bjorn nyland's test of tesla vision

[Battpower]

The ze50 I had was the 2020 car and has a list price of £33k…

My 2017 40kwh Zoe cost me £17.5k brand new and that was one of the few with no battery rental... Owned out right. My dad has it now. 100% gives 185 miles still. I didn't get another Zoe because I got 64kwh Kona Premium (demonstrator) for £25k and the spec left Zoe in the shadows. Range is real 300 plus (currently reports 315) and driven carefully it will give 6mpkwh or better. That's 170 ish watt hr per mile in Tesla speak, 10 year battery wty, minimal if any battery drain if not driven.

Of course the market and prices have changed a lot recently, but my comments are based on pre-crazy.

Relevance to this thread is that mainstream, not too expensive can (and do) deliver what what they offer in sales blurb and more. Tesla needs to up its game.

 

[bro1999]

I hate my 3's autowipers. They always seem to either wipe too often or not enough.
That being said, I've hated the autowipers in other cars I've owned as well.

 

[Durzel]

My 2017 40kwh Zoe cost me £17.5k brand new and that was one of the few with no battery rental... Owned out right. My dad has it now. 100% gives 185 miles still. I didn't get another Zoe because I got 64kwh Kona Premium (demonstrator) for £25k and the spec left Zoe in the shadows. Range is real 300 plus (currently reports 315) and driven carefully it will give 6mpkwh or better. That's 170 ish watt hr per mile in Tesla speak, 10 year battery wty, minimal if any battery drain if not driven.

Relevance to this thread is that mainstream, not too expensive can deliver what what they offer in sales blurb and more. Tesla needs to up its game.

£25k Kona Premium? How??

 

[Battpower]

£25k Kona Premium? How??

A lot of hunting around. Got 3 dealers all with demonstrators to move on. I got the last model before they deleted the embossed front grill. So I guess, just luck. But since I got it I've hardly driven the MS.

And regarding auto wipers ... I just realised I haven't used the wiper control in the Kona pretty much since I got the car a year ago except to squirt washer fluid. It just sits there and does what's needed. Same with auto lights.

 

[Dilly]

We seem to have swerved a little from the vision discussion. I still have radar for the driving functions and it isn’t a saint by any means
One of the satatements by Tesla was” your car will improve over time with OTA updates. We’ll I‘ve had circa 46 updates since March 2020.
There have been some good improvements but they are paled into insignificance by the nonsense, bugs and downright failures.
Whether vision plays any part, I don’t know, but my AP has been pushed from side to side of a lane over the last half dozen or more updates. It has been nicely central I and is now a little too far left again closing in on curb rash sometimes.
And on the subject of vision, don’t get me started on UI font sizes…

 

[Battpower]

circa 46 updates

So what has been the main purpose and who the main beneficiary of those updates? I've never counted mine, but by the time you get over 10 updates either your car should be wicked awesome perfect or someone is just tinkering around!

 

[yessuz]

The ze50 I had was the 2020 car and has a list price of £33k…

I remember that at 2016 or so we looked at one at ~15k mark

 

[Dilly]

So what has been the main purpose and who the main beneficiary of those updates? I've never counted mine, but by the time you get over 10 updates either your car should be wicked awesome perfect or someone is just tinkering around!

One forword, two back

 

[Neilio]

Still no worse than the Renault zoe auto high beam

Maybe that's not a direct comparison? Compared to my previous car, which cost the same as my tesla the headlights are dreadful in every single way and the auto high beam is insanely bad in comparison

 

[Neilio]

Following a month/6 weeks of near drought across much of the country I wonder if this sentiment is in part linked to not being needed lately?

Either way I find they’re at their worst when it’s mizzle, fine rain and spray in winter, when it’s darker, whereas proper constant rain where they just need to be on and they’re not too bad.

Maybe but mine seemed "ok" before then too. Not great, not amazing but OK. Which sadly is the standard you have to hope for with Tesla tech. I guess "ok" translates as "in spec"

 

[browellm]

But that is my point, why wait?? Residuals are super strong, NOW is the time to change.

Nothing in life is perfect, if it was most of us wouldn't have a job to go to I suspect . But there is nothing worse in life than just moaning and not acting on it, if you don't like something go and do something about it, moaning about it never achieved anything in life.

