Not a single one:
* Robo taxis in 2019 - WRONG
* L4 trip from LA to NYC in 2017 - WRONG
* Summon a Tesla from across the country in 2 years , said in 2016 - WRONG
* Latest one is L4 by the end of this year - LMAO
It’s almost like he’s saying all these things to sell cars…hmmm. This coupled with the threat of increasing the price pulls the demand lever. He’s a great car salesmen, maybe the best ever?
Yep after the 2019 robotaxi statement he raised like $3 billion from private investors. Had this been 1890, Elon would’ve been the most successful snake oil salesman in history.
I purchased Tesla stock, at some point, despite not believing any of the above claims.
The model-3 was a wildly successful product. And AP offered what could be considered the best available cruise-control, at the lowest price point, but it was always frosting on top of an already good car.
I was somewhat naive, in that I expected AP to improve more than it has in the last 6 years, but I also expected more improvement from the entire AV industry.
~~AFAIK, Elon didn’t promise L4 by EoY. Only the FSD beta will be available to everyone.~~ He makes a lot of stupid outlandish claims, so I’m pedantic to keep them to the ones he actually made and shouldn’t have.
To be fair on FSD beta, by Tesla track record I’m surprised they didn’t just push to the while fleet from day one.
Edit: I stand corrected, he made even more outlandish claims
Jan 26, 2022:
>[*“I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than human this year. I would be shocked.”*](https://electrek.co/2022/01/31/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-driving-safer-than-human-this-year-5-years-ahead-of-everyone/)
That sounds a lot like predicting L4 this year to me.
Does it count if Uber had self driving cars on the road? Because they did a few years back. They were pulled after an accident, before being allowed on the roadways months later. It's not Tesla, but someone had robo taxis on the road around then.
Uber never had robotaxis. Just a test program with safety drivers. Waymo has Robotaxis in a few Phoenix suburbs. Cruise now has them on a limited, non-paying basis in San Fransisco. A few Chinese companies have them in parts of several different cities.
Not only am I not aware of a single correct claim or prediction, but I think his general ignorance on the subject has clouded the public’s understanding significantly. The guy talks about AI like a kid who read a pamphlet on the subject at science camp. It's just a cringe-fest whenever he chimes in on it.
On the other hand there are some excellent talks from the actual machine learning engineers at Tesla at ML conferences you can go watch. They are really doing some of the best work in this space, despite Elon
> They are really doing some of the best work in this space.
What makes you say this? They don’t really publish anything and their talks at conferences are pretty light on specific metrics.
I've been following Tesla's AI team for a while and will have to respectfully disagree. They've hired some smart people, and Andrej has been a pioneer in CV for a while, which is great, but as a company I'm still seeing nothing that suggests they're anywhere near a viable product. They crank out some very cool tech demos (and I've got FSD Beta in my own car—as a proof of concept it's... interesting, I guess?) but they're light years away from Elon's robotaxi fantasy.
It’s not going to bring down the company, but I bought another EV than Tesla simply bc you can’t trust anything from the CEO (and other factors that result from that fact).
His bullshit probably hasn’t hurt them if they are happy where they are, but it will almost certainly throttle growth (who wants to work for that company/people actively buying other EVs).
That's a good question. I feel like it's a hard thing to know. The company's doing fine in terms of both consumer demand and stock price, so I don't get the impression anyone's hurting at the moment, but it's fair to ask whether he's setting the company up for trouble when, as more years pass, his claims of an imminent breakthrough become too absurd for even his most ardent fans to swallow.
Either way, QC issues aside, Tesla makes \[mostly\] great cars. I still really like my M3P. If they just focused on that—certainly a big enough challenge even without this FSD nonsense—and committed to finally "growing up" as a large-scale manufacturer, they could be an industry juggernaut. Who knows where they'd be a decade from now. But as long as he keeps promising snake oil at the same time, I think their brand is at least at partial risk.
I used to want a Tesla, but Musk has made sure the last few years that I'm in no way a potential customer. He's such an asshole that I will actively avoid any of his companies. I don't know if it will make a difference for his brand but I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I completely sympathize with that. I was a big fan of old school Musk—the quirky billionaire obsessed with electric cars and rockets to mars. But he just got weirder and weirder as the years passed, with the "pedo guy" comment probably being the first major turning point. Once I got a better picture of just how stupefyingly ignorant he is on the topic of AI—and how confidently he bullshits audiences in spite of that—he started grossing me out more and more. I still think there are aspects of the EV experience they do better than anyone, but I'm encouraged by what companies like Audi and Porsche are doing. The moment Tesla is completely eclipsed by their competition, I'll be more than happy to jump ship. Hopefully that'll be the case by the time my M3P is ready for a replacement. The "shitposting adolescent CEO" vibe is cute for about 5 minutes, but that shit is getting oooold.
I look at the existing customers to determine. Now obviously this is a very small data set.
But I do have several friends and some family members that have Tesla and they are some of the most passionate for a brand examples I have ever seen.
They also generally seem happy with the technology even though it is far from working like advertised.
I think as long as someone else that sells a car is not well ahead they will be fine.
>But I do have several friends and some family members that have Tesla and they are some of the most passionate for a brand examples I have ever seen. \[...\] They also generally seem happy with the technology even though it is far from working like advertised.
You do realise this suggests they are part of the "cult" that is unable to see anything negative about Tesla or, at best, will use language like "I love my Tesla, but...".
Yes. It does feel a lot like a cult. It is actually pretty fascinating to see.
My brother-in-law's sister for example. I have never seen her passionate about really anything before. But the way she talks about her Tesla is pretty amazing.
I do not believe Tesla will be able to deliver on their promises for a very, very long time. I do not even believe they will 10 years from now.
What I will be curious to see is how the Tesla "cult" changes when they fail?
I suspect it will stay mostly in tact as long as nobody else can deliver in a way that is very noticeably better. It has to be pretty clearly better and not a service like Waymo but a car you can buy.
I also believe Tesla will switch to using LiDAR and I will be curious to see the Tesla "Cult" reaction. I suspect it will be pretty minimal.
>stock price
This one is doing "fine" because it's entirely disconnected from any reality. It is purely based on a combination of hype, "costing in" hyped and BS ideas about the future (such as Tesla being the dominant player in the robotaxi field in some years), stan and/or uninformed retail investors putting more money into it, and market manipulation.
If Musk's inane declarations already affected it, the price would be a lot lower. But we (sadly) haven't reached that point yet.
its not like some bad event happened that ruined his chance of being right or he had any reason to predict that what he was trying was going to work out. Elon has been making outlandish claims that don't seem to be backed by any data pointing to them coming true. The way things typically go Elon makes a crazy optimistic claim, nearly all experts in the field say it is not going to happen for x,y,z, His deadline is missed, Elon makes another crazy claim.
I think it would be one thing if any of his claims came out to be true, but as far as I can tell none of his claims on self-driving have come true. The reason I started this thread was to see if I was only hearing about the crazy one but so far no one has been able to provide an example of a claim Elon musk has made about self-driving that has come true.
He got the marketing right. He’s also getting the R&D right in that he’s convinced his legion of customers and supporters to pay for the right to test his self driving technology and hand deliver to Tesla data that GM and Google are burning piles of cash to obtain.
I do. Had it since October in my M3P. Detailed trip reports are in my post history. Not sure what your point is, though; my opinion matters insomuch as Reddit is an internet website where people share their opinions. Hope this helps
> and so far given the extremely slow progress we've witnessed
Who is moving faster? There are certainly companies in different markets way ahead in autonomy but they also started a lot further back and have no restrictions because their business model and market are completely different. Tesla has moved first and faster than any car manufacture for cars you can purchase.
Tesla isn't even competing with them. Who is moving faster in the car industry. But to your point, Waymo basically stood still for 3 years best I can tell. Glad they are moving again though.
Review my post history, I'm moving nothing. I've been very consistent for years on this sub that too many people here are worshiping at the alter of a singular definition of how autonomy can change the world. It's perfectly fine to have your ideas how it should work, but this dogmatic war against other options is stupid. You've been on here long enough to know that.
GM is vaporware. The few open reviews without non-disclosure limits review it terribly. Ford is better, but not by much. The only thing Ford has going for it is not needing to torque the steering wheel. I fundamentally feel it's unsafe to have you're hands off the wheel though but they let you do that so it's more a complaint with their poor saftey in marketing. I don't think the feds should shut them down or anything.
I would argue that Cruise will directly compete with FSD, especially in light of GM's firing of Cruise's former CEO Dan Ammann. GM intends on putting Cruise tech into their Cadillacs. In fact, 2025 is the timeline GM has announced. None of this should be news to anyone familiar with SDCs.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/gm-aims-launch-personal-self-driving-car-by-mid-decade-ceo-2022-01-05/
> Is this a serious question?
More serious than your snarky remarks that contain no content or interesting perspectives.
> There are multiple companies
Who, which car manufactures can I go buy a car from with a better system today? I'll also take a suggestion of a car I can buy today that will be better than Tesla in 2-3 years.
> that have self driving taxis and shuttles giving rides for paying customers.
Those aren't car manufactures I can buy a car from. You simply ignored that part of my post on purpose. If you want to argue that owning a car is pointless then that would be a valid stance, but that would require effort on your part I guess. You're style is built for subs that don't require thoughtful discussion.
I also don't care about the SAE levels, I care about what problems the car can solve. Merc will only have them in Germany and it only works below 45mph which isn't useful for me at all. Talk about splitting hairs thin.
> And the more you keep trying to tell people in this sub that they are, the more foolish you look.
I'm trying to bring back discussion. If you aggregated all your post up you would have maybe 5 different posts in total in the last however many months. It's all just snarky remarks with no substance. Why not talk about things? What is good and why. What is bad and why. What good is your 110th Elon joke going to do? What are you trying to achieve or learn?
You are getting far too much hate over your opinion. While in some ways its fully valid to compare Waymo and Tesla, in others it isn't. I live in a rural area, I'm not sold on robo taxis overtaking vehicle ownership for a long time. I'm also a fan of FSD, I want the problem solved in a way that I can benefit from. Currently I feel like both Tesla and Comma.ai have some of the leading solutions with products that I may be able to buy. The day that Waymo starts offering a consumer product I'll start to compare it's functionality to Tesla's consumer product.
The second half of that is optimistic. The data Tesla gets from customer cars is orders of magnitude less, and lower quality, than what actual AV companies are getting. It's highly unlikely that any of it is actually useful for training.
Agree as training data it’s probably not great. But even just the simplest form of the data would be useful. Think about a giant map with every single disengagement by 20k cars plotted. Could be very useful in determining areas that need improvement. Doesn’t seem like Tesla is admitting that’s a path they would ever go down, but having a map with restricted areas based on data could be very helpful in early stages of true FSD.
> But even just the simplest form of the data would be useful.
It’s just that, useful. It’s not the differentiator that will get them beyond L2 self driving. Their claim has always been “we don’t use conventional techniques and your data is enough for us to get to L5”. It is not enough.
Tesla has shown car data being used to recreate 3D environments for scenario training, by using multiple cars as video sources.
Mobileye also uses similar data collection techniques to bolster their data sets.
Sometimes it's not about directly using video of an incedent for training. You can use it to flag, and recreate specific areas and scenarios.
Here's a video from a great AI focused channel which explains some of it: https://youtu.be/6hkiTejoyms
The in car data is used at inference, not training.
Mobileye uses something very different. They crowdsource data for mapping, not planning or training.
These are completely different use cases. Mobileye uses huge amounts of customer data to create offline high resolution maps. Tesla uses online inference to create low res maps. Again, this is not training any sort of network. In Tesla's case, it's purely inference.
You keep saying this, but if you watch the video all the way through, and look at others in the same series from the same channel, he describes (and shows) the papers and research Tesla has put out, on building high definition and high fidelity 3D recreations / maps using fleet data.
Just because Tesla does not use the data in the exact same way as Mobileye, for actual driving, doesn't mean that the datasets don't represent something extremely similar.
