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Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

I placed my order on AI day in 2019 right after all of the claims were made. I took delivery June 1, 2019.

When I ordered the car, I did so expecting it to be able to drive while I slept sometime during the life of the car. I have considered suing Tesla for failing to live up to the promises that prompted me to purchase the car. I had never purchased a new car before and wouldn't have except for the phantasmal claims of full-self driving. Refunding the $6k I paid for FSD seems insufficient to me.

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>When I ordered the car, I did so expecting it to be able to drive while I slept sometime during the life of the car. I have considered suing Tesla for failing to live up to the promises that prompted me to purchase the car.

genuine question but , were you not the tiniest bit skeptical when only Tesla were able to promise FSD?

like what secret sauce have they got that no one else has?

they have a guy who leads a company that made reusable rockets profitable and electric vehicles sexy. I have no problem believing that people strongly believed in Tesla cracking L5 autonomy within that year.

Also, remember that self-driving cars were all the rage then too. Hype was at its peak then, I think.

> what secret sauce have they got that no one else has?

A large fleet of networked cars that were built from the ground up to provide real-world data (including cameras and human driver inputs) for AI training.

Honestly I kind of wonder if Tesla's software team (or overall technical approach) wasn't very badly mismanaged since they seem to have thrown away a huge head start. Or maybe autonomous car AI is just really hard.

> Honestly I kind of wonder if Tesla's software team (or overall technical approach) wasn't very badly mismanaged since they seem to have thrown away a huge head start.

Keep in mind they are likely spending 10x or less than Waymo on FSD, so a lot less employees/researchers, have been around a lot less time and have decided not to use the sensors and ground truth data that Waymo relies on.

Just having lots of data isn't necessarily very useful, or we'd see the pure FSD trying to get their sensors on everybody's cars.

Where are you getting "10x or less" from? Googling says Waymo burns about $1 billion/year, and Tesla's 2022 R&D budget was $3 billion.

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