It’s because we are scared as fuck with autopilot on and are hyper attentive. My car drives like a drunk teenager and routinely tries to murder me in autopilot.
That said, I have a lot of faith in Papa Musk and his team. I think this nut will be cracked eventually, but its just going to take a lot of time to do so - far more than the timeline he initially proposed, as detailed in your excellent post earlier.
Peter Thiel once said, "Never bet against Elon Musk."
Elon said he was going to build a private space launch company. He did.
Elon said he was going to build an electric car company. He did.
Elon said he was going to build a $35,000 electric car for the masses. He did.
Elon said he was going to build a worldwide satellite constellation for Internet access. He is. Rapidly.
Everything Elon has said he was going to do, he has. He hasn't always done it at the speed at which he said he would, but he does always get it done.
He (meaning his team / company) will eventually develop a fully self-driving car. No, it may not occur at the pace at which he proclaimed, but I have confidence it'll occur.
He has accomplished everything he said he would do, except the ones he hasn’t yet.
So if he ever doesn’t accomplish something we’ll never know because maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.
He also said they would have a solar roof as cheap as a normal roof and that the new roadster would hover with rocket engines. Let’s see if that happens.
Name one of those projects that didn't take in huge amounts of money from the government? He did those things because they were initiatives of the US federal government (including autonomous cars, see DARPA challenge).
Thank uncle sam for putting in the effort to create the markets that Elon plays in.
I absolutely believe he's a genius, just not in the way of Einstein or Tesla. He's a genius at assembling people in order to execute a vision, and when I say genius, I don't mean the layperson's definition of "really smart", I really do mean that whatever qualities combine in a person to allow them to convince hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people to follow them and help them build their vision, Musk is a genius-level intellect in that capacity.
He's not unlike Steve Jobs. They both possessed enough knowledge and technical acumen to understand what they're being told about disparate subjects, but they may not have the in-depth knowledge that a Jim Keller would. And despite my enormous respect for Keller, he's not an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Jim's a craftsman at heart, and that comes through in interviews with him. Musk and Jobs are true visionaries.
Your description is not of a genius but more a "commercial community organizer" who organizes people and then negotiates between a company looking for cost reductions and State&Federal Governments to subsidize.
This is not genius-level but is the blending of two skills, a charismatic Administator, who can temporarily suspend disbelief, and a Fundraiser. Each of those takes a ton of work. I'm not minimizing Musk's dilligence in any way, but there are lots of people who can do those activities at high levels. The difference is that most people can't survive their tweeting SEC violations while stoned.
Most of the things he has accomplished have been accomplished before. I'm not saying it's easy and he doesn't deserve respect for it. But it's not like he's constantly achieving unprecedented things. Full self-driving cars, Hyperloop, Neuralink, people on Mars are just pipe dreams so far. And that wouldn't be a problem if he simply didn't claim for 5 years that FSD will definitely be ready next year and let customers pay for it and test it on public roads.
Tesla will never achieve safe, certified level 5 autonomous self driving with the current generation of vehicles, without either a fuckton more CPU power or better sensors(as in some proper high res depth sensors).
On this I will bet. Come back at me in 5 years. He'll either have to bite his pride and put some sort of re-branded lidar on, or some decent stereo camera rigs.
You know there are many promises he made that haven't come to fruition? Remember Hyperloop? Interplanetary travel? Neuralink?
His achievements are remarkable but that doesn't mean that he should be treated like an infallible demi-god. Yes he's done some really cool stuff but that doesn't mean he should not be the subject of scrutiny.
Hyperloop was an idea and nothing more. He never said he was personally committed to developing that, hence third-parties working on it.
Interplanetary travel? Starship is actively going through testing and looks like it should be ready for moon launches around 2023, which is in two more years.
I don't consider him infallible, or a demi-god, but its hard not to admire the sheer work ethic of this man. He's legitimately trying, and by all accounts of people who know him, he's actively working on all these projects and also making considerable stride towards these goals. These are not easily achieved tasks.
I admire the work he does. But he oversells. FSD is one example. He has been promising it for half a decade and people have paid him substantial amount of money for a feature that he'll likely never deliver as he describes and certainly not on the time-line he promised. At the same time he is putting dangerously incomplete software out on public roads and marketing it as FSD when it's clearly not. It's endangering not only his own customers but also everyone around a Tesla on the public roads. If that's not unethical, I don't know what is.
He promised Earth point to point travel, which would require rocket safety to improve by a factor of a million.
He has been promising ridiculous things from Neuralink but with literally nothing to show for it.
To be fair though, iterative is usually the way to go.
We didn't get to the safety levels that airliners currently have by sitting down with books and, we got there by having the NTSB thoroughly analyze each incident.
