The official policy to deprive customers and victims of information as much as possible is shocking from the standpoint of being flagrantly, cynically customer-hostile to the point of probable illegality, but it's right out of both Musk's normal playbook and that of his erstwhile colleagues at e.g. Paypal
For me, cars cross a very key danger threshold, which I express like this: "I am trusting my life to this device by using it. I must trust that it will not malfunction". We are in an era where cars have computer overrides, so that standard needs to be applied to the security and reliability of the computer inside. We are also in an era where computers sold by corporate robber-barons (IE most major corporations) will routinely not merely malfunction, but explicitly, intentionally betray the interests of their end-users for increasingly marginal gains for the company
Even if you trust the company that sold your car's computer, do you trust their security? All their employees? When we are putting computers in devices, like cars, where them operating as expected is life-or-death, those computers need to be auditable by independent experts and controllable by the end-user. To be clear, that unambiguously refers to the person or persons trusting - with their lives - that car operating safely and responding to their commands. We need to mandate open-source, user-owned computers in devices this dangerous, period.
I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.
I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.
There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.
All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.
If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.
I'd love to, the problem is it would get some pitifully low NCAP rating (because lack of active securities would bring the score down and I remember it is && deal, so car can have excellent crash safety yet still get low stars coz of lack of the electronic toys), and manufacturers want to sell as much gadgets as possible, because every few bucks of extra electronics is every few dozen bucks they can charge customer for.
The other problem I think is that the "fancy annoying electronics" are probably not that big part of the price of the car. Add chassis, battery, heating/cooling system for the car and all the mechanics and you already arrived at most of the car's production price.
Like, even if you add $500 of the compute (amounting to mid-high range GPU) and $500 on ruggedizing it for car work... extra $1000 worth in electronics isn't all that much of car price.
I for one am keeping my 8th gen Civic Type-R for as long as possible, got ABS, airbags, even some traction control but none of the annoyances of modern cars. All I want from new car is android auto...
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.
Concrete example: this week I had to drive some people between San Jose and Hollywood. Google maps says that's 5:40 hours over 340 miles. I looked at renting a model 3 for the trip but it simply could not justify itself when compared to the minivan I ultimately rented with 500+ miles range. Not only was I not forced to stop in BFE for 20-40 minutes, I didn't have to stop at all. Arrived with plenty of gas to get to any station in LA I might want (cheapest). And I wasn't even pressed for time, but if I'm slapping an extra half hour onto the trip I'd rather spend it (and actually did) on taking the more scenic US101 route for ~400 miles instead.
Touchscreens on cars need to die out, preferably quickly.
If Aptera manages to scale up production, it looks like they'll deliver that part at least. They're promising to make all the manuals and parts available to anyone.
that 1. removes an ICE off the road 2. saves on new mfr costs and 3. is a worthy hacker endeavour and/or 4. supports a local business
of course if you simply hate cars and want everyone to ride the train or bikes you'll find a million reasons to not do this. good luck with that.
Naturally if my estate sues you personally, your defense would be that you didn't know the product was dangerous. Perhaps if the whistleblower's leak is widely publicized, that would weaken your defense.
Certainly the leak should weaken the maker's ability to claim they didn't know.
Are Teslas measurably less safe than other cars? I.e. is the accident probability per km driven on a Tesla higher than on another car? I haven't seen any data suggesting that, but I'm happy to be corrected.
Additionally, there's no data because Tesla releases nothing except heavily doctored numbers meant to make them look good. (To Tesla, a crash means airbag deployed. Sorry, random person that got ran over and killed, but you're out of Tesla's statistics)
You can count on Tesla for one thing, and that is to lie.
Why do you think that? If we used statistics to guide criminal justice policy we’d be in big trouble
girlboss...?
Source: I'm a zoomer who was active on TikTok during the pandemic :P
We should require a huge and lengthy validation process for true autonomous level 5 self driving so keep others safe. It seems possible for an open source self driving system to go through this validation for one particular build of the system. But the moment I start modifying my own system (say, increasing `DRIVING_AGGRESSION` by 10 percent), it's no longer the same system that was verified as safe.
But even if personal modification is out of the question, the safety verification process needs to be so thorough and costly it seems difficult for anyone but a major for-profit company to go through it.
"girlboss" ? Care to elaborate ? I don't exactly know what you mean here
It seems like you're holding Tesla to a higher standard than any other automaker. Which other automakers reveal similar information willingly? Many (or likely most) other automakers have made deceptive and/or dangerous products, in just about every manner imaginable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12007862/fca-jeep-grand-c...
Look forward to a criminal fraud investigation, billions in fines, Musk resigning etc.
because it sure reads like this is exactly what your view.
it doesn't matter if there's a double standard, it's bad behavior no matter what the rules are for everyone else. and if there is a double standard then that is something else that needs addressing. a double standard does not diminish the severity of these documents.
Other automakers don't go and scream around in their advertising (or in the antics of their founder) to the degree Tesla does.
