The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot software director) confirmed:
* They collected extra data along this particular route.
* They made multiple test runs and picked the best.
Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying".
This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash.https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
> This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
> And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
I mean... they haven't launched Full Self Driving. You can (for money) get a beta that requires you to remain in control of the car and often makes mistakes. But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.
I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.
Q. And isn't it true that during the various
attempts to generate the video, there were instances
in which the person sitting in the seat had to intervene?
A. Yes.
> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch
A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills you.
You at least had control over the decision to use FSD (bad already, given human driver psychology) and then not pay attention to be able to intervene in a split second (which is ambitious to begin with especially over periods longer than a few seconds).
Below [0] is a link to a comment I recently made about a very dangerous incident I myself experienced with only a much more mundane "lane assist", on a German autobahn, while fully engaged and in control. Imagine I had had something like FSD and had required even a split second longer to get control of the car back... it would probably have been too late by then. I don't think it's a good idea to think well, I can just disable assistants, or FSD, unless conditions are perfect. Some day you will forget.
If you read the actual fraud charges [1] it does list the demo video, but along with very clear lies like saying it "fully functions and works" at an unveiling for the Nikola One or "Nikola is producing [hydrogen] well below $4 a kilogram" when the charge says In fact, Nikola has never produced any hydrogen at any price, nor at the time could it have produced hydrogen for below $4 per kilogram. To the contrary, Nikola has never obtained a permit to produce hydrogen or installed the equipment necessary to produce hydrogen. At the time that MILTON was claiming that Nikola was producing hydrogen for less than $4 per kilogram, it was in fact purchasing hydrogen from a supplier for $16 per kilogram.
(Something can also be fraud without being a lie.)
I didn't watch that trial closely because the fraud seemed so obvious and the company was still a fledgling (?)
The Musk / Tesla fraud also seems extremely obvious, but even tho Musk has haters, he's made a bunch more people tons of money, I would expect him to have much better lawyers, etc.
Problem is, now it's years later, the product has been in the hands of consumers for a while now, and yet it still doesn't work. People are pissed off, people are getting hurt, and yet he continues to insist on calling it "Full Self Driving" when it is very far from that. If the government can't do anything to protect consumers for whatever reason, then the consumers must take it to the courts and to the media relentlessly until the knowledge of what FSD really is becomes a part of the zeitgeist. Much value and many lives will be destroyed needlessly because of one snake oil salesman holding a whole bunch of money.
These are not similar cases at all. Any competent engineer can work through the iPhone bugs and fix them. That's well-trodden ground, the sort of thing thousands of engineers do each day. Fixing a self-driving neural network is a research topic. Even years later it's not a fully solved problem, and that should have been clear in 2016.
And of course they fixed them before the public release of the product (or shortly after).
Teslas FSD is released for years (which they call beta for marketing / libility) and is still missing a lot of features (including the ability to work without human oversight) and being quite buggy on others.
> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch.
In a past life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I did a lot of demos on behalf of Microsoft that were precisely scripted. And, even then, NT4 BSOD'd on me in front of a packed auditorium once.
That's why one of the key skills of a corporate public face in IT is stand-up comedy. They didn't see the flawless ISS crash containment they were promised, but at least they had some great laughs.
Funny now that the devil isn't that much of a baddie anymore.
Did you read the actual deposition? The linked article is not clear on the exact details, I don't think it's possible to come to any conclusions from the article alone.
The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)
I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way worse.)
Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this.
Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
I'd agree with your characterization. But after downloading the PDF from your WeTransfer link, I was able to find a link on Google by searching for the quoted opening sentence of the deposition. Oddly, the resulting Google page has a header at the top that says something to the effect of "No results found", but then it has a link to the page that contains it.
Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better reading material than news articles covering them, especially court decisions.
A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem to be taught the opposite.
I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers), and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting. And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the internet for free.
On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.
I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.
When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.
The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try.
Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.
What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on.
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
"Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly misleading.
It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing it correctly identifying golden retrievers.
They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.
>"planned, organized, or arranged in advance (often of an event or situation intended to seem otherwise)." - Oxford English Dictionary
Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"
The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"
> A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that claim.
Weren't they saying they weren't going to use HD mapping at that point, that their cars just pick up the lay of the land and deal with anything, making their approach way more scalable than competitors?
Sarcastically, a 2000 lb robot could be programmed to drive in a random walk pattern quite cheaply: film it for many days and use the section of the recording where it has the fewest collisions as the promo video!
Were the other companies putting that the driver is only there for legal reasons at the front of the video and selling the product for thousands of dollars with promises it would work as depicted imminently?
There is a world of difference between the demos other companies were showing and this.
> The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
Yeah, this coverage (as is so common with this company) seems a bit off. This wasn't a product in 2016, it was a technology demonstration. How many tech giants have stood on stage demoing products that barely worked, with an army of engineers on site to get it right before the reveal?
As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for this industry for every manufacturer except Tesla.
Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise. No, it's not done. But it's great.
>>To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto
Remember they don't have the 3d maps, so they used a completely different car with different hardware to showcase it !
>>But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed
>>When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said.
The part about the 3D map is particularly interesting. ELon Musk has made strong claims that machine vision, without LIDAR, radar, or acoustic ranging, is enough for FSD. In fact it can't even auto-park reliably.
