Elon Musk Today
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If you get caught lying, it will eventually cost you $X in penalties. However, it will take years for you to pay that fine. Just lie in such a way that your stock growth outpaces the inevitable penalties.
This doesn’t work for promises with concrete deadlines, but the beauty of self driving cars is that they’ve been “a few years away” for about 30 years. So when the penalties come, he can get a slap on the wrist for merely being optimistic.
I use it 100% of the time that nobody is behind me. The worst thing is how it handles stop signs… it actually stops at the stop sign, then rolls forward slowly to where a human would actually stop.
(Note: I got it back when FSD was substantially cheaper; I don’t think it is work the $12k it is today)
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Why the 'nobody is behind me' ?
So basically… embarrassment. I don’t mind it driving like an old person, but I’m embarrassed to be seen as driving that way.
I've never had issues with lane changes or general driving, but the phantom breaking (where the car slams the breaks out of the blue) is extremely unnerving, and the main reason why I use self driving a less these days than I did in the beginning.
On a philosophical level, I agree with you. As a practical matter, did anyone who actually purchased FSD feel duped? If they did, were they denied a refund?
"I bought a Model 3, taking delivery in July 2019 and paying £5800 for the FSD extra. My view was that Tesla had failed to deliver on the contract with how they described FSD at the time, and so I ended up taking them to court for £5800 plus interest and costs. Just before the court hearing was about to take place, Tesla settled with me, the core of the settlement being:
- FSD removed from my car, e.g. just standard Autopilot
- Tesla paying me a little over £8000"
https://electrek.co/2023/10/02/tesla-weasel-way-out-full-sel...
If you read down a bit in TFA, you'd see Elon addressing this exact issue:
"1,115 days since Elon Musk announced the FSD button and v9 of FSD would be 'uploaded' soon. (3/20/2021)"
"Given significant architectural changes, including fundamental improvements to pure vision, there is limited value to testing 8.x. Hoping to upload V9.0 & button next month." Elon Musk in a Tweet
So a year into Covid he was claiming they were a month away from FSD.
You're confusing two entirely independent positions.
Customers buy what's on the market today. They buy the features available today, and Tesla is bounded to meet the expectations of the claims it makes regarding their current product line. As Tesla did not made any claim that their current product line ships with full self driving, and as customers made their decision based on how these products are advertised, FSD is not a factor.
Investors however are promised something entirely different. Elon Musk has been making wild claims about what products and features are just around the corner, and how fantastic they are and how they will be selling like hotcakes. Be it FSD, be it an affordable electric car, be it robocars, etc etc. Investors want returns on their investment, and they hear these outlandish promises of fantastic returns arriving just around the corner and therefore act upon these promises. But these promises end up being vaporware.
I opted not to buy it for exactly that reason, I just didn't believe the "coming in a couple years" – I thought we were further away from it.
For somebody that doesn’t bat an eye at Full Self Driving™ being a proper noun that is entirely disconnected from the meaning of the words, nothing that has ever been said about it is a lie. For somebody that would expect Full Self Driving™ to actually be what it says it is, everything that’s been said about FSD has been a lie. It’s a matter of charity toward people and organizations that regularly tell you incorrect things and a flexibility around the definition of words.
I’m sure I could come up with many other examples. The meta issue is that if you blow past estimates multiple times, you should at minimum stop providing estimates because you’re very bad at it. If you keep providing estimates that happen to prop up your stock price, I don’t think you deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Especially if you are giving estimates that say "FSD, this year" while your Director of Engineering is sending memos to the California DMV saying that your statements are "not an engineering reality".
But isn't it true that the car did drive itself? And #2, that I can't find any claims that what you see in the video was available in Teslas at the time it was released, only that it's a future thing that's coming?
Again, I don't have FSD, and still wouldn't trust it. I'd say that EAP (Enhanced Autopilot) is basically the same it's always been, haven't noticed any meaningful improvements in 5 years. But have driven for hours on it, and I'd describe it at best as a more enhanced cruise control on highways.