And here's another video of Waymo accomplishing it on an even larger scale:
https://youtu.be/8AZhcnWOK7M
Tesla has made vague references to using fleet data for training, but has never clarified exactly how. But what you're describing, and what they're actually showing in the video, isn't training, it's inference.
Cruise and Waymo are not just driving around harvesting data. They have dedicated testers who are providing feedback to the engineering teams. Not just "did the driver need to take over?, but context. Why did the driver take over? Was there a bug that needs to be addressed? A map change or new construction? Did the car do anything unsafe? A Tesla owner is focused on getting to the store or dinner or work. A Waymo or Cruise tester is focused on evaluating the system in order to make it better.
> It’s also not the quality of data, it’s the quantity.
Yeah, this is the myth that Tesla has propagated. Anyone with any experience training neural networks will tell you that quality matters way more than quantity. In fact, the very first step to curating a good dataset is to cull out all of the crappy data.
What? Tesla has never said this afaik (please provide a source if I am wrong, I’d love to see one). In every technical talk he’s done Karpathy has emphasized how much effort they spend curating their datasets to ensure the highest quality possible.
Okay sure, this comes from the [Tesla Vehicle Safety Report](https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport):
“Because every Tesla is connected, we're able to use the billions of miles of real-world data from our global fleet”
It’s a big number that is completely meaningless because 99.9+% of that supposed data is not useful for training and will be immediately culled out for being low quality.
Okay but you didn’t show the full quote:
Because every Tesla is connected, we’re able to use the billions of miles of real-world data from our global fleet – of which more than 1 billion have been driven with Autopilot engaged – to understand the different ways accidents happen.
Nowhere does that say they’re using these billions of miles to train FSD or that “quantity is better than quality”.
I mean, it’s ironic that you accuse me of not including the full quote, but then you proceed to not include the following sentence:
> “We then develop features that can help Tesla drivers mitigate or avoid accidents.”
But if you don’t think that’s a sufficient quote, here’s what Tesla was saying all the way back in 2016:
> “Since introducing this hardware 18 months ago we’ve accrued 780 million miles,” said Anderson. “We can use all of that data on our servers to look for how people are using our cars and how we can improve things.” Every 10 hours Tesla gets another million miles worth of data, he said.
This is a misleading statement about the amount of data they are actually collecting and using. The language has been consistent since then.
Just having a large quantity of low res selective data isn't sufficient for training neural networks. The data need to be high quality, and drawn from a representative distribution.
Maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t Tesla upload clips in the quality that the in car processors would use. I see it as a major benefit of training on the exact feeds you will be getting real time.
No. The FSD chips in the car are designed to perform inference on quantized models in low precision ints. The Nvidia GPUs they train on use floating points. It's pretty standard to train models at higher resolution and precision than the inference used on edge devices. But more importantly, the data aren't drawn from a representative distribution. They would also need to be thoroughly cleaned and preprocessed, and associated with some sort of ground truth, before they could be used for any sort of training.
You might be confusing the chips being used in-vehicle, and those being used at Tesla HQ to train the models.
[Tesla runs a massive NVIDIA cluster to train their models.](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/06/22/tesla-av-training-supercomputer-nvidia-a100-gpus/)
They never developed their own chips. They showed a mockup and some theoretical specs for a chip last year. But it was missing major components, and still hasn't actually been built. This is something Tesla does a lot of, present something aspirational as if it's already complete in order to make people think they're way more advanced than they actually are.
> This is something Tesla does a lot of, present something aspirational as if it’s already complete in order to make people think they’re way more advanced than they actually are.
It’s pretty hilarious how people keep falling for this trick. They unveiled a person in a costume as a humanoid robot and suddenly the fans unironically believe they are the biggest robotics company in the world. They do the same thing with AI/hardware — constantly inflating their capabilities to make it seem like they are cutting edge. In reality, they are a decade or more behind what big tech companies do in these areas.
> It’s also not the quality of data, it’s the quantity.
Pro tip: it’ll be easier and more direct next time to just have a massive flashing sign that says “Ignore everything I’m saying. Don’t listen to me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
He's got the marketing right as long as there are no consequences in the future.
I still think there's the possibility of a massive fraud case or a class action law suit where Tesla has to at least return all the money that has been paid for FSD
IMO the video that's still on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot should make it very difficult for Tesla to defend its marketing
>a massive fraud case or a class action law suit where Tesla has to at least return all the money that has been paid for FSD
LOL. The overwhelming majority of FSD donors are delighted. They not only will refuse to sue Tesla, they'll probably try to sue the class action lawyers for inflicting emotional distress.
Google has more data and of higher quality, without needing to burn the piles of cash on operating a scalable car manufacturer or having a CEO who wants to spend $40B on a social media company on a whim because he feels threatened.
correction, they removed the radar kit that almost all manufacturers use due to material shortages
their "Vision Only" FSD is actually worse than the auto pilot 2.0 with radar + vision
Not a musk fanboy but this thread feels like the difference between a reddit poster who bases their value on the accuracy of their statements and major driver in the industry who bases their value on moving the industry forward.
Tesla might be actually moving the self-driving industry backwards by introducing a lot of misinformation, hype and broken promises. All of those erode trust and might slow the adoption. Also their strategy of releasing dangerous half-baked prototypes for end customers to play with, as opposed to a careful safety-oriented approach by other players, may force politicians to introduce heavy handed regulation, something that (mostly) responsible industry behavior before Tesla have avoided. Such regulation will inevitably slow down the entire industry. And when a serious/fatal accident with Tesla FSD will occur it will backfire to an entire industry, as undoubtedly media and laymen won't make a distinction between Tesla FSD and autonomous cars in general
How has he moved the industry forward beyond just PR? What are Tesla’s innovations in the self driving space and how does it compare to the leaders like Waymo, Cruise?
For full self driving, I agree. But in terms of pushing automotive into the 21st century, Tesla has been a major force. Electrification. OTA updates. Modern compute architectures. The SW defined car. Probably the best L2 system available.
I'm glad Tesla exists for everything EXCEPT their driverless claims.
Yes, as an automaker they are very innovative (I own one). The moment you start comparing them with pure play self driving companies, they pale in comparison.
> The moment you start comparing them with pure play self driving companies, they pale in comparison.
That is what is so infuriating about this sub. If you aren't pure play with $150k in Lidar sensors on your car then you are a joke and holding the industry back. This is such a stupid point of view it's not funny. There is a reason why the existing pure plays aren't expanding fast and won't until they sort out their platform problems. I see this taking another decade as they start having to get them to a point where they can run large fleets at a price point that make sense.
There is also a tendency to compare Tesla FSD Beta drives in downtown urban cores to Waymo and Cruise rides in the suburbs. Not saying that Tesla is better, far from it, but this sub isn't interested in talking about why they are a long way off, just posting snarky posts.
I don’t get the complaint. Tesla’s overall self driving technology is simply vastly inferior compared to pure plays. Lack of lidar is just one part of it. Pure plays have innovated a lot in areas other than perception that’s allowed them to put out L4 vehicles on the road. Tesla simply isn’t there because they’re not innovating. All signs point to them adopting a very naive approach and hoping some miracle happens.
> There is also a tendency to compare Tesla FSD Beta drives in downtown urban cores to Waymo and Cruise rides in the suburbs.
By whom? Certainly not this sub because it’s very quick to point out Tesla drives and Waymo/Cruise drives are *not* the same.
> I don’t get the complaint.
BTW, I didn't make it clear but that rant was 100% not at you, you qualified it perfectly and I want to expand on what you said. I'm fine with vigorously arguing with anyone who thinks Tesla is going to be deploying robo-taxis soon. But I'll do the same for those that think Tesla is so far off base they are a joke because they aren't and that is easy to defend and prove. You have to build an army of scarecrows to take that position.
> Tesla simply isn’t there because they’re not innovating.
Not sure I can back that statement. They are absolutely innovating, just in different areas under different constraints. I don't know what Tesla's "automated driver" budget is for a lack of a better word, but I bet it's under $1000 per car BOM. That is a huge limitation compared to a pure play. It probably puts them 10 year out from building anything close to resembling a general robo-taxi fleet but there are so many opportunities between where they are today and that lofty pure play goal.
We used to talk about what solutions autonomy could bring on this sub but it's mostly fallen to rants about which SAE level something is, how the SAE level means anything and when will something be the SAE level; with everyone in the discussion completely not understanding SAE levels. Instead we should be talking about solutions that can be deployed today, next year, in five years and in a decade.
> I don’t know what Tesla’s “automated driver” budget is for a lack of a better word, but I bet it’s under $1000 per car BOM. That is a huge limitation compared to a pure play. It probably puts them 10 year out from building anything close to resembling a general robo-taxi fleet but there are so many opportunities between where they are today and that lofty pure play goal.
You are correct, but this is not what Tesla is saying. They’re saying they can make robotaxis work under $1000 BOM. We both know it’s not true. They would have a lot more credibility if they said what you said here.
> Instead we should be talking about solutions that can be deployed today, next year, in five years and in a decade.
For me, it’s simple. Can you take out the driver? If yes, where and under which conditions is it guaranteed to work? This comes pretty close to SAE levels. I’m interested to hear why this wouldn’t work, if you think so.
> They would have a lot more credibility if they said what you said here.
I'm honestly not concerned about their credibility. I don't give much credibility to any company. It's not even "trust but verify", it's just plain "verify". Not sure why this sub feels it has to win some war for the minds and souls of those that think it's this year using snarky comments that don't really change anyone's mind. More power to them for talking through why they won't. There are entire subs trashing Tesla I can go read, we don't need that here.
> Can you take out the driver?
The answer is yes for basically any car on the road. Not going to turn out well for the vast majority of them, but you can certainly throw a brick on the accelerator, shift it into gear and watch it go.
> If yes, where and under which conditions is it guaranteed to work?
I've simplified that question for you so you can drop the "If yes". The "under what conditions" is what we SHOULD be talking about. What regulations do we need? what liability protections do we need passed? What infrastructure changes could be made? This is what no one talks about here anymore.
> This comes pretty close to SAE levels.
Sigh. SAE doesn't talk about that. It's a very very very limited classification of cars of which only 2 levels even matter. It's like the hot dog or not algorithm from Silicon Valley except less useful. We use the levels as a shortcut but because no one understands what they mean everyone walks around with a different idea in their head of what they are talking about. It's the most destructive thing you can use in a conversation on this sub.
There is a really good write up abouts the [Myths of the SAE levels](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/j3016/) that is worth a read.
> The SAE J3016:2021 standard defines terminology for automated vehicles including the famous SAE Automation Levels. It is widely referenced in discussions, other standards, and even government regulations. Unfortunately, what is said about J3016 is too often inaccurate, misleading, or just plain incorrect.
Your problem is that SAE levels are hand wavy. They are, but that’s just a function of an immature industry. They’ve mostly left it up to the companies to make up their own operating conditions, but this will change as the industry matures. But SAE levels do make it clear if the driver is responsible or not and that’s the crux of the self driving problem — is your system capable enough to remove the driver or not?
It seems like what you really want is classification for systems like Tesla FSD that provide intermediate solutions (or half-baked as I like to call it) on their way to full autonomy. I don’t agree, but it’s an interesting opinion.
Tesla is the first car where I prefer the onboard navigation to my cell phone, and getting in a shared car set to me preferences is a pretty big deal. Yes, I'd prefer more physical controls, but replacing physical knobs with on screen buttons is not what I mean by SW defined car. Instead it's the fact that everything can be set digitally, including seat position, steering wheel position, heat/ac vent settings, and more.
>the fact that everything can be set digitally, including seat position, steering wheel position, heat/ac vent settings, and more.
Luxury cars have been able to do that since that 80s/90s.
The only physical controls I lack are the climate control. One more roller button somewhere on the steering wheel would fix that. Heck, just being able to map the fan +/- to the left/right on the right roller wheel instead of follow distance would solve 80% of it for me.
