Tesla on self-driving claims: failure to realize aspirational goal is not fraud
electrek.co
electrek.co
This just in, we're adding Hawaii as a stop! Ignore the fact that the bridge is still technically a pier down at the harbor and only 100 feet long. We've already got our first "Bridge Across The Pacific" at our first stop at the end of the pier.
A better example would be running a Twitter poll if foxyv should have to invest in the pier project.
1) Tesla's technical achievement with the degree of self driving they've already shown is very impressive
2) It absolutely is not ready for regulatory approval and production use.
Tesla's software is NOT a 100 foot pier. Is it 30% of the distance across the pacific ocean? Is it 80% but the last 20% is deep choppy waters? Who knows.
Videos of self-driving show the driver intervening about, what, less than 1% of the time? Or maybe 5% of the "decisions"? Now, the standard for autonomous driving is probably in the .0001% of the time, and a lot of that would be winter/weather related and good error handling (just stop the car or recognize an area is a difficult area and pre-warn the driver).
It is amazing how much a CEO doing annoying tweets morphs the objectivity of people on a site that is ostensibly about engineering and rational thought.
How many other companies have shown concept cars of EVs and "when we have self driving" cars with no steering wheels and people seated around a table in a car? Hell, look at this:
https://electrek.co/2022/11/28/stellantis-relaunches-lancia-...
It doesn't have wheels! It doesn't even appear to be touching the ground! And it's the lead image for one of the biggest foot-dragging idiots 15 years after the reality of a production EV trying to say "hey we'll be good at EVs now that literally every carmaker is way ahead of us" and also "please don't fire me as CEO".
THAT is a 100 foot pier.
You want fraud? The last 50 years of petroleum + ICE car companies in lockstep to ignore carbon emissions.
So what were Tesla people buying with "full self driving"? Parlor tricks to impress other people with, and nothing more. Was it oversold? Yeah, but so is everything else in marketing.
I would say full self driving was only slightly more oversold than the IoT smarthome (hey, you know all that stuff that lasts 30 years that you replaced with IoT stuff two years ago? Yeah we don't want to support the software anymore). Full Self Driving is LESS hyped that virtually all crypto.
A couple more steps past crypto, and you get to Theranos.
With that uncertainty, we may instead be building a bridge to Mars. It's a problem that has never been solved and may never be. Selling something that may not even be possible to people is pretty ballsy. But not telling people the reality while selling them something that may not be possible?
In any case, donate to my new kickstarter "Bridge to Mars." Our initial plan is to start with some stairs made out of ultra-light carbon fiber.
Once we reach $200 we can fund our prototype: https://www.acehardware.com/departments/building-supplies/la...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker#:~:text=Parke....
This is pretty damning.
I predict this will be settled out of court with a truckload of hush money, like all of these are.
I don't think so and I would claim that FSD is as impossible as doing what Theranos claimed they could do.
The problem here is defining what "full" means and debating what "full" _should_ mean.
Worst case is that Tesla refunds a lot of people's money, FSD gets a name change, and shareholders will find a way of dethroning Elon.
Exactly. Do you mean "we can get rid of the drivers and save on labor expenses" or do you mean "We can upsell this feature to make driving easier". A lot of investors, for example Uber investors, were promised the former. That's the fraud angle. But there are a lot of satisfied car owners who are enjoying the latter right now.
Some Theranos-y devices have since been built successfully by competent companies (particularly small automated PCR systems)
THE PERSON IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS
If that's not technically fraud, it's at least fraud in spirit.
If it turns out that there was a human driver of that car I think it'd count as fraud but I mean all you have is a video of a demo. Where is the fraud there?
They used intentionally misleading stunts like this video to get people to shell out $10k dollars thinking the technology is imminent
w.r.t. the video though, I think it pretty clearly shows that the car can drive itself. What do you see in that video?
Do you not think a Tesla of today couldn't be used to produce a similar video to that one 5 years ago? It's definitely pesky legal reasons as to why Tesla won't let you do more with self driving. You don't need an AI driver to T-bone another car. It's definitely a column A&B type situation. If some state passed a law giving manufactors immunity in the event of a collision involving self driving I 100% think Tesla would OTA update cars in that state.
But when you say the driver is only there for legal reasons you are implying that the car doesn't need supervision except to appease regulators. You are implying that the technology side of it is much more solved than it is.
The video link is for Autopilot and you're talking about FSD...
Last I checked Autopilot couldn't even avoid crashing into stopped emergency vehicles. So clearly the human isn't present purely for legal reasons, unless they mean the legal risks of causing an accident.
If you accept payment on an order you can't fulfil that is fraud.
Yes, refund is a remedy, fraud is one of the torts that arguably occurred which warrants the remedy.
“The video did not provide a full picture of how the car operated during the filming,”
“The route taken by the car had been charted ahead of time by software that created a three-dimensional digital map, a feature unavailable to drivers using the commercial version of Autopilot."
“At one point during the filming of the video, the car crashed into a roadside barrier on Tesla property while using Autopilot and had to be repaired.”
Unfortunately, that part is not true.
It's one of the claims in the lawsuit [1].
It’s not the failure to realize it, it’s that the product was sold with dates it was expected to be functional to x degree by.
Tesla FSD may be one of the simplest examples of false advertising I can think of that’s still going.
Arguable Tesla believe the claims it was making. Certainly a lot of people who bought Teslas thought they did!
I don't think consumers shouldn't have any recourse though. They should be given refunds but I don't think they should get any sort of multiplier/etc. (In general/for non-necessitates) If you give a merchant $x in exchange for Y and the merchant later realizes they can't give you Y I think it's totally fair to just give you back the $x.
It may have believed its claims about the future would be true, the problem (well, for fraud; for false advertising and implied warranty claims, that belief may not be material) is that it supported them with misleading/false representations of past & current facts within Tesla’s knowledge, like the conditions of the self-driving demo.
They charged a lot of people money to participate in an experiment to see if they could ever do it with the promise that they could do it soon enough that it would sell, only to gradually let the truth set in.
Now people are rightfully pissed, that none of these promises that - to be fair, mostly Musk, made; have come to any sort of fruition, they’re tired of paying to be Guinea pigs; and they want the finished final product.
The basis of relief is violation of implied warranties and false advertising.
I think its going to be interesting if this case actually proceeds forward.
[+] https://www.classaction.org/media/matsko-v-tesla-inc-et-al.p...
Ok, I revise my take. That looks like fraud.
Well, at least they didn't have to push in down a hill to gather enough speed to reach the fence.
Like McDonald's offering Free Cheeseburger for 2,99USD