Tesla faces U.S. criminal probe over self-driving claims
reuters.com
reuters.com
The longest stretch I’ve used EAP for is >3 hrs going from MA to NY. Highways were totally smooth, did its own lane changes, etc.
It can be slightly jerky at times when the traffic keeps speeding up and slowing down sharply, that’s my only real complaint.
This is how you can tell who is a TSLA shareholder and who isn't.
Pucker factor influences any current-generation self-driving. I've given demos to friends in the passenger seat who have had such strong negative reactions that I've had to end the demo -- as in they want to reach over to grab the steering wheel to save our lives in mid-turn. This reaction isn't totally surprising; I've been in human-driven cars with people who simply cannot be a passenger because they're so jumpy.
It takes a leap of faith to let the car drive itself, but with that faith and the requisite attention, the experience is good.
No, it isn't. Do you think "student drivers" go around banging into things? Comparing the two is ridiculous and dishonest; FSD regularly gets fooled by things no human would ever be confused by.
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I took a shower since the first version of this comment, so the following edit is an actual shower thought about your comment.
If self-driving vehicles succeed, it will be because they're safer than human drivers. That's obvious. But we probably won't be able to cherry-pick an arbitrary driving metric and show that computers always beat humans. Computer drivers will be safer than humans, but they will make different kinds of mistakes. Instead of 40,000 humans dying in auto accidents each year in the US because of inattention, DUI, sleepiness, overreaction, or poor training, we'll have maybe 1,000 humans dying because of ridiculous computer behaviors. And that 1,000 probably won't be a subset of the 40,000; they'll be 1,000 completely different people.
That will seem weird. The 40,000 deaths feel like a natural part of life, but the 1,000 will feel like a grave injustice.
Yet my computer thinks 1 divided by 10 is 0.10000000000000001, and I still use it for arithmetic.
Well, and legitimately they are used for data collection to improve the system. This is integral to how they develop FSD.
How much research did you do? Genuinely wondering.
Personally, I bought FSD because I wanted to test it, not because I thought it would be robotaxi-level anytime soon. And also because I believe that Tesla will one day be forced to give free camera and computer upgrades to everyone that purchased FSD (on top of the HW3 upgrade I already got), because the current in-car cameras and computers are not enough to implement what they promised.
I don't see how it's worth $1. Do you trust the system to properly gauge the speed of a vehicle accelerating to pass you? If not then you need hands and eyes at the ready.
The bmw system costs $2k Canadian.
A comparison between Tesla self driving and bmw, bmw seems superior.
Tesla has spent so much time focused on going to level 5 that other manufacturers had plenty of time to catch up.
Tesla always has something just around the corner that's "better", and they get full credit for it as if already exists. Like their robot tapping into a multi-trillion market.
I was quite happy with my old Mobileye equipped i3. It never got updated though.
According to Forbes it is Mobile until 20225 when the full lineup will switch to Qualcomm.[1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2022/03/11/bmw-qu...
I drive the car 100% manually now. I don't even use cruise control it's that bad. $60K on a car that doesn't even have usable cruise control is disappointing.
My experiences with FSD tell me that it will never fulfill its promises and I'm just out $10K. Some other manufacturer maybe could do it, but not Tesla under its current leadership.
I'm hoping Lucid can pick up the mantle where Tesla left off.
This is called "specific performance" [1] and it is extremely rare for courts to compel fulfilling a contract when the standard approach of monetary damages will suffice. At the very worst case scenario for Tesla, they could be forced to refund those upgrades or even buy back the cars. One big way specific performance is used is if someone contracts to transfer real estate or infrastructure to be used as part of a bigger development project, but tries to pull out. Or if a subcontractor partially fulfills their duties as part of a bigger project, but is holding up key components.
Imagine someone has contracted with a tax accountant to help them respond to an audit. The contract says the client can fire the accountant and end the relationship at any time. The contract also says that if the client fires the accountant, they must pay $1000, and once payment is received, the accountant will transfer all records to the client within 24 hours.
The client fires the accountant and writes a check for $1000. The accountant refuses to take the check and refuses to transfer the files. A court might order specific performance that the accountant must fulfill the terms of the contract. This kind of issue is easy for courts to mandate specific performance, it is pretty straightforward to determine if the files have been transferred or not. The client faces monetary damages for sure if they don't get the files to give to their new accountant. But monetary damages aren't really a good way to make the wrong right.
But assuming a court sides against Tesla, what is the most commonsense remedy to make the wrong right? Refund the sales of a product that was not as advertised, or force the company to make the product into what was advertised? Courts don't have the kind of expertise or understanding of what is technically possible in future technology development.
Also I paid $3k for FSD.
Ok but that's not what Elon ever sold, even once, even a little bit.
He's promised full self-driving is one year away for each of the last nine years. [1]
So I'm happy you paid a huge sum of money to beta test a product on a completely unrealistic timeline, but that's not going to suffice for most customers. I have to imagine that many, if not most, people took the company at their word.
[edit] Here's a compilation video. [2]
[1] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
I will definitely bookmark this as a nice replacement for "lying".
Consider that in the past plenty of other people in the industry have underestimated things that he's overestimated, such as the potential for reusable rockets, and the timeline for electric cars becoming viable, and the timeline for low-cost phased array antennas to support Starlink. And those have been incredible success stories for him, despite his initial overestimation, which really was overestimation, that many called stupid at the time, with some justification. And AI may yet turn out that way too. Even if he's wildly optimistic about timelines, he may still end up closer to correct than the conservative establishment in the industry which has a very strong status quo bias, like with disposable rockets and internal combustion engines.
Whether he believes it or not doesn't mean jack. You are still out several thousand dollars for something that doesn't work.
I bet Liz Holmes really truly thought Theranos products were going to work too.
Funny how Tesla is able to pull this off. I can't think of another brand that so easily gets people to throw large sums of money at it while expecting so little in return.
I wonder what percentage of Telsa car owners are also shareholders.
Nobody gives Toyota $6k for no good reason, but TM is not in the same league as TSLA.
While I didn't take advantage of it for self driving, or the iPhone (though I did buy the first one), I did for VR (backed the Oculus Rift Kickstarter and then made a career in VR) and deep learning (jumped in early and also made it part of my career) and Bitcoin (not part of my career, but still good).
