[argonaut]

On the contrary, I thought Hotz came off in the original article as a bit too arrogant when he basically bashed Tesla's autopilot in order to sell the reporter on his own project.

EDIT: For what it's worth, this may have been the angle the reporter wanted: reporters are very good at stroking your ego and getting you to tell them things you shouldn't be telling them. Nonetheless, revealing email correspondence about private business/job dealings is not very classy, whether or not you're a big company.

[arethuza]

I think if you are a person working in a garage you can get away with bashing products from multi-zillion dollar companies.

A multi-zillion dollar company criticizing someone working in a garage, as amatic notes, is the opposite of classy.

[rootlocus]

Where's the criticism? They merely pointed out (to non technical people) there's a long way to go to reach 99.9999% precision. They said nothing bad about Hotz achievement (except that it's relatively easy to achieve). They also corrected a mistake in the article regarding developing the autopilot in-house.

[scotty79]

"you got nothing" is kind of empty criticism

[rwmj]

It's rather like the rule of comedy: you're allowed to "punch up", but not down.

[agumonkey]

The reaction toward the article about geohot is largely positive in his favor. I wish him no harm, not even a buzzkill, but his words appeal to the iPhone jailbreak generation more than Elon Musk. They hold him as a genius that can do anything for to liberate the people while Tesla is yet another Big Corp. that ask too much for false value. Proof: someone just said he did it in his garage.

So kudos to him for making Tesla react, yes they were a bit needy, but they had to realign things a bit.

[rl3]

Not to mention disclosing presumably sensitive correspondence to the reporter. If I were Elon I'm not sure I'd be too happy about that.

[amatic]

The original article paints Hotz as brilliant, arrogant and reckless, the archetypal young hero, as what writers often do to make the story interesting.

Tesla's PR fell right into their assigned role of the big, rich, dumb rival. Which is silly, because they have great technology, and they are much smaller and faster to move then, say, the Big Three. Tesla plays as the underdog in stories of them vs big car companies.

The correction the title is referring to is in the third paragraph, it should have been the first, as the main point that they are not using vendor technology.

PR misstep, I suppose.

[uniclaude]

And that would be OK. He doesn't have a PR department.