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by KindAndFriendly 1158 days ago
Reading this entire story, it baffles me that as of today I can still add a "Full Self-Driving Capability" option when ordering a Tesla.
13 comments

$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 don't think anything will happen to $TSLA's CEO unless except through malice aimed at his peers that affects their wealth.

He needs to watch out for the Saudis, for sure.

It's also baffling that she faces consequences for financial fraud and not the impact on patient health of knowingly giving faulty test results.
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.
that was what could be proved in court personally (that she had intent)

when it comes to the patient health there was not this clear paper trail

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.
The difference is that TSLA investors are happy.
Both statements are hella cynical and 10000% true.
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.
I wonder if dealers are still telling people that the future robotaxi service means that the car will entirely pay for itself?
Man, that's a blast from the past. Elon was claiming that was about to happen seven years ago.
I am amazed at that too. If you need to pay attention and intervene, it’s clearly not ‘full self driving’.
It demonstrably has FSD capability. Marques Brownlee has a video from last year where it drove him to his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nF0K2nJ7N8

>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.

Self-delusion is not fraud. It's only a crime when you are not deluded and knowingly lie.
Building your company so that you can keep up your own delusions (and repeat them to customers) in spite of evidence sounds like it might be fraud.
the only crime here (or anywhere) is screwing with rich people's money.
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.
No that’s not fraud. Fraud requires a lie and justifiable, detrimental reliance on that lie by a victim.
Hi, welcome to hacker news.

Why wouldn’t a buyer be justified in relying upon a sellers description of the goods for sale?

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.

It’s closer to

Seller Assumes Liability for Injury†

†Seller Assumes No Liability for Injury

I'm really tired of people just treating words as meaningless attention hooks and then leaning on a unilaterally convenient redefinition of them.
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.
Fair enough. You're correct, I'm jus expressing my antipathy to marketing technique.
It's actually really common. Like lemonade with no fruit juice. Or check out "Mayo" fake mayonnaise. It's literally not mayonnaise.
That's why in Europe we have laws against this type of false labeling.
doesn't make it okay though
> 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!
If I got that wrong, then I apologize.
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.

"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.
That's true.

You're testing it with the lives of others on the road or walking beside it too.

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?
Yeah sometimes it's other peoples' lives.
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.
Oh good point, I should be more careful of what I read.

It's "Full Self Driving" not "Full Self Driving without Accidents".

you mean like people?
It is not about not being fooled, it is about maintaining standards so that people in society can spend less time ensuring they do not get fooled.
Valid point.
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). Until the car can do it, it's all "hypothetical capability".

Selling a "capability" that won't get delivered within the expected lifetime of the car is just marketing garbage.

> 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.

[1] "the facility or potential for an indicated use or deployment," emphasis on "potential" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capability

Sure. In the same way that I have Olympic "capability".
> the same way that I have Olympic "capability"

You may. Not everyone does. That doesn’t mean everyone capable of Olympic greatness achieves it.

It’s a “full” capability they’re incapable of delivering. It’s really hard to see how your distinction has any meaning.
I have 0% faith the current hardware will ever run a real level 5 solution.

It will require better processors, better cameras, LiDAR, more RAM, something.

> 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.)

Selling a product that does X that neither currently does X nor can in the future do X seems like fraud to me.
> nor can in the future do X

We don’t know this. That’s the point.

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.
I don't understand, up top you said it's just the "capability". So if it isn't even that, what's left?

Don't they already have a new, more powerful HW design for 2023 that is incompatible with the fittings for the old one?

I don't see any reason to think that Musk is either genius or crazy.
In 2019 Musk publicly stated Model 3's would support robotic taxi functionality in 2020.
> 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.
> don't think Musk deserves the benefit of the doubt

Neither do I. But that's a civil matter. Criminal conviction doesn't turn on the release of the benefit of doubt.

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.
> Most FSD buyers seem aware they’re paying into a research effort.

Shades of Star Citizen right there.

"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons."
Is level 5 where you call a rich person black car service?
Level 5, as defined by the SAE, is a fully self driving system that will never ask you to take control and operates under all possible conditions.

https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/...