[HN Gopher] Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engin...
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Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, engineer testifies
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 302 points
Date : 2023-01-17 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Huh...Is this the new Nikola Motors?
|
| The difference between Trevor Milton (Nikola founder) and Elon
| Musk is that the latter tends to deliver something resembling
| what he promised even though he lies and exaggerates a lot.
|
| Trevor Milton couldn't even make a car! If he had done that,
| he'll be rolling in his hundreds of millions of cash from stock
| sales thanks to hype and occasional lies instead of waiting to go
| to federal prison.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I see parallels to Nikola's "Nikola One" video, where they
| claimed that their truck was driving along using its newfangled
| zero-emission engines, but in reality it was just rolling
| downhill in a totally staged video. Nikola's CEO was recently
| convicted of fraud, and that incident featured very prominently
| in his indictment...
| buran77 wrote:
| I think a lot of people knew there is something unrealistic
| about Tesla's video and the promises even back then. But Musk's
| charisma and fan base sort of pushed this idea deep down. There
| were super popular websites completely dedicated to praising
| Tesla or Musk and no chance of any negative/realistic comment
| ever surviving.
|
| Times have changed, Musk's debt (in every sense) caught up with
| him. Tides have shifted, his charisma has worn off. And people
| are starting to notice or remember the cracks that were always
| there. 7 years after that promise it's hard to imagine anyone
| still realistically believed in it or him.
|
| In contrast Nikola's video survived scrutiny for far less time.
| It had none of Musk's advantages, the ability to steal people's
| imagination and make them just bury those red flags. The fact
| that they sold trucks didn't help with this.
| jchw wrote:
| Obviously, negativity regarding Tesla has hit a fever pitch. It's
| a bit of a shame in some regards, though it's easy to see how it
| is justified; no matter how cool the cars are, Tesla as a company
| has a leadership issue.
|
| What Tesla did for the world, in my opinion, was make electric
| cars a desirable product. Before Tesla, the image of an electric
| car was that of a compromise, a vehicle for "hippies" and not
| people who love cars. In that regard, they got some things right.
| I really doubt the F150 Lightning would have happened if not for
| Tesla's successes in the market, for example.
|
| And even still, it does seem like the market has a lot of
| catching up to do. While I'm not an expert, it seems like the
| Model Y heat pump is still state of the art electric vehicle
| engineering. Hopefully in the future, all electric cars will have
| high performance heat pumps and sophisticated temperature
| management for the battery system, as it would definitely
| alleviate winter range concerns. I think right now a lot of
| people believe that it is impossible to have an electric car that
| performs well in cold environments, but it seems like it is
| possible to maintain almost all of the range with enough
| engineering.
|
| It's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this. It's easy to meme
| on it, but the truth is that behind the many issues, the team did
| accomplish something pretty incredible. It really isn't every
| other day that a new car manufacturer pops up and manages to
| swipe significant marketshare. When I first moved to the
| California bay area, it was pretty novel seeing just how many
| Tesla's there were. But back here in the Midwest again, it's
| getting to be kind of uncommon to not see one on a drive
| nowadays, too.
| saisundar wrote:
| You are absolutely right. Yes, Tesla did introduce a seismic
| shift into the automotive industry.
|
| Their stock was an appreciation and acknowledgement of that?
| They were valued more than all of their ( major) competitors'
| market cap aggregated together at one point. Many argue that it
| still is overvalued.
|
| The incident cited above is on the same slippery slope as the
| Nikola demo, just more nuanced. It is well worth a discourse.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It 's sad to see Tesla in the dumps like this._
|
| Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on brought
| to light?
| jchw wrote:
| > Why is it "sad to see" potentially fraudulent goings-on
| brought to light?
|
| Good question, to be honest, I have no idea since that's not
| what I said.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Most electric cars do have heat pumps, and have had for some
| time; the Leaf had once since 2012, for instance. In some, it's
| an upsell option (VW, for instance, justifies charging an extra
| 1k or something on the basis that they don't provide
| interesting efficiency boosts in places where it's rarely <0C.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Whatever good things Tesla has done in the past doesn't give it
| a pass on the bad things it's done.
|
| It may have cracked open the market for electric cars, but now
| it's recklessly playing with people lives. If for this and
| other reasons it goes out of business that's perfectly fine.
| Other companies will produce breakthroughs and Tesla doesn't
| matter is the greater scheme of progress.
| jchw wrote:
| Agreed. Still, I find it sad given that it all seems
| senseless. Seems like they produced enough actual value to
| not need to go down this path.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Equally damning is the fact that the Head of Autopilot Software
| does not know what an Operational Design Domain is or what
| perception-reaction time is. These are foundational concepts for
| safely engineering the type of automated systems that Tesla is
| building.
|
| https://twitter.com/MoodyHikmet/status/1614743058092019712
| vigneshv_psg wrote:
| fwiw, it seems like it's a common thing to avoid answering
| vague/overly broad questions like this in a deposition. see her
| e:https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th.
| ..
|
| it reminds me of a time when Larry Page (in a deposition)
| referred to the code repository at Google as: "I mean, there's
| some code-based repository thingy".
|
| https://www.scribd.com/document/355385613/Larry-Page-deposit...
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo
| stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-
| working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?
|
| Imagine you read an article with _damning testimony_ from an
| Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really
| worked for the demo. That 's what this article is.
| sidibe wrote:
| Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the
| implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still
| wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| > Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone
| prototype on stage for the first time?
|
| If Apple never delivered the features that he demo'd and went
| on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those
| features existing, then yes.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in
| the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical,
| capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell
| hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.
| yreg wrote:
| There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the
| keynote when running out of memory or having other problems.
| They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to
| always show full signal strength.
| choeger wrote:
| Now the real question will be: Will we see a leap as we did in
| language models if we just wait for the computing capacity to
| grow enough?
| alfor wrote:
| In a video from 2016 in an lawsuit about a crash in 2018 in which
| the driver was repeatedly told by the car to pay attention.
|
| The driver knew about how this part of the road was incorrectly
| recognized by the software yet didn't pay attention.
|
| You get sue for the life you didn't save and get almost zero
| merits for the ones you did.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| A software system sold as "self-driving" with the lawyer-
| derived safety valve of an attention warning is not safe. All
| automotive companies have done takeover studies for ADAS
| systems. Spoiler: there's no such thing as a timely takeover at
| highway speeds. The more a system drives itself, the more the
| drivers are lulled to a state of inattention (or in the case of
| many Tesla drivers, literal sleep). This doesn't work at 70
| mph. It's false advertising on top of a highly unsafe
| apparatus.
|
| Walter Huang's Tesla drove into a barrier on the 101 not far
| from Tesla's Palo Alto facility. It drove into a barrier
| because of its naive vision-only system paired with the
| constantly changing and faded lane lines on the 101 due to
| construction. If Teslas can't drive the 101 without mistakes,
| they can't drive anywhere. It's literally right down the road
| from their autonomous driving team's office.
| alfor wrote:
| How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial
| autonomy, to full autonomy?
|
| What if it's a net positive (reduction of death) and delaying
| the progress cause more death, who is accountable for those
| death?
|
| The Tesla system was approved by the relevant authorities or
| they would not be able to drive them in the US. If the system
| was required to nag the driver by law and didn't then it is a
| breach of the law. If the system is imperfect, know to be so
| and approved that way I see no foul play.
|
| If the law isn't good, change the law.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| >How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial
| autonomy, to full autonomy?
|
| I don't. Should you be able to sell an unsafe car just
| because _you_ speculate about some non-existent alien
| technology that _would_ make it safe if it existed? Why?
|
| > If the system is imperfect, know to be so and approved
| that way I see no foul play.
|
| So if NHTSA doesn't force their hand then they have no
| obligation to make a safe driving system, even if they know
| it to be unsafe? I'm very glad that countless engineers at
| Volvo (3-point seatbelts) and GM (airbags) and others
| didn't have that mindset.
| stusmall wrote:
| >How do you see the path from no autonomy, to partial
| autonomy, to full autonomy?
|
| Honestly that isn't the question here and also not
| society's problem. If Tesla can't make the business model
| work, that is a Tesla problem.
|
| Plenty of other companies are making great progress on
| autonomous vehicles without passing a non-working system
| off as something that "drives itself (no human input at
| all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then finds a
| parking spot". It is more expensive that way and requires
| more upfront costs, but thems the breaks.
|
| >If the law isn't good, change the law.
|
| This thread is literally about a deposition in a court
| case. It might not require any change of law. It might not
| be a criminal trial, but civil cases can be just as
| effective at getting bad actors and their faulty products
| out of the market.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first", "We
| had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed into
| a fence on one practice run".
|
| In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
|
| As a viewer, none of those things are surprising. If the car
| could reliably do those things pretty much every time, they would
| have brought a journalist along for the ride. If it could do it
| every time on any route, they would have released it to the
| public to try.
|
| Back in 2016, other self driving companies were making similar
| videos, and I'm sure all of them were mapped and took multiple
| tries too.
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, this coverage (as is so common with this company) seems a
| bit off. This wasn't a product in 2016, it was a technology
| demonstration. How many tech giants have stood on stage demoing
| products that barely worked, with an army of engineers on site
| to get it right before the reveal?
|
| As far as mapping the route... that's The Standard Model for
| this industry for every manufacturer _except_ Tesla.
|
| Folks: please stop watching coverage that merely confirms your
| priors. Every car can get FSD now for $200/month and enroll in
| the beta. Call a friend and get a ride. It's great, I promise.
| No, it's not done. But it's great.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _It 's great, I promise._
|
| It's not just great, it's _hardcore_ :
|
| https://theintercept.com/2023/01/10/tesla-crash-footage-
| auto...
|
| Woo! FSD! FSD!
| ajross wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of unserious flamery I was talking
| about. And it's simply out of control on this site. Get a
| ride, is all I can say. It may not be as fun as yelling
| about it on the internet, but you'll get a much better idea
| of the capabilities of this technology, and probably have a
| ton of fun while you do.
| clouddrover wrote:
| What, you think an 8 car pileup is "unserious"? That's
| interesting.
| warinukraine wrote:
| > The big claims here seem to be "We mapped the route first",
| "We had to try multiple times to get the video" and "We crashed
| into a fence on one practice run".
|
| > In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
|
| Fanboy detected.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > In my view, none of those things make the video staged...
|
| "Staged" might not be the correct term, but it was certainly
| misleading.
|
| It's about equivalent to saying you made an algorithm that can
| identify the breed of dog in a picture, but then only showing
| it correctly identifying golden retrievers.
