Tesla is sued by drivers over alleged false Autopilot, Full Self-Driving claims

Yesterday I had to drive at night in awfully intense rain and I was very close to stopping because it was at the very limit of acceptable safety for me. My night vision is not so good, cars in the opposite direction were blinding me with their headlights, and road markers become invisible in the rain in Germany (not in US or Italy, I don't know why this is so bad in Germany - different paint?).

Self driving doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than me (including knowing when to stop!).

Tesla isn't there, but I'm pretty sure they can get there in my lifetime. May be way way too late for the angry customers, the courts, the investors and the stock market, but it's not unreachable.

Never is a long time. I'm going to say that AGI will be able to drive a car. AGI is very far into the future but I would not say it's impossible.

Self-driving also won’t work in the Sierra desert, but no one expects it to.

I think matching expectations with the varying definitions will be important moving forward.

If the lanes positioning is determined by embedded stuff, roadwork that diverts/shifts lanes becomes more expensive and more time consuming

I'm sure preparation of such does take time, but I would guess that the CA DMV recently determining that Tesla's "Full Self Driving" is not, in fact, full self driving and banning trying to use it as such is the motivation. FSD costs a obscene amount of money for a feature that every Tesla clearly already supports, but as it has now been declared by the CA DMV to be not FSD, and therefore people cannot even consider using it, the purchasers quite reasonably want their refunded.

Also it remains absurd to me that you can advertise a product for X, but then get out of liability by saying you do not guarantee it can be used for X. In the case of Tesla FSD it's both "full self driving" but also "the driver must remain in control of the vehicle at all times", but there are plenty of other examples you can produce.

> I wonder why it took so many years?

Tesla recently turned it into an up-sell, instead of a free (beta) feature. It was $10000 when I was considering a Tesla.

It's a bit of nonsense put out by Musk. Whether there's a "Media relations department" is immaterial. That's not actually a thing that companies have to have. You could call it marketing, light touch sales, corporate communications. When people write articles they ask for comment from the company. Normal companies either comment or don't comment. Tesla is way smarter though - they've come up with a PR strategy (definitely not something that would in any way be described as media relations) to say "Oh it's not that we're not commenting on this article about us cheating on safety tests. It's just that we don't do PR". Apparently some people fall for this, forgetting that when does release information to the media when it's autopilot kills someone. Sorry, it didn't kill anyone, Tesla says it disengaged before the crash, oh hold on hang on, I thought you guys didn't have a media relations deparment....oh.

Elon thinks PR is "manipulating the press" and that Tesla is better off spending their time and energy on product development.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2021/06/07/...

Why do they need a media relations department? Their order backlog stretches into 2023.

Media outlets put this disclaimer on practically every Tesla article because the media in the US are clearly butthurt that Tesla doesn't need (or want) them. Maybe we should be questioning our underlying assumptions of why a company should "need" a media relations department?

They just use Twitter

(1) it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to do that, and be of pretty much no use to the _vast_ majority of tax payers. Essentially it would be an enormous cost that would primarily be shouldered by people for whom it had no value.

(2) all the things that "FSD" vehicles need are things that degrade quickly to the point where they don't work for said "FSD", so the highway maintenance costs would skyrocket

(3) Even if you were to say the costs of 1&2 were reasonable, that money has to come from somewhere, and what that will essentially mean is that the already underfunded infrastructure will have even less funding for things that are the also already underfunded freeway things, so your normal streets end up in even worse condition, and based on existing spending the brunt of _that_ cost will be born by low income people. The cost for low income being exacerbated by their presumably cheaper and poorer condition cars taking more damage from poorly maintained roads, and so increasing their direct maintenance costs.

(4) Fundamentally single car travel is an inefficient way to move people around, it simply does not scale as well as good public transport, and always will be: the amount of people a road system can transport is directly proportional to the area of the road that each person takes up, and cars are just not efficient. The average car is 8m^2 and in commute traffic the vast majority of them are single occupant, the average bus is ~30m^2. If we were extremely optimistic and assume an average of 2 people per car you have 4m^2/person vs 1m^2/person in a bus. This is excluding following distances, which if we were to include (say) 2m of following distance you get a conservative 3.5-4m^2 of additional wasted space so lets just say your total for a car is maybe 5m^2 per person. I think :D

That sounds great. A dedicated safe self driving vehicle network. We could call these special signs 'signals'.

We could then get them to automatically travel close together to reduce air resistance.

And you could charge them while they drive.

Maybe have a special low friction surface for the wheels to reduce energy use and air and waterway pollution from tyre, road and brake dust. Without tyre wear and range being a weak point in the design they could travel at much faster speeds.

Also if they are travelling together anyway you could have one big one with a more efficient motor and join them to it and use the charging network directly rather than needing them all to have individual batteries. We could call it a tesla chain or tchain. With then coupled together you could just have one person in the big-engine car supervising the 'full self driving' for all of the cars. Doesn't really matter then that it's in beta because it's just one or two people for 700 passengers.

Then there wouldn't be so many constraints on the size and shape so you could basically make the cars a box to fit more people.

Then with our self driving car network coming close to any given point we could just let them stay on the highly efficient part and get off it near our destination. We'd no longer need to dedicate 50-70% of the land area to collectors, arterials, extra wide streets and parking. What little time you spend walking would be more than made up for by not having to find a park, higher density and higher speeds. What a world! You wouldn't even have to dedicate a quarter of your home's lot to setbacks, driveways and storage for your car!

If only we'd had elon's amazing genius in 1879 we could have had a whole network of these by the beginning of the 1950s. We wouldn't have had to destroy half of our cities to make room for highways and parking then choke on exhaust fumes and toxic dust for 70 years.

I suspect this could be a really efficient way of working this. In much the same way that public transport - trains, busses etc. are more efficient. But I suspect a big part of the answer is incentives. You have the Silicon Valley model, where Billionaires plow billion after billion into self-driving vaporware in the hope that one day they can force the entire middle class into serfdom. On the other hand you have city planners who literally could solve the problems of public transit if previously mentioned billionaires paid a bit of tax - but that's totally off the table don't be ridiculous.

Efficient transportation in cities is communal, and built using tax dollars. That's not Silicon Valley sexiness.

I recall seeing that option discussed on The Daily Planet with Jay Ingram back in the early 00s. They interviewed a research engineer on self-driving vehicles, probably in the context of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. He'd clearly been working in the space for years and was very knowledgeable.

IIRC, they had some very successful prototype road systems back in the 90s (or maybe earlier) that were based on implanting magnetic markers into the road at regular intervals. The big problem was cost. There's miles and miles of roads and the cost to upgrade and maintain enough miles was prohibitive.

With that said, perhaps now that the cars themselves are 90% of the way there, the upgrades to the roadways could be more limited. I wonder if adding machine-readable markers to particularly important or problematic areas might be reasonable at this point.

Spending many, many billions of dollars on revamping public infrastructure for an unproven, nascent technology with functionally zero current adoption sounds absurd to me. Good luck convincing governments and the people that hold the purse strings.

so, like a worse version of public transit, except only for people who can afford to spend 80k on a car?

Public Transportation still has many issues, with the largest being it doesn't make enough money for the rich.