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Comment by jijojv | Hacker News Reader

Week after the fatal accident Musk continues to promote Autopilot as safe by retweeting stuff like https://twitter.com/Teslarati/status/980476745106231297 Tesla Model S navigates one of Vienna’s ‘crappiest’ roads on Autopilot

IIHS '17 study puts Autopilot at only reducing 40% accidents which is the same as their '16 study which had the same 40% reduction for any car with Auto Emergency Braking.

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What does Musk have to do for him to be investigated for misleading consumers or fraud?

He definitely has a penchant for exaggeration if not outright dishonesty. It bothers me that people respect someone who can say so many blatantly false things and that an engineer can be so loose with the truth.

That's his shtick though, promise unbelievable things, then when you get halfway there, people don't care you were wrong and/or lying. He understands how to market himself and his ventures.

My guess is he's got too many fans and money behind him. If things ever go truly south, that's when they'll really go after him, because people really care about their money.

>It bothers me that people respect someone who can say so many blatantly false things and that an engineer can be so loose with the truth.

Why does it bother you though. "People" are like that, right? If you know your target demographics, and thus know what strings to pull, then you can make your target do anything. In this case, invest, financially and emotionally in what ever he is doing. Pretty basic advertising.

Elon Musk's target demographics is the "tech" inclined (administrators and layman alike. America is the greatest country in the world!, Yay!), and what he is doing is to exactly cater to that target. What you see is just a manifestation of that.

Again, pretty basic advertising/marketing tactics. But I think it is for the first time we are seeing PR tactics that are tailored to the nerds/techies. That it why this seems so effective..

In someway, I think Elon Musk is to tech what Christopher Nolan is to movies..

You're asking why exaggerated claims which have led to deaths are distasteful?

It might be basic advertising, but that doesn't make it right nor effective. If Musk would just do what he has without all the exaggerated promises, why's that not good enough? The claims make him look worse, not better.

Denying reality is great until it comes crashing down. Just a few examples. Forgive this first title. The important part is the quote:

http://www.businessinsider.com/musk-epic-failure-2016-5?op=1

Tesla reported first-quarter earnings last week, and while they were better than Wall Street expected, the earthshaking news that emerged was that Musk is taking the carmaker in a new strategic direction.

Tesla, which delivered about 50,000 vehicles last year, is aiming to deliver 500,000 in 2018. The production target isn't new, but the timeline is. Tesla had previously said it would build half a million cars a year by 2020.

This did not happen, which led him to Tweet last July that they could deliver 20k cars per month by Dec. This did not happen either. Investors were relieved they managed to hit 2k per week this past week (this is down from the 2.5k they were targeting).

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/881757617416056832

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-stock-jumps-after-pr...

He's got a shaky attachment to the truth. I don't know if he really believes himself (this is called delusion, usually) or he's a liar. Either way it's kind of odd for a guy who doesn't need to exaggerate to be impressive. Not sure what it has to do with Nolan. He's never promised a 20 hour movie.

Break the law? One surprising thing to me there is a ton of media attention on the SV right now (almost all negative) and that does not look like a coincidence. I disapprove of what FB is doing but on the scale of problems that Big Pharma, Health Insurance, big banks are causing thats not even a blip and yet most media attention and good amount of public outrage is fairly skillfully directed toward tech and SV.

Or perhaps that SV is vocal, excessively so: promises miracles, yesterday, at will, almost for free. In other words, massively overpromises, then underdelivers - that amounts to painting a huge sign "KICK ME" on its collective butt. While other enterprises might do that as well, even to a criminal extent, they do not brag about it. This might be all the explanation that's needed, no conspiracy necessary.

What miracles was FB promising? (Again not a fan of FB).

I would guess "we'll give you social network, not a total-surveillance tool" would qualify. I don't think the second part would have been a reasonable expectation.

Would you point at FB marketing that has this message?

I don't see any (although "FB is free and always will be" has plenty of wiggle room). Also, I don't see any explicit mention that Tesla's Autopilot is actually an autonomous Level 5 system - and yet people assume that. Are you saying that people should only be angry about things they were promised explicitly? (If so, I would agree - but 1. people are not 100% rational, 2. expectations are important for PR, even if not legally binding. Going from "SV doesn't put this in big bold letters on the front page" to "it's a conspiracy against SV, not because they're an easier media target" is a bit too much of a leap for me.)

" Are you saying that people should only be angry about things they were promised explicitly?" I am def. in no position to direct how people should feel about something. To me expecting something beyond what is actually promised just sounds unrealistic. If I hired you to write software and you promised to write software but I was also expecting you to clean my pool that would pretty weird.

Indeed. But if it would make a clickbaitable story, would it seem more lucrative to cover this vs. yet-another-corporate-embezzlement cause? In other words, media attention is also eyeball driven, to the point of sensationalism.

> scale of problems that Big Pharma, Health Insurance, big banks are causing thats not even a blip and yet most media attention and good amount of public outrage is fairly skillfully directed toward tech and SV.

It really shouldn't surprise. "Big pharma continues shitty but legal business tactics," "Big banks continue to play games with people's money without significant oversight," and "American health care system overly expensive for poor outcomes marking continued national shame for leading nation" they're all old stories so there's not much new happening there. There's still lot of people angry out there about these things but there's nothing really new coming out so it doesn't get coverage. News is naturally biased against news that doesn't change, it just gets boring to most viewers.

I agree with you with one exception "Big pharma continues shitty but legal business tactics" I doubt the legal part they get constantly fined for various illegal activities.

Yeah that depends a lot on what you're mad about wrt pharma. I was referencing the generic high price of drugs issue. They're definitely doing actually illegal things for sure.

Big pharma has been mistrusted for decades now. Think of the 1993 movie The Fugitive.

Banks and other lenders has been mistrusted since biblical times.

> at only reducing 40% accidents

Unless I'm missing something, 40% is actually a good result (given what they're trying to measure).

However, I think the more important statistic would be regarding how many injuries/fatalities does it reduce vs cause. Are there any studies on this?

Wasn't the IIHS study relevant to the old Mobileye-based Autopilot? Any reason to assume it applies to Tesla's in-house Autopilot?

That may be correct as IIHS took few months and concluded in Jan'17. People are still waiting for in-house Autopilot aka AP2 to reach feature parity with mobileey AP1 if you follow https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/enhanced-ap-hw2-qa-fir... so i'd suspect AP2 to be worse-off depending on when it gets tested.

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