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Comment by amatic | Hacker News Reader

They seem sort of defensive and needy. "Oh, the didn't reaaally make a better car then we did, we had that two years ago, and ours is so much better and ... ". Of course it is, the guy made it in his garage.

The classy thing to do would be congratulating the guy and encouraging even more open experimentation. I mean, they already are open-sourcing a lot of their work.

This statement doesn't seem in line with that.

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On the contrary, I thought Hotz came off in the original article as a bit too arrogant when he basically bashed Tesla's autopilot in order to sell the reporter on his own project.

EDIT: For what it's worth, this may have been the angle the reporter wanted: reporters are very good at stroking your ego and getting you to tell them things you shouldn't be telling them. Nonetheless, revealing email correspondence about private business/job dealings is not very classy, whether or not you're a big company.

I think if you are a person working in a garage you can get away with bashing products from multi-zillion dollar companies.

A multi-zillion dollar company criticizing someone working in a garage, as amatic notes, is the opposite of classy.

Where's the criticism? They merely pointed out (to non technical people) there's a long way to go to reach 99.9999% precision. They said nothing bad about Hotz achievement (except that it's relatively easy to achieve). They also corrected a mistake in the article regarding developing the autopilot in-house.

"you got nothing" is kind of empty criticism

It's rather like the rule of comedy: you're allowed to "punch up", but not down.

The reaction toward the article about geohot is largely positive in his favor. I wish him no harm, not even a buzzkill, but his words appeal to the iPhone jailbreak generation more than Elon Musk. They hold him as a genius that can do anything for to liberate the people while Tesla is yet another Big Corp. that ask too much for false value. Proof: someone just said he did it in his garage.

So kudos to him for making Tesla react, yes they were a bit needy, but they had to realign things a bit.

Not to mention disclosing presumably sensitive correspondence to the reporter. If I were Elon I'm not sure I'd be too happy about that.

The original article paints Hotz as brilliant, arrogant and reckless, the archetypal young hero, as what writers often do to make the story interesting.

Tesla's PR fell right into their assigned role of the big, rich, dumb rival. Which is silly, because they have great technology, and they are much smaller and faster to move then, say, the Big Three. Tesla plays as the underdog in stories of them vs big car companies.

The correction the title is referring to is in the third paragraph, it should have been the first, as the main point that they are not using vendor technology.

PR misstep, I suppose.

And that would be OK. He doesn't have a PR department.

They came across in that statement as insecure and having self-esteem issues that they had to downplay or belittle the brilliant guy's work just to feel better about themselves or to dispel their investors fears of an imminent competition emerging to challenge their position in the market.

That's a bit of a trend on the Tesla blog. You saw the same thing with all the excitement about range anxiety and journalist tracking and such. I agree that it doesn't play too well for them, but ultimately I would buy a car based on the car, not the defensiveness of the company or lack thereof... so perhaps it's a case of no such thing as bad publicity; they know responding will likely get them some press, so might as well.

I have a feeling MobileEye wanted Tesla to release something like this.

Right - the relationship with MobileEye, and motivation for in house staff, are really important.

This is just a press release to keep stakeholder value and their relation with MobileEye. Nothing to see here.

Stakeholders do not really care if Hotz say that and Musk said what. They just want to know their money is being spent correctly.

Yeah, I don't really understand the point they are trying to make there. Of course Geohot does not have a massive amount of engineers working on his car, and it's not meant to be a mass-market product, it's just a hobbyist project built in his garage, it's already amazing it worked so well to be honest regarding the massive complexity of a project like this. Unless I misunderstood something...

It's not just meant to be a hobbyist project. From the original story:

Soon enough, the two men started figuring out a deal in which Hotz would help develop Tesla’s self-driving technology. There was a proposal that if Hotz could do better than Mobileye’s technology in a test, then Musk would reward him with a lucrative contract. Hotz, though, broke off the talks when he felt that Musk kept changing the terms. “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk wrote to Hotz in an e-mail. “I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.”

It didn't work out, but...

“I’m a big Elon fan, but I wish he didn’t jerk me around for three months,” he says. “He can buy the technology for double.”

I am too getting negative vibe from the Tesla comment. Even though all they said is true. Maybe it's because they start with telling how improbable in their opinion is that someone other then google could beat them in any shape or form.

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