Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

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100 pointsschintan124 comments

I've been acquainted with a number of engineers at various autonomous vehicle companies and they are some of the most reserved people when it comes to the reality of autonomous driving. Many of them going so far as to say they would never use one for themselves now or in the near future.

I think when domain experts speak up like this we should listen. The autonomous vehicle technology seems like it has a long way to go.

FWIW, I work in AV eng/research and have never heard someone say this. Most of the people I know in the space are pretty clear-headed about how dangerous human driving is.

We are generally less optimistic about timing, but that was more true a couple years ago (before all the big cos' 2019 deadlines got pushed back) than it is now. Current timelines seem like an achievable challenge to me, and I don't think I'm unusually optimistic.

Musk's timeline pronouncements, as usual, just aren't taken seriously (and imo hurt the industry's credibility). I like the guy and respect what he's done, but for whatever reason he says really out-there things that are best ignored until he shows the receipts.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. Human-driven cars are dangerous.

2. Autonomous driving (currently) is dangerous.

AD solves some human driving problems (like inattention) but introduces new ones (like driving under trucks).

Obviously so, and this doesn't contradict anything I said. But the types of people who work on AVs are quantitative enough to understand that these magnitudes can differ, and are able to process that difference instead of waving them away as "both dangerous" and sticking with the status quo out of blind habit.

Almost literally every decision trades off one danger for another: to pick an adjacent example, airbags introduce dangers that are different from the ones they solve. And yet, "airbags have dangers! Take them out of your car" is a woefully incomplete understanding of the risk landscape, driven more by our Neanderthal brain's superstition than our Homo Sapiens reasoning about risk.

That sort of magical thinking is a hurdle that every shift in the risk landscape needs to overcome ("what if vaccines have microchips in them??").

This is, of course, dependent on actual comparative safety stats, but I've yet to hear a safety argument against taking a Waymo ride over an Uber in Chandler[1]. If the same level of transparency and rigor is used in more complex environments, I'd take a cruise/waymo car in sf too (once they launch).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/30/waymo-...

I don't find your analogy to airbags persuasive. The vector space of "weird situations where an airbag can kill a person who would not have been killed otherwise" is vastly smaller in dimension and size than the comparative space where autonomous driving can kill someone. That in and of itself does not make AD a bad idea, but it does make it a much harder engineering problem.

As engineers we can pretty much completely characterize the airbag space and make predictions about where airbags are dangerous, and then mitigate those. What makes AD a bad idea is that such characterization is impossible with the AD space because AD is currently done almost exclusively by feeding massive amounts of data into a neural net pattern matcher. In other words we have no idea why AD works, and thus we have no idea when AD won't work until somebody dies. This is no way to do engineering, especially when lives are at stake.

This reminds me of the first bubble. Everyone on the inside were looking at each other as stock and salaries skyrocketed thinking this was crazy and unsustainable. But we all just shrugged because there was no stopping the hype train.

Here, anyone even just tangentially involved or know the some details of AI/ML are highly skeptical that Elon's vision of self driving cars will occur in our lifetime. Yet, Elon keeps pitching it, the press runs with it, and the public grabs it up, patiently waiting.

To be fair to Elon, there were a lot of naysayers coming at him about Tesla and SpaceX but he has accomplished more than they ever thought he would. Most of the time, however he has exaggerated the timeline in order to keep the hype around him and his companies. I think he would do better to under-promise and over-deliver. Especially with a technology that could potentially cost lives if delivered too early.

The way I like to think about it, Elon Musk over over over over promises, and "just" over delivers. Most CEOs could never dream of producing the kinds of real results that Elon Musk has, but also most CEOs aren't as comically obnoxious as he is.

with rockets and electric vehicles however science & engineering had an "angle of attack" based on fundamental discoveries in physics, and centuries of continuous progress , that's not the case with AI.

Deep learning is great for a few narrow cases but there is no path to general human-like intelligence required for a complex human-like activity like self-driving which has an infinitely long tail of edge cases you can't train for with these large and "dumb" ML models equivalent to curve fitting.

The mistake of Tesla is betting on covering more and more of these edge cases incrementally but what's needed is qualitative change rather than incremental improvement.

By qualitative change I mean actual model of human-like intelligence, including reasoning and "common sense", which is a prerequisite for self-driving. The solution to this problem requires more than the sum of its parts.

It's kind of like planning to build an airplane before figuring out Newton' basic laws of physics.

I don't want human like AI to drive cars. I want a deterministic system that we can prove always does the right thing.

I'm not sure that is possible on roads.

True, I am unfairly singling Elon out, but he's put himself at the front of this hype train. There are plenty of other "visionaries" that are in the engine with him.

