Tesla removes parking sensors, the results are predictably terrible | Hacker News Reader

Tesla removes parking sensors, the results are predictably terrible

carexpert.com.au

472 pointsbelter592 comments

Heres what really happened:

Tesla decided they wanted 'birds eye view', which most of their competitors had. To get that, they needed more cameras and more camera inputs on their autopilot computer. It would be a big redesign of many features of the car. With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.

However... The big new birds eye view feature gets delayed by ~ a year, because it depends on new autopilot silicon (HW4).

Tesla is now stuck - they don't have the sensors to make the old version, the sensors themselves are EOL by the manufacturer, and the new version isn't ready yet.

So - the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors.

That kept people happy for months. But the software team was pulling their hair out - the camera placement on the old HW3 cars was insufficient to see things very near the vehicle needed for parking, so it was never going to work well.

And the autopilot software team is being pulled in a lot of directions, and hasn't really met expectations on any targets lately - although perhaps they're trying to achieve the unachievable.

Given the original screwup (not having a backup plan for when this big new feature was delayed by a year), I think they made the best of a bad situation. Their approach of 'promise the impossible, and then underdeliver' will hurt the brand, but probably less so than any other approach.

Can the cars sold without the sensors plausibly be retrofitted later by Tesla service? That would be a good gesture and solution but depends on how completely they removed it I suppose.

The cars without sensors could be retrofitted with sensors, but those sensors are no longer manufactured. You could maybe take some from scrapped cars, or design an entirely new but compatible sensor.

We are talking about car company thats worth 600 billion? Cant they just pay someone to make those sensors?

Only about 1/30th of that is cash. Still enough, but also, they can just not pay someone to make the sensors, as they're doing.

Based on investigation by GreenTheOnly it's unlikely a retrofit will be possible https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905186387505155?...

This sounds plausible to me, but do you have any sources?

> The big new birds eye view feature gets delayed by ~ a year, because it depends on new autopilot silicon (HW4).

Why? Cars with orders of magnitude less processing power have that. Is that because of the lack of camera inputs?

They also said "the camera placement on the old HW3 cars was insufficient to see things very near the vehicle needed for parking, so it was never going to work well."

So it's probably more of that!

>Software would replace the sensors.

This is a fault in design philosophy. Remember MCAS, where Boeing decided their solution to a hardware design problem was a software workaround? I know it's tempting, but these types of design decisions need a very careful thought process to work; they shouldn't be a last-ditch workaround. I guess I give TSLA some slack here because it's only applied to parking, but I hope they don't apply the same design philosophy on more safety critical systems.

I think there are some parking scenarios that might be catastrophic.

"backing into the pedestrian" is pretty bad, but what about fire hydrants or gas pumps?

Those don't move, so memorizing their location/occupancy should work better.

How much object persistence does this system actually have? Watching objects jitter around the screen and morph from a sign to a cone to a person back to a sign hasn't inspired confidence in me.

Aren't fire hydrant valves usually a few feet underground, which makes running them down not as exciting as it could be?

Gas pumps (gasoline), at least in Canada, the pump is underground and you're really just holding a big nozzle. Bad, but not too bad. People have been driving into and through those for years.

Natural gas lines and meters could be a catastrophe, but they're usually pretty close to a wall.

Therac 25 is another example of hardware being replaced by software and things goong terribly wrong.

MCAS wasn't to rectify a hardware electronics problem, it was for a dynamics/physics problem.

The equivalent would be if, say, the car was designed to be overweight on one side and susceptible to tipovers, and had software to automatically turn the wheels the other direction when it felt like it.

When I said hardware, I meant in the broader airframe hardware, not specifically electronics hardware. The physics you mention is a result of the center-of-gravity of the airframe design. The broader point being, it became cheaper and more expedient (at least superficially) to try and fix a hardware problem with software.

(Although Boeing did also create a cringey option to incorporate already existing redundant AOA sensors only as software option, rather than as a default)

> The physics you mention is a result of the center-of-gravity of the airframe design.

No, it's not. The larger size and more forward placement of the engines on the MAX caused it to pitch up in certain high angle-of-attack maneuvers, so MCAS was designed to automatically trim the aircraft to make it act more like the NG.

Yes, it is. But you don't have to take my word for it.

>"heavier engines that are also cantilevered further forward on the wing to provide more ground clearance. That changes the center of gravity."[1]

The "pitching up" is a direct result of the change in the center of gravity and thrust vector.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-e...

> it was for a dynamics/physics problem

Not exactly. The plane was (and still is) perfectly flyable without MCAS, but its handling characteristic were sufficiently different from the plane it was designed to replace that it required pilots to be retrained. That made its value proposition less attractive because of the extra training costs. MCAS was an attempt to make the new plane handle like the old one so pilots would not have to be retrained. And it failed catastrophically.

The point is, it was a completely artificial problem produced by business considerations, not physics.

> it was a completely artificial problem produced by business considerations

Making the plane behave the same as a different airplane makes it safer. There are many examples of crashes due to pilots reacting to an emergency in a manner appropriate to the previous plane they were flying, rather than the current one.

About 98% of the mass media reporting on MCAS was written by people who have no idea how airplanes work, and is hysterical nonsense.

Well, I'm a (private) pilot, so I like to think I have some clue about how airplanes work.

It's true that, all else being equal, making an airplane's handling characteristics the same as a familiar predecessor improves safety. But clearly all else was not equal here.

There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. What was wrong was its reliance on a single sensor, such that a bad sensor made it misbehave. Other things wrong with it were it had too much authority, and it should have disabled itself if the pilot was countermanding it with the control column.

The other thing wrong was the pilots not using the stab trim cutoff switch, which is supposed to be a "memory item" for them.

I worked on the design of the 757 stabilizer trim system. The cutoff switch was always the backup for things going wrong with the trim. It's right there on the console within easy reach for a damn good reason. (Other systems could be turned off by overhead circuit breakers, but the stab trim cutoff was placed in a special priority position.)

As for needing software at all, all jetliners have an active yaw damper to keep the pointy end forward. This is to counter a stability problem from having swept wings. Pilots of low&slow straight wing aircraft are often not familiar with this. A Cessna will be stable if you just let go of the controls. A swept wing jetliner, not without augmentation.

The mass media also omits the reason for the MAX. The new engines gave it 15% less fuel burn. This is massive cost savings (and less pollution, too.)

I fly an SR22, which has a yaw damper. It's not strictly necessary -- the SR22 is quite stable without it -- but I'm familiar with the concept.

The facts of the MCAS debacle have been litigated to death (literally!) and since you work in the industry you probably know more about them than I do. However, I'm still going to respectfully take issue with this:

> There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept.

That's a vacuous claim because "the MCAS concept" is not well-defined. If "the MCAS concept" is something like "an automated control system that always does the Right Thing" then obviously there is nothing wrong with that. But MCAS was never an automated control system that always did the Right Thing. The problems with it were known -- indeed, self-evident -- long before anyone actually died. MCAS was explicitly designed to be an automated control system that sometimes did the Right Thing, and sometimes did the Wrong Thing (with a single point of failure), but that was OK because when it did the Wrong Thing, the human pilots would take over and do the Right Thing in its place [1]. I think it's pretty clear, even without the rather definitive evidence in the form of two lost aircraft, that there is quite a bit wrong with that concept. But maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

And, somewhat less respectfully...

> The new engines gave it 15% less fuel burn. This is massive cost savings (and less pollution, too.)

I'm sure the families of the victims will take great comfort knowing that their loved ones died efficiently.

---

[1] UPDATE: And, I might add, that they were expected to do the Right Thing without any additional training because the whole point of MCAS was to make the new plane behave like the old plane. Which is manifestly failed at rather spectacularly. But that is neither here nor there because I think the case can be made that the "MCAS concept" was flawed even without this little detail.

> I fly an SR22, which has a yaw damper. It's not strictly necessary

The SR22 is a straight wing aircraft, not a swept wing one. "Some aircraft, such as the Boeing 727 and Vickers VC10 airliners, are fitted with multiple yaw damper systems due to their operation having been deemed critical to flight safety.[1][4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaw_damper

There have been crashes due to failure of the yaw damper and the pilot being unable to control the resulting instability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_roll#Accidents

> I'm sure the families of the victims will take great comfort knowing that their loved ones died efficiently.

We should get rid of jet airliners entirely. The whole point of jetliners was to reduce operating costs. People have died because of many flaws in jetliners. Should have just stuck to the DC-3.

>The mass media also omits the reason for the MAX. The new engines gave it 15% less fuel burn. This is massive cost savings (and less pollution, too.)

Sure they did. It's all over the reporting. Just from a cursory search:

>Boeing gave the Max aircraft larger engines for greater fuel efficiency"[1]

>Consequently, improving fuel efficiency has emerged as one of the major bases of competition between airline manufacturers.[2]

>Airbus announced the A320neo, a more fuel-efficient version of the A320...Boeing had to choose between short-term gain and long-term pain. The simpler option was to refurbish the 737NG with a bigger, more fuel efficient engine.[3]

>Mistakes began nearly a decade ago when Boeing was caught flat-footed after its archrival Airbus announced a new fuel-efficient plane that threatened the company’s core business. It rushed the competing 737 Max to market as quickly as possible.[4]

>That threatened to change in 2010 when Airbus introduced a version of the 320 called the Neo (for “new engine option”) that offered large improvements in fuel efficiency, range and payload. The following year, American Airlines warned that it might abandon Boeing and buy hundreds of the new Airbus models. Boeing responded with a rush program to re-engineer the 737[5]

The real issue was leadership strategy and poor process control.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/despite-similarit...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2019/4/5/18296646/boeing-737-max-mcas-so...

[3] https://dhruvmark.medium.com/lessons-in-product-management-f...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-c...

Yes, the cutoff would have worked had it been activated quickly enough. The failure is insidious though.

a) When MCAS falsely activates, it only does so briefly. Then, assuming the problem is that the AoA sensor is broken, it activates again every five seconds. This is very confusing as the problem appears to have resolved and then it comes back.

b) During initial climb, other parts of the speed trim system are normally working and the trim wheel is turning and clacking with no input from the pilot. If not for the big pitch down, the extra MCAS inputs would not be otherwise noticeable.

c) The pilots had no way of knowing that MCAS even existed, because all references to it were deleted from the flight manual, so they had no way of being ready for such a set of circumstances.

d) After MCAS has activated a couple of times, if you then recognize a problem and flip the trim cutoff, you lose the manual electric trim as well, and the trim is so nose down that you don't have the physical strength to turn the trim wheels. If you turn the trim cutoff back on to try to recover control, MCAS will hit you again.

e) The procedure on previous versions of the 737 for dealing with a plane so out of trim that you couldn't turn the wheel was to pitch down even more to unload the stabilizer and then crank the trim wheel, but this procedure was also deleted from the flight manual, I believe as of the 737 Classic series.

Are you making the claim that MCAS made the plane behave similar to previously certified designs? Maybe that was the intent, but the execution seemed very much the opposite. That's largely the point: the software workarounds don't behave like a hardware-engineered mitigation.

The MCAS system is still on the 737MAX.

> the software workarounds don't behave like a hardware-engineered mitigation

You probably should never get on an Airbus, because they won't fly without computers.

I'm aware that MCAS is still in use. You may be conflating what I'm saying. I'm not making a claim that software is inherently dangerous. I'm making the claim that software as a workaround to sound risk mitigation is dangerous, especially when it's a workaround for a hardware problem because of the interaction effects. It's pretty clear from the hazard analysis and subsequent decisions that Boeing didn't understand and mitigate the MCAS risk effectively.

And, yes, I'm aware of the two philosophical camps regarding ultimate authority in command (pilot vs. software). That doesn't negate my point. Software, in either case, shouldn't be a workaround solely because it's easier to implement than a hardware change. Using it as an engineered mitigation is ok, but you have to actually implement the mitigations properly. For example, the hazard analysis listed MCAS as "critical". With that classification, it required redundant sensors, yet Boeing didn't make that the default and opted instead to sell it as an option. (Never mind the fact that the classification should have been higher, they didn't even follow through with their own processes based on the mis-classification).

> I'm making the claim that software as a workaround to sound risk mitigation is dangerous

Mechanical systems aren't inherently better or more resistant to hidden flaws. Remember it was a failure of the mechanical AOA sensor that initiated the MCAS failure.

> Software, in either case, shouldn't be a workaround solely because it's easier to implement than a hardware change.

Software runs our world now. Mechanical computers on airplanes were around for decades before software, and they were hardly free of fault and problems.

>Mechanical systems aren't inherently better or more resistant to hidden flaws.

Besides the fact that failure modes of mechanical systems are generally more understood than software, you're again conflating my point and having an entirely different conversation. This isn't about some "mechanical vs. software" dichotomy. I literally said there is nothing about software that makes it inherently dangerous and that using software as an engineered mitigation is fine if the mitigations are implemented properly.

What isn't fine is all the process and design gaps that occurred. Things like using software as a mitigation, not because it was the best alternative, but simply because it was cheaper/faster. Things like not following your own hazard analysis when it comes to mitigation. Or not characterizing the risk accurately or the failure modes because you didn't understand the system interactions.

>Remember it was a failure of the mechanical AOA sensor that initiated the MCAS failure.

This is exactly why, had they followed their own procedures and hazard analysis, redundant sensors would have been a default. A "critical" item (like MCAS in the hazard analysis) is supposed to get redundant input as a default.

My post isn't about mechanical vs. software. It's about the the allure of using software as a workaround that leads to process gaps and bad design philosophy. Like removing sensors because of a supplier/cost issue and assuming "we'll fix it with software" instead of doing the hard work to understand, characterize, and mitigate the risk effectively.

> Like removing sensors because of a supplier/cost issue

There were more than one AOA sensors. Not hooking the other one up to the MCAS system could hardly be a cost issue. Nor is it an issue of software vs hardware. It being implemented in software had nothing to do with MCAS's problems. The software was not buggy, nor was it a workaround. What was wrong was the specification of how the software should work.

I was bringing the context back to the article of this thread, not talking about Boeing there. Sorry if it lead to confusion.

You can note that I acknowledged there were multiple AOA sensors in other replies. Further, they were already “hooked up” to MCAS, but Boeing made this safety critical redundancy requirement an option within the software. That’s bad practice, full stop.

I still maintain that the software was 100% a mitigation to a hardware change and I think there’s plenty of other evidence supporting that. E.g., has they not updated their engines, would MCAS be installed? If the answer is no, then it was a mitigation to a risk introduced by a hardware change.

I’ll say it one more time just to be clear: I’m not saying the concept was bad. I’m saying their design philosophy and implementation was bad. They could have used software mitigation within the right process/philosophical framework just fine. What doesn’t work is using software as an “easy” risk mitigation strategy when you don’t understand the risk or the processes necessary to fully mitigate that risk. The problem arises because software is a seductive fix because it’s relatively easy and cheap on its surface, but if your design philosophy and processes are equipped to implement it effectively, that “easy” fix is rolling the dice.

> That’s bad practice, full stop.

No disagreement, there.

> it was a mitigation to a risk introduced by a hardware change

It wasn't really a risk. It was to make it behave the same.

Allow me to explain something. A jet airliner is full of hardware and software adjustments to the flying characteristics. For example, look at the wing. What do you think the flaps and slats are for? They are to completely change the shape of the wing, because a low speed wing is very very different from a high speed wing. There are also systems to prevent asymmetric flaps, as that would tear the wings off.

The very existence of the stab trim is to adjust the flying characteristics. The stab trim has an automatic travel limiter to constrain the travel as the speed increases because, you guessed it, full travel at high speed will rip the tail off.

The control columns are connected to a "feel computer" which pushes back on the stick to make the airplane feel in a consistent way from low speed to high speed. This feel computer can be mechanical or software. Pilots fly by the force feedback on the stick, not the travel of it. The idea is to make the airplane "feel" like a completely different airplane. Without the feel computer, they'd promptly rip the airplane apart.

There are plenty more of these. The MCAS concept is no different in any substantive way.

Your thesis that using software to run it as some unusual risk is simply dead wrong. What was wrong with the MCAS system was:

1. reliance on only one sensor

2. too much travel authority

3. it should have shut itself off if the pilot countermanded it

What was also wrong was:

a. Pilots did not use the stab trim cutoff switch like they were trained to

b. The EA pilots did not follow the Emergency Airworthiness Directive sent to them which described the two step process to counter MCAS runaway

There weren't any software bugs in MCAS. The software was implemented according to the specification. The specification for it was wrong, in points 1..3 above.

P.S. Mechanical/hydraulic computers have their own problems. Component wear, dirt, water getting in it and freezing, jamming, poor maintenance, temperature effects on their behavior, vibration affecting it, leaks, etc. Software does not have those problems. The rudder PCU valve on the 737 had a very weird hardover problem that took years to figure out. It turned out to be caused by thermal shock.

In various times in my past I've been a private pilot, airframe mechanic, flight-control-computer engineer, aerospace test & evaluation software quality engineer, and aerospace software safety manager. I've even worked with Boeing. So I am quite familiar with these concepts.

>It wasn't really a risk. It was to make it behave the same.

Hard disagree here. The fact that it did not behave the same and lead to mishaps shows there is a real risk. That risk could have been mitigated in various ways (e.g., engineering via hardware or software, administrative via training etc.) but they did not. You downplaying the risk as not credible is making the same mistake.

">There weren't any software bugs in MCAS. The software was implemented according to the specification.

I'm not claiming there were bugs. This seems to be a misattribution regarding how software fails. There are more failure modes than just "bugs". It can be built to spec but still wrong. This is the difference between verification and validation. Verification means "you built it right" (ie meets specs) while validation means "you built the right thing" (ie it does what we want). You need both and in this instance, there's a strong case they didn't "build the right thing" because their perspective was wrong.

>Your thesis that using software to run it as some unusual risk is simply dead wrong.

