Tesla FSD no longer offered for purchase
notateslaapp.com
notateslaapp.com
They were offered a lie. Tesla still hasn't delivered what those customers paid for.
> Let’s look at what else has changed on Tesla’s website on FSD before we dive into the wording changes.
Another recent change on Tesla's website is to remove old blog posts, including a 2016 blog post in which 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":
https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240709163806/https://www.tesla...
Tesla might now also outsource its AI work to xAI:
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tesla-xai-partnership-elon-musk-30e...
If indeed Tesla is "worth basically zero" without full self-driving:
https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-drivin...
Then moving that work to xAI seems like a good way to turn Tesla into a private company without actually purchasing it.
Things may change in the future as we make advances in computing and AI, but right now it is not possible.
His boldness and thinking he's exceptional is both the reason of his success and failures.
The good thing is that we, as humanity, benefit from his successes, but have also deal with his unfulfillable promises, not to mention occasional fits.
Come on now. Elon was the one being pigheadedly stubborn about camera vision over LIDAR. There's really no reason to think this was a case where the engineers were insisting on a viable approach that unfortunately proved infeasible over time.
They weren't going to be able to do it with the tech they put in the cars and damn near everyone knew it. We shouldn't think their engineers were uniquely blind to what everyone was saying when it's fairly clear that there was a top down push here.
No matter how good the AI is, the car is not going to be able to drive if the image is a big white blob of blown out sun or bird poop, and there is no redundant sensor.
I can move my eyes, put on sunglasses, lower the sun visor. That rinkydink camera is stuck looking straight at the sun. It’s a no go.
Perhaps unintended but this is a bit misleading. Tesla changed their blog system and didn’t migrate older posts. My initial reading of your comment was that they selectively removed some older posts which they wanted to hide.
Not worth keeping the posts? No readership? Why upgrade?
Sus, as the kids say, but plausible.
Remember when the law made sense? Me neither.
0. Tempering customer expectations from overpromising.
1. Investors' concerns about liabilities of advertising autonomous operation, potentially implicitly implying unsupervised.
2. Culpability of drivers when "supervised" (within visual sight) operation fails in a manner that's not immediately physically controllable. What if summon runs into a person or runs over a pet?
3. Potentially replacing "original FSD" with a lower tier substitute at the same price point, or as a subscription only.
While I might jump to 3, 0 and 1 seem the most likely. 2 is still remains a big question mark.
Now that they see the light at the end of the tunnel, they're planning to transition to a subscription model, and the cars that do have it will slowly fall out of circulation as they age, with many of them not having the right hardware for the real thing anyways.
This is similar to what they did with supercharging.
If that's the case, Tesla will probably figure this out as well.
I don't see how Tesla is even a serious contender.
Whether this is correct for delivering self driving cars, we will find out soon enough. Long term though, it definitely makes sense. We just don't know what the missing pieces of the puzzle are.
this is commonly repeated but very obviously untrue.
We don't only have vision. We have a general intelligence, coupled with vision. In the absence of AGI, the base assumption has to be the sensor apparatus needs to be significantly superior to humans for an FSD system to drive at a comparable level.
Humans process sensory data in a fundamentally different way to anything that's possible for a self-driving car. The idea that we should base the decision about the sensors on what humans have just fundamentally makes no sense.
Lidar substitutes hardware for something which humans find easy and CV systems find hard - creating a map of the environment. Humans do that by using a brain. CV systems based purely on video really struggle to do that in lots of edge cases. You can shortcut that in a car by using something like lidar.
Would you agree then, that if the goal was to develop AGI, just relying on vision is a credible choice?
When learning how to solve problems, that is not as helpful.
But they don't. I can't see how anyone could look at modern driving and see an optimal state. Driving isn't being managed at all, it's killing droves of humans.
If we put the same restrictions on airplanes (flying by instrument is a crutch), everyone would rightfully find that ridiculous.
They appear to have bet on the wrong technology. The failure happened back in the design phase.
If a driver doesn't have vision, the right decision is to figure out how to safely stop.
Spend a few million years programming a computer to swing through trees and they'll probably get something that can drive a car.
What we lack is (still) the fundamental algorithms to learn from video. Tokenization like LLMs or diffusion are starting to fall short of this goal.
Apple Watch is probably one of the greatest examples. So many of it's features are inferred via "basic" sensors.
On a different angle, sports refereeing is largely becoming possible due to advances in camera based analysis. We can turn 2d images into a nearly centimeter accurate representation of a playing field in seconds.