I tend to give him a break since he is one of the few modern entrepreneurs that I think actually produces things of real value.

The fact that it tends to be in businesses that are among the most mature and hardest to get into is really amazing.

> Most of the time, however he has exaggerated the timeline in order to keep the hype around him and his companies

All of Elon's companies are heavily subsidized by US tax payers (energy credits for Tesla and solar, rockets are paid for by NASA, military, etc...) So to use tax payer money you need to have the goodwill of the tax payers behind you. Its worth every penny to lie and bolster your image of doing cool shit so people don't mind their tax dollars continuing to go towards your cause. It's 100% PR. Without US tax payers none of these companies would still exist.

One of the biases in Hacker News is that comments like yours tend to get downvoted.

Some of my more reserved comments get downvoted, and then flooded with replies about 360 vision and cars never getting sleepy.

IMO: Most of the autonomous driving tech will evolve to be driver assistance and safety tech in the upcoming decade. I still believe we'll get autonomous driving someday, but not until we have a few more AI breakthroughs.

Until then, "Autonomous driving" will be like "Duke Nukem Forever."

... he comments under the top comment.

Skepticism of self-driving tech and "AI" in general is a very popular position here.

My most upvoted comments on HN[0] are the ones that pick on some hyped up technology. HN loves to be "contrarian" (in quotes because this contrarianism is actually the mainstream position).

[0]: I don't think this is good, it's just a statement of fact.

It has been increasing. 5 years ago we were more hopeful. However the needed parts have not delivered and so we are rightly looking harder.

5 years ago self-driving cars looked like technologists were letting their imagination run away.

There's always "something" that technologist think is right around the corner, until they realize that the hard problems are harder than they anticipated.

This is because OP's comment is simply an appeal to authority without any direct evidence or reasoning. Listen to the experts. This is highly counter to the hacker ethos, and personally, I'm disappointed to see it as a top comment on HN.

To be fair, Autopilot is about as good as Duke Nukem Forever.

Work at Waymo. Know lots of folks at Cruise. This is not reflective of the general outlook that most engineers have.

I have engineer friends at Waymo that I went to school with who tell me that real self driving is 30 years out.

What does "real" mean to you? L4 self driving in most parts of dense cities in the American sunbelt and similar constraints for trucking represents massive revenue and a real business in my eyes.

If you mean driving like a human does with no priors over the area and in nearly any circumstance, I would agree.

Shocking that the outlook at a self-driving car company doesn't match the general outlook of the entire automotive industry.

I don’t know, I used to ride an autonomous vehicle every day in London. DLR is autonomous, the catch is - it has its own lane and it’s on rails. Also, someone sits in the car during rush hours, just in case.

Here’s how it looks to be in the front car of the train when there’s a supervisor: https://imgur.com/geFIidK

Outside of the rush hour, that lid is closed and it feels like the Half-Life train at beginning of the game.

I know it’s not possible to build trains to everywhere and USA is huge but I suspect that the answer for self driving would be somewhere in between of human+ level intelligence and dedicated infrastructure.

We could've vastly expanded a lot of train systems with the amount of money that's been burned trying to make cars drive themselves.

Unfortunately, most new transportation methods that are not trains are just attempts to build trains, while claiming they are not trains and will cost less than trains. But inevitably end up costing as much as trains.

Trains.

Is this really true? To be able to build a track you need to have government-level authority (e.g., in GP's example, to build something on its own lane in the road, or to displace people in homes in the way of the track). However, the entities funding SDCs are private.

Having dedicated tracks solve a lot of problems for autonomous vehicles.

Governments already claim a monopoly on roads in most places. Imagine if those roads had some sort of cheap embedded track that a number of vehicles could latch onto. Then you just need some sort of computer to coordinate the vehicles using the track, and understanding where the vehicles are on the track.

This isn’t exactly stopping the Boring Company or Loop from making its promises, is it?

Or they are attempts to reinvent the wheel because we can't possibly use a train built elsewhere. Or they are using trains as an excuse to push money to their political friends.

> We could've vastly expanded a lot of train systems with the amount of money that's been burned trying to make cars drive themselves.

I'd like to see the numbers on that. Given the cost for the CHSR is around $100B, I don't think that statement is true. The bigger issue here is the US's inability to build fast trains, affordably, and on a reasonable timeline.

Counting only published investment in companies like Cruise, Zoox, Argo, Nuro, Aurora, etc. gives investment of around 20B . But its likely that the money invested "privately" in Tesla's AV division, Uber ATC, lyft's AV division, Waymo, and Cruise post acquisition is much higher.

I think a very conservative guess is that there's been $40B invested in this space. That would, for example, cover the south bay BART expansion 4-5 times over.