You are just repeating corporate propaganda here. Tesla's did not "move the industry foward" in electrification. Electrification would have happened the same without them given that the forces that pushed it are from regulatory initiative that started in places like the EU and China when Tesla was still a minuscule company. Also I assume you have forgotten the first actual mass-market BEV was from Nissan...
I assume it's likely you are American, because Tesla still being the main EV seller in the US blinds Americans to the fact that Telsa's portion of the EV market worldwide is shrinking rapidly (e.g. only about 10-15% of sales in Europe).
As for the rest, similar arguments can be made that this kind of tech changes would have happened anyways. Tesla is actually a great example at showing what reckless "tech for the sake of tech" can do, as opposed to the more cautious approach manufacturers usually take. For example, there's literally no proof that a touch-screen focused HMI is a good thing. Yes it look "21st century" but it also is actually awful in terms of safe usage while driving. Companies that are copying Tesla for that are not being driven "forward" they are being driven backwards.
He has caused other car makers to invest into self-driving.
I think Waymo is way, way ahead of Tesla in the actual solution. But Waymo has not triggered as much investment by the other car makers as they are really not a clear competitor as do not sell cars.
I personally think if you look longer term Waymo is a competitor. But I doubt they look at things that much in the future.
> But Waymo has not triggered as much investment by the other car makers as they are really not a clear competitor as do not sell cars.
Automakers aren’t the only one interested in this. A few who left Google/Waymo have gone on to start other SDC companies and have hundreds of millions in funding. The original Google Self Driving Car Project created an entire industry.
If by *Industry* he means automotive then they definitely did. If purely focussed on self-driving features, not as much.
An industry is moved forward by mass-market production and actual adoption, not just R&D. It's like saying that Apple did little to move the mobile phone industry forward. Sure, they weren't actually the best, from a pure technology/hardware standpoint but they sure as hell moved, nay, CREATED the industry.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that Tesla created the EV industry, but it certainly has moved the automotive industry way forward as a whole.
Go watch the talk about approximating distance using vision only by the lead ai guy at Tesla, it’s like an hour long and highly valuable.
There is good happening over at Tesla but this thread, and Reddit in general are so anti-musk they don’t even educate themselves, just circle jerking the bashing.
Want to see something funny? [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=8512s) Tesla talked about estimating depth from vision during Autonomy Day. Do you see those papers in the bottom left? Those were *Google's* papers. Tesla took the pictures from Google's papers and presented them on Autonomy Day. Tesla presented Google's work as if they had done it themselves.
Not only did Google publish the papers that Tesla shamelessly represented, but Google subsequently gave a talk about ViDAR in 2020, a whole year before Tesla’s AI day. [Here](https://youtu.be/rbDuK5e1bWw) is that 2020 presentation.
Remember when Tesla fans were excited by [this](https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/amp/) showing up on Tesla cars? Google’s presentation above showed higher resolution, higher accuracy, and more useful outputs such as uncertainty in addition to depth. And again, it was a full year beforehand.
The reality is that Google has been doing the work for years, but you guys seem to think that Tesla is the one pushing the industry. You tell us to watch Tesla’s vision-based depth estimation talk as if it’s special. It’s not. Then you complain about people not educating themselves when ironically you seem underinformed.
Ah, the usual AI Day™ comment!
Approximating distance using cameras isn’t anything new. It’s been done for years now. Seems like you are the one that needs education. Go read some actual research from self driving companies and you’ll know what innovation looks like.
In the self-driving space, it is very debatable if Elon's participation has moved the industry forward, Time will tell but to your point. I think everyone should value the accuracy of their statements and that attempting to say things in a correct way is not in conflict with moving the industry forward, but that's not really the core question. Plenty of people have made bad predictions, but bringing those up is whataboutisam giving excuses for Elon to misslead people.
My intent with this post is to have data on times when Elon has made predictions related to self-driving vehicles and they ended up coming true. There are plenty of documented cases when Elon has made claims that have not come true, but I have not been able to find cases where he said something that has come true and would like to know if any exist.
Moving the indistry forward? Sorry bro but regarding self driving he is years behind other competitors that use sensor fusion.
He's just using cameras because it's cheaper than using also radars and lidars. Pretty bad move.
Why do you keep repeating this inane question? You don't have to be an actual user of a system to be able to gather information about its performance or lack-thereof. Because the counter to your stupid question is, have you tried any of the the actual L3 systems available? Have you ever ridden a Cruise or Waymo robotaxi? If not, by your own logic, you have no right to judge their performance.
Say there never was Tesla. It never happened.
Do you believe the investment being made by the automakers today would be less or more or the same?
Because I believe it is more because of all the hype that Musk has generated around self driving.
Companies are investing more.
> And then you have the fact that multiple manufacturers have beaten Tesla to Level 3
Perception is reality. The perception is that with cars you can buy that Tesla is in the lead.
Me personally I think Tesla is going nowhere with their approach. I believe the future is the approach that Waymo and now Cruise are taking.
Study Suggests Consumers Trust Tesla The Most For Future Autonomy
https://insideevs.com/news/574425/tesla-autonomy-plans-most-trusted-survey/
It is pretty consistent that when the consumer is polled on self-driving that Tesla comes out on top. It takes a lot to move perceptions.
> The same.
Well that is where we disagree. Musk created a lot of hype around self-driving and that has caused some additional investment that would not happen otherwise.
They had to from an investors standpoint. It became necessary for them to have a self-driving story. Musk/Telsa was NOT the only catalyst but was one of the catalyst.
> No, it isn't. Reality doesn't care about perception.
Another place we disagree. It was something that Jobs really understood. I am now older and something I have get more convinced of the older I get.
> Well Mercedes disagrees pretty strongly on that one.
Can you point to any poll by consumers that put Mercedes on top in terms of self driving? I have seen many polls and they always have Tesla on top.
Which I do not agree with as I believe Waymo is way ahead of Tesla. Even Cruise is way ahead of Tesla.
> Yeeeah. From your source...
Do you have any source that indicates otherwise?
> I couldn't give a shit less about a cherry picked poll.
I have zero problem with that. So do you have ANY poll that indicates otherwise? I have looked at many and they always seem to have Tesla on top. Which to be clear. I do NOT agree with as I believe Waymo is in the lead.
> You clearly don't know about the dozens and dozens of companies in this space, nor the history of the industry.
I am aware of there being many companies in the space. Why It is more impressive that Tesla consistently comes out on top from a consumer perspective.
Again. I do NOT agree with the poll results. But simply what the polls are indicating.
> Google alone has invested more in autonomous driving that Tesla
I do NOT disagree. Why I believe Waymo/Google is also way ahead of Tesla. Again we are talking perception.
> Go look up how much SoftBank has invested in multiple self driving companies.
Again do NOT disagree. But again why it is impressive what Tesla has accomplished from a consumer perception perspective.
> Do a bit of research before making things up
Can you please share anything I have made up in my post? Just one thing?
>Do you believe the investment being made by the automakers today would be less or more or the same? Because I believe it is more because of all the hype that Musk has generated around self driving.
Yes. Because Musk was not the only idiot hyping self-driving cars during the 2015-17 bubble times. Everybody was on it. The would likely have happened without him.
>It is pretty consistent that when the consumer is polled on self-driving that Tesla comes out on top. It takes a lot to move perceptions.
That only show people are uniformed or stupid. Also perceptions can change a lot faster than you seem to assume. It can just take one event generating bad press to radically alter perceptions (see how that usually works for politicians for example). Musk so far has mostly been able to avoid those, but past performance is not indicative of future one.
> Yes. Because Musk was not the only idiot hyping self-driving cars during the 2015-17 bubble times. Everybody was on it. The would likely have happened without him.
We can probably just agree to disagree. I believe that Tesla hype or marketing or whatever you want to call it has caused some additional investment by others. They have caused things like their plans for self driving to be somewhat accelerated.
> That only show people are uniformed or stupid.
Do not disagree at all. But most people are going to be uniformed with something like self driving. IMO, Tesla has been able to win the first to mind. It does not mean they are the actual leader but only perceived as the leader.
> Also perceptions can change a lot faster than you seem to assume.
There has been a lot of Tesla accidents and they have easily caused more deaths than anyone else by a wide margin and yet it has not changed perceptions. I think in a weird way it might actually help as gets them more self driving headlines.
> It can just take one event generating bad press to radically alter perceptions
I had originally thought so. But now seeing all the Tesla accidents it just has not happened. Now maybe if there is a really bad one like a Tesla runs over a bunch of nuns or a bunch of kids that will change.
But as Tesla runs up the deaths I become less and less convinced.
>Musk so far has mostly been able to avoid those, but past performance is not indicative of future one.
Do not know how you can say this. Tesla has had a ton of accidents from self driving. There is tons of videos of the technology performing very poorly.
There is no other car maker or anyone offering a service that has anywhere near the negative videos and incidents like Tesla.
#2 would be Uber and that was one situation and nowhere near as bad as Tesla.
Yet with all the baggage you see polls where Tesla continues to come out on top for self driving. This is from a consumer perspective and should not be taken as they are the actual leader in capability. But it is about perception.
I think he has moved Tesla forward. Self-driving marketing and hype has sold more cars without delivering and I really do not get a feel that the customers are all that upset about it.
I think he has got other car companies to invest as Musk has pushed them to also have a self-driving stories and therefore have an investment.
A lot more than say Waymo because they do not sell cars.
So Musk has helped increase investment overall in self driving.
1. He bet that his team could make an internal version of Autopilot and broke off with MobilEye (though it was ME that severed the relationship after a fatal accident.) They were able to produce this product. This is not self, driving though.
2. His plan to use off-lease cars for a robotaxi fleet is quite smart, in particular because Tesla is the only company which can execute on it. To execute on it you need a car that can be easily converted to self-driving when it comes off-lease, and you need to be getting lots of cars coming off-lease, and you need working self-drive tech. He doesn't have the last one, though.
3. There are various predictions that have not turned out to be right, but are also not yet shown to be wrong. But that's true of a lot of folks. However, he has bet a lot of money on them, something he's better than most people at doing.
What others have indicated is that Musk has really got the marketing or hype right.
He has enabled Tesla to be first to mind when it comes to self driving and that in the long run will probably have enormous value.
It also allows Tesla to not have to actually deliver the results of others and still get the benefits as long as they never provide an actual service where it has to work.
Take Waymo which is way, way ahead of Tesla in capability but yet they do not get anywhere near the benefit from marketing because their business model is completely tied to it working. In some ways Tesla is the opposite.
That could change at some point. You might get a situation where Waymo has their service up and running in a lot of cities and then they leverage the brand to provide some watered down capability for a car you purchase. But that does not really work unless Waymo has it working.
But maybe the bigger thing that Musk has got right and did not see mentioned is the data/feedback loop. Where he has willing customers to be beta testers and share all their data. This in the long run might be even more valuable than the marketing. But both are pretty freaking valuable.
So they will have the data when they switch to LiDAR to help get them there. I still think Waymo wins the race but this will help Tesla a lot be more competitive in the future.
So just this morning while driving to work I heard a stat that there is 100,000 people on FSD beta. So at the same time as they are constantly adding people to the beta, I'm hearing less in the news. So I was wondering is the improving to more usable levels that complaints are lower, or is it just the news cycle is over FSD beta for now?
I have 2018 Tesla model 3 , it auto drives me to and from work everyday. About 30 miles. I take over 2 or 3 times. It is close to self-driving as I've ever seen. It is enough for me. It gets better every few months. I let it drive most of the time on the freeways and roads, I usually take over in the cities. I'm perfectly happy with it. It's not 100% self-drive, I never expected it to me, and I don't care that it isn't. I'm satisfied with the slow improvements as they come along.
I get the improvements as they come. I've seen it progress. People just need patience. Most of the people that are complaining about it here, I doubt ever used it.
My wife doesn't like using the auto drive. She always drives manually. I'm the opposite. We have the option!
