
Autonomy
"We bought a full autonomy product..."
And the moral of the story is don't buy anything that mentions "Autonomy", especially one with a charismatic leader of the company
California's Attorney General is reportedly investigating complaints about the safety of Tesla's so-called self-driving features, as well as boasts made by the automaker about the technology in its marketing. CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly come under fire for making outlandish claims about the capabilities of Tesla's Autopilot …
No, the moral of the story is always let some other poor sap buy the car first, test it for you and discover and deal with all the problems, then research your purchases accordingly before parting with 30k+ of your money.
At no point was it ever full autonomy. Ever. Not even for a microsecond, and then later revoked. You bought a sales "promise", from a car dealer, with absolutely no way for them to deliver on it. And, hilariously, you bought a promise that this car would do something that no other car has ever done in all of recorded history.
I have no sympathy, but I am very grateful that someone is now taking this up from a consumer-law point of view because it's years past that point and Tesla are still getting away with fraud.
I agree, it's the fraud aspect that should have consequences. It means you can simply not trust anything that the company says that is not strictly regulated and verified.
But hey, if you had not worked out by now that Musk is literally as reliable as a car salesman you really haven't been paying attention.
Or are one of his reality-blind fans.
The article, like so many other people, waves it's arms over the Society of Automotive Engineers level ratings(which were invented after the fact, self drive was cowboy country). In reality, while Musk has personally fueled Tesla owners misconceptions, and also personally pushed Tesla to release dangerous features(like summon), may of the loudest voices were people outside Tesla making wildly exaggerated claims about what these cars could do, and when the they would be able to do them.
Tesla's autopilot is only rated to Level 2, but it was designed to be able to do much, much more. So it's no surprise that other companies have jumped ahead in certification, as they are only rated to work in bumper to bumper traffic on large and designated roads. That's not what Tesla sold people that pre-paid for "Full self drive" and they have made it pretty clear that they indent to sue. So Tesla has to keep shooting for delivering what it sold. It may well leapfrog back over the completion at some point, but meeting the L3 constraints doesn't seem like a priority for them, because it won't take much heat off them. And the cars already do ok at those speeds with a hand on the wheel. So Tesla should rightly not waste time chasing L3 and focus on fixing it's tendencies to slam into emergency vehicles, cut off other drivers, and stop in the middle of the freeway like a startled donkey.
"And the cars already do ok at those speeds with a hand on the wheel. "
And that's helpful how? I've driven a car with "driver assistance" and it's not a pleasant experience. Bells and beeps are going off and since it wasn't my car, I have no clue why nor could I take my eyes off the road to study the display/idiot lights. The last thing I want is for the car to also apply the brakes, accelerate or steer without my input. Maybe it would help prevent an accident, but I believe it would be more likely to cause one as I overcorrect in the other direction since I'd have no clue why the car was taking over.
If I have to pay attention and be ready to take over with no notice, I'm much better off doing it all myself. I do use my cruise control all of the time and wish it was adaptive, but that's mainly to keep my leg from cramping up, staying within the speed limit and saving petrol by not having big speed oscillations. I don't find that it's making me pay less attention to the road ahead of me. A function I haven't seen any maker installing is to notify when some speed demon is approaching from behind at a fast closing rate. A voice that says "check 6" would be more helpful than a bell/chime.
"I have no sympathy, but I am very grateful that someone is now taking this up from a consumer-law point of view because it's years past that point and Tesla are still getting away with fraud."
Some years ago Elon was saying that all Tesla cars were being built with all of the hardware they'd need for FSD. The only thing left was to get the software working well enough. Wellllllll, it appears that the early hardware isn't going to work and other hardware that isn't more than a couple of years old might work, but won't support all of the capabilities as the latest hardware supposedly will. Who's to say what the narrative will be in 12 months?