|
| They over-fitted the AI for the specific route they took.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Sarcastically, a 2000 lb robot could be programmed to drive in
| a random walk pattern quite cheaply: film it for many days and
| use the section of the recording where it has the fewest
| collisions as the promo video!
| acdha wrote:
| What makes it staged is saying "Tesla drives itself (no human
| input at all) thru urban streets to highway to streets, then
| finds a parking spot." -- no qualifications or caveats, just a
| sales pitch for a 10^4 USD pre-order which will not ship in the
| service life of the vehicles it was sold on.
|
| (Corrected sloppy math, see below)
| wilg wrote:
| I mean, didn't it do exactly that? Just only once?
| acdha wrote:
| The clear implication is that you should buy one because it
| can do that for you, too. Sales would be far less likely if
| they showed the clips of it crashing or stalling.
| wilg wrote:
| There's no reason to apply such an implication. This was
| a tech demo! No one ever claimed that was something
| production cars could currently do at the time, nor would
| that make any sense, as the cars clearly did not do that
| at the time.
|
| An article from the time clearly interprets it as a tech
| demo: https://electrek.co/2016/10/20/watch-tesla-new-
| full-self-dri...
| acdha wrote:
| Reading that article, I see lots of things which do not
| sound like "this worked once on a single known course".
| They're taking orders, talking about unattended cross
| country trips, and claiming the driver is only there for
| legal reasons -- all of which makes it sound a lot more
| mature than it is.
| wilg wrote:
| Nonetheless, there is no claim that any current product
| does this, just discussion of potential future features.
| danaris wrote:
| That's a pretty big stretch.
|
| If someone says, "Buy a Tesla, now with Full Self
| Driving! Here's a demo!" <insert demo>, then you're going
| to very reasonably assume that the demo is supposed to be
| of the _current_ Full Self Driving feature, not of any
| future feature, and of a _typical_ , if slightly
| polished-up, usage of that feature.
|
| The kind of absurdly nitpicky legalistic weasel-wording
| you're trying to do wouldn't even fly in most American
| courts, let alone in the court of public opinion.
| wilg wrote:
| I don't know what to tell you, man. There was no "current
| Full Self Driving" feature at the time, in 2016. That
| option literally had no features until 2019 when some
| stuff began getting enabled via software update.
|
| Edit: Here is the blog post the video was embedded in:
| https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-
| now...
| yreg wrote:
| No, it was very clear that it cannot do that for you at
| that time. The only implication was that it will do it
| soon, which didn't happen.
| ericpauley wrote:
| Nit: 10^4 (10E3, 10E5 would conventionally be 10*10^5 or
| 1,000,000)
| acdha wrote:
| You're right, I blame commenting while taking care of a
| sick kid. Thanks!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Exactly, and for that matter, why not just write 1E5?
| acdha wrote:
| Just writing without an editor - the main point I was
| thinking was that it was quite a significant upcharge.
| It'd be one thing if they had a, shall we say, optimistic
| video about future vehicles but selling something for
| that much money that implies it is a lot closer to
| available.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Hey, it didn't work on me, because I was expecting them to try
| to scam me.
| mzs wrote:
| Just a heads-up to others in the comments here that have not
| read the article, none of those are quotes from the article.
| sidibe wrote:
| Were the other companies putting that the driver is only there
| for legal reasons at the front of the video and selling the
| product for thousands of dollars with promises it would work as
| depicted imminently?
|
| There is a world of difference between the demos other
| companies were showing and this.
| johntb86 wrote:
| The article says
|
| > A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-
| driving technology was staged to show capabilities like
| stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that
| the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior
| engineer.
|
| Completely faking capabilities would be much worse than using
| multiple tries, though I can't find a transcript of the full
| deposition and so I'm not sure the deposition backs up that
| claim.
| GGO wrote:
| This is not surprising. I expect more shenanigans like this from
| Elon to come to light over next couple of years.
| xyst wrote:
| If TSLA needs a bailout in the future, I say we just let it fail.
| This company is just fucking terrible. It has turned me off from
| EVs completely. From the terrible build quality to multiple
| failed deliveries, it's just not worth it anymore.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Whoops, that was an aspirational demo!
| orwin wrote:
| This isn't that bad compared to Elon speeches.
|
| I still wonder how him lying about robotaxi in 2019, the whole 2
| minutes speech he gave that prompted the rapid increase in share
| price, is any different from Elisabeth Holmes speech about
| Theranos blood recognition. Except that Holmes did not sell any
| Theranos share. I must be missing something, because it seems
| like I'm the only one perturbed by this.
| dqpb wrote:
| Does teslas AI maintain a world model? Videos I've seen of path
| flicker suggest it reinterprets the worlds at every frame.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I saw a video that there is some sort of state and "memory", so
| i don't think that's the case.
|
| If I'm not mistaking, it was a video that detailed how they did
| the AI training.
| redox99 wrote:
| It does not use what's often called "HD maps". It uses vision +
| NNs to guess the lanes (even if they aren't visible), with some
| help of regular map data, but vision takes priority.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Why do so many news articles do this? It references a deposition,
| describes it becoming publicly available, and even quotes from
| it, and then chooses not to link to it or otherwise provide
| access to it. And search engines absolutely suck for finding
| useful things like this.
|
| Has anybody managed to find the deposition? The search engine
| fail is made even better by the fact there was another deposition
| involving the same individual. Ugh!
| undershirt wrote:
| I was frustrated by this back in covid when data was almost
| never linked. I resolved that it was probably a weird market
| effect where the data collectors have to be funded by those
| willing to buy access to it (i.e. news publishers not readers),
| and editors were in place to ensure integrity in its reporting.
| And maybe readers can still make phone calls and go to
| libraries to find the data instead of finding it on the
| internet for free.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, I find court documents generally far better
| reading material than news articles covering them, especially
| court decisions.
|
| A lot of legal writers are actually pretty good, even from the
| perspective of a layperson, especially judges/clerks writing
| for judges at the appellate and Supreme Court level.
| dang wrote:
| There is a decent discussion at
| https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/10df9y9/th...
| which contains quotes from the deposition, as well as a link to
| a pdf of the deposition at
| https://wetransfer.com/downloads/8b24e0528e23c45d543f4d4182b...
| (I know, but that's the only link there).
|
| In this case it's surprisingly hard to find a link to the
| deposition via search engines. Just out of curiosity, I tried
| googling and binging (?) several phrases from the pdf; nothing
| comes up. Adding the case number doesn't help much either. It's
| 19CV346663, if anyone wants to try.
|
| The deposition is from June 2022 btw.
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They don't want you to click away.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| > Why do so many news articles do this?
|
| Because they're serving ads. They don't want you clicking on a
| link that takes you to an external site. They don't care about
| you reading primary material and forming your own opinion,
| either. They want to shape your thought and they want you to
| click their ads.
| dpifke wrote:
| If they cared about serving ads, they could rehost the
| document. Then they'd get more clicks, from the folks
| interested in reading the primary source material. (Court
| filings are public domain, so there are no copyright concerns
| with doing so.)
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| But then you may form an opinion of your own (that differs
| from theirs) by reading the source material. Or you may
| notice that those trusty journalists weren't accurately
| representing the content of source material in their
| articles.
|
| That would be bad (for the media company).
| parineum wrote:
| On a very separate case, I was also very annoyed by this on one
| of the recent-ish mass shooters, I think the Buffalo guy.
|
| I saw a million articles talking about his manifesto calling
| him a radical socialist and picking out some quotes and then
| others calling him a radical conservative and picking out some
| quotes. All while not providing links to said manifesto with a
| kind of proclamation of "we don't want to share his ideas"
| (except they already did with the quotes). Really it just
| sounded like they didn't trust me not to kill a bunch of people
| if I read such a "dangerous" document because it was so
| compelling.
|
| When I eventually found it, all it really turned out to be was
| the ramblings of a clearly not well adjusted mind. It seemed to
| me like the motivation for not linking it was more likely that
| they didn't want me to realize that whatever conclusions they
| decided to draw were totally unfounded because the document was
| complete nonsense.
| oehpr wrote:
| [dead]
| solarkraft wrote:
| I learned at school that the things I state as fact should be
| verifiable. It keeps amusing (baffling) me how journalists seem
| to be taught the opposite.
| ilyt wrote:
| I find it baffling they are called journalists. It's just
| generating controversy based on events, with no actual
| thought put into actual "news" part.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Musk currently looks set to lose the "funding secured" civil
| suit. I'd expect this to follow shortly after.
|
| Is there a public accounting of Musk's balance sheet? His
| fondness for margin loans is documented, after all.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they delivered
| actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is _far_ below
| the Theranos level.
| rapsey wrote:
| How many people did Theranos kill compared to Tesla self
| driving?
| ggreer wrote:
| Theranos's faulty blood tests were used by a couple major
| insurance companies and at least one state-run medical
| provider. Over 1.5 million tests were run. I'm sure quite a
| few people died because they weren't correctly diagnosed in
| time for treatment.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Better comparison would be to VW ~ 1200 premature deaths
| https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109238_vw-diesel-
| cheat...
| dqpb wrote:
| > they delivered actual cars and fraud,
|
| I think your punctuation is doing you a disservice.
| chihuahua wrote:
| They're giving you cars, they're giving you fraud, they're
| giving you cars with some fraud, what more do you want? You
| people are so hard to please.
|
| /s
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I absolutely agree with you, so we have an upper bound, Elon
| Musk is facing _far_ less than 12 years in prison. Doesn 't
| anyone want to help us out with a lower bound?
| unregistereddev wrote:
| This is interesting context. I'd say a fine of $125,000 -
| because that is the lowest fine I can find in a brief DDG
| search of fines levied for materially misleading investors.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Not in market value...
| nkozyra wrote:
| "Less fraud than Theranos" probably isn't the accolade you hang
| on the mantle.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Lol is this how low our standards have sunk?
| sho_hn wrote:
| "Well, it's less bad than Theranos" --Tesla in Review, 2023
| WaxProlix wrote:
| > below the Theranos level
|
| Isn't that just like, an insanely high bar of fraud to meet?
| How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud
| that Theranos represents?
|
| "Not the most fraudulent fraudsters" just comes across as a
| damningly weak defense (imo).
| ronsor wrote:
| > How many things in recent memory rise to the level of fraud
| that Theranos represents?
|
| Mr. SBF from FTX would like to have a word with you.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| True, crypto sort of lives in its own world of perpetual
| ongoing fraud/grift, eh?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| FTX was crypto. If you're suprised by fraud there, you
| haven't been paying attention the last years.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The only unique thing about the Theranos fraud is it seem
| Holmes didn't make an overt moves to profit off the inflated
| valuation of the company.
| spoiler wrote:
| I think she genuinely believed in the technology, and
| thought they just needed more time. Like, she kept
| pressuring people to work on it, and there were some small
| advancements in the tech, just not good enough.
|
| I think the worst thing they did was giving those device
| out to healthcare institutions, when they knew it was
| inaccurate.
|
| I'm not defending her, she was clearly dangerously
| delusional, but I think it explains why she didn't behave
| like a classical con artist/scammer
| beebmam wrote:
| > Say what you want about Tesla as an enterprise -- they
| delivered actual cars and fraud, if any actually happened, is
| far below the Theranos level.
|
| The missing comma before "and fraud" is doing a lot of work in
| this sentence.
| leaf8937 wrote:
| say whatever you want about Theranos, but Hitler killed
| millions. Say whatever you want about Hitler but Genghis...