> That would, for example, cover the south bay BART expansion 4-5 times over.

I've become more cynical about CA (and the US in general) lately. By reasonable costs it would, but I think the various corruption interests would find their way to increase the price tag until it is only half done, while they enjoy their $40 billion.

I'm pretty cynical myself, but the first phase of BART extension to the south bay is already completed and has been running for nearly a year, and cost $2.9B. The second phase is a bit more difficult because it requires substantially more underground work in downtown San Jose, but $40B would be quite a bit even by CA standards.

Madrid does all underground lines lines like your phase 2 for about 1 billion. Someone needs to learn about cost control. Think of how much more they could get with Madrid prices.

Not saying that CA prices aren't inflated, but there are also geological differences that probably matter. Madrid isn't near active fault lines (not to mention generic soil differences that can matter, but IDK if they do in this case).

I don't have Japanese costs, but they are lower, and deal with worse earthquakes than CA

Imagine the investment wasted on self-driving cars being spent to solve that problem.

There is basically no good place to build high speed rail in the U.S. Cross country routes aren't remotely competitive with air travel. Regional routes only make sense on the coast where they have unfavorable terrain like mountains, and some of the most populated/valuable land in the country. HSR really starts losing in time cost to flights in the 800-1000 mile range, and needs about 200 miles to make it better than driving. That a very narrow band for the U.S.

Even if all that were true, it still does not explain the high costs. There are countless examples in other countries proving it's possible.

800 miles is quite far from the coast.

Also there are considerations other than time, it's much more convenient that driving or flying. I know in USA there's last mile problem going out of railway station but that can be solved by car trains.

Another good example of a pretty neat, autonomous personal rail transport system is in Morgantown WV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Tran...

A slight tangent, but the Victoria Line (London Underground system) was officially opened in 1969 to run trains automatically without the need for drivers. However, there is always a driver in the cab for emergencies etc.

On opening, the line was equipped with a fixed-block Automatic Train Operation system (ATO). The train operator closed the train doors and pressed a pair of "start" buttons and, if the way ahead was clear, the ATO drives the train at a safe speed to the next station. At any point, the driver could switch to manual control if the ATO failed.[27] The system, which operated until 2012, made the Victoria line the world's first full-scale automatic railway.

- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_line#Service_and_roll...

The Copenhagen metro has zero drivers, and not even room for one.

https://migogkbh.dk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Metro-1200x72...

No modern metro system should have anything new with drivers, as of about 20 years ago. Now most systems were build when automation wasn't an option, and it does take years to upgrade, so I'll give them another 10 year to do all the needed upgrades to get rid of the now obsolete drivers. I'll be shocked if any make them that haven't already, but the upgrade and remodel cycle should be 30 years long for all transport systems so I have to give them those 10 years.

It's an incredibly hard problem to solve.

The Boring Company might be onto something. These tunnels are a very controlled environment, highly predictable. If they can be be made cheaper it might just be the initial "killer app" of self-driving cars.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27077320

The Boring company is essentially redesigning trains. With single-family train cars that are also very overpriced normal cars. That need to be substantially modified into very inefficient train cars to go down the tunnel.

if it's just fixed route stuff why not just build more advanced subways/underground trains? not that boring couldn't make that cheaper and faster to do the whole 2/4 door cars in a tunnel thing feels weird to me

I'm not trying to contrarian or anything but most of my life those have been my primary mode of transportation and it's worked out great especially if you throw a bike or now I guess a e-scooter into the mix

I think the Boring idea is that at the end of the trip you still have your car. So suburb to suburb works.

> why not just build more advanced subways/underground trains?

The train business is horrible to be in. Just look at Bombardier Transportation/Alstom. City A in State B and country C decides it needs a new train. The existing infrastructure was all custom-made in the 60's. Bombardier/Alstom has to design a mostly custom train for it. Everyone bike shed on the design. Then, because it's a government project, and State B financed some of it there's a clause in the contract that is must be manufactured in State B of Country C. Not only is a new production line (manufacturing hell) for the almost completely custom design required, they must also set shop in this new jurisdiction and work their supply chain around that. Ribbon cutting ceremony, positive polls for reelection.

Few years later, City D in State E of Country Z wants a new train system. The whole process starts all over again. Can't just retool the existing plant in State B of Country C, it has to be a new one too in State E of Country Z, or a local manufacturing partner (ribbon cutting ceremony obliges). Meanwhile the press in State B of Country C gets angry as workers are laid off since there's no more work to be done.

By using standard road vehicles, Musk eliminates one of the biggest cost. It's all off the shelf stuff that's user-supplied.