I think all of us here understand that with something like this, the hardware and software need to grow hand in hand or it just won't work properly. When I was designing and building avionics for rockets, I worked with the software guys very closely and there was a lot of back and forth. The group would always joke "we'll just fix it in software", but it was just an ongoing joke.
If the claims about rigging the battery charge levels are true, that would be like the equivalent of the VW Dieselgate scandal for EV makers. Should be pretty easy to prove as well if investigators can get their hands on the source code before Twitler orders all evidence to be purged from the repos.
But on a more general note, I'm just glad that all the ridiculously obvious bullshit claims Twitler makes are finally starting to come back to bite him in the ass. I'm probably hoping for too much, but maybe this time the board will decide that he's more liability than asset and boot his ass to the curb like PayPal did. There are complaints about quality of the cars, there are multiple pending lawsuits with some pretty damning allegations alleging racial and sexual harassment/assault at Tesla factories, and why the SEC hasn't come after him for making claims about how FSD will be available by the end of the year (multiple years running) I'll never know. The SEC should bar him from ever being able to hold an officer position at any publicly traded company ever again after all the market manipulation he's done right out in the open on Twitter. Let him spend his days being queen bitch on his mean girls platform for however long he can manage to keep it operational, then he can play pretend rocket engineer at SpaceX and get in the way of the actual engineers until he destroys that company too. It's not like he actually ever had any intention of going to Mars even if it were possible. He'd never survive 6-months without the ability to be a Nazi troll on Twitter.
SpaceX already have a team of people whose sole job is to ensure that Musk is kept from doing any more damage to the company. I believe one of the ways they do that is o ensure that Musk is not allowed to talk to any of the real engineering staff (he is allowed to talk to some "engineers", but has not realised that they are shop dummies dressed up in corporate clothes with old plats of pizza near them).
"SpaceX already have a team of people whose sole job is to ensure that Musk is kept from doing any more damage to the company."
Sorry, I see no evidence of that. The reason they didn't install the "not-a-flame-trench" water cooled plate under the exploding grain silo is that it wasn't ready for the Stoner's holiday (4/20). That was a Musk thing. He could have waited a week for it to be installed, but then he'd miss his favorite day of the year.
The SEC should bar him from ever being able to hold an officer position at any publicly traded company ever again after all the market manipulation he's done right out in the open on Twitter
He also did that with crypto. Now I am the first to agree that the whole blockchain thing is nothing more than a global warming causing scam (a limited supply means the haves can manipulate the have-less to their heart's content), but Musk brought the scamming to a whole new level by accepting and then not accepting crypto coin as payment. To me the whole on/off/on/off aspect seemed pretty much the most blatant market manipulation possible, but as crypto is not as regulated as it should be (ask victims of FTX) he got away with it..
"Now I am the first to agree that the whole blockchain thing is nothing more than a global warming causing scam"
Crypto and Blockchain are different things. Blockchain is a method of tracking something and keeping a non-editable record of it (for a certain value of 'uneditable'). Crypto uses Blockchain, but that doesn't make them the same thing.
"To me the whole on/off/on/off aspect seemed pretty much the most blatant market manipulation possible, but as crypto is not as regulated as it should be (ask victims of FTX) he got away with it.."
There is a $258 Billion dollar lawsuit surrounding Dogecoin with Elon as a central defendant. He didn't get way with it just yet.
A large percentage of the board are family. They might be peeved that they have to return their $735M when Elon has so far kept the $55B they agreed to. I would also like to see some consequences for sending Tesla staff to Twitter but so far the board have done nothing about that.
" I would also like to see some consequences for sending Tesla staff to Twitter but so far the board have done nothing about that."
Motions by the board must be unanimous. Elon votes no and that's that issue s-canned. Do you need to wonder who wrote many of the Tesla corporate bylaws? Short of a judicial removal of Elon from the management of the company, there's not much that can be done about him. If Elon gets in a bunch of financial trouble and has to sell his unencumbered Tesla shares, perhaps he won't have enough votes in a shareholder action to stave off removing him as CEO.