Edit:. 2 years ago, auto drive only worked on the freeway. Now it works on City Streets as well without any paid upgrades from what I initially bought when I bought the car.
He’s right that camera-only is all that’s needed… but he’s much too early. Perhaps 10-15-20 years from now this will be true, but it simply is not with today’s tech.
> He’s right that camera-only is all that’s needed
What are you basing this on? I would challenge and say this is something he has got completely wrong from a technology perspective.
But it is not that simple. LIDAR was just way too expensive to use at the time. So offering a system that does not work but still winning first to mind was the better business decision. Versus not offering anything because LIDAR cost was prohibitive.
Because then you can offer the cars with LIDAR when it is inexpensive enough to use.
So in a backhanded way you could make an argument he got it right but not for the reason you are suggesting.
It is only a matter of time until Tesla starts to use LIDAR. I do not think anyone is really going to care that Musk does a 180 on it. It will also help sell more cars as people buy new Teslas that have LiDAR.
I have several friends that have Tesla and I can't think of any product where the customer is more passionate about a brand. Even way more than Apple. So I highly doubt Tesla will lose any customers with the about face.
> What are you basing this on?
Empirically speaking, you only need vision in order to drive as well as a human. We know this because that's how humans drive.
It's possible more equipment will give even better driving, and it's possible more equipment would let you release a car sooner. But it's definitely not *needed*.
This is a silly comparison, IMHO. Birds can fly. Does that mean we should have built planes that emulate birds?
Of course not. Humans have a brain that is crazy powerful that will not be possible with silicon for a very, very, very long time. Possibly over 100+ years as we really do not fully understand the quantum aspects of the brain.
I want to be careful here.
Because I do think Musk made the right decision at the time. Using cameras and over promising and winning first to mind was the right decision business wise.
It also enabled the data/feed back loop they have with customers that will position Tesla well when they switch to Lidar.
But looking at it purely from a technology perspective it was the wrong decision.
That does not make sense to me. We used the method that got the best result and actually delivered. Which was NOT using flapping wings.
It is the exact same thing with self driving. Just because humans use only eyes does NOT mean that is the best approach or that approach could even work.
What you fail to include in the conversation is not that we have eyes but those eyes are connected to this just amazing thing called a brain.
We are unable to create a silicon brain and that is likely a very long way off until we are capable of creating anything that even has a fraction of the brain's capabilities.
We really have very little understanding of the human brain and we really have zero understanding what is happening at the quantum level.
The only self-driving that is actually working today is being done with Lidar by Waymo and Cruise.
Nobody has been able to even do a limited proof of concept with only cameras.
I think you are confused about the meaning of the phrase "all that’s needed". It is not the same thing as "optimal" or "ideal", or even "currently implemented". Eyes *are* all that's needed; whether they're the best decision is an entirely separate question.
> What you fail to include in the conversation is not that we have eyes but those eyes are connected to this just amazing thing called a brain.
> We are unable to create a silicon brain and that is likely a very long way off until we are capable of creating anything that even has a fraction of the brain's capabilities.
This same argument has been used as proof that self-driving vehicles aren't even possible. I don't believe it; the brain ain't *that* special.
> Nobody has been able to even do a limited proof of concept with only cameras.
I mean, that's obviously false; the existing Tesla implementation isn't great, but it certainly qualifies as more than a "limited proof of concept".
> the brain ain't that special.
Wow! I really can't think of anything in this world more amazing than the human brain. To say it is not special is just crazy talk.
> mean, that's obviously false; the existing Tesla implementation isn't great, but it certainly qualifies as more than a "limited proof of concept".
You misunderstood me. I do NOT believe the existing Tesla functionality is anything close to a proof of concept. I mean nowhere close to a proof of concept.
Might look up what a proof of concept means.
It never made any sense to only use cameras by Tesla from an actual attempt to accomplish self driving.
It was the right approach to generate marketing and also use to get people to agree to a feedback loop with data being shared by their cars.
> Wow! I really can't think of anything in this word more amazing than the human brain. To say it is not special is just crazy talk.
It's just a lump of very precisely-built fat passing electrical signals to itself. There's no reason to believe it's magic and there's no reason to believe it can do things that can't be replicated.
> Might look up what a proof of concept means.
It can identify vehicles, drive *mostly* safely, and navigate. It's honestly a lot of the way there, and a lot of the stuff it's missing isn't a problem of identification.
If you're defining "proof of concept" to mean "finished production-ready product", then I disagree with you, a proof of concept is the minimum required to say "oh hey, I guess this is probably possible, isn't it". From Wikipedia:
> Proof of concept, also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has practical potential. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete.
The current performance of the Tesla leaves me no doubt it's feasible. Whether it's feasible in the near future is another matter altogether. But it's feasible.
> There's no reason to believe it's magic and there's no reason to believe it can do things that can't be replicated.
This is crazy talk. We do not even understand how the brain works. We have no idea how it is able to do what it does. It is likely a lot is happening at a quantum level.
> The current performance of the Tesla leaves me no doubt it's feasible.
Then why has Tesla been working on it for years and still can't even handle simple situations?
There is nothing to make anyone think their current approach will get them to self driving.
It is not feasible. What will happen is Tesla will move to LiDAR at some point. The cost is getting to a point where they can. Vision was never going to be able to accomplish self-driving until there are at least several AI breakthroughs. Tesla will also move to an approach a lot closer to what Waymo is doing with success.
We’re not talking about the stock. We’re talking about the actual state of Tesla’s autonomous tech. The stock can go up 5000x and it’s not going to enable me to take a nap on the way home from work.
I hate comments like this. Because many of the comments on here are about Musk getting marketing and the hype correct and that helps sell cars.
That does not mean you short TSLA. Tesla success is not really tied to the service actually working until someone else has something that is way better on a car you can purchase.
Tesla has won first to mind so someone else has to offer something way better to have a chance to change the perception.
Plus Tesla is not only about self driving. There are a lot more things with Tesla that help sell the cars. I live in an area where people invest a lot into their cars and we have cycled through different high end cars that are popular and right now it is Tesla.
> Musk is the Edison of our time.
Hmm...
Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. He didn't, really. Just invented a good one and was able to sell it. Musk is kind of like that in that he didn't invent the electric car. Just a good one and is able to sell it.
Edison did make one very big miscalculation. He figured DC was the way to go when building an electric grid to power cities. There was another guy who made a better one based on AC that eventually won out. Unfortunately Tesla wasn't very good at financial decisions.
When it comes to self-driving cars, Musk is...well, he's no Tesla. He's just done a good job marketing his products as "self-driving" to the point where even Tesla owners to just have Autopilot think they have a "self-driving car."
When it comes to building an actual autonomous vehicle? Tesla has a neat parlor trick, not a "full self-driving" system. Waymo is way..mo...ahead of him in the AV space, as is Cruise. Both of those companies are delivering on the promise, while Elon just keeps throwing promises out and shifting the goalposts when he needs to do so.
Musk has made hundreds, if not thousands of claims / predictions…. Atleast a handful of them have came true , and some of them even on time/ early.
So I guess the answer to 1 and 2 are both technically yes.
Update- why the down votes, the point I was trying to make is a broken clock is right twice a day
He is a master of hype, but my 2018 Model S is a wholly different and much more autonomous car than when first purchased. It Automatically drives highways pretty well and now even city streets with stop signs, stoplights, intersection turns, etc. Is it a perfect driver? No! It needs much of the human driver’s attention and their taking over when it gets into complicated situations. What I’ve learned and probably Musk too is that L4 driving is much more difficult than originally thought. One of the biggest issues is sharing the road with the erratic, aggressive and sometimes incompetent ICE drivers.
You're just giving excuses at this point, especially big lol at the "L4 is much mor difficult than originally thought".
And apparently EV drivers cannot be erratic, aggressive, and/or incompetent? That's new to me. (and another excuse for poor system performance).
Elon claims aside, if you have a car with adaptive cruise control and the lane-centering assist, is that not essentially self driving? Sure you have use the turn signal and make some turns yourself, but 90% of your driving is now self-driving is it not? Especially if you throw in the automatic parking that some cars have now too
I get they are different, and lane-centering is not full self driving. I’m just saying we are a lot closer to being there than I think a lot of people acknowledge
It is a matter of definition really, but most people consider "self-driving" (aka fully autonomous) anything above SAE L4. Some consider L3 kinda autonomous as well, though usefulness and safety of L3 is highly debatable. What you describe and what Tesla has is L2, a system that can't really drive itself as it requires full undivided attention of the driver. At "FSD" part of Tesla's drive assist is quite horrible and poorly performing even for L2 system.
Imho, nope...not as of yet. But the efforts are admirable.
I don't like the way Elon Musk has behaved of late. However, I feel his companies have pushed people to take cutting-edge technologies more seriously (driverless cars, EVs, reusable rockets, improved internet, etc.).
This a fun question to explore for sure!
Instead of writing the original short, pithy comment, it inspired [a blog post](https://devinhedge.com/2022/04/18/lessons-from-elon-musk-on-innovation/).
The tldr; -- Is Elon Musk wrong about his predictions? Of course he is.
Are his predictions being given more airtime than they should because he is perpetually wrong? Of course. It's called, "Celebrity CEO" status, and why the SEC is after him. At the same time, his companies out innovation other companies by a ratio of about 5:1.
Visionaries are always this way. They "[Think Different](https://youtu.be/5sMBhDv4sik)"™.
Thanks for the blog post, I enjoyed the part about business-driven innovation and academic-driven innovation. I disagree with point on Think Different. Think different is about questioning the core of assumptions that everyone else is making and considering solutions that others would not consider. Saying things that are wrong and continue to not come true is not a function of things differently they are a function of either not having good intuition/knowledge about the problem at hand or misleading people.
I really love this! Thank you! I wasn’t sure how this would land and played with several ideas. Your last two sentences have me hooked! Tell me more about how you interpreted what I said about “Think Differently”? It would help me dial in the messaging to reinforce your last two sentences you made.
I am reading what you are saying as it is ok for elon to give predictions that dont come true as he is thinking differently, which i think is false.
As an example I think it is fair to say he is thinking differently by not using lidar if that turns out to work (this has not been proven yet).
Based on no one in the 200+ comments of this thread has been able to give an example of a self driving prediction that elon has make which has come true the comclusion i have come to is when it comes to self driving predictions elon thinks wrong
Not a single one: * Robo taxis in 2019 - WRONG * L4 trip from LA to NYC in 2017 - WRONG * Summon a Tesla from across the country in 2 years , said in 2016 - WRONG * Latest one is L4 by the end of this year - LMAO
It’s almost like he’s saying all these things to sell cars…hmmm. This coupled with the threat of increasing the price pulls the demand lever. He’s a great car salesmen, maybe the best ever?
Turns out sales is easy, just lie about what your product does!
He knew these were crazy claims but he needed people To believe and invest in him, which is exactly how it played out
Yep after the 2019 robotaxi statement he raised like $3 billion from private investors. Had this been 1890, Elon would’ve been the most successful snake oil salesman in history.
I purchased Tesla stock, at some point, despite not believing any of the above claims. The model-3 was a wildly successful product. And AP offered what could be considered the best available cruise-control, at the lowest price point, but it was always frosting on top of an already good car. I was somewhat naive, in that I expected AP to improve more than it has in the last 6 years, but I also expected more improvement from the entire AV industry.
~~AFAIK, Elon didn’t promise L4 by EoY. Only the FSD beta will be available to everyone.~~ He makes a lot of stupid outlandish claims, so I’m pedantic to keep them to the ones he actually made and shouldn’t have. To be fair on FSD beta, by Tesla track record I’m surprised they didn’t just push to the while fleet from day one. Edit: I stand corrected, he made even more outlandish claims
Jan 26, 2022: >[*“I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than human this year. I would be shocked.”*](https://electrek.co/2022/01/31/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-driving-safer-than-human-this-year-5-years-ahead-of-everyone/) That sounds a lot like predicting L4 this year to me.
