I can't speak for Tesla, but Elon's plan is to get rid of the Bureau of Consumer Protection which is the institution that you would appeal to in such cases.
Edit: Open and honest edit, Elon wants to get rid of the CFPB, not the FTC's BCP.
"Duped" is an accurate description of how Elon Musk has been treating customers who bought a Tesla car with a HW3. He's been repeatedly promising those buyers that full self driving is just a software update away. Now apparently FSD is an impossibility and the company is rushing to hire drivers? In the very least it's bait-and-switch scam.
> Aren't the drivers being hired for their recently announced Robo-Taxi fleet (...)
The robo-taxi fleet is scheduled to be launched by 2026. This means Tesla, in spite of Elon Musk's wild claims, is not counting on providing anything remotely similar to FSD until at least 2026.
The label on the Tesla site in the past has always been “FSD capable”. For years the FSD software was only available to a very small set of beta testers even if you had paid for it. People still have their money knowing they were not getting something at that monent. Not sure why we pretend they were fooled somehow.
The consequence of voting for a 3rd minority candidate is that your vote will effectively be wasted. Or, perhaps in a less pessimistic view, a protest vote, a flavored way of blank voting. In several European voting systems, parties form coalitions, so your vote will only go to waste if the party you vote for fails to cross some minimum boundary, e.g. 2%.
As for buying electric cars, you still have at least 10 models to choose from that won't have a really bad, unfixable experience, or a high risk of the car brand going bankrupt.
So comparing buying Tesla and voting Trump seems a little simple.
There's not much "if" about it. It's been 8 years since Tesla claimed "as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".
Smells ripe for disaster. Not self-driving and will be ridiculed all over the place. I guess the lies are starting to catch up with them.
But not only PR-wise. Imagine any kind of security issues. Or what if the signal is blocked out somehow, unintentionally or intentionally by some bad actor.
Basically this looks like remote taxi drivers. Maybe they will be able to work from home or something. But probably badly paid. And then driver quality might go down. Oh and imagine the PR disaster, if any of them ever gets a customer into a car crash...
I suspect that the remote driver will not have unilateral control of the car. It'll probably be something along the line of giving hints when the car asks for them.
I really dislike Altman but if Musk was in charge of decision over there ChatGPT would be a pipe into Amazon Mechanical Turks or something like that ...
> It’s a back up system in case The vehicle gets stuck
People seems to be thinking emergency control, but that would make no sense. Imagine being dropped into a completely unknown setting, milliseconds away from a crash and being expected to take over the wheel. That's pretty obviously not what this is about, it can't be much beyond a car that hasn't moved in a few minutes because it's stuck.
The other robot taxi systems with cars actually on the road are SAE level 4 systems. Unless Tesla's will also be level 4 or 5 they are not comparable. Their current consumer FSD systems are level 2.
I don’t want to sit in a taxi that’s remote controlled by someone who has low stakes (their body not in the way of harm). There will be a number of accidents attached to the self driving mechanism, so I can make an informed decision, but there won’t be such a number for the person taking over remotely.
You'd think that if they can't get a reliable self driving car given how much training data they must currently have, perhaps they need to try a different strategy.
Really? You're surprised that I don't want to get in a vehicle driven by Greg in Florida while he's scratching his nuts? ... Or Javinder in India while he's got a side eye on how his cricket bet is going?
Count me out. This is a laughable version of the promised vision.
I assume they mean take emergency corrective action when an issue arise like google with Waymo, and the general thing will still be sorta kinda self driving like tesla does (which is not like waymo, but still better than nothing) ? Because being a network latency event away from a car crash doesn't inspire me much confidence, and I don't have to sit in one of those to be affected, just to be on the same road.
> assume they mean take emergency corrective action when an issue arise like google with Waymo, and the general thing will still be sorta kinda self driving like tesla does
Having taken Waymos and put my parents' Tesla in FSD, I wouldn't assume as much. Tesla's FSD makes mistakes more frequently, and they're bad ones, in part due to its willingness to aggressively accelerate when it thinks the road is clear.