It's more or less the direct opposite to dieselgate. On the one hand the harm to the purchaser is obvious with the false range display, on the other hand they haven't used that to deceive the regulators. It may come to a similar extremely expensive end though.
I was thinking more in terms of it being a scandal relating to the car maker rigging the software to produce false results. And the fact that both will likely end up being blamed on a "rogue engineer" as if that sort of thing wouldn't be spotted in a second by coworkers and have to pass through some kind of change control process, or the fact that the software engineers probably wouldn't have had any reason to know that the car wasn't meeting expectations until someone came along and told them they need to come up with a solution for how to make it appear as if the car was meeting expectations.
Reading some of the reports about what the call center employees did, I am once again reaffirmed in the idea that I would never make it working at Tesla. They clearly want sociopaths, whereas I'd be like the guy in the Incredibles movies who surreptitiously tells people how to navigate all the red tape. That's if I had any desire to work there after knowing the CEO is a giant narcissistic nazi man-baby who's utterly incompetent, is known for firing people who just happen to be within eyesight when he's in a bad mood, and is a pretty obvious conman. Years ago, I was always suspicious of the guy, even when he was the darling of the tech world and mass media, because he would go out of his way to try to smear people who complained about their Tesla cars. That never sat right with me, and ever since the pandemic when he decided that his personal wealth was more important than the health and safety of his employees, he's repeatedly proven my unease to be well founded.
>” On the one hand the harm to the purchaser is obvious with the false range display”
and mileage claims to prospective purchasers…
and the creation of a team/department tasked to further mislead owners by cancelling owners’ service appointments by claiming “ remote diagnostics have determined battery is fine”…
I owned a 2014 VW Alltrack TDI and was so proud of the mileage I was able to get out of it until I checked the calibration of the odometer and found it was actually reporting nearly 5% over. Indeed, Tesla is playing almost exactly the same game as VW. VW did replace my TDI with a later model TSI after the recall. The mileage is not nearly as good owing to gasoline versus diesel--and the fact that it seems accurate.
Unfortunately the big, and legally important difference, is that what really landed VW in trouble - and some of them in jail - was the fact that they lied on a formal submission to the Federal Government.
Instrument readings given to drivers are made not made under oath, or with the risk of perjury charges.
"If the claims about rigging the battery charge levels are true, that would be like the equivalent of the VW Dieselgate scandal for EV makers. Should be pretty easy to prove as well if investigators can get their hands on the source code before Twitler orders all evidence to be purged from the repos."
They don't even need the code. It's easy enough to check by looking at the state of charge, the reported miles remaining and the efficiency. There are also apps that query the stats through the CAN bus and independently report estimated distance remaining.
"...if investigators can get their hands on the source code before Twitler orders all evidence to be purged from the repos."
You mean, something like this (allegedly) happening over in Florida...?
This deletion scheme is said to have started in the days following June 22, 2022, when the US Department of Justice sent a draft grand jury subpoena for the surveillance video to the high-profile defendant's attorney.
On Monday, June 27, 2022, De Oliveira, according to the superseding indictment, privately met the IT director and said "that 'the boss' wanted the server deleted."
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/29/florida_man_video_indictment/
Followed by Liz Truss
To be fair - *we* didn't elect Liz Truss. It was done by the Conservative party members (being mostly old white people who fondly remember Maggie Thatcher and didn't much like short, brown people). It was notable that Rishi's election was a 'Tory MP-only' elections - the pasrty rules only require the membership have a vote if there's more than one candidate who passes the MP vote. Since Rishi was the sole candidate, no membership vote was required.
Bojo however, yes. That's a collective responsibility. The country was fooled into voting for Tory MPs despite the fact that the head of the party was a known liar and serially-unfaithful to his various wives and thus provable to be unable to keep his promises. But he waved the "oven-ready Brexit" flag, despite Brexit still being in the back of the freezer..
