At minimum, I can't see anything other than Tesla being forced to refund FSD purchases. It's fraud, plain and simple.
But whether it's due to the embarrassment of being swindled or being drunk on the Kool-Aid, the amount of Tesla owners I know that tell me they are happy for paying up to $15k for what is essentially cruise control, and who honestly believe 'real FSD is only a year away' is shocking.
With ~3 million Teslas sold worldwide, 285K FSD was much fewer than I had thought. As someone currently not interested in buying a Tesla, I assumed most of the people in its target market are attracted to the FSD claims (reputationally, consumer-facing self-driving seems to be where Tesla is perceived to be the outright leader) and are able to afford it at its FOMO buy-now pricing.
A lot of Tesla drivers aren't "car people" but they're excited by the tech in the car besides FSD. I have zero interest in FSD and would never have gotten a BMW or Mercedes but still got a Tesla. I was ok with a Nissan before Tesla because premium ICE cars were just cars with added bells and whistles + marketing. If I had to get a new EV that isn't Tesla it would be a Rivian, Ford, or KIA because they all offer something unique that isn't just a retrofitted faux-premium ICE car. I don't care about leather seats or wooden accents or impressing anyone. For regular car folks who aren't into luxury Teslas introduce you to a whole new way of interacting and interfacing with your car such as the app control, sentry mode streaming, at-home charging, driver profiles, full touch UI, etc. Plus it smokes cars that try to block you from merging. Tesla delivered something that all of the MBAs combined from the other legacy car companies couldn't.
It's so funny, and this is not a criticism at all, how big the divide in the two market segments are. I'm basically the polar opposite of you. I don't want a lot of technology in my car, I don't want big touch screens, apps, automatic software updates or any of that. I want a car that feels nice (not to impress anyone, but because I'm sitting my butt in that seat for potentially hours every day, touching the controls thousands of times, etc. and the cheapness of the Tesla materials is very noticeable to me in that context) and just happens to have an electric drivetrain. Unfortunately most of the manufacturers think it's better to try to be "innovative" by turning the car into an android phone on wheels instead of letting it be enough to innovate with the source of power. I'm fine with that stuff existing. Obviously people (including you) want it, and that's great. But I wish there were more options for people who don't want that.
I’m in a similar boat. I just want something as disconnected from what I do day to day as possible.
I write code. I notice bugs. I don’t want an in dash embedded device with a poorly designed ui/x.
I want something I can wrench on and when it breaks I can debug and fix.
Currently in a 2015 wrangler. Auto trans, manual locks, manual windows, $90 marine radio with shit bluetooth.
I’d get a cassette deck if I could bluetooth to it.
Point being, where I am, the car is what I need and can deal with my roads and winters and doesn’t have an OTA updated dash-to-drivetrain link that can decide at any time heated seats or cruise control is 30 bucks a month.
My hypothesis is that most people won't buy it because most people would rather drive themselves, especially if you're paying $15k for that privilege, and that many people don't know that you can subscribe to FSD on a monthly basis (though there are upsells within the MCU to drive consumption there).
This was a much more lucrative proposition as a $2k add-on, I think.
It's going to be more complicated than that. They will absolutely try to mitigate by downselling to Enhanced Autopilot, which gets more usage (I think). Depending on when you purchased FSD, that will yield somewhere between a $0 and $9,000 refund.
However, the Enhanced Autopilot option was removed in 2019 and came back last year. I think this was done to juice the sales count. If the DoJ agrees, then Tesla might have to honor EAP's 2019 purchase price. This would make the minimum refund something like $3500.
Either way, this would be a blow to Tesla and will definitely worsen the layoffening.
Autopilot/Navigate on Autopilot are actually really useful, especially during highway driving.
Other lane-keeping systems do nothing but try to keep the car in the lane (and some do a poor job of even that). Autopilot is rock solid in this regard. Like "I now actually prefer road-tripping 700+ miles instead of flying" rock solid. (I never road-tripped in the past because driving long distances wipes me out. Not so with Autopilot.)
