Elon: "Feature complete for full self driving this year"

[mongo]

Are we still relying on what Elon says at this point? after all he's said that haven't happened?

No offense, but I'll listen to him more than you.

Where does it say that it will eventually be Level 4/5, driverless, summon from accross the country, sleep?

Where does it say they never will? You are claiming they will never progress just because they have aligned their website to the near term reality of their system performance.

 

[BigD0g]

Guys, if your all starting to believe Elon now, I've got this awesome bridge to sell you in Brooklyn!! Top notch one of the most trafficked bridges in the US!

 

[BigD0g]

No offense, but I'll listen to him more than you.



Where does it say they never will? You are claiming they will never progress just because they have aligned their website to the near term reality of their system performance.

Sorry, on this one I gotta call you out, how many Elon promises regarding EAP / FSD have come to pass?

Let's keep in mind they have had what they are calling EAP on the highways for millions of miles, and we are not getting less nags, we are getting more nags and more frequent, so color me skeptical that suddenly it's going to go the other way anytime soon.

 

[mongo]

Sorry, on this one I gotta call you out, how many Elon promises regarding EAP / FSD have come to pass?

Let's keep in mind they have had what they are calling EAP on the highways for millions of miles, and we are not getting less nags, we are getting more nags and more frequent, so color me skeptical that suddenly it's going to go the other way anytime soon.

That's fine, I understand and respect your viewpoint. The recent developments make me optimistic that things are progressing well and that Elon's new timeline has testing to back it up. So I am more inclined to believe him when he says feature complete (with nags) this year, and sleepable likely next year even though I know there is no way to be sure of those dates unless they have already fully done everything. That is in contrast to bladerskb who seems to be claiming that Tesla has redefined Level 2 as FSD and will never provide higher level features.

As to more nags recently, I can also understand that from a SW development course. They had a dead end framework, pitched it and regressed some, however the new framework is proving to be able to extend to FSD.

 

[diplomat33]

Here's tesla's disclaimer about Smart Summon:
"“Enhanced Summon is only intended for use in parking lots and drive ways, not public roads. This feature is in beta mode and you must monitor your vehicle and its surroundings at all times."

Honestly, this sounds like a typical CYA legal disclaimer. Tesla puts out this disclaimer explaining where and how Smart Summon should be used and telling owners to monitor things so that Tesla is protected if some idiot uses Smart Summon in an irresponsible manner and it causes someone to get hurt or worse. Having said that, the critics do have a good point that if the feature were L4/5, this type of disclaimer would not be needed. But I don't think the disclaimer is necessarily proof that the feature is so bad that it needs constant supervision. Heck, lots of products today have similar legal disclaimers, not because the product is bad or dangerous, but because we live in a very litigious society and there is always that one idiot who uses the product in a completely irresponsible manner.

I would point to this anecdotal evidence as to the features capabilities:
"According to feedback from testers, the feature actually works fairly well and Tesla’s Autopilot system is able to navigate parking lots."

So it appears that if used responsibly, the feature works pretty well. It is encouraging to me that AP is able to navigate parking lots semi-autonomously.

 

[diplomat33]

Look, I get it that you’re a newer Tesla owner and like your Model 3 a lot. Many of us like our Teslas. But this below is what many of us bought in 2016-2017 on the FSD order page. Where is our Tesla Network details? There are actual features and an actual timeline. Broken.

So you can not really feel what we feel and felt because you weren’t lured into the same bad deal. By Model 3 it was all exposed anyway.

I empathize. I am sure it really sucks to have purchased FSD and then been disappointed year after year when you thought you were going to get FSD "soon". No, I can't know exactly what it feels like. Having said that, I've been around a long time. I was following Tesla long before I actually purchased my Model 3. I am not some naive new owner who is ignorant of Tesla' history. I watched it all happened. I don't need a history lesson every time Tesla announced a new AP feature. I know all about the 2016 FSD video, Musk's tweets, etc...

Also, we've all had big disappointments in life. it sucks but nobody can change the past. We can't go back and unpay for FSD or go back and somehow make Tesla not promise FSD. What is done is done. The important thing to remember is that Tesla is trying to make good on their promises. We are getting FSD-like features this year according to the order page. And if you have AP2 and prepaid for FSD, you are getting the AP3 chip and you are getting these FSD-like features when they come out. So you are going to get something significant. It is not a total loss, far from it. So respectfully, try to focus on the future and the good things coming rather than on the failed promises of the past that you can't change.

