This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S.
The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny and clear.
> Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model S
Being that dismissive and willfully ignorant discredits your entire argument. A snake oil salesman produces nothing and hoodwinks people. I drive my "snake oil" every day and not only is it the best car I've ever driven, it's the coolest thing I've ever owned. I routinely watch his "snake oil" launch huge payloads to orbit and land the booster(s) autonomously for cheap re-use. Hate the guy personally if you want, but slander like yours is simply holding back progress.
Nobody said the snake oil salesman doesn't also offer aspirin and stuff that is actually valuable... in fact they'd be a shitty caricature of a snake-oil salesperson if they didn't.
I agree it's overly strong language and I admire Teslas for what they are (fancy toys, his words) and SpaceX more than I can adequately communicate... however, his claims about Hyperloop, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and yes, even those about the future of Tesla self-driving could all be considered hyperbolic claims that fall into the "fake it till you make it" category, just adjacent to the actual frauds.
People challenging these claims and holding hyped up individuals to account are not holding back progress, it's the blind faith people put into hyped individuals and their claims that is holding back progress. Elizabeth Holmes has done far more to hinder progress than the people who were naysaying her claims and calling her a snake-oil salesperson before it was commonly known to be true.
It means that when you defraud investors over outlandish claims, even if you believe you can do what you are claiming, then you have destroyed trust and made it harder for everyone else in the industry (who isn't making shit up) to get the funding to do the real work that creates real progress.
You seem to have skipped/ignored the whole paragraph where I give Elon lots of credit and then the part where I how people were treating Holmes before it was common knowledge that she was making shit up.
I don't believe she did that because she wanted to defraud investors, she just believed her own hype and was willing to lie more than most to maintain that hype... if you don't think that these exact conditions affect Elon, or the people that feed him information, then I think maybe you're suffering from some the negative effects of excessive fandom.
I just think it is disingenuous on your part to act like their output puts them in the same boat. You are lumping them together and I find that to be a completely inaccurate comparison. How you can compare someone who literally made nothing with someone who took his millions of dollars of worth and risked them on a space company and a car company ... it just blows my mind.
As far as self driving is concerned I do think that we might be suffering from early apply iphone prototype syndrome: at best we might be a couple of decades away from a solution to this problem. However, if you take the time to listen to some of the presentations given about how Tesla is actually trying to solve self driving, their approach sounds about as sound as I could expect to be.
Please note that defraud is something that applies to people who intentionally deceive. Of the two I would say that only Elizabeth falls in that boat: she went as far as to attempt to alter her voice intentionally among other things. When it comes to Elon, he is just too eager to see results happen. I have difficulty faulting him for that.
I lump them together in one dimension, the one where they can extract millions from investors based on hype.
Yes, Elon deserves the hype more because he has delivered in the past and he certainly has more skin in the game, but it doesn't mean he isn't still playing the "fake it till you make it" game to some extent, and because failures are more impactful than wins, I think it's a dangerous game to play with his reputation.
I want Elon to cut the hype BS because I think it will hurt him in the long run. It's all about trust for me, it's a resource that is being depleted at a rapid rate and it's extremely important to a functioning civilization.
Until the relatively recent backlash, Tesla’s Autopilot page was carefully worded to trick the average reader into thinking that Tesla was far closer to autonomous driving than it really was.
That’s snake oil salesman 101.
> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.
It's hard to judge Tesla at this point, most automotive companies really can't be judged until their vehicles are
on the road heavily for over a decade. I've said this before but I can't imagine a Tesla on the road today being on the road in thirty years. Hopefully I'm wrong. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of 'good for the environment' vehicles in landfills like cellphones. While the gas guzzling 30+ year old Toyota will be chugging along.
Tesla Roadsters have been on the road for over a decade. I have a 2012 Model S and a 2018 Model 3. Best cars I've ever owned, and my almost seven year old S keeps getting better with software updates. I totally get people hating on Elon, but it must largely be jealousy of what he has accomplished.
Well yes. Most people's current car is the "best they've ever owned" because people generally amass more wealth and drive nicer cars as time goes on (people who begrudgingly buy minivans notwithstanding).
I'm not gonna declare Tesla a "mature automaker" I see scrappers strapping stolen I-beams to the roof of 20yo Teslas.
SpaceX is the more mature and financially stable company by far IMO.
There are Teslas with 900,000 km. It's a bit less than 3 times the distance from the earth to the moon and a lot of 30 years old card have less km than that.
The first model S has been released in 2012, about 370 weeks ago. 900 Mm would be would be 2432 kilometres per week (1511 mi/wk), approximately 24 hours of highway speed driving (100km/h) per week.
Do you have any additional information on this claimed 900000 km figure? Or did you mean 90000 kilometres, which is just standard for such a car type.
