Tesla cannot abandon FSD, if they did Musk, and by extension (and due to all kinds of financial connetctions and dependencies) all his other companies would be in very serious trouble.
Now everyone is acting like it's do or die, as if everyone bought Tesla's just so they won't have to ever touch a steering wheel at some point in the future. Only 19% opted for it and plenty of those are probably wealthy people who can afford novelties and all that matters at the end of the day is if you're competitive with the alternative options on the market (holistically not just feature to feature). Ultimately it's still just a car people bought instead of a BMW or whatever. They're not making car purchasing decisions comparing it to some beta project only running via taxis in silicon valley and some random small cities.
Tesla is very well positioned even if they did zero on FSD (which they won't). The Model Y was the best selling car on earth across all categories (including ICE and EVs!) - not sure what more you could want for car company success.
If you look back, 10 years ago HN loved him (see convo about first time 2 falcon 9s landed), but now that he is the richest man in the world the tides have turned.
I'm stunned that I need to explain that to you. Is it actually news to you? If so, welcome out from under your rock. Or are you just pretending not to know, in order to troll?
I don't care that he called someone a pedophile. He apologized for that: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/elon-musk-apologizes-for-....
You've got a lot of catching up to do from your 10 year absence from reality. I'm not going to lead you to water because you'll refuse to drink. Go google it for yourself, and stop trolling.
Have a nice day.
I don't owe you any examples, because you know very well but are pretending not to know what I'm referring to, you're not a serious person, you're intellectually dishonest, and you're trolling, so your bad faith arguments don't matter, and you don't deserve a response, troll.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Let me ChatGPT that for you:
This quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre's work "Anti-Semite and Jew" (originally "Réflexions sur la question juive"), written in 1946. In this passage, Sartre analyzes the behavior and motives of anti-Semites. He argues that anti-Semites are aware of the absurdity and frivolity of their arguments. According to Sartre, they engage in such discourse not to persuade through rational debate but to amuse themselves and to disconcert their opponents. They do this by undermining the seriousness of any conversation, thus avoiding genuine discussion. When pressed, they may cease the discussion, indicating that they are above argumentation. This approach, Sartre suggests, is a form of bad faith, a concept he discusses in his existentialist philosophy, referring to acts of self-deception or dishonesty in one's dealings with oneself and others.
Robert Hurtado, a supervisor at Tesla, called Diaz the N-word over 30 times, including by saying “[N-word], hurry up,” “[N-words] are lazy,” and “I wish I can get all you [N-words] fired.” Tr. 3:604:23-606:8. Ramon Martinez, another Tesla supervisor, called Diaz the N-word over thirty times, said “I hate you, [N-word],” and told him “to go back to Africa.” Tr. 3-603:11604:20. Diaz's supervisor, Tamotsu “Tom” Kawasaki, testified that Martinez often used the words “mayate” and “chongo,” both racial slurs in Spanish. Tr. 2-281:9-12. Wayne Jackson, a Black program manager at Tesla, confirmed that Martinez used the word “mayate.” Tr. 2-381:17382:7. Martinez denied all of this. Tr. 3-584:18-585:1.
Diaz also testified that he complained to Romero several times about being called the N-word. Tr. 3-613:5-14. Romero agreed that he learned Diaz had been complaining about racist conduct, see Tr. 3-542:22-24, 543:13-14, though Romero said Diaz did not complain directly to Romero at least until the Timbreza incident, Tr. 3:561:1-4. Romero testified that he did not personally investigate Diaz's complaints and was specifically told by Tesla to not personally investigate the Timbreza incident. Tr. 3-541:22-542:1, 544:21-545:2, 549:13-550:16. Diaz and Romero both testified that Tesla never fired anyone for using the N-word. Tr. 3-552:10-19, 615:13-15.
Jackson testified that the use of the N-word was “[r]ampant,” as in it was used “[e]very day,” “[m]ore than several times a day.” Tr. 2-381:3-15. He found the N-word “[e]xtremely” offensive and “very derogatory” when it was used, regardless of how it was said. Tr. 2-383:15384:2. He said that these words should not be used in a workplace, but that there was “nothing” he could do to stop their use “[b]ecause Tesla allowed it. They didn't stop it.” Tr. 2-384:12-22.
and don't forget all of the anti-union causes he donates to
The same types of people (inaccurately) labeling Musk an antisemite are often simultaneously pushing/defending DEI offices and ideology at universities that cause actual direct threats against Jewish students.
But my mind still fails to comprehend this. It's a $80k cad luxury idiosyncratic vehicle. How's this out-selling civic and corolla, kia and hyundai base models? Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide? I just don't understand that number if it's talking by units sold (and not revenue or profit). My entire world-view fails to make sense of that factoid.
I share your scepticism.
That's not bad for a new car, especially when the general buyer I think mostly considers it a luxury brand.
Also the floor for car prices has gone up. The days of the near $10k new car are over.