My thesis is that they didn't know how to effectively characterize the software risk because, as you point out, software risks are different than the risks of mechanical failure. Software doesn't wear-out or display time-variant hazard rates like mechanical systems. Rather, it incurs "interaction failures." The prevalence of these failures tends to grow exponentially as the number of systems that software touches increases. It's a network effect of using software to control and coordinate more and more processes and is distinct from buggy software failures. Which is why we need to shift our thinking away from the mechanical reliability paradigm when dealing with software risk. Nancy Leveson has some very accessible write-ups on this idea. There's nothing wrong with using software to mitigate risk, as long as you're actually characterizing that risk effectively. If I keep thinking about software reliability with the same hardware mentality you're displaying, I'll let all those risks fall through the cracks. They may have verified the software met specs, but I could also claim they didn't properly validate their software because you usually can't without understanding the larger systemic context in which it operates.

So what does that mean in the context of Boeing and, in a broader sense, Tesla? Boeing did not capture these interaction risks because they had an overly simplified idea of the risk and mitigations. They did not capture the total system interactions because they were myopically focused on the software/controls interface. They did not capture the software/sensor interface risk (even though their HA identified that risk and required redundant sensor input). They did not capture the software/human interface risk, which led to confusion in the cockpit. They thought it was a "simple fix". Tesla, likewise, is trying to mitigate one risk (supplier/cost risk) with software. TFA seems to implicate them in not appropriately characterizing the new risks they introduced with the new approach. I'm saying that is a result of a faulty design philosophy that downplays (or is ignorant of) those risks.

Neither will the Boeing 777 or 787!

The 757 was also engineered to behave the same way as the 767, to reduce costs in pilot training and improve safety.

The 757 has a stellar safety record.

It’s getting tiresome to say this, but you completely bypassed my point to talk about something different.

MCAS did not make the airframe operate the same in practice, especially from a human factors perspective. It confused pilots about how it was reacting. The plane acted very differently from previously certified designs and that was a major factor in the accidents.

This is just not true. What confused the pilots and caused the accidents was the MCAS was looking at only one faulty AOA sensor.

Sorry, but there are multiple reports that point to pilot confusion. What you're displaying is exactly what Boeing leadership showed: an oversimplification of the problem, leading to poor understanding of the risk and necessary mitigations.

MCAS had a built in delay; it wasn't a continuous command. It would push the nose down and periodically disengage and allow pilots to bring the nose back up. This type of intermittent feedback is difficult to resolve in real-time, especially for an untrained pilot under stress.

But to the larger point, what you're relating is actually bolstering my point. The design philosophy was poor; they didn't fully understand the interaction effects of the system (to include software, hardware, people, and the environment). In that simplified mental model, they thought software was an easy fix to their problem and they didn't follow through with the necessary risk mitigation. This includes having a redundant AOA sensor feed into MCAS (which their hazard analysis already required), characterizing MCAS properly as having the potential for causing a 'catastrophic' mishap, training for their pilots (which they didn't think was necessary because it was the 'same' airframe, despite different handling characteristics), and an appropriate understanding the human factors that govern its use.

If we erroneously simplify our mental model and claim it's "just software" and an "easy fix," we miss all of that.

They did the same with rain sensor a few years ago. Result: auto rain wipe is still in beta in 2023!

Lol… they are going all in on cameras so yes it’s going to be used in critical safety systems. No more LiDAR. Relying entirely on computer vision without sensor fusion is asinine imho.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/10/31/former...

> No more LiDAR.

Lidar is not in any cars. You're thinking about Radar, which they've added back with HW4. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-first-lo...

> Remember MCAS, where Boeing decided their solution to a hardware design problem was a software workaround?

The problem was the software wasn't dual path. There was nothing wrong with the concept.

Not the concept, the implementation. That's why I'm referring to it as a flaw in design philosophy. The did not follow through with the appropriate mitigations for using software in a safety-critical application.

> Their approach of 'promise the impossible, and then underdeliver' will hurt the brand, but probably less so than any other approach.

I have worked for several other automakers and they plan platform changes 3-7 years out. I know that's not Tesla's style, but that long term planning usually prevents these cases of under delivering what you promised. That's because the marketing department isn't promising anything until engineering has it working on a mule and manufacturing operations has the parts on order for production.

> With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.

I believe it was more that they couldn't get the sensors due to supply chain issues.

The idea that bog standard 'birds eye view' would require HW4 is the saddest thing I've heard today. How powerful is the computer that Nissan puts in a rogue to provide that view, as compared with HW4?

I'm guessing they mean more it's a limitation of where the cameras are placed rather than the processing power. HW4 slightly tweaks the camera positions and angles which I believe removes the current blindspots that make birds-eye impossible.

The processing power probably isn't the limitation. It's probably hardware, like the number of hardware ports for the cameras are limited. These aren't webcams stuck into a USB hub. If they're physically out of pins, then hardware development will be required, either for some hacky, relatively dangerous (you would be switching out primary cameras), multiplex solution, or the addition of a computer and the support/supply chain nightmare that entails.

If they can't source the older sensors why are the S and X still being manufactured with them?

They're not. March 2023 model X does not have sensors.

Ah recently then!

> With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.

Sorry but that's a large logical chasm you just casually leapt. How does bird's eye view magically determine the distance to a textureless wall when parallax fails to detect it?

Why do cars with birds eye view still come equipped with parking sensors if they are obviated?

Parking sensors are handy if you're looking to the side or back when reversing, since you can hear them without looking at the screen in front. I honestly don't know where I'm supposed to look when backing up sometimes — it feels irresponsible to just look forward at a camera display, but in most cases that shows more than looking all around would. Parking sensors are nice because you can hear them chirp no matter where you look.

>honestly don't know where I'm supposed to look when backing up sometimes

Even with the addition of backup cameras I still look all around and check blind spots as if I didn't have a camera. No backup camera I've used shows enough information to be confident enough otherwise.

Unless ya'll have some truly high end cars I don't see how anyone can confidently back up with just a camera and not fear hitting objects/children etc.

I never even thought about my habit until a friend who is very terrified of riding in cars told me they were made comfortable by how much I look around me while driving. Which just convinces me further that most people shouldn't be on the road.

> Unless ya'll have some truly high end cars I don't see how anyone can confidently back up with just a camera and not fear hitting objects/children etc.

If I look backward I wouldn't see a small child right behind my vehicle. The parking sensors and backup camera would, though. That's why I feel like it's weird to look backward instead of looking at the video feed from the wide-angle camera.

I don't mean that I look backwards the whole time. I mainly look at the camera, but at the same time I'm glancing around checking mirrors and looking out of the windows for hazards. I've watched some people just stare down into a camera and then be surprised when they nearly hit a truck that was coming down the parking lot not yet visible in the camera.

That's why many cars include also a radar that detects and alerts you of approaching traffic from the sides before it comes into view - both camera and the driver (the blind spots when reversing are large).

E.g. Mazda 3 has that - if it detects a vehicle or even a pedestrian approaching from the side while reversing, it starts beeping and showing orange chevrons on the camera screen to alert me.

Obviously, this doesn't remove the need to look around and not rely only the sensors and cameras. The tech may fail and the ultimate responsibility is with the driver.

Which is where the utility of backup cameras comes from. It's nearly impossible, at least impractical, to design a car that holds human beings with a rear view that could provide the same field of view as a camera. Even if the back of the car was a giant pane of glass just having a trunk or back seat will occult the driver's rear view such they could miss a curb, pet, or small child. Even a shitty camera will give a better view than most cars' actual rear view from the driver's seat. They're even more useful when you consider they better enable shorter or taller drivers that don't have the ideal view out the back of the car.

I check blind spots I know my camera has but then use the camera to actually back up because it's got a far better view from the back of my car than I do from the front seat.

No, but you might see a child walking or running in from the side

My camera has a very wide angle, and is 10 feet behind where I am (and can see around bushes/cars that I can't). There are definitely times that I can see things the camera can't see, but I feel like the balance is that the camera can see more.

I mean, do both? Surely as a driver we should be using all the information we can get to drive safely. When I'm reversing I'll look around, get in position to reverse, and alternate between side mirrors, looking around, and the reversing cam.

Might be a side effect of how we're taught in the UK, but we were always told we should keep glancing in our mirrors whilst driving so it seems natural to me at least.

Turning my head quickly to pivot between the video screen and the back (and the back left) makes me feel like I'm being less safe than if I just looked straight at the video or possibly straight backward.

In most cases, I do an initial sweep, then use my camera. If I'm backing from between two vehicles, I check the camera, then turn around and keep an eye for anyone coming from either side. The fisheye on the backup camera helps a lot, but it's not going to show the idiot going 20 mph through the parking lot until it's too late.

I nearly backed into a tree that managed to slip into the blind spot between stitched-together camera feeds on a rented BMW with 360-degree camera. I was only saved by the curb stopping me inches before impact with the tree.

tl;dr, look around in real life, too. I'm not sure why the parking sensors didn't notice the tree or the curb, to be honest.

A friend of mine was backing in to an unfamiliar parking garage and was watching the screen and all of a sudden we hear a scrape. There was an air duct over hanging the car and we hit it. The camera didn't think to show the roof. Luckily for us we hit the duct before hitting the sprinkler. That would have been a disaster.

Was just about to post this, glad someone else did.

I have a car with both (birds eye view and parking sensors), and they are absolutely complimentary to each other, and I use them for different reasons. E.g. for squeezing through my garage door (I only have about 1.5 inch of clearance on each side) I like the birds eye view, but then when I pull up to the front of the garage I use the sensor because I know exactly how many inches from the front my car should be so that I can both walk around the front and the back if I need to unload stuff from the trunk.

How do you open the car door inside the garage?!

At a guess, the garage is wider than its door.

Correct.

They exit via the sunroof.

By opening the door to the living room, opening the car door in the free space that has been cleared by opening the living room door. easy peasy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-MaC9fFtz0

edit : English subtitles : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4jeN2QO1Gs

I love how at the end he puts two chairs in front of the door, as if otherwise it would be too easy

lol, never saw that before, the last step of pushing the car to close its door is just a beauty

It's a parking sensor. How many parking garages are textureless walls? Borrowing phrasing from the grandparent: "promise the impossible" may indeed be bad marketing, but "demand the needless and infeasible" is at least as much a problem here. Everything, everything about Tesla has to be some kind of existential argument about how This One Thing Proves Everything I Hate. And.. it's still just a parking sensor.

Meh. I have the sonar equipment in my car and it works nicely, and I'd view its removal as a mild loss. But it wouldn't have changed the purchase decision. It's a technical mistake, and at the margins will probably hurt them in sales.

But there's nothing here to justify the size of the thread we're spending on it. It's a parking sensor.

"parallax fails to detect it"

AFAIK, pretty much none of the driverless systems are using parallax. The reason why not is that parallax only gives good depth information at most up to about 10 feet. Disparity mapping is pretty limited in real life.

Instead they get depth from video.

I'd imagine in almost every situation the car would cast a shadow to that featureless wall. Although Tesla might not have a camera placed to a right spot to actually see that shadow...

> Instead they get depth from video.

Do you have a source for that? DfM is pretty much always a worse option than multi-camera reconstruction AFAIK.

> almost every situation the car would cast a shadow to that featureless wall.

I think "almost every situation" a pretty low bar for automotive safety.

I don't know too much about what people do in the automotive world, but in robotics it's pretty common to have an IR pattern projector if you really need depth on featureless surfaces.

While it does work for human eyes somehow, it is quite difficult in computer vision. It could give you precise information but you need to match two almost identical pictures via stereoscopy and that with a significant framerate and resolution. The advantage might be that you can have better conditions that a human skull provides, but the needed calculation power is quite significant.

I think this can only ever be reliable with a projection. A pulsed line laser or something that is synced with the camera. Then again, a simple ultrasound sensor might do a better job.

Otherwise the system might work, but is much more unstable in non-optimal conditions. Robustness is a pretty important feature for driverless systems. That said, stereoscopy would at least be better than only one camera.

What it comes down to is a strong, dogmatic belief at Tesla that vision will solve all problems. It's not aligned with reality unfortunately

A strong dogmatic vision that seems to come entirely from a desire for cost reduction rather than a concern for safety or functionality.

The set of parking sensors costs what? 100 USD? On a car that sells for upwards of $30-40k?

That's a pretty ridiculous penny pinching.

Almost every component of your car is the result of absolutely insane cost cutting and overworked suppliers. Car companies are notorious for putting enormous pressure on subcontractors to reduce prices at all costs.

Worth noting there's other savings associated with reducing complexity; operational, supply, QA, etc. But yeah a car that's worth that much I think should certainly have them.

I’d pay extra if they remove FM too. My previous car always blasted the radio when started. The radio is either white noise or people talking or music that isn’t mine… not sure which is worse.

Throwback to a past where you cloud remove the audio player and replace it with one you bought, all for not that expensive.

Modern cars, like all tech, are losing customizability and repairability in favor of slick designs and vendor control. I just hope the car-equivalent of tower PCs never fully go away.

Yes in those days car stereos were frequently stolen. The entertainment system is so integrated these days you'd have to steal the entire car.

$100 here, $100 there, after a while you're talking about real money!

I guess it helps explain why Tesla's margins per car are so huge.

Munro & Associates estimates the cost of the sensor plus installation to be $8 so $96 across the car, and the rest of the cost for the wiring totals to $114[0] all including cost to install them.

From sales alone, ie. 420k a quarter or 1.6 million a year[1], they save $180M in a year and Munro estimates $100k/yr savings in removing them from their inventory.

0: https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE?t=276

1: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...

> That's a pretty ridiculous penny pinching.

Ford is eliminating AM radio from its entire line (except where contractually required), saving, I suppose, less than $10/vehicle. They’d rather deal with the bad press to save a few bucks from their BOM.

This may be marketing lies, but I thought that was due to AM radio not working well on electric vehicles [0].

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/am-radio-c...

If you can’t use an AM radio in an electric vehicle your vehicle is violating FCC regulations.

I don't think the FCC cares about interference unless it affects other people.

Look at TVs and computer monitors for example. I've got a Samsung SyncMaster T240 monitor that blasts out annoying noise all across the 2m ham band (and nearby police and fire bands). I've got to turn it off if I want to usefully scan those bands with a radio that is within a meter of the monitor.

Yet it passed FCC certification. Yes, it is noisy, but even if I were in a small apartment it would not be noisy enough to interfere with someone in another apartment. It just is a problem near the monitor.

Not all TVs and monitors are noisy. When playing with an RTL-SDR on my 2017 iMac I've never found any significant noise coming from the iMac for example.

Unfortunately this is something that reviewers don't seem to ever test.

Almost every EV now comes without an AM radio because of the interference. The original tesla model S had an am radio, but now they dropped them. It's apparently not a requirement any more. They must have some some special work to somehow eliminate the interference of the electric drivetrain.

Mercedes and BMW couldn't get away with it because they sell on premium and German engineering.

Well the whole VW cheating disaster was prompted by trying to save a few $ in parts IIRC

Nah, that was much more defensible from a penny pinching standpoint since they would’ve had to reengineer their vehicles for larger DEF tanks, would’ve had to represent lower fleet mileage, etc.

You may have been remembering the GM ignition crisis which was exactly that — engineering team shipped inadequate springs at a potential cost savings of pennies per vehicle that allows the cars to turn off while moving.

On a podcast (Lex Fidman I think), the former head of the AI group seemed to say that Tesla would rather focus all of its resources on vision instead of using some resources on researching, specifying, ordering and calibrating sensors.

Humans have top-notch visual/spatial reasoning systems and we still bang our shins and elbows on stuff. We shouldn't be removing proximity sensors from cars, we should be installing them on people!

To that point, humans have a whole proprioception system (as well as the direct sense of touch) and auditory system to help feed that spatial reasoning system.

> With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.

Is OP saying that the proximity beeping would be done by the cameras (some sort of computational videography like an iPhone?) rather than the old sensor type or that the only answer would be visual? If the latter, that’s crazy - my truck has amazing cameras but if I am trying to back up with the sun low in the sky behind me, or the camera covered in dirt or snow, it is useless.

Yes, my EV6 has both, and they are just 2 different useful features.

Theoretically they would not be needed, but I agree that the mechanism of some ultrasound sensors is much more reliable. Given that they are as cheap as they are, I don't know why a car would leave them out in the first place given the margins of modern cars.

In a nutshell, this whole process is the reason two Tesla owners are without heads. I realize that has nothing to do with the parking sensors, but the real problem is the engineering process.

Tesla is single handedly responsible for setting the robotics industry back decades (pre 2007) with their capricious and glib attitude toward autonomous safety. Back then, its was completely unheard of for people to be testing 2-ton autonomous hardware in public on consumers. Enter Tesla and Elon Musk, and suddenly they are responsible for a general attitude that it's okay to just put these things into your community without any warnings, or laws, or safety protocols, or apparently even sensors.

Capitalists gonna capitalist, and unless laws or regulations prevent Tesla from testing their software in the public, they're going to march forward.

As for the accidents/deaths, responsibility needs to be shared between the owners as well as Tesla's marketing. Naming a feature "full self driving" when it's only level 2 autonomy is disingenuous at best. This may be a large part of the reason that people trust the system more than they should (fall asleep, stop paying attention, etc.)

I place blame first on Musk and the executives, but then on the engineers, and third on marketing. Because the engineers know, or should have known, better. They were educated to know better. I know some of those people and they are smart people. I know for a fact they know better. And yet two heads are without bodies.

They knew what the fix was after the first decapitation. Real sensors. Don't test on public roads. Don't test on consumers. That they didn't quit en masse after that is on them. That they went on to continue building and shipping the car without fixing the problem, leading to a second decapitation... there are no words. Malpractice doesn't cover it.

It's as if you were an engineer for a bridge which resulted in a collapse that caused loss of life due to the poor bridge design. If you go on to make that same bridge again... that's on you.

> With birds eye view, parking sensors aren't really needed anymore, so they didn't place an order for new sensors.

I can see someone at Tesla making this determination if they never actually drove a competitor vehicle that has birds eye view and parking sensors.

So in other words an amature failure in leadership. How many other things did they fail to consider or plan for?

The common one is the lack of a rain sensor for the automatic wipers. It relies on image recognition, and it’s very bad. They could perhaps train the model a bit better, to perhaps not start the wipers at full speed when it’s a blue sky with a dry road. But the cameras are on top of the windshield, and it can’t easily water at the bottom.