Early FSD purchasers were selected for their enthusiasm to contribute towards making FSD work. These were people who were happy to contribute their time and effort to create training data and give it to Tesla for free. They paid money knowing that FSD required continuous supervision. Perhaps they some of them have caught on to the fact that FSD will not exceed SAE level 2 without new hardware. I am not sure what their legal position is now.
Tesla later expanded FSD sales to people who read the headlines and tweets but not the small print. If they tried contacting Tesla after sales support I am sure that they found the experience as useful as talking to a wall. If any of them got as far as talking to a lawyer then their lawyer would read the small print and advise the client accordingly. Many customers are actually happy with FSD. Under ideal conditions it performs well enough to give a strong false sense of security.
Musk has clearly signalled the type of employee he wants to deal with Tesla customer complaints. That should convince anyone with a clue not to buy and apparently the message is getting through.
I expected FSD litigation to take a long time to get started but this particular drugged sloth does seem to have been crippled in a car accident.
(Selling a Tesla ends FSD for the vehicle. Anyone seen evidence that buying a replacement Tesla restores FSD for a purchaser?)
I tried looking for a link supporting my statement and found conflicting results.
When FSD disappears unexpectedly it hits the news hard and spreads. When FSD transfers with the vehicle it hardly generates any news.
Allegedly Musk has said FSD transfers with the vehicle but I did not bother to check because he has said many things that are not entirely true. I have found a few reports of FSD transferring with the vehicle in private sales. There are also horror stories: FSD in test drive, buy the second hand vehicle and it disappears. FSD working fine in a second hand car until new owner registers with Tesla. A vehicle had FSD when documentation said it didn't - this was fixed in a software update.
FSD does disappear if you sell back to Tesla. The next purchaser may choose to buy FSD, but it will be with new terms and conditions more favourable to Tesla. FSD has disappeared at the end of a lease. Check the terms and conditions.
A quick internet search is not going to tell me what the proportions are or if any reports are exaggerated. I could say caveat emptor but I would rather recommend buying from a supplier with a reputation for proper after sales support.
Don't forget that FSD can be taken away at any time by Tesla, like happened to a former employee who had a Youtube channel devoted to their experiences with FSD that apparently Twitler didn't like.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/tesla-fired-employee-who-posted-fsd-beta-videos-as-ai-addict-on-youtube.html
Doesn't that classify as straight theft?
After all, he paid for the license.
The more I read about FSD and the weird conditions it is associated with, the more it looks like a straight up con to extract money from people for as yet totally unmet promises.
Which is normally called 'fraud'.
It is just a giant scam. It doesn't do anything remotely like what Twitler claims, they're nowhere near delivering what they've promised, and they keep raising the price. You can't quite call if vaproware because there is at least something, but it's just barely on this side of vaporware.
"Seriously? If this is true, reselling the car would make it drop tens of K's in value."
The same applies to software controlled enhancements you pay BMW for. You pay for "lifetime" heated seats, but when you sell it, the heated seats no longer work unless the new owner also pays again for those same heated seats. Or you pay-per-month on a subscription model, the preferred way as far as BMW are concerned as they want the regular income after the one off sale of the vehicle. They are all at it or heading that way. Even the sale of the car is falling out of favour as lease companies are targetting private individuals these days rather than corporate fleets.
"but when you sell it, the heated seats no longer work unless the new owner also pays again for those same heated seats."
Can't you buy a bypass module on AliExpress yet? Heated seats would be easy to work around if they were subscription locked. FSD is going to rely on continued support from Tesla and far more difficult to patch the car's software to get around the lock. If Tesla gets wind of a crack, they'll do something like have a check the next time they broadcast an update and have the car display an annoying red banner with instructions to take the car to a Tesla service center to make it go away. I don't think they could brick the car and not get drawn and quartered in a lawsuit, but they could still do something to punish the miscreants that modify their software.