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| Theranos delivered blood test results. Tesla delivered cars.
|
| The problem is that neither delivered those things to the
| particular qualities promised.
| pengaru wrote:
| I'm not defending this kind of shit at all, but when it comes to
| marketing/advertising imagery _everything_ is staged and dolled
| up - and it 's nothing new.
|
| Back in the 90s my older sister left college a talented artist
| and promptly found the only real paying work available to her in
| the advertising industry. Every day she'd tell stories at the
| dinner table of what sounded to us like fraudulent advertising.
| Toothpicks holding buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller
| in the commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to
| make them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a
| constant game of deceit.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| The analogy here is not a burger is made to look better with
| toothpicks, but that the burger vendor doesn't mention that it
| has a small chance of containing a deadly poison.
| a4isms wrote:
| > everything is staged and dolled up
|
| Dolled up, yes. Staged as in, "Portrayed in the best light?"
| Yes. But staged as in "As fake as the Apollo 11 moon landing?"
| No.
|
| McDonald's Canada did an entire video showing how they shoot
| their food. They're not allowed to fake it, but what they can
| do is put forty patties on the grill and choose the nicest two
| to put in the ad. They can take a basket of heads of lettuce
| and pick the perfect piece. They can carefully layer the food
| on the bun with a slight setback to give the illusion that it's
| taller via perspective, but they cannot actually lie about how
| tall the food is.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xnjBoJHzE
|
| I met a specialty food photographer once. He had food dyes and
| a tackle box full of glass beads, he could make a fake cup of
| coffee look like a hot cup of coffee, but he was clear that he
| did that when shooting an ad for something else, e.g. If it's
| the cup being sold, not the coffee.
|
| Not everything in advertising is an outright fraud, although
| everything in advertising is staged as well as possible, just
| as you say.
|
| And "as well as possible" can be really, really well when you
| have deep pockets.
| pengaru wrote:
| > they cannot actually lie about how tall the food is
|
| Anyone that's eaten a big mac and seen a commercial for one
| knows they clearly _do_ lie about how tall the food is.
|
| I presume what you meant here is that they're not _supposed_
| to lie about how tall the food is. Clearly the _can_ and
| _do_. Actual McDonalds hamburgers are the saddest looking
| flat soggy salt biscuits ever to be called a hamburger. Their
| commercials show nothing of the sort, get real.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| It's truly bizarre that Musk stans are resorting to calling
| out McDs to try and defend Tesla's blatant fraud.
|
| But I can tell you right now that McDs is not lying about
| what a BigMac _can_ look like, because I have eaten a Bic
| Mac, and other McDs burgers, that looked just like they
| were from a commercial. Food has natural variability; how
| the final burger appears depends on the ingredients and the
| preparation, and some McDs locations like the ones near me
| do a better job of storing their buns and assembling their
| burgers than others.
| a4isms wrote:
| Perhaps McDonalds lies to you in your jurisdiction, but no,
| I have never seen an ad where they claim that their
| hamburgers are so-and-so many millimetres tall. I have seen
| plenty of claims from them about things like the uncooked
| weight of their burgers, and the fine print always
| clarifies that cooking reduces the weight.
|
| Perhaps you could share with me the lies McDonalds has told
| you and everyone else about their food? I mean, sure, it
| sucks. But the video I linked to above explains exactly why
| and how the food in the ads looks better than the food they
| sell you.
|
| Other than that, where are the lies?
| flutas wrote:
| > Every day she'd tell stories at the dinner table of what
| sounded to us like fraudulent advertising. Toothpicks holding
| buns off lettuce to make a burger look taller in the
| commercial, grapes dipped in oil before photographing to make
| them look shiny... I can't remember the others, it was a
| constant game of deceit.
|
| McDonalds Canada has published a behind the scenes of them
| doing a photoshoot for a burger[0] then compared it to the real
| thing. It's interesting seeing the tricks you mention involved
| (one you didn't mention but they do, is the patty is frozen and
| only the edges seared so it stays thicker).
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8
| david-gpu wrote:
| Nobody dies because a burger is flatter or because some grapes
| are matte.
| pengaru wrote:
| No, but people develop ailments like obesity and heart
| disease from eating too much fast food.
|
| One could argue broadcasting such misrepresentations
| contributes to the incidence of their excessive consumption
| related ailments. Obesity and heart disease can resemble slow
| death. Autopilot/FSD just does it faster.
| mikeryan wrote:
| However, there is literally a point where this becomes fraud
| and as a publicly traded company Tesla has to be aware of where
| that line is drawn.
|
| I mean heck just look at what happened to Nikola.
| https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think this is a stretch: consumers understand that
| advertisements for food do not _literally_ represent the
| material conditions of what they get at Burger King (compare,
| for example, any number of ridiculous advertisements where the
| food flies around in front of the camera).
|
| This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive
| advertiser), where an ad that shows the car _driving itself_
| might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in
| fact, drive itself.
| curiousllama wrote:
| New idea: open a pop-up cafe near a law school called
| "Material Statement of Fact." Run a bunch of advertisements
| with silly pictures (food flying in the air, tootpicks
| holding in the lettucs, etc.). Each meal is served exactly as
| absurd as it is pictured.
|
| I think it'd be a lot of fun for like 2 days.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Don't forget daily live performances by whatever band's
| music is in the background of the ads! Otherwise it could
| possibly be construed as false advertising, after all.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >This is different from Tesla (or any other automotive
| advertiser), where an ad that shows the car driving itself
| might reasonably be considered a claim that the car can, in
| fact, drive itself.
|
| Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a Tacoma
| in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled driver
| spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land Rover up a
| ski hill in an elegant way.
|
| That won't stop people from playing dumb in order to prop up
| some farcical point they tried making online and got called
| out on.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Right! And emphasis on playing dumb: the GP's argument
| requires the courts to not understand the difference, when
| they clearly do.
| pengaru wrote:
| > Everyone knows you can't tow the space shuttle with a
| Tacoma in any reasonable sense and that only a very skilled
| driver spending a day taking a crack at it can get a Land
| Rover up a ski hill in an elegant way.
|
| As someone who lives on a dirt road surrounded by airbnb's
| near a national park seeing lots of tourist traffic, I
| think you have an extremely flawed understanding of what
| "everyone knows" WRT their vehicle's capabilities.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| Musk used smoke and mirrors to promote something that wasn't
| real? I'm shocked. SHOCKED.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| I imagine Elluswamy's career at Tesla is over. What a dilemma,
| either lie in a deposition or get fired.
| danans wrote:
| I don't think a company can fire you for not perjuring yourself
| in the company's defense. That would invite even bigger legal
| liability on them.
| squokko wrote:
| It's sad to see a company that has actually produced an excellent
| normal car, get so insane about its essentially fraudulent self-
| driving representations.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| Tesla is in the process of discovering that the electric car was
| in fact never a disruptive innovation in the Christensen sense.
| It's a sustaining innovation. Under the sustaining innovation
| model, the upstart is not likely to succeed because the
| innovation plays the the incumbents' strengths.
|
| It's just taken time for the industry to respond.
|
| I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with
| self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose.
| The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a
| time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have
| bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car
| market.
|
| Christensen book, _The Innovator 's Dilemma_ even specifically
| identifies the electric car as a potentially disruptive
| innovation, mapping the path an upstart could take to eventually
| dominate the car market. Tesla never took that path, and instead
| did the exact opposite. It sold social status to wealthy
| customers rather than basic transportation to an abandoned
| market.
| brookst wrote:
| I agree with your interpretation, but I don't think Tesla is
| discovering this. I think they've known that the electric car
| was a mere sustaining innovation, while a true self-driving car
| is disruptive. That's why they've tried to sell their electric
| cars as self-driving cars.
|
| Unfortunately for Tesla, you can't just hang an "automobile"
| sign on a faster horse and declare yourself the owner of a
| disruptive product.
| kentlyons wrote:
| Using Christensen's theory against Tesla is an interesting one
| and one I've thought about. I largely think batteries and EV's
| are a red herring as far as Tesla goes and this type of
| analysis. I think it is much closer to a new market disruption.
| Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto
| industry - it's playing against a different set of customer
| values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this
| way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing
| Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone targeted different
| values than the dominant "smartphones" of the day. The attacks
| against Tesla to me feel very analogous to the attacks agains
| the iPhone. But I guess only time will tell.
|
| As an aside, I actually think the advantages of Tesla are its
| willingness to constantly improve the product - from software
| OTAs that make the cars better years after purchase to
| fundamentally reworking manufacturing (eg mega casting).
| They've taken Toyota's Kaizen and cranked it up to 11.
|
| As far as the rest of the auto industry, I think there is
| probably a cheaper worse play (low end disruption). EVs are
| much simpler to make and that's going to wreak havoc on the
| auto supply chain (needing it to be much smaller/leaner). And
| it would also seem the dealer's days are numbered - both as a
| dated sales model as well as their revenue drying up (fewer
| repairs to make). Do any of the encumbants disrupt themselves
| (knowing it is inevitable)? Or is there another player that
| comes in? (And I don't think Tesla really fits this role).
