Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
> The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance systems where customers have expressed safety concerns has more than 3000 entries.
Out of millions of cars? And for the entire time Tesla’s been making cars?
I’ve watched YouTube videos of a SF Tesla driver who submits one or two reports every video (autopilot wasn’t aggressive enough, or failed to navigate a complicated turn, etc). Are each of those counted in the 3000 safety concerns?
I can’t even fathom any other car manufacturer having lower numbers.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fsd-beta-safety-crash-statis...
> My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.
Not least because this is why I wouldn't consider buying a Tesla. It feels too much like dealing with software: it isn't your car. It is Teslas car. And maybe paying a bunch of money for it means you can drive it, but sometimes, when you hit some corner case, it doesn't.
I've been a tech at a Ford dealership, and I'd say that the incidents which render the average Ford undrivable are far greater than the incidents which render the average Tesla undrivable.
The there are the massive privacy issues and the fact that you can't do anything about that: your car is spying on you. (I know consumers don't care enough about this in the US to elect politicians that take privacy seriously, but in Europe we do. Which is why Tesla is under scrutiny for not only collecting massive amounts of invasive data, but also for not being able to adequately safeguard the data they collect).
Still think it's your car?
Why?
No, seriously. Why?
Most people are (correctly) disillusioned enough to understand not to use a company-provided feedback funnel.
It is possible that this one is different. Doesn't change the fact the correct first impression is to never use the feature.
To improve the feature. The same reason that we report bugs to KDE, Mozilla, LibreOffice, Canonical, Debian, Red Hat, Anki, JetBrains, Oracle, etc.
I don’t submit random bugs to Oracle because nothing happens unless it’s serious and I have paid for support to have dedicated engineers debugging stuff.
we all know that these feedback channels just create a corpus of opinions to be used for arbitrary arguments by management. no one is gonna read or even react to this unless it's necessary.
The effort is in the follow up time and the pointlessness.
Submitting an IT ticket is different than a Tesla event. But I don’t want someone to ask me if I’ve rebooted my computer and trying to call and confirm I’ve tried all the things I said I tried.
I never submit tickets unless I expect some strong probability of solution.
We recall consumer products for danger well below the numbers reported in the article above. A vehicle on the road should be held to an even higher standard.
Aren't recalls related to systematic failure and severity, instead of absolute number of occurrences of an issue?
If someone is claiming that there is a safety issue despite the existing data, then yes, the burden of proof moves to them to validate their new claim.
The numbers here aren’t very high and they don’t reflect any serious risk of harm. Recall math is interesting to me, but it’s not just a function of customer complaints.
Obviously these issues should be solved, but net-net, Teslas are very very safe.
All of those were low numbers.
Ford recalled 1.5 million cars for about 40 fires.
GM recalled 30 million cars for about 120 deaths.
To put things into perspective, about 100 people die from traffic accidents each day in USA.
This site doesn't seem that impartial/unbiased. From a linked article on Tesla:
> It’s also worth noting that the above email was sent after 2 a.m. Pacific, which isn’t specifically relevant to the faked video. But it does make it look like Musk is a loser with no friends or anything else to do other than work. Loser.
Edit:spelling
But it is one of those trends that I personally do not like either where these posts are made like it's a personal conversation between two girlfriends or whatever. There's opinion pieces and then there's this kind of I don't even know what it's called I'm so un-hip
My read from this link to a story about a story:
~1000 crashes related to autopilot reported for the 2.6 million autopilot enabled vehicles shipped in the reported time frame.
.04% total failures. How many of these were user created and not the fault of the car? How many of the failures from the car were specific to that cars hardware vs the software? Was it a Tesla hardware failure or an OEM device failure?
I’m not gonna do a full analysis, but whenever I re contextualize myself on car crash statistics I am reminded that Tesla failures represent an insignificant fraction of all failures.
The behaviour described (not wanting anything written) might very well be standard operating procedure with any company with decent legal counsel. If it is common behaviour, it is not some sort of Muskism, part of his evil scheming as is implied in the article, instead it is a reflection of the world we live in.
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-...
They go a step further. They use their cameras to detect the environment and significantly slow down acceleration if they think it might be a mistake.
As a side note, I've never heard of confusing the pedals as an issue for ANY car, so if Telsa's get people to confuse them enough to bring them to court, it's probably bad design.
Edit: The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates 16,000 accidents per year in the United States occur when drivers intend to apply the brake but mistakenly apply the accelerator.[3] from wikipedia on Sudden unintended acceleration
Hard to imagine how you fail to design pedals!
Then you haven't been paying attention around the Toyota acceleration scandal.
Pedal confusion is remarkably common when you buy a new car/use a rental (your feet rely on muscle memory), and it's not uncommon in the elderly.
Most of the Toyota unintended acceleration fits the statistical profile of pedal confusion in the elderly.
However, what Toyota really got whacked for is that when people pulled their software for audit, the software was a disaster and didn't even adhere to basic standards. At that point, it was cheaper for Toyota to just admit fault than go through with a whole lot of court cases that they were likely to lose once a jury got involved.
When skimming about Toyota, I'm getting unsafe floor mats and sticky pedals as the cause of acceleration, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough. The other commenter also brought up that it's a common issue.
Guess I'm feeling less safe on the road then ever - and I'll get a manual to boot
The ECU module includes watchdog support that runs on another chip or core (can't recall) that was intended to do backup monitoring of the main ECU - and especially it should have watched the brake pedal and of the brake was held for a minimum time it would override the ECU and force the accelerator to zero. However that function did not work reliably, making the watchdog useless.
The code itself was poorly structured, with lots of critical things done in one big "god" task that if accidentally disabled by a single bool flip in RAM would ultimately disable many safety critical functions. Normally you'd have multiple copies of such data structures that must agree, split the code up into separate isolated tasks so a failure of one doesn't stop the others, and implement basic stack overflow protection which again IIRC was available on the toolchain they were using but was not enabled.
The watchdog problems are especially inexcusable for a safety critical system.
How many people will have to die before governments impose the software to be submitted for approval?
But it is one of the most common if not the most common cause of unintended acceleration in any car.
I’ve even had it happen to me one time. The typical scenario is that you’re traveling at low (“creep”) speed with your foot on (but not pressing) the gas pedal. You think your foot is on the brake, so you push to slow down… whoops you’re starting to accelerate.
The probable reason that it happens more often with Teslas is that they have less lag between pressing the accelerator and getting juice. So by the time you realize you messed up, you’re already going fast.
In most gas cars, firmly pressing the accelerator results in milquetoast acceleration and a lot of noise for a second while the transmission downshifts and the engine revs up. In an EV, you just… go.
