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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything special about this process? All the cool tech videos are staged and it’s pretty normal. Robots fall dozens times until they make it. Every nice cozy commercial with snow is shot inside. Every washing powder video is a blatant lie. That’s why they are called videos and not live streams. I worked with a guy who staged scenes for years promotional videos. It’s a hard work to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. Why should it be different for so called self driving car? That’s how advertising works.

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There's nothing special about a "this is what we're aiming for" or "this is what it could be" concept video, or even a "this is how it works in the best circumstances" video.

What matters is:

(a) whether you clearly communicate which kind of video it is, or make misleading claims

(b) whether you clearly communicate dependencies, release schedules, etc.

(c) how things are framed, e.g. whether the video is shot on a test track or things are made to appear like they are in an everyday situation

If you look at other similar promo videos from other OEMs at that stage of development, you'll find that they often take place on e.g. locked-off test tracks where each car in play is driven by a professional and often pre-faced or end with clear words on product availability and what it's subject to.

Some of these OEMs are even willing to take the liability for their product once it becomes available. These come from the same place ...

(Disclaimer: I work for a competitor.)

Well Autopilot and stuff was sold exactly the way how weight loss industry works. Clients wanted to believe wink wink promises from charming self made billionaire CEO. I bet legal imprint in small letters at the time described the deal exact enough to be suspicious. Exact the same advertisement I get from companies who repair old concrete foundations. There are 2 pages in small font describing when repair may fail and the company is not responsible. So it’s clear to me, that it’s not a good deal. Probably the same as adding full self driving package to a car without ultrasonic sensors with a claim, that it can park itself.

Maybe so, that's probably why:

> Weight-loss products accounted for 13 percent of the fraud claims submitted to the F.T.C. in 2011, the most recent data available. That is more than twice the number in any other category.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/us-charges-4-com...

It is legal to make a video that portrays your product in the best possible light.

It is not legal to do so when it materially misrepresents your product.

I'm kind of astonished I have to explain this, but there's a difference between showing the product in the best possible light, and faking what the product can do. As you say - it's hard to show well grilled steak on a video without special effects. So why not just use special effects? Because that would be fraud.

The key detail here is that the engineers went off and 3d mapped a route and used that to operate the car. That's not actually something the product does. That's fraud. You can totally produce that video and say "Here's how autopilot will work in the future" because you're demonstrating the intended behaviour, not claiming something about the current product. What you can't do, is fake what the product can do today, and then claim it's capable of that today. Unless Elon Musk plans to personally go and 3d map every journey I take for eternity then that's not an honest claim about how the product behaves.

Note, we're 7 years down the line, and autopilot still doesn't work. The average age of a car is about 12 years. So if you saw that advert, bought a Tesla, you bought it under the understanding that it had a feature it still doesn't have and your Tesla is (edit:~~half~~) quarter-way to being scrapped.

12 years old would be half-way to being scrapped, assuming car sales are approximately constant, and it is of average expectancy.

Ugh!

I think the confusion is around what the term autopilot is supposed to mean.

That is completely Tesla’s fault: when you say the driver is only there for legal reasons, it’s not the public’s fault for taking you seriously.

Maybe, but pilots are also taught to “fly the autopilot.” https://www.nxaviation.com/post/the-autopilot-s-impact-on-av...

And every human being is clearly an expert in honeywell flight automation and can rationally understand what it means. Wait, no, that's not correct at all and most people think planes basically fly themselves. They also don't seem to realize that "follow this carefully mapped and highly regulated GPS route" is a hundred miles away from "drive an arbitrary road route"

How much training does Tesla require you to complete before using FSD? I don’t think there’d be much criticism of autopilot if users were trained like pilots.

Agreed. It’s almost like they are assuming a future where people learn this in drivers ed. This is a job of the government to act asap, since they are in charge of deciding if someone can drive.

If Theranos was still around you'd be hired on the spot.

I guess this is different because the false advertising has lead to deaths, and it wasn't "shot" the same way a commercial was. Commercials seem more like little films, where this seemed more like a demonstration. Dunno if that makes any difference here, but that's my reasoning as to why it's different

Nikola rolled an inert truck down a hill to claim it's truck was ready to hit the road, Tesla staged a self-driving video to sell people $10k upgrades that couldn't self-drive and still can't.

Tesla also likely staged their battery swap presentation as well as the solar shingles reveal.

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