Navigate on Autopilot is also super reliable in automatically changing lanes and exiting highways, and works on highways that SuperCruise and BlueCruise Hands-Free do not.
Traffic Aware Cruise Control is rock-solid in detecting and acting upon traffic lights and speed limit signs, though some systems already do this. This used to require purchasing FSD (it was a $7,000 option when I purchased our Model 3), but now you just need Enhanced Autopilot to enable it (which is $6,000).
I can easily see people asking for at least a downgrade to Enhanced Autopilot (a $9,000 difference), and I don't blame them. For example, my wife would NEVER use FSD Beta in its current state, but she loves Autopilot and uses it all of the time.
Given that FSD is included in the final price of the car that is used for car registrations, I'm wondering how those refunds will work.
> Other lane-keeping systems do nothing but try to keep the car in the lane (and some do a poor job of even that).
This is simply not true. Drove recently in BMW, Audi, and Volkswagen and all had a very reliable adaptive cruise control + automatic lane change assist.
I have two cars, one of them being Tesla, and Tesla does not have advantage in basic cruise control.
> Like "I now actually prefer road-tripping 700+ miles instead of flying" rock solid.
I am completely uneducated on the state of EV charging right now. But for a 700+ miles, you would have to fully charge 2+ times? And how does it compare to a gas car given the availability of superchargers, excessive demands on long weekends, etc? Not trying to dismiss EV because of these factors, just genuinely curious of the compromise.
Gas cars have more refueling options, and refueling them is much faster. It takes about 45 minutes to refill our Model 3 at an average supercharger, of which there are many, but not as many as gas stations.
However, gas stations tend to be very spartan. Maybe you'll be fueling up at Bucee's or Wawa or Publix or something like that, or maybe you'll be filling up at Rod's Country Store which is a murder house that happens to have gas. Superchargers are usually located at the back of malls (which are useless if closed, but very useful when they are not) or large stores. Sometimes they are right in the city center, which is great because you can walk around and explore while you charge. It forces a break, which is great during road trips.
On a 700 mile road trip, we'd probably stop three times or so. However, Tesla Navigation is really really good at route planning with its superchargers. The nav can tell you when a charger is full or about to be full or if it has broken stalls or not. It will actually re-route you if a supercharging station fills up, if possible.
The idea of needing the car to know how to keep me in-lane is bizarre to me. Never in my life have I found it difficult to stay in my lane. The day that I need a car that helps me stay in my lane, is the day my license needs to be revoked and my decrepit ancient ass settled into an old age home.
I think it depends when you bought FSD, since how it has been described has changed over the years.
At the minimum, it's not "fraud, plain and simple" because there are people that currently use it and are happy with it. And it's not just sunk cost fallacy because you can buy it as a subscription for $200/mo, which is much less of an investment, and you can cancel that at any time. I don't know if Tesla breaks out numbers of how many FSD subscribers there are, but I think that would be pretty interesting to know.
Regardless, for something in development like FSD, I think the subscription model makes the most sense, since you know kinda what you're getting and if it's not worth it to you, you can cancel and then try again later after some updates. I kind of think they bumped the price to $15k just to switch more people to the subscription model.
I placed my order on AI day in 2019 right after all of the claims were made. I took delivery June 1, 2019.
When I ordered the car, I did so expecting it to be able to drive while I slept sometime during the life of the car. I have considered suing Tesla for failing to live up to the promises that prompted me to purchase the car. I had never purchased a new car before and wouldn't have except for the phantasmal claims of full-self driving. Refunding the $6k I paid for FSD seems insufficient to me.
>When I ordered the car, I did so expecting it to be able to drive while I slept sometime during the life of the car. I have considered suing Tesla for failing to live up to the promises that prompted me to purchase the car.
genuine question but , were you not the tiniest bit skeptical when only Tesla were able to promise FSD?
like what secret sauce have they got that no one else has?
they have a guy who leads a company that made reusable rockets profitable and electric vehicles sexy. I have no problem believing that people strongly believed in Tesla cracking L5 autonomy within that year.
Also, remember that self-driving cars were all the rage then too. Hype was at its peak then, I think.
