Edit: I guess I was wrong, the accidents are now so common we don’t care anymore. In the beginning they were hyped up a lot.
That said, I have a lot of faith in Papa Musk and his team. I think this nut will be cracked eventually, but its just going to take a lot of time to do so - far more than the timeline he initially proposed, as detailed in your excellent post earlier.
Elon said he was going to build a private space launch company. He did.
Elon said he was going to build an electric car company. He did.
Elon said he was going to build a $35,000 electric car for the masses. He did.
Elon said he was going to build a worldwide satellite constellation for Internet access. He is. Rapidly.
Everything Elon has said he was going to do, he has. He hasn't always done it at the speed at which he said he would, but he does always get it done.
He (meaning his team / company) will eventually develop a fully self-driving car. No, it may not occur at the pace at which he proclaimed, but I have confidence it'll occur.
His achievements are remarkable but that doesn't mean that he should be treated like an infallible demi-god. Yes he's done some really cool stuff but that doesn't mean he should not be the subject of scrutiny.
Hyperloop was an idea and nothing more. He never said he was personally committed to developing that, hence third-parties working on it.
Interplanetary travel? Starship is actively going through testing and looks like it should be ready for moon launches around 2023, which is in two more years.
I don't consider him infallible, or a demi-god, but its hard not to admire the sheer work ethic of this man. He's legitimately trying, and by all accounts of people who know him, he's actively working on all these projects and also making considerable stride towards these goals. These are not easily achieved tasks.
He promised Earth point to point travel, which would require rocket safety to improve by a factor of a million.
He has been promising ridiculous things from Neuralink but with literally nothing to show for it.
Look at this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/88805317515594957...
Does that really indicate no personal commitment? He touts that he's received government permission to build a Hyperloop, NY to DC in 29 mins.
We didn't get to the safety levels that airliners currently have by sitting down with books and, we got there by having the NTSB thoroughly analyze each incident.
Humans are terrible drivers, so each day we delay the transition to self-driving also costs lives, it's just that human traffic fatalities are less visible since society generally accepts that level of death.
It's not even his idea, Robert Goddard came up with it decades ago.
He also threw money into it, and then backed out, saying he was too busy.
And now he's tweeting about applying for and obtaining permission to build on the East Coast.
So, there's several issues there. Not to mention the more general issue - that it offers the same benefit as Maglev with massively inflated costs and far less comfortable passenger experience.
All of these are still in progress/development in various ways. I don't remember him ever saying they were complete (or even over with).
Thank uncle sam for putting in the effort to create the markets that Elon plays in.
The Federal Government has consistently funded some of our most important projects. The Human Genome Project, for instance.
He's not unlike Steve Jobs. They both possessed enough knowledge and technical acumen to understand what they're being told about disparate subjects, but they may not have the in-depth knowledge that a Jim Keller would. And despite my enormous respect for Keller, he's not an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Jim's a craftsman at heart, and that comes through in interviews with him. Musk and Jobs are true visionaries.
This is not genius-level but is the blending of two skills, a charismatic Administator, who can temporarily suspend disbelief, and a Fundraiser. Each of those takes a ton of work. I'm not minimizing Musk's dilligence in any way, but there are lots of people who can do those activities at high levels. The difference is that most people can't survive their tweeting SEC violations while stoned.
True, as long as this excludes everything he still says he is going to do but hasn't yet done. But of course, he will.
So if he ever doesn’t accomplish something we’ll never know because maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.
He also said they would have a solar roof as cheap as a normal roof and that the new roadster would hover with rocket engines. Let’s see if that happens.
That is true for absolutely everyone in the world.
Tesla will never achieve safe, certified level 5 autonomous self driving with the current generation of vehicles, without either a fuckton more CPU power or better sensors(as in some proper high res depth sensors).
On this I will bet. Come back at me in 5 years. He'll either have to bite his pride and put some sort of re-branded lidar on, or some decent stereo camera rigs.
To the extent that people who were using the feature on their way to work are working from home, that's a lot less miles driven and less potential collisions.
To the extend that many people are working from home, that's a lot less traffic on the road to interact with, and drivers may be more attentive because of the novelty.
Statistics would be nice, of course. Tesla doesn't report on total miles driven.
Here's a recent Tesla Autopilot into parked emergency vehicle report though. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/17/tesla-in-autopilot-hits-poli...
Anyway, "accidents" are not a good measure of safety for FSD Beta because just in this video it would've caused about 4-5 accidents and all of them were averted only because the driver intervened.
Don't forget about that Tesla on autopilot which crashed into a parked police car __two days ago__ in Michigan...
As soon as it's going to be legal somewhere to remove your hands from the wheel, there will be incidents for sure. And then there will be responses to those incidents. At some point, that drops to acceptable levels and more will follow. Tesla will simply be able to pull out the numbers and say: look we're doing it here and it's fine. Solving the chicken egg problem of having the data to say that is key to ever getting to that point.
Tesla's strategy is not to lock itself up in an ivory tower for a few decades and to then release the perfect system. Companies following that strategy will fail. Instead, they are releasing imperfect software now and they are improving it rapidly and incrementally. As long as they have hands on the steering wheel (level 2) it does not actually have to be perfect. It will give them a steady stream of issues to fix. Lots of real world video footage to analyze. And a track record of slowly improving safety relative to human drivers in terms of numbers of incidents per million miles. Rolling this out to millions of drivers is going to get them a lot of data to work with very quickly. Data is the key thing to have in this space. Without data you can't make progress. Tesla is setting themselves up to get a lot of that. The reason they are getting cocky is that they already have good metrics.
It would be interesting to repeat the same journey with the same car in about a year. I bet it will still have issues but probably less of them. It's going to take more than two years for sure. But ultimately leveling up to 3 and 4 is going to have to be evidence based. And Tesla is building that case by gathering data from real drivers intervening when the software messes up and fixing things as that happens. That's something you can measure. The better that metric gets, the closer they get to their goal. Who else is even close to doing that? I think some of the Chinese manufacturers have shamelessly copied Tesla's strategy. And in some cases the actual software apparently. Regardless, China is the market to watch when it comes to full autonomy. A bit of wild west but they are moving fast there. IMHO if Tesla gets there, those manufacturers won't be very far behind. Unlike some traditional manufacturers who seem to be a bit hands off (bad pun) when it comes to moving forward on this front.
When Tesla is 2x better, we'd be reckless not to use it immediately.
So depends on your measure. If you mean "on average" then yes. But it seems Tesla has a long way to go in other safety measures first.
If you watch the videos in the thread, the answer is it is far worse than the worst human driver you've ever seen.