Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies

I think the opening is what separates this from "not technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that exact route with that exact software they have in my mind elevated it to an outright lie.

> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch

A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills you.

In the context of using a neural network model this is very much lying.

Problem is, now it's years later, the product has been in the hands of consumers for a while now, and yet it still doesn't work. People are pissed off, people are getting hurt, and yet he continues to insist on calling it "Full Self Driving" when it is very far from that. If the government can't do anything to protect consumers for whatever reason, then the consumers must take it to the courts and to the media relentlessly until the knowledge of what FSD really is becomes a part of the zeitgeist. Much value and many lives will be destroyed needlessly because of one snake oil salesman holding a whole bunch of money.

Milton, ex-CEO of Nikola, also technically didn't lie about their truck demo (it was rolled down the hill, and said it was "in motion").

He was found guilty of fraud, and will be sentences soon, facing up to 25 years in jail.

These are not similar cases at all. Any competent engineer can work through the iPhone bugs and fix them. That's well-trodden ground, the sort of thing thousands of engineers do each day. Fixing a self-driving neural network is a research topic. Even years later it's not a fully solved problem, and that should have been clear in 2016.

> This is pretty normal in marketing demos.

This was my thought, isn't this stand operating procedure for pretty much all companies? How is this news?

> This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...

And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see how that's the same thing.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

A phone is not a car. You can't die by believing in a feature of a phone but you potentially can or be hurt when it comes to a car.

Did you read the actual deposition? The linked article is not clear on the exact details, I don't think it's possible to come to any conclusions from the article alone.

The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)

I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way worse.)

> This is pretty normal in marketing demos.

Except Tesla kept on with the lie for years. Tesla has already copped to false advertising around "full self-driving":

https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...

Now Tesla doesn't want to be done for fraud so their current spin is that they have failed at full self-driving but "failure is not fraud":

https://electrek.co/2022/12/07/tesla-self-driving-claims-fai...

It's not helping Tesla's case that they took money from customers for an "aspiration". Tesla should do the right thing and refund everyone's money.

They also crashed the car trying to park it at the end.... I wonder how many takes it took to get the demo working.

> The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch.

In a past life, when I sold my soul to the devil, I did a lot of demos on behalf of Microsoft that were precisely scripted. And, even then, NT4 BSOD'd on me in front of a packed auditorium once.

That's why one of the key skills of a corporate public face in IT is stand-up comedy. They didn't see the flawless ISS crash containment they were promised, but at least they had some great laughs.

Funny now that the devil isn't that much of a baddie anymore.

People don’t die if an iPhone doesn’t work right. Autopilot/“fsd” on the other hand…

They don't want you to click away.

> Why do so many news articles do this?

Because they’re serving ads. They don’t want you clicking on a link that takes you to an external site. They don’t care about you reading primary material and forming your own opinion, either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to click their ads.

On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.

I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas" (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so compelling.

When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was complete nonsense.

I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem to be taught the opposite.

As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better reading material than news articles covering them, especially court decisions.

A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.

There is a decent discussion at https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th... which contains quotes from the deposition, as well as a link to a pdf of the deposition at https://wetransfer.com/downloads/8b24e0528e23c45d543f4d4182b... (I know, but that's the only link there).

In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.

The deposition is from June 2022 btw.

I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers), and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting. And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the internet for free.

What makes it staged is saying “Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot.” — no qualifications or caveats, just a sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the service life of the vehicles it was sold on.

(Corrected sloppy math, see below)

Hey, it didn't work on me, because I was expecting them to try to scam me.

Were the other companies putting that the driver is only there for legal reasons at the front of the video and selling the product for thousands of dollars with promises it would work as depicted imminently?

There is a world of difference between the demos other companies were showing and this.

Just a heads-up to others in the comments here that have not read the article, none of those are quotes from the article.

The article says

> A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.

Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that claim.

> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...

"Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly misleading.

It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing it correctly identifying golden retrievers.

They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.

Yeah, this coverage (as is so common with this company) seems a bit off. This wasn't a product in 2016, it was a technology demonstration. How many tech giants have stood on stage demoing products that barely worked, with an army of engineers on site to get it right before the reveal?

As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for this industry for every manufacturer except Tesla.

Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise. No, it's not done. But it's great.