 

[electronblue]

I empathize. I am sure it really sucks to have purchased FSD and then been disappointed year after year when you thought you were going to get FSD "soon". No, I can't know exactly what it feels like. Having said that, I've been around a long time. I was following Tesla long before I actually purchased my Model 3. I am not some naive new owner who is ignorant of Tesla' history. I watched it all happened. I don't need a history lesson every time Tesla announced a new AP feature. I know all about the 2016 FSD video, Musk's tweets, etc...

Also, we've all had big disappointments in life. it sucks but nobody can change the past. We can't go back and unpay for FSD or go back and somehow make Tesla not promise FSD. What is done is done. The important thing to remember is that Tesla is trying to make good on their promises. We are getting FSD-like features this year according to the order page. And if you have AP2 and prepaid for FSD, you are getting the AP3 chip and you are getting these FSD-like features when they come out. So you are going to get something significant. It is not a total loss, far from it. So respectfully, try to focus on the future and the good things coming rather than on the failed promises of the past that you can't change.

There is a pertinent saying: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Many of us have written down the FSD purchase a long time ago, that is not at issue here. For example my personal feelings about it are merely amusement by now. What a fool I was.

But I do not plan to be fooled again and I would not wish for anyone else to be fooled again either — and that is something I can affect and that affects today. That is not ”done is done”.

I see @mongo for example believing in sleeping in a Tesla’s driver’s seat next year. I would consider that fool me twice territory.

I fear your type of enthusiasm and lack of appreciation for this history (and more importantly: what it tells of the company and its players today) will lead some others to be fooled again. I would not wish for that.

 

[strangecosmos]

This seems to be the reaction on this forum:

2016 Tesla: FSD is coming.
2017-19 Owners: So where's our FSD Tesla? You promised! Did you lie? Where is it?
2019 Tesla: All the FSD features are finally here! In the beginning, we'll require driver supervision for city self-driving but it will go away once the system has proven itself.
2019 Owners: BOOOO!!! That's not FSD. You lied again!

Elon said at TED on April 30, 2017 that he thought it would be “about two years” before full self-driving is ready. So, anyone who ordered FSD after watching that TED Talk should have expected it no earlier than April 2019.

On January 10, 2016 — nine months before FSD was made available — Elon tweeted:

“In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY”​

People who ordered FSD in October 2016 should not have expected it before January 2018.

The “about” and “~” qualifiers also indicate uncertainty. What does “about two years” or “~2 years” mean? What’s the error bar on this prediction?

I think people who say that Tesla falsely claimed FSD was ready and was only waiting for safety validation and regulatory approval were not listening to what Elon was saying, and were instead simply misinterpreting a disclaimer on the Tesla website. Here is the text of a disclaimer:

“Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.”
​

People misread this disclaimer. Let’s say we drive to the beach and I say, “I have some folding chairs in my trunk.” You look in the trunk and say, “Hey, you lied! There are folding chairs in here, but there’s also a spare tire!” This is absurd because I didn’t say, “I only have some folding chairs in my trunk, and nothing else.” I just told you one thing I have in my trunk.

Tesla said that FSD “is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval”, but that does not automatically imply that FSD “is only dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, and nothing else”.

So Elon gave his timeline of “~2 years” in January 2016, and then pushed it back to “about two years” again in April 2017. (It’s a new year so, once again, Elon’s timeline is being pushed back to about two years.) The mistake people made was to ignore Elon’s explicitly stated timeline and then to misread a disclaimer on the Tesla website. The disclaimer didn’t mention any timeline, but their misreading gave them a subjective feeling that’s FSD was imminent.

And then some people accused Tesla of lying!

By the way, let’s imagine, hypothetically, that Tesla only needed to do software validation and get regulatory approval. How long would that take? This is what Elon wrote in Master Plan, Part Deux in July 2016 (emphasis added):

“As the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car could break and your car will still drive itself safely. It is important to emphasize that refinement and validation of the software will take much longer than putting in place the cameras, radar, sonar and computing hardware.​

Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.”
​

6 billion miles / 3 million miles per day = 2000 days, or 5.5 years. Of course, the daily mileage increases as the fleet grows. But based on Lex Fridman’s estimates, we are still only at ~3.5 billion total miles on HW2 cars. Plus, the counter only starts “once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver”.

Now, I can agree that since apparently some people purchased FSD without realizing all this, then in hindsight maybe Tesla could have done a better job communicating to prospective FSD purchasers that Tesla believed FSD was years away. That’s fair.

What’s not fair is to say that Tesla deliberately deceived customers into buying FSD with promises that it was imminent. If you look at Elon’s public statements on the matter, he explicitly said it was going to take a long time.