Every AV project other than Tesla (and maybe geohotz's AV thing?) uses other types of sensors, especially LIDAR, and 3D mapping.
If it turns out that 3D maps and LIDAR are necessary to achieve L3 and higher, not only are Tesla cars not equipped to ever be AVs, the data Tesla has collected from their cars is much less valuable for developing and operating AVs.
I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new.
Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera).
This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured.
>This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up some farcical point they tried making online and got called out on.
> Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food.
One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.
McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.
I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.
Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.
And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.
> they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is
Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one knows they clearly do lie about how tall the food is.
I presume what you meant here is that they're not supposed to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the can and do. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.
Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is building.
it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".
I see parallels to Nikola's "Nikola One" video, where they claimed that their truck was driving along using its newfangled zero-emission engines, but in reality it was just rolling downhill in a totally staged video. Nikola's CEO was recently convicted of fraud, and that incident featured very prominently in his indictment...
I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment ever surviving.
Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone still realistically believed in it or him.
In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time. It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact that they sold trucks didn't help with this.
Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense. It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths.
It's just taken time for the industry to respond.
I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
> I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose
You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.
I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.
This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.
I seem to remember automated manufacturing was supposed to be his big thing. The other companies were bogged down with union labor and he saw an opportunity. Then the first gigafactory failed to fully automate the process and so he put all his chips on "cheap" autopilot that didn't require expensive vision hardware and could instead all run on video.
Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I suspect.
> I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this
Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":
At Battery investment day (a few years after Autonomy investor day) he said the opposite: that self driving wasn't worth much because competitors would follow in 2-4 years, and that their advantage was all about their new battery tech. The new Tesla-made batteries have come out now and are 20% worse energy density than Panasonic's.
I don’t get why tesla can’t just do the thing that originally made them successful: build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.
Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just outcompete by doing things as they already were?
AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and customer satisfaction.
There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.
Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.
>It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost not additional money, mass or volume. So building something like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive. Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it can't really do road trips.
> That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery.
Kind of, you can also change the other factors in the equation like that startup building 'Lightyear' with the light weight platform, aerodynamics and with PV panels [0]
I think the range problem is already solved by the 800V/250kW+ charging. A 20-minute break every 3 hours of driving is within reason, and it makes the range effectively infinite.
I know there are people with steel bladders who also need to tow a boat every day, through a desert, in the snow, uphill both ways, but for commuting and occasional road trips it's already pretty good. Just don't try this with Leaf and its previous-gen peers that are 5 times slower than the state of the art.
Just imagine what you could do if you could just open the boot and swap out a few 10kg batteries at the fuel station. You'd still have 30KWh hidden around the chassis, but most people don't need >100mile range every day.
Taking a long road trip with multiple people in a subcompact "penalty box" car the size of a Honda Fit is kind of a miserable experience regardless of what kind of motor it uses. People mostly only do that when they have no other options.
Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption. Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.
As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.
As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).
> Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry.
Can you expand on this?
When the iPhone came out there was literally nothing like it on the market. It genuinely redefined what could be done with a phone, and it doing so, completely changed the category.
Nothing that Tesla is doing rises to that level of disruption/innovation, at least as far as I can tell.
What, exactly, are they doing that brings you to this conclusion?
> But I guess only time will tell.
I find this so strange.
Tesla has been around for... let's see... 20 years. The S is over 10 years old now (production started in late 2010).
The iPhone came out in 2007. A blink of the eye later and the smartphone was ubiquitous.
You say "time will tell", but... how much more time, exactly?
This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the more tech of all the car companies. They have the disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as much as possible. Historically car companies outsource everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is why they have all the quality problems.
> In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day.
As much as the iPhone killed off those companies, it grew the market for smartphones more.
There is no significantly growing market for cars like there was for "handheld
internet-connected personal computers". Every EV sale is effectively 1 less ICE sale - a 1:1 replacement in the market. Whatever market growth potential exists is in the very price sensitive developing world (South Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc), where EVs will show up en-masse last.
Now that practically every company is selling EVs, Tesla only has its brand to differentiate it, which was at one time significant but perhaps less so lately.
As I see it, their only meteoric growth opportunity (by eating into competitors' market share) would be if they released a $20K, 250+ mile range, 5 seater EV in the very near future - like what the VW Beetle did in its generation.
But that's hard to achieve in an EV (especially from a luxury brand used to high margins), since the majority of the cost of an EV is still in the battery, and that cost doesn't scale down much with a lower price tag.
I think that was part of why FSD was such a core pitch from the beginning. IF Tesla had managed to crack that to the actual fullest it could have been the game changing thing to put them ahead. The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock. Too bad they hard committed to camera only sensing which is looking like a major mistake given how little headway they have against traditional car safety features.
If one takes a moment to think about the value of a private car participating in a public taxi fleet, the idea collapses completely. Public transit is difficult, so is a taxi fleet. A part is labour - drivers specifically - but equally large portions are maintenance, insurance and related things.
Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles to overcome.
There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent public transit. The value is largely in limited regions - north america being one.
>The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock.
Sounds miserable, I wouldn't want to get back to my car after work and find some passenger had ruined it in some way. Bodily fluids, smoking weed in it, leaving trash, the possibilities are endless!