> what secret sauce have they got that no one else has?
A large fleet of networked cars that were built from the ground up to provide real-world data (including cameras and human driver inputs) for AI training.
Honestly I kind of wonder if Tesla's software team (or overall technical approach) wasn't very badly mismanaged since they seem to have thrown away a huge head start. Or maybe autonomous car AI is just really hard.
> Honestly I kind of wonder if Tesla's software team (or overall technical approach) wasn't very badly mismanaged since they seem to have thrown away a huge head start.
Keep in mind they are likely spending 10x or less than Waymo on FSD, so a lot less employees/researchers, have been around a lot less time and have decided not to use the sensors and ground truth data that Waymo relies on.
Just having lots of data isn't necessarily very useful, or we'd see the pure FSD trying to get their sensors on everybody's cars.
At the minimum, it's not "fraud, plain and simple" because there are people that currently use it and are happy with it.
I don't think that happy customers necessarily mean that it's not fraudulent. FSD provides some value and has been seriously misrepresented by Tesla. The fact that some people are happy with the value they get from it does not diminish Tesla's misrepresentation.
> At the minimum, it's not "fraud, plain and simple" because there are people that currently use it and are happy with it.
Just because there are people who use it and are happy with it doesn't mean it's not fraud. There likely are people who are being sold fake products (unbeknown to them) and are still happy with those products, they were still sold to them under a fake premise. Regarding subscribers, sure there are people who are happy to pay $200/month for driving assist (I mean people pay significant premium for other makers driving assist technology), however I suspect there are a significant number of people where the promise of "autopilot" was a deciding factor to buy a Tesla over another car. So it is likely not just fraud, but also unfair competition.
When I was buying a Tesla with autopilot back in 2015, the salesperson was telling me that autopilot would become FSD with only software updates. Honestly, it felt more like poor training of salespeople rather than outright fraud because the marketing material said different.
To be fair, the beta is out and it seems to work shockingly well from what I can tell. Expecting it to be out of beta and working everywhere in a year seems reasonable
I rented one for a few weeks in late 2021, and the experience completely turned me off of Tesla's FSD.
During a 2 hour drive on an interstate on a clear, sunny day, FSD started steering into another vehicle 3 different times. One was a truck, and another was a wide load house being transported. I'll admit that is an odd case, but "don't accelerate straight into a house that is at windshield level" seems like a pretty simple ask. It did this multiple times and I had to temporarily disable the cruise control.
It also failed miserably on curving state highways, to the point that I turned it off after about 20 minutes.
I'm not refuting your general claim here, but the system you interacted with is Tesla's Autopilot, not FSD. They are two distinct systems for two distinct use cases (today).
FSD is supposed to only work on city streets, and was in limited beta in 2021 (you had to explicitly enroll). Autopilot is what runs on freeways/interstates today, and can be used on the street (but is not meant for city streets).
Autopilot, and it's Navigate on Autopilot system have been fantastic for me, but they are absolutely systems you need to monitor because they can do dumb things. It's not meant to be a hands-off driving system like the FSD system Tesla claims it will be one day.
People will pay $20K for sport brakes or $10K for an unusual paint color.
Acting like you know better than actual customers of FSD whether the $8K, $10K, $12K, or $15K they spent on the software is reasonable for them is the height of arrogance.
Also, characterizing the current FSD Beta system as "cruise control" is delusional.
Tesla's FSD would be better compared to Star Citizen then to a paint job.
If you pay $10K for a paint color, you get the paint color. If you pay $20K for sport brakes, you get the brakes. If you pay $15k for Tesla FSD, you get the hope that Tesla will eventually deliver FSD, much the same as a Star Citizen customer is buying the hope that they'll eventually actually be able to fly their ship in a full game.
You can still argue that the aspiration is worth the money to the customers, or that they're already getting enough value out of the partially delivered product. But I also think it's reasonable for onlookers to think that there's some level of fraud going on, given the constant promises without delivery.
If you pay $15K today, you get FSD Beta. For some people, the beta is worth the price, even not knowing precisely when it will be more than SAE Level 2.