A lot of 30 year old cars with less km than that? I think that's a pretty big assumption unless you're only considering non daily drivers or garage cars.
I also imagine most buyers who own a Model S today probably aren't going to keep that vehicle for 30 years because they're technically savvy and will want a newer vehicle. Hopefully I'm wrong but what I'm getting at is I don't want a new brand of vehicle that is treated like a cellphone.
Cycling cars every few years for hardware improvements cannot be good for the environment. Tesla also has a pretty bad reputation with self repair and rehabbing damaged vehicles which I imagine will deter the used market quite a bit.
21.5k km per year is the average driving distance in US: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Multiply it for 30 years and you get 645k km.
It seems to me that it’s well below 900k km.
Do you have any official data that contradicts the US department for transportation to prove your assumption?
if you dont think elon musk is a fraudster with this robotaxi bullshit sir you might have drank the kool aid
repeatedly pretending that full self driving was anything more than a pipe dream is dangerous. everyone knows that except people that enable his scamming
I don't think he's a fraudster. I think he's a visionary who sometimes sees things more the way he imagines them than the way they really are.
Things aren't as black and white as a bunch of people on here make them out to be. It's possible to deliver great products while dreaming too big and failing on others. The quality of being able to take risks and fail repeatedly until finally succeeding is one that most entrepreneurs possess.
I don't know why everyone gives this guy such a hard time. And I don't know why he has to be either a genius or a crackpot but not both at the same time. He can be enormously successful - like getting a new car company off the ground, making electric cars mainstream, putting unprecedented driving aids in the hands of consumers, rocket launches at an incredibly affordable cost - and not hit a home run with other ambitious projects like hyperloop, underground tunnels, robotaxis, etc.
Personally, I think the robotaxi idea is stupid. I get that there's a market for autonomous fleet vehicles but which individual car buyers are asking for a taxi service? I didn't buy a 70k car so that it could drive a bunch of strangers around and make me a couple bucks on the side. And, assuming they pull it off (which I doubt), I'd be pretty pissed if the cost of new Teslas went up because of the availability of some service I had no interest in to begin with. It would alienate me as a customer.
That said, I love my Tesla. I use Autopilot every day and it has been life changing. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for 90% of my driving. I rode in one of those self driving Lyft cars recently. It required 2 operators, the driver had to repeatedly take over and it was very similar to my Tesla in terms of ability. The difference is the Tesla is in the hands of consumers. It would be very difficult for me to go back to a regular gas car and I don't think I could go back to daily driving without advanced driver aids like Autopilot.
I have my doubts about city self driving. When I'm coming up to a light and it's obstructed by a big truck that's in front of me I wonder how they will solve that problem. Or railroad tracks, pedestrians, animals running into the road, etc. Those seems like insurmountable problems to me. I'm willing to wait and see though. They've already achieved more than I thought I would see in my lifetime. I won't begrudge them the occasional failure.
>I don't know why everyone gives this guy such a hard time
I literally wrote that hes advertising the dangerous idea of any kid of self driving
the other reply to me even used "autopilot" in their comment. if you dont think branding lane assist as "autopilot" is dangerous and still defend elon then alright. have fun writing walls of text worshipping techbro jesus?
>repeatedly pretending that full self driving was anything more than a pipe dream is dangerous. everyone knows that except people that enable his scamming
Drove my Model 3 on autopilot today. Entered a roadway that had recently been repaved, and lacking lane markers. The Model 3 couldn’t handle it and wouldn’t let me engage autopilot. There aren’t robotaxis until that trivial problem is solved.
It’s surprisingly good at 99.9% of scenarios. Unfortunately I encounter one of those 0.1% events each day, and they’re always different. For example, yesterday there was a tractor driving down the road in the lane next to me. It had axles which stuck out almost two feet from the wheel. Suspect that scenario isn’t going to be handled properly as the appropriate bounding box is non-standard.
I know this is far out there. But I believe the problem of fully autonomous anything via software is fundamentally impossible. The divide between analog and digital is just too big.
You are basically saying AI is fundamentally impossible. Could you explain what kind of magic in humans beside our simulateable physics is fundamentally impossible to imitate? I understand we might be a long way off of understanding how our minds work and there is no guarantee we can massively simplify those processes. But even an inefficient imitation of a human mind as seen in earlier sci-fy could bring lots of benefits. Saying fundamentally impossible seems like... well, wishful thinking, to say it nicely.
Rephrasing it as "fundamentally impractical with Silicon transistor-based computers" might make the statement quite a bit easier to defend without substantially changing the meaning. There's no magic in the human brain, but we're nowhere near capable of building one in the lab and certainly not simulating one in a computer. We're so far away from doing either of those things, that we really have no frame of reference to even talk about whether AGI is possible or practical.