> Many of them going so far as to say they would never use one for themselves now or in the near future.

I'm less worried about the autonomous vehicle I might be driving and more about the ones others are driving. Here's an idea, how about being able to geofence a neighborhood as "<= Level 3 autonomy only". I'm only somewhat joking. I know it smells of NIMBY but it might be useful around schools, daycares, etc.

Based on how I've seen humans drive their vehicles for school dropoffs and pickups in San Jose, I would much prefer robots.

Not the kind of "robots" we have right now I think.

This is my single biggest beef with Elon and Tesla. From the jump I think that the name overstates the ability of the vehicles. I think his tweets have been consistently optimistic regarding timelines to the point of hyperbole. I agree that autonomy is a worthwhile goal, but I think the real selling point of a Tesla is that they were until recently the best electric car you can buy. That still may be the case today but others are catching up. To me it would be a shame if autopilot NHTSA investigation brought Tesla down or a giant class action by everyone who plopped down 10 grand to get full autonomy and it never shows up.

I think it's the best car you can buy, electric or otherwise. That's why it baffles me that Musk feels the need to consistently lie about autonomy, because the car is already great without it, and the "intelligent cruise control" which the car does have is convenient and as good as anybody else's.

It's as if Apple made the best computers--which some people think they still do--but Tim Cook was tweeting every day about how the MacBook Pro can solve the halting problem. No it can't; of course it can't. Why would you continue to drag down your company's good name by lying like this?

Ego? Surrounded by yes-men (I’m guessing)?

I don't think Musk is intentionally lying about autonomy, this is just his worldview. He truly believes that strong AI is just around the corner and it poses an existential threat to the human race, and by the same token, of course we'll have full self-driving cars as soon as just a few small kinks are ironed out. These beliefs stem from a very strong worldview, and are not attempts at stock price manipulation or some kind of investor scam. Musk is convinced that there isn't a very big difference between the human brain and the tech inside GPUs combined with some matrix multiplication and training data, and these differences, to the degree they exist, are easily bridged with a bit of software. That's a core element of his beliefs.

What is more interesting is why he hasn't learned that his worldview is so fundamentally wrong. And for that, I would say that it's hard for very rich and successful people to acknowledge they are so completely wrong about important things.

> and are not attempts at stock price manipulation or some kind of investor scam

Why isn't he working on stuff in a full open source manner like Linus of Linux did back in the day?

Also , let's assume you are in it to solve the problem and believe that the for-profit model is the better than opensource ...then why not live modestly like Warren Buffett?

Guy knows what he's doing. He wants to be famous and rich and surronded by yes-men and yes-girls.

> I don't think Musk is intentionally lying about autonomy, this is just his worldview.

I’ll say that’s a rather naive view. It sounds like saying Mark Zuckerberg is not lying about FB and privacy, it is just his worldview that nobody should have privacy, except of course him and his family.

No, it's not the same thing. Musk has been very vocal about thinking the world will end because of AI robots running amok. This is not some stock-boosting ploy, it is who he is. Unlike Zuckerberg, Musk is quite transparent about his aims and his values, and most people are able to recognize this.

When you keep saying the same thing year after year "we will have L5 this year" and you see with your eyes that 100% of your predictions were wrong, but still do it again. I find it hard to believe that this is coming from his "worldview" and think it's more like lying to create hype so you can sell more products, get more investment and boost stocks (which all happened thanks to what he has done)

When i remember correctly he came up with the robotaxi pitch when tesla went through a difficult phase. Autopilot feature was going well enough. This came handy to position Tesla as „far ahead“ in terms of technology. Now that every other OEM jumped on the hypetrain it does seem to no longer matter if those bold claims ever become reality or not.

Different needs for different people, I don't think there is a singularly best car out there. I'd personally like to see an electric minivan, as it's the most practical for my family of five, with all our luggage and three children in carseats.

Are we talking about the luxury priced car where everyone complains about quality issues?

[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/34144/the-tesla-model-y-is-alr...

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/29200/customers-revolt-as-fix-...

Yep. Our Model Y has had zero issues. Either Tesla got their act together or we just don't hear from the vast majority of Tesla owners who are happy because those stories don't generate clicks.

Fake it til you make it is fine with startups, however with publicly traded securities it is fraud. Elon Musk gets away with a lot of things that most capital markets participants would be imprisoned for. I'd certainly be in jail if I did half the BS he does on an almost daily basis.

Yet, this fake it til you make model has enabled reflexivity in the growth and stock price allowing Tesla and other Musk ventures to grow and accomplish a lot with amazing speed.

An interesting study in Soros' theories. Turns out that lying about timelines, product capability (even existence), liquidity, buyouts, crypto pump and dumps, and defamation is heavily rewarded by the market. Particularly if your fame, past accomplishments, and world savior persona makes you immune to prosecution.