We are talking about the group of people who system16 criticized for being "happy with having paid for FSD." Other peoples' needs and wants differ, and characterizing those needs and wants as if they are plain wrong is arrogant.
What's the beta used for? If you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel and monitor the FSH I feel it's more of a testing task (which should be performed by qualified personnel) rather than end users on public streets. If the beta software kills someone you are responsible because you didn't stop it on time. Is this something people want?
It is semi-autonomous driving software, so the use cases are what you might expect. For example, I have seen many Youtube videos where people are using it for supervised semi-autonomous drives. Some say that once you're used to its quirks, it's less stressful/easier to drive this way.
In the end, who knows? Who cares? If a customer says they are happy with the purchase, why should someone else tell them they are plain wrong? I can disagree, of course, but I should not tell them they're just wrong for being happy.
I don't tell people they're wrong for paying extra for a special paint color.
> You can still argue that ... they're already getting enough value out of the partially delivered product.
I think it's true that some people feel that way, and that's fine. But I agree with OP that the others "who honestly believe 'real FSD is only a year away'" are being taken advantage of if not outright defrauded.
> A system that doesn't have the capability to make turns at all will not make an error when making a turn.
Yes, a system that doesn't try to do something is better than one that does it poorly.
> By the same token, walking will avoid the risk of being in a highway accident. So by this logic, walking is superior to driving.
Again we're on the same page, walking is superior to driving. Although the pesky cars often make it more dangerous and there are limits that make walking impractical at times.
Not being a Tesla owner and definitely not someone paying $15k for FSD Beta, I have to ask, when someone does pay $15k for FSD are they told it is FSD or that it is FSD Beta?
Full Self-Driving Capability
$15,000
All functionality of Basic Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot
Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control
Coming Soon
Autosteer on city streets
The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.
So, for the people actually buying it with the actual contract paperwork and the sales pitch being provided, does the word Beta ever get used and is it fully explained?
to me, it looks like another "smear the DoJ for doing their job" campaign by those having the job done to them. it is so in vogue these days
This subthread is about the people who system16 criticized for being happy with purchasing FSD. The Justice Department is not acting on behalf of that group of satisfied customers.
They are investigating, so it is not known whether or not they disagree yet. And even if they did, your argument would still be nothing but an appeal to authority.
In 2016 Tesla claimed that all Teslas being produced "will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That was a lie: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
I think that's a stretch. FSD is a product name. There seems to be no expectation or legal requirement that product names be literal descriptions of the functionality. So long as everybody knows what they are paying for is not an actual fully autonomous driving system, it wouldn't be fraud IMO. And I'm pretty sure everybody knows it, especially given the safety features that don't allow you to take your hands off the wheel.
Would you call all of these "unbreakable wine glasses" fraud? https://www.amazon.com/s?k=unbreakable+wine+glasses I think we would all agree that not one of them is actually unbreakable. But if someone sued for fraud because they were able to break one, they would probably be laughed out of court.
It's an even bigger stretch to pretend that FSD is just some sort of jokey trademark and not something which the CEO has repeatedly insisted is the intended purpose of the feature and a forthcoming release to drivers who purchase that option, probably by $currentyear+1, something confirmed in only slightly more cautious terms by the product marketing pages.
I imagine the vendors of unbreakable wine glasses would probably be in trouble if they charged $15k and argued that they'd receive over the air updates to Kevlar as soon as the regulatory approvals had gone through...
If the wine glasses were sold with the promise that in one year I'd receive a solution to apply to them that would truly make them unbreakable? Yes, I would call it fraud.
It is also possible that the wine glasses are unbreakable in the context of being used as a wine glass, i.e. they will not break if they fall from a the height where they would normally be used or stored, which is a reasonable assumption to make.
Whereas for a "full" self driving car, Tesla obviously has not (and probably will not) deliver a car that can fully drive itself in the context of normal car usage.
So you think the Justice Dept. has a formal investigation ongoing for which the main argument hinges around the name Full Self Driving? Umm..okay.