Elon/Tesla couldn't careless how much moaning there is on car forums about XYZ, they have never done, and never will do. IF you really want to Tesla to change/listen the best way is to sell the car, and make it clear to Tesla why you are doing it. If enough people did that, than Elon/Tesla MIGHT notice and change, moaning does little to nothing.

A three paragraph "if you don't like it, f**k off".

Impressive.

 

[browellm]

Elon/Tesla couldn't careless how much moaning there is on car forums about XYZ, they have never done, and never will do.

The incredible irony of this sentence is the amount back-and-forth Musk does with randoms on Twitter, with features ending up in production off the back of it.

 

[Battpower]

Elon/Tesla couldn't careless how much moaning there is on car forums about XYZ, they have never done, and never will do.

Tesla certainly do a good job of putting across a monumental level of indifference about most user and media coverage these days. (In fact they make it feel as though they would rather not have to deal with customers at all!) But they USED (imo exploited) the early owners to build the brand indirectly through pretty much any way possible, effectively getting owners to put Tesla's (Elon's) allusions forward to prospective buyers as though they were fact in return for generous incentives.

Now some of the gloss has worn off and the incentives gone, you'd think Tesla would at least want to shut down any potentially libelous or fallacious negative claims (like Bjorn's video) not only because of the potentially negative impact on sales and brand image, but also because they become irrefutable public evidence of these problems existing and being widely publicised.

The fact they don't presumably suggests they realise they don't have the grounds on which to base doing that and trying to impose cease and desist orders would just make things worse.

So I guess they just keep building Giga Factories and pumping out cars as fast as possible.

I find it quite interesting that for a car maker Tesla does an excellent job of providing energy distribution facilities that hardly ever come in for criticism. The charging network is, I reckon, responsible for a huge proportion of Tesla car sales.

 

[Durzel]

It may be more simple than that.

I’m perhaps more cynical than you, and I think the reason Tesla doesn’t respond to this stuff is broadly because evidence shows they don’t need to.

They seem to sell their cars easily enough, despite price rises and despite these issues, which informed buyers ought to know about by now. The thing is - people don’t seem to care, they are buying the cars regardless. The aspirational value is still pretty high, Tesla is still seen as the de facto EV brand.

Until that changes I can’t really see Tesla changing course significantly. But, I think it will change as the old school marques crank out more and more variants of EVs and iterate on them, particularly with “one term” Tesla owners peeling off into other brands after they’ve experienced what Teslas are actually like.

I actually think that Tesla will need to do a proper refresh of the 3 and Y before too long, both platforms are long in the tooth, plenty of people bemoan the lack of a display behind the wheel, or a HUD (or both) etc. They won’t be able to rest on their laurels forever.

 

[Battpower]

Tesla is still seen as the de facto EV brand.

Which I would say is a vestige of the original 'selling using the reputations of previous buyers' approach. I agree, Tesla is to EV's as Hoover was (still is?) to vacuum cleaners.

the lack of a display behind the wheel, or a HUD

They seem to be very focussed on less is more because Tesla says so. I still can't get my brain to like the Cyber Truck design. Their whole design approach has too many compromises as far as I am concerned. I wonder too how long it will be before the realisation that 'The king is in the altogether'! and as 'naked as the day he was born' gain traction. Too much Snake Oil.

The absence of The Clutter of those pesky switches ceases to be a benefit when virtual controls keep changing. Give me a real switch any day. All these gadgets purely for the sake of it must as a bare minimum be as functional as the established / existing ways of doing things.

So, has anyone found any evidence other than what sounds reasonable and likely, to support the argument that with VO cars wipers and lights will have to be under the car's control so that VO can 'see' under the widest possible range of conditions?

If true, this seems like an argument in itself for keeping / fixing / improving Radar.

 

[_Redshift_]

It may be more simple than that.

I’m perhaps more cynical than you, and I think the reason Tesla doesn’t respond to this stuff is broadly because evidence shows they don’t need to.

They seem to sell their cars easily enough, despite price rises and despite these issues, which informed buyers ought to know about by now. The thing is - people don’t seem to care, they are buying the cars regardless. The aspirational value is still pretty high, Tesla is still seen as the de facto EV brand.

Until that changes I can’t really see Tesla changing course significantly. But, I think it will change as the old school marques crank out more and more variants of EVs and iterate on them, particularly with “one term” Tesla owners peeling off into other brands after they’ve experienced what Teslas are actually like.

I actually think that Tesla will need to do a proper refresh of the 3 and Y before too long, both platforms are long in the tooth, plenty of people bemoan the lack of a display behind the wheel, or a HUD (or both) etc. They won’t be able to rest on their laurels forever.

+1

They won’t change their ways until sales suffer.

The new customers buying Teslas are (still) blinded by all the hoopla surrounding Tesla.

They will learn.

This is on a slow glide path down a couple of years from now, but for now the plane seems to be cruising nicely.

 

[Wol747]

The incredible irony of this sentence is the amount back-and-forth Musk does with randoms on Twitter, with features ending up in production off the back of it.

That’s half - or more - of Musk’s problem: living on Twitter.

 

[Wol747]

Which I would say is a vestige of the original 'selling using the reputations of previous buyers' approach. I agree, Tesla is to EV's as Hoover was (still is?) to vacuum cleaners.



They seem to be very focussed on less is more because Tesla says so. I still can't get my brain to like the Cyber Truck design. Their whole design approach has too many compromises as far as I am concerned. I wonder too how long it will be before the realisation that 'The king is in the altogether'! and as 'naked as the day he was born' gain traction. Too much Snake Oil.

The absence of The Clutter of those pesky switches ceases to be a benefit when virtual controls keep changing. Give me a real switch any day. All these gadgets purely for the sake of it must as a bare minimum be as functional as the established / existing ways of doing things.

So, has anyone found any evidence other than what sounds reasonable and likely, to support the argument that with VO cars wipers and lights will have to be under the car's control so that VO can 'see' under the widest possible range of conditions?

If true, this seems like an argument in itself for keeping / fixing / improving Radar.

This fixation on using the screen for everything is just dangerous, apart from being hopelessly inefficient in many places.
Most of us are right handed and I for one find it challenging to do something as simple as switching air conditioning on the move (This in a right hand drive country). The settings change at will and randomly - it often takes half a dozen stabs at various icons to get what I want because touching one changes several others as well. All the time I’m trying to stay on the road.
As for having the Plaid choose whether to go forward or backward - which juvenile thought up that answer to a non-existent problem?

 

[jmcdono362]

My primary frustration, along those lines, is the auto wipers and auto headlights are a fully solved problem.

The solutions are not particularly technical, either. Neither requires AI or "deep learning" or calibration.

The problem - as you touched on - is that Tesla basically decided not to do what every other manufacturer did, and go their own way, and it's the customers who suffer and have no choice. They could've just deployed a $5 (or less, at scale) Bosch rain sensor and a front facing camera to "see" distant rear lights, etc.

In the former case Tesla in its infinite wisdom decided to use AI and cameras to try and work out when its raining. They failed. The system as it exists does not even rise to reach parity with the aforementioned $5 rain sensor, even before you consider how much has been spent in development man-hours on it, or the wasted CPU cycles consumed doing it.

In the latter case the car has front facing cameras, so it really ought not to be difficult to solve the auto headlights problem. The car evidently has ambient light sensors too, since it will turn the dipped beam on when needed. For whatever reason though Tesla don't seem at all interested in solving this problem. I am not convinced there has been any improvement in it since I got the car, or that any improvement should be expected any time soon.

AP1 cars had rain sensors, and I'm reliably informed that their auto wipers work as you'd expect - i.e. properly. Somehow, cars built years later are orders of magnitude worse. It is long past the time Tesla accepted that the "cameras & AI detects rain" gambit has failed.

I can concur that my 2015 Model S rain sensors work pretty well overall.
The auto high beams function well except for very tight corners where a car comes around fast.
AP1 is amazing for how old it is. It stays dead center on the highways to reduce that fatigue you get on long drives. I don't get phantom breaking but it does ask me to grab the wheel when approaching overpasses. I don't use it on back roads due to its inability to handle sharp curves, unless I'm going very slow.

 

[gangzoom]

+1

They won’t change their ways until sales suffer.

Which is exactly my point. The shortest time I have owned a car in the past was 2 months. Life is far too short to put up with things you don't enjoy, especially when it comes to cars which are literally as swappable in days, and in current climate for virtually zero deprecation.

If all those people moaning on here actually did something like dump their cars instead of just moaning, you can guarantee Tesla/Elon will notice.

Elon isn't even bothered by the superme court, he certainly couldn't careless about moaning from car forums. But he dumped Bitcoins in a heart beat when the $$$$ didn't look right.

Action speaks far louder than words, do something about what you don't/cannot stand, don't just moan about it.