$TSLA made enough people rich I suppose. I saw some gains myself although not on a large scale. Still don’t like the guy but there’s the old adage “for my friends everything, for my enemies the law”.
If $TSLA plummets a crazy amount the tables may turn
> Still don’t like the guy but there’s the old adage
Interestingly, Juan Domingo Peron's version of that adage was "For our friends, everything. For our enemies, not even justice." I'm not sure which one is worse, but they are certainly both evocative.
> If $TSLA plummets a crazy amount the tables may turn
It depends. What happened here is that Holmes screwed over peers, and not just consumers. I don't think anything will happen to $TSLA's CEO unless except through malice aimed at his peers that affects their wealth.
I think this is a Theranos reference that went over everyone's heads. Theranos were using Siemens machines while pretending to use their own technology. Obviously Tesla is not doing anything like this, and GP's point is that they are not similar.
Given Tesla were the first to use a "Giga Press" [1] to mould the chassis, I very much doubt your claim. They innovated significantly. Most car manufacturers use Bosch components all over the place, if that's what you're getting at.
There are at least four replies at this moment missing the point entirely, it's incredible how knee-jerk these are to defend Tesla against a defense of Tesla.
Honestly, a lot of the anti-Tesla and anti-Musk arguments I've seen people post on-line, including here on HN, are like that comment, except in earnest. I'm not surprised so many people "missed the point" when your average Tesla/Musk thread on the Internet still has people posting blatant lies and trivially fact-checkable bullshit stories, like e.g. that apartheid emerald mine thing, and that's regardless of how cultured or enlightened the venue claims to be.
If the point is so opaque that four separate comments miss it, then maybe it was not well described in the first place.
It’s less a knee-jerk defense of Tesla and more of a knee-jerk “what are you talking about that’s absurd” because at face value it’s an exceptionally absurd claim.
I mean, that doesn’t change how it’s a confusing and seemingly absurd claim at face value.
It doesn’t read like a joke, it doesn’t in any way imply the link, it just sounds like an absurd statement put out to incite responses. And people clearly all read it this way. If one person read it wrong then sure, you might have a point. If every single person replying read it this way, then it just shows the point was not clearly articulated to begin with.
Even if you had just watched the documentaries about Theranos, I doubt you could have immediately pieced that connection on first read.
I'm well acquainted with the Theranos story and still had no idea what the VW comment meant until I read the replies. It's a pretty tenuous joke, and given the other responses I'm clearly not the only one who thought so.
Being aghast at people for misunderstanding is silly.
Yeah, I hate saying stuff like "it only matters when it hits the pockets of the rich" because it's reductive and cynical, but seriously - how are the patients not better protected here? How is that not the bigger story?
It's because she didn't directly lie to any patients, she was insulated from all of that. They got her on lying to investors because those are the kind of people she was actually talking to.
I don't know this area, but I suspect the regulatory framework around this needs revision so that government could discover that kind of malice, i.e. if there were some requirement of regular reporting that would have created the paper trail.
I imagine there is something in the paperwork you sign when you pay for it that basically says roughly "this may never actually materialize" and that's the key difference.
>Marques Brownlee has a video from last year where it drove him to his studio.
I don't know where to start with this if you think that one, year-old video is somehow proof that Tesla FSD is ready for use--and, say, the recall earlier this year isn't indication that maybe it's not.
wrong. watch the latest FSD videos. FSD has proved all the detractors wrong. it drives unbelievably well. and the rate of improvement is astounding. this comment might have been valid a few years ago but not anymore.
I'm an FSD Beta user. If you stop reading at "Full Self Driving Capability", then yes, it's an issue for a potential purchaser. But if you read just a little bit more, it becomes more clear what you're buying. I don't feel "fooled" and neither do 1000s of other Beta testers with whom I regularly communicate on Discord.
Don't think this is the point. Calling something Oranges, and then saying "they're not really oranges, but an approximation, but we call them oranges bc it sounds cool" is still fraudulent in my view.