> Yet, this fake it til you make model has enabled reflexivity in the growth and stock price allowing Tesla and other Musk ventures to grow and accomplish a lot with amazing speed.

But once you are a company that size the goal is to grow and accomplish amazing stuff but with great margins.

Tesla has essentially arrived at destination with regards to MarketCap, it won't become a 5 trillion dollar company. Nobody will. There is such a thing as the Sherman Act and Antitrust.

Tesla still lags behind in every other metric (especially margins) compared to similar companies of that size.

Seems to me Musk will have to work a whole lot just deliver and thus mantain the current valuation and his level of net worth right now.

Alternatively he could get to 5 trillions by promising new products at an increasingly higher rate and thus avoiding the antitrust laws. Those laws were written for a company which actually has a market dominance, not a company which has a stock market dominance based on the promises of the CEO and people believing in it and buying the stock.

I think from what we've seen, he's going in this direction exactly, he'll keep inflating the bubble that's for sure. He only has one gear

this is how a narrative replaces unbiased journalism. the underlying email chain shows this conversation is regarding the full self driving "beta" that Tesla is slowly releasing. while it is clear that the regulators are concerned about customer confusion, they are more concerned that Tesla is releasing capabilities beyond what was explained to regulators (I.e. level 2). the reporter is able to twist this into a whistleblower like headline and use language that completely distorts the nature of the underlying conversation. readers can then opine on how they like or dislike Tesla/elon and ignore relevant facts.

Tesla has shown that it is taking increasing steps to ensure people are using fsd responsibly. while autopilot used used simplistic sensors to gauge operator attentiveness, fsd uses cameras to watch to driver. as elon has said, with autopilot, the company has data that proves that it reduces the risk of accident. he has said there is a moral argument that it is immoral to wait until it is "complete" before making it widely available. this evidence is regularly ignored by people talking about the dangers of Tesla/elon automation claims.

Autonomous cars might be possible for climates without snow but they'll never be capable of driving with humans in winter till they start making the same intuitive mistakes as humans given sparse data (complete snow covering).

The problem with any non-vision based location system to compensate for covered roads is that it isn't what humans use. In winter in cold climates sometimes the roads are covered with snow for days to weeks and road margins drift for the entire season. Humans just form new emergent lanes. These lanes often aren't the "correct" lanes that non-vision based absolute position would find. And they're very difficult to detect with computer, or even human, vision.

Having one set of laws of autonomous cars in arizona and another for minnesota will lead to a lot of problems.

There are already limitations by road condition. This level of control over the operating environment is part of why so many services are targeting robotaxis as their initial product.

Would a robotaxi in Detroit, Chicago, or Minneapolis in the winter be viable?

I'm thinking about those roads where it's nominally a two lane in each direction, but the snow banks make it a 1.5 lane in each direction (if that).

Where one doesn't start into the intersection when the light turns green - to give any cars that have the need to slide through. And likewise the ability for the robotaxi to realize "well, I've got no traction - guess I'm going to slide through this intersection and the left turn is impossible - I'm going straight through."

A robotaxi in LA, SF... ok. Pheonix - sure. But I've yet to see any examples of a self driving vehicle able to drive in winter condition roads in the midwest.

That's my point. Presumably Detroit doesn't have winter driving conditions in the summer, in which case robotaxis are feasible seasonally, or when there hasn't been rain/freezing conditions for X # of days, etc. Determining a bound on operating conditions is a far easier problem than making a car that drives itself.

Before launching in any city, you have to validate that you can handle the idiosyncrasies of its driving environment. Perhaps the business side decides that Detroit isn't worth launching in, but <other snowy city> is drivable 200 days/yr and that's enough to warrant launching an intermittently-available service.

My ultimate point is that AVs can cover a lot of ground from a business perspective without getting to full universal-availability. This is helped along by a combination of validating each city independently[1], limiting operating conditions, and safe-fallback teleoperation for occasional use.

Validating a 2021 AV in a snowy environment isn't an inherently harder problem than validating a 2016 AV in a normal environment (with a safety driver), and a similar approach will be applicable.

[1] Presumably less and less narrowly each time

I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them. The snow problems mentioned above are real - but it isn't all winter, it is a couple weeks scattered around the whole season. Then the plows get out (and things warm up enough for salt to work) and you can drive like summer for a few days.

Right, and these companies are more than capable of running on a week to week or day to day basis (they already do this in the markets they test in).

> I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them

Do you feel similarly about making cities bike-friendly?

> Would a robotaxi in Detroit, Chicago, or Minneapolis in the winter be viable?