Removing the wiper stalk. That decision killed one German driver who was busy fiddling in the menues to figure out how to get the wipers to max when hit by heavy sudden rain (and yeah their sensors don't work well, because they saved money by removing the industry standard IR sensor for rain and tried to rely on their front-facing camera).

They have changed it now so if you push the button to do a single manual wiper stroke, the wiper speed icons pop up on the left side on the screen so you can then proceed to set them to max, but it's still a ridiculous decision that is dangerous. I guess it doesn't rain in California so nobody in charge bothered :)

It's happened many times driving that I have for example overtaken a trailer that splashed an infinite amount of water on me while passing, and I had to hit the max-wiper just to see anything. A delay of a second there could mean a crash..

> They have changed it now so if you push the button to do a single manual wiper stroke, the wiper speed icons pop up on the left side on the screen so you can then proceed to set them to max,

When did this event happen? Since very early on in the Plaid I remember this popup wiper selection happening: https://youtu.be/gHTdsOImKmo

IIRC around the same time. Just tested it and scrolling doesn't work on the model 3, you still have to use the touch screen.

>the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors

That's the opposite of taking the fall. That's shifting the blame to the software department.

This is not accurate. Most cars that have 360/top down views still have parking sensors. Tesla has just been steadily removing features to increase profit margins.

I fail to see what works be inaccurate. That other car manufacturers are conservative has no bearing on it, it’s easily believable that Tesla would want a 360 view, and given their all in approach on vision would assume they would get rid of the seed for parking sensors (see: LiDAR). It’s also easily believable that they would go with that ahead of anything being ready because Tesla hubris and would end up where they got.

This still doesn't add up. The new HW4 Model 3 "highland" doesn't have more cameras. Notably there is a no front bumper camera. It also have one LESS camera in the windshield. The HW4 board DOES have space for more cameras though.

Regardless of their desire, it is very easy for the cameras on a Tesla in the rain to have water in front of the lens. This makes it very hard to see anything from the camera.

I dread how software trained on cameras working under normal conditions will interpret the resulting mess of an image.

"Given the original screwup (not having a backup plan for when this big new feature was delayed by a year), I think they made the best of a bad situation."

Yes, by greed and arrogance they shot themselves in the foot. But the day after that happened, they had no more opportunities for greed so they dealt with things as well as they could and you can't criticize them for that, now can you?

The scenario of "we'll go from the old thing to the new thing, burn our bridges to the old thing and not have the thing ready" these days in a multitude of industries and isn't something that should be taken as OK by those who caught by it.

I have both birds eye and ultrasound sensors all round and I’d give up the Birds Eye first easily. And there is no way Tesla will completely replace the ultrasound distance sensing with software. Ultrasound sensors are cheap compared to making multiple cameras equally reliable for depth sensing which I imagine must require deicing and wash nozzles to work well. I need to rub my finger over the lenses of my side and rear cameras every day with rain or snow (So daily for at least half the year).

Who is the CEO, again? What fall did they take? Must’ve been big to avoid naming them.

> the CEO takes the fall, and announces that this was the plan all along. Software would replace the sensors.

the CEO doesn't "take the fall", he __has__ the fall. He's the one deciding to gamble people safety and to hand to his engineers yet another unnecessary hot potato for sake of profit and share holders dividends.

I have a 2023 Model Y without radar sensors and got the parking assist update recently. It's by far one of the most annoying updates I got. Sitting in traffic, it would trigger itself thinking that I'm trying to park. Parking in the garage is now even more annoying with the cameras not being able to accurately figure out how much distance they have instead of reality. I miss the radar sensors. They need to bring them back. My wife's seven year old Infiniti is doing a better job at helping me back into a parking spot than the Tesla does. Insanity.

Tesla seems to be quickly burning its reputation with consumers. Elon seems very good at doing things, but not great at maintaining it. Recently when Karpathy left Tesla and is now at OpenAI, IMO that is good sign that this is no Steve Jobs 2.0, capable of maintaining one the best teams in the world at Apple.

Hell at this point, if you look at mature company CEO vs startup, Tim Cook seems better than Elon. Honestly Elon's companies are all suffering from what appears to be his own mismanagement.

For all I can tell, Elon has steadily continued his descent into mental illness. Or at least that's the character he plays on social media. The best thing that could happen to Tesla at this point is for him to 100% hand over control to someone like Gwynne Shotwell.

More Howard Hughes than Jobs or Gates?

Definitely a bit of Howard Hughes, no? Must’ve been similarly alarming at the time to his close ones, but now we see it happen in public.

I recommend you disable the chime

Didn't even know that was possible! You've saved me a lot of stress from that damn sound.

Happy to help

I also have a 2023 Model Y. I was so surprised when I bought it that it had no parking sensors. I was desperate for the update. I just received the update and now I would be happier without it. It's just constant beeping to the point where I can't concentrate on actually parking. Most days it's parallel parking on small European streets so trying to do this without sensors is very difficult. I think I might just go back to "parking by touch".

I'm pretty close to just disabling the chime altogether. It's terribly inaccurate, and tries to warn me of all the things I'm about to hit even though I'm clearly not. Just watching the wavy lines all around the car as they shift and move when the car is stationary... well, it doesn't inspire much confidence in the technology.

Parking in my own garage, the FSD preview graphics hallucinates all sorts of other vehicles, semi trucks, humans, you name it.

> I miss the radar sensors.

They're USS, radar was just for measuring the distance from the car in front of you in traffic-aware cruise control.

I appreciate Telsa's ambition to push technology forward but they shouldn't experiment with customers in real time like this. You want to replace parking sensors with vision, go right ahead, prove it in the lab first, don't remove the parking sensors and just assume that the engineers will figure it out.

Seeing this as "pushing technology forward" is a pretty generous interpretation. It reeks of cost cutting.

Agreed. I suspect there were parts shortages, and Elon was like, "The best part is no part, take it out of the design and do it with cameras". Same story with radar.

Now both radar and sonar are coming back because it's far better to have the sensor data, even if you have to wade through it, than to not have it, particularly in adverse conditions.

Karpathy gave a talk about radar - they were getting worse results with radar than without (according to him).

Mostly because they would get false readings from radar shooting under the car and stuff like that - vision alone was more accurate.

If you're talking about his appearance on Lex's podcast, he didn't say this. He said that the additional accuracy wasn't worth it. Which to me sounds like it was more accurate, but they didn't want to deal with the additional cost and complexity and thought that vision only would be good enough. But the link we're commenting on, along with the ongoing complaints about FSD, seem to indicate that the real world results haven't proven that theory out.

He is talking about the long technical talk at CVPR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc

For example look at this section: https://youtu.be/g6bOwQdCJrc?t=1370

Also if you look into it you will find Google's self-driving car project ran into similar issues. They upgraded the radar in response to the issues rather than removing it, but there are actual issues.

Vision only was better than radar plus vision in their stack. For real world situations that frequently come up in driving radar wasn't worth it. The theoretical accuracy of the sensor fusion didn't happen in practice because in practice you needed to have vision tell you when sensor fusion wasn't going to be accurate. It isn't naive sensor fusion as in toy math models of sensor fusion. So when there was a disagreement you needed to go with vision. Yet vision was already able to predict both the failure of and the actual result of radar. In theory, you could just have done the more complicated sensor fusion. In practice, the relative advantage of improving other parts of the vision stack far exceeded improving the sensor fusion. Over time one would expect the relative advantage to change as other improvements were made such that this was no longer true. That doesn't mean the time at the decision wasn't correct, it just means people who evaluate it with future changes already in place are suffering from hindsight bias/committing an anachronistic fallacy.

Yep - this is the one I was talking about, thanks for linking!

Yeah, Google actually made the right call. Thinking that Tesla made a stupid and dangerous call isn't "hindsight bias", their vision-only approach has always been inferior and reckless.

It is hindsight bias.

You are explaining the observed safety record of Tesla being on top for safety by appealing to them being inferior and reckless. You are explaining Tesla causing a greater reduction in accident death than Waymo by them being more inferior and reckless than Waymo.

You are not explaining the evidence with your theory.

Your theory doesn't even reflect reality. Google invested in Tesla and in Waymo. Google did both things. Google didn't make the right call. They made both calls.

The practical impact of the change you call stupid and reckless was that the car stopped slamming its brakes when going under underpasses. So when it comes down to it what you are claiming is that it is stupid and reckless to decide not to slam on the brakes.

Look - I get it. I too thought radar sensor fusion would improve the results. Guess who else thought this? The people you consider stupid and reckless thought this. Do you know why they changed their mind? According to you, because they are stupid and reckless.

I can't stress this enough: you are telling yourself inaccurate stories about what happened. If you just /look/ at the /measured impact/ instead of /wrongly guessing what Karpathy thought/ and /wrongly guessing what Karpathy has said/ and /wrongly guessing what other people were referencing when they talked about what Karpathy said/ then you would realize this.

Haha, it’s funny that you circled back a day later to leave another comment lambasting me.

It’s so naive to just take Tesla’s word for all of this, and to believe that they took this approach because they decided it was the safest and most effective. Meanwhile, other credible teams out there have not gone with vision-only, and as a result their systems aren’t a pile of dangerous dogshit that are killing customers. But Tesla is incredibly arrogant and reckless, and they just keep doubling down.

Vision-only is the wrong choice, it won’t get us to L4, and that should have been pretty easy to see from the start.

Here is my point through the filter of ChatGPT asked to state it nicely. I'm sorry if it comes off as a rude.

If you propose a theory that suggests overconfident individuals are taking reckless actions, compromising safety, it's crucial to treat that theory as a hypothesis and extrapolate conjectures based on it. For instance, if your theory revolves around adopting vision-only technology leading to increased accidents, this should be reflected in the accident rates per mile. However, current data indicates a decrease in accidents per mile, which, while not conclusively disproving your theory, serves as strong evidence against it.

Dismissing such reasoning by claiming naivety on the part of Tesla supporters is unconvincing. As a Tesla owner, I have experienced the car's safety features firsthand. For example, I have noticed the vehicle slows down when passing under an underpass, and this improved after the update, making it safer.

Furthermore, it's essential to consider the full range of evidence available, not just a specific instance. One such piece of evidence is Karpathy's CVPR talk, which demonstrates accuracy improvements through video evidence. It's challenging for your argument when you accept Karpathy's comments only when they align with your intuition but dismiss them when they contradict it, especially when the latter is supported by video and metrics and the former alignment with intuition was a misunderstanding of Karpathy on your part.

Additionally, you're overlooking evidence from sources not affiliated with Tesla. For instance, safety assessments by NHTSA and regulatory agencies in other countries consistently rank Tesla as one of the safest cars. While the electric design contributes to this, it remains an issue for your argument, as Tesla's top safety rankings are confirmed by multiple independent bodies. When theorizing about reckless overconfidence, receiving accolades for safety doesn't support the idea that these individuals are taking actions that endanger others.

Later, Musk came out and said that they were using cheap radar sensors, and that higher-quality radar sensors would likely have been better than vision alone.

But radar only does anything for detecting cars in front of you, so the only deficiency by removing it is using vision to perform that distance-keeping when using traffic-aware cruise control, which is not a pain point in my 2022 M3LR even in the rain.

But it used to be better: it was able to follow closer to the car in front--which is really important when you are in stop-and-go 3mph traffic on the highway--and it was supposedly able to see under the car in front of you (reflecting off the highway) to track the car ahead of them <- a friend of mine who's entire family is super into Tesla has all cars with the radar sensors, and when I was driving her around she was commenting about how many dumb decisions the newer Model 3 I have been renting was making, seemingly because of this. She was not happy about it when she heard Tesla started deactivating radar in old cars.

But yeah: the feature minimally seems to work well enough--...even surprisingly well!--given the lack of having the sensors that Tesla previously swore were amazing, and so in some sense that particular cost cutting measure was a success. I was even thinking of buying one to own... but then they removed the parking sensors, and frankly that feature only barely works WITH the sensors--I drive a ton of random cars as I am always renting stuff, and the Tesla's parking radius feature is a cool UX but has tons of slop and has massively high latency... it is frankly just super dumb--and I cancelled my order when it finally arrived a week after it was for sure I wouldn't have the sensors.

Regardless, though, even if you feel it works perfectly, radar was another situation of just hastily scrapping stuff and working on it in the field, as they removed the sensor before they had the software which was tolerable, and then they just kept promising people it was going to get better as they frantically tried to turn their marketing into reality. Over time it got better and after a long time it finally started to work at higher speeds, but for a long time it had a cap lower than the in-practice speed of even my nearby highways here in the United States, and still hasn't managed to regain all of the functionality of the prior design. Can you imagine Apple removing a sensor in a new iPhone without already having the software to replace it, and then just promising new customers they'll figure it out in the hope it doesn't affect sales?

> Now both radar and sonar are coming back because it's far better to have the sensor data, even if you have to wade through it, than to not have it, particularly in adverse conditions.

This is something that every roboticist has known for 60+ years. It's just galling to me that two people had to lose their heads because new born Tesla Inc. and the know-nothing manchild running it, felt they had the right (due to the size of their wallets, not their knowledge or experience) to overrule people who knew better. And people call this "pushing technology forward".

Agreed. Actually pushing technology forward would involve replacing parking sensors with two additional cameras to cover the blind-spot, then using vision to exceed what parking sensors could do.

It isn't simply to remove parking sensors, have areas of the vehicle with blind spots, then hack the problem by trying to "guess" what in happening in those locations.

It has been suggested this removal saved Tesla less than $150/car. That's crazy for a $40K+ vehicle. There's nothing to defend here, it makes their vehicles objectively worse.

FWIW, while I am in the camp if people who think this was a dumb move and who in fact cancelled my buying a Tesla over it at the last possible moment I could still walk away from the car, I had thought Tesla wasn't just running into cost issues: they also were also quickly reacting to the semiconductor shortage and even had tons of cars sitting around missing just a few parts as they frantically tried to ship, and so maybe dropping this part wasn't as much "cutting costs" as "cutting dependencies".

  It has been suggested this removal saved Tesla less than $150/car.

Far be it for me to defend lord elno, but $150 is a pretty hefty amount in automotive circles. Car manufacturers (especially the Big 3) do all sorts of shit to save literal pennies on unit cost. The idea is that their cars are sold in such high volume they're saving a ton of money. Of course it's myopic since that doesn't account for customers' willingness to pay a bit more here and there for a higher quality product.

Tesla is way behind everyone on computer vision. They have not "pushed the technology forward" at any time in any respect.

Having tested a modern Tesla car a few weeks ago, I was mostly impressed by how bad the vision algorithm was at understanding the roads. There were plenty of entirely fixed curbs, intersections, lane lines, etc that it could not handle correctly, and this was on a clear, dry day with excellent visibility.

They’ve certainly pushed the willingness to use so-so technology forward, but I was really not impressed by the underlying technology.

The odd thing is that these type of errors really ought to be correctable by training with a small fleet of humans annotating data. AI is very, very good at getting examples from the training set right, and fixed roads a few tens of miles from the old headquarters ought to be in or at least very similar to the training data.

Cost cutting is a good thing if it makes things cheaper and more accessible. Yes, I know that in the short term Tesla will see expanded margins but longer term this will make things cheaper.

All other things equal, sure, but this isn't just cheaper and more accessible; it's cheaper and more accessible and worse.

Most of the savings from cost cuts go back to the company. The buyer in this case gets a highly degraded experience with negligible savings.

I don't really see how putting a bunch of Californian developers on the task to write software to solve a problem that $114/car (according to an estimate) already solved could be considered cutting costs.

They've already spent 6 months on 1 out of 5 features they lost by getting rid of their sensors.

This is the same company that continues to waste countless hours of development time trying to get a camera-based solution to an IR rain sensor that costs about 5 bucks. I think there is a strong ideological component, not just cost cutting.

The biggest Wall Street "bull case" for Tesla these days is around the gross margin on their cars. Tesla has always been a little bit of an accounting project (around subsidies, etc.), and this sounds like the kind of thing that a company with a keen awareness of their stock price and a lot of comfort with accounting sleight-of-hand would do. The accountants capitalize a huge R&D loss, which fits with the company being "innovative," and in return the gross margin of the car is higher.

Especially when the software-based solution very likely will fail in weather that is very unusual in California but relatively common elsewhere.

How much do these sensors even cost?

My understanding is not much.

It's amazing what Tesla can get away with and keep this reputation of being the best company to ever grace the surface of the Earth.

about $2 each

They have blatantly shown a pretty large disregard for consumer safety multiple times, this really isn't surprising. Not using lidar and releasing "self-driving" modes which routinely caused accidents both come to mind. Telsa is basically done now that real players have entered the EV market, you can kinda see it with the upper managements strange sudden shift to social media operation

> Telsa is basically done now

Its been a long time since the other players entered the market and they still have a horrible state with their charging networks. There are many non Teslas I would like to buy but none are viable options unless its a car that will stay in town only.

I know electrify America is "ok", I've used it, multiple places with success, though always at least some stalls are broken, in weird ways, and its less pleasant to use even if it works.

Fortunately US isn't the only country in the world - elsewhere Tesla is failing to take hold, it's just way too expensive for what it is. No idea why you'd buy a Model 3 over a Skoda Enyaq for instance.

Are you sure about that? https://www.torquenews.com/15475/europe-embraces-tesla-model...

"if this trend continues, the Model Y could easily secure a place in the top 10 best-selling cars in Europe by the end of the year"

Where have you see FSD routinely causing accidents?

Full Self Driving has arguably been regressing as they try to do everything with just a few cameras as well.

Here's what self proclaimed Tesla fanboys discovered when they tried the newest FSD beta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ND2ibwue_E

You will often see people saying that they've put thousands of miles on their Tesla without incident, but pretty much inevitably when you dig into it you will discover that those were all highway miles where it's little more than spiffy cruise control with basic lanekeeping.

There is inescapable fact that the AI at its current state can't reason and it can only deal with problems it had been trained on.

Which means that on the road, where _anything_ can happen, there is a ton of blind spots where the AI rather than taking a reasonable decision, would hallucinate one, that could turn out to be disastrous.