> Have millionaires outnumbered regular folks by that much worldwide?
I'm far from a millionaire and a $40-50k car is not unreasonable, my wife's car is in the low $50s. But I have a Kia Forte that was like $25k. A small Kia for $25k! But it was the cheapest car I could find on shortish notice that had lance centering and whatnot.
the media salary in the US is like 55k is a lot, esp. given the prices of everything going up, and given the alternatives.
Toyota RAV4, according to website, starts at 36K CAD.
So that's plus or minus twice the price :-/
Other way of looking at it - even if it were "Only $15k USD difference" in USA, that is an entire car worth of difference (not only in pre-COVID times, when you could buy a new car for $10k! We just bought a $17k Kia Rio 5. Tesla Y is four time the price, and ~2.5 times the price of Corolla or Civic, which again I wouldn't think of as "marginally more expensive". (Edit: And this does not include the money one would presumably need to spend to install chargers etc at home).
Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's a somewhat Hacker-News specific perspective that Tesla isn't luxury, or that $15k USD difference isn't much. Acura RDX starts at $57K CAD, which is 12K CAD less than the Tesla Y, and I'd certainly consider that a luxury car. Other people might not! But that underscores my point that for high earners, "luxury" and "rich" creeps up. (same for me too! I used to think $100k a year was "rich" until I got there and then I conveniently moved up my own personal definition. I don't consider our Honda Odyssey a luxury internally - I consider it a "necessity" or a "practical choice" until I have a "whoa" moment and remember that my parents took five people around in a little Citroen AX and Zastava 101, and that vast majority of people cannot afford a $55k CAD family car - and even we got it used from a 2 year lease because $55k CAD for a car is just a lot lot lot of money)
The price is comparable, the costs of ownership are way lower, and the product is at least twice as good.
There's basically no downside which is why they're selling so well.
Tesla has sold about 5 million vehicles in its entire history. The last time Toyota sold less that 5 million vehicles in a single year was 20 years ago (they do close to a million vehicles a month now [1]). VW Group is not far behind Toyota.
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1 - https://www.investopedia.com/toyota-global-output-hits-recor...
Officially announcing that FSD is a dead end takes allnof that away, and Tesla might very well be valuated as car company (which it is). And that share price adjustment could, or will, be a very serious problem Musk and his enterprises.
Energy. Batteries. Charging network. Top selling vehicles (Model Y is best selling car worldwide)…
So no, having the best selling car is by no means a reason Tesla share prices are where they are.
You could make the argument a few years ago that Tesla was only electric car maker and would capture the market as it grew. But now lots of companies make electric cars. Electric cars are booming, Tesla is growing fast, but they are losing market share.
Most of Tesla's valuation is easily attributable to the fact they sell a ton of cars, with very high profit margins, and are on track to sell even more in the future.
If a company consistently lies to its customers and the market as a whole, shouldn't there be consequences?
The Supercharger Network is nice as well but Electrify America and evGo have been scaling hard as well and they work for the most part. Not like that matters because the Supercharger Network is being opened up.
2 million miles per day of FSD driving is impressive. The resulting training data from every corner of the USA is a bonkers advantage.
All models that we train today have edge cases where the model produces wildly inaccurate output. As far as I'm aware, nobody yet has managed to squeeze this problem out.
ChatGPT is still an overall useful tool with the occasional hallucination. Those types of edge cases in software driving a car are unacceptable.
In FSD, as you point out, the stakes are higher. It makes a different design decision: it slows down in low-confidence situations. Just like a person. If you watch a FSD video, you'll see that most of the human interventions happen because FSD lost confidence in a tricky scenario and halted the car even though the pathing ultimately wound up being correct. This won't solve every edge case, but neither do humans -- the bar is (or should be) "better than human," not "perfect," otherwise we are sacrificing lives on principle.
I have no idea if training will stall out half way through the march of 9s. It might, but if it does, it won't be because there is no high level strategy to control hallucinations. That already exists.
Customers are willing to tolerate the latter right now because they believe the former is still in development.
I'm not here to argue that the overly enthusiastic timetables weren't cringe. They definitely were. I'm just here because there seems to be consensus that FSD is doomed and it doesn't remotely seem that way to me.
My point is that in the long run, Tesla cannot solve the ML edge cases by having a human available to take over at a split second notice.
I dunno. I personally think the Tesla approach is fundamentally better because it obtains more data, faster. Millions of miles per day rather than millions of miles per year, with better macrodiversity to boot. However, that's just a heuristic: we've got a Tortoise and Hare scenario and as the parable teaches us, it's not so difficult to imagine a scenario where slow and steady wins the race. Even though I favor the Tesla approach, I could see this going either way.