I agree with your interpretation, but I don't think Tesla is discovering this. I think they've known that the electric car was a mere sustaining innovation, while a true self-driving car is disruptive. That's why they've tried to sell their electric cars as self-driving cars.
Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile" sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a disruptive product.
I think they initially had hopes that they would be able to make some disruptive innovations in auto manufacturing - but all the evidence suggests they went way over their skis as Teslas are notorious for having extremely poor fit and finish. The failure to deliver on self driving is in line with a history of failing to deliver. You can include the weird hype around the Tesla humanoid robot on this list too imo.
> It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next.
Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
You're a bit too late with that observation I think as Tesla is no longer the upstart.
> The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023. That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents dragging their feet to being in the top 10.
Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked out. They are here to stay.
That explains why so many of the subsequent youtube reviews of the tech years later still aren't that great. I guess I'd assumed it was mild cherry picking rather than outright disingenuous.
I'm sad about this.
(I'm also reminded, thanks to chatting with friends over the weekend, of Grolsch adverts in the UK about 20 years ago: "Stop, it's not ready yet!")
"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,"
It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-driving representations.
If TSLA needs a bailout in the future, I say we just let it fail. This company is just fucking terrible. It has turned me off from EVs completely. From the terrible build quality to multiple failed deliveries, it's just not worth it anymore.
Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.
There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video.
What matters is:
(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims
(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.
(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation
If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.
Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...
Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.
I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.
The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.
Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.
I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still can't.
Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?
Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.
That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.
It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.
> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.
Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.
I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked, if not outright faked.
In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.
First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.
Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.
Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
> for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.
When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.
One difference is Tesla runs on all roads basically (subject to weather view on cameras). It's gm super cruise and google that only work on road that have been imaged. It does seem that super cruise and google waymo is ahead of tesla. Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem, random roads and conditions. I think that tesla won't succeed very soon, and as the "pre-scan the road" groups get better and better tesla's approach will be seen as unacceptable risky. I have only driven the new versions a few time, it was interesting to see all the things they could see but it just wasn't safe. Waymo has their weird stuff but did seem much safer in theory. But who knows if there is a hole, like happened in Arizona to that poor woman who got run over in the night while crossing the dark road.
If the title of the article was instead, "Tesla video promoting self-driving was scripted, engineer testifies," this article is probably mostly ignored. Take a loaded term like "scripted," which some interpret as "faked," and here we are. Of course the video was staged, the engineers were asked to make a video showing it's capabilities. The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.
> The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.
Or Tesla's video that says "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself"?
"The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons" - sure, to assume legal responsibility when "autopilot" crashes into something or someone.
I still wonder how him lying about robotaxi in 2019, the whole 2 minutes speech he gave that prompted the rapid increase in share price, is any different from Elisabeth Holmes speech about Theranos blood recognition. Except that Holmes did not sell any Theranos share. I must be missing something, because it seems like I'm the only one perturbed by this.
Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue.
What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic shift into the automotive industry.
Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.
The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it a pass on the bad things it's done.
It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.
> I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.
Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.
Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.
The video is a kine of misleading, which should told you that the driving in the video was a vision of the future rather than a capability it already had or would soon have.
The difference between Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) and Elon Musk is that the latter tends to deliver something resembling what he promised even though he lies and exaggerates a lot.
Trevor Milton couldn’t even make a car! If he had done that, he’ll be rolling in his hundreds of millions of cash from stock sales thanks to hype and occasional lies instead of waiting to go to federal prison.
There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised that FSD was so advanced it would make you money[1] by driving your car for Uber when you're not using it. That's almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your cancer.
> When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.”
Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO
Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel.
> The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
There's also the AJ defense for it - that at this point in time, there is a public expectation that no reasonable person should be stupid enough to actually believe such a tweet. Everyone knows that the man is just playing a media character.
You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being far easier than production up a lot.
Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a better criteria for discussing fraud.
C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus.
Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?
What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death?
The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US.
If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
Theranos’s faulty blood tests were used by a couple major insurance companies and at least one state-run medical provider. Over 1.5 million tests were run. I’m sure quite a few people died because they weren’t correctly diagnosed in time for treatment.
I absolutely agree with you, so we have an upper bound, Elon Musk is facing far less than 12 years in prison. Doesn't anyone want to help us out with a lower bound?
This is interesting context. I'd say a fine of $125,000 - because that is the lowest fine I can find in a brief DDG search of fines levied for materially misleading investors.
Any Elon or Tesla related topic on hackernews is such a cesspool these days. Any support of him even with actual true statements is downvoted. Somehow the technologist board has become the least friendly to actual technological innovation. Any statements like the one I just made will get countered with attacks on his person.
He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Maybe he's an asshole too, but no one get's the same level of scrutiny.
> Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By making himself a very prominent public individual and the face of Tesla, he's inextricably tied to the brand. No one knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many that's transferring to Tesla as well.
> He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive.
Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line all the way back to his father who bankrolled him?
It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.
In the sense that without him the innovation would not exist or become mainstream. Don't be fooled into thinking he only has cash to offer. John Carmack himself has stated that he thinks Elon is in his wheelhouse in terms of engineering.
>Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla.
Tesla was a concept car at the time, not a mass production vehicle with no intentions of ever making millions of cars, if you don't see why they are different I don't know how to help you. The production is at least as hard as the innovation.