These cameras are in a very different and much less dynamic environment than on a road speeding at 100+ km/h while getting splashed on, shat on, dusted on, muddied, stroke by bugs, snowed, etc.
Starting with "basic" sensors is backwards. It is like aspiring to become a chess grandmaster so good you can play with your eyes closed, and starting out as a beginner with your eyes closed.
It's possible that there exists some error metric inside Tesla that consistently goes down with more training and bigger neural nets in their Vision FSD - whereas switching to LIDAR would reduce that error by a fixed 30%.
They just assume that vision will eventually work out.
Tesla's plan is (or has become) to do an end-run around all that, and just train a giant network on camera-only sensor stacks, so that it can navigate without large 3D representations of the environment / city in which it works, without expensive lidar/radar sensor suites, and to skip the "partner" phase that Waymo and others do with particular cities.
This allowed them to bring me, a MN customer, something like lvl 3 autonomy before any other company did. But it might not have the same upper-bound as other, more fine-tuned approaches do, and having ridden in Waymo, Nuro, etc vs my own Tesla, I can tell you the Tesla is wonkier for it. Time will tell.
Besides, I'm pretty sure some degree of mapping is necessary - I know some seriously wonky roads with poor visibility, tons of shoulder lanes, roundabouts, and stop-and-go traffic, where I need to know which lane to get in half a kilometer before the turn comes up.
Most people can't figure it out at the first glance - I usually see a couple trying and failing every day.
I'm quite sure Mercedes-Benz was the first to bring lvl 3 autonomy on the market.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/mercedes-benzs-level-3-...
It is also the only carmaker confident enough in the system that it takes full liability over it
> Confidence in Drive Pilot is high within Mercedes-Benz, as the system has been active in Germany for over a year without incident. That confidence is demonstrated by Mercedes’ decision to assume liability for the vehicle while Drive Pilot is in use. That’s a particularly bold move since no other manufacturer offers that kind of assurance.
I'm quite confident that lvl3 autonomy is becoming widespread, regardless.
Cheeky Reddit discussions arguing how reaching Mars is easier than the moon care more about saving some delta V than saving the lives of the astronauts that would embark on a suicide mission just to appease SpaceX investors.
SpsceX has no plans to build a space station around Mars, meanwhile NASA wants to build a Mars gateway by rehearsing on the moon. SpaceX has not built any hardware or space suits that are necessary for long term survival on the martian surface. Those astronauts would arrive without any means for survival, stuck in their starship just as if they were stuck in a space station. Then there is the fact that at the current rate of progress, the mars schedule is faster than the moon/artemis schedule, implying that they don't care about the moon and are diverting resources away from it even though they have received money and a super tight deadline for it.
That was like 10 years ago, and we still don't have anything even remotely close to self driving besides the few $$$ experimental cars driving the long straight roads of ever sunny california
The last 20% are the hardest so if you're only 50% of the way there you haven't even started the hard part
It generalises quite well even though it’s only trained on US roads AFAIK.
I still like his quote “SpaceX makes the impossible merely late”
Fully self driving cars and people on Mars will happen. And I feel pretty certain Tesla and SpaceX will be at least a bit responsible for pushing it to happen faster than if they didn’t exist.
Of course they are not perfect, but on the whole I think we’re better off because they exist.
10 years of lies is not optimism. It's just lies:
He says crazy things that he believes, it manipulates investors and as his wealth increases he just believes the crazy things more.
This is the kind of thing that makes me believe that class solidarity is real.
We should hold people accountable for their behavior regardless.
At what point would it be considered fraud?
IDGAF whatever Musk really believes, the fact of the matter is that if he repeats the "any moment" line on an investor call, he has to be held to it. You can't trot out your own personal beliefs with investor's money, even if you sincerely believe it. He has staff and advisors that can tell him point blank if the tech is really ready, or not ready at all. If those advisors or staff tell him that it's close to being ready, that's straight up fraud unless they can put-up-or-shut-up. If they tell him it's not ready but he repeats the lie, it's also fraud.
How many more excuses will we give this guy? This is absurd.
Disclosure: I founded a startup, and have a few investors. I have to be fully transparent with them, because that's not only the ethical thing to do when you take someone's money, you also have to do so because the law compels you to do so. If I tell them that a product is close to being ready, I have to be ready to prove it. I can't make such claims otherwise. Why are we not holding the wealthiest guy on earth to the same laws EVERYONE ELSE is held to?
they have never had a thing called "FSD" that existed, but they keep taking money from customers and also people keep dying, for years and years.