Tesla says its vehicles that are equipped with the latest versions of its vaunted “Full Self-Driving” system can travel from point to point with little human intervention.
The company has cautioned that cars equipped with the system cannot actually drive themselves and that motorists must be ready at all times to intervene if necessary.
This describes a level 2 system…
And in less than two months, the company is scheduled to unveil a vehicle built expressly to be a robotaxi.
…but this would require a level 4 system.
“It’s not even close, and it’s not going to be next year,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety.
This will be the reason Tesla falls behind the rest of the automotive industry, wasting money on vanity projects instead of developing better vehicles.
The 3, Y, and the huge number of Chinese EVs being sold around the world have shown there is a huge market for affordable, practical electric vehicles, and what are they developing? A vehicle that won’t be able to fulfill it’s intended role for a decade almost everywhere.
My understanding is that the only places in the world where self-driving vehicles are actually legal is the UK and weirdly Tehran or something very odd like that.
But that’s all just a technicality, most jurisdictions say you can’t have them because we haven’t verified their safety. The UK says you can have them but only in very limited testing scenarios (limited speed, limited to certain roads in a mapped area). But they both effectively amount to the same thing.
I think the focus on AI is what will be the problem. Sure, AI is cool, and sure you need advances for self-driving, but you’re a car manufacturer and can’t neglect car manufacturing
All that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their “we’re disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars” story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge “we’re a Tech Stock” premium that keeps Tech companies’ stock prices high even when they’re loosing money (the valuations are justified by investors with the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep “faking until you make it” all the while getting farther and farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker. (In my mind I have the image of the Coyote from Road-Runner running out of track, going over the cliff and keeping on running until noticing he’s not running on ground anymore and is high up in the air)
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
Electric cars is an incredibly old Tech (older than ICE, even), since the very first cars invented were electric.
Tesla were just updating an old tech and trying to make it viable (in which they succeeded), by using modern batteries and electric motors instead of what was used in the original EVs.
The innovative Tech stuff was things like automated parking and automated driving. I don’t think integrating what’s basically a tablet on a car dashboard counts as innovative Tech - it’s the same kind of thing makers of “Smart” Fridges were doing - grab old tech, put a touch screen on it and call it high tech.
Without the actual high tech part around automated driving, Tesla is just a company that started in the market for car manufacturing with a strategy of carving out a new market segment by updating to the XXI century a technology from the XIX century that is now cheaper to run and adresses the Ecological concerns of many people - quite a smart and in some ways innovative business strategy but it makes them no more a Tech company than Mercedes-Benz is a Tech company for having invented Electronic Fuel Injection or my local supermarket is a Tech company because they have a smartphone customer loyalty app - merelly using existing Tech, integrating new Tech that somebody else invented with old Tech or even inventing new electronic parts for a specific domain is not what makes a Tech company, IMHO.
That said, the Stock Market will believe any old bollocks and the Startup World has never been this fraudulent (and I say this having been an insider) so you can pass pretty much anything that uses Tech in non-innovative ways as a Tech Company - I mean Glovo is deemed a Tech Company even though their business is basically a booked express delivery business that uses a smartphone app and has some backend integration with sellers - a new combination of existing things, not innovation.
Improving an existing technology using modern components is an “improvement” but is not especially “innovative” and not at all any kind of unique breakthrough - it’s Tech use, not Tech making.
Maybe because I’ve spent most of my life working at or near the bleeding edge of Technology I don’t find them especially innovative in Tech except for the self-driving stuff: what they did that was impressive was in the sphere of business strategy and they seem to have run with just that for too long and not pivoted when they should’ve.
That said I can understand that people holding shares is TSLA would be scared shitless about Tesla not being treated anymore as a Tech company by the stockmarket, and hence desperately try to argue that Tesla is a Tech company that makes cars rather than a car company that uses Tech like all the other carmakers.
Thing is, I quite like the idea of a self driving car. I do whitewater kayaking, and I’d love to be able to do a trip and have my car meet me at the end.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious this isn’t happening any time soon though, and developing a vehicle that is totally reliant on the technology doesn’t seem like a smart idea.
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…
Also this seems to very much be them suffering from the 90/10 problem that some many software projects suffer from: you can do 90% of the work with 10% of the effort but that also means it takes 90% of the work to do the other 10%.
