The claim was made in a lawsuit over Walter Huang's fatal Model X crash in 2018.
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Tesla staged 2016 self-driving demo, says senior Autopilot engineer
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I'm reminded of the joke/story about the not-from-the US couple who arrive for graduate school a few days early, but are allowed into their graduate housing. Since the campus food service isn't up and running, they go to a typical American grocery store to buy a few days of food, using the pictures on the cans to guide them.
They bring back 2 cans of Crisco.
(While Crisco cans often feature a beautiful cherry pie and apparently do so currently, at the time Crisco was pushing using it for fried chicken, and that was the can art I most remember from childhood, like this
My sophomore year as an undergrad, I got to the dorms the Sunday they opened after Christmas, driving carefully through heavy snow. It got heavier. Classes were canceled for the first week. The 25% of us who had been able to get to the dorms for that week could have had a much better party if the cafeterias weren't on skeleton crews, but we managed.
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My guess is that they also upgraded the front brakes and are still shipping with Brembos on the front, just not the rear. Rear brakes get a lot less attention, and maybe they were hoping to slip it in without anyone noticing? Save a quick $100-200?
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And it was on a tether too iircIn fairness, event the Mythbusters remote-driving car crashed into a fence
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It's possible I misunderstood. I read it as they were previously only upgrading the rears. Mostly because the argument is that the site still says the brakes are upgraded but now they're not. If the fronts are still upgraded, that's honestly fine. The rear brakes do next to nothing anyway. My car has massive 6 piston Brembos on the front but the rears are standard.
Silently making the change and trying to hide it behind fake covers is still fucked though.
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That has been their MO since the start of the pandemic. They've stripped a lot of features out of the cars after people ordered the cars expecting those features.
How much of a silent price hike this is is questionable, since it is hard to know how you'd structure pricing them out if they weren't just standard features on the vehicle. But I got to imagine a conservative estimate is at least $2k to $3k on most of their models.
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Jesus. I'm basically a beginning programmer and most of what I know about self driving comes from Ars Technica and a long time ago elektrik.
How on earth could he not know those terms? I didn't know ODD by that term but obviously know it's use case and I knew the rest by the jargon presented.
So either an idiot is in charge or perjury is taking place. Maybe both.
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The GMC Sierra also offers TOWING while on SuperCruise with compensation for trailer sway. Competitors have leapfrogged Autopilot at this point.
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It was difficult to verify the claims made in the video were not easy back then . The video may not be considered deceptive if there were specific routes FSD could reliable drive. At that point pretty much everything about the program was not public knowledge, and Tesla wasn't promising the results right away.
Since then we've had the FSD beta program on the road and in public for anyone to see just how non-functional the system is. It is also many years since the systems should have been ready based on Tesla's promises to the users to deliver.
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I had a relative who recently bought a new Subaru Forester. The dealership asked them to come back after driving it for a few weeks for orientation, the theory being that it is too overwhelming to absorb everything at once. They love it, and use all the driving assist features.
And to save someone else from looking it up:
Operational Design Domain
Operational design domain means a description of the specific domain or domains in which an automated driving system is designed to properly operate, including types of roadways, ranges of speed, weather, time of day, and environmental conditions.
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I have not compared AP against the others on the market, but my experience is decidedly mixed. It does work pretty well most of the time, but there are a few things that are quite annoying with it:
(1) phantom braking still does happen at times, despite the various OTA updates in the last year or two, and it's rather irritating and can be dangerous in terms of getting rear-ended. I know it would be the other driver's fault but who cares; I don't want to have to deal with insurance, repairs, etc. especially considering that repairs on Teslas can take some time.
(2) AP brakes much harder than seems necessary during routine driving. It's unpleasant for those in the car and I can't see any reason why it doesn't just cruise and start to regen brake a bit earlier when brake lights show up or the car in front starts to decelerate. My only theory is that this approach somehow regens more energy, but I have no clue.