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Tesla is playing a different game than the rest of the auto
| industry - it's playing against a different set of customer
| values (electric might be part of it, but only part). In this
| way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and basically
| killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry.
|
| Can you expand on this?
|
| When the iPhone came out there was literally nothing like it
| on the market. It genuinely redefined what could be done with
| a phone, and it doing so, completely changed the category.
|
| Nothing that Tesla is doing rises to that level of
| disruption/innovation, at least as far as I can tell.
|
| What, exactly, are they doing that brings you to this
| conclusion?
|
| > But I guess only time will tell.
|
| I find this so strange.
|
| Tesla has been around for... let's see... 20 years. The S is
| over 10 years old now (production started in late 2010).
|
| The iPhone came out in 2007. A blink of the eye later and the
| smartphone was ubiquitous.
|
| You say "time will tell", but... how much more time, exactly?
| kentlyons wrote:
| There's a few things to unpack here. One is the perception
| of the iPhone. Eg here's a quote from PC Magazine I saved
| when it came out: "Poor business e2mail and PIM
| connectivity. Bad audio quality on phone calls. Tons of GSM
| buzz on nearby speakers. Virtual keyboard hard to type on.
| No phone functionality with iPod speaker docks. It's the
| best portable media player ever. It's possibly the most fun
| we've ever had with a handheld device. It browses the Web
| like a champ. But poor phone call performance and missing
| messaging options make us unwilling to recommend it as a
| phone." There are similar other criticisms. It was not part
| of the category of smartphones at the time as seen by the
| people using them.
|
| The early criticisms about Tesla's build quality and a lot
| of the arguments about a battery not being good enough seem
| to follow a similar argument. Is the original Model S as
| good as a top of the line gas car at the time? By most
| metrics used at the time, no. The criticisms in the peer
| comment by lbsnake7 are similar - those are legacy metrics
| of a car. However it did find a customer base that valued
| what it offered, bad seats and poor panel gaps and all
| (just like the GSM buzz and non-replaceable battery).
|
| As far as the timeline, the slowness has surprised me a bit
| but I think comes down to a couple of things. One is the
| turn over time of getting a new phone vs a new car. Cars
| are much slower. And another (which might be related) is
| the price point of cars being orders of magnitude larger
| than phones. And finally, it's taken a good while for Tesla
| to ramp - it's been supply constrained forever (although
| there might be signs of that shifting).
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| So you've provided your perspective on why you think the
| iPhone wasn't that disruptive at the time (though, given
| that, a year after its launch, numerous phone
| manufacturers announced their own smartphones, I think
| you're rewriting history a bit, but whatever, that's not
| actually the point of the conversation).
|
| At the same time you've claimed Tesla will be the iPhone
| of the car world. You claimed "In this way [Tesla] is
| similar to the iPhone coming in and basically killing
| Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry."
|
| I'm asking why you believe that. Can you expand on that?
|
| I've heard claims of vertical integration, but that
| hasn't proven to be a major differentiator, and in fact
| is turning out to be a liability (see: reliance on
| China).
|
| I've heard claims of manufacturing automation, but that's
| turned out to largely be a failure.
|
| I've heard claims about the synergy with Solar City and
| their battery development, but that's proven to be a very
| small moat, at best.
|
| I've heard claims about the value of OTA updates for
| software, but that too hasn't been that disruptive, and
| now other manufacturers are doing the same.
|
| I've heard claims about their abandonment of the
| dealership model, but that doesn't seem to have been much
| of a differentiator, and given their service reputation,
| seems to have become a liability.
|
| Elon is selling the idea that FSD is the critical factor,
| but FSD is increasingly looking like an unattainable
| dream, at least with the hardware platform Tesla
| currently has in the market.
|
| So what's your take? Why do you still think Tesla will be
| like "the iPhone coming in and basically killing Nokia,
| Motorola and Blackberry"? What am I missing?
|
| You've also explained why you think Tesla, at 20 years,
| hasn't yet had the disruptive effect on the market that
| you seem you be predicting, laying it at the feet of
| market structure and so forth.
|
| But you haven't explained why you believe that will
| change, either.
| kentlyons wrote:
| It is the part just before you cut in my quote: "it's
| playing against a different set of customer values". That
| is how Christensen defines a new market disruption. That
| is not enough for a successful new market disruption, but
| is one of his key characteristic of one. So I believe the
| values people are finding in their purchase of a Tesla
| are radically different than those buying ICE vehicles.
| kube-system wrote:
| The iPhone was seen as a niche device when it was
| introduced. It was both "too expensive" to be a mass market
| consumer device and lacked features that the enterprise
| demanded at the time. At the time, consumer phones were
| much cheaper, and smartphones were PDAs that made calls --
| they were electronic Rolodexes. "Kids don't want to play
| with a rolodex, they want MP3 players!"
|
| What nobody expected is the power of: people just loving
| the device. Enterprise IT departments were approached by
| C-suite folks demanding to use the device. Consumers
| decided they _did_ want to fork out big bucks for one, and
| carriers found a way to finance them.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I'm far from a Tesla fan myself, but one thing I found
| really cool are claims by friends who worked with Tesla is
| that they have a huge lead on mainstream car makers thanks
| to the fact they design and make a huge part of the cars
| and "stack" in-house. Rather than 80% of the car (and code)
| being built by 1st tier makers, packaged by 2nd tier and
| integrated by your 3rd tier provider, leading to very very
| slow iteration cycles. One friend even claimed they do
| continuous delivery on many parts of the hardware on a
| daily basis (meaning revisions are a frequent thing across
| the entire stack). I am not sure how much of this is true
| though.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > I'm far from a Tesla fan myself, but one thing I found
| really cool are claims by friends who worked with Tesla
| is that they have a huge lead on mainstream car makers
| thanks to the fact they design and make a huge part of
| the cars and "stack" in-house.
|
| That might be true, but it's not clear at all that it's
| _good_.
|
| Vertical integration carries risks because you now have
| to run your own end-to-end supply chain, which means you
| are also responsible for building diversification in that
| supply chain (as otherwise you end up with single points
| of failure), which is complex and expensive.
|
| I've heard similar claims about how cool it is that Tesla
| doesn't have dealerships, but the downside is they also
| have absolutely horrendous service.
|
| And this is ignoring the fact that how Tesla builds and
| sells their products is somewhat orthogonal to the
| question of product category disruption.
|
| No one would've called Apple disruptive if they made yet-
| another-flip-phone but just built and sold it
| differently.
| lbsnake7 wrote:
| This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the
| more tech of all the car companies. They have the
| disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive
| amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as
| much as possible. Historically car companies outsource
| everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly
| engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves
| because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats
| better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is
| why they have all the quality problems.
| danans wrote:
| > In this way it is similar to the iPhone coming in and
| basically killing Nokia, Motorola and Blackberry. The iPhone
| targeted different values than the dominant "smartphones" of
| the day.
|
| As much as the iPhone killed off those companies, it grew the
| market for smartphones more.
|
| There is no significantly growing market for cars like there
| was for "handheld internet-connected personal computers".
| Every EV sale is effectively 1 less ICE sale - a 1:1
| replacement in the market. Whatever market growth potential
| exists is in the very price sensitive developing world (South
| Asia, Latin America, Africa, etc), where EVs will show up en-
| masse last.
|
| Now that practically every company is selling EVs, Tesla only
| has its brand to differentiate it, which was at one time
| significant but perhaps less so lately.
|
| As I see it, their only meteoric growth opportunity (by
| eating into competitors' market share) would be if they
| released a $20K, 250+ mile range, 5 seater EV in the very
| near future - like what the VW Beetle did in its generation.
|
| But that's hard to achieve in an EV (especially from a luxury
| brand used to high margins), since the majority of the cost
| of an EV is still in the battery, and that cost doesn't scale
| down much with a lower price tag.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| >It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic
| transportation to an abandoned market.
|
| That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars. To
| get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy,
| expensive battery battery. You can get tons of power for almost
| not additional money, mass or volume. So building something
| like a 5 series BMW is very easy to do and make competitive.
| Building a Honda fit is very hard. The nissan leaf is the
| closest thing to that, and people don't want it because it
| can't really do road trips.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Just imagine what you could do if you could just open the
| boot and swap out a few 10kg batteries at the fuel station.
| You'd still have 30KWh hidden around the chassis, but most
| people don't need >100mile range every day.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > That is more an artifact of the physics of electric cars.
| To get the range the masses want, you need a large, heavy,
| expensive battery.
|
| Kind of, you can also change the other factors in the
| equation like that startup building 'Lightyear' with the
| light weight platform, aerodynamics and with PV panels [0]
|
| [0] https://lightyear.one/lightyear-2
| tromp wrote:
| Or the extreme aerodynamics of Aptera which in 3 days [1]
| claims to "showcase our production-intent design and
| announce our Launch Edition's unique specifications and
| revolutionary capabilities in a livestream webinar."
|
| [1] https://aptera.us/meet-delta/
| nradov wrote:
| Taking a long road trip with multiple people in a subcompact
| "penalty box" car the size of a Honda Fit is kind of a
| miserable experience regardless of what kind of motor it
| uses. People mostly only do that when they have no other
| options.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes cars like the Honda Fit are only for people who cannot
| afford a nicer, bigger car. Very few people actually prefer
| them. Their advantages are low cost and high fuel economy,
| which are the biggest factors forthe bottom end of the
| market.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Never owned a Fit, I take it?
|
| My wife and I owned a Fit for over ten years. We took many
| long roadtrips (i.e. 8+ hours in the car). For a couple
| with no kids, it's perfect, with a decent amount of cargo
| space, and great mileage.
|
| Frankly, outside of North America, small cars are by far
| the norm rather than the exception. The American SUV or
| pickup are quite literally jokes in other parts of the
| world for how absurdly large they are.
| pornel wrote:
| I think the range problem is already solved by the
| 800V/250kW+ charging. A 20-minute break every 3 hours of
| driving is within reason, and it makes the range effectively
| infinite.
|
| I know there are people with steel bladders who also need to
| tow a boat every day, through a desert, in the snow, uphill
| both ways, but for commuting and occasional road trips it's
| already pretty good. Just don't try this with Leaf and its
| previous-gen peers that are 5 times slower than the state of
| the art.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| But the only 800v cars are the extreme upper end of the
| price scale even for EVs. I think currently it is only the
| Lucid Air and the Porsche Taycan, both extreme luxury even
| in the expensive EV segment. And the infrastructure for
| non-Teslas just isn't there. The state of charging
| infrastructure sans Tesla's Supercharger network is really,
| really bad in the US right now, to the point that major EV
| influencers are just straight up recommending not yet
| switching to an EV just because of this.
|
| I'm talking 1/2 of the stations broken/bricked on average,
| another 1/4 not delivering at all or not delivering the
| promised (250kW+) output, so you're stuck with 50kW in the
| middle of nowhere and your 20 minute stop now takes you
| 2.5h with no amenities around.
|
| Check the Out of Spec channel on Youtube for frequent
| updates on this type of stuff.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| The Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5 are both 800v charging
| too.
| amalgamated_inc wrote:
| Oh, thanks for the correction, I knew I was forgetting
| someone. Yea, those 2 (same car I believe, just
| rebadged?) are supposed to be pretty awesome. And at low
| $40k entry level they're maybe not priced cheap, but
| cheap-ish in the EV world, especially for vehicles with
| 800v systems!
|
| What does a Lucid get you over these? 1,000HP. Does
| anyone really need that? So why pay 4x the price?