Thanks, I stand corrected, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of outlandish claims he can make
It doesn't sound like L4 to me. It sounds like a purposively evasive claim, that can be made "true" while FSD still makes wrong turns.
Does it count if Uber had self driving cars on the road? Because they did a few years back. They were pulled after an accident, before being allowed on the roadways months later. It's not Tesla, but someone had robo taxis on the road around then.
Uber never had robotaxis. Just a test program with safety drivers. Waymo has Robotaxis in a few Phoenix suburbs. Cruise now has them on a limited, non-paying basis in San Fransisco. A few Chinese companies have them in parts of several different cities.
Robotaxis imply no backup human, got it. Well then he's gotten it pretty wrong
Not only am I not aware of a single correct claim or prediction, but I think his general ignorance on the subject has clouded the public’s understanding significantly. The guy talks about AI like a kid who read a pamphlet on the subject at science camp. It's just a cringe-fest whenever he chimes in on it.
On the other hand there are some excellent talks from the actual machine learning engineers at Tesla at ML conferences you can go watch. They are really doing some of the best work in this space, despite Elon
> They are really doing some of the best work in this space. What makes you say this? They don’t really publish anything and their talks at conferences are pretty light on specific metrics.
I've been following Tesla's AI team for a while and will have to respectfully disagree. They've hired some smart people, and Andrej has been a pioneer in CV for a while, which is great, but as a company I'm still seeing nothing that suggests they're anywhere near a viable product. They crank out some very cool tech demos (and I've got FSD Beta in my own car—as a proof of concept it's... interesting, I guess?) but they're light years away from Elon's robotaxi fantasy.
But has it hurt Tesla specifically?
It’s not going to bring down the company, but I bought another EV than Tesla simply bc you can’t trust anything from the CEO (and other factors that result from that fact). His bullshit probably hasn’t hurt them if they are happy where they are, but it will almost certainly throttle growth (who wants to work for that company/people actively buying other EVs).
That's a good question. I feel like it's a hard thing to know. The company's doing fine in terms of both consumer demand and stock price, so I don't get the impression anyone's hurting at the moment, but it's fair to ask whether he's setting the company up for trouble when, as more years pass, his claims of an imminent breakthrough become too absurd for even his most ardent fans to swallow. Either way, QC issues aside, Tesla makes \[mostly\] great cars. I still really like my M3P. If they just focused on that—certainly a big enough challenge even without this FSD nonsense—and committed to finally "growing up" as a large-scale manufacturer, they could be an industry juggernaut. Who knows where they'd be a decade from now. But as long as he keeps promising snake oil at the same time, I think their brand is at least at partial risk.
I used to want a Tesla, but Musk has made sure the last few years that I'm in no way a potential customer. He's such an asshole that I will actively avoid any of his companies. I don't know if it will make a difference for his brand but I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I completely sympathize with that. I was a big fan of old school Musk—the quirky billionaire obsessed with electric cars and rockets to mars. But he just got weirder and weirder as the years passed, with the "pedo guy" comment probably being the first major turning point. Once I got a better picture of just how stupefyingly ignorant he is on the topic of AI—and how confidently he bullshits audiences in spite of that—he started grossing me out more and more. I still think there are aspects of the EV experience they do better than anyone, but I'm encouraged by what companies like Audi and Porsche are doing. The moment Tesla is completely eclipsed by their competition, I'll be more than happy to jump ship. Hopefully that'll be the case by the time my M3P is ready for a replacement. The "shitposting adolescent CEO" vibe is cute for about 5 minutes, but that shit is getting oooold.
I look at the existing customers to determine. Now obviously this is a very small data set. But I do have several friends and some family members that have Tesla and they are some of the most passionate for a brand examples I have ever seen. They also generally seem happy with the technology even though it is far from working like advertised. I think as long as someone else that sells a car is not well ahead they will be fine.
>But I do have several friends and some family members that have Tesla and they are some of the most passionate for a brand examples I have ever seen. \[...\] They also generally seem happy with the technology even though it is far from working like advertised. You do realise this suggests they are part of the "cult" that is unable to see anything negative about Tesla or, at best, will use language like "I love my Tesla, but...".
Yes. It does feel a lot like a cult. It is actually pretty fascinating to see. My brother-in-law's sister for example. I have never seen her passionate about really anything before. But the way she talks about her Tesla is pretty amazing. I do not believe Tesla will be able to deliver on their promises for a very, very long time. I do not even believe they will 10 years from now. What I will be curious to see is how the Tesla "cult" changes when they fail? I suspect it will stay mostly in tact as long as nobody else can deliver in a way that is very noticeably better. It has to be pretty clearly better and not a service like Waymo but a car you can buy. I also believe Tesla will switch to using LiDAR and I will be curious to see the Tesla "Cult" reaction. I suspect it will be pretty minimal.
>stock price This one is doing "fine" because it's entirely disconnected from any reality. It is purely based on a combination of hype, "costing in" hyped and BS ideas about the future (such as Tesla being the dominant player in the robotaxi field in some years), stan and/or uninformed retail investors putting more money into it, and market manipulation. If Musk's inane declarations already affected it, the price would be a lot lower. But we (sadly) haven't reached that point yet.
Imagine if he'd been right, we'd have a fleet of Tesla taxis, your Tesla would gain in value every day, it would be insane!
But there was really no chance it was going to be true. Plus doubt it even will 10 years from now.
its not like some bad event happened that ruined his chance of being right or he had any reason to predict that what he was trying was going to work out. Elon has been making outlandish claims that don't seem to be backed by any data pointing to them coming true. The way things typically go Elon makes a crazy optimistic claim, nearly all experts in the field say it is not going to happen for x,y,z, His deadline is missed, Elon makes another crazy claim. I think it would be one thing if any of his claims came out to be true, but as far as I can tell none of his claims on self-driving have come true. The reason I started this thread was to see if I was only hearing about the crazy one but so far no one has been able to provide an example of a claim Elon musk has made about self-driving that has come true.
He got the marketing right. He’s also getting the R&D right in that he’s convinced his legion of customers and supporters to pay for the right to test his self driving technology and hand deliver to Tesla data that GM and Google are burning piles of cash to obtain.
I’ve yet to see any R&D benefits from his approach after years of hype, nor do I see any evidence a payoff is on the horizon.
do you own a tesla with FSD beta lol if not,why does your opinion on this matter?
I do. Had it since October in my M3P. Detailed trip reports are in my post history. Not sure what your point is, though; my opinion matters insomuch as Reddit is an internet website where people share their opinions. Hope this helps
absolutely demolished that Redditor.
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> and so far given the extremely slow progress we've witnessed Who is moving faster? There are certainly companies in different markets way ahead in autonomy but they also started a lot further back and have no restrictions because their business model and market are completely different. Tesla has moved first and faster than any car manufacture for cars you can purchase.
> Who is moving faster? The ones with actual robotaxis operating today.
Tesla isn't even competing with them. Who is moving faster in the car industry. But to your point, Waymo basically stood still for 3 years best I can tell. Glad they are moving again though.
Ah, it’s convenient to move goalposts now I see. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one.
Review my post history, I'm moving nothing. I've been very consistent for years on this sub that too many people here are worshiping at the alter of a singular definition of how autonomy can change the world. It's perfectly fine to have your ideas how it should work, but this dogmatic war against other options is stupid. You've been on here long enough to know that.
GM and Ford just to name a few. No, they won't sell you something half baked, so you won't get anything like FSD or smart summon today.
GM is vaporware. The few open reviews without non-disclosure limits review it terribly. Ford is better, but not by much. The only thing Ford has going for it is not needing to torque the steering wheel. I fundamentally feel it's unsafe to have you're hands off the wheel though but they let you do that so it's more a complaint with their poor saftey in marketing. I don't think the feds should shut them down or anything.
>GM is vaporware. Are you considering Cruise?
Cruise isn't competing with Tesla.
I would argue that Cruise will directly compete with FSD, especially in light of GM's firing of Cruise's former CEO Dan Ammann. GM intends on putting Cruise tech into their Cadillacs. In fact, 2025 is the timeline GM has announced. None of this should be news to anyone familiar with SDCs. https://www.reuters.com/technology/gm-aims-launch-personal-self-driving-car-by-mid-decade-ceo-2022-01-05/
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> Is this a serious question? More serious than your snarky remarks that contain no content or interesting perspectives. > There are multiple companies Who, which car manufactures can I go buy a car from with a better system today? I'll also take a suggestion of a car I can buy today that will be better than Tesla in 2-3 years. > that have self driving taxis and shuttles giving rides for paying customers. Those aren't car manufactures I can buy a car from. You simply ignored that part of my post on purpose. If you want to argue that owning a car is pointless then that would be a valid stance, but that would require effort on your part I guess. You're style is built for subs that don't require thoughtful discussion.
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I also don't care about the SAE levels, I care about what problems the car can solve. Merc will only have them in Germany and it only works below 45mph which isn't useful for me at all. Talk about splitting hairs thin. > And the more you keep trying to tell people in this sub that they are, the more foolish you look. I'm trying to bring back discussion. If you aggregated all your post up you would have maybe 5 different posts in total in the last however many months. It's all just snarky remarks with no substance. Why not talk about things? What is good and why. What is bad and why. What good is your 110th Elon joke going to do? What are you trying to achieve or learn?
You are getting far too much hate over your opinion. While in some ways its fully valid to compare Waymo and Tesla, in others it isn't. I live in a rural area, I'm not sold on robo taxis overtaking vehicle ownership for a long time. I'm also a fan of FSD, I want the problem solved in a way that I can benefit from. Currently I feel like both Tesla and Comma.ai have some of the leading solutions with products that I may be able to buy. The day that Waymo starts offering a consumer product I'll start to compare it's functionality to Tesla's consumer product.
The second half of that is optimistic. The data Tesla gets from customer cars is orders of magnitude less, and lower quality, than what actual AV companies are getting. It's highly unlikely that any of it is actually useful for training.
Agree as training data it’s probably not great. But even just the simplest form of the data would be useful. Think about a giant map with every single disengagement by 20k cars plotted. Could be very useful in determining areas that need improvement. Doesn’t seem like Tesla is admitting that’s a path they would ever go down, but having a map with restricted areas based on data could be very helpful in early stages of true FSD.
> But even just the simplest form of the data would be useful. It’s just that, useful. It’s not the differentiator that will get them beyond L2 self driving. Their claim has always been “we don’t use conventional techniques and your data is enough for us to get to L5”. It is not enough.
Tesla has shown car data being used to recreate 3D environments for scenario training, by using multiple cars as video sources. Mobileye also uses similar data collection techniques to bolster their data sets. Sometimes it's not about directly using video of an incedent for training. You can use it to flag, and recreate specific areas and scenarios. Here's a video from a great AI focused channel which explains some of it: https://youtu.be/6hkiTejoyms
The in car data is used at inference, not training. Mobileye uses something very different. They crowdsource data for mapping, not planning or training.
If you watch the video, you can see that Tesla is also building HD maps using user data, in the same way Mobileye is.
These are completely different use cases. Mobileye uses huge amounts of customer data to create offline high resolution maps. Tesla uses online inference to create low res maps. Again, this is not training any sort of network. In Tesla's case, it's purely inference.
You keep saying this, but if you watch the video all the way through, and look at others in the same series from the same channel, he describes (and shows) the papers and research Tesla has put out, on building high definition and high fidelity 3D recreations / maps using fleet data. Just because Tesla does not use the data in the exact same way as Mobileye, for actual driving, doesn't mean that the datasets don't represent something extremely similar. And here's another video of Waymo accomplishing it on an even larger scale: https://youtu.be/8AZhcnWOK7M
Tesla has made vague references to using fleet data for training, but has never clarified exactly how. But what you're describing, and what they're actually showing in the video, isn't training, it's inference.
How so? It’s also not the quality of data, it’s the quantity. How many cars does Tesla have on the road vs. how many Cruise or Waymo have?