So how hard are you willing to short the entire software industry over the next 10 years? I definitely wouldn't bet against automation in the next few decades.
You get the feeling that they're solving the wrong problem though.
No-one can can predict what other people are going to do, and what other drivers do is also affected by what you do. Most drivers aren't even paying that much attention. Realistically you can't model that to any useful level of precision.
I think maybe vendors are trying to build a more deterministic system that can justify its actions, but to make autonomous driving actually work, I suspect you have to make it drive like human: taking actions "confidently" (i.e. slightly recklessly) assuming the world will roughly follow a rational model, while also driving "defensively" to cope with the general unpredictability of reality.
The price to pay for this strategy is familiar to human drivers: the occasional fender bender.
The 'wrong problem' might include trying to achieve everything with smart-as-an-ant cars on dumb roads. It may be possible to make any important road smarter inexpensively, so that the car's sensors could 'read' the road. Then the car has external, deterministic 'input'.
By reading the road, pinging dumb targets, the car has input to help it decide if it can drive safely. If the targets go missing, it quits safely. The dumb targets should ping thru snow. At certain intervals, the road is smarter, with powered, networked targets that can update the car about 'danger, Will Robinson' conditions in real-time.
> Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman
Dude, you may not like Musk personally (which is glaringly obvious), but at least stick to the facts - he triggered much needed car industry transformation more than anybody else in recent times. industry itself wouldn't change itself so rapidly even if planet would be burning, that's obvious. And mankind gravely needs it now. Plus small detail about revolutionizing whole commercial space industry in extremely effective way.
Mankind now gravely needs more of these 'snake oil salesmen', even with their missteps
Ah yes, because it's not like the Prius demonstrated that there was a market for green car, or the CA or federal green car credits and HOV access provided incentives to people to buy said green cars, or federal regulations regarding fleet emissions standards created the market for trading emissions credits that has singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat everytime it's come closer to running out of money.
It's silly to shun emissions credits that are desperately needed to electrify transportation considering the trillions of dollars of subsides petroleum has received and the severity of climate change. The market for an underpowered hybrid like the Prius is not the same as a market for an EV with no compromises (how does one compare a Model 3 to a Prius?).
Any automaker gets ZEV credits and federal tax credits for their EVs sold, Tesla is the only automaker selling EVs people want to buy (in quantity). Tesla has already sold more Model 3s in a quarter than Chevy has sold Bolts ever. So why is Tesla the one selling hundreds of thousands of EVs per year and no one else is?
"How dare Tesla take advantage of these regulatory and market advantages anyone else could be taking advantage of!" /s
Sorry to hear that's your opinion! Besides waiting a bit longer to Supercharge vs getting a tank of gas (which is rare, only when traveling, I charge at home every night), my experience has been much better with a Tesla than any internal combustion vehicle I've owned.
That's not really the only compromise Tesla has. It got terrible ergonomics, lack of what is now isn't considered particularly luxury features, mediocre build quality, repairs that can take months etc. But it got fart jokes! So it all evens out. /s
For my personal usage, when I am traveling (which usually is something like driving 2000 miles with a single long stop) filling/charging time makes all the difference between getting there how I want it or not, too.
You might have a point if there wasn't any demand, but Tesla is shipping almost 360k vehicles a year (and Gigafactory 3 in China is about to turn up). Someone likes the cars they build.
Very, very few people use their car as you describe (2000 miles in a single sprint). If you must perform such a trip, most will fly or rent a car just for that trip.
Oh, of course there is demand, that's quite obvious. (Well, there was demand for Juicero, too, for a while)
Not too many people might use the car exactly like that, and I do it only when I actually need to get the car there. Otherwise flying is more pleasant. But there are quite a few use cases where recharge/refuel time, usually for people who need cars to make a living.
Personally, I just will not, ever, buy anything from Musk, because I think that he is a terrible (even by SV standards) person, but yeah, sure, Teslas obviously work for some people. But saying that they are the bestest, uncompromiziest, never before had the world seen anything as awesome super-vehicles is just ridiculous.
If anything, driving across Southern US, even if you are on a leisurely road trip, in a car with cooled seats (a $30K Hyundai works) is far more pleasant than in a car with fart jokes.
It's silly to shun emissions credits that are desperately needed to electrify transportation considering the trillions of dollars of subsides petroleum has received and the severity of climate change.
It's disingenuous to claim that subsidies for petroleum are remotely the same thing as subsidies for EVs. You're comparing corn to apples here. The proper comparison would be subsidies for renewable energy like solar and wind to subsidies for petroleum, since in both cases the subsidies are indirect to the market that's were talking about: automobiles.
It's also disingenuous to claim that subsidies stretching out over a century, and partially rooted in global geopolitical politics, are the same thing as subsidies that have been around for about a decade.