A different but related topic is FSD features rather than full FSD (to be redundant). Elon overpromised with his “6 months definitely” tweet in January 2017. My intention in this post is just to address the frequently repeated claim about the order page disclaimer and customers’ expectations for full FSD.

 

[electronblue]

Your lack of history with Tesla betrays you @strangecosmos.

Elon Musk famously talked about this in March 2015 on GTC. This was before Tesla had any ”bridge to sell” in this area. His views were much more realistic:

He talks of a ”few years” before cars are safer than humans and then ”2-3 years” after that for regulatory approval. Other than the gringe-worthy talk of how easy autonomy is, his timelines were much more realistic when he did not have a product to peddle yet. Why not offer this level of realism after AP2 launch? Well, everyone can believe what they want...

Then suddenly the narrative changes in 2016. It was not unrealistic to listen to Musk in 2016 and think a major breakthrough had happened. Everything was pointing to that and the way he talked changed. In hindsight, one theory is that this bombast at first happened probably because Tesla was making progress with MobilEye’s chips (EyeQ4 is very impressive) as part of the AP2 suite (original AP2 board’s empty chip spot probably is for EyeQ4 rather than EyeQ3) and after that to hide the disaster that was losing MobilEye as a chip provider.

But moving beyond that how about Elon tweeting on January 23rd, 2017:

Q: ”At what point will ”Full Self-Driving Capability” features noticeably depart from ”Enhanced Autopilot” features?”
Musk: ”3 months maybe, 6 months definitely”

That would have been ”definitely” by July, 2017. We are now in 2019 and there are no Full Self-Driving Capability features yet even the ones announced as current for the new ”FSD” are old ”Enhanced Autopilot” features. As is usual Tesla never offers any retractions. It is the reality itself that has exposed the situation over time.

The infamous video has been later exposed as a hard-wired demo too, not some robust piece of existing tech just going through ”software validation”. Unless you call making the software ”validation”.

Finally, how about the coast to coast demo announced for late 2017 showing this Full Self-Driving? Postponed a couple of times and then just silence.

These were all significant factors people made purchase decisions on.

Go read Reddit or TMC or any site in late 2016 and see how Tesla’s announcements really were perceived back then. People actually believed them.

 

[Barklikeadog]

As I stated before, Tesla has chosen to release "FSD" under supervision, merely as a precaution. That's why there is the dead man switch right now. I would surmise that Tesla is hoping that having so many Tesla owners using FSD under supervision, will help speed up getting it to L4.

that and Lidar.

 

[Bladerskb]

Please pay no attention to the Historical revisionism;

1. December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."
2. January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"
3. June 2016: "I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year," Musk said.

 

[electronblue]

Please pay no attention to the Historical revisionism;

1. December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years."
2. January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"
3. June 2016: "I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year," Musk said.

Yeah, something shifted in Musk around new year 2016. Realistically, what shifted is that AP2 launch was inching closer and Elon was starting the process of hyping it all up... At that time it was still supposed to be together with MobilEye...

Remember how he launched Boring Company? This is how he does it, one innocent-looking tweet at a time...

Then reality of course intervened but unfortunately for us (and for Tesla’s credibility) Tesla never bothered to retract all these comms.

 

[diplomat33]

There is a pertinent saying: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Many of us have written down the FSD purchase a long time ago, that is not at issue here. For example my personal feelings about it are merely amusement by now. What a fool I was.

But I do not plan to be fooled again and I would not wish for anyone else to be fooled again either — and that is something I can affect and that affects today. That is not ”done is done”.

I see @mongo for example believing in sleeping in a Tesla’s driver’s seat next year. I would consider that fool me twice territory.

I fear your type of enthusiasm and lack of appreciation for this history (and more importantly: what it tells of the company and its players today) will lead some others to be fooled again. I would not wish for that.

Well, first of all, I do know the history very well. And, if I buy FSD now after everything that has happened over the past years, because I buy into the hype of AP3 and the features announced for this year, and Tesla falls behind again and does not deliver, then that is completely on me.

Heck. I was disappointed with NOA because the initial expectation was that it would be L3 highway and it wasn't. But I know Tesla improves features with updates and I've already seen NOA get much better. So I am ok with features missing the mark at first because I know Tesla works to improve them over time. Even in my own admittedly short use of EAP, I've seen it make a lot of progress.