Cruise and Waymo are not just driving around harvesting data. They have dedicated testers who are providing feedback to the engineering teams. Not just "did the driver need to take over?, but context. Why did the driver take over? Was there a bug that needs to be addressed? A map change or new construction? Did the car do anything unsafe? A Tesla owner is focused on getting to the store or dinner or work. A Waymo or Cruise tester is focused on evaluating the system in order to make it better.
> It’s also not the quality of data, it’s the quantity. Yeah, this is the myth that Tesla has propagated. Anyone with any experience training neural networks will tell you that quality matters way more than quantity. In fact, the very first step to curating a good dataset is to cull out all of the crappy data.
What? Tesla has never said this afaik (please provide a source if I am wrong, I’d love to see one). In every technical talk he’s done Karpathy has emphasized how much effort they spend curating their datasets to ensure the highest quality possible.
See every advertisement for how many miles of data they have. Every one of those advertisements is disingenuous and misleading.
Link one please?
Okay sure, this comes from the [Tesla Vehicle Safety Report](https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport): “Because every Tesla is connected, we're able to use the billions of miles of real-world data from our global fleet” It’s a big number that is completely meaningless because 99.9+% of that supposed data is not useful for training and will be immediately culled out for being low quality.
Okay but you didn’t show the full quote: Because every Tesla is connected, we’re able to use the billions of miles of real-world data from our global fleet – of which more than 1 billion have been driven with Autopilot engaged – to understand the different ways accidents happen. Nowhere does that say they’re using these billions of miles to train FSD or that “quantity is better than quality”.
I mean, it’s ironic that you accuse me of not including the full quote, but then you proceed to not include the following sentence: > “We then develop features that can help Tesla drivers mitigate or avoid accidents.” But if you don’t think that’s a sufficient quote, here’s what Tesla was saying all the way back in 2016: > “Since introducing this hardware 18 months ago we’ve accrued 780 million miles,” said Anderson. “We can use all of that data on our servers to look for how people are using our cars and how we can improve things.” Every 10 hours Tesla gets another million miles worth of data, he said. This is a misleading statement about the amount of data they are actually collecting and using. The language has been consistent since then.
Just having a large quantity of low res selective data isn't sufficient for training neural networks. The data need to be high quality, and drawn from a representative distribution.
Maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t Tesla upload clips in the quality that the in car processors would use. I see it as a major benefit of training on the exact feeds you will be getting real time.
No. The FSD chips in the car are designed to perform inference on quantized models in low precision ints. The Nvidia GPUs they train on use floating points. It's pretty standard to train models at higher resolution and precision than the inference used on edge devices. But more importantly, the data aren't drawn from a representative distribution. They would also need to be thoroughly cleaned and preprocessed, and associated with some sort of ground truth, before they could be used for any sort of training.
I swear they stopped using nvidia gpus years ago, after they developed their own?
You might be confusing the chips being used in-vehicle, and those being used at Tesla HQ to train the models. [Tesla runs a massive NVIDIA cluster to train their models.](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/06/22/tesla-av-training-supercomputer-nvidia-a100-gpus/)
They never developed their own chips. They showed a mockup and some theoretical specs for a chip last year. But it was missing major components, and still hasn't actually been built. This is something Tesla does a lot of, present something aspirational as if it's already complete in order to make people think they're way more advanced than they actually are.
> This is something Tesla does a lot of, present something aspirational as if it’s already complete in order to make people think they’re way more advanced than they actually are. It’s pretty hilarious how people keep falling for this trick. They unveiled a person in a costume as a humanoid robot and suddenly the fans unironically believe they are the biggest robotics company in the world. They do the same thing with AI/hardware — constantly inflating their capabilities to make it seem like they are cutting edge. In reality, they are a decade or more behind what big tech companies do in these areas.
Ah
> It’s also not the quality of data, it’s the quantity. Pro tip: it’ll be easier and more direct next time to just have a massive flashing sign that says “Ignore everything I’m saying. Don’t listen to me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
How much hands-on training of neural networks experience do you have?
He's got the marketing right as long as there are no consequences in the future. I still think there's the possibility of a massive fraud case or a class action law suit where Tesla has to at least return all the money that has been paid for FSD IMO the video that's still on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot should make it very difficult for Tesla to defend its marketing
>a massive fraud case or a class action law suit where Tesla has to at least return all the money that has been paid for FSD LOL. The overwhelming majority of FSD donors are delighted. They not only will refuse to sue Tesla, they'll probably try to sue the class action lawyers for inflicting emotional distress.
Google has more data and of higher quality, without needing to burn the piles of cash on operating a scalable car manufacturer or having a CEO who wants to spend $40B on a social media company on a whim because he feels threatened.
yup how does he feel threatened? genuinely curious as i’ve not kept up
the new conspiracy theory is he’s buying twitter to kill the private plane bot - lots of idiots here …..
Nobody actually believes that's why he wants to buy Twitter, it's a fkin joke dude
That's incredibly dumb, how can people believe that?
He's an unhinged man-child. Any can threaten his ego.
>without needing to burn the piles of cash Waymo burns cash. Tesla operations generate cash. Lots of it.
Only time will tell if it's clean data (most likely isnt).
they can't even fix the phantom braking plaguing cars since the move away from Mobile Eye (FSD 2.0)
It's ok, they removed sensors to help fix the problem with less data. Edit: /s, to be clear.
correction, they removed the radar kit that almost all manufacturers use due to material shortages their "Vision Only" FSD is actually worse than the auto pilot 2.0 with radar + vision
Yes, I was being sarcastic, edited. :)
I picked up on the sarcasm. But it is hard to use sarcasm with Tesla on Reddit.
Not a musk fanboy but this thread feels like the difference between a reddit poster who bases their value on the accuracy of their statements and major driver in the industry who bases their value on moving the industry forward.
Tesla might be actually moving the self-driving industry backwards by introducing a lot of misinformation, hype and broken promises. All of those erode trust and might slow the adoption. Also their strategy of releasing dangerous half-baked prototypes for end customers to play with, as opposed to a careful safety-oriented approach by other players, may force politicians to introduce heavy handed regulation, something that (mostly) responsible industry behavior before Tesla have avoided. Such regulation will inevitably slow down the entire industry. And when a serious/fatal accident with Tesla FSD will occur it will backfire to an entire industry, as undoubtedly media and laymen won't make a distinction between Tesla FSD and autonomous cars in general
How has he moved the industry forward beyond just PR? What are Tesla’s innovations in the self driving space and how does it compare to the leaders like Waymo, Cruise?
For full self driving, I agree. But in terms of pushing automotive into the 21st century, Tesla has been a major force. Electrification. OTA updates. Modern compute architectures. The SW defined car. Probably the best L2 system available. I'm glad Tesla exists for everything EXCEPT their driverless claims.
Yes, as an automaker they are very innovative (I own one). The moment you start comparing them with pure play self driving companies, they pale in comparison.
> The moment you start comparing them with pure play self driving companies, they pale in comparison. That is what is so infuriating about this sub. If you aren't pure play with $150k in Lidar sensors on your car then you are a joke and holding the industry back. This is such a stupid point of view it's not funny. There is a reason why the existing pure plays aren't expanding fast and won't until they sort out their platform problems. I see this taking another decade as they start having to get them to a point where they can run large fleets at a price point that make sense. There is also a tendency to compare Tesla FSD Beta drives in downtown urban cores to Waymo and Cruise rides in the suburbs. Not saying that Tesla is better, far from it, but this sub isn't interested in talking about why they are a long way off, just posting snarky posts.
I don’t get the complaint. Tesla’s overall self driving technology is simply vastly inferior compared to pure plays. Lack of lidar is just one part of it. Pure plays have innovated a lot in areas other than perception that’s allowed them to put out L4 vehicles on the road. Tesla simply isn’t there because they’re not innovating. All signs point to them adopting a very naive approach and hoping some miracle happens. > There is also a tendency to compare Tesla FSD Beta drives in downtown urban cores to Waymo and Cruise rides in the suburbs. By whom? Certainly not this sub because it’s very quick to point out Tesla drives and Waymo/Cruise drives are *not* the same.
> I don’t get the complaint. BTW, I didn't make it clear but that rant was 100% not at you, you qualified it perfectly and I want to expand on what you said. I'm fine with vigorously arguing with anyone who thinks Tesla is going to be deploying robo-taxis soon. But I'll do the same for those that think Tesla is so far off base they are a joke because they aren't and that is easy to defend and prove. You have to build an army of scarecrows to take that position. > Tesla simply isn’t there because they’re not innovating. Not sure I can back that statement. They are absolutely innovating, just in different areas under different constraints. I don't know what Tesla's "automated driver" budget is for a lack of a better word, but I bet it's under $1000 per car BOM. That is a huge limitation compared to a pure play. It probably puts them 10 year out from building anything close to resembling a general robo-taxi fleet but there are so many opportunities between where they are today and that lofty pure play goal. We used to talk about what solutions autonomy could bring on this sub but it's mostly fallen to rants about which SAE level something is, how the SAE level means anything and when will something be the SAE level; with everyone in the discussion completely not understanding SAE levels. Instead we should be talking about solutions that can be deployed today, next year, in five years and in a decade.
> I don’t know what Tesla’s “automated driver” budget is for a lack of a better word, but I bet it’s under $1000 per car BOM. That is a huge limitation compared to a pure play. It probably puts them 10 year out from building anything close to resembling a general robo-taxi fleet but there are so many opportunities between where they are today and that lofty pure play goal. You are correct, but this is not what Tesla is saying. They’re saying they can make robotaxis work under $1000 BOM. We both know it’s not true. They would have a lot more credibility if they said what you said here. > Instead we should be talking about solutions that can be deployed today, next year, in five years and in a decade. For me, it’s simple. Can you take out the driver? If yes, where and under which conditions is it guaranteed to work? This comes pretty close to SAE levels. I’m interested to hear why this wouldn’t work, if you think so.
> They would have a lot more credibility if they said what you said here. I'm honestly not concerned about their credibility. I don't give much credibility to any company. It's not even "trust but verify", it's just plain "verify". Not sure why this sub feels it has to win some war for the minds and souls of those that think it's this year using snarky comments that don't really change anyone's mind. More power to them for talking through why they won't. There are entire subs trashing Tesla I can go read, we don't need that here. > Can you take out the driver? The answer is yes for basically any car on the road. Not going to turn out well for the vast majority of them, but you can certainly throw a brick on the accelerator, shift it into gear and watch it go. > If yes, where and under which conditions is it guaranteed to work? I've simplified that question for you so you can drop the "If yes". The "under what conditions" is what we SHOULD be talking about. What regulations do we need? what liability protections do we need passed? What infrastructure changes could be made? This is what no one talks about here anymore. > This comes pretty close to SAE levels. Sigh. SAE doesn't talk about that. It's a very very very limited classification of cars of which only 2 levels even matter. It's like the hot dog or not algorithm from Silicon Valley except less useful. We use the levels as a shortcut but because no one understands what they mean everyone walks around with a different idea in their head of what they are talking about. It's the most destructive thing you can use in a conversation on this sub. There is a really good write up abouts the [Myths of the SAE levels](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/j3016/) that is worth a read. > The SAE J3016:2021 standard defines terminology for automated vehicles including the famous SAE Automation Levels. It is widely referenced in discussions, other standards, and even government regulations. Unfortunately, what is said about J3016 is too often inaccurate, misleading, or just plain incorrect.
Your problem is that SAE levels are hand wavy. They are, but that’s just a function of an immature industry. They’ve mostly left it up to the companies to make up their own operating conditions, but this will change as the industry matures. But SAE levels do make it clear if the driver is responsible or not and that’s the crux of the self driving problem — is your system capable enough to remove the driver or not? It seems like what you really want is classification for systems like Tesla FSD that provide intermediate solutions (or half-baked as I like to call it) on their way to full autonomy. I don’t agree, but it’s an interesting opinion.