I would describe the difference as: Waymo drives like a limo driver, carefully and smoothly, and tries to disappear for the passengers in the back seat. Tesla FSD drives like a car owner might, and tries to make the person in the front seat feel like the behaviour of their car is the same as they would do it.
I rode in a Waymo for the first time last week. The highest praise I can give it is that it's boring. It drives like a careful human with zero surprises.
The more important difference is that Waymo's FSD system is SAE level 4. The Tesla FSD system that is in their cars that people can currently buy is level 2.
The difference is that the former only needs human help in rare circumstances. The latter needs human help in common circumstances.
If you base you robot taxi on a level 4 system you just need humans on standby to respond when the car knows it needs help and asks for it. If you base it on a level 2 system you need humans monitoring during routine trips to be ready to intervene when the car is about to do something stupid and has no idea that it is out of its league.
Humm I wonder if there's some truth to that, some kind of pattern matching, like "at this stretch of the road usual behaviour was: speed X mph, turning at this and this points, etc"
And FSD is improving everyday. The only question is when will it be good enough to run a system similar to Waymo where a remote operate an help if it gets stuck, and then when will it be good enough to not need that and be full autonomous.
Network latency is no issue when operators control cars in LLM style:
„Slowly drive around on the left of the obstacle on the right, accept crossing the opposing traffic barrier line if you are sure you will be back on your side after you drove around the obstacle.“
Tesla is apparently talking about full teleoperation, with someone using a remote steering wheel while wearing a VR headset. Phantom Automotive tried that.[1] Baidu does that.[2] Apparently Tesla is hiring people to do that.
Waymo doesn't do that. The support center can only give hints to the vehicle software.
If the situation is so bad that won't work, they dispatch someone to go to the car and drive it manually.
The sensor suite, with all those LIDARs and RADARs, isn't well matched to VR-type driving by a human.
Tesla is trying to get away with Fake Self Driving, which they've been trying to do since 2016.
Now we see why Musk wants federal pre-emption of state regulation.[3]
California's "restrictive rules"[4] require SAE 4 or SAE 5 autonomy for autonomous vehicles.
Worse, DMV can (and did, with Cruise) revoke a company's license to drive autonomously. They apply about the same standards they do for human drivers.
Musk probably wants Federal rules where Tesla can cover up, litigate, and stall after accidents, since that's what Tesla has done in the past after major accidents. DMV can suspend a license immediately.
> Recent reports show the company is planning to hire a human team to remotely troubleshoot its robotaxi operations.
> Tesla would not be the first robotaxi company to use this method. In fact, it’s an industry standard. It was previously reported that Cruise, the robotaxi company owned by General Motors, was employing remote human assistants to troubleshoot when its vehicles ran into trouble (the vehicles appear to have run into trouble every four to five miles). Google’s Waymo is also thought to employ the same practice, as does Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon.
Big pile of nothing. Fools only read titles exclusively. If Teslas offering is bad then that’s a story, but hiring human operators is the norm.
What matters is the frequency of interventions, remote or in person. Having taken Waymos and Teslas in FSD extensively, the interventiona rate in the latter is substantially higher, in part due to them being a Level II system trying to operate globally.
The article isn't anything damning. But it's also not a nothingburger.
What "this" are you referring to? Tesla doesn't have a robotaxi. It does have FSD, which makes it a reasonable comparison for (a) existing and (b) sharing FSD's camera-only dogma.
The title leads the reader to believe that Tesla’s robotaxis will be piloted by humans rather than self-driving software. The combination of the word “control” with scare quotes on “self-driving” gives this impression.
The article may not be damning, but the title? It doth mislead.