I consider the cost of being an early adopter of things like FSD money well spent given the opportunities it can create for you. I think a lot of people are making money on YouTube simply recording themselves driving around with FSD Beta on.
And the videos with the most hits are the ones where it almost gets the driver or nearby drivers or pedestrians killed.
I have a hard time putting FSD in the same category as VR or the iPhone, because those can't kill you. When you bought your first iPhone, I would bet you had high hopes that it would be a nice project and do what it said it would do, in contrast to your admitted low expectations when you paid for FSD.
Also, FSD was $3k when I bought it, so that helps, and it came with a guaranteed computer upgrade too. I wouldn't pay the $15k it costs today.
Why can't the most advanced driving system park the car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
I'd say you've been suckered into doing Tesla's testing work for them. Worse than that, you're even paying them for the very great privilege of being an unpaid intern.
It's perverse. They advertised at you and I think we have to say the manipulation has worked.
Being an early adopter of technology always involves paying to test unfinished work. Even the first iPhone (which I also bought) was deficient in many ways. And yet being an early adopter has brought me personally a lot of benefits. The world is not zero sum, turns out.
So.. the most advanced driving system is so far ahead that it's years behind?
> Being an early adopter of technology always involves paying to test unfinished work.
It really doesn't.
The tech-bro -- basically us here -- crowd thinks that they're immune to marketing. But they get suckered in just as well as anyone, it's just a matter of playing to different preconceived notions.
I agree the hardware won't be enough, but I find more likely that the software will actually get available after your current car has passed its normal lifetime, and you'll have gotten rid of it already.
* automated lane change when you press indicator
* Summon (a google tells you all you need to know about how bad)
* Autopark (this has never worked on my model 3 either, aside from a handful of times. Again, common knowledge it doesn't work).
* Automated freeway exit selection
Otherwise, its the same pretty good lane-keep system they give you with the car as standard.
Of course, Tesla being Tesla I'm sure the feature set will change with time, so maybe you get more later? Tesla don't promise this though, and like all tech you should evaluate purchase on its features today, not its promises tomorrow? I might have missed something, but generally thats all it adds over the basic AP you got with the car, and it's quite clearly documented as such. I can certainly agree I'd feel sick too if I'd paid $6k for it in its current advertised form!
Is autopark that bad on the model 3? To parallel park I just pull past an open spot (to let the sonar sensors see the gap) and when the P symbol shows up, put it in reverse and press [Start] on the display. It usually parks better than I could especially with tight spots.
Please update this review in a few years.
CIO was late to work, again, today because the Tesla no go. One thing after another. It's kind of ridiculous.
(One of) the things that pisses me off about this is all through Tesla's marketing and website, the consistent undertone is that these are complete and working, but that much of EAP and FSD is "just awaiting regulatory approval", when that's far from the case.
Of course, it's very convenient for Tesla, too, if it never happens (and I think we are a decade or so at least from anything), they will just point blame away from themselves, ignoring that what they've offered would never reach the barrier for regulatory approval. And there will be the usual cries about the short sellers, and "big oil" pressure, rather than placing blame where it lies, Elon's cowboy-esque attitude to the whole thing.
Even ignoring any possibility of raising more capital, the amount of revenue recognized from FSD is much smaller than the financial hit that would have been required to bankrupt the company, at every point in time.
> Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the carmaker was “about a month” from bankruptcy during the run-up in Model 3 production from mid-2017 to mid-2019
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...
You're right, that never really appeared in the annual reports. So either Musk lied to CNBC, or the annual reports played down Tesla's actual position.
The car itself is wonderful. Driving a Tesla is a level beyond anything else I've owned.
Autopilot on freeways works great. I disagree that it's deceptive. The name is confusing to the average person (it sounds like it drives itself without help). But there are constant reminders that you need to pay attention and be ready to take over. Stupid people will be stupid. A name change wouldn't be the worst outcome, but it's a great feature.
Navigate on autopilot is not great. It's kind of useful, but makes dumb lane changes and is too timid in traffic to work. Being able to switch lanes with a turn signal is useful and I use it.
Auto park is garbage and only works on very easy parking spots. Half the time it doesn't even "detect" the spot and won't offer the option. It's also not that good at parking.
Summon (classic) is useful for me. I use it to move my car out of the way to take out the trash. It's cool and not dangerous, though not super useful.
Smart summon is dangerous and not useable. As a previous commenter said, it has serious "nervous raccoon energy" and either gets confused or nearly hits things.
Full self driving is not even close to ready. It's nowhere near what was promised (get in your car and it drives you from A to B). It's unclear to me that this is even possible with the vision hardware in the car. I like playing with it, but I've never had a successful drive without having to take over. This was massively overhyped, perpetually pushed out, and honestly I agree with the fraud case here.
I'm mostly annoyed that all the broken features have sat stagnant while the company works on FSD releases that incrementally improve something that's fundamentally not even close to working right.
I do not recommend people pay for summon/autopark/fsd/navigate. The basic autopilot is pretty good for highway driving and great that Tesla includes it free though. The simple summon is fun and works most of the time but not worth paying for.
okay then
I use it all the time - it takes me to dentist, drives me home - every single drive. It actively monitors traffic lights when stopped & when it turns green - it chimes, blinking lights, yields, left turn yields, pedestrians, bicycles on the road, dogs and blind spots - all of it gets managed by the car with just 5-10% of my attention. It doesnt let me pickup my phone (I get a warning) or fiddle with spotify. I need to keep my hands and be active, but I am not anxious about blind spot checks or bicycles in the dark.
When it is released to the general public, it will be groundbreaking.
If Summon doesn’t work, try turning on Bluetooth on your phone.
Cue corporation selling you "Full Self Driving" for 5 figures, allowing your vehicle to become autonomous. Except you have to be alert and behave as if it wasn't. At all times. Of course.
If they deliver it, then (at that time, and depending on how well it works), the complaints of not-good-enough or dangerous-killing-people could come into play.
The second thing sounds even more dangerous to Tesla - smart to keep delaying (and building up that first risk higher and higher!)
There might be an awkward silence when you ask why as recently as six months ago, it was still happily hopping the curb of roundabouts, or why even to this very day, there's no AEB capability in FSD (if your foot is on the accelerator, the car will consider that a higher priority input than an imminent collision).
You learn very quickly on the water to get out of the way of large private yachts when in open waters. There is literally no one at the helm. Even if they did notice you, they aren't in a position to halt the boats travel.