If not, the robotaxi could drive itself to Florida and leave any customers who relied on it up north in a lurch, and also mess up the traffic and transportation economy of Florida in the winter. Screwing two economies with one car = bonus.

My own guess is that the difficult-to-solve problems tend to be in surprising areas (as are the easy-to-solve).

People are so poor at driving on ice/snow that it seems like a much lower bar to clear.

I think people are pretty good at driving on snow, we have lots of snow every winter, but there is rarely any problems in traffic.

For self driving cars its very hard, roads might be a lot narrower and visibility is limited because of snow banks, also you need to know what part of the road you should drive, sometimes there can be deep grooves and you might get stuck. If you stop at traffic lights etc. it might be hard to get going and how does the computer know that this crossing is very slippery and it takes 3x more time to take off?

Yes. We already knew this.

Elon is a marvelous marketer and salesman.

He's frequently MISIDENTIFIED as the new Edison or Tesla. He's NOT that - both of those men were insanely technical and enough so the jump into technical problems and add value to work being done by their employees. Musk is not that. He's had very little to do with any technical aspects of any of his companies. But there's been plenty of PR spin to imply the opposite. That spin has always been a lie.

I've had Silicon Valley bosses just like him. Our recent president is someone with the same personality just with fewer IQ points. But the same otherwise.

I mean, he's got a physics degree and can speak knowlegeably about the domains he's in without reading off a script; that's more than you can say about the majority of CEOs in this day and age. He may have moved away from the nitty gritty day-to-day problem solving, but that's par for the course when you're heading successful companies.

Disclaimer: I don't like the dude, he's an edgelord jerk.

Unfortunately, musk wants to present himself as if he is some kind of Tony Stark character like in the iron man movie. He also says the he doesn't care about college degrees, but I bet that all the people at SpaceX have the necessary degrees and are not drop outs, so that's probably also not really true about him either. The Tesla car company was also not founded by him but by someone else who actually engineered a car. I will give him some credit for SpaceX though, I think the company is doing well, but I doubt he is directly involved in engineering.

When ADAS systems come into play, the primary concern is who's going to shoulder the blame when things fail. This autonomous driving thing is no simple nor incremental improvement, this is an overhaul in our current structure of liability. So far, with a human driving, when things go awry, blame can be easily assigned, it's simple and case can be closed. When we introduce total absolution of the former party in charge, simeone else has to step in. The only one with any control here is the producer of the vehicle, yet the scope of responsibility is far too large for anyone at the traditional levels of rigor. The consequence is that ever increasing levels of safety requirements get demanded from the self-driving technology, enough to make it at any time both insuficiently mature and an even more desired thing for how much it has to offer in order to cover the said requirements. Mr. Musk seem like a smart man to not be aware of this, which makes me think about the moral hazard of his tweets.

I'm assuming you are talking about when we reach level 4+ right? Anything below that is clearly still in the realm of driver responsibility. Level 4 is really where the large grey area will live, because level 5 will certainly require moving that liability to the system manufacturer.

Just a minor nit, "ADAS systems" is redundant.

Liability is the difference between L2 and L5 systems. Most people don't understand that Tesla FSD will operate in L2 mode until it's 99.999999% reliable. Until then, you'll have to keep your hands on the wheel and accept that you are liable, even if the car drives autonomously.

Engineer says Sales Person overstated features...

Isn’t this the norm in any company? It’s always a struggle to keep a lid on sales promises!

I still can’t get over how deceptive the marketing was on the Autopilot page on Tesla.com

>Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars

>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.

How was it possible to know in advance what hardware will be required?

What would they need the better hardware for?

If they haven't achieved full self driving, how could they know, and hence claim, to have the necessary hardware?

Better sensors, which has already been one of the reasons for some of Tesla's self-driving crashes.

I don’t know, but Tesla took that text off their Autopilot page in late 2019, so maybe something changed…

>How was it possible to know in advance what hardware will be required?

I suspect that most of the hardware is the ability of a computer to drive the car. Steering/throttle/braking inputs for example.

It could be that what you mean by 'hardware' is some combination of intelligence and sensor system.

Regardless of what I might mean by “hardware”, is there any way Tesla should be stating as fact that the cars coming off the line in 2019 (when I took that quote from) need no additional hardware to accomplish something that is years (if not decades) away from becoming reality?

I think the big issue is that if you really want autonomous driving over any road, you will likely either need sensors beyond vision or some AGI level model of the world.

For example, on the highway, truck infront of you drops some debris.

What do you do? It can be dangerous to suddenly swerve or brake, but also dangerous to hit something.

