@S4WRXTTCS Sure Tesla might fail as a company, but barring that the conversation just moves on to the next big thing when the last one fails. That’s how it has gone and that’s how it will likely go with Tesla. Due to the unique dynamic inside the company and outside it. (Barring a radical change inside and out of course.)
I thought Karpathy’s role was to deliver on Tesla’s past promises, but glad to see you are already taking a forward-looking stance, now we are discussing Level 3 that Tesla has not
ever even promised themselves.
Tesla has the best people following it, for them, really does.
As a company I don't think Tesla will fail.
As a leader in autonomous driving I think failure is more likely than success. They just don't have the resources of other companies or the level of focus on it.
With Tesla past promises don't mean a whole lot when it comes to exactness. You got the AP1 promises from the Tesla blog, but it's full of things that we never heard about again. I fully expect Tesla to deliver on promises of EAP with ULC, and Enhanced summons. But, just barely. Maybe an iteration or two of improvements to fix big ticket items before they switch focus to FSD/HW3.
You don't sell cars on past promises. You sell cars based on what you can promise now or in the case of Tesla what they can promise in the next year.
But, more seriously I think we have to look at the nature of the buyer of the vehicle. Tesla used to sell to rich people who could afford to simply buy the next greatest thing when the current thing didn't deliver on promises. They might huff and puff, but their bank balances were big enough to limit the impact to them. Plus a lot of them made bank off Tesla stock. At times it felt like it was part of some big machinery that ran on the vapers of unmet promises.
That's not really the case anymore. The newer buyers are a lot more careful with their money. You can see that in the polls that show more people getting AP for $2K because it was a deliverable that was ready to go. They were still hesitant on the whole FSD even when told they'd get HW3 for free.
Tesla very much caters to the nature of the kind of person that buys the car. I imagine I'm like a lot of Tesla owners who are attracted to the SW upgradability of the vehicle. It's most definitely a double edged sword that is both the best attribute, and the worst attribute. One of these days this week or next week I'll wake up to a car that is 5% more powerful than I had the day before. That's pretty neat I say. Everyone makes fun of things like fart Easter egg that wasn't an Easter egg. It was silly yet it's part of what makes owning the car fun.
If one isn't completely locked into the whole FSD fiasco there is a lot of fun elements about the car itself. When focused too much on unmeetable FSD promises it's a bit depressing. They used the promise of Software upgrades as a way to sell a farce.
I focus on L3 because it's a tangible thing that I know the competition will offer. For myself it's what matters the most. If EV competitors have L3 self driving and some resemblance of a Supercharging network then I doubt I'll stick around in whatever goofiness Tesla is promising. There is radical change coming. That change is competition. Competition allows people to move to things that more exactly fit their needs.
As to Tesla promise of city driving that I call goofy? That would be neat if it works. I'll probably buy my mom a Tesla if they somehow pull that off, and it meets my expectations. I love the idea of putting my mom in one simply because it could simultaneously torture her, and give me peace of mind.
I put a lot of faith in Karpathy because vision is Tesla's biggest problem. I might gripe about NoA, and it's driving policy/mapping issues, but nothing is worse than the stupid car not seeing an obvious thing in the road.
A lot of what I want is largely under the hood.
The number of objects it can detect
The accuracy of the detections
The working resolution of the neural network
The speed of the neural network inference
I don't expect other people to look at those things as they aren't the big ticket promises.
I'll be disappointed in Karpathy if he doesn't significantly improve the Vision capabilities of the system with HW3.