The current solution is to train for every possible scenario and hope for the best, but I don't think that should cut it when the human lives are at stake.

You’re talking out your butt. That’s not how these cars make decisions. It’s not AI in the deep/learning neural nets sense making decisions.

Such an eloquent reply, well done.

ChatGPT:

Tesla's Autopilot system uses a variety of machine learning algorithms to enable its autonomous driving capabilities. Here are a few examples:

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): These are commonly used in computer vision applications and are particularly useful for object recognition. In the context of Tesla's Autopilot system, CNNs are used to identify and track objects on the road, such as other vehicles, pedestrians, and road signs.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): These are commonly used in natural language processing and sequential data analysis. In the context of Tesla's Autopilot system, RNNs are used to predict the behavior of other vehicles on the road and to make decisions about how the Tesla vehicle should respond.

Decision Trees: These are commonly used in classification and regression tasks. In the context of Tesla's Autopilot system, decision trees are used to make decisions about the behavior of the Tesla vehicle based on its sensors and other inputs.

Reinforcement Learning: This is a type of machine learning that involves an agent (in this case, the Tesla vehicle) learning to make decisions based on feedback from its environment. In the context of Tesla's Autopilot system, reinforcement learning is used to teach the car how to navigate complex driving scenarios, such as merging onto a busy highway or navigating a crowded intersection.

Overall, Tesla's Autopilot system uses a combination of these and other machine learning algorithms to enable its autonomous driving capabilities, with the goal of providing a safer and more efficient driving experience.

> Full Self Driving has arguably been regressing as they try to do everything with just a few cameras as well.

FSD has been steadily improving. You can see it well in AI DRIVR's uncut videos.[1]. I'm not saying it's great or that one doesn't need to be vigilant while using it, but it used to be much worse.

BTW, v11 is the first version that uses the actual FSD stack on highways, before that it handed over to enhanced autopilot.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpTGy2SKURM

The latest release v11 is a step change improvement. I use it daily.

You still can't use cruise control on a tesla safely because they refuse to put in a normal cruise control option and their traffic aware one still slams the brakes inappropriate at intermittent times. And careful! If you are about to tell me YOUR Tesla cruise control works fine, it is just a matter of time before it doesn't. We have all been there.

auto wipers are still also wonky because the ambition is to do it with vision but they haven't figured that out yet either.

I love the Autosteer. I just did a cross country trip with it. I did get 2 or 3 of those brake slamming moments though (they keep it...interesting?).

Auto wipers aren't there yet. I agree with you.

Also, often when I would say "Wipers off", it would try to navigate to "Microsoft". The voice recognition is not quite ChatGPT smart.

I rest my foot on the accelerator pedal so that I can react quickly when using AP. "Interesting" translates to "my wife gets irritated when I engage AP" because the occasional phantom braking destroys any sort of confidence she has in the car.

> Auto wipers aren't there yet.

They are better than my first Model 3 in 2019. But not that much better, and it is 2023. Auto wipers will work on a Tesla as soon as they start using the ubiquitous $5 IR sensor everyone else has been using for the last few decades, and not a moment sooner.

> The voice recognition is

Incredibly shitty, that's what it is. Let's just admit that. It gets used as an excuse for all the missing controls, but it's pretty awful.

They should just offer a retrofit stalk that has proper wiper controls on it. On most other mainstream manufacturers that would be easy, the stalk is just a module that hooks into the CAN bus and is replaceable with two screws.

ChatGPT is not a speech dictation engine.

> I did get 2 or 3 of those brake slamming moments though (they keep it...interesting?).

Not a word you want to describe your car trip?

The voice recognition is bottom of the barrel. It makes Siri seem incredible. I've more or less given up on being able to reply to a text or make a call by voice command.

I don't understand how even one of those brake slamming moments isn't sufficient to stop using that feature forever.

I am extra circumspect when driving around Teslas as a result of this seemingly common and extremely disconcerting flaw.

>I did get 2 or 3 of those brake slamming moments though (they keep it...interesting?).

This is a really interesting way to call something dangerous.

>I did get 2 or 3 of those brake slamming moments though (they keep it...interesting?).

Also keeping it nice and interesting for the unsuspecting people in the cars behind you.

Tesla, and the interesting fools who buy and drive them on public roads, can seemingly be relied upon to keep things interesting for everyone.

Fully self driving ludicrous mode beta, keeping things interesting, because interesting is what everyone wants on public roads... Thanks Elon!

> You want to replace parking sensors with vision, go right ahead, prove it in the lab first, don't remove the parking sensors and just assume that the engineers will figure it out.

That's what surprised me about this. Some of these tests were really obvious. Failing one or two edge cases is forgivable, but being this inaccurate so consistently says far more about the company and their priorities.

Clearly they are not QAing their products properly. This is a customer facing feature so it's easy for a reviewing to identify and test, but they're willing to cut costs on a safety feature like this then who knows what else they're doing to save costs that isn't so obvious.

I have a 2018 Tesla Model 3. It has been the absolute best car I've ever owned. But it will be my last and only Tesla.

A Model 3 built today has less features, costs more, and performs worse than my 2018 Model 3.

The Autopilot/FSD nonsense has soured me off the Tesla brand.

I will admit though, that the competition, even today is lacking compared to my 2018 Model 3, but I'm hoping Rivian pulls through and WV has got some nice stuff coming as well. I'm in no hurry though, I think my current EV can easily last another 5-10 years, so I'm optimistic.

Inflation is global, so you should also consider the fact that you bought it at the right time. The other companies you mentioned also have to fight with inflation, Tesla is not the only one.

As for me I tried a Model 3 once and it didn't feel as comfortable as my 15 year old BMW 3 with beige leather seats, and somehow I expect improved comfort over what I already have.

>A Model 3 built today has less features

I have a 2021 TM3 and I don't think it has.

- heatpump for one makes a major difference

- LFP battery is great (available only in SR+)

- powered lift trunk

- double pane front windows

- wireless charging trays (a simple thing, but very nice)

- USB-C ports (and the drive can be mounted in the locked glove box)

- Ryzen CPU

- matrix headlights (not sure if this is true in US)

- outer (pedestrian awareness) speaker

- magnetic sun visor clips

- depending on location, the build quality is also much better now

I'm surely forgetting/not aware about more changes.

And that's not counting the many improvements that came in software updates, which of course you now have as well, but they were not in your car when you bought it in 2018. E.g. sentry mode.

>A Model 3 built today has less features, costs more, and performs worse than my 2018 Model 3.

Don't you think this was typical of car manufacturers during the chip shortage? Higher prices but lacking simple features.

Most car manufacturers had to deal with chip and part shortages. The way many of them handled it was delivering a car without features and offering to add the feature back when it's in stock free of charge or gave discounts for not including the feature.

The way Tesla handled it was piss poor. Removing USS 6 months before they had a solution. Delivering a half-baked solution that is less trustworthy than not having it all. And it's par for the course. Smart Summon hasn't had an update since 2019 and is a joke. Auto park is useless for most cases. If Tesla had come out and said "Look, supply chain is fucked, we're shipping without these features, but we'll add them back in the future" I don't think many people would be pissed. But them trying to frame it as a positive and better alternative, when it clearly isn't, is just annoying at this point.

Man, what a coincidence. My neighbor across the street just bought a Tesla this weekend. Having just returned from driving Hyundai IONIQ 5s, I of course scurried over to check it out. He's thinking about returning it. Why? No parking sensors. Seriously, that's the reason he gave, unprompted from me. He seems otherwise happy with the car, but for this sole feature he might take it back.

IONIQ 5 has parking sensors, BTW. Yes, I pointed this out to my neighbor. :-)

Is the Tesla more difficult to park than other cars for some reason? I'm asking because I've never had parking sensors or that cool "bird's eye view" and thought I was fine.

That's not the point.

Parking sensors are pretty much standard in this price range, and have been for quite a while.

> Parking sensors are pretty much standard in this price range, and have been for quite a while

And all "smart phones" had keyboards for quite a while before suddenly they were just gone.

Just because a feature is standard in an industry, that is not reason alone to mean it should stay.

@OPs comment: Keyboard has not been replaced by nothing.

OP says he uses nothing.

------------------

@the topic: physical keyboard has not been replaced by some random character generator. The on-display keyboard does at least the same job as the physical one. This new camera thing not only does less, it does it much worse.

The use case of my neighbor is apparently backing into his garage. Though also mentioned something about sensing the garage door behind him (to make sure he pulled in far enough?). So I'm not exactly sure why it's important to him, but it's a big feature for him, at least.

As for parking, I'd let actual owners comment, but as I was sitting in the front seat, yeah, there's blind spots like a lot of modern cars, but not so much that sensors would be a requirement for me personally. Backup camera would be good enough for my purposes.

It's generally easier to back in since you have the side repeater cameras that automatically come up whenever you enter reverse, so if you are pulling to a garage, you have room if you can see the back of the garage (your only check after that is to ensure your mirrors don't hit the sides of the house next to the garage door opening).

It is a pretty wide car, and super chargers require you to back in. Visibility isn’t great out the windows or mirrors because you’re expected to use the cameras. The parking sensors covered the blind spots via the same screen you’re already looking at for the cameras and UI for it was really impressive. It was honestly one of the nicest things about the car.

How is he going to return it? IIRC Tesla got rid of the return policy some time during the pandemic.

Oh, yet another feature Tesla removed? :-) Yeah, I don't know anything about that process. I'll pass it on that he might want to check that policy (though a bit late now, I guess). Thanks for the heads-up.

In Europe, you have 14 days to return a good you ordered online. That includes a Tesla.

I'd be cautious of that statement, that's not true in some countries for car purchases or if you purchased on premise.

It's fun to see the IONIQ 5 on the road. The Model 3 design is getting rather old.

I'm hoping they create an IONIQ 5 option that lets you program animations on the LED taillight grid. Start with space invaders.

I've always wanted a car with a moving LED messageboard on the back, "STAY BACK!... FURTHER!!"

I watched the video, those graphics on the screen seem so glitchy, jumping all over the place every second, like from some bad physics simulation in a video game. Can't believe it's something that is in production and being sold with a "luxury" car.

This is really impressively bad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1g1okoQJEE). The glitching alone is enough to not trust this thing one bit, but it's not even able to prevent other predicted cars from clipping into each other, detecting a person right behind the car and so on. What a joke. Combining all the raw camera feeds into a virtual overhead view would be so much more useful that this computed mess.

Same exact thought. Imagine dropping 50-100k on a car and getting a UI that looks like pre-alpha.

I suppose car owners are used to junk UIs, but this feels like a polished turd.

This was what I noticed the first time I rode in a Tesla uber, and I was shocked. While driving down the street, cars would flicker in and out of existence on the screen constantly.

It's funny we got all the people pointing out their great software because not only did the "feature" randomly crash multiple times in that video, the UI is also busy drawing random Tesla semi trucks everywhere. It's embarrassing.

I guess we can laugh about it but the real problem is that this is what the "self driving" thinks is the environment.

It’s really crazy they removed the forward looking radar too, those are so useful and life saving when used for emergency braking. They can even “look”under the car in front of you and get a return for the next car in front of them, to better predict braking needs.

>They can even “look”under the car in front of you and get a return for the next car in front of them, to better predict braking needs.

I miss that feature the most, even though my Tesla has radar it has been disabled via software. With that feature I would know if the person immediately in front of me was going slow, and I could/should overtake or if there were a line of cars in front. I used that feature daily, made me feel a bit superhuman.

> even though my Tesla has radar it has been disabled via software

The fact that people put up with this is crazy to me. If I bought a car with a feature and then it was later taken away via an OTA update because the manufacturer didn't want to support it I would be pissed.

Oh, I am, just not much I can do about it.

It’s surprising to me that it’s legal to sell something and subsequently remove functionality from that already-sold thing.

Tesla is behaving like a company which doesn't realize the competition is catching up fast. For a long time they were the only game in town if you wanted an actually-good EV, which let them get away with some of their weirder and worse decisions, but now there are lots of good options available and it's no longer necessary to put up with this. I think they're in for a bad couple years if they don't return to putting the customer first.

This tired trope needs to die. "Competition" has been "coming" since 2013. Good luck to them.

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/electric/top-gears-top-20-e...

Well, you can place your bets on the market then if you’re confident we’re wrong.

So what bets have YOU placed?

I'm risk averse so I've been picking up short-term CD's at 5% interest.

The F-150 was already the most popular vehicle. I wouldn't expect Ford's stock to explode any time soon.

Why would anyone bet against the greatest promoter on earth? Doesn't make sense because the bet isn't restricted enough in scope. I bet people here would be willing to bet on number of sales in the next 10 years if that were possible.

Competition is here! Ford's electric F150 is selling quite well, and most of the other major auto brands have electric options on the market too. I haven't seen the sales figures, Tesla is probably still leading the EV segment at the moment, but they need to do something to keep up. They haven't put anything that they've announced on the road since the model 3.

Tesla is blowing everyone else out of the water in terms of sales- at least 4x the rest of the market combined. Ford was also losing money on every lightning sold- they've just bumped the base price up again.

The competition is coming, but it won't put a hard crimp on Tesla until battery prices drop significantly and EVs stop being luxury goods.

> Tesla is blowing everyone else out of the water in terms of sales- at least 4x the rest of the market combined.

Nope [1].

[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/

I see a whole bunch there related to % change, but it looks like the hard numbers are behind paywalls.

See the chart on the bottom of the page. The bars are 2022 sales (green for pure EVs, blue for plug-in hybrids), and the numbers to the left are the percent change from 2021.

> Ford's electric F150 is selling quite well

> I haven't seen the sales figures

This is just a fantasy. While it reviews well, they are impossible to buy and Ford struggles to make any money from it. Ford sold just 13,000 of them last year. Maybe it might sell well in future, but to date its a rounding error on total F150 sales.

I would recomend actually being familar with the rough sales volumes before passing opinion on them, personally. Tesla's lead is not some fanboy exaggeration.

> They haven't put anything that they've announced on the road since the model 3.

The Model Y, They shipped nearly 800k of them last year alone. The Tesla Semi is also shipping now.

They are impossible to buy because Ford has been selling them faster than they can make them. Will it be the top selling EV of 2023? No. Will Ford keep making them? Absolutely.

They are impossible to buy because Ford loses money on each one. The recent massive price increase doesn't help sales, and is critical to actually stemming the losses in short term. Ford in bald financial terms simply can't sell the F150 Lightning at scale, yet, and timeline to profitable at scale production is not clear at all.

Of the 13k that have been shipped, a very large percentage are registered in Michigan - Ford employees. The amount of F150 Lightnings that have made it through the retail channel to actual customers nationwide is still really low.

13k sales of any vehicle in a year is not fast by any definition appropriate for the US car industry, especially a truck! My point still stands - the F150 Lightning to date has not sold well, at all, loses a lot of money for Ford, and the 150,000 a year by Autumn 23 as Ford previously targeted seems a pipe dream.

And how much is Ford loosing on each electric F150, and how much profit is Tesla making on each vehicle? Ford still has a long, long way to go.

Market Reality is hitting and they are being forced to raise their lightning prices waaaay higher

You can't compare numbers when they're not produced using the same methodology.

Only cause their price was artificially lowered on release , they recently were forced to bump their lightning model price up pretty I high

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43473797/2023-ford-f-150-...

I bought a VW ID.4. I love it, and in my area I'm starting to see as many Ioniq 5's as I do Teslas.

The Ioniq 5 is a solid choice. I regret buying my most recent Tesla and wish I had gotten the Hyundai instead. Especially now that the supercharger network is opening up.

EVs were a small irrelevant market segment until 2017ish.

Just to be clear, the competition was coming. Now the competition is here.

There are even more competitors coming too.

What you are referring to is the Veblen good effect Tesla has. You think that the brand is beyond competition, which I unfortunately agree with. People buy feelings, and there is a feeling when you buy an Elon Musk product.

> People buy feelings, and there is a feeling when you buy an Elon Musk product.

After his acquisition of Twitter there's a feeling alright. Just not the one there used to be.

At some point you get dangerously complacent if you believe you’re so far ahead of the competition that they’re forever catching up.

In 1995, when Windows 95 launched, Apple bought newspaper ads highlighting how Microsoft’s new OS was adding features that the Mac had ten years earlier. They completely ignored the reasons why people wanted PCs instead of Macs. The company nearly died and was only saved by the “reverse acquisition” of NeXT and a total platform pivot by Steve Jobs.

And they may finally be arriving, which is good; but yeah, they're not here yet. I also feel like Tesla originally expected the competition to catch up much faster, and honestly it feels like a few things actually stumbled when that didn't happen.

Tesla's still riding most of its (IMHO/AFAIK) innovations: EVs as a status symbol; charging network; dealerships; manufacturing. Of those, only manufacturing has any pressure on towards continual improvement. (More chargers has demand, but not pressure).

Still. There's more non-Tesla fast chargers around every year, there's way more way better looking EVs from all the other brands; it is coming. I do think they'll catch up, but I don't know if they'll reach the point of competing for pack leader.

Disclosure: I freakin' love my Tesla Model Y.

I think its a company with a churn/morale problem.

I also feel like the fancy software features ate up a lot of resources for not much return, which makes me wonder how much cheaper EVs could get with a more basic/classic set of features (and hardware supporting them). Only need a backup camera, all the sensors can go except for backup, no need for a GPU/PC/AI ASICs on board, etc. Basically a 2014 Ford with an EV drivetrain.

Teslas have fewer chips than legacy OEMs due to better integration. They are already the most cost efficient EVs to build, and they’re making further progress as described on investor day.

Elon has proven over and over and over again to lie through his teeth. No way that I'd rely on investor day information.

Munroe tear downs lie ?

Munroe, heavy long investor in Tesla? Who only became pro-Tesla after investing in them?

They use fewer chips due to cutting corners:

1. Their "self driving" adaptive cruise is very bad compared to other brands. Because they dropped radar and don't use proven modules like others.

2. Same for their idiotic attempt to replace well working sensors for automatic wipers with not working cameras.

3. And now this next thing on parking sensors that just don't work.

Still hordes of people are stupid enough to believe Musk claiming it's all great innovation and good for the customer. While in reality things just don't work and Tesla is cutting corners.