Which is why I have little faith in FSD at the moment. But do want to push back a bit about what claims were made because at best, your video doesn't show that the whole thing was made up, nor that they claimed that this was ready for the masses.
Maybe there was a more damning accompanying tweet (or others) that make it more obvious.
In fact, the person was there to prevent the car from accidentally killing someone.
Are you really asking whether the car drove itself in spite of the car's inability to break and accelerate, including stopping on red lights?
FSD is quite an amazing example indeed - they are supposedly unveiling a Robotaxi in 4 months, while he spent the past 10 years saying that each Tesla ever produced will turn into a Robotaxi with an OTA update.
All of this is fun and games, but you can only imagine, what kind of accounting shenanigans this guy is doing behind the scenes where nobody can watch, if he's willing to lie so blatantly in the open.
That's true in a sense. The only thing that stops anyone in the world from marketing a full self driving car is the risk of being held liable for killing anyone involved directly and indirectly, including the driver/customer, in crashes caused by FSD. I mean, imagine how the fines would eat away the bottom line.
Tesla released advertising in Australia that claimed that they were now the most popular selling car there, outselling the Camry. Which lead to some investigations and (Australia has some strong truth-in-advertising laws) retraction when it was shown that Tesla's definition of "sold" somehow in no way equated to the numbers of vehicles or VINs registered with the varying state databases.
Also note the non-zero numbers of "new" Teslas delivered that have been previously registered and delivered. What do we think the odds are that Tesla subtracts a sale from their numbers on returns?
I fully believe many announcements from Tesla serve no other purpose than to provide a "shield" for unlocking value from the books.
Meanwhile, many non-traditional investors, including the cultists that basically worship Elon, are putting everything on FSD/Robotaxi. Some of them want Elon to stop selling cars to the public altogether ASAP so he can stockpile them for the Robotaxi fleet that will surely be launched yesterday.
I don't think that's an accurate take.
What I'm seeing is increasing concerns that Tesla is even a healthy company capable of producing a decent classic car, and so far acting like a bottomless pit for resources thrown at a series personal projects that are moonshots that so far have been either failures or outright disastrous.
The cyber truck is an example, and so is Elon Musk's plans to force it to be a competitor for completely unrelated projects such as Musk's threat of creating an OpenAI competitor and even a Boston Dynamics competitor.
You have a cash cow that is drying out while being slowly and not-so-slowly milked dead, and is being killed based on a baseline of ill-advised personal projects. This is what scares investors.
The vehicles they’ve already shipped have about the equivalent tensor compute as an NVIDIA V100, and much less than that for older model cars.
The Bitter Lesson is that self driving AIs will probably need large scale more than anything. If we look at the capabilities of something like GPT-4V, it’s a good sign of what’s needed as the baseline minimum.
By extrapolating industry trends, I suspect that a future GPT 6 or 7 level AI with true video input might be able to be specialised to perform real time driving with human-level capability to parse complex situations such as construction sites or accident scenes.
That level of AI inference would require at least an order of magnitude more compute than what’s in any shipping Tesla, maybe more.
Elon promised something that will be possible, but not with the hardware of they day.
When Elon made his comments about “every Tesla shopping now has FSD hardware” he may have just been honestly optimistic. This was before GPT2, let alone the current state of the art. I can forgiven him for that, but not for doubling down on statements that are clearly no longer valid.
I suspect the actual problem is that Elon is a sociopath who simply does not care about honesty in any fashion and has become powerful and wealthy enough that he no longer needs to mask.
People's attitude to Elon especially cracks me up. Before he acquired Twitter he could do no wrong. He was Tony Stark, and the Internet loved him. Then he fired thousands of overpaid Silicon Valley developers that were failing to properly engineer a chat platform that sends 1KB text messages, and suddenly he become the Antichrist and could do no good.