I think this is media bias. The media picks up accidents involving Teslas far more often than they do other manufacturers. The national news will even cover Tesla recalls when it's just an over-the-air software patch with zero known real-world impact), and similarly despite that there are ~25K vehicle fires per year, you only see them in the media when a Tesla is involved. In particular, confusing pedals is pretty common, particularly among very old drivers.
I remember NASA thought so. So I just posted it, thanks for the post idea!
1. Most unintended acceleration events are user error across all vehicles. 2. Some small number of Toyota unintended acceleration events were caused by low quality software on the ECU and a very badly implemented watchdog that did not implement brake override or other safety measures.
Next to no cars use lidar for driver assistance. The vast majority uses MobilEye.
Instead, what was shown in court was that Toyota had a culture of firmware engineering that produced code impossible to consistently QC, debug, test or verify. And as a result, they quietly fired the directors of that department, rebuilt it from scratch, and replaced every TCU from that era with a re-engineered unit in a series of about a dozen recalls spanning a decade and millions of vehicles.
Reference, please? Are you referring to a specific complaint, or truly "every" customer complaint?
That doesn't mean that those journalists are necessarily completely unbiased. Germany's traditional car industry is threatened by Tesla without any doubt.
However, the details on how Tesla is handling these reports is revealing and I have no doubts that they are real. That those who publish them might not like Tesla does not change that.
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/autokonze...
For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.
“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.
Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. “They never sent emails, everything was always verbal,” says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.
[...]
"Due to the sheer volume and structure of the data sets, the editorial team had to make a selection of which of the more than thousand Excel tables could be taken into account in the query tool. "
https://app.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/leseraufr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...
From that link, it's pretty bad if it's not even clearly better at general "highway miles" than when it's off because people are least likely to use it at the times that are much more dangerous generally, such as merging onto and off the freeway.
If you didn't overemphasize the good parts and downplay the bad parts you might find out that maybe you shouldn't really like what Tesla is doing at all, or you'd have a legitimate reason to like Tesla.
What you shouldn't do is overemphasize the good parts so you can feel better about your decision to like Tesla. Then your conclusion has been fixed from the start and you're adjusting the facts to fit to avoid cognitive dissonance.
For example, I like tesla autopilot 1 (mobileye based) and found its behavior to be reasonable. I also know its limitations - it has only one camera - so I don't use it in edge-case scenarios.
I think model S display is good for turning settings on and off, but is bad for controlling any aspect of the car especially critical ones like headlights, climate control, door locks and more.
I think the newer model S/X cars are bad, replacing stalks with touch controls for the headlights, turn signals, horn and wipers. They get in the way of good driving.
How would a self driving car get through heavy fog or snow covered roads when there are only very difficult to decipher hints to the road edges?
How will self-driving cars deal with humans that can perfectly predict their actions? I believe that bad drivers will take advantage of self-driving cars by cutting them off and failing to yield when they should.
Because human drivers have a sense of self preservation we can break the rules when we are about to be car-jacked or see an impending collision coming. Imagine how easy it is to obstruct a self-driving car for nefarious reasons.
I'm confident that, eventually, self-driving cars will address all of these issues to some degree, and that will mark a turning point where it is better to leave driving to the cars than average drivers. However, this doesn't mean I'm going to put my $100K car into a taxi pool to be used by (sometimes drunk) strangers; I don't buy the argument that the cost of buying such a car will pay for itself.
It seems to me that something really dangerous or illegal needs to be going on to morally justify publicly releasing a 100GB worth of (presumably unfiltered) private company data.
I wonder if they're acting on behalf of another auto manufacturer.
Sounds like click bait more than anything.
There is a reason it is said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistically, there's a ~7% chance I won't die because ~7% of all humans who have ever lived haven't died.
I would like to see mercedes publish their own statistics on their FSD. Given the tight constraints where they allow self driving, they could easily claim 100% safety record and thus infinitive more safe than any other manufacturer. It would be misleading, but statistically it would be the truth (any accidents could be said to be outside the constraint and thus will not count).
Personally I would only really trust such statistics if insurance companies would reflect that in the premium. Somehow I doubt they would be willing to cut the fee based on what Tesla claims.
If they had evidence that their cars were less likely to be involved in accidents then it would pay them to set up an insurance company and charge just below the usual rates.
Even if they are merely as safe as other cars then Tesla could provide insurance at lower prices because they need only break even and they have better statistics.
That way the carrying capacity of the road is higher. But when traffic is less dense 'station keeping' should be avoided at all times and if someone moves into my 'dead zone' or just to the left of me I'll gradually slow down to force them to finish their overtake.
Why are you in the lefter lane if you can't pass?
I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit. Some are in the right lane doing a few below the limit, some are in the left-most lane doing a few above.
Occasionally, someone who is late to work, emergency services, or whatever goes flying by in one of the left-most lanes.
Or are these protected lanes for carpooling?
I find this very impressive!
I've been on interstates in every continental US state and I've never seen this, but I think something has been lost in translation because "bumper-to-bumper" and "everybody doing the speed limit" are mutually exclusive as I understand the terms. If everybody on the road can fit into the right lane with enough space in-between to do the speed limit, that is done but I wouldn't call that traffic "bumper-to-bumper". I would call that light traffic. Bumper-to-bumper is when the space between cars really starts to contract, because everybody is going substantially below the limit, or because people aren't maintaining a safe distance.
Once the road has too many cars to fit them all into the right lane at the speed limit, then in every state I've driven, cars start using the left lane for travel, not just passing. If the right lane is so full that it can only sustain 5 below the limit, then people start driving in the left lane and stay there for as long as the right lane won't support speed-limit traffic. In this kind of traffic you'll start to have cars moving fast alongside each other with low relative velocity.
Seriously, that's objectively insane. Try the ruler drop test for reaction times if you don't believe me, a 10th of a second to even initiate your response isn't realistic and obviously gives no time for the response itself to have effect. What I'm saying is that at a tenth of a second, you can't even start to press the brake pedal in time, let alone have enough time to actually slow down.
In America, with only 2 meters between vehicles the traffic would be inching forward at a snails pace, under 20 km/h at least. "Stop and go", as in people would stop their car and then drive forward slowly when a larger gap ahead of them appears.
Reminds me of driving in western Virginia, people drive insane there. This is going into Amsterdam in the morning. Highly recommend “Not Just Bikes” on YouTube if you want an interesting comparison between roads here vs. Canada/US.
I think it really depends on where/when you're driving. I find this to be a common scenario on interstates during rush hour:
I'm in the right lane, doing approximately the speed limit. There is a safe distance between me and the cars in front and back of me, but only just. If many more cars enter the road, traffic would need to slow down to maintain safe distances. In the left lane is the same situation, except they're averaging about 1 or 2 mph faster. In this situation, there are cars in the left lane passing very slowly, spending a lot of time alongside me. I could slow down below the speed limit every time a car passed on the left, to reduce reduce that loiter time. But this would make my driving less predictable to the drivers behind me (and waste a lot of mileage too...)
