[ocdtrekkie]

My peeve is not the slow progress: My peeve with self-driving companies, Waymo and Tesla alike, is their constant misrepresentation of their capabilities and their timelines for the benefit of stock value and public opinion. The technology doesn't really work, and Google's marketing for the past five years has claimed regulations were the only thing holding them back.

[whatshisface]

Is the market really being fooled? Tesla's stock price falls pretty often, and in a universe where the hype was real it would be a lot higher.

[ghaff]

In all fairness, it seems as if a lot of the companies and individuals on Team Right-around-the-Corner have really backed off in the past year or so. I'm not sure how much of this is the deflating of unrealistic expectations and how much is just a tacit agreement to stop trying to top each other given how many hurdles remain.

[DannyBee]

citation? This feels like you swapped google for tesla (Elon literally said that, i can't find anything that says Google has said it)

[ocdtrekkie]

I mean, off-hand, this paywalled article from 2016: https://www.barrons.com/articles/googles-self-driving-cars-f... The search result for it had the text "Google is so confident about its technology that the Internet search giant has already agreed to accept liability if its self-driving cars cause an accident."

Here's someone following right along with the suggestion that regulations, not lack of technology is to blame: https://www.wired.com/story/outdated-auto-safety-regulations... The author, part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, works for Google: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_...

That was page one of my search results, but suffice to say Google's been insinuating this for a while, both from the Chris Urmson era and the John Krafcik one.

I specifically referred to Tesla in my post as well. I saw the suggestion that Elon's claims about release dates for Autopilot features were effectively timed to manipulate the market. I'd give credit to that theory, or that Elon just has no clue how far he actually is from success. One of the two.

Both companies horribly misrepresent the fact that self-driving isn't around the corner.