Elon has several strong personality traits that make him effective. One of these is being an technological optimist and setting aggressive timelines for his employees instead of letting things twist in the wind for decades.
E.g.: if Elon put his mind to it, he could probably get a working fusion power plant in a decade, instead of five decades like ITER. Oh sure, he might claim it'll take only three years, but that's just puffery or pep-talk.
Seriously though: if Elon went up on a stage tomorrow and claimed to have clean fusion energy solved in three years, delivered it in ten, then people like you would be on the Internet bemoaning that he's some sort of liar and a cheat because he didn't deliver as promised.
In my circle of engineer friends, he was viewed as a bullshit artist long before Twitter. His fans seemed annoying, but were easy to ignore.
I feel like the perception changed when he started marketing FSD in a way that would kill people. The cave diver incident and his attitude toward Covid were big “what?” moments, and it’s accelerated downhill from there.
I think that after his bumbling of Twitter people started looking closely at his past and realized he put a ton of energy into sculpting an image detached from reality. This four part podcast does a great job looking behind the curtain: https://techwontsave.us/episode/189_elon_musk_unmasked_origi...
I think it started with his slandering of the cave diver in Thailand, and got into full swing with his repeated false claims about Covid.
This isn’t to say there aren’t still some rubes left, but the smart money isn’t impressed with the sideshow anymore.
It's just that I wouldn't attribute that necessarily to an inherent malicious personality type.
You've got to keep in mind that at the time Elon was under enormous pressure because the Model 3 production numbers weren't up to expectations. He was working round-the-clock, sleeping in the office, and taking sleeping pills. Ambien especially is known to cause people to behave erratically.
There's a fundamental difference between leaders that are outright evil, harming others directly for their own gain, and leaders that just fucked up late at night while zonked out on medication.
Take the Sacklers for example. They knowingly, deliberately, purposefully marketed addictive painkillers to make money. They addicted hundreds of thousands of Americans to drugs, and directly killed thousands.
Elon tried to make self-driving as safe as possible. He's limited by technology, not morals.
Generous to assume, given recent revelations, that prescription medication is the drug he was zonked out on while behaving erratically.
> Elon tried to make self-driving as safe as possible. He's limited by technology, not morals.
Arguably the end goal was the make billions of dollars for himself, and self-driving is the lever he found. If he was doing all this for a researcher's salary I'd have an easier time believing he was doing it for humanity's sake.
I used to think the same actually. But the more I looked into it, the more it turned out that it was not just thanks to his achievement. He very actively supressed every negative article or mention of him or Tesla. He apparently figured out way before the other that you can manipulate public opinion at scale through social medias. There is an army of Tesla influencers and there are numerous cases where Tesla / Elon went after critics.
Look at the story of the guy called 'Montana Skeptic' for example - a vocal and appreciated Tesla critic - in 2018 Elon reached out directly to his employer and threatened a lawsuit (without any basis for it of course).
He's effective because he's used to the pain from his terrible childhood. He is almost bathing in it. Some of that pain he eventually unlashes into public. Thats when the hate towards him start.
Musk has been cratering his reputation with the garbage that comes out of his mouth or from his keyboard for YEARS. From "FSD. This year. For reals this time." to "It would be financially irresponsible to not own a Tesla by the end of 2019 and have a vehicle making you money as a robotaxi" to "Funding secured" to "Pedo diver".
Your attempt to frame his reputation challenges as what, a bunch of butt-hurt geeks annoyed that they or some of their peers were fired from Twitter, doesn't pass even the most trivial of sanity checks.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7642cb5d-2298-485f-aa5c-7bc0abf...
That's why it's called the Free Market.
If you think Volkswagen or Kia is going to deliver a better self driving technology, you can take advantage of the free market and use your knowledge to make millions. In fact it would be much more entertaining if the OP actually put some of his own cash on the line so we could watch, instead of making a glorified Tweet aggregator.
I mean, he definitely took the first step into making that happen by changing the name even if everybody laughed at him for it.