[dpiers]

FSD = fraudulent sales and disappointment

I can’t believe Tesla has gotten away with selling a feature that doesn’t exist, and will never be delivered, on so many cars for so long. Tesla began selling “full self-driving” in October, 2016 and a month later marketed it with (now known to be heavily controlled) video of a car driving itself for two minutes. Owners of those initial cars have probably paid them off by now and still don’t have a feature they were sold.

[ghaff]

In fairness I know people with "FSD" who went into it well aware that it's not really FSD and they still like it. That said, the marketing is clearly fraudulent.

[ra7]

FSD has enabled a ton of sales for Tesla and is arguably one of the biggest factors they were valued over a trillion dollars at one point.

[SapporoChris]

This has always confused me. I knew FSD wasn't feasible, I knew Tesla was selling a lie. I also knew it was an incredible investment opportunity. I passed on it because I envisioned a bunch of lawsuits destroying the company.

Obviously, I was clearly wrong. While the stock is way down from peak it's clearly been an amazing investment for those that invested early. 2020/1/10 $31.88, 2021/11/30 $381.59 (peak I think) and around 122.81 at close Friday.

Normally, I can look back at an investment in mistake and the issues are obvious in hindsight. With Tesla, I still have no idea why the company still hasn't succumb to lawsuits.

[clouddrover]

The lies worked in the short term, but Tesla's on the hook now for a lot of free hardware upgrades:

https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/tesla-ordered-upgrade-self-dr...

That won't be helping the stock price going forward.

[quonn]

Those updates will be cheaper than the 15k price. And for those who already opted in, it‘s a small expense to pay for the upgrade. Tesla can easily afford it.

[clouddrover]

It would have been even cheaper to simply not lie about the capability in the first place.

[berkle4455]

A lot of people knowingly buy into ponzi schemes too.

[ghaff]

You can not buy into all of a manufacturer's marketing puffery and still like a product on balance.

[Retric]

Puffery has specific meaning here and making objective statements doesn’t qualify.

You can’t call a 3’ log 5’ and say it’s just puffery.

[rafael09ed]

You can call a 1.5" by 3.5" plank a 2x4

[dymk]

Tesla calls it FSD, not "Nominal FSD".

To nitpick your metaphor further: A 2x4 plank starts off as 2" by 4", and it is shaved down to 1.5 x 3.5 side to straighten it out. A Tesla "FSD" car has never been in its life fully self driving.

[Retric]

I don’t think Tesla can round up from 0 and say you can make money with a self driving Taxi service.

[misiti3780]

Im one of those people, I have it and love testing it out, but I know it's not FSD, I really do get the big deal about the name. Anyone who buys it thinking it's really FSD is an idiot.

The difference between me and apparently everyone else in this forum is I do think TSLA will build a video model that is L4/L5 in the next few years. I live in a rural america and majority of my drives do not require interventions.

[bagels]

Why are they idiots? Because they believed the marketing messages that Tesla put out?

[misiti3780]

pretty much yes. If you live in 2022 and believe any marketing, you're not firing on all cylinders.

[remote_phone]

Musk said that by 2020 there would be a million robotaxis on the road. To say that anyone who bought it thinking that FSD wasn’t real is a very, very stupid statement.

[ghaff]

Before I spend $10K+ on something, I do more research than listening to the claims of some CEO who has a history of being "optimistic" about timelines at a minimum.

[WA]

It’s still up in all its fraudulent glory: https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...

[93po]

The title of this is "Full Self Driving Hardware on All Teslas". The hardware is in fact on all Teslas. What part of that is fraud? Nothing about this video was misleading and the car did in fact drive itself through that route.

[epistasis]

Calling it hardware for "Full Self Driving" is fraudulent if FSD doesn't exist, is nowhere close to existing, and the video has been deliberately edited to defraud viewers into thinking the hardware is capable of something that doesn't actually exist.

What sort of semantic game are you playing here and why? I don't understand how you can not see this as anything but competent fraudulent, particularly with the editing that happened to make this video. I'm truly bewildered, this is not rhetorical or exaggerated at all!

[93po]

There is no misleading editing in this video.

[xattt]

The name FSD intimates an SAE Level 5 experience. It’s not partial self-driving or any other sort, but full. If there was any name to suggest it, this would be it.

Imagine going to an emergency department with chest pains/trouble breathing/thunderclap headache, and the triage nurse saying “oooooh yeaaaaah, I know emergency is in our name but we don’t really deal with that, you’re on your own”.

Things that are critical to life-or-limb should be appropriately named without the use of weasel words or asterisks.