Sarcastically, a 2000 lb robot could be programmed to drive in a random walk pattern quite cheaply: film it for many days and use the section of the recording where it has the fewest collisions as the promo video!

> The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into a fence on one practice run".

> In my view, none of those things make the video staged...

Fanboy detected.

Waymo is completely self driving and does it well… even years ago was cruising around self driving

And you don’t see them doing all the carnival barking line Tesla does

The part about the 3D map is particularly interesting. ELon Musk has made strong claims that machine vision, without LIDAR, radar, or acoustic ranging, is enough for FSD. In fact it can't even auto-park reliably.

Every AV project other than Tesla (and maybe geohotz's AV thing?) uses other types of sensors, especially LIDAR, and 3D mapping.

If it turns out that 3D maps and LIDAR are necessary to achieve L3 and higher, not only are Tesla cars not equipped to ever be AVs, the data Tesla has collected from their cars is much less valuable for developing and operating AVs.

Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes are matte.

I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that advertisements for food do not literally represent the material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare, for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the food flies around in front of the camera).

This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in fact, drive itself.

However, there is literally a point where this becomes fraud and as a publicly traded company Tesla has to be aware of where that line is drawn.

I mean heck just look at what happened to Nikola. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...

> everything is staged and dolled up

Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?" Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?" No.

McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xnjBoJHzE

I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's the cup being sold, not the coffee.

Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just as you say.

And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you have deep pockets.

> Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a constant game of deceit.

McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and only the edges seared so it stays thicker).

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8

The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.

fwiw, it seems like it's a common thing to avoid answering vague/overly broad questions like this in a deposition. see here:https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th...

it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition) referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's some code-based repository thingy".

https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...

I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment ever surviving.

Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone still realistically believed in it or him.

In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time. It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact that they sold trucks didn't help with this.

> It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.

I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume, high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step funding the development of the next.

Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?

> I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose

You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were already available off-the-shelf.

I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and making the market believe it's going well.

This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.

>It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned market.

That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy, expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost not additional money, mass or volume. So building something like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive. Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it can't really do road trips.

I think they initially had hopes that they would be able to make some disruptive innovations in auto manufacturing - but all the evidence suggests they went way over their skis as Teslas are notorious for having extremely poor fit and finish. The failure to deliver on self driving is in line with a history of failing to deliver. You can include the weird hype around the Tesla humanoid robot on this list too imo.

I think that was part of why FSD was such a core pitch from the beginning. IF Tesla had managed to crack that to the actual fullest it could have been the game changing thing to put them ahead. The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes and rental opportunities that would unlock. Too bad they hard committed to camera only sensing which is looking like a major mistake given how little headway they have against traditional car safety features.

I agree with your interpretation, but I don't think Tesla is discovering this. I think they've known that the electric car was a mere sustaining innovation, while a true self-driving car is disruptive. That's why they've tried to sell their electric cars as self-driving cars.

Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile" sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a disruptive product.

What are you talking about lol. The whole point of Tesla has always been able to achieve scale so they can sell mass market cars.

Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption. Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto industry - it's playing against a different set of customer values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.

As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its willingness to constantly improve the product - from software OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting). They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.

As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).

You're a bit too late with that observation I think as Tesla is no longer the upstart.

> The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car market.

The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023. That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents dragging their feet to being in the top 10.

Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked out. They are here to stay.

I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different

There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video.

What matters is:

(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims

(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.

(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation

If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.

Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...

(Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)

Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still can't.

If Theranos was still around you'd be hired on the spot.

It is legal to make a video that portrays your product in the best possible light.

It is not legal to do so when it materially misrepresents your product.

I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.

The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.

Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.

> Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?

If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.

Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later

There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.

I saw a video that there is some sort of state and "memory", so i don't think that's the case.

If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did the AI training.

It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision + NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.

Ah, the old binary tree con: https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html

You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but they're pretty orthogonal to each other.

You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down a hill).

You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).

Where to start...

First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see runs that were repeated when almost all runs are repeated by design.

Second, what Tesla did is nothing like you described. Tesla lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal reasons. No one else has done that.

Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone anything about.

I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked, if not outright faked.

In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others) claimed were absolutely bullshit.