>So long as everybody knows what they are paying for is not an actual fully autonomous driving system
The expectation is that it will be. And, I admit, it might be, one day. But at what point is selling some potential future promise fraud? Over an infinite horizon, you could get away with any claim.
The wording is a bit vague so it’s hard to tell, but as a Tesla owner I hope they get raked over the coals for the whole “FSD will be released this year” 10 years in a row. Past a certain point it’s not a naive mistake, it’s deliberately lying to boost sales.
There is an old parable about a frog and a scorpion:
>A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but it is my nature".
Should we accept that the scorpion will always sting its associates, and continue to allow them to hitch rides on frogs? Or should we prevent the scorpions from getting into a position where they can sting others once their nature is readily apparent?
We should ask, given the risk, what was the pay off for the frog?
This applies to FSD. Why risk your life testing software for the benefit of Tesla? Either FSD frogs are irrationally altruistic given that Tesla is a corporation, with wealthy shareholders, they are unable to judge the risk, or they are being mislead.
Given the large number of FSD frogs enforcement seems inevitable.
Grr, I almost didn’t post my comment because I knew I’d get a few replies like this.
Yeah, I know, I know. But I bought a Tesla because I like the brand and liked Musk, so figured even if he was wrong it wouldn’t be far off. So victim blame away, but I still think the overwhelming brunt of the blame is on the liar, not the naive sucker who believed them.
Sorry if this reply comes across as mean - not a criticism of you or anything, just personally dislike that way of viewing things.
Yeah it’s a callous point of view because it assumes everyone has the same point of view and level of information. You used a heuristic that works sometimes and fails sometimes and the real blame should fall on the person committing fraud and the agencies that failed to stop the fraud. Even if you could have avoided the situation other people would have still been victims.
Nah I was mean too, it is warranted. Different ways of viewing things for sure.
The part that I feel is on everyone who bought into FSD is that literally every expert in self driving (A field I was in directly at the time) was pretty sure Tesla was never going to get there with there hardware. Tesla supporters were quite rude denying this.
I have been the "victim" in a few cases like this. Usually it ends up with lawyers getting paid 100% and the victim getting $15 or 6 free months of some service.
I suspect the same will happen here, the problem here that the prosecution has is the signed purchase agreement is much more legally binding than a tweet. No where in the signed purchase agreement does it say "Statements from our CEO take precedent over this agreement", in fact it says the opposite basically.
A 'Lawyers will take a whole bunch of your money if you behave badly' asshole tax is not the best way to structure society, but its better than not having it. At least it creates a financial disincentive to behave in a fraudulent manner, even if the people you wronged aren't made whole.
I know FSD is non-refundable... But I've got a feeling Tesla has been refunding FSD for really unhappy customers, as long as they're happy to sign an NDA.
That's how they've managed to keep this out of the courts for 10 years.
As the potential class of litigants increases in size, and Tesla FSD continues to not be a real thing, the odds of a class-action lawsuit increase. Possibly the reason it hasn't happened yet is, even the lawyers thought eventually Tesla would make the thing they sold actually work.
All the folks that don’t own a Tesla but feel that people who pay $20k for “beta” software, please Google for “FSD saved my life” to understand how this seemingly irrational expense makes perfect sense from a personal safety perspective. https://www.google.com/search?q=fsd+saved+my+life having experienced this first-hand I know that I would gladly pay $20k to avoid a potential fatal accident with my family in the car. Yes, it’s miss-sold and feature-incomplete. But it’s a lot more than “cruise control”. It’s easily the most advanced safety feature in a mass produced vehicle.
Well, the question is would a normal driver avoid collision? I personally avoided a collision with a truck that was overtaking me (e.g. it was coming from behind) in a shoulder where it did not fit. I swerved to an adjacent empty lane.
In my opinion, many of the safety systems while flawed, have an advantage over a human in that their attention never falters. Their judgement might be 25-50% that of a human's but their attention is 100%. AEB isn't going to get distracted with the radio, spilled drink, or dropped phone under the seat.
I think they're an augmentation that can make drivers better.
I also think Tesla's FSD is too lax and allows drivers to be worse.