So normally, when the other cars are my size, I maintain my present course and speed, driving as predictably as possible to help the other drivers anticipate my course. Changing position in traffic is inherently risky, so I avoid making changes unless doing so is necessary to avoid something I judge to be more dangerous than the average. If a truck passes me on the left, I'll slow down to make the passing faster even if that means a car behind me has to brake. But if in that moment I judge the guy behind me to be even more dangerous, then maybe I won't. It's the kind of decision that needs to be made on the spot in a case-by-case basis. On interstates that are flowing fast near capacity, you need to be constantly evaluating the relative threat of the traffic around you.
Since my time of learning to drive, the requirement to have formal driving training has ping ponged in being a requirement or not. The number of hours as an observer is just as important as the hours being behind the wheel. One of the things repeatedly mentioned by the instructor was to not drive side by side any car unless absolutely necessary. It was also a recurring theme in my repeated defensive driving classes. I also have an uncle that drove trucks for a long time, and he would tell stories of things he saw on the road. A relevant story was when one of the wheels of a tractor-trailor doing 70mph down the highway lost the outside wheel of the trailer and seeing the damage it cause the car driving along side. All of that added together makes me never like to have a car on my sides and I will speed up or slow down (which ever has more space available) to avoid it. For those that did not have to take a driving course, this is just information they may never have been provided.
You can drive the car normally, you aren't forced to use ADAS if you don't like it.
Highway code rule 126[0] says 2?
[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/general-rules-t...
At any time, a child could run out from a hidden spot and the car in front of you could have to slam on the brakes as hard as possible. Or any of a hundred other realistic scenarios.
These things aren't common, but statistically they will happen to you multiple times during a lifetime of driving, and it's your responsibility to always be at a safe distance behind in order to react as well.
The common rule of thumb is generally 2-3 seconds in perfect conditions, and 4-6 seconds in rain or other normal challenging conditions. 10 seconds is only in cases of ice/snow where most people wouldn't be driving in the first place (you know, when you're going just 15 mph but it still takes 5 seconds to come to a full stop on the slippery ice). The heaviness/lightness of traffic is irrelevant.
I've usually heard that it's three seconds. Even still, you control your follow distance. Even in heavy traffic, you can give yourself more space between you and the car in front of you than other people do. It's easy to do, and I've been able to do just that even in metro areas with heavy traffic.
You can't always assume that you will be able to tell when a situation has turned from safe to unsafe. You just can't exactly see what the driver in front of you (or the driver in front of _them_) is seeing.
And you can't assume that the driver in front of you is sane!
You have to _always_ follow at a safe distance.
They don’t just randomly brake for no reason.
If both drivers only had basic insurance covering damages that aren't your fault, he got nothing and the other driver got paid for having his car damaged by a reckless driver that smashed into his car.
How does your friend even know it was without reason? Maybe a kitten or a squirrel crossed the road.
Let's compare a few situations. In the baseline you're tailing the car in front of you with a focus on not letting anyone cheat and get in front of you, let's say 50 feet away. Your commute is 30 miles, and in this frictionless sphere of traffic you're going 60mph the whole time. You get to work in 30 minutes flat.
In the second scenario you're following the 3-second rule[0]. This would put you ~285 feet behind the car in front of you. Let's say over the course of your commute 20 cars move in front of you. If the average car length is 15 feet, and they all are 50 feet away from each other, when all 20 cars are in place you're a net -(20 * 65) feet away from the original car, or 1300 feet total. At 60 mph that adds ~15 seconds to your total commute time.
Well worth having an easier time avoiding a potential crash IMO! Also has the benefit of helping prevent traffic to begin with[1]
0: https://driversed.com/trending/what-safe-following-distance.
Someone will always keep cutting into the space. It is impossible to maintain 3 second to the car ahead. First one car will cut in, you make room for them and add 3 second gap the next car will cut in. Maintaining even a 1 second gap is sometimes very hard close to exits.
[1] Personally my driving pattern changed once I switched to driving a hydrogen fuel cell Mirai, slower is better on the mileage and fuel cell owners are very range conscious.
Not only can I see everything beyond the car in front of me, I tend to "soak" up the braking energy when there is a panic braking incident in front of me. I have no data to back this up, but I'm almost positive I've kept traffic moving much better behind me and prevented rear ending incidents using this tactic. Also, I wouldn't downplay the amount of fuel that is being saved that comes with not having to almost stop, then start over again from the slinky effect.
You need to not care about that, and you're actually supposed to let people change lanes into your lane. You're getting into a mental competition with other drivers and sacrificing the safety of yourself and everyone around you.
And if anyone believes that longer following distance causes more traffic, that is also false and the reverse is actually true. It is the poor reaction times of tailgaters that cause traffic slowdowns.
> You need to not care about that, and you're actually supposed to let people change lanes into your lane. You're getting into a mental competition with other drivers and sacrificing the safety of yourself and everyone around you.
> And if anyone believes that longer following distance causes more traffic, that is also false and the reverse is actually true. It is the poor reaction times of tailgaters that cause traffic slowdowns.
I think that what they're saying is the flow of cars in front of them keeps that distance between them and the 'next car' to a shorter undesirable distance as more cars fill that gap during traffic.
if you leave lots of space they can do so entirely safely.
trying to prevent other people from changing lanes does not enhance traffic safety.
I also keep additional distance in traffic to minimize slowdowns/stops, which ultimately actually improves/fixes the flow.
> 0,7 m/s² and ≤ 1,3 m/s² The signal may be generated. > 1,3 m/s² The signal shall be generated.
Thunderf00t points to an interesting interview of karpathy where he says (truthfully) that when he joined Tesla, the cars couldn’t even follow the lines or something, yet at the same time the scam king was promising coast to coast self-driven rides. See timestamp 16:48 of the video below:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grefAhSvcvc&t=16m48s
P.S. no offense to the excellent employees of Tesla who’ve achieved tremendous things, including the driver assist system. But the scammy claims of the conman in chief straddling the border of fraud and and futurism unfortunately overshadows these legitimate achievements.
I get that they're trying to create a wider moat against their competitors, but if their self-driving software are found to have systematic failure modes in them as these internal docs seem to suggest, then that could very well do more harm to their reputation in the long run.
Which is how we determine depth when there is occlusion ie. we move our head.
We move our head to ascertain depth. LiDAR uses laser pulses.
These comments seem to confirm: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/does-tesla-have-bino...
Tesla can't tell apart a deadly bollard from a large plastic bag flying in the wind.
I don't. Yet, somehow I operate vehicles with little to no "phantom braking or unintended acceleration."
They shouldn't be harming lives to pursue this.
But if you think this line of reasoning through, cars should have never been admitted on the road in the first place.