One difference is Tesla runs on all roads basically (subject to weather view on cameras). It's gm super cruise and google that only work on road that have been imaged. It does seem that super cruise and google waymo is ahead of tesla. Tesla is trying to solve a harder problem, random roads and conditions. I think that tesla won't succeed very soon, and as the "pre-scan the road" groups get better and better tesla's approach will be seen as unacceptable risky. I have only driven the new versions a few time, it was interesting to see all the things they could see but it just wasn't safe. Waymo has their weird stuff but did seem much safer in theory. But who knows if there is a hole, like happened in Arizona to that poor woman who got run over in the night while crossing the dark road.

> The only part worth arguing over is if someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do anything.

Or Tesla's video that says "the driver is only in the seat for legal reasons - the car is driving itself"?

I don't think a company can fire you for not perjuring yourself in the company's defense. That would invite even bigger legal liability on them.

>It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this.

Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought to light?

Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.

Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it a pass on the bad things it's done.

It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine. Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't matter is the greater scheme of progress.

You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic shift into the automotive industry.

Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that? They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors' market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it still is overvalued.

The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.

> I think right now a lot of people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough engineering.

You'll never have all the range because you're going to have to spend some amount of energy on heat, and even with heat pumps it's often more energy heating a space than cooling when it's hot. Where humans mostly are, it gets way colder than room temperature than it gets hotter. Sure it might get to 110F in Phoenix (+38F from 72), but it'll get to -40 in the cold areas of the US (-112F from 72F). That bigger temperature differential means more energy.

Don't get me wrong I imagine there's some improvements to be made out there, but with current battery chemistries and needing to warm a cabin you're gonna spend a lot of energy on heating no matter what.

There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised that FSD was so advanced it would make you money[1] by driving your car for Uber when you're not using it. That's almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your cancer.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-teslas-1756196...

We need to somehow get "just trolling" as a legal loophole in our justice system.

Or that time he went to SNL and yelled "TOOOO THE MOOOON" about Dogecoin and his fans accidentally bought the top. What a troll haha!

Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the company operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)" parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are considered personal chattel.

(/s)

There's also the AJ defense for it - that at this point in time, there is a public expectation that no reasonable person should be stupid enough to actually believe such a tweet. Everyone knows that the man is just playing a media character.

> The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

This part is even worse.

I'd hope his scams fold down quicker than "decades"

Please, show a little respect for Jobs here. /s

A better comparison might be "I think Elon's greatest accomplishment was convincing people he was Tesla and not Edison."

that's the definition of a strawman.

"The driver is just there for legal reasons"

That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that does not exist now

The video says the only reason a driver is there is legal reasons: obviously not true unless you are a psychopath and would send it out on its own.

Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as rocks.

Don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is true lol

A software system sold as “self-driving” with the lawyer-derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS systems. Spoiler: there’s no such thing as a timely takeover at highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn’t work at 70 mph. It’s false advertising on top of a highly unsafe apparatus.

Walter Huang’s Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far from Tesla’s Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier because of its naive vision-only system paired with the constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to construction. If Teslas can’t drive the 101 without mistakes, they can’t drive anywhere. It’s literally right down the road from their autonomous driving team’s office.

"Less fraud than Theranos" probably isn't the accolade you hang on the mantle.

Lol is this how low our standards have sunk?

"Well, it's less bad than Theranos" --Tesla in Review, 2023

> below the Theranos level

Isn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet? How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud that Theranos represents?

"Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a damningly weak defense (imo).

> Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is far below the Theranos level.

The missing comma before "and fraud" is doing a lot of work in this sentence.

How many people did Theranos kill compared to Tesla self driving?

> they delivered actual cars and fraud,

I think your punctuation is doing you a disservice.

I absolutely agree with you, so we have an upper bound, Elon Musk is facing far less than 12 years in prison. Doesn't anyone want to help us out with a lower bound?

Not in market value...

say whatever you want about Theranos, but Hitler killed millions. Say whatever you want about Hitler but Genghis...

Theranos delivered blood test results. Tesla delivered cars.

The problem is that neither delivered those things to the particular qualities promised.

Didn't Theranos deliver actual results, just using the Siemens machines instead of their own?

> Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd

This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By making himself a very prominent public individual and the face of Tesla, he's inextricably tied to the brand. No one knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many that's transferring to Tesla as well.

> He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple sectors than anyone alive.

Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line all the way back to his father who bankrolled him?

It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his businesses already existed before he took the helm, including Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.