically speaking).

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

> It sounds like you are afflicted with the same affliction as your dad, just in the opposite direction (especially if you actually cried over typing this post).

I don't think it's exactly completely delusional or obsessive to be sad that your dad is now financially unstable and obsessive about a single thing to the point it's alienated the people around them.

You can be well adjusted and sad that someone close to you is on a bad path.

You can even resent people you blame for enabling that path.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to the source claiming that?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/full-autonomy-waymo-driver#:~:text...

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.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Let’s not diagnose people based on a few sentences.
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