Hacker News Reader

Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

I love Tesla, but Musk's starting to smell a little like Peter Molyneux -- promising the world and delivering little. Get the Model X out (2 years late and counting...)

View on HN

If you get past the tremendously misleading headline, you'd see that his statement isn't so crazy. All this article is about is Musk saying that Tesla Model S firmware version 7, out within a few months, will include full "autopilot" functionality, which means traffic-aware cruise control and automatic lane keeping. The former is already enabled (I just used it half an hour ago) and the latter has been demoed extensively and there's no reason to doubt it will ship when claimed.

I don't think that's what the article says. I mean, maybe that's what it actually means, but what it says is the cars will "navigate" themselves. It uses the term a bunch of times. Nowhere does it hint that "navigation" is limited to "not rear-ending the car in front of you and staying in the lane," and I don't think that's the plain reading of "company drivers letting the car navigate the West Coast largely unassisted."

It's certainly not the plain reading of "the self-driving technology was 'technically capable of going from parking lot to parking lot,' meaning through cities as well."

If what all that actually means is "adaptive cruise control + lane keeping," then either the GP poster is right that Musk is overpromising and underdelivering, or the journalist completely misconstrued Musk.

All Musk promised in the near term for autonomous driving is lane keeping. Everything else was either wishy-washy "eventually, someday" or imagined by the article's author.

actually it pretty much does - "But, he said, Tesla will disable the autopilot when cars are not on highways or major roads, citing safety concerns." translation, only on the high, and basically really nice and fancy cruise control that they think can and will eventually do more but not right now.

I don't that comparison is apt. One delayed product is not nearly the same as a long sequence of products that were launched without many promised features.

You've got to have ridiculously unrealistic standards to say SpaceX and Tesla have "delivered little".

In this instance though, it's more of selective delivering. He is still delivering on many of these features and "futuristic updates" just not on 1 specific piece of hardware.

If you think Musk hasn't done anything then you haven't been paying attention.

PayPal, Solar City, SpaceX, Tesla Motors..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com