Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes That Teslas With "Self-Driving" Computers May Never Be Able to Actually Self-Drive
Elon Musk Suddenly Realizes That Teslas With "Self-Driving" Computers May Never Be Able to Actually Self-Drive
Tesla customers may need a hardware upgrade to allow their cars to fully drive themselves unsupervised, Elon Musk admitted.
"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...
Still no LiDAR.
"Trust me, you just need to buy more compute for your car. We'll figure out reliable driving by sight someday."
It’s got something way better: LieAr
We'll fix that, the car will be driving fully autonomously 2018, promise!
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151497/tesla-lidar-luminar-elon-musk-sensor-autonomous
Tesla bought over $2 million worth of lidar sensors from Luminar this year
I personally don't think it's a matter of more sensory input. Whilst Lidar wouldn't be a bad thing, autonomous cars are just a problem current technology can't solve.
The vehicles with a higher automated driving rating than Tesla use a more diverse range of sensory inputs. While it may not make fully autonomous driving, it very clearly would have made Tesla closer to it based on the fact that cars that use things like lidar in addition to cameras surpassed Tesla's rating many years ago.
It is. The machine learning algorithm has maxed out its parameters because Elon decided to get rid of redundancy. The machine learning algorithm had to invent new algorithms to do what redundancy would have easily done in far fewer lines of code. They are out of compute power BECAUSE they decided to cheap out and removed redundancy.
Have you seen Waymo?
We already have road legal level 4 self driving cars for sale in Germany (Mercedes EQS and S Class), level 5 isnt far away.
If Tesla didn't go the vision-only route they would probably also have level 4 autonomy by now
It is to some degree. Lots of other new cars have lane keeping assist and automatic braking, BLIS, adaptive cruise control etc, and so on with more capable sensors and can for the most part drive without input from the driver better than the Tesla models with ultrasonic sensors or simply cameras. In fact the ones that rely solely on cameras absolutely do reportedly perform worse in testing. Musk was insistent that they could cheap out on the types of sensors used in order to make more profit and it shows. I don't think it's that tech cannot handle self driving currently. I think that it's a numbers game where the firms attempting it want to do it as cheaply as possible while promising the moon and stars which they can't deliver on a cheap budget. Vehicles like Ford's (Blue Cruise) use all kinds of sensors including radar and GPS to allow for handsfree (not self driving) and it does work. The proofs of concept are out there in the world, but the costs to go from something like that to full self driving just doesn't make it feasible for the average car manufacturer.
First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn't do it either.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it's getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it's practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn't even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn't used to be this bad.
Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it's either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you're in traffic because you know it'll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don't. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I'm watching it close. It can't navigate city streets, but neither can FSD....
TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it's bad and getting worse, not better. I can't believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that's why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.
I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It's a simple tractable problem that's generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.
I agree with that. Adaptive cruise and lane keep do reduce road trip fatigue in my experience. Tesla-bros bought the idea that this would be a fully autonomous car and it's not. Rather than learning their lesson and using it as a tool, they put their faith in it anyway, weighting the wheel or whatever to get what they paid for regardless of what the car can reliably do.
I agree. VWs' drive assists are absolutely stellar. It's just line assist, speed limit recognition with cruise control and active distance assist, that's essentially it. It's not FSD but on the highway it almost feels like it. I was very skeptical and distrusted the sensors at first because my previous car had none of that, but after a while I got very comfortable with them.
I can even safely get something out of my bag on the passenger seat without worrying that the car is going to fly of the road if I take my eyes of it for a second.The only thing that kind of annoys me, but that goes for all line assists, is that they don't seem to follow a center line between the road markings, rather they bounce around inside a "zone" with margins left and right.
So if you are on the inside of your "zone" and approach a sharp turn, the car enters the outside margin at a fairly steep angle and often skims the outside road markings before bouncing back. It just feels like the assist is on a constant rubber band, so I don't really trust it with high speed turns.I absolutely love my adaptive cruise control, I use it all the time. I have a hybrid and it does a much better job of keeping the engine from kicking in than I do. Thankfully with Honda I can use it everywhere not just highways. It's been my absolute favorite "new" thing to have in a car!
GM’s Super Cruise is absolutely great. It only works on highways though. I recently drove for 5 hours through three states without touching the gas, brake, or steering wheel once. Except the little nub on the steering wheel to adjust the set speed.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it's getting worse, not better.