(3) In odd opposition to #2, AP also takes a long time to decide to accelerate when cars ahead are doing the same, leaving sometimes large gaps that other drivers love to abuse. This is true even when setting the distance to minimum (which is now 2 cars after Tesla disabled radar even on cars like mine that have the sensors). I sometimes find myself having to press the accelerator to compensate for the laziness of AP.
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Engineering 101: Never, never, never buy a product for an unreleased feature. Wait for the feature to arrive or buy the lesser model without the feature. There are lots and lots of reasons why things that may seem easy aren’t, and as many or more reasons why even if it is easy, you will never get it because it is unprofitable.
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Your description of that Subaru dealership's practice sounds really good. Making this more widespread would be a good step towards solving the problem of communicating the limits of ADAS. The problem is that not every dealer or manufacturer currently does this, and it doesn't do anything to educate drivers who acquire those same vehicles used instead of new. If ADAS features and capabilities were standardized, education on them could be incorporated into standard driver's ed for new drivers, and everyone who already has a license would at least know that whatever knowledge they gained from a previous car would transfer over and/or be able to look up documents telling them what to expect.
This is starting to sound more like training for pilots, which might not be such a bad thing.
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Elluswamy's deposition was just leaked.
The news hook is not that FSD doesn't drive by itself. The hook is that the head of Tesla's automated driving program testified under oath that the much-shared video was deliberately deceptive (er, represented aspirations rather than current capabilities). And that they put out the video and sold the package knowing they were promising capabilities they couldn't deliver. That testimony was not previously public.
(ETA: critical "not" in the last sentence)
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You can expect that kind of service from a high-end luxury brand like Subaru.
Econobox manufacturers like Tesla can't afford that level of service given their tiny margins.
It's a tradeoff: pay Subaru prices and get support or pay those dirt cheap Tesla prices and you're on your own.
Different people will make different decisions given that tradeoff.
/s as needed
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
It’s becoming relevant again now that the FSD beta is open to everyone, there have been several high-profile crashes, and multiple investigations in the news. If 5 years ago, something I said sounds like fraud, but it’s minor and more ephemeral, and all of a sudden it’s given new context (say, an investigation into fraud), it becomes newsworthy again. People reporting on these things are learning that context. Hence it is once again news (and bigger news than it was at the time, given the what it says about those issues today).
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Or in the case of the article today, there was damning testimoney from the person in charge of FSD development that the video was both staged and deceptive in nature. That is extremely damning form an insider.
It is sort of like being able to find a smoking gun.
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Snarky Robot
Ars Legatus Legionis
It’s my understanding that the deposition is old, and was not widely reported at the time. That’s what I’m talking about when I say the relevance and newsworthiness has grown with proper context. I may be wrong in that, but I’m pretty sure the deposition happened 2 or 3 years ago.
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According to the Reuters piece linked in the Fine Article, the deposition of the Tesla engineer was taken in July. The Reuters piece is dated Jan. 17th 2023.
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Per the Reuters article, the deposition happened in July last year.
Apparently depositions only become public if used as evidence at trial (unless leaked illegally):
https://depositionacademy.com/do-depositions-public-record
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Longmile149
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Do you have any links to back that up?Wasn't it shown by someone that in fact, only a SINGLE camera was responsible for environmental awareness in FSD mode? I seem to recall in the report that they disabled or covered up all the other sensors and cameras leaving only the front facing camera and the car still worked in FSD mode and no errors or warnings were reported due to all these other systems not working, and the FSD did not behave any differently than before.
So in line with their argument that the demo wasn't meant to portray existing functionality but potential functionality, perhaps the presence of all those extra sensors and cameras did not mean that they were actually being used, but could potentially be used. , but are now being cost-reduced out of the design as they really were not being used
It wouldn’t surprise me, but that’s a tough pill to swallow unsourced even when we’re talking about Tesla.
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That's because the 2021 Corolla has Lane Tracing Assist, not lane centering. Other companies call the same thing Lane Keeping Assist.
https://www.enstoyota.ca/toyota-corolla-safety-features/
It's there to prevent you drifting out of the lane, not drive for you. You were supposed to continue driving and it was there to keep you in the lane if you got momentarily distracted.
