Tesla ending Models S and X production

Sure, it might be considered safer because it only allows itself to work when its on a controlled highway in a straight line.

On stretches of pretty straight highway and in traffic, it fares very well, only requiring minor interaction, but on larger curves, it completely disengages with no tone or warning, just a light on the dashboard that turns off.

I'm fully aware you're supposed to drive a car by paying attention to the road, but if the whole point of this feature is to make driving more chill, randomly disengaging makes me distrustful of it

Did they ever have a first mover advantage? They had first mover hype, but did they really have an advantage?

Companies like Kia and Hyundai had an advantage. They already had logistics, design, R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, etc. all figured out from decades of building and improving cars. Tesla had NONE of that. All Kia and Hyundai had to do to get into EVs was add another few models to their lineup with some iteration on all their existing processes. And immediately, these models became hot sellers.

Tesla had to literally reinvent (but to themselves invent) what it takes to design, build, and sell a car.

This writing has been on the wall for years. Tesla has less than a handful of models and can't even iterate on them in any substantial way. Other car makers make dozens of models and rev them every year and do a design refresh every five to ten years. Tesla never had any advantage or key selling point outside of hype.

Now that they are going away, there's maybe an opportunity to produce some more premium 3/Y models. Before now, they couldn't make the 3/Y too premium because they had to distinguish them from the S/X and keep them in a distinct price bracket.

I fully agree, but your statement is quite ironic.

For driving, humans drive well because we operate more like Mu Zero model does - we can "visualize" the possibilities of the future states depending on what we do and pick the most optimal path. We don't need to know what the specific object is on the road, the fact that we can recognize that its there, in our path, and understand the physical interacting of a car hitting something that is taller than a bump means we can avoid it.

The way to implement self driving is exactly that - train your model to take sensor data and reconstruct a 3d space in latent dimensions, train another model to predict evolutions on the 3d space given time history with probabilistic output, and then your inference is a probabilistic guided search in that space with time constraints based on hardware. Mu Zero is nothing new, and already proved that you don't even need a hardcoded model of environment to operate in.

And you don't even need human driving data for this, as the model will be able to predict things collisions solely based on pure physics. And as a bonus, as you enhance it with things like physical models of the cars, where it can reconcile what it thinks the system is going to do versus what the physics calculations predict, you can even make it drive well in snow with low traction.

The irony of your statement is that everyone who is going end to end is manually hand coding all these hacks (like image warping in the case of Comma AI) to make the training work, all because the training data is just not sufficient, which is the exact same exercise as humans drawing lines.

And if you doubt that what Im saying is true, again, Mu Zero was proven to work. Driving is just another game where you can easily define a winning scenario, the board, and moves you can make, and apply the same concepts. The only technical part becomes accurately determining the board from sensor data.