It's almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.
Buckle up folks, we're going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.
Since the first time I heard about FSD I’ve been wondering why Tesla (or others) doesn’t set up a system where drivers opt-in (no opt-in by default) to sending anonymized driving data to help train the model. The vast majority of the time, it’s probably modeling OK driving. At least no accidents. But the shitty driving and accidents are also useful as data about what to avoid.
Maybe they’re already doing this? But then I wonder why their FSD is getting shittier rather than improving. One would think with more driving data, good and bad examples, would only help.
I don't believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations of intersections, traffic signs, special conditions like accidents, heavy Rain or fog, road closures or construction sites to get it right every time. Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.
This doesn't mean that AI will be better, because then you don't even have a source code to track down where it went wrong to correct it in future updates.
Sounds like it'd be nice if you had real control over the car's software, and you could roll it back.
This... also makes me a little more weary driving around Teslas in traffic.
Some of us Tesla drivers refuse to use any of their bullshit auto-driving software (I don’t even use lane assist anymore) because of bad experiences so hopefully most of them are just driving normally. Which I do admit may not spark much confidence given how terrible some drivers are.
Fully agree. The sort of good news for driving around them is that most of my frustrations come from it being overly cautious and almost getting rear-ended because it decided to stop for a green light or some other odd decision. It's rare to have it interact poorly with someone that is driving predictably. Like, cut it off without a signal and you have introduced something has not already accounted for. Driving alongside it on the highway, it sees you and knows where you are. But people are unpredictable and it only takes one mistake.
That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.
Sounds like it still drives like a teenager!
Which of course is terrible since it should be improving over time.
It works well on freeways. I still don't use it much on city streets except for the occasional shits and giggles. It has issues on non-divided highways and refuses to drive at my set speed limit.
I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them.
This is worse than just driving yourself. I either need to be engaged in actively driving, or it really needs to be able to handle the task by itself.
It's why I find the lane-keeping feature in my vehicle to be useful, but lane-centering is just too weird for me to use.
I went to Texas for the eclipse. Made a big family vacation out of it...landed in Houston, rented a Mustang Mach-E, stayed there for a few days, drove to Austin for a few days, drove to Dallas for a few days (and for the eclipse, was at the Perot), then back to Houston for a few more days.
I say this because this was a lot of highway driving. More than I would usually do. And I absolutely loved one-pedal driving in the city, and the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping on the highway. I trusted it much, much more than in our 2019 Odyssey.
Anything more than that, I don't think the tech is really ready for. I wish it were. I know theoretically a computer could be a much, much better driver than humans...but it takes a non-trivial amount of intelligence to drive. We take it for granted, because a lot of it is practically instinctual to us, and almost entirely subconscious. It's an incredible amount of identification and complex decision making that goes into it if you actually break down the number of inputs you observe and variables you "know" the values of (such as stopping distance for various surface and weather conditions).
Mu dude, ad fellow tesla driver, I fully concur!
First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist
Ditto for my Volkswagon
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.
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 would like them to try to go to Mars this coming January. I am sure with enough fuel one of Elons rockets can get it moving in the right direction, they can wing everything else as they go.
Can't wait for the supporters to come out and gas light buyers instead: "uh, well of course they couldn't. He didn't lie you just don't understand tech...!
I work in IT and people that think like that can fuck themselves. "What do you mean Meta lied by selling your data to a company you didn't know about. Maybe you should just have never trusted Meta."
Stupid fucking boot lickers.
To be fair to Meta, they did tell you they might do that. They didn't lie. They just told you in the find print of an already convoluted and arcane legal document that they know most people would never read, fewer would understand, and no one could do anything to change.
So unlike Tesla, where they did lie about FSD's capabilities, and that is at best false advertising but probably actually fraud, Meta at least had a thin veneer of plausible deniability against accusations of being liars when they sold your data to unknown third-parties because they did tell you about it, you just needed a law degree to understand what they were telling you.
Olympic level mental gymnasts
Oh, so it turns out that "genius billionaires" only exist in comic books?
Nobody could have seen that one coming!
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."
There's a word for that already. Lied. They/He lied.
No need for 30 words when 2 will do.