> “If this is true, reselling the car would make it drop tens of K's in value.”
In a number of recent radio discussions, it has been noted that whilst used ICE vehicle prices have been going up, the price of used EVs continues to fall and EVs are the hardest for a used car dealer to sell.
"selling a Tesla ends FSD for the vehicle"
FSD is sold to the buyer and isn't a 'feature' of the car they purchase. The buyer that has purchased FSD can have it activates on their new Tesla.
Think about that. If somebody sells their Tesla and doesn't replace it with another Tesla, they've lost $15,000 or whatever they paid for FSD. They also can't recoup the money by having the function stay with the car and getting the new owner to pay for it. The new owner can themselves send Tesla a pile of banknotes to have FSD switched on. Somebody at Tesla in their "Total Slimeball" department figured out that it would be a way to incentivize (or penalize) people when considering their next vehicle purchase.
"Tesla does not advertise."
Yes. At least, they don't *pay* to advertise. They (and Musk, especially Musk) just release wild PR and the media does it for them :-)
And, of course, designing a product with a specific shape and corporate logo on it is also advertising, emblazoning the Tesla logo on the "superchargers" is advertising etc etc etc :-)
Not making TV, print or online adverts doesn't mean they don't advertise.
"Yes. At least, they don't *pay* to advertise. "
I thought there were rumblings that Tesla was going to advertise on the service formerly known as Twitter as a way to shovel money from Tesla to Elon and keep the Saudi Investment fund operators from hunting Elon down and lopping off his head for losing their money.
It really is a case of the Empreror's new clothes. The man is a fraud, his companies are all clearly dodgy. Rockets that are *meant* to explode? yeah, right... and self-driving cars that aren't? Yeah, that's part of his playbook. And cars the exaggerate range? that too.
What's the point in 'full autonomy' if the human needs to be able to take over at a monent's notice? If you're not driving, you're not concentrating. And if you're not concentrating, you're not in any position to 'take over'. The more I see that man do, the more convinced I am that the power has gone to his head. I wouldn't trust him to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions emblazoned on the heel, let alone take the helm of a CAR company. And as for Twitter? he broke it. He may have some grand plan in that weird excuse for a brain he has, but it's not going to work by alienating the public.
Experimental rockets are not meant to explode but it is expected, and that goes double for hardware rich development. For the consequences of not doing hardware rich, look at SLS, Vulcan, Ariane 6 and New Glenn. SpaceX Falcon 9 has demonstrated outstanding reliability. I attribute that record to SpaceX employees (and Twitter) keeping Musk away from important decisions.
Musk's grand plan for Twitter has already been tested when his x.com merged with Thiel's Paypal. Thiel and other investors could see where it was going and kicked him out before he did too much damage. Musk does particularly badly in fields with effective regulation. I hope that makes the bank of X-Twitter a non-starter but there may be still be a few fools ready to sign over their pension fund for a Musk promise. Presumably that is why he is pissing and whining so loudly to end the consent decree he signed to avoid prosecution for securities fraud.
I thought the purpose of 'full automony' that requires human supervision was clear: Sell it for loads of money and sell out of the company before the consequences arrive.
(Muskrats are recognised as an invasive species in the EU but in there natural habitats they are an important food source for other animals. To the best of my knowledge they are rarely accused of fraud and would be unhappy about being associated with Twitler.)
Before buying Twitter, TSLA was around $300/share. When Musk sold several large batches of shares to buy Twitter the price dropped to around $110 recovered quickly to about $250 and is now about $270 (maximum was about $400 - when you see larger numbers they are pre-split). I did not understand the initial high price and I really do not understand the recovery. As nothing so far has had the expected result I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA.
"I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA."
Enable FSD?
"and I really do not understand the recovery."