But it's also key to manage expectations. If you set your expectations high, you'll be disappointed every time. If you set your expectations lower, you won't be as disappointed. Yeah, I get super excited when Tesla announces anything new. But later, when the excitement subsides, I actually do try to temper my personal expectations: what if FSD is just "autopilot with traffic lights?" If I spend the $3000 expecting that, then I won't be disappointed if Tesla does not deliver L4/5 autonomy right out of the game. Plus, Tesla has said that FSD will require supervision at first and is not promising when the supervision will be removed. So Tesla is actually trying to set more realistic expectations this time.

 

[diplomat33]

From Tesla's official announcement:
"Customers who previously purchased Full Self-Driving will receive an invitation to Tesla’s Early Access Program (EAP). EAP members are invited to experience and provide feedback on new features and functionality before they are rolled out to other customers."
Upgrading to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability

So folks who pre-paid for FSD will be part of the early access program. So you will be getting these FSD features before anyone else since you paid for the features way before they were available and you'll get a chance to provide feedback to make FSD better.

 

[BlueRocket]

From Tesla's official announcement:
"Customers who previously purchased Full Self-Driving will receive an invitation to Tesla’s Early Access Program (EAP). EAP members are invited to experience and provide feedback on new features and functionality before they are rolled out to other customers."
Upgrading to Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability

So folks who pre-paid for FSD will be part of the early access program. So you will be getting these FSD features before anyone else since you paid for the features way before they were available and you'll get a chance to provide feedback to make FSD better.

I was promised (or at least led to believe) my car would navigate like the car in the FSD video if I plunked down $3k. Still waiting for something after 26 months. Now I'm being offered alpha version software. How will my car use these new FSD features? I don't have the proper hardware in my AP2.0 car? If I get early access, are they v going to upgrade my hardware early as well?

 

[rnortman]

As I stated before, Tesla has chosen to release "FSD" under supervision, merely as a precaution. That's why there is the dead man switch right now. I would surmise that Tesla is hoping that having so many Tesla owners using FSD under supervision, will help speed up getting it to L4.

Exactly. Release under supervision to validate reliability. Once it is proven reliable, remove supervision.

The question is not: Is there a path for Tesla to eventually make these features L4? The question is, or ought to be, what is the most likely outcome here, and the most likely explanation for the actions Tesla is currently taking in its descriptions of these option packages, based on all available present and historical evidence?

Some people choose to search for possible outcomes that appeal to them, and cling to those possibilities. Some people prefer to try to understand the world as it actually is. So when many people have been saying for years that Tesla will be lucky to hit L3 on the highway, and the defenders have been calling them pessimists, or shorts, or short-sighted -- and all along every single development in Autopilot supports the thesis that AP will never exceed L2 on local roads -- and then Tesla starts redefining the option packages to remove any hint of L3+ even on highways, let alone local roads... which kind of person are you in this scenario?

 

[diplomat33]

I was promised (or at least led to believe) my car would navigate like the car in the FSD video if I plunked down $3k. Still waiting for something after 26 months. Now I'm being offered alpha version software. How will my car use these new FSD features? I don't have the proper hardware in my AP2.0 car? If I get early access, are they v going to upgrade my hardware early as well?

Yes, presumably, Tesla will give you the AP3 chip for free since the chip is required for FSD.

 

[BlueRocket]

Yes, presumably, Tesla will give you the AP3 chip for free since the chip is required for FSD.

Presumably... We'll see and when. AP3 chip, upgraded cameras, redundant wiring required by regulation. 3 months maybe, 6 months for sure

 

[rnortman]

No offense, but I'll listen to him more than you.

Why, exactly?

 

[diplomat33]

The question is not: Is there a path for Tesla to eventually make these features L4? The question is, or ought to be, what is the most likely outcome here, and the most likely explanation for the actions Tesla is currently taking in its descriptions of these option packages, based on all available present and historical evidence?

Some people choose to search for possible outcomes that appeal to them, and cling to those possibilities. Some people prefer to try to understand the world as it actually is. So when many people have been saying for years that Tesla will be lucky to hit L3 on the highway, and the defenders have been calling them pessimists, or shorts, or short-sighted -- and all along every single development in Autopilot supports the thesis that AP will never exceed L2 on local roads -- and then Tesla starts redefining the option packages to remove any hint of L3+ even on highways, let alone local roads... which kind of person are you in this scenario?

Let me bottom line this for you:

Optimists: Tesla will release L4 FSD
Realists: Tesla will release a L2 "FSD" that will improve and eventually become L4.
Pessimists: Tesla will release L2 "FSD" that will always be L2 and never be L3/4/5

I think the realist position is the most sensible.