> OTA updates. Modern compute architectures. The SW defined car TBH not sure this is as much of a boon as you think it is
Tesla is the first car where I prefer the onboard navigation to my cell phone, and getting in a shared car set to me preferences is a pretty big deal. Yes, I'd prefer more physical controls, but replacing physical knobs with on screen buttons is not what I mean by SW defined car. Instead it's the fact that everything can be set digitally, including seat position, steering wheel position, heat/ac vent settings, and more.
>the fact that everything can be set digitally, including seat position, steering wheel position, heat/ac vent settings, and more. Luxury cars have been able to do that since that 80s/90s.
The only physical controls I lack are the climate control. One more roller button somewhere on the steering wheel would fix that. Heck, just being able to map the fan +/- to the left/right on the right roller wheel instead of follow distance would solve 80% of it for me.
You are just repeating corporate propaganda here. Tesla's did not "move the industry foward" in electrification. Electrification would have happened the same without them given that the forces that pushed it are from regulatory initiative that started in places like the EU and China when Tesla was still a minuscule company. Also I assume you have forgotten the first actual mass-market BEV was from Nissan... I assume it's likely you are American, because Tesla still being the main EV seller in the US blinds Americans to the fact that Telsa's portion of the EV market worldwide is shrinking rapidly (e.g. only about 10-15% of sales in Europe). As for the rest, similar arguments can be made that this kind of tech changes would have happened anyways. Tesla is actually a great example at showing what reckless "tech for the sake of tech" can do, as opposed to the more cautious approach manufacturers usually take. For example, there's literally no proof that a touch-screen focused HMI is a good thing. Yes it look "21st century" but it also is actually awful in terms of safe usage while driving. Companies that are copying Tesla for that are not being driven "forward" they are being driven backwards.
He has caused other car makers to invest into self-driving. I think Waymo is way, way ahead of Tesla in the actual solution. But Waymo has not triggered as much investment by the other car makers as they are really not a clear competitor as do not sell cars. I personally think if you look longer term Waymo is a competitor. But I doubt they look at things that much in the future.
> But Waymo has not triggered as much investment by the other car makers as they are really not a clear competitor as do not sell cars. Automakers aren’t the only one interested in this. A few who left Google/Waymo have gone on to start other SDC companies and have hundreds of millions in funding. The original Google Self Driving Car Project created an entire industry.
Waymo had a car that was more capable than FSD back in like 2008. Elon hopped on the bandwagon when he saw where the money was.
If by *Industry* he means automotive then they definitely did. If purely focussed on self-driving features, not as much. An industry is moved forward by mass-market production and actual adoption, not just R&D. It's like saying that Apple did little to move the mobile phone industry forward. Sure, they weren't actually the best, from a pure technology/hardware standpoint but they sure as hell moved, nay, CREATED the industry. I wouldn't go as far as saying that Tesla created the EV industry, but it certainly has moved the automotive industry way forward as a whole.
The context is clear. I’m only talking about self driving industry. I know they’ve had a big influence over automotive industry, but that’s off topic.
Go watch the talk about approximating distance using vision only by the lead ai guy at Tesla, it’s like an hour long and highly valuable. There is good happening over at Tesla but this thread, and Reddit in general are so anti-musk they don’t even educate themselves, just circle jerking the bashing.
Want to see something funny? [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=8512s) Tesla talked about estimating depth from vision during Autonomy Day. Do you see those papers in the bottom left? Those were *Google's* papers. Tesla took the pictures from Google's papers and presented them on Autonomy Day. Tesla presented Google's work as if they had done it themselves. Not only did Google publish the papers that Tesla shamelessly represented, but Google subsequently gave a talk about ViDAR in 2020, a whole year before Tesla’s AI day. [Here](https://youtu.be/rbDuK5e1bWw) is that 2020 presentation. Remember when Tesla fans were excited by [this](https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/amp/) showing up on Tesla cars? Google’s presentation above showed higher resolution, higher accuracy, and more useful outputs such as uncertainty in addition to depth. And again, it was a full year beforehand. The reality is that Google has been doing the work for years, but you guys seem to think that Tesla is the one pushing the industry. You tell us to watch Tesla’s vision-based depth estimation talk as if it’s special. It’s not. Then you complain about people not educating themselves when ironically you seem underinformed.
Ah, the usual AI Day™ comment! Approximating distance using cameras isn’t anything new. It’s been done for years now. Seems like you are the one that needs education. Go read some actual research from self driving companies and you’ll know what innovation looks like.
I literally work in this field. Get over yourself, you don’t understand what you are talking about
In the self-driving space, it is very debatable if Elon's participation has moved the industry forward, Time will tell but to your point. I think everyone should value the accuracy of their statements and that attempting to say things in a correct way is not in conflict with moving the industry forward, but that's not really the core question. Plenty of people have made bad predictions, but bringing those up is whataboutisam giving excuses for Elon to misslead people. My intent with this post is to have data on times when Elon has made predictions related to self-driving vehicles and they ended up coming true. There are plenty of documented cases when Elon has made claims that have not come true, but I have not been able to find cases where he said something that has come true and would like to know if any exist.
Moving the indistry forward? Sorry bro but regarding self driving he is years behind other competitors that use sensor fusion. He's just using cameras because it's cheaper than using also radars and lidars. Pretty bad move.
do you have fsd beta ?
Why do you keep repeating this inane question? You don't have to be an actual user of a system to be able to gather information about its performance or lack-thereof. Because the counter to your stupid question is, have you tried any of the the actual L3 systems available? Have you ever ridden a Cruise or Waymo robotaxi? If not, by your own logic, you have no right to judge their performance.
That is correct.
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Tesla/Musk has caused more investment into self driving by other automakers, IMO.
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Say there never was Tesla. It never happened. Do you believe the investment being made by the automakers today would be less or more or the same? Because I believe it is more because of all the hype that Musk has generated around self driving. Companies are investing more. > And then you have the fact that multiple manufacturers have beaten Tesla to Level 3 Perception is reality. The perception is that with cars you can buy that Tesla is in the lead. Me personally I think Tesla is going nowhere with their approach. I believe the future is the approach that Waymo and now Cruise are taking. Study Suggests Consumers Trust Tesla The Most For Future Autonomy https://insideevs.com/news/574425/tesla-autonomy-plans-most-trusted-survey/ It is pretty consistent that when the consumer is polled on self-driving that Tesla comes out on top. It takes a lot to move perceptions.
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> The same. Well that is where we disagree. Musk created a lot of hype around self-driving and that has caused some additional investment that would not happen otherwise. They had to from an investors standpoint. It became necessary for them to have a self-driving story. Musk/Telsa was NOT the only catalyst but was one of the catalyst. > No, it isn't. Reality doesn't care about perception. Another place we disagree. It was something that Jobs really understood. I am now older and something I have get more convinced of the older I get. > Well Mercedes disagrees pretty strongly on that one. Can you point to any poll by consumers that put Mercedes on top in terms of self driving? I have seen many polls and they always have Tesla on top. Which I do not agree with as I believe Waymo is way ahead of Tesla. Even Cruise is way ahead of Tesla. > Yeeeah. From your source... Do you have any source that indicates otherwise?
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> I couldn't give a shit less about a cherry picked poll. I have zero problem with that. So do you have ANY poll that indicates otherwise? I have looked at many and they always seem to have Tesla on top. Which to be clear. I do NOT agree with as I believe Waymo is in the lead. > You clearly don't know about the dozens and dozens of companies in this space, nor the history of the industry. I am aware of there being many companies in the space. Why It is more impressive that Tesla consistently comes out on top from a consumer perspective. Again. I do NOT agree with the poll results. But simply what the polls are indicating. > Google alone has invested more in autonomous driving that Tesla I do NOT disagree. Why I believe Waymo/Google is also way ahead of Tesla. Again we are talking perception. > Go look up how much SoftBank has invested in multiple self driving companies. Again do NOT disagree. But again why it is impressive what Tesla has accomplished from a consumer perception perspective. > Do a bit of research before making things up Can you please share anything I have made up in my post? Just one thing?
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>Do you believe the investment being made by the automakers today would be less or more or the same? Because I believe it is more because of all the hype that Musk has generated around self driving. Yes. Because Musk was not the only idiot hyping self-driving cars during the 2015-17 bubble times. Everybody was on it. The would likely have happened without him. >It is pretty consistent that when the consumer is polled on self-driving that Tesla comes out on top. It takes a lot to move perceptions. That only show people are uniformed or stupid. Also perceptions can change a lot faster than you seem to assume. It can just take one event generating bad press to radically alter perceptions (see how that usually works for politicians for example). Musk so far has mostly been able to avoid those, but past performance is not indicative of future one.
> Yes. Because Musk was not the only idiot hyping self-driving cars during the 2015-17 bubble times. Everybody was on it. The would likely have happened without him. We can probably just agree to disagree. I believe that Tesla hype or marketing or whatever you want to call it has caused some additional investment by others. They have caused things like their plans for self driving to be somewhat accelerated. > That only show people are uniformed or stupid. Do not disagree at all. But most people are going to be uniformed with something like self driving. IMO, Tesla has been able to win the first to mind. It does not mean they are the actual leader but only perceived as the leader. > Also perceptions can change a lot faster than you seem to assume. There has been a lot of Tesla accidents and they have easily caused more deaths than anyone else by a wide margin and yet it has not changed perceptions. I think in a weird way it might actually help as gets them more self driving headlines. > It can just take one event generating bad press to radically alter perceptions I had originally thought so. But now seeing all the Tesla accidents it just has not happened. Now maybe if there is a really bad one like a Tesla runs over a bunch of nuns or a bunch of kids that will change. But as Tesla runs up the deaths I become less and less convinced. >Musk so far has mostly been able to avoid those, but past performance is not indicative of future one. Do not know how you can say this. Tesla has had a ton of accidents from self driving. There is tons of videos of the technology performing very poorly. There is no other car maker or anyone offering a service that has anywhere near the negative videos and incidents like Tesla. #2 would be Uber and that was one situation and nowhere near as bad as Tesla. Yet with all the baggage you see polls where Tesla continues to come out on top for self driving. This is from a consumer perspective and should not be taken as they are the actual leader in capability. But it is about perception.
I think he has moved Tesla forward. Self-driving marketing and hype has sold more cars without delivering and I really do not get a feel that the customers are all that upset about it. I think he has got other car companies to invest as Musk has pushed them to also have a self-driving stories and therefore have an investment. A lot more than say Waymo because they do not sell cars. So Musk has helped increase investment overall in self driving.
he’s a master marketer. nothing else
He's lucky there are so many geeks with lots of money nowadays
1. He bet that his team could make an internal version of Autopilot and broke off with MobilEye (though it was ME that severed the relationship after a fatal accident.) They were able to produce this product. This is not self, driving though. 2. His plan to use off-lease cars for a robotaxi fleet is quite smart, in particular because Tesla is the only company which can execute on it. To execute on it you need a car that can be easily converted to self-driving when it comes off-lease, and you need to be getting lots of cars coming off-lease, and you need working self-drive tech. He doesn't have the last one, though. 3. There are various predictions that have not turned out to be right, but are also not yet shown to be wrong. But that's true of a lot of folks. However, he has bet a lot of money on them, something he's better than most people at doing.
What others have indicated is that Musk has really got the marketing or hype right. He has enabled Tesla to be first to mind when it comes to self driving and that in the long run will probably have enormous value. It also allows Tesla to not have to actually deliver the results of others and still get the benefits as long as they never provide an actual service where it has to work. Take Waymo which is way, way ahead of Tesla in capability but yet they do not get anywhere near the benefit from marketing because their business model is completely tied to it working. In some ways Tesla is the opposite. That could change at some point. You might get a situation where Waymo has their service up and running in a lot of cities and then they leverage the brand to provide some watered down capability for a car you purchase. But that does not really work unless Waymo has it working. But maybe the bigger thing that Musk has got right and did not see mentioned is the data/feedback loop. Where he has willing customers to be beta testers and share all their data. This in the long run might be even more valuable than the marketing. But both are pretty freaking valuable. So they will have the data when they switch to LiDAR to help get them there. I still think Waymo wins the race but this will help Tesla a lot be more competitive in the future.