Most hit-and-runs don't even result in jail time[1]. But sure, I can believe that hitting and killing the wrong person may once in a blue moon result in the law coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
It basically says that statistics on conviction are unknown, and sometimes people don't see jail time.
And no, the driver wasn't drinking. They were 17 at the time and went to prison instead of college. I remember it because they had a soccer scholarship. I was scared because it could have easily have been me going to prison
Your point only alleges that amateur yacht drivers act irresponsibly, not that naval autopilot systems are inherently unsafe.
It can't visually identify non-ADS-B traffic (and I'm not even sure yet if it will avoid ADS-B equipped traffic?), it can't comply with ATC clearances, it can't coordinate with other pilots in the pattern, and it will happily fly your aircraft right into potentially-fatal icing conditions. It certainly can't be used during routine flight.
Garmin Autoland is a wonderful piece of engineering, but even at best it's not a replacement for what a pilot would normally be doing to safely navigate. It's strictly there as a last-resort measure if the pilot is incapacitated.
It’s feels almost like full self driving when you drive on the highway.
It makes the ride significantly less tiresome but I would say it definitely reduces my attention.
I can totally see how people with more capable systems may treat the car as intelligent enough to drive %100 by itself and became negligent.
Then comes some smarter ones like Tesla AP or comma.ai which are pretty good at centering on straight roads, curve roads, wide lanes, lane splitting etc.
I upgraded to a Comma 3 and it's basically is night and day. The car never hunts from side to side and it uses eye tracking so I don't have to touch the wheel. Again if you have to touch a wheel on a ACC system, just drive the car haha.
I disagree with this. I use to get RSI type pain from long drives. The constant, small tweaks really took a toll on my hands/wrists/forearms.
When my car's lane centering isn't perfect, it still takes 90% of the force off. It's even more noticeable in windy conditions. Lane centering fights all of the gusts automatically.
I think that's a good balance, because it's giving you alerts but you're still the one driving.
While my Tesla is working to keep the car perfectly centered in the highway lane, it frees me to focus on higher-level situational awareness during the drive.
In particular, I find I can more quickly and consistently identify and avoid other distracted drivers, because I can look more closely at those features without drifting a few inches out of the middle of the lane.
Just because you are not steering does not mean you have to disengage from driving. The focus on steering as a proxy for engagement is over-simplistic. Manual steering just to lane center can lead to “blind stare” which causes many accidents, so it’s a lossy proxy for attention / focus.
As a new technology is adopted and people become less scared of the change, it eventually comes to a point where a new generation laughs at how things used to be done.
What HN consistently likes to frame as a fundamental human limitation (“driving without actively steering can never be safe”) is in fact just a faulty assumption and purely conjecture in the context of a modern car cockpit with advanced lane keeping, adaptive cruise, object detection, and driver gaze & blink tracking.
Another difference is that piloting a boat or a plane is usually much less dependent on quick reactions than when you are driving a car. The skies and seas are much more open, with much less traffic than on the road. On a well trimmed plane, I could probably sleep for 10 minutes and there is a good chance nothing will happen. Obviously, it is excessively dangerous, but I am not almost guaranteed to crash as I would be on a car. Flying or sailing is more about precision and planning than it is about reacting.
never get tired listening to the guy. He is just amazing.
Sailing boat off American Samoa maintaining watch, but watch crew unable to change course (we did).
Near miss with unidentified floating object.
Automating the easiest parts of driving and just expecting a human to jump in and figure out the tricky stuff in an instant is just such a horrible design that it’s hard to see how it’s gone this far.
Same. I thought they'd get slapped hard and forced to stop doing that YEARS AGO.
Instead they doubled down and started selling "full self driving"
lmao.
The second something that's not autopilot was marketed as autopilot should have been an instant barrage from the FTC.
The second Musk committed securities fraud for "funding secured" he should have been banned from ever being an officer or director in a publicly listed company.
The second it became clear that Tesla was ignoring the requirement to have a Twitter Nanny on Musk's Twitter, the SEC should have obliterated the Tesla board.
But this is the post-Obama US, where insider trading is fine as long as it's the Right People doing it. Where bankers and investors can take obscene and reckless risk knowing the tax payer will cover their loses. Where a President's son can openly try to sell influence - who knows with what degree of success - and the intelligence agencies won't move a finger. So the Musk saga makes perfect sense.
Musk was not facing overregulation by not having to commit fraud and misleading consumers.
I personally think Tesla would be a better company today without Elon Musk. The reality is they’re not executing on the one thing that makes them money. They’re nearly 2 years late on their pickup truck which is a license to print money in the United States. We’re JUST seeing the first deliveries of the semi but who the fuck knows when production scales. The kind of risks he’s taking (removing radar from cars, losing billions of dollars while putting up Tesla stock as collateral to buy twitter, cryptocurrency nonsense) is just not the type of thing you do when you’re the size Tesla is today.
Tesla is just insanely distracted right now shareholders are eventually going to be punished. If I only knew when, because I believe there’s money to be made.
I don't think the claims are solely about the name "autopilot", but additional names and marketing.
There is a second mode in some. There it broadcasts emergency, uncontrolled plane will land, get of my way as I won't get out of yours. Useful if the pilot is dead (so a passenger who is told hit that button in an emergency can safely land), but cannot be used for anything else.
It has a different name because it is different from traditional autopilot that just maintain heading and altitude.
> [A man] was driving along in his motor home. He turned on his ‘cruise control’. Apparently misunderstanding the function of ‘cruise control’, he then went into the back of the motor home. The motor home drove off the road and crashed. Apparently he did not realize that ‘cruise control’ is not ‘autopilot.’
This story is apocryphal, but it illustrates that the popular understanding of 'autopilot' for road vehicles was full self-driving.
The self-driving feature also steers the car, stops at signals and stop signs, merges onto the freeway, etc. Those are all things that adaptive cruise control does not do.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-69AEB32...
The marketing for this stuff is absolutely liable and as much as I like what Tesla has done for electric cars in general we are one big, massive accident away from this all absolutely blowing up.
Think about that. If someone can literally sleep while the car is driving itself, and it doesn't crash, then the self-driving feature actually works really well.
I mean, try doing that in a Chevy.
Compare it to other self-driving cars and you’ll see that it is actually one of the better systems on the market.
It is in fact so good that people can sleep in their cars and not crash -- and I wouldn't bet that the guy who sleeps in the car only did it once!