Elon Musk is a prime example of an "alternative facts" kind of liar. Keep shouting loud enough and some people start te believe you. He got very far with all his lies, but so did Bernie Madoff...

Lmao in your own personal world perhaps. Out of spec has a basic freeway test on youtube - most cars ping pong within lanes, shut off when the road curves too much and/or only work on select mapped sections of freeways.

You can diss the wipers or parking sensors but pretending that the competition is anywhere near autopilot, especially the newest one based on FSD code, is hilarious.

What do curves have to do with adaptive cruise control? That's just keeping a speed and a distance, without randomly hitting the brakes. Other brands do it much better than Tesla at the moment.

The distance is detected by radar or sonar and comes from the front of the car. A curve means you’re no longer dead on to the car in front of you — and in extreme cases, are dead on to a car from another lane. This proved difficult for the radar packages of the 00s

> out of spec has a basic freeway test on youtube - most cars ping pong within lanes

Maybe several years ago. My car stays happily in the center of the lane -and- doesn't veer to the right with offramps, or lane count changes.

One of the problems with some Tesla owners is they buy too fully into the "dinosaur" thinking, and assume that other manufacturers have not adjusted their thinking since the 90s.

My car actively maps the road ahead and will, while staying in lanes, avoid potholes, for one very simple example.

Not sure which reality you are in, adaptive cruise and automatic wipers works great in my car. What data are you basing "adaptive cruise is very bad compared to others" and "automatic wipers with not working cameras" on?

23 MY owner here - I have been very unimpressed with the automatic wipers in my car, especially in intermittent rain/water thrown up from the car in front, or snowy conditions/lots of salt on the road - they seem to either want to wipe like crazy and smear the windshield, or they never trigger when most of the windshield is covered. This wouldn't be quite as annoying except that the wiper interface isn't physical, and having to reach over to the touch screen to change wiper speed when you're already in a reduced visibility situation is not a great UI! I basically end up just pressing the one physical button to trigger a one-off windshield wipe a lot.

This was a pretty big disappointment for me coming from a 2005 (!) Audi A4 which has auto wipers that work _almost_ flawlessly (and has a physical adjustment on the stalk when I need to override).

I'm very much not a Tesla hater - overall I _love_ the car. I just wish a few details were different (speedometer & nav more directly in line of site, physical controls for windshield wipers, CarPlay integration). I've just been kinda shocked how bad the auto wipers are for a brand new car.

Adaptive Cruise works well for me though, although I enjoy the act of driving so I don't use it all that often other than long straight highways.

> Teslas have fewer chips than legacy OEMs due to better integration. They are already the most cost efficient EVs to build

This is interesting. What links can you provide backing this up?

Yep. We need the electric equivalent of a starter car with good range and basic hardware. I'd take a car with roll-up windows, physical buttons, single A/C controls, 4 doors, 300 mile range, and a backup cam.

Would the masses take it? Who knows. But I'd be all in on that one.

Count me in for one of those too.

I'd take it. I wouldn't even need the A/C, as I live in a part of the country where it wouldn't get used more than a week or two in the year anyway.

If it has a heat pump, which I argue it should, ”AC” is basically free.

Sign me up. I hate everything about my Tesla except the drive.

There are plenty of them out there if you are willing to give up the Tesla brand. Look up the Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen ID.4 or Chevy Bolt.

Unfortunately the ID.4 is a bit too techified for my taste. The smart system to control windows and mirrors crashed while driving on the highway once, closing the mirrors inwards so I couldn't use them and stopping me from rolling down the windows.

I love my ID.4 very much but it is not the entry level EV described at 40K and up. The Leaf and the Chevy Bolt clock in at under 30K which is much closer.

Neither is the Model 3, either, which is the point of comparison. The Model 3 will still set you back a minimum of $47K (plus taxes, title, yada yada).

I agree. The ID.2 and ID.1 are the likely entrants in the cost category we’re talking about.

Not entry level, but still a very attractive price when compared to Model X, Model Y and the equivalent segment.

Was going to post about Volkswagen and škoda!

The Renault Zöe is a good contender too

Almost anything but the leaf. Doesn't charge much. Terrible battery lifetime because they don't have a battery management system (heat/cool the battery). Only charges with chademo, not ccs, 50kw. They are cheaper. Buy the chevy bolt, that's the best starter/low end basic car.

The majority of the cost of any EV is in the batteries. They make them faux-luxury to justify the price that they cost. A stripper EV is going to cost only a couple thousand less than anything out right now.

Maybe relax on the 300mi range and get a Nissan Leaf.

My rav4 prime has a combined range well north of 500 miles and I need every bit of it-because I live in the sticks and we’re not to the point of being able to charge comparably. Something’s got to give.

> Something’s got to give.

Living in the sticks?

ICEs enabled housing sparsity, reversing that is part of the solution.

I’m guessing you don’t realize how offensive that statement is.

I’d like to know what percentage of GDP is done “in the sticks”. It’s one of the more viable ways to address NIMBYISM and locality problems.

20 percent of the population, 10 percent of GDP. So the entirety of rural USA has a GDP 3 points higher than the NYC metro area.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/redefining-rural-am...

A couple things:

That census definition of urban/rural is different from the colloquial definition. The census link allows an "urban" classification as low as 2,500 people.

Colloquially-defined rural areas have been decimated by globalization in the last 40 years. The "rural" area I grew up in had thousands of manufacturing jobs; now it may have 200. The drop in GDP goes far beyond urban sprawl enabled by ICE vehicles.

2000 is far far too low to declare things urban. That line should be drawn at least above 10k-20k, I think.

Also critical infrastructure is out “in the sticks” like dams, power infrastructure (lines/plants/storage), and the support of the container trucks. Then there’s agriculture. It all needs to be electrified and reachable by electrics.

I generally hate that rural areas are so over-represented in US politics but jesus, some of the comments in this thread are making me question that. There is some serious big city myopia going on here. Not everyone can and wants to live their entire lives in a dense city and that's perfectly fine.

It should be very possible in a decade or so to extend charging capacity to the boondocks. Just look at where we were ten years ago, versus today. In the meantime, if you can install even a slow 220V/12A charger in your garage, a PHEV should be quite effective.

Quite, it’s about a 90/10 split right now. 80/20 would really be something.

Edit Just to expand on this, the current 90/10 split (500 miles gas/40ish electric) has cut my long distance drive gas usage down by something like 50-75%. If it were more like 500 miles gas/100 miles electric that’d probably cut it down to 2-4 gallons of gas per month or less. Around my house is already fully electric with the 10%.

The numbers I have not done are would simply going inline series with the gas be better than having the traditional power train and electric. In line meaning a generator to fire up the amps needed when the batter gets low-how modern trains work. I’m guessing it’s not so obvious since BMW cancelled their range extender.

It reminds me of housing which is in a very similar situation. Developers will often throw in something nice like a granite countertop and use that as justification for jacking up the price way beyond the cost of those additions because a majority of the cost lies elsewhere.

These luxury features aren't why these products are so expensive. They are thrown in to segment the market and make people feel better about spending this huge amount of money. There is no incentive for the people producing these products to remove these luxuries.

Soon the only option for people who can't afford or simply don't want to buy the new luxury product is to buy an old and rundown version of what was once a luxury product. New affordable alternatives just aren't as profitable so they aren't produced anymore in the quantities that we actually need.

Given that the govt already has a gazillion auto subsidies, perhaps they should do something to encourage an affordable no-frills EV with good range. I for one would pay more for a vehicle like that.

I would too. The problem is, like the mini phones, there aren't enough of us, and the profit margin small enough (manufactures make more money on luxury vehicles), that automakers don't see a point. Add in a great number of safety regulations (eg mandatory backup cameras in the US since 2013, automated emergency braking (AEB) in the EU since 2022) which all bring up the price of cars, means that we're relegated to the pre-2017 used car market.

It is really hard to recommend getting a Leaf in 2023, at least in the US, unless you _only_ plan to charge at home. The Leaf still uses the Chademo plug, (I believe it's the last car sold in the US that does so) where as CCS is becoming the standard here. The Chevy Bolt is otherwise a similar car for a similar price.

"Majority" is an exaggeration. Tesla battery replacements cost around $13-20k while the cars themselves go for well over double that.

https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-often-do-te...

The battery still drives costs to some extent, but the bigger issue is manufacturing capacity; you can only make so many EVs on the existing production lines (including battery factory capacity), and there's plenty of high-end demand to consume the supply, so you're not going to leave money on the table selling a cheap car.

People who want a cheap EV just have to do what every cost-conscious consumer does when a new technology comes along: wait. At some point there will be plenty of EVs for the PMC and it will make sense to build one for the rest of us.

I think the big issue is that this hypothetical car would still cost $30k-$40k before tax benefits.

While I think plenty of buyers yearn for a "traditional" car, it's hard to justify one with the added base cost of electric. The Nissan Leaf got pretty close to this (albeit with less range) and while it sold OK, it was far from a barn-busting success.

The marginal cost of adding gizmos and gadgets to an electric car is not very high due to the large base cost sunk into the platform, so we get gizmos and gadgets.

>The marginal cost of adding gizmos and gadgets to an electric car is not very high due to the large base cost sunk into the platform

This may be plausible, but is there data to support it? Because, anecdotally, all the add-ons of "gizmos and gadgets" options can blow up the price. For example, a base F-150 is $43,325. The Platinum options package adds over $23k in just options.

I suspect the more likely culprit is manufacturing cost and efficiency. It just makes more sense to make electric windows the default when the majority of people are going to pay for them anyways.

Isn't that basically a Chevy Bolt? It's ridiculously good on value/price.

I don't think that quite exists, but the Chevy Bolt has good range, is the same price as like a Honda Accord, and everything critical has physical buttons.

Real 300 winter miles range means paper 400+ miles WLTP. And this is where expensive cars start. Real 300 kilometers look better, but still doable with rather expensive cars.

Yeah, I considered a Model Y last year, but the range in winter for EVs is a non-starter for me. People don't realize how significant a drop in range occurs in cold weather.

Depends on how cold, and if you set your car to charge and warm up the battery before you leave. I have 10 years of driving to ski areas around the PNW. It's never mattered that much. But it doesn't get that cold here either. Parking it at a hotel where the high was 25 degrees did seem to reduce range a little, but not enough to matter.

But there are stories of people driving them in below 0 F where if you don't warm it up in the morning (via setting the leave time when charging) they have real loss. This is another area tesla is way ahead, with the battery mgmt system working better in the cold, plus the heat pump. People in cold Quebec also suffer this cold weather.

I live in the central Plains. It's normal for many days between Dec 1 and Feb 1 to be below 32ºF, and not unusual at all to be subzero in the day time. Even prewiring the battery won't help as much as you imply. Sure Tesla may be better than competitors at battery management, but that doesn't mean the battery life is any good in this type of weather. If your "normal" range is 300m, but drops to 180 in cold weather, then it dramatically affects your route planning since you'll need to recharge far more often. And while there are Superchargers in the Midwest, there aren't that many.

Look into Toyota bZ4x

> physical buttons

I'd pay extra for that

To me, rolling your windows looks as funny as cranking the engine. It's a simple motor that doesn't consume a lot of power as far as I can tell. It probably costs manufacturers $30/door for a huge UX improvement (at least for me), with no maintenance. It cannot possibly be the first thing in a list of conveniences to give up.

We have villages in Eastern Europe that don't have plumbing or gas, yet they have fiber optic cable and free and fast public Wi-Fi, so you see horse-pulled carts carrying villagers with laptops.

That's what I'd feel like in 2023 rolling my own window in an EV.

Window motors require wiring looms through the hinge void, which can wear out, plus the motors, switches and a logic board to handle "one touch" operation. All cross-wired through the car so that the driver can command all windows.

In Europe, Renault Zoe is quite popular as just that.

Surprised the Chinese automakers haven't been mentioned. BYD is currently the world's largest EV seller. The Dolphin for example is exactly what you mention -- as basic an EV can get, and probably as cheap as it can get as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Dolphin

AUD$35,000 for small subcompact is not cheap.

Yeah I don't think it's cheap in absolute terms, just that it's probably as cheap as you can get it right now. I don't think they have left any corners uncut with that car.

I have the opposite complaint. I don't need 300 miles of range, 100 would be more than enough. I can rent a traditional car if I need to take a road trip. But I do want a nice interior, and other "premium" features, such as a heads-up display, lane keeping assist, 360-degree camera, etc.

For the car you're describing, check out the Chevy Bolt EV/EUV. It's the closest car to what you're asking for, although it doesn't have a 300 mile range. It may be hard though, Chevy is moving all they can make.

A used EV with a fairly depleted battery could work well for your use case. Only problem is that lane keep assist was pretty lousy in many cars until recently.

Citroen seems to be the closest to making these a reality. The Ami and Oli are wild, weird, but absurdly practical starter cars marketed to a slightly-more-sophisticated-than-starter-car demographics.

The Oli is especially impressive in that they've learned that you can sacrifice battery capacity, and if you just keep the car lightweight and aerodynamic enough, you can still get decent range. They're claiming a (pretty phenomenal) 6.2 miles per kWh, and for a car targeting a price point starting at $20k that offers the utility of a small city car, SUV, and pickup truck in a single vehicle, I find it compelling, even as the sort of person for whom this is the least viable car.

And if $20k sounds like too much, the Ami is less impressive, but I think starts at closer to $10k.

I have a VW e-Up and it's basically that. 160 miles of electric range, analog gauges, real buttons for everything, it has a reverse camera and parking sensors but that's about it. I love it. It's amazingly simple - you turn the key and drive, nothing to worry about. And new these were/are about £20k.

I read a while ago that these cars are pretty much unobtainable. Can someone shed some light as to why this is? The premise of the car seems like it would sell very well.

Probably sold out due to being popular hah.

The same reason why most other EVs are unobtainable - the production line is maxed out and orders are closed through 2023. There's loads of second hand ones for sale that I can see online, and personally I got mine through a lease deal - signed paperwork, got the car delivered 3 days later. If I wanted to order one I'd probably wait a year.

I believe most of those are so-called compliance cars, cars designed to mainly satisfy imposed legal requirements, such as weighted average of CO2 emissions for a brand.

Sure, but they only fulfil that purpose if they sell loads. Just it existing does nothing for manufacturer's averages. They need to sell one of these for every 200g CO2/km car to average 100g CO2/km overall.

Give me a Model 3 drive train (and charging infrastructure) with the tech and interior of a mid-2000s Toyota and I'll drive it for life.

I agree, though I'd like infotainment just new enough to support CarPlay.

Yes. I've never used a car infotainment system that was better than CarPlay. Plus Android Auto/CarPlay allow me to leverage stuff I'm already paying for (Spotify, 3G connectivity, etc) to enhance the car.

What’s even better is an infotainment system old enough that it has the standard double DIN interface, so you can trivially swap in a brand new CarPlay unit.

Of course you would. That’s why it never happen!

Checkout the latest auto line daily w sandy munroe , Tesla is going to 48v wiring instead of multiple 12v channels https://insideevs.com/news/656775/tesla-switch-48v-voltage-s...

Will cost less and be more weight efficient

Do you actually think the removal of a few bundles of wires will make any sort of difference in either price or weight when the battery pack weighs around 1000lbs and costs $10-20k to replace?

Actually.... when I worked there seven years ago, I wrote a point-by-point memo explaining why 48V was such a win (trying to move to 48V for falcon wing doors), even having the TI guys build for us some custom PCBs w/+12 to +48V converters that we could try for the powerful motors required.

However....the decision was made to stick with +12V because, mainly, the Industry pumped out accessories (door locks, fans, you name it) that run on +12, and hence +48 would be 'custom' (read: 'expensive'). Was also true of the actuators. The moby FETs needed to switch the current existed and heatsinking wasn't too much of a problem, and so.... +12V it was. Big-ass thick wires... ok....

It seems some others inside found my memo recently -- or re-discovered what I had found -- and, finally, +48V seems to be moving into vehicles. With a +48V LiFePo battery, it should work really well. And to the original comment here: yes, your copper wiring is smaller because E x I is same but I*2*R is less because I is less for given power. Note the squared term; that is why +48V is a win.

Somehow, it seems like some folks (I am by no means the first!) 'see the future' but for reasons I don't fully understand, The Future seems to take longer to get here than necessary.

> Somehow, it seems like some folks (I am by no means the first!) 'see the future' but for reasons I don't fully understand, The Future seems to take longer to get here than necessary.

Microsoft tried to sell the world on Smart TVs back when most Americans had dial up.

Smart car infotainment back in I think it was 2008 or 2009, complete with voice control.

Sometimes being early can be worse than being late.

(Look at all the early attempts at ebooks!)

It's the opposite. All of these fancy features cost almost nothing extra for the manufacturer but are used to bump up the price by $10-20K over an equivalent no-frills car.

Not only this, but the features have rapidly transitioned from fancy features unique to Tesla to table stakes features of other manufacturers.

I feel Tesla and Netflix are really similar. They spent a huge amount of money on software but they failed to understand, they are not a software company. I have moved on from Tesla to the Taycan and the Ionic and they are both better products today.

Serious question.. Is the software on the Taycan or Ionic a better experience than in the Tesla?

The real question is whether Tesla's software is better than CarPlay/Android Auto. I don't want my car manufacturer competing with Apple/Google and their 3rd party app ecosystems because they're going to lose every time. Give me the controls I need to drive the car as physical buttons/levers, let my phone take over the infotainment system.

But not everyone cares about the software that much in their cars.

I don't care about playing Doom or The Witcher on the giant touchscreen infotainment system in my car, nor do I want any so called "smart" featured that don't work right half the time.

Give me Android/Apple connect and physical knobs and switches and I'm good.

The software? I haven't even thought about it as much till you asked this question. But the Taycan and the Ionic are both a better car at this stage than a Tesla.

As a Taycan owner I would say it isn’t ( there are a lot of factors involved to sum that up ).

It’s a better car though.

But can you watch Netflix in a Taycan or Ionic?

I have a giant phone.

Not 15"

how long are you sitting in your car that you need a 15 inch screen for entertainment. are you a taxi driver? on the rare occasions when you have to wait that long, just get your ipad with you.

