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Tesla Shifts the Goalposts For 'Full Self-Driving' Technology (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Tesla has been selling "full self-driving" capability since 2016, promising that "you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere," and that "once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else en route [sic] to your destination." Last week Tesla shifted the goalposts, redefining "full self-driving" as a number of Level 2 driver assistance features that were already available, and a few new tricks to be delivered later. All will require a qualified driver behind the wheel, paying attention at all times and ready to take over if the car can't handle the situation. Worse, owners who bought the previous full self-driving feature paid $8,000 for it. Tesla is now offering owners who bought their cars prior to the change the same package for $5,000. Owners who paid the $3,000 higher price are unsure if the previously promised technology has been abandoned and Level 2 is now the most they can expect.
So it's harder than Tesla expected. Big whoop.
Now go ahead and reimburse your loyal customers for the functionality you cannot deliver and I see no issue.
Don't do that, however, and I feel Tesla is just a bunch of lying scumbags...
Being a good person is simple... just take responsibility for your fuckups. Oh, wait... that's hard, isn't it? Well, let's see whether Tesla rises to that challenge.
What's wrong with "en route"? Don't tell me - a cretinous AMERICAN didn't understand the language. What's new?
So full self driving doesn't fully drive itself? Gotchya.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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As a techie and a human, I know that people "freak up" way more often. So yeah I want to ride self-driving cars. But more scary to me is the interim period where the technology is immature and there is a mix of computers and human drivers on the road.
First we wrote the software, then we wrote the specs. It was way easier to meet the target that way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Musk has been very successful in getting Tesla treated like Kickstarter - people paying money, $8,000 for this software, thousands to reserve a car, for things that did not exist at the time. Usually using similar motivations as kickstarter - preordering because they like the company and want it to exist even more than because they want the product. Man, I wish I had that salesmanship.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
These are referring to autonomy levels, not versions. They are defined by the federal government (at least in the US). Level 5 is what all non-tech people imagine. "Car, take me to work. I'm going to sleep now". Level 0 tops out at something like ABS. Level 1 is something like cruise control or lane assist (but not both). Level 2 is both, or Tesla's autopilot. The car can maintain speed and steer, but the driver must be ready to take control back at any time. Level 3 is the car drives itself and asks for help when it needs you to take over (if traffic is crazy or the rain is messing with LIDAR), so you can read a book til then and not pay attention. Level 4 is fully autonomous but it has limitations known at purchase time. And Level 5 drives as well as you.
So, yeah, it's meaningful.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I know as a techie that humans tend to be really bad at statistics and often over estimate the abilities of technology and underestimate the abilities of humans. Techies are especially bad about this.
You seem to forget that self driving cars "freak up" about once every 600 miles right now, humans "freak up" about once every 150,000. And that human number includes all the very worst drivers driving in all the very worst conditions. That self driving car number is them operating only in the best conditions. Fact is, the average human driver will only be in a handful of accidents in their life time and will never be in a severe injury or fatal accident.
Humans tend to be very bad about understanding rare occurrences in large populations. Yes, somebody dies in a car wreck every day. The chances of you dying in a car wreck ever are very small.
I know quite a few people who really, honestly and stupidly thought Musk can do anything at all in general, and that full self-driving isn't all that difficult for him, specifically. A few even dropped money into the money pit that is Tesla, and even refused to listen when they were told Tesla marketing is mostly bullshit. All of them lost money, one or two - a lot.
Now, I don't really feel pity for any one of them, but if Tesla had been responsible with their claims about Tesla cars, these people would not have lost as much, which is the smaller benefit in the grand scheme of things.
The bigger benefit is that had Tesla not used false and misleading claims, it may have happened so that someone with a better technology and abilities but less "marketing savvy", that is, propensity to lie and exaggerate, would have gotten this money and moved the state of the art further ahead to the benefit of us all.
I know that people "freak up" way more often.
[Citation needed]
People are pretty damned good at complex tasks like driving, and it will be quite a while before a machine can even do what an average driver behind the wheel does routinely while holding onto their smartphone for dear life.
Not that I'm trying to defend anything here, but the statements about requiring a fully alert driver behind the wheel... isn't that the law? I know he's made some very large claims about the self driving technology, but until the laws change to allow people to not pay attention to the road, they need to put that statement in everywhere, don't they?
I mean, I think the self driving feature as it is now, can work... but you need a place where there are no human drivers. Until that "random" factor of human error is removed from the equation, I think it will be a very, very long time before we see fully (legally allowed on the road) self driving cars.
If you 50% of the cost of the car is made by LG (the batteries and motor). Tesla makes their own batteries and motors (the batteries are a partnership with Panasonic). Toyota makes their own batteries in partnership with Panasonic. Everyone else is basically just wrapping a car around LG batteries. Toyota seems to be about five to ten years before they get to solid-state batteries, and Tesla is making improvements, and have the best current technology, but it seems like they have such severe cash flow issues that they may not be making the investments to keep their lead.
Musk's announcements are clearly aspirational, but the cars are amazing and the model 3 is clearly pushing other companies to start developing real electric cars.
Most Tesla owners I know planned on keeping a second car for road trips and found that road trips are more pleasant driving the Tesla than the other cars, even with the charging station issue. And, really the Supercharger version 3 with a Tesla model 3 isn't all that much worse than stopping for gas. (And not no worse than stopping at Costco for gas in California)
I expect that the well-known car companies will wind up mostly failing with the transition to electric cars. I think Tesla is still a long shot to be around in 20 years, but GM and Volkwagon are having problems producing something technologically on par with the original roadster, much less something like the model S or model 3. Maybe Nissan will pull it off, but they dumped their own battery technology for LG.
