This is clickbait from a publication that's had it out for Tesla for nearly a decade.
Tesla is pivoting messaging toward what the car can do today. You can believe that FSD will deliver L4 autonomy to owners or not -- I'm not wading into that -- but this updated web site copy does not change the promises they've made prior owners, and Tesla has not walked back those promises.
The most obvious tell of this is the unsupervised program in operation right now in Austin.
Marketing choice of words aside, it's already really good now to the point that it probably does 95% of my driving. Once in a while it chooses the wrong lane and very rarely I will have to intervene, but it's always getting better. If they just called it "Advanced Driver Assist" or something, and politics weren't such an emotional trigger, it would be hailed as a huge achievement.
Yeah, Tesla did themselves no favors with how they initially marketed FSD, and all the missed timelines amplified the brand cost of that. I'm glad to see them focus on what it can do today. Better to underpromise and overdeliver etc.
As an aside, it's wild how different the perspective is between the masses and the people who experience the bleeding edge here. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed," indeed.
Yeah I think their early success with Tesla Vision was faster than expected, it went to their heads, and they underestimated the iteration and fine tuning needed to solve the edge cases. It's difficult to predict how many reps it will take to solve an intricate problem. That's not to excuse their public timeline -- their guidance was naive and IMO irresponsible -- but I don't think it was in bad faith.
> They have not given up on unsupervised autonomy. They are operating unsupervised autonomy in Austin TX as I type this!
Setting aside calling a driver in the driver's seat "unsupervised"... that's exactly the point. People paid for this, and they are revoking their promise of delivering it, instead re-focusing on (attempting) operating it themselves.
I'd have no objection to this if they offered buy-backs on the vehicles in the field, but that seems unlikely.
I would like to understand what population feels they were fleeced. The FSD available on their cars with HW3 (some as old as 2017?) is quite impressive when you consider what the capabilities were back then. Sure, it won’t be as good as a 2025 Juniper Model Y. But who are the people that bought FSD in the early days and are unhappy and how big of a population is that? Is this the main thing people are upset about?
Or are people upset about the current state of autonomous vehicles like Waymo (which has been working for Years!) and the limited launch of Robotaxi?
I haven't closely followed which rides have drivers where, and what is driven by Tesla vs what is regulatory -- but I thought some "drivers" were still in the passenger seat in Austin?
At any rate, I don't think they are revoking their prior promises. I expect them to deliver L4 autonomy to owners as previously promised. With that said, I'm glad they are ceasing that promise to new customers and focusing on what the car does today, given how wrong their timelines have been. I agree it's shitty if they don't deliver that, and that they should offer buybacks if they find themselves in that position.
Yeah, they never said this. This article smells like anti-Elon FUD. "Elon is a dummy, everything he tries will fail, replace him with someone who isn't so controversial and supports the proper politics for a powerful global figure" and repeat in 100 minor internet blogs until the money to write these articles runs out.
They used it on test mules to create labeled training data for their older monocular depth / Occupancy Network models (which they still use as part of the supervisory policy enforcement and active safety layer, alongside the end-to-end model).
They’ve never had LiDAR in their cars and it would not ever have been practical for them to have done so. Nobody has any mid or long range LiDAR in vehicles as the scale that Tesla sells.
It was successful at first, but ultimately we traded one set of problems for another (how novel, I know).
In particular, I underestimated the pain of troubleshooting the database itself. Riak was a new product, we were a small team that had never run anything on BEAM, and ultimately we lost too many days debugging and trying to make sense of Erlang stacktraces.
The Basho folks were great, and to this day I appreciate how quickly they fixed a number of bugs for us. But ultimately it wasn't enough -- we found problems faster than they could be patched.
I'd suggest Lost in the Funhouse. It's a collection of short stories and showcases a wide range of his authorial style. I'd suggest a paper copy for reasons that will be clear by page two (maybe page one).
Damn. He was my favorite living author. Got introduced to his "Lost in the Funhouse" in senior seminar in high school, was hooked immediately. His stories (and especially his writing style) changed how I approach literature and writing at large. RIP.
...He's clearly talking about third-party replacements for the default messaging app, ie. apps that are allowed to interface with the SMS/MMS protocol implemented by your phone. Android has had this capability forever.
Not sure why everybody responding to him is being obtuse. If you don't understand something, maybe take a minute to think about it instead of assuming the person you're talking to is an idiot. (Not you, yours is the sanest response by far)
There's lots of research here in the Tesla hacker community. The car continues to function. The easiest (not trivial, but easiest) way to test it yourself is to remove the SIM and disable wifi -- the non-network features of the car continue to work indefinitely. There are even some third parties who support early Tesla vehicles, on stock firmwares, in part by fully blocking comms with Tesla.