The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot software director) confirmed:
* They collected extra data along this particular route.
* They made multiple test runs and picked the best.
Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising, but within "not technically lying".
This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died" we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
> This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
> And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.
I mean... they haven't launched Full Self Driving. You can (for money) get a beta that requires you to remain in control of the car and often makes mistakes. But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
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If a phone crashes what’s the worst that can happen?
However if a car crashes you can put multiple life’s in danger, isn’t it?
I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.
I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.
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Not just crashed, but also:
The charitable interpretation is "The person in the driver's seat is not interacting with the car in any way in this video".
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> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch
A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills you.
> a glitching autopilot kills you.
Or worse - others.
You at least had control over the decision to use FSD (bad already, given human driver psychology) and then not pay attention to be able to intervene in a split second (which is ambitious to begin with especially over periods longer than a few seconds).
Below [0] is a link to a comment I recently made about a very dangerous incident I myself experienced with only a much more mundane "lane assist", on a German autobahn, while fully engaged and in control. Imagine I had had something like FSD and had required even a split second longer to get control of the car back... it would probably have been too late by then. I don't think it's a good idea to think well, I can just disable assistants, or FSD, unless conditions are perfect. Some day you will forget.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986939
Milton, ex-CEO of Nikola, also technically didn't lie about their truck demo (it was rolled down the hill, and said it was "in motion").
He was found guilty of fraud, and will be sentences soon, facing up to 25 years in jail.
If you read the actual fraud charges [1] it does list the demo video, but along with very clear lies like saying it "fully functions and works" at an unveiling for the Nikola One or "Nikola is producing [hydrogen] well below $4 a kilogram" when the charge says In fact, Nikola has never produced any hydrogen at any price, nor at the time could it have produced hydrogen for below $4 per kilogram. To the contrary, Nikola has never obtained a permit to produce hydrogen or installed the equipment necessary to produce hydrogen. At the time that MILTON was claiming that Nikola was producing hydrogen for less than $4 per kilogram, it was in fact purchasing hydrogen from a supplier for $16 per kilogram.
(Something can also be fraud without being a lie.)
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-nikola-corporati...
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I didn't watch that trial closely because the fraud seemed so obvious and the company was still a fledgling (?)
The Musk / Tesla fraud also seems extremely obvious, but even tho Musk has haters, he's made a bunch more people tons of money, I would expect him to have much better lawyers, etc.
Problem is, now it's years later, the product has been in the hands of consumers for a while now, and yet it still doesn't work. People are pissed off, people are getting hurt, and yet he continues to insist on calling it "Full Self Driving" when it is very far from that. If the government can't do anything to protect consumers for whatever reason, then the consumers must take it to the courts and to the media relentlessly until the knowledge of what FSD really is becomes a part of the zeitgeist. Much value and many lives will be destroyed needlessly because of one snake oil salesman holding a whole bunch of money.
> This is pretty normal in marketing demos.
Except Tesla kept on with the lie for years. Tesla has already copped to false advertising around "full self-driving":
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...
Now Tesla doesn't want to be done for fraud so their current spin is that they have failed at full self-driving but "failure is not fraud":
https://electrek.co/2022/12/07/tesla-self-driving-claims-fai...
It's not helping Tesla's case that they took money from customers for an "aspiration". Tesla should do the right thing and refund everyone's money.
at this point the fsd refund is basically pocket change for the company, not sure why they wouldn't do it or at least offer the option
These are not similar cases at all. Any competent engineer can work through the iPhone bugs and fix them. That's well-trodden ground, the sort of thing thousands of engineers do each day. Fixing a self-driving neural network is a research topic. Even years later it's not a fully solved problem, and that should have been clear in 2016.
And of course they fixed them before the public release of the product (or shortly after).
Teslas FSD is released for years (which they call beta for marketing / libility) and is still missing a lot of features (including the ability to work without human oversight) and being quite buggy on others.
> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch.
In a past life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I did a lot of demos on behalf of Microsoft that were precisely scripted. And, even then, NT4 BSOD'd on me in front of a packed auditorium once.
That's why one of the key skills of a corporate public face in IT is stand-up comedy. They didn't see the flawless ISS crash containment they were promised, but at least they had some great laughs.
Funny now that the devil isn't that much of a baddie anymore.
Did you read the actual deposition? The linked article is not clear on the exact details, I don't think it's possible to come to any conclusions from the article alone.
The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)
I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way worse.)
In the context of using a neural network model this is very much lying.
A phone is not a car. You can't die by believing in a feature of a phone but you potentially can or be hurt when it comes to a car.
They also crashed the car trying to park it at the end.... I wonder how many takes it took to get the demo working.
People don’t die if an iPhone doesn’t work right. Autopilot/“fsd” on the other hand…
Two wrongs don't make a right.
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huh?
> This is pretty normal in marketing demos.
This was my thought, isn't this stand operating procedure for pretty much all companies? How is this news?
If you put "Musk" in the headline you get more clix.
Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition, describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding useful things like this.
Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition involving the same individual. Ugh!
There is a decent discussion at https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th... which contains quotes from the deposition, as well as a link to a pdf of the deposition at https://wetransfer.com/downloads/8b24e0528e23c45d543f4d4182b... (I know, but that's the only link there).