I get that they're trying to create a wider moat against their competitors, but if their self-driving software are found to have systematic failure modes in them as these internal docs seem to suggest, then that could very well do more harm to their reputation in the long run.
So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
> So I totally disagree on that end, as do most investors given teslas enormous valuation.
Yes, and most Gamestop investors think the company is going to be the next Amazon. Buying a popular meme stock doesn't make their predictions right.
I’m not saying you’re completely wrong on the general concept, but the relationship between value increase and drivable time per week (or whatever unit of time) is not 1:1. There’s going to be some loss in there.
Also not all cars would see drive time increases. Those used as Ubers or similar certainly will, but that won’t displace the vast majority of car owners who will continue to own a car and drive it at similar rates for the convenience of having it immediately on hand, at all times, ready to go. If it self drives too then that’s great, the claw back some personal time during a commute etc.
They’re not delayed by a few years. The problem is intractable, unless you can limit the journey to a controlled scope.
I drive over multiple pathways and grassy lanes a week that aren’t mapped and have no markings. A self-driving car can’t arbitrarily account for something like that any time soon.
Waymo is able to operate a limited route in Phoenix because they restrict to best-case routes.
That week of driving is worth what an Uber driver’s take-home pay would be for the same week after finance (or equivalent lost interest if you buy with cash), insurance, on-road costs, charging, maintenance, depreciation, and whatever intangible value you put on not having hundreds of strangers farting in your car every week.
Multiply that by the number of weeks that you expect the car to be nice enough to do this, and that’s your return on investment.
Look at it this way, assume humans drive, or need to be driven/travel, X miles per year.
Today, assuming a car drives Y miles per year, the market needs X/Y cars.
Given your argument, with self driving, a car runs nY miles per year, the demand for car will drop to X/nY, basically 1/n of before or maybe a little more, since after all the humans won't suddenly need to drive/travel nX miles per year.
So, if a car were to become worth 5x more, but we need 1/5x cars, the total market would remain the same.
Cars depreciate based on distance driven, not on age. A car will need to be serviced every X miles and replaced every Y miles, and these numbers are independent of whether the car is driven one hour a week or forty. In no universe does driving more hours per week increase the value of a car.
The only thing I can think of is maybe it would make some trips not need my presence at all. Like I could see placing a Wal-mart grocery order, and sending my car to go to Wal-mart without me in it, they load it up, and then it comes back, and I can unload it.
Which is nice, but I'm not paying 5x the already expensive car prices in order to save a few minutes here and there.
You can already lend out your car for other people to drive, and there are numerous companies that do exactly that as their entire business model.
So this is a serious question, in what way does self driving cars mean your personal car is going to be used more?
The only people for whom self-driving cars represent an actual real world monetary win are people and companies that transport people and things. So public transport, trucking companies, uber, etc - for them self driving would mean no longer having to pay for drivers.
For every other group self driving has no financial impact on the value of the car (except possibly tremendously devaluing any existing cars where a component of their value is current generation "self driving").
Cars driven commercially like that are worth less money.
Take a hybrid Toyota Camry that’s driven as Taxi almost 25 hours a day.
Are they worth more? Do they command a premium?
No, they do not. And at the end of they short useful lives their value goes to zero.
You could argue that self driving cars don’t need drivers, and so can be driven 24/7 at less cost of labour.
Even that eventuates, and we get a world where car ownership is significantly on the decline, it just means they sell less cars.
As we’ve seen with most technology commodity products, price tends to be forced downwards.
So maybe Elon is right, and a self driving car is worth 5x. But it’s not obvious to me, and I’m wary of people like Elon talking up his own book. He is a proven loser and fantasist, but also a very successful billionaire. :-/
They shouldn't be harming lives to pursue this.
People do realize it. Especially people who specialize in building safety critical systems.
And they are all aware that Tesla's doesn't do anything to build actually safety-critical systems. They just treat it as building a webapp for sharing photos of cats.
The Model X was ranked 16th by car and driver which is pathetic (the impressive BMW iX was #1)
Personally, I'm surprised that the "Summon" feature wasn't matched by a corresponding "Banish" feature (go away and park yourself)
I don’t think they are trying to become the leader in self-driving. I think that, too, is smoke and mirrors.
They don’t just randomly brake for no reason.
> 0,7 m/s² and ≤ 1,3 m/s² The signal may be generated. > 1,3 m/s² The signal shall be generated.
> The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance systems where customers have expressed safety concerns has more than 3000 entries.
Out of millions of cars? And for the entire time Tesla’s been making cars?
I’ve watched YouTube videos of a SF Tesla driver who submits one or two reports every video (autopilot wasn’t aggressive enough, or failed to navigate a complicated turn, etc). Are each of those counted in the 3000 safety concerns?
I can’t even fathom any other car manufacturer having lower numbers.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fsd-beta-safety-crash-statis...
> My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.
We recall consumer products for danger well below the numbers reported in the article above. A vehicle on the road should be held to an even higher standard.