[jdminhbg]

You know there are lots of ERs that can’t handle lots of emergencies, right? There’s even a whole “Level” system to describe which emergencies they are and are not equipped to handle.

[xattt]

Even when a rural ER receives a CTAS 1-2 patient, there is a chain of survival that’s followed to ensure continuity of care and transfer to an appropriate facility and accountability.

There is no safe failure mode in FSD that doesn’t rely on human intervention that’s intimated in the name.

[acover]

How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question. Is it because Tesla is a large company and should have self funded it?

[lolinder]

Any Kickstarter is obliged to be very explicit about the risks. They're required to have a section in the pitch dedicated to what might go wrong, and Kickstarter itself has text everywhere reminding you that rewards are not guaranteed. Tesla, on the other hand, never acknowledges the very real possibility that your extremely expensive vehicle never sees full self driving.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The sale page is pretty explicit about what you’re buying and has this note:

> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.

Also, at this point, my experience with the FSD package in my 2020 Model 3 is that it is not misleading to call it a “FSD beta”: in specific predictable situations it has problems with maneuvers but, over the last month or so, it’s continuously gotten better at making full trips without disengaging.

[matthewdgreen]

Somehow we got used to companies selling products named "Definitely Does Thing [X]!" and then adding fine print that says "this product absolutely does not do thing [X]." I think it would be much better if we stopped accepting that practice.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The stuff above this says exactly what the FSD package is. All this fine print is adding is that you will get new features as they are released. In 12/2022 this is a very good description of what the package does (and, IMO, it undersells the capability: autosteer on city streets works really well for me with the new FSD package)

> Full Self-Driving Capability $15,000

> All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot

> Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control

> Coming Soon

> Autosteer on city streets

[matthewdgreen]

Again, to repeat my point (which I didn't think was very confusing), the things described in the small-point text are all fine. But they cannot in any reasonable world be summarized by the product name "Full Self Driving." Insofar as California is encouraging Tesla to name their products more accurately, that seems like an absolute good.

This point holds even if I don't go into the fact that both autosteer/autopilot (phantom braking problems) and FSD-beta (requires active driver control, disengagements every < 1 mile) are both kind of a mess. Or that the claims from Musk regarding capabilities and timing have been completely inaccurate.

[robryk]

This note makes it very obvious that customer's evaluation of the expected timeline might impact their purchase decision. In my non-expert opinion Tesla puts itself on notice that any false statements that might impact that evaluation would be fraudulent. If my opinion matches the legal consensus, then the doctored video would be such a false statement.

[masklinn]

> How is it different than kickstarter? Genuine question.

The average kickstarter funds actually producing the project, and does not literally endanger the funder and everyone else during that period.

[rvz]

More like 'Fools Self Driving'.

Hardly surprising that action has been taken over FSD, especially the robo-taxi claims and the deceptive advertising over this alleged safety-critical system proven to be unsafe and putting other drivers on the roads at risk. As I have previously said before. [0]

So not a surprise here that many are realising that FSD is a complete scam and is being investigated by regulators and lawmakers for its false claims and misleading advertising.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28000436

[93po]

FSD beta is literally deployed to all Teslas that have purchased it.

[bagels]

It doesn't fully self drive, contrary to the implication of the name.

[roflyear]

And it doesn't work.

[afrcnc]

They made people pay for it?

[jupp0r]

I think claiming it "will never be delivered" is probably wrong as well.

[anonymoushn]

The feature is impossible to implement with the sensor suite that comes with the car.

[redox99]

It is pretty trivial to disprove that: A human could no doubt "remotely" drive using the current Tesla cameras. So the sensor suite might be more challenging than alternatives, but obviously not impossible.

You could however argue that the current computer isn't powerful enough to run the software required for vision based L3/L4.

[bragr]

>A human could no doubt "remotely" drive using the current Tesla cameras.

I have doubts about that. I wouldn't want to remotely drive that without much better cameras at the very least. Advanced planning to be in the right lane or avoid obstacles is hard when the details are just a couple pixels.

[sonofhans]

It’s a trivial claim, advanced without evidence. There’s no reason to believe that a human could drive a car based only on those limited visual inputs. Humans use all our sense to drive.

And even if it were true, so what? Last I checked Tesla didn’t have software which can perfectly emulated a human agent.

[robryk]

> And even if it were true, so what? Last I checked Tesla didn’t have software which can perfectly emulated a human agent.

GP was arguing against:

> The feature is impossible to implement with the sensor suite that comes with the car.

_For that statement_ it's immaterial whether Tesla does something right now, but rather whether it's in principle possible. Modulo your previous objection humans provide a counterexample to that (very general) statement.