In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
The deposition is from June 2022 btw.
I'd agree with your characterization. But after downloading the PDF from your WeTransfer link, I was able to find a link on Google by searching for the quoted opening sentence of the deposition. Oddly, the resulting Google page has a header at the top that says something to the effect of "No results found", but then it has a link to the page that contains it.
The full deposition is embedded on this page: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559294/tesla-autopilot-...
A direct link to download the deposition is here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23574198/elluswamy-de...
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> Why do so many news articles do this?
Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.
If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks interested in reading the primary source material. (Court filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns with doing so.)
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As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better reading material than news articles covering them, especially court decisions.
A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem to be taught the opposite.
I find it baffling they are called journalists. It's just generating controversy based on events, with no actual thought put into actual "news" part.
I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers), and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting. And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the internet for free.
On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.
I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.
When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.
They don't want you to click away.
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The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try.
Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.
What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on.
(Corrected sloppy math, see below)
Nit: 10^4 (10E3, 10E5 would conventionally be 10*10^5 or 1,000,000)
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I mean, didn't it do exactly that? Just only once?
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> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
"Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly misleading.
It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing it correctly identifying golden retrievers.
They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.
>"planned, organized, or arranged in advance (often of an event or situation intended to seem otherwise)." - Oxford English Dictionary
Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"
The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"
The article says
> A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that claim.
Weren't they saying they weren't going to use HD mapping at that point, that their cars just pick up the lay of the land and deal with anything, making their approach way more scalable than competitors?
But the product demo was instead mapped?
Sarcastically, a 2000 lb robot could be programmed to drive in a random walk pattern quite cheaply: film it for many days and use the section of the recording where it has the fewest collisions as the promo video!
Just a heads-up to others in the comments here that have not read the article, none of those are quotes from the article.
Were the other companies putting that the driver is only there for legal reasons at the front of the video and selling the product for thousands of dollars with promises it would work as depicted imminently?
There is a world of difference between the demos other companies were showing and this.
Hey, it didn't work on me, because I was expecting them to try to scam me.
Waymo is completely self driving and does it well… even years ago was cruising around self driving
And you don’t see them doing all the carnival barking line Tesla does
> The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".
> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
Fanboy detected.
Yeah, this coverage (as is so common with this company) seems a bit off. This wasn't a product in 2016, it was a technology demonstration. How many tech giants have stood on stage demoing products that barely worked, with an army of engineers on site to get it right before the reveal?
As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for this industry for every manufacturer except Tesla.
Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise. No, it's not done. But it's great.
> It's great, I promise.
It's not just great, it's hardcore:
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...
Woo! FSD! FSD!
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Interesting bits ...
>>To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to Tesla’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto
Remember they don't have the 3d maps, so they used a completely different car with different hardware to showcase it !
>>But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed
>>When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, he said.
Is it legal to falsify the claims ?
The part about the 3D map is particularly interesting. ELon Musk has made strong claims that machine vision, without LIDAR, radar, or acoustic ranging, is enough for FSD. In fact it can't even auto-park reliably.
Every AV project other than Tesla (and maybe geohotz's AV thing?) uses other types of sensors, especially LIDAR, and 3D mapping.
If it turns out that 3D maps and LIDAR are necessary to achieve L3 and higher, not only are Tesla cars not equipped to ever be AVs, the data Tesla has collected from their cars is much less valuable for developing and operating AVs.
I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to marketing/advertising imagery everything is staged and dolled up - and it's nothing new.
Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera).
This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as absurd as it is pictured.
I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.
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>This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.
Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up some farcical point they tried making online and got called out on.
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> Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.
McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8
However, there is literally a point where this becomes fraud and as a publicly traded company Tesla has to be aware of where that line is drawn.
I mean heck just look at what happened to Nikola. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...
Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes are matte.
No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart disease from eating too much fast food.
One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
> everything is staged and dolled up
Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.
McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xnjBoJHzE
I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.
Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.
And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.
> they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is
Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one knows they clearly do lie about how tall the food is.
I presume what you meant here is that they're not supposed to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the can and do. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
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The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.
Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is building.
https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712
fwiw, it seems like it's a common thing to avoid answering vague/overly broad questions like this in a deposition. see here:https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th...
it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".
https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...
Musk currently looks set to lose the “funding secured” civil suit. I’d expect this to follow shortly after.
Is there a public accounting of Musk’s balance sheet? His fondness for margin loans is documented, after all.
I see parallels to Nikola's "Nikola One" video, where they claimed that their truck was driving along using its newfangled zero-emission engines, but in reality it was just rolling downhill in a totally staged video. Nikola's CEO was recently convicted of fraud, and that incident featured very prominently in his indictment...
I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment ever surviving.
Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone still realistically believed in it or him.
In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time. It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact that they sold trucks didn't help with this.
Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense. It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths.
It's just taken time for the industry to respond.
I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose. The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
Christensen book, The Innovator's Dilemma even specifically identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
> I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose
You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.
I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.
This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.
I seem to remember automated manufacturing was supposed to be his big thing. The other companies were bogged down with union labor and he saw an opportunity. Then the first gigafactory failed to fully automate the process and so he put all his chips on "cheap" autopilot that didn't require expensive vision hardware and could instead all run on video.
Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I suspect.