Earlier people from the outside perceived Tesla as being ahead of everybody else on this because they just started before just about everybody else, were riding the easy part of the curve were you’re constant delivering improvements because you’re just tackling the easy bits, and they were probably even doing a rush job and taking shortcuts to maintain that apperarence of being ahead of the rest because that maintained an appeareance of Tesla as a Tech Stock rather than an Auto Industry Stock, hence with market valuations 10x or 20x higher than they would others which meant sky-high Tesla Stock Prices justified by how “technologically ahead” they were in a “key future technology” - the company was just executing a typical conman strategy of looking like they were making it in the hope that their early-mover status and the increasing investor funding that strategy pulls in would allow them to actually make it before everybody else or at least with a larger installed base, similarly to how Theranos was doing only unlike that company Tesla did just the right balance of deceit and reality to just be on the right side of the Laws for Fraud.
Tech companies absolutelly can get away with doing this during the early and easy parts of the project because for non-experts it looks like they’re doing fast progress - which is why Startups nowadays (which is an Era of way more bullshitty and even fraud in the Industry than, say, pre-2000) commonly do things exactly like this - but then they reach the hard part, progress speed naturaly goes down a lot (the project transitions from the 90%-results/10%-work speed to the 10/90% one) plus all the the early shortcuts (a.k.a. Technical Debt) come due to be paid for: “out of control car careening down the hill” meet “concrete wall”.
Finally, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they’re stuck down a dead-end for the technology which is the wrong way to reach level 4 and have to go back and redo much if not most of that work they did as a rush job to keep impressing investors and ill-informed customers with how “ahead of the pack” the were. Under the leadership of Musk I suspect that they will never be able to reach level 4.
Aren’t level 4 systems still illegal in the US anyway? I remember Volkswagen holding off on a minibus due to this limitation when they managed to create a working proof of concept 8ish years ago
My understanding is that they’re not illegal in so much as they would have to be proven to actually work. Since no one’s ever been able to do this to the satisfaction of the regulators effectively self-driving cars are illegal.
We have Tesla’s on the road anyway, so I don’t quite understand how that works.
They are only effectively illegal right up until they’re not. If a company came up with a genuinely self-driving vehicle my understanding is that it would be authorized but they would have to actually demonstrate it, and that’s possibly more than the corporations really want to take on at the moment.
Presumably being second to market is the more cost-effective option so everyone’s holding off until someone does it first.
We have Tesla’s on the road anyway, so I don’t quite understand how that works.
The feature marketed as “Full Self-Drivinng” is qualified as a beta feature undergoing test and that it requires a human to be in control at all times. It also makes at least some effort to ensure a human actually is paying attention.
You could certainly quibble that maybe it’s not obvious to all, but it is there.
Also I believe the human sensing was much easier to trick until last fall. But if you have to go out of your way to trick it, how can you claim you didn’t know it wanted a human in control?
That makes sense. The VW I’m thinking of may have been level 3 (trying to remember autonomous driving levels off the top of my head so don’t quote me on this), as I believe it needed guidance from on-road infrastructure to double check safety issues, which would have obviously been too much hassle for the US.
The proof of concept was miles ahead of Tesla has ever been, though, so it’s unfortunate that we can’t be bothered to add some sensors to the road
They are only effectively illegal right up until they’re not.
Well for Level 4, installation of human-controllable steering wheels and pedals are optional, and there isn’t a system for demanding the human take over at any given time. So in a sense, a street-legal level 4 car will need to be certified before it takes the road, because it simply won’t necessarily have functionality that even gives a human the opportunity to drive.
By creating regulations that apply to the creation of those things? Level 1 AVs exist and as such regulations exist for AVs. These regulations apply to level 4 AVs despite being mostly theoretical.
The other commenter in this thread basically already answered this as well by talking about how manufacturers need to prove the safety of it before it can be green it.
This describes a level 2 system…
…but this would require a level 4 system.
And so I tend to agree, fully.
This will be the reason Tesla falls behind the rest of the automotive industry, wasting money on vanity projects instead of developing better vehicles.
The 3, Y, and the huge number of Chinese EVs being sold around the world have shown there is a huge market for affordable, practical electric vehicles, and what are they developing? A vehicle that won’t be able to fulfill it’s intended role for a decade almost everywhere.
When I see EVs (southern Netherlands) they are mostly model S or non-Teslas from mostly VW. Autonomous vehicles aren’t even allowed here AFAIK.
Edit: I am agreeing with you, for clarity’s sake.
My understanding is that the only places in the world where self-driving vehicles are actually legal is the UK and weirdly Tehran or something very odd like that.
But that’s all just a technicality, most jurisdictions say you can’t have them because we haven’t verified their safety. The UK says you can have them but only in very limited testing scenarios (limited speed, limited to certain roads in a mapped area). But they both effectively amount to the same thing.