For sure, advanced driver safety systems can become a crutch. I don’t think driving a Tesla has made me a worse driver… but I am very aware of the lack of 360 cameras and collision avoidance when I drive a different car. Back to the OP though, I’m glad that the DOJ keeps Tesla on their toes. Just hope they don’t stifle innovation. I feel much safer in the Tesla than I do in other (even more expensive/luxury) cars.
Yes, absolutely a “normal” driver would avoid some of the collisions. But read the stats on road/traffic accidents and particularly fatalities. The stats are grim. The “Tesla saved me” owner reports are “anecdata”. But again, having experienced this personally where someone in an Audi Q8 undertook us just before a highway exit, I didn’t see him but our car swerved to avoid the collision. It would have been a nasty accident. Avoided. Totally worth paying for IMO. Then it’s a just a question of “how much?” The software could be free. But it’s a “free market” and people are willing to pay. So they do.
You missed the Audi. What is to say you will react in time to an FSD bug at some point in the future? There are so many disengagements on YouTube where it looks like FSD is trying to kill the driver.
I don't have Autopilot or FSD but my Model 3 has AEB and it saved my butt with in a week of owning it when some jackass in a Mercedes cut me off abruptly. We joke about the car being bossy with our child because it makes beeps when it thinks we're too close to other cars, walls, etc; but these safety systems are a fantastic addition to vehicles.
The safety systems like lane keep, obstacle avoidance, and AEB are not exclusive to Tesla; and Tesla does them really really well.
The thing is... If they offered a full refund of the FSD money to any owner today, I'd take a bet that most owners wouldn't take the offer.
Thats because FSD now costs more to buy, so these people still think they've got a good deal. It still adds more value to their car 2nd hand than they paid for it.
It’s non-transferable in the sense that it stays with the car, not the owner. If the owner buys a new car they have to buy the FSD package again. But the car they sell on the second hand market will keep the FSD package, unless they sell it back to Tesla. In that case Tesla usually disables it before putting it back on the market.
> In that case Tesla usually disables it before putting it back on the market.
To do this is a really interesting business move. At first glance, they are throwing away revenue (because a 2nd hand car with FSD presumably sells for more than one without). But they might be able to sell it as an addon or a subscription to the new owner... But the chances of that are probably low to those buying 2nd hand cars.... But also by artificially restricting the numbers of cars available on the market with FSD enabled, those which do have FSD enabled will keep their value better... Which may in turn help with sales of the feature with brand new cars...
I bet there is a really big spreadsheet written by an MBA to make this decision...
They aren't throwing away any revenue. If they sold it as part of the car it would either be discounted roughly like the used vs new value of the car or would make the car look expensive if at full price. Instead people who want FSD can get the car for "cheap" and then pay then pay full price for FSD.
FSD can already handle most drives really well, and has progressed further than any competitor (by a wide margin). I'd expect ~20-30% would take the refund.
It can. But the drives it can't drive well can be catastrophic. There are countless videos and reports of FSD doing the exact wrong thing at the worst possible time, and immediate driver intervention was require to avoid catastrophe. Mind boggling things like swerving on oncoming traffic.
I wouldn't take the offer. I only paid $5k for it and I've already used it enough to be satisfied. I never expected whatever level of automation all the detractors are always going on about. Can't say that other "scams" have been so useful in real world use cases. I don't think I'd pay $10k or more for it at this state though, but that should be up to the consumer in my opinion.
Frankly it's far less of a scam than 80% of the crap that gets posted here on HN.
I generally don't like blanket statements like these. TSLA has a bunch of retail investors and sort of a cult like following with Elon, but kid you not, they made a ton of money and that speaks for something.
I spent a fair bit of mental anguish on whether to purchase FSD or not. Thankfully the FSD subscription was out and I reasoned that it could be turned on when valuable enough. The FOMO pricing of FSD seems unnecessary, in retrospect.
> In October, we discovered that Justice Department prosecutors in both Washington and San Francisco were investigating whether Tesla had misled investors and customers by making unsupported claims about the capabilities of its driver-assist features
Presumably, the Justice Department used their time machine to get a sneak preview of that rather tedious expose?