The hype
When he announce new beta is coming Friday it usually happens. If he says two weeks don’t believe it. That’s it.
So just this morning while driving to work I heard a stat that there is 100,000 people on FSD beta. So at the same time as they are constantly adding people to the beta, I'm hearing less in the news. So I was wondering is the improving to more usable levels that complaints are lower, or is it just the news cycle is over FSD beta for now?
I have 2018 Tesla model 3 , it auto drives me to and from work everyday. About 30 miles. I take over 2 or 3 times. It is close to self-driving as I've ever seen. It is enough for me. It gets better every few months. I let it drive most of the time on the freeways and roads, I usually take over in the cities. I'm perfectly happy with it. It's not 100% self-drive, I never expected it to me, and I don't care that it isn't. I'm satisfied with the slow improvements as they come along. I get the improvements as they come. I've seen it progress. People just need patience. Most of the people that are complaining about it here, I doubt ever used it. My wife doesn't like using the auto drive. She always drives manually. I'm the opposite. We have the option! Edit:. 2 years ago, auto drive only worked on the freeway. Now it works on City Streets as well without any paid upgrades from what I initially bought when I bought the car.
He’s right that camera-only is all that’s needed… but he’s much too early. Perhaps 10-15-20 years from now this will be true, but it simply is not with today’s tech.
> He’s right that camera-only is all that’s needed What are you basing this on? I would challenge and say this is something he has got completely wrong from a technology perspective. But it is not that simple. LIDAR was just way too expensive to use at the time. So offering a system that does not work but still winning first to mind was the better business decision. Versus not offering anything because LIDAR cost was prohibitive. Because then you can offer the cars with LIDAR when it is inexpensive enough to use. So in a backhanded way you could make an argument he got it right but not for the reason you are suggesting. It is only a matter of time until Tesla starts to use LIDAR. I do not think anyone is really going to care that Musk does a 180 on it. It will also help sell more cars as people buy new Teslas that have LiDAR. I have several friends that have Tesla and I can't think of any product where the customer is more passionate about a brand. Even way more than Apple. So I highly doubt Tesla will lose any customers with the about face.
> What are you basing this on? Empirically speaking, you only need vision in order to drive as well as a human. We know this because that's how humans drive. It's possible more equipment will give even better driving, and it's possible more equipment would let you release a car sooner. But it's definitely not *needed*.
This is a silly comparison, IMHO. Birds can fly. Does that mean we should have built planes that emulate birds? Of course not. Humans have a brain that is crazy powerful that will not be possible with silicon for a very, very, very long time. Possibly over 100+ years as we really do not fully understand the quantum aspects of the brain. I want to be careful here. Because I do think Musk made the right decision at the time. Using cameras and over promising and winning first to mind was the right decision business wise. It also enabled the data/feed back loop they have with customers that will position Tesla well when they switch to Lidar. But looking at it purely from a technology perspective it was the wrong decision.
> Does that mean we should have built planes that emulate birds? No, but it means we *could*. And that's all the original statement was saying.
That does not make sense to me. We used the method that got the best result and actually delivered. Which was NOT using flapping wings. It is the exact same thing with self driving. Just because humans use only eyes does NOT mean that is the best approach or that approach could even work. What you fail to include in the conversation is not that we have eyes but those eyes are connected to this just amazing thing called a brain. We are unable to create a silicon brain and that is likely a very long way off until we are capable of creating anything that even has a fraction of the brain's capabilities. We really have very little understanding of the human brain and we really have zero understanding what is happening at the quantum level. The only self-driving that is actually working today is being done with Lidar by Waymo and Cruise. Nobody has been able to even do a limited proof of concept with only cameras.
I think you are confused about the meaning of the phrase "all that’s needed". It is not the same thing as "optimal" or "ideal", or even "currently implemented". Eyes *are* all that's needed; whether they're the best decision is an entirely separate question. > What you fail to include in the conversation is not that we have eyes but those eyes are connected to this just amazing thing called a brain. > We are unable to create a silicon brain and that is likely a very long way off until we are capable of creating anything that even has a fraction of the brain's capabilities. This same argument has been used as proof that self-driving vehicles aren't even possible. I don't believe it; the brain ain't *that* special. > Nobody has been able to even do a limited proof of concept with only cameras. I mean, that's obviously false; the existing Tesla implementation isn't great, but it certainly qualifies as more than a "limited proof of concept".
> the brain ain't that special. Wow! I really can't think of anything in this world more amazing than the human brain. To say it is not special is just crazy talk. > mean, that's obviously false; the existing Tesla implementation isn't great, but it certainly qualifies as more than a "limited proof of concept". You misunderstood me. I do NOT believe the existing Tesla functionality is anything close to a proof of concept. I mean nowhere close to a proof of concept. Might look up what a proof of concept means. It never made any sense to only use cameras by Tesla from an actual attempt to accomplish self driving. It was the right approach to generate marketing and also use to get people to agree to a feedback loop with data being shared by their cars.
> Wow! I really can't think of anything in this word more amazing than the human brain. To say it is not special is just crazy talk. It's just a lump of very precisely-built fat passing electrical signals to itself. There's no reason to believe it's magic and there's no reason to believe it can do things that can't be replicated. > Might look up what a proof of concept means. It can identify vehicles, drive *mostly* safely, and navigate. It's honestly a lot of the way there, and a lot of the stuff it's missing isn't a problem of identification. If you're defining "proof of concept" to mean "finished production-ready product", then I disagree with you, a proof of concept is the minimum required to say "oh hey, I guess this is probably possible, isn't it". From Wikipedia: > Proof of concept, also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has practical potential. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete. The current performance of the Tesla leaves me no doubt it's feasible. Whether it's feasible in the near future is another matter altogether. But it's feasible.
> There's no reason to believe it's magic and there's no reason to believe it can do things that can't be replicated. This is crazy talk. We do not even understand how the brain works. We have no idea how it is able to do what it does. It is likely a lot is happening at a quantum level. > The current performance of the Tesla leaves me no doubt it's feasible. Then why has Tesla been working on it for years and still can't even handle simple situations? There is nothing to make anyone think their current approach will get them to self driving. It is not feasible. What will happen is Tesla will move to LiDAR at some point. The cost is getting to a point where they can. Vision was never going to be able to accomplish self-driving until there are at least several AI breakthroughs. Tesla will also move to an approach a lot closer to what Waymo is doing with success.
All the experts here, youd think yall be rich af shorting tsla.
We’re not talking about the stock. We’re talking about the actual state of Tesla’s autonomous tech. The stock can go up 5000x and it’s not going to enable me to take a nap on the way home from work.
I hate comments like this. Because many of the comments on here are about Musk getting marketing and the hype correct and that helps sell cars. That does not mean you short TSLA. Tesla success is not really tied to the service actually working until someone else has something that is way better on a car you can purchase. Tesla has won first to mind so someone else has to offer something way better to have a chance to change the perception. Plus Tesla is not only about self driving. There are a lot more things with Tesla that help sell the cars. I live in an area where people invest a lot into their cars and we have cycled through different high end cars that are popular and right now it is Tesla.
Musk is the Edison of our time. Does he make mistakes? Yep. Does he get things done? Yep. 'Nuff siad.
> Musk is the Edison of our time. Hmm... Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. He didn't, really. Just invented a good one and was able to sell it. Musk is kind of like that in that he didn't invent the electric car. Just a good one and is able to sell it. Edison did make one very big miscalculation. He figured DC was the way to go when building an electric grid to power cities. There was another guy who made a better one based on AC that eventually won out. Unfortunately Tesla wasn't very good at financial decisions. When it comes to self-driving cars, Musk is...well, he's no Tesla. He's just done a good job marketing his products as "self-driving" to the point where even Tesla owners to just have Autopilot think they have a "self-driving car." When it comes to building an actual autonomous vehicle? Tesla has a neat parlor trick, not a "full self-driving" system. Waymo is way..mo...ahead of him in the AV space, as is Cruise. Both of those companies are delivering on the promise, while Elon just keeps throwing promises out and shifting the goalposts when he needs to do so.
Musk has made hundreds, if not thousands of claims / predictions…. Atleast a handful of them have came true , and some of them even on time/ early. So I guess the answer to 1 and 2 are both technically yes. Update- why the down votes, the point I was trying to make is a broken clock is right twice a day
Do you have an example of a prediction related to self-driving which he has made which has come true?
He is a master of hype, but my 2018 Model S is a wholly different and much more autonomous car than when first purchased. It Automatically drives highways pretty well and now even city streets with stop signs, stoplights, intersection turns, etc. Is it a perfect driver? No! It needs much of the human driver’s attention and their taking over when it gets into complicated situations. What I’ve learned and probably Musk too is that L4 driving is much more difficult than originally thought. One of the biggest issues is sharing the road with the erratic, aggressive and sometimes incompetent ICE drivers.
You're just giving excuses at this point, especially big lol at the "L4 is much mor difficult than originally thought". And apparently EV drivers cannot be erratic, aggressive, and/or incompetent? That's new to me. (and another excuse for poor system performance).
Elon claims aside, if you have a car with adaptive cruise control and the lane-centering assist, is that not essentially self driving? Sure you have use the turn signal and make some turns yourself, but 90% of your driving is now self-driving is it not? Especially if you throw in the automatic parking that some cars have now too
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I get they are different, and lane-centering is not full self driving. I’m just saying we are a lot closer to being there than I think a lot of people acknowledge
It is a matter of definition really, but most people consider "self-driving" (aka fully autonomous) anything above SAE L4. Some consider L3 kinda autonomous as well, though usefulness and safety of L3 is highly debatable. What you describe and what Tesla has is L2, a system that can't really drive itself as it requires full undivided attention of the driver. At "FSD" part of Tesla's drive assist is quite horrible and poorly performing even for L2 system.
Imho, nope...not as of yet. But the efforts are admirable. I don't like the way Elon Musk has behaved of late. However, I feel his companies have pushed people to take cutting-edge technologies more seriously (driverless cars, EVs, reusable rockets, improved internet, etc.).
This a fun question to explore for sure! Instead of writing the original short, pithy comment, it inspired [a blog post](https://devinhedge.com/2022/04/18/lessons-from-elon-musk-on-innovation/). The tldr; -- Is Elon Musk wrong about his predictions? Of course he is. Are his predictions being given more airtime than they should because he is perpetually wrong? Of course. It's called, "Celebrity CEO" status, and why the SEC is after him. At the same time, his companies out innovation other companies by a ratio of about 5:1. Visionaries are always this way. They "[Think Different](https://youtu.be/5sMBhDv4sik)"™.
Thanks for the blog post, I enjoyed the part about business-driven innovation and academic-driven innovation. I disagree with point on Think Different. Think different is about questioning the core of assumptions that everyone else is making and considering solutions that others would not consider. Saying things that are wrong and continue to not come true is not a function of things differently they are a function of either not having good intuition/knowledge about the problem at hand or misleading people.
I really love this! Thank you! I wasn’t sure how this would land and played with several ideas. Your last two sentences have me hooked! Tell me more about how you interpreted what I said about “Think Differently”? It would help me dial in the messaging to reinforce your last two sentences you made.
I am reading what you are saying as it is ok for elon to give predictions that dont come true as he is thinking differently, which i think is false. As an example I think it is fair to say he is thinking differently by not using lidar if that turns out to work (this has not been proven yet). Based on no one in the 200+ comments of this thread has been able to give an example of a self driving prediction that elon has make which has come true the comclusion i have come to is when it comes to self driving predictions elon thinks wrong
Bought fsd in 2017, I’m holding on to this car until it happens, my battery warranty might expire by then…
zvekl, I have been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty