> One of them is a bus hitting a stationary Tesla - hard to paint that as the teslas fault.
Since the narratives are redacted, who's to say the Tesla didn't change lanes to be in front of the bus, slam on the brakes, then get rear ended?
Or pull partially out of a driveway, stopping and blocking a lane with a bus traveling 35mph in said lane and got hit by it?
> A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I'm sure this happens to humans all the time, but not a single one of those humans would be considered a good (or even decent) driver.
That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.
Even Waymo have tons of reported crashes in the same document.
Self driving cars need to be better than the average human - which means less injuries and deaths. Given 100 people will be killed on the road in the US today, it’s actually not a crazy high bar to clear.
> lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.
A year? They'll be gone in two weeks!
Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
> None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile".
With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages.
History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.
Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.
Try to avoid cherry picking if you want to have a discussion where you or the other person learns something. All the Elon stans on this site that I've encountered are highly disingenuous, starting to think that's not a coincidence.
According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor)
The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.
No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.
This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
Even if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement.
Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
You have an extremely detailed world model including a mental model of the drivers and other road users around you. You rely on sight, sound, experience and lots of knowledge. You are aware of the social contracts at work when dealing with shared resources and your brain is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any box full of electronics.
What you can do with 'just vision' misses the fact that you are part of the hardware.
You rely on a moving camera, microphones and vibrations all together. Driven by a supposedly more advanced meatware than what tech can create today, so that it can properly reason even with faulty/missing signals.
Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius
Agreed, anyone who has worked on engineering a moderately complex system involving sensing has explored the power of multi domain sensing... without sensor fusion we'd be in the stone ages.
I bought mine with cameras and a radar, which they then deprecated and left an unused. Even though autopilot was better when it had radar. Then I realized that this thing would never be self-driving and that its CEO was throwing nazi salutes. Cut my losses and got rid of it. Gotta admit defeat sometimes.
Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying.
Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input.
But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer.
I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.
Cameras are only "cheap" because of mobile phone camera development, radar/lidar is going through the same process with car and mobile robotics.
So the "we can train cheaply because of lots of cameras" falls down when, for example, BYD has all of its cars with lidar for ADAS but can collect the data for training as well as the vision from cameras and whatever other sensors like tyre pressures and suspension readings and all the other sensors that are on a modern car.
The argument that we can make the cars cheaper in the future by not collecting the additional data now has been proven wrong by the CN and KR manufacturers.
That's also independent of the whole EV side of things.
It's just that the cost of lidars are falling like crazy, with new automotive lidars using phased-array laser optics instead of what waymo started with (mechanically scanned lidars)
The data is key. You need a lot of homogenous data collected at vast scale over places and time, and you need to be able to synthesise data accurately.
Waymo gets limited data from very limited locations, and will have a harder time synthesising data than others.
Do Tesla fans think that? I've seen plenty of Tesla fans say that lidar is unnecessary (which I tend to agree with), but never that lidar is actively detrimental as Musk says there.
I mean, humans have only their eyes. And most of them intentionally distract themselves while driving by listening to music, podcasts, playing with their phones, or eating.
I get your point about camera vs lidar. Humans do have other senses in play while driving though. We have touch/vibration (feeling the road surface texture), hearing, proprioception / acceleration sense, etc. These are all involved for me when I drive a car.
Humans are not good drivers when it comes to long, monotonous rides (because we get tired)
But (some) humans have the ability to handle difficult situations, and no autonomous system gets anywhere close to that. So this is more of a "robots handle the easy 80% better, but fail hard on the rest of the 20%". Humans have a possibly worse 80% performance, but shine in the 20%.
Actually humans are fairly good drivers. The average US driver goes almost 2 million miles between causing injury collisions. Take the drunks and drug users out and the numbers for humans look even better.
Personally as much as people like to dunk on Musk, he did build several successful companies in extremely challenging domains, and he probably listens to the world-leading domain experts in his employ.
So while he might turn out to be wrong, I don't think his opininon is uninformed.
I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value).
But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possible to save on operational cost and complexity. The argument about "humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well" served as the excuse to shareholders.
> humans can drive with vision only, so self-driving should be able to as well
In May 2016, Tesla Model S driver Joshua Brown died in Williston, Florida, when his vehicle on Autopilot collided with a white tractor-trailer that turned across the highway. The Autopilot system and driver failed to detect the truck's white side against a brightly lit sky, causing the car to pass underneath the trailer.
Our eyes are supported by our brain's AGI which can evaluate the input from our eyes in context. All Tesla had is a camera, and it didn't perform as well as eyes + AGI would have.
When you don't have AGI, additional sensors can provide backup. LiDAR would have saved Joshua Brown's life.
What doesn’t make sense to me is that the cameras are no where as good as human eyes. The dynamic range sucks, it doesn’t put down a visor or where sunglasses to deal with beaming light, resolution is much worse, etc. why not invest in the cameras themselves if this is your claim?
I always see this argument but from experience I don't buy it. FSD and its cameras work fine driving with the sun directly in front of the car. When driving manually I need the visor so far down I can only see the bottom of the car in front of me.
The cameras on Teslas only really lose visibility when dirty. Especially in winter when there's salt everywhere. Only the very latest models (2025+?) have decent self-cleaning for the cameras that get very dirty.
For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3).
The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.
It doesn't run well on HW3 at all. HW4 has significantly better FSD when running comparable versions (v14). The software has little to do with the front camera getting blinded though.
"works fine" as in can follow a wide asphalt roads' white lines. That is absolutely trivial thing, Lego mind storms could follow a line just fine with a black/white sensor.
This vision clearly doesn't scale to more complex scenarios.
I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
> I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.
> This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
Whether sensor fusion makes sense is a highly domain specific question. Guidance like "pick a sensor and stick with it" might have been correct for the projects you've worked on, but there's no reason to think this translates well to other domains.
For what it's worth, sensor fusion is extremely common in SLAM type applications.
And to some extent, I also drive with my ears, not only with 2 eyes. I often can ear a car driving on the blind spot. Not saying that I do need to ear in order to drive, but the extra sensor is welcome when it can helps.
There is an argument for sure, about how many sensors is enough / too much. And maybe 8 cameras around the car is enough to surpass human driving ability.
I guess it depends on how far/secure we want the self-driving to be. If only we had a comprehensive driving test that all (humans and robots) could take and be ranked... each country lawmakers could set the bar based on the test.
The other day I slammed the brakes at a green light, because I could hear sirens approaching -- even though the buildings on the corner prevented any view of the approaching fire trucks or their flashing lights. Do Teslas not have this ability?
Nuanced point: Even if vision alone were sufficient to drive, adding sensors to the cars today could speed up development. Tesla‘s world model could be improved, speeding up development of the vision only model that is truly autonomous.
Stongly disagree. I don‘t like the fella but thinking that he founds and successfully manages SpaceX and Tesla to their market value _by chance_ is ridiculous.
> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain.
I would firmly disagree with that.
What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. When he brings money to good engineers and lets them do their thing, pretty good things happen. The Tesla Roadster, Model S, Falcon 9, Starlink, etc.
The problem with him is he's convinced that he is also a good engineer, and not only that but he's better than anyone that works for him, and that has definitively been proven wrong. The more he takes charge, the worse it gets. The Model X's stupid doors, all the factory insanity, the outdoor paint tent, etc. Model 3 and Model Y arguably succeeded in spite of his interference, but the Dumpstertruck was his baby and we can all see how that has basically only sold to people who want to associate themselves closely with his politics because it's objectively bad at everything else. The constant claims that Tesla cars will drive themselves, the absolute bullshit that is calling it "Full Self Driving", the hilarious claims of humanoid robots being useful, etc. How are those solar roofs coming? Have you heard of anyone installing a Powerwall recently? Heard anything about Roadster 2.0 since he went off claiming it would be able to fly? A bunch of Canadian truckers have built their own hybrid logging trucks from scratch in the time since Tesla started taking money for their semis and we still haven't seen the Tesla trucks haul more than a bunch of bags of chips.
The more Musk is personally involved with a project the worse it is. The man is useful for two things: Providing capital and blatantly lying to hype investors.
If he had stuck to the first one the world as a whole would be a better place, Tesla would probably be in a much better position right now.
SpaceX was for a long time considered to be further from his influence with Shotwell running the company well and Musk acting more as a spokesperson. Starship is sort of his Model X moment and the plans to merge in the AI business will IMO be the Cybertruck.
You say that you disagree with my point, but then your first paragraph just restates my argument. And your subsequent paragraphs don‘t refer to my comment at all.
I never claimed he‘s a good engineer, nor that he has high EQ, nor that he is honest, nor that he has sole responsibility for the success of his companies.
Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced
themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).
Lowest cost per mile will win and Tesla's cyber cab doesn't need expensive suite of sensors. They use lidar in their validation/calibration test cars which is the correct use of lidar. People are already driving USA coast to coast without an SINGLE intervention. It's already over, Tesla has won, Waymo cant compete on cost.
Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now…
Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.
He's really excellent at faking it until he makes it. That, and sucking down government funds. SpaceX, Tesla, NeuraLink, and Boring Company all relied or rely on subsidies or government contracts.
An actual car company would not have the market cap of Tesla. It's all hopes and dreams, of which Elon apparently is an excellent purveyor.
Well, given that Elon openly lies on investor calls...
One of his latest, on the topic of rain/snow/mist/fog and handling with cameras:
"Well, we have made that a non-issue as we actually do photon counting in the cameras, which solves that problem."
No, Elon, you don't. For two reasons: reason one, part A, the types of cameras that do photon counting don't work well for normal 'vision'/imagery associated with cameras, and part B, are not actually present in your cars at all. And reason two, photon counting requires the camera being in an enclosed space to work, which cars on the road ... aren't.
What Elon has mastered the art of is making statements that sound informed, pass the BS detector of laypeople, and optionally are also plausibly deniable if actually called out by an SME.
> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.
Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?".
Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.
I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.
