“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
He and Trump deserve each other.
Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.
I would like them to try to go to Mars this coming January. I am sure with enough fuel one of Elons rockets can get it moving in the right direction, they can wing everything else as they go.
I don’t think he would go submarine diving, it would be more in-character for him to try and fail a moon vacation.
Makes sense. I’m not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.
I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.
His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.
More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.
Aren’t they all motivated by wealth and greed?
Well any political choice will increase the wealth of the billionaire class in general. Ant candidate that is a threat to that will be smeared to dust before they get anywhere near power.
But Musk is going for the more direct approach, and tbh I think the second Trump gets power again he’ll have no need for Musk and will treat him like the parasite he is. He’s certainly done that before.
Over Promise under deliver
Good. I don’t trust them dern robuts.
No, there won’t be endless series of recalls and free upgrades for everyone until they finally achieve it as promised, somewhere between 2050 and 3050…
You have to live with it as it is.
Forever? No. Only for as long as you live.
He’s just trying to sell the upgrade so people will throw away their old cars and buy new ones. But that already happened with the last version and it still can’t do it. This won’t be any different with him in charge. Put an engineer in charge, invest in the tech, and you might get there. But Tesla is not going to ever get there while it needs to sell every incremental advance in tech rather than spending time and money on lots of iterations of prototypes that don’t need to be mass produced.
Lol put an engineer in charge! Hahaha what a ridiculous idea. Can’t have engineers in charge of businesses! Would never happen
salesmanship
You mean false advertisement
It’s pure grift.
Or just fraud
Right. Good salespeople listen to customers, not try to sell them something they a) don’t need or b) won’t work as advertised.
Worse than that. Fraud. He’s scammed people out of millions.
Can’t wait for the supporters to come out and gas light buyers instead: "uh, well of course they couldn’t. He didn’t lie you just don’t understand tech…!
I work in IT and people that think like that can fuck themselves. “What do you mean Meta lied by selling your data to a company you didn’t know about. Maybe you should just have never trusted Meta.”
Stupid fucking boot lickers.
To be fair to Meta, they did tell you they might do that. They didn’t lie. They just told you in the find print of an already convoluted and arcane legal document that they know most people would never read, fewer would understand, and no one could do anything to change.
So unlike Tesla, where they did lie about FSD’s capabilities, and that is at best false advertising but probably actually fraud, Meta at least had a thin veneer of plausible deniability against accusations of being liars when they sold your data to unknown third-parties because they did tell you about it, you just needed a law degree to understand what they were telling you.
My Leaf can handle itself on the highway and it’s the perfect amount of self driving that I want. I also didn’t need to pay half the price of the leaf for the privilege.
I believe that some technological ideas can work. The problem is that ideas that are under people like Musk, are doomed to always fail and will be seen as negative.
Elon Musk sucks.
The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail
Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…
Yep Elon famously invented the first electric car and the first reusable spacecraft. He did it in his garage with his own two hands!
Read your damn history.
SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period
Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.
Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.
Wow. What a visionary 🙄
I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.
And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.
He wasn’t up Trump’s ass like a month ago. That’s a fairly recent development.
Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.
Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.
People also shouldn’t sell things to end users before they’ve invented them
As ever, things that succeed with Musk as the figurehead succeed despite him not because of him.
Maybe he shouldn’t have called it “autopilot.”
Copilot would just violate patents
Hot take, common words should not be patentable.
Hotter take: patents shouldn’t exist.
Knowing Elon, you’d think he’d have just called it something stupid like BroPilot to get around that
69420Pilot 🤣 DogePilot 🤣🤣 Concerning!!Pilot 🤣🤣🤣
This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.
Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.
This 100%, too many musk fanboys don’t understand how much he is actually hindering innovation.
Even at SpaceX they make more progress when he isn’t involved.
Never buy a product for a non existent feature that’s promised in update.
Just like early-access games.
you just angered the entire AI/singularity community. Expect a sternly worded, AI-generated notice.
The letter is not here yet you liar
The letter is not here yet you liar
A sternly worded, AI-generated notice:
While it’s understandable to be cautious about buying a product based on promised updates, there are several reasons why it can still be a reasonable decision:
-
Trust in the Brand: Many companies have a track record of delivering on their promises. If a brand has a history of providing valuable updates and features, it may be worth trusting that they will continue to do so.
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Current Value: Even if a product has promised future features, it often provides substantial value in its current state. Users can benefit from the existing features while looking forward to enhancements.
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Community and Ecosystem: Some products thrive in a vibrant community where users share tips, tricks, and workarounds. The support of an active user base can enhance the product experience even before promised features are released.
-
Long-term Investment: In fast-paced technology markets, many products evolve over time. Buying early can sometimes give users a competitive edge or ensure they are part of the development process, influencing future updates.
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Risk vs. Reward: While there’s a risk that promised features may not materialize, the potential reward—enhanced functionality, improved performance, or even a price drop due to demand—can make the investment worthwhile.
-
Feedback Opportunities: Early adopters often have a voice in the development of future updates. Engaging with a product before all features are released can allow users to provide valuable feedback that shapes the final product.
In conclusion, while it’s prudent to be wary of non-existent features, evaluating the overall value, the brand’s reputation, and potential benefits can justify the purchase.
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I realized self-driving on roads is impossible for so-called when someone pointed out what human drivers do when there’s like a flock of geese camped out in the middle of the road.
We know that we should slowly move forward until they get out of the way, including bonking then with the car (gently). Do we want cars deciding that some obstruction in the road is “ok” to hit? I don’t. So what’s the solution? Something other than pure autonomous self driving.
We can probably have some very high level driver assist. Maybe.
All the issues with self-driving could be solved if they actually gave a shit about making it work. You don’t let the machine choose. You give it hard fucking rules to follow. It doesn’t need to identify geese, human, ball, dog, child to react differently to each; it should see an obstruction and stop to avoid damaging the fucking object and car, regardless of what it is. They are making it way more complicated than it really has to be.
You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.
We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it’s seeing, otherwise it’s useless.
That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it’s going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It’s fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can’t recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.
They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)
It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.
That’s why they use LIDAR and not just visual cameras. They don’t need to know the difference between different objects; they just need to know an object is there, in the way, or even moving in a way that could potentially put it in the path of the vehicle.
They’re making it more complicated by working on both autonomous driving, and also image recognition for use by AI.
my point is that “if there’s an obstruction, stop” means these cars are going to be stopping and requiring human intervention all the time. That’s semi autonomous at best.
I don’t know if you’ve encountered intransigent geese in your driving adventures, but the only way to deal with them is to slowly drive through the flock until they move out of your way.
fully autonomous cars are never going to happen without major changes to our roads. we’d be better off investing in more busses and trains.
I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that’s literally what those technologies are for.
But even then, that’s not enough. LIDAR/radar can’t help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.
The thing with (full) self-driving is that the edge cases are the challenge. Driving is the Pareto Principle really cranked up: (fully made up numbers) 2% of the driving represents 90% of the difficulty. And highway driving is a much simpler task to be automated than driving on a stroad, weird intersections, unprotected turns, etc.
I think we are a long ways off from full self-driving, and highway driving capabilities of current vehicles only address what is by far the easiest scenario. And even there those capabilities are limited from what I’ve seen.
This is the epitome of American “ingenuity” as it promises, promises, promises, and no-one ever actually delivers.
Just. Like. Trump.
Trump is the most American president we’ve ever had.