Skittish markets. It's something we see all the time. the slightest hint at a problem with a listed company and the price crashes as the markets "panic". Almost invariably it turns out that most sensible people didn't really see the blip as a serious problem and clever ones start buying when they see the price falling and make a quick profit as the price recovers both because of the initial "panic"being overblown and the buying spree of now-cheap stocks in what is a perfectly viable business. Just look at stock falls when a company doesn't quite make it's predicted $billions, even though they are still beating last years profits.
It's generally the "get rich quick" short termers causing this. people in it for the long run are looking years down the line, not just next week.
"Skittish markets. It's something we see all the time. the slightest hint at a problem with a listed company and the price crashes as the markets "panic"."
The skittishness of Tesla investors is not inappropriate. The price of the stock and market cap of the company is way out of register with the size, revenue and net profits of the company. A house of cards. One stiff breeze could crash it. If it's an institutional investor, they could sell a large chunk of stock to move elsewhere with better prospects that that could trigger the landslide. As Tesla pays no dividends, to make money on the stock, one has to sell or take a big risk of the stock price falling below where they purchased it when they need liquidity.
"Musk's grand plan for Twitter has already been tested when his x.com merged with Thiel's Paypal. "
That's not even a close enough approximation to let go. X didn't "merge" with Paypal. Elon had nothing to do with the company Paypal. Elon owned stock in Paypal through a series of buyouts that included one of his ventures.
"Experimental rockets are not meant to explode but it is expected, and that goes double for hardware rich development."
No, lots of work by real rocket companies goes into a new design to avoid anything going off bang. To say "hardware rich development" is making something up to excuse poor engineering. Tom Mueller is recognized by many as the person behind the Falcon program. Tom would have nothing to do with Starship and has left SpaceX altogether. Elon is not an engineer, knows little about engineering and manufacturing no matter what his claims are about being the top person in the world when it comes to both. It really shows each time another Starship/Booster explodes and fails in ways other companies have figured out decades ago. A huge downside is Texas and the US Federal government letting Elon do this in the middle of sensitive ecological areas and just a stones throw (or flying chunk of concrete) from an international border. The wreckage of his 420 flight came down in Mexican territorial waters.... ooops. "Sorry (not sorry) about all of that hydraulic fluid everywhere".
Still an incredibly stupid name. That’s the product that watches your blind spot, beeps at you if you get too close to the car in front of you, etc. Many other cars have the same features. AFAICT it works just fine.
It’s FSD that is utter horseshirt. It’s $12K extra and gets you a bunch of dangerous half-finished nonsense that should be banned from public roads.
IMO it’s important to separate the two, which would be easier if Autopilot had a better name.
It’s common knowledge that the weather affects your range, in any vehicle. If you are running the AC full blast that energy has to come from somewhere. ICE drivers don’t notice because mostly you just stop at a station when the light comes on.
The Tesla route planner might be “rosy” but it’s also just really simple. Here’s a partial list of things it doesn’t account for:
- Outside temperature
- Precipitation
- Elevation change
- Number of passengers (and their sizes)
- Cargo in the vehicle
- Trailers, roof racks, etc.
- % of charge desired at destination
There’s an app called A Better Route Planner that does all of that and more.
And it should go without saying: I wish Elon would FOAD so that people can go back to evaluating Tesla on the merits.
It isn't hard to note the current charge level and the rate of drop in real time, averaged over some period to produce a more dynamic range estimate than waiting for a drop to 50% charge and suddenly wildly dropping the range estimate.
Maybe they didn't actually write the algorithm and just ripped off and adapted the MS Windows file transfer time algo?
It also isn’t hard to implement a simple feedback and forecasting system in the car. My 2002 ICE car had both an actual fuel level indicator and an estimated distance indicator that was based on my actual driving pattern; yes it’s not perfect, but it has often permitted me to better judge refuelling stops - on occasions ignoring the actual level indicator because I was doing significantly better mpg and on others to ignore the forecast as I knew I was driving into congestion etc. and so would use fuel more rapidly.