Comment by londons_explore
3 years ago
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)
You’re right, I blame commenting while taking care of a sick kid. Thanks!
Exactly, and for that matter, why not just write 1E5?
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I mean, didn't it do exactly that? Just only once?
The clear implication is that you should buy one because it can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.
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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!
This is exactly the kind of unserious flamery I was talking about. And it's simply out of control on this site. Get a ride, is all I can say. It may not be as fun as yelling about it on the internet, but you'll get a much better idea of the capabilities of this technology, and probably have a ton of fun while you do.
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