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think they initially had hopes that they would be able to
| make some disruptive innovations in auto manufacturing - but
| all the evidence suggests they went way over their skis as
| Teslas are notorious for having extremely poor fit and finish.
| The failure to deliver on self driving is in line with a
| history of failing to deliver. You can include the weird hype
| around the Tesla humanoid robot on this list too imo.
| recuter wrote:
| You're a bit too late with that observation I think as Tesla is
| no longer the upstart.
|
| > The feature is a gizmo that appeals to techies and can, for a
| time, prop up sagging unit margins. But it's a nice to have
| bobble at best compared to the real prize of dominating the car
| market.
|
| The feature and all the rest of the hype somehow got it this
| far.. it might break 2m ($100B revenue) cars sold in 2023.
| That's about as much as Mercedes. BMB is 2.5m. So it has
| wiggled its way by sheer tyranny of will, luck, and incumbents
| dragging their feet to being in the top 10.
|
| Otherwise I'd agree with you but the bluff, improbably, worked
| out. They are here to stay.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I think that was part of why FSD was such a core pitch from the
| beginning. IF Tesla had managed to crack that to the actual
| fullest it could have been the game changing thing to put them
| ahead. The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while
| you don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on
| changes and rental opportunities that would unlock. Too bad
| they hard committed to camera only sensing which is looking
| like a major mistake given how little headway they have against
| traditional car safety features.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| >The whole pitch of "your car makes money for you while you
| don't need it" robo-taxis and all the other knock on changes
| and rental opportunities that would unlock.
|
| Sounds miserable, I wouldn't want to get back to my car after
| work and find some passenger had ruined it in some way.
| Bodily fluids, smoking weed in it, leaving trash, the
| possibilities are endless!
| eldaisfish wrote:
| If one takes a moment to think about the value of a private
| car participating in a public taxi fleet, the idea collapses
| completely. Public transit is difficult, so is a taxi fleet.
| A part is labour - drivers specifically - but equally large
| portions are maintenance, insurance and related things.
|
| Even if Tesla developed robo taxis tomorrow, there are
| numerous legal, regulatory, liability and willingness hurdles
| to overcome.
|
| There is also the issue of which markets robo taxis would
| address. Old-world cities tend to have good to excellent
| public transit. The value is largely in limited regions -
| north america being one.
| rtkwe wrote:
| True but that's still a huge market and if it were
| demonstrably safer than people driving you could work
| through the insurance and liability issues in fairly short
| order.
|
| Also even European cities with great transport are often
| choked by cars and parking issues. London in particular
| seems to have issues with the volume of vehicles that could
| be at least partially helped by car share robo-taxis.
|
| There were tons of potential issues but it still formed the
| ideological core propping up any semblance of rationality
| to Tesla's pre-crash stock price. IMO it's still way over
| valued but it's at least no longer larger than every other
| major car manufacturer combined.
| prottog wrote:
| > It sold social status to wealthy customers rather than basic
| transportation to an abandoned market.
|
| I thought their plan explicitly was to start with low-volume,
| high-margin exotic cars (the Roaster), followed by the slightly
| higher-volume luxury car (Model S), then progressively going
| towards higher-volume, lower-priced cars, with each step
| funding the development of the next.
|
| Are you looking for the Toyota Corolla of the EV market?
| solarkraft wrote:
| It does feel like they're pretty comfortable selling
| expensive cars for now while others are expanding info the
| cheaper segments.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I don't own an EV but wouldn't the closest one to that be the
| Nissan Leaf?
|
| I see them all around me and the marked for used ones, all
| the way back to 2012 models seems to be strong.
| pornel wrote:
| Leaf is a "city car" which is an euphemism for very short
| range and slow charging using a dying standard.
|
| MG4 is the cheapest EV (PS30K) sold outside of China that
| could reasonably compete with a Corolla. There isn't much
| else in the cheap bracket. e-Niro and ID.3 start at PS35K.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| In Australia we now have the BYD Atto 3 (AUD$45k plus on-
| road costs) from China, and the MG ZS EV (AUD$45k plus
| ORC).
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I know it's not a Corolla, but it might be the Corolla of
| the EVs.
|
| It is inexpensive for an EV and seems to be a reliable
| and durable car.
|
| I'm almost sad to hear it's going to be discontinued but
| for myself, when the time comes, I'll be taking a good
| look at whatever Nissan will be offering.
| giobox wrote:
| It never sold that well and is being phased out of Nissan's
| range:
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40613694/nissan-leaf-
| bein...
|
| While they were a dime a dozen in the bay area and a
| handful of wealthy urban markets, its been _hugely_ outsold
| by the more expensive Model 3 and Y despite being on sale
| since 2011 and didn 't sell anything close to Nissan's
| hopes for the model.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > I say this because I interpret Tesla'a nonstop obsession with
| self driving as an admission they're in a race they will lose
|
| You don't need to interpret there; it's one of the few things
| Musk has been relatively consistent and forthright in admitting
| to. EV technology alone is not a very wide competitive moat, it
| was clear that other OEMs would be able to catch up to it. The
| mechanical and electrical engineering required is not a big
| challenge for the supply chain and a lot of the components were
| already available off-the-shelf.
|
| I believe he has said something similar to "without Autopilot
| Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic statement like
| this - it's supposed to be their competitive moat going
| forward, so there's a lot, no pun intended, riding on it and
| making the market believe it's going well.
|
| This is doubly true because Tesla is arguably not doing great
| at scaling out the stuff that makes the other OEMs be able to
| participate in the overall industry business model. Tesla has
| made very impressive strides in bootstrapping and building out
| a volume production network etc., but what other OEMs do in
| having stable and predictable schedules and refresh cycles for
| a number of underlying platforms and car lines is still a very
| different ball game. Just look at how long in the tooth the S/X
| and even the 3 are getting without a full makeover or how long
| the Cybertruck is taking. Also a full refresh cycle of the
| factory network when you switch from one carline gen to another
| etc. is a milestone Tesla still has to manage.
| cheschire wrote:
| I seem to remember automated manufacturing was supposed to be
| his big thing. The other companies were bogged down with
| union labor and he saw an opportunity. Then the first
| gigafactory failed to fully automate the process and so he
| put all his chips on "cheap" autopilot that didn't require
| expensive vision hardware and could instead all run on video.
|
| Now that isn't panning out either. I don't know if there are
| any other places to fundamentally disrupt in the automotive
| space, but if there are, that's where Tesla will focus next I
| suspect.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| It is panning out, it's just not all robots, gigapress is a
| thing.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This never really made sense either -- labor is
| manufacturing's largest "avoidable" cost by far, so all
| manufacturers want to reduce the amount of labor to an
| absolute minimum. The machines Tesla were buying to
| automate their plants only existed _because other auto
| manufacturers were already using them for the same
| purpose_. Tesla thought they could extend their use to
| places where traditional manufacturers had decided against
| it -- for instance shaping /fitting body panels, but
| quickly learned why the GMs and Toyotas of the world had
| human input in those areas.
|
| Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal
| millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring
| margins. There are plenty of videos from even economy car
| assembly plants 15 years ago where robots did the entirety
| of the welding and humans were only involved for little
| bits of final assembly.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Trying to "out automate" companies who make literal
| millions of cars per year was never a recipe for enduring
| margins
|
| Unless of course you've bought into your own marketing
| and think yourself a disruptive genius.
|
| To me this is just a wonderful object lesson in the
| naivete of so many SV "disruptors" who fail to understand
| Chesterton's Fence.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's almost like a system that selects only for the best
| marketers (the elevator pitch and pitch deck) is terrible
| at finding people with a grounded worldview and an
| understanding of the market.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Pretty funny considering even people who don't pay
| attention to him (like myself) are seeing repeated
| patterns of him walking into areas he doesn't know and
| thinking he knows better than all the existing
| industry/insider knowledge.
|
| Now i'm just trying to figure out of it's arrogance or
| ignorance at the root of his problems in this space.
| W-Stool wrote:
| You can suffer from both - arrogance and ignorance - and
| I think Musk truly does.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| On of the next big things will be the next GPS, internet
| and other services that Starlink will make possible. Who
| knows how long it will take but I get the notion that Tesla
| can fix a lot of their problems in a production cycle or
| two and still have killer features to set it apart.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| That's odd considering VW's impression of the Berlin
| factory was that it is the new standard to beat regarding
| automation and build time.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _I believe he has said something similar to "without
| Autopilot Tesla is worthless" or some sort of dramatic
| statement like this_
|
| Musk said, "The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-
| driving. That's essential. It's really the difference between
| Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero":
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/elon-musk-solving-self-
| drivin...
| cma wrote:
| At Battery investment day (a few years after Autonomy
| investor day) he said the opposite: that self driving wasn't
| worth much because competitors would follow in 2-4 years, and
| that their advantage was all about their new battery tech.
| The new Tesla-made batteries have come out now and are 20%
| worse energy density than Panasonic's.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Who cares about power density? They are designed to lower
| $/kwh not kg/kwh.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Well, you need to drive the extra weight around so it's
| gonna affect your mileage. Ultimately, what you should
| care about is $/miles of range
| gamblor956 wrote:
| I hate defending Tesla/Musk, but the reason the new
| batteries have worse energy density is because they
| switched chemistries to much cheaper, longer-lived, and
| safer lithium-iron-phosphate batteries.
|
| The downside to LFP batteries is that they are less energy
| dense than the old NMC chemistry, though modern LFP
| batteries now have the same energy density as NMC batteries
| from about 10-15 years ago (due to the fact that individual
| cells can be placed more closely together than in NMC
| batteries due to the lack of thermal runaway risks).
| kmonsen wrote:
| Also as I understand the newer batteries doesn't have
| cobalt from Congo mined with child slavery. So that is a
| big plus.
| cma wrote:
| That's not the case for their new batteries:
|
| > Moreover, independent 4680 battery teardowns and
| chemistry analysis shows that Tesla is still using the
| regular 811 nickel-manganese-cobalt mixture for the
| cathodes and ordinary graphite anodes.
|
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/First-Tesla-4680-battery-
| teard...
|
| They also aren't using added-silicon anodes yet, which
| may explain why the energy density is so poor. I'm not
| sure if they are having trouble working on this, or if
| they are waiting on patents to expire.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Afaik the LFP batteries Tesla uses are from CATL, their
| own batteries are still NCM
| sho_hn wrote:
| 'Tesla founder Elon Musk said the key to his electric
| automaker's value is whether it can achieve self-driving
| technology, adding that the firm would be "worth basically
| zero" without it.' (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-
| musk-tesla-worth-basica...)
|
| I guess it's a trope he trots out in different contexts.
