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Comment by BluSyn | Hacker News Reader

The Beta program is Level 2, this is well known already. It’s intended to collect data amongst volunteers, not as a final end consumer product. The end goal for FSD that most paid for is for Level 5. Not sure why this is confusing. The 10k FSD “add on” is NOT for the Beta they are planning to offer soon, but the final post-beta release, which will be Level 5. The information sent to regulators is for the BETA they are hoping to release in the next month or so. I don’t know why the press in general can’t seem to acknowledge the difference here.

Tesla needs to explain better, but given the intentional mis understanding by journalists lately, I sense they feel silence is better than being taken out of context yet again.

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It doesn’t seem at all guaranteed that Tesla can ever achieve Level 5 autonomy, in any timeline, using the hardware deployed into Tesla vehicles today which were sold with “Full Self Driving” (FSD) as the $$$ expensive upgrade option.

I doled out ~$5000 for FSD on a Model 3 Performance bought 2018 which has now had a new computer fitted (at no cost to me) and always considered FSD pretty much a “bet”, which is not IMHO a complete loss since the HW3 upgrade got me more Level 2 features on a 2018 MY vehicle, something which is quite unprecedented in the auto industry.

I suspect Elon may be wrong about LIDAR and for any manufacturer to get to Level 5, it may be required and cannot be replaced entirely by cameras and computer vision. Since it is not present on any Tesla today and cannot be sanely retrofitted, barring what feels like a miracle to me, the “Defects per Million Miles” (e.g. disengagements, and accidents leading to property damage or non-fatal injury) and the “Fatalities per Million Miles” (where one was enough to tank others Autonomous Driving programs) will probably continue too high for public and regulatory acceptance that Tesla has attained Level 5 autonomy with their current vehicles and their current hardware.

Elon and LIDAR reminds me of Steve Jobs and his stance on the the concept of a smaller iPad or bigger iPhone (both which materialized after his death IIRC).

In both cases, both people seem fundamentally and adamantly adversarial for whatever reason.

Science advances, one funeral at a time.

I think cameras and computer vision are better than LIDAR but the issue will always be the hardware supplied.

The computer for processing the cameras will probably be swapped out a couple of more times before the cameras need to be swapped. The question will be if your 2018 car will get FSD in 2035 by having all of the hardware replaced instead.

Why do you see it as an “intentional misunderstanding” on the part of journalists (and regulators and customers, for that matter) rather than an intentional misstatement, or at least exaggeration, on the part of Tesla?

Literally the next line of this email to the DMV says they will follow an iterative process and get regulatory approval as they release updates with Level 3+ functionality.

This article is essentially disinformation. If the article actually included the relevant source email, it would be obvious to everyone that it is a nothingburger.

You can't call a level 2 system a "beta" of a level 5 system any more than you can call khtml a beta of Chrome.

So your claim is any driverless system that needs training or data gathering by a driver can never achieve level 5?

I mean this is obviously spurious bordering on ridiculous at this point.

I swear this whole comment section is being over-run by agents of disinformation or luddites. Not sure which is worse.

Musk explicitly promised L5 since 2016. This is the first honest statement Tesla has made about “FSD” (actually less-than-half self-driving).

When asked about a cross-country autonomous trip; “[by 2017] all you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar.” [1]

He explicitly promised L5 by end of 2020:

“I am still confident we will have the basic functionality for level 5 complete by this year“ [2]

He’s a conman, and the cult of personality is going to end like any other cult.

[1] https://www.inverse.com/article/37652-tesla-self-driving-car... [2] https://mobile.twitter.com/Benshooter/status/133387343433455...

I strongly doubt that current gen hardware for FSD will be level 5. There is at the moment no indication of this happening.

I recommend following the FSD beta drivers on YouTube. If you’ve at all been following the progress, I think you’d be impressed what is already possible. I’ve see no major corner cases that require hardware changes yet. It’s all software now.

More important than what works is what doesn’t. And what doesn’t work is dangerous and I doubt any regulator would be okay with it.

Will it be L5 within the lifespan of the cars currently being sold with it though?

Level 5 self-driving will never be delivered on models that Tesla delivers now.

Their cars are attractive but they will lack the hardware for level 5 when it comes, and anyway will most likely be past their end-of-life then.

I’m looking forward to so many on hackernews eating their hat a year from now.

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