Tesla starts using 'Supervised Full Self-Driving' language | Hacker News Reader

Tesla starts using 'Supervised Full Self-Driving' language

electrek.co

40 pointsCharlesW57 comments

I really don't understand how Musk gets away with egregious fraud. I feel like we've become desensitized to it, but that doesn't make it ok. There is an enormous difference between a robitaxi and a car with partial self driving capabilities. Part of the premise seems to be that you could actually use the car as a robotaxi for supplemental income but it is increasingly clear that will almost certainly not happen with software updates alone and definitely not on the time scale he promised, which is already long past.

I really don't understand why claims like this are legal.

I really don't understand why claims like this are legal.

There have been some civil lawsuits. IIRC Tesla settled in some cases (though not sure the amounts were substantial), others (including a potential class action) got snagged by the arbitration clause most customers don't bother to opt out of. The statute of limitations had expired in one instance. I'm surprised a group of purchasers didn't go after the company more aggressively, but I think most Tesla owners love their cars despite them not living up to the hype.

> but I think most Tesla owners love their cars despite them not living up to the hype.

Just last night, a friend was arguing that Tesla is a good investment (maybe it is, for now, I'm not going to judge) _because_ of its full-self-driving capabilities and all the tech going into that. I disagreed for a number of reasons, but the thing I highlighted at the end is that I've met a lot of people who like their Teslas, and not one of them made the decision because of FSD or even highlighted it as one of their top-10 favorite differentiating features. There's obviously a sampling bias at play in that survey, but I don't think if Tesla completely shut down the FSD efforts they'd have a dramatically different customer base; FSD is intended to impress a different crowd from the actual buyers and drivers.

Agree. I’m a Tesla owner and I bought it only for the super charger network. Living in Europe, every country I travel to can have different charging networks and so the Tesla network is one of the few that lets me drive on road trips without a worry. I don’t care about FSD.

Exactly, I brought the model y not because of FSD - actually I couldn’t care less about it. I brought it because of the range it can drive, interior space and space in trunk, Tesla phone app and supercharger network (and more stuff). I won’t care if they shutdown FSD.

The CEO's forward looking vision statements are not the same as spec sheets or a product user manual.

The website never said robotaxi. The manual never said robotaxi. The app never said robotaxi.

The CEO thinks it can be a robotaxi at some point in the future pending regulatory approval. (he has said it many times)

How is it illegal for the CEO to have a vision for the future of the product?

> How is it illegal for the CEO to have a vision for the future of the product?

It's not, but naming your product to intentionally mislead people into thinking that it's the present of the product is

It was literally called "Full Self-Driving".

Tesla hasn't used the term robotaxi in official material.

But they do regularly use the term "full self driving" which it definitely does not do.

I suppose you could argue that as long as the car is doing the driving, it is in fact full self driving, even if you have to watch it?

By that definition any car with cruise control is “full self driving”.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but cruise control doesn't turn off the highway, drive down surface streets, obey streetlights and signs, and navigate you home on its own.

Cruise control only manages the speed, right?

No, you can't argue that. No reasonable person would see "full self-driving" and assume it means they have to watch it like a hawk instead of taking a nap or watching a movie.

Well, at least no reasonable person before Musk had normalized this garbage.

My (non-Tesla) car has adaptive cruise and lane-keeping, and it works quite well. The car is certainly "doing the driving" to some extent, but "full self-driving? No, definitely not.

It’s not “full”, since it only works in very limited circumstances.

Yes they have.

Tesla Autonomy Investor Day 2019

https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?si=blLBL58Qv_qjwcAn

At 3:13:41. Robotaxis is clearly written on that slide. Elon Musk is talking about robotaxis for minutes as well during the official presentation to investors.

It did indeed say a future update would make your car eligible for the tesla network as a robotaxi, then they later removed the language.

Here's the diff:

https://www.thedrive.com/content-b/message-editor%2F15519938...

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26840/tesla-transforms-full-se...

>The CEO thinks it can be a robotaxi at some point in the future pending regulatory approval.

The problem isn't approval but Tesla's capabilities. They don't get an approval because FSD doesn't work but they already sell it to customers.