|
| As for batteries, you hear much the same content at a
| variety of different OEM "battery days", which usually get
| much less coverage on places like HN however.
| jonfw wrote:
| X is the key to success in the automotive industry, where
| X equals the trait in which Tesla has the best market
| position right now
| MDWolinski wrote:
| Musk is a marketer. The keystone of any good Marketing
| is: "Sell What You Have." So it's Electrification. Then
| it's self driving. Then it's GigaPress. Then improved
| batteries. If Tesla ends up nailing level-5 autonomous
| driving, it'll be self driving again.
|
| Steve Jobs was very good at this as well. Here's the all-
| new iPod! Video? Who'd want to watch video on such a
| small screen? Next year, the all new video iPod.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> "without Autopilot Tesla is worthless"_
|
| There's nothing too special about their autopilot compared to
| what other manufacturers offer. Musk's fast and loose claims
| about what Autopilot cand do "in the next six months" or
| "around the corner" were overhyped exaggerations designed to
| sell cars at best or Theranos style lies at worse, hoping
| that by the time people wise up about the false promises,
| Tesla's engineers will have something to show for close
| enough to what he promised which will buy hem more time to
| create more hype to sell more cars. Rinse and repeat.
|
| The thing is Tesla can't maintain their wide moat as the
| other manufacturers are catching up.
|
| Grown up friends of mine were rabidly buying Tesla stock,
| basically putting their life savings into it, and when I
| asked them why, they kept telling me "because Tesla's
| innovations would make the other car manufacturers obsolete".
| Now they're pissed at him.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > they kept telling me "because Tesla's innovations would
| make the other car manufacturers obsolete".
|
| Always thought this was a pretty odd belief, because this,
| generally, is not how things work. It's very unusual for a
| company to sustain a monopoly on _innovation_; where it
| happens it's usually down to the market being too small to
| justify the investment to catch up by others.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| What company has as good of an autopilot? The luxury car
| makers don't seem to have one.
| zwaps wrote:
| Mercedes Benz
| redox99 wrote:
| Autopilot (not FSD) is glorified lane centering + traffic
| aware cruise control. Most cars have this nowadays.
| Tesla's is among the best but others are up there too.
| Out of spec reviews has compared these systems among many
| brands.
|
| This Autopilot is pretty old Tesla technology, basically
| abandoned, to be replaced by their FSD stack which also
| handles cities.
| treis wrote:
| FSD does way more than glorified lane centering. It
| legitimately drives the car through city streets. It
| doesn't do it reliably enough that you can just set it
| and forget it but it's still a legit accomplishment.
| redox99 wrote:
| I think you misread. Autopilot is the glorified lane
| centering.
| idkyall wrote:
| Seems VW and Mercedes have highly rated systems today[1]
| [1]https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/assisted-
| driving...
| nradov wrote:
| Independent reviews indicate that GM SuperCruise is
| superior in most respects.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/test-driving-gm-ford-and-
| tes...
|
| Mercedes-Benz is about to launch true level 3 autonomous
| driving technology, but it's not quite available for
| purchase yet.
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/mercedes-benz-gets-
| approval-to...
| tel wrote:
| Isn't SuperCruise limited to a subset of highways still,
| though?
|
| Super curious about Mercedes, though. If nothing else,
| they will take on liability and thus likely delve more
| deeply into some of the challenges around L3.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| They even have certified Level 3 already, which Tesla is
| still beta testing.
| Joeri wrote:
| I don't get why tesla can't just do the thing that originally
| made them successful: build really good electric cars, that
| people choose to buy over cheaper alternatives.
|
| Why do they need a competitive mote when they can just
| outcompete by doing things as they already were?
|
| AFAICT teslas are becoming worse instead of better, because
| of this obsession with gimmicks instead of excellence and
| customer satisfaction.
| leesec wrote:
| What are you talking about lol. The whole point of Tesla has
| always been able to achieve scale so they can sell mass market
| cars.
| jefftk wrote:
| The story here is that in a deposition Elluswamy (Autopilot
| software director) confirmed:
|
| * They collected extra data along this particular route.
|
| * They made multiple test runs and picked the best.
|
| Contrary to the spirit of the demo video and their advertising,
| but within "not technically lying".
|
| This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the
| original iPhone presentation: _The engineers identified a "golden
| path," a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in
| a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone
| making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example,
| Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he
| reversed the order, the phone tended to crash._
| https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
|
| If it weren't for the "and then when they released the product
| people thought it could do the things but it couldn't, and died"
| we might be looking back on this as a "clever marketing hack".
| justapassenger wrote:
| Milton, ex-CEO of Nikola, also technically didn't lie about
| their truck demo (it was rolled down the hill, and said it was
| "in motion").
|
| He was found guilty of fraud, and will be sentences soon,
| facing up to 25 years in jail.
| jefftk wrote:
| If you read the actual fraud charges [1] it does list the
| demo video, but along with very clear lies like saying it
| "fully functions and works" at an unveiling for the Nikola
| One or "Nikola is producing [hydrogen] well below $4 a
| kilogram" when the charge says _In fact, Nikola has never
| produced any hydrogen at any price, nor at the time could it
| have produced hydrogen for below $4 per kilogram. To the
| contrary, Nikola has never obtained a permit to produce
| hydrogen or installed the equipment necessary to produce
| hydrogen. At the time that MILTON was claiming that Nikola
| was producing hydrogen for less than $4 per kilogram, it was
| in fact purchasing hydrogen from a supplier for $16 per
| kilogram._
|
| (Something can also be fraud without being a lie.)
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-nikola-
| corporati...
| joshstrange wrote:
| > This is pretty normal in marketing demos. For example, in the
| original iPhone presentation: The engineers identified a
| "golden path," a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could
| perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance
| of the phone making it through the presentation without a
| glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the
| web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash.
| https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-o...
|
| And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to see
| how that's the same thing.
| wilg wrote:
| > And by the launch of the phone that was fixed... I fail to
| see how that's the same thing.
|
| I mean... they haven't launched Full Self Driving. You can
| (for money) get a beta that requires you to remain in control
| of the car and often makes mistakes. But the beta does most
| of the stuff shown in the video.
| buran77 wrote:
| > But the beta does most of the stuff shown in the video.
|
| Today, after ~7 more years of development? Can it do them
| consistently or "80% of the time it works every time"?
| Because that's the problem, the bar for an autonomous
| driving system to be useful is high.
|
| Below that bar you either have just a set of driver assists
| that have no claim at real autonomy, and have existed for
| (relatively) cheap for years, or you have the the
| "Goldilocks zone" of dangerous tech, smart enough to coax
| you into handing over the control but too dumb to be
| actually capable of taking over.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| In the context of using a neural network model this is very
| much lying.
| rwmj wrote:
| These are not similar cases at all. Any competent engineer can
| work through the iPhone bugs and fix them. That's well-trodden
| ground, the sort of thing thousands of engineers do each day.
| Fixing a self-driving neural network is a research topic. Even
| years later it's not a fully solved problem, and that should
| have been clear in 2016.
| Vespasian wrote:
| And of course they fixed them before the public release of
| the product (or shortly after).
|
| Teslas FSD is released for years (which they call beta for
| marketing / libility) and is still missing a lot of features
| (including the ability to work without human oversight) and
| being quite buggy on others.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I think the opening is what separates this from "not
| technically lying". By leading the video with "The person in
| the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons" when they
| know for a fact that the vehicle had previously crashed on that
| exact route with that exact software they have in my mind
| elevated it to an outright lie.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Not just crashed, but also: Q. And isn't it
| true that during the various attempts to generate
| the video, there were instances in which the
| person sitting in the seat had to intervene? A. Yes.
| jefftk wrote:
| I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us to
| film this without a driver we would have", and I think that's
| probably true. But while that's reflective of a pretty
| worrying safety attitude for a car company it's not lying.
| sidibe wrote:
| They would not tried that without a driver. I think even
| Elon has that level of restraint and sense
| jefftk wrote:
| I wonder if we're disagreeing on what they thought the
| odds of an embarrassing incident were or whether those
| odds would have been acceptable to them?
|
| The video is 3:44, and I think doesn't have any bits cut
| out. I'm guessing that after running the route many times
| for practice and giving it extra data they could have
| gotten down to about odds of somewhere around 1:10k. And
| I think they would have accepted those odds.
|
| (I would definitely not accept those odds, and would not
| want to ride in or near a car made by people who would.
| I'm glad that the law prevented them from doing runs
| without a safety driver at that stage. And I don't think
| they're anywhere near ready to do that today either.)
| sidibe wrote:
| > I'm guessing that after running the route many times
| for practice
|
| Why practice? They did the run until it worked well for
| the video. It wasn't a demo with a live non-Tesla
| audience. In this case not working 9/10 times is good
| enough rather than 1/10000
| jefftk wrote:
| They did practice, though?
|
| The odds I'm talking about are not "it doesn't work as
| well as the video" but instead "things go horribly wrong
| in a public way".
| sidibe wrote:
| There is no reason to think it was better than today's
| FSD even with those "crutches" (as I believe Elon himself
| refers to them when talking about other SDC companies),
| and the chance unsupervised FSD does something horribly
| wrong in a public way on real streets even in 3.4 miles
| is far higher than 10000:1 today. After all the car did
| hit a barrier during the making of this video. I doubt
| they spent much effort improving the odds when they had
| infinite takes.
| jefftk wrote:
| Looking around I see something like 6mi per disengagement
| [1] which, yes, is unacceptably high. The video is
| probably about 2mi, which naively would give 1:3. But
| disengagements have a large amount of precaution, so this
| isn't an accident rate. And some accidents wouldn't be
| ones they'd need to be public about, like the one in
| testing which only came out years later.
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2022/12/14/tesla-full-self-
| driving-data-...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I interpret the opening claim as "if it were legal for us
| to film this without a driver we would have"..it's not
| lying.
|
| I interpret lying as reclining your body in a horizontal
| position.
| wilg wrote:
| The charitable interpretation is "The person in the driver's
| seat is not interacting with the car in any way in this
| video".
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > This is pretty normal in marketing demos.
|
| This was my thought, isn't this stand operating procedure for
| pretty much all companies? How is this news?
