“Translation: all the times Tesla has vowed that all of its vehicles would soon be capable of fully driving themselves may have been a convenient act of salesmanship that ultimately turned out not to be true.”
Another way to say that, is Tesla scammed all of their customers, since you know, everyone saw this coming…
Wow, what a genius!
/s
Yay for OpenPilot
He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting
Lying liar lied. News at 11.
I realized self-driving on roads is impossible for so-called when someone pointed out what human drivers do when there’s like a flock of geese camped out in the middle of the road.
We know that we should slowly move forward until they get out of the way, including bonking then with the car (gently). Do we want cars deciding that some obstruction in the road is “ok” to hit? I don’t. So what’s the solution? Something other than pure autonomous self driving.
We can probably have some very high level driver assist. Maybe.
All the issues with self-driving could be solved if they actually gave a shit about making it work. You don’t let the machine choose. You give it hard fucking rules to follow. It doesn’t need to identify geese, human, ball, dog, child to react differently to each; it should see an obstruction and stop to avoid damaging the fucking object and car, regardless of what it is. They are making it way more complicated than it really has to be.
This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.
Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.
This 100%, too many musk fanboys don’t understand how much he is actually hindering innovation.
Even at SpaceX they make more progress when he isn’t involved.
Maybe he shouldn’t have called it “autopilot.”
The thing with (full) self-driving is that the edge cases are the challenge. Driving is the Pareto Principle really cranked up: (fully made up numbers) 2% of the driving represents 90% of the difficulty. And highway driving is a much simpler task to be automated than driving on a stroad, weird intersections, unprotected turns, etc.
I think we are a long ways off from full self-driving, and highway driving capabilities of current vehicles only address what is by far the easiest scenario. And even there those capabilities are limited from what I’ve seen.
I believe that some technological ideas can work. The problem is that ideas that are under people like Musk, are doomed to always fail and will be seen as negative.
Elon Musk sucks.
The problem is that ideas that are under people like musk, are doomed to always fail
Like electric cars, like reusable rockets…
Yep Elon famously invented the first electric car and the first reusable spacecraft. He did it in his garage with his own two hands!
Read your damn history.
SpaceX is basically 100% Elon’s creation. He was founder, Tom Mueller (who designed the Merlin rocket engine) was the first employee period
Tesla was Elon and a few other people who had seen a good electric roadster, but it had been a one-off that that company was not going to produce. They decided they wanted to produce an electric roadster, so they did. Initially, Martin Eberhard was in charge of the company and Elon was just an investor. Search archive.org for the original Tesla blog. It’s all laid out. I know this because I was following them while it was happening.
Eberhard was in charge, and they were going for a setup with a two-speed gearbox. There was to be no clutch, just a synchromesh to allow shifting. Problem is, shifting at 10,000+ RPM under heavy load is mechanically stressful, and they were having a lot of trouble getting the gearbox to work reliably. After a good year of screwing with this, they were burning through cash and not getting close to actually shipping a car. That’s when Elon stepped in, pushed Eberhard out, and took over Tesla. Elon quickly switched to a setup with a single speed non-shifting gearbox (much easier to build, much less expensive, and will basically last forever as long as you lubricate it) and a larger and better cooled electric motor to deliver the required torque that they wouldn’t get from a lower speed gear. That setup is still in use today in all Teslas.
Wow. What a visionary 🙄
I’m not saying he’s not an asshole. But he is a visionary.
And right now, if he wasn’t up Trump’s ass, you’d probably be saying he’s a visionary without sarcasm.
He wasn’t up Trump’s ass like a month ago. That’s a fairly recent development.
Okay Trump is recent, but his whole change of focus since buying Twitter is where public opinion on him shifted. That started a shift in public statement more toward the libertarian or perhaps conservative and that made him unpopular with a lot of the liberals who previously liked him for pushing environmental causes.
Now that he pushes conservative and libertarian ideals, supports a Republican candidate, he becomes persona non grata. That may well be valid, but it should not take away recognition of his other accomplishments. If he’s now an asshole, he can be a visionary asshole. Becoming an asshole doesn’t mean he isn’t or wasn’t a visionary.
As ever, things that succeed with Musk as the figurehead succeed despite him not because of him.
Over Promise under deliver
He and Trump deserve each other.
I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.
His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.
More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.
Aren’t they all motivated by wealth and greed?
Well any political choice will increase the wealth of the billionaire class in general. Ant candidate that is a threat to that will be smeared to dust before they get anywhere near power.
But Musk is going for the more direct approach, and tbh I think the second Trump gets power again he’ll have no need for Musk and will treat him like the parasite he is. He’s certainly done that before.
Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.
I don’t think he would go submarine diving, it would be more in-character for him to try and fail a moon vacation.
Makes sense. I’m not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.
Good. I don’t trust them dern robuts.
Just recently saw a video of an experimental self driving vehicle from Bosch - from the 90’s!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTnBiTIvGqY
You could imagine we’d be much further now, considering how far computing power, computer vision and AI have come.
Surprised if he is truly capable of even this level of self reflection.
Billionaires also fall into the Gartner hype cycle. And convincing a billionaire there’s an opportunity to automate workers out of a job is a quick way to get an injection of cash.
It’s going to be generations before we are actually able to automate most labor. But long, long before that AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
AI will be capable enough to replace overpaid CEO’s.
How would this play out? The shareholders pay off the current CEO to implement an AI-CEO and step aside?
I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.
McKinsey, Deloitte & co will provide that service.
Maybe. Or companies that are AI ran will outcompete the existing ones.
But how does an AI come to run a company in the first place? A CEO has to be replaced by an AI. What does that process look like in the first place?
Worker owned co-op with CEO duties coordinated by an AI.
My Leaf can handle itself on the highway and it’s the perfect amount of self driving that I want. I also didn’t need to pay half the price of the leaf for the privilege.