Not as impressive as the time the Democrats used their time machine to make Tesla settle an employment complaint including lurid sexual harassment allegations in 2018 as soon as he announced that he'd switched to being a Republican in 2022!
If there's any correlation between Elon making wild political gestures and awkward stories about Elon and his companies he would really rather his fans ignore (or better still be very angry that people are reporting), it's the other way round...
Can you summarize for us what damning information, embarrassing to the current administration, was released with the Twitter files that would cause this implied retaliation?
The links are to Tesla’s filings with the SEC. They disclose various requests, including “from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features.” (The SEC is also investigating Musk and Tesla, but that isn’t new information.)
> why would the DOJ need more then several weeks of notice
Criminal cases are complicated. When there is flight or document destruction risk, Justice can quickly seize and freeze. But requests typically indicate months-old processes.
> Can the 99th percentile importance case be expedited to several weeks of notice?
We don’t have evidence this wasn’t a product of retaliation. But the rapidity puts it in a narrow percentile. At which point one asks what’s the pay-off on a page-86 voluntary document request. (There are also investigations pre-dating December, including by the DoJ.)
I assume it's like the Trump classified-documents scandal. The agency spends a lot of time in private communications with the defendant, asking nicely for cooperation and compliance, before they launch formal investigations and issue press releases.
It's tempting to complain about how only the wealthy and powerful get this kind of consideration, but if you think about it, it's no different from the way the IRS deals with any random taxpayers whose paperwork isn't in order. They don't bring out the rack and leg irons on day 1.
On the other hand, yes, if this is about FSD, then cutting Tesla 10 years of slack was too lenient by any reasonable standard.
You should check out the actual link and not go by the headline posted to HN. There are several investigations started long before the "Twitter Files". I would argue it goes the other way around: Elon released the "Twitter files" the way they were framed in retaliation against the federal government because he's well known to have little to no respect for federal agencies.
I think there's a bit of both, plus a lot of man has unhealthy social media addiction and feeds off what his most loyal fans like. Think he could happily have got the GOP onside without culture warring, never mind buying Twitter.
His first public statement in favour of the Republican party was notably accompanied by the "watch out for dirty tricks" shortly after he'd have been asked to comment on allegations involving massages and promises of horses for a story that was due to be printed tomorrow.
Why are you faking writing in broken English? Going back in your comment history, you wrote perfectly fine just 45 days ago. [1] Do you think this somehow gives you more credibility as a "concerned foreigner"? This is embarrassing behavior, and coming from someone who said they were "Sad to see the current state of what gets posted on HN." [2]
> I’ve crossed paths with these “consulting” types twice in my career. I don’t mean to generalize, but these so called “engineers” didn’t understand source control or versioning, didn’t understand basic programming concepts, and lacked any sort of communication skills.
> It seemed like you were working with someone who watched a couple YouTube videos (and no more than a couple videos) on some framework, with no former programming, design, or critical thinking skills, and they were now given a job title.
lol, I think some people just got inordinately freaked out by that demo of stylometric analysis of HN users (which was on the front page about 45 days ago...)
This comment [0] from yyt554 in that thread seems to be aging well:
> Fun exercise would be to find all accounts that suddenly stopped posting around today and correllate them with new accounts created around today.
> All those scared folks who naively think that it's not too late yet. Busted.
Our government is corrupt and the Department of "Justice" is a political entity. In fact, it's part of the executive branch and the Attorney General (the head of the Department of Justice) is appointed by the President and can be fired by the President. So the more accurate headline would be, "Joe Biden's Justice Department is investigating Tesla."
They will make a big dog-and-pony show about how they're independent from the White House, but at the end of the day, constitutionally, it's just not true. The Justice Department is part of the executive branch and the President is the executive branch.
So yes, if Musk had not bought Twitter, there's a good chance that the "Justice" Department would not be investigating Tesla right now.
Does that mean they shouldn't be investigating Tesla? Not necessarily - maybe there is a case there. But it's about priorities. And priorities are political.
