I don’t actually hate the company, although i distrust it. There was a time when i aspired to own a Tesla. I do hate Elon Musk. But i ruled out buying a Tesla before i realized he was a fascist because
my friends who didn’t like their Tesla were more like me in their preferences for tech than my friends who love their Teslas. (And i have three good friends who are very happy with their Teslas, five if you count a bridge buddy and a next door neighbor.)
i worked in the claims department of a major insurance company, and my coworkers who were claims adjusters told me not to get a Tesla. I gather that when they need repairs after an accident, things don’t go very well.
I would look askance at someone who bought a Tesla today because of the political statement it makes. But an awful lot of people bought Teslas when the political statement was “environmentally correct”. I’m still rooting for them to succeed at autonomous driving, because it’s a tech i really want.
But Tesla has a history of releasing misleading info about the performance of their cars. They were claiming some huge benefit to autopilot as if it were a thing unique to them when that benefit could be completely explained by the feature usually called something less sexy like “front auto-braking collision avoidance”, which was already common in high end cars, and as an option in other cars. And they were not the industry leader (at least in terms of safety) in that feature. There are a ton of examples of things like that.
And i must just have had back luck, but the couple of trips I’ve had in a self-driving Tesla were legitimately scary. That’s largely on my friend, who is way too slow to correct the car. It’s better when his wife is with us, because she yells at him and makes him take over before it gets scary.
All of that is valid. Elon is evil and I and pretty much every Tesla owner, to the extent that they think about it, don’t trust a thing he says. Like the narcissists that I have had the misfortune to meet, he makes fantastical claims and only very occasionally pulls it off.
I wouldn’t have a Tesla if anyone else had even close to the same self driving capability. I have taken dozens of people on their first FSD ride. All but two of them were very impressed. One is a complete pain in the ass who complains about fucking everything and the other is my friend’s wife who was nervous but too polite to mention anything to me (you aren’t a person who is in either camp). We aren’t anywhere near actual fully automated driving but things over the last year have improved dramatically and I haven’t had to intervene for a safety related thing in over a year (10k miles).
My concern is that if Musk made the decision to remove radar in favor of all optical is someone at Tesla actually willing to push back if radar/lidar/uncooled longwave IR or whatever really becomes useful? The radar decision sounds like borderline Muntzing.
I do have some concern with lidar (and to a lesser extent radar) due to co-site interference between vehicles as vehicle density increases.
My understanding was that the decision to remove radar Was something Musk did because there was a shortage after Covid (supply chain issues, of course). He colcuded that cameras could do just as well. Having decided “we’ll go 100% visual” he seems in his Musky fashion to have doubled down since then, convinced that his decision was the right one. …And of course the cost savings probably didn’t hurt the equation. As I’ve said before, I haven’t seen any FSD situation where Lidar or radar would have been safe where visual was not.
I have to wonder what the lidar unit in a Waymo accomplishes - what sort of resolution and distance is it capable of? How immune is it to fog, snow, driving rain on the window or whatever that messes up sight cameras?
Tesla cars primarily used the USS (ultrasonic sensors) for parking, not driving. When I got my Tesla a little over two years ago, it was vision only and it wasn’t able to back into parking spaces or parallel park. A few months later they had solved that.
I’m not disputing your facts here. Just wondering whether they are good as in “Wide open for rogue entrepreneurs to experiment on the public” or good as in “Thorough, logically complete, and well thought out with a careful balancing of all parties’ interests”. Or good as in “Simply absent; rules are for woke sissies”.