The issue I see is lack of transparency. If the % of accidents that can be avoided is provably much higher than those caused by Tesla's self-driving tech, an informed argument could be made in favor or against.
But with Tesla withholding the information in the leak there is just FUD around the whole issue instead of facts.
other manufacturers are slowly rolling out more self driving like tech, AND taking on liability.
People do realize it. Especially people who specialize in building safety critical systems.
And they are all aware that Tesla's doesn't do anything to build actually safety-critical systems. They just treat it as building a webapp for sharing photos of cats.
It’s a whole engineering discipline. Just Google safety critical systems and safety engineering.
In terms of automotive, ISO 26262. Tesla’s chaotic release process and hot fixes are definitive proof that they don’t do safety life cycle and change management in compliance with it.
So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
From ridesharing company PoV right now they are only taking 30%-50% of the revenue, and they have gaps in meeting demand due to resourcing challenges.
The business model is pretty solid if self driving taxis work even if its only in urban and suburbs
Why would then Tesla even sell such cars if they can just compete and outcompete Uber?
Google self driving car division has an agreement with Uber now.
People really do not understand that the Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Deliveroo make a huge amount of money from offloading liability - it's suddenly not Deliveroo's fault that the guy delivering your pizza in London does this on illegal, unroadworthy e-bikewith no insurance, and in case of a crash he is liable. Airbnb routinely rents out apartments in blocks that have this forbidden in the leave / rental agreement.
If the human is gone, then liability offloading is impossible. You have noone to blame. That liability off-load is worth more to deliveroo than is the pittance they pay him.
The pitch Tesla (if you believe them) keeps making is we could rent out our cars when we don't use it to the rental networks. We still own the car ( and the liability ) and unlock RoI.
Both Uber and Lyft[2] run rental businesses already, the model works where you can rent a car on a weekly basis just to drive on their apps, they cover maintenance and other services.
Uber will have to find a way to maintain their growth, and Lyft probably will be acquired by a rental network. The result is the same vertical integration.
[1] Uber's equity investment so far. SaaS startups can be valued lot more even $100s of billions, but pure tech companies do not raise that kind of cash. Stripe for example despite its delayed IPOs and ESOP issues has only raised $8B.
[2] They own some of the inventory and rest are from partners I believe.
> So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.
It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams.
As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote :
"What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!"
First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation.
> > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?
Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012
There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla
That is what we used to do in America, since the days of JD Rockefeller, Henry Ford...but also Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. I mean I used Windows before Gates became richest man in the world and so did hundreds of millions of people.
Musk got to #1 by selling go karts to a handful of rich people and promises of future selfdriving and total domination of the EV sector when EVs are not even sure to be the winner tech in the decarbonization of cars
The vast majority of Americans have never even set foot in a Tesla.
You seem to condone the poker game that Wall St. has become, I don't agree with that because entrepreneurship shouldn't be about bluffing and then offloading your hand to a bigger fool. We do that in Vegas, like men where at least you have to look in the eyes the dude you are screwing over.
Not so sure about that. Model 3s seem to rapidly replacing Civics as the Uber car of choice.
They say a sucker is born every minute
You seem to have a more personal vendetta against him, I’m just looking at his insane success and envying hype/ management style
His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA. This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.
So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.
Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.
Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.
Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.
Is there any other car company in the world selling electric vehicles at a profit besides Tesla? Everyone else is losing money on their EVs most are losing a lot of money. Not only is Tesla profitable but they have better margins than many companies have on their gas cars.
Tesla is the only car to drop prices in 2023, and the only car that doesn’t feel like you are paying 50% more for whatever you got 3 years ago.
Anything else at the 40-50k usd range is simply a joke compared to model y, and Tesla is simply eating the market right now.
and I don't even like this guy, but this is just dishonest from you
By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.
That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).
> What was successful after Tesla and SpaceX?
So I started wondering, can he be a good leader when he can't take criticism? How does he retain best pepple if his ego is this fragile?
I am quite happy to see more people reassess him as he demonstrates capricious and callous behavioir, for exanple the Twitter aquisition whoch he first wanted then tried to get out of.
I think you will come around when he targets something yoi carw about.
Just because you want him to be a failure or a con-artist or whatever doesn't mean he actually is.
"It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say."
What a projection
Happy?
It's not reasonable to pretend like Tesla/spacex is not a smashing success story.
You're not dealing with human relationships. What are you talking about. The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
so as an initial, I don't think your argument is reasonable at all. it goes against so of the most basic and recent facts about tesla. I can understand feeling different because you like him and he makes you feel fuzzy or something like that. but hard to say you are being reasonable - when you don't offer reasons!
> The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.
This is absolutely the boundaries of human relationships and is not better defined in the space of mathematics or physics, or even game theory, to the point you boil things down to being rational/un-rational. rational is basically the lowest boundary here, it means possible, it doesn't mean likely.
>There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.
I guess it depends on what you think accomplished is. I certainly think he's achieved a certain kind of status in society, I'm not sure if it's an accomplishment, but the amount of money that belongs to him is certainly very large and something anyone else would like to have.
So have a lot of companies? Tesla is down 7% in the last year. Up 12% from 2 years ago. Another example of unreasonable hyperbole.
> is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall,
A massive recall fixed by over the air updates? Be real. Yet another example of hyperbole.
> and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car,
Okay this is speculation. What can I really say about this?
> and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.
what does this have to do with elon's success? He's not allowed to fail sometimes?
The Model Y is currently the world's best-selling car. I think that counts as Tesla taking advantage.
https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...
Although I do think Tesla did take advantage of their head start. But it’s clear that the pandemic and issues with China and supply chains are hampering them globally.
And sure, Tesla launched successful Electric cars and woke the market up when they realised consumers actually really would switch.
But it’s not like other manufacturers couldn’t do it, they just chose not to.
The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
In a market where companies stopped selling sedans in favour of SUVs, Teslas came along with the model 3 and then model Y, and showed people will choose electric tech over SUV form factor.
People weren’t buying ICE sedans because they were largely garbage!
> The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!
If you disappeared Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Twitter and even Mr.Musk overnight, the world would look exactly the same the following morning.
Try and disappear Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Boeing, JPMorgan, BankofAmerica, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell overnight.
You'll have chaos and civil unrest within a week. That's where your quality of life comes from, sure it's not as exciting aas drinking the kool-aid of future Mars colonies and self driving cars and 100% domination in the EV cars sector, but at least it's real
The important bit for Ukrainian is Starlink is subsidized by other countries and it reduces the incentives for Russia to destroy communication infrastructure. Unfortunately because Russia is focusing less on communication infrastructure they get to focus more on other targets.
People say same seriously crazy shit about the Ukraine war, but the ground truth is fairly pedestrian as far as recent wars go.
No it won't. Where would the Twitter trolls go? They'd flood the streets. If Twitter had disappeared no 1 can announce for president anymore!