The one thing that Tesla clearly created was the market for electric sports cars. It will be interesting to see who will be the big players in it. But, Tesla seems to still be pretty limited by its battery production. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next few years.
Work bio at MMWD
[*] While the critics and PR were talking about net profits, Musk had internal numbers showing a healthy 20% gross margin in S and X. Once gross margin is positive, getting net margin is simply a matter of scaling up.
So Musk has come to believe ALL the critics are wrong ALL the time. That is again not true. But from Musk point of view, everything he did starting from writing a shoot them up arcade game as a teenager, to making money in the dot com irrational days were deemed "impossible" by most people. So he has come to distrust everyone.
But once in a while I see reports of him being very realistic and candid. With Monroe agreeing the bad designs that was costing too much money in making model3 for one. His praise for the little known "pump team" in the cave rescue. There is a lot to like the engineer in Musk, and the dedication to chase the impossible.
But he would have benefited from a few honest critics who could have earned credibility by saying, "This is possible, That is hard, that one is impossible, this one is a question of money, that one is a question of time, but that one is really really impossible". Hope there are a few in his trusted circle. There must be a few, else Space X would not be this successful.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
..........and dangerous charlatans at that. Everything from the name Autopilot to the impression they give of what the system does is simply dangerous and disingenuous. Everything they're saying suggests that self-driving vehicles are here. They are not, and never will be for perhaps decades to come. There are far, far, far too many variables.
As a techie I know technology sometimes do freak up. No way I will let myself inside a self-driving car.
People make more mistakes than a well-written and tested application that is working within the scope it was designed for.
That's what worries me most about these "half-way-there" solutions. You do things enough for people to trust them and people's focus drifts. If you expect your car to do everything, you won't be prepared when it doesn't. I don't even like to use Cruise Control for that reason.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The lawsuits that follow their first catastrophic crash will likely kill development in self-driving cars for the next decade or more.
What I find most troubling about this is how it shows Musk does not get enough push back and/or there are not enough critically thinking people from academia allied with Tesla to even raise the issue.
Because this was completely predictable.
We've known about the complexity or reality since the 80's, with people like Lucy Suchman pointing out how we underestimate the complexity of the world (in books like Situated Actions). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We've know about the limits to AI since then too. The famous quote is "the hard things turned out to be easy, and the easy things turned out to be hard".
Machine learning, as one Slashdot commenter once said, is basically "statistics on steroids". It you say "we're going to build self-driving cars that can handle the complexity of the life world with statistics", well... then you will fall into the same trap that technologists have been falling into for the past 30 years.
The problem with Silicon Valley is that it started to believe the stories that were originally designed to separate investors from their money. The Californian Ideology slowly became an unspoken faith, and anyone who questioned it was branded a 'pessimist'.
Musk is a clever man, but he is clearly from Silicon Valley. His fear of AI taking over is another example of this, as anyone who has studied the digital humanities can explain. It's only a valid fear if you have a simplified view on the world, a view where everything can, in the end, be modeled in a system.
The truth is it can't. Society is amazing at producing never before seen situations. The long tail of edge cases is unending, and the degree to which society demands that you cover them is greater than any non-intelligent/non-sentient system ever can.
Don't get me wrong - having a simplified view of the world is what makes people like Musk such powerful forces. But as we've seen here it has its limitations too.
As with anything new, they are pushing the boundaries on what is currently available and moving at a quick pace. Full Self Driving is supposably coming later this year (though I suspect more like later next year) and includes hardware changes. I read they are going to put a second forward-facing radar unit, changing the driving computer out for one with a 10X faster chip that sits behind the glove box, and enabling the technology slowly as reliability increases, regulations allow, and hardware developed. The current chip works by processing 200 FPS of video from the 8 cameras, and the new chip processing 2000FPS.
I have a Tesla ModelX, with enhanced autopilot and I paid for the FSD upgrade when purchasing. I read all of the fine print, the purchase agreement, and made an informed decision to bet that they would deliver on it. Why not? They have delivered (eventuallly) on many of their other goals. Worst case scenario they refund me my purchase of that option. I still think with everything else I got, it was a hell of a purchase and I am very satisfied with it over all. Honestly the worst part of the owner experience is the service timelines.
No other car gets software upgrades like this, and every time they do, I get excited again to see what new functions they enabled. Drive on Nav is super cool.
No where have I read that you will never be able to summon your car from across the US one day. Tesla have shown videos of the development vehicles driving, both in the city streets and on the highway unaided successfully. What I think they need to do is answer for a high number of so many thousands of edge cases before they can go "unaided" as well as seek regulatory approval.
They demonstrated this two years ago: https://youtu.be/VG68SKoG7vE
Now, we are waiting for the HW 3.0 upgrades and drive-on-nav to work off the freeway.
Also. One final thought: Super charging is going to have to work with that snake thing they use to auto plug in, or Tesla is going to need an attendant at the Super Charger for personless cross-country travel. The new faster SC is nice and all, but I was hoping for self-plugging in.
I drive a Tesla (Model S P85+), I live in Canada. My commute is 155 km of highway each way and I regularly do 2000 km road trips. I don't have the luxury of picking what weather I drive in.
The Tesla is the best car possible for my use case, there is nothing better on the market currently.
That said, Tesla as a company is the worst company I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and I will never again give them even a penny of my money. I just hope that I don't need to replace this car before some other actual competition appears in this space.