They Lied.
Maybe one extra world: They lied maliciously.
Also, they did so repeatedly, over a very long time and while it must have been fully apparent with insider knowledge that this setup cannot work.
He said it would exist by 2019 and you would be able to use your car as a taxi when not using it. Even made claims about how it will Delray costs. That's all sorts of other extra business legal words like fraud.
salesmanship
You mean false advertisement
Worse than that. Fraud. He's scammed people out of millions.
Or just fraud
It's pure grift.
Right. Good salespeople listen to customers, not try to sell them something they a) don’t need or b) won’t work as advertised.
Let’s not split hairs lol
Nah a judge determined it was just " puffery " and obviously he didn't really mean self driving
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.
This is the epitome of American "ingenuity" as it promises, promises, promises, and no-one ever actually delivers.
Just. Like. Trump.
Trump is the most American president we've ever had.
😆
Took my first drive as a passenger in a FSD Tesla the other day. I was rapidly underwhelmed. I mean, yeah...it's pretty cool the car drives itself, to an extent. But even as a passenger I was struck by the number of times I would have taken the wheel and made the car do what it was supposed to. Hesitant pulling forward to turn, hesitant pulling out into traffic after a turn, wrong speed for the road, abrupt turns... Did it get us there? Sure. Did it do a good job? Mid at best. Probably better as an anti-fatigue measure on highway drives instead of taking you places in town. I would not pay for FSD were I to own a Tesla...at least it seems really inappropriate for the kind of driving I do.
so like the autopilot in Elite Dangerous. will it get you there? sure. will it get you there fast? ...not exactly.
Will it get us there in one piece? Probably
Friendship drive charging
Better than the autopilot in eve....
It's funny because what you describe is way BETTER than I would have expected. LOL.
It's only killed a few people recently, so I assume it has to work pretty well at least 99% of the time. Though it's really funny watching tech bros talk about how great it is and then seeing it blow a stop sign.
The best use cases I can think of for full self-driving are the elderly, the visually impaired, the drunk, the disabled, and the easily distracted.
Eh.. If full self driving got to where it needs to be then it would be safer for everyone if all vehicles were full self driving.
The safest driver is a predictable driver. When vehicles are subject to algorithms and are programmed to obey the laws of the road, and have open constant communication of their intentions with other vehicles, you can't get any more predictable than that.
I say this as someone who drives for a living, too. I don't think it's happening any time soon, but full autonomous would be way safer than people.
Lying liar lied. News at 11.
This was the inevitable result even years ago. When self-driving cars were the hot topic and several companies were doing their own thing, that's when it should have been obvious it was never going to happen. It's not a problem any one independent company was ever going to solve, especially quickly. For to work it would have to be an open source, global standard with several companies working together.
I mean you'd have to build out a massive amount of infrastructure to further support it. All vehicles would have to have a module in it that would communicate with everything else around it, regardless if it was self-driving or not. There can't be a premium model, or a subscription, ect., it would need to just be there and work.
The overall task to get this done was never going to be quick, easy, or cheap. This was always going to be bigger than any one single company and a handful of engineers. It's going to take the effort of many companies and governments all working selflessly.
I can't help but think he's saying this now as an attempt to distract from the stories of "Musk has been talking to Putin since the spring when they were both faced with problems: Musk being forced to buy Xitter and Putin unable to steal Ukraine. Odd how Musk has been becoming more rabidly pro-Russian-interests, isn't it?
I rather think he’s trying to tank the Tesla stock price lately. No idea why though.
He wants in on the new authoritarian regime. Slowing down or stopping electric cars is on their to do list.
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.
He realizes this every couple of years and then he forgets again during the next shareholders meeting
Wow, what a genius!
/s
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.
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.
He's just trying to sell the upgrade so people will throw away their old cars and buy new ones. But that already happened with the last version and it still can't do it. This won't be any different with him in charge. Put an engineer in charge, invest in the tech, and you might get there. But Tesla is not going to ever get there while it needs to sell every incremental advance in tech rather than spending time and money on lots of iterations of prototypes that don't need to be mass produced.
Lol put an engineer in charge! Hahaha what a ridiculous idea. Can't have engineers in charge of businesses! Would never happen
Over Promise under deliver
Yup this is his copout so he doesn't have to produce an entry level vehicle all while cozying up to Trump so he doesn't have to compete with the rest of the world on EVs
I thought he said they would replace the modules to support FSD?
