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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Something like 92% of Americans don't own a boat, let alone one fancy enough to have an autopilot. 99.9% of Americans don't own a plane. As such, most Americans have no exposure to an autopilot and its functionality beyond perhaps having heard the name.

Tesla themselves muddle the waters. On https://www.tesla.com/autopilot, it states "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

Further down, it talks about "Full Self-Driving Capability", "All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go.", "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.", etc.

It's not shocking folks have gotten the impression it's a self-driving feature instead of a fancy cruise control.

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I was going to write something nastier. But really. Those would seem to be, at best, wildly optimistic claims. And at worst simply counter-factual.

The second point is salient - theoretical hardware capability is still a long shot from actual Level 5 autonomous driving.

Yes exactly, they don't clarify at all that the full driving capability is after they finish the hardware. and they have taken forever. I'm glad I have a hw1 tesla. it works, not full automation but a lot of good features like tacc

Full self-driving is a vaporware feature separate from the current Autopilot. It's confusing that they would advertise a feature that doesn't exist, but it's not like they're claiming Autopilot works that way. More importantly, the page where you configure your car explains the distinction very clearly (and charges extra for full self-driving, even though it doesn't exist!), so I doubt anyone has actually bought a Tesla thinking that Autopilot was full self-driving.

From that same page:

"Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot software has begun rolling out and features will continue to be introduced as validation is completed, subject to regulatory approval. "

"Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval."

The latter paragraph is very vaguely worded and certainly not very clear that it is non existent as yet.

Yes, I said in the comment you're replying to that Tesla's advertising for that nonexistent feature was confusing. I'm not sure why you're repeating it back to me.

But at any rate, this thread isn't about whether it's clear that the Full Self-Driving software is vaporware. The question is whether people are buying Teslas under the misunderstanding that regular Autopilot is the same thing as Full Self-Driving.

It is complete vaporware. Their radar sensors depend on a hokey whitelist database to avoid triggering false positives on "problematic" static structures like billboards and overpasses. Tesla deserves to be sued into the ground for daring to make such audacious claims. It is complete lunacy to believe that this is acceptable for autonomous driving in a dynamic real world environment.

actually tesla's ability to deal with dynamism (even without lidar) is something that puts them ahead of most cars. the famous waymo required pre-mapped roads, it didn't work on changes. They even had lidar and they had that restriction. I don't know if they've relaxed it since then.

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