Humans are terrible drivers, so each day we delay the transition to self-driving also costs lives, it's just that human traffic fatalities are less visible since society generally accepts that level of death.
> Hyperloop was an idea and nothing more. He never said he was personally committed to developing that, hence third-parties working on it.
It's not even his idea, Robert Goddard came up with it decades ago.
He also threw money into it, and then backed out, saying he was too busy.
And now he's tweeting about applying for and obtaining permission to build on the East Coast.
So, there's several issues there. Not to mention the more general issue - that it offers the same benefit as Maglev with massively inflated costs and far less comfortable passenger experience.
He's definitely described autonomous driving as a solved problem. Does that count as "complete?" I don't know what happened with solarcity, but I thought I heard it's done poorly too.
A large factor in that is there is a lot less vehicle use recently compared to the norm.
To the extent that people who were using the feature on their way to work are working from home, that's a lot less miles driven and less potential collisions.
To the extend that many people are working from home, that's a lot less traffic on the road to interact with, and drivers may be more attentive because of the novelty.
Statistics would be nice, of course. Tesla doesn't report on total miles driven.
This isn't Autopilot, this is FSD Beta. We don't know if it has had any accidents because it's limited to a handful beta testers.
Anyway, "accidents" are not a good measure of safety for FSD Beta because just in this video it would've caused about 4-5 accidents and all of them were averted only because the driver intervened.
That site presents figures for other manufacturers at the bottom, but those are driver deaths per million registered vehicle years. The comparable Tesla figure is 47 deaths (from their own site) / about 1.5 million registered vehicle years, so around 30-31 deaths per million registered vehicle years, which puts it about average.
It's impossible, legally, for there to be a "tesla accident". It is the driver's responsibility. Wake me up when Tesla can be legally held responsible is when I buy one.
I’m not sure your statement that it’s impossible to hold Tesla responsible is an accurate statement of the law. There is no law that says that Tesla can’t be held responsible. Any car manufacturer can be held responsible for damages caused by a product defect.
Ok, yes, "impossible" is a poor choice of word from a legal perspective, but is not tesla covering themselves legally from legal liability of accidents stemming from drivers enabling "full self driving"? No? If not, then I am interested is what I'm saying... I think I am not alone in that line of thinking...
That's actually going to be the key argument for Tesla (or any solution) leveling up from driver assist level 2 to full autonomy (level 3 to 6): it will have to be evidence based. The difference is that Tesla is actively accumulating a lot of evidence in the form millions of vehicles actively using this and gathering a lot of telemetry, video footage, etc. in the process.
As soon as it's going to be legal somewhere to remove your hands from the wheel, there will be incidents for sure. And then there will be responses to those incidents. At some point, that drops to acceptable levels and more will follow. Tesla will simply be able to pull out the numbers and say: look we're doing it here and it's fine. Solving the chicken egg problem of having the data to say that is key to ever getting to that point.
Tesla's strategy is not to lock itself up in an ivory tower for a few decades and to then release the perfect system. Companies following that strategy will fail. Instead, they are releasing imperfect software now and they are improving it rapidly and incrementally. As long as they have hands on the steering wheel (level 2) it does not actually have to be perfect. It will give them a steady stream of issues to fix. Lots of real world video footage to analyze. And a track record of slowly improving safety relative to human drivers in terms of numbers of incidents per million miles. Rolling this out to millions of drivers is going to get them a lot of data to work with very quickly. Data is the key thing to have in this space. Without data you can't make progress. Tesla is setting themselves up to get a lot of that. The reason they are getting cocky is that they already have good metrics.
It would be interesting to repeat the same journey with the same car in about a year. I bet it will still have issues but probably less of them. It's going to take more than two years for sure. But ultimately leveling up to 3 and 4 is going to have to be evidence based. And Tesla is building that case by gathering data from real drivers intervening when the software messes up and fixing things as that happens. That's something you can measure. The better that metric gets, the closer they get to their goal. Who else is even close to doing that? I think some of the Chinese manufacturers have shamelessly copied Tesla's strategy. And in some cases the actual software apparently. Regardless, China is the market to watch when it comes to full autonomy. A bit of wild west but they are moving fast there. IMHO if Tesla gets there, those manufacturers won't be very far behind. Unlike some traditional manufacturers who seem to be a bit hands off (bad pun) when it comes to moving forward on this front.
I think that's the wrong question. The right question is "how much better is it than human drivers?" When you get up to 2x better, there will be _only_ 20,000 fatal Tesla crashes compared to 40,000 human ones a year in the US. It's a very low bar.
When Tesla is 2x better, we'd be reckless not to use it immediately.
Edit: I guess I was wrong, the accidents are now so common we don’t care anymore. In the beginning they were hyped up a lot.