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> I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this
Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving. That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":
https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...
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At Battery investment day (a few years after Autonomy investor day) he said the opposite: that self driving wasn't worth much because competitors would follow in 2-4 years, and that their advantage was all about their new battery tech. The new Tesla-made batteries have come out now and are 20% worse energy density than Panasonic's.
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I don’t get why tesla can’t just do the thing that originally made them successful: build really good electric cars, that people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.
Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just outcompete by doing things as they already were?
AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and customer satisfaction.
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> "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless"
There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping that by the time people wise up about the false promises, Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the other manufacturers are catching up.
Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock, basically putting their life savings into it, and when I asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete". Now they're pissed at him.
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>It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost not additional money, mass or volume. So building something like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive. Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it can't really do road trips.
> That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery.
Kind of, you can also change the other factors in the equation like that startup building 'Lightyear' with the light weight platform, aerodynamics and with PV panels [0]
[0] https://lightyear.one/lightyear-2
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I think the range problem is already solved by the 800V/250kW+ charging. A 20-minute break every 3 hours of driving is within reason, and it makes the range effectively infinite.
I know there are people with steel bladders who also need to tow a boat every day, through a desert, in the snow, uphill both ways, but for commuting and occasional road trips it's already pretty good. Just don't try this with Leaf and its previous-gen peers that are 5 times slower than the state of the art.
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Just imagine what you could do if you could just open the boot and swap out a few 10kg batteries at the fuel station. You'd still have 30KWh hidden around the chassis, but most people don't need >100mile range every day.
Taking a long road trip with multiple people in a subcompact "penalty box" car the size of a Honda Fit is kind of a miserable experience regardless of what kind of motor it uses. People mostly only do that when they have no other options.
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Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption. Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.
As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.
As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).
> Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry.
Can you expand on this?
When the iPhone came out there was literally nothing like it on the market. It genuinely redefined what could be done with a phone, and it doing so, completely changed the category.
Nothing that Tesla is doing rises to that level of disruption/innovation, at least as far as I can tell.
What, exactly, are they doing that brings you to this conclusion?
> But I guess only time will tell.
I find this so strange.
Tesla has been around for... let's see... 20 years. The S is over 10 years old now (production started in late 2010).
The iPhone came out in 2007. A blink of the eye later and the smartphone was ubiquitous.
You say "time will tell", but... how much more time, exactly?
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This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the more tech of all the car companies. They have the disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as much as possible. Historically car companies outsource everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is why they have all the quality problems.
> In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day.
As much as the iPhone killed off those companies, it grew the market for smartphones more.
There is no significantly growing market for cars like there was for "handheld internet-connected personal computers". Every EV sale is effectively 1 less ICE sale - a 1:1 replacement in the market. Whatever market growth potential exists is in the very price sensitive developing world (South Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc), where EVs will show up en-masse last.
Now that practically every company is selling EVs, Tesla only has its brand to differentiate it, which was at one time significant but perhaps less so lately.
As I see it, their only meteoric growth opportunity (by eating into competitors' market share) would be if they released a $20K, 250+ mile range, 5 seater EV in the very near future - like what the VW Beetle did in its generation.
But that's hard to achieve in an EV (especially from a luxury brand used to high margins), since the majority of the cost of an EV is still in the battery, and that cost doesn't scale down much with a lower price tag.
I think that was part of why FSD was such a core pitch from the beginning. IF Tesla had managed to crack that to the actual fullest it could have been the game changing thing to put them ahead. The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock. Too bad they hard committed to camera only sensing which is looking like a major mistake given how little headway they have against traditional car safety features.
If one takes a moment to think about the value of a private car participating in a public taxi fleet, the idea collapses completely. Public transit is difficult, so is a taxi fleet. A part is labour - drivers specifically - but equally large portions are maintenance, insurance and related things.
Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles to overcome.
There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent public transit. The value is largely in limited regions - north america being one.
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>The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock.
Sounds miserable, I wouldn't want to get back to my car after work and find some passenger had ruined it in some way. Bodily fluids, smoking weed in it, leaving trash, the possibilities are endless!
> The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis
If you can print cash with your Robotaxi, why would Tesla ever sell you one? Just build your army of Robotaxis and make your billions that way.
I agree with your interpretation, but I don't think Tesla is discovering this. I think they've known that the electric car was a mere sustaining innovation, while a true self-driving car is disruptive. That's why they've tried to sell their electric cars as self-driving cars.
Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile" sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a disruptive product.
I think they initially had hopes that they would be able to make some disruptive innovations in auto manufacturing - but all the evidence suggests they went way over their skis as Teslas are notorious for having extremely poor fit and finish. The failure to deliver on self driving is in line with a history of failing to deliver. You can include the weird hype around the Tesla humanoid robot on this list too imo.
> It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.
I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next.
Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
I don’t own an EV but wouldn’t the closest one to that be the Nissan Leaf?
I see them all around me and the marked for used ones, all the way back to 2012 models seems to be strong.
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It does feel like they're pretty comfortable selling expensive cars for now while others are expanding info the cheaper segments.
You're a bit too late with that observation I think as Tesla is no longer the upstart.
> The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.
The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023. That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents dragging their feet to being in the top 10.
Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked out. They are here to stay.