Because the more detailed description of the feature clearly explains what it does and doesn’t do. Say you sign a contract, one section is titled “Seller Assumes Liability for Injury” but then the text of that section lists some circumstances where they don’t. Totally fine and legal.
Maybe, if all that is within the four corners of the contract. I don’t think that’s what we are talking about here; our current discussion seems to involve the marketing name of a car feature (full self driving) and the technical functionality that name represents.
With that in mind it seems that you are not thinking about the Rst. 2d Torts 540 duty to investigate rule. I can be justified in relying on something (e.g., your intentionally misleading name for the feature) even if an investigation would have shown the misrepresentation was false. Instead of “totally fine and legal” I would say that this is “a fact-dependent situation.”
Do you believe that selling something called Full Self Driving that actually could not drive itself fully is within the duty of good faith and fair dealing? This sidesteps the issue of the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation and goes right to the heart of the customer confusion a product like a Tesla sows.
Yes, good faith and fair dealing has nothing to do with this and shows that while you may know enough to pull out the restatement, you don’t really get the law. Good faith has to do with conduct in the execution of an agreement that undermines the deal without seeming to technically violate it. It doesn’t have anything to do with putting caveats in fine print.
False, of course; a bait and switch contract is a violation of the implied duty of good faith and fair dealing. The conduct of delivering something that is not what you advertised fulfills the elements.
If you want to sit here and tell me that the contract actually says the car can't drive itself, that's fine but my hypothetical had nothing to do with a caveat in fine print. I suggest before you make a personal attack, you do your best to read the regular-sized print that I delivered to you. The website which you are using this twenty-hour old account to troll has some rules, too, and you would do better to study those rather than to try to contradict me.
It’s very clear when you buy a Tesla that the car does not completely drive itself without human supervision. It’s part of the agreement, and the use of FSD as the marketing name of the feature doesn’t change that.
>The conduct of delivering something that is not what you advertised fulfills the elements.
The issue is what was promised. The promise is not just the title of the feature, but all of the information presented to you when you buy a Tesla.
And I’ll contradict you all day if I want because you’re not just wrong, but clearly suffering from Elon Derangement Syndrome.
You’re clearly not a lawyer even if you role play one online.
I’m not totally defending Tesla’s mildly misleading advertising here. I’m saying it’s not fraud and not really comparable to the massive fraud committed by Holmes.
> I'm an FSD Beta user... 1000s of other Beta testers
Ah, so the hundreds of thousands or millions who bought FSD years ago should be happy that a few thousand of you get to test out a system with your own lives. Great.
Edit: Don't bother responding if you're a Tesla or Elon fanboy/fangirl. I'm not interested in being insulted any longer by you folks.
There are 400,000+ Beta users currently (US and Canada). You are being fooled by the headlines. The people in the EU have a legitimate beef (not being able to use the functionality). "test a system with our own lives" is silly hyperbole and you know it.
> "test a system with our own lives" is silly hyperbole and you know it.
No, I actually believe that, because I have some morals and ethics around introducing dangerous and untested black-box AI into a several-ton machine with no physical consrtaints as to it's location (aka: a moving car), as in I wouldn't do it myself nor use a product like Tesla that was developed in such a shoddy manner.
It's pretty fucking rude to assume you know what's in my head, and I wish I could insult you as hard as you insulted me with that statement, but that would just be tit for tat and HN isn't about that kind of insulting remark.
It's ADAS Level 2. Tesla is one of many. And are you equally concerned aboout parents who allow their 15 and 16 year olds to drive on the same streets with no-to-little training... and where the parent cannot easily grab the steering wheel or press the brake?
15 and 16 year olds, in many states, are required to drive with a fully-licensed individual until they are 18 or even older! I'm not as worried about a teenage driver, though, because they are humans and we have a lot of experience as humans on how to teach other humans to drive. Not so much with a black-box neural net AI!
Thanks. In the future, try to be charitable and assume people are telling their true feelings on HN, and not being trolls or dickheads. Most people here are pretty good about that, I find.
so when they introduced drive by wire, and just put it out there on the roads without telling anyone, that was reckless? or any of the countless other designs that have led us to the modern cars we have now? how about all the severe recalls, not over the air recalls that tesla gets press for but real safety issues? GM and the others have tons and tons of real physical safety recalls, way more than tesla, and thats not shoddy to you? thats not reckless to you? thats foolish. fsd as it is now probably drives more safely than a teenager. so do you want to take all teenagers off the road? and where is your crusade against drunk driving which kills way, way more people than fsd ever will every single year. doesnt bother you. no, your issue isnt with safety or with ethics or principles or anything like that. your issue is with elon musk. because you read brain-rot mainstream media all day who use lies and misdirection to paint elon musk and tesla as evil.
Well, drive by wire wasn't just put out there, it was tested on military jets for decades and the tech eventually got to cars. There are also testing rigs and failsafes for such designs, however Tesla is just putting a black-box AI on the roads in charge of massive vehicles.
I'm not going to engage with someone like you any longer, though, as you're being really fucking rude.
no, youre not going to engage because you know youre wrong. high volume drive by wire is way different than millions of dollars jet fly by wire systems. and it doesnt matter anyway because it was one of countless systems that were tested on the road. hydraulic brakes. for a long time half the industry wouldnt trust them because it was too out-there. and yes, these systems are developed and tested in house and safety measures are put in place, all true with fsd i should add, but putting them out there on real roads in thousands or millions of vehicles is not something you can ever test for. the simple and plain fact is that when you deploy these kinds of system updates at scale, there is risk. so far, fsd has proven a lot less risky than other systems deployed by other auto manufacturers because there have been many recalls and many deaths associated with systems that did not pass the at-scale test and none of those are fsd related. there are some articles that try to attribute a crash or fatality to a malfunction of fsd but none of them have panned out. its bullshit. and even if they were all true, it would still probably not be the most dangerous system thats been deployed at scale in recent times. but its not true...
ABUSING YOUR FLAGGING PRIVS IS RUDE, DISHONEST AND SHAMEFUL. A PERSON AS OLD AS YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER
"test a system with our own lives" is actually an understatement; FSD Beta is being tested on other peoples' lives without their consent. Other drivers, pedestrians, etc.
so when you have a student driver, or a new driver, the lives of not just them but the people around them are being risked just to test a system. so we should just stop all new drivers. no more new drivers. because a new driver, especially a teenage one, is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the current fsd.
Student drivers are typically subject to significant limitations - no other kids in car, no driving past certain hours, parental supervision for a certain period of time, etc. They're not learning for a billionaire's profit, and they're fairly unlikely to get a software update that causes a whole bunch of them to make the same mistake in a short period of time.
so where is your proposal to limit the passengers of a self driving car, all of the countless brands who are advertising level 2 systems? where is your proposal for compromise? there are none because nobody who likes pouring cold water on tesla is coming from a place of intellectual honesty.
so self driving cars could only exist for a billionaires profit? how about for the countless lives that will be saved by this technology? tens of thousands of people die every year. cmon dude.
I'd like to see safety-critical beta software in cars undergo independent audits prior to widespread release. (My dream would be for it to be open source, but that's probably unrealistic.)
I'd like to see formalized safety testing processes of such software at the regulatory level, similar to how crash testing is currently conducted.
I'm sure others have specific, useful suggestions.
> there are none because nobody who likes pouring cold water on tesla is coming from a place of intellectual honesty.
This, ironically, doesn't sound like it comes from a place of intellectual honesty.
> how about for the countless lives that will be saved by this technology?
these compromises are productive and show that you do come from a place of intellectual honesty.
if the federal government had been tasked with overseeing the early versions of fsd, it would have been swiftly shut down because of the nature of the federal government, not to mention the politics. but thanks to the private sector we now have modern fsd which is bar none the most advanced and capable self-driving solution in the world. now that self driving has gotten this far, its probably much less likely to be aborted if subjected to government intervention and oversight. in light of the huge benefits that self-driving cars stand to create, measured in human lives, compromise is the only rational proposal. shutting down fsd like mouth-breathing internet commenters talk about would be objectively wrong given the state of its competitors and the nature of the problem.
edit: your bio says 'fuck elon musk.' making a two dimensional character out of elon musk isnt a good way to understand him or his projects. when the time comes and elon musk uses his influence and money to do something really bad, it might be boy crys wolf thanks to your camp.
My Twitter bio does. Added shortly after he banned links to Mastodon, broke Tweetbot (and lied about them breaking the rules), and announced breaking changes to the Twitter APIs I use extensively at work with a few days warning.
you seem passionate and knowlegable about this so i will ask you. i want to know more about the API changes. detractors say that it was at best an irresponsible change to the API that inconvenienced companies that use it. proponents say that musk simply stopped making the API free which was always unsustainable and people should have known better. what was really going on?
Entire businesses had their products cease to function, with no warning, and no explanation from Twitter, until a couple of days later they got vaguely libeled by Twitter's developer account. (https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1615405842735714304)
Absolute clown show. If they'd said "in 90 days we're shutting down third-party clients and implementing a paid tier", people would've grumbled but seen it as fairly reasonable. Kneecapping devs who've been building Twitter apps and integrations for a decade was cruel and unnecessary.
I 100% agree with you that we should have regulators auditing and verifying safety information for autonomous systems.
But I'd like to point out that the link you included is out-of-date. Tesla has continued to publish their autopilot safety numbers in their quarterly slide decks. Here is Q3 2022 for example, see page 10: https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/SVCPTV_2022_Q4_Quarterly_...
Miles between accidents on Autopilot
Q4 2021: 4.3 million miles
Q1 2022: 6.5 million miles
Q2 2022: 5.1 million miles
Q4 2022: 6.2 million miles
That’s the same old sketchy number they like to tout.
Autopilot can only be used in safer conditions, and if the car goes “whoops I’m out, take over” shortly before an accident that doesn’t count in that stat either.
It’s not an old number, it’s a new number reported every quarter.
But you’re right that comparing largely highway miles vs all miles isn’t completely fair. FSD on the other hand can be activated and used in most scenarios and has 3.2 million miles between accidents vs the US average of 500,000 miles. So still quite a bit safer but less so than autopilot.
As for autopilot deactivating right before an accident, if autopilot was active within 5 seconds of the accident it is still attributed to autopilot, not the human driver.
> It’s not an old number, it’s a new number reported every quarter.
"Old number" here means "the same old stat they trot out every time". The value gets updated; the concerns over its being a cherry-picked apples-to-oranges comparison remain.
FSD still nopes out in the most challenging circumstances, which are the circumstances where accidents are far more likely to happen. It's like a surgeon bragging about their low complication rate; if they run out of the OR screaming when something unexpected happens and their colleague has to take over, it's not a super useful stat.
It's ADAS Level 2. Tesla is one of many. And are you equally concerned aboout parents who allow their 15 and 16 year olds to drive on the same streets with no-to-little training... and where the parent cannot easily grab the steering wheel or press the brake?
Hey now, don't forget the lives of everyone else they are in traffic with. That increases the number of beta tested by an order of magnitude if you think about it.
This is a dumb comment. Leading with stretched claims that are then clarified in the fine print is different than outright lying. No one who did a modicum of due diligence bought a Tesla thinking they were getting a completely self-driving car that requires no human input.
There’s a reason why we have specific false and deceptive advertising laws. Most of it doesn’t rise to the level of fraud. Fraud requires a lie and reasonable/justifiable detrimental reliance on that lie.
> it baffles me that as of today I can still add a "Full Self-Driving Capability" option when ordering a Tesla
Capability, not feature. I know that isn’t how it’s marketed. But Elon isn’t claiming he has Level 5 right now. Most FSD buyers seem aware they’re paying into a research effort.
