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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

It would seem the market (and more current engineering and design reviews) disagrees with you!

There are many people who have bought FSD from Tesla, and have had their car reach end of life without ever getting to enjoy FSD.

It's possible after being "less than a year away" for... a decade... that it may be less than a year away now. But it looks like a bit of skepticism has been earned.

Are Teslas really end of life after 8 years? Why such a limited lifespan?

Original owner tends not to own car for 8 years; FSD "disappears" when you sell the car.

Plus, there's accidents, etc, that weed out a fair bit of the fleet before 8 years.

I don’t think that’s typical.

The people who buy $100k cars will usually refresh them on the regular, passing the car down to another buyer.

But also, the older Tesla's do not and cannot have the hardware for FSD so they really are EoL in that respect.

I think the skepticism is reasonable, but that’s not really what my comment is about.

Are these outside "engineering and design" reviews from a big conflicted youtuber stockholder guy (Sandy Munroe)?

I highly doubt Sandy Munroe's opinion can be bought at any price. He speaks his mind.

Yes, that’s one of them. What evidence do you have that he has a conflict of interest or is a shareholder?

I've watched a lot of Munro (and even bought one of their retail reports for fun) and the thing that most bothered me that looked like tesla bias was when he was doing side-by-side stats comparisons of all of the mid-size crossovers like the id.4, mach-e, and tesla y. he kept on harping about the epa range in the comparison and never once mentioned the methodology of the epa estimate and the fact that manufacturers have a lot of leeway to conduct the test themselves - and either overreport or underreport the epa range. this was really glaring to me because tesla is known to stretch their range estimates (as do other manufacturers), but some manufacturers seem to deliberately underreport (mercedes, porsche, ford with some models of the mach-e for example). given that he's in the business of competitive analysis he HAS to know this, but he never said a word about it, which I think made tesla look a little better than it should have. it's one thing to just present the epa range and leave it at that, but he was using it as the basis for a ton of discussion and derived numbers and basically putting down the non-tesla cars... all without mentioning the limits of the number

I think this is the video I'm remembering, but he reused charts like this a lot https://youtu.be/p0kFZ9CVLNg?t=512

see this for some real-world testing, there's lots like it and the results usually skew a certain way for each car. for example, there's about a 20% delta in epa vs. tested range for the tesla y LR and mach-e standard range in his chart. the tesla artificially looks 20% better! and this delta was well-known at the time of his video https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

to your question about conflicts of interest, owning a stock is a conflict of interest. nobody needs to show that something is happening inside his head, the circumstances exist and that's it. I think he's usually pretty good and I still watch the videos, and he trades on his reputation and I still regard him as a good source. but I'm still glad to learn that he's sold the stock

I guess he sold after the conflict of interest criticism. Now his conflict would be in capture to his audience of Tesla megafans.

Reasonable skepticism based on the facts presented.

A conflict of interest accusation is pretty serious, and I think if all you had to go by is your skepticism, you probably shouldn't just make that claim as if it were a known fact: that's just very dishonest.

Sure, be skeptical, but then maybe say something like "I have no evidence for this, but I believe his manifest enthusiasm can only be explained by the fact that he's trying to manipulate the stock price to his own benefit."

Sure, it sounds less rhetorically convenient, but it's more honest.

It is my understanding that he had a substantial amount of shares up to 2021-07-29. After criticism about the conflict of interest he claims to have divested his shares.

It's shocking to me that people are willing to pay to be beta testers for Tesla's entirely-from-scratch manufacturing process and smartphone-with-wheels style of car experience but it doesn't matter what I think - that's the beauty of capitalism.

Rent it for a few days and you will see

Renting a tesla for a few days will cost more than I paid for my current car. Admittedly it's 22 years old, but it still does what I need.

Yeah, can’t argue against that. Tesla may not be for everyone, but it’s a damn fine commuter car just because of autopilot.

I have driven a friend's model 3 and while yes its nice, I feel like I would get more value for my buck with the driver assist in for example modern Toyotas.

But I'm also perfectly happy driving my decades old Honda so what do I know.

Exactly. I wouldn’t buy FSD myself (I take the bus), but other people would, and I still find the thing’s development immensely fascinating to follow.

Based on the videos I've seen I'm not even sure I'd call their software beta. It looks like it's in early development, like where you'd be running it exclusively on closed tracks. Definitely nowhere near folks outside the company.

The market considered NFTs highly valuable too, until it didn't.

NFTs don’t have amazing unit economics with gross profit margins of 30% (or any unit economics at all), and incredible discounted cash flows (actually they don’t have any cash flows at all).

It’s like comparing the productivity of a med student on Adderall in a quiet library, and the productivity of a peeled russet potato sitting in the sun.

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