Tesla’s high-beam assist feature surprised by Swedish moose
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Things like this (and panel gap, and build quality, and over promising features) are why I have yet to buy a tesla, and likely won't any time soon. Even though they were the only viable luxury electric car (during my last car search), I decided to pass. I will probably seriously re-evaluate them for my next car purchase, but right now, no thanks!
BTW, I got my first demo of tesla FSD a few weeks ago. In san francisco, on market street, a place I'm sure is tested extensively. Within minutes, FSD had the car perform an illegal AND dangerous mid intersection merge followed by an extremely hard and jerky lane follow correction. lol.
Teslas were the only ones that did, that were also electric.
If I were to buy an electric car today, i would probably consider a polestar, taycan, audi, tesla. I would give them a fair shake! I'd probably end up with the taycan though, tbh. I would rather wait a year or two though, there's some really interesting things coming down the pipeline.
Telsa used to be the cool kid because their cars were fast-charging, neck-snapping fast, had autopilot, and were very efficient per-mile.
It was enough to make up for the assembly/initial quality, material quality and NVH issues in the interior, poor reliability, and for some models, very dated design.
Now they're being beaten in almost every category. GM has one of the best fully automatic cruise control systems now; Mercedes has full self driving on the autobahn. Many cars are as or more efficient per-mile, out-accelerate all but the most expensive Teslas, have as fast or faster DC charging systems. The Audi e-tron and Porsche match or out-accelerate them while having top-of-the-market build quality and design; stepping into any modern Porsche is a like stepping into a swiss watch. Lucid's car out-accelerates and screams "FUTURE!"
There are a ton of good EVs out or coming out in the next year or two. All of those cars are assembled better, are more reliable, have nicer interiors, less dated designs, are backed by much more extensive dealer/service/parts networks, etc.
Ultimately Musk's problem is that he thought he could to better at building cars than companies which have been building cars for a century.
The problem wasn't that car companies couldn't do better than Tesla; it's that they didn't want to. Now that EVs are a Thing, they want to. They have more cash, more manufacturing capacity, more R&D, more dealers, better supply chains, and much better relations with the media and automotive press.
Tesla is fucked long-term. I suspect Musk's plan is to pivot to being an energy/charging company - that Tesla cars were just a vehicle to get him a worldwide charger network and accompanying infrastructure (it's the one thing that Tesla does just about flawlessly.)
This was always my take as well. He wants to make cars (they're a halo product), but the real value of tesla is in skateboards, batteries, charging. I suspect that things like the roadster/cybertruck are tesla preparing to transition to a business model where car sales are not the largest part of their business.
Compare either of these to Tesla's Autopilot (Which is NOT the same as FSD!). I'd be surprised if there were significant differences.
> Many cars are as or more efficient per-mile,
Are they, though? I dunno about other cars, but the Taycan is extremely inefficient. The Taycan 4S Performance Battery Plus has a 93 kwh battery, but only 227 mile EPA estimated range. Meanwhile, my Model 3 Performance is 75 kwh, but EPA rated 300 miles.
> out-accelerate all but the most expensive Teslas
And significantly more expensive.
> have as fast or faster DC charging systems
That are fewer and farther between, not to mention expensive, and also I'm not sure about the faster part. The latest gen superchargers are up to 250 kW. I can drive on any Interstate highway in the continental USA and not have to worry about where to charge. Even the I-90 corridor across over 1,500 miles of rural highway has enough Superchargers on it to make a road trip viable.
That all said...
In the long term, you may be right. But we're still 5+ years away from their downfall. The other manufacturers have REALLY been dragging their feet on making good EVs. Honda could be selling tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of fully electric Civics and CRVs, but don't because ????.
I agree with you about the 5+ years thing. Ford released an EV that they basically never advertised and got swamped with orders. They announced the next one and got even MORE swamped because it was the F150. They’ve had to delay the introduction of at least two more EV models just to try and keep up with demand for the first two.
My understanding is VW has been doing extremely well with the ID.4. I know there is heavy interest in the Kia Niro and the Cadillac Lyriq and of course the new Hummer.
Other newcomers like Rivian and Lucid are pulling a lot of eyes/orders.
Tesla owned the EV segment because outside the Volt/Bolt/Leaf there was nothing else. Certainly those aren’t equivalent to the S/X/Y or even 3.
But the question is, can Tesla improve faster than the rest of the entire automotive industry can move to EVs. I doubt it.
In some ways this feels like a double disruption. Tesla came along and disrupted car manufacturing I proving that EVs could work and were even popular/desirable. They also proved online car buying could be quite successful.
But I think they will now be disrupted by the companies they tried to replace. I just don’t see how they can hold off every single major car company in the world. They may have the most efficient cars (from my understanding) and they’ve obviously got the whole over the air update thing figured out. But they don’t make enough models to cover everyone’s taste and they still have some real manufacturing/customer service issues that they could have grown a out of by now if they had wanted to. I feel like they may have spread themselves much too thin, and lost their chance at king of the hill because of it.
In my mind they’ll never be a VW or Toyota sized car manufacturer in the long term. But will they be as big as Audi? Or just a Jaguar? Or gone like Pontiac?
Don’t know. Bankruptcy? Merger? Acquisition? Exit the consumer market? Will be interesting to watch.
Tesla's Autopilot works perfectly on the highways, in my experience. I've done a few thousand miles on the highway, and I think the only times I've had to manually take control are when my one lane is becoming two lanes, and it gets confused.