That said, I do think it's uncharitable to read failure into Tesla's high level decisions. They could have chosen the Waymo path and dumped all their effort into maximizing reliability on a small scenario subset. They chose not to. There are Andrej Karpathy interviews about it. They wanted to data-max. They data-maxed. Now they have 300x the data collection rate of Waymo. That's not failure, and it may even be a killer advantage. We'll see.
Citation needed.
What Tesla lacks is quality data, which Waymo has due to their high fidelity sensors. Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for. They still have embarrassing failures so basic in nature [1], you know they're going nowhere. If all it took was data, they would have something meaningful by now.
[1] https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1727889381309239731
Anyway, you asked for citations. Here they are.
Waymo:
> Waymo was the clear leader in 2022 with 2.9 million miles with safety drivers
https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-testing/#:~....
Tesla:
> FSD Now Drives 1 Million Miles Per Day
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1327/tesla-fsd-milestone-1....
> Graph showing 2M miles per day
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
> Tesla has been "collecting data" for years without much to show for.
Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
> Except, you know, millions of miles per day of self-driving in situations that Waymo isn't even planning to attempt for years.
And what exactly have they got to show for it? All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco. You don't need nationwide data not to run stop signs or swerve onto oncoming traffic.
> All that data collection and they can't handle the easiest of situations in San Francisco
Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade. Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere. You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope. Time will tell.
Waymo does most of its training in simulation. They do 20+ million miles of simulation every single day with 25,000 "virtual" vehicles. They don't even have to put out many cars for training.
> Unlike Waymo, they haven't limited to and exclusively trained on the easiest situations in SF for the last decade.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think driving in SF is easy or that Waymo is only doing it in the easiest situations. They cover the entire city 24/7, and in rain and fog.
> Just like Tesla hasn't even attempted true driverless miles, Waymo hasn't even attempted unmapped back-alley navigation, let alone unmapped back-alleys in the middle of nowhere.
And they won't because maps are clearly a big part of their tech stack and they've found a way to efficiently maintain them. That's what gives them the confidence a.k.a reliability to remove the driver.
> You need scope and reliability to win this race, and it seems to me that the Tesla formula for improving reliability scales better than the Waymo formula for expanding scope.
So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today. Community trackers (absence of Tesla sharing data) show Tesla's intervention rate hasn't really improved much at all and they still seem to make extremely basic mistakes. So the formula clearly isn't working as of today.
> if you think driving in SF is easy
I'm not here to trivialize SF driving, I'm here to say that it's a small corner of a big weird world that Tesla has done a much more thorough job of exploring. Google and Waymo are used to having a scale advantage, but Tesla's fleet utterly dwarfs them.
> Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla. They just announced airport terminal rides in PHX today.
That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
> So far, evidence suggests Waymo is expanding both scope and reliability faster than Tesla.
FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time. They don't even use freeways, last I checked. Slow and steady is a fine strategy, I wish them luck in the marathon, but it's a bit early to call this one for Waymo.
I'm used to holding back the enthusiasm in Tesla circles where we are naturally predisposed to call the race early for Tesla, so this is a fun change of pace.
Then explain to me why it can’t stop for stop signs in SF or can’t drive in a straight line without swerving onto oncoming traffic. Surely, they have a lot of data from the city with their large fleet? Either the data is helping or it’s not.
> That's nice, but FSD already drives almost everywhere in the USA. It can usually even figure out poorly mapped rural roads in flyover country. What's Waymo's timetable for those?
Yes, with a driver. And still with poor intervention rates after years of development. What’s Tesla’s timetable for getting their reliability up and removing the driver? That’s really the ballgame in self driving.
> FSD has gone from private to "mostly works everywhere in the USA" in the last 3 years. It has taken Waymo 10 years to start escaping the hubs one city and route at a time.
“Works everywhere” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when you rely on a driver to prevent crashes. Literally does not pass the true test of self driving.
It took Waymo 10 years to completely remove the driver. Now they’re announcing new cities and capabilities constantly, with freeways coming soon. Let’s see how many “rewrites” it takes for Tesla to tell drivers not to pay attention, let alone completely removing them. I wish them luck (as a Model 3 owner), but they’re working with their hands tied behind their backs on this one.
I'll take a ride in a self driving taxi through residential streets that might hit a dog.
I will not pay for a vehicle that will hard brake on a highway or drive under a tractor trailer.
Maybe after more deaths and data Tesla will pull ahead in that risk calculation but I will not pay to be part of that.
If you're right it'll be a relatively great payday for you.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a45326503/mercedes-benz...
DRIVE PILOT is ready to chauffeur you under conditions that help ensure a secure ride. Conditions include:
Clear lane markings on approved freeways
Moderate to heavy traffic with speeds under 40 MPH
Daytime lighting and clear weather
Driver visible by camera located above driver's display
There is no construction zone present.
The distance [to the vehicle in front] is neither too small nor too large
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
Any other move causes a precipitous drop in stock price as investors see that they won't be taking over the entire transportation industry.
Oh wait, thats exactly what we see.