Compare this argumentation with typical argumentation about violenceful computer games players which are also going to flood the streets for some different reasons but with similar unwanted outcomes.
Thanks for understanding.
Solar city actually failed as an independent company.
Boring company is floundering.
Twitter is having massive issues.
I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.
i wouldn't call the cybertruck a true failure, since it's effectively free marketing, and they don't have a real obligation to make a sale.
Tesla's massive competitive moat is their battery making capacity. I do not believe the incumbent car manufacturers are able to catch up any time soon.
It would be the chinese manufacturers of electric cars that pose the biggest threat to tesla, not the US/western incumbents.
A significant part of that is they lack of a truck option considering how popular the Ford Lightning, Rivian, etc are. Alongside that is the general perception of stagnation among car buyers, the yoke was seen as a gimmick not the refresh the model S is in serious need of.
They just keep fumbling. Consider the amount of bad press they got around the undersized breaks on the Plaid or their 1 foot rollout numbers. What could have been a real halo product did almost as much harm as it helped.
Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The Model S is a tiny and irrelevant portion of Tesla's sales.
The perception of the plaid being unsafe unconditionally extends to people viewing all their cars as unsafe irrespective of actual crash statistics etc. The same thing happened with self diving car fatalities it’s a trivial number of accidents but still impacted people’s perception of the brand.
> Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The company’s stock price is based on the assumption they can ride the wave of exponentially increasing EV sales and take a large share of the global car market. Having largely squandered that opportunity the company’s prospects are far less favorable.
Didn't every single product launch happen after the takeover? We probably would have never heard of the company otherwise, why would we assume a similar trajectory with different leadership? It's like saying Jobs did more harm than good after returning to Apple.
Tesla was founded in 2003, Musk invested in 2004, Roadster unveiled in 2006 and entered production in 2008. October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the 5 year old company which then went public in 2010. The model S entered production in 2012 and they discontinued the roadster.
So Tesla went public selling a product developed under the original CEO, and he took 5 years to get the next model our even after having a working EV. That said the Model S was a hit, but it was also the original founders goal to work down to more mainstream products.
TBMs are just slightly too expensive right now. At 1/2 the price per mile a huge number of projects suddenly become very attractive. Which then opens the door for more economies of scale, further efficiencies, and in theory a very valuable company.
Trains i.e. proper mass transit, require wide bore tunnels and cost increases with the diameter of the bore
A lot of the costs with tunnels isn’t the tunnel but things like the portals that need to dissipate pressure waves as trains enter and leave at high speed
The boring company produced a smallish bore TBM and then ‘oh look it’s cheaper than a large one’, there is no innovation there
Um what? He has a rocket company where he basically has absolutely no involvement at all...
We definitely now live in a world that needs this word. I am now adopting it myself. Thanks!
This is actually false. Automation of vehicle controls has a surprisingly large overlap between air/space and land.
The main difference is the amount of traffic and lack of vibration dampening.
Not to be pedantic, but lots of people "realized" (or predicted) this, myself included.
He promised something, charged for it, and had little to show for. To me that's a big mistake, not little "ooopsie shit happens".
And it's not clear this will be fixed 10 years from now. Experimental research often fails in some stage between research and production.
Unsupervised self-driving in an unconstrained environment is a completely different game. The reason humans can drive is that they have millions of years of evolution in both low-level image processing, reasoning, etc, diverse knowledge of the world that an individual obtains during the course of their life which can be blended in various ways to make driving-related decisions, as well as a sense of self-preservation that generally forces them to err on the side of caution. Short of a major AGI breakthrough, safe self-driving on existing road infrastructure is impossible.
This is not true. The only thing that enabled the reusability of SpaceX rockets was the convexification of the soft landing problem, a novelty by Lars Blackmore.
Sure, you could argue the the model predictive control scaffolding was pre-existing, but so was linear algebra for self driving.
If you look at just CLIP, Dino, GPT-4, given the current pace of progress, it's pretty obvious that it's going to happen.
I personally don't think Tesla will ever develop the FSD architecture that ends up used by everyone else.
Whilst I agree with Elon that _technically_ FSD could be done only with cameras, because that's how humans do it, humans only drive "fine" and not "perfectly". We need cameras, LIDAR and whatever other sensors we can fuse in.
The software that runs the thing will not be developed by a car company, because car companies (yes, even Tesla) are absolute dogshit at software. All of them. Every single one. They can't even make a proper entertainment system that isn't laggy, let alone all of the legwork & research required to piece together enough models in the right way for FSD that meets the lofty standards of the public (ie a perfect 0 fatalities, vs angry evolution-driven hormonal monkeys in multi-tonne hunks of steel powered by explosions whose fatality count grows every day at 3700 deaths/day, 8th leading cause of death globally).
Unrelated but GameStop should combine combine games plus what RadioShack used to be for 'us', for modern times / tech / electronics
I don’t know that I would connote “meme stock” and “Tesla”
What's your evidence of this?
Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.
They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope.
I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon.
Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.
For any Tesla price estimate, you've got to pick a number, how many million vehicles the company will ship in say 2025.
Then pick an Average Selling Price, profit margin, and P/E multiple.
Divide by 3 billion to get the price per share of your estimate.
Considering Tesla is on track to deliver 1.8M vehicles this year and the delivery growth trajectory it's been on, 4M is a good target goal for 2025, $45k ASP, 10% profit margin, 30 P/E . . . from that I get $180, so today's price is fair as a base case for 2025.
$400 was a nice top in 2022 and I think we'll see it before 2025 as Tesla Energy starts contributing to the bottom line, each $1B of profit from energy is worth $10 on the share price (30 P/E, 3B shares).
If you think $180 for Tesla is way too high you have to account for that in the model...either 2025 deliveries will be a lot less than 4 million, or 10% profit margin will come way down, or P/E will come way down below 30 (it's currently 51).
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/13obftu...
Edit: I see that you actually addressed the PE roll down. Missed that on the first read.
If wealth made people smart or gave them taste, we'd know. Dumbasses do tend to have a lot of cash, that's why they can happen to be dumbasses repeatedly.
That's a lot of assumptions. Why not wait 3 years till all those projections materialize, and buy it then for $180 (if the price is still there)? Currently, if you buy at $180, you're discounting all the uncertainty and risk included in your calculations. Not to mention, even if you're right, the stock will be worth $180 in 3 years from now, which means your money will be idling for 3 years if you buy now.
That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week.
Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.
At least when there's a human driver in a car, they can tell misbehaving people to knock it off. Not so when the car is unattended and robotic.
I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there.
Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.
That might be different with an LFP Tesla, which have what should be 750,000 mile batteries.
Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year.
Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars.
Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year.
So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.
Even if we need 1/5 cars (and EVs do last longer, so without self driving, this will happen anyways), as long as the lost cars come from your competitors, it’s fine.