What are you talking about lol. The whole point of Tesla has always been able to achieve scale so they can sell mass market cars.
That explains why so many of the subsequent youtube reviews of the tech years later still aren't that great. I guess I'd assumed it was mild cherry picking rather than outright disingenuous.
I'm sad about this.
(I'm also reminded, thanks to chatting with friends over the weekend, of Grolsch adverts in the UK about 20 years ago: "Stop, it's not ready yet!")
"The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,"
The video
https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-driving representations.
If TSLA needs a bailout in the future, I say we just let it fail. This company is just fucking terrible. It has turned me off from EVs completely. From the terrible build quality to multiple failed deliveries, it's just not worth it anymore.
This is not surprising. I expect more shenanigans like this from Elon to come to light over next couple of years.
Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.
There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video.
What matters is:
(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims
(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.
(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation
If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.
Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...
(Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)
Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.
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It is legal to make a video that portrays your product in the best possible light.
It is not legal to do so when it materially misrepresents your product.
I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.
The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.
Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.
12 years old would be half-way to being scrapped, assuming car sales are approximately constant, and it is of average expectancy.
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I think the confusion is around what the term autopilot is supposed to mean.
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If Theranos was still around you'd be hired on the spot.
I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still can't.
Tesla also likely staged their battery swap presentation as well as the solar shingles reveal.
Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?
Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.
> Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?
If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.
That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
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Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.
Does teslas AI maintain a world model? Videos I've seen of path flicker suggest it reinterprets the worlds at every frame.
It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.
I saw a video that there is some sort of state and "memory", so i don't think that's the case.
If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did the AI training.
At what point does this fraud count as lying to shareholders?
There is a detailed breakdown by Thunderf00t of how the "Tesla Bot" video was clearly also staged here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU
I told you so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018
> This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other.
You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill).
You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
It’s about scale. When you show a video of the car driving itself, you’re implying it can do it in similar arbitrary scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn’t allow you to collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don’t mention this in your video, you’re committing fraud.
Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the quality map.
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This person just has no idea how AVs work and thinks an openly shared approach to AVs is a conspiracy
https://medium.com/cruise/hd-maps-self-driving-cars-b6444720...
https://blog.waymo.com/2019/09/building-maps-for-self-drivin...
https://zoox.com/journal/putting-our-robots-on-the-map/
When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as discovering some well-hidden secret.
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Ah, the old binary tree con: https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html
I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked, if not outright faked.
In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.
Where to start...
First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.
Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.
Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
> for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.
When you post a video of a “successful” drive, have the CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the same software version of your autonomous stack literally crashed on an earlier run, you’re committing fraud. If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of roads, you’re also committing fraud. If you think otherwise you’re drinking somebody’s Koolaid.
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One difference is Tesla runs on all roads basically (subject to weather view on cameras). It's gm super cruise and google that only work on road that have been imaged. It does seem that super cruise and google waymo is ahead of tesla. Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem, random roads and conditions. I think that tesla won't succeed very soon, and as the "pre-scan the road" groups get better and better tesla's approach will be seen as unacceptable risky. I have only driven the new versions a few time, it was interesting to see all the things they could see but it just wasn't safe. Waymo has their weird stuff but did seem much safer in theory. But who knows if there is a hole, like happened in Arizona to that poor woman who got run over in the night while crossing the dark road.
If the title of the article was instead, "Tesla video promoting self-driving was scripted, engineer testifies," this article is probably mostly ignored. Take a loaded term like "scripted," which some interpret as "faked," and here we are. Of course the video was staged, the engineers were asked to make a video showing it's capabilities. The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.
> The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.
Or Tesla's video that says "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself"?
"The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons" - sure, to assume legal responsibility when "autopilot" crashes into something or someone.
This isn't that bad compared to Elon speeches.
I still wonder how him lying about robotaxi in 2019, the whole 2 minutes speech he gave that prompted the rapid increase in share price, is any different from Elisabeth Holmes speech about Theranos blood recognition. Except that Holmes did not sell any Theranos share. I must be missing something, because it seems like I'm the only one perturbed by this.
I imagine Elluswamy's career at Tesla is over. What a dilemma, either lie in a deposition or get fired.
I don't think a company can fire you for not perjuring yourself in the company's defense. That would invite even bigger legal liability on them.
Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company has a leadership issue.
What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right. I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature management for the battery system, as it would definitely alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive nowadays, too.
>It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this.
Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
> Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?
Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not what I said.
You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic shift into the automotive industry.
Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.
The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it a pass on the bad things it's done.
It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.
Agreed. Still, I find it sad given that it all seems senseless. Seems like they produced enough actual value to not need to go down this path.
> I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.
You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.
Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.
Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.
Tesla owner here ( 2019 Model 3P, including paying for the "full self driving" ).
I wish Tesla hadn't gone whole-hog after full self driving, and had just concentrated on making a Better Car.
The video is a kine of misleading, which should told you that the driving in the video was a vision of the future rather than a capability it already had or would soon have.
Elizabeth Holmes has a lawyer she can recommend
Whoops, that was an aspirational demo!
Now the real question will be: Will we see a leap as we did in language models if we just wait for the computing capacity to grow enough?
Huh…Is this the new Nikola Motors?
The difference between Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) and Elon Musk is that the latter tends to deliver something resembling what he promised even though he lies and exaggerates a lot.