I think the focus on AI is what will be the problem. Sure, AI is cool, and sure you need advances for self-driving, but you’re a car manufacturer and can’t neglect car manufacturing
All that stuff is what justifies Tesla being treated as a Tech Stock rather than an Automotive Stock and hence having Stock Prices which are 10x or 20x what an auto-maker with similar Revenue and Margins would have.
Dropping the techno-bollocks that underpins their “we’re disrupting the Auto industry with our Technology and will become the Google of cars” story and just focusing on being good at making electric cars would mean loosing the huge “we’re a Tech Stock” premium that keeps Tech companies’ stock prices high even when they’re loosing money (the valuations are justified by investors with the expectation that they will one day dominate entire markets, like Google or Apple), and hence accepting their stock falling 90%, from Uber style valuations to Ford style valuations.
I doubt shareholders will ever accept that, hence I expect Tesla will just keep “faking until you make it” all the while getting farther and farther away from making it, until eventually they crash far harder (possibly even cease to exist in the next decade or two) than it would happen if they just settled down to be just another auto-maker. (In my mind I have the image of the Coyote from Road-Runner running out of track, going over the cliff and keeping on running until noticing he’s not running on ground anymore and is high up in the air)
They were a tech company because they developed cars with features and technology no one else ever had. The stock stayed too high because they were delivery 50%+ growth every year and legacy manufacturers weren’t even trying to compete. The stock was truly excessive because of a long term roadmap to bring the future into present reality. Funding for ai was part of the competitive advantage, when it was used to add features to their cars.
AI for its own sake is not a good place to be and will only suck attention and funding from the core business
Humanoid robotics may be a vision of the future and I’m excited that someone will make that attempt, but it has nothing to do with cars. It’s a distraction of funding and attention at the expense of the core business
Previously Musk developed a portfolio of companies, so each can go for their own attempts at the future with less impact on each other. It’s just basic business sense. For example, a solar company could go bankrupt without affecting a car company. Now he’s taking a leap of fantasy and I don’t see any sign of the solid technical base other of his companies started with, and he’s doing it as part of a company that had been succeeding
Electric cars is an incredibly old Tech (older than ICE, even), since the very first cars invented were electric.
Tesla were just updating an old tech and trying to make it viable (in which they succeeded), by using modern batteries and electric motors instead of what was used in the original EVs.
The innovative Tech stuff was things like automated parking and automated driving. I don’t think integrating what’s basically a tablet on a car dashboard counts as innovative Tech - it’s the same kind of thing makers of “Smart” Fridges were doing - grab old tech, put a touch screen on it and call it high tech.
Without the actual high tech part around automated driving, Tesla is just a company that started in the market for car manufacturing with a strategy of carving out a new market segment by updating to the XXI century a technology from the XIX century that is now cheaper to run and adresses the Ecological concerns of many people - quite a smart and in some ways innovative business strategy but it makes them no more a Tech company than Mercedes-Benz is a Tech company for having invented Electronic Fuel Injection or my local supermarket is a Tech company because they have a smartphone customer loyalty app - merelly using existing Tech, integrating new Tech that somebody else invented with old Tech or even inventing new electronic parts for a specific domain is not what makes a Tech company, IMHO.
That said, the Stock Market will believe any old bollocks and the Startup World has never been this fraudulent (and I say this having been an insider) so you can pass pretty much anything that uses Tech in non-innovative ways as a Tech Company - I mean Glovo is deemed a Tech Company even though their business is basically a booked express delivery business that uses a smartphone app and has some backend integration with sellers - a new combination of existing things, not innovation.
Parking assist is incredibly old: Toyotas had it 1999. You can get it off the shelf from Bosch.
Should even be legal to install on your own, given that it’s only steering the car, not operating throttle or brake.
Are you actually trying to says Tesla is no real technology improvement over done 1890s electric salon? I want what you’re smoking
Improving an existing technology using modern components is an “improvement” but is not especially “innovative” and not at all any kind of unique breakthrough - it’s Tech use, not Tech making.
Maybe because I’ve spent most of my life working at or near the bleeding edge of Technology I don’t find them especially innovative in Tech except for the self-driving stuff: what they did that was impressive was in the sphere of business strategy and they seem to have run with just that for too long and not pivoted when they should’ve.
That said I can understand that people holding shares is TSLA would be scared shitless about Tesla not being treated anymore as a Tech company by the stockmarket, and hence desperately try to argue that Tesla is a Tech company that makes cars rather than a car company that uses Tech like all the other carmakers.
If you want to be the google of cars you shouldn’t be building cars, but become Bosch.