It’s a rather arrogant, and unrealistic assumption, (on Tesla’s part if they are making it) that they will capture the entire market. It’s not going to happen.
This does not require self driving btw, but a more important question is: would you really? Would you let strangers in your private car? Would you want to clean it afterwards? Would you accept damages other people do to you car? Would it still be your car if strangers use it far more than you do? And at this point we have arrived at car sharing, which already exists today...
Why make a medium-distance flight, when you can just sleep in the back of your EV as it cruises down the highway overnight? (This will pare well with lay flat front seats what would allow turning the car into something like one of those airline sleep pods).
Are you sure? How many people right now own a car that they use mostly a few times per week? Car ownership right now is the only way to guarantee personal long-range transport. But if self-driving cars can replace taxis and even some form of public transport, car usage might go up but it's not clear to me that car ownership will go up along with it.
A lot fewer than the average SF/NYC bubbler probably thinks. It is the only viable means of transportation for probably 90% of americans.
You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model.
So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more?
The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers.
For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").
Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money.
Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day.
Are they worth more? Do they command a premium?
No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero.
You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour.
Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars.
As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards.
So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/
The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it.
Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.
Personally, I'm surprised that the "Summon" feature wasn't matched by a corresponding "Banish" feature (go away and park yourself)
valet banish, where nobody drives your car.
The Model X was ranked 16th by car and driver which is pathetic (the impressive BMW iX was #1)
I don’t think they are trying to become the leader in self-driving. I think that, too, is smoke and mirrors.
The official policy to deprive customers and victims of information as much as possible is shocking from the standpoint of being flagrantly, cynically customer-hostile to the point of probable illegality, but it's right out of both Musk's normal playbook and that of his erstwhile colleagues at e.g. Paypal
For me, cars cross a very key danger threshold, which I express like this: "I am trusting my life to this device by using it. I must trust that it will not malfunction". We are in an era where cars have computer overrides, so that standard needs to be applied to the security and reliability of the computer inside. We are also in an era where computers sold by corporate robber-barons (IE most major corporations) will routinely not merely malfunction, but explicitly, intentionally betray the interests of their end-users for increasingly marginal gains for the company
Even if you trust the company that sold your car's computer, do you trust their security? All their employees? When we are putting computers in devices, like cars, where them operating as expected is life-or-death, those computers need to be auditable by independent experts and controllable by the end-user. To be clear, that unambiguously refers to the person or persons trusting - with their lives - that car operating safely and responding to their commands. We need to mandate open-source, user-owned computers in devices this dangerous, period.
Naturally if my estate sues you personally, your defense would be that you didn't know the product was dangerous. Perhaps if the whistleblower's leak is widely publicized, that would weaken your defense.
Certainly the leak should weaken the maker's ability to claim they didn't know.
(IAAL, but this is greatly simplified -- consult a licensed attorney.)
You cannot sue Mercedes if someone decides to use a car they manufactured to ram into people on the sidewalk. Well, Maybe you can sue, but you can absolutely not win.
On the same line of logic, you absolutely can not sue Walmart if your relative gets stabbed by a knife they sold, Had manufactured, or similar.
And then along the same line of logic, you cannot sue a gun manufacturer/dealer if someone decides to use a gun they sold/manufactured to harm someone.
Guns dont kill, people kill.
IF however a gun manufacturer ran advertising suggesting people buy their guns to shoot up farmers markets, schools etc. Or if gun sellers ran advertising with subliminal messages urging people to whack their neighbor, well then you absolutely CAN sue them, and would probably have a good case.
More similarly to this case here, IF a gun manufacturer made a gun that is obviously defective, leading to injury/death, and you had a leaker come and show evidence they knew about it, and didnt care, well then you would probably have a good case aswell.
Yeah, I see someone brainwashed and agendaed here and is not me. BTW if that phrase had any hint of truth to it people could just buy nuclear weapons as long as they can afford it, but no, we know that is too much power to be handed to the capriciousness of a single random person, but they pretend it's any different with handguns; manufacturers and everyone else involved know the next victim will be some kid they don't know and therefore don't care about and doesn't concern them at all, while nuclear warfare is much ore likely to affect them directly so it cannot be abstracted away as a statistic.
yes, I have an agenda, its called freedom and anti-violence. You dictating I cannot have a gun is violence against me. Same as if I tried to dictate you cannot have a car
but yes, it is violence. owning another human being would be too, and you for sure are also aware that it is not even comparable to own a piece of metal/plastic/wood and a human being.
Gun control isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job in most of the world. You can't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
Your examples are bad. People do both of those things all the time.
survivorship_bias_airplane.jpg
Access to most of the latest versions of FSD were doled out on the basis of privilege. What do you think happened to people who post negative "reviews"?
https://electrek.co/2022/11/24/tesla-full-self-driving-beta-...
AP/EAP will run red lights and can't merge lanes on a freeway. FSD will stop for lights/stop signs, but that's about it. FSD Beta is what Tesla is typically known for and what many YouTube videos are showing. FSD Beta will stop at red lights and merge into freeways. Most people use FSD interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.
Genuine question: what evidence is there of this?
If you google FSD fail compilation, you'll get a FSD fail compilation. You can do the same for humans.
Now if FSD proponents want to stop people from having doubts, they need to run several experiments in very diverse settings (as diverse as real world driving). In the absence of sufficient evidence, a skeptic is completely justified.
There's so much bias at every step of the process of looking up youtube videos that it lends essentially no credibility to any claim in any direction on this matter
If? FSD drives a million miles a day. There are a few.
Tesla spends $0 on advertising with Google.
Please continue this line of thought -
When I see a human fail video, where that person is an idiot, or drunk I conclude they shouldn't be driving. And usually their legal right to drive is taken away.
When I see FSD driving like a drunk idiot, I also conclude FSD shouldn't be driving. And their right to drive shouls also be taken away.
Lets treat them the same.
I have big doubts regarding this claim. I could not find any source that is not Tesla.
Given that TFA is about Tesla deceiving and hiding information from customers, do you have any source that isn't Tesla or Musk?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdUjrOnKdw
and human drivers do not set an infinitely high bar.
If you kill the R&D goose or smother it in overregulation, more people will die.
Feels to me like amateurs (backed by a small army) confidently building bridges and daring the community to try and stop them. (Except Tesla's army are fan boys, lobbyists, and lawyers.) So basically speed running a millennium of civil engineering, except ignoring the more expensive safety controls; like LIDAR.
It seems like you're holding Tesla to a higher standard than any other automaker. Which other automakers reveal similar information willingly? Many (or likely most) other automakers have made deceptive and/or dangerous products, in just about every manner imaginable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12007862/fca-jeep-grand-c...
You read the whole 100GB already? I'm impressed with your speed-reading skills!