Meh, if it's autopilot/FSD all they have to do is share their own internal stats on safety. Autopilot is 6-7x safer than driving without it, and I assume FSD is similar.
>Meh, if it's autopilot/FSD all they have to do is share their own internal stats on safety. Autopilot is 6-7x safer than driving without it, and I assume FSD is similar.
For sure! All they have to do is release the data showing just how safe FSD is!
How is having the leading tech a "trump card" that you don't tell people about? It's literally the best marketing on the planet, if true. More 6d chess from Elon?
You're suggesting holding evidence from an investigation as a strategy? That'll get you into a whole heap of legal trouble. As others has commented, this is not a game.
What would be the utility in hiding good information from the public? Wouldn't any marketer with a pulse want to demonstrate that their product is good?
Strongly depends on your hand shape and how much of the trump suit you hold. Playing high trump early to flush out others' trump cards is a common tactic.
While the Tesla safety report [0] does compare Teslas with and without Autopilot, and the safety rate does look to be 3-5x better in terms of millions of miles per accident, it's not clear if the stats account for the fact that Autopilot can only be activated in ideal conditions, e.g. highway driving in relatively good weather.
In other words, what is the accident rate of non-AP Teslas on highway/freeway only versus the Tesla-AP rate? I'm assuming Tesla doesn't have an easy way to figure out weather at time of accident (of course, wouldn't be hard for a dedicated researcher). But accidents-per-highway-miles only shouldn't be burdensome to calculate and would provide a much more apples-to-apples comparison
They say it's that much safer but the data hasn't been available. They have only said concrete numbers for the number of autopilot beta users. They aren't running as uncrewed taxis like waymo and other companies have been doing. That really suggests they aren't as far along.
Tesla will almost certainly have to refund people's money, in part because they keep ratcheting up the hardware requirements and they can't bring all the people along from previous generations of hardware. There's also the issue of claiming funding was secured but it wasn't actually ready apparently, according to the infamous tweet from Musk.
>the latter having a moat in self-driving technology.
I don't think anything will upset the narrative that Tesla is the technology leader until it's completely obvious. Not Mercedes taking liability, not Waymo operating real driverless robotaxis, not independent comparisons of tech, not videos of FSD crashing into fake children, nothing.
> Not Mercedes taking liability, not Waymo operating real driverless robotaxis, not independent comparisons of tech, not videos of FSD crashing into fake children, nothing.
> only for freeway-style driving (no stop lights or intersections), and only at speeds under 39 MPH?
Yes. But it’s more than Tesla has granted. And the car can still self drive in other situations (like a Tesla). You just don’t get the umbrella (like a Tesla).
This is a remarkable level of comparison for a company that only a few years ago looked set, if it focussed, on monopolising the EV supply chain.
> what world does purchasing a group insurance policy produce a technology moat
Argument is there is no moat. Mercedes is close enough to Tesla that it’s unclear who’s technologically ahead. Mercedes’ level III approvals and liability umbrella are materially ahead of Tesla. That makes FSD another feature, not a barrier to entry.
There was a hypothesis that a decade on, Tesla would have the only or unequivocally best self-driving electric car. (The way it had the unequivocally best electric car for several years.) Evidence is accumulating against that outcome.
Based on Mercedes' own demo video, it is quite clear who is ahead. It can't handle a curve and has so many explicit asterisks attached, with even more that are unknown.
Promising no input (until unexpectedly required) is much worse than being ready to take over.
Firstly, you're saying that they need to see Tesla's own internal stats and then making a stats claim about safety, and that doesn't make some much sense to me.
I'm wondering how sharing their internal stats will help - the claim is about whether "Tesla had misled investors and customers by making unsupported claims about the capabilities of its driver-assist features" - do you think their internal stats will prove that they thought their grandiose claims were supported by evidence? Otherwise, I don't know how that will help them.
But whether it's due to the embarrassment of being swindled or being drunk on the Kool-Aid, the amount of Tesla owners I know that tell me they are happy for paying up to $15k for what is essentially cruise control, and who honestly believe 'real FSD is only a year away' is shocking.