Thing is, I quite like the idea of a self driving car. I do whitewater kayaking, and I’d love to be able to do a trip and have my car meet me at the end.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious this isn’t happening any time soon though, and developing a vehicle that is totally reliant on the technology doesn’t seem like a smart idea.
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…
If I can leave the boat unattended, I could just take a taxi back to the start of the trip.
The main issue is my vehicle is already set up to carry all my gear, so a taxi of any type is far less convenient.
Also this seems to very much be them suffering from the 90/10 problem that some many software projects suffer from: you can do 90% of the work with 10% of the effort but that also means it takes 90% of the work to do the other 10%.
Earlier people from the outside perceived Tesla as being ahead of everybody else on this because they just started before just about everybody else, were riding the easy part of the curve were you’re constant delivering improvements because you’re just tackling the easy bits, and they were probably even doing a rush job and taking shortcuts to maintain that apperarence of being ahead of the rest because that maintained an appeareance of Tesla as a Tech Stock rather than an Auto Industry Stock, hence with market valuations 10x or 20x higher than they would others which meant sky-high Tesla Stock Prices justified by how “technologically ahead” they were in a “key future technology” - the company was just executing a typical conman strategy of looking like they were making it in the hope that their early-mover status and the increasing investor funding that strategy pulls in would allow them to actually make it before everybody else or at least with a larger installed base, similarly to how Theranos was doing only unlike that company Tesla did just the right balance of deceit and reality to just be on the right side of the Laws for Fraud.
Tech companies absolutelly can get away with doing this during the early and easy parts of the project because for non-experts it looks like they’re doing fast progress - which is why Startups nowadays (which is an Era of way more bullshitty and even fraud in the Industry than, say, pre-2000) commonly do things exactly like this - but then they reach the hard part, progress speed naturaly goes down a lot (the project transitions from the 90%-results/10%-work speed to the 10/90% one) plus all the the early shortcuts (a.k.a. Technical Debt) come due to be paid for: “out of control car careening down the hill” meet “concrete wall”.
Finally, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they’re stuck down a dead-end for the technology which is the wrong way to reach level 4 and have to go back and redo much if not most of that work they did as a rush job to keep impressing investors and ill-informed customers with how “ahead of the pack” the were. Under the leadership of Musk I suspect that they will never be able to reach level 4.
Don’t know if he even wants to go up to level 3.
As long as he can sell these level 2 systems and tell people these were real robotaxis :)
“And they are sooo extremely safe. Just look at our statistics!” ;)
Aren’t level 4 systems still illegal in the US anyway? I remember Volkswagen holding off on a minibus due to this limitation when they managed to create a working proof of concept 8ish years ago
My understanding is that they’re not illegal in so much as they would have to be proven to actually work. Since no one’s ever been able to do this to the satisfaction of the regulators effectively self-driving cars are illegal.
We have Tesla’s on the road anyway, so I don’t quite understand how that works.
They are only effectively illegal right up until they’re not. If a company came up with a genuinely self-driving vehicle my understanding is that it would be authorized but they would have to actually demonstrate it, and that’s possibly more than the corporations really want to take on at the moment.
Presumably being second to market is the more cost-effective option so everyone’s holding off until someone does it first.
The feature marketed as “Full Self-Drivinng” is qualified as a beta feature undergoing test and that it requires a human to be in control at all times. It also makes at least some effort to ensure a human actually is paying attention.
You could certainly quibble that maybe it’s not obvious to all, but it is there.
Also I believe the human sensing was much easier to trick until last fall. But if you have to go out of your way to trick it, how can you claim you didn’t know it wanted a human in control?
That makes sense. The VW I’m thinking of may have been level 3 (trying to remember autonomous driving levels off the top of my head so don’t quote me on this), as I believe it needed guidance from on-road infrastructure to double check safety issues, which would have obviously been too much hassle for the US.
The proof of concept was miles ahead of Tesla has ever been, though, so it’s unfortunate that we can’t be bothered to add some sensors to the road
Well for Level 4, installation of human-controllable steering wheels and pedals are optional, and there isn’t a system for demanding the human take over at any given time. So in a sense, a street-legal level 4 car will need to be certified before it takes the road, because it simply won’t necessarily have functionality that even gives a human the opportunity to drive.
Top end Mercedes are lvl 3.
How can something that does not exist be illegal?
By creating regulations that apply to the creation of those things? Level 1 AVs exist and as such regulations exist for AVs. These regulations apply to level 4 AVs despite being mostly theoretical.
The other commenter in this thread basically already answered this as well by talking about how manufacturers need to prove the safety of it before it can be green it.