That's not a vision that's fraud.

It's not pending regulatory approval, it's pending developing an actual full self driving system. Elon Musk didn't want to pay for the sensors that were needed to do it properly, so now they're competitive with similar-hardware Mobileye-based level two systems instead of Waymo's level four system.

Even according to the extremely strict standards for fraud in the US, around the time you make unequivocal statements.

In 2019:“ I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark." [1].

That was after 5 years of development. Now, another 5 years later (10 years total) and they have still failed to achieve even basic capabilities like understanding and obeying safety-critical Road Closed and Do Not Enter signs. They have failed to make it fully self-drive in their literal one-lane tunnel under Las Vegas. There is a gigantic gap between vision and fraud; it just so happens Tesla is the world champion shark jumper.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doubles-down-on-cl...

The problem is people believed that, including journalists :DDD

> The CEO's forward looking vision statements

They aren't vision statements. At this point they are just continuous lies, and lies that are no longer forward looking. The false claims are old and stale.

In 2016 Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was a lie: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

In October, 2019 Musk said, "Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road. The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes." That was a lie: https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-mil...

Tesla lies routinely with with faked full self-driving videos: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-sel...

And even dumber faked quarter miles: https://insideevs.com/news/699260/tesla-cybertruck-porsche-r...

The lies are a decade old: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

But it's all fine because Tesla claims its lies are constitutionally protected speech under the 1st Amendment. So that's a nice, not-warped-or-twisted-or-deranged-at-all perspective: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-11/tesla-dmv-...

Everything you quote is Musk's goals for the future he wants to implement.

The website where you buy the car never said it was capable of that.

Nobody thought it was a robotaxi when they bought it.

> Everything you quote is Musk's goals

His goals that he lied about. His goals that he had set specific timelines for that were not, and are still not, achieved.

Musk is a liar. He lies.

> Nobody thought it was a robotaxi when they bought it.

Plenty of people drank the Kool-Aid. They were lied to and they believed it. They believed the lie enough to put money down for this false "vision".

They really should demand their money back.

Why do you think having a vision and working towards it is fraud?

Why do you think that "having a vision and working towards it" necessitates naming the product as if the vision already exists _today_? If you don't think that it does, why are you intentionally trying to derail the discussion by ignoring the actual thing that people are criticizing?

If we down to naming things - my Apple products are inedible, AI personal assistants do not assist in most cases, footlong subs are 6”, SuperCruise is SomeplaceCruise…

Let's not pretend that naming a computer "Macintosh" but it not being edible and calling a car "full self-driving" that can't self-drive fully are equally confusing. One of them is inaccurate about a purpose that no one actually intends to use it for, and the other is inaccurate about a purpose that people do actually want to use it for, and they're paying for it because it sounds like it fulfills tht purpose.

My brain read _today_ in the voice of Elon Musk.

I don't think Elon Musk is advertising visions, or hopes and dreams. He advertises concrete features, and gives his word they are just around the corner, but has been always doing what looks like blatant bait and switch.

Even if Musk believes it's always right around the corner, it's still fraud to sell what you don't have. Calling it "beta" forever doesn't make it OK to deliver oranges when people are paying for apples.

Selling something that doesn't exist is fraud.

Booo hooo Mr BeyondMeat TotalCommander

It's a good question.

But let's turn it around - after how long can we admit it's a fraud ? Let's say they manage to make it to a real Full Self-Driving in 20 years. Eventually somebody will do it, it's nearly certain.

Was it a fraud then to sell it 30 years early, on promises it will be operational in '2 weeks probably' ?

The existence of real, honest-to-goodness commercial robotaxi service, being offered by other companies makes the deception even more clear: The actual thing exists and it looks nothing like Tesla's offering.

I believe the bigger problem is that the tesla models are increasingly being designed in a way that makes it harder for the driver to directly control the car.

Newer tesla cars are removing or degrading critical controls.

The ability to turn on defrost, use the turn signals, shift into forward or reverse, neutral or reverse is all being hobbled by cost-cutting controls.

There is no shift lever (car guesses) and there are no turn signal/light/wiper stalks.

Some functions have buttons on the steering wheel, which rotates and moves the buttons.

