The false promises of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving

Imagine naming a feature "Full Self-Driving," and yet you can't take your attention away from the road and must be ready to take over at a moment's notice.

Without LIDAR, this is a fool's endeavor.

The elephant in the room is that the NHTSA still doesn't have a director, and hasn't had a long-term director since 2017.

Steven Cliff was the director for 2 months in 2022. Aside from that, this important safety organization has been... erm... on autopilot (see what I did there?) and leaderless.

How are we supposed to keep tabs on car safety if the damn agency in charge of automobile safety doesn't even have a leader?

So, when are we changing this forums name from Technology to it's actual purpose of late "every click and rage bait post about Tesla and Musk so people can circlejerk worse than reddit"?

Tesla FSD Timeline

Tesla's software is not safe:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that, henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” You will be able to nap in your car while it drives you to work, he promised.

But while Musk would eventually ship an advanced driver-assist system that he called Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta, the idea that any Tesla owner could catch some z’s while their car whisks them along is, at best, laughable — and at worst, a profoundly fatal error.

Since that 2016 announcement, hundreds of fully driverless cars have rolled out in multiple US cities, and none of them bear the Tesla logo.

His supporters point to the success of Autopilot, and then FSD, as evidence that while his promises may not exactly line up with reality, he is still at the forefront of a societal shift from human-powered vehicles to ones piloted by AI.

You’ll also hear from a former Tesla employee who was fired after posting videos of FSD errors, experts who compare the company’s self-driving efforts to its competitors, and even from the competitors themselves — like Kyle Vogt, CEO of the General Motors-backed Cruise, who is unconvinced that Musk can fulfill his promises without rethinking his entire hardware strategy.

Listen to the latest episode of Land of the Giants: The Tesla Shock Wave, a co-production between The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Counterpoint - I’ve been using it for a year and it’s better than human drivers. It’s not perfect but if we replaced every car with an FSD Tesla, fatalities would drop. The worst it will do is pick the wrong lane and detour a bit to get back on track. There’s 40,000 deaths a year from car crashes, so highlighting the handful of ones caused by tesla mistakes is just scaremongering.