Item — HN Reader

This was purely an effort to improve margins on the cars that they tried to sell with other types of rationale. From the way I've seen him operate his companies, treat his employees, and now work with the government, he has a high tolerance for risk paired with a very low tolerance for perceived inefficiencies plus too little patience to fully understand the problem.

He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and break things". So let's fire 80% of the staff, see what falls down, and rehire where we made "mistakes". I really think he has an alarmingly high threshold for the number of lives we can lose if it accelerates the pace of progress.

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It's pretty funny because lidar used to be many thousands of dollars and now it's down to hundreds and they're still sticking to just regular cameras. Funny in the sense that Teslas are many times more dangerous than lidar enabled cars but anyway.

Yes, it's become clear to me that it's only a matter of time before Tesla adds LiDAR and says that was the plan all along. Meanwhile, what better way to test vision-only than by releasing it to the beta testing public? Elon Musk knows people will die but in his ketamine addled brain he's convinced himself that a vision only self-driving Tesla is safer than a human driver so it's ok. People were going to die anyway statistically speaking.

it's okay. the media will be along to tell us how unsafe ketamine is because they don't like Elon.

How much is a solid state lidar now?

Hesai, a Chinese company, sells lidar for cars and they plan to sell at $200 later this year, their current one is around $400. You would need four for a car. I assume the ones for Waymo would be a bit more expensive.

The sour irony is that "move fast and break things" was formulated in the low-stakes world of web entertainment software, which was able to become so prominent precisely because of the stability of having our more pressing needs being predictably taken care of (for the most part).

To quote Black Adder: Some of you may die, but some of us will live!

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." — Lord Farquaad, Shrek, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/characters/nm0001475?it...

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

The argument here isn't against self-driving. Flying is also 100x safer than driving, but there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer.

"Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame."

Ok, what other ADAS is driving over 2 billion miles a year?

As for "best technology available," the galaxy brains in this thread are tossing out numbers assuming that sensor fusion never fails and that correlated failure modes can be neglected, which is wild. I never thought Elon was a genius -- he's a business guy willing to make big bets on interesting tech, nothing more nothing less -- but if the confidently incorrect engineering claims on display in this thread are any indication, maybe you guys should be calling him a genius after all, because this ain't it.

> there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer.

That's true, but it would obviously be completely unreasonable to stop all flying in the meantime.

Grounding entire fleets of aircraft when a safety issue is discovered is completely normal, and that's the way things should happen. Remember when the MCAS issue was discovered on Boeing 737 MAXes after 2 fatal crashes? They were all grounded for a while, and rightfully so.

Two fatal crashes that resulted in 300+ fatalities iirc. Human driven cars have many more fatalities than self driving cars and no one is talking about stopping all road travel until we can fix it. Your argument is disingenuous at best if not deliberately deceptive.

[citation needed]

Tesla releases all self driving statistics including time since disengagement of self-driving before accident, right?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...

The numbers include all incidents where self-driving was active within 30 seconds of the crash, because of course they do. The meme that Tesla is allowed to simply bypass reporting on a technicality would be absurd if it weren't so voraciously spread by post-truth luddites. Look, if you want to dunk on Elon, I get it, but he does so many real shitty things that I would ask you to focus on those and not make shit up.

Guess what: Musk will probably get this rewuirement scrapped by his orange mate.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...

Finally some good criticism in this godforsaken thread. Yes, Elon wants to do corruption and we should oppose him.

That number is incidents successfully detected, not ground truth. Last I looked, the majority of recorded fatalities went undetected by Tesla telematics. That demonstrates their accident detection/reporting is empirically incapable of producing a robust ground truth estimate. The number presented is a lower bound with no identifiable upper bound.

A upper bound could be easily produced by Tesla. All vehicle fatalities identified by police are recorded in the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) [1]. Tesla could investigate every recorded Tesla fatality by VIN and cross-reference with their telemetry to determine if their systems were available at all or active on or near the time of the fatal crash. This would cost them between a few thousand dollars to a few million dollars annually, depending on desired precision, which compared to the billions it makes annually is minuscule sum to affirmatively establish safety.

They intentionally choose to not do so. Instead deliberately deceiving consumers and the public by conflating the lower bound with a upper bound in all official safety messaging.

Even ignoring their gross incompetence or maliciousness in not doing simple safety analysis when numerous lives are on the line. The mere fact they conflate a lower bound with a upper bound in their messaging is scientific malfeasance of the highest order. Their reporting has zero credibility when they make such clear and intentional misreporting purely for their own benefit to the detriment of the public and even their own customers.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...

If Tesla is Level 2, that link doesn’t support the OPs point about “all” incidents, but rather only those involved in a fatality, hospital treatment, airbag deployment, or towed vehicle. Am I reading that link correctly?

The problem with "all" incidents is that reporting bias drowns the whole thing in noise. I clipped a curb the other year and didn't report it to anyone -- am I messing up the statistics? In contrast, hospitalizations and bodies are concrete enough to all but eliminate reporting bias.

Of course, at first this just substitutes one type of problem for another because even shitty drivers have to drive many lifetimes of distance before killing anyone so you wind up with the unfortunately named "shot noise" from small-N. But Tesla FSD drives so many miles that the statistics are no longer small-N. If supervised FSD was worse than human, we should be seeing many more bodies than we do, so supervised FSD is clearly better than human.

Of course, that number needs to be adjusted for critical interventions before we can say anything about unsupervised FSD, and in an ideal universe I wish Tesla was forced to disclose those figures. Unfortunately, we live in a universe where luddites are firmly in control of this conversation and I cannot deny that a forced disclosure would be heavily abused in a way that costs lives. Still, regulators get to see the numbers before approving unsupervised rollouts, and as a compromise this makes neither myself nor the luddites happy but I suppose it will do.

First, do not put words in my mouth. I did not claim he was "bypassing" federal reporting. Although he quite literally bypassed much more strict self driving reporting in CA by claiming it was ADAS instead of ADS. So maybe know the facts before calling someone a Luddite.

What I literally said was Tesla doesn't release all of the self-driving statistics, like time to disengagement. They are noticeably more cagey about releasing that kind of info claiming it as "trade secret". Did you see the data sets you pointed to before pointing to them? Full of Tesla crashes, and full of redactions.

I don't need to dunk on Elon. He dunks on himself. Some people just worship him too hard to realize it.

FSD is not able to drive in the same conditions humans are so you're comparing humans driving in challenging conditions to FSD driving in good weather on highways.

Yup, it's a product development process known as "Muntzing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

While it was absolutely vital to getting the costs of the original Tesla Roadster and SpaceX launches way down… it can only work when you are able to accept "no, stop" as an answer.

Rockets explode when you get them wrong, you can't miss it.

Cars crashing more than other models? That's statistics, which can be massaged.

Government work? There's always someone complaining no matter what you do, very easy to convince yourself that all criticism is unimportant, no matter how bad it gets. (And it gets much worse than the worst we've actually seen from DOGE and Trump — I don't actually think they'll get to be as bad as the Irish Potato Famine, but that is an example of leaders refusing to accept what was going on).

After reading the Wikipedia article on Muntzing it is worth also reading the article about Muntz himself [1]. He may have been the first person to sell TVs by diagonal screen size instead of screen width.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz

> He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and break things". So let's fire 80% of the staff, see what falls down, and rehire where we made "mistakes". I really think he has an alarmingly high threshold for the number of lives we can lose if it accelerates the pace of progress.

Which seems like an antidote to the current culture of "don't build anything anywhere."