Aren't recalls related to systematic failure and severity, instead of absolute number of occurrences of an issue?
If someone is claiming that there is a safety issue despite the existing data, then yes, the burden of proof moves to them to validate their new claim.
The numbers here aren’t very high and they don’t reflect any serious risk of harm. Recall math is interesting to me, but it’s not just a function of customer complaints.
All of those were low numbers.
Obviously these issues should be solved, but net-net, Teslas are very very safe.
This site doesn't seem that impartial/unbiased. From a linked article on Tesla:
> It’s also worth noting that the above email was sent after 2 a.m. Pacific, which isn’t specifically relevant to the faked video. But it does make it look like Musk is a loser with no friends or anything else to do other than work. Loser.
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-...
They go a step further. They use their cameras to detect the environment and significantly slow down acceleration if they think it might be a mistake.
Edit:spelling
My read from this link to a story about a story:
~1000 crashes related to autopilot reported for the 2.6 million autopilot enabled vehicles shipped in the reported time frame.
.04% total failures. How many of these were user created and not the fault of the car? How many of the failures from the car were specific to that cars hardware vs the software? Was it a Tesla hardware failure or an OEM device failure?
I’m not gonna do a full analysis, but whenever I re contextualize myself on car crash statistics I am reminded that Tesla failures represent an insignificant fraction of all failures.
The behaviour described (not wanting anything written) might very well be standard operating procedure with any company with decent legal counsel. If it is common behaviour, it is not some sort of Muskism, part of his evil scheming as is implied in the article, instead it is a reflection of the world we live in.
But it is one of those trends that I personally do not like either where these posts are made like it's a personal conversation between two girlfriends or whatever. There's opinion pieces and then there's this kind of I don't even know what it's called I'm so un-hip
https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/autokonze...
That doesn't mean that those journalists are necessarily completely unbiased. Germany's traditional car industry is threatened by Tesla without any doubt.
However, the details on how Tesla is handling these reports is revealing and I have no doubts that they are real. That those who publish them might not like Tesla does not change that.
For example, I like tesla autopilot 1 (mobileye based) and found its behavior to be reasonable. I also know its limitations - it has only one camera - so I don't use it in edge-case scenarios.
I think model S display is good for turning settings on and off, but is bad for controlling any aspect of the car especially critical ones like headlights, climate control, door locks and more.
I think the newer model S/X cars are bad, replacing stalks with touch controls for the headlights, turn signals, horn and wipers. They get in the way of good driving.
If you didn't overemphasize the good parts and downplay the bad parts you might find out that maybe you shouldn't really like what Tesla is doing at all, or you'd have a legitimate reason to like Tesla.
What you shouldn't do is overemphasize the good parts so you can feel better about your decision to like Tesla. Then your conclusion has been fixed from the start and you're adjusting the facts to fit to avoid cognitive dissonance.
The article doesn't present any evidence or argument to support it's own thesis.
Everything in it sounds like my experience dealing with any corperation.
I mean, that's pretty suspicious right there.
It seems suspicious to you because you assume it's not standard industry practice. But that assumption is not in evidence.
They have the internal communications and this is the most incriminating thing they could come up with?
[...]
"Due to the sheer volume and structure of the data sets, the editorial team had to make a selection of which of the more than thousand Excel tables could be taken into account in the query tool. "
https://app.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/leseraufr...
It seems to me that something really dangerous or illegal needs to be going on to morally justify publicly releasing a 100GB worth of (presumably unfiltered) private company data.
They Musk open sourced tesla patents 9 years ago: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y...
For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.
“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.
Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. “They never sent emails, everything was always verbal,” says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.
How would a self driving car get through heavy fog or snow covered roads when there are only very difficult to decipher hints to the road edges?
How will self-driving cars deal with humans that can perfectly predict their actions? I believe that bad drivers will take advantage of self-driving cars by cutting them off and failing to yield when they should.
Because human drivers have a sense of self preservation we can break the rules when we are about to be car-jacked or see an impending collision coming. Imagine how easy it is to obstruct a self-driving car for nefarious reasons.
I'm confident that, eventually, self-driving cars will address all of these issues to some degree, and that will mark a turning point where it is better to leave driving to the cars than average drivers. However, this doesn't mean I'm going to put my $100K car into a taxi pool to be used by (sometimes drunk) strangers; I don't buy the argument that the cost of buying such a car will pay for itself.
I wonder if they're acting on behalf of another auto manufacturer.
Sounds like click bait more than anything.
Thunderf00t points to an interesting interview of karpathy where he says (truthfully) that when he joined Tesla, the cars couldn’t even follow the lines or something, yet at the same time the scam king was promising coast to coast self-driven rides. See timestamp 16:48 of the video below:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=grefAhSvcvc&t=16m48s
P.S. no offense to the excellent employees of Tesla who’ve achieved tremendous things, including the driver assist system. But the scammy claims of the conman in chief straddling the border of fraud and and futurism unfortunately overshadows these legitimate achievements.