The end of Tesla is nigh

(No, this is not about Musk supporting a racist, homophobic, bigoted authoritarian – others will write endlessly about that today)

Tesla is valued as a software company, not a car company. This is an image they’ve pushed endlessly – they’re “further ahead”.

Their cars will be self-driving in 2016 .. sorry, 2017. No, 2018. 2019 it is – promise! Your Tesla will robotaxi and make you rich while you sleep in 2020. Here’s full FSD for everybody in 2021. I meant 2022 …

The truth is, as every other carmaker has tried telling you, Tesla isn’t further ahead. They’re just more careless. Musk – in his ignorance (he isn’t some technical genius) – simply stated that since a human can drive a car with only our eyes as input (not true, but let’s go with that for now) a Tesla should also be able to do it by using cameras only.

The latest FSD version is “more aggressive”, “runs red lights”, “doesn’t slow down for pedestrians”. And this shows that Musk has finally realized he can’t keep the stock price scam up by “soon, trust me bro!” promises anymore.

FSD is pretty much useless outside of well-behaved roads. Up until now, as soon as you enter city traffic it’s “too careful”, “breaks suddenly”, “surprises other cars and you get rear-ended” etc. This is because up to this point there have been people who care about safety still able to make their voices heard, however, progress on solving these issues has stalled.

The reason for which is obvious. Humans can drive cars using our eyes (and other senses) only because we possess human level intelligence (!). We’re constantly predicting the actions of others. How people “usually act”. “That driver has probably”. “Uh that child’s completely occupied with their phone” …

… the thing Musk needed for Tesla’s FSD bet was AGI – Artificial General Intelligence – Human level AI. I don’t think he realized this, and I still don’t think he has, though.

Other carmakers know that the only full self driving you’ll get is in certain settings, restricted to well mapped roads, with plenty of additional sensors making up for the fact that the car’s software cannot do all the things a human driver does naturally.

Musk just widened the above mentioned careless FSD beta to a lot more people. The results are hilarious, in a sad way. My best guess is that there’s one recent precedence for why he might think this could work; the Autopilot headlights farce. “We just need more data, so force-enable this non-working function for everybody since they’re otherwise not using it”.

Back then, for a few weeks every single Tesla out on the roads blinded other drivers. The next software update indeed had pretty much working headlights automation though. At about the same level as other carmakers’.

There’s a slight difference between “blinding other drivers” and “crashing into other drivers”.

Not that Musk cares. He’s just trying to save the stock price from crashing when “trust me bro” doesn’t work anymore.

/Tesla-driver since 2020