Defrost and other critical controls are on the touchscreen and it has gotten harder to reach out and access controls with each new model.

(and I am someone who likes tesla)

Shift lever? Tesla’s don’t have a multi-speed transmission. What are you talking about?

Shift lever as in Park, Reverse, Neutral, and Drive.

Why is it so important those controls be on a lever? It’s not the only car to put them somewhere else?

It's pretty much the only car that puts them on the touch screen, yea.

As long as they are physical controls that a person can find and operate while focusing on where they're trying to go. Levers are familiar to hundreds of millions, so that's a safe bet. Changing it without good reason is unwise.

Using touch screens that require visual inspection is irresponsible.

Funnily "autopilot" is pretty much the closest term to an accurate description for cruise control. Unfortunately consumers have different expectations for an "autopilot" than real life. Real life aviation autopilots are much much dumber and simplistic than the whole deep learning world models control systems setup they have running because pilots in planes have to continuously monitor the avionics and radio, everything is controlled down to a T. It's definitely disingenuous of Tesla to exploit the two different interpretations of the word here.

Heh that's correct, for the earliest/longest time "autopilot" in aircraft meant "maintain constant airspeed + attitude (with later bonus points for bearing and altitude)" so technically the automotive equivalent would really be cruise control + lane keeping.

Ironically in happy conditions there's much more leeway in an airborne craft for the autopilot to make the occasional mistake: you don't really run out of air if AP misses the mark by a few degs for a few seconds, whereas on ground you'll quickly run out of road.

In a way flight mode normal law is closer to autopilot than to actual direct mode piloting.

So "autopilot" would be technically correct, although piloting in automotive has a significantly different meaning than in aircraft, I mean pilots are for racing...

But anyways even if technically correct "auto" is sadly misunderstood as "human do nothing" which is untrue...

"self driving" though is a downright lie, "full self driving" is a tautology, as there can not be such a thing as "partial self driving: either a thing drives itself or it does not! (and as of today no automotive vehicle does). "supervised full self driving" has to be the most obscure, convoluted, and oxymoronic way to say "autopilot".

They should make every potential tesla buyer spend a few hours in a Skyhawk before buying an "autopilot" enabled car. The buyers are all more than rich enough to afford aviation.

What will be interesting, now that they change the language, is how charlatans like ARK Invest adjust their models, where they were and still probably are projecting hundreds of billions (or trillions, hard to count the zeros) of profits from robotaxis fleets and god know what else.

As to why it's legal - it's only in North America - it's forbidden everywhere else.

"Supervised Full Self-Driving" sounds to me like someone really wanted to leave the word "Full" in a name where it doesn't belong.

That's not the kind of decision-making I want for a product like this on public roads, where innocent bystanders are at risk.

Fully supervised self-driving?

If u cant upgrade the system, just upgrade the words you use to describe it.

Or downgrade the wording, making it even more absurd. "Supervised Full Self" anything sounds like a contradiction. I did it entirely by myself ... under continuous supervision, in case something needed to be corrected within a sub-second time window.

Hell, even Supervised Self Driving would be more understandable, despite it being nearly as contradictory. Can't they just call it Partially Automated Driving?

You can drop the "partially" and just call it automated driving. There is a distinction to be made between automated and autonomous. With automated driving, some aspect of the driving task has been automated. If every aspect of the driving task is automated, then that is autonomous driving.

That's a pretty sweet marketing-speak oxymoron. If it needs to be supervised, it's not "full".

The car drives its full self. No parts left behind, assuming proper supervision.

> Supervised Full Self-Driving

This is what happens, one assumes, when the irresistible force of the legal department meets the immovable object of marketing.

Absolutely beyond parody.

I've been out of the loop with regards to Tesla as of late. Are people who claimed 5 years ago they would be paying off their car with self-driving features to ferry passengers around with a fare still making that claim?

I’m sorry, you’re severely out-of-date. Those people moved onto crypto-nonsense, then metaverses, with a brief detour into meme stocks, and are currently YOLOing everything into generative AI. CV/self-driving car stuff was at least four hype cycles ago.

I’m of limited mental capacity. Who’s doing the supervising in this thing?

The driver.

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