Other automakers don't go and scream around in their advertising (or in the antics of their founder) to the degree Tesla does.
Look forward to a criminal fraud investigation, billions in fines, Musk resigning etc.
Agreed that it seems like everyone at least looked suspicious.
"But, mom! Everyone is doing it!" cried the 12-year-old.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where their diesels, along with Mercedes, got pushed out of California and CARB-compliant states. The opinion among diesel enthusiasts was that this was intentional on the part of CARB not just over NOx concerns, but also to help the market for hybrids grow. Otherwise, given the TDI's at-the-time superior highway mileage and the then-prevailing diesel prices, the VW diesel would have presented as the superior option to the Prius for a lot of people.
During this period, there was still a lot of pent-up demand for the VW and Mercedes diesels in California. Any car coming from out of state with at least 8,500 miles on the odometer was considered a "used car" and could be registered no matter the powerplant, so there was quite a cottage industry of putting that much mileage on brand-new out-of-state diesels and then turning them around on LA or SF Craigslist. The market here was primed to buy VW, but VW cheated to get in a position to sell new "CARB-compliant" diesels again. I'm not surprised that the prosecutors went after them disproportionately.
Example making can be rather distasteful, but it can also be an effective deterrent preventing similar things happening again.
because it sure reads like this is exactly what your view.
it doesn't matter if there's a double standard, it's bad behavior no matter what the rules are for everyone else. and if there is a double standard then that is something else that needs addressing. a double standard does not diminish the severity of these documents.
girlboss...?
As in Tesla's official policy is to gaslight you and gatekeep the information.
Source: I'm a zoomer who was active on TikTok during the pandemic :P
Are Teslas measurably less safe than other cars? I.e. is the accident probability per km driven on a Tesla higher than on another car? I haven't seen any data suggesting that, but I'm happy to be corrected.
I mean, what you say is sorta specious. Of course that's true, it's always true. The interesting question is "are the cars dangerous?". And the answer seems to be a pretty emphatic no, at this point. So instead everyone wants to argue about abstractions ("they're still liable") or absolutisms ("no failure is acceptable").
And that seems increasingly counterproductive, and frankly to have more to do with the somewhat questionable mental stability of the CEO than to the behavior of the actual products.
All of the elements of the Tesla business model like no repairs, no dealers, etc are all about maintaining that control.
Also Full Self Driving is extremely deceptive name for feature that does not do that
Is this even a real question? The product acts on it's volition! Ofcourse it's different.
Imagine you buy a crate of crate of C4 - well, its super dangerous, but it does not have a mind of it's own. Untill you touch it, it stays put. So long as you store it properly, it doesnt go off. If you kill someone with it, you go to jail.
But with a car, it can suddenly decide to kill you because of bad code. It could allow someone else to take control and kill you. It could kill someome else and make it look like you committed murder.
The fact that it has a computer and follows someone else's orders is a foundamental difference.
The question is whether or not the murder robots are a real thing or just a meme. And I think we all know the answer. Look, the cars are safe. Another story on the front page today noted that the Model Y is currently the best selling car on the market. If they were dangerous in any measurable way, we'd know. They aren't. They just aren't. But sure: if they do decide to kill their overlords, it's 100% on Tesla.
If a car kills someone (e.g. it explodes, or burns down, or brakes fail) but the manufacturer took all legally required precautions & followed all the rules & regulations, then they're not legally on the hook. It was "an accident".
Yes, we noticed that corporation are never held accountable for their actions.
After all, personal responsebility is only for little people.
If a human driver fail to brake somehow (like they have a bad reflex and push the wrong pedal), they might have followed all the rules and regulations, it might be "an accident", but they will still be liable for dammages they cause.
I'm not sure why it should be any different for a software bug in the autopilot for example.
Insurance covers risk. More cost exposure, more cost gets passed on to the customer
Lets assume the ridiculous best case scenario: Tesla cars are 2x as safe as other cars.
If replacement parts for a Tesla car cost 2x the amount of regular cars, there is practically no difference in cost. It will still cost more to repair that Tesla comparatively to other vehicles per accident.
Remember, insurance also calculates the driver's individual risk level.
Combine that with reckless Tesla owners letting the car just drive for them while asleep at the wheel. Tesla cars still have a high risk overall.
Why do you think that? If we used statistics to guide criminal justice policy we’d be in big trouble
Uh... we do use statistics to guide criminal justice policy? Not sure I understand what you're saying. How do you think they decide where to police and what to prosecute? How they decide on legislative penalties? It's true that this process isn't necessarily 100% data based, and in a bunch of ways ends up very unfair, but it's absolutely driven by a mostly-sincere attempt to get the most social good out of our limited enforcement and regulatory budgets.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with statistics, you just need to maintain an appropriate threshold for where you draw the statistical line.
Additionally, there's no data because Tesla releases nothing except heavily doctored numbers meant to make them look good. (To Tesla, a crash means airbag deployed. Sorry, random person that got ran over and killed, but you're out of Tesla's statistics)
You can count on Tesla for one thing, and that is to lie.
Not perfect, and has serious bugs but it’s been used by millions for decades. Even software that costs billions has zero days.
We could be in a world where everyone pays RSA and still have massive vulnerabilities.
We could be so lucky if all software ra exactly like OpenSSL.
We should require a huge and lengthy validation process for true autonomous level 5 self driving so keep others safe. It seems possible for an open source self driving system to go through this validation for one particular build of the system. But the moment I start modifying my own system (say, increasing `DRIVING_AGGRESSION` by 10 percent), it's no longer the same system that was verified as safe.
But even if personal modification is out of the question, the safety verification process needs to be so thorough and costly it seems difficult for anyone but a major for-profit company to go through it.
I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.
I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.
There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.
All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.
If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.
that 1. removes an ICE off the road 2. saves on new mfr costs and 3. is a worthy hacker endeavour and/or 4. supports a local business
of course if you simply hate cars and want everyone to ride the train or bikes you'll find a million reasons to not do this. good luck with that.
Of course you can say "here are 4 pros - if you say anything bad you want the world to suffer from cars" but you know that this is not how we can get to a solution.
Case in point:
At a time where Manhattan commercial real estate is about to implode and traffic is at a nadir, there’s a major push to kill driving in NYC to pay for overpriced mass transit. Instead of investing in electric vehicle infrastructure, we’re investing in destruction of lots of businesses (like nationally prominent hospitals).
Maybe it should implode? The prices for real estate are so high, you have to sell drugs on the side to pay rents. Many businesses just aren't viable becaus of it.
Growth in real estate is not real economic growth, it's more of tumour.
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.
Amazing tech. It usually warns me against collisions after I'm done avoiding them. 90% of the time it doesn't notice.
Cars aren't phones, and maybe a $15k car would sell well in this economy, but with way higher margins on a slightly better car at $40k, why would any automaker willingly give up a big pile of profit?
