"Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true."

Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming...

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[–] 181 points 2 years ago (24 children)
  • [–] 84 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    "Trust me, you just need to buy more compute for your car. We'll figure out reliable driving by sight someday."

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I'm happily using all the sensors my car offers, even if I'm pretty ok with driving by eyesight. Better sensors that can easily see through fog/rain/snow/whatever? Hell yeah, give them to me.

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  • [–] 39 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Elon Musks make engineering orders of magnitude more difficult. Those poor Tesla neoslaves

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    [–] 143 points 2 years ago* (43 children)

    First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn't do it either.

    That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it's getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it's practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn't even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn't used to be this bad.

    Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it's either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you're in traffic because you know it'll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don't. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I'm watching it close. It can't navigate city streets, but neither can FSD....

    TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it's bad and getting worse, not better. I can't believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that's why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.

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  • [–] 80 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It's a simple tractable problem that's generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it's not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I agree. VWs' drive assists are absolutely stellar. It's just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that's essentially it. It's not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
    I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.

    The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don't seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a "zone" with margins left and right.
    So if you are on the inside of your "zone" and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don't really trust it with high speed turns.

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    [–] 101 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    He and Trump deserve each other.

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  • [–] 89 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.

    His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn't a car company, it's a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value -- and his wealth -- can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.

    The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn't worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They're all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads... that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.

    More than anything else, I think that's what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Sometimes I'm reminded that there's always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.

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  • [–] 94 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Can't wait for the supporters to come out and gas light buyers instead: "uh, well of course they couldn't. He didn't lie you just don't understand tech...!

    I work in IT and people that think like that can fuck themselves. "What do you mean Meta lied by selling your data to a company you didn't know about. Maybe you should just have never trusted Meta."

    Stupid fucking boot lickers.

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    [–] 82 points 2 years ago

    Oh, so it turns out that "genius billionaires" only exist in comic books?

    Nobody could have seen that one coming!

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  • [–] 69 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true."

    There's a word for that already. Lied. They/He lied.

    No need for 30 words when 2 will do.

    They Lied.

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    salesmanship

    You mean false advertisement

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    [–] 48 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Never buy a product for a non existent feature that’s promised in update.

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    [–] 39 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

    Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

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  • [+] 38 points 2 years ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Took my first drive as a passenger in a FSD Tesla the other day. I was rapidly underwhelmed. I mean, yeah...it's pretty cool the car drives itself, to an extent. But even as a passenger I was struck by the number of times I would have taken the wheel and made the car do what it was supposed to. Hesitant pulling forward to turn, hesitant pulling out into traffic after a turn, wrong speed for the road, abrupt turns... Did it get us there? Sure. Did it do a good job? Mid at best. Probably better as an anti-fatigue measure on highway drives instead of taking you places in town. I would not pay for FSD were I to own a Tesla...at least it seems really inappropriate for the kind of driving I do.

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    [+] 30 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)
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    [–] 26 points 2 years ago

    Lying liar lied. News at 11.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago

    This was the inevitable result even years ago. When self-driving cars were the hot topic and several companies were doing their own thing, that's when it should have been obvious it was never going to happen. It's not a problem any one independent company was ever going to solve, especially quickly. For to work it would have to be an open source, global standard with several companies working together.

    I mean you'd have to build out a massive amount of infrastructure to further support it. All vehicles would have to have a module in it that would communicate with everything else around it, regardless if it was self-driving or not. There can't be a premium model, or a subscription, ect., it would need to just be there and work.

    The overall task to get this done was never going to be quick, easy, or cheap. This was always going to be bigger than any one single company and a handful of engineers. It's going to take the effort of many companies and governments all working selflessly.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I can't help but think he's saying this now as an attempt to distract from the stories of "Musk has been talking to Putin since the spring when they were both faced with problems: Musk being forced to buy Xitter and Putin unable to steal Ukraine. Odd how Musk has been becoming more rabidly pro-Russian-interests, isn't it?

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    [–] 22 points 2 years ago*

    My Leaf can handle itself on the highway and it's the perfect amount of self driving that I want. I also didn't need to pay half the price of the leaf for the privilege.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Maybe he shouldn't have called it "autopilot."

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    [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    Wow, what a genius!

    /s

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Surprised if he is truly capable of even this level of self reflection.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Billionaires also fall into the Gartner hype cycle. And convincing a billionaire there’s an opportunity to automate workers out of a job is a quick way to get an injection of cash.

    It’s going to be generations before we are actually able to automate most labor. But long, long before that AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    He's just trying to sell the upgrade so people will throw away their old cars and buy new ones. But that already happened with the last version and it still can't do it. This won't be any different with him in charge. Put an engineer in charge, invest in the tech, and you might get there. But Tesla is not going to ever get there while it needs to sell every incremental advance in tech rather than spending time and money on lots of iterations of prototypes that don't need to be mass produced.

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    [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    The thing with (full) self-driving is that the edge cases are the challenge. Driving is the Pareto Principle really cranked up: (fully made up numbers) 2% of the driving represents 90% of the difficulty. And highway driving is a much simpler task to be automated than driving on a stroad, weird intersections, unprotected turns, etc.

    I think we are a long ways off from full self-driving, and highway driving capabilities of current vehicles only address what is by far the easiest scenario. And even there those capabilities are limited from what I've seen.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago

    Over Promise under deliver

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