Not really. In the very least it proves that at best Tesla is way behind established robotaxi operations, and once again demonstrates that Elon Musk's recurrent promise that "full self driving cars is just around the corner" is just a blatant lie to fool investors. I mean, think about it: if Tesla's promise of full self driving was indeed around the corner, why would they suddenly feel the need to hire teams of drivers to drive there cars?
I mean it’s not nothing. Those companies have been honest about their practices and intentions while Elon Musk is known to have lied consistently and persistently and egregious about the “self driving” state and capabilities of Tesla and resently made the bogus claims that they had autonomous robots that were just remote controlled.
The subtext is that it’s likely Tesla will soon claim that have self driving cabs, which are just remote controlled.
I'm not sure what the news is here. Of course they are going to have a team of people to take over when the self-driving software reaches its limits. It would be stupid not to, and every autonomy company does.
As much as I would enjoy some Elon-bashing, this is a bit unsurprising.
I used to write remote dashboards for autonomous vehicles, and if we had been able to fully support remote operation (latency was just unbearable at the time), we would have gladly done so, if only to unstuck vehicles from tricky situations.
Also, it seems like it's already done in other robotaxi setups.
It makes sense for the company, as long as the remote operator only drives a fraction of the miles ran by the vehicles (and if you can keep the wage low enough, while still ensuring driver engagement.)
It makes sense for the user as long as the vehicle reach its destination, and they don't have to car about driving.
I would still heavily fine Tesla for calling it "Full Self Driving" or "Autopilot", because it's a plain lie.
But Elon retired from science & engineering to focus on running an ad-funded political campaigning platform, so "truth / lies" is a bit of moot point.
> Also, it seems like it's already done in other robotaxi setups.
I think you're missing the whole point.
The whole point is that Tesla has been promising full self-driving cars for years, and going as far as to talk shit about specific computer vision strategies used by competitors with actual real-world autonomous car services being provided to the public. Elon Musk has been promising the public that full self driving was just a software update away for those who spent money on a Tesla car with a specific onboard computer.
And now, after years of making promises about full self driving cars and shitting on companies who already provide autonomous car services, they silently decide that after all they "need the ability to access and control [Tesla cars] remotely” ?
I mean, using teleoperators is a widely known industry standard. Tesla was promising way more than that and shitting on those who were using them. And now apparently they are scrambling to catch up with what Waymo was doing over a decade ago?
If I was a shareholder or a customer, I'd be pissed.
> Well, the share is up 3% since that article was published. :shrug: , I guess ?
I don't know where you get your stock quotes. The ones I get tell that last monday TSLA stock prices were at around $350 and right now they stand at $345.
Problem is, after listening to or observing most Tesla owners for a few minutes, I’d steer the car directly into the nearest guardrail or garbage truck.
Genuine question: instead of self-driving cars, why don't we have remote controlled cars all around? With cameras all around the visibility would not be as terrible, together with the current self-driving capabilities which can get through basic situation I would have imagined we'd see more of them around.
Too bad! You don't own the company or make the decisions. The value of your life has already been determined and paying a low wage to someone far away makes the most financial sense for these companies.
I don’t understand why this is a bad thing for so many people here. This kind of tech will eventually allow more people to have their own “private driver” who works remotely and on demand. Fully reliable self driving via AI isn’t coming for a very long time.
This is a peak Elon Musk stan quote: playing catch-up to what is described in the article as the industry standard, and something that established players were doing over a decade ago, is... "Genius"? Is that it?
What does the word "genius" mean to you at this point?
The aggressive push to cover LEO with Starlink satellites is starting to make a lot of sense.
This worldwide communication and telekinetic infrastructure has the potential to change the global economy in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Your imagination and experience can fill in the blanks here. Brilliant foresight and execution ostensibly by Elon.
https://electrek.co/2024/10/23/elon-musk-finally-admits-tesl...
Those buyers were made specific promises which Tesla has never delivered on:
https://electrek.co/2024/08/24/tesla-deletes-its-blog-post-s...
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