[93po]

It is plenty possible to implement with the sensor suite that comes with the car.

[rootusrootus]

The cameras on a Model 3 were quite mediocre in 2018. Subaru puts a lot higher quality cameras on their cars than Tesla does.

[dymk]

Then why haven't they?

[93po]

It's possible to cure cancer, so why haven't we?

[dymk]

It is? Where’s your evidence?

[jupp0r]

How do you know? It's definitely hard to prove that something is impossible.

[fallingknife]

The only currently known self driving system uses that same sensor suite (neural nets and cameras).

[lolinder]

This is wrong. Waymo uses both lidar and radar, which Tesla opted to remove. Also, look at Waymo's cars. Those things have sensors strapped all over in ways that give them lots of range and visibility. Tesla will never do that because it compromises the aesthetic.

https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/

[_Microft]

They certainly referred to humans.

[ModernMech]

Brains aren’t neural nets and eyes aren’t cameras.

[britneybitch]

If you're talking about humans, I think you're underestimating the importance of the less obvious senses:

- sound

- touch

- equilibrioception (balance)

- proprioception

- and surely there are more

Think of the visceral difference between driving a car in real life, vs driving a car on a screen in a video game.

[treis]

The problem with driving in video games is using a keyboard/mouse or controller. Driving with a steering wheel and pedals is pretty easy. Even more so if you have the monitors to give you a realistic field of view.

[qetlrkn]

driving a car in a video game with a steering wheel is easy because it's an experience designed from the ground up with that interface in mind. driving games happily do shit like change the fov to make the user think they're going faster, etc.

being easy to drive with a steering wheel in a driving game, and being easy to drive a real car with a steering wheel (with internet level latency and packet loss at play, mind you) are very different things

[jcampbell1]

Traction control software uses touch (knowing how much grip tires have via slip), proprioception (knowing the steering angle), equilibroperception (accelerometers).

[dtgriscom]

Don't forget taste; when you can taste an oncoming car you know you have trouble.

[PartiallyTyped]

If you are referring to humans, we have a couple orders of magnitude more connections, our neurons can achieve the same functions at 1 order of magnitude fewer numbers, and our brain has better inductive biases.

[rsynnott]

Our ‘cameras’ are also so much better than any camera that could be put in a car (by most though not all metrics) that there is no real comparison.

[giobox]

By which metrics are human eyes outperforming “any camera that can be put in a car today”? This seems unlikely in almost any domain, given the much wider dynamic range camera sensors can capture - cameras can see into spectrum we simply can’t (infrared, UV…) and operate at much lower levels of light than a human eyeball while retaining full color vision using really cheap tech. They also don’t get tired or worse with age, or forget to wear their glasses, which is nice.

This strikes me as a pretty odd statement to make, personally!

“There is no real comparison” - for the benefit of the less informed, please make the comparison, assuming you are able.

[fallingknife]

The claim was impossibility with the sensor suite. It may well be impractical. In the long run, there's no better way to be wrong than claiming impossibility.

[simonh]

Teslas don’t have LiDAR, which is used in all the best self driving systems.

[725686]

He was talking about humans.

[simonh]

In which case he’s even more wrong. Humans use a whole mess of different senses while driving, including hearing, the inertial sensitivity in the inner ear, touch to feel vibrations and from the car and the wheels on the road. Plus we have a huge amount of contextual information about the meaning of what we are seeing from life experience outside driving, which no Tesla that currently exists can ever have.

It’s a clever bit of snark, but absurdly wide of the mark. If that’s actuary what the Tesla engineers think, no wonder they’re failing by their own criteria so completely.

[rich_sasha]

Humans don't have lidar either.

[giantrobot]

I hope not because it makes them even more wrong. Humans have a number of different sensors we use while driving.

[bastawhiz]

Humans have stereoscopic vision

Edit: I'd love to know why I'm being downvoted. Tesla cars guess depth with a neural net. Humans have the hardware for getting this data directly. Unless you either have lidar, radar, or dedicated stereoscopic cameras, you don't have real/accurate depth data. And depth data like that stops your car from plowing into white trucks.

[oneplane]

It also takes almost 2 decades to train them (individually), not likely sustainable for a car seller.

[typon]

If you think humans are equivalent to cameras and artificial neural networks, you are severely wrong.

[mikeyouse]

I think it’s substantially unlikely that all of the cars sold with FSD will be capable of using whatever Tesla settles on — between processing power and sensor differences in their lineup, feels like they’d have to hamstring the software a fair amount to make it work fleet wide. Maybe not?

[Dalewyn]

The only FSD I know is the Frame Shift Drive, sometimes known as the Friendship Drive.