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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Well, that's if you ignore Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Tesla auto-pilot - many failed experiments as well, or over-promising and under-delivering.

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Hyperloop was an idea, not a company. Musk only released a white paper containing his thoughts on the topic. You can't compare a successful (and arguably revolutionary) company to a glorified blogpost!

The Boring Company is still going on, with about as much speed as it was intended to.

Tesla auto-pilot is still work-in-progress. Behind the promised schedule, but so were propulsive landing of rockets and Falcon Heavy, and yet here we are.

> Behind the promised schedule

The promise has been full self driving robo taxi fleet by the end of the year for years now. Is there an actual "schedule" of features that are missing to reach that goal or is he just repeating the exact same promise without any sign of progress to back it up? His competition still doesn't have a general purpose solution and they at least aren't cheapening out on the sensor data.

> Tesla auto-pilot

Huh? It's being improved constantly. Nothing like it in the car industry.

What about the production efforts from Nissan and GM which have launched level 3 with higher safety and no fanfare?

What about the other 10 companies who have launched similar systems at level 2 with much better safety records and again no fanfare?

What about them? They only did it because Tesla is forcing them to do it. You think they would have pushed EVs and things like autopilot to the consumer at this pace for any other reason?

They haven’t really earned the right to be talked about.

Tesla is a pioneer of mass market EVs, but is not in any way a pioneer on self-driving cars.

Okay, which major car company is putting in auto pilot features in their cars today (as in, if I go out and buy this car I’ll have it today).

Open to being educated here, and I’m hoping the answer is ‘a couple believe it or not’.

Every Cadillac currently + the new GM EVs come with Supercruise.

Ever heard of the Nissan Leaf?

It is not, and will not become in the next 20 years, a self-driving mechanism, as it has been designed to be.

IDK about the 20 years claim, but he's definitely consistently said that full autonomy is just around the corner and that when you buy a new Tesla the hardware is already fit for full autonomy and just needs a software update with the algorithms to enable it... Both are bold claims and at least the first claim is consistently being proven wrong. I guess it creates more enthusiasm than "we are working on it", and saying that the hardware of a new Tesla is fit for autonomy means that fans buy a new one and not a second hand Tesla.

I think that given enough dedication and investment, it's certainly possible that we'll have fully autonomous cars one day, and it's likely that Tesla will be one of the first companies with such a car, but I'm just annoyed by their constant "it will be around in 6-12 months" that they repeat year after year.

Right now Tesla may literally be the last company likely to get there:

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self-driving-study-naviga...

And those are not 'bold claims' as much as 'outright lies'. There is no known path right now to full autonomy, so to claim your hardware is ready for it is nothing but a fantasy.

That list may not be the most reliable. It pretty much seems like they put Tesla last because of the bold estimates Musk gives for full self-driving. The part where they criticize the software seems disregard-able because it's impossible to find a standardized measure of comparison when all the other competitors don't have a product one can buy and test, and the environments they run in are far less diverse than the landscape encompassed by Tesla owners.

The Boring Company and Tesla auto-pilot are still alive though

The Boring Company is boring boring regular tunnels, nothing like Musk's fanciful visions that civil engineers have scoffed at.

Tesla auto-pilot is far behind even the state of the art in self driving (Waymo), and even that is far behind actual self driving. So sure, some good has come out of the project, no doubt about it, but the naysayers have also been right.

What are you basing your assessment of Tesla auto pilot on? Genuinely curious, if you could point me in the direction of some resources on the topic I would appreciate it.

I've seen this described numerous times. Here is a quote from a research company called Navigant[0]:

"Tesla continues to make high-profile promises, including having one million robotaxi-capable vehicles on the road by the end of 2020," Navigant's report reads. "However, the performance of its systems remains inconsistent and its products do not match its proposed mobility business model."

[0]https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self-driving-study-naviga...

He has repeatedly said "full self-driving" is coming soon with the hardware that they've already sold. That is utter nonsense. Here is a very recent example but he's been saying it for years:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53349313

The tunnels themselves were never the innovation, it was the TBMs. Have they not made progress there? I imagine not much since I haven't seen them on here in a while.

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