I often need to wait for a family member to do some shopping, or wait somewhere to pick a family member up. So yea if I couldn't use the large screen already built into the car, I would have to use an iPad I guess. Watching YouTube in the Tesla automatically turns off the headlights and dims the canopy lights which is nice. Total integration.

Not sure if I'm weird but I have literally never wished that I had a big screen for watching Netflix in my car.

The only infotainment system a car needs is a dumb screen that supports CarPlay and Android Auto.

And yet for some reason GM is planning to remove CarPlay and Android Auto from their EV lineup in the next year or so, because screw you consumers.

I like the driver assistance.

The early mobileeye autopilot was actually pretty good, it did traffic aware cruise control and autosteer, making driving easier. Everything after that seems only marginally better.

Yup, then you plug in an iPhone with CarPlay gen 2 for the infotainment and you're good to go.

I am honestly having trouble finding a good alternative in US. Want to see how have others’ experience card with alternate choices?

There really aren’t any, they all have some sort of tradeoff - usually many.

More expensive, worse range, worse charger network, worse software etc.

I wish there was more competition in the space, it’s starting but the legacy companies wasted a decade doing nothing (other than trying to pass legislation so they could continue to do nothing).

A friend of mine cancelled his Model 3 preorder because the waitlist was too long, got a Kia EV6 instead and is perfectly happy with it.

I also tried Teslas and ultimately wound up with an EV6, which I love. It is missing some features that Teslas have, but also has some features Teslas don't, such as plentiful buttons in the cabin and the ability to charge other EVs (or power part of your house) from its battery.

Thanks for sharing! I hope they make and sell a ton and force Tesla and others to offer similar innovations.

imo the only advantage tesla has remaining in its price class is the charging network (which is now open to non-teslas, albeit with a worse UX).

Kia and Hyundai have some solid options. If I were in the market for a car at the moment I'd probably go with the Hyundai Ioniq 5. The software isn't quite what you get in a Tesla, but I honestly prefer just using CarPlay (wired, unfortunately, but you can get an adapter for wireless).

You lose a bit of the "cool factor" with these like the weird Tesla keys, and the mobile apps aren't great (though they may have improved in the last 1.5y since I've seen them). But as a car, they function very well and have features similar to Tesla's AutoPilot - just called something like Adaptive Cruise like it should be.

Apparently the Kia Niro LX has wireless carplay.

Interesting. That may be a new model-year thing, I'm only familiar with 2019.

Especially interesting considering LX is their base trim (or at least it used to be on ICE cars).

Tesla delivered 422,875 vehicles in Q1 2023.

Here is what the competition manged for all of 2022

GM: 39,000, Ford: 61,000, Hyundai: 175,000, Kia: 80,000

Combined, Tesla delivered more Evs in one quarter than their competition manged in a whole year, combined.

What about Nissan Leaf? I don't pay attention, but I know that was a huge seller a few years ago.

They have been doing less than ~5k a quarter for the past 2 years. Q3 last year was less than 1,500 sold.

US market: Nissan sold 12,026 Leaf in 2022. In 2021, Nissan sold 14,239 Leaf. They sold 2,213 more units in year 2021 compared to 2022 with a percent loss of 15.54% YoY.

https://carfigures.com/us-market-brand/nissan/leaf

Tesla has had a 20 year head start. Plot these numbers on a year over year graph and it'll be clear how quickly the competition is catching up.

I think you'd actually see the opposite. Tesla is building additional EV capacity at an absurd rate, onlining a 500k/yr capacity factory almost every year the last few years (Shanghai, Berlin, Austin) with more on the way (Mexico).

Volkswagen is up to 572K EV sales per year despite only starting to focus on the category in 2017.

Well, in the US, Tesla had 74% of the electric vehicle share in January 2022. It had 57% in January 2023. That seems to tell its own story.

VW 570,000

You forgot to include Volkswagen, they delivered 572,000 in 2022 and are still ramping up. And BMW close to 200,000 with their more mainstream models released later in the year so expect rapid growth this year.

Volkswagen Group BEV sales by brands:

Sales in Q1-Q4 2022:

Volkswagen (cars): 325,100 (up 23.6%)

Audi: 118,200 (up 44.3%)

Skoda: 53,700 (up 9.3%)

Porsche: 34,800 (down 15.7%)

Seat/Cupra: 31,400 (up 140.8%)

Volkswagen (commercial vehicles): 7,500 (up 109%)

other (MAN, Scania, Navistar): 1,420 (up 75%)

Total: 572,100 (up 26.3% year-over-year)

in the US or worldwide?

Mercedes-Benz Cars reports 520,100 global car sales during the third quarter of 2022.. according to some random site.

I know that the vast majority of merc sales were not EVs but i think they are making enough to know hows its done.

Vertical integration seems tesla main moat.

Meanwhile, in Europe they're already outsold by VAG group for example.

Exactly the same thing you and every other FUDer has said for the last decade.

Tesla does some wild stuff for sure, but they are the largest(and will remain) car company in the world for a reason.

Largest by market cap. That's mainly due to investor hype. With that logic, you can argue Nikola was a top 10 largest car company in the world at one point (with zero vehicles delivered).

Tesla is not even in top 10 in terms of revenue or number of vehicles sold.

Tesla is the largest automaker by market cap because of speculation.

Yeah speculation that's it. Not because the government is printing money left and right for EVs or something

Tesla is not the only EV manufacturer.

No, you don't say? They are the largest and in the best position to profit from this legislation though.

The UAW didn't fight so hard to get Tesla excluded for nothing.

PE ratio of 50 seems very reasonable for a growth stock.

By what metric in the world is Tesla the largest car company? Ford, Toyota, and Chevrolet each produced triple the number of cars over the past year as compared to Tesla.

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2022-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...

Even if this comment is true, I wouldn't short TSLA. There are too many irrational TLSA investors..

Surely irrational investors are the #1 reason you'd want to invest the other way? At least in the longer term.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

- John Maynard Keynes

As the famous saying goes “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”.

There are many people who predicted the 2008 financial crisis but only a few of them were able to time it right make a profit.

The market can stay irrational longer than most people can stay solvent.

Tesla Model Y Grabs 49% of Denmark’s EV Market in March

https://teslanorth.com/2023/04/01/tesla-model-y-sales-denmar...

This is happening all over Europe and it’s only one of the two insanely popular models Tesla sell. My wife has a Polestar and it’s awesome (second best electric car manufacturer in my mind), but it can’t compete with my model 3.

Try a VW ID and see what you think of the software, in fact try any modern manufacturers software and compare it to Tesla. It’s always junk. The only reason the Polestar is close is because it’s native android running the show.

Tesla have a ton of issues, but the iPhone had a ton of issues when it launched, but if you were shouting about how good your blackberry keyboard was you were having the wrong conversation. I don’t think the other auto companies have embraced the paradigm shift that Tesla have introduced.

I don't want anything but the most basic software in my car. As long as you can plug in an Android device, it doesn't matter - it's not the core competence of an auto maker.

And GM has decided to force you to use their software and not plug in Android on all upcoming EVs.

This is akin to the keyboard argument in the comment you are replying to.

Except that Tesla is the keyboard. They are never going to duplicate every app on iOS and Android, so they should focus on connecting those OSes to their screens, speakers, and physical controls (like volume) rather than build something just for their hardware.

100% agree. One of the most consistent irritations with my Tesla is the inability to use CarPlay. The only thing that Tesla does better is navigation. And even then, it's only because built-in knowledge about superchargers and battery SOC. This information can be made available via CarPlay.

But as long as it is such an important part of the car the software must be at least as reliable and well built as, say, the gearbox. If auto makers want their cars to be rolling computers they have to embrace the technology. Half hearted efforts at touchscreens and ux is not good enough.

None of the current electric cars appeal to me. I basically want a 1/1 scale team associated or team losi RC car that I can sit in and drive.

I think you'll be surprised how much of a core competence software is for Tesla.

It doesn't matter. Their UI will never be as good as Android Auto or Car Play. They will simply never have the same app support.

Really? Does CarPlay have access to my cars controls, cameras, climate, driving alerts, etc..

Nope, you constantly have to switch between CarPlay and the car's own software to do certain things.

In a Tesla it's all integrated together and works great, CarPlay is unnecessary. If I need to use my phone while driving, the phone's screen is perfectly visible from the charger/dock.

Personally I don’t want any controls on the infotainment screen behind some touchscreen. Physical buttons are easier, safer, and quicker, as is a well designed HUD.

I consider the fact Tesla requires you to poke around in its software a huge design flaw and safety concern.

I can’t think of the last time I had to use my cars software over CarPlay - all the apps I need are there, and they do things teslas can’t that I rely on

I like the lack of any screen in front of my face - no distractions, just the road. The buttons on the steering wheel are all I need. Voice control works fine as well.

I used CarPlay in my old car, it was great, thought I would miss it in a Tesla, but nope, I can see my phone screen fine from the dock and bluetooth audio works as well.

Weird to hear given teslas have more screens then basically everything else out there.

How many screens are in this picture?

https://www.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2020/05/2020-Tesl...

> I can’t think of the last time I had to use my cars software over CarPlay

This is because most cars other than Tesla have terrible software.

> they do things teslas can’t that I rely on

I'm curious what these are.

What makes the Model Y better than the Polestar?

I'd like to know this too! I have a Polestar 2 and with the recent software updates, the only thing I feels it is beaten on with the Tesla is that it is a little less efficient.

But for me for looks, interior etc, the Polestar is miles ahead of the Model 3.

The Polestar 3 (a SUV like the Y) is almost twice the price. The Polestar 2 is a very good answer to the Model 3, and you can even upgrade it with a lidar.

It’s cheap for the range you get. That’s about it in my personal opinion.

Prefer Polestar, Hyundai, Kia and a whole bunch of others to Tesla.

The Hyundais and Kias look very competitive on price and features I care about. They actually include Carplay, which should be standard at this point.

>They actually include Carplay, which should be standard at this point.

You would think, but as soon as I start looking at Bolt EUV's Chevrolet decides to never get my money with their newest announcement[0]

[0]https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43488135/gm-apple-carplay...

The problem with CarPlay in my Ioniq 5, as I detailed in my sibling reply to the post you replied to, is that it doesn't inform the car's own nav-based features like the dashboard directions or the HUD navigation arrow. If I use CarPlay nav I simply don't get those.

I think Chevy is going to Android's whole-car auto system, not just Android Auto. In that system phone based nav probably does do things like inform dashboards and HUDs. And I think Apple has a CarPlay version out or coming that has similar capabilities. Only, Chevy and probably any other manufacturer is not going to make a car that wires two systems all the way through the car.

So I think it's not gonna be just Chevy, and since Android has more design wins announced than Apple as well as probably the brighter future outlook for market share (by way of being hedged across multiple sources) I think you might be looking down the barrel of either this standardizes, or Apple's out.

Just keep in mind the tradeoffs. For example, I was thrilled to get CarPlay in my Ioniq 5 until I realized A) it's wired, as I guess there's some exclusivity deal Apple has for wireless in cars with their own nav, and B) I lose features like the HUD-displayed navigation arrows, since that only works with native nav.

Upshot is I end up using native nav and really only use CarPlay for phone-based audio apps. I've only had the car for a few weeks, so maybe I settle into a different pattern long-term but I doubt it. I bought it for stuff like HUD-based nav, so having it be either/or probably means no CarPlay.

Charging network is the big one, the degree of which would vary based on your location.

> the iPhone had a ton of issues when it launched

Tesla came out with their first car in 2008, so we are not talking about a "first gen iPhone" with the Model 3 (which came out in 2017). The point is that Tesla is squandering their huge lead.

Tesla's first car was a six-figure performance vehicle for the rich. It's goal was to make EV's cool and attractive, not for the average consumer.

The model 3 was the FIRST Tesla that the average car consumer could consider actually getting.

The Model 3 came out in 2017, six years ago. Again, hardly "first gen iPhone" at this point. But, granted, the Roadster is not a good comparison.

> squandering

https://twitter.com/ICannot_Enough/status/161212131982648934...

I wish I could squander like that.

That's a silly chart.

It's charting % change from 2021 - 2022 vehicle sales.

If you add a couple other manufacturers from the [1] source data, this becomes more apparent. Rivian sales were up 12-million% in the same time period. Doesn't mean Rivian is crushing the market.

This chart is showing that Tesla went from selling 331,000 vehicles in 2021 to 491,000 vehicles in 2022. And while Toyota (by comparison) looks bad on the tweet you linked, they sold about 5x the vehicles that Tesla did in the same time period.

Tesla's growth in that period can largely be chalked up to being "a vehicle manufacturer with EVs in stock and available to sell". That special position is starting to erode, and will erode further with time.

When customers can easily choose between a range of EVs available from a range of manufacturers, things like, "can I trust my vehicle to warn me when I'm about to back into another car" will matter a lot more.

I personally don't think Tesla is going to tank, but I do think they're going to have to work to be competitive to a different standard than they have in the past.

[1] https://www.autonews.com/sales/dec-us-auto-sales-market-slid...

"1/5th the size of Toyota and growing 44% yoy" isn't the insult you think it is, lol.

This is not the forum for clever one liners in response to engaging and earnest responses. Please add to the discussion instead of devolving it.

Just test drove an Ioniq 6 the other day. Insanely fast, beautiful and the software is pretty good too. Model 3 doesn't even compete.

What doesn't it compete on? Model 3 is much quicker. Beauty is definitely subjective. I don't love the Model 3, but find the Ioniq quite ugly. They compete on price.

Build quality, Model 3 is not "much quicker", Ioniq has a higher range, customer service, interior design, better colors

Model 3 performance is 3.1 0-60, Ioniq 6 performance is 5.1. That’s pretty big. On the low end model 3 is 5.8 vs Ioniq 6 is 8-9 seconds, also much slower.

First Tesla came out 1 year after the first iPhone

> Try a VW ID and see what you think of the software, in fact try any modern manufacturers software and compare it to Tesla. It’s always junk. The only reason the Polestar is close is because it’s native android running the show.

I don't always agree with Tesla's -UX- decisions, and things that are buried layers deep, but their UI is certainly one of the nicest, agreed. But there's more to it than that.

And if the response to that is "Just use voice control", well, then it doesn't matter anywhere near as much that they have the nicest UIs.

The big thing I notice is that a lot of Tesla owners are fully bought into the "dinosaur" hype and think that many Tesla features are exclusive to them.

Meanwhile, my non-Tesla has things like:

- Traffic sign recognition - my car talks to (well, listens to) the traffic lights in my city and actually will show a countdown until when they will change. It will even recognize school zone signs and (at least when they are connected to lights) will recognize when those are active (will display 'school' above the speed limit, regardless, and then blink that if it notes a blinking light associated with that sign).

- Adaptive blind spot - so nice. Speed differential low, or you're going faster? Will not activate, or only activate last moment. But if someone is blowing by you in the HOV lane, it will warn of them when they're still several hundred feet back.

- Laser headlights. Matrix headlights. Night vision with thermal imaging.

- Predictive active suspension - The car actively scans the road ahead with sensors and it will adjust suspension for poorer road conditions.

- The car can not just stop, but will actively swerve, if safe, around obstructions to avoid a collision, or even a parked car opening a door into traffic.

All this in the Model S price range.

What car do you have?

That could be a lot of mid-to-high end cars. Matrix headlight makes me think of Audi, but none of these features are especially cutting edge nowadays.

What kind of car is this? I’m looking for a non-Tesla right now, very curious what the hood options are

I'm going to guess Audi e-tron based on the feature list.

These are features on most of the mid to high end Audis.

And a modern model S does not have those features and more?

(asking because I honestly don't know)

It can "sometimes" recognize traffic lights (I say sometimes, because it also recognizes railroad crossing lights as broken traffic lights).

It also doesn't have traffic light communication. Nor school zone identification.

Predictive active suspension - no. The car treats even road sealant at times as an obstruction.

Will not swerve around another vehicle - only AEB.

Predictive active suspension: https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-adaptive-suspensio...

Ok, this is just a blog, but it seems to have it (for at least 2 years now)? Or am I missing something?

> Will not swerve around another vehicle

Huh?! Ever seen a recent FSD video? I've even seen it swerve around wildlife?

Tesla's Adaptive Suspension is essentially "adjustable suspension":

> new control settings for Standard and Sport modes allow the driver to adjust the suspension for a smoother or more “road aware” driving feel. Originally a move away from the control structure of the older Smart Air Suspension, the Adaptive Suspension is raised and lowered based on preference selections in the control panel (Never, Always, or Highway) rather than through ride height by increments.

The Audi system does that and a bunch more:

- raises the car for ingress and egress

- It's also meant to absorb the road's pitches and dips by prepping the chassis where appropriate.

- In comfort mode, the front camera pairs up with the steering, which allows the car to feel any unevenness and signal the system to respond accordingly.

- Audi also claims that a "curve-tilting function" cuts down on lateral acceleration felt by occupants.

- "Upon entering a curve, it elevates the side of the body on the outside of the curve and lowers the other side, thereby tilting it into the curve up to three degrees,"

and more.

You know who else is fully bought into the "dinosaur" hype and think that many features are exclusive to them? Apple/iPhone users. Apple is constantly behind competitors when it comes to cameras and functionalities, but they are still the most valuable company in the world.

My Tesla Model 3 has matrix lights physically but not the software to make them actually useful beyond being really nice lights. It does not have any of the pixel control beyond the pointless light show which I have never even tried.

> Tesla Model Y Grabs 49% of Denmark’s EV Market in March

Inertia. It works both ways - they may coast on their past reputation now, but when the market catches up, they'll find it hard to regain customers even if they course-correct.

In this analogy, Tesla is BlackBerry, right? BlackBerry was one of the first usable smartphones, developed a huge market share by doing their own quirky thing, then a bunch of new upstarts (Apple, Samsung, etc.) come onto the scene and eat BlackBerry's lunch by actually building what customers want.

Still think the BB Passport was the best phone ever (keyboard, mouse, form factor) - except phone reception was 0 everywhere ;-)

Coming back from a 1k km trip with a Model YLR. Software was much nicer than VW/BMW/Audi/Renault/GM.