If you are going to compare it to human drivers, it also matters which humans you compare it to. Every time I drive I see people doing things far stupider than what a Tesla would do. Driving skill, and judgment, is so unevenly distributed in the human population that it would not be difficult to find a large number of humans who underperform the Tesla system.
It would be weird to punish Tesla for not being perfect. It has delivered self driving features that are already better than a lot of the humans on the roads today, and better than all of its competitors.
Let's go a bit deeper into your argument:
> Because people buy this feature because they don't want to drive (as a human); what does it matter how it compares to other self driving systems?
Ok, pretend you are someone who is looking to buy a self-driving car because you don't want to do the driving. Wouldn't you want to buy one that works well? It's a matter of life and death, after all. So you would do some research to find out who had the best systems. If you did that you would find out that Tesla's system, despite all the criticism it gets, is one of the few on the market that is worth buying.
This thinking is absolutely going to get someone killed. It’s also why Tesla faces so much criticism.
Any improvement under 99.999% is unremarkable because the end product is unusable. No one is going to buy a car that crashes once a year.
Disengagements should be unheard of if Elon wants to continue selling FSD.
Even the worst component of the driving system (the driver) is solidly over 99.999%. And every single hardware component is vastly better than the driver. The Pinto, a classic example of a death trap, only resulted in a hardware-induced fatality something like every 1,000,000,000 miles, or using the minute basis above a fatality every 1,500,000,000 minutes (99.9999999%, 9 9s). The person you responded to is correct, 99.999% is unusably, criminally bad.
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
Out of politeness I engage in chit-chat with the drivers, but I would be completely comfortable reading hacker news in the backseat or even sleeping. I hope self-driving reaches this level of ability soon; I’m going to be to old to drive in 15 years.
To get a perspective of what this requires, reflect carefully on what your brain is attending to while you drive. Does it ever require higher levels of reasoning than pattern matching? It does for me. I regularly encounter issues that would confuse current technology: bad fog, reckless drivers, icing on overpasses, drivers going the wrong way, a marathon blocking my route, boisterous junior high-school students walking along the curb, detours, temporary lanes inconsistent with actual markings, broken traffic lights, and damaged or vandalized traffic signs. I could sleep soundly on my way being driven by a professional driver under such circumstances.
This comment is everything that's wrong with FSD and its marketing.
The bar isn't what self-driving cars can do in general (besides the fact you completely ignore that other companies are operating driverless taxis as we speak).
>It's a matter of life and death, after all.
Consider this: it's not just life or death for you. Do you understand that bystanders and other drivers don't want to be part of your experiment? The selfishness is unreal.
If you want to ban FSD, then go ahead and vote for a ban. But it’s not realistic to say that FSD is allowed only when it’s perfect — no technology reaches perfection without first passing through a phase of imperfection.
About 40,000 people die per year in the US from traffic fatalities. There are about 200,000,000 people licensed to drive in the US. So, about 1 in 5,000 drivers die per year. Tesla has released FSD Beta to ~160,000 drivers. So, to first order, we can approximate that as ~32 Tesla drivers will die a year due to a traffic fatality if they constitute a representative sample (they do not, but we are doing some quick estimates here). So, a system that is used as a full-time, unassisted replacement for their human drivers will result in, on average, one extra person dying per year per 3% worse it is than a human driver when applied to a mere 0.1% of the US driving population. If applied over the entire US driving population a system that is 3% worse applied to all driving interactions would result in ~1,200 extra people dying per year.
At the scales being discussed, extremely small differences applied over the entire domain result in very serious risks to human life. It is not okay to knowingly sacrifice people at the altar of moving fast and breaking things so that Elon Musk can make another couple billion dollars.
Also, it is not even close to being one of the better systems from a safety perspective. It is something like 400-800x worse than Waymo and 2,000-4,000x worse than Cruise [1]. It is so far behind so many other companies it is fair to say that they are not even in the race let alone a frontrunner.
No one else sells self-driving cars to consumers because they know they cannot.
"Being unable to do something and not saying you can do it"
"Being unable to do something and saying you can do it"
Spot the difference?
I was under the impression Chevy SuperCruise outperformed Tesla FSD in most ways, other than being bound to mapped roads.
SuperCruise is only rated higher than Autopilot when people use rating systems that dock Autopilot for having fewer driver monitoring features, i.e. nanny features that scold you for not paying enough attention. I haven't seen any evidence that the actual driving part of SuperCruise or any other competitor is better than Autopilot.
Not do I understand anyone trusting their Tesla this much. Even the cruise control freaks out sometimes and slams on the brakes from phantom apparitions. I don’t even trust the base autosteer feature going down the highway.
Those blue screens occurred in dramatically less complex and better understood software, too.
I'm not saying we don't understand how FSD works, or the underlying technology. It's not a complete black box. I believe there was even a proof recently showing that these things are essentially massive decision trees and they can be deterministically unravelled.
But this is otherwise totally negligent from where I'm standing.
This might be mitigated if the result includes a confidence percentage, ie panic if confidence below threshold, but even then I'm not sure how reliable this metric is.
When we need to audit something that is more complex than we can really comprehend, can we come to reliably accurate conclusions? If we need tools to do this for us, can we be certain they’re accurate as well?
All of it feels very Icarus-like. I’d be content if we tested this stuff out in isolation for another 20 years before throwing it on public streets.
He'd have to work around and bypass several safety features that prevent you from doing this. You cannot do this out of the box. You have to work hard to get it to do it.
I take any claims of people doing this with a large grain of salt.
imagine doing nothing else besides working and commenting. I can't. It sounds like a recipe for a lonely life.
If the solution is not tenable, the plan should be aborted. Not rammed through via abuse of technology.
- move closer to work
- secure lodging to amortize the commute over more days
- arrange a carpool
- work remotely to reduce the cost of any of the above options
- find a different job.
(edit for list format)
This is definitely a thing that happens. If you are ever doing crimes, just be sure to commit a whole bunch of them so the DOJ has to move more slowly. It's a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen kind of thing.
And make sure the figures involved are not below 9 digits. That way, when you get your two year (6 months with good behavior) white collar slap on the wrist, your French Chateau will still be waiting, and you can laugh at the guy who's doing a decade for bouncing a $200 check on the way out.