Finally, it's disingenuous to cite the "trillions" of subsidies worldwide for petroleum while leaving out the hundreds of billions of subdisidies that green power like solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear have received worldwide.
Tesla has already sold more Model 3s in a quarter than Chevy has sold Bolts ever....So why is Tesla the one selling hundreds of thousands of EVs per year and no one else is?
The Chevy Bolt is supply-constrained; total global production is 30,000 vehicles a year. There are currently waitlists at every dealership selling a Bolt. Competing EVs like the iPace are similarly supply-constrained and also have months-long waiting lists. Unlike Tesla, other automakers launch models slowly and scale up production as demand proves itself and production hiccups reveal themselves and are addressed. Last I checked, there's no months-long waiting period to get a Chevy Bolt fixed because (a) they don't need fixing straight out of the factory like so many Teslas do and (b) the supply of repair parts is readily accessible due to Chevy's mastery of basic automobile logistics...
Tesla made it cool. Prius was never primarily known for being eco-friendly, it was known as the car that dorks and hippies drove. Ignoring the cultural impact of Tesla is why plenty of green vehicles failed in the past.
Outside of SV, Teslas aren't viewed as any cooler than Priuses. They're actually seen as much worse--elitist vehicles--since Priuses are affordable for most families and Teslas are not, plus require lots of expensive infrastructure just for basic use.
I know a few people who drive Teslas. Not one of them is someone who would even be remotely described as cool. I know a lot of people who drive Priuses, and they range the gamut from dorky to cool.
Ignoring the cultural impact of Tesla is why plenty of green vehicles failed in the past.
What cultural impact? Tesla's influence operates largely in a self-made echo chamber. Outside of the echo chamber, it's had literally no impact on car sales or car culture.
Green cars failed in the past because they were (a) super expensive and (b) had no marketing spend. Tesla's innovation was the same innovation that Toyota made a decade earlier with the Prius--green cars will sell if you market them to customers. (And despite Elon's claims that Tesla spends $0 on marketing, Tesla spends roughly $100m/year or more on marketing, per their SEC filings.)
The Prius succeeded in spite of itself. They are ugly as hell, didn't offer plug in capability for years despite customers begging for it, so slow you can barely merge onto the highway and not the most ideal family car. It's the kind of car you put up with because you want to be green or you have a shitty commute and you're tired of paying $4/gallon for gas. Nobody buys a Prius for any reason other than that it's a hybrid with great fuel economy. Nobody. Then there was the Honda Insight which was worse in every way.
Teslas appeal to both the customers who want to be green and the ones who don't give a rat's ass about the environment. They look nice, they go fast, they hardly require any maintenance and they have a badass infotainment system which no other manufacturer has been able to get right. The first Model S really popped and people were buying it in spite of the uncertainty around it being electric. Then they started loading them up with tech and driver aids.
I get that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I don't know how anyone who's into cars can look at one and not find something cool about it.
As for "expensive infrastructure", you do realize the first car manufacturers didn't decide to start building gas cars in the beginning simply to take advantage of the gas station infrastructure that was already in place? Electric cars are here to stay. Sooner or later somebody had to start building charging stations just like somebody had to start building gas stations.
> Nobody buys a Prius for any reason other than that it's a hybrid with great fuel economy. Nobody. Then there was the Honda Insight which was worse in every way.
I don't understand this comparison. Yes, it's a commuter appliance. Any car you spend 90k on is going to look nicer and go faster than a Prius. So will a 7 series, who cares?
What the Prius did is mainstream the idea of hybrids and "green" vehicles in general, and they've sold a zillion of them. Go ahead and call it boring (it's super boring), but so is essentially every other commuter car it's competing against. The Model S on the other hand has only "popped" among people who can buy luxury sports cars to begin with. It's fast, it's impressive, and it's a niche luxury product whose entire fleet is a rounding error in Prius sales figures.
What did he trigger exactly that wasn't triggered by regulation? He just exploited some regulations to keep his structurally bankrupt company afloat long enough. Tried the same with Solar City and failed BTW.
No other automaker is building EVs at the scale Tesla is (nor has built out global EV charging infrastructure to support those vehicles being built and sold). No EV being sold today meets the standards set by Tesla's vehicles sold in 2013.
I'm not agreeing at all. BMW just lost their CEO because they've lost so many sales to Tesla. Other automakers are desperately trying to play catchup to them.
I have never had people come up to any other car I've owned (Chevrolet, Mercedes, Jeep, Toyota, Lexus, Infiniti) besides our Model S and Model X with questions, tell us the car is beautiful (in an Aldi parking lot no less), or want to go for an impromptu ride along. I've never had kids run up to any of our cars besides our Teslas and go "omg it's a Tesla!!".
The transformation was making electric cars better than internal combustion vehicles in every way, sexy, and desirable. Mission accomplished.
The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny and clear.