[eisa01]

Toyota's solid-state EV battery promises are almost as bad as Elon's full self driving timeline

Only exception is that they give themselves a bit more lead time "early 2020's" in 2017. Probably because they have an interest to delay competitors EV sales, while Elon is pumping FSD sales

Will be interesting to see which technology comes to market first

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/toyota-claims-a-leap-that-w...

[simondotau]

A few choice headlines:

2017: "Toyota’s new solid-state battery could make its way to cars by 2020" https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/toyotas-new-solid-state-ba...

2020: "Toyota's game-changing solid-state battery en route for 2021 debut" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400725

2023: "Toyota Touts Solid State EVs with 932-Mile Range, 10-Minute Charging by 2027" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36353474

2023: "Toyota Only Plans to Make Enough Solid-State Batteries for 10k Cars in 2030" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374322

[0xbadcafebee]

Have you ever in your life met, or even heard of, a single person who said "I'm not buying an EV because I read a PR piece that Toyota is doing R&D on some weird cutting edge tech thing" ?

[ZeroGravitas]

Worse, I've seen people say they are waiting for hydrogen cars. I've seen them write op-eds to that effect.

Which the Japanese government and Toyota have also been pushing hard for reasons that don't appear to make any logical sense.

The classic examples of "groupthink" used to be the Japanese Navy in WW2 but I think we have a new contender.

[justin66]

The Californian government was a big booster of hydrogen at one point. Toyota might have reaped the rewards if California had built that infrastructure out (and, to be honest, if Tesla had failed early on).

Their hydrogen fuel cell technology is very good for what is. It’s just not something many people need.

[justin66]

> Toyota's solid-state EV battery promises are almost as bad as Elon's full self driving timeline

They’re not even in the same category. Tesla sells a feature called “full self driving.” It’s a fraud.

[LightBug1]

At least there's an actual, verifiable end result for Toyota.

I don't see that for Schrödinger's FSD.

[testing22321]

You’ve never seen a self driving waymo, and extrapolated that to trucks and other commercial uses that will no longer need drivers?

[filloooo]

All of these need human intervention as failsafe, you just don't see them sitting in the car.

A good example is those Chinese unmanned delivery vans, that's real world results of current AI driving.

[bobthepanda]

i think they are making a point about Tesla's FSD specifically and not about autonomous vehicles.

We have been trying to automate trucks for one or two decades but I'm not exactly willing to bet on it getting beyond the testing phase in a specific calendar year.

[recursive]

It's verifiable in the sense that you can check whether they followed through, and they did not? How is that better?

[LightBug1]

At some point, either Toyota will have delivered or not.

Whereas Tesla have been saying FSD is amazing and breakthrough technology for years now and yet and, as a novelty, it is, kind of. Still needs human intervention. And I wouldn't trust my family with it at all. ymmv

So, we're back at the heart of the basic criticism it's had for years. They've been selling this dud for years, and it's still not feature ready.

Schrödinger.

[recursive]

That point can always be in the future.

[LightBug1]

Yes, the issue is that Tesla and its fanboys have said that point is now, or yesterday. Which is not the case.

[BurningFrog]

All recent model Teslas can use FSD now, at least in the US. It's a $100/month subscription.

[wewtyflakes]

Tesla calls it "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" now, no? Seems odd to call it "full" self-driving if it has to be supervised.

[simondotau]

I agree it's a bad choice of name, though I think the controversy is somewhat overstated.

In Tesla's view, "full" is an antonym to "limited", where Autopilot designed to work on a limited class of roads. In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection. In its current state, FSD can perform complete drives without intervention almost every time. (Yes, "almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But the same is true of some human drivers who hold driver licenses.)

And to be fair, it's important to disambiguate technical and regulatory achievements. It is "supervised" because "unsupervised" would necessarily mean Tesla's software is the legally licensed driver of someone else's privately owned vehicle, which is a situation regulators are nowhere near contemplating. And it would require a vastly different insurance product to what is currently sold by insurers.

[imtringued]

That's a lot of words to say that Tesla's self driving software is not ready yet and is undeserving of the name "full self driving".

Externalising the blame to regulators is pretty embarrassing, because regulations are flexible with respect to how well self driving cars work.

Why would Tesla be scared of having liability for a self driving car that drives better than humans? Shifting the liability to the driver who is merely sitting in the car and only exists for regulatory reasons and never controls the car is illogical in the case of the car never getting into an accident or violating traffic rules.

Additionally, it is still illogical even in the case of an accident as the driver did nothing to bring about the accident or traffic rule violation. Their existence as a backup can only prevent such things from occurring.

Assuming adversity from the driver is just one more reason to take control away from humans. E.g. the driver disengaged the self driving features to produce an accident on purpose as liability was shifted to Tesla.

Supervision appears to be extremely suboptimal for Tesla with no conceivable upside if we trust your word that regulations are holding them back from full self driving without the supervision disclaimer.

If anything, they have an incentive for locking out drivers from driving their cars manually. You should be paying for manual control instead of paying for full self driving.

[breve]

> In this way, "full" was intended to describe the system's intended ability to perform the full task of piloting a vehicle, not that the system has achieved some unspoken threshold of engineering perfection.

No. Tesla simply lied. Tesla very specifically claimed it would outperform human drivers.

In 2016 Tesla claimed every Tesla car being produced had "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver":

https://web.archive.org/web/20161020091022/https://tesla.com...

Wasn't true then, still isn't true now.

[simondotau]

I don't think it's proven that Tesla knowingly lied as opposed to catastrophically misjudged the level of processing power required in 2017. But you'll get no argument from me that it's a distinction without a difference, for customers stuck with older iterations of FSD hardware.

[BurningFrog]

I think the hardware definitely is that good.

The software is perhaps not there yet. But that's not what they claimed.

[BurningFrog]

The "supervised" part is more legal than technical.

It can drive anywhere a human can.

Of course the goal posts can always be moved so the current real FSD isn't actually "Full" because of some inevitable imperfection.

[abenga]

Can it drive in downtown Delhi or Nairobi? On unpaved roads on safari? Onto and off a flatbed truck for transport? Through a lightly flooded town?

No, it can't drive "anywhere a human can".

[simondotau]

A little bit of charity should be given to common turns of phrase, as opposed to being uncharitably pedantic. "A human" can also drive a stunt car on a movie set, or drive a fuel tanker around London city streets, or an F1 car around a race circuit at high speed.

Based on videos I've seen, FSD is absolutely fine with unpaved roads. My guess is it would fare as well as your average foreign tourist when placed in Delhi or Nairobi. But we can only guess.

As for driving on "lightly flooded" roads, this is an extremely foolhardy thing to do, especially in a normal passenger car, and if FSD refused to drive in that circumstance it would not be a mark against its abilities. Arguably a mark in its favour. Moving water can be orders of magnitude more dangerous than it appears. Even shallow standing water can conceal debris which could insta-destroy a tyre, or your suspension, or your coolant loop, or your fuel tank.

[imtringued]

My point still stands. Tesla doesn't benefit from this legal aspect whatsoever. They should be removing the steering wheel as soon as possible.