What you do In real life is quickly evaluate. You are looking at the object that fell and estimating how deformable it is. For example, if it looks like a wad of paper, you would continue on. Or you estimate if you have clearance based o how big it looks and your mental model of your car’s clearance.

You also look at the traffic beside you and behind you to evaluate risk of braking or swerving.

You are also doing object recognition. If it is an empty box, you may be ok hitting it, but if it is an infant car seat that fell, you will brake hard/ swerve even if it is dangerous.

Also, for people who bring up the safety of human drivers, one thing to consider is the safety of a hybrid approach where the human is still in charge but you have safety features like lane keeping, blind spot monitoring, automatic emergency braking, etc. That hybrid approach may be actually safer than either only human, or only computer driving.

> You are also doing object recognition.

Object recognition has been a part of autonomous driving systems for a very long time. The difference between a stroller and a piece of paper is pretty well understood by these systems.

> For example, on the highway, truck infront of you drops some debris. > What do you do?

The answer is to always keep a large safety margin between you and the vehicle in front of you when traveling at high speeds, so you have time to react and take the safest course of action. Seconds make a huge difference in this scenario and it's easy to get them. No autonomous system is going to be hugging a truck bumper, but rather is going to always maintain a significantly greater safety distance than an aggressive human driver would.

> If it is an empty box, you may be ok hitting it,

You can never be sure that the box is empty, so I'd recommend always swerving to avoid.

> I think the big issue is that if you really want autonomous driving over any road, you will likely either need sensors beyond vision or some AGI level model of the world.

Somehow people manage without this.

Without any real knowledge of the problems the engineers are hitting, my current take is that to produce a reasonably good autonomous driving system requires killing some people. Slowly adding features will send more information to the mothership and they'll have to push the envelope to learn enough.

Killing people to achieve a technology is unacceptable and unethical ... maybe in nazi germany you could pull that off, but I think you'd eventually be charged with crimes against humanity.

Events like this are rare, and often not handled well by humans. You have 3 basic options, and in reality some mix of all of them.

1) Hit the object 2) Swerve 3) Brake

Hitting the object is almost always a bad idea. On a highway the best option is almost always 2. On an empty road, the best option is almost always 3.

Saying things like "You also look at the traffic beside you and behind you to evaluate risk of braking or swerving" implies that humans are good at this and computers are bad at this. I'd wager humans are bad at this and computers are good at this. And in either case, situations like these represent a small fraction of accidents on the road. If the computer arbitrarily chose to recklessly swerve to the nearest lane every time it would still likely outperform human drivers in terms of safety if it solves the low hanging fruit elsewhere.

If you are looking for some level-headedness on the topics of AI, self-driving etc, here are some recommendations:

Book suitable even for lay people, written by someone who has been working for years in this field:

[1] Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

People to follow:

[2] https://twitter.com/missy_cummings/

[3] https://twitter.com/rodneyabrooks/

[4] https://www.twitter.com/MelMitchell1/

Edit: For criticism of Elon Musk and/or Tesla:

[5] https://www.elonmusk.today/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tes....

[8] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/surely-we-can-do-bett...

[9] https://troll.tv/videos/watch/54bc7bd0-8691-4359-aa7d-dc5148...

I'm hopeful that we'll get self driving capability in the next few decades, but pre-selling this feature to customers before it was even CLOSE to ready was criminal.

Maybe the problem is that Musk keeps thinking the Autonomy scale is linear; it's not. Level 3 Autonomy is 10x as hard as Level 2; Level 4 is 10x as hard as level 3, etc.

I don't know if 10 is the right multiplier here, but the point is the difficulty is exponential.

Musk's engineers know this but for whatever reason he can't or won't understand it.

And we all knew that this 'Level 5' full self driving BS from Elon Musk, was actually and 'admittedly' Level 2. [0]

I think that joke should have been reserved for Saturday night live.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932616

I say this as a stock holder and Tesla car owner.. they should refund all FSD purchases, remove it from the store, and the app, make the EAP better, and keep building FSD, but STFU till its ready.

This is exactly why Tesla should rename full self driving to FUTURE SELF DRIVING. Because thats exactly what it feels like. there should be no mis-understanding. :-)

This is basically hearsay. The claim in the title is based on this:

"“Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ,” Miguel Acosta, chief of the California DMV’s autonomous vehicles branch, wrote in the memo"

So someone in the CA BMV claims a Tesla engineer (CJ) said this, but doesn't quote them, and the article doesn't elaborate on it.

Maybe it's true but they're clearly reaching a bit with the title.

Who is asking for autonomous vehicles? Biased sample sure, but I've never heard anyone actually express a desire for it.

