> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1442706542839701510
And Tesla is rolling out FSD beta to cars based on drivers' safety score.
And Tesla is rolling out FSD beta to cars based on drivers' safety score.
"Full Self Driving" does not exist. Every indication is that it never will.
I still can't believe no one's gone to prison over this. Tesla's "self driving" features are probably the biggest fraud in history with a body count to match.
Since most drivers only operate in certain fixed conditions often (e.g. driving to work or along certain routes during the day/night), people are going to get vastly different experiences of the same software.
This is why you get some people claiming FSD beta is a fraud and others claiming that it works well with 0 disengagements 99% of the time.
I think their tech is probably a LOT better than what you’re making it out to be but no where close to living up to its promise of full self driving.
I don't really trust anything Elon says anymore. I feel like he's not followed through on commitments about FSD far too many times. I'd personally never buy a TSLA until they get things much more in order (build quality/fit and finish, and actually deliver FSD)
Once the costs of ownership are well understood, that uncertainly will be resolved and the cars can be priced correctly. That will take time -- if I buy a 10 year old corolla with 100K miles I will know (after the usual mechanic inspection) what my expected maintenance costs will be, on average, for the next 5 years of ownership.
You can't really say that for an out-of-warantee Tesla because there isn't a large group of independent mechanics that can service it and because there is a lot of uncertainty about the battery life and service costs. Over time, if Teslas remain popular, and if the company doesn't DRM them out of existence, such networks will develop and we will accumulate actuarial data on repair costs that will reduce risk.
Until then, this market will remain primarily one of price insensitive or risk-insensitive customers -- e.g. wealthier people and possibly government or other large corporate fleet sales. That is exactly what you would expect for new technologies. But for most people, a car is a major proportion of their networth, one they need to get to work, and so they are going to be risk averse (which is exactly what they should be).
My next car will most likely be a 10 year old Lexus or Acura product. Even if it's a different manufacturer it will be an ICE vehicle and not an electric vehicle. Purchasing an out of warranty Tesla isn't remotely close to a viable option as it's not possible for me to price it. But used car prices drive new car prices because most purchasers are not planning on driving the car until it has zero value, they are counting on the used car market to pay for half of their car purchasing costs. Really for new technologies, Tesla should focus on leasing their cars if they want to reach out beyond the price insensitive market.
Where I live I see FJ cruisers, Porsches, and Bentleys every day, but I understand that my area is not typical. It's a wealthy area in which offroading is very popular. I also see Teslas and BMWs (more Mercedes than BMW and more BMW than Tesla).
I also understand that those cars tend to be more memorable, so it's foolish to pretend that FJ Cruisers, Porsches, or Bentleys are suitable for the vast majority of the public just because they seem suitable for many people in my area. In the same way, perhaps you should recalibrate your expectations as well when extrapolating based on what you see in your area.
Now what prevents a Porsche or Bentley from being suitable is that these are for niche performance or price insensitive markets. But what prevents something like the Tesla from being suitable is the charging network and repairability uncertainty. With a Bentley, you know you will pay through the nose for repairs which is why Bentleys depreciate so massively. But with Toyotas you know their reputation for durability, which is why used FJ Cruisers cost more than used Bentleys. But how much should a used Tesla go for? I honestly don't know -- and neither does anyone else right now. Unless you have a lot of money to play around with, that's too much of a risk. You don't spend 15-20% of your household net worth on something that you can't price.
I think you’re massively overthinking things. Most people look at the Model 3, see it costs the same as a Toyota Camry, want to help the environment and have Spotify in their car, skip the dealership, go to tesla.com, see dirt cheap financing available, and make the purchase. If they don’t it’s because they’re not comfortable giving up their gas car yet because that’s what they know. Not because they can’t “price it”. Further in the current market Teslas depreciate noticeably less than ICE vehicles because they don’t need maintenance.
You may not be able to price a Tesla, and that’s fine, but don’t get some impression that just because you can’t that other’s cant and moreover that it’s the sole factor contributing to why they allegedly don’t buy. Where I live nobody is “pricing” their $65k Truck, they just want a big fucking truck 30% of their household net worth be damned! You’re full of FUD.
Lastly looking at overall population numbers is kinda silly. We’re not going to wake up and everyone has replaced their perfectly fine car with a tesla. If you look at market share growth Tesla shot up in 2017 with the Model 3. And it wasn’t just a balloon, their growth has continued. They sold 500k cars last year, a little less than half of their previous total up to that year. Again: people are buying Tesla and more people by percentage are buying every year. A Tesla was a rarity 5 years ago but that’s no longer the case. The fact that we can observe this with only 1.5MM Teslas on the road is pretty cool.
Just to clarify your position, you want to hand over beta car driving software to people that do not first pass a test for safe driving?
I don't think that's accurate. Tesla collects a whole host of telemetry on all of their drivers. "Shadow Autopilot", etc., etc.
They show zero hesitation in releasing that telemetry to the media, or elsewhere, if there's the slightest hint it will put you under scrutiny rather than them. Even misleadingly so - witness a fatal accident where Tesla said "the driver was not paying attention - the vehicle had warned him about taking his hands off the steering wheel", neglecting the ever so slight detail that it had warned him, once, and that warning occurred a quarter hour before the crash.
Tesla collect all this data constantly, not just for entry into the FSD beta program.
Even if they arrive 1-2 years later than Waymo/Cruise, they can quickly dominate the driverless market.
It's tough to anchor Tesla's arrival based on the rest of the industry's progress. Cruise and Waymo are heavily dependent on Lidar; Tesla is solving a fairly different technological problem.
This sounds like premature optimization. The real unsolved problem here is autonomous technology (software and hardware), not manufacturing equipped vehicles. No point having millions of vehicles if your self driving technology doesn't actually work.
> They do not rely on HD maps.
Precisely why FSD doesn't work and is still level 2. The AV players have shown fully autonomous driving needs HD maps and (inconspicuously) the only one not to graduate out of level 2 self driving is the one that's not using HD maps — Tesla. Creating/maintaining HD maps isn't nearly as hard as you think it is, but the benefits are incredible for safe driving.
Tesla doesn't have competition because they aren't in the game at all. They do not make self-driving cars and probably never will.