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See the thing is humans suck at monitoring a system that mostly gets it right with occasional failures. Humans get bored and think about other things then miss some critical detail. This is and has been known for decades.
And yes people will lose focus even when their lives are on the line. There's a famous story of nitroglycerin workers falling asleep while controlling the mix. https://www.wattylercountrypark.org.uk/safety
Search up Vigilance Task or Vigilance Problem, there's plenty of research in this area.
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I would bet their lawyer advised claiming ignorance if there was any ambiguity possible.
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Frankly, I’m amazed that it’s even possible at all with two cameras on a rotating mount, two microphones, and stability sensors. (I’m talking about the MK I human.)
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Around 1,000,000 it would seem. https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/number-purchases-tesla-fsd-capability-1-million-testers/
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#TFW you realize, a few years on, that the reason that person is there for legal reasons is so Elon's crappy AI can dump all the legal liability on the human after it crashes the car.
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On an article about how Tesla faked a demo, you're going to believe Musk when he predicts a million FSD drivers by the end of the year?
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We can take it with salt, but absent alternative sources, we don’t have much information to go on. That number is also probably a little lower than the actual total, given that it is only for North America. We must remember that many people paid the extra $7500 to get their car sooner, as orders with FSD were prioritized for delivery during periods of high demand, and rolling it into a loan increased the payments only modestly, around $100 per month I calculated.
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Isn't the liability here such that if FSD/Autopilot/whatever it is this quarter is in control and then the driver takes over and there's still an accident that the FSD/Tesla is legally off the hook since the driver was in control at the time of the accident? Perverse incentives there...
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downvoted for truth, SMH.
Looks around at system that utterly dominates our broken world, shrugs, thinks "certainly this is the best system".
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Except he did speak for himself - that’s referring to the dead man’s actual complaints showing foreknowledge of the shitty software messing things up.
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Wasn't it shown by someone that in fact, only a SINGLE camera was responsible for environmental awareness in FSD mode? I seem to recall in the report that they disabled or covered up all the other sensors and cameras leaving only the front facing camera and the car still worked in FSD mode and no errors or warnings were reported due to all these other systems not working, and the FSD did not behave any differently than before.
So in line with their argument that the demo wasn't meant to portray existing functionality but potential functionality, perhaps the presence of all those extra sensors and cameras did not mean that they were actually being used, but could potentially be used. , but are now being cost-reduced out of the design as they really were not being used
1) Radar equipped systems appear to perform much better at eliminating high speed phantom braking events. It was used for this, now disabled even on models with the hardware.
2) Sensor fusion is a thing. Every other self driving system is doing it. Elon is maniacally directing his team to do it with cameras only, even when other systems (radar for emergency braking, ultrasonic for parking distance) are reliable and reasonably cheap.
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The video, which now has been proven to be faked and to not show actual FSD but instead a preprogrammed drive, is STILL being used by Tesla to advertise FSD on their website.
https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
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Unless Elon would bring his newborn baby home from the hospital in one of his Tesla's on auto I will never believe they are safe.
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Longmile149
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Oh my god
I went looking for it and I was not prepared for how incredibly, unbelievably horrifying this is.
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=77cbSy-rBEQ&feature=youtu.be
It’s like 12 minutes long and the driver is a true believer. He doesn’t seem to understand at all the implications of what he’s demonstrating.
He disables most of the car’s sensors and it still allows him to engage both FSD and Autopilot.
This video is wild.
At one point he’s got the radar covered with aluminum foil and the car is intermittently reporting a vehicle inches in front of him and it still fires up the FSD and takes off because the cameras don’t see anything.
They aren’t doing any sensor fusion or cross-checking. There’s damn near no failsafe, no error checking, and no sanity checks. There were two times in the video that his FSD wouldn’t engage, and one of those times all he had to do was hit the button again and it started right up.
For almost the entire video he’s got all the side and rear cameras covered and he talks a couple times about how cool it is that the car remembers there’s stuff there as it continues to visualize him moving past it even though he knows the car can’t see anything there.
Watch this.
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