Trevor Milton couldn’t even make a car! If he had done that, he’ll be rolling in his hundreds of millions of cash from stock sales thanks to hype and occasional lies instead of waiting to go to federal prison.
Everything looks better in commercials, i bet you have never eaten a hamburger as is advertised.
There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised that FSD was so advanced it would make you money[1] by driving your car for Uber when you're not using it. That's almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your cancer.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-1756196...
> When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.”
Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of fact by a CEO
We need to somehow get "just trolling" as a legal loophole in our justice system.
So a more extreme version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery ?
I don’t know whether you’re being coy but this is rumored to be his strategy.
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Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel.
(/s)
Or that time he went to SNL and yelled "TOOOO THE MOOOON" about Dogecoin and his fans accidentally bought the top. What a troll haha!
> The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
This part is even worse.
There's also the AJ defense for it - that at this point in time, there is a public expectation that no reasonable person should be stupid enough to actually believe such a tweet. Everyone knows that the man is just playing a media character.
[flagged]
I'd hope his scams fold down quicker than "decades"
For sure, but I'm still gonna be talking about it.
I think Elons greatest accomplishment was convincing people he's Woz and not Jobs.
A better comparison might be "I think Elon's greatest accomplishment was convincing people he was Tesla and not Edison."
You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being far easier than production up a lot.
Please, show a little respect for Jobs here. /s
Musk used smoke and mirrors to promote something that wasn’t real? I’m shocked. SHOCKED.
Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a better criteria for discussing fraud.
C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
that's the definition of a strawman.
Just drove my model 3 yesterday and it stopped for stoplights and made turns on its own. Everything in that video exists now and shipped to customers.
Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
> This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.
That honestly sounds like the description is "unpredictable and dangerous".
"The driver is just there for legal reasons"
That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that does not exist now
Don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is true lol
The video says the only reason a driver is there is legal reasons: obviously not true unless you are a psychopath and would send it out on its own.
In a video from 2016 in an lawsuit about a crash in 2018 in which the driver was repeatedly told by the car to pay attention.
The driver knew about how this part of the road was incorrectly recognized by the software yet didn’t pay attention.
You get sue for the life you didn’t save and get almost zero merits for the ones you did.
A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus.
Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.
How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial autonomy, to full autonomy?
What if it’s a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those death?
The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or they would not be able to drive them in the US. If the system was required to nag the driver by law and didn’t then it is a breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved that way I see no foul play.
If the law isn’t good, change the law.
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Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is far below the Theranos level.
"Less fraud than Theranos" probably isn't the accolade you hang on the mantle.
> Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is far below the Theranos level.
The missing comma before "and fraud" is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
> below the Theranos level
Isn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet? How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents?
"Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a damningly weak defense (imo).
> How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents?
Mr. SBF from FTX would like to have a word with you.
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The only unique thing about the Theranos fraud is it seem Holmes didn't make an overt moves to profit off the inflated valuation of the company.
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"Well, it's less bad than Theranos" --Tesla in Review, 2023
Lol is this how low our standards have sunk?
> they delivered actual cars and fraud,
I think your punctuation is doing you a disservice.
They're giving you cars, they're giving you fraud, they're giving you cars with some fraud, what more do you want? You people are so hard to please.
/s
How many people did Theranos kill compared to Tesla self driving?
Better comparison would be to VW ~ 1200 premature deaths https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109238_vw-diesel-cheat...
Theranos’s faulty blood tests were used by a couple major insurance companies and at least one state-run medical provider. Over 1.5 million tests were run. I’m sure quite a few people died because they weren’t correctly diagnosed in time for treatment.
Theranos delivered blood test results. Tesla delivered cars.
The problem is that neither delivered those things to the particular qualities promised.
Didn't Theranos deliver actual results, just using the Siemens machines instead of their own?
Not in market value...
I absolutely agree with you, so we have an upper bound, Elon Musk is facing far less than 12 years in prison. Doesn't anyone want to help us out with a lower bound?
This is interesting context. I'd say a fine of $125,000 - because that is the lowest fine I can find in a brief DDG search of fines levied for materially misleading investors.
say whatever you want about Theranos, but Hitler killed millions. Say whatever you want about Hitler but Genghis...
Any Elon or Tesla related topic on hackernews is such a cesspool these days. Any support of him even with actual true statements is downvoted. Somehow the technologist board has become the least friendly to actual technological innovation. Any statements like the one I just made will get countered with attacks on his person.
He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive. Maybe he's an asshole too, but no one get's the same level of scrutiny.
How about this article from 2018 suggesting GM will have a wheelless car in 2019? https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-self-driving-car-launc...
Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
> Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By making himself a very prominent public individual and the face of Tesla, he's inextricably tied to the brand. No one knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many that's transferring to Tesla as well.
> He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive.
Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line all the way back to his father who bankrolled him?
It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.
>Responsible in what sense?
In the sense that without him the innovation would not exist or become mainstream. Don't be fooled into thinking he only has cash to offer. John Carmack himself has stated that he thinks Elon is in his wheelhouse in terms of engineering.
>Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla.
Tesla was a concept car at the time, not a mass production vehicle with no intentions of ever making millions of cars, if you don't see why they are different I don't know how to help you. The production is at least as hard as the innovation.