I do agree that eventually, the other manufacturers will surpass Tesla, but it's going to be a long timeframe (I think ~10 years), and it will hinge on being compatible with Tesla chargers, since the other networks are either too slow (Seriously, whoever decided that 7.2 kW J-1772 chargers should exist did a major disservice to EV adoption), too expensive, and too spread out.
Also level 2 charging? Preach. Public charging (except at like hotels) seems like it should be minimum 50kw.
If the only difference between Level 2 and Level 3 is whether or not you have to monitor it, then I think its just market buzz, and Mercedes will kill someone because they'll claim that their system didn't need to be monitored, so someone won't, and it will make a mistake and someone will die.
Limited to 37 mph with the claim you don't need to monitor it means someone is going to be in heavy traffic, activate it, then fall asleep. When traffic clears up and they're still sleeping, they're going to get rear-ended when the car is putting along at 37 mph while everyone else is going 60+.
I will not purchase a car that has a panel gap I can fit my pinky in. I will not purchase a car that is at the bottom of reliability ratings. I will not purchase a car without radar sensors for the adaptive cruise control.
Regardless, I ended up buying a faf bmw and I'm loving it. So I did okay, anyways.
Most people buy cars based on brands, and also a very substantial amount of car purchases are impulse purchases.
Anecdotally, I rented a jeep a few months ago (compass) and it was truly abysmal.
The drivers handbook only says that if you start into an intersection you need to finish crossing. Nothing about what lane.
A whole lot of this probably comes down to the lack of radar or other sensors. And the lack of ability for them to get machine learning with only cameras to perform.
Maybe they should just send the engineering team up far north during the winter and force them to dog food their software to get around. Really it's not the individual engineers fault, it's always crap management.
As you note, unlike most manufacturers' TACC, Tesla has made the (IMO terrible) decision to use a purely computer vision based system instead of radar. That's why it works so poorly in adverse weather conditions, and that's also why it will never work well in adverse weather conditions.
Governments (or EU) should just ban all beta software from public roads. You want to ship a feature to customers? Fine, but you'll have to take responsibility for it first. Make sure it's tested, has well understood failure modes, who's to blame if it malfunctions, etc.
This is kind of where I draw the line. If the manufacturer isn't willing to accept liability, then I'm not going to believe them when they say that the car can drive itself, especially if I'm paying for said feature.
Tesla is aggressively and non-consensually consuming part of my daily road-safety budget to subsidize development of beta software in pursuit of long-term profits.
Now if they open-sourced their FSD sensor data to help train other self-driving systems I think my perspective would be different.
Is there any software in this effing car that is not beta software?
Why are regulators allowing Tesla to use beta software which can have an obvious impact on the safety of the driver and those on the road?
Pretty sure the solitaire app is considered stable.
Presumably it thought it was a person or vehicle so it dipped to avoid dazzling.
Not what you'd want in this exact case if you were making an intelligent decision, but not really 'strange' is it?
Also high-beam assist isn't any kind of unusual Tesla feature - it's pretty standard on all new cars.
Tesla is the odd one where they decided to implement those kinds of features themselves, using their own machine learning algorithms for the cameras. Which results in random weird behavior that just doesn't happen with other brands.
It's a fundamental problem with Tesla, they think they know better but the result is shit. Apart from the wipers and now high beam, autopilot is another example. While Tesla was a pioneer in the area, it now performs worse than most other brand's adaptive cruise control. They've shot themselves in the foot with computer vision, with many phantom braking events as a result.
What is it about the problem that means it needs custom silicon?
We do not have the same definition of "working well" and standard then.
On the 6 non-Tesla cars I drove lately, 4 of them have issues with automatic wipers that goes nuts without reasons.
Automatic high beams tend generally to be even worst for the ones without matrix light.
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-full-self-driving-beta-causes-acc...
Given what went on, it's in the direction of what would generally be the opposing lane.
It seems that the large mass of light haired Moose reflected enough of the Telsa's own light back at it to make it think it was a car approaching from far away.
It wasn't a car far away with lots of light, it was a moose, close, with little light.
Both appear to the Tesla as the same thing.
This happens ALL the time with UFO's. It's a problem with the human eye, light and distance are indeterminate. It could be either way around, close and dim, far and bright.
Seems better integration of light vs radar is needed.
For that matter, the Toyota lane keeping is one of the better and safer ones that I've driven, but it flakes out and gives up way too easily to rely on (a small gap in the line and it disables, as opposed to trying to push you into curbs). Again, just a "better than nothing" experience that can be useful on the tail end of a long drive. In the case of Queensland -> Melbourne, the car was the better driver at the end.
The street sign reader, speed warning and rear cross assist is absolute black magic and I have no idea how it's so reliable!
I wonder what are those scenarios? Shifting gears? Aren't drivers suppose to be more careful before shifting?
I'm just asking because at the moment I'm not sure If I can agree with "better than nothing". Putting assistant in to MS Office is one thing but cars?
Model S - July 2022 Model 3 - February 2022 Model Y - July 2022 Model X - January 2023
Tesla is far from F'ed.
TIL the GM is currently not selling any BEVs.
How is your car going to stop if it can’t really see what’s in front?
My Volvo (and I guess subaru) don’t market their ADAS as “autopilot” or “self driving”.
The poles have a standard height, and a standard distance between poles.
Do we know where that is coming from?