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| If you put "Musk" in the headline you get more clix.
| GoToRO wrote:
| Two wrongs don't make a right.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > The engineers identified a "golden path," a specific set of
| demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that
| afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through
| the presentation without a glitch
|
| A glitching IoS is mildly annoying, a glitching autopilot kills
| you.
| nosianu wrote:
| > a glitching autopilot kills you.
|
| Or worse - others.
|
| You at least had control over the decision to use FSD (bad
| already, given human driver psychology) and then not pay
| attention to be able to intervene in a split second (which is
| ambitious to begin with especially over periods longer than a
| few seconds).
|
| Below [0] is a link to a comment I recently made about a very
| dangerous incident I myself experienced with only a much more
| mundane "lane assist", on a German autobahn, while fully
| engaged and in control. Imagine I had had something like FSD
| and had required even a split second longer to get control of
| the car back... it would probably have been too late by then.
| I don't think it's a good idea to think well, I can just
| disable assistants, or FSD, unless conditions are perfect.
| Some day you _will_ forget.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986939
| Lendal wrote:
| Problem is, now it's years later, the product has been in the
| hands of consumers for a while now, and yet it still doesn't
| work. People are pissed off, people are getting hurt, and yet
| he continues to insist on calling it "Full Self Driving" when
| it is very far from that. If the government can't do anything
| to protect consumers for whatever reason, then the consumers
| must take it to the courts and to the media relentlessly until
| the knowledge of what FSD really is becomes a part of the
| zeitgeist. Much value and many lives will be destroyed
| needlessly because of one snake oil salesman holding a whole
| bunch of money.
| NN88 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jefftk wrote:
| huh?
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| A phone is not a car. You can't die by believing in a feature
| of a phone but you potentially can or be hurt when it comes to
| a car.
| steveylang wrote:
| Did you read the actual deposition? The linked article is not
| clear on the exact details, I don't think it's possible to come
| to any conclusions from the article alone.
|
| The iPhone example is an interesting one. I would say that was
| still a 100% legit demo, because Jobs was demonstrating the
| actual working features (rather than say bring up screenshots
| of a web browser and claim to be surfing the web.)
|
| I can't tell for sure whether the Telsa video is closer to the
| iPhone demo or the Nikola semi demo (which was obviously way
| worse.)
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| That explains why so many of the subsequent youtube reviews of
| the tech years later still aren't that great. I guess I'd assumed
| it was mild cherry picking rather than outright disingenuous.
|
| I'm sad about this.
|
| (I'm also reminded, thanks to chatting with friends over the
| weekend, of Grolsch adverts in the UK about 20 years ago: "Stop,
| it's not ready yet!")
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Everything looks better in commercials, i bet you have never
| eaten a hamburger as is advertised.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's a massive difference. A hamburger costs $5, tops. FSD
| costs thousands. Not only that, but at one point Musk promised
| that FSD was so advanced it would _make_ you money[1] by
| driving your car for Uber when you 're not using it. That's
| almost like if McDonalds claimed its hamburgers would cure your
| cancer.
|
| [1] https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-self-driving-
| teslas-1756196...
| sorokod wrote:
| "The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was
| available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was
| possible to build into the system,"
|
| The video
|
| https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
| NN88 wrote:
| Elizabeth Holmes has a lawyer she can recommend
| valine wrote:
| Just drove my model 3 yesterday and it stopped for stoplights and
| made turns on its own. Everything in that video exists now and
| shipped to customers.
| alphabetting wrote:
| "The driver is just there for legal reasons"
|
| That part of the video implies Teslas are self-driving and that
| does not exist now
| cma wrote:
| The video says the only reason a driver is there is legal
| reasons: obviously not true unless you are a psychopath and
| would send it out on its own.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Funny enough, I also drove my Model 3 yesterday and had to
| forcibly override the autosteer when it tried to swerve into a
| merging onramp on the left (since the white lane marker was
| suddenly ten feet further left) instead of just continuing
| straight ahead, and this is a pretty regular occurrence that
| I've come to anticipate. This system may work someday but today
| it's still dumb as rocks.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > This system may work someday but today it's still dumb as
| rocks.
|
| That honestly sounds like the description is "unpredictable
| and dangerous".
| leesec wrote:
| Don't know why you are getting downvoted. This is true lol
| nblgbg wrote:
| Interesting bits ...
|
| >>To create the video, the Tesla used 3D mapping on a
| predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to
| Tesla's then-headquarters in Palo Alto
|
| Remember they don't have the 3d maps, so they used a completely
| different car with different hardware to showcase it !
|
| >>But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla
| had deployed
|
| >>When trying to show the Model X could park itself with no
| driver, a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla's parking lot,
| he said.
|
| Is it legal to falsify the claims ?
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| I told you so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850#33214018
|
| > This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos
| to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps
| in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive
| the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then
| they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just
| like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball,
| hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I
| just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| You describe mapping and cherrypicking as intertwined, but
| they're pretty orthogonal to each other.
|
| You can cherrypick without mapping (Nikola rolling a truck down
| a hill).
|
| You can map without cherrypicking (Waymo/Cruise allow you to
| record your ride in fully driverless vehicles in SF right now).
| BoorishBears wrote:
| This person just has no idea how AVs work and thinks an
| openly shared approach to AVs is a conspiracy
|
| https://medium.com/cruise/hd-maps-self-driving-
| cars-b6444720...
|
| https://blog.waymo.com/2019/09/building-maps-for-self-
| drivin...
|
| https://zoox.com/journal/putting-our-robots-on-the-map/
|
| When you're ignorant on a topic, it's not surprising that
| every fact you come across might end up being misconstrued as
| discovering some well-hidden secret.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| I literally work for an automotive OEM and have worked in
| computer vision for over a decade. Nice links to
| engineering blogs written by my colleagues.
|
| You are a moron and I seem to have struck a nerve. Hello,
| salty Tesla owner or engineer.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I work at one of the companies linked.
|
| Meanwhile working at an automotive OEM speaks to your
| qualifications on the subject about as much as being a
| mechanic at a car dealer: it doesn't.
|
| The only person who sounds like they've had a nerve
| struck is the one who immediately devolved into name
| calling the moment they were called out.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| You work at a company committing fraud with a dead end
| product that will never scale. You're mad that I'm
| exposing your fraudulent demo tactics. Go tweak those
| hyper parameters one more time --- cross your fingers
| your model converges this decade before your funding gets
| pulled and your resume has a half-decade block filled
| with "I bought the hype, committed fraud, got caught, and
| failed."
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I don't know what's fueling your vitriol but this ranting
| would be a lot more relevant if you couldn't hail rides
| in our vehicles.
|
| I think we're seeing what happens when FOMO meets "missed
| out". It'd just be more humorous if you weren't
| projecting your anger onto me.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| It's about scale. When you show a video of the car driving
| itself, you're implying it can do it in similar arbitrary
| scenarios. When the car can only drive itself on a route with
| an ultra-HD map, yet your business model doesn't allow you to
| collect ultra-HD maps across the country, and you don't
| mention this in your video, you're committing fraud.
|
| Waymo and Cruise can drive SF because they limit the number
| of scenarios and they collect ultra-HD maps for that tiny
| area. Throw a Waymo van in Knoxville, TN and it fails left
| and right, even in similar scenarios due to the lack of the
| quality map.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN, they'll
| have a couple people take X months to map it (in parallel
| with all the other cities). Mapping is probably the closest
| thing to a solved problem in autonomous driving.
|
| > you're committing fraud.
|
| Where is the fraud? Waymo and Cruise are not selling cars.
| They are selling only the rides which they have the ability
| to provide. Not only that, they pretty prominently display
| mapping as a part of their stack, so it's not like
| investors are deceived.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| > Ok, and when they want to expand to Knoxville, TN,
| they'll have a couple people take X months to map it
|
| No they won't. That's the entire point. It doesn't scale
| from a cost perspective. The entire thing is funded by
| their search ads monopoly right now. They can't pull in
| the revenue they need to maintain the map from ride fares
| alone.
|
| > Mapping is probably the closest thing to a solved
| problem in autonomous driving.
|
| LOL! Not even close to true. "We can do it" != "we can do
| it without burning billions of dollars per year"
|
| > so it's not like investors are deceived
|
| Investors (and consumers) are absolutely deceived. I
| don't really care: being a VC is risky. But these types
| of videos are intentionally deceiving. Only the best of
| many runs is shown. Editing is often used. The routes
| have HD mapping that won't be collected universally (due
| to cost problems). How is that not deception in your
| mind?
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how much
| it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of
| amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with
| nothing to back it up.
|
| > LOL! Not even close to true. "We can do it" != "we can
| do it without burning billions of dollars per year"
|
| "We can do it" = closest thing to solved. No one can say
| without a doubt we can do it for the other parts.
|
| > How is that not deception in your mind?
|
| You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party. All
| the VCs have asked these questions and were given answers
| satisfactory enough to invest.
|
| Here's a basic one they can tell investors: the top 10
| cities for ride-sharing comprise 70% of the total market.
| It will cost $X to map and permanently have access to the
| vast majority of the market. We believe in addition, we
| can induce demand so this 70% of the market becomes a
| massive multiple of the current market.
|
| If you're going to be this snarky, at least do some basic
| research.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| >You don't know how much a map costs to make, nor how
| much it would cost to maintain long term. Nor the cost of
| amortizing over 30 years. You're just making claims with
| nothing to back it up.
|
| I literally work at an automotive OEM that maintains its
| own AV team and map infra. I have seen the balance
| sheets. It's not going to scale.
|
| Also, you make the inverse claim without evidence or any
| purported industry expertise. Where's your evidence that
| Waymo can just walk into a new city without ballooning
| costs? If they can do it, why don't they? That which has
| been asserted without evidence can be dismissed without
| evidence.
|
| > You used "fraud". Fraud requires damages to a party
|
| Tesla owners bought a product called "Full Self-Driving".
| You are illiterate if you don't consider that product
| name tantamount to fraud if the car can't drive itself.
|
| Investors were clearly lied to. Once again, I don't care
| about VC money. Part of the game to lose it.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| > I literally work at an automotive OEM
|
| An automotive OEM would probably have a hell of a time
| scaling a video streaming website or a search engine as
| well. Yet it scaled when a tech company did it.
|
| > Tesla owners bought a product called "Full Self-
| Driving".
|
| Can you point out where I used the word "Tesla"?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Where to start...
|
| First off, you're saying AV companies share examples from
| repeated runs? What a truly shocking insight to absolutely no
| one. That's how you track improvement in AVs, repeating runs
| and comparing. There's no trickery involved in the fact you see
| runs that were repeated when almost _all_ runs are repeated by
| design.
|
| Second, what Tesla did is _nothing_ like you described. Tesla
| lied about who was running the drive they showed. A human was
| driving when they claimed the human was only there for legal
| reasons. No one else has done that.
|
| Maybe hold the "I told you so" for something you understand
| enough to actually tell anyone anything about.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| > for something you understand enough to actually tell anyone
| anything about.
|
| I work in computer vision and work at an automotive OEM. Left
| autonomous field specifically because it was fraudulent. Have
| many friends that helped stage fraudulent videos like the
| ones that Tesla/Zoox/Waymo put out regularly.