It’s actually a 5th Amendment (double-jeopardy) thing; prosecuting a subset of crimes from a single course of conduct may preclude prosecuting others depending on their relationship, so it becomes important to fully investigate before prosecution.
Everyone involved is going to be very careful to not end up personally targeted or liable, and that nothing done could be twisted to make themselves or the administration look like idiots.
It’s a big part of why ‘the rich don’t have consequences’, as is the current fashion to say - they can defend themselves against all but the most careful prosecutions, and can afford to hire people to make sure their asses are covered (if they think to do so).
As to if Elon actually did cover his ass here is yet to be determined. I think he probably didn’t sufficiently, but can muddy the waters enough to not go to prison, and would just have to shell out some money in a decade or so to fines or civil suits.
Only time will tell!
Completely unrelated to Mr. Musk, I'm sure.
Isn’t it fun how wild, unsubstantiated, paranoid speculation can cut both ways?
I ask myself a couple of questions, if Tesla was to release in the near future, some game changer technology in the self-driving space and I was the face behind it, would I leave the company so other person could take the merit? Would I leave the company because I think they are going to push something that I consider dangerous to the public and I don't want to be the scapegoat?
I might trust a fully-open-sourced vehicle, produced in a manner which the software and hardware design and implementation are fully verified as error-free versus a simple-to-understand open-source model. That will never happen, though.
It seems like a very easy question, but it is admittedly hard for me to answer without some additional way to parse it.
Could you narrow it down a little?
I'm also not sure how a fully open source stack would help to alleviate your safety concerns. Current vehicle stacks are impossible for a single individual to meaningfully review, however motivated. These are incredibly complicated distributed systems with dozens of processors running multiple operating systems and frameworks on top of those before you even get to application code. The safety requirements alone consume thousands of pages.
If you think this is possible you must not be a very good software engineer. Maybe that was your point. If so, you should say "I accept faulty human drivers but will forever reject anything worse than absolute perfection in autonomous drivers".
I'm curious how many times people have been refunded for the enhanced autopilot claiming a bait and switch. They believed the marketing materials purchased the car, and then discovered when they get it "hey not really".
But, I'm guessing what will hang them, is the question over whether people actually believed the warnings were real or just CYA, and then promptly treated it like a full "better than human" AI.
Also, I haven’t seen it mentioned here, but the tech does exist and currently you have to demonstrate “safe” (according to their heuristics) driving to get access. I have access, and it more or less does the things they promised, far from perfect (in fact it makes lots of mistakes where I take over for safety), but I fail to see how they promised perfection. My interpretation of the “full” in full self driving was that it handles the full list of maneuvers they enumerated like obeying traffic control and making turns, which it does do today.
> The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.
You should NOT have to beg permission. This is normalizing a dystopian future, which tesla is also doubling down on with their car insurance
Modern masters deceive you with the truth - carefully selected facts, but true. Or close enough for legal purposes.
Elon made a mistake of giving a specific number. If he just made any run of the mill bullshit grandiose claims it would have been fine. I really have no idea why people are so caught up on this. There is massive securities fraud actually happening every day, and people are hung up on some Twitter banter from half a decade ago.
The lawyers will cover themselves by writing memos about how they "informed the client to not do thing X, but they indicated that they don't care," but because those are work product, they're confidential. They're only for future malpractice suits, should they come.
If I -- Minion #64752 in BigCorp -- run my ad copy by legal and they strike it all as a legal hazard, but I run the ad anyway, my boss -- Low-Level Manager #11235 -- is going to fire me the next day, and hope that keeps his boss -- Mid-Level Manager #3142 -- from doing the same to him.
If legal doesn't have veto power on ad copy, it's because the management hasn't given it to them, or because management is making the decision to disregard legal's advice.
Tesla likely has a complete understanding of all the possible legal outcomes. At present Tesla isn’t actually facing ANY criminal charges. They are being investigated, but that investigation has been ongoing for more than a year. This very article cites Tesla marketing and usage language which complicates any potential DOJ case.
Its a massive scam and fraud thats made them trillions, and its amazing they haven't been sued for it.
Tldw it is a video that says the driver is only there for legal reasons, and it took them many takes to make the video.
That's been there for many many years and any time this topic comes up I check it and yup, still there.
They aren't perfect and there are plenty of manual fail safes but they are there.
I dont think it actually has merit, at least not in the terms framed by the article.
In most circumstances it "probably is better than a human driver", not all circumstances, and not proven (hence probably).
But if LM can push the F35 as the best jet ever while it racks up a wreckage count to make the 737 Max jealous, claims made by Tesla arent even in the same ballpark....
It would be a real shame if we lose any chance of full self driving over a misunderstanding about the system being "not perfected yet"
Comparing a military jet which operation requires thousands of hours of training just to get off the ground compared to a mass produced vehicle is not a valid comparison, at least in my mind. Plus what LM pushes to its stockholders is definitely not as comprehensive as the Pentagon gets.
And supersonic flight.
Its just its been held up by the small detail that the airframe keeps making huge holes in the ground every few weeks.
We can still have self driving cars, but they should be developed within a culture that values safety. Tesla is not such a culture. We know this because after the first accident that resulted in decapitation, Tesla collectively shrugged and made the problem worse by removing sensors, which predictably resulted in a second decapitation. They collectively shrugged after that one as well, and again made the problem worse by removing more sensors.
Tesla does not value safety, and their YOLO attitude toward driverless cars, in which the general public is forced to participate in their beta test whether we like it or not, is holding the driverless car industry back. They are not friends of the cause, and the sooner they are prevented from running beta tests on the general public (which have caused deaths), the sooner the industry as a whole can move forward. Reckless engineering by Tesla will not result in a net gain in safety for everyone. Safety is hard even when done intentionally, it won't be achieved as a second order effect of Tesla's "move fast and break things" ethos.
This is a weird framing. Are Teslas unsafe? Either they are or they aren't, right? Are other cultures that "value" safety producing safer cars? If they're not, does that say anything about the value of "values"? What's the goal here, values or safety?
No, that's not a binary, and never was.
3 years ago. Its entirely capable of negotiating public roads with no user input.
Absolutely nowhere has Tesla said (as far as I have seen anyway) "Teslas can full self drive with 100% safety on public roads".
But hey, the hate on Elon Musk regardless of the facts crew is out in force. Personally I think they are worse than the believe everything Musk thinks will be ready next year crew, but neither are worth the downvotes.
