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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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...

As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it every time on any route, they would have released it to the public to try.

Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple tries too.

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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)

Nit: 10^4 (10E3, 10E5 would conventionally be 10*10^5 or 1,000,000)

Exactly, and for that matter, why not just write 1E5?

Just writing without an editor - the main point I was thinking was that it was quite a significant upcharge. It’d be one thing if they had a, shall we say, optimistic video about future vehicles but selling something for that much money that implies it is a lot closer to available.

You’re right, I blame commenting while taking care of a sick kid. Thanks!

I mean, didn't it do exactly that? Just only once?

The clear implication is that you should buy one because it can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.

There's no reason to apply such an implication. This was a tech demo! No one ever claimed that was something production cars could currently do at the time, nor would that make any sense, as the cars clearly did not do that at the time.

An article from the time clearly interprets it as a tech demo: https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/watch-tesla-new-full-self-dri...

Reading that article, I see lots of things which do not sound like “this worked once on a single known course”. They’re taking orders, talking about unattended cross country trips, and claiming the driver is only there for legal reasons — all of which makes it sound a lot more mature than it is.

Nonetheless, there is no claim that any current product does this, just discussion of potential future features.

That's a pretty big stretch.

If someone says, "Buy a Tesla, now with Full Self Driving! Here's a demo!" <insert demo>, then you're going to very reasonably assume that the demo is supposed to be of the current Full Self Driving feature, not of any future feature, and of a typical, if slightly polished-up, usage of that feature.

The kind of absurdly nitpicky legalistic weasel-wording you're trying to do wouldn't even fly in most American courts, let alone in the court of public opinion.

I don't know what to tell you, man. There was no "current Full Self Driving" feature at the time, in 2016. That option literally had no features until 2019 when some stuff began getting enabled via software update.

Edit: Here is the blog post the video was embedded in: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

> No one ever claimed that was something production cars could currently do at the time

"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." Tesla's website, at the time, and until now.

No, it was very clear that it cannot do that for you at that time. The only implication was that it will do it soon, which didn't happen.

"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." makes it sound like that’s almost ready, as does taking expensive advanced payments on a device which has a relatively short service life. That’s a big up charge for a feature many buyers will never be able use as long as they own their Teslas.

Even now, they say “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”. Again, that’s fine if you’re showing a tech preview but when you start taking preorders on consumable product you really should be very clear that what people get for all of that money is nowhere near the demo.

Almost ready or not, it doesn't make it sound like the product can do it right now if you purchase it.

Whether it's FSD, Cyberpunk or a Kickstarter campaign, preorders should cary the same expectations — if what you are buying doesn't exist yet, the seller cannot possibly guarantee they will be able to make what they 'promised'.

I would definitely support some rules like that for pre-orders: once you start accepting money you have to be very up-front about the state of the product and test results. If that’s too much, do conventional R&D and tell people they can buy it when it’s ready.

Agreed. It could be also regulated the way e.g. investment ads are, so you always have to explain that this is not a finished product and that it may be different on release or in fact never be finished.

I won't defend Tesla here, but I think e.g. the gaming world is often unfair to game studios and game developers when a game is launched and is different from what was presented on some conference before. Scope changes, priorities change, playtesting changes the original plans, resources are limited. It's normal. When the end product is different it doesn't mean the developers lied when they originally presented it.

imho.

> 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.

>"planned, organized, or arranged in advance (often of an event or situation intended to seem otherwise)." - Oxford English Dictionary

Seems to me it's the very definition of staged. They arranged all aspects of the route in a way that typical driving wouldn't allow and then selectively released information about how it went. Seems unlikely Musk's intended readers to know how the actual drive went when he tweeted "Tesla drives itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a parking spot"

The only real argument that can be made here is some variant of "all demos are staged and everyone should have known not to believe the car can actually behave that way outside of a demo"

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.

Weren't they saying they weren't going to use HD mapping at that point, that their cars just pick up the lay of the land and deal with anything, making their approach way more scalable than competitors?

But the product demo was instead mapped?

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!

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

> It's great, I promise.

It's not just great, it's hardcore:

https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-auto...

Woo! FSD! FSD!

This is exactly the kind of unserious flamery I was talking about. And it's simply out of control on this site. Get a ride, is all I can say. It may not be as fun as yelling about it on the internet, but you'll get a much better idea of the capabilities of this technology, and probably have a ton of fun while you do.

What, you think an 8 car pileup is "unserious"? That's interesting.

That accident was caused by an inattentive driver, full stop.

Even an FSDb equipped Tesla isn’t autonomous, and the car in question didn’t even have that.

> That accident was caused by an inattentive driver, full stop.

No, you've been musked. It was Tesla's software that brought the car to a full stop, full stop. It's funny how Tesla wants to claim credit for X million miles without crashes under software control, except for that last mile where there's a problem. That one belongs to the driver.

> Even an FSDb equipped Tesla isn’t autonomous,

So.. you agree that Tesla's video promoting full self-driving was staged. And you agree with Tesla that they have failed to deliver full self-driving:

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

> the car in question didn’t even have that.

Sure it did. Your beliefs are not matching the realities. You might want to read the article. Here's another article:

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/17/business/tesla-8-car-cras...

> No, you've been musked.

Sorry internet troll, but no, I haven’t. You’re the one stupid enough to take Musk at his word, not I.

> you agree that Tesla's video promoting full self-driving was staged.

Of course I do. Any sane person would also agree.

> Sure it did.

Read it again. Then apply logical thought to it and not “yeah, here’s a link that I can parrot around like an idiot!”

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