He did. Right in this article it says that they will upgrade the older models for free. This whole post is a circle jerk for Elon haters. I mean, I despise the guy as well but I don’t find distortions to be a useful outlet for that.
What we have is one generation of Tesla cars that might need a free hardware upgrade to fully deliver on the promises that were made.
What the post and most of the comments heard is “no Tesla can ever self drive and Elon scammed everyone and laughed to the bank.”
It’s just embarrassing. At this point I filter Elon content not only because I don’t want to hear what the jerk has done today, but because he whips people up into such a stupor so efficiently.
More like most of us don't care to read past the headline.
It really is embarrassing. It's a common theme on Lemmy, Reddit too but not the extremes in large casual subs.
Left and right both bullshit and exaggerate so many of these stories and it makes them both look like clowns.
But hey, I'm fully prepared for a bunch of downvotes because this place has the self reflection of a fucking mop.
P.s. May Biden become supreme overlord and drink the blood of all those who run on a ballot against him.
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.
I feel like this is a recurring theme for the silicon valley billionaires and we reached "Peak Bullshit" at NFTs and ever since then one thing after another has hit wall after wall
No, there won't be endless series of recalls and free upgrades for everyone until they finally achieve it as promised, somewhere between 2050 and 3050...
You have to live with it as it is.
Forever? No. Only for as long as you live.
The self refers to the person driving the car
probably knew long ago, just strung em out for funding
Anyone knowledgeable about city planning? Why did we never put some type of signal in our roads? (I don't know. Passive RFID every few feet?) It would only cost what, ten, twenty thousand on top of each million spent paving every mile?
Seems it would be better baseline navigation than self driving cars and occasionally map apps. The cars would still have to do obstacle avoidance, of course.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about self driving tech or city planning. But if interstates are replaced every 10 years, and highways every 20, and Musk first made these claims in 2013? Then we'd have the base tech for every auto manufacturer to do moderately reliable self driving on interstates and a lot of our highways already.
Or maybe that large view pathfinding is the relatively easy part? That's why I'm asking. I'm sure there's something more obvious from an informed viewpoint that I don't know.
I imagine power is the tricky part. Badge readers and the like that use RFID also use wireless electricity to "power" the card. The range of that is limited without massive coils. You may be able to harness power from heat in asphalt (from traffic or sunlight beating on it), but I'd think that'd also be very limiting.
Better would be low power RF beacons set up at every transformer or every N utility poles. Something like BLE, maybe a little bit beefier. Power is readily available. They don't require data. All they need to do is broadcast their exact location and time (which they can get from GPS receivers).
It is way more experience. Has to withstand great pressure and sheer forces. Updates as road changes. Heat of building asphalt and later of summer. Horrible road maintenance. And what does it provide exactly to a car that actually helps? How long until most roads are updated with it?
Y'know GPS didn't even enter my mind. Hell, depending on GPS 3 accuracy (isn't it supposed to be in the centimeters?) my talk of signals is completely moot. That measured against a map of roads on a server somewhere would probably let you download an entire map of nodes toward your destination. Along the way the car just measures against its current location and does the math for obstacles. Great point. This is why I ponder shit out loud. Thanks.
Yay for OpenPilot
But Tesla will gladly keep charging a lot of money for FSD.
Good. I don't trust them dern robuts.
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.
You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.
We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it's seeing, otherwise it's useless.
That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it's going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It's fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can't recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.
They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)
The main issue I have with full self driving is that it'll probably never actually be full self driving; there'll always be use cases where people have to take over - ice, snow, slightly flooded roads, sand, whatever*. And humans will have to take over under conditions when it's extremely helpful for them to have had extensive driving experience under a range of conditions - experience they'll no longer have because the car's been driving them everywhere.
* Yes, I know we're not supposed to drive in some of these conditions, and yet sometimes we have to, even if it's just to get to a safer place.
"Fuck that particular con, I have a president in my pocket now."
You know the craziest part? Had king dipshit just used fkin'
camerasLIDAR instead ofLIDARCameras not only would manufacture had been cheaper, but it would work waaaaaaaay better at the whole self driving part.Edit -
Fixed