Apparently Hacker News thinks humans are safer than Autopilot. So why wouldn’t we advocate a highly advanced vision-based model in cars, rather than a complex, awkwardly synchronised fusion of different classes of sensor?
Take LiDAR, for example. Some claim it’s superior to Tesla’s vision sensors. But LiDAR can’t detect colour, so how will it read traffic lights? Its model of the world will have to be synced up to a camera vision-based model of the world. Syncing two 3D (4D in fact) models precisely is a pretty tough problem to solve. Complexity becomes a risk in its own right.
That's the core issue here, really. Is autopilot more or less safe than a human driver? If it is, then it's hard to see how there's any criminal liability here. (And "fraud" judgements over "the car doesn't really drive itself" would be limited to a refunded purchase price on vehicles that sell used higher than their sticker price).
And... is it less safe? Tesla publishes their own data saying not only is it safe, it's MUCH safer. Every time the subject comes up, people show up to whatabout and explain how that's not a good data set. But does anyone have a better one? Does the DoJ?
I was making this point last year when there were half as many Teslas on the roads: there are millions of these cars now, and every one has autopilot[1]. Any notable safety data would be glowing like hot plutonium if it existed. It probably doesn't exist. Teslas seem to be safe; they're almost certainly safer than the median vehicle.
[1] The headline obscures it, but the text makes clear the investigation is about the Autopilot product, not anything branded FSD.
There is a risk Tesla is hiding data, if they are the investigation should surely find it - if not then those hating on the autopilot can cry into their caramel lattes while we move step by step closer to being able to nap in the backseat while travelling alone cross country.
Is there? That's a weird frame to argue in. There are existing regulations on accident statistics and reporting. Tesla does that. That they also release data split out by autopilot usage certainly can't be construed as "hiding" anything, given that (AFAIK) other manufacturers have varying levels of assisted driving technology too and don't do any public reporting at all.
But others do, it is possible the full story isnt being told. In fact I would go as far as saying we can be sure the full story isnt being told for the simple fact that they have some evidence to base an investigation on - what is just not given in the article.
It would be. But there's no misunderstanding here. Tesla continues to misrepresent their self driving capabilities in marketing materials, after years of feedback that tech hasn't caught up to the promises. If Tesla's profit-seeking dishonesty were to undermine the entire industry, that would be a shame.
"It would be a real shame if this snake oil were banned before we had a chance to figure out what it can cure" might be a better framing.
We were able to ban lawn darts in the 80s because of a few isolated incidents. But the state of affairs we are in now is only possible due to the absurd level of regulatory capture we've reached in this country. I don't expect anything to change at this point.
No lobbying needed
Got a link to a list?
The few cases I've investigated turned out either not to have it enabled or were cases of serious negligence on behalf of the driver.
Also, they get a user manual they need to read/click through before they're allowed to use the autopilot.
There's been 10 just this year: https://fortune.com/2022/10/19/tesla-cars-involved-in-10-of-...
I'm fairly sure the grandparent just didn't consider what the sentence constructed was actually saying and was just expressing a dislike of automated car marketing. Unfortunately, people often believe unsourced comments on hackernews to be literally true rather than sentimentally true.
Hi fellow watcher of the impending societal collapse. Glad to know I'm not alone. I have no answers for you but agree that this has gotten significantly worse since 2015 (although such imprecise discourse was inevitable with the creation of social media).
In particular this site discourages commenting about "did you read the article?" which is a great rule but does slowly ensure that no one in the comments has any reason to be actually informed, just plausibly informed.
For example, entry #259 involves a motorbike being hit by a truck and thrown at an autopiloted Tesla that was stopped in traffic. Was there a death? Yes. Was there a Tesla? Yes. Was autopilot enabled? Sure, lets say it was. Did it have anything to do with the accident? No. Was marketing material to blame? No.
This kind of shoddy, imprecise thinking is everywhere in discourse and its honestly quite worrying...
Is it ?
This basic lane assist type functionality is available in almost every new car today.
Something that all of the companies would go through, administered by the government (not waymo).
It's sort of like "tax what you want less of" except with regulation
I think it's a remarkably sensible thing to do.
I think they are way ahead of you.
They do test a child running in front but not an elephant.
Also, any deep learning AI is extremely tested because that’s how you build such AI. Tesla and other built complex simulator to test their AIs.
I think the standard tests should eventually have more self driving scenarios, but what you wish is not too different than the current situation.
I once had a few seconds to choose between 1) a multi-vehicle collision at 60mph with oncoming vehicles in both lanes that had a steep up-hillside to their right (one was a gasoline tanker), and 2) getting my vehicle stopped on a two-foot shoulder with a long steep 45-degree down-hillside next to it (no guard rail). I would NOT have wanted computer assistance, thanks anyway.
The car should be traveling at a speed where it can break and stay in its lane to avoid any at fault accident. Nothing more, nothing less.
"And roads should be without any defect, weather should never happen, pedestrians and other drivers should always behave rationally, and black ice is not legally allowed to exist."
The Uber that killed Elaine Herzberg in 2018 failed to solve the only problem it had. Did the CPU die? Did Uber or Uber's president?
My decision saved the 3 lives in the oncoming vehicles (including the idiot who decided to try passing the gasoline tanker in their rattletrap), as well as my own and those of the two additional children I eventually had (and their children).
If shareholders collectively promise and agree to hold Tesla stock and upvote it for a 5-10 year period it would give Tesla the space and time they need to develop FSD safely.
As long as they're at the mercy of ruthless quarterly free market capitalism, safety will go to shit. Same thing with Boeing.
This is the problem. Shareholders demand short term returns, not a long term safe/sustainable future and long term returns.
> successful enough to keep them placated
No, not really. A good chunk of the market value of TSLA is hinged upon FSD becoming a reality at some point in the future.
So what? There's nothing wrong about that. Shareholders demand both long term stability and short term returns btw - if the market thought there are no long term returns to be had, the stock price would've crashed.
Shareholders don't have much say about how Tesla does it, and they're actually the ones defrauded.
When Tim Cook was asked pointed questions on why Apple gave a crap about environmental concerns, rather than focussing on pure profit über-alles, he smacked down the questioner [1]
"If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
A company's decisions can be guided by shareholders, but it's on the company to forge their own path. If the shareholders don't like it, they'll vote with their feet. Promising unicorns to keep the feet planted where they are is not a good strategy.