100kw supercharging just worked and got us to a free charger. Really nice compared to the competition.

The one really bad thing was how loud the car was. Wind noise was at 150km/h at a level a BMW had at 190km/h. Also AI/car detection was really bad in (heavy) rain.

(Without rain) Also on German roads, traffic speed sign detection was totally random. Signs not detected, signs detected that are not there. ID3 E.g. had none of these problems I guess b/c they use map data for speed limits not speed sign detection.

All in all I'd nevertheless buy the Tesla not the ID3.

As a Tesla owner, I find the software to be buggy with a poor UX. I much prefer the CarPlay experience and wish all manufacturers just stopped trying to push software we don’t need.

1. Opinionated “clean” UX has no place in a car. The important buttons need to be bigger and the alerts clearer. Colors need to be employed to draw attention.

2. A shocking number of bugs get released on stable that they fix in the next release. It seems the car prompts you about an update almost every time you drive.

3. It’s annoying to have to rely on two data plans that provide the same functionality - let me use my phone data instead of upselling me on a data plan that I need to have a good experience.

4. It’s super annoying to rely on their Spotify player which keeps getting worse (ie hiding the shuffle button below two levels of tiny arrows - what??)

5. Their voice recognition is awful - worse than Siri. It’s starting to feel extremely antiquated. The fact I can rarely call up the right name to send a message and then have to make several attempts to speak a message - bleh. Will this ever be an enough of a priority for them to compete with google? No, but it’s critical for car software and the gap between their walled garden and state of the art will get worse and worse.

6. They dedicate almost the entire screen to a worthless animation of what the car thinks it sees. Sure it’s “cool” but it’s a waste of precious screen real estate and frankly shows their hand on how bad their camera recognition really is.

The whole thing seems super arrogant to me. Maybe before the age of CarPlay and android auto it made sense to build software as a car company and was a differentiator, but not today - my next car definitely won’t be a Tesla for precisely this reason.

I thought I'd miss CarPlay, but the charger/dock is right under the screen and perfectly visible; so if I need to run an app on my phone it's right there anyways - easy to see and control. Hey Siri works fine for me as well.

CarPlay just seems like a bandaid on bad car software, which still isn't well tied into the car's climate controls or other settings anyway so you have this weird half and half experience.

Does Tesla support GaiaGPS? Overcast? Audiable? Emby?

The thing that makes CarPlay and android auto great is anyone can write software that pops up on the infotainment screen.

I will never get a vehicle that doesn’t have it again.

I can run those apps on my phone and see them fine from the charger/dock right under the screen.

https://www.notateslaapp.com/images/news/2022/wireless-charg...

That's kind of not the point.

Having those apps run on the main screen has advantages... - touchscreen is easier to access - screen is bigger - screen is better placed (less eye movement = safer)

For media apps at least, they can be controlled fine from the buttons to the steering wheel, no need to take your eyes off the road. Any navigation app you're going to have to look over anyways. I've used Waze in a Tesla, didn't take me any more time to look at that than the map on the upper screen.

The steering wheel is going to control an app running natively in the phone (which is sitting in a cradle, and not linked by CP/AA)? That's what the post above mine was asserting worked well.

My car steering wheel controls control my phone over bluetooth fine, at least for skipping and pausing.

That has nothing to do with Tesla thou. You can put a phone mount anywhere you want in any vehicle. The discussion is around Tesla vs CarPlay

GM is reversing course and making their own system and will no longer support CarPlay. Manufacturers want the subscription money and control, I wouldn't be surprised if more pull back.

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1139243_gm-to-phase-out-...

Precisely. And consumers lose out.

They want the data

That makes me wonder if there's any development on deeper integration into car systems going on for future models.

Why does the climate control need to be in the same UI as the entertainment or nav?

My Honda has physical buttons for HVAC and that's just fine.

What are use cases for fully-integrating the entertainment/nav into the rest of the car? The only one I can think of is coupling nav to battery state management in EVs (and yeah, that's a BIG one).

There's all kinds of integrations - my app can control the climate, the cameras are integrated with data where I can see a live feed of my dog in the Tesla from the app. Physical buttons can't change, while Tesla is constantly improving the UI for things. Hell even watching YouTube in the Tesla will automatically turn off the headlights.

Tesla's software isn't just 'infotainment' it extends to controllers across the entire vehicle - all can be improved with software updates.

>watching YouTube in the Tesla will automatically turn off the headlights

Now I'm picturing a Tesla kool-aid drinker driving down the highway with their fully self beta ludicrous speed engaged, watching youtube with their headlights off.

Don't worry, they'll fix it in the next update...

In fact I believe there have been studies showing how positively dangerous making everything controlled by a touch screen is.

I’m calling it - 10 years from now, a car company will roll out “physical controls” as a feature and it will be heralded as a great advancement in usability.

>The only reason the Polestar is close is because it’s native android running the show

Well ok, but this is now true for most manufacturers, isn't it?

My wife's Hyundai UI is absolutely terrible, laggy and jumbled mess. It's only usable because you can ignore it and use CarPlay. That requires a physical cable which is annoying.

Sure, my Ioniq 5’s software isn’t as good as Tesla’s and I’ll never have all those experimental features.

What I do have that a 2023 Tesla will never have, no matter how many updates it gets:

- A dash in my center view that is as or more informative than Tesla’s while driving

- Blind spot camera feeds that pop up prominently on said dash as needed instead of some corner of a tablet in the middle of the car

- A HUD that maps most of the important driving information directly onto the windshield, including navigation arrows “on” the road

- Physical controls I don’t have to look at to find while driving

I also have ADHD. If I look away from the windshield it’s a little random when I get back. Without these types of things that keep my eyes front and center by putting the prettiest lights there, I’ll be in trouble someday, and maybe get someone else in trouble too.

Tesla’s entire car UI aesthetic of drawing attention away from the centerline and then making you search a screen is simply fundamentally flawed and is detrimental to safety. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise because I know it’s detrimental to mine, and I know I’m just a canary. What affects me affects others, I’m just the one where it’s easier to have a consequence.

Plus, to the subject at hand, my Ioniq has parking sensors with collision avoidance and the best 360 view I’ve ever seen, with a 3D reconstruction of your car and surroundings you can swipe around with a virtual camera.

And just to seal the argument, the MY would’ve been cheaper when I bought my Ioniq 5 less than a month ago. I still bought the Hyundai. It’s safer.

PS of all of the features it has, my Tesla MY owning friends seem to want this last one most:

- Sunshade that closes over the roof glass panel

The Ford software seems fine. The latest update to the Mach-E lets me control many things onscreen with a physical knob, which is great (and I think not something Teslas do), and I want Apple CarPlay for everything else anyway.

I’d never want to rely on the power grid to be mobile in a widespread emergency. EV might be okay as a second car. I’ve lived through civil unrest so maybe just my bias.

You rely on the power grid for gasoline too. Gas doesn't pump without electricity. Also, refineries are a more concentrated source of failure than power stations and a grid.

If I'm getting nervous from Civil Unrest (or just a really bad snowstorm coming up in Canada), I can always grab a few 5-gallon containers, fill them up at a Gas Station, and keep them in my garage just in case, along with filling up my car. If nothing happens, I'll just use them up. If something does happen... I don't want to be the guy with the EV trying to get away when everyone else is also trying to use the EV charging stations for the same reason. If the charging stations are even functional.

Plus, an electric car (or any valuable car) is prime target during civil unrest. It's fun to destroy expensive stuff. It's not fun to destroy a mid-2000s Civic.

I understand buying something extra just to be prepared, but to drive a Civic because someone might destroy it 5 years from now seems like optimizing for 0.001% of the time at the expense of 99.999% of your time. Plus, there's insurance.

Just keep your car charged (easy to do with at-home charging) and you'll almost always have 200+ miles of range available. If you need to travel further than that to safety, you have bigger problems (and traffic will probably be jammed to the point of roads being unusable anyways).

Gasoline can be more easily stored and moved around than electricity. Just don't forget the fuel stabilizer and you're good.

Gasoline can't be manufactured in your backyard, the solar panels on my roof produce over 100 kwh per day half the year, with battery storage my house and transportation can function without grid support.

Most people have a gas can. or 6. Most people don't have battery storage for electricity.

No people that I know have a gas can. They had, like 30 years ago, but nowadays, not a single person.

I think it would be easier to find a battery storage in one of the houses that have solar panels (like 50% of them in my neighborhood) than a gas can.

This may be an apartment dweller/SFH split kind of thing. I have multiple gasoline, diesel and oil/gas mix cans. Most people around here do, for lawnmowers, snowthrowers, chainsaws, etc.

The only time I didn't have one was when I lived in apartments.

I live in a house, but I don't own a oil based lawnmowers, chainsaws etc. (just battery or direct electric), I don't have such a large property to justify oil ones :)

My in-laws have a larger property but they also go with electric based tools, but yeah one of their neighbors does have such lawnmower (I would probably buy robot one, but...).

But you are right I forgot that there are tools that do require gasoline, 30 years ago those gas cans were used for storing gasoline for use in a car or motor (when I lived in apartments).

All you need to get gas in a bad situation is a 4 foot tube

Whether your car is electric or not, you're relying on an external power distribution system to keep it working. Gas has to be moved to you just as much as electricity does.

It's very easy to store 1000mi worth of fuel and take it with you. It's not very easy to store 1000mi worth of range for an EV.

Now you are just doing last of us fever dreams.

Just a year ago, that was not remotely fever dreams for a lot of people in Ukraine.

I offroad and camp in the backcountry a lot, often 100s of km from the nearest gas station (let alone anything with an ev charger) and then might be driving area the area hiking/climbing away from camp.

Hard for an ev to beat two 20L jerry cans adding 300km of range to a tank with 450, in the winter, with 500lb of gear. I imagine one day a PHEV will replace my truck but we’re not there yet.

Don’t take the collapse of society to suddenly need to grab a few jerry cans and travel a long way quick where there is no ev chargers

Well...I'm replying to the person above me.

But also: I find this attitude a bit silly. The last 3 years have kindof proven the preppers right, haven't they?

If you're running a diesel vehicle, all you need is a tank in your shed (for ~1000€ [1]) and an inverter powered by your car's 12V battery to run the pump. Assuming your vehicle is barely efficient (10 l / 100km), a full tank load is enough to last you for 10.000km.

Electric vehicles are a bit harder, but even there, it's possible to install enough solar panels and battery storage to last virtually infinitely.

Disaster resilience is easy to achieve, if a bit expensive if you're going on a "full societal breakdown" scenario. No matter what, unless you're a grain farmer with storage, you're running out of food way before running out of transportation.

[1] https://www.geratech-tankanlagen.de/tankanlagen-diesel-adblu...

Diesel has an average shelf life of 12 months if stored at a temperature below 20°C (68°F). As the temperatures rise, shelf life goes down. Additives (biocides and stabilizers) available to extend life but maybe maximum a few years. NFPA 110 diesel standard is "1.5 to 2 years of storage life.".

> all you need is a tank in your shed

Maybe two tanks so you can rotate fresh fuel - now deliver and pumping is a regular operation? Must be designed so water doesn’t condense (not just drums?). Or underground to help if you in warmer climate? Keeping diesel around for decades while waiting for a disaster is going to be a hassle.

Perhaps solar on your roof and an electric car is likely to be more practical (depending on your personal constraints).

Portable Generators are a thing and a hell of a lot cheaper than a car. Buy one and stock gasoline for an emergency and you are fine.

Gasoline has a somewhat short shelf life.

Gasoline polluted with ethanol has short shelf life. Clean gasoline should last few years.

You rotate it. So keep some in the garage, use it, refill the cans instead of your car.

How to stock gasoline? Isn't it a fire hazard?

And I won't be digging up a hole in yard and turn into a petrol station.

Oh, but you do, even if you drive a traditional car!

Most gas stations - for both diesel and gasoline - rely on electricity to pump the gas. No electic = no gas. The stations that run during outages generally have generators to do so. You might have some luck for a short time.

After that, no power, no generator, no gas. The trucks won't even be able to get diesel to deliver it to you.

..... ? A small backup generator is all that's required for the gas pumps to work. The state of Florida now mandates gas stations have back up power on evacuation routes, a law enacted from painful lessons learned from all of the problems caused by Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina. The state of Louisiana I believe also has a similar requirement but I haven't checked.

http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...

I mentioned in another comment, this is true, but all you really need to get gas if the gloves are off is a short tube or hose.

In which case you'd be far better served with an electric car and rooftop solar. Gas supplies disappear. Electricity is needed to run pumps. But no one can cut off a home solar generation system short of bombing your house.

I see a lot of Rivians driving around where I am at, surprisingly. I am starting to get tempted.

They do seem to offer tremendous value for that price point (even though it is a high price point).

It's one of the least efficient EVs out there. I have an Audi E-tron, which is also one of the worst. I still save compared to gas, but I was hoping to save a lot more. To compare, the Model3 is twice as efficient as the Rivian.

If efficiency is a deal breaker for someone, they're not going to be looking at a pickup truck in the first place.

A Corolla is twice as efficient (or more) than a 4Runner but like the Model 3, it will get stuck going on a curb so it’s not really comparable.

I'm sorry but you're wrong. Even Ford's CEO admitted they are way behind. Tesla isn't the best but they can fail quick and learn from it fast. The reason you see so much hate is probably it comes from the Short and Distort playbooks from hedge funds who want them to fail.

Even this guy who has no skin in the game knows how far behind everyone else is and laughs at all you haters. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj--iMtToRO_cGG_fpmP5XQ

> The reason you see so much hate is probably it comes from the Short and Distort playbooks from hedge funds who want them to fail.

This meme is tired and stale. It is possible to have a skeptical outlook for Tesla that is not connected to a short financial position.

> Even this guy who has no skin in the game

Okay, I see how this is going. You are kidding, right? Munroe has -repeatedly- disclosed that he has a significant financial investment in Tesla.

It more sounds like overly strict bean counters have won some internal battle at Tesla, thereby ensuring cost cutting measures are winning out over everything else. Regardless of brand damage, etc.

Did they have a change of CFO or similar in the last 6 months?

It is definitely related to cost cutting and margins. This is what will help them survive a downturn.

But it makes no sense. Why parking sensors? Why not find a cheaper supplier for upholstery or remove any of the completely unnecessary and barely noticeable non-functional elements of what's still a luxury brand? Surely ultrasound ranging sensors are dirt cheap, and the reaction of the press 100% predictable, so it should've been obvious to any bean counter that this is a self-harming move.

> so it should've been obvious to any bean counter that this is a self-harming move.

While true, the seagull types seem to exist in every profession.

eg fly in, crap everywhere, then leave for the next place before they catch the blame ;)

> Tesla is behaving like a company which doesn't realize the competition is catching up fast.

Should their market cap be $600b, higher, or lower given this statement?...

If you believe the competition is 'catching up' it should be lower. If you believe they've been saying that for 10 years and it hasn't happened, then it should be higher.

You should consider that the other manufacturers have demonstrated absolutely no software acument at all. What should be amazing in 2023 is that the SW is total crap in the typical car.

It's not that Tesla is good. Tesla's in-car SW is not good, it's just the least crap in a crapsack industry.

Most other car manufacturers have the good sense to include support for CarPlay and Android Auto, so you can mostly just ignore the craptastic built-in software.

Agreed. My next car will have CarPlay. It’s great.

It's typical startup behaviour, but burning orders of magnitude more cash

Competition isn’t really a thing in the short term. Every EV manufacturer is selling every car they are capable of producing for at least the next year or so. Someday I guess supply will catch up with demand and then we’ll see if Tesla can keep up.

All my objections to Tesla melted away after I took one for a test drive. They outclass the competition in every way. It's not just the software, it's the driving experience. The Model 3 is a rocket ship and handles like a 911 for half the price.

Plus Tesla serves customers who don't want a silly crossover -- most other brands are only making EV crossovers. If you want a smaller car you don't have very many choices, and most of them cost more (e.g. Porsche Taycan, the Audi version of the Taycan).

This is probably a product of where you are. I see plenty of actual EVs in a lot of shapes and sizes and from what I can tell, price ranges. (Not actually in the market for a car, so I'm unsure of any sizes). Of course, I'm in Norway and there are many electric cars on the road and they've been building the infrastructure for them - and the mix of brands available and what brands are cheaper than others would vary quite a bit from, say, the US.

I have autocrossed various cars competitively including a model 3 and a 911 GT3.

There is nothing "Bad" about the model 3 handling, but nothing good either. It is vastly under-tired for how heavy it is, but of course you can fix that with big wheels and tires. It also has no adjustable front camber, a necessity to set up a car to handle decently. Its just got a totally normal suspension, and is atypically heavy with atypically narrow tires.

Now does it set good times on certain tracks? Absolutely, because it has 500 horsepower from "idle" up to a pretty decent speed. On tight, short tracks it can power out of corners in an absurd manner.

But the "handling" is really kind of bad, which can be fixed in the same way you can fix any cars handling (aftermarket coilovers, a proper alignment, and big tires)

I care about handling on public roads, not autocross or track racing.

Ok, it all works the same on public roads too, and isn't as good as a 911 there either?

I realize there is a valid point here that actual handling doesn't matter other than "the steering feels fun to me for whatever reason" and sure, the Tesla does that decently. So does a Mazda CX-50 crossover for some reason. (I dunno why but they gave it the sportiest steering feel ever)

I'm not sure I want to be on the same public roads with anyone that thinks they need "handling" there.

All my objections to Tesla were validated after I took one for a test drive. It felt cheap, the ride was fine but nothing special, and the control scheme (with that touchscreen) was awful. I also can't agree with you at all on the handling. It certainly handles better than a Honda accord, but nowhere near a 911 unless you're driving in a straight line. Teslas are hard to beat in a straight line thanks to the torque from the electric motors.

Also, as a practical matter, you have to ride the accelerator pedal in a Tesla because the car will roll to a stop in a very short distance if you don't. With most other cars, you can hover your foot over the brake to prepare for an emergency. I assume that some fraction of the people whose Teslas "accelerated out of control" when they were trying to hit the brake didn't realize this.

