Tesla customers may need a hardware upgrade to allow their cars to fully drive themselves unsupervised, Elon Musk admitted.
"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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yup this is his copout so he doesn't have to produce an entry level vehicle all while cozying up to Trump so he doesn't have to compete with the rest of the world on EVs
I feel like this is a recurring theme for the silicon valley billionaires and we reached "Peak Bullshit" at NFTs and ever since then one thing after another has hit wall after wall
I realized self-driving on roads is impossible for so-called when someone pointed out what human drivers do when there's like a flock of geese camped out in the middle of the road.
We know that we should slowly move forward until they get out of the way, including bonking then with the car (gently). Do we want cars deciding that some obstruction in the road is "ok" to hit? I don't. So what's the solution? Something other than pure autonomous self driving.
We can probably have some very high level driver assist. Maybe.
Anyone knowledgeable about city planning? Why did we never put some type of signal in our roads? (I don't know. Passive RFID every few feet?) It would only cost what, ten, twenty thousand on top of each million spent paving every mile?
Seems it would be better baseline navigation than self driving cars and occasionally map apps. The cars would still have to do obstacle avoidance, of course.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about self driving tech or city planning. But if interstates are replaced every 10 years, and highways every 20, and Musk first made these claims in 2013? Then we'd have the base tech for every auto manufacturer to do moderately reliable self driving on interstates and a lot of our highways already.
Or maybe that large view pathfinding is the relatively easy part? That's why I'm asking. I'm sure there's something more obvious from an informed viewpoint that I don't know.
You know the craziest part? Had king dipshit just used fkin' cameras LIDAR instead of LIDAR Cameras not only would manufacture had been cheaper, but it would work waaaaaaaay better at the whole self driving part.