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2014/02/28/tim-cook-rejects-ncppr-propos...
In fact, some of their other departments are notable for contradicting the lofty claims of their marketing.
It happens every time. The best defense for the engineers is to have thoroughly documented the limitations of the system.
Citation needed please
> Pony looked around, a hunted man. He’d got his pink carbon copies, and they would show everyone that he was nothing more than a man who’d tried to make things work, but right now all he could find on his side was the truth. He took refuge in it.
That is, you may induce your employees to commit crimes, while not personally violating any laws.
Or your employees may commit crimes because middle management thought it was more important to hit their targets.
There is an obvious moral conflict here; the laws have not caught up to the complexity of corporate culture.
BTW, he was later acquitted by a jury.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-boeing-737-max-chief-t...
Edited to add this link https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/busi...
- "The Justice Department may also face challenges in building its case, said the sources, because of Tesla’s warnings about overreliance on Autopilot."
How often do criminal defendants get to read the internal deliberations of their prosecuting office, and before they're even charged?
What a dysfunctional mess. This leak was unethical, unlawful, and unworthy of the gravitas of an office whose work puts people in prison.
There's really no reason this info should be secret. If you can provide extra info to persuade them not to charge you, then all the better - time saved for both parties.
No real way to know from the outside, unless they bring charges against a leaker.
Between the regular pro-Russian reporting and this and other issues I've found Reuters to be a highly unreliable source recently. They're very hit and miss.
Important also to look at the stock market. There's zero blip on the stock ticker from this news, which means that basically no one who owns decent amounts of TSLA stock care about this. Which generally means that they know something that's not in this article.
While the filing said he was under investigations, it did not say what the exact focus of the probes was and which federal authorities are conducting them."
They are reporting what the court filing said, what are they supposed to do?
Maybe put a modicum of effort into verifying comments put forward by an antagonist in a court case? Lawyers regularly lie or twist the truth in an attempt to push their case forward.
I don't think the White House denied that Elon Musk was under investigation. It would be...completely inappropriate for the White House to comment on specific investigations from the FBI or DOJ.
Rather, the White House denied that there was a national security review of Elon Musk's projects. That's important, but very distinct from a denial that there are no investigations of Elon Musk. It's also a subject matter that is much more appropriate for the White House to comment on.
https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1584648258130829317
I'll let the White House press secretary speak.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/elon-musk-under-federa...
Which... sounds exactly like what the person you are replying to was saying.
And Tesla's claim that "Full Self Driving" is merely a phrase that doesn't describe the capabilities of its software is weak and criminally deceitful.
Tesla needs to be held accountable for this.
People can and will fail to follow instructions. You have to design around this. If you don't have failsafe mechanisms, don't ship.
Tesla's not taking enough responsibility.
Musk is buying Twitter today or tomorrow, and he'll likely need to sell more Tesla stock unless he can get additional financing. This news will obviously depress Tesla stock. The timing is hardly inconspicuous.
There’s obviously some spat going on between Musk and the Biden administration that the public has limited insight into. Suddenly Biden’s DOJ is going after Musk… too much of a coincidence for me.
If it slows down for cars it might be emergency collision avoidance that does it.
Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible.
How could the government come up with benchmark standards for car autopilots when Tesla (and others) are actively inventing the technology?
How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners?
How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D?
How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech?
California seems to be using the Society of Automotive Engineer's standard here, per the forms for applying for an AV license.
> Air autopilots rely on a pilot being present, observant, and able to take over if necessary. Air autopilots are not infallible.
Air autopilots aren't really comparable. First and foremost, pilots require far more rigorous training than drivers, and are unlikely to be wholly unaware of the limitations of autopilot. It's also almost unanimously agreed that air autopilot is safer than manual flying under some conditions. There's some debate over how heavily it should be used, but I can't find anyone saying it shouldn't be used at all.
> How could Tesla realistically train its ML models if not for the billions of miles of data it collects from Tesla owners?
Tesla would pay employees, who are well-versed in the risks, to monitor the vehicles while they drive. The same thing that other self-driving companies do.
> How much damage will this litigation do to American autonomy R&D?
Probably very little. Tesla is the only one selling to consumers, so they're really the only one in the space that could be at risk from this lawsuit.
> How much of the recent Musk hatred (by institutions such as the media, and large elements of the public) is due to Musk re-aligning himself politically against the Democrats and Big Tech?
I won't discount it as a possibility, but Musk has had a lot of detractors for a long time. It was bound to happen at some point; you can only overpromise and underdeliver for so long before people start to notice.
These articles with no named sources are so tiring. This one didn't even bother to tell us why the sources are anonymous. Hard news and serious journalism is dead and buried. Did this reporter even have to leave their figurative basement to write this story?
You might think they are full of shit about whether it will ever be delivered, which is a fair argument, but that's much different than lying about the actual product in people's hands.
What's ironic is that despite his image as a genius no one ever holds Elon to account for his failure to accurately predict the state/progress of his own technology. He's either not as smart as people think or he's knowingly lying, but I think you have to pick one.
It actually is. When accepting a preorder you have to provide a fixed delivery date, or it is assumed to be no later than 30 days after sale (or 50 days if you offer in-house financing). The fraud case here is actually very straightforward.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/business-gui...
I know if you are in the weeds you know the capabilities - but I think most people get the impression it can drive itself and its safe. And that impression is a direct result from marketing materials. Given the severity of car accidents it seems reasonable to be strict on these marketing claims, even if they call it a "beta" in the fine-print.
and even then, oftentimes it's -very- strongly implied that if it's not really available now the only thing holding it back is regulators.
(Well, that's actually true in its own way, though not a good thing - I am certain that Elon would be yeeting all sorts of shit over the fence if the regulators let him, if only so Tesla could realize all manner of deferred income.)
I don't think it's anywhere near clear-cut fraud to say "you can pre-order this for a cheaper price" and to be wrong about your deadline estimates. Yes, if it never comes out or there is evidence they never even tried to make good on the offer, then you would be open to some kind of legal action. But clearly they are trying. If a bunch of owners want to try to argue that the timeline was promised and missed and do a class action to get their money back, that seems reasonable enough. But none of this seems to relate to actual safety issues or anything.
As far as I can tell, there aren't droves of Kickstarter campaigns that keep getting sued or prosecuted on regular just for perpetually delaying their delivery dates (often for years).