|
| When you post a video of a "successful" drive, have the CEO
| tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet the
| same software version of your autonomous stack literally
| crashed on an earlier run, you're committing fraud. If you
| imply via video that your AV can handle a certain type of
| driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual video your
| AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that specific route that
| your company cannot conceivably collect for the majority of
| roads, you're also committing fraud. If you think otherwise
| you're drinking somebody's Koolaid.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > When you post a video of a "successful" drive, have the
| CEO tweet about it and say the car is driving itself, yet
| the same software version of your autonomous stack
| literally crashed on an earlier run, you're committing
| fraud
|
| Right. Just like Steve Jobs holding an iPhone that crashed
| before the keynote is fraud.
|
| Fraud is saying it's driving itself when a human is
| driving.
|
| > If you imply via video that your AV can handle a certain
| type of driving scenario without issues, yet in the actual
| video your AV is relying on an ultra-HD map of that
| specific route that your company cannot conceivably collect
| for the majority of roads, you're also committing fraud.
|
| This is so utterly nonsensical I don't even know where to
| start. Driving scenarios are not fungible. Navigating
| around a stopped car in downtown SF is not the same as
| being able to navigate around a stopped car in Mumbai rush
| hour, or navigating around a stopped car in the middle of a
| California wildfire with 0 visibility and a fire roaring 10
| feet away.
|
| So when a video shows that the vehicle can handle a given
| situation _and the vehicle handles it on video_ , the
| implication is not "we've now solved every variation of
| this situation to ever exist", the implication is "we were
| able to handle the situation you just witnessed".
|
| I thought it ended at you not understanding EVs, but it's
| even worse: you don't even know what "fraud" means, and you
| clearly don't understand how bleeding edge technology is
| presented. That mentality is definitely more at home in the
| fossilized environment of an automotive OEM, but it must
| certainly be interesting to watch all that "fraud"
| translate into hundreds of thousands of miles on public
| roads and open betas with real riders... sour grapes much?
| redox99 wrote:
| I agree with you that these videos are extremely cherry picked,
| if not outright faked.
|
| In response to the link you provided though, it's fair to add
| that with current FSD beta, a trip such as the one Tesla faked
| in 2016, is now almost trivial. So there's definitely some
| progress in the space. Of course the timeline Elon (and others)
| claimed were absolutely bullshit.
| brookst wrote:
| Ah, the old binary tree con:
| https://math.temple.edu/~paulos/oldsite/scam.html
| lnsru wrote:
| Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech
| videos are staged and it's pretty normal. Robots fall dozens
| times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is
| shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That's
| why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a
| guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It's a hard
| work to show well grilled steak on a video without special
| effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving
| car? That's how advertising works.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck
| was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to
| sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still
| can't.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Tesla _also_ likely staged their battery swap presentation as
| well as the solar shingles reveal.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a
| difference between showing the product in the best possible
| light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's
| hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special
| effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that
| would be fraud.
|
| The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d
| mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not
| actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can
| totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will
| work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended
| behaviour, not claiming something about the current product.
| What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and
| then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans
| to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity
| then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.
|
| Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot _still_ doesn
| 't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you
| saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the
| understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and
| your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.
| kube-system wrote:
| 12 years old would be half-way to being scrapped, assuming
| car sales are approximately constant, and it is of average
| expectancy.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Ugh!
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I think the confusion is around what the term autopilot is
| supposed to mean.
| acdha wrote:
| That is completely Tesla's fault: when you say the driver
| is only there for legal reasons, it's not the public's
| fault for taking you seriously.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Maybe, but pilots are also taught to "fly the autopilot."
| https://www.nxaviation.com/post/the-autopilot-s-impact-
| on-av...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And every human being is clearly an expert in honeywell
| flight automation and can rationally understand what it
| means. Wait, no, that's not correct at all and most
| people think planes basically fly themselves. They also
| don't seem to realize that "follow this carefully mapped
| and highly regulated GPS route" is a hundred miles away
| from "drive an arbitrary road route"
| acdha wrote:
| How much training does Tesla require you to complete
| before using FSD? I don't think there'd be much criticism
| of autopilot if users were trained like pilots.
| ninepoints wrote:
| If Theranos was still around you'd be hired on the spot.
| kube-system wrote:
| It is legal to make a video that portrays your product in the
| best possible light.
|
| It is not legal to do so when it materially misrepresents your
| product.
| spoiler wrote:
| I guess this is different because the false advertising has
| lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial
| was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed
| more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference
| here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for"
| or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is
| how it works in the best circumstances" video.
|
| What matters is:
|
| (a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is,
| or make misleading claims
|
| (b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release
| schedules, etc.
|
| (c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a
| test track or things are made to appear like they are in an
| everyday situation
|
| If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at
| that stage of development, you'll find that they often take
| place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is
| driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear
| words on product availability and what it's subject to.
|
| Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for
| their product once it becomes available. These come from the
| same place ...
|
| (Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)
| lnsru wrote:
| Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight
| loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink
| promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal
| imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact
| enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get
| from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are
| 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the
| company is not responsible. So it's clear to me, that it's
| not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self
| driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a
| claim, that it can park itself.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe so, that's probably why:
|
| > Weight-loss products accounted for 13 percent of the
| fraud claims submitted to the F.T.C. in 2011, the most
| recent data available. That is more than twice the number
| in any other category.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/us-
| charges-4-com...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| At what point does this fraud count as lying to shareholders?
| seanhunter wrote:
| There is a detailed breakdown by Thunderf00t of how the "Tesla
| Bot" video was clearly also staged here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO9yw9QThzU
| woah wrote:
| > When Tesla released the video, Musk tweeted, "Tesla drives
| itself (no human input at all) thru urban streets to highway to
| streets, then finds a parking spot."
|
| Obviously this was just extremely dry and self-deprecating satire
| from a master troll and shitposter, not an actual misstatement of
| fact by a CEO
| pawelduda wrote:
| Or that time he went to SNL and yelled "TOOOO THE MOOOON" about
| Dogecoin and his fans accidentally bought the top. What a troll
| haha!
| stouset wrote:
| Clearly "Tesla drives itself" is referring to the the _company_
| operating the vehicle. The "(no human input at all)"
| parenthetical is a nod to the fact that Elon's employees are
| considered personal chattel.
|
| (/s)
| vkou wrote:
| There's also the AJ defense for it - that at this point in
| time, there is a public expectation that no reasonable person
| should be stupid enough to actually believe such a tweet.
| Everyone knows that the man is just playing a media character.
| nkozyra wrote:
| We need to somehow get "just trolling" as a legal loophole in
| our justice system.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| I don't know whether you're being coy but this is rumored to
| be his strategy.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Though it may help legally, I'm surprised he still has
| people falling for the "tech genius" schtick when so much
| of his accomplishments are "trolls" that are apparently
| intentionally poorly made ruses.
| rsynnott wrote:
| So a more extreme version of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery ?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > The video carries a tagline saying: "The person in the
| driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing
| anything. The car is driving itself."
|
| This part is even worse.
| paradygm wrote:
| If the title of the article was instead, "Tesla video promoting
| self-driving was scripted, engineer testifies," this article is
| probably mostly ignored. Take a loaded term like "scripted,"
| which some interpret as "faked," and here we are. Of course the
| video was staged, the engineers were asked to make a video
| showing it's capabilities. The only part worth arguing over is if
| someone could interpret Elon's tweet as meaning I could jump in a
| Tesla and have it do all of those things without me needing to do
| anything.
| europeanguy wrote:
| I've been calling Elon musk a scammer for years. I'll be saying I
| told you so for decades.
| ilyt wrote:
| I'd hope his scams fold down quicker than "decades"
| johnohara wrote:
| Bankrupting entire nations like Iceland by selling derived
| securities based on tranches of never-will-perform assets is a
| better criteria for discussing fraud.
|
| C'mon Reuters, you're better than this article. Or are you?
| curiousDog wrote:
| that's the definition of a strawman.
| leesec wrote:
| Any Elon or Tesla related topic on hackernews is such a cesspool
| these days. Any support of him even with actual true statements
| is downvoted. Somehow the technologist board has become the least
| friendly to actual technological innovation. Any statements like
| the one I just made will get countered with attacks on his
| person.
|
| He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple
| sectors than anyone alive. Maybe he's an asshole too, but no one
| get's the same level of scrutiny.
|
| How about this article from 2018 suggesting GM will have a
| wheelless car in 2019? https://www.wired.com/story/gm-cruise-
| self-driving-car-launc...
|
| Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime
| there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Nobody cares to follow up and hate on Mary Barra everytime
| there's an AV or EV conversation. It's absurd
|
| This is the cost of the kind of marketing Elon engages in. By
| making himself a very prominent public individual _and_ the
| face of Tesla, he 's inextricably tied to the brand. No one
| knows who Mary Barra is because she's not on Twitter replying
| to AOC with sick memes. Unfortunately the knife cuts both ways
| and now that Elon is regarded with a lot of suspicion by many
| that's transferring to Tesla as well.
| willio58 wrote:
| > He's clearly responsible for more innovation across multiple
| sectors than anyone alive.
|
| Responsible in what sense? In the sense that he bankrolled his
| engineers? If that's the case then couldn't we draw the line
| all the way back to his father who bankrolled him?
|
| It's hard to see Elon as a visionary these days. Most of his
| businesses already existed before he took the helm, including
| Tesla. Twitter has been a shitshow to say the least. The only
| remaining thing in my eyes is SpaceX, and we shouldn't fall
| into that trap of giving the billionaire all the credit.
| leesec wrote:
| >Responsible in what sense?
|
| In the sense that without him the innovation would not exist
| or become mainstream. Don't be fooled into thinking he only
| has cash to offer. John Carmack himself has stated that he
| thinks Elon is in his wheelhouse in terms of engineering.
|
| >Most of his businesses already existed before he took the
| helm, including Tesla.
|
| Tesla was a concept car at the time, not a mass production
| vehicle with no intentions of ever making millions of cars,
| if you don't see why they are different I don't know how to
| help you. The production is at least as hard as the
| innovation.
| foxandmouse wrote:
| I think Elons greatest accomplishment was convincing people he's
| Woz and not Jobs.
| breakpointalpha wrote:
| Please, show a little respect for Jobs here. /s
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| A better comparison might be "I think Elon's greatest
| accomplishment was convincing people he was Tesla and not
| Edison."
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| You mean despite publicly saying his and Tesla's role is more
| similar to Edison's? He brings the point of invention being
| far easier than production up a lot.
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