The single-pedal braking can be turned off in the settings. I have no idea why coasting and hovering over the brake is ever a good idea in any circumstances, but if you really want to do that, you can.

if you are driving defensively? you may think there is potential for brake usage in the upcoming section of highway, so you might take your foot off the accelerator and hover the brake just in case. I believe this is pretty common.

at least when I drove a model s this wasn't really possible because the car would slow rapidly when I took my foot off the accelerator. nice to know that can be disabled, ill look for it next time I'm driving a tesla

When you get used to it, driving other cars just feel dangerous. Like if for any reason if your feet leave the pedals the car will just fly out of control and not slow down.

Even taking your foot off the brake at an intersection will cause the car to drive right into it. That seems crazy when coming from a car that when it is stopped, it remains stopped.

Holding the brake is like holding the trigger of a grenade.

It may seem odd, but it is pretty key to reaction time - studies on this have shown that it takes about 2 seconds for an emergency stop when you're actively using the accelerator pedal (which is almost 100% of the time your Tesla is rolling forward), while it only takes a little under a second to do an emergency stop when your foot is over the brake. The car rolling forward when no pedal is applied is actually a safety feature, weirdly (although an accidental one).

Yea, but the Tesla can brake faster automatically in an emergency faster than I can realize an emergency is happening.

And again, when I drive cars that don't slow down without input, or creep, it just feels more out of control and dangerous. The Tesla is inherently safer by quickly slowing down when no input is applied.

(citation needed)

I'm sure that it feels safer, but a lot of people felt safer in cars without airbags too.

Also, relying only on auto-braking is a really bad idea. A lot of people have died doing that (not just in Teslas). It works 99.9% of the time, but that other 0.1%...

Having a car quickly slow down and stop automatically is inherently safer. Most other cars will continue coasting/creeping until they hit something. There's really no way to spin how that is better/safer.

Until the rest of the market has something about half as good as the SuperCharger network, they may be behaving correctly.

> now there are lots of good options available and it's no longer necessary to put up with this

Tesla has its battery supply chain nailed down to a degree its competition can only dream of. That’s slowly changing. But they likely have another half decade of margin advantage before the majors begin to seriously bite into their volume.

Yes they are catching up, but also cost more and get you less.

In NZ base ioniq5/ev6 cost slightly more, but you don’t get panoramic roof, autopilot, app, leather seats, heated seats, electric tailgate, storage.

What Tesla is missing tho is v2l, buttons, carplay.

Overall people here seem to like paying a little more just not to be seen driving “flashy Tesla”…

I love how Tesla reviewers always say, "Now to be sure there will be continuous improvement," even as the product quality is decreasing.

Typical startup behaviour - realise they can't afford, or don't want to pay for what they offered before, and cut service to a substandard level.

Except in this case it's with a car, so injury and death is almost inevitable.

Tesla is a 20 year old company, I don’t think it can be considered a startup anymore.

I love my tesla, but the auto wipers are terrible. They have been terrible for 4 years. They made a similar decision to not use a rain sensor, instead using vision.

The auto wipers are my main gripe too. But hey, I got an almost perfect car... I love every second in it.

The logical next step is to remove all windows and windshields. Who needs them when you've got cameras?

Who even needs the car? Just send the camera out on a little drone!

Who needs the drone? Just play Gran Turismo 2049 over Neuralink.

Ultrasonic sensors are super common in industry. Modules vary by FOV, distance, update rate, mounting, size, etc. We did a semi-formal comparison of the more popular mainland Chinese units last year.

They all have the problem where partial blocks to their FOV (eg. thin post or foliage) or non-perpendicular surfaces generate wildly fluctuating output. Other problem scenarios include dirtied sensor lenses, glass and liquids (feel like reversing through a fish tank?). While these issues are basically inherent to the physics, approaches like sensor arrays, post-processing or visual/inertial sensor fusion, inset mounting and washdown can help to resolve it.

The good thing is at the low end they are dirt cheap, in the order of $0.50 or less at volume, with typical nominal ranges of 45 or 60cm, though 4m may be readily achieved in practice. So for an array of three units with dedicated post-processing you may be talking an anticipated final production cost of around $2 per unit.

That said, your control plane is still going to need to remain seriously skeptical of output, as something as simple as mud can totally destroy your readings.

One may reasonably suspect that Tesla made a strategic decision to move away from ultrasonic owing to the reliability issues pervasive to the technology.

Entirely predictable train wreck in the making. The vision based transition from the start has been a complete mess for years now. Here is a short summary for those that don't understand.

- Mobile Eye dumps Tesla in AP1 days forcing them to develop their own vision based auto pilot aka AP2 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobile... For those that aren't aware it took years for it to work nearly as well as AP1. - Tesla removes rain senor in favor of vision based detection in AP2 cars as well. To this day vision based rain sensing is one of the worst features of the car. It is laughably bad in certain scenarios (night). - Early 2021 Tesla removes radar in favor of vision based cruise control and Traffic aware cruise control. Again, the product was rushed out due to supply shortages in an unfinished state. Still to this day the speed limit and distance settings are not on parity with radar enable cars. Vision based cars still deal with frequent phantom braking (just google it). Surprise surprise this one was so bad radar is coming back in hardware 4.

I've AP1,2, and 3 cars now and we were forced to sell our 2021 Y over issue #3 the phantom braking in the vision based system. I've heard it has gotten better but this parking sensor business is just more of the same from Tesla. Another one that is flying under the radar with HW4, Tesla is removing the ambient outdoor temperature sensor. This is right up there with the rain sensor. I can't tell you how many times I've been traveling through a weather system or going up and down elevation it's nice to know the actual temperature, not something fed from an API.

>Tesla is removing the ambient outdoor temperature sensor

Another 20c saved, lol. That's truly pathetic. I mean, it's not a cheap car.

This is solidly mad. In a car, you have the opportunity for the perfect collaboration of hardware and software - computer vision is great if all you have is a rubbish PC webcam as the lowest common denominator, but when you control the hardware, why on earth would you give up sensors that give you actual depth calculations!?!

Worsening products to improve stakeholder value. But they forgot that the value itself is generated by good products that people actually want to use. Very shortsighted.

I'm not sure I agree. I've meet enough Tesla owners to know that they bought it because it was a "Tesla". The same car with any other branding would not have sold it.

They have a Veblen good and Tesla knows it. The best thing they can do now, is take the profits and push their 1 extraordinary feature that no one else cares to compete on(take your pick, fans will embrace it).

Automated parking is a feature available on many cars in the USA now, but I haven't myself driven one yet. Does this feature in other brands typically use ultrasonic sensors, or just computer vision? how is it implemented for other brands?

Pretty sure they use ultrasonic sensors.

This channel actually had an automated parking test with many different EVs, and Tesla's performance was pretty all over the place there too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

Yes basically any car north of 30k usually has little dots in front and back for the ultrasonic sensors. Basically standard for most cars these days. Very cheap, very effective

They are so cheap they get installed in base models that don't even have the parking assist feature activated, often because they are used for other features like blind spot assist and reverse warning.

This makes it seem especially weird that Tesla is removing them, right?

Yes agreed. It reminds me of the change a few years ago to remove radar (or was it ultrasonic?) from the FSD hardware to go vision only. Which they seem to be reversing again? https://www.extremetech.com/cars/341409-tesla-may-bring-back...

I had automated parking on bottom range Mercedes (A180) in 2013. With one button press it would reverse, turn and magically land up in a parallel parking. 10 years later I have the top of the range Tesla Model Y and it doesn't even beep accurately when I'm near another car.

I had a manual version of that same Mercedes parallel park assist. It'd show you on the cluster how much you needed to turn the steering wheel, when to accelerate and when to stop.

It definitely worked, although it was a bit fiddly since you could easily overshoot the steering wheel turn and it'd tell you to spin it back.

https://youtu.be/kItT3yG5H6I?t=23

I have never had a truly successful (by my standards) auto park with my Tesla (with USS). It either fails to "enable" - meaning I can't even start it - or it takes so long to do it's maneuvers I may as well have just done it myself - and when it does complete, it's not centered like I would like - or it gave me a heart attack getting too close to some other car, etc.

They all rely on ultrasonic sensors and it usually works quite well. I drove a manual transmission VW Golf in 2010 that had it.

My wife's 2022 Chevy Suburban excluded both radar-distancing cruise control and also parking sensors.

It is very annoying, but Tesla is not the only one that has had to make these compromises. At least Tesla is trying to solve the same problem, Chevy dealership says they will "eventually" be able to retrofit (ha...). They do still have rearview cameras and a front windshield.

The tests using a wheelie bin and…person…seem really basic.

How could this pass testing?

As with other Tesla features, the public release is the test.

OMG! that was pretty bad. In our Toyota Rav4 it shows camera stitched 360 view. I as a user get to decide with my eyes and brain what is around and my visual cortex does a decent job even in rainy/blurry scenario.

It seems Tesla is hiding the raw camera output and letting their vision stack perceive (which is pretty bad compared to human visual cortex).

I wonder why they went that route. Even if they augmented an overlay but still showed camera stitched video like https://babydrive.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TOYOTA_R..., it'd have still worked.

They don't need to re-invent the wheel here. Overlay is a pure software thing, they are doing a disservice to their users.

> First it was lumbar adjustment for the front passenger, then it was carpet in the front boot, shortly after the mobile charger disappeared – and now Tesla has removed front and rear parking sensors in the Model 3 and Model Y in a quest to save money and improve profit margins for shareholders.

This is why you can't have nice things. There's no way I would buy a new Tesla without these features. Teslas cost too much to not include these.

> improve profit margins for shareholders

When is this going to stop? I'm sorry, I get that with this audience, I just hurt some of you by asking that. But seriously, this is fucked.

This is similar to that yoke steering wheel - goes way too far with minimal user benefit. The sensors probably add what, $100 to the manufacturing cost?

They could simply charge users $200 more and make everyone happier.

Seems premature to cut costs on a system that doesn’t work yet.

Just coming back from a 1k km trip with a Model Y LR, generally nice, but on the topic, with heavy rain detection of other cars was real bad.

Everything in Tesla 3 or Y screams COSTS CUTTING.

Wow, the video shows how horrible the system is. It shows what the systems see, how can people tolerate it when the display shows all the detected objects dancing around in the UI? At 9:50 it even draws a pickup that the Tesla is about to phantom-crash into, without warning the driver that "Oh I see an object in your way!"

Yeah it's incredible they shipped it like that. I bet they planned to ship it with the FSD visualization (which is very impressive), but it got delayed so much that they used that atrocious legacy visualization to meet whatever "deadline" they had.

>Tesla is behaving like a company which doesn't realize the competition is catching up fast.

Does this really matter when demand for EVs outstrips supply? Can any other OEM deliver close to as many EVs as Tesla?

I recently purchased a non-Tesla EV because I appreciate things like having a gauge cluster, but the vehicle was not easy to find.

At least for top two EV manufacturers (Tesla, BYD) manufacturing capacity exceeds demand, hence the large price cuts in Q1.

but the vehicle was not easy to find

As one example, we've been looking at Hyundai Ioniq 5s, and multiple dealers have over 40 on the lot in the Seattle area (Kirkland and Edmunds are two we've checked on). VW that we drove by has a row on their lot. Supply appears to be rapidly catching up.

Musk in trying to cut costs is going too far in replacing hardware with software. It was the same with Lidar. I don't know why he is okay with car being as good as humans when with sensors like lidar self driving cars can be better than humans.

The HUD in that video reminds me of cartridge tilting on an N64 to make the models glitch out.

https://youtu.be/7DJQb_9CVHc?t=229

Funny in a youtube video, not so much in a $50k car.

Whilst this obviously seems like a dumb move (and likely will stay that way) is there not a case that the vision software will continue improving rapidly until it is better than the original parking sensors?

There is, but why ship a bad product until it does?

Full agreement there. Although I think there's nothing like finding your edge cases by deploying!

Not seeing it. I feel like there's a reason why we have backup cameras AND parking sensors, even though we have a pretty intelligent vision system inside our brains.

A good stance to have if you have access to a crystal ball that can tell the future, and you don't care about safety today.

How can it be better than parking sensors? Seriously, what is the area where normal parking sensors are failing at?

Poles and curbs

Yes and no.

IMO the major benefit of parking sensors is that they see things that the driver and the cameras can’t. Not because of perceptual or image processing issues — because the obstacles are obscured by the rest of the car.

So surely a good enough machine vision algorithm could do the same things if it had camera on the bumper, but they would get dirty and be more expensive than ultrasonic sensors on the bumpers.

How many times have you not been sure whether there’s an obstacle right in front of your car because you can’t see there?

(Maybe a really nice mapping algorithm could remember what’s in the way, but that’s not terribly useful when un-parking if obstacles move, or when parking and approaching obstacles of which the driver and the cameras have never gotten a good view.)

On my 2019 Model 3, the sensors could not detect the curb in front of the car even when it was tall enough to hit the bumper cover. So there's definitely room for improvement there. That's pretty implementation-specific, of course, some cars can do it.

I'd just like functional top-down 360 camera view like a bargain basement Nissan Rogue has. My eyes can detect the curb.

Think about how much the auto wipers have improved in the last 5 years. That's about what I expect for vision-based parking.

Part of the problem is that the cameras Tesla puts in a Model 3/Y were mediocre in 2018. By today's standards they're really quite bad. Though I think I heard a rumor that this would finally be changing soon.

The question is really if a software update will "fix it down the track". If the auto wipers are an indication, no it won't.

On the other hand, the basic vision-based autopilot really _does_ work very well.

You mean the one they said that they'll eventually bring back it working with over 140 km/h and being able to follow at 1 car distance instead of the minimum 2 now?

It's been 2 years since they've promised that.

Whether this bothers you really depends on the country. It would both me in Germany where there are still many unlimited roads, but anywhere else? Not sure ... But even then it was limited to 150 before. Not a big difference. And a follow distance of 1 is not safe in any case.

Still - they took away the functionality, promised that it' return and there's nothing for 2 years.

Anything else is just making excuses for them.

I am surprised noone has brought up Andrej Karpathy's role in all of this. He was the one who proposed vision-only self-driving, but his rep seems to have survived unscathed.

Does a $100 sensor really change the bottom line of a $55k+ car?

Only when you can't ship a $55k car because you don't have any $100 sensors.

This holds true until Tesla/Elon gets into the business of semiconductors to control that level of supply chain and the vertical monopoly gets taller.

If you need a million dollar team to support the sensor, maybe.

That seems way over the top. An ultrasonic sensor is really not a difficult thing.

Apparently Tesla makes on the order of 10k per car. If they can drop $100 on cost of goods and keep the same sell price, that's a 1% bump in profit/margin. Alone, that's not significant, but it's also not trivial. 1% bumps can quickly add up to "real" growth.

Another way to look at is, is $100 BOM cost reduction would be like finding ~2 hours of man-hours saving in producing a single vehicle. Which at this point in Tesla's lifecycle (they've been building Model 3s for years now), is probably not an easy or cheap task.

If they are, as I assume they are, ultrasonic sensors - schlub punters like us can get them for £3 a pop. I've got some sat in my drawer here (for yet another project that's not gotten very far in over a year now :\ ...).

I once needed a couple but it was the same price to buy ten instead of one. I don't know what to do with 9 extre ultrasonic time of flight sensors lol.

> $100 sensor

Not even that. The retail price of an ultrasonic bumper sensor is $5. And that includes a display if you buy them in a pack of 8.

I wonder what was their defect severity assessment and whether they thought "oh since there's a workaround it's fine we can ditch the sensors"

I have a friend with a three- or four-year-old Caravan, with all the sensor bells and whistles. It works much better than what they are showing, here.

HW4 is adding radar back. So it's not impossible that Tesla could bail on this bad decision and add USS back.

Maybe AI bros could explain why computer vision still sucks so much?

Not an AI bro, but it's easy to underestimate how good the human vision system is at dealing with novel inputs as well as degraded input quality. When viewed in isolation, our eyes might suck compared to a digital sensor - but the brain does a load of work turning that input into a cohesive and continuous view of the world. And this continues to work when vision is partially obscured by fog, rain, snow, or even injury.

Is all this drama part of the experience?

Should be fixed with a software update

There's no fixing the lack of a front camera.

It seems that the refresh that's coming up will have front cameras and that model will likely work well enough, but currently people are just getting shafted

That dealer is going to get Elon'd somehow.

How much has this one idiot, Elon Musk (and his enablers like Kaparthy) done to slow down / stifle the self driving car industry? I claim it's a lot. We are easily 3 years behind where we should be with self-driving vehicles due his refusual to believe that "Sensor Fusion" works or even is a real field of study with lots of smart people who work on it.

He is hell bent on taking the things that make cars objectively safer, more aware, and awesome, like radar-based sensors, parking sensors, and heads-up-displays and not only refusing to put them in his cars (or taking them out), but also disparages them and their users on twitter.

I am just capital S shocked that this is the behavior of the CEO of a company who is trying to have the aesthetics of being technologically advanced and superior and all that. The sad truth is that my 2017 lexus has a far superior set of sensors on it than a 2023 Tesla. If Tesla didn't have such insanely good powertrains and batteries, no one would buy these tin-cans shitboxes, and they ARE garbage in terms of initial quality/fit-and-finish.

I am baffled by the negativity towards Tesla here. I wonder how many people here actually own a Tesla car? It's an amazing car.

I test drove a Model 3 recently and wasn't impressed at all. I would never buy the car, on its own and with so many news stories like this where they are cutting costs for lower feature set essentially.

Is this your first time in an EV-related thread on HN? This is mostly par for the course.

How old is yours? I.e., does yours still have the hardware they've been removing lately?

My neighbor across the street "actually owns" a Tesla car. Bought it just this weekend. And when I talked to him yesterday, he was talking about returning it because it doesn't have parking sensors, which is the topic at hand.

But don't just take my word on it, plenty folks who actually own a Tesla are commenting on this very page, and some of them are not flattering toward Tesla.

Maybe the negative posts watched the video in the article.

It's an econo shitbox sold at premium price with dubious software to increase their margins, with removals decided on a whim by an egomaniac idiot.

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