It's more that police will use it for their own personal inquiries- to track their girlfriends, potential girlfriends etc. This happens enough already with license plate readers:
- Sedgwick, Kansas (2024): Former Police Chief Lee Nygaard resigned after it was discovered he used Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her new partner 228 times over four months, according to The Wichita Eagle and KAKE.
- Menasha, Wisconsin (Jan 2026): Officer Cristian Morales was charged with misconduct in office for allegedly using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend, WLUK-TV reported. Morales admitted to using the system due to "desperation" and "bad judgment".
- Orange City, Florida (2025): Officer Jarmarus Brown was charged with stalking after reportedly running his girlfriend's license plate 69 times, her mother's 24 times, and her brother's 15 times over seven months, the Miami Herald reported.
- San Diego, California (2021): Sergeant Mariusz Czas was arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend using police resources
> It's more that police will use it for their own personal inquiries- to track their girlfriends, potential girlfriends etc.
That's far from my biggest concern. Sure, cops stalking people/carrying out personal vendettas is not good.
But a little creativity will allow far far greater abuses. Here's one: imagine the current administration deciding they need to debank the great and powerful terrorist organization Antifa. Ring data on protest attendance is a great help in building a list of those rotten domestic terrorists.
All of these seem like examples of oversight working, and penalties being applied? We obviously don't know the rate at which abuse like this is detected, but if it's high, this seems like a healthy system working as intended?
More likely - a quiet update changing opt-in to opt-out. They can repeat this update as many times as they want and each time, a few more people will miss the email. They can also hold your data hostage, i.e. "All data now and historical will be included in our partner sharing unless you delete it all."
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
> This medium page simply quotes people. Feel free to quote your imaginary friends on your own medium page.
Simply quotes people with obvious large financial interest in the success of the company, who are therefore motivated to continue the super genius narrative.
I guess we all have our biases - I believe first hand accounts, you believe social media posts. To each his own.
Yes, yes, everyone is a sycophant except you and your friends... For the record, you are lying about the quoted people having a financial interest in Elon.
No it's not "to each his own". Using your free expression to smear without admitting counterevidence, while painting everything that does not go along with your views as a doctored narrative is not a legitimate intellectual position.
> Yes, yes, everyone is a sycophant except you and your friends... For the record, you are lying about the quoted people having a financial interest in Elon.
Let's go through them:
- Jim Cantrell: SpaceX founder
- Garett Reisman: astronaut, former SpaceX employee, current SpaceX "consultant"
- Joshua Boehm: former SpaceX head of SQA
- Carmack: maybe this one is genuine, however, Carmack is also an industry outsider who founded his own aerospace company, so there might be some projecting going on there
> Using your free expression to smear without admitting counterevidence
Interesting take when you came in here telling me (in your now flagged comment) that my friends are imaginary and I'm a liar, who's rejecting counterevidence again?
Named engineers making public statements with their reputation on the line is not the same thing as "my friends told me." One is falsifiable, the other is not. That's not a double standard, that's basic epistemology.
I've watched Elon build rockets for years. Here's him walking you through metal parts from early SpaceX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCc2F8KccD4. You're pretending he's not technical for ideological points. That's why you need sweeping assertions and "friend's testimonies," because the actual footage doesn't support you. I could give you hours of Elon doing engineering on camera and you'd still call it a puff piece. You're trying to prove an impossible thing.
What specifically did your friends take issue with?
Why are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
> Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach?
My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
> Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
And which of those is also an American institution, with American educated employees and American cultural values, operating in an American legal and business framework?
Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th grade STEM class down the street!
Russia would've been a much better comparison given the history of the world we live in, but still not apples to apples.
Shedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
When you boil it down though, sometimes more than one company is built using almost the same exact mold, and the only major difference between them is the idea that the business plan is bult around.
The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
I always felt that Microsoft's winning move was to be consistently mediocre. They just waited until competitors screwed up. Now they're following in IBMs or Intel's footsteps - concentrating everything on the enterprise market and slowly dying.
> Along for the trip this time were Warren Ahner, an AI exec and former autonomy executive for a major automaker, and self-driving enthusiast Paul Pham. Both are deeply knowledgeable about Tesla’s Full-Self Driving suite and Roy stressed that he couldn’t have completed the trip without them.
Interesting - wonder when it will be ready for use by non-experts
Lasers, space, super geniuses, and most importantly money. You're worrying too much about the details and not enough about the awesomeness.
But seriously, why are all the stans in these comments as unknowledgeable as Elon himself? Is that just what is required to stan for this type of garbage?
Since the narratives are redacted, who's to say the Tesla didn't change lanes to be in front of the bus, slam on the brakes, then get rear ended?
Or pull partially out of a driveway, stopping and blocking a lane with a bus traveling 35mph in said lane and got hit by it?
> A few are low speed reversing into things, the extreme majority of which done by humans are never reported and are not in the dataset comparing how many crashes Tesla have had vs humans.
I'm sure this happens to humans all the time, but not a single one of those humans would be considered a good (or even decent) driver.
reply