Fraud requires knowledge and intent. You’re making a good case for a class action lawsuit, i.e. civil action. Not for putting someone in jail.
> Capability implies that the car can do the thing (software included)
It’s made clear that isn’t the definition of capability they’re using [1].
I am not a fan of the Autopilot branding. But I struggle to see how someone buys FSD capability, realises their mistake on delivery and is then unable to get restitution through either a return or a resale.
> have 0% faith the current hardware will ever run a real level 5 solution
Me either! But that’s not fraud. It’s delusion. We don’t criminalise it because the difference between genius and crazy is often only apparent ex post facto.
Is the key difference that no one can prove the current hardware will be unable to reach a level 5 solution?
Taken to the (more) absurd we wouldn’t have this issue if the claim was the cars could fly, be boats, or time travel. People wouldn’t buy the “capability” either.
This is a fascinating murky area and seems there’s no market solution beyond caveat emptor
> a fascinating murky area and seems there’s no market solution beyond caveat emptor
I think so. It's interesting to discuss and think about, because the grey area is incredibly complex. (Not that we get too far into it on these kinds of forums.)
Generally, when you don't know that a product definitely can do something, you don't sell it saying that it has the "capability" to do it. That's fraud.
> when you don't know that a product definitely can do something, you don't sell it saying that it has the "capability" to do it. That's fraud.
Capability is defined as "the facility or potential for an indicated use or deployment" [1]. There are other definitions. But selling capability based on future potential is not fraudulent, unless you say the capability is present.
I think you're reading the word "potential" incorrectly for the context. Dictionaries are tricky things to read, because they tend to incorrectly communicate nuances. The capability to do something means that it can be done, not that it might be able to be done. Otherwise, my Honda has the capability to fly.
No, because there is no reasonable potential for it to generate enough thrust to be a lifting body. We understand aerodynamics enough to say that. We don’t understand self-driving cars enough to rule out the sensors on today’s Teslas being adequate, given the right software.
Saying someone is capable of climbing a mountain, conditioned on training, isn’t a lie. The caveat is important. I think Tesla has played fast and loose with its caveats in a way that produces civil liability. But it doesn’t appear to be wilfully defrauding its customers, who are more or less happy with their cars.
We do understand flight well enough that I can confidently tell you that given an appropriately sized and shaped ramp, my Honda can fly. It doesn't even need a software upgrade, the car as it is today can do it!
A Tesla today has no self-driving capability without software that doesn't exist. That means it doesn't have self-driving capability. It doesn't mean that someone "played fast and loose with caveats."
> 2019 Musk publicly stated Model 3's would support robotic taxi functionality in 2020
No evidence these forecasts were made in bad faith. Delusion isn’t criminal. It’s mis-selling in the here and now, in absolute terms, in a way that causes damage, that is problematic.
He made the statement it made no financial sense to buy any other car than a Tesla because of the certainty of robo taxi functionality arriving in 2020. He sold people on the promise that their car would be revenue generating in 2020.
Everyone who bought a Tesla with FSD since 2019 should sue Elon for lost revenues from failing to deliver robo taxi functionality over three years late (and counting!) than originally stated.
When you sell a capability you are making a commitment. The fact that you deluded yourself about it does not get you off the hook. You are still responsible for your claims. Or should be.
> when you sell a capability you are making a commitment
Sure. And if you sold the promise of future capability with no intent on delivering it, that's fraud. But if you try, it isn't. And if you fail, your customers should have a claim on you. But I don't think it should be a crime.
I don't think Musk deserves the benefit of the doubt. His history of just lying about this sort of stuff (outside of Tesla-related claims) is too long and rich for that.
I'm sure there is a negligence or recklessness standard that an overzealous prosecutor can apply here. Being willfully stupid about your own company and the products they produce in order to repeatedly get away with delusional over-promising could be construed that way, as could creating a culture that suppresses internal doubt about your company's capabilities.