Use cases:

1) sleeping/reading/etc whilst driving long-distance 2) getting home from the city after drinks 3) pick up kids from school/practice (this would be a major time saver)

Me. It would honestly be one of the biggest life improvements technology could possibly provide me given it was really and truly autonomous. The amount of extra time it would grant me as well as the amount of driving/traffic stress it would alleviate would be such a huge positive in my life.

Me. I've lost enough good friends because of bad drivers. It doesn't take much honest analysis to realize that humans can never be good drivers, so I want to take their car away from all.

However in today's world there isn't a good option. Even if we would put in arbitrary subways, there are still jobs [like plumbers[ that cannot reasonably use transit. Thus self driving cars must be a part of my better future.

I hate driving and am a danger to myself and others but I still have to do it.

Me, just because I don't want to drive.

If it was actually a real thing that might show up in a decade, sure, why not, sounds nice. It's not, though.

Why can’t robo taxis just be human taxi drivers at a desk remotely driving a vehicle around?

Latency matters, as does reliability. If the network can go down for any reason you cannot do this.

It's not surprising actually.

People are looking for something to believe in, which will make them feel like the future will be brighter.

Musk has this ability . Unless he goes crazy and becomes overleveraged with debt he'll be fine.

He'll constantly move the goalposts and keep giving people hope, if Autopilot is proven not feasible, he'll just move onto the next big thing which will fill people with enthusiasm .

He's essentially a politician, a techno-utopian cult leader who is also a CEO and major owner of the stock.

His best intuition was understanding that telling people that the future will be brighter is itself a product which people are willing to buy. Much like people pay for insurance to have peace of mind, people gladly pay to be reassured that the world will be better.

His second best intuition is to never bankrupt the company trying to deliver, just move the goalposts. As long as you don't bankrupt the company you can always move the goalposts

A talking engineer?

I love reading the opinions that people who have done nothing and will do nothing for the world have on Elon. Imagine if you spent your energy doing something good or interesting instead of writing lengthy essays criticizing a guy who has achieved every single milestone his detractors claimed were impossible.

This is how marketing works, all companies do this

Apple -- best iPhone ever so what happens to phone I purchased last year (reality - there a decent upgrades)

IBM Watson -- commercials looks like you can layoff 20% of employees as this things can work like wonders (reality - its not that smart)

Tesla -- Autopilot is not 100% auto pilot human supervision is needed at times. We are far away from 100% autonomous vehicles. I wish they selected a better name for this feature.

There is obviously a qualitative difference in the claims Tesla (and other Musk companies) have made and standard marketing claims of most companies.

Someone is criticising Musk? He's obviously a pedo guy and a polluting BMW driver. I shall send my people to reeducate him. No need for this to be front page. /s

I joke, but seriously, how long can this Musk worship go on? Musk invested in Tesla AFTER Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning built the Roadster. He later sued them for founder status and ousted the real founders from their own company. It's now almost 20 years later, and Tesla is still a tiny little car company that has not had one profitable year (a fact which actually benefits Musk right now as the share price can not be anchored to anything real... the possibilities are infinite ;) The one company Musk actually founded; SolarCity, was an epic failure which needed to be saved from bankruptcy by Tesla and SpaceX. I honestly suspect that Tesla might have been a bigger success, had it remained with it's original founders.

By the way, there are at least 11 lawsuits and investigations of SolarCity listed on it's wikipedia page. That's quite a rap sheet for such a young company with such noble goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity#Lawsuits_and_investi...

> Tesla is still a (...) company that has not had one profitable year

Isn't this true of most growing companies? Like Amazon, Uber, YouTube (now Google), etc.

Do they ever become profitable?

I believe Amazon finally has. I don't know about YouTube, but I suspect they are. Uber has a bad business model and so won't (unless their raise prices)

Do you have a source on the Roadster issue? Per Wikipedia:

> Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.[12] Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body and that Musk led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

Do you have a source on your company founding point?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

I don’t have time to keep going through this, but even the tone of your whole post is extremely smarmy/troll-like. Usually discourse here is a little more polite.

"However, it is wrongly assumed that Musk was behind the idea of Tesla Motors and electric vehicles. That credit belongs to Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who originally started the company in 2003 and Musk's recent news prompted one user to tweet, "I still find it darkly amusing that the actual creator of a company named after Nikola Tesla is constantly erased from history, with all credit being given to some rich bully instead."

https://meaww.com/elon-musk-tesla-cofounder-lawsuit-settleme...

Yes, we all know Tesla was founded shortly before Musk invested. That doesn’t tell us anything about the design of the Roadster (or Musk’s other companies).

I’m sure millions of people had the idea of building an electric car before Eberhardt and Tarpenning, but as the quote goes “ideas without execution don't matter; execution matters.”

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