This is what you get when you have incompetents doing statistics.
At this point nobody on the planet can fit a phone in their hands, but they keep getting larger.
There aren't even any base-level trims available from most of the big manufacturers to offer to the "99% of people." Less than two months ago I was looking to see if I could find a manual Nissan Versa 2023 for my uncle. It's basically the paper-cup-and-string-phone tech equivalent for a car. It wasn't available within 300 miles of me, and pre-orders were above MSRP.
If an Eastern European country could export 5,000,000 two-stroke wooden cars to the U.S. right now they would probably dominate the auto industry in less than a month.
(Let alone the fancy stuff like electronic stability control, blind spot warning, autonomous emergency braking, autodipping headlights, lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, auto-parking, or attention monitoring? Those'd be nice too, probably.)
Things like heated steering wheels, and heated seats with rise and fall motors and motorised windows and mirrors, yeah, OK, I could do without those - but lots of people would disagree.
But "tons of houses and not a shop or anything else in sight" is of course a problem on its own. Thankfully not really in my country, there is usually some local shops nearby everywhere
The problem is they charge $300 for a maps update.
For that $300 I can just pay for a third party maps app that has the same features.
If the argument for connecting phones to cars is navigation I don't feel it is the strongest one.
I'd love to, the problem is it would get some pitifully low NCAP rating (because lack of active securities would bring the score down and I remember it is && deal, so car can have excellent crash safety yet still get low stars coz of lack of the electronic toys), and manufacturers want to sell as much gadgets as possible, because every few bucks of extra electronics is every few dozen bucks they can charge customer for.
The other problem I think is that the "fancy annoying electronics" are probably not that big part of the price of the car. Add chassis, battery, heating/cooling system for the car and all the mechanics and you already arrived at most of the car's production price.
Like, even if you add $500 of the compute (amounting to mid-high range GPU) and $500 on ruggedizing it for car work... extra $1000 worth in electronics isn't all that much of car price.
I for one am keeping my 8th gen Civic Type-R for as long as possible, got ABS, airbags, even some traction control but none of the annoyances of modern cars. All I want from new car is android auto...
And might have A/C controls built into infotainment...
On the other hand, I think the whole concept of cars is the actual problem, especially heavier cars. The tire dust alone is enough to think about weening ourselves off the project. Then there is strip mining the earth for cobalt and all the other nasty shit in the devices, it's pretty bad.
Where I live e-bikes are really taking off, to me e-bikes and public transport seem like the ultimate way to go. It even looks futuristic. A little bit of exercise and movement, combined with fully autonomous, small electric trains would be the best of all worlds.
By "public transport" you mean shared ebikes? I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward. Ebikes are unsafe, for starters. I expect a lot worse security issues than what's being reported with Teslas...
> I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward.
The cities of Copenhagen and Amsterdam beg to differ. Bicycles are first-class citizens there in terms of transport.
> Ebikes are unsafe, for starters.
Do you have any stats on that?
Bike have half the number of tires but remember that they carry 1/5 the number of people. For one person, fine, but families? Good luck selling it... They're also problematic when it rains or snows. Or when the sun is hot.
Ebikes won't be mainstream in a typical American city though, the distances between home, goods and services and work are usually too great and cars are basically baked into the culture. Better mass transit and bikes for those living in denser cities, is likely America's only good option.
I don't think e-bikes are unsafe though, their lack of safety is dominantly because of cars, and infrastructure not being set up for cycling.
According to WSDOT, there were 2 bicycle-related fatalities in Washington state in all of 2023, vs. 218 automobile-related fatalities. So a 100x difference. The data is there if you care to look for it.
The number of bike trips will not increase by 100x only, certainly by orders of magnitude more than that.
Now multiply the 2 fatalities considering 10K, 100K or even more bike trips.
Ebikes can reach and sustain higher velocities much more easily than normal bikes as well. If they were to be adopted in mass, I'd expect crash severity to worsen in general and fatality rates/trip to go up.
Sources:
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykke...
I find it very dubious to assume that cars drive the same amount of kilometers as bikes in the Netherlands...
I ride my bike just shy of 40kms per commute, the same amount I would drive.
Compare that painful inconvenience to a car accident and it's just silly to call an e-bike dangerous.
I have been in 4 car accidents, and am lucky to be here. You step out from a totalled car, and see the carnage, distress and mess that everyone is now subject to. Traffic has to be redirected, cops show up to take down details of those still alive, EMTs try to find the ways you've been contorted, firemen have to disable the vehicle and clear any fuel and fire risk, the tow trucks scrape the husks of twisted metal off the street so people can use the road again. It's a whole ordeal, and regularly fatal.
Although there are exceptions, usually bike accidents are only fatal when a car was involved. Cars are not safe and never have been, we just accept the risk for the convenience.
Concrete example: this week I had to drive some people between San Jose and Hollywood. Google maps says that's 5:40 hours over 340 miles. I looked at renting a model 3 for the trip but it simply could not justify itself when compared to the minivan I ultimately rented with 500+ miles range. Not only was I not forced to stop in BFE for 20-40 minutes, I didn't have to stop at all. Arrived with plenty of gas to get to any station in LA I might want (cheapest). And I wasn't even pressed for time, but if I'm slapping an extra half hour onto the trip I'd rather spend it (and actually did) on taking the more scenic US101 route for ~400 miles instead.
It takes me at least 3 minutes one way to get to a gas station, then another few minutes to fill up.
They aren't, as a matter of fact you buy yourself a whole lot of ICE interior opulence with the price you'd pay for a spartan EV.
The time saved up over the year of not having to go to a gas station every other week and just plugging in at home will dwarf the extra charging time on the very rare road trips (where I'd have to stop and let the kids have some fresh air anyway)
Say I have to go round trip to LA every 6 months. Adding up the 2 charging stops that's an hour:20 or so of downtime charging.
With a gas car, 5 minutes at a gas station every 2 weeks works out to only one hour every 6 months.
So your assertion, confidently presented, does not carry water.
Touchscreens on cars need to die out, preferably quickly.
I have so many things where I just want the old non-electric style back.
If Aptera manages to scale up production, it looks like they'll deliver that part at least. They're promising to make all the manuals and parts available to anyone.
"girlboss" ? Care to elaborate ? I don't exactly know what you mean here
The article doesn't present any evidence or argument to support it's own thesis.
Everything in it sounds like my experience dealing with any corperation.
I mean, that's pretty suspicious right there.
It seems suspicious to you because you assume it's not standard industry practice. But that assumption is not in evidence.
They have the internal communications and this is the most incriminating thing they could come up with?
That said, I don't think we should excuse or normalize sociopathic and customer hostile behavior from businesses.
--professional politicians at the State Capital building
They Musk open sourced tesla patents 9 years ago: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y...