The original claim I replied to was talking about the possibility of Tesla getting sued for delaying multiple times the release of a product that's in active development (and thus being unavailable). I don't see how the discussion about a product that the public has no access to "killing people" is relevant at all.
This isn't relevant to the law! But also by the same argument how is a non-released self-driving product killing people?
Steam Early Access allows you to request a full refund at any point up until the actual launch of the game (and then 14 days after based on the standard refund policy), even if you have played it extensively.
I don't see any evidence of this on the Kickstarter website.
> Steam Early Access allows you to request a full refund at any point up until the actual launch of the game
This is not true. They are considered normal purchases.
https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ You may need to go back and forth with support to get a refund, but Early Access is ultimately covered under the pre-purchase terms.
And re: kickstarter, I think "pledge" is in relation to the fact that you don't have to pay unless the project gets over it's goal. I remain very skeptical that pre-orders are as legally shaky as you claim.
It's about the current "autopilot" product, or more importantly, the marketing around it. They are investigating if Tesla deliberately oversold the capabilities of autopilot, implying that can do far more than it actually can.
Basically: are Tesla criminally responsible for customers who misunderstood what autopilot was, and then didn't correctly supervise the autopilot and ended up in accidents?
Though the fact that Tesla/Musk were continually talking about the FSD features will play into the probe, but only because customers might have confused things said about the future FSD feature, for the capabilities of the current system. But only if Tesla deliberately encouraged or knew about this confusion (or should have known)
Most frauds are prosecuted in state court. There are several federal fraud statutes. For instance, wire fraud, which is any interstate fraud that uses telecommunications, has the following (paraphrased) predicates in the model jury instructions:
(1) You knowingly took part in a scheme to deceive people.
(2) The lies you told were material and caused people to spend money or give up property.
(3) You had an intent to cheat people out of money.
(4) You used some form of interstate telecommunications as part of the scheme.
Prosecutors don't have to prove that Tesla says "the car is fully autonomous today". They just have to prove that Tesla made statements that it knew weren't true, in order to get people to buy cars or Tesla stock. Those statements can be much narrower than "we have achieved full FSD", so long as they are material: that is, so long as they're significant enough to influence people's purchasing decisions.
The other thing is, the messages Tesla sends to the market can be contradictory; prosecutors will home in on the least responsible things they say, and it'll be up to the defense to establish "no, what we really meant, and what every reasonable person took away from what we said, was this banal statement we made in the manual for the car". That'll be tricky, because people have obviously been killed by Tesla's "autopilot" feature, which they were dumb enough to name "autopilot".
Who knows if there's a real case here, though? There may not be!
Plus, when enabling either feature (which are opt-in) a very clear warning is displayed which you must agree to.
So I just don't know who is like, "well, I bought the thing and read the warning and agreed to it but just assumed it was fully autonomous because it's called Autopilot and therefore it is reasonable for me not to pay attention".
Tesla does that quite regularly.
Summon - "bring your car to you while you deal with a fussing child" (fine print buried far away, "pay complete attention to car").
FSD - "the driver is only in the seat for legal purposes - the car is driving itself".
> [Smart Summon is] the perfect feature to use if you have an overflowing shopping cart, are dealing with a fussy child, or simply don’t want to walk to your car through the rain. … [But] those using Smart Summon must remain responsible for the car and monitor it and its surroundings at all times.
So he explicitly explains that you have to monitor it, and does not bury it in the fine print as you claim. Hardly a smoking gun, even if you really are contorting yourself to find something objectionable in this quite.
The Tesla marketing page mentions fussy children. The 'full attention and responsibility' is buried away elsewhere.
* I mean... if you or I were to operate a company like that, we'd get destroyed, anyway. Whether or not Musk is too rich to face any real consequences for, say, shooting somebody on 5th ave, is an open question.
Whether or not he faces any real consequences (unlikely), it will be interesting to see what impact it has on the corporation.
Tesla has made corporate filings that @elonmusk is an official communications channel of the company. That's why he was required to have a lawyer vet all his Twitter posts. Even though he plainly and openly ignored that.
At the minimum it is a violation of the "30 day rule." If you accept money for a preorder of something, you must clearly state a delivery date. If you do not, it is assumed within 30 days of an order.
Tesla can face FTC fines of $16,000 per Autopilot sale, in addition to lawsuits from consumer protection agencies in every state where a vehicle was sold with the undelivered feature.
This is why all the crowdfunding platforms are basically donations with "rewards" of products and not preorders.
Among many other reasons, if he knows it to be false but states it as is true, this is market manipulation
1) Usage of the term "Autopilot"
2) Usage of the term "Full Self-Driving Capability"
3) The phrase: "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver's seat."
4) The statement: "From Home - All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don't say anything, your car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigating urban steets, complex intersections and freeways. To your Destination - When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."
3 is probably the most damning, because it specifically promises features that do not work, and could not legally be used in that way even if they did without further licensing.
1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22128016-california-...
What if they actually saved lives?
There is plenty of video evidence of that: https://youtu.be/hF96jQ0SY8w
Would we try to stop it? A lot of companies would like to stop it, that’s for sure.
There no doubt that a computer will match a human, than exceed its capability, 24x7, never tired, never distracted.
For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure or random comment in a tweet a few years ago.
Of course this comment is going to be heavily downvote like everything positive about Tesla here. I wonder why?
And what if they are not?
Furthermore to me the issue is not safety vs not-safety, but the advertisement is clearly misleading at least
>For the moment, every drive has to acknowledge that they are responsible, need to keep the control and have to stay vigilant every time they use self-driving. It seems to me that take precedence to the product brochure...
Maybe we should hold the company to make sure the product brochure is truthful. Because if people trust the brochure they might die over it.
On their site: https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot
"Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."
It’s clear they are working toward full self driving but it’s not there yet.
"The future use of these features without supervision is dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates."
And what if a frog had wings? Why, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops!
I wonder why?
Probably not what you're thinking, but I'd guess a lot of "what if..." with a single, carefully-selected video to back the hypotheticals.
There is a cost both ways, we are used to pay the cost of the status quo, it feel easier to push back against progress.
"video evidence" is not the kind of evidence which can demonstrate that. The kind of evidence which could demonstrate that Teslas are safer than a regular driver would be statistics. Statistics which by the way is available to Tesla, and they could let researchers scrutinise if they choose to do so.