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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

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It’s interesting that you focused on so called “idiots” for having an issue with misleading branding and not the actual idiots who came up with that name

Juliet called this out hundreds of years ago:

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

I’ve been pretty critical of people who felt that “autopilot” meant way more than it did. For anyone who’s spent time in aviation, autopilots historically have been extremely basic: hold altitude, hold heading, hold climb, etc. I do get the confusion for people not in that space, but calling basic lane-following and adaptive speed control features “autopilot” is pretty defensible.

But “full self driving” is on another level entirely. There’s no ambiguity on what that should mean. Full. Self. Driving. Tesla’s actions here are clearly criminally misleading here to any functioning justice system.

>There’s no ambiguity

There certainly is, and I think you just demonstrated it. You convolute the meaning 'full' with 'perfect' and implied it was on another safety tier or level from the average driver. 'Full' means it competes on the average driver skill level. When you consider the average driver is fairly terrible at driving safely, you get what we have today.

Punting back to requiring human control with the frequency they do pretty unambiguously violates any sane notion of “full” self driving. Even by your own example, I am confident that humans do not call it quits and throw their hands up in the air while traveling at speed, expecting someone else to take over steering for them.

Nowhere in my post did I even hint at comparing FSD to human driving safety. That was all you.

If not humans, what else could you possibly use to compare it with for judgement on safety? It is heavily implied this was humans, but you somehow know of a better model for public safety?

I didn’t even mention safety. All I said was that the moniker Full Self Driving is misleading by any sober reading of the term.

You were the one that decided my comment was somehow an argument about safety rather than one that was pointing out the obvious fact that it does not “fully” self-drive by any stretch of the imagination.

Why are you so angry about other people not wanting to buy a deceiving product?

Not OP, but it's ironic how Musk/Tesla fans tell us we shouldn't make political decisions when buying products, but they only seem to be angry when someone boycotts their political heroes.

So which is it? Should buying decisions be political or not?

I personally wouldn't buy a Tesla for many individual reasons (terrible quality, not valuing safety, racist work environments, Musk's behavior), but just the terrible quality would be enough for me. I don't want a car that's in the shop all the time.

Tesla fans think Teslas are the best cars in the world, and they can't conceive you not buying a Tesla for reasons that are not political.

It's idiotic, but it is consistent.

Personal reasons I won't get a Tesla is just that they are too expensive. Tesla fans will tell me I am wrong of course. They will tell me that you can't get anything better at this price, which may be true if your needs matches what Tesla offers. But I don't want "at this price", and my needs are of a much cheaper car.

Key Consumer Reports Findings for Tesla • Brand Reliability Rank: Tesla jumped into the top 10 for brand reliability at 9th place out of 26 brands

I'd take it over any German car in a heartbeat.

EVs are way more reliable than ICE so the fact that Tesla only got 9th is actually sad.

The difference between the top brands and 9th are enormous. Why would I spend so much on anything that isn’t competing for 1st?

They continue to not buy a product from a fraudster. Not much changes, I propose. They buy a BYD or other quality non Tesla EV (Tesla sells ~2M EVs/year, China can build ~50M/year in aggregate, as of this comment). Those who still want Teslas buy them.

Tesla has become a vanity project operated by an emotionally unhealthy, power seeking narcissist who will chase attention and validation for the foreseeable future. It is not a critical component to global electrification. China will do all the heavy lifting (as of this comment, ~60% of Chinese auto sales are electric [largest auto market globally], and ~29% globally for 2026; exports are currently ~12M/year run rate, constrained by marine shipping capacity). Buy from Tesla, don’t buy from Tesla, doesn’t matter.

IEA Expects Electric Vehicles to Account for 29% of Global Car Sales in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970471 - October 2026

China growth straining global auto shipping capacity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553327 - September 2026

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026/executive...

As my kids say, “You don’t buy from people who lie to you.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

(disclosure: I own several Teslas purchased 2018-2022, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, sometimes we believe and trust the wrong people, we win or we learn)

Tesla was always an option on batteries improving at roughly the widely forecasted rates. This is the same information that the established automakers used to not focus on electric vehicles.

No one but Tesla has point to point autonomous driving in a consumer car.

Tesla does not have point to point autonomous driving. They state in their own marketing material, https://www.tesla.com/fsd, that "Currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous." I used to blame Elon Musk for this, but while he's made a number of over-optimistic predictions, as far as I can tell even he doesn't claim that FSD is currently autonomous. The idea that you can safely turn on FSD without being actively alert and engaged seems to be entirely a social media hallucination from Tesla fans.

It’s a parlor trick, having experienced “FSD” myself as a Tesla owner (as well as tens of thousands of miles of enhanced autopilot in a legacy Model S across the continental US). I’m safer in a Waymo, because they know how to actually build an autonomous vehicle. I’ll put my kids in a Waymo, I do not allow FSD to be active in my Teslas. It’s just theater to juice Tesla enterprise value, not a human safe autonomy system.

I don’t need to be able to own it, I need it to work and be safe. Let those who use FSD own the consequences of system failure. They’ll learn eventually. You’re never going to talk cultists out of their cult of personality, imho.

While I would not pay for Tesla assisted self driving, I have seen it provide daily utility to many drivers, especially older ones.

At only $100 per month on a $40k vehicle, I consider it to be a serious product and